Chapter Text
The last flame dies with a puff of gray.
“Go to sleep, Wilbur,” Techno whispers.
His brother turns hollow eyes from the drifting smoke. His lips are chapped and his breath catches at pale, peeling skin and billows in the frozen air.
Techno reaches for him but lets his arm drop to the chill earth. “You can…” he begins, and shudders with a stab of cold. “You can rest.”
“What about you?” Wilbur murmurs.
“I….” The warrior drags a bare fingertip over a last piece of smoldering charcoal. It flakes off under his touch, and disintegrates as it floats away. “It’s… isn’t it a beautiful night?”
Wilbur traces his guitar’s strings gently, so soft that the sound barely reaches their ears. “Beautiful.”
“I’ll sit watch,” Techno decides. “I’ll wake you up when the moon is highest so we can switch.”
The pair gaze at the bright stars, brilliant against the pitch sky. It’s a new moon and they both keep silent.
Wilbur holds out a crooked finger and dredges up a memory from the recesses of both their minds. “You’ll wake me then? Promise?”
Techno holds out his own finger, bent and broken, rough with promises. Their fingers fit together as they always have. “Promise.”
Wilbur lays his guitar down and leans back against the oak. He opens his mouth like he wants to say something, and Techno’s mind falls forward, churning up new resolutions to this night, new ways to live on, how they could mend what’s so irretrievably broken.
The twins hold eye contact, and the stars are mutely reflected in their wind-dry eyes.
Then Wilbur closes his eyes and his breathing fades into smooth sleep. He shivers with each inhale, enough that each time Techno thinks—hopes—that maybe, he’ll shiver himself awake.
But Techno is left as he has been, and as he will be. He splits his focus between the two sleeping figures, his father on one side of the young tree, his brother behind him on the opposite. His stone is smooth against his back.
Clouds close overhead, the ones they’d all seen on the horizon and kept silent about, the types of clouds that block out the stars. As the first flake flutters through the branches, Techno prays that this final broken half-promise will be a blessing.
And as the snowdrifts settle around the three shattered men, Techno looses the world from his grasp, and lets himself fade off into the darkest of sleeps.