Chapter Text
If there was one thing Wilbur did not expect about the afterlife, it was that it felt so similar and yet so, firmly different at the same time. The best way to describe it was the inbetween : he wasn’t living, clearly, but he was… existing. Somewhat.
(Wilbur sometimes wishes he wasn’t. It would have been easier to succumb to the blissful darkness, than being forced to remember the things he did.)
No one told him it would be so boring being dead either. Wilbur spent the majority of his time roaming the seemingly endless fields. While the flowers did shift over the various regions, he somehow kept running back into the hyacinths he’d first seen when he arrived here. Hues of purple, pink, orange have started blending together in his eyes, as the sunset in this supposed ‘afterlife’ seemed to be never-ending. Sure, in theory, it sounds beautiful. But too much of a good thing is still poison; sweet, deceptively so, but poison nonetheless.
And Wilbur was sick of it. He ached for some sort of change, some sort of shift in this world as he traveled its seemingly never-changing plains.
In particular, Wilbur found himself missing the rain. He missed the clouds of stormy gray, dotting the sky in a soothing drizzle. He missed-
Thunder boomed from outside the cave depths.
“You really had to pick the worst time to go hunting, didn’t you?” Wilbur groaned, his navy coat soaked through. He stomped his boots on the stone floor in another attempt to dry off, leaving dark footprints.
“Well okay, forgive me for not consulting the sky beforehand, prick. How was I supposed to know?” Tommy protested as he tried to shake the rain out of his hair. The hastily set-up fire in front of him sputtered in complaint.
“Guess we just have to camp it out tonight then. There’s no way we’re making it back to L’Manberg in that.” Wilbur gestured towards the heaving storm right outside the cave.
“Nothing like camping night with the boys, am I right?” Tommy grinned, before noticing Wilbur’s deadpan expression. “C’mon now Wil, this isn’t half bad! We got a nice fire going, now all we need are some… some smores and a ukulele!”
“Where the hell are we going to get smores and a ukulele.”
“...you might have a point. But you get the idea!” Tommy flopped down on his rucksack. The light of the fire flickered against the two figures, casting long shadows across the walls. Willbur let himself slide down, back against the cold stone, until he was sat on the rocky floor. Closing his eyes, he let out a tired breath. For a long moment, all was quiet except for the rhythmic downpour coming from above.
“You know it takes a lot to move me...” Tommy’s quiet humming brought Wilbur back to reality. Turning his head, his eyes found Tommy slouched against his bag, face towards the darkening skies outside. “So if you figure it out, then tell me…”
Despite the circumstances, Wilbur couldn’t stop a smile from worming onto his face. He had sung this to Tommy: when his fingers didn’t fit quite right on the guitar strings yet, and his voice was just a little shaky out of hesitance. He had scrapped the song since then, despite the outrage from Tommy- and yet here he was. Something warmed in Wilbur’s heart as he leaned back against the stone, listening. The tune was only barely audible against the storm.
“I trace figures on your smile lines…
Work a formula to cure me…”
Even if Wilbur wouldn’t often tell this to Tommy (out of fear of his ego bursting through the roof), he did have a rather pleasant voice. The flames cast Tommy in a warm glow as he continued his soft singing, accompanied by the storm.
And for a moment, Wilbur felt like he could stay there forever: just the two of them, a crackling fire, and the rain.
Wilbur's nails were digging into his palm. When he released them, a crushed hyacinth sat there, taunting him.
(Perhaps if he closed his eyes hard enough, the sunset was his fire and the breeze could be his rain.
But there was no Tommy. Nothing even half-capable of resembling or echoing him in this stagnant world, except from Wilbur’s own memories.)
Afraid that if he stopped somewhere he would stop forever, Wilbur forced himself to keep moving- keep wading through the ever-growing pool of memories that called to him, threatening to pull him under.
But sometimes, Wilbur felt like drowning. The fields never felt more alone when those memories tugged the hardest.
It was hard to remember that Wilbur wasn’t here by himself. Although he would always somehow come across Schlatt, who seemed to prefer sitting alone on the top of hills, peering off into the distance. Wilbur often wonders what he thinks about.
( Do you think about what you did? He wanted to ask. Do you remember like I remember? )
But when he finally picked up the courage, one time, he didn’t ask any of those questions. In fact, he didn’t really say anything at all.
He had made his way towards Schlatt, before carefully sitting on the grass beside him. The petunias were in full bloom around them, creating a blanket of white and purple. Schlatt didn’t make any moves of acknowledgement, except for perhaps a quiet sigh. And as Wilbur studied him out of the corner of his eye, something in his voice died.
Gone was the burning curiosity. Gone was the desperate search for affinity. Looking at Schlatt felt like looking in a broken mirror.
So Wilbur settled for another question. One he’d been asking himself.
“Do you regret it?” Wilbur said quietly, thinking of the two boys in the world below them.
One who now cowers at the slightest of raised voices and thunder, who’s been left alone to pick up the remains of a broken family; and who can never readily trust anyone- at least, not anymore. And the other, who can no longer stay in small spaces for long before hearing phantom fireworks; who cringes and recoils at the barest scent of alcohol; and who’s been stuck on a pedestal, trying to carry the weight of a warring country on his shoulders.
Both were shaped (and broken) by their hands.
Both were happy once.
A brief moment passed, as Schlatt didn’t respond. (Although, for all Wilbur knew, it could’ve been anything from seconds to hours. After all, time was a funny thing in the great beyond.) He fiddled with the sleeve of his sweater idly. But before Wilbur could take Schlatt’s silence as an answer within itself, he finally spoke.
“They were young,” Schlatt sighed, picking at the dried petunia he’d pinned on his suit. Wilbur followed his gaze to the eternal sunset that painted the purple fields a fiery gold. “We were greedy.”
Wilbur ended up sitting amongst the petunias for a long time, even after Schlatt left.