Chapter Text
This is the way the world turns:
Tommy lies in a bed next to his best friend and listens to their breathing until he's sure that it's the only sound in the universe.
Tubbo is a heavy sleeper. Ultimately, this is a good thing. Tommy spends nights of nightmares gasping awake in a bed and feeling as if the world is caving in; Tubbo's elbow brushes his and the world and it's caving has confined itself to his chest. This time he's shaken awake by wide eyes and hands on shoulders and an incomprehensible babble of comfort. Coherency was never either of their strong suits.
"You haven't slept," Tommy says first. Tubbo's still muttering under his breath, quiet affirmations that ultimately won't make a dent in the darkness behind Tommy's eyes. He goes silent instead. His hands dig into Tommy's shoulders.
"You were having a nightmare," he says.
"No shit," Tommy says. There's no room for conversation. There's no room for much of anything at all.
This is the way these things go, haunted by consistent nightmares that hardly have much to do with Wilbur or Schlatt or Manburg at all. He wanders hallways or drowns or gets stuck in seas of wide smiling faces. He hasn't seen a pair of ram horns once, hasn't seen his brother's superior grins or a firework loaded into a crossbow.
Tubbo's fingers are still digging into his shoulders. He has the bizarre urge to peel them up one by one. Their eyes still bore into his, and their mouth is still moving, as if trying to decide what he wants to say.
Pogtopia is silent these days. Tubbo does not say anything more. Tommy does not ask for a hug. The walls of the ravine are frozen into the ground.
This is not the first nightmare that Tommy will have. It is certainly not the last.
“You shouldn’t be awake,” Tommy goes on. He wipes at his face. “You should be, like, passed the fuck out by now.”
“You were having a nightmare,” Tubbo says again, sounding confused and almost frustrated.
“Yeah, but you weren’t.”
Tubbo pauses, then quietly says “Maybe I was.”
In one startling, fell swoop, Tommy reacquaints himself with uncertainty.
He's known Tubbo. Forever, it feels, it's been Tommy and Tubbo to the end. They're best friends. Should understand each other on some deep, intrinsic level, down to the smallest fault or freckle or secret. He knows their deepest fear. His favorite color. His morning routine, the color of his eyes, his shoe size. How to tell when he's angry or sad or tired or excited or nervous.
He does not know if Tubbo has been having nightmares.
He is not angry. The sudden wave of grief and loss and earth-shattering loneliness crashes over him until he's drowning in so many feelings he nearly starts crying.
The war could take Wilbur. Could take Techno, could strip him from Phil or Fundy or Schlatt, even. Could take the country he built, the walls he helped elect to protect it. The strength of his right hand. The steadiness of his feet. The space between his ribs, right over his heart.
But the war could not take Tubbo. He'd said it to himself, sat on a bench that doesn't exist anymore, listening to a disc he's not even sure he gives a shit about. A silent promise, and he never breaks promises, that no matter what it takes, the war cannot take Tubbo from him.
And yet it has.
“Go back to bed,” Tommy says.
“Tell me about your nightmare,” Tubbo counters.
“No,” Tommy says. He's being difficult on purpose and they both know it. “Tell me about yours.”
Tubbo flinches as if Tommy had just hit him, face drawn in sour distaste. He releases Tommy's shoulders. He doesn't say a word as he settles back into bed, drawing his blanket tight around his shoulders as if trying to block out the world itself.
Tommy rolls over and does not sleep the rest of the night.
They cannot leave. They are stuck in a nightmare so real that his mind can only conjure nonsense. He's not sure which scares him more. When he shuts his eyes, thousands of faces with the grins of hungry men stare back at him, or the hallway is long and winding and sweltering hot, or the ocean swallows him whole and holds him down. He will be stuck in these places until he is roused from them, into a truth that feels so sinister it shouldn't be real - but he will not see Jschlatt in sleep for a long, long time.
So he wakes up the next morning in a cold sweat and makes a point to avoid his best friend. He spends the day with a thoroughly silent Quackity; Techno is out in one place or another, and Quackity, ever the drifter, seems to have decided upon the potato farm as a place of solitude in the same breath that Tommy has.
“Hey, Big Q.”
The Q in question jumps about a foot in the air and whirls, holding the hoe he's got like a sword. It's almost funny - it's not a sharp tool, and yet in that moment Tommy can almost believe that Quackity could hurt him with it.
“You motherfucker,” he says, bringing the hoe back to his side. “You snuck up on me.”
“You're easy to sneak up on,” Tommy counters, bored. “D’you want some help?”
By the end of the day, they're both sweaty and drenched in mud. Quackity smiles at him, a foreign and careful thing, as they pack potatoes by the dozen into chests. They don't say a word, and yet Tommy re-emerges into Pogtopia’s freezing hallways realizing that Quackity has carved a deeper sense of respect into Tommy's heart than he started with.
Pogtopia is nothing if not working. When he wanders out from the farm, there is no-one waiting - Tommy's forced to seek out new company, and finds himself stumbling into Niki's new hideout, a small room carved into one of the walls, full of ovenborne heat and too much bread to know what to do with.
Niki herself is the same; neither Tommy and Tubbo nor Wilbur and Techno quite want her on their side, and yet Tommy feels that she's much more trustworthy than either of the other two from the sheer strength of her will. Most days, she's grueling and hard, baking as if she will die if she does not occupy her time fully and completely, existing conversationally as a woman so dense with information she could never hope to spit any of it out.
Today, Tommy finds himself pleasantly surprised by a comfortable warmth and Niki pounding something that definitely isn't bread dough.
“Niki,” he says, and she looks up from her work without stopping in her kneading.
“Tommy!” The grin she wears is so real and true that it almost feels the opposite. “Come in! Do you want to help me?”
“Uh,” he says smartly, “what exactly are you doing?”
“Pie. I thought it'd be a nice change of pace, you know?”
He doesn't know. He's not sure he's ever had a change of pace, certainly not in the form of making a pie. Life is about efficiency, about morality, and here in Pogtopia, it's about staying alive. Not leisure.
“Sure,” he says, standing beside her at the counter and taking the dough into his hands. It's flaky and dry and the exact opposite of the ration dough they use for bread. "I'll have you know, I make - and don't tell BadBoyHalo this, he'll throw a fit - I'll have you know that I'm the best damn baker you've ever seen.”
Niki giggles, actually, truly giggles, and Tommy finds himself laughing in a way he hasn't in a long time. Conversation is light; neither of them mention Wilbur, or bombs, or festivals, and maybe that's all for the better. They're not avoiding it, either, so it doesn't sit heavy around their feet like molasses as they talk. It just doesn't matter.
“So Tubbo’s doing better, then?” Niki asks eventually. She’s tearing the skins off of peaches now, the blanched peels coming off like their own little coats. It's a bizarre and childish thought that Tommy harbors in his mind for only himself.
“He's alright,” Tommy says. “Why, what's it matter?”
“Well - I just have not seen him with you today, is all. Usually you two are pretty inseparable. Especially since the festival.”
Tommy’s not really sure what to say to that. When he thinks of Tubbo, the first thing that comes to mind isn't even the guy himself. The first thing he sees is Techno. The next is a tight knot of scar tissue in the center of his chest, just below his collarbones, made a pair by the matching splatter across the bridge of his nose.
It had been a long night for all of them. Respawns are always easy. The scars are a bit less so.
“Yeah, everything’s fine,” he says thickly, reaching for another peach. “Where’d you even get these things, anyway?”
“I had a tree back in L’manburg,” she says. “Well - have a tree. Sometimes I sneak in for supplies.”
She still calls it L’manburg, some part of him says, and a bizarre sort of anger blisters at the skin of his heart. He’s not sure when it started being Manburg in his eyes, but it's clear that it never did in Niki’s.
Maybe that’s a good thing. He takes a coat off of a peach and nearly drops the body of it. Tries not to think of how he’s stopped considering his nation his own.
“What, and you don’t get caught?”
“No. Though, to be completely honest - I’m not really sure that Schlatt cares about what I do.”
It shouldn’t be a surprising conclusion to come to. It is, though, on some level. Tommy could almost say that they're similar in that way - torn apart by administrations and an unfortunately tense atmosphere, Tommy's sorry that he's never really talked to her before. The feeling of unnecessariness lingers in the slope of both of their shoulders. He guesses he's just lucky he escaped it, at one point or another.
Tommy decides to let it stew. "Probably not," he says and grabs another peach from the ice water. Niki gives an appreciative hum and allows them to settle back into the rhythmic silence of pastry making.
It’s nearly three hours of work before it’s placed in the oven - the floor is covered in flour and Niki is covered in sugar and the hems of Tommy’s sleeves are damp with peach juice and neither of them really care.
“I’m proud of it,” Niki says when it's out of the oven. The lattice has fallen through, turned black where it’s sunken into the filling - a little ocean of volcanic rock on a pink and orange sea. It’s ugly and smells a bit burnt. “I’m proud of us.”
“What?”
She smiles at him. It’s nothing like Wilbur’s predatory grin or Quackity’s prey-like one - just a smile, real and genuine. Tommy thinks that Niki, for all her hard fast stability or silence, might be the realest thing in the world. “We made a pie, and I’m proud of us.”
“Huh,” Tommy says. “Yeah, yeah - proud.”
Niki gives him the first piece. Tommy insists they share. It’s sweet and the crust is flakey and he’s never had pie, before, certainly not pie from Niki or anyone else within DreamSMP or its respective territories, and he thinks that maybe that makes it all the better. It’s a waste of good supplies, Wilbur or Quackity or Tubbo would say.
It’s a good pie.