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5. Denial
(what kind of faith are you holding onto?)
It’s right after their reunion that Tommy asks for the first time.
He’s not entirely sure why he asks, why he even thought of the question in the first place, what kind of masochistic curiosity possesses him to do it at all.
Maybe it’s the empty expression on Wilbur’s face — happy, yes, and at peace, but so eerily blank, shallow, that Tommy almost mistakes him for a mannequin for a second, perfectly sculpted into the caricature of contentment.
Maybe it’s the fact that he can’t completely stamp down the angry bitterness clogging his throat, scratching at the relief blooming in his chest. He should be angrier, he should, but right now he can’t muster the energy to feed his flames, not when he’s unreasonably happy at the prospect of getting his brother back.
Maybe it’s because Wilbur’s looking at him with a pair of white eyes, devoid of any colour or pupils or life, more dead grey (hah), like a… dead pigeon, or something, well, something equally as lifeless and morbid.
(Tommy misses the brown of his irises, he does. He misses the almost-black of reading bedtime stories of wars and heroes when they were younger. He misses the golden glow of declaring independence against a tyrant silhouetted by the blazing sunset. Hell, he even misses the crimson glint of standing victorious over a crater. Anything, anything but this dull static.)
Whatever the reason, Tommy opens his mouth and the question spills out his mouth like he’s been holding it in for months. In a sense, he has, and it’s only now that he actually gets to say it out loud and have a person hear it.
“What does dying feel like?”
His chest twists with something sour as soon as the words leave his mouth.
Wilbur takes a little too long to reply, but that easy smile doesn’t leave his face.
“It’s great!” he says, horribly chipper. “I think everyone likes me better when I’m dead. I, uh, I remember that much, at least.”
He looks down at Tommy (or at least Tommy thinks he does, he can’t tell exactly where the fuck he’s looking, what with the whole… pupil-less eyes thing he’s got going on).
“Look, everyone, even you- uh, everyone’s happier now that I’m dead, so what does that say about alive Wilbur, right?”
Tommy opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. Wants to say everything running through his head. Wants to scream and rant about the pain of watching your brother die by your father’s hands and punch his stupid grey face and ask him why he chose to die and shake all the answers out of him. Wants to insult him and derive a shitty joke out of the situation and tell Wilbur to shut up I don’t want to hear any of your excuses I just want my brother back.
Instead, what comes out is a strangled, “What the fuck.”
“I know, right?” Wilbur says, still smiling, still unnervingly happy. “I should probably be worried about that, but…” He trails off for a hot second, thinking, but lights up again like that plasticky carefreeness never faltered in the first place. “But- but that’s the good thing about being dead, I think! I’m not worried and… and I don’t have a reason to be, yeah? Everything’s better now that I’m... dead.”
“That’s not true,” Tommy says automatically, before he has a chance to rethink his words.
Wilbur’s smile falters. He pats Tommy in the cheek — the condescending fuck that he is — and laughs, the sound airy and echoey and decidedly not Wilbur-y. “And that’s not true, either,” he says. “Anyway, I think I’m happier now, too, so… so that’s what really matters, right?”
Tommy nods woodenly and tries not to squirm at the feeling of Wilbur’s ghostly hand on his shoulder.
“Right,” he parrots, and ignores the way that the word tastes dry on his tongue, ignores the way that Wilbur smiles and it doesn’t reach his eyes because his eyes are dead, ignores the way he can feel a pit growing at the base of his lungs; ever bitter, ever painful, ever sickening.
4. Anger
(say sorry three times to the mirror and you'll be forgiven)
The second time Tommy asks, he’s sitting tangled in his sheets, and it’s the middle of the night where he’s woken up rudely by a nightmare. Wilbur is awake, hovering by his crafting table, prodding his lit furnace with a stick and humming a vaguely familiar tune to himself. Tommy slaps a hand over his mouth before he can scream, and squeezes his eyes shut to chase away the last dregs of his adrenaline.
“Tommy?” Wilbur asks, turning his head when Tommy throws his blanket off his chest and buries his head in his hands. “You alright?”
Tommy doesn’t answer him. He simply sits there, clenching his shirt in both hands and trying to keep his breathing even. The only sounds he can hear for a few tense moments are his ragged breathing, the crackle of the flames in the furnace, and the distant howling of hostile mobs in the forests surrounding New L’manberg. He grits his teeth and shakes his head, hoping to dispel the images burnt into the back of his eyelids.
Closing his eyes, he tries focusing on his heartbeat, the blood rushing in his ears, the stretch of his diaphragm as he inhales deeply. His chest hurts. It’s nothing but a phantom pain, he knows, the ghost of an arrow hitting its mark and the memory of two disks passed over in an impossible deal.
(Two deaths, a part of him thinks, a part of him wishes, a part of him fears. Two deaths, and he’s never going to muster up the courage to bet his life on the freedom of a nation again.
Somewhere, it all comes crashing back down on him.
Somewhere, two nations play tug-of-war and it ends with the press of a button and the shifting of pistons.
Somewhere, two twin arrows cross each other in the air and only one hits true.
Somewhere, two friends are hanging onto life by their last string and onto each other by a limp promise.
Two deaths, a part of him muses, and the rest of him wants to cry at the weight of this realisation pressing on his shoulders. Two deaths, and yet he’s still betting his life on his own freedom.)
“Wilbur,” he gasps out, his eyes snapping up to meet his dead brother’s gaze, “what does dying feel like?”
Wilbur frowns, as if he doesn’t understand the question. “Well, you- you’ve died before, right? Surely you know?”
And they’re separated by the veil of life and death itself, untouchable, uncrossable; and they’re separated by a deep, scathing betrayal that left a wound Tommy doesn’t know how to seal; and they’re separated only by a few metres but to him it feels like he can’t bear to take a single step towards his brother; and the thing about this, their story, them, is that it’s over.
They’ve both missed their chance to make it right and all that’s left for them now is to hope that they can scrape up whatever pieces haven’t burned away in the crossfire.
(An ugly scar has closed the wound but somewhere deep inside it still fucking hurts.)
“Answer me,” he spits out, not harshly, but not kindly either. He speaks how he feels — stuck in that middle ground ravaged by conflict, both perpetually bitter and perpetually loyal.
Tommy watches the endless emotions flip through Wilbur’s face, honing in on the little twitches of his cheek muscles, the shift in his eyebrows, the flicker of his eyelids. He thinks of Wilbur, alive, of the untamed hair he fiddles with whenever he gets nervous, of the blemishes on his face and the calluses on his fingertips, of the way his voice breaks whenever he laughs.
He thinks of Wilbur, alive, and then he looks at this perfect mockery of his brother’s legacy and wonders how the hell he’s going to reconcile the two of them.
Wilbur gives him a sad smile — all his smiles are sad, Tommy decides. Not really, but this Wilbur makes him sad whenever he smiles so he’ll call it whatever the hell he wants.
“Imagine a road, right?” he starts. His voice echoes in the room, bouncing off the walls and reverberating through Tommy’s bones. “So this road, it’s got its bumps and then it’s got its ups and downs, and you’ve been driving on the road for... for as long as you can remember.”
Tommy feels his chest tighten. It’s hard to breathe, but he’s not gasping in air or hyperventilating or blacking out. He’s just breathing and noting the fact that his lungs aren’t filling up as much as they need to. It hurts, but not quite, like someone’s slapped him but only hours ago.
“And one day the road takes a sudden turn to the left, but you’ve been going full speed down a hill and you don’t see it until it’s too late,” Wilbur says. His smile dims. The light of the fire flickers in his grey eyes. “Or... or I just didn’t want to slow down.” He shrugs, like it doesn’t matter, like he’s not talking about his own death. “Well, the point is that you go crashing through the barrier and get launched off the side of a cliff.”
Tommy stares at him. Wilbur’s eyes never leave his face. It would be creepy if it wasn’t so depressing.
Tommy thinks: you tried to kill everyone but I had to watch you die.
“Is it really?” he asks softly, feeling younger than he’s felt in a long time.
Wilbur shrugs again. “Well, it’s how I’d describe it? I mean, you’ve died before, you tell me.”
Tommy thinks: dying feels like getting betrayed by a friend. Dying feels like getting shot by an arrow. Dying feels like watching your brother blow up a nation and then beg to be killed.
“So what’s it like now?”
“It’s...” Wilbur runs a hand through his grey hair, and a lock falls over his eye. “It’s, uh, it gets kinda lonely at times. Like at night. Um, especially at night.”
And because Tommy doesn’t know when to shut up, he asks, “Are you happy?”
Wilbur takes a second too long to reply. In that second, Tommy learns everything he needs to know about this version of his brother. “Go to sleep, Tommy,” he says, smiling and turning away from him. “You’ve got a meeting with Dream in the morning.”
Tommy thinks: I wish you’d answer the question that really matters.
3. Bargaining
(history is written by its winners but we all lose in war)
He’s running for his fucking life when he asks for the third time.
Not really. More like: he’s been thrown out of the peaceful life he thought he’d finally earned after sacrificing everything the things that matters most to him and he’s now running for his fucking life.
…Or, most accurately: he’s sulking in a boat, following the person who threatened war on his country and exiled him, with the ghost of his dead brother tucked behind him, absently rowing away from his home and ignoring the ache in his arms… for his fucking life.
He’s desperate to shut Dream up, make him stop his mocking and taunting, and his first instinct tells him to make everyone mildly uncomfortable so that’s exactly what he does.
“Wilbur, what does dying feel like?” he says loudly, enunciating and emphasizing every syllable.
Dream clamps his mouth shut mid-sentence, turning his head away from him, so Tommy counts that as a win.
“Well,” Wilbur starts, and Tommy shivers at the feeling of his cold breath against the back of his neck. “I lied to you the last time you asked, I think. I don’t- I don’t actually remember dying, so… you can make of that what you will.”
Tommy, well, Tommy does. He mulls it over in his head, but can’t seem to come up with a solid conclusion. The rest of the trip goes by silently.
2. Depression
(and the world isn't wide enough for two hypocrites)
Tommy almost dies before he asks for the fourth time. In hindsight, he should’ve asked before trying to throw himself into a sea of lava. It would’ve made things a whole lot easier, maybe.
Because if anything, Tommy is stubborn, and he’s persistent, and he’s known for being the kid who never gives up no matter fucking what. He didn’t give up when he lost the bow duel. He didn’t give up when Schlatt banished him out of Manberg. He didn’t give up trying to convince Tubbo to change his mind.
So why should he give up now? Why now, out of literally any other time he could’ve decided: oh, fuck it, I don’t care anymore?
Truth be told, there isn’t… really… a reason. One moment he’s watching Wilbur and Dream and Sapnap disappear into the portal back to the Dream SMP, and the next, he’s standing on one side of the platform, looking over the edge and contemplating the lava below.
And if anyone should know anything about him, is that Tommy is a rash, reckless son of a bitch.
(Let’s say he’s rash, let’s say he’s reckless, let’s say he doesn’t think about his actions and let’s say he dives headfirst into all his bad decisions. Let’s not think about the fact that maybe, maybe he’s just too good at ignoring exactly why he’s not the best at self-preservation.)
(It used to be this sense of heroism, of selflessness, of putting others before himself and dealing with the consequences only when they inevitably sock him straight in the jaw. Because that’s what heroes do, and even though he never… asked to be the hero in this demented story, no one else did, either. And of course no one would want to be the hero; look what happened to him.)
(So when did he grow up and grow sad?)
He steps off.
Tommy falls for a second, and he can’t say that the second lasts for an eternity because it doesn’t — a second is over in a fucking second because that’s how time works. His body twists around, and then his stomach twists around, and then the whole world twists around and he’s yanked back up through the air and spat down on the blackstone bridge and he yelps out because it hurts.
“Ow- what the fuck!” he screams, scrambling to his feet and touching the back of his head gingerly as it pounds from the impact.
“Tommy!” Dream yells, and Tommy winces at the sound (and his hand flies to his inventory instinctively but he’s not going to talk about that). “Tommy, what the hell did you think you were doing?!”
Tommy glares up at him and forces as much venom as possible into his next words. “What does it look like I was doing?!” he screams again, just as shrill, because he’s the kind of guy who screams to solve all his problems— or hide them, in this case — so he does exactly that. “Fuck you- fuck you, who do you think you are-“
“Well to me it looks like you just ignored the fucking railing, and you could’ve died, permanently if I may add!” Dream yells back at him, like the immature fuck he really is. Like they’re both toddlers playing hot potato and screeching gibberish at each other. The hot potato being Tommy’s last life, that is.
“We don’t even have railings in the Nether hub, you fucking prick!” Tommy steps forward, unflinching recklessness coursing through his veins like fire, the first heated emotion he thinks he’s felt in a long time. “And so what if I did die, huh?” He plants a firm hand on Dream’s netherite chestplate and shoves him back as hard as he can. “So what if I did? Don’t you want me dead? You’re the one who, who fucking threatened to- to kill me if I- if I… if-”
His voice breaks and so does he, and he falls to the floor with his eyes and teeth clenched tightly. He’s not crying, he’s not, his… his eyes must be sweating, or something, because he’s not sad, and he hasn’t given up, and he doesn’t miss his home and his friends and he doesn’t, he doesn’t, he promised himself he’d move on and build a new life in Logstedshire and he’d be alright and he’s told himself time and time again that he’s not completely, depressingly, hopelessly alone.
“Fuck you,” he spits. “I hate you.”
“No, you don’t,” Dream says softly.
“I do.”
(And even as he says it, both of them know that it’s a lie. Tommy will never chase away all the memories of Dream, of building the Holy Land stone block by stone block with him, or opening a chest and finding Tyrant stacked neatly on top of netherite gear and supplies, or trying to coerce Badboyhalo into cursing during one of their many breaks from war. He’s never going to forget them, never really going to hate Dream no matter how hard he tries, never going to forgive him for this very reason.)
“Tommy,” Dream says, crouching down in front of him. Making sure his movements are slow and visible, he reaches for Tommy’s hand and unclenches it gently. He places his communicator on Tommy’s palm and turns it on. “Look.”
Tommy swallows a block in his throat and works his jaw as he reads the last message- no, command, on the screen.
Teleported TommyInnit to Dream.
“Tommy, look at me.”
He does.
“It’s not your time to die,” Dream says, and Tommy really, really wants to hate him. This is one of those moments, where Dream, for some fucking reason, decides to be an actual decent person between threatening his life and exploding his valuables in holes. Tommy has no idea what to make of him, and it makes his head spin knowing that he can’t truly pinpoint his feelings on solid hatred.
“It never is,” Tommy whispers.
Dream purses his lips and lays a hand on Tommy’s shoulder, and there’s a strong heat in Tommy’s skin at the weight of it. “Please,” he says, maybe for the first time. “You haven’t lost everything. You still have- you still have Wilbur, and, and you’ve got this second chance in Logsted, and you’ve still got m-”
As if on cue, Wilbur and Sapnap materialise in the portal, midway into a joke. Sapnap says something, and Wilbur laughs, and something inside Tommy turns sour and undeniably jealous at the lightness of that sound.
“Hey Tommy!” Wilbur says as the pair approach him and Dream, both still on the ground. “Look- we got you this photo of the Christmas tree-“
“Wilburwhatdoesdyingfeellike?” Tommy blurts out. He coughs once, twice, and sucks in a breath of sulphurous air to steel himself before saying it slower. “What does dying feel like?”
Sapnap freezes. Wilbur falters. Dream stops breathing.
“Wil,” Tommy tries again, and winces at the sound of his own voice, “please.”
Wilbur looks at him, at Dream, at Dream’s communicator in his hand, at the edge of the bridge, and finally lets his eyes rest on the lava bubbling below them. Something dawns on him, then, and his face twists into a horrified look of shock.
“Tommy,” he says, and stops. His mouth stays hanging open. “Oh my god.”
Distantly, Tommy thinks that maybe he should feel bad about this.
Wilbur rushes forward and drops to his knees beside him, pulling him into an embrace. He squeezes him as tightly as his ethereal form allows him to.
Tommy doesn’t cry. He doesn’t. He feels strangely dizzy, almost like he’s drunk, like he’s just bitten one of Tubbo’s pufferfish and he’s downed a potion of speed and his head and his heart are racing but his body refuses to budge. If he tries hard enough, he can almost ignore the lack of an answer.
1. Acceptance
(you know there are no endings where you are headed, young man)
The last time he asks, he feels all empty inside, and he’s not…he’s not going to do anything, but, but he’s just curious, alright? He’s…he just has to know for sure, is all. He’s got to make sure, and whatever comes next is nobody’s problem but his own.
It’s a particularly lonely night where Tommy would normally fill the gaps of silence with endless chatter, and yet he’s quiet, because he doesn’t feel like it and he hasn’t felt like it ever since he tried to step into a sea of lava. They’re both sitting next to each other on the beach, a boy and his loyal ghost, looking out into the sea with a campfire lit a little too close to the water.
And he’s tired of waiting, so he cuts to the fucking chase.
“Wilbur?” Tommy asks, voice small. Normally, he’d kick himself for sounding weak but…but.
His brother turns to him and sets his mouth in a thin line, like he already knows what’s coming.
“What does dying feel like?”
And Wilbur — too perceptive for his own good, ghost or not — looks at him with wide, kind eyes, and maybe he understands, maybe he’s the only person who can. His form flickers out of existence for a while, like a redstone lamp on its way out. When he’s corporeal again, his eyebrows are creased and he looks worried. Or at least, the perfect kind of worried that Tommy so despises to see.
“You’ve asked that question quite a lot, Tommy,” Wilbur says.
Tommy nods.
“That’s…what, the…the fourth? Fifth time you’ve asked?”
Tommy clenches his fists on his lap.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for, or…or what you want to hear from me.”
Tommy bites his bottom lip and looks down. He should’ve asked someone to get him some shoes earlier on — his feet have blistered over from months of walking bare, and it used to hurt, but now it doesn’t. Just like the rest of him; callused and hardened and numb.
“No,” Wilbur says, sucking in a breath, “no, I know what you want to hear from me, but… I know that I don’t- I can’t tell you that it’s easier on this side of the veil. I mean, it- it is, sometimes, but…”
Wilbur closes his eyes and runs a hand through his hair. Tommy watches the strands get tangled between his fingers, watches him work the knots out of his locks.
“Okay, okay, I…how about this, alright? My turn to ask:
What does living feel like?”
0. Healing
(yet we keep going anyway)
Tommy’s breath hitches in his throat.
“That’s a dumb question,” he forces out.
He can’t see it, but he knows in his heart that Wilbur’s rolling his eyes. “And you’re a dumb child.”
“What the fuck.”
“I’m just asking you the same thing you asked me, prick.”
Tommy makes a face at that. “No way you don’t remember living.”
“No, I do,” Wilbur says, shaking his head. “But I just… I want you to tell me.”
And when Tommy doesn’t respond, Wilbur grimaces and prods on. “Please,” he says, “call it formalities, or something, just, please.”
“How would I even describe living,” Tommy says flatly.
“Tell me…uh, tell me what you’re feeling?”
“You’re not my therapist.”
“I’m your brother.”
“So?”
“Does that not mean anything to you?”
Tommy scoffs, folding his arms and leaning a little closer to the campfire. They fall into an uncomfortable silence, the unspoken rejection hanging between them like a tangible thing, sour and ugly on their tongues.
He watches the fire dance along the logs, slowly destroying the wood and spitting sparks into the freezing night air. It’s way colder in Logstedshire than it’s ever been in L’manberg or the Dream SMP. Hell, even Pogtopia had at least been well-insulated, and as soon as the main caverns were all lit up, Tommy never felt cold anymore.
But here, further up north and closer to the colder biomes, away from life and people and friends and memories, Tommy just wishes he’d brought a good pair of wooly socks or a nice coat. Who can blame him for always hanging out in the Nether, right?
“Sensations,” Wilbur says out of nowhere.
“What?”
“Your senses,” he says. Tommy watches his expression shift and change, the first real sign of authenticity in the way he lights up but not all the way through, something not quite as perfect as his usual chipper. “Tell me about them — tell me what you…uh, see, hear, smell, taste, feel, all that.”
Tommy blinks up at him and allows himself a bitter scowl. “You’re not going to shut up about this, are you?”
Wilbur shakes his head. “I think it’s only fair that you give me an answer after you’ve asked me how it feels like to die, right? C’mon, man, I at least deserve to know.”
“I just said — no way you don’t remember-”
“Tommy,” Wilbur interrupts, sternly, kindly, “please.”
Tommy looks down.
“Fine,” he grumbles.
Tommy looks around, tries to find something to start off. His eyes wander back to the fire, and bitterly, he wonders what’ll happen if he stands up and walks straight into it. Wilbur wouldn’t be able to stop him, he’d be all panicked and he wouldn’t be able to focus and his hands would phase right through Tommy’s body and that’ll be the end of it.
(If he does, Wilbur would scream and his body would start flickering violently and he’d send a flurry of panicked messages to the rest of the server, but then he’d be destroyed after it’s all over because no one’s awake to come save his little brother.
Tommy doesn’t want to do that to Wilbur.)
“It’s hot,” he says bluntly. “The fire, I mean.”
Wilbur hums an affirmation. “Okay.”
“I know we all like to, I don’t know- sit around the fire and think about life or whatever, but let’s be real: after five minutes it just gets uncomf- uncomfortably warm. Makes me all sweaty and shit.” Tommy leans away, breathes in lungfuls of chilly air. “I don’t know how you can stand wearing that ugly-ass sweater and not sweat your balls off or something.”
“It’s not hot in here,” Wilbur says. “It’s not cold, either.”
“That’s dumb,” Tommy grumbles.
“I know.” Wilbur smiles. “Go on.”
“This is dumb,” Tommy says, but he keeps going because there really isn’t anything else to do. “My feet hurt.”
He pauses.
“No, that’s a lie- I can’t feel my feet anymore — I need to get me some proper shoes, man — but, uh, the point is, I walked around for too long today and my legs hurt.”
“Mm. Okay.”
“And stretching them out doesn’t actually help. Either I did it all wrong or it doesn’t work, and both of us know that I’m never wrong, so.” An attempt at a joke. It falls flat. Wilbur doesn’t laugh, and Tommy winces. “So I think I’ll take an off day tomorrow, I don’t know.”
Wilbur looks down at his own legs, which are translucent and shimmering out of existence. “I can’t feel my legs,” he says.
“That sucks for you,” Tommy says immediately, his Cain instinct flaring up.
But his brother doesn’t retort. Instead, Wilbur says, “It does,” and smiles — another sad smile, the kind that makes Tommy feel nauseous.
Tommy chooses to ignore it. He looks away from Wilbur, tries to think of something else, tries to gently herd away the ugly feeling in his belly and when that doesn’t work, stamps it down violently.
His chest hurts. Right. He’ll talk about that.
“My chest hurts,” he says.
“Are you injured?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He reaches a hand up and presses on his chest. “Ow- yeah. I think I’ve broken a rib or something.”
“…Do you need a potion of healing?”
Tommy bites the inside of his cheeks.
“Dream blew up my diamond axe earlier today so all I had was this shitty stone sword.”
He pulls up his inventory and tosses out his sword, all dull edges and broken handle. It falls on the sand with a muted thud. Useless.
His mouth keeps moving without his express permission, and his eyes begin to sting. “And I was just trying to make some signs for my to-do-board, and I saw that a creeper was going to blow my tent up, and I didn’t have a shield, and no one else was around, and HBomb’s portrait was going to get destroyed and I couldn’t just let that happen and-“
He tastes salt on his tongue. He stops talking.
“What the fuck.”
Tommy touches his cheek with one hand. It’s wet. He wipes his face with the collar of his tattered shirt and pulls away to find dark, wet stains.
“I’m not crying,” he says automatically, voice stretches thin in his throat, “what the fuck. No way, I’m not- I- this isn’t-“
A violent sob tears through his body, and he flinches from the sharp pain of his broken rib.
“My chest fucking hurts, Wil,” he wheezes out, and sniffs in, and hates himself just a little bit more. “I- I want this to fucking end already. I want to die, I don’t- I- you said it yourself: you’re a whole lot happier now that you’re dead and, fuck, fuck, I don’t want to be this fucking sad and angry and lonely all the time-“
Wilbur pulls- yanks him into a hug and Tommy winces from the impact. He squirms for a second, but after realising that he’s not going to get shanked by a sword, he relents.
It’s cold, and it’s shitty, and Wilbur’s sweater is soft only on the inside because the hug feels scratchy around his body. After five seconds, it’s awkward, and after ten, it’s uncomfortable, but Tommy wraps his arms around Wilbur’s torso and squeezes back anyway because it’s the best fucking hug he’s ever gotten.
(He thinks of all the people that Wilbur used to be, of all the people that Wilbur is.
He thinks of Wilbur, young and prideful and ready to take on the world with his wits and his words.
He thinks of Wilbur, all grown up and donning a revolutionary coat, battle-hardened and dutifully fearless in the face of looming defeat.
He thinks of Wilbur, losing himself in a ravine, letting go of his better morals in favour of giving up and exacting the kind of revenge that would leave a scar on the earth forever.
And he thinks of Wilbur, now, all greys and yellows and empty, empty eyes and yet still so unflinchingly real.)
“Can you feel that?” Wilbur says, voice muffled.
Tommy can hear the smile around his words, the wet laugh he lets out after he speaks and his voice breaks, and the sound hurts and makes his head spin because it’s so familiar and so far away and it makes him think: maybe, maybe, maybe.
“Because I can’t,” the ghost tells him.
(The one thing that stays constant, the one thing that never changes even though people change and grow and fall off and die, is that Wilbur is, first and foremost, his brother. And he never wanted to hurt Tommy, never wanted to see him hurt beyond repair.
And Tommy- he’s not going to do that to Wilbur.
If anything at all is true — in this world of cheap lies and easy betrayals — then this is it.)
"It's not easier on the other side," Wilbur says, and Tommy feels a cold hand running through his hair, picking the dirt out his strands. "It's not- Tommy, it's not, there is very little I wouldn't give to come back to life again. I promise you-" Wilbur sniffs, and chokes on his words, and for the first time in forever, Tommy might just believe him, "I'd drop all of this if it means that I can stop existing in this- this weird state of purgatory."
Tommy's not crying, he's not, but damn if there isn't anything he'd rather be doing in the world than break down into tears right then and there.
"And," Wilbur adds, "I'd do anything — I'll... I'll remember all the bad shit I've done, I'll confront everything I've been avoiding, hell, I'll rebuild L'manberg from the ground up — and I mean anything, if it meant that I'd be able to- to tell cold from hot again, or to feel pain again, or- or to be able to hug you and really, really feel it... I'd do anything, you hear me?"
"But you died," Tommy whispers, voice barely audible even in stark silence. "You- you died and you left me. You left all of us."
"I did, but- but I came back. I came back, Tommy, and I'm- I'm here, now!"
Tommy grips whatever purchase he can find, clenches Wilbur's scratchy sweater in his fists. "Why would you stay?" he hisses. "If you- if you hate existing like this so much, then why'd you stay?"
(And even as he says it, he thinks he might know the answer already. He's known for a long time, now, and all that's left is to hear it from the man himself.)
"You."
Tommy closes his eyes.
He breathes.
He lives.
"Because you're still here, yeah?" Wilbur says. Laughs, the kind of laughter that's all broken and nervous and shakes his shoulder almost like he's crying, the kind of laughter that makes Tommy shiver because he's missed it so fucking much, the kind of laughter that's real. "And I'm not going to let you get hurt or- or hurt yourself. I'm not going anywhere, Tommy. Okay?"
He heaves in a shaky breath, nods into Wilbur’s shoulders, and laughs, too, for the sake of laughing.
He's still uncomfortably warm. His legs still ache. His chest still hurts. And yet, and yet, it’s the best feeling in the whole damn world.
“Okay,” he chokes out. “Okay.”
And Tommy feels free, tonnes lighter than he’s felt in months. This is what he’s been fighting for, this feeling that leaps high in his chest, that flares to life where all that was left was ash, that reminds him that here, now, he’s alive, and that deep within himself he knows he won’t give this up no matter what.
Wilbur squeezes him tighter, and they don’t let go for a long time.
(Somewhere, he thinks he’s going to be alright.)