Work Text:
As loved our fathers, so we love,
Where once they stood, we stand;
Their prayer we raise to Heaven above,
God guard thee, Newfoundland.
~
Fundy knocks on the cracked open study door. “You wanted to see me, Eret?”
“Ah.” Eret looks up from his desk. “Come in.”
Fundy does so, shuffling to take a seat on the opposite side of the table.
“I just,” Eret says, sliding a pen and paper across the wood, “need you to sign your name for me.”
Fundy hesitates, taking the pen slowly. “What, my full name?”
“Mhm,” Eret affirms.
Fundy makes a face. “Can’t - can’t we just put Fundy?”
“I need your full, legal name,” Eret says. “If you don’t have a middle name, then yes.”
“Well, I don’t have a middle name,” Fundy mumbles. “But my full name isn’t, uh - isn’t Fundy.”
“What?” Eret frowns. He’d been there when Wilbur first brought Fundy to L’manberg. Not once along the way has he ever gone by anything except Fundy -
“It’s Newfoundland,” Fundy says.
Eret blinks.
“New -” Eret starts, then stops. “Newfound -”
“It - it’s a - it’s a real word.” Fundy mumbles, visibly cringing.
“Well, uh, write it down,” Eret says, slightly distracted by this new information.
Nodding, Fundy raises the pen with no further protest. He scrawles the letters down as neatly as possible with how long his claws are.
Newfoundland Soot
It loops a little bit sideways, but it’s legible.
“You’ve gotten better at cursive,” Eret says without thinking.
Immediately, Fundy blots the cross of the ‘t,’ and scowls up at him.
“Well.” Eret takes the paper back and lightly waves it to dry the ink faster. “I’ll be honest, I had no idea Fundy was a nickname.”
Fundy grumbles something under his breath.
“What’s that?”
“I said, that was the idea.”
“You don’t like it?” Eret cocks his head to the side, staring at the letters. “I think it’s very unique.”
“That’s what people say when something’s weird.”
“Oh, come now.”
“To answer your question, no, I don’t like it.”
“Why’s that?”
“Just - I just don’t. It’s fucking pretentious.”
“Did Wilbur come up with it?” Perhaps a bad question to ask, but it leaves his mouth before he can stop it.
Fundy’s ears slump ever so slightly. “Yeah. It’s a place he grew up in, or lived in for a while, or something.”
“Really? Interesting choice.”
“Well, L’manberg was already taken.”
Eret chuckles, then squints at the boy through his shades - Fundy stares right back, giving him no indication as to whether or not that was a joke. Knowing Wilbur, it might not have been.
Eret looks away awkwardly. “This will do for now. I’ll need to draw up the final versions, and then you and Phil will have to sign them, but that’s for later.”
“Yep.” Fundy exhales, standing, rocking ever so slightly on the balls of his feet. “Yeah.”
Eret puts the papers safely in the desk drawer. “Fundy.”
“Hm?”
“You’re sure you want to do this?” Eret asks.
“Absolutely,” Fundy says, looking sincere, but who knows what the fuck that means, anymore.
For a moment, Eret sees Wilbur in the slump of his shoulders, the abnormal peel of his lips when he grins too far back, showing too many teeth.
Eret sighs, trying not to show it. “Alright. I’m - I’m happy to hear that.”
“Yeah.” Fundy smiles. “Yeah, I - me too, Eret. I’ll see you on the day, yeah?”
Maybe, Eret thinks, things are getting better, and when Fundy leaves without remembering to set a date, neither one gives it any second thought.
~
“Do I raise the dead when I put him behind bars?...We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him!”
~
Way back in the beginning, Eret was sure he had planned for every possible outcome.
Dream is a brilliant strategist, and Eret’s not so bad himself. Together, they’d created a maze underneath L’manberg, they’d planted bombs, they’d written signs and plan upon plan. There were backups. There were escapes. There were traps, trip-ups, contingencies for every action and reaction their little group of five could think of.
It was a blur, day after day of discussing taking life like it was no harder than simply snuffing out a candle. Dream’s smile as he dictated his reasoning still flashes behind Eret’s eyes when he blinks.
Stairs in, no stairs out, that way it’ll be slower if they try to escape. We can easily outpace them. Make the tunnels claustrophobic, so they won’t be able to run, they’ll be crowded. Go for Tubbo first, Tommy will not leave without him. Don’t let Wilbur get beyond the door. Take their stuff, take their lives, ruin them.
Hush now, Eret, don’t look like that - all you have to do is push the button.
The day Wilbur came home with Fundy, Eret’s pockets were already thirty pieces of silver heavier.
Wilbur looked tired. His rather sudden hiatus for the past few weeks now made sense, although Eret cannot say he’d been expecting this return. The child he held was so, so small, but not quite small enough, and Wilbur told them in a gravelly voice that Fundy grows abnormally fast.
Hybrid genetics, he’d said. Must have been my father’s side.
Eret had offered to watch the child while Wilbur rested, because neither Tommy nor Tubbo were equipped to care for even themselves, let alone a toddler. Wilbur had agreed, so gratefully Eret almost didn’t recognize him, and the phantom crown around Eret’s head began to burn, a headache that never really went away.
He goes to Dream, later. Tells him of the General’s return. Fundy stays a secret until Eret’s sure he’ll be older than sixteen on the day of the war; after that, he struggles to look at Tommy or Tubbo the same way.
Watching Fundy occasionally grew to babysitting during Wilbur’s watch, grew to going out of his way to gather sweet berries for him, whenever he happened by a bush, grew to teaching him to read and write in his spare time.
Wilbur laughed and called him Fundy’s wine aunt. Tommy laughed and called him soft, though there was something jealous in the bite of his jaw. Fundy laughed and his voice dropped and his fur darkened, until suddenly it wasn’t Uncle Eret anymore, just Eret - just a fellow soldier, and Fundy was only a few human years away from being the same age as his father.
And Eret kept meeting with Dream.
It was hard not to lose sight of the truth, spending so much time in L’manberg, seeing Wilbur’s spirit seemingly personified and running around, a child growing up in the middle of a cold war. But he found himself constantly gritting his teeth in war meetings. Wilbur’s speeches grew harder and more dangerous, more zealous by the minute. And Dream never quite let him forget exactly what was hanging over all of their heads.
Eret did his job, determined to see it through, and did not once waver in his convictions. So it’s funny, he thinks, that in the end he had failed.
Because this is what nobody but him and Tommy remembers - Eret had not pushed the button.
Tommy’s foot had found the uneven ground while Eret was still drawing up enough air to speak. Eret had watched, mouth open, so many feet from where the script wanted him. He sees it like a movie, clear as day - Tommy looks down, eyes wide with a feral kind of hope, cocks his head in curiosity, and steps down on the button so hard it splinters.
Eret blinks his eyes, surprised, and when he opens them next, Punz has thrust his sword through Wilbur’s chest.
Eret speaks his piece to a room full of corpses, accompanied by Dream laughing his head off just behind him. Nobody noticed that it was Tommy who pulled the final trigger, by accident, by ignorance. Nobody cared, and they were right not to. It was Eret’s fault, still - the noose around his neck, still - and he would have it no other way. He had placed the button. He’d written down the stage directions. He’d led them into their own fucking tomb.
Wilbur Soot remembers only the click of a button and a line pitched low with the weight of sole survival, and history marks him down as the one who did it all. Hell, Eret doesn’t even think Tommy himself remembers.
Eret had planned for every possible outcome. It wasn’t necessary, but it worked. Things played out how they were always meant to, and the weight of his failure is on him and him alone. He feels no regret for his betrayal. What’s done is done, and without his actions, who’s to say things would be any better? Betraying L’manberg was not a mistake. Neither was denouncing Dream, losing his kingship, neither was gaining it back. No.
His only mistake was a trivial one, but it is the one that keeps him up at night, and it is this: Nobody but Wilbur Soot has ever accurately accounted for TommyInnit.
“What do you want, Eret?” Tommy leans forward, eyebrows raised. “What’s your goal in life?”
“Well, I want to advocate for justice,” Eret says, “to make sure my kingdom is safe, to -”
“No, no.” Tommy scowls. “I mean you. You personally. Fuck your crown, your castle - what do you want?”
Eret really doesn’t know what this has to do with their current negotiation, but Tommy has always been rather roundabout in his ways. Eret shrugs and humors him. “I want to be happy.”
He can almost hear the way Tommy’s thoughts grind to a halt. “You want to be...happy.”
“Yeah,” Eret says.
Tommy frowns. Perhaps that wasn’t the answer he wanted. Whatever the case, he recovers quickly, digging in his pockets for something.
“Well, have I got - got the thing for you, then!” Tommy pulls out two handfuls of brittle green leaves, thrusting them in front of Eret’s face. “Mari-chu-ana!”
There are three painful seconds where Eret thinks that Tommy is indeed trying to deal drugs to the server’s only monarch; then he stares a little closer and realizes the plants Tommy holds are not drugs - just dried kelp. Whether or not Tommy knows this is another question altogether.
Eret bursts into laughter, surprising himself. Tommy flinches back but covers for it with his own wavery giggle.
“I don’t think,” Eret says, wheezing slightly. “I don’t think I want that.”
“It makes you happy,” Tommy argues, pushing the leaves a little closer. “Snort a line of the devils lettuce, feel good…”
“Tommy,” Eret says, gently placing a hand on Tommy’s wrist. His skin is cold. “How about we figure out something else, huh?”
“Don’t touch me,” Tommy grumbles, but it gets him to put the kelp back in his pocket.
Eret gives one last chuckle, attempting to compose himself. He turns on his heel, motioning for Tommy to follow him up the path to his storage room. “You want hearts of the sea, correct? How many?”
“How many’ve you got?” Tommy asks. He trots through the door and stays bouncing on his tiptoes, wary, like an animal caught in a trap.
Eret busies himself with sorting through his chests until he locates the bag of large blue marbles. “Really? I’ve got sixteen.”
“I’ll take them all,” Tommy announces.
Eret snorts. “What the fuck do you need sixteen hearts of the sea for?”
“Hand them over, yeah? What do you want for ‘em?”
Tommy, as per usual, is steamrolling the conversation. Eret finds himself unwilling to stop him. Nobody’s pushed back like Tommy used to since - well - since Eret stopped talking to Tommy on the regular.
“You aren’t getting sixteen,” Eret says. “How about eight?”
Tommy splutters. “What? No! Fucking - I want all of them, what do you need them for, eh?”
“I want them,” Eret says, unable to keep the edge of amusement out of his voice.
“You - well, I need them, so.”
“Why?”
Tommy hisses through his teeth, eventually settling on, “because.”
Convincing.
They’re a little bit on uneven ground, here, Eret realizes. Tommy is staring up into his eyes only to be met with the unforgiving tint of his sunglasses, while Eret can see every twitch in his face, every bloodshot vein in his sclera.
Making an executive decision, Eret reaches up, pulls off his crown and throws it onto a chest beside him.
“What,” Tommy says.
Eret’s fingers find his face, and before he can think too hard about it, he pulls off his sunglasses.
The world flashes brightly without them, light piercing straight through the white voids in his skull. He’s forced to squint to make out Tommy’s shocked expression.
Nothing’s worse than Eret, normal man, he thinks wryly, because it was Eret, normal man, who’d screwed everybody over. Tommy seems to recognize this, too.
“Prime’s sake,” Tommy wheezes nervously. It’s a show of how much he must need these hearts of the sea that he doesn’t immediately attack or run away. “Prime. Y-you, uh, I -”
Tommy shuffles around, scrambling for something to do to match - he settles on ruffling up his hair like a fucking peacock, setting his stance wide and baring his teeth up at Eret. “Take that, bitch!”
It’s - it’s so ineffective that Eret can only laugh again, utterly undignified, standing in the middle of his storage closet with his eyes exposed in front of TommyInnit, who looks like he almost can’t believe he hasn’t been killed already.
“Calm down there,” Eret says, raising his hands as though placating a wild animal. “No need for such threats.”
Tommy exhales, face twitching into a grin, every muscle pulled tense.
“I’m not giving you sixteen hearts,” Eret says, “but - I will give you eight.”
“Twelve,” Tommy says, pushing it.
“Nine,” Eret counters, holding up the bag tantalizingly.
Tommy hesitates, then shakes his head. “Ten, or I’m walking out.”
“You’re walking out,” Eret repeats. “Tommy, you haven’t offered me -”
“Ten, my final offer!”
“Tommy, this isn’t how negotiation works.”
“Geezus, as a king, you should know a good deal when you see one,” Tommy says confidently, comically contrasted by the way his eyes are blown wide and he’s still primed to run.
Eret resists the urge to laugh again, as that would shatter any hope of maintaining this conversation - instead, he drags his focus to the realization of a ball of - of what, annoyance? nostalgia? - lodged in his gut.
It hurts, almost, slowly but surely spreading to his throat and making his breathing shallow. Prime, this was supposed to be a light-hearted bit with an old friend -
Tommy’s face looks different than Eret remembers.
“Ten,” Eret says, then clears his throat and starts again, “ten hearts and an IOU, how about it?”
“I don’t owe you,” Tommy sneers, dropping his shoulders by a fraction and staring him in the eyes for the first time. There’s a beat of silence where his face contorts, ever so slightly, and then he mutters, “I’ll never owe you.”
Tommy is the one who pushes the button. Eret thinks about this every time his castle rings with silence, and tells himself he did his job and he tells himself his failure was inconsequential and he tells himself he may as well have pushed it, anyway.
Eret’s stomach turns.
“You never apologize,” Tommy says. He gazes at Eret with so much emotion it makes his head pound, and takes an accusatory step forward. “You never fucking apologize.”
“I don’t think there’s anything to apologize for,” Eret says.
“‘Course you don’t,” Tommy says, “it was my fault, huh? Everything’s my fucking fault ‘round here, right? You just laid the fucking trap, just - just lied through your teeth about everything, but no, not your fucking fault -”
Eret’s lost for words, stunned, realizing that Tommy does, in fact, know who really pushed the button, that day. “That’s not what I -”
“I’m not the one who killed us,” Tommy says, defiant, like he’s been carrying this for months on end, like he’s daring Eret to prove him wrong.
All Eret can say is, “I didn’t think you remembered.”
It’s the wrong answer. Tommy barks a laugh, cold anger leaching off him in waves. He whirls on his heel and makes for the door -
Stops.
“I need the hearts,” he grits out, “for my hotel. Sam Nook needs them. I have to get them for him, and he didn’t tell me how many he needed.”
“I didn’t mean for you to push it,” Eret says.
“So if you could just give them to me -”
“I swear, Tommy, you were just supposed to -”
“To what?” Tommy yells. “Die?”
“Well,” Eret says, “yeah -”
“What kind of idiot puts a button on the floor, anyway -”
“I never meant for you to feel responsible -”
“Who said I was fucking responsible?”
“No one, but you seem to think so!”
“I’m not - you - it’s your fault,” Tommy cries, splaying his arms out. “Everybody says so! Even you!”
“Then why are you arguing with me?” Eret asks, straightening up, watching the way Tommy stiffens and tries to do the same.
“I died,” Tommy says, bright, “we all died. And you never fucking apologize.”
Eret doesn’t know what to say. Embarrassing, he thinks, detached in a way that scares him - he should be much, much better at debating than this.
Except, maybe, this goes deeper than just a debate. Eret thinks about Fundy Soot, thinks about how maybe Fundy isn’t the only one he should have worried about sending to an early grave, thinks that maybe, Tommy is not old and weathered; maybe he’s just sixteen.
Still sixteen. He had been sixteen when Eret signed his first death warrant.
Tommy miraculously hasn’t left the room by the time his brain’s caught up with the conversation. He looks expectant, waiting for Eret to say something. Waiting for anything besides the awful pressure in the room.
“I will not apologize for my actions,” Eret begins, slow. He expects his monologue to end there, but Tommy only bristles silently, jaw glued shut by something dark behind his eyes. “But, I’m sorry -”
I’m sorry that you had to die. I’m sorry the dominoes fell this way. I’m so, so, sorry that this is how you grew up.
“I’m sorry the button was on the floor,” Eret says, instead of everything he owes.
Before he became king, before all the dethronings and rethronings and retaliation, Eret may have been able to draw himself up and cooly deliver his reasoning. He could say more than just a weak apology, he could explain why the regret in his head is so selfish in nature it makes him sick, some days.
But he’s not that Eret anymore. He hasn’t been for a long time. So that’s all he says, and Tommy is left to fill in the void himself.
“Yeah,” Tommy says, sounding worn out by the interaction. “Yeah. Shit place to put a button.”
Eret’s eyes burn. He remembers that his shades are clenched in his fist, and that Tommy hasn’t stopped staring since he took them off.
“Here,” Eret says, thrusting out the bag of hearts of the sea. “Take them. No strings.”
Tommy eyes him warily, but snatches the bag from him anyway. “Promise?” he asks.
Eret’s word carries no weight without legislation to back it up, these days. As a result, he hasn’t made a promise in months.
“Promise,” Eret says. Somehow, it feels true.
Tommy lets out a breath and it takes his posture with it - he slumps forward, shoulders dropping for maybe the first time since he started talking. “Thanks,” he mutters.
Eret fumbles with his sunglasses, shoving them on and nearly taking his eye out in the process. “Of course.”
“I - I’ll send you an invitation when the hotel is done,” Tommy says, breaking towards the exit, hovering in the doorway. “I want it to be a place for everyone.”
“Okay,” Eret says, soft. “Thank you.”
“Yeah.”
And then Tommy’s gone. Eret doesn’t move, just stands, not thinking much at all.
The crown is still sitting on the chest.
Eret stares at it for a long time; when he finally picks it up, it is ice cold against his skin.