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Do I shoot him, Wil, or do I aim for the skies?
Tommy levels the crossbow at Schlatt, listens to the drunken ravings of a man who took away everything he cared about. His nation, his home, his best friend. His brother, even now. Schlatt has taken piece after piece of Wilbur, and Tommy doesn't want to think of how he will begin to put him back together.
Wilbur's hand brushes across his shoulders. His fingers are cold.
"Put it between his eyes," Wilbur whispers, giddy, and Tommy closes his eyes. Remembers the last time he faced a tyrant with his brother at his back and a bow in trembling hands.
Tommy, I want you to do whatever your heart says you should do, Wilbur does not tell him, not this time. His hand on Tommy's shoulder is not reassuring in the least.
"Victory or death," says Wilbur, a broken reflection of the man Tommy used to know. (When did he change? When did he slip away, put on a face Tommy barely recognizes?)
We fight with our words, Wilbur once said.
Tommy breathes out. He lowers the crossbow, and for the second time, he does not slay a tyrant.
One time, when Tommy is eight and Wilbur sixteen and Phil and Techno are absent as they so often are, Tommy wakes up to find Wilbur gone without a note.
He tears the house and surrounding valley and woods apart, yelling his brother’s name until his voice is hoarse, and when he can’t find him, he curls up in Wilbur’s bed and sobs until he has no tears left to shed.
That’s how Wilbur finds him hours later, returning from his supply run to the village.
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” Tommy whispers, staring at him with eyes far too tired for a child of his age.
“Why wouldn’t I come back?” Wilbur asks, worried and confused.
Tommy shrugs. “People always leave.”
(The silent me at the end is deafening.)
Something in Wilbur’s face and posture crumples, and he slides onto the bed, gathering Tommy into his arms.
“Oh, Toms,” he says, dropping a kiss on the top of Tommy’s head, “you don’t have to worry, okay? I’ll always come back. I won’t leave you.”
Tommy should have known that even then, even before the DreamSMP, it was too good to be true.
The sixteenth comes and goes, and so does L’Manberg, and so does Schlatt, and so does Wilbur. Phil’s sword and hands are covered in Wilbur’s blood, and something tears loose within Tommy, something he’s not sure can heal the same way ever again.
Techno is furious, and then he is gone.
Phil is grieving, and he is gone too, off to find Techno.
(He never tells Tommy where Wilbur’s body went.)
The last words Wilbur said to Tommy—before he left, before he pressed the button, before Techno betrayed them and everything went to shit—were a reassurance.
“I’ll be back,” he had said, soft and warm and easy. Like the old Wilbur, before the ravine and the rebellion and the election that went awry.
I’ll be back.
Tommy’s still waiting.
Icarus, Tommy reckons, might have been another name for Wilbur, at least in Techno’s eyes.
(He’s not stupid—he knows full well who Techno was referring to when he raged and soliloquized and retold the legend of Theseus across the seemingly endless space between them. An exiled hero, a disgraceful death; it’s not hard to put two and two together and come up with Wilbur, especially not with fresh blood coating Phil’s sword and angry tears on Techno’s cheeks. The others might not be able to see them beneath the boar skull mask Techno wears, but Tommy knows him well enough to notice.
Everyone thinks Tommy is some kind of hero, and why? Because Techno said he could die like a hero? Die like Wilbur did?
As if Techno would ever have seen Tommy as a hero, anyway. He’s nothing but a scared child in the Blade’s eyes, and he knows that now.)
Yes, Techno has always loved his theatric myths and metaphors. Tommy, on the other hand, would like to think he’s more down-to-earth, himself. Sure, his family is Phil, a man known for living on hardcore worlds for the fun of it; and Technoblade, all blood for the blood god and shit, once farmed millions of potatoes a day for months on end just because he could; and of course, Wilbur, so naturally it tracks that Tommy would be the sensible one, right? If they’re thinking of metaphors for his dead brother, then Wilbur was a canary, plain and simple.
A canary in a coal mine, that’s how the stories run. You know you’re in danger when the canary stops singing.
Pogtopia was an echo chamber. The rock walls of the ravine sent any sound ricocheting down the twists and turns and carved out chambers, plunging through Tommy’s mining excavations and soaring through the suspended walkways and spiraling staircases. Techno could sneeze in his potato farm and Tommy, sitting on a path with his feet dangling into empty space, would be able to hear it a dozen times over, fainter and fainter with each repetition, until it had faded into nothingness.
(Is that what history is like? Sometimes, Tommy wonders.)
You can hear everything in Pogtopia, which means Tommy knows that the last time Wilbur sang anything before he…before the sixteenth, was when he sang the national anthem, standing bloodied and fraying about the edges, poised at the point of unravelling, watching his son help tear down the walls they had all bled to build. His eyes had been shattered, and his hand had trembled, white-knuckled, in Tommy’s own, but Wilbur’s voice had been steady and soft as he watched their world crumble.
That was the last time Tommy heard his brother sing.
(Wilbur brings out his guitar, once, the night before the sixteenth of November. He lets Tommy drag him by the hand out of the dim, lantern lit recesses of the ravine and into the chilly night air.
Sitting by the torches Tommy staked to ward off mobs, Wilbur sits and plays, and Tommy leans against his knee to listen, fingers splayed in the cold soil, and for a moment, everything is the way it should be.
Can you play the anthem, Wil? Tommy remembers asking.
Wilbur plays the chords, slowly, like he can’t quite remember how. When he opens his mouth to start the lyrics, nothing comes out but an aborted, choked-off noise.
Tommy hums it in his place.
Looking back, he knows he should have seen how Wilbur was running out of air.)
Wilbur was a canary in a trap of his own making, darkness pressing down all around until there was no air left, nothing but soot choking his lungs.
Pogtopia wasn’t the mine. (Maybe even L’Manberg wasn’t.)
Pogtopia was just the cage.
(Are you proud of me, Wilbur? he thinks, standing at the precipice of the crater that used to be the nation they built together, from dandelions and blackstone and a wild, terrifying hope. Were you ever?)
When they first set out for the DreamSMP, leaving their childhood home behind, Tommy is scared. He hasn’t lived somewhere without his family since Phil took him in. It’s always been the four of them, together.
Neither he nor Wilbur want to admit that Phil and Techno haven’t lived with them in a long time.
Wilbur straps his guitar across his back and Tommy takes his hand, and together they set out.
They don’t leave a note. There’s nothing but a slowly deepening layer of dust to tell the tale of their absence to a father and brother who might never return home.
Wilbur doesn’t get a grave.
Schlatt gets a funeral with all the trappings, attended by practically all of L’Manberg, receives a graveyard entirely to himself, fenced in with iron and blackstone. Wilbur gets nothing.
Funny, how a tyrant gets a monument for them all to spit on, and the founder of their nation—founder, general, president, judge, jury, executioner—gets nothing but failed attempts to forget.
Tommy thinks Wilbur might have liked that, in a twisted sort of satisfaction. If he couldn’t make history, couldn’t be history, he didn’t want to be part of it in the first place.
Am I a villain in this story?
Tommy never wanted him to be one. No one mourns the villains.
At one point on their journey, Wilbur leaves him along the way. He never tells Tommy where he’s going; he just disappears one night with nothing but a ping on Tommy’s communicator, promising he’ll come back.
Tommy keeps going, finds his way to Dream’s lands, because what else is he supposed to do?
Wilbur says he’s coming back, and Tommy believes him. He holds onto Wilbur’s promise long after the message is wiped from his comm logs, and builds himself a house on the SMP, going to sleep every night hoping Wilbur will show up the next day.
And one day, Wilbur does what Phil and Techno didn’t.
He keeps his promise.
He comes back.
He sits under the L’Mantree one night, back pressed against the bark, fingers tracing the stems of the poppies he planted so painstakingly earlier that day.
(Eret had given the seeds to him and smiled sadly behind their sunglasses. Poppies, she said, for remembrance.)
Tommy sits beneath the one original remnant of the home Wilbur built for them and thinks this is as good a grave for Wilbur as any.
They’ve been building for a week now, but he can still smell the acrid scent of smoke and gunpowder and dust lingering beneath the clean smell of fresh lumber. No matter what he does, Tommy can’t stop smelling the smoke. Maybe he never will.
He’s not sure he wants to, because the smoke reminds him of Wilbur. Cigarettes and TNT and brewing potions and campfires outside the Camarvan in those early nights of the fledgling revolution. Tommy doesn’t have much left of Wilbur, so he thinks he’ll take even the bad things right about now.
Drawing his legs up, he rests his chin on them and tries not to cry, tells himself it’s just the torch smoke in his eyes.
There’s movement out of the corner of his eye—too smooth to be a zombie or a skeleton, too quiet to be a spider, too yellow to be a creeper—and Tommy tenses.
Wilbur, or Ghostbur as he insists he’s called, sidles up beside him.
“Tommy? Can I sit with you?” he asks quietly, voice echoing in that hollow way of his. His nose wrinkles. “Well, maybe float next to you. I haven’t quite got the hang of sitting just yet. Phil says I’ll get there soon though!”
“I guess,” Tommy mumbles, and turns his head away, searching for something else to stare at. It hurts too much to look at the ghost of his brother right now, a washed-out specter of the man Tommy remembers. (It hurts to see him, but Tommy wants so desperately not to be alone.)
They sit in silence, watching the paper lanterns rise over New L’Manberg. Lanterns Phil taught Wilbur how to make, once upon a time.
Wilbur had promised he’d teach Tommy how to make them one day. Now he never will.
Moments pass, and Tommy feels the words sit heavy on his tongue, rise up in his throat like acid bile, demanding to be spoken. If he’s going to say anything, it might as well be now.
“Phil,” he says, and his voice nearly cracks. He clears his throat, tries again. Ghostbur waits patiently, black tears slowly coursing their way down his cheeks. “Phil won’t tell me how…how it happened. Why he—why he did it.”
Ghostbur’s face falls.
“I don’t really remember it,” he says, playing with a cuff of his sweater. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you.”
“S’okay, big man,” Tommy replies. He rubs a hand across his face, knowing it does nothing to hide the tears fighting to overflow from his burning eyes but trying to mask them nonetheless.
He remembers a time when he wasn’t afraid to cry in front of Ghostbur. When did that change?
“I miss you, Wilbur,” he whispers, muffled behind his hand, and he sniffs. It feels like a monumental confession, witnessed by the flowers and the lanterns and the wind in the leaves, sighing with regret as it rustles the L’Mantree’s branches and remembers warmer, happier days.
(Tommy doesn’t see it, but Ghostbur reaches out an ashen hand, fingers flexing, but pulls it back in regret.)
“I’m still here,” he says instead, and tries to smile, but there’s a world of guilt weighing on his shoulders that not even he understands fully.
“It’s not the same.”
(You’re not the same.)
“I know.”
(The lie of I’m not him goes unspoken between them.)
One of the lanterns has strayed from the skies over L’Manberg, much lower than all the others, drifting over the grass to them, and Tommy watches his brother reach up a spectral hand to touch the edge gently, try to help it fly again.
As it rises back towards the stars, narrowly avoiding the canopy of branches above them, Tommy lets another question slip past his defenses.
“Can I hug you?”
“I’m not sure if you can,” Ghostbur admits, eyes affixed to the lantern’s trajectory but gaze so, so far away. Tommy wonders if he’s been touched by anyone at all since he died.
He inhales, ignoring a tear that slides down his cheek.
“Please,” he says, so quiet he wonders if he even said it at all.
Ghostbur looks at him for a moment, just a moment, and Tommy thinks he’s going to say no. But then he reaches out, jerkily, as though he’s afraid he won’t be able to touch Tommy, or maybe that he’s not allowed to, and pulls Tommy in for a hug.
He doesn’t smell like Wilbur anymore, not like steel guitar strings and cedar wood, like the sachet of lavender he always kept in his pocket that never quite masked the sickly sweet scent of his soul-sand cigarettes, but his arms are familiar and solid and Tommy buries his face in his brother’s chest and tries not to sob.
“I’m sorry,” Ghostbur repeats, voice sounding even reedier. “I’d…I’d tell you how it happened, if I knew.”
Tommy holds in a wet chuckle, squeezes his eyes shut.
Wilbur’s always been a shit liar, when it really counted.
When Ghostbur disappears, leaving nothing but the embers of a fire in his little home in the sewers and traces of his presence lingering in every market stall and home, every lantern strung over the docks and boardwalks of the city, Tommy thinks nothing of it, at first.
He’s used to people leaving, after all.
But as time goes on, it becomes more apparent that his brother’s ghost is well and truly gone.
Tommy’s not sure how to feel about that.
He’s angry, at first, angry at the way no one seems to notice, to care. His brother is gone, gone again, and everyone is far too happy to try to forget he was ever there in the first place. No one says anything as they live in the houses Wilbur helped build, walk under the lanterns he made, whisper admiring comments about the peace and prosperity of “Tubbo’s L’Manberg”, as though it’s better to pretend Wilbur, the real Wilbur, never did anything for them.
He’s angry because Wilbur came back every time before, followed him all the way to the DreamSMP, but now he’s gone.
It hurts.
And beneath the anger, there is a simple, aching loneliness. Now that Wilbur is gone and Tubbo is president, Tommy has no one. Everyone else has someone they can go to—Phil spends his days with Techno, Tommy’s sure, and even with Fundy. The cabinet meets without him, passing him over in most governmental affairs. Who does he turn to now, without Wilbur?
Tommy is alone.
Missing Wilbur is a constant in Tommy’s life, at this point. It feels like he has a song stuck in his head, a song he doesn’t know the words or even the tune to.
It feels appropriate, like a metaphor or some shit like that.
Maybe.
Tommy’s never been the best with words.
That was always Wilbur’s thing.
The fire has long gone out, leaving the damp chill of the sewers to start creeping in, when Tommy heaves open the creaking door to Ghostbur’s abandoned home in the sewers. He creeps past dusty brewing stands, breath pluming in the cold air, and pushes open the door to the library.
The books all sit neatly on the shelves, the quill and parchment resting untouched on the lectern. In the light of the lantern he carries, Tommy can make out the wilted plant on a shelf, and the film of dust coating everything. He dislikes the dust. It’s just another reminder of his brother’s absence.
He’s not sure why he’s here, alone, in the middle of the night.
Maybe for some kind of closure.
Maybe to find out why Ghostbur is suddenly gone.
(It doesn’t make sense for him to be gone. He had said he’d always look after Tommy. He’d promised.)
Either way, Tommy sets the lantern on a shelf and carefully pries open the barrel he knows holds a more motley collection of books, assembled from across the SMP. He’s not here for either Declaration, or Big Q’s Funny Hoots, or any of that shit. He’s here for something else.
Things I Remember is at the bottom of the barrel, quiet and unassuming, a tiny book bound carefully in cloth and tied with a leather strip. Tommy’s hands shake as he lifts it out.
He carries the lantern to the ragged chair, ignoring the dust that rises as he sits.
Gently, he opens the book, flips through each page with care, tears pricking his eyes as he looks at Wilbur’s familiar handwriting, everything he remembered scratched out on parchment, smudged and messy.
Fundy growing up, the smell of bread, the wind.
Sparring with Techno and being president and Phil protecting me.
(Phil stabbing me to death with a sword.)
Tommy’s fingers hover over the shaky I don’t know for a moment, hand wavering just like the unsteady lettering, before he flips back to the first bit of the list.
Bullying Tommy (he’s a child).
A child? Tommy thinks. Is that all I was to you, Wilbur?
If I was just a child, why did you ask me to fight in your wars? Why did you leave me?
He wants to hurl Things I Remember against the wall or take it out to the sewers and drop it into the water, let it be swept away into the darkness. But he can’t.
Ghostbur made this book. He wrote it, filled it up with the things that Wilbur saw as good, the things that made him happy.
Ghostbur built this house, and most of New L’Manberg, and Tommy sees him everywhere when he walks down the boardwalks.
It’s a poor substitute for the real Wilbur, but he’s gone, and Tommy is alone, and he will take what he can get.
(He rereads the book until the sun comes up, until his eyes are burning and blurring, until his lantern has run out of oil. Tommy falls asleep in the tiny room in the sewers, and no one comes looking for him.
He wishes that surprised him.)
New L’Manberg is peaceful and thriving, everything they’ve ever wanted (everything they’ve never had), and Tommy feels like he’s suffocating. Tubbo barely talks to him, and Phil is never home. Every time he speaks in a cabinet meeting, or at least the ones they don’t have without him, his words are met with scoffs or eyerolls or are completely ignored.
Tommy feels almost like a ghost, unable to be seen or heard, passing through life without doing anything, being anyone.
He might as well have died on the sixteenth with Wilbur, for all the acknowledgment he gets.
Tommy has tried to be seen and heard in every way he can think of. He’s fought battles, led rebellions, won wars. He’s given up his home, his discs, and even his lives for other people’s dreams—for Wilbur’s dreams, he does not say, but he knows it nonetheless—but when has anyone ever noticed? When was the last time someone truly looked at him and asked how he’s doing? Tommy can’t recall.
He remembers signs atop Ponk’s tower. Public Enemy Number 1: TommyInnit scrawled in Tubbo’s familiar hand.
He gives Tubbo "Mellohi", tries to tell him he trusts him, but the words get all jumbled and stick tight in his throat, and it doesn’t come out the way he wants it to. Instead, he sits alone on the bench and listens to nothing but the rustling of grass along the clifftop. Tommy likes making connections, building roads and tracks and highways, but every bridge he tries to build leads to nothing at all these days.
Maybe that’s why he burns George’s house.
He remembers the early days on the SMP, when things were wilder, happier. Causing trouble with a grin. Before there were laws and wars and deaths.
(He remembers Technoblade’s words, no matter how much he wants to forget them.
The thing about this world, Tommy, is that the only universal language is violence.)
His screaming has gone unheard for so long. Maybe he just hasn’t been speaking the right language.
Tommy grabs a torch and drags newcomer Ranboo with him, and as he watches the flames flicker and crackle around George’s pretty, useless house, some part of him knows this is the beginning of the end.
He goes home that night throat raw and smelling of smoke, and the pressure on his chest has eased, just a bit.
(Tommy, says Sapnap, twisting his headband in his hands.
Tommy pauses from where he’s installing glass in his tiny one-room house beneath Ranboo’s home in L’Manberg.
Yeah, big man? he asks.
Did…did Dream really say he didn’t care? About anything?
Tommy winces.
He said — he said my discs were the only things he cared about on the server, or some shit. Yeah.
But what about me and, and George? Tommy, do you think he cares about us? He has to, right?
There’s a note of desperation in Sapnap’s voice, and Tommy thinks of all the times he and Tubbo talked themselves into believing that Wilbur was fine, that he would never really press that button, that he still cared. That he wouldn’t hurt them.
He thinks of the way he still can’t let Wilbur go.
I reckon…I reckon he might not, mate, Tommy whispers, hands resting atop the furnace where he’s making glass. I don’t mean to be cruel but…
But I can’t lie to you and let you go on believing something that will hurt you in the end, he does not say, but Sapnap seems to see it in his face.
Thank you, Tommy, he says solemnly.
Look after L’Manberg for me? Tommy asks, and Sapnap nods.
Later, Tommy wades into the ocean with nothing but a prayer and a bucket.
As Phil ushers Tommy into the husk of the button room the next day, Sapnap finds a familiar tropical fish swimming happily in a bucket outside his door, with nothing but a waterlogged note attached. The bleeding ink can just barely be made out as two words:
I’m sorry.
Sapnap is too.)
The journey to the safe house is long and exhausting and fuckin’ cold. It’s already nearly full winter, and he has to walk through a snow biome?
Tommy’s too tired to be properly annoyed, but he’s not exactly happy, either.
With every step, he tries not to think about the look on Tubbo’s face when he said I’m sorry, Tommy. He tries not to remember the smug satisfaction in Dream’s voice, the self-assurance in his posture when he reached towards Tommy atop the wall.
(He fails.)
If Phil hadn’t been there, what would have happened to him? Where would Dream have taken Tommy?
He can’t imagine it’s anywhere good.
Two full days after his exile, Tommy finds himself looking out across a snowy plain, upon which stands a tidy house and stable. The windows glow in the early evening, and smoke plumes from the chimney.
Tommy imagines he knows who waits within the cottage, but he’s too cold and tired to walk all the way back to L’Manberg (and Dream) in protest.
“Fine,” he mutters. “What-fuckin’-ever, I guess.”
And he strides across the snow into Technoblade’s waiting arms.
Things are unsteady between Tommy and Techno, which isn’t surprising. Tommy’s not one to hold grudges, for the most part, but he’ll fight tooth and nail against anyone who hurts the people he cares about, and even now, even after his exile, he remembers a rocket launcher and a yellow box and the terror on Tubbo’s face that didn’t fade like the light in his eyes did seconds later, fizzling out like the very fireworks that killed him. Tommy remembers his best friend’s body evaporating in his arms, and he remembers the rocket launcher held steady and sure in Techno’s grasp.
The sad thing is, he also remembers when Techno was one of those people he would fight for.
The sadder thing is, he doesn’t know if that’s still true or not.
They dance around each other the first few days, Techno’s offering of welcome home, Tommy held like a precarious olive branch between them. Most days, Tommy just sits at the window and watches the icy tundra, holding the compass he refuses to return to Techno, waiting for something.
He doesn’t know what. Phil, maybe. Or, impossibly, Tubbo.
Or Dream, come to kill him for running away, evading him in L’Manberg. For all the terrible things he’s done.
Tommy watches the snow, and feels the numbness spread in his own chest, weighing him down, heavy and cold. He’s a boy made of ice, and all his tears have frozen behind his eyes, leaving him with cold fingertips and a dull gaze.
“I thought you’d be angrier,” Techno says offhand as he’s brewing potions, and that, oddly enough, is their breaking point. The tiniest bit of pressure that sends the ice creaking and cracking across endless depths of unspoken hurt.
Tommy shifts from his spot cross-legged on top of a crate by the window.
“What?”
Techno shrugs a shoulder, and a strand of his now-short pink hair slips out of its low ponytail. Tommy wonders, distantly, when Techno cut his hair. It used to be so long.
“I just thought you’d be angrier about bein’ exiled from L’Manberg, is all. That’s your home, right?”
“Yeah, my home that you blew up,” Tommy mumbles bitterly, and he watches as Techno’s shoulders tense slightly.
“You were startin’ a government, Tommy,” he says slowly, over-enunciating as if talking to a very young child. Something trembles within Tommy’s chest, creaking and shifting. “You knew when you asked me to help you that I was against governments. Hell, I told you. Multiple times. Even Wilbur knew—”
“Don’t,” Tommy warns, fist holding Phil’s compass clenching tighter until the smooth edges begin to cut into his palm. “I don’t want to hear it.”
Techno slams a fist on the table, making the brewing stands clink and rattle, and Tommy’s breath hitches.
“He was just as responsible as I was for blowin’ up L’Manberg, Tommy, if not more, an' you know that. Don’t try to tell me somethin’ different. An' you can’t tell me not to talk about him, because he’s my brother too!”
“Some brother you were!” Tommy yells, and somehow he’s standing on his feet, nearly toe to toe with Techno, who towers over him. The cold is receding, making way for familiar burning rage. “You saw that he was sick, that he was losing it, and you didn’t help! You just encouraged his spiral because it best fit your interests, you bastard!”
"Oh, an' you ignorin' it in favor of tryin' to win your little war wasn't the same damn thing?"
He shoves Techno in the chest. Techno doesn’t budge, but Tommy rages on.
“You helped him blow everything to hell, you killed Tubbo, you betrayed us all, you left us—”
“I don’t know what else you think I could have done!” Techno yells. “I wasn’t exactly welcome in L’Manberg afterwards—”
“I mean you left us before that, you bitch!”
“—and forgive me for blowin' up your home, it’s not like you immediately rebuilt it or anythin'—”
“It wasn’t fucking L’Manberg that was my home!” Tommy roars, and just like that, everything freezes. Techno stares, mouth open, as Tommy trembles, limbs stiff and fists clenched, tears building in his eyes. He’s a boy made of ice, cold and terrible and empty.
“L’Manberg wasn’t home,” he repeats, hushed, like he’s admitting it to himself more than to Technoblade. "Not completely, anyway. Wilbur was my home. And you helped take both away from me.”
“Tommy—”
“For all your talk about power corrupting,” Tommy whispers, “you never seem to realize you’re just as powerful as all the worst people on this server.”
He meets Techno’s gaze.
“Maybe you’re just as bad as Dream. Both of you took away everything I cared about.”
He’s a boy made of ice, and the ice shatters.
Techno catches him as he falls and sinks to his knees, letting Tommy sob onto his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, hand cradling the back of Tommy’s head. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
You should have, Tommy doesn’t say. That doesn’t mean Techno doesn’t think it.
It’s not enough to fix everything. Not enough to repair the hurt and the betrayal between them, stretching back for years.
But it’s a start.
Wilbur is alive.
Wilbur is alive.
I’ll be back, Wilbur had said on that fateful day in November, and here he is, hale and whole and alive.
Wilbur is alive, and Tommy cannot let himself be happy.
He loves his brother, more than anything. The hole Wilbur’s death had torn inside of him is less raw, now, edges not quite so sensitive to the touch, slowly coming together to mend. But every time Tommy looks at Wilbur’s tall frame, he smells gunpowder and smoke and tastes dust and blood on his tongue, remembers all the horrible things Wilbur said to him.
It’s as though his grief over Wilbur was a dam, blocking all the hurt and anger Tommy harbored for the terrible acts Wilbur committed, and now that Wilbur is back, the floodgates have opened.
After the first night, the night they all cried and hugged and fell asleep together on the floor, Tommy tucked against Wilbur’s side and unashamedly refusing to let go, things get worse.
Tommy flinches if Wilbur raises his voice, ducks away from his touch without thinking.
He’s not oblivious, either. He sees the hurt and regret that flashes in Wilbur’s eyes every time it happens. He notices every time Wilbur stops himself when he gets frustrated, overhears some of the time Wilbur sobs on Phil’s shoulder, saying all the things he wishes he could change.
But he can’t quite bring himself to forgive Wilbur. Not yet.
He wakes from a nightmare one night, covered in sweat, a strangled, aborted scream tearing from his throat, head full of arrows and blackstone rooms and obsidian walls, Tubbo’s horns curling and growing and swinging forward to gore him, morphing into Dream’s smiling mask and dancing puppets on strings.
Even now, he can’t escape the pain he’s been through.
Tommy lies in his bed, shivering, and bites down on a sob.
There’s a soft knock at his door, and he freezes.
Fuck. He’s probably woken someone, and now they’ve come to complain.
“Tommy,” comes Wilbur’s quiet voice, and Tommy stops breathing. “Tommy, are you all right?”
No. I’m not.
“Yes,” he lies hoarsely.
“It’s okay if you’re not.”
Tommy doesn’t know what to say to that, so he falls silent.
There’s a soft thud, as though Wilbur has leaned his head against the door.
“Tommy, I’m…I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and Tommy has to strain to hear it. There’s a soft shuffling and rustling, and he realizes Wilbur has sat down on the other side of the door.
Hesitantly, Tommy creeps out of bed and curls up against the door himself, back pressed to the cold wood. He wonders if Wilbur will keep speaking.
“I’m sorry for everything I did,” his brother says. “And for everything I failed to do. I fucked up, Tommy. I fucked up so badly, and I know that. You know that. Fuck, everyone does. Everyone hates me, and I…I think they should.”
Silence.
Then, “If you hate me, I won’t be mad. It’s okay.”
I don’t hate you, Tommy thinks.
“I love you, Toms,” Wilbur whispers. “You can go back to sleep. I’ll stay here with you.”
After a moment, Wilbur starts humming. It’s a familiar tune, and old lullaby Phil once sang to them that Tommy couldn’t sleep without when he was younger. Wilbur painstakingly learned it on guitar to sing Tommy to sleep every night.
He hasn’t heard it in years, since he proclaimed he was “too much a big man” for lullabies.
Any other night, Tommy might complain, but it has been far too long since he heard his brother’s voice.
He’s learning to appreciate the small things, lately. He’s learning to be kind again, and to accept kindness. How to be gentle.
How to be a kid again.
Tommy sits on one side of the door, and Wilbur sits at the other, with so many things between them yet unsaid, and he lets Wilbur’s singing lull him to sleep.
If he opens the door to find Wilbur snoring softly on the other side the next morning, well, he won’t tease him about it.
Much.
Ranboo visits sometimes, bringing Tommy stories of the antics Fundy and Karl have gotten up to, brings bread from Niki’s bakery, and tells Tommy all about how their pet bat is doing in his little home beside the Camarvan.
Sapnap sends him messages every week, updating him on the state of L’Manberg and how Tubbo’s doing.
Tommy never asked.
He does it anyway.
If you got the chance, one of Sapnap’s comms reads, would you want to see Tubbo?
I don’t know, Tommy replies.
He doesn’t think he’s ready for that, just yet. Maybe he won’t ever be.
Still, he hopes he gets to see Tubbo again. Someday.
Just not yet.
“I think I understand,” Tommy says slowly, sleepily, late one night as they sit together by the fire.
“Hm? Understand what?” Wilbur asks, gazing at the flickering flames.
“Why you did it. Why you blew up L’Manberg.”
Wilbur stiffens, just slightly, but Tommy has to say it. Needs to know if he’s right.
“Dream said he only cares about my discs because I care about them. Because they were a way to control me. He — he cares about power. About controlling people, and shit. He said L’Manberg can be independent, but L’Manberg can…can never be free. Is that why you blew it up? Because he was just going to keep using it was a way to control us, to hurt us all?”
He laughs, softly. “I knew the real you wouldn’t want to hurt us. You wanted to protect us. That’s why you built L’Manberg, in the first place. To keep Fundy safe.”
Wilbur smiles sadly. “There is no real Wilbur, Toms. There wasn’t some version of me who was perfect and disappeared once I…once things got bad. There’s just me. It’s always been just me. Maybe you’re right, a little. Maybe I told myself I was doing it to protect you, to cut Dream’s strings, when I pressed that button. But Tommy, do you know what I told Phil?”
He waits, and Tommy shakes his head. Phil still refuses to tell him anything of what happened in that room, before Wilbur pressed the button, and he hasn’t quite worked up the courage to ask Wilbur himself just yet.
“I told him the same thing I told you, Tommy. If I can’t have it, no one can. Sure, I might have had some—some delusion about playing the hero, about erasing a corrupt nation, whatever. But at the end of the day, that’s just something I told myself to rationalize to myself the horrible things I was doing. I was scared of losing something, so I destroyed it before it could leave me behind again. I hurt people. And that’s something I’m going to have to live with.”
The firelight plays across his cheekbones, his eyes, the new white streaks in his curly hair, and Tommy sees real regret, and acceptance, and peace on his brother’s face. Wilbur has come to terms with himself, at least a little, and Tommy almost envies him for it.
“It’s not selfish to want something for yourself, Tommy,” Wilbur says, and Tommy closes his eyes, remembering the hurt in Tubbo’s eyes, the way selfish had sounded screamed in his best friend’s voice.
“I’m not sure I believe you,” he admits.
“That’s okay, man. You’ll get there.”
Wilbur wraps an arm around his shoulders, and Tommy slowly relaxes against his side.
“There’s something else you ought to know,” Wilbur says after some moments of silence. “I…part of why I built L’Manberg, Tommy? It was to keep you safe, too, not just Fundy. I cared about you more than I ever cared about L’Manberg, Toms. I hope you know that.”
Tommy nods shakily. His throat feels tight, all of a sudden, and any words he might say are too big to squeeze their way out of his mouth.
“I’m glad you said it,” he whispers instead, and leans his head against Wilbur’s shoulder.
They’ll be okay.
Further down the line, when the thought of Dream doesn’t hang over them quite so heavily, when the well of their hurt has been plumbed and explored, when they are beginning to heal, Tommy and Wilbur go adventuring again.
It feels like the old days back on Phil’s old realm where they grew up, in the cabin by the lake. They used to build forts in the woods and wage imaginary wars, nations rising and falling in an epic storyline only they knew.
It starts when Phil goes on an extended Nether mining trip, and Techno is hunting, and Wilbur turns to Tommy with a sparkle in his eye.
“Wanna make a fort with me?”
As though Tommy would say no.
And so, laughing, they leave a note and borrow Carl, just because it will annoy Techno. They find a nice plains biome with a beach and a forest, and Tommy chops down trees and Wilbur erects walls. They shear the bark off the logs and sit within their tiny fortress, sweaty and laughing about some stupid pun or another, eating apples from the trees. Wilbur’s guitar sits at his side, his elbow knocking gently against Tommy’s, and everything feels right.
“This could be our new nation,” Tommy jokes later, as they stand outside the walls, preparing to mount Carl for the trip back. “We could call it…fuckin’, I dunno, Logsteadshire, or something.”
It’s a terrible pun, but it makes Wilbur snort nonetheless.
He smiles tiredly at Tommy and ruffles his hair, Tommy halfheartedly attempting to duck out from under his hand.
“Maybe no more nations for now, little brother, all right?”
“Okay, Wilbur,” says Tommy. “Okay.”
And together they turn towards home.