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What’s dying like? Tommy recalls asking Wilbur. He asks him a few times, and the answer is always different.
Why the fuck are you asking me impossible questions, child? sixteen-year-old Wilbur laughs, flicking Tommy’s ear.
Because you know everything, Tommy does not say, and Wilbur never does answer him that time.
After the revolution, after the Final Control Room, after Tommy breathes out his last shuddering breath a second time over in Wilbur’s arms—well. Tommy doesn’t bother to ask, because he’s felt it. He’s lived it, ironically enough. Death feels, just a bit, like a wary acquaintance, someone you nod solemnly at as you cross the street to avoid them. Not a friend. Not by any means. But he respects her, and he knows she will come for him again, someday.
✾
(What’s dying like? Tommy asks Wilbur, sitting in the ruins of the room where Wilbur ended far too many things, fingers hovering just above the terrible stain on the floor. There’s no body. Phil never told him where it went.
Wilbur doesn’t answer that time, either.)
✾
L'Manberg rebuilds, rising again from rubble and dust, a phoenix bursting forth from the ashes, and Death is but a distant memory for a time. There are newcomers to their lands, those who have never known Death's touch, and for a time, Tommy wants to know what living is like.
Living, it turns out, is much harder. Living is suffocating, and doing it the way people want doesn't feel like being alive at all.
So Tommy burns, and he pays the price.
✾
(What's dying like? Tommy asks Wilbur, wrapped in a tattered, patched, and all-too-familiar coat, ice-cold and soaked to the bone from hours of rowing and the leaks in the roof of their shitty dirt shack. He's shivering and wet and so terribly alone.
Wilbur looks at him sadly and whispers, cold.)
✾
(Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.)
In exile, things change. In exile, Death is less an enemy, less an acquaintance, and more a welcome presence. Tommy burns the soles of his feet in the Nether and wishes for Death to take his hand and lead him away. She doesn’t.
(You do not have to die this certain day.)
It’s not your time to die, Tommy, but who ever said it was Dream’s choice? Tommy builds a tower and stares across the ruins of yet another home, a mockery of a nation, and he thinks Death might be a little like flying.
(Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.)
But Tommy wasn’t meant to fly, not really. It’s Phil who is the one with wings, and after all, flying is banned on the server. Instead, Tommy climbs down his tower with his burned and blistered feet, and he walks. He faces north, and he walks. On and on and on.
(Stay here. See what news is going to be tomorrow.)
He walks until he wants the lava a little less, until he doesn’t look at the sky with such yearning, and Death nods approvingly as Technoblade opens his door.
✾
(What’s dying like? Tommy asks Wilbur, sitting beneath the L’Mantree, pretending to watch the lanterns so he doesn’t have to see the empty smile on his brother’s face.
I think I liked it, says Wilbur, and Tommy flinches. A single black tear slides down Wilbur’s cheek, marring the shoulder of his cheery yellow sweater.
Tommy thinks, just a little, he hates the color yellow.
Phil was there, Wilbur muses, tipping his head back. And that made me happy.
Tommy turns away.)
✾
Tommy does not think of Death so much when he is sheltered in Technoblade’s home. It’s hard to remember the allure of the lava when he’s surrounded by snowy plains for miles. Tommy watches the icicles collect in the eaves and he thinks, maybe I will be okay.
Then comes the festival, then comes Dream standing in the ruins of the Community House, then comes the return of Techno’s fury and the bitter taste of words Tommy will forever regret.
Tommy is not okay.
Techno delivers a countdown like a eulogy, and though Tommy does his best to rally the troops, prepare for battle—he still finds himself sitting alone on the bench, holding an emerald in one hand and a compass in the other, thinking of Death with a cold certainty settling in his bones. L’Manberg will die tomorrow, he thinks.
Or maybe it died a long time ago, and these are just the last rites.
✾
(What’s dying like? Tommy does not ask Wilbur, the night before they go to face Dream one final time, because Wilbur is gone now. Maybe for good. That makes something twist, deep in Tommy’s chest, sliding warm and sharp between his ribs and hollowing something inside of him ever wider.
Tommy wonders if he’ll find out tomorrow.)
✾
Tommy grasps Tubbo’s hand in his own and cranes his head back to gaze up at the mountain that looms over them, and he feels no cold certainty, no tired resignation. They will make it through this, one way or another. Death won’t be the end, he thinks. Not for the server, not for Ranboo or Techno or Phil or Sapnap and Mars, not for Eret, trying to be better, or for Fundy. Not for the fight against Dream, he hopes.
Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.
And anyway, Tommy thinks he and Death are more like old friends now.
✾
(What’s dying like? Tommy almost asks Wilbur when all is said and done and he sits on the bench with Tubbo at his side and the voice of his brother echoing in his ears.
But Wilbur laughs, laughs like Tommy hasn’t heard in oh so long, and says, you never could quite take things as they come, can you?
Tommy bites his tongue instead.)
✾
We’re free! he screams, soaring through the air with trident in hand, carried higher and higher and arcing back downwards in joyous freefall, reckless defiance of the earth and the danger and gravity itself. I’m free!
If only it had been true.
✾
Death is many things, Tommy knows. Death is an enemy, an acquaintance, an old and welcome friend. Death is a burden and a sorrow and a freedom like none other. (Death is completely and utterly unexpected, falling down upon him in a tiny obsidian box, painful and unfair and far, far too ironic. Why is it always Dream who gets to decide?)
Death, he finds, is a Tube station, crowded and bustling and utterly barren, with the sound of a guitar echoing off tiled walls. He follows the sound until the train doors close and everything falls away. The train speeds onwards, and suddenly Death is someplace shining and white, soaring so far above that no matter how Tommy cranes his neck, he cannot seem to see the end.
And then that great in-between place warps, and Death is a lady in waiting, smiling gently at him, and Tommy feels like they have met somewhere before.
“Hello,” he says, feeling odd. He should hurt right now, shouldn’t he? Seems so. But he doesn’t.
“Hello,” she replies. “I’m Kristin.”
“Are you Death?” It’s a stupid question, as stupid as asking a sixteen-year-old what dying is like—or is it?—but he asks it nonetheless.
She looks thoughtful. “Today I am.”
“Shit.” It slips out before he can stop himself, and he coughs, feeling embarrassed, because, well, she’s a fuckin’ lady, isn’t she? This isn’t Puffy, who lets him call her Pussy and get away with it with a gleam and a sparkle in her eye. Death feels a little more like Niki, the old Niki, the one who would playfully scold him when he called her a bitch and immediately regretted it.
The thought makes him ache, a little.
Death doesn’t seem to mind at all. She simply laughs softly, extends a hand, and Tommy reaches out to take it.
“We have places to be,” Death whispers.
She leads him into the dark, and this, Tommy realizes, is what dying is like. He almost wishes he minded it more.
✾
“Hello,” he says when he sees Wilbur again. “Did you miss me?”
Wilbur doesn’t look particularly happy to see him. His face is tear-stained, his hair wild. His nails are ragged, as though he has been clawing and clawing at an unyielding wall, to no avail.
“You aren’t supposed to be here,” croaks Wilbur, sounding heartbroken. “I didn’t want you to be here. Not like this.”
His hands shake as he pulls Tommy into a hug. Over Wilbur’s shoulder, Tommy sees familiar blackstone walls, a flag snapping in the wind. Smells the crackling of potions brewing in the distant Camarvan.
“How is this here?” he whispers.
Wilbur sighs. “L’Manberg died too, Tommy.”
Oh. He reckons that makes sense.
“I’m sorry,” says Wilbur.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not.”
Tommy pulls back to look him in the eye. “I’m…at peace, Wilbur. I’m okay.”
Wilbur’s whisper is cracked and splintered down the middle, barely audible. “You shouldn’t have to be.”
“I know.”
Life is many things, but it is least of all fair. Tommy thinks he can deal with that, if he gets his brother back, even for a time. He leans his head on Wilbur’s shoulder.
“I’m still proud of you,” says Wilbur. “I always will be.”
(He still sounds sad. Even the dead must mourn, it seems.)
✾
Death is many things, and not all of them are bad. In some ways, Death is like leaving.
Today, it is a little like coming home.