Work Text:
It takes a special kind of bravery to strip a song back to its roots, to cut the harmony away and bare the heart of it. Wilbur thinks he might be learning it, this second time around; slowly, in pieces, tempo rubato. Fits and starts. He does not have the strength to conjure any of the symphonies he used to swear by - but he has a brother, and a hut, and a melody line, and bit by bit he starts to wonder if it's enough.
There are no anthems echoing around a ravine, no plaintive country-names dancing with the flag above in song. There is no country at all, this time around. He hasn't been back to the crater since his resurrection, too haunted as it is by old ghosts, most of all his; he thinks, if he were to see it, the words that hung about the walls as he first burned would hang, just the same, like broken compositions in the too-still, silent air. Instead of anthems, he turns himself to quieter things. Being the man he used to is something he can't do - but what he can do is split the truth, cut it up neatly like vegetables for a salad, scribble the falsehoods down with ink and commit the rest to the faint rasping songs he is learning to manage again. His voice took the longest to heal after the explosions.
His house is in the snow, and his guitar is always out of tune because of it, and so he manages without accompaniment more often than not; it is neither Snowchester nor the place he's heard the Syndicate spends their merry time, but somewhere close enough that he could find them, if he wanted. He doesn't. Not yet. In time, he thinks - and of course he still thinks in metaphor, because how could he not, when the villain thing was the one extended allegory he could rely upon, the one way of constructing an identity for himself that was more than "in pieces", than "had my symphony stolen from me" - in time, he will be ready for other instruments to return to the song that is his being, that has been given an impossibly new start by the coda that is resurrection. This isn't a repeat; it's a second ending. Maybe the future holds different harmonies, but - for now he exists as a two-part melody, just him and a brother that pops in and out like he owns the house, and that's so much more than he deserves that it's world-shattering. He hasn't seen anyone other than Tommy in a while. He's okay with that.
(And Tommy arrives on his own terms or doesn't, and Wilbur has no say in the matter - which was the only way it could have worked, after the void Wilbur half-remembers, after the fucked sickness that filled the space between the ending chord and the Alexander-note that began the coda. He's glad. He'd rather see Tommy when Tommy wants it than see him all the time, doesn't want to send the key signature careening out of alignment like he so often did, before it all. It's good to have a silence to fill. When Tommy is there, in the house in the snow that Wilbur built to get away from everything, it's filled with chatter and sometimes arguments and sometimes crying; it is immeasurably good to get out of his head, but still, Wilbur needs a quiet to come back to. A story waiting for him at the end of the day. A song he can fall back on, to make sense of the world with.)
It takes a special kind of bravery, Wilbur thinks, to strip a song back to its roots. He hasn't gone home to them yet - hasn't yet braved the tundra to speak to his father - but he could, and some time this week, or maybe next month, he will do it. There is no rush. The melody progresses in its own steady time, the thud of his socked feet against spruce wood a beat with no bite to it; what will come will come, and he will pick up his boots when he's ready. He's died once. Putting down roots of his own, paying them tribute, is something he used to promise, half-joking, that he'd do.
He has never been brave, as much as he liked to espouse quixotic, heroic virtues like it. He's never been naive, only played on the innocence in others. Used it, if gently so. But being is not the same as doing, and so: he cuts away the harmonies he liked to hide in, demands of himself that he look his own truth in the eye. Coaxes honesty out of his scratchy throat. He can only muster up so much music.
It's enough.