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1.
“Five hundred a month,” The landlord says, and Tommy’s heart plummets. Five hundred pounds, he thinks. Five fucking hundred for a tiny place like this.
The landlord scratches at his stained shirt and then at his head. He’s not even bothering to make the place look good, and, well, Tommy doesn’t blame him. It’s a little hard to make the dingy row of flats he owns look appealing.
“Well?” He says, hand outstretched like he already knows the answer. Tommy picks at the skin around his nail bed. Above him, the yells of a particularly loud couple penetrate the alarmingly thin walls. Next door, a baby cries, shrill and piercing and gross. Over the kitchen sink, water drips intermittently, staining the linoleum floor. There’s no other word to describe the flat than disgusting. “You payin’ or what?”
Tommy exhales. It’s this or the streets, really. He’s got no other choice. Still, it’s a little hard to depart with the monthly rent as he deposits it into his new landlord’s hand.
“Bills ain’t included,” He says, and then the door slams shut.
Tommy stares at a nasty looking dark patch on the cinderblock wall. He gives himself a minute to calm his breathing down, and then clenches his fists determinedly. He doesn’t have time for emotion right now.
Tommy doesn’t have much with him - a backpack with a couple of sets of clothes and a charger, but he’s got his house keys and he knows his parents’ll be too busy to change the locks for another couple of days. He makes a mental note to go back tomorrow when they’re both at work and take his setup and more clothes. The green screen, too. They can’t know I’ve been kicked out.
Kicked out. Kicked out. That’s what his Dad said Thursday night, face red with rage and boot at his chest. That’s what his mum had told him when he’d called her in the morning to make sure that he wasn’t kidding, wasn’t joking around. That’s what he’d repeated to himself over and over and over again alone in the tube slide in the park across from his house until sunrise, grappling with reality like a
It still doesn’t seem real. Everything’s been happening too quickly, too fast. Tommy stumbles over to the sink in the corner of the room and latches onto it, eager to feel something physical under his hands. There’s a wad of paper towel next to it, and a clean-looking rag stuffed on its piping. Tommy finds a bar of soap on the sole counter, and for what feels like the first time in days, he smiles.
With plastic bags over his hands, he cleans. He scrubs down the sink and the little counter and the floor, and then tackles the funky stains dotting his apartment. By the time he’s done the sky is dark, but his new home feels safe enough to live in. Tommy arranges the clothes he has in a neat enough pile in the corner of the room he’s dedicated to his bedroom and plugs his phone in at the wall. It’s not exactly comfortable, but it’s only one night. He can do only one night. He waits for his phone to start charging and then turns it back on.
1 Missed Call from: Wilbur Soot. Play Message?
Somewhere, a siren wails. Through the little window, red and blue shines, cutting through the dark, slicing open the quiet. At home, there were no sirens. At his old house, he corrects.
With shaking fingers, he raises the phone speaker to his ear and presses play.
“Yoooooo, Tommy. How you doin’, man? Tubbo’s a bit worried; I think you missed the stream yesterday. Don’t worry about it, though. Take care of yourself.”
There’s a pause, and Tommy jams his fist into his mouth in a fruitless attempt to silence his sobs. Wilbur’s voice is grounding. Calming. Tommy squeezes his eyes shut, and for a second it’s like he’s in a VC with his friend. He redirects the speaker closer to his ear and settles down onto his makeshift mattress. He can hear every little inflection on Wil’s voice. Tommy can picture his facial expressions, the crinkling of his eyes, the little side-smiles he gives when he’s nervous. His mental image of Wilbur is so clear Tommy can almost visualise him here. Oh, Toms, he’d say - or maybe he wouldn’t say anything at all. Tommy pushes the thought away.
“I hope you’re doing okay. Don’t call me clingy, I just - well - you’re never a second without being online, and it’s been three days. Just give us a call back, yeah? I - stay safe, Tommy. I’ll talk to you later. Love you.”
The call ends.
“I love you too,” Tommy whispers, to no-one. The sirens and cries and screams of his neighbours drown him out.
Nobody is around to hear him. Nobody is around at all.
2.
Tommy knows he’s sick when he wakes up.
His alarm is buzzing when his eyes finally peel open, and before he even opens his phone he knows he’s slept through it. Tommy sits up, and his head spins. He’s been in his flat two months now, verging on three, and - it’s hard, to say the least. He had snuck back into his old house to get his setup and snagged basic things like clothes, blankets - even the old space heater in his parent’s garage, but they do little to defend him from the elements. Cold air seeps through the cracks in the paper-thin walls and under the door, and there’s enough germs in his apartment alone to kill his grandma, so getting sick has only really been a matter of time. His neck is sore from the questionable lumps in the mattress, but his head is pounding . Spots dance across his blurred vision, too quick and infrequent to be passed off as grime spots on the walls. Tommy swipes the alarm off his phone screen with a trembling finger. He has just enough time to register how fucking freezing he is, how horribly hungry and thirsty he is, and then his world whites out.
When Tommy comes to next, he’s still reeling. He wakes quickly this time, not because he wants to but because he has no choice. He trips over his shitty blankets and sticks his foot in a cable in his haste, and then he’s on the floor without the energy to get back up, a million miles from the sink. All he can do is try to angle his head away from his setup and force the tears building in the corners of his eyes back down. It’s disgusting. He feels gross. He wants someone. He wants his mum.
Call Wil, he thinks. Call Wil, or Tubbo, or Phil - or someone. You’re sick. You need help.
For a second, he almost follows through. Tubbo’s contact is blaring up at him before he can even think, teasing, taunting. His profile picture is grinning - it’s an old photo, one from the Brighton meetup. Tommy had taken it moments after they’d hugged for the first time. Tubbo’s eyes are smiling. Tommy’s foot is in the corner of the frame, and in the very top right is Tommy’s father’s outstretched hand. He was never very good at taking photos, but that didn’t matter then.
Tommy’s father had driven Tommy all of one hour and twenty-one minutes to be with Tubbo. They’d laughed and joked all drive. He’d played his old tunes and wound down the window, and Tommy had stuck his head out on the highways, and they’d screamed the words to What’s Up? and Tiny Dancer and Uptown Girl and Billie Jean until their throats were sore. Everything was good.
And then they’d gone home, and the screaming songs had morphed into screaming words, and his dad’s hand was no longer a stray object in a photo frame but a red mark on his cheek, and then Tommy was out in the frigid night air.
He rubs at the goosebumps riddling his shoulders now and stumbles to his feet, clutching the edge of the plastic white table he’d bought at Dollar King to stream on. He’s shaking like a fuckin’ leaf, knees knobbling and legs threatening to give out from underneath him. Tommy wants nothing more than to collapse, to shut out the world and to stop fucking thinking, but something primitive gnaws at his chest - hunger or loneliness, he can’t quite tell - and he hesitantly pushes himself from the table. There’s no point wishing and hoping for someone to come help him. There’s no point wanting something that’s not going to happen.
“Okay, Tommy,” He mumbles, mustering up any strength he has and making for the little area of his flat he’s dedicated to the kitchen. There’s not much there, only a camp burner and a sink screwed into the back of a chipped, tiled wall. He’ll clean up the vomit later. “You’re okay. You got this.”
His words disappear into the yellowing walls of his flat. He reaches the “kitchen” after an embarrassingly long time and steadies himself on the plastic sink before pulling his phone out again. He swipes past Tubbo’s smiling face, past the hour long late-night conversations they’d had, past the “you know you can tell me anything, right?”, the “don’t ever hesitate to call”s, and opens Spotify in a vain effort to quell the silence. The first song that comes on after he shakily presses shuffle is a song from the playlist Wilbur had sent him all that time ago. Coldplay, or something. He turns the volume all the way up.
Somehow, it makes everything ten times more quiet.
3.
- Consider the system of linear equations above. Which of the following choices will result in a system of equations with no solutions?
Tommy’s head slips out of his palm. He catches himself just in time, jerking awake before the bell rings out. The rest of his classmates lean back in their chairs, relief etched into their faces. In the seat in front of him, Sarah McBride shakes out her hand, pencil tip completely worn out. She’s beaming, test paper folded neatly at the end of her desk. Tommy stares dejectedly at his own.
Maths has never been his strongest subject, but - fuck. One and a half pages are answered. Tommy didn’t even get through the multiple choice section . His grades have never been this bad, and it’s the first semester. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do.
“Thomas, your test,” Mrs Thompson instructs. He hastily folds the first page over, obscuring his mark. She sends him a disapproving look over the edge of her glasses, and his heart sinks. Mrs Thompson’s always been nice. When he fell asleep in class a couple of months ago, she let him stay until he woke up. Now, he’s ruined that relationship. He’s ruined everything. There’s not one subject he isn’t failing apart from Film, and even then he’s scraping at a B-. Tommy spends the majority of his school days red-faced in shame, head ducked against his chest, silent.
“Tommy,” Mrs Thompson says. “Stay behind, please?”
Tommy’s face burns. He awaits the ‘oooo’ from his classmates, but they all file dutifully out the door without another word. It’s kind of jarring to go from the loudest kid in the class, constantly laughing and talking and grinning to being completely and utterly invisible.
Mrs Thompson stacks the pile of tests against her desk and opens the top drawer of her desk. “Tom, there’s no way to put this nicely, I’m sorry. You’re flunking. You need to try harder. Study, maybe.”
Tommy closes his eyes. This is me trying, he wants to say. This is all I have left. It’s true - he’s running on three, four hours of sleep a night, has been for months. He’s streaming and uploading videos like there’s no tomorrow and trying to stay alive. In the little breaks he does get, he studies, but he’s so exhausted all the time that nothing ever sinks in. His entire life is a chore: pretending life is normal on streams, pretending life is normal around everyone, pretending life is normal in school. There’s no-one to help him. He’s been thrown in the deep end, and nobody taught him how to swim. Tommy’s been treading water for months now. How much longer can I stay afloat?
“I - okay,” Tommy musters. He holds his battered books closer to his chest and tries not to cry. He hadn’t enough time to visit the laundromat down the street last week, and this shirt is a little gross. He’s worn these pants for the past four days. His shoes are scuffed, soles parting with the leather. “I’m sorry. I’ll - I’ll find some time. I’ll try harder.”
Mrs Thompson raises an eyebrow. “I’m sure you can squeeze in some study between those streams of yours, Tom.”
Tommy bites down on his cheeks. He doesn’t trust himself to speak, so he nods instead, and then turns on his heel, making for the door. English has already started, and Mr Johnson isn’t going to be too happy to discover he’s late; Tommy’s been sent out of his class for sleeping more times than he can count.
“Wait - Tommy,” Mrs Thompson calls out. She scribbles something on a pink slip and marches around her desk to hand it to him. The clacking of her high heels is so familiar, and for a split second his mum swims in front of his face. He has to stop himself from reaching out to grab her. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Let me back. Please. I can’t do this. “I need you to give this to your parents.”
Tommy startles. “Wh - what?”
She sighs. “Your parents need to understand you’re failing, Tom. I need them to sign this. Bring it back next week, yeah?”
Tommy blinks. He tries to imagine going home with the slip in his hand, presenting it to his parents. He tries to imagine a world where his mum would care about his schoolwork, his grades, tries to imagine his father taking the slip in his hands and signing the bottom with his swirly signature and handing it back with a clap on the back and a pitying smile - or even a disappointed stare. He can’t. He never really had that in the first place, but at least then he had parents, and now he -
He doesn’t have anything at all. He’s just alone.
“Tommy? Tom, did you hear me?”
“Yeah,” He says. He pockets the slip and feels all the more heavier because of it. “Yeah, I did.”
4.
It’s a Sunday, and Tommy is in Brighton.
Brighton. It’d taken him three and a half hours to get here - the train ride was impossibly long - and his wallet is scarily lighter because of it, but Tommy can’t stop grinning. It’s been so long since he’s seen anyone; school doesn’t really count. They’re supposed to be filming a vlog of Brighton - “¾ in Brighton” - but the weather is shit and half the tourist-y destinations are closed because of some public holiday or festival they hadn’t accounted for. Not that Tommy minds - the day’s half over and it’s officially his favourite day maybe ever. Second to meeting Tubbo, of course. Everything is so easy with Phil and Wilbur. There’s not a second of quiet: Wilbur’s shit jokes and ramblings and Phil’s intermittent wheezing drown out the ever-present silence. For a couple of hours, Tommy can pretend everything is normal. He grins and laughs and answers questions about his parents and lies far too easily. For a couple of hours, Tommy can pretend as though he doesn’t have nothing to return to, that he takes himself to and from school, that the only thing he’s eaten in the span of forty-eight hours is an expired can of cold soup, that last week he’d been so sick he’d cried.
They’re standing under a shallow awning watching the rain pour down dejectedly. Wilbur’s hair is frizzing up in the damp air. He’s trying - and failing - to hide the messy curls with his beanie, but Tommy can’t laugh, because his own hair is a spiky mess. His socks are wet and his supposedly waterproof jacket is saturated. He hates the rain. It’s cold as balls back at his place - the heat never works and the walls don’t keep anything out. Tommy’s been sleeping under all his blankets lately. He flicks away a stray raindrop clinging to the bottom of his jacket and sighs. He’ll never get this thing dry.
“Maybe it’ll clear,” Phil comments optimistically. As if the sky hates Philza Minecraft personally, the heavens open up and the rain pours harder.
“Is that hail?” Wilbur says, pointing. “Oh, fuck.”
Tommy follows his finger and watches pieces of ice dent the top of someone’s expensive-looking car. He winces. “Oh, fuck indeed, Wilbur.”
His phone buzzes in his hand. He unlocks it and stares at the Uber cancellation notification on his home screen. “Wow, the universe really fucking hates us today, huh?”
“Watch your fucking language,” Philza Minecraft says, and promptly giggles. Phil thinks he’s the shit. (He is, but Tommy will never admit it. He’s taking his embarrassingly deep admiration for Phil to the fucking grave .)
Wilbur sighs. “What do we do now?”
They end up in a library, of all places. It’s the only place open, and it’s dry and warm - something Tommy hasn’t had in a while. He curls up in one of the armchairs and takes too much comfort in the quality cushions and heat. Wilbur and Phil have to keep shush-ing him every five seconds while they wait for an Uber or a Lyft or a fucking taxi - anyone that’s willing to risk their car for their comfort. After half an hour of relentless cancellation, Tommy succumbs and takes his crumbled homework out of his bag. You need to try harder, Mrs Thompson had said. Okay, Miss. I’m trying.
Wilbur looks up from his phone as Tommy takes out a pen. “Sometimes I forget you’re a child.”
“Sometimes I forget you’re a bitch,” Tommy counters. “That’s a lie. How can I forget that?”
He stares at the homework in his hand. It’s English - something about analysing a poem. He really doesn’t have the energy to detect hidden similes and make up bullshit about themes, so he puts it to the side and picks up the next thing in his book. It’s his math test. Tommy slides a thumb over the spot where his parent’s signature is supposed to go and frowns. The backs of his eyes sting. It’s moments like this where he really misses his parents.
“Toms?” Wilbur says. Tommy looks up. Wil’s crammed into an armchair, legs crossed over one another. His phone sits in his limp left hand, fluorescent light reflecting in the lenses of his glasses. His Twitter drafts are open. Words swim under his eyelashes. Tommy’s not sure if they’re blurry from his own unshed tears or the distortion of the light. “You okay?”
Tommy nods. “‘Course, big man. I just really hate maths.” He stops. A lightbulb goes off in his head, and he jumps up out of his chair in excitement. “I’m a fucking genius! Yes!”
“Shh!” Phil and Wilbur say at the same time. Tommy sinks back into the lounge.
“Sorry, not sorry. Phil, you’re an adult, right?”
“Depends,” Phil says at the same time as Wilbur says, “so am I.” Tommy leans forward in his chair, test in his outstretched hand.
“Don’t judge my mark; maths is not my strong suit.” Tommy passes him a pen as he takes the paper. “I need to get an adult to sign it. Can you?”
Phil takes the pen, but hesitates. “Aren’t your parents adults?”
Oh shit. “Um. Yeah, I just - uh, forgot about the test ‘till today, and I need it signed for tomorrow.” He nods to himself. I should be a secret fucking spy. I’m like James Bond, lyin’ and shit.
Wilbur sits upright. “And they can’t sign it because?”
Tommy’s heart stutters. Spoke too soon, he thinks. “They’re out. Business trip or some shit. I didn’t pay attention when they were telling me - probably too busy talking to women.”
Wilbur snorts, but he doesn’t go back to his phone, instead staring curiously at Tommy over the frames of his glasses. Phil signs the paper awkwardly with a raised eyebrow and hands it back to Tommy, who tucks it safely back in his bag. Tommy shifts uneasily in his seat under his friends’ gaze, giving into the need to clear some of the air.
“Thanks, Philza Minecraft,” Tommy forces a laugh. “I promise I won’t sell your signature on the internet.”
The tension in the room dissipates as his friends dissolve into laughter. Tommy sinks back into his seat and grins.
Wilbur stands up abruptly. “Men. We have secured a ride.”
“You say that so shiftily,” Phil says, still chuckling, but he stands up too. Tommy shoves the rest of his work into his backpack haphazardly and follows suit, tugging his jumper over his head as they exit the library doors and brave the elements.
“Where to?” The driver says, and Wilbur looks expectantly to Tommy, turning around in the passenger seat.
“Is your Dad picking you up from my house?”
“Nah,” Tommy says, struggling to contain the emotion on his face. What would Wilbur say if he knew I haven’t seen him in months? He turns away, buckling himself into the backseat. “Just the train station, if - if that’s okay.”
“It’s pouring,” Wilbur says incredulously, but he shrugs at Tommy’s persistent nodding. “If you say so.”
The cab descends into silence. Wilbur tells the cabbie where to go and Tommy pulls out his phone, flicking absent-mindedly through the photos he’s taken today. There’s some incredibly shaky footage of his feet, a ten minute and thirty seven second timelapse of the view outside Tommy’s train window, a series of stupid shots of Phil. He favourites a particularly unflattering one to Tweet later, and then the car stops. “Are you sure you wanna get out here, mate?” Phil says. His voice is impossibly gentle, and for a split second Tommy finds himself edging forward as if to bury himself in his arms. It takes everything in him to stop.
“Yeah. I’m all good. Really.”
He pulls his hood up and struggles with the car door. The rain outside is horrendous, so heavy that Tommy has no time to stay and wave. Only once he’s under the thin awning of Brighton train station does he look back. There’s just enough light left in the sky to see Phil throw his head back in a laugh, to see the corners of his eyes crinkle up, to watch him lean forward, hand clapping on Wilbur’s shoulder. The taxi rounds the corner and disappears as the sky dims darker, and Tommy is left standing in the rain.
Come back , he thinks. He’s cold and dripping wet and shivering but not because he’s cold and he can feel the beginnings of a headache wrapping around his cranium and his body hurts and Tommy really doesn’t want to be alone again. Come back. Come back, please.
“You orright, son?”
Tommy turns around. The bloke in the ticket booth smiles, gap-toothed and tired. Tommy looks over his shoulder one last time. It’s too dark to see anything now. “Yeah. Ticket for London, please.”
5.
“ - Kiddo. Kiddo, can you hear me? Wake up, son.”
Tommy huffs, hand clawing uselessly at whatever’s waking him up. He yawns, body curling up tighter, and rests his head on his knees. “Five mo’ minutes.”
There’s a low, unfamiliar chuckle. The rocking sensation stops, and Tommy jerks awake to see the train driver grinning down at him, hat lopsided on his head, uniform crinkled with a long day’s work. “Oh, fuck,” He apologises, scrambling up into a more respectable position. “I’m - I’m so sorry. Sir. Sorry.”
The train driver - Darryl, his nametag reads - laughs. “You got nothin’ to apologise for. I think this one’s your stop, yeah?”
As if to punctuate his sentence, the metal doors behind him slide open. Emblazoned on the white-bricked walls are blue and red insignias with the words London Victoria smack-bang in the middle. Tommy nods feverishly. “Th - thank you.”
“No problem, mate,” Darryl says. His speech is horribly similar to Phil’s. Tommy swallows a wave of emotion down, hastily waves goodbye to the driver, and steps onto the platform. It’s absolutely freezing out. He tugs his coat around him and races up the stairs as fast as he can manage in the hopes of getting a little warmer. Upstairs, the train station is empty. The streets are not. The rain had stopped, but the cold air remains; frost creeps over the pavement and over the station windowpanes. Hundreds of people hustle past, with red-flushed faces and bright grins and scarfs and beanies and coats on. They don’t pay any attention to the scraggly looking teenager next to them. Nonetheless, Tommy takes his keys out and holds them tight; he’s had enough close encounters to know he needs them.
By the time he stumbles into the alley the set of flats he lives in backs on to, he’s exhausted, tripping over gutters and stray cobblestones in the pavement. He can barely keep his eyes open, resorting to digging his fingernails into the crook of his elbow in order to stay awake. Liz, one of his neighbours, peers up at him as he approaches the lobby door. She twists her cigarette butt in the tarred road and stands up from where she’s seated on the gutter. “Howzit, kid? You got friends over tonight?”
Tommy blinks sleepily. “Wh - what?” Friends?
Liz jerks her head at the lobby door. Through the steel bars, Tommy can make out the silhouettes of two tall men. His heart jumps. “They said they were looking for a Tommy, so I let them in. That’s you, innit?”
Tommy digs his nails into the soft flesh of his palm, teeth sinking into his lip. “I don’t - I don’t know those guys.”
Liz shrugs nonchalantly, taking out her own key and moving toward the door. “I’m not stayin’. Yell out if you’re dying, yeah?”
“Jeez,” Tommy breathes. “I’m not leaving you shit in my will, then.”
Liz sends him a sharp, amused look, and pushes open the door. “Gentlemen,” she nods, glancing in their direction before exiting up the stairwell, the click-clack of her heels echoing all the way up. The men murmur, confused. “Phil,” the taller of the two whispers, and Tommy steps into the doorway to hear, fingers curling around his key for protection, “I told you this was a bad idea. Can we go home?”
“Not yet, Wil,” The shorter mumbles.
There’s a confused murmur from the men. “Phil,” One of them complains, “I told you this was a fucking shit idea, he’s obviously not - “
The taller guy trails off as Tommy steps into the lobby and fumbles with the light switch. It’s stupid; you have to bang it a couple of times to get it to work. Tommy does, and then turns back to the blokes in the room with a triumphant grin as the overhead globe buzzes back on.
“ Tommy? ”
Tommy stops smiling.
In the centre of the room, dressed in thick, expensive-looking, out of place clothes, are his friends. Phil and Wilbur.
Fuck. Fuck.
“I - I don’t understand,” Tommy whispers, fighting to keep his voice steady. “What the fuck? Why’re you here?”
Wilbur crosses his arms and Tommy takes a step back, heel colliding with the plasterboard wall. “Why are you here, Tommy? This isn’t exactly a good part of town.”
“You said you were going back to London, mate,” Phil says. His eyes are gentle, but Tommy knows how quickly that can shift. “What are you doing in a place like this?”
Wilbur has the audacity to crack a smile. “Drugs, Tommy? Is that why you’re here?”
Tommy’s breath shudders in his chest. He sucks in air desperately, but none is coming. Wilbur shuffles forward and Tommy can’t stop the flinch. When he lowers his arms, face red and ashamed, Phil and Wil are staring.
“Tom? Wh - what’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” Tommy parrots. He clenches his fists, focusing on the pain instead of his lack of breathing. “What’s - what’s wrong?” The light above flickers. Bass-heavy music floods down from somewhere upstairs. Outside, a bottle breaks. Inside, Tommy snaps. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that you fuckin’ followed me here, or whatever. Or maybe it’s you guys jumping to conclusions. Drugs. Really? Do I look like I have the money for shit like that?”
Wilbur’s eyes go wide. “What do you mean, money? I thought - “
“You thought wrong,” Tommy interjects. He forces another breath in. “I - they only let you withdraw so much as a minor. And I need parental permission to get a credit card, or - or - set up a new account. I can’t do it on my own.”
“On your own,” Phil echoes, and - fuck. “Tom. Tommy. Tell me you haven’t been living by yourself.”
There's a beat of silence. Tommy watches Phil’s face drop. “Oh, Tom,” Wilbur says, and he’s crying, and then Phil is crying, and Tommy’s struggling to keep the tears in, to keep breathing. Wilbur walks toward him and he presses himself against the wall on instinct, pulse hammering.
“Don’t - don’t - I can live alone. I don’t need help. I can live alone.”
Wilbur shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have to,” is all he says. His arms open in a hug, and Tommy can’t resist. He pushes himself off of the wall and into Wilbur’s arms.
When Tommy breaks, maybe, finally, there’ll be someone there to catch him.
+1.
There’s a lot more tears that night. The last thing Tommy wants to do is show his idols, his mentors, his friends the squalor he’s been living in, the sorry excuse for an apartment he’s made his home, but Wilbur takes his hand in his and reminds him they need to get his stuff. “You’re coming home with me,” he says, and ignores any protests Tommy makes. His voice is a billion times more comforting in person. Tommy doesn’t hold back from latching onto him.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” Tommy steps out of the doorway after he unlocks it. Phil and Wilbur shuffle in. The silence they bring is too much, and Tommy shifts his weight anxiously, picking at the skin around his fingers, readymade apologies on his tongue.
“Oh, Toms,” says Wilbur for the second time that night. There’s no disgust, only pity. For once, Tommy relishes in it. Wilbur opens his arms wide and wraps Tommy in a hug, and Tommy realises belatedly he’s not been hugged since Wilbur hugged him goodbye in Brighton in the meet up before last. He doesn’t comment on the way Tommy’s shoulders shake, or the slowly dampening shoulder of his trademark yellow sweater. “How long?”
“February,” Tommy forces out. A hand joins his back, rubbing slow circles on his spine - Phil. “They kicked me out in February.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath from the both of them, so comical Tommy looks up. Phil’s eyes are glassy, and Wilbur looks horrified. “You’ve been alone for half a year?”
Tommy shrugs. Having someone else say it out loud is - weird, to say the least. Puts things in perspective. Wilbur inhales deeply, squeezes Tommy’s shoulder, and claps his hands together, moving towards the side of his cramped room with his bed and setup. While they work putting everything together in neat little piles, Phil and Wilbur wheedle information out of him. How he’s doing at school, how he gets to school. How nobody knew (Tommy holds up the green screen he’s taking down as an answer), how it happened, how he’s doing. Tommy takes an embarrassingly long time to answer the last one. “Good,” he says, finally. “I think I’ll be good now.”
Wilbur smiles at that. While Phil ducks out to collect some boxes, he tells Tommy how they found him. It’s fucking hilarious, really - they thought something might be up and checked his Snapchat location. Tommy, as much as he makes out on Stream, doesn’t ever really check Snapchat, and he hadn’t the sense to uninstall the app, buried in a folder somewhere, from his phone. Tommy laughs and laughs until he can’t breathe and his stomach muscles cramp and he has to sit down on the off-beige carpet to try and catch his breath. Phil comes back, arms laden with cardboard, and they fill him in on why Tommy’s laughing. It takes them half an hour to recover.
Phil and Wilbur load the car up, and Tommy’s home is empty. It was never really home , he realises. He slams the door as loud as he can and marches down the stairs for the last time. He stops on Liz’s floor.
“What do you want, kid?” She says when she opens the door, bouncing her kid on her hip. “Those guys give you trouble?”
“Nah,” Tommy grins. He thrusts a box forward. “I came to give you this. Turns out I am leaving you shit in my will.”
Liz takes the box and balances it on her other hip. The baby in her arms reaches out for it, giggling childishly. Sure, they only really spoke a couple of times, but Liz isn’t all that bad, and her kid’s cute. Tommy vows that when he gets his control of his bank account, he’ll find her PayPal.
She peers inside at the camp gas cooker she’s been haggling him for for months. “You - you’re not dying, are you?”
He laughs. “Nope. I’m leaving. Outta here, babey.”
Liz grins. “Yeah, well. You look after yourself. Have a good life, bitch.”
“You too, fucker!” He calls, and then he bolts down the stairs and out of the building for the last time. An unfamiliar car is parked in the alleyway, Phil’s grinning face in the passenger window. Tommy climbs in and realises it’s the same cabbie as before.
“Holy shit, your bill,” He gapes. Wilbur leans over to ruffle his hair.
“For you?” He says. “Absolutely worth it.”
Phil stays for the first week and helps Tommy move into the spare bedroom. He takes them out in his stupid lime green Honda to Ikea to buy furniture and curtains and too many pillows and those really crappy hot dogs. They spend the whole day laughing. At the end of their shopping trip, Wilbur pays. “You’re never paying for shit again,” He tells him the fifth time Tommy tries to apologise for not buying his own stuff.
That’s how most of the first week goes: constant awkward apologies and sleepless nights and panic attacks. Phil sits him down on the second night and everything he hadn’t already said spills out: his parents; the words and shattered glasses and eventual fists on skin. Life on his own; the week he was so sick he thought he might die, the pressures of school, the days he couldn’t eat, the month where he didn’t limit his spending enough and he couldn’t afford power, the winter he spent with blue fingers and purple lips. Wilbur books him into a therapist on the fourth day, a nice lady by the name of Clementine who gives him prescriptions to the medications his parents forbade him from. She laughs when Tommy tells her she has a name fit for a moth.
Phil leaves the next week, but he comes back for dinner on the Sunday with a casserole and Kristin. When Tommy drops a bowl while loading the dishwasher and freaks, nobody says anything, nobody shouts. Wilbur takes him aside instead of hitting him - “I’d never do that, Toms. Never,” - and they go through breathing techniques and watch Up until the early hours of the morning. Tommy falls asleep on the couch and wakes up in his bed. It becomes a weekly occurrence, Sunday dinners. They cement their hodge-lodge little family in everything but writing.
The third week rolls around and Wilbur bridges the topic of school. Tommy’s been on a two-week holiday for the end of term, but now the two weeks are coming to a close and Tommy has to figure out what to do next. No, he reminds himself, Wilbur and I have to figure it out. Together.
“We can keep going to your school, if you want,” Wilbur remarks. It’s probably not the best option - Tommy’s school is an hour and a half away back in London. He could catch a train, but he knows Wilbur would insist, and that’s a hefty petrol price.
“Nah. Never really liked that school anyway.”
“Okay,” Wilbur says, and then opens up a new tab, typing furiously. There’s no ‘ absolutely not’ or ‘ do as I say’ or even an ‘ are you sure’ . Wilbur - Wilbur respects him, Wilbur believes him. Even after three weeks, it’s still kind of strange to have someone do that for him. Hard to wrap his head around. “What about Tubbo’s school? He lives around here, doesn’t he?”
Tommy pulls out his phone and messages Tubbo, and Wilbur starts looking into the process of application while Tommy and Tubbo catch up. Tommy hasn’t seen his best friend in so long. The prospect of seeing him again is exhilarating. For the first time in Tommy’s life, he’s excited to go to school. Only - there’s a little bit of a roadblock.
To enroll in a new school, you need parental permission. And according to every fucking legal document out there, Tommy’s parents are still listed as his guardians.
“You can get emancipated, I think,” Phil says when he comes over next Sunday and sees he and Wilbur elbow-deep in legal google searches and diet Coke. “But - isn’t Quackity a law student? You could check with him?”
They do. Wilbur calls him over Discord and everyone crowds into Wilbur’s bedroom where his streaming setup is to hear. “Uh, well, the US legal system is a bit different from the UK,” Quackity tells them, “but you - you apply for a court order, I think - uh, and then you have to prove that you’re financially independent and capable of living on your own.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Tommy says. Through the screen, Quackity seems to deflate.
“Tomas,” He says, quiet and incredibly unlike the Big Q Tommy knows. “I - I’m sorry that all happened to you. It’s fucking balls.”
And, well. Tommy has to laugh at that.
They apply for the court order and the date is scheduled. Tommy spends the days beforehand as an anxious mess, and when he gets to the day of the proceeding his hands are shaking so hard he can’t even do the buttons on his shirt up. Wilbur does them up for him with steady hands and a kind smile. “It’ll be okay, yeah?”
And it is. The preceding goes smoothly. His parents are there, of course, but they don’t speak or look up once, except for when the magistrate calls on them to announce they consent to him living separately from them. They answer in the affirmative. There’s a twenty minute break, and when they come back in there’s only good news: Tommy is officially emancipated.
Tommy does not cry. Tommy does not cry at all, not one bit - not when Phil takes them out for dinner afterward and fucking Technoblade is there, grinning awkwardly and way taller in person than he estimated. He does not cry when Techno tackles him in a hug with enough strength to crush a bear. He does not cry when Tubbo turns up, either. He does not cry when their plates are cleared and the table goes quiet and Wilbur pulls out a stack of papers from his satchel with the words Adoption emblazoned on the top. He does not cry when they’re walking back to Phil’s monstrosity of a car and Wilbur doubles back to walk with him. He doesn’t cry when Wilbur’s hand interlaces with Tommy’s own in a heartwarming familial gesture. He doesn’t cry when his brother’s hand snakes up to card through his hair.
“You’re never gonna be alone again, Toms,” Wilbur says. Tommy is not crying. He is not. “Everything’s going to be okay, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Tommy says, and he means it. “Yeah, I know.”