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Wilbur smiles, pocketing his deck of cards in his trenchcoat, standing up from his spot on the bench when he hears disruption.
A visitor.
He’s always liked those.
He liked when he had Tommy with him. The boy wasn’t his usual self, to be fair, he was very unlike his older self, considering how he’d repelled back when Wilbur tried to playfully punch him at their reunion, but hey, at least it was Tommy.
Wilbur twists the length of his body into a sideways stretch, trying to shrug off excess energy. Any moment now. His eyes travel the length of the empty platform, reminiscent of the time Tommy arrived.
Fragments are always better than the whole pieces anyway. Easier to mold into the people he wants them to be.
He fixes his hair out of habit. There are white streaks in them now, but he quite likes them. They make him look important, more dignified. Even more of a president, if he may say so himself.
He just wishes Tommy hadn’t been ripped away that quickly. Three months isn’t long. He’s been here thirteen years now, rotting in lonely misery.
Compared to that, Tommy’s three months are nothing.
Wilbur cracks a knuckle. And if, this time around, it’s Tommy visiting again, he’s going to make sure Tommy understands what exactly they’re here for. Tommy would have to understand their mission, that they’re fighting a dangerous war, and that to win, amongst men richer than them, cruelty is necessary and selfishness is a gift.
The platform is quiet. Shadows flicker in and out, escaping the wrath of the overhanging station lamps.
It’s ghostly. Wilbur’s sure he’s heard ghosts here. Wilbur glances over his shoulder, raising a hand to touch the back of his neck instinctively. There’s no one there, which is quite the usual, it’s always just him, but Wilbur often hallucinates fatigued gray faces lingering in stagnant spots.
They never go away. They never stay either. They’re halfway here, halfway nowhere.
They linger.
Wilbur’s presumed them to be the spirits of the people who have died twice in the void. Souls who ripped themselves apart in the void's noiseless desolation, unable to piece themselves back together.
The goners, Wilbur feels. The losers.
Wilbur calls it the underground experience.
The platform is his little personal hell.
People don’t escape easily from here.
There’s more to the void, obviously, for the void is endless, but Wilbur finds himself back on the platform on more days than he’d like, waiting for the train that threw him down here to return. To take him back home.
Either way, he thinks, squinting hard at the cemented platform, it’s coming back again. Carpe diem, he whispers, shoving hands into his pockets.
Back to the plans.
To win, Wilbur knows, they would need violence.
And if Tommy doesn’t understand, Wilbur knows he’s ready to inflict whatever is needed to get him to.
He hears a train rumble in the far off.
Any moment now.
Wilbur walks over to the ledge and peers, trying to catch a glimpse of what’s coming.
There’s a sudden impulse to throw himself off the ledge while he waits, and keep waiting until it’s too late to climb back up. Too late to protect himself from the inevitable.
But he’d only return to the void.
Wilbur can’t die anymore.
He’d only return to the void again, an endless loop of life and death, and yet there’s a sick sense of comfort in imagining it anyway. In imagining the squeal of the train as it runs into his body, the crunch of his bones, relishing the way his blood would squirt out—
He slams a fist into his jaw. The pain shudders him back to reality. No time for thoughts like that. No point wasting the one shot he might get. He needs to focus.
The platform beneath his feet wakes up raging in tremors. Overhanging lamps flash off red light, swinging back and forth on their hooks violently. They splice Wilbur’s face, lighting it up in broken shards, in red and black.
Wilbur takes a step back instinctively as the train finally roars into the platform, evidently coming to a halt as its wheels screech shrilly into the rails underneath. The roar is deafening and Wilbur unconsciously tilts his head into his neck, trying to cover up his ear.
There’s a brief moment where Wilbur wonders if he should open his arms up, in case it really is Tommy.
In case Tommy wants to hug.
His arms hang loosely at his side, itching to be raised and thrown wide open.
Wilbur’s not a big hug person admittedly, and so he brings up his arms and crosses them around himself instead.
The thought somewhat makes his skin crawl. He loves Tommy, he loves the way the boy looks up to him and considers him to be his mentor but the fact that he considered Tommy needing a hug is foolish.
He knows Tommy better than that. Tommy doesn’t need hugs. No one should need hugs.
The train has halted now. The doors of the train slowly slide open, and Wilbur’s immediately put on alert as arguing voices emit, breaking the silence of the void.
“Take me back, Dream! Take me back! I want to go back! Tommy’s there and Tommy– Ow! That hurt! Tommy needs me!”
Wilbur’s eyebrows shoot up. That’s surprising. That’s not Tommy. That’s– that’s…
“Don’t hurt him please! Don’t hurt him, please, if you want you can hurt me instead!”
That’s him.
It's unbelievable.
The voice he hears is a hoarser, cruder version of his own— a distorted version of his own clever, silvery tongue. It repulses him. It's what he’d sound like if he’d reached inside his throat with a pocket knife and gashed his vocal chords into shreds.
The doors are thrown completely open now, and the white blaring lights of the underground train scream into Wilbur’s face in the dark, causing him to shrink a footstep back and cover.
It’s not as bad as the pathetically loud human screams however.
“Please, don’t hurt him! I told you, I will do anything!”
“Oh Ghostbur, hush now," a laughing voice says. "We'll do what is to be done.”
Wilbur recognizes that voice.
Dream steps out, as if on cue.
He’s dragging out a person along with him, and Wilbur desperately struggles against giving up his facade to scrunch up his nose in disgust.
Not only is the man’s voice very like his own, the man is him, he looks like him. The person in front of him is too much like him and Wilbur wants to punch the daylights out of him.
Fragmented, broken Ghostbur.
“Please, don’t hurt him! I will do anything!” Ghostbur’s screams ripple through the papery void as Dream drags him onward. “I will do anything, Dream, anything! Just don’t do anything to Tommy.”
Dream stills in front of Wilbur, offering a quiet nod in his direction. Wilbur stiffens but nods back, not impolitely. “Yeah?” Dream turns to Ghostbur. “Would you now? Would you give yourself up for him?” he asks, tilting his head towards Wilbur.
The void’s lightened up. Everything is changing. It doesn’t slip past Wilbur.
Ghostbur quietens down, eyes widening. Wilbur can feel his eyes boring down on him. He doesn’t meet them. He stares past, across the platform, where the doors of the train hang open.
His escape. He could leave so soon.
“I would.”
“Then stay,” Dream says quietly. “This is your home now.”
There’s a pause. “It’s hardly a home.”
Wilbur wants to laugh. Ghostbur’s not wrong. It’s hell, he thinks. It’s his own personal hell. He’s been here almost forever now, and never once has he called it his home.
Wilbur’s home is L’Manberg.
His home lies in the lands he built himself, brick by brick, mortar and steel, and then tore apart with his bare hands. Wilbur never belonged in the void, he’s only been waiting.
Waiting to be a passenger, waiting to leave his hell.
Ghostbur is right, the man who’s too like him is right. The void is a sick place, and Wilbur’s already inflicting violence by forcing another person to trade places for his own escape.
He’d do it.
And if it needs convincing, he can lie.
Wilbur whirls around to look at Ghostbur straight in the eye. “Take what you get, Ghostbur,” Wilbur says, turning up the corners of his mouth into what he hopes is a sympathetic smile. “It’s not that bad. Really, there’s so much to do in the void. Did you know it’s endless?” He smiles, snapping a finger in his face. “You can explore! The station’s just a bookmark really… no, that’s wrong, what do you call it, landmark?”
Ghostbur nods his head, cooperatively.
Wilbur smiles again, unwaveringly. “Good. Very good, Ghostbur. The station’s just a landmark, as you said so, and you can come back to it whenever. If you want, you can even call out for help, and I’m sure a train will take you back.”
Wilbur’s tried it. On his worst nights, Wilbur has screamed his throat raw, withered and fallen to his scraped out knees and clawed the ground, and gotten no reply. Wilbur wonders how hoarse Ghostbur’s would get if he tried that. It already sounds clawed raw.
He holds out a firm hand. “It doesn’t get any better than this, Ghostbur. You’re safe here, I promise.”
Ghostbur looks at him, eyes sparkling with fresh tears. They seem to burn his ghastly skin, leaving behind dark, burn marks on otherwise pale skin. They shake hands briefly and then Wilbur looks away, taking a step forward on the platform.
Towards his freedom.
Dream, who’d been quiet throughout this while, now speaks. “I’m assuming you will be making the exchange then?”
Ghostbur’s quiet for a second and Wilbur almost looks back, almost wants to grab hold of his doppelganger and knock sense into him if he dares disagree. This is his freedom, his chance, his choice to make. Not Ghostbur’s, definitely not Dream’s, only and only his.
But he maintains his calm. Surely, his words must’ve been enough.
Ghostbur must have voiced his agreement wordlessly because a moment later, Dream asks. “Very well. That was quite… easy.” Wilbur wants to laugh. Of course it was. It was easy because it was him talking. Wilbur’s always been the better convincer. “Any last words, Ghostbur?”
It’s at that moment Wilbur tears his eyes away from the enticing white lights and throws back a glance.
Wilbur watches Ghostbur seat himself on the bench he’s spent eons on.
He watches the shadows grow stronger, the void darkening as a symbolism of the commission of a terrible crime.
But the shadows listen to him. The void listens to him, it dances on his command. Thirteen years! Thirteen years in this hell, Wilbur's learnt all he needed to in order to survive, to manipulate, to thrive. “You’ll be safe, Ghostbur,” he repeats again passionately, for convincing's sake. “You’ll be safe. Just keep to yourself.” Just keep to yourself and you’ll go mad quicker.
Dream fidgets, running a hand into his hair. His mask smiles cordially as ever, but Wilbur doesn’t trust him. “So that’s it then? We’ll be leaving, Ghostbur,” he says again. “Any last words?”
Ghostbur looks at Wilbur. “Keep him safe. Tommy promised me it would be okay,” He pauses, swallowing whatever seems to be clogging up his words, and Wilbur finds himself choking up too. “It wasn’t,” Ghostbur whispers, hoarsely. “It wasn’t. But he made a lot of it okay anyway.”
Wilbur doesn’t know what to say to that.
Neither does Dream apparently, for they leave him there, boarding the train silently.
The train gasps, blowing out air as steel doors behind them close seamlessly, locking Ghostbur in the endless void forever.
Wilbur hears the crying start again as the train roars back to life, hurrying out of the platform, and out of the void.
The passenger has been exchanged.
The broken for the one who’d always glue himself together. The crier for the one who had never cried, even while begging for death from his father’s arms.
Wilbur smirks. He can’t help but feel the void would mourn his loss.
The passenger has been exchanged.
And Wilbur is free.