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Tommy’s breath comes to him as a shallow, shaking thing. In and out, in and out, in and out. A repetitive rhythm pulsing hot and thick under his ribs.
His shoes are polished so finely they reflect the golden light of the hallway back at him, stinging his retina with their gleam. They’re flexible, but oversized, and the space within the leather makes them wonky to run in.
As he turns the corner, he nearly crumples, ankles spinning as the ends of the bones tap against together. Hissing at the pain, he stops and leans against the far wall as he kicks them off. They hit the wall with two solid thumps, leaving prints of black-brown dirt against the floral wallpaper.
Good. Tommy never liked it, anyway.
Ignoring the sting in his ankles, he powers back into a sprint. The sweat and mud dampening the soles of his socks leave tracks on the carpet lining the center of the hall--his shoes did, too, but those were dryer, ashier, less damp and personal.
His breath continues to fail him, his side burning from running and his lungs alight with an even harsher gasoline lick, shallow and spiked--like rocks piled at the bottom of his lungs, shaken up with each inhale. The flames trail down his spine and legs to his feet as he skids to a stop at the center of the hallway, sliding to stand sideways.
He shoulders the door open, hard enough to bruise, but he doesn’t feel the pain through the adrenaline pulsing through every motion, every breath, every movement. The handle of the door hits the wall with a heavy thud, a faint crunch edging the noise.
Distantly, Tommy wonders if it left a dent. The closer, easier to grasp part of him doesn’t care. He kicks it shut anyway.
“Wilbur!” He calls, gravely, weighted like lead in his chest. His throat stings as he speaks, and Tommy isn’t even surprised when he coughs leftover smoke into his fist and pulls it back to the sight of blood, speckled haphazard on the skin like a paintbrush bristled inches from canvas.
The light in the room is warm, unmistakingly so. The lightbulb hanging under plastic cover on the ceiling is dark, but radiates heat, as if turned off recently, and the fireplace to the left wall pops and crackles, embers flicking through the iron fence blocking it off. Tommy’s arms hiss at the sight, a mimicry of the nights spent curled over that fire as his president typed away on a shitty, overly-loud typewriter, the embers flying to hit his arms and face and leaving small burns that mimicked freckles in their wake.
Said president stands at the other side of the room, facing the window behind a worn-down desk. The edges are worn, scratches of white edging the top counter, a sign of something akin to, but not quite, love. The typewriter is pushed to the back edge, threatening to tilt the wrong way, and the lamp that makes a cord stretch across the entire floor is off--an unfamiliar sight.
“Wilbur, the colony--Schlatt’s colony is attacking. It happened so fucking fast, we need to get reinforcements, I--I was overseeing the--the…”
On the other side of the desk, the side that Tommy would often perch onto to pester Wilbur as he worked, is a small grey box, a red button sticking dramatically from the top, off to the side. Next to it is a timer.
It’s beeping.
The rocks in Tommy’s lungs drop to his stomach, piercing the delicate organ as it spun with nausea. His head spins with it, dizzy and light.
“Wilbur, you fucking--” Tommy laughs, breathless, “You didn’t.”
“It’s a mess out there, isn’t it?”
Wilbur doesn’t look at him, hands folded behind his back. It’s funny, seeing someone with their hands behind their back from the back. It looks out of place, wonky and childish. It looks wrong, yet it's oddly fitting. Maybe not for a president, but it is for Wilbur--the line gets blurred, nowadays.
Tommy giggles, a shocked, dazed thing. It feels out of place even to him. Wilbur copies and lets out a small chuckle, much smoother and honied than the cracking, bloody mess Tommy’s was.
Tommy’s face falls, the sudden shift of stretching in his face almost comical, as he steps further into the room. “What the fuck did you do?”
“Do you really need an answer to that?” Wilbur turns around, then, and the sight makes Tommy pause. His hair’s unjelled, falling wildly in front of one of his eyes, and his skin’s flushed and warm, cheeks full. His eyes gleam with a gentle expression, preening and crinkled at the corners. Fuck, it’s--
He looks happy.
“No need for me to patronize you, tell you what you already know like some kid.” Wilbur laughs, soft, as he kicks his desk chair a few meters off to the side and leans down, pulling a drawer open. There’s a clinking sound, and a bottle is placed next to the lamp.
His president gestures him forward, and Tommy complies, albeit hesitant, peering at the bottle as his brother kneels and causes more clinking sounds to reverberate from behind the desk.
Wine. Tommy swallows down the growing thickness in his throat.
Once, maybe a year or two ago--the exact date doesn’t matter, with how Wilbur wormed his way into Tommy’s life like it always had been that way--Wilbur was nothing to Tommy but a guitar case, a worn orange-and-black leather jacket he refused to give the backstory to, and a backpack. The backpack was littered with holes and had barely been filled. He wasn’t very attached to what was in it, either, opening it wide for Tommy to scrounge through when he eyed it.
A vial of ink, some feathers and paper, two identical white t-shirts, some guitar picks, a pack of sloppy soul sand cigarettes and a bottle of wine. He had wine but didn’t have any fucking food or money, and Tommy feels that introduction sums Wilbur up pretty well.
That bottle of wine he flicked Tommy on the nose over when asked to let him have a sip turned to wooden mugs of frothing beer shared over a bonfire under the cover of blackstone walls. That recreational beer turned to stress beer as they crossed the final stretch of the revolution, and that recreational beer was dumped in favor of wine all over again as Tommy recovered from his second death that week.
Then the elections happened, and the wine turned to vodka. Burning and hot, the smell alone made Tommy want to gag--and Tommy wasn’t a stranger to alcohol, to drugs. He’d smoked his fair share of weed with Tubbo and Fundy under Wilbur’s encouragement, and he’d been around Wilbur enough to adjust to the drinking, even if he himself rarely participated after Eret. The smoky taste of beer left bile on his tongue, the familiarity of it crawling up his arms and wrapping thin, flaking fingers around his throat, piercing his adams apple with its talons.
The vodka proved worse than the wine or beer. Not because of familiarity, and not even because of the smell, but because of how it claws into Wilbur. It doesn’t make him angry or aggressive, like the drunkards in the stories Dream and Sapnap would tell him before everything went to shit.
The vodka makes Wilbur sad, sad in a way he’s never been. The beer and wine make him giggly, so Tommy isn’t sure why vodka’s so different, and he isn’t sure why Wilbur keeps drinking it, when it smells so vile and makes him feel just as. But he does, and Tommy doesn’t feel like trying to fight an uphill battle that may as well be a cliff with how prominent yet impossible to tackle it is.
The faded, looped script on that bottle label throws all of that to the fire raging on outside. Fifteen months, two days, twelve hours and forty-two minutes since Wilbur’s last drank wine. Fifteen months, two days, twelve hours and forty-two minutes. Fifteen months, two days, twelve hours and forty-two--
“Wilbur, what the fuck--” Tommy breathes out, voice gasping and strained.
“Come on. It’d been forever since we’ve had a drink together. When was the last time, had to have been… during the revolution?” His president stands, smiling saccharine with two thin glasses that widened at the bottom and rounded at the top held precariously in his hand.
“Stop the fucking timer!” Tommy stresses, voice rising in pitch because he knows, he knows his president wouldn’t aim at an abandoned colony, not when they’re all knocking at the White House doors, not when Wilbur’s been raving to Tommy for months about this. It hurts his throat, every word does, but he has to, has to stop his president, has to do something--
“You know that isn’t possible,” Wilbur coos softly, cocking his head as his smile softens. “You made sure of it, remember? I let you help with the proceedings. Hell, you led a good portion of them. It was admirable to watch, y’know.”
“That was so if we aimed them at Schlatt’s colony they wouldn’t be able to break in and stop it!” Tommy flaps a hand in front of himself uselessly, like dead weight, heavy, every motion feeling as if pulled through water. The other runs through his fringe and ruffles it a little, something familiar in the motion, “I didn’t think you’d fucking aim one at our own country! At the same time as the one to their colony--”
Wilbur exhales indulgently through his nose, face not shifting from warm saccharine as he sets the glasses down. “Have a drink with me, Tommy.” He hums, popping the bottle open and pouring. The thick sloshing of wine and the smell of fruit and salt itches at the back of his skull, intermixing with the smoke and ash that never stopped making Tommy sneeze, almost three years later.
"Wilbur--”
“Look outside.” Wilbur pours wine into the other glass, jutting his chin vaguely behind him, to the window stretching across the entirety of the back wall. Tommy frowns, but instinctually follows the order, pained, socked steps silent against the wood below them.
Everything’s on fire. The buildings, the gardens, the fucking bakery--it’s all swallowed by flame. Ash intermixes so violently with the snow hazing the Earth that Tommy can’t tell them apart, even through the lack of winter-typical fog clouding the glass. Embers fall with them, an occasional star in the inky black of the sky, and there’s screaming, piercing and sharp and angry, howls and laughter, cackling.
Through the shifting flames, Tommy can make out figures. He doesn’t recognize the colors or shapes, just that they’re there, and that their movements are fluid, human. Some fall to the swords and tridents, others step over bodies dressed in the familiar curling coats and shiny shoulder pads of their guard.
Tommy swallows the thick bile once again crawling up his throat.
“I saw this earlier, Wil. That--I was coming to get you. So we could get backup.”
“You know then,” His president whispers, “They’re angry, sunshine. They want my head--they want our head. They want our flag to be nothing but ashes blowing in the wind.” A puff of warm air hits the back of Tommy’s neck, baby hairs rising with it, “They want her. They want our country.”
Tommy tenses, shoulder shaking. He knows, he knows. There’s a hand on his shoulder, but he shoves it away, shouldering Wilbur and glowering up at him, who meets his gaze with lidded eyes and a smile, saccharine, but lacking the warmth.
“So you--what, you decide to blow it up? We agreed we’d use the nuke as a final precaution, only after we evacuated everyone.” Tommy snarls, rising on his heels and stepping away from the window. “We had other options, you ass! Eret--” Tommy ignores the way his chest tightens at the words, “--said her army was at our disposal! We could have fought back, but no, you fucking--”
Tommy pauses, chest loosening, and the thick bile building in his throat dripping to loosen the rocks in his lungs.
“What’s hit you now?” Wilbur hums. “The gravity of what comes next? The fact you and everyone you’ve ever known, everyone you’ve ever passed on the path or made eye contact with is going to die within a millisecond? The fact my supposed son and godfather and your supposed best friend are both at our doorstep with their crossbows pointed at our heads?”
A sob pulls itself from Tommy’s chest, sudden and ripping, tearing at the skin, like a fish caught by a fishhook at the lip. He collapses into his brother’s free arm, the arm wrapping like a noose around his upper back and leading him away. He vaguely recognizes the rope leave, a sudden heat pulsing in front of his crumpled form, and something thin is placed in his hand, heavy.
He blinks, lethargic, met with dark, churning liquid, cupped in glass that's cupped in his palm, the handle hanging like limp rope in the wind. He scowls at it, cheeks puffing, and moves his gaze to blink at the form that sits next to him.
His brother smiles, leaning back and stretching his feet out so the gleaming leather is inches from the metal gating fire. An ember hits the toe, and Tommy isn’t surprised when his brother doesn't wince at the hole it leaves.
He sips from his cup, and Tommy, though slow and hesitant, follows his brother, gingerly holding the cup within the cupped fingers of his hands. A part of him whispers its fitting, that he’s spending his last minutes alive doing what he’s always done.
“How long?” He murmurs when the glass is half-drained.
“Hm?” His brother’s is long finished, rosemary-stained glass perched on the rim of the fireplace.
“How much more time is on the timer?”
“Ah, I’d say about,” his brother checks the watch snug on his wrist, visible due to his sleeves being rolled to the elbows, “seven minutes or so?”
Tommy hums, low, something in him settling.
Tommy’s been a lot of things. He’s been a soldier, a follower, a brother and a best friend and a vice president. He can switch into roles like slipping into new clothes, it’s part of who he is, part of being Tommy.
A suit he’s never let people force him into is weak.
He’s never relented, he’s never submitted. Sure, he’s followed, but it was of his own volition, and he never let himself back down even in the shadows of those who had enough warmth in their voice and the right glint to their eyes for him to hunch into that shadow in the first place. He always made his voice heard, and if he has to cuss or put on a show in order to make that voice loud enough, so be it. It’s better than backing down, better than being seen as a kid. Being seen as weak.
So he isn’t sure why, when his brother holds an arm out, blinking at him with a painfully neutral expression, he lets himself curl into it. Isn’t sure why he eases into the hand that cards through his hair, the scratches that send a pleased trill into his core, the lips and then forehead that press into his temple.
Maybe it’s the fact Tubbo wants him dead. The fact that Niki and Jack and Sapnap and Dream and Eret and Fundy and everyone else who’s ever meant something to him are either dead, piled among the bodies hazing the swallow of flame outside, or want him dead, marching closer and closer to the center of the maze with each tick of the timer across the room.
Everyone’s gone.
Everyone but Wilbur.
Wilbur, who Tommy stuck to like glue the moment he came knocking with that shitty backpack and leather jacket he’ll never hear the origins of.
Wilbur, who he let lead him into a revolutionary war at fourteen and then vice presidency at fifteen, into a cold war at sixteen and into brotherhood somewhere along the way.
Wilbur, who even as Tubbo snuck off to the colony during the swallow of night, even as Niki cursed him out and even as Jack left his ripped up passport at his front door, never left him. Even as everyone else did, even as their country became nothing more than a president, a vice president, and half a million faceless citizens.
Wilbur never left. And neither did Tommy, because who’s a vice president without a president, a little brother without a big brother, a stupidly loyal teenager without someone to be loyal to?
I’m nobody, the sun whispers. We’re nobody, a moon echos.
He finishes the wine. It’s the first full drink he’s had since those nights chugging beer during the revolution, before Eret, before the smokey taste made him feel ill with longing, before it made his stomach knot up in a way not even weed, his brothers one-size-fits-all cure for negative emotions could ease.
Wrapped side-to-side with Tubbo, those matching scarves somehow looked brighter in the firelight than the stars in their leader's eyes, and his neck suddenly feels bare in a way it hasn’t since he was given collared shirts to fill the void.
The timer continues to tick. His brother takes the glass from his hand and sets it next to his own, cackling when Tommy yawns, something about stained teeth leaving his lips. Tommy doesn’t bother barking out some sharp reply as he nestles deeper into the moon's side, letting his brother soak up rays of sun.
“How much time?” Tommy murmurs into the chest of the now-wrinkled dress shirt.
His brother’s chest rumbles as he hums, low, the run of fingers across his scalp briefly stilling, “about a minute.”
“‘Kay,” he exhales, soft, content.
The hand doesn’t restart. Instead, it leaves, and his brother moves, gently prying Tommy from him to stand. Tommy lets out a vaguely confused, hurt noise, trying to rub the tendrils of sleep from his retina as his brother ruffles his hair. Footsteps pad to the other side of the room, a door opens, and then the warmth is back. Tommy leans into it, kicking his feet onto his brother’s knees just to spite the man.
“I wrote you a song, sunshine. Do you want to hear it?” The voice is barely a whisper.
“When?” His is even quieter.
“Ah, few hours ago, maybe.” His brother pushes him back once more, softly. Tommy goes to snap at him, but when he sees the guitar that’s being pulled to his lap, he quiets.
His brother abandoned his guitar when they won the elections, claiming he was busy with building their country up from the walls they’d contained it in. A higher population had higher needs to be met, and his brother didn’t have the time to be a person, to be Wilbur, to write poems or teach Tommy to tie his long abandoned running shoes or strum on that polished guitar with the carvings of a whale and discs and other symbols to painful to register on the back.
The sight of his brother, holding that guitar gentler than he could ever hold Tommy, biting his lip to the point of where blood beaded at the center was nostalgic. Like beer, or orange and blue fish named after planets, or the combination of the colors red and green, but less nauseating. Almost fuzzy, warm.
Tommy shuffles to sit back and cross his legs under him, resting his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand, eyes drooping. His brother wraps the leather strap of the guitar flying in the wind around his shoulder, adjusting it so it's snug against his chest, hand resting loosely at the top of the neck. It's a bit ironic, considering how constricted Tommy’s throat feels, apple bobbing in the middle of an ocean.
“Time?”
His brother looks down at the hand near the base, “thirty.”
Tommy just hums, accepting, eyes near closed from his hunched position.
His brother clears his throat, “I forgot my pick in my drawer, so I’ll have to use my nail. I apologize for the delay, folks.” He smiles, mockingly sheepish, and Tommy chuckles, sluggish, chest straining with every movement.
There’s a pounding in the hallway. Tommy blinks the lethargy from his skull at the steady increase in thrum. His brother is unbothered, fiddling with the tuning at the top of the neck, so Tommy follows, a smile playing on his lips as he taps his brother's knee, leaning in like a child sharing a secret when their gazes meet.
“Hurry up, they’re coming,” Tommy stage whispers.
“Okay, okay,” his brother whispers back, equally gleeful, strumming experimentally. Tommy’s chest curls pleasantly at the noise, feeling like that fourteen year old who let some random adult stay in his home for the night in exchange for getting to hear a song of his choosing all over again.
The pounding gets louder. It briefly stops, before it hits the door, shaking heavy, heavy, heavy, making the room vibrate under Tommy’s legs.
“President and Vice President Soot! Your army is dead!”
“Ignore them, sunshine,” his brother hums, beginning to strum, hands moving a bit lower on the neck. The guitar lets out a low, shrill noise as the pads of his fingers scrape against the strings. His brother’s never been careless with the thing, but hey, they’re gonna die in a few seconds.
“Come out with your hands up!”
His brother starts to sing, loud enough to be heard over the pounding, but quiet enough for only Tommy to hear, as if his melody were some precious secret he didn’t want shared with anyone else. That thought made Tommy feel warm in a way it probably shouldn’t have, as he nestled into his brother’s side for a final time.
The timer lets out three rapid, simultaneous beeps.
“My feet are aching--”
Tommy’s brother would always call him sunshine, but Tommy can’t help but think it should’ve been the other way around as he watched it swallow his brother whole.