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Routine. Routine was important. Routine was grounding, routine was predictable, routine was structure, routine was a catalyst. Routine was rational. Routine is refuge. It has to be, for Tommy.
He catches glimpses of himself in the water while he’s tending to the wheat just outside his door, he spends lifetimes in minutes, staring at the polished stone walls, watching the world make funny faces at his own reflection. He’ll hear knowing glances walk down the path to his door, and he’ll card his fingers through his hair, rub his eyes, run shaky fingers along his cheekbones to his jaw, and hold his palms against the sides of his face as he stares. Routine, he tells himself. Routine.
He hated how the air fell heavy and stifling at night, yet the wind could still dance in it. He hated how he could hold his breath and the flowers on the lawn would still whisper to each other. He hated how he could stand still and the door would still rattle, the windows would still echo. He hated how he couldn’t recognize the polished stone walls, not with the vines threading through new cracks and moss growing in littered pockets of absence. He has routine, though. He keeps himself busy. A drop in an empty bucket only makes you realize how empty that bucket truly is. So he collects the stone for Wilbur, repairs the Prime Path, tends to his farm, builds up around Church Prime, explores Las Nevadas, builds a railroad. He does things. He keeps himself moving. He occupies time.
The server is quiet in the dark. Perhaps it’s because the air has settled, and most people bloom in its warm intimacy. Tommy is not most people, evidently. The night is an unwelcome intimacy. It’s suffocatingly lonely, a perpetual cavalcade he spends walking the same paths over and over and over again. Tommy cannot do things in its liminality.
It’s one of his better nights, he supposes. The nights have been better, recently. They seem to pass faster now that Wilbur is back. But Tommy doesn’t really know why. He doesn’t really care to know why. The nights are still the same nights, and no matter what, he can waltz around the server, he’ll still stumble on pebbles and latch on splinters. It’s all routine, he tells himself. Though if he finds his feet lingering around the museum, he grabs an extra loaf of bread for his next round of the server.
And that’s where he is, currently. Stale bread in a woven basket that hangs low to the ground with eager echoes as his fingers flex around the handle. Routine is apt, isn’t it? Carrying familiarity disguised in motion. Insidious, perhaps. Exploitative.
Tommy sat on the front steps of the museum, ripping pieces of bread from a loaf, tossing it in his hands, crumbling it for the raccoons that scramble around the recreated Camarvan. He hasn’t seen them yet, but notices the distinct tufts of fur caught on the doors and bars. He hasn’t gone in either, out of respect, or out of envy, perhaps, leaving littered crumbs on the ground. Everything dwells along silver lines anyway, and Tommy thinks it’s easier to eat stale bread.
He is trying his best, he is trying, and he knows it’s not easy. If healing was sheltered behind habitual instinct, it wouldn’t be healing, right? He’s been through shit. He’s done shit. Hell, he’s even been shit. His stomach gnaws at him, his fingers rattle against each other, he finds shed white hairs strewn on his blankets, on the clothes that hang limply from his shoulders, with their remedied tears and purposeful rips adorned with patches and bloodstains from pricked fingers, and he doesn’t feel anything.
He shakes his head, a soft laugh escaping to ring hollow, suspended in the air, “L’manberg can be independent, but L’manberg can’t be free”. Tommy lets it hang there.
Morning arrives after mindlessly walking the server and Tommy sees Captain Puffy waving him over, as she’s picking weeds from the wheat farm around the spider spawner.
“Hey Tommy! Want some weed?” she invites, with a playful smile and soil flinging from her hand as she uproots a clump of grass.
Tommy offers a dip of his head, before reaching down and snatching the weeds from her hand, holding it up to the sun, his eyes squinting, and dropping it in the pile at her feet. “Nope! Not up to my standards!”
She grabs it from the pile, holding her palm out as she looks at it and back at him, smirking, “Uh huh….and what are those? Cause clearly, well….”
“What do you MEAN???? I am the biggest stoner—dare I say weeder, because that’s how much better I am than everyone else—this server knows and will ever know!” he shoots back, straightening his back, pointedly sticking out his chin.
Puffy lets out a snicker, continuing to pull weeds, “There’s loads of weeds on the other side over there, if you want something to do, by the way,” she glances up at Tommy, whose shoulders stiffened forward and arms lay folded just above his waist, waiting for tired eyes to reach hers, before continuing. “Maybe you can go trick someone into thinking this is actual weed,” she states, tossing a plant into the pile, “you never know.”
An unblinking moment of silence passes, both of them trained on the ground, before Tommy lifts his head back up, mumbling a goodbye, tensing his thumb and index fingers as he curls them tightly into his left arm. Passive eyes scan the farm, before blinking once more and turning back to the path.
He kept his fingers clasped around his arm with grazing circles, and twists of his hand as he fell in step, climbing the oak stairs to his house in the hill. He didn’t particularly enjoy starting his day like that. If “starting” could even be considered appropriate, it’s not like he had any real awareness of time, anyway. But nonetheless, entering the daylight with a conversation that only put him on edge, that was far from ideal. He was too aware of his restlessness too fast. He paced into his backroom, taps ricocheting against all the nooks and crannies they could find, the static polished stone walls glaring at him, fabric spilling through one craving hand in white strands of hair, the other biting into an arm with a locked jaw. How desperately ears wanted to lap up the crashing white noise, just for something, anything, how willingly ears would relinquish rudimentary numbness for just one breach. The air rises, tantalizing, during the day, and Tommy found himself drowning.
Shaky hands check to see if he’s still there with its faithless assurances of routine, routine, routine.
It’s still daytime. Tommy has washed his hair and changed into fresh clothes, harvesting wheat from his garden as the sun lazed at its peak. Longer, unkempt hair, doesn’t dry with haphazard cloth stuffed at the bottom of a chest, he’d learned, at the end of that day he first visited Dream in prison and was splashing with a flying trident, like he was glowing, like magic was running through his veins. That his hair was dipped in ambrosia, and when he’d jump with the trident, droplets saturated the plants, the water, the air. Even without the trident, his hair ends up drying the same in the sun. So maybe that’s why he let himself be enamored by the Las Nevadas pools and fountains. He wasn’t dunking himself in ambrosia, but he felt its salve.
He finished replanting the seeds, and brought inside the wheat, setting it aside to bake later. His hands rest on the furnace, shifting uncomfortably to take weight off his left arm, and he scoffs. He scoffs at how pathetically domestic he feels. He glances at the faint red marks fading from his left arm, soreness still there, and he feels a warming ache in his chest, slowly, then all at once, as he presses his palms against his eyes, and slumps against the cold furnace, looping linked arms around his knees.
He didn’t like starting his day like that, he admits, because this is the loneliest he’s felt. He’s keenly aware of the empty spaces that haunt him, in all the ways that don’t matter. He’s not alive, in all the ways that do.
He misses Wilbur. He misses him more than he’s ever missed him, and Wilbur isn’t even dead. He notices the holes Wilbur left, more than ever before. He thinks the universe is cruel, for making him live without him, only to bring him back and make that pain meaningless, wasted, because he didn’t want to have to live without him in the first place. He can blame Wilbur, he can blame Sam, he can blame Dream, but he doesn’t. That’s wasted energy. He blames himself. For wanting to want good things, happy things, for letting nostalgia drain everything from him, for wanting someone to just take care of him, for wanting protection, for not being able to be alone.
Watching it weave into a mellow gust, he concedes to the air that it hurts more to be alive and feel dead, than to be dead and feel alive.
---
Maybe that’s why Wilbur found himself bouncing to Tommy’s door later that day, with a glint in his eye, spinning on his heels with his coat flapping in the wind and his fingertips rhythmically tapping their addictive promises of indulgence. He twirled wilted dandelions between his knuckles, his pockets lined with drying flowers and loose petals.
“Oh. You look like shit.”
Tommy came up from behind him, dirt under his fingernails and green stains painting his palms and knees and an easy laugh broke from Wilbur’s face. “I can say the same, prick.”
Tommy scoffs, rolling his eyes, as he shuffles past Wilbur, his hanging arms latching against his sides, standing taller, one foot in front of the other. He reaches for the oak door while kicking out a crumbling rock from the wall and nudging it to the bottom edge. The door creaks inward slightly as he leaves his arm and walks to his chests, stuffing his blue cardigan away.
“Haven’t seen you around for a bit,” Tommy comments, glancing up at Wilbur as he leans over the chest, blue threads like spiderwebs sticking out.
Wilbur shifts against the doorframe, hitching his foot up against the rock, muttering, his eyes dancing around Tommy’s. “I’ve been wandering. I’ve gotten extra time, Tommy. I’m using it.”
Tommy breaks his stare, his hands fumbling on the hinges of the chest quietly, stringing and unstringing blue threads around his thumb. “Yeah. Yeah, yeah,” he nods to himself, tucking his chin towards his chest, “time,” he spits out. They stay there in silence for a few breaths, shadows leaned into each other, now melting, as the sun begins its descent. Wilbur breaks the silence, pushing himself off the frame, as he pulls a handful of flowers out from his pocket, stepping inside and sticking them in an empty pot on the ledge of one of the windows. “Have you ever thought about pressing flowers? When they dry and thin, it’s really easy to see their veins and cellulose structure like that.”
“You mean once it’s dead? That’s fucking morbid.”
“I mean, yeah, I guess, but it’s cool! Plus I don’t pick flowers unless there’s at least three others there, cause then they can repopulate. Most of the ones I’ve found have been on the ground already so I’m just repurposing them. It’s better than just throwing them away, you know?”
Tommy’s hands pause before opening the chest and pushing the cardigan down further, soft blue wool enveloping his hands. With his back turned to Wilbur, leaning over the chest, he closes his eyes and asks, “Do you have any cornflowers?”, springing back up and swinging his legs around him, as he shifted his gaze to the flower pot, and back to Wilbur.
“Oh, yeah! 100 percent. Definitely.” Wilbur reaches his arm out, as if he were to grab onto Tommy’s shoulders and bump him against his side to excitedly draw and point out stories in the air. As if. Tommy plucks a few cornflowers from the pot, and pushes them into Wilbur’s outstretched hand, and he plops down, tapping the ground in front of him, sitting cross legged with his elbows resting on his knees and his hands holding his face. “Go on, then.”
So that’s where they sit, hunched backs huddled over a messy array of flowers.
Wilbur’s rambling about how he tried to get poison ivy on purpose, “Just to see what it was like!”, when Tommy cuts him off.
“Aren’t you tired?”
Wilbur stares at him, unblinking, his mouth slightly open, like he froze mid-sentence and needed to be rewound to play again.
“I mean, it’s night. Don’t you sleep at Phil...and- and Techno’s? Aren’t they expecting you? The one day you’re around here and not ‘wandering’?”
Wilbur tilts his head as the corners of his mouth twitch upwards, and he lunges a hand out to ruffle blonde hair.
“HEY! What the fuck??” Arms are swatted away in commotion, and retaliating hands find brown hair.
“You’re such a dickhead.”
“You look like a gremlin.”
“Yeah cause you messed up my hair!”
“Oh, it’s fine, here, look,” fussing hands are dropped as Wilbur grabs the tangles and pulls apart a few knots.
“How come your hair doesn’t get all knotted? That’s not fair.”
Wilbur smirks, a teasing, matter-of-fact lilt on his tongue. “I’m just better than you, obviously.”
“Yeah, sure, okay. Your hair looks like a bird’s nest. Your white streak’s probably bird shit.”
Wilbur doesn’t respond. His mouth thins into a tight line and trembly fingers finish straightening out the last couple knots and pat the top of Tommy’s head as he gets up.
“What are you doing with these?” Tommy huffs, picking up a leaf, twisting the stem between his forefingers.
His elbows shift to settle on the younger’s shoulders, arms folded flat over each other, slouching as he leans fingerprints onto his cheek, “I dunno. I just thought they were interesting. I’m sure there’ll be something else to do with them.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tommy screeches, tilting his head back with a pout, “They’re just taking up space for no reason then!”
“Make a reason, then, that’s not my problem—”, nonchalant hands threading through stray ringlets.
“You’re the one who brought these!”
“—but they don’t need a reason, either. They can just be there. Use it when you want. It’s not like TommyInnit’s humble abode is filled to the brim with only the absolutely immediate bare necessities.”
Flicking the leaf to the ground, Tommy pushes himself up, picking the skin around his nails, wincing with clenched teeth, as he turns to face Wilbur. He stands there, eyebrows furrowed, absorbing a sharp inhale. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I just did. I just clarified for you.”
“The other one, you idiot. I see your eyebags.”
“And I see yours too. What’s your point?”
“I don’t know!” defiant and hungry eyes shoot up to match Wilbur’s, Tommy’s hands swing down, curling in, nails digging into palms, with bared teeth. “Do I need one?”
Unflinching, brown eyes boring into blue ones and pleads drifting in the air, an older brother tears away his skepticism. “We’re going on a walk,” he sighs, as he picks up Tommy’s fists and unfurls them along his own tugging fingers with urging admittances.
“Come on.”
-
They amble in silence, spare glances catching each other, and the night is the most bearable it’s been. Something about them keeps the monsters passive, and Tommy wonders briefly if that means they’re the ones who are hostile. With Wilbur’s slowing footfalls and Tommy’s hands weighing on his axe, he wonders how hostility can mean sacrifice and safety. He wonders why it gets both, when nothing else is allowed to.
They settle in a grassy opening in a spruce forest, as the sky is dark, and the stars are out. Wilbur plops down, bones cracking as he stretches his legs out, his arms extended behind him, fingers digging into dirt, his right palm carrying his weight, his left arm bent outwards. He lifts back his head, hair flopping back, closing his eyes, his chest rising and falling as a gust of wind saunters through the dell. Tommy watches him, wondering how a man who looked so goddamn peaceful wanted to help Dream escape. Was he just basking in the calmness because he knew it was almost up? The man he stood watching just breathe was the same one who spent all his air on talking, and it was addictingly familiar.
Tommy wants answers to questions he doesn’t even know. Questions he doesn’t want to know. So he lets himself sit, dipping his head down, tracing constellations in the dirt, bantering with the wind as it glazed the ground.
“You know why we can’t take pictures or draw the stars the way they really look?” Wilbur mentioned, his head hanging to the side, tucked into his shoulder.
“If you’re trying to say my drawings don’t look good—”
“No, nonono, nono, no,” sitting up swiftly, with waving hands and a shaking head, “I mean anything. No matter how you try to translate the stars, something gets lost along the way.”
“So at their cores,” he begins, eyebrow spiking up, “everyone is bad at drawing?”
“No, there isn’t even good or bad! It’s that we can’t fully comprehend the stars, and we don’t need to! That’s the thing! We don’t need to be able to copy them, because they aren’t gonna just disappear.”
“You sound like me. Got a fuckin’ emotional attachment to the stars, or something?”
“It’s poetic!”
“It doesn’t do anything! Just because the stars don’t go away doesn’t mean people don’t!”
“Come on, it’s not that—“
“Oh, yeah, okay, the reason people go away is because they aren’t constant, like the stars. How do you rely on the stars?”
“Alright, okay. People can be constant. You are here, I am here.”
“No, you’re not. I’m not. You fucking know- life isn’t a fucking guarantee.”
“But we’re alive, Tommy. It is a guarantee! We have Dream to thank for that!”
“Stop- stop talking- I don’t want to hear this, no, I don’t, you don’t get it-”
“What? What don’t I get? We’re both here, we’re both constant right now, we aren’t
leaving each other. We wouldn’t leave each other. You’ve heard of the saying “humans are made of stardust”, yeah? That everything in the universe and on Earth were made in stars and perpetual supernovas that rebuild bodies over and over? Stars are what connect us, what flows through your veins. You can rely on other people and yourself.”
“You’re just saying shit, are you high or something? You’re off your mind. You actually
sound like a crazy old man. Oh my god.”
“Come on, you’re trying to say I’m lying? I’m not! I look at the stars and the sun and I
see you, Tommy. And I see Tubbo, and even Quackity, for fuck’s sake!”
“Did limbo have the sun and the stars? Yeah. They aren’t constant.”
“Limbo was a fucking shithole, man. We weren’t supposed to feel like we could rely on
anything.”
“Wish someone would have told me that, then.”
“Death doesn’t save you, Tommy.”
“You don’t think I know that? I had to die and I still came back.”
“Even if you didn’t come back, it wasn’t gonna save you. Believe me, I know.”
“Of course I was gonna come back, Dream won’t let me stay fucking dead.”
“Then good! Stay alive! Spite him! If you want to live, you won’t need him for it.”
“How do you know so much yet get the most basic shit so so wrong?”
“We needed Dream to bring us back, but now that we are, we don’t need him anymore!”
“I never fucking needed him. I needed you! And you left!”
“I’m back because of him—”
“You’re back because of me! He would have let you stay dead. You’re back because I
wanted-”
“So he did us a favor?”
“No, no, no, the- the way we’re back isn’t right, this isn’t how I want to feel. He didn’t do
me any favors—”
“I’m back, aren’t I?
“But it doesn’t feel like that! You’re- you’re Wilbur, you’re my brother, and that’s not
because of Dream! You’re- but- but you’re also, so, so far away. This isn’t what I expected when you would come back...you’re still...dead. And I’m still dead! And if I feel dead, so do you, right? You look the same, you walk the same, I...get that. It’s just not what I wanted. From all this. I asked for- not this- I just want to be allowed-”
“Look at this, okay? Feel this. Press your grubby little gremlin fingers on my wrist. Here,
okay, you can feel my pulse. You can feel my blood pumping around my body. The stardust. So if I’m alive, you are too, right?”
“Are you fucking mental? What the shit is this supposed to solve??”
”Come on, just try it. Count my pulse and I’ll count yours. Okay?”
“Fine, fine, okay. I trust- Okay I can feel your pulse. You want me to count it?”
”Man your heart is beating...slow down, match mine, chill out.”
”Shut up, you absolute wanker- oh my god. Maybe you need to speed up your counting, hm! My heart’s perfect and above average!”
“The beats can go faster or slower, but they’re always there. There is something keeping
you alive, whether you’re aware of it or not. So relax. I can feel your pulse, you can feel my pulse. That isn’t going away.”
---
It’s escapism, Wilbur mentioned off-handedly, on one of their night walks, which had become more frequent. They were sitting at the edge of a riverbank, feet splashing, one pair of hands in a rolled up yellow sweater, lighting matches and snuffing them in the water, the other embroidering flowers on a dull brown coat. They would ramble about nothing in particular, and didn’t know what answers they were looking for, and still enjoyed the silences in between. They didn’t need to fight words out for the other to hear them, and they’d rather keep it that way. Conversations about Las Nevadas, the prison, were few and far between. They required an unwilling, borderline sacrilegious, energy, that they just didn’t have, or want, to spare. Their time was simple and easy, and it didn’t need to mean more than what it was. No hidden secrets to tease out, just fundamental harmony. Just two brothers, for once.
Somehow, in the mundaneness of feeling, leaves tickling skin, shoes kicking up gravel, loose stones in odd boots, the smell of old dust, getting drunk on drifting snowflakes, and hands wrapped around wrists, there is a homesick balance. It doesn’t hang over their shoulders, but rather tethered in tangibility, like it would drag them down and make them aware of the crushing reality that dangled above them if they didn’t hold on tight enough.
It felt like an illicit affair, to walk around the server, and completely ignore it. It felt like a slap in the face, disrespectful. It felt immoral to pick out the pieces untouched from memories and find a nostalgia in them. But it also felt like release. Like the air was breathable, for more than just a passing moment.
It was harder when they were around Las Nevadas, or Snowchester, or even just the server in the daytime. People were watching with peering eyes and maybe it was a reluctance to share those moments of vulnerability with people who didn’t earn it. Who didn’t get it. They had to keep up appearances, and confront all the things that were easier to ignore, to overlook. Bodies are a built history, and under a magnifying glass are their individualities made unavoidable. Maybe it was telling of desperation, a scrambling grab of idyllic confidantes, to avoid the unavoidable, for whatever chances their fingertips could graze.
Maybe that’s why Tommy had been especially snappy the past few days. Wilbur was off somewhere, and he was spending his night walks not at all comforted by the fact that Wilbur was doing the same thing, just not with him. He was increasingly aware of the things around him, upset that they weren’t feeding any sort of comfort, upset that he was being painstakingly reminded of empty shells of memories. He couldn’t just let them sit there, tauntingly. So it was out of contempt, as well as restoration, that he decided to not let the past bog him down. And maybe that was selfish, maybe it got a little carried away, maybe it felt too real, when he sat on the picnic blanket outside his home, with a straight back and his head lifted high, hands in his lap, buzzing, and hawk eyes trained on the ground where Ninja’s house was built and The Hanging Ball.
He wanted to make his night walk easier, getting rid of the useless things that were bringing up useless memories, when he was alive right now, when he was supposed to be living right now, breathing in the moment. His futile attempts at “moving on” only made him much more aware of how different things were. Making all those empty spaces physically tangible, too. But maybe that’s redundant. He’d feel lonely either way, unless there were people there. And that was part of it. Maybe people would start to fill in those spaces if they saw them up for grabs.
It’s selfish, he thinks, when he rubs his eyes and pulls his fingers along his cheeks and jaw, pressing them down to their bones, shaky hands corrected on narrow joints. He asks for too much and can’t handle it when he gets it. Maybe he can feel his lungs and hear the blood rush to his head when he stands up too quick, but he can’t believe it. He can’t rationalize it.
Sam mentioned his death in the prison and the lives he’d lost so casually. So effortlessly. Like they were just numbers to count, not this real fucking shit that he can’t shake. He wishes it were that easy. Like he could take it as a fact and move on, not let it get stuck in his head and play on loop.
“You don’t have to come up with reasons to justify the things you’ve been through. No one should have to experience those things, and you don’t have to make your suffering “worth it” in order to be okay with it or to move on. Your pain, your trauma, doesn’t have to be turned into something helpful, it doesn’t have to make you stronger. Because it doesn’t. It doesn’t do those things. Nothing warrants trauma. It isn’t selfish to not want it.”
“How can I not want it? It needs to mean something, have some value, because it does. I can see it does. I am here and people know me. That’s because of all the shit I’ve been through.”
“You are a person outside of your suffering.”
“Trauma keeps me alive. It kept me alive.”
“Do you want it to?”
“What the shit’s that supposed to mean? I’m not- I’m not- I don’t hate myself, okay?”
“But it doesn’t let you live, does it?”
“I’m literally built by betrayal. Built for betrayal.”
“Trauma did not change who you are. It affected and affects you, yes. It can change what you are, but not you yourself. And you can change what you are, too. Not just negative experiences do that.”
“The reason I exist, the way I am the way I am, is because of experience. We aren’t born with our personalities pre-made. What, I’m depressed because I’ve fought in wars and watched people die, but I’m funny because that’s just who I am?”
“You’re not funny because of trauma. You’re just using it as material. Like I said, trying to justify your suffering by linking it to something you think is good.”
“So it’s like an add-on? Extra?”
“Yeah, that’s a good way to look at it! You are built by a lot of things, negative and positive, but those overwhelmingly negative things? It isn’t what makes you, you. You have other stuff too.”
“I guess I don’t really know what that other stuff is, though.”
“And I don’t expect you to. It’s hard. It’s really really hard. But you work on it. You work on figuring out who you are outside of all that.”
“But I can’t separate it. It’s part of me. I can’t just forget it.”
“No, you can’t. You don’t have to let go of it. It’s more to feel like you are someone, something, with or without it. It’s going to influence you, because that’s what experiences do. But it does not make you.”
“Okay, it doesn’t make me. I rely on it though. It’s still the reason I am doing things.”
“So we work on not relying on it. It’s not like you need to refill a quota. Don’t give your trauma that much credit.”
He had that conversation with Puffy the day after Wilbur talked about escapism. He thought maybe he was exploring that “other stuff” they talked about. He wasn’t so sure, now, considering his fucking therapist messed with his house, made his walls see-through, let him out in the open for everyone to see. Doing that kinda takes away some of your credibility. He doesn’t know if he can really “escape” anything on this server, even if he tried to blow it up. Maybe he couldn’t “run away” unless Wilbur seemed to be there. But also because Wilbur seemed to be there. He existed as silver lines. To see Wilbur in perspective, in places he’d seen him before, with people he’d known before, he couldn’t wrap his head around it. The same person that felt like a stranger, was so undeniably not. And that’s what made it so infuriating. Tommy wanted to scream and shout and just break because he couldn’t stand feeling so fucking scared and worried for someone, for himself. Everyone around him acting like they have the right to tell him about what Wilbur was, is, did, does. Like Tommy is some blind kid who’ll throw away his choices, just because Wilbur told him to do something. Like any of these people shit talking Wilbur were looking out for Tommy. Like they think they’re saving him from something. Like they think they’re heroes. Like they think Tommy is gonna thank them for disclosing such well kept secrets that Wilbur’s a dickhead, a threat, an enemy, a villain. Like they’re doing him a favor in that. It makes him want to defend Wilbur to the ends of the earth even more, because these people got him completely wrong, and they’re acting like they know him better than the person who knows him like the back of his hand. But he also knows their concerns, shares their concerns. And that’s why it hurts. Because he isn’t forgetting. He won’t. He reminds himself enough. He just wants a minute away from constantly thinking about all the pain that can come from a selfish ache to just have his brother back, to have someone to shield you, to give you their arms when you need them.
He can’t articulate his feelings. Wilbur is just Wilbur. That says enough. And no one understands all the words behind it. It’s exhausting, to try and explain it knowing other people just won’t get it. Tommy didn’t want the things this server had done to him, and them, but this server hadn’t changed who he was either, because he was just Wilbur, every single time. He was still just Wilbur when Tommy looked up at him, lumbering to him on the picnic blanket, dumping out cookies he nabbed from the Outpost, when he fit pressed against the younger’s side, resting on his shoulder, his coat steeped in old and new smoke, tossing up pieces in the air for them to catch with euphoric laughter, when he held his arm out upon greeting weary eyes, when his fingers burrowed into rhythms, with faithful assurances of stability.