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I sat watching the flames flicker against the dark background of the forest, its crackling sound and the whistle of the wind in the trees the only thing to keep me company. I sighed with the breeze, wishing I could sleep. Everything that had happened over the past couple of days seemed to pile up into a wall, blocking me from rest.
I glanced over at Tommy, curled up on my left. I didn’t understand how he could sleep with everything going on, but I guess after you sleep in a tent in exile for two weeks, you can sleep anytime, anywhere.
With another sigh, I settled in to watch the fire until it burned out or the sun came up, whichever came first. As I listened to the forest I heard Tommy’s breaking grow heavier, as if he were running. Or scared.
I turned to watch his hand start twitching and his legs starting to kick, tangling the blankets around himself. He started to mumble, his voice growing louder and louder until he sat bolt upright, his blue eyes unfocused, still seeing his nightmare play out in front of him.
“No, stop it!” He yelled into the night, his shoulders curling in on themselves, shielding himself from something. I moved slowly to crouch in front of him, balancing on my toes, watching for his eyes to focus on me and not whoever was hurting him. After a moment his eyes cleared, eyelids drooping as he realized what had happened.
“Tommy?” I asked, tilting my head to the side.
“Hey, Tubbo.” He breathed out, dropping his head in between his bent legs. I sat down, my legs starting to hurt from crouching that long.
We sat like that for a long while, Tommy taking breaths in and out, air whistling between his lips as he struggled to ground himself. I made no move to touch him or move closer, knowing that I would need to wait until he was fully here. I knew firsthand that touch was one of the best ways to send someone back into their nightmare.
Tommy huffed, ducking lower between his legs before straightening a little bit, staring in the fire. “It’s always the same thing, did you know that? It’s always him, standing there with his hand outstretched. ‘Give me your armor Tommy.’ He says. And in my- my dream, I don’t have any. And every time, every time Tubbo. He blows it all up. He blows up Logstedshire.” He started to ramble, shoulders shaking as he relived the dream.
“And I try to explain, try to- to reason with him, to- to make him stop, and he never does. And then at the end, the very end, he turns to me, and I- I can’t move. He places a piece of TNT, just one. And he smiles, and lights it. And I wake up, every time, thinking I’m going to be like Wilbur. A ghost.” He twists to look at me, his blue eyes darkened with the pain he carried from exile.
I sat there, frozen. To think I sent my best friend away to suffer through all that, it was unbearable. And to think that I thought he was- I shot forward, wrapping my arms around his shoulders in a hug.
“I’m glad you’re alive.” I whispered into his shoulder.
“Heh, yeah, so am I.” He chuckled as we pulled apart and sat together watching the fire. “It’s rather nice, being alive. I can’t imagine being all ghosty like Wilbur.”
I laughed, knowing humor wasn’t going to heal our scars, but it might be a good place to start. “Yeah, you’d float around everywhere and melt in the rain. You’d have to pick a color to give to people with no context at all.”
“Of course, of course! I imagine I’d pick red. It’s the best color.” I saw him turn to face me out of the corner of my eye, a grin on his face.
“I think I’d have to disagree with you, green is pretty good.” I turned to see his smile had melted away into a frown. “What’s wrong? I don’t have a leaf in my hair or something, do I?” I patted my hair, finding nothing but knots and the nubs of my horns.
“Technoblade really blew you up.” He stated, staring at my face. “At the festival.” He leaned forward and traced the scar reaching from the bridge of my nose all the way to my ear with feather-light fingers. Instinctively I leaned into his touch, savoring the warmth he always gave off.
“And to think I trusted him and thought he was going to help me.” His nose wrinkled with distaste as he dropped his hand.
“To be fair, he did help you out a lot. And like you said, we were friends with him. He was the one that used us to climb the ladder.” I reasoned, always being able to see both sides of the situation.
“I don’t know how much I enjoy being a rung on a ladder. I can’t imagine being stepped on would be very comfortable.” Tommy grumbled, sending us both into a giggling fit. As we both laughed, my chest twinged with old pain. I winced, a gasp escaping my lips, and brought up a hand to massage the still-healing wound.
“What’s wrong? Are you alright?” Tommy leaned forward, concern scribbled all over his face, an emotion he showed no one but the people closest to him.
“I’m fine.” I gritted out, taking my hand away as I realized that touching the wound was making it worse.
“Yeahhhh, no you’re not. What’s wrong?” He scooted so that he was more in front of me.
“During the festival, if you remember, my face wasn’t the only thing that got hurt.” I started to explain, lifting up the hem of my shirt to show him the layers of bandages circling my chest. “It’s taken a while to heal since it was such a deep and big wound, and all the fighting opened it up a little more. It hurts from time to time, I’m fine, really.” Tommy’s head was shaking even before I finished my weak protest.
“When was the last time you changed those bandages?” He asked, standing up and moving over to our supplies.
“I don’t know, a week or so? Things have been kinda busy if you haven’t noticed.”
“Yeah, I figured. If I learned one thing from Technoblade, it’s how to take care of injuries. You’ve gotta change bandages on deep wounds like that every couple of days. Tommy walked over with a white roll of gauze and some scissors. “All we gotta do is take off the old ones, clean the cut, and put some new ones on. I totally know what I’m doing.” He sat back down in front of me with his regular impish grin.
“Okay, NurseInnit.” I laughed, making his scowl.
“Shut up…” He muttered. I kept laughing as I slid off my shirt, revealing the bandages encircling my shoulders and upper arms.
“Right, this might take a little bit longer…” Tommy mumbled and started working on cutting away the old bandages. The top layer was hardly more than rags at this point, worn and dirty. As he got closer and closer to the gashes, more and more red showed, and the darker and darker it got.
“Do you think you could hurry up? It’s cold without a shirt on.” I shivered despite trying to keep as still as I could so Tommy wouldn’t nick me with his scissors.
“I’m going as fast as I can! And you are literally next to a fire, shut up.”
“It's not my fault I get so cold easily!”
“Shut up, I’m cutting the last layer, I need to focus.” I nodded silently, feeling the cool metal slide across my skin, snipping away the last of the blood-soaked bandages. Tommy stared at me, eyes tracing over the partially healed wounds, the deepest ones still leaking blood into the open night air.
“Let me grab a healing potion really fast. It won’t heal everything completely, but it’ll help speed up the process and keep them from opening up again. And it’ll clean up everything, so we won’t need to use water or anything.” Tommy stood again, leaving me to shiver next to the fire as he grabbed the glowing pink bottle. He settled down in front of me, uncorking the bottle with one hand and grabbing the gauze with the other.
“Technoblade taught me this trick.” He held the gauze up to the bottle and tipped it, the sluggish pink liquid seeping into the cloth.
He scooted closer to start wrapping the gauze around the ropey cuts and abrasions that started from my left shoulder, snaking all the way down to the middle of my right ribs. There were thinner cuts on my shoulders, stinging in the night air. I helped get the gauze around my back before handing it back to him.
“You know, for all your talk about hating Technoblade, you sure do talk about him a lot,” I mentioned casually, a little grin quirking my face. It fell away the moment Tommy stiffened.
“Well that’s cause I spent so much time with him, and he taught me a lot and protected me from Dream while he was hunting me, he did a lot for me, okay?” His words sped together, making them almost unintelligible for people who weren’t used to his defensive speeches. I held my hands up in a placating gesture.
“It’s okay! You guys were close, even before your exile, in Pogtopia he helped us out a lot then too. I get it.” He grunted, still seeming unconvinced, his eyes trained on our hands passing the roll of potion-soaked gauze around and around. He would stop every so often to run his hands over a crease, making sure everything was flat and perfect. This side of TommyInnit, the gentle side, almost never came out, only when I was in pain did it seem to appear.
After a while, he finally spoke. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore. I joined you again, and he joined Dream. I shouldn’t have stayed with him for so long, I should’ve gone to see you, I had no idea you thought that I was-” He choked off, staring at the ground, the gauze forgotten.
“Hey,” I said, raising a hand to cup his chin, making him half look up at me with one unwavering blue eye full of guilt.
“If anything, I should be apologizing. I’m the one who sent you into exile in the first place, and I didn’t try to visit you, and I should’ve tried to do everything in my power to get you back in L’manburg. I’m really sorry Tommy.” He brought up his head all the way to look at me, fully leaning into my hand now before pulling away to stare resolutely into my eyes.
“I forgive you. And Tubbo? I’m really, really sorry for becoming someone I swore not to be, and I said all those hurtful things to you in the community house, I’m really sorry Tubbo. I hope we can leave all those things in the past, and we can figure out what to do.” I smiled at him, almost too choked up for words.
“I forgive you, Tommy.” We both smiled, tears shining in the firelight before practically collapsing in each other’s arms, our foreheads bumping together. Neither of us mentioned the crystalline tears pouring down our faces, finally being able to release and start to heal. As we held the other, we vowed a silent promise to never leave the other, to hold the other person together, and keep each other intact. We were going to protect each other from here on out.
Once we finally let go, Tommy picked up the gauze, half-smiled at me, and said, “Why don’t we finish putting you back together?” I grinned and nodded, and helped him wrap up the final layers around my chest and shoulders, using up all of the healing potion and almost all the cloth. I was finally able to put my shirt back on, albeit a little stiffly. It was nice to be semi-warm again.
As if knowing that I was still cold, Tommy grabbed our biggest blanket and wrapped it around both of us, sharing the warmth of the fire and each other. I rested my head on his shoulder, feeling his head coming to rest on top of me.
“Thanks for being there for me,” I said through a yawn, feeling my eyes grow heavy. The health potion was working, seeping into my cuts and making the pain ebb away.
“Thanks for letting me be around.” I heard Tommy mumble before I fell asleep.