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There is no warmth in the server tonight.
It’s midnight in the midst of November, and the ash of L’Manberg hasn’t even settled yet. It’s cold. It’s so damn cold.
There are some things no one tells you about when you enter war. They tell you there will be death and blood and devastation, and you take it all in half-heartedly. To the young and the proud, you’re ready to take back everything, to swing that mighty gleaming sword of yours.
No one tells you about the guilt and the grief and the true feelings that come with loss. Maybe it’s because there’s no amount anyone can say that will ever accurately describe such things.
Tommy was one of the many who listened but did not hear the warnings of death. He was a fool. He has gained nothing and lost everything, all in the last twelve hours.
He has a house to sleep in tonight. Some are not so lucky. It doesn’t matter, though. No matter how tightly he squeezes his eyes closed, the wailing outside does not surrender, and he cannot fall into unconsciousness. People everywhere are mourning.
He supposes he is, too.
Because of him. The one man he can’t forget.
He’s everywhere. He’s in everything. Wilbur Soot is dead, but he’s haunting Tommy Innit even now.
Somewhere, someone shrieks, loud and long and drawn out. It’s awful. It’s awful and Tommy wishes it would stop. Please let it stop.
It does.
Tommy shivers. He throws the covers off; there is no rest to be found here tonight.
Tommy shuts the door of his house behind him. It doesn’t have a lock, never has before. He hadn’t realized until now how hateful the world can be. Even when he took an arrow to the chest for his country, even when a traitor he once called brother sacrificed Tommy’s life for the title of king, he had still held some hope. There had to be some light at the end of the tunnel.
Then the tunnel collapses in on itself, and you are well and truly left in the darkness.
The Prime Path is freezing underfoot. Tommy isn’t wearing shoes. Not even socks. His feet scrape crudely against the wood. It’s better this way. It makes him feel grounded to the Earth—like he isn’t about to float away. He hasn’t felt right since the explosion. It seems like he’s half-here, half-not.
It doesn’t take long to reach what used to be L’Manberg. It never has. He’s always been so close to this nation.
It’s a ruin. And that’s putting it lightly. There is nothing left. Wilbur couldn’t spare any of them a single memory to hold. Anything and everything that once was tangible is now ash.
Tommy stumbles down the crater, and the soot still hovering in the air latches onto him, clinging to his skin and hair. The stench of sulfur and smoke is potent, almost overwhelming. It smells like Wilbur used to. With those awful cigarettes of his, the candles that were always lit near him—Wilbur was a man always close to a flame. He was a moth drawn to the biggest, hottest-burning thing around. He thought he was invincible, inflammable, but then he burned.
He took down all of it with him, too.
The pit is flooded with water. They had tried to scoop some of it out in buckets earlier, but everyone was tired and Dream and his friends were laughing victoriously and Tommy had seen Wilbur’s corpse and nothing was okay. It couldn’t be okay. Not when Wilbur was so pale and thin and gone.
So here in the remnants of everything Tommy has ever known, his feet splash through water up to his knees. He trudges through it to the exact center and then stands still as a stone. He blends in perfectly.
The dust is still too thick to see through. When he tilts his head back in hopes of seeing the stars, he finds there are none.
He closes his eyes instead and lets his mind hollow out, all the thoughts seeping from him like the warmth seeps from his skin.
Down here, he doesn’t hear the weeping. He can almost pretend that it is a normal night in L’Manberg. Tubbo is strolling beside him. Wilbur is ahead of them. They were just observing something relatively meaningless, but Wilbur made them feel like they were discussing something profound. He made them feel like poets, though no one sung nearly as well as himself.
And…
Wilbur Soot, who were you, exactly?
Were you a hero? A soldier?
Wilbur Soot, when you led your men into battle, did you know that not all of them would make it out alive?
Tommy shudders. He thinks if he opened his eyes, he might be able to see his breath.
Wilbur Soot, did you know you wouldn’t make it out alive?
Now that gives Tommy pause.
Phil killed Wilbur. Tommy knows this, he saw it. He witnessed the blood, bold and rose-colored, stain the stone beneath the man. He saw him take his last breath. He saw it all.
And yet Phil was Wilbur’s father.
Deep down, Tommy knows that he didn’t murder his son in cold blood. Deep down, Tommy knows Wilbur asked for it.
You were in everything, Wil. You were everything.
And that is precisely the moment Tommy loses himself.
He drags his hands through the dirt and thinks of Wilbur.
He looks into the sky and thinks of Wilbur.
He begins to cry and thinks of Wilbur.
“Damn you,” he says. He sobs. “Damn you to Prime and back, you selfish bastard.”
The crater is silent. And this is when the realization hits for Tommy that he will never hear Wilbur Soot speak again.
(Even when a ghost appears tomorrow, stealing Wilbur’s voice and Wilbur’s hair and Wilbur’s insufferable smile, Tommy will know instantly that it will never be the same. Wilbur Soot was an inferno, raging and brilliant, but nothing perpetual ever comes from embers. Ghostbur is going to be an echo, a shadow, the-thing-left-behind.
For now, though, there is no ghost. And there is no Wilbur.)
“Are you happy?!” Tommy screams as loud as his heaving lungs let him. “Did you finish your symphony, Wil?”
He did.
Here is what they’ll tell you: Tommy survived November sixteenth. He lived and he kept going until several months later, but he did survive this.
And here is the truth: he did not. A piece of Tommy broke off him that day, a part of him he would never get back. Just like Wilbur said—even with Tubbo in charge, it would not be the same.
Because here is a boy who fought and bled and died all for something that crumbled before his eyes. When you put enough of yourself into something, and then that something dies, you find that you start to die as well.
Tommy rakes his hands through the stone and dirt, trying to find even one thing he recognizes. He will stay there all night searching, but it will be pointless.
Wilbur Soot, did you think he wouldn’t mourn? Didn’t you see the way he looked at you with those bright, blue eyes? Did you not see it, or did you just ignore it?
Did you destroy the thing he loved most knowing fully that it would destroy him as well?
Or was this the way you thought it was meant to be?
Here’s something only Tommy knows, that he never reveals, ever: Wilbur Soot does get a grave, in the end. Because a grave, if nothing else, is a place where someone grieves and visits and remembers. And in this very spot, for as long as he is able, Tommy goes and mourns Wilbur. He asks him questions, never expecting answers, and tells him about his day. Even when New L’Manberg is constructed, Tommy will sneak down at night into the water to talk to Wilbur. The silence is almost a prayer.
The server is cold tonight.
It’s a small blessing not to burn.