Chapter Text
“It’ll be fun,” Schlatt urges, his face so close to Wilbur’s, and Wilbur feels warm breath coast over his skin before he laughs uncomfortably and draws away.
“I don’t know, Schlatt,” he says with a small smile, his hand ghosting over his wrist, fingering the small bandaid, smooth under his fingertips. “Small little rental worlds have never been my kinda thing, and Phil hates those little respawn servers.”
“Why, cause he’s so busy building a fucking sea monument?”
“Probably,” Wilbur giggles. “But he’s so proud of it.”
“Fucking stupid,” Schlatt grins, sharp and amused. Wilbur stares into his honey eyes, and snorts.
“Hey. Insult your own dad.”
“Maybe I will if you come with me,” Schlatt suggests, and it’s not smooth at all, or a good offer, but Wilbur sighs. It’s Schlatt’s birthday soon, anyway, and he reckons he’d rather fuck himself over in a virtual world.
“Fine,” he sighs eventually, and Schlatt smiles brightly, bright enough that Wilbur almost freezes in his tracks as they pull away from leaning over cold metal railings, water gushing dark and soft beneath them. “When?” he asks as they walk, looking up at the light sprinkling of stars half-obscured by clouds.
“Whenever?” Schlatt suggests.
“Tomorrow, then,” Wilbur says, feeling a reckless smile lift the corner of his mouth. Schlatt echoes the smile, and then raises a hand in a small goodbye, though he briefly sways towards Wilbur, as if about to hug him goodbye, the way he only really does when he’s drunk. Wilbur wonders if he’s had a drink of something beforehand, and decides it isn’t too unlikely. “Bye, Schlatt,” he grins. “Love you,” he adds with a smirk, and blows him a kiss before giggling and running away as Schlatt yells something at him.
He walks the rest of the way home alone. It’s not long, just a couple of minutes before he reaches a familiar looking old house with a small red car parked at the front.
“Hey dad, I’m home,” he calls. “Can I go out with Schlatt tomorrow?”
“Again?” Phil calls back, sounding amused.
“Yeah,” Wilbur shrugs. “He’s invited me to come to one of his servers and poke around.”
“Yeah?” Phil asks, and Wilbur can tell he wants to know more, but he just sticks his head into the room where Phil’s watching TV and nods.
“Can I go?” he asks.
“Well… As long as you don’t get up to anything,” Phil says after a while. “Will you be staying over there?”
Wilbur considers. It’s one of Schlatt’s insane servers, probably, which means he’ll be dragged into some elaborate scheme… “Yeah,” he nods. “Maybe a couple days. We’ll be fine.”
“Well, alright,” Phil says dubiously, and Wilbur knows he doesn’t like Schlatt very much, but he can’t bring himself to care.
He goes up to his room. Tommy’s shouting something, probably playing with his friends, and Techno’s probably asleep, or reading again. Wilbur hasn’t switched the light on in his room for ages – he’s mostly hanging out with Schlatt these days, or sitting in the darkness with the curtains drawn, just scrolling through his phone. He sits behind his desk, half-heartedly picking a few clothes from the floor and dropping them in a neater pile. He’ll take care of it later. He’s been telling himself that for a while.
He tried to write songs, has tried for weeks now, but he feels blank. A few months ago, he’d drawn a knife over his own skin, wondering if he’d feel it properly, wondering if it would mean there was anything wrong with him. Maybe he’d feel like the was fucking worth something if he had the scars to prove it.
He’d only really wanted to do it once, but the bandaid on his wrist was from yesterday, hiding several smaller, deeper cuts across the bone of his wrist, and he doesn’t know how he’d explain the scars. Scared a cat outside, or paper cuts, or something.
Schlatt was a breath of fresh air, he muses, thumbing over the cuts again, pressing down slightly, but they’d healed enough that they didn’t hurt, and for some reason that makes him angry. But even Schlatt has started to… Well. Schlatt is an entirely different problem. One that Wilbur doesn’t have the energy to think about – so he doesn’t. He lies down and closes his eyes, and though he knows already he won’t sleep, he tries anyway.
Schlatt is there in the morning, after Wilbur tries desperately to wake up at five am but his eyes keep closing and he can’t drag himself up, and he’s had nightmares like this but it’s worse in real life. He finally manages to stagger up at the sound of his voice mingling with Phil’s, and sways on his feet for a while. Is he ill? Possibly. Or maybe he didn’t eat or drink much, yesterday, and he really didn’t get much sleep. Schlatt bursts in just as he’s yawning and grabbing a fresh change of clothes.
“Come on, Wilbur,” he says impatiently, throwing Wil’s coat at him. “Hurry up. And next time go to bed earlier, idiot.”
“I did,” Wilbur mumbles. “Couldn’t sleep. Now piss off.”
“Boo-hoo,” Schlatt returns, rolling his eyes, but backs out of the room and quietly closes the door.
Wilbur gets dressed quickly, stopping to rifle at his desk, and a sharp pain on his other wrist makes him blink before he realizes he’s just made another, very obvious, cut. Shit. He puts the knife away again, hand shaking slightly, but he does feel slightly calmer, even though he knows he’ll probably regret it later. Even though he already regrets it even now, a familiar pang of shame and hatred. Whatever. The sleeves of his coat cover it, and he can wipe the blood off easily enough.
He really doesn’t know why he does that. But that’s a thought for later, just like every other thought he has these days. Maybe hanging out with Schlatt will help. “M’ready,” he yawns again, opening the door, and sees Schlatt waiting on the landing, looking half-bored out of his mind, but he lights up when he sees Wilbur.
“Fucking finally – come on,” he grins. “Get breakfast.”
“I don’t usually have breakfast,” Wilbur says, wrinkling his nose, and Schlatt shrugs.
“We can stop and get a baguette or something on the way, now hurry up.”
He waves goodbye to Phil, who looks disinterested. Probably wouldn’t notice his absence if he hadn’t announced it. “What server we going to?” Wilbur asks as they leave the house, stepping out into a cool morning, feeling a droplet of blood sliding down his hand and wiping it on his coat sleeve.
“Just a little one, with respawning,” Schlatt smiles. “Apparently more dangerous than the usual ones. I got a friend to help set it up.”
“Friend? Or shady person you met for like ten minutes?”
Schlatt tilts his head, sunlight falling across his features for a brief instant before they pass beneath a tree, and smiles. “More like five minutes, but that’s the risk, isn’t it?”
“I guess,” Wilbur laughs, feeling like he wants to be reckless, so reckless.
They break into a run, both of them giggling like kids, before skidding to a stop outside a bakery, Schlatt darting in for a few minutes to buy two warm buns and handing one to Wilbur. “Here, idiot, eat it,” he tells him, and leads him through the streets.
They reach the hub just as Wilbur finishes eating, and suddenly they’re in the portals, and then they’re standing alone in a new world, high mountains spread around them, and for a while, Wilbur just lies on the ground, squinting up at the new sun.
“Pretty, isn’t it,” he asks, content, staring up at the freshly generated clouds.
Schlatt snorts. “You keep staring up at the sun and you’ll go blind.” He grabs Wilbur’s wrist and pulls him up, letting go after several seconds.
“So what’s the point here,” Wilbur asks, looking around them.
Schlatt shrugs. “Survive,” he says simply. “Just a normal world. Apparently more likely to have unpredictable events, but shouldn’t be a problem. I set the timer for tomorrow night real-time, apparently about four nights on this server, is that alright?”
“Cool,” Wilbur says brightly. “Now let’s build a house. The Man Shack.”
“The man shack?” Schlatt laughs. “That’s a stupid name. Fine.”
“Eyy,” Wilbur grins, breaking several sticks and fashioning a mock axe. The server was quick to fix the mess of twigs, and after an electronic sputter, Wilbur held a real axe. He loved the way these servers worked, defying everything one knew about the real world. It was a nice detachment.
He got splinters from a few logs, and soon the tiny cut on his hand was unnoticeable amongst the scratches. Usually larger servers corrected minor wounds, but this clearly wasn’t a reliable one.
“You pansy,” Schlatt says with a roll of his eyes, grabbing Wilbur’s wrists and turning them so his palms were face up. “Look at you. Splinters and shit. How long’s it been since you’ve done some proper building?” Slowly, the fresh splinter wounds fizzle away as server correction takes effect, though it’s remarkably delayed, not to mention slow, in this little server.
“Ah,” Wilbur laughs. “It’s been a while.” He hasn’t gone anywhere beyond meeting Schlatt for weeks now, and before that he’d only really been to one of his own private servers just to stroll around and relax in the peace and quiet for a while.
“You need to get out more,” Schlatt grumbles, letting go of his hands.
The wind brushes coolly over his skin in absence of the contact, and Wilbur shivers faintly. “Let’s just get on with it, Schlatt. We have like an hour before sundown. And I don’t fancy being gored to death by a giant spider.”
“Sure, sure,” Schlatt replies, nonchalantly hoisting several logs over his head and pushing them onto the house base, where the server was quick to meld them to the structure.
They work in relative silence, Wilbur making use of his inventory to gather logs and deposit them at Schlatt’s feet, who works on building the house. It’s pretty small, but it’s big enough to fit two beds – and once the furnace is next to the crafting table, it’s home. At least for now.
The sky is darkening, purple fingers tinging the horizon, and Schlatt fixes a door to the little base, and turns back to smile brightly at Wilbur. “C’mon, princess,” he says, and Wilbur almost chokes at the old nickname.
“Don’t call me that,” he protests, sitting cross legged on his bed.
“Alright,” Schlatt replies with an amused smirk. “Sure, honey.”
“Hey,” Wilbur says, glad that his blush is hidden at least partially by the red glow of the furnace, and he pouts at Schlatt.
“I’ll lay off, darlin’” Schlatt tells him with an evil smirk, and Wilbur groans.
“Is it too late to say fuck, go back?”
“Never too late, princess,” he grins, his face alight with triumph, and Wilbur sighs, accepting his fate.
“We goin’ to sleep or what?” he asks after a brief pause, when their eyes meet in awkward contact and he needs something to quickly fill the silence.
“If you like,” Schlatt replies. “I’m not tired yet, but apparently I got more sleep than you, so…” He shrugs.
Servers like these run on faster time scales, because they have to take energy from the inhabitants. That means getting tired faster, but also faster recharging – since there’s no need to run the server while everyone is asleep, so it’s easier to give back some of the spent energy. But that means that Wilbur, already tired beforehand, is damn near exhausted by now, so he turns his back to Schlatt and pulls the rough wool blanket over himself, closing his eyes. He wonders if he’ll be able to sleep tonight – but behind him, Schlatt starts crafting something, the rough burr of stone on stone and his breathing, and Wilbur concentrates on the repetitive sound until eventually he falls asleep, quicker than he has for the past few months.