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“You know,” Tommy says, “I never really got to—to mourn you. Not properly, anyway.”
He’s not sure what response he’s expecting from Wilbur. He’s not sure why he’s saying anything at all. He’s not sure why he’s here.
That last one is a lie. He scuffs the ground with his shoe, and then pretends that he didn’t.
“I wasn’t expecting you to mourn me,” Wilbur says, in that stupid, even, condescending tone of his, the one that he uses whenever he thinks Tommy has said something incredibly obvious, when he’s got an idea in his head of how things are and what people mean, regardless of the way it all actually is. “In fact, I rather thought you wouldn’t. Shouldn’t, even.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” He has no patience left. No patience left for the look in Wilbur’s eyes, no patience left for the way he focuses straight ahead, barely sparing him a glance, no patience left for the way he speaks, measured and calculating, every word he says carefully weighed against the end result, curated for intent and impact. No patience, and he had precious little to begin with. “I’m not even—this isn’t about you.”
Wilbur raises an eyebrow. It makes him look like a prick. “Oh?” he says.
“Because I would’ve,” he continues, doggedly. Now that he’s started saying it, he’s damn fucking well going to finish it. “But, y’know, you blew it all up, so we had to rebuild, and then I got exiled” —His voice doesn’t waver at all— “and then shit just kept on happening, so I never got to decide. How I felt. I never got to think about it.”
Wilbur laughs, then, and it’s the laugh that he hates, because it’s the laugh that’s not genuine. He knows what Wilbur sounds like when he’s happy, and this isn’t it. Hasn’t been it for a long time.
“Not sure there’s much to think about, there,” Wilbur says, and he scowls.
“Shut up, you prick,” he says. “And yes there was. That’s not something you get to choose. What I feel.”
“I’m not trying to—” Wilbur starts, but he shakes his head, going back to talk over him, because no, he’s not doing this. Not today, and not here.
“You are though, aren’t you?” he says. “You always do this. You go, you go mimimimi, I’m Wilbur, and I understand everything about how people think and I’m always right and you are all wrong, and you, I dunno, man. You just. You just don’t. You don’t know. You think you know things, but you don’t. You’re not always right. And I’m—I don’t fucking know why I’m bothering with this right now, but it’s not so you can tell me that I shouldn’t be. Because that’s not something that’s up to you.”
“Then why are you bothering with this?” Wilbur says, and his voice isn’t unkind, but it’s not kind, either.
“I just said I didn’t know—”
“Because if you’re asking me if you should mourn me, you already know what I’m going to say to that,” Wilbur says. “I’m right here. And I’m not going anywhere.”
“That’s the fucking problem,” he says, and tacks on a quick, “Not like that,” but Wilbur’s face has already hardened, and yeah, there’s a million better ways he could have put that, but that’s the thing about talking to Wilbur. His brain is never firing on all cylinders, as it were, because it’s too busy trying to figure out if he should associate him with warm summer days and the haze of potions and a strummed guitar or explosions and drifting smoke and blank eyes and the awful realization that what he thought would make everything right didn’t do anything at all, and that nothing would ever be right again.
And before the both of them, L’Manberg’s crater stretches out, vines trawling over the edge, leaves sprouting from between the rocks, sunlight catching on the pool at the bottom, the flag fluttering lightly in the wind. Before the both of them, L’Manberg’s crater has grown over, time pressing itself into the cracks. Before the both of them, L’Manberg is a crater. It wasn’t always.
“You make everything so fucking difficult,” he says.
“It’s what I live for,” Wilbur says.
“It’s what you died for, too,” he says.
Wilbur pauses.
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t.” But for once, he doesn’t elaborate, and Tommy glares at him. Only for a moment, because there’s no point in glaring when someone won’t see. Won’t look. Wilbur has his eyes turned to the crater, and Tommy has his eyes turned to Wilbur, and something about that is how it’s always been. The vines have grown over the earth’s old wounds, but Tommy can’t help but feel like they’ve curled around his ankles, holding him to the spot, the moment, and every moment that came before.
I never got to mourn you, he doesn’t say again. I never got to mourn you, and I feel like I should. But you’re here, and what the hell am I supposed to do with that?
Wilbur won’t hear him. And if he does, he won’t understand.
He collects bits of the past like buttons, or stamps, or memories.
He has his discs. He’s hesitant to play them, even now. Hesitant to take them out of his enderchest. He has his home, still in the same spot, all this time later. His hill, his hole, his garden, their bench. He sat on that bench and heard Wilbur, once, reaching out from beyond the grave, and Wilbur told him he was proud, and something in him ached in the same way that his scars now do when it rains.
He has some of Friend’s wool. Just that, just wool, because he doesn’t know how to knit, and he doesn’t know who would teach him. He can sew a little, but it was something born of necessity, of the need to patch up uniforms and close the tears over freshly dealt wounds, and he can still feel the needle pricking into his fingers, again and again and again. He never could figure out how to hold it so that it wouldn’t. He bled for L’Manberg in more ways than one.
Deep inside a chest, he has two uniforms. Blue and red and white. One is a size too small. The other is several sizes too large, and always will be.
He still goes to pray, sometimes, though not as often as he did. He got the chance to meet god and found no one there, so it’s a little tricky, these days, being faithful. But he’ll go to Church Prime, because no one else really does, so he’ll have the whole building for himself as he strides up to ring the bell, to ask for guidance and favors, to pay his homage at the feet of a higher power that he cannot believe cares. On the best days, he’s tempted to try to conduct a service. But there’s no point when there’s no one to hear it but himself. Even he can’t bring himself to put on a show for empty pews.
He prays, and nobody answers, and sometimes he can’t help but remember the void, the tearing, ripping nothingness, raking him to shreds again and again, where he was not alone and yet nobody came.
He considers visiting Tubbo. But Tubbo has his own life, and a mansion he hasn’t moved into, and a town that Tommy does not belong to, and an allegiance that Tommy does not share. He considers visiting Ranboo, but that’s either the same as visiting Tubbo, or it’s the same as visiting Techno and Phil, or it’s the same as visiting Wilbur.
So he looks at his discs and doesn’t play them, bunches his hands in wool that he has no use for, and calls out to a god he can only now offer false homage. He holds to the past, and wishes he could believe he has a future. Wishes that he didn’t see obsidian and curtaining lava whenever he closes his eyes.
The first time he hears Wilbur play again, he hides in the forest like a fucking coward.
The guitar is strummed hesitantly, haltingly, interspersed with silence every few seconds, as if Wilbur is struggling to find the old positions, struggling to move his fingers just right. He wonders, then, if limbo took away his calluses. He didn’t think to look. Thirteen odd years without playing a guitar is bound to make anyone rusty. Tommy wonders if Wilbur’s fingers will bleed if he presses down on the strings hard enough, and then he banishes the thought from his mind, because something in him revolts at the idea of Wilbur bleeding. Of Wilbur trying and trying to play until he—
There is something to be said, here, about using yourself up in the pursuit of something greater. There is something to be said, here, about holding matches ‘til they burn down to the skin, about stairs without handrails, about things that are never meant to be and yet claw their way into existence anyhow. There is something to be said about pushing too far, too quick, and flying too high.
Wilbur’s not singing. Is just going from chord to chord. And Tommy hides behind a tree, pressing his back against the bark, because it has been so very long. Wilbur didn’t play in Pogtopia. Wilbur barely played in L’Manberg. The last time he heard the twang of this instrument was sitting by a campfire, plans for a van in the works, the night sky starry and welcoming above them, his chest warm in a way that had nothing to do with the flames. And Wilbur smiled at them, smiled at all of them, and his voice was light and sure, his notes soaring.
Wilbur’s not singing. After a moment, he starts humming, softly and meandering, and each turn in the melody hits like a wrench, like he’s dragging the notes out behind them, yanking at the tune whenever it goes somewhere he doesn’t like. It’s a lot of leaps and skips and jumps, a lot of highs to lows and then highs again, and something about it sounds like wailing. There are no words, and there is no happiness.
But he’s playing. He’s playing, and does that count for something? There was no music for such a long time, no music in the darkness and no music even in the light, and now there is music in the grey twilight, and it is not happy music but it is music. Wilbur is playing again, and Tommy’s not going to cry, because what kind of pussy cries about hearing a guitar? So he doesn’t cry, but he doesn’t venture out from this spot, either. He stays there, and listens as Wilbur sends his voice shooting up into falsetto and then back down again.
It’s good that there are no words, maybe. They’d be sad. He can tell.
“That sounds nice,” Ranboo says, all of a sudden, and Tommy jolts at the same time that Wilbur’s hand must jerk, a discordant clash of notes, something that can’t even be called a chord. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”
“You didn’t,” Wilbur says, after a pause. Tommy almost creeps out to see his expression, because he can’t picture it. Can’t tell from his voice what his face is doing. “I was just about done anyway.” There is another pause, and a rustle of clothing. Standing. The crunching of leaves underfoot. It’s nearly autumn again, and already the leaves are changing, falling.
It would be wrong of him to resent Ranboo. He’ll never admit it aloud, but he likes him. Rather a lot. Hiding it is probably pointless now, though that doesn’t stop him from trying. But Ranboo is occupying the space that should be his, that once was his. There is a van in a forest, and a guitar song winding its way through the branches and the roots, and everything is different and everything is the same, and the new story is written without him in it. He doesn’t know what he wants, but he thinks it is not this. He thinks it is not to be left behind.
And Ranboo does not know Wilbur well enough to hear the lie in his voice.
They go off together through the trees. Tommy stays. Runs his hand across the tree bark, and tries not to put his emotions into words. Better to let them drift along as is. Better not to give them voice, because whispers turn into shouts all too easily, and there is not enough space here for shouting.
There’s a thing about graves. There’s a thing about graves and who gets one, and who doesn’t.
He didn’t think about it at the time, the fact that Schlatt—Schlatt the tyrant, Schlatt the enemy, Schlatt the man who had Tubbo executed—got a funeral, and a tomb, has one even to this day, and Wilbur got rubble and a room sealed off and untouched. Didn’t think about the fact that there was no burial. Didn’t think about the fact that there was no gravestone to deface or to ornament with flowers or to kick or to scream at or to kneel beside and speak to or to cry or to do any or all of those things. He didn’t think about it at the time, because there was rebuilding, and then there was a house on fire, and then he doesn’t like to think about it.
And there was Ghostbur.
Wilbur hates Ghostbur. It makes him angry, the way that Wilbur hates Ghostbur. Ghostbur was good, and Ghostbur was kind, and Ghostbur tried his best, and Ghostbur did not deserve to die in the way that he did, terrified, with no one there by his side, with only shouted numbers to soothe his terror, and Ghostbur does not deserve to be stuck in a train station for all of eternity. So he makes Ghostbur a memorial, because it’s all he can do, and the first time he’s next to it at the same time as Wilbur, he meets his eyes squarely. A challenge. A dare. And Wilbur looks right back at him, and then to the gravestone, and his lips curl into a sneer.
And he says nothing at all.
He says nothing at all for a long time. Until he does, and it’s all made so much worse.
“Would you rather he was here, instead of me?” Wilbur asks, and it’s all very even and nonchalant, so much so that it might have him fooled if he didn’t know better, hadn’t heard time and time again exactly what Wilbur thinks of the ghost he left behind him.
“The fuck kind of question is that?” he demands.
“An honest one,” Wilbur answers.
“Right,” he says. “Because you don’t lie anymore, or whatever the fuck.”
“I don’t,” Wilbur agrees, and that is a lie. Tommy would be insulted if he weren’t so tired of it. “Really, I’d like an answer.”
“What does it matter?” he snaps. “He’s not here anymore. He’s not here anymore, and you are. No changing that. I’m fucking stuck with you. You’re like, you’re like a leech, you know that? A leech in my brain.”
Wilbur smiles tightly.
“I’d rather be a leech in your brain than dust in the ground,” he says. “Like he is.”
“Shut up,” he grits out. “Don’t—just don’t fucking talk about him.”
“Alright, then,” Wilbur says. “I won’t. If it upsets you that much.”
And he doesn’t. And the grave stays.
And it is not until later that he thinks about the thing about graves again, about who gets one and who does not. There is no grave with Wilbur’s name on it. There was no soil to lay him to rest, only cold, hard stone, a room undisturbed, a monument to destruction. And had there been time, he would have thought about it more. Would have taken it upon himself, perhaps, because the thing is, in the end, that maybe Wilbur deserved better than to be remembered as the man who destroyed his nation. Deserved better than to be remembered solely by the ravine’s dark corridors and the smoke that clung to him like foreshadowing and the way his eyes looked dead, dead, dead for a long time before Tommy watched Phil plunge the sword into his chest.
Because he was not only that. It hurts to think about, how he was not only that. But sometimes, things that hurt to think about ought to be thought about. Because Wilbur was shattered edges that Tommy knows only now that he could not fix, because Wilbur did not want fixing, but Wilbur was also laughter and a gentle hand on his shoulder and the words “I’m proud of you” that lit him up like sunlight, and he was kind and he was kind of a dick and he was brilliant and Prime, maybe Tommy should have known. Should have known that there was going to be a fall. But he looked up to Wilbur like a child to a shooting star, and it’s a long time before children understand that shooting stars aren’t stars at all, and that the wonder of them comes from self-destruction.
But before Wilbur fell, he shone. A beacon in the dark. Hope, freedom. And before he was those things, too, he was Tommy’s brother. Just that, and nothing more, because more was not needed.
And he received no grave.
It’s a question of time again, and a question of mourning, and a question of how he was ever supposed to grieve when there was no time for it at all, and when a ghost shadowed his every footstep and dripped blue from cold fingers and insisted that nothing was ever wrong. But for the first time, he wonders how Wilbur thinks about it. Graves, and ghosts. And who gets a grave, and who does not.
Who is mourned, and who is not.
Who is given up on, and who is not.
The question echoes once again: “Would you rather he was here, instead of me?” And this time, Tommy hears no taunt in it, no mocking, no cruel joke about the ghost who deserved so much better. Only bitterness, and exhaustion, and resignation. Like Wilbur already knew what answer he would be granted.
That’s a realization of some sort, that Wilbur believes he prefers him dead. It’s a realization of some sort, but he doesn’t know what kind.
There’s ghosts and there’s graves, and there’s the living and there’s the dead, and both are left waiting for relief that never comes. It’s thirteen years in a train station and it’s months without knowing what to think, without having space to breathe, without being able to process that his brother was unwell and then that his brother was gone. It’s too much time and too little, too much distance and too little, and Ghostbur did not deserve what he got, but neither, he thinks, did Wilbur.
That thought feels right. And wrong all at once. Bitter, heart-wrenching. That Wilbur deserved better. They all did, that he knows—but Wilbur did too. And that thought is muddled up in all the rest, and he doesn’t know what to do with it, but it’s there. If there’s anything to be done with it at all.
Here is a fact: he kept Dream alive for Wilbur’s sake.
Here is another fact: he doesn’t know if he regrets it.
Because here is the thing: he remembers that day, remembers the pain and the fear and the devastation, and he remembers the moment it all turned around, cowering behind Sapnap and behind Eret until the time came to step forward, to take the axe in hand and deliver the blow, to deliver himself to safety, finally, finally. And he remembers the words bitten out from Dream’s mouth, panicked, desperate, and he remembers what he said. He will never forget.
And the decision, in that moment, was far easier than it had any right to be.
It became harder, later. Because he made the decision thinking, in large part, of the person that Wilbur used to be. Of a quick, charming tongue and flashes of smiles and music and song and leadership and knowing what to do, always, and Prime above but Tommy missed that person. And so maybe he deluded himself. Maybe he thought, in that dark room, with the portal swirling behind him and the entire server at his back, that he could get that person again. That Wilbur would return, and that it could all go back to the way it used to be. Discs spinning in the sunrise, the server at peace, his brother with him.
But death put those thoughts to rest.
Because death proved to him that Wilbur had only gotten worse. Because in death, Wilbur was happy he was there, did nothing but talk to him and make him play competitive solitaire as he was torn apart atom by atom. Because Wilbur—he became so very certain that Wilbur, if released, would bring nothing but harm to the server again, would tear everything down, because there was something in his voice, in his eyes—
But that was then. And now, Dream still lives in prison, rots but lives, and Wilbur has a burger van in a forest with a friend and spends most of his days lounging about or making eyes at Quackity or talking up a storm but doing jack shit, and Tommy doesn’t know what to make of it, and doesn’t know how to admit that maybe his idea of what Wilbur would be like and what Wilbur would do wasn’t entirely accurate.
And he still doesn’t know if it was worth it. Worth the constant fear, worth knowing that one day, Dream will be out, will come to him, will try to finish what he started. He tried to prevent it and only made it worse, only led Ghostbur to his doom by his innocent, trusting hand, and Dream resurrected—
A monster, he would have said, once. He no longer knows if that is fair.
Because here is another fact, one that he is only now beginning to understand: Wilbur is very, painfully human. He’s always known, and yet he hasn’t, because once, he thought Wilbur hung the stars and the moon and all things bright and glowing and good, and he thought that Wilbur could never be so human as to be fallible, and then it turned out that he was wrong. And it was easy, in the aftermath of that, to figure that Wilbur was perhaps some kind of monster instead, and everyone around him said as much.
But that, he thinks, goes too far in the other direction.
His hopes will never be realized. He will never have the old Wilbur back. He clings to a past that clings to him right back, that has him in a chokehold and will not let go, but Wilbur is something else entirely. The rest of the past does not live and breathe, is contained in his overflowing chests, in uniforms that don’t fit him, in the church’s empty hall. The rest of the past is made of things he can hold, but he has never been able to hold Wilbur. Not then, and not now. And there is no hope of making of them what they once were.
There is no going back.
So was it worth it, then? To keep Dream alive, and to receive this, this man who varies between manic energy and calculated calm, who speaks with a whip in his tone at some times and unbearable softness at others, who proclaims Dream his hero and then claims he would have killed him, if he could, for what he did? Was it worth it, and is it worth it, and how is something like that measured at all?
Wilbur is a tightness in his chest when he speaks and a ghost that won’t leave and a ghost that died and a thousand words like a thousand stinging hornets and no picture that could encompass all of them, all of what they are and were. Wilbur is Wilbur, and Wilbur is not safe, not anymore, and perhaps Wilbur is not even good—but there, that, that is wrong, and he won’t make this mistake twice. Wilbur is good, it’s just that he’s forgotten that, and Tommy is so, so very tired of having to be the one to try and remind him. And Wilbur is empty space and Wilbur is a space too full and overflowing around the fractured edges, and Wilbur is too bright and too loud and too quiet and too little and too much, and even now, even still, Tommy does not know where they stand.
Was it worth it, to have this?
He doesn’t know. But sometimes, he imagines what it would be like if Wilbur were still dead, if Wilbur were never, ever coming back in any shape, in any form, and his throat closes up and his eyes sting, no matter how much he has laid out his hatred for the man, his regret at going into the prison that day. He tries to imagine a world without Wilbur in it, in which he has given up on Wilbur, and even now he doesn’t like it, even though maybe he should, and that is, perhaps, answer enough.
“Why do you keep coming here?” Wilbur asks him.
“I dunno,” he says, instead of a hundred other things. “Why don’t you ever fucking leave?”
Wilbur just looks tired. There are bags under his eyes. Tommy thinks he can guess why; he so rarely slept during their exile, but Tommy is thinking about limbo, and train stations, and how whenever he closes his eyes, part of him is convinced that his heart has stopped beating. He wonders if Wilbur, for all his sunrise-obsession and constant movement and moments of utter wonderment at the world around him and the way he doesn’t move whenever a creeper approaches him, feels the same way.
“There was a reason I asked Ranboo to do this with me instead of you,” Wilbur says, suddenly, apropos of nothing. Tommy feels himself still. “I mean—actually, I asked Phil, and Phil was all, oh, Wil, go and make friends, and I was like fuck you I’m not twelve years old anymore but Ranboo’s pretty great so it worked out. But I—I guess what I’m getting at is that I don’t get it. Why you choose to keep coming ‘round here anyway.”
“Yeah?” he asks. “What’s not to get?”
Wilbur shoots him a look, eyebrows going up and mouth slanting all sympathetic-like.
“Tommy,” he says, slowly, as if talking to the child that Tommy has not been in a long, long time, “I’m not what you want.”
Several answers form in his head, and then dissipate just as quickly before he’s able to reply. “‘S that right?” he says, and something boils within him, hot and snapping and popping.
“I can see it when you look at me, man,” Wilbur says, and he doesn’t even sound upset. “You’re—and I mean, I don’t blame you for it. I was awful to you, Tommy. I don’t deserve anything less than your scorn. But you and everyone else, you’re all waiting for what I’m going to do next. You’re all waiting with bated breath. Scared of the next disaster I’m going to cause. So you don’t—you don’t have to be here, Tommy. Not if you don’t want to be.”
There are so many things he could say. Your disasters always cause the most damage to yourself, is one of them, and then there’s a simple, you think I don’t know that? Because how many times has he told himself that same thing? That he doesn’t need to be here? That it would be better for him if he wasn’t? And some part of him must listen, because he’s not actually here all that much. He has other things to do. A life outside of this, outside of this forest on the edge of a fake desert and a van that makes pretty shitty burgers and one Wilbur Soot, like a portrait from the past and yet nothing like that at all, because portraits are shadows, still images, permanent and unchanging, with mo mutable future, and Wilbur Soot is none of those things.
He has a life. He has Tubbo, still, even if it’s all changed. He has others. He’s not alone.
Wilbur’s right that he doesn’t have to be here.
“Stop fucking doing that,” he says. “Stop trying to make my decisions for me.”
Wilbur’s eyebrows furrow. “I’m not—”
“You are,” he says. “You always are. It’s my fucking choice whether I want to be here or not. And I’m making that choice. Not you. Me. And sure, maybe one day you’ll manage to get rid of me for good, but you’re gonna have to fucking work at it, and I don’t see you trying.”
“I thought you didn’t want me here, Tommy,” Wilbur returns, and the words seem to fall so effortlessly, like easy acceptance, and why, why is it this of all things that Wilbur seems to take in stride? Why is it this and not a thousand other things? Why is it this and not the fact that despite it all, despite every warning sign and every indication that maybe it might be better for him to give up after all, Tommy is still here?
“I didn’t want you gone, either,” he snaps, and Wilbur falls completely silent. So he continues, because who knows when he’ll have a chance to say this again? That’s the thing about chances; they’re difficult to count, impossible to anticipate, and he bollocksed up the first one he got, to try to break through. “I never wanted you gone in the first place. So maybe I don’t—maybe I don’t fucking know what I want. Because I never got to just live with that. There was never a chance to—there wasn’t even a fucking grave for me to visit. I never got to figure anything out, and now you’re back and nothing’s the fucking same, so maybe I don’t know what I fucking want. Maybe I don’t fucking know if I want you here, but I didn’t want you gone. I didn’t want you to be dead. And then you were. You just were, and I couldn’t—did you expect me to be alright with that?”
It’s a question of mourning, and a question of graves, and a question of chances and who deserves them. And Wilbur just looks confused.
Fuck him.
There’s so much more to say, and he can’t say any of it at all, and the past chokes him like a knot of vines or a clump of flowers in his throat, but he’s still breathing. He’s still breathing, breathes again, whatever, and Wilbur is the same. They’re the same in a lot of ways, maybe. On the other side of the final death, trying to hold onto and release the years gone by all at once. Moving forward, but stuck in quicksand, and they’re never going to get out if they don’t let each other.
“You’re my brother,” he says, and that’s all. As if that explains everything.
And maybe it does.
Wilbur blinks.
“Ah,” he says.
“Yeah,” Tommy says. “Fucking ah.”
“I’m sorry,” Wilbur says.
“You’d better be,” he says.
And impossibly, the vines uncurl, and the flowers come floating up, and when he takes a step forward, it comes easily.
There is a van in this forest, and it is not the same van. Some distance away, there is a crater in the ground, and nature has draped itself over the ruins of the lives they once had, and the flag still flaps at the bottom, and they are never, ever going to be able to rebuild what they lost. The crater will always be a crater, a scar in the earth. Healing, healed, grown over and stitched shut, but still a scar.
And there is a man standing in front of him who is not the same man that he knew. Not the same man that he claimed for his family, and who claimed him in return.
But he is not the same, either. Perhaps nobody and nothing is. The past clings, and he clings tighter, but perhaps he needs to loosen his grip, because despite everything, there is a future out there, somewhere past the next sunrise. They are going to get older. They are going to live. So he has his discs and his uniforms and his wool and his prayer, and he has this, too, because it is his choice. To take a step forward, and wait to be met in the middle. To dare to turn ahead, to believe that there is something awaiting him. The both of them.
And he thinks he might finally be able to let himself grieve. Grieve, and let go. Grieve the dead, and what they had, and what they might have, and grieve for the fact that there was no grieving, no grave.
And then, let himself hope that they will have better after all.
The next time he hears Wilbur play, he steps out from behind the tree.
And maybe the song is a little less sad.
And maybe nothing will ever be the same as it used to be.
And maybe it will be alright.