Chapter Text
“They’re raining arrows down on us!”
Wilbur looks up to see Tommy and Tubbo leaping across the small clearing, dodging and swinging their swords at empty space.
“Alright! We have to retreat! Follow me!” He turns and rolls on the ground to dodge an imaginary attack before grabbing Tommy’s hand and rushing into the woods, and a group of six follow behind him.
The seven children rush through the woods, rustling the leaves and disturbing the peaceful plants who definitely hadn’t expected to be disturbed today, and the sky above them is the same eerie black as it always is.
Wilbur stops his running after a couple minutes or so and turns to look at his soldiers.
Behind him, Jack leans against one of the giant purple stalks and pants, no doubt exhausted. Eret, Fundy, and Niki linger in the back of the group, looking just as grateful as the other for this break. Even Tubbo seems to have broken character, dropping his giant stick in favor of the water bottle he had brought in his little backpack.
“Wilbur! Why did we stop?” And Wilbur can’t help but let out a small laugh at his younger brother’s enthusiasm. No matter what he dragged their little group through, Tommy never seemed to lose his energy and enthusiasm.
He had to admire it.
“All good soldiers need to take a break,” Wilbur says with a smile, collapsing back onto a stalk of chorus fruit plants himself.
Tommy looks puzzled for a moment, before his expression is cleared with a moment of realization. “Ah! Like Hamilton!”
Wilbur laughs. Childish, sure, but it’s not like he wasn’t thinking of the same thing. “Yeah!” He confirms.
“Like, uh-,” Tommy begins singing. “Take a break and get away-”
“Run away for the summer-”
“Let’s go upstate!”
They laugh together, and from next to him, Tubbo cracks a small smile as well.
“You two are fuckin’ losers,” Jack says, and Tommy sticks his tongue at him.
For a moment, the group sits in silence, and Wilbur leans back and stares up at the dark void above and all around them. With most of the excitement of their game worn off, he’s briefly brought back to the real world, where he is in fact not a general leading soldiers into a war, but a fourteen year old running into the depths of places they were probably not supposed to go to.
He shakes his head, grabs his little homemade bow and arrow off the floor, and pushes himself up. “Well!” Wilbur announces to the crowd, and he’s met with a groan of annoyance from Jack. “Let’s get going, then!”
Tommy and Tubbo leap to their feet, picking up their giant sticks and wielding it, and the others aren’t far behind.
It’s his younger brother who picks up their game again, screaming that Dream was close behind them.
“We have to run!” Fundy declares, slipping back into character rather easily, while Tommy swings his sword at nothing.
“No! We fight the bitch!”
“Don’t let the counselors hear you say that,” Eret mutters under her breath, earning a “stop-breaking-character” look from Wilbur, to which he gives an apologetic shrug.
Niki drags Jack up from the floor where he had still been sitting, and turns to face the forest. “Look! The rest of the Dream Team is here as well!”
Wilbur surveys the area and then shouts out a command. “Retreat!”
“Wait!” Eret steps up to the front of the group. “I have a secret weapon we may be able to use.”
He’s met with a silence of surprise, as even Tommy pauses for a moment to look at Tubbo with uncertainty, then turning to Wilbur, who’s attempting to read Eret, his head slightly tilted.
This wasn’t- this wasn’t part of the plan.
Well, he couldn’t just ignore her.
“You do?” Wilbur breaks the silence, taking charge again, and regaining his loud general voice. “Lead us!”
“Follow me,” Eret says, and then they turn, and the rest follows, with varying states of certainty.
He leads them into a small thicket of bushes and pushes it aside to reveal a small pathway behind it.
“How did you find this?” Fundy mutters quietly.
Eret ignores him, simply saying, “In here,” before heading off.
Wilbur hesitates, for a brief moment, before steeling himself, grabbing Tommy’s hand, and pushing himself in to follow the other.
As the group follows, Tommy whispers something to his older brother.
“Wilba, where are we going?”
“Uh,” Wilbur keeps his eyes trained at the sky as the two slowly walk through the pathway. And he notices it. The black sky- the void that’s greeted him for the past eight weeks every day is slowly disappearing. The canopy is getting thicker.
A shiver is sent down his spine.
Eret knows what he’s doing, he tells himself.
“We’re going to our secret weapon. Remember what I told you? It’ll help us beat Dream.”
Tommy clings onto his arm. He looks frightened. “Is this part of the game?”
The sky’s completely out of reach now. It’s suffocating. He can’t breathe.
No, no it’s not, I have no idea what the fuck this is-
“Yeah, it is.” Wilbur laughs as best he can, and looks up at Eret, who’s walking with a purpose. “Just you wait till we reach the ending. You’ll love it, I promise you.”
The younger kid cracks a small smile. “Just you wait,” he whisper-sings. “Just like Hamilton.”
“Yeah. Just you wait.” And the two grin at each other before Tommy turns to whisper something about a cool purple bug on the floor to Tubbo, and Wilbur has to hold himself back from telling the two 9-year-olds that it was an endermite as he listens to the two theorize about aliens and unknown species.
Behind him he can hear Niki, Fundy, and Jack whisper a conversation to each other.
“Where are we going?”
“Does Wilbur know about this?”
“We should go back to camp.”
“I knew I hated this ‘game’.”
Wilbur turns briefly and mutters a “Just keep walking, there’s something great at the end, I promise,” and rushes forwards to Eret.
“So where are we going?” He whispers to the other.
Eret doesn’t turn to look at him and only smiles, and another shiver is sent down Wilbur’s spine.
The group walks in silence for what feels like hours through this small little tunnel. The endstone under their feet creates an unsettling rhythm as each of the kid’s feet meet the ground as they walk towards-
“Here we are.”
The group stops as Eret pulls behind a small curtain of vines to reveal a giant cave behind the veil.
“Woah,” Tommy gasps, walking up to grasp Wilbur’s hand again.
“Holy shit…” Wilbur says, looking around the giant room, and ignores Eret’s elbow jab at his use of language.
He steps into the cave and loses his last bit of cautiousness as his eagerness returns to him and he falls back into their game. “Great work, Eret! This’ll make an excellent hideout in our war for indepen-”
“Hey, what’s that?”
Wilbur stops and turns to the corner in which Niki is pointing.
Shadows paint the corners of this secret room and creep along the edges.
And there, a low growl of sorts comes from the darkness, and when Wilbur takes a step closer to it, he makes out a shadowy human-like figure in the corner, lurking and staring at the group of friends.
Wilbur feels Tommy’s grasp on him tighten.
“Wh-” Eret mutters, and the others fall silent as Wilbur and the figure make eye contact, and every instinct in his body screams at him to run as he looks into the lurker’s glowing, purple eyes.
And he would have, probably, if he wasn’t hiding six incredibly scared children behind him.
And Tommy looks up to him with wondering and fearful eyes, and his face is white as a sheet, but he’s looking at him with trust, and Wilbur pushes down his fears and steps forwards.
“Hey! Stranger!” He declares, trying to hide his shaking voice best as possible. “Who are you?”
He’s met with silence.
“I said, who are you?” He points his “bow” at it.
More silence.
“W- Who are you?”
A low growl.
“B- By order of General Soot of L’Manberg, I declare you-”
He’s cut off with another growl, and before Wilbur can say anything further, the figure leaps forwards and a blaring pain pusles through his body, and he yelps out in agony.
“Wilbur!” Tommy cries, and Wilbur’s senses are taken over by a haze of pain and screams as the figure lets go of his shoulder.
He collapses to the ground with a half sob half scream and his vision blurs as Eret, Niki, and Jack kneel by him, Tommy and Tubbo not far behind.
“Wil! Wil, are you-”
Tubbo is cut off by an ear shattering roar from the figure, and then, a purple gas fills the room, and the others rush out of the room.
All except-
“Wilbur! Wil- Wil, come on-” Tommy grabs his hand and pulls.
And as Wilbur tries to push himself up from the floor, his wound pulses and he collapses with a whine.
“Tommy- get out-”
He can feel his skin boiling from the gas. God, it hurts-
“Wil- Wil you need to-” Tommy’s voice is panicked now.
“Get out!”
And Tommy doesn’t listen- he never fucking listens- and he grabs his shoulders and stubbornly attempts to drag him out of the cave.
“Tommy-”
His vision blurs and he’s cut off with a violent cough, and another blinding pain racks his body.
Tommy holds Wilbur close to his chest as he tries his best to drag the older boy out of the cave, and it must be almost comical, seeing this child trying to carry someone 5 years older than him.
The figure stalks towards him, taking it’s time at a terrifyingly slow pace, and Wilbur sees a horrifying, simple smiley face mask on the figure’s face.
The mouth under the mask opens to expose countless rows of teeth, and Tommy screams in fear, and the next thing Wilbur feels is a final, desperate push towards the exit and two hands grabbing his feet and fully dragging him out of the cave.
And the next thing he sees is-
His little brother falls to the floor and Wilbur lets out a final noise that’s something between a sob, a noise of shock, and a final whisper of “...Tommy?” before his world fades to black.