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The ground beneath him is cold. He’s not sure why he expected it to be a warmer embrace. Maybe it is kinder to think of the Earth with the gentleness of a hug. It is what nurtures him, after all.
It will be his home to rot for all of eternity one day, after all.
A rock scrapes the tender flesh of his knuckle and rips. He hisses. Blood slips from his body and into the dirt. The man on the phone is still crooning, still saying things that don’t make any sense.
The running joke about them being brothers doesn’t feel very funny anymore. It feels like a warning sign that he should’ve looked at twice.
The tripod could probably kill someone in the right hands. Wilbur has decided that his are the ones.
Wilbur has decided, and Tommy has to do this. He has to do this.
“You’re doing good.” Wilbur hums. His voice is distant. Tommy left the phone on speaker before he started. It’s the only sound around.
“Wilbur, I’m cold.” His hands are shaking. He keeps clawing at the dirt. He can see the lights on in Tubbo’s house if he looks up. The silhouettes of his friends. Their laughter is trapped behind the panes of glass, but his mind fills in what he knows goes along with those specific shaking shoulders.
The problem with knowing someone is sometimes their voice gets stuck in your head like a song that keeps playing on the radio. The lyrics get all wrong, strung together out of order or with gaps, but the sound is always the same.
“Keep digging.” Wilbur sounds wrong. He sounds cold. “Tommy, keep digging.”
He talked to Wilbur the day before. They were alright. They were fine.
A ghost is twisting its way forwards to sit heavy on his chest. His lungs aren’t working right. Every breath inhales wet dirt.
His hands won’t stop clawing at the dirt. His hands can’t stop. He’s falling forwards and forwards. He has to be surrounded. He has to keep going.
He doesn’t want to dig anymore.
“Please.” He wants to go inside and hear their laughter for himself. He wants to end the phone call. He wants to be warm like the broken promise of the grave. He wants to do anything but dig.
“Tommy.” Wilbur warns. There is static in the air. He thinks he might be crying. He can’t bring his hands out of the dirt to check.
He has to dig but he doesn’t want to. He wants to be inside. He wants to be with his friends.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? The swirling taste of bile and copper in his mouth can’t hide the truth. The dirt piling around him cannot hide the truth.
He is with his friend. Wilbur is his friend.
No matter the dirt. No matter the cold.
Wilbur is his friend.
No matter what he wants from him.
The cold has sunk into him. His fingers are stained black with dirt. He’s damp, and the chill has sunken deep within. It’s lodged into his heart and stained his organs, rotted him from the inside out. He will never be free again.
“I think it should be deep enough now, Toms.” It should not be comforting to hear those words. “You can stop. You did good.”
He’s dug a grave, but it isn’t a grave really. Just a hole. A grave demands the presence of a corpse.
He doesn’t want to put anyone in it. Not his friends. Not strangers.
He’d like to just leave it as nothing but a hole in the Earth.
“Wilbur.” Half a whisper, half a sob. “Please, don’t make me. Please.”
“Tommy.” Just his name, but an answer anyways. A reminder. A threat.
It isn’t a grave without a body in it.
“It could be me.” The words come out of his mouth almost in the wrong order in their hurry to escape. The dark closes in on him.
He’s meant to be here for three days.
“It couldn’t be you, Tommy. I need you.” Once again, the words should not feel good and warm, but they do. They are light shining across the dark. They are.
There are other words after that. Leas kind words. They are cold. They are insignificant. They slip by.
The world around him is all wrong. It starts and stops.
He climbs from the hole that will be grave.
He opens a door.
He is on camera. Someone asks him a question that he will never be able to answer.
Everything is out of focus. They speak to him and it floats past him, barely tangible. He can’t be afraid. They have a stream to finish.
He has three days. There is an empty space in the backyard waiting to become a grave.
Tommy can’t be the one that calls it home, but someone will have to.