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He hums softly beneath his breath.
The wind rustles his hair, blows white and blonde in front of his dim blue eyes.
He sits with his legs crossed in a wheatfield littered with pretty little flowers.
A butterfly lands on his nose, a citrus orange.
He taps his ever-quivering fingers against his knee.
The discordant notes of his half-singing carry on the breeze, he echoes across the little garden like a ghost.
The sun lays across his skin like a blanket of gold.
He shivers, takes a steadying breath.
He’s freezing. He’s always freezing.
Dying is healthy. It’s natural, it’s true.
There’s an order to life, you know. You live until you don’t, and then you die, that’s what’s written. There’s an order that’s meant to be followed.
Tommy is, among other things, an exception to this order.
Rebirth is sick. It’s twisted and backwards and it takes things from you. When you go against the gods, shatter the rules of stone and cement your own, rewritten. There is a cost. Tommy pays it. Dream watches with a painted grin.
It’s all science to him. All what does it feel like and who was there and tell me tell me tell me. Dream’s the curiosity. Tommy’s the cat.
He hears a bird call from a tree.
The sky is blue as a diamond, cloudless and sprawling.
Grass curls his shoes, mud dirties the cuffs of his sleeves.
There’s something in him that’s cold and hollow. There’s something in him that might always be.
See, he’s alive by definition. Somedays that’s all he has.
So there’s a gap, in his chest, his center’s gone cold.
His soul is dark. His heart is thumping anyway. He wishes things were different, but he knows there’s no point to wishes. If he wants something, he has to stand up and chase it. But he’s tired and his legs hurt. So, for now he’ll stay here and wait for someone to visit, and when no one does, he’ll water his plants and feed his spider and pass out freezing in an empty old embassy.
He stands abruptly, and the butterfly on his nose flutters away.
His bones creak like hinges.
He tiptoes through his little field, careful not to smash flowers with his shoes. He doesn’t like to destroy things, but he’s always been too clumsy to be gentle.
He pulls his sweater tighter around him, goosebumps flitting across his skin like flame.
He strolls to his door, caught in the fog of his mind. Then he opens it.
Wilbur is stood at the center of his home, his hands neatly folded in front of him.
There’s a contrast of sorts, that his mind presents him with in the moment, despite his desire to be left alone to a thoughtless abyss.
Wilbur then, general brother: Soft smiles and fluffy hair. Warm eyes and brave words. Gentle hands and lovely guitar.
Wilbur now, ghost alive: Scars and dark circles. A yellow sweater and an old coat. A perpetually bleeding wound and a smile so forced it looks to be hurting his teeth.
He looks a wreck. Something about the cleanness of the sky outside illuminates that. He looks like he’s crumbling, cracking, stone against pickaxe, diamond and obsidian.
Tommy knows the feeling.
Wilbur blinks up at Shroud with wonderous eyes. There’s a light like a firefly, like a firework, like a fire. It’s familiar, Tommy stings.
When he hears the door open, Wilbur spins around. His coat fans out like a ballgown.
“Tommy,” Wilbur seems shocked to see him in his own home, but Tommy is unsurprised by this. He’s known the man long enough to expect nothing and expect everything. Wilbur is what he is. That has long since been accepted.
Tommy considers moving further in, stripping Wilbur of the power to freeze him still, but he’s too cold to care, too desolate. He’s a sculpture of ice already. No need to keep up appearances before the one person who’s seen him at his worst. He can take care of himself, and he can do it from the spot his feet have nailed him to. “Yes?” He cocks his head to the side.
Wilbur is briefly silent. The room is thick, but not uncomfortable. More cautious. More fragile. They are glass, they are ice. They are terribly breakable. They have already been broken.
Wilbur exhales, slow and steady. “What were you doing out there?” There’s a twinge in his voice, but Tommy can’t discern it.
He shrugs, noncommittal. He tries and fails to meet his brother’s eyes. Some things still feel too hard. Some things make him remember too much too quick, and the pressure change pops his ears. “Singing to the flowers,” he says, soft. The house almost swallows the sound.
A strange, tiny smile finds its way onto Wilbur’s face, sweet in the mess of ugly and brutal. “Alright, little muse.” He speaks like a song. Tommy’s looking at him. Tommy misses him. “You look exhausted.”
Tommy is. “So do you,” he says, and then brusquely, “why are you here?”
“I wanted to see you,” he breathes, an admission. And Tommy squints his eyes, searching for deception.
People lie. This is something he has learned from all the lessons people have decided he deserves to be taught.
People lie, and people deceive, and people use, they exploit. (“I thought you were useless.” Techno said, more to the rain than to Tommy himself. Tommy felt something in him crack and bleed. He swallowed his sorrow. He agreed).
He doesn’t trust easy anymore. Nothing is what it seems. He took those words from Wilbur’s own mouth.
He crosses his arms, chilly and skeptical. “So there is a first time for everything,” he raises a brow, all faux bravado. (There’s a gap, in his chest, his center’s gone cold). He fights back a shiver.
Wilbur puffs a laugh, all sad and light. “I wouldn’t say that, Toms,” he mutters. He sounds shy. “I always want to see you.”
“You have a funny way of showing it,” he stands his ground, unsticks his feet from the floor, and sits on top of one of his chests, lets his legs swing.
“I suppose I do,” Wilbur says moderately, eyes following Tommy.
“You okay, man?” He asks, because a brother can always read a brother, no matter how estranged, and something here is wrong. Wilbur flinches.
“Not particularly.” His voice cracks.
Tommy chuckles without emotion. He gives a two finger salute, leans against the wall. “Welcome to the club, asshole.”
Wilbur grins a little, wags an accusatory finger in Tommy’s direction. “Hey, don’t give me that bullshit,” he says, poking Tommy’s core. “I started this club.”
“You’re so dramatic, Wil,” his eyes sting but he can’t tell why. There is a buildup, in his chest. He feels full of air. “I miss you,” he says, strained.
Wilbur ducks his head, looks over himself. “I’m right here.”
Tommy looks too, eyes Wilbur’s coat, the blood on his arm, the pack of cigarettes barely peeking out of his pocket. “Are you?” He pushes.
“Of course,” Wilbur asserts with an air of obviousness. “Always.”
Tommy frowns. “Always is a long time Wil. Even you can’t promise that.” He kicks his heels against the chest he’s sat on.
“I have before,” Wilbur insists.
“And you’ve broken your word” Tommy leans forward, elbows on his knees. He still smells of outside, dirt and flowers and wheat. “Isn’t that enough to strip you of your confidence?”
He shakes his head. “Not when it comes to you.” He says earnestly. Tommy believes that Wilbur believes it. He believes nothing else.
Tommy sighs. “Where have you been, Wil?”
Wilbur shifts, almost awkward. It would be kind of funny if not for the direness, the seriousness that accompanies everything nowadays. He thinks a few years ago, he would’ve died in a place like this. All darkness and heaviness and lack of brevity. He thinks maybe that part of him did. “I built a van,” says Wil.
He cracks his knuckles, shakes the ice from his bones. “I saw.”
He recalls stumbling on it. He recalls a pressure in his chest.
“Red and white.”
His colors.
“I saw that too.”
Wilbur stares at him for what feels like an eternity, gears in his head turning “I’m scared, Tommy,” he says eventually, and it’s a bucket of ice on his already freezing form. He blanks.
“Of what?” He wonders.
“Of you,” he says simply, as if it doesn’t send Tommy’s head spinning.
He shakes his head, “Why?”
Wilbur pauses again, thinking. He’s always gotten so caught up on words, the way they need to be used. He gives them a value. Tommy used to admire it. “Because you remind me, Tommy,” he settles on clumsily, a far cry from his usual well-spoken collectedness. “Of that ravine. Your eyes are the same, your face still bends and warps. I’m afraid that you’re afraid of me, I suppose, backwards as that sounds.”
Tommy pauses too this time. “Not too backwards,” he says. "You are an idiot though.”
Because Wilbur is a walking oxymoron, mismatched and impossible. A living corpse, a genius dumbass, a nationless president. And somehow Tommy dying twice on his behalf for love of him and his tireless convolution wasn’t enough to drill into Wilbur’s thick skull that Tommy isn’t going fucking anywhere.
“What?” Wilbur’s face scrunches up in confusion. Tommy groans. He’s much too tired for this. Maybe he should just go back outside and lay in the wheat and wait for Wilbur to get his shit together. But no, he supposes, that wouldn’t be quite right.
He looks to Wilbur, meets his eyes, something fierce and tired stirred up in him. “You’re a fool Wilbur Soot, a genius and a fool.”
Wilbur runs fingers through his hair, desperately communicating. “Tommy, I’m smoke and mirrors,” he says, throwing his hands wildly about. “None of it’s real.”
Tommy rubs the bridge of his nose. “I know that. Don’t be such a bitch about it.”
Wilbur looks as though he might start crying. “You’re baffling,” he says breathlessly.
“You’re stupid.” He reaches out and grabs Wilbur by the arms, steadies him, ignores the itching of his skin.
He rolls his eyes. “I don’t give up on people, Wil,” he holds him tighter. “I don’t need the fucking magic show. You don’t have to trick me to have me, I’m right here.”
“I’ve hurt you,” Wilbur begs. “You deserve better.”
Tommy disagrees. For a lot of reasons.
“Everybody hurts everybody,” he dismisses. “And everybody hurts. There’s no use for agonizing. It doesn’t matter.”
Wilbur laughs all funny. “You wised up,” he says, throat squeezed tight, “you grew up.”
Tommy shrugs. “I had to.”
Wilbur meets his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says plainly, which is all Tommy ever really needed at all.
“I know.”
Tommy reaches out a hand, an offering. Wilbur looks for a moment, then takes it. Their fingers tremble.
There is something to be said about complexity and contrast. There is something to be said about forgiveness. Tommy is no poet, no bard, no storyteller. He doesn’t know what it is.
But he knows this.
There is bad in the world they survive in. There is bad that is loud and bad that lurks. There is rot.
It is not born of nothing. It is not incurable.
People are flawed inherently.
But Tommy has looked Death in her eyes. He knows that at the end of the day none of the specifics matter. People hurt people all the time. On purpose and on accident. It’s all menial. It’s the ones that stay, the ones that care. That is what is important. That is why he will extend olive branch after olive branch. He is only human. He needs to be loved like he needs air.
His fingers lace with his brother’s. He’s dead, he’s alive, and now he has to live. His hand is steady in Wilbur’s, warm.
And the cold, just barely, subsides.