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It’s an insidious thing, this illness Wilbur has. It’s creeping up his house like vines, infesting his walls with its poisonous words. He’s never truly able to get rid of it, even when he grabs the vines, pricking himself on thorns, and pulls. He pulls and he pulls and he feels the whole house start to unravel as he does so—feels the very foundation tremble, and it fills him with terror.
So he stops pulling. He covers up the holes in the walls with cheap homemade plaster and pretends he doesn’t notice when the vines break through. He draws happy little scenes over the blemishes and ignores when people express their confusion over what it is—because clearly, they are just not artistic enough, they don’t understand Wilbur’s brilliance and that’s not his fault. Everyone else is wrong—they have to be. If they’re not then that would mean that Wilbur is wrong, that something is wrong with Wilbur, but that’s just not possible.
Wilbur doesn’t realize it, at first. When the vines move from their home in the walls and wrap around his wrists, his ankles, his throat. He doesn’t realize it. He screams till he’s blue in the face that he’s fine, that they can stop babying him, and don’t you see what’s going on? He doesn’t see that it’s the vines choking him that are making him breathless, and not his anger.
He’s nineteen, rebellious, away from home for the first time after his departure was delayed by sudden and unexplained depression—and nearly delayed even longer, but he insisted, no, dad, I’m fine, I promise. That was back when he was still calling Phil, dad.
He had just met Sally on a server far away, as far away from home as he could possibly run. She was beautiful, alluring, and he was young and stupid. He loved her, and she loved him—at least he thinks she did. It’s hard to tell the difference, back then. He knows that his thinking was flawed and that he didn’t see things the same way as the others, that he saw and felt and knew things that weren’t real. But he hopes, he really hopes, that even just a small part of what they had was real.
She leaves him, eventually. After he accuses her of going behind his back and cheating on him, all sorts of baseless accusations that his mind screams at him, things that it tells him are true.
He calls his dad for advice and when he gets concerned, starts asking Wilbur if he’s okay, Wilbur gets frustrated and asks if he’s against him too. That’s when dad becomes Phil and something in their bond breaks.
He finds out about Fundy three weeks after Sally leaves him. He’d been avoiding food, thinking the puking was because someone was trying to poison him and he knows —some small part of him knows that it’s illogical, that there has to be another cause but it—he doesn’t see it.
He doesn’t see it until he’s passed out in an alleyway from dehydration and a stranger takes him to the doctor, and he finds out he’s pregnant and his child was hurt because of him.
He knows he has to get help. The next seven months are, to put it, hell. He sees malicious grins in soft smiles and sharp claws in gentle hands. Everyone who tries to help him is snarled at, they’re all against him but he’s not going to let them hurt his child.
He barely makes it through those months. There’s a few moments of clarity there, where he can stop and breathe and tell the nurses and doctors I’m sorry, and Thank you for helping me , but there aren’t many. At the times he can’t, he refuses his medications over and over. It could hurt him, hurt his child, they could be trying to get rid of such a useless waste of space, trying to kill him and—
When Fundy is born he’s so small. He’s so small and all Wilbur can think is this is my fault. His first moments holding his child are full of tears, though not all happy. He knows he can’t take care of this child. Not the way he deserves.
Out of all the hard decisions Wilbur will go on to make in his life, he makes the hardest decision right then.
He gives Fundy up. He leaves his child, like he had promised he wouldn’t do after he left—no, Phil left him, he knows but—does he? Can he really trust what he swears he knows, now that he knows his own mind is against him?
He leaves Fundy on Hypixel. It wasn’t—it wasn’t supposed to be permanent. He was giving him up but he promised he would come back. He didn’t know about the time difference there, that it was accelerated. He just knew he needed help and he knew he couldn’t get that while taking care of a baby. So he left Fundy with an old midwife who promised to take care of him, that he would be back in just a few months and he would be better then.
He comes back exactly as he promised, a few months later, with shaking hands and a mind stuffed with cotton but with the knowledge that he was ready to be a dad to Fundy so that he would always be dad and never Wilbur.
He didn’t know that thirteen years had passed in the three months he had been gone, so he walks into the old midwife’s home and he just freezes because there—there she is. It’s not possible. Why would Sally come back? And then the fox hybrid turns around and he realizes it’s not, in fact, Sally, which is both pathetically relieving and painful and, hey, is that a fist flying towards him?
After being mauled half to death by his son—he takes the gender news in stride, thank you very much. It would be incredibly hypocritical of him not to—the midwife comes running in and pulls Fundy off of him. Wilbur’s too shaken up at the sight of his child, his grown child.
She sits them both down—a very kind old woman, that one is—and they talk. Eventually, they come to understand that Hypixel time runs faster than many other servers, like the one Wilbur was on for treatment. The old lady, well, she thought he knew.
When he didn’t come back after six months she started to get worried he wasn’t improving. After a year she thought maybe something was really wrong.
After two years she decided he had either abandoned Fundy—and god, does that hurt to hear, and see Fundy’s ears flick backwards—or that he had died. So she took him in as her own.
Fundy started questioning why he looked nothing like his mom when he was six. He wondered why she was so old when he was nine. He was told the truth when he was eleven, the old woman had explained she was not his birth parent, but she loved him very much. She showed him a few pictures of Wilbur, from back when he would participate in those championships that Techno enjoyed destroying the competition in.
She told him that Wilbur had loved him very much, but he had died, and she didn’t know who his other parent was. Fundy only started to understand what that meant at twelve.
At thirteen a newspaper article from another server found its way into Fundy’s hands that mentioned Wilbur Soot, on another server, alive.
Fundy burned with rage.
So when he saw the face of his father, staring at him as if he was a ghost, as if he never expected to see him again, he lost it.
Fundy feels bad, now, because he knows Wilbur was only trying to get better for him so he could take care of him— but he can’t help but feel a little bit of smug satisfaction when he sees the bruise blossoming on Wilbur’s jaw.
He starts out as Wilbur, not dad.
---
Wilbur takes Fundy to a new server and he tries to start anew. He teaches him all he had learned from Phil about survival. He builds walls around their camp to protect his son and eventually, those walls expand. They gain more members of their little encampment and they gain friends and Wilbur thinks maybe, just maybe, they’ll be okay.
Then the vines begin to creep. In his haste to build a place of safety, he had forgotten about the safety of his own mind. He had been neglecting his medication lately and he— he hadn’t noticed he was slipping, he thinks with horrified, choked breaths.
Yes, he can admit the drug van wasn’t a great idea but he—he was just having some fun, and it helped, okay, and Dream was just—Wilbur he—he wanted freedom. From anyone, from his own mind.
So he did what he did best. He raised walls until they were towering to the sky and then he built his new nation’s walls even higher. He declared outsiders to be bad and untrustworthy and he didn’t tell anyone that he meant, “I don’t feel safe.”
After Eret’s betrayal, “outsiders aren’t safe,” becomes, “my friends aren’t either,” and before he knows it he’s exiled and he’s lost his second life and he’s lost his friends and he’s lost another piece of the plaster that is keeping the vines from crashing through.
Then his little light becomes a darkness he couldn’t possibly fathom. A traitor. He watches as his son tears down the walls he built to protect him, burns down the flag that they designed together. He realizes that Fundy isn’t a child anymore. Wilbur realizes he missed the chance to become dad and not just Wilbur.
---
The rebellion is a haze. A haze of watching and waiting and always looking over his shoulder, trekking up the steep Pogtopia stairs, and looking around to make sure he won’t be ambushed, all while hoping that maybe one day he’ll slip and fall and be done with this.
He focuses on espionage but every stumble, every stuttered word is just proof they’re lying to him and there’s another traitor even as a part of him screams and begs for him to look and see that these people love him , they love L’Manberg and they love him and they won’t betray him.
It doesn’t matter, in the end. Wilbur loses like he always does. The universe always seems to draw these cards for him and Wilbur is sick of it. He’s sick of it in a vehement, virulent way, and he decided he’s going to do something about it. If his mind says there’s going to be another traitor, then so be it.
He ignores Tommy by his side—the only one who has stayed by his side, this whole time—as he proclaims, as he embraces that they are the villains. He ignores the voice in his head that says, “not villainous, just sick,” and he decides that he’s tired of flying.
If the universe declares the sun to never be his, then so be it.
---
His death was supposed to be poetic , it was supposed to be Icarus flying too close to the sun, laughing as he falls, for if he cannot have the sun then he will ensure no one else will. He was supposed to die in the explosion, one so big and grand but only a shadow, a backdrop to the last act, to the grandiosity of himself.
He was supposed to say, “fuck you!” to the world that has betrayed him time and time again, but when he says, “it was never meant to be,” it feels more like he’s saying, “this was never meant for me.”
The explosion goes off and he doesn’t die, not instantly. It feels like one last betrayal from the world, to not even grant him the wish to die painlessly and gloriously—even though in his dying moments he has enough clarity to realize it was never really the world against him at all. He takes a moment to breathe and truly thinks, for the first time in all the time that he’s lost, about how he feels.
He feels…empty. He feels small. He wants to curl up in his father’s embrace and beg for him to help him out of this mess —but father has been Phil for longer than Wilbur’s mind has been against him.
He wants to be a child again. He wants to go back to before the poison seeped into his veins and the bond between them. He just wants his father.
So when the dust clears and he sees the great looming wings of a man whose shoes have always seemed too big to fill, he cries out, “Dad, I’m sorry, dad, please.”
He cannot tell if the trembling is his own, or that of his father now holding him. And for all that those in Wilbur’s family have been grand and glorious, he realizes—with no small amount of shock—that they, too, are human.
And suddenly this doesn’t feel very good anymore. This tragedy, supposed to go down as history never to be repeated, it feels so small. A tiny blip in the cosmic scale of things. He looks out across what was once his grand nation and he realizes that no one is even looking at the two of them.
“I didn’t want this, it’s not fair I didn’t—I just wanted—” he mumbles, blood spilling past his lips. Phil wipes it away with a quiet shushing sound, petting through his hair in a way that makes Wilbur feel ten again; when he jumped out of a tree so he could fly like his dad and broke his leg because he wasn’t born blessed with wings.
“I know, I know. It’s not fair, I’m sorry,” Phil whispers back, burying his face in Wilbur’s blood-soaked hair. It’s a lot of blood, Wilbur realizes distantly. He’ll probably die soon, though not soon enough.
“No. Don’t—Don’t say that, Wil, you’re gonna be fine,” Phil responds, tilting his chin up to look him in the eyes, and oh, did he say that out loud?
Wilbur doesn’t tell him it’s his last life. He doesn’t want to see the shock and the grief on his face before he dies. Though he thinks, deep down they both know it. The vines are gone from his throat now, burned along with what remained of his legacy. They can both see the cracks in the walls left behind, the damage to the structure of the house. It’s a lot of damage, too much for him to repair alone with cheap plaster and shaking hands. Not again.
“I’ll be here—for you,” Phil promises, his voice strong, resolved. “I’ll do whatever you need me to. We can get through this, we can—together. We’ll do this together. I’m not leaving you.”
Wilbur says, “I know, I love you.” He doesn’t have the heart to say I know, but I’m the one leaving you.
Wilbur smiles at Phil and for once it’s genuine, no tinge of the distrust or the fear, not placating nor calculating. Wilbur just—he wanted to go out on his own terms. And he realizes, now, that he didn’t have to go out at all but—but now he has no choice. He’s not okay with that, not exactly. It’s too soon, and too small, and it’s not fair but at least—at least he can go out smiling, in his father’s arms.
When he whispers, “I need you to kill me, dad,” he knows without a doubt that his father will do it. He knows he can trust him, and he can trust his own mind.
---
Dying was divine retribution for the errors of a madman—a sick man, he reminds himself—and he was content with that, even if he didn’t go out the way he intended to. He spent over a decade on that rusty old train platform with nothing but his thoughts— his thoughts, he thinks, and isn’t that wonderful? To think, for once, that they belong to him?—and eventually, he gave up trying to find a way home and he was fine with that in a way that was so much more than pretty painted scenes on peeling wallpaper.
He knows now that he wasn’t evil, that he didn’t deserve the hand he got dealt, and that he made a lot of bad choices because of it—but working through years of deep-rooted self-hatred and fears doesn’t just bring you back to life. So he accepted that this was his afterlife now, and he smiled with cracked edges when he saw his name on the platform display and he tried to piece the shards back together.
It’s when he’s brought back to life, ripped violently out of the small semblance of peace he had managed to craft himself, that he realizes again that the vines had never really left. The seeds were still in the ground and each new tidbit of information—accomplishments, that life moved on without him, that he didn’t make an impact that he was nothing— he learned watered those seeds.
He recognizes now, though, when it’s becoming an issue. When the seedlings turn to plants and the shadows start to creep and follow him. He recognizes it when he’s stirring up trouble and his playful fighting words to Quackity sound just a bit too real this time, and he pulls himself back in.
It’s only when he’s ranting again about how his rival has upstaged him for the last time, how he’s going to get revenge, that he realizes it. Tommy twitches, just barely there. An aborted flinch that he couldn’t contain and Wilbur thinks he’s scared of me. It’s the wake-up call he needs.
He breaks down on the floor of Phil’s cabin later that night and begs his father for help, telling him that he doesn’t want this to happen again and he doesn’t want to lose his second chance . Phil pulls him into the darkness of his wings and the warmth of his arms, cradles him like a babe when he hasn’t felt the touch of another human for thirteen years, and Phil whispers, “It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re here. I’m here, I’m not leaving you.”
Wilbur whispers back, in a voice so quiet, “I don’t want to leave you,” and he finds that he really means it.
---
It’s about week six of his spiral into antipsychotics fueled depression—it’s not exactly depression, but how else is he supposed to describe, “my head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton and I can’t stop shaking and I hate it so fucking much I feel useless,” aside from, “the drugs I take to make me not hate people are making me hate myself,” which isn’t much better, but really, Wilbur’s only been in therapy so long. He doesn’t know how to express himself because it just—wasn’t done.
His psychiatrist—a real one, because as much as he loves Puffy she is not equipped to deal with this—tells him that he should talk to Phil about this, that opening communication between the two of them is a good idea and will help him trust Phil again.
So he goes home that night with all the interactions in the past few weeks racing through his mind and before he even gets his shoes off at the door he’s telling Phil about how awful he feels, that Tommy is afraid of him, and oh god, is he really so horrible as to make his own brother afraid of him?
He doesn’t realize till he’s midway through his vent and Phil has yelled his name for the third time that they’re not alone in the house.
Tommy sits at the kitchen table, wide-eyed and shaking. His eyes fill with tears as he drops his spoon back into his bowl and pushes out his chair with an awful screech that makes all of them wince.
Tommy stalks up to him with clenched fists and eyes hidden by his bangs, refusing to look up to him. All Wilbur can see in his place is fluffy orange ears and the swing of a fist coming to his face— oh.
Tommy has—he’s put his hand on Wilbur’s shoulder. Since when did he grow big enough to do that? How much has Wilbur missed?
“Wilbur, you fucking dumbass, I’m not scared of you—”
Wilbur cuts him off. He knows he shouldn’t—he should let Tommy talk, his psychiatrist talked about this, about letting others have a say, but he needs Tommy to know that he isn’t mad at him, that he doesn’t fault him for it.
“Tommy it’s—it’s okay if you are I—I understand—”
Tommy pushes him back with the hand rested on his shoulder, though not unkindly. More like the gentle little thwaps they would give each other when they were being gremlins.
“No, you’re not listening! I wasn’t—I’m not scared of you, Wilbur, I’m scared for you!” Tommy shouts, and the house goes quiet.
Wilbur can only focus on Tommy’s ragged breaths and his trembling fingers where they’re curled tight in Wilbur’s shirt, as if he’s afraid that Wilbur will disappear if he lets go.
He realizes, with a start, what Tommy means. He did disappear when Tommy let go. Not that—it wasn’t either of their faults, obviously, but Wilbur left Tommy, and Tommy is afraid that it’s going to happen again. That Wilbur is going to decide he’s tired of living again and just leave.
“I'm not leaving you,” Wilbur says with a choked voice, holding back tears of his own, and he really means it this time.
They collapse into a pile of tearful hugs, soft whispers of promises to support each other, and apologies for grievances years past roll from their tongues and it feels so good to just let go.
Phil joins them and wraps them up in his wings and eventually, when Techno returns to the house, he takes one look at them, shrugs, and joins what now has just become a glorified cuddle pile. Wilbur had missed this.
It’s not okay, not yet. Vines don’t need sunlight to grow and his vines are no exception—but he thinks that maybe, he can grow to accept the flowers and become something hardy.
He’ll twine around his support structures, and maybe, one day, he won’t feel the need to climb at all.