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People tended to forget the details of Tommy’s loneliness.
The greater picture was known, unmistakable in the agony through which its remembrance wracked the frame and splintered the mind. Tommy’s story was a jagged tapestry, torn in its completion and riddled with messy threads and clogged grey—quiet and sad and entirely empty.
It was a difficult thing to look at, with the beginning magnified by the vibrancy of youth and camaraderie that once represented him—quickly succumbing to the thick stormcloud of exile at the end. How could it be that Tommy endured such suffering, even enough to cut a lifetime of colour to meaningless scraps? Loneliness was such a tiny thing in the grand scheme of Tommy’s time, but its weight was somehow heavier than every incandescent year preceding it.
Despite the harsh feelings of denial and misery, everyone understood the true nature of the event that tipped the scales of fate.
Tommy’s story ended at age sixteen, when the child built a pillar of cobble and dirt and sand shook loose from a series of explosions, climbed to the top, and then jumped. He felt so betrayed, so lonely, that he killed himself to escape it.
It was the details, though, that most people tended to forget.
They didn’t see the gradual fading light in Tommy’s blue eyes as each miserable day crept by, or the way he’d choke and gasp for air as he drowned himself in his sleep whilst yearning for home, or the crumple that marred his brow—perched atop the scalding cliffs of blood red netherrack and yearning for the lava’s tide with each shift and sway of arid light that cut sharp planes of shadow over his starved frame.
These details were kept secret in Tommy’s memory alone, further entrapping him in solitude.
Ghostbur was the only one who could’ve known the full extent. He was the only one that visited beyond Dream—the tormentor, the tyrant.
And, of course, the chipper blue phantom had a tendency to forget.
Tommy’s final hours living were spent entirely alone, apart from Ghostbur, and that was the key detail that shrouded it all from public knowledge.
“What are you doing, Tommy?” Ghostbur asked, drifting around the base of Tommy’s tower as it climbed into the stratosphere.
Tommy didn’t respond. He was too tired and numb and lonely and lost.
Ghostbur was patient, though. The opposite of his living self in every way, he shrugged and sat in a patch of green, waiting for his little brother to return and have a conversation with him. The indigo wool of Friend was warm by Ghostbur’s side.
This, the ghost would remember. He might not hold onto the haunted pallor of Tommy’s washed-out complexion, nor the crystal tracks of tears that sluiced down his bony cheeks, nor the wailed and rasping cries that rose to a crescendo when the boy’s plummeting descent drove him into the earth, but Ghostbur would remember being patient.
He would remember how the grass swayed, caught in a gentle breeze, and how Friend nibbled on the corner of a dandelion with the strange tower cutting a gnarled shadow through the light of the moon in the background. He would remember wondering what Tommy was up to, and if he’d want to play a game like they did when they were kids once he came back down.
Ghostbur would remember the serenity of that night.
Then he would remember nothing at all.
The empty space between the grassy hillside and Ghostbur’s next memory would only take up a split second in time, a blink of an eye in comparison to some of his earlier mental gaps. Ghostbur would not waste his anxious feelings wondering what he might be missing between there, not when such precious moments seemed so trivial to him—a flicker of a frown, perhaps, or an unhappiness at the mud in Friend’s wool.
Ghostbur would not remember seeing Tommy’s body burst on impact, bones and flesh and pulpy blood scattering a blackened starburst over the hillside beyond the tower. He would not remember the agonized gasp that shuddered from his mouth when he saw it, nor the rawness of his grief as he screamed and wailed and begged for Tommy to come back.
Instead, he would remember turning away from something warm and sticky, something that coated his hands and clothes as he draped over it, a frustrating tingly sensation drawing stripes up and down his cheeks and budding from his tear ducts, and the sound of Tommy’s voice.
“Hey Ghostbur,” his departed little brother greeted, his voice a strange airy whistle like the hollow notes of a thin reed flute.
Ghostbur would remember seeing him—Ghostinnit, Tommy— in a translucent figure of smoke and shadow, and Ghostbur would remember his face brightening in relief so fleeting he barely registered the possibility that it could have a legitimate source.
“Tommy! Hello, would you like to play a game with me now that you’re done with your project?” Ghostbur chirped, clasping a hand around Tommy’s wrist and jolting with delight at the solid sensation he felt beneath his ghostly skin. “Oh, you’re a ghost now, just like me! Would you like me to call you ‘Ghostinnit’ now?”
“Um,” Tommy stammered, and again his voice was lost even in the slightest breeze, sounding like it resonated from all sides and yet nowhere at all. “I don’t really have an opinion either way, I guess. Whatever you want is fine.”
Ghostbur shrugged, his lips splitting into a warm and welcoming smile. “Alright, I guess I’ll keep calling you ‘Tommy,’ then. Since that’s what I’m used to.”
Tommy returned his smile, hesitant and pale, and Ghostbur nodded to encourage him. It seemed like Ghostinnit would need a bit more practice talking before he got the hang of it like his living self, like his voice had been stripped clean away from his own throat and scattered to every corner of the server, dissociating Tommy’s ownership and independence from the action of speech altogether.
Ghostbur then dragged Tommy through the woods to a familiar place he’d scouted days earlier in the name of hide-and-seek, and Tommy reluctantly played along until daybreak, when Ghostbur caught him staring empty-eyed at the shore that led to L’Manburg.
Thus became the truest image of Tommy’s last day living—a rickety pillar, a soft bed of grass, a lazy hummed tune, a blue sheep chewing dandelions, a blink of an eye, and then a game of hide-and-seek between two dead brothers.
People tended to forget the details of Tommy’s loneliness, and Ghostbur was never an exception.
“Go fuck,” Michael babbled.
Tubbo scowled across the table and wagged his pointer finger, scolding. “No.”
“Yes! Very good, Big Mike!” Tommy chorused in his signature whispered singsong. It reverberated against the cozy wooden walls and floorboards in their Snowchester abode, skimming over listeners’ ears like a plume of dandelion seeds, tickling for a moment and then drifting away. At Michael’s prompting, he dragged a card from the pile at the center of the table and slipped it into the crowded fan in his hand.
Ghostbur cleared his throat and turned his attention from where it was stuck in dopey fondness, smiling at the antics of his little ghost brother, and back to the game. “Um, Ghostboo—got any threes?”
Ghostboo shook his head. The gauzy veil of phantomed fabric floated around his shoulders and the pointed tips of his ears like thick droplets of ink dissolving into crystal clear water, weightless and curling in shapes like spider’s silk. “Go fish. Tubbo, show me sevens?”
“Damn it,” Tubbo hissed under his breath and peeled the requested card from his hand, flicking it at the incorporeal shape of his late husband, and pretended not to flinch when he saw it pass clean through the murky fog of Ranboo’s outstretched hand.
“Damn it,” Michael parrotted.
Tubbo’s cheeks glowed scarlet. “Fuck—shit—don’t repeat that, Michael. Bee said a bad word on accident, but it’s still a bad word.”
Michael ignored his father in favor of perking his ears up at Tommy, across the table from him and flashing an expectant smirk. “Fuck! Shit! Go fuck!”
“Yay, Michael!” Ghostbur and Tommy cooed simultaneously, their attempts at clapping sending a few glossed playing cards from their hands to the floor.
“No,” Tubbo groaned again. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and huffed out a weary exhale through parted lips like a raspberry. “You ghosts are so annoying, you know that? Haunting me still, when all I asked for was my dear platonical husband and father to my child to stick around and lend a hand around the house. Now you’re teaching Michael to cuss over a game of ‘Go Fish.’ What have I done to deserve any of this?”
Ghostinnit wilted. The proud puff of his chest deflated, drawing his shoulders down and droopy along with the miserable turn of his mouth, and the definition in his features began to fade out to grey, melting him.
Immediately, Ghostbur hopped on damage control. “Hey! Tubbo, that was not very nice. We are very cool, isn’t that right, Ghostboo? Tell your husband how cool and poggers we are.”
“We are so cool, and definitely poggers,” Ghostboo reported back dutifully. “All of us—Ghostbur and Ghostboo and Ghostinnit.”
“Hear that, Tommy?” Ghostbur consoled, jostling his brother’s shoulder in an attempt to ground him, pulling him back to semi-corporeality despite the way his hand sank into Tommy’s flickering shadow like tar. “Ranboo said you’re poggers!”
Tommy’s reply emerged in the distance, warbling and almost indistinguishable from the gentle toll of windchimes outside the sturdy oak front door. “Thanks, Boob Boy.” His figure began to clarify, the contours of his profile sharpening into a pointed nose and dewy eyelashes, eternally painted pale white to match the greyscale of his undead colour scheme. At last, the meagre blossoms of saturation in Ghostinnit’s rosy cheeks and chill-tipped nose warmed to the surface, and the flat expanse of laser-bright cyan flooded his irises in place of the void of black that appeared whenever he dissolved off in loneliness.
Ghostbur exhaled a sigh of relief, and the moment was already fuzzing away into gaussian blurs in his subconscious.
“Tubbo,” Ranboo murmured, cocking his head in a chipper prompting.
Tubbo’s gaze snapped up from Tommy’s sluggish form, mouth opening in an apologetic grimace. “Right—I’m really sorry Tommy, I didn’t mean to sound like I don’t want you around, I was just kidding. I should’ve made my tone more clear—”
Ranboo shook his head again. “Actually, I was gonna say that you left the airlock hatch on the bee sanctuary open again.”
Seconds passed in silence, wherein Tubbo stared emptily at Ranboo’s ghost with a diverse mixture of emotions crossing his expression, until finally he laughed a bitter, quiet laugh to himself and dropped his head into his hands.
“I thought you were supposed to be the forgetful one, Bossman.”
“Not anymore,” Ghostboo replied, shrugging. “Since I’m dead, I remember everything. Like remember how weird I used to be? All oh—um—sorry—um— like a total moron. And my big stupid limbs just got all over the place, I dunno how you managed to deal with me all those years, but you seriously deserve an award or something. No, I’m much better now that I’m dead. Don’t you think?”
Tubbo let out a pained whine, then pursed his lips to keep the lower from trembling. “I never thought you were stupid or clumsy, Boo.”
Ghostboo shrugged again. “Well, I did.”
“I know,” Tubbo murmured. “I miss you.”
Sensing his father’s distress, Michael climbed onto Tubbo’s lap and set to work combing through his overgrown bangs, separating them into sections to be braided. Tubbo smiled down at him and brought their foreheads together, a tiny headbutt and squeeze.
“I miss when Phil and Technoblade were my friends,” Tommy added softly, biting his lip and peering over at Ghostbur, who had been sorting his cards and trying to remember the rules of whatever game they were playing before the conversation got all sad.
“Oh, they’re still our friends!” Ghostbur soothed in a rush. He floated away from his chair to curl around Tommy’s shoulders, holding him from above like when Tommy was small and his wetted face would bury itself in Alivebur’s sternum while he sobbed through his nightmares, and Tommy brought his hands up to pinch at the hem of Ghostbur’s sweater, returning the embrace as best he could with his newfound shyness and the deeply-ingrained fear that if he clung too tight he’d end up thrown to the floor in disgust.
“Uh, I wouldn’t exactly say that we’re…” Tubbo trailed off at the flinty glares he received from both Ghostbur and Ghostboo before he could finish, throat bobbing as he swallowed. “Actually, forget I said that!”
“I can’t forget anything,” Ghostboo interrupted with a serene smile. “I’m dead, remember!”
“Yes, dear,” Tubbo groaned.
“Phil and Technoblade hate me now,” Tommy wept, hiccuping like the faraway church bells of prime. “I don’t want to be hated, I want to be friends again—I just want to be friends again!”
Ghostbur filled the space surrounding Tommy’s ears with hushed reassurances as best he could while the form in his arms was still Tommy-shaped, though his deterioration was quick and inevitable as the sinking of a skipping stone beneath the skin of the ocean.
Michael finished the plait in Tubbo’s hair with a flourish, clasping the solitary rope of misplaced hair in place with a clumsy golden clip, and clapped his pink hands together in glee. “Braid! Blade! Braid! Blade!”
Ranboo straightened in his seat and blinked owlishly across the table at Michael, an awed smile adorning his fanged mouth. “Looks like he picked up a new word! Blade, like Technoblade!”
“Braid!” Michael babbled back. “Blade!”
Ranboo nodded along. “Yes, they do sound similar. I can see how excited you are to have made the distinction. Proud of you bud!”
Michael stopped his clapping for a moment, instead turning to drum his hands against Tubbo’s chest and continue his spouting for the Blade.
Tommy’s formless shoulders shuddered in a wheezy sob, the sound of it creeping further away and blending with the twinkling of thawed frost on the window.
Ghostbur’s eyes fluttered shut to better focus on Tommy’s words, in case he decided to try to say something else. Still, he cradled his brother in his arms.
Tubbo’s reluctant declaration was muffled by the wool of his collar when he next spoke, but the ghosts heard it all the same.
“… Maybe we can invite Phil and Technoblade to dinner sometime.”
Two days later, there came a sharp knock at the front door.
“I’ll get it!” Ghostboo announced, already phasing through the wall in the kitchen where he was helping Tubbo prepare their meal and speeding to the entryway.
Standing on the porch before their little house was the imposing figure of Technoblade, draped in furs and a warm winter coat to ward off the Snowchester chill. Any light left beyond his hulking silhouette was shrouded by Philza’s flat raven’s wings, oil-slicked and glossy in the twilight.
Ghostboo grinned and stuck out his arm for a formal handshake. “Hey Phil, hey Techno!”
“Uh…” Techno stammered. When he tried to accept the greeting, his fingers passed through Ghostboo’s hand and wedding ring like he was combing through cobwebs. “Hey, Ranboo—er, Ghost boo. How’s—how’s dead life treatin’ you?”
Phil cleared his throat and not-so-subtly kicked Techno in the shin.
“It’s fine,” Ghostboo mused. “I actually wanted to say something before we get into the pleasantries, if that’s alright.”
“Oh, uh, sure. We don’t mi—”
Ghostboo barrelled on without waiting for Techno to finish his confirmation. “Yeah, so here’s the thing—now that Tommy is Ghostinnit, he gets all melty when he thinks people are abandoning him all alone again, like he was in exile—you remember exile, right? Where he got starved and manipulated and abused until he killed himself? That’s how he died, he killed himself in exile. Anyways, when Tommy melts too much he gets lost and it’s a real pain in the ass to find him again, especially with his voice all meek and whispery—you understand, right? So, rather than start a confrontation with Tommy involved, I decided I’d just squash all his beefs right here and now. No hard feelings, guys, but also fuck you.”
Phil and Techno stared at Ghostboo, mouths agape, as the pause that followed flooded the air with trepidation like static electricity, chattering in their bones and drawing their hairs up on end.
Seeing that he was going to receive no further response, Ghostboo cleared his throat and began on the speech he’d had prepared since they first started planning the reconciliation dinner.
“Ahem—Technoblade, you’re a piece of shit. Shit-no-blade.”
Hiding behind the couch in the living room, Ghostbur had to clamp a hand over both his and Tommy’s mouths to keep them from giggling. Tommy’s voice may be quiet, but it still could be heard from every angle of every room. If Phil and Techno heard the dead child snickering and turned to search for the source of the voice, they’d ruin the big surprise!
“Furthermore, Phil, you are also a piece of shit. Philza Shit-craft.”
“Wow, okay,” Phil spluttered, incredulous, and opened his mouth to speak again, but Ghostboo jabbed his finger in his face with a noisy SHH! to cut him off.
“I’m not finished,” Ghostboo snapped. “For my final point, I’d like to direct your attention to your left, where you’ll find a sculpture made out of snow, previously camouflaged with the porch rails.”
Ghostbur couldn’t hold in his anticipation any longer.
He sprung out from behind the couch, Tommy hot on his heels, and flew through the air over Phil and Techno’s heads. The brothers just barely managed to get outside in time to see the dawning looks of horror and mild amusement cross over their pseudo-family’s features.
The three ghosts—along with Tubbo and Michael—had spent all afternoon carving the statue of a middle finger from a six-foot block of snow on the porch, and it turned out absolutely perfect. To top it all off, Ranboo added a crooked sign that read, Hey fuck you guys! Fuck you! in wobbly inked lettering.
Astonished silence swept over Snowchester like a plague.
Then, something incredible happened.
Techno’s impassive deadpan cracked.
One corner of his mouth curled up, and then the other, and then all of a sudden both he and Philza were bowled over laughing, teeth bared in the cold and delighted tears pricking at their eyes.
Ghostbur always found laughter to be infectious, now that he was dead and unable to process sad things, and so he immediately joined in. Ghostboo was not far behind, hugging himself to ward off the bite of winter outside, and of course that drew out Tubbo and Michael to see what all the commotion was about.
Tubbo looked between Techno and Phil with a wary gasp of surprise. He saw the way the great warrior Technoblade—destroyer of nations and owner to the hand that pulled the trigger on the fireworks that took Tubbo’s eye and one life—was practically choking on the wheezy laughter that expelled from his lungs, and how he hugged the ghost of a beloved enderman Tubbo knew he’d tried desperately to save from dying, and something warm inside Tubbo’s sternum lit up.
It felt an awful lot like forgiveness.
Then, like the radiant break of a long-awaited dawn cutting through the darkness of a stormy night, the heavens unfurled to an uproarious angel’s choir.
Ghostbur looked to his left and saw Tommy, smiling like he’d never done as a ghost, laughing loud and wide for all the world to see.
The melody of it stretched to the farthest reaches of the server, bouncing off towers and hillsides and dandelions, collecting harmonies from all the beautiful parts of the world Tommy could never seem to enjoy while he was alive, and converging back on that snowy porch in an overwhelming swell of joyous clamour.
“Welcome home, bitch!” Tommy crowed, his voice amplified a thousand times over by the incandescent brilliance of his smile, and stretched his arms out to tug both Phil and Technoblade into his chest, dragging Ghostbur along with him.
“This concludes my diss track,” Ghostboo twittered, content with his work, and tumbled through the warm opening to his home.
Tubbo ushered him in and gestured over his shoulder for the others, a familial flush dusting his cheeks. “Hurry inside, you’ll let the cold air in!”
“Dinner! Blade! Fuck!” Michael agreed.
As the remaining stragglers made their way through the threshold, Tommy pulled Ghostbur aside with a quietly pleased expression on his face. The pink of his blush and the blue of his eyes looked brighter, somehow, and if Ghostbur squinted he could almost see a few golden strands of his hair regaining their colour.
“Think you’ll remember this one?” Tommy whispered, wiggling his eyebrows in jest.
Ghostbur’s expression melted into an adoring gooey grin. “I’d say so, yeah. Today’s been a very good day.”
Tommy nodded at that.
Then, as though he was trying to keep himself from changing his mind, he threw himself out into Ghostbur’s chest and squeezed him in the tightest hug Ghostbur ever had.
People tended to forget the details of Tommy’s loneliness, and Ghostbur didn’t care.
He’d forget a thousand sad things if it meant maintaining the space in his memory for that hug.