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Tommy could actually feel his atoms splitting away from one another the first time he disintegrated.
It was quite the unnerving sensation, despite the supposed comfort to be found in the cleansing process of renewal. He knew—of course he did—that getting ‘dusted’ was a natural part of his hybrid life cycle, and that he’d emerge from the experience fresher and sharper than ever before. It’s just—he never expected it to be so damn lonely.
Tommy was an avian—specifically, a rare subcategory called phoenix—and family was everything to him. Yearning for the closeness of Flock had become a part of Tommy’s daily routine at that point; it was the first instinct that greeted him each morning, and the daydream was a familiar pillowcase upon which he’d rest his head each night.
If he thought about it really hard, Tommy could sometimes convince himself that those distant fantasies for family were actually based in real memories.
They were always sharp and fleeting in his mind’s eye, most likely captured when he was still young and didn’t live in the Facility yet, but he could see a distinct winged silhouette that looked just like himself aside from a few minor differences. The unidentified figure had Tommy’s same vibrant wings that shifted and glossed in a myriad of holographic colours—though in the memory they were much fuller and cleaner than Tommy’s—with a kaleidoscope of feathers and light and magic to match the metallic golden glow of his hair.
But then Tommy would remind himself that the person in his ‘memory’ was most likely just a projection of his grown-up reflection, formed from fleeting few glances at the Facility windows and polished lab tables.
Even though his mind’s eye imagined a wildly different haircut, metallic blonde in a slightly different shade, and donned in plain street clothes that were nothing like the black jumpsuit uniform Tommy’s always worn at the Facility—surely it was just wishful thinking, right?
Yeah, the imaginary phoenix looked really cool and achingly familiar in some childish way, but that was just Tommy fantasizing about what he might look like if he ever escaped. There wasn’t a phoenix for him to call Flock because there were no other phoenixes period.
Tommy was the last one.
And thus, the very first time he died, Tommy felt himself splitting into a million tiny pieces while his heart broke right alongside the rest of him. He disintegrated into a small puddle of pale and sandy ash that the nurses said looked like the purest white, though Tommy suspected that his glowing powder actually shone in a million colours they just couldn’t perceive, and all he knew through it all was that he was bitterly alone.
He came back, though.
Tommy was fourteen years old and a newborn baby all at the same time, and to cope with this knowledge he simply stepped into his familiar black uniform, signed off on the lab report that was shoved into his arms, and followed a nurse down the endless porcelain hallways back to his cell with the other hybrid Anomalies his age.
Part of Tommy hoped he’d never get used to dying.
More than seven long years he’d spent cooped up in the Facility, absolutely refusing to be killed, no matter how hard the doctors and nurses tried. He’d been tortured and mutilated nearly beyond all recognition by the time it finally happened, and to be completely honest Tommy didn’t even know what finally did it.
One doctor theorized that he’d finally gone ‘feral,’ meaning that he’d suppressed his hybrid urges long enough that it got completely sick and took him over. They said that people’s unique traits were just like any other survival instinct. If you went too long without food, you’d eventually snap and devour anything in sight. Too long without sleeping, and your body would succumb to exhaustion and render you unconscious. Holding your breath for a long time would have you gasping huge dramatic lungfuls of air until your oxygen levels went back to normal.
In the same fashion, when a hybrid suppressed their Anomaly instincts for too long, they’d eventually be overtaken entirely and go feral.
That, Tommy discovered, was the Facility’s favorite word. Feral.
It almost felt like he and his fellow Anomalies were there for nothing more! The doctors said they were researching all sorts of hybrid effects so they could come up with new medicines and surgeries that would help people on the outside, but Tommy saw how he and the others were punished for letting their instincts loose even the tiniest bit. They were forced to suppress their Anomaly sides or die trying, and only when they finally succumbed to the chaos of their neglected instincts were they swept away by Facility staff for questioning.
According to them, when Tommy went feral, he merely burned.
He burned, and he burned, and he burned some more. Between the flickers of flame, he’d see visions of people and places and things he didn’t recognize—snapshots of the afterlife, he assumed—and then he’d continue burning until he woke up unscathed on the lab table with clean wings and soft hair and smooth skin free of scars.
The doctors had no explanation for his visions, so Tommy stopped trying to ask after a few rounds of dying.
After a few rounds of dying, he got used to it.
Two years passed, and Tommy’s day-to-day routine went almost entirely unchanged.
His feral state still killed him when the daydreams of Flock became too much for his heart to handle, and he still spent the remainder of his time beyond the ashes with his fellow Anomalies in their shared cell.
The only change was that Ranboo came back from the lab one day absolutely bonkers. Completely off his rocker. Batshit fucking insane.
“I swear to God, I am not lying!” Ranboo lied. “Why would I joke about this?” His voice was a conspiratorial whisper, eyes darting around the smooth white box that was their Facility cell.
“I dunno, ‘cuz you can?” Purpled sneered back. “No one sees where you teleport except yourself, dumbass. You could say you’d been to Endlantis and back if you really wanted and nobody’d be able to prove a thing!”
Tommy nodded along, snickering at the unimpressed glare that the enderman hybrid affixed on Purpled’s primary set of alien eyes.
Ranboo seemed to wrestle with his words for a second, cocking his head as soft tufts of violet particles swirled around his pointed ears the more he pondered. “Okay, well, I haven’t made up anything—and I won’t. You’ve gotta believe me, I really did meet someone outside the Facility this time!”
“Ranboo, how’s that even possible?” Tommy groaned, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “The Facility grounds are warded against ender hybrid effects. They said that if you ever teleport somewhere you don’t recognize, it’s just an outdoor simulation running in one of the corner sections of the grounds. It’s literally impossible to teleport out of here.”
“Okay, okay, okay—stop right there!” Ranboo blurted out and threw his hands up, flailing. “Yes—okay? Yeah, you’re right. Sometimes it’s looked like I got really far from the Facility when I enderwalked, but the doctors made sure I knew it was all just on a giant screen and that those sections of the campus were restricted from us unless we stumbled upon them accidentally like me. You all agreed that they were being, like, super forgiving whenever that happened, right?”
Purpled nodded warily. “I respect any doctor who’s lenient about mistakes like yours are when you trespass with enderwalking. Most of mine don’t give a shit about me at all unless I’m melting something.”
“Right—good—now keep that in mind,” Ranboo affirmed, snapping his fingers and leaning in very close all of a sudden. His arms lifted to wind around Tommy and Purpled’s shoulders, drawing them in tight and forcing them to pay apt attention to his next words. “What if I told you that it was all lies?”
Tommy spluttered and leaned back, jabbing an elbow in Purpled’s side. “Oh god, hes back onto his stupid conspiracy theories. Remember that time he thought I had a cone in my eyeball just because I could see more colours than him?”
“No! And I said you had an extra cone—like the kind everyone has in their eyes—which would make four. You’re a tetrachromat, and that’s not a conspiracy, it’s a real thing—alright? Just listen to me!” Ranboo snapped in response, his mismatched brows furrowing in a tight monochrome scowl. “When I was out enderwalking these past few times that I went feral, I intentionally returned to the same place multiple trips in a row, just to see what would happen. It was some weird grassy pavilion with flowers and yellow-striped bugs, and every time I saw this same kid named Tubbo there. And he was real, I could touch him and talk to him in real life, not just through a screen, yeah?”
“So you found another Anomaly nursery, great,” Purpled drawled, inspecting the end of one indigo-tipped antenna before releasing it to bob and sway in the stale Facility air. “Whoop-de-doo. If you wanted to ditch us for your cool new flower friend you could’ve just said so.”
A confused pang of hurt rippled over Tommy’s chest, and he looked over at Ranboo with wide and watery eyes and a jutted lower lip. He hadn’t considered the possibility that Ranboo might want to leave their Anomaly nursery to join a new one—would he really do that? But the three of them were family! They hadn’t been apart for more than a few feral states at a time in the past two years they’d been together!
“Don’t be stupid, Purpled,” Ranboo hissed, eyes glittering dangerously and the bridge of his nose crinkling up in disdain. “I’d never abandon you two, even if Tubbo was another Anomaly. No, he said he was from the outside. He’d never even heard of the Facility!”
“How do you know he wasn’t making fun of you?” Tommy interjected with a light frown. Now that his fears of being abandoned were assuaged, he went right back to feeling concerned for his sweetest, most naive and well-intentioned friend. “That’d be quite a prank—and a cruel one.”
“He just wasn’t, okay? He was real, and he said he’d never heard of the Facility, but that it sounded illegal to him, and that he’d tell his dad about it—Tubbo’s dad is a part of the police precinct in L’Manburg, apparently, and he even knows some folks in this place called the Serverwide Bureau of Investigation that want to join the investigation!” Ranboo enthused, shaking them by the shoulders ever-so-slightly. They’d long ago learned that the bedroom security cameras were mostly for show, not often monitored and unable to pick up soft-spoken audio, but that didn’t stop them from trying to make as little movement as possible in the hours after a feral state experiment. They didn’t want to risk garnering the attention of the doctors enough to be called out for a follow-up.
“Wait, you mean the SBI? They’re getting involved?” Purpled whispered back, suddenly intrigued. “Dude, that’d be huge! We might actually be able to get out of here!”
Tommy did a double-take and shot an incredulous gasp in Purpled’s direction. “Wait, what the fuck? When did you join his side?”
“The SBI, Tommy,” Purpled echoed, now joining Ranboo in his paranoid scrutinizing sweeps over the room before ducking down into their huddle circle again. “They’re a body of hybrid law enforcement that just got established a couple months before I was brought to the Facility. You and Ranboo would’ve never heard of them if you weren’t told by someone who’d lived on the outside fairly recently, since you lot were here long before me. I think this Tubbo guy Ranboo was talkin’ to might actually exist—and if he does, and he can get the word out to the actual SBI, we’re as good as rescued!”
Ranboo nodded frantically, his glowing eyes blurring into streaky up-down pathways with the movement. “That’s what I’m saying! Tubbo thinks that the Facility was using this thing called a gaslight—he said that’s what it’s called when people try to convince you that what you’re seeing or feeling isn’t real, it’s just in your head or in a simulation, so they can manipulate you better. The Facility doctors were giving me a gaslight when they said I couldn’t enderwalk beyond the borders, and it worked!”
Tommy frowned. “That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about gaslighting to dispute it.”
“Shut up Tommy,” Purpled snickered. “Ranboo, tell us more about the outside. Did you get to see any stars?”
Ranboo’s face lit up with enough joy that Tommy completely forgot to be angry with Purpled.
“Oh, yes! Tons!”
It had been almost six months since that first escape plan huddle, and Tommy was getting nervous.
Ranboo was forcing himself to go feral more frequently, sticking his hand into the water pitcher they were brought during mealtimes and pacing around the room each night instead of sleeping so he’d be more likely to trigger the enderwalking dream state. Ranboo was only allowed to teleport when he went feral, since natural teleporting was punished as one of the ways they could act on their suppressed hybrid instincts, and as such he was only able to conduct his escape planning with the Tubbo kid on the outside when he was hurting.
Tommy didn’t like it.
Sure, he wanted freedom—the Facility was crushing the life out of them with every passing day, and Tommy couldn’t bear to see how it affected his Anomaly brothers—but he didn’t want them to get even worse before their escape could happen.
Because, well…
More than anything, Tommy was used to it.
He’d long since come to accept what the Facility was doing to him, and he’d made his peace. Ranboo and Purpled were a bit newer to it all, with Ranboo arriving when they were both eleven, and Purpled three years after that.
Tommy had been here since he was six.
You learn to make some sacrifices after spending that much time lost and alone.
One example was the fact that Tommy knew he’d give up his own chance of escape a thousand times over if he could somehow find a way to get his brothers out of there without all the self-inflicted torture it took to go feral.
Ranboo seemed happy enough to do it, though. Tubbo was good to him, and asked after the other two Anomalies often, almost like he wanted to be friends with them too. It was shocking and unfamiliar—so why did it draw so much warmth out from Tommy’s chest?
Tubbo agreed with Ranboo on the whole tetrachromat conspiracy theory, even going so far as to tear out a page from a real life textbook for Ranboo to crumple under his jumpsuit when he came back explaining it all. Apparently phoenix hybrids had a fair amount of research done on them in the past, which made Tommy wonder how long ago it was that they went extinct—or if that was just another manipulation on part of the doctors that owned the Facility.
Phoenixes were best known for their inexplicable view of colour, the book said. They were born with the ability to see a full different array of light, which meant that they saw colours in even the plainest textures. They could tell when others were sick before they even felt it just by the pallor of their skin, and could differentiate the subtlest shifts in hue between seemingly identical swatches of colour. Most extraordinary of all was their wings, which to the untrained eye appeared uncanny and white, glowing with some undetectable brilliance—however, a fellow phoenix would recognize the vastly transfixing rainbow refracting off the others’ wings in an instant.
That explained why people always said his wings were plain white, Tommy thought, although the article struck the smallest chord of unhappiness in his gut when he realized there were no phoenixes left who could truly see his wings for what they were.
He tried not to let it get him down.
As the days between each of Ranboo’s feral states grew shorter and more strained, Tommy affixed his full attention on his fellow Anomalies. He’d offer food and drink wherever he could, suggesting that Ranboo lie down for a bit if he worked himself too hard immediately after an episode, fanning down the radioactive solar flares that cropped up on Purpled’s skin when he got too angry, and between that Tommy generally sat around the Facility wondering what the hell kind of fucked-up excuse for a person he’d become if he was actually sort of afraid to lose this place—home to everything he’d ever known and hated and loved.
“I think it’s coming together soon, guys,” Ranboo reassured them one night.
It was a few hours past quiet time and the room was pitch black dark aside from the eerie violet glow emanating from Purpled’s trembling figure, blistering hot and electrifying to the touch. He’d been gradually decaying the way his alien biology dictated each time he suppressed those parts of him, becoming mute and unable to do much more than chitter and click at things from across the room as his body combusted from the inside out.
Purpled was a celestial hybrid—a child born from the stars. As such, his feral states were never quite the same, triggering his body to cycle through a star’s phases of expansion and decay. He’d exploded to more than ten times his original height as his skin changed colours and burned hot enough to melt metal like a red giant before, but also shot down to the size of Tommy’s palm, miniature and bright like a white dwarf. Purpled’s feral transformations always ended up creating more questions than answering before the nurses came in to collect him, so Tommy and Ranboo just tried their best to keep him comfortable and calm in the tentative days before and after each event.
In the otherwise eerie blackness of night, Purpled let out a songlike mrrp and turned around on his cot, the light around his body flashing like aurora borealis.
Ranboo pursed his lips and reached out to fan him off, cooling the light away from the edge of an explosion. “Just hold out a little longer.”
Purpled’s final feral state came at dawn the next day.
Tommy was wiping the sleep from his eyes when he saw it, the flickering flash and sway of the alien’s figure, sprawled out over his blankets and wheezing shallowly through his mouth like the air was too thick for him to breathe.
Ranboo was knocked out on the floor across the room, having paced himself awake into the early hours of the morning before an inevitable crash, and though Tommy was loath to wake him from the few willing hours of sleep he allowed himself each week, there was something seriously off about Purpled that needed to be addressed. It was unlike anything else they’d ever seen from the boy made from star stuff.
Tommy reached behind his head and gripped the corner of his pillow, hurling it across the room to land square on Ranboo’s drooling face. “Oi, Boob boy. Get up.”
Ranboo startled and smacked his lips, pulling himself upright while his head swayed and bobbed, still partially asleep despite the lucid movements of his body. “Hmm? Whazzit—?”
“Purpled’s in trouble,” Tommy interrupted, pointing to the glitching celestial figure on the cot beside him. “I think we should call a nurse.”
Ranboo’s eyes took a second to process the scene before him, but when they did, his face went white as a sheet. “Oh, that’s not good! Yeah, I’ll—I’ll go get the emergency radio.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when Purpled went still.
Tommy and Ranboo had only just woken up, the world was all too fresh and fumbling in their sleepy minds, so it almost felt like a flippant blink of an eye when they saw Purpled finally dim so quietly into that goodnight.
Tommy was no less than two paces away from Purpled’s cot when a formless melty pool of space dust smothered the last shapes he’d ever remember of Purpled’s face.
And then, like reliving an old memory, Tommy watched his brother die.
Purpled was nothing but ash.
The nurses came in and tried all sorts of tests, but nothing happened. They couldn’t even move him—or what remained of his body—to another room. His ash was not like Tommy’s. It was suspended in space like clouds of glitter, with brighter spots gathering in the center of it all like some sick parody of a heart, while the rest of him drifted around like smoke, completely unhindered by gravity.
In the confusion of it all, Ranboo managed to go feral and disappear long enough that nobody noticed until a good few hours had passed.
There were no goodbyes, no promises to return, just a horrified gasp and a nod—and then Ranboo was gone in a shower of violet smoke.
The doctors were calling it a security breach, lockdown protocols drenching the white campus in red alarm lights, reminding Anomalies to remain in their rooms until further instruction, there was a loose ender hybrid threatening the safety and integrity of their Facility.
Tommy didn’t care.
To be honest, he was still reeling over the fact that the Facility had lied to him about the outside world—which meant he didn’t have time to emotionally acknowledge their potential escape plan just yet, which meant he wasn’t anywhere close to processing Purpled’s abrupt and unceremonious death, which meant he truly couldn’t give less a fuck about security protocols.
Ranboo was nowhere, and Purpled was dead, and Tommy was entirely alone.
Loneliness was always infinitely worse than death, Tommy thought.
So why, then, was he born a stupid fucking phoenix who couldn’t take the kinder alternative no matter how much he prayed? Tommy couldn’t even be suicidal correctly—he was a fuck-up, a freak of nature, an Anomaly, and he was lonely, God damn it!
He was so alone!
Alarm bells wailed all around the Facility, and Tommy only curled around the nebulous space that used to be one of his best friends, and wept.
After a day or two, the alarm system shorted out its speakers.
The red lights still flashed erratic strobe patterns over Tommy’s room, but now he was surrounded only by silence.
He tried his best not to make any noise from then on.
There was something infinitely more lonely about hearing nothing but the mournful tune of his own cries.
Ranboo came back the day after the alarms broke.
In an overwhelming shower of violet sparks like the ones Ranboo toted around like Anomaly accessories, he appeared—along with a full task force of strangers.
Tommy couldn’t make out a single person wearing the black jumpsuit uniform of the Anomalies, nor a crisp lab coat of the doctors or the nurse’s white scrubs. Instead, an elixir of colour and unfamiliar fabrics assaulted his eyes, from the green of a billowing robe to the dandelion yellow of a knitted sweater. Even Ranboo was clad in unfamiliar outside garb—donning a neat suit and tie piece that complemented the offset shades of his hair and eyes.
“Tommy!” Ranboo gasped, staggering forward until he fell into Tommy’s wiry arms, outstretched from his place at Purpled’s cot.
The moment the two were reunited, Tommy’s eyes welled up again with tears. He’d thought he’d sobbed out everything his body had to give, now that the Facility had apparently been abandoned and he was no longer getting daily food or water, but apparently there were always more tears to be shed over long lost brothers.
Through blurred vision, Tommy watched a group of uniformed men swivel their attention towards him and Ranboo. One lifted his hand up to his earpiece, hidden beneath an elegant slope of rose-colored hair, and murmured something Tommy couldn’t quite catch. He was dressed in colours that Tommy only ever saw refracted in his own wings, sharp and piercing the dull monotony of the Facility he’d grown to call home.
“Hey mate,” another stranger said, stepping forward and offering a broad calloused hand in greeting. His hair was long and blonde, but not the kind of blonde that phoenixes had, and he had two jet black wings extending from his back that shimmered in all shades of violet and blue and celadon through Tommy’s vision. “My name is Phil, I’m with the SBI. We’re gonna bring you boys home, okay?”
Ranboo’s arms tightened around Tommy’s shoulders. “You can trust them,” he whispered in a breath like a ghost skimming over the shell of Tommy’s ear before pulling away.
Tommy nodded, and the agent—Phil—seemed to brighten at that, starting forward to help both boys to their feet, but Tommy held up a hand with a watery glare that stopped him in his tracks.
“I’m not leaving without my brother.”
Phil’s eyebrows shot up. He looked to Ranboo with a question in his gaze, then over his shoulder at the group of agents behind him. One stepped forward—the man with the obnoxious yellow sweater and mop of brown curls that looked soft and frizzy in the gentle breeze of movement disturbing the air around him.
“Do you mean…?” the agent pointed to the collection of stardust hovering static by Tommy’s arm over the cot, and his brown eyes hardened with something determined and strangely sad.
Tommy swallowed the lump that suffocated his throat. “Purpled. He’s an alien hybrid—celestial.”
At the utterance of his very first word, Tommy noticed the agent with the sweater swivel and tap the shoulder of another man behind him, who was facing away and scanning the plain room with fanged desperation marring his weary features. He was dressed in soothing white, with a strange golden pendant draped around his neck and partially covered by the draping fabric of his hood. His hair was a silvery blonde, paler than Purpled’s had been, but shimmering with the same extraterrestrial effervescence that Tommy only remembered seeing atop his own brother’s head.
When the sweater-clad agent jostled the one in white, his eyes landed on the three Anomalies—two shaped as human and one a star-dusted pile of ash, and his eyes flew wide open. His mouth tore out a horrified gasp, and he shoved Phil aside in his haste to reach the cot with enough speed to rival light itself.
“Purpled?!” he choked out, “Is that you? How long has it been since he turned nebula?”
“Nebula?” Tommy repeated dumbly.
At the same time, Ranboo reached out to curl his hand over the silver-haired agent’s outstretched arm and said, “It’s been about three days now, I think. I left just moments after it happened.”
The agent’s face went stony with anger.
It made Tommy want to shy away, but he persisted, seated firmly in solidarity beside the ashes of Purpled while the agent who claimed to know him reached out with tender, trembling hands, and began encircling the nebulous matter in a vivid prism of light.
Tommy had barely any time to ask just what he thought he was doing with Purpled’s ashes before the light faded away, and in its place appeared the curled-up form of… Purpled?
It was the dead boy’s body, no doubt about it—but he was different. Smaller, softer, and peaceful in sleep as he rested one rosy cheek against the agent’s chest.
Unbidden, a noise of wonder fluttered up from Tommy’s throat.
“That’s Punz,” Ranboo supplied quietly, pointing to the agent who was now collapsed on the smooth white floor beside the cot and cooing a dopey and sickeningly sweet smile down at Purpled’s young face as his eyes started to stir and flutter awake. “He’s Purpled’s older brother.”
As though on cue, Purpled at last regained a handle on his full consciousness, and when he noticed the face of the person cradling him, his mouth fell slack with shock.
“Hey, alien boy,” Punz teased softly.
Purpled didn’t respond right away. His mouth opened and closed a few times, gaping like a fish, until finally he scrunched up his eyes and jumped, springing from Punz’s arms and tackling him to the ground in a vicious embrace.
“Fuck you!” Purpled snarled, his voice muffled by Punz’s hoodie. “I fucking hate you, stupid brother! What the fuck took you so long, huh? Fuck you!”
Punz laughed and squeezed impossibly tighter, shielding his wetted eyes in Purpled’s ash-blonde hair. “Yeah, yeah… I missed you too—little shit.”
Tommy averted his gaze, suddenly shy, and Phil snickered good-naturedly at the awkward flush of his cheeks.
“Hybrids of their kind make eternal familial bonds with one another, since their matter can be recycled and reused to create new stars in the sky, along with old ones falling down and getting all mixed up with their current forms. If Purpled turned nebulous, it meant that his connection with space was getting too strained, and he started trying to rebuild his body from scratch,” Phil explained, squatting down so Tommy wouldn’t need to look up at him while they conversed. “That’s why he looks younger—his celestial matter was reverting back to that of a newborn star so it could stabilize itself with the restrictive elements around him rather than relying on the closeness of the sky he felt before he was kidnapped.”
“Oh,” Tommy murmured numbly. “I thought—I thought he’d died. Because of—you know… He sorta looked like…”
“Ash?” Phil filled in for him, a heartbreakingly empathetic expression crossing the wrinkle of his brow.
Tommy nodded.
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Phil mused, rising to dust himself off. “Unfortunately, phoenixes are the only hybrids in existence that turn to ash when they die, so I don’t know how adept I’d be at sympathizing with your situation.”
Tommy’s brows furrowed, his mouth pulling down into a perplexed frown. He’d never asked the agent to sympathize with him, why was he—?
“But I think I know someone who could.” Phil gave him a sly little smirk, turning over his shoulder to signal at the small group of agents loitering in their cell space, and Tommy twisted his puzzled gaze to Ranboo, who looked like he was trying very hard not to scream or burst into song or both.
A man pushed his way through the group, shoulders hunched and posture uneasy, with each step growing less confident and more unsure than the last. His face was shielded by a pearly white mask that caught every colour in the light almost reminiscent of Tommy’s wings. An emotion curdled in his stomach, telling him he should be feeling something in response to the man’s distant figure, but all Tommy felt was confused.
“He’s actually part of the main reason we were able to find you three so quickly—along with Ranboo and Punz’s help, of course,” Phil continued, though his words seemingly offered very little context. “Your missing person’s trail had long since gone cold—all the way until one night, two years ago, when we all witnessed him turn to ash, only to be replaced by the barest flicker of someone else—someone younger.”
Tommy tore his gaze away from the man to face Phil, then back again, over and over again until his vision started to blur.
The man had finally made his way through to the front of the crowd, and Tommy felt his heart plummet into his stomach at the sight of a single feather peeking out from behind his back. He followed its opalescent path up to the body of a wing, bright and oozing all the colours of the phoenix rainbow, the ozone of magic thickening the air despite the main body of his wings being tucked tight behind his back.
“I don’t know if you know this, but phoenixes are extremely Flock-focused hybrids. They’re never meant to die apart from one another—and if they do, their biology finds ways to bring them together regardless. When phoenixes of a feather find themselves dying somewhere far away, their closest kin will also die along with them. Then, their ashes will be swapped, and they’ll be reborn in the place where their Flock first found danger so they can help rescue them.”
The mask fell to the floor beside the man as he closed the final few paces’ distance between them, and Tommy finally got a full, unfiltered view of his face.
It was then that he realized he already knew who it belonged to.
“So, imagine our surprise when the only phoenix on our team drops dead one evening out of nowhere, replaced by his long lost little brother for only a fraction of a second, before disappearing again!” Phil’s voice fell hushed despite the quivering anxiety in his tone, and he clasped a hand over both phoenix’s shoulders, squeezing tight before letting go. “It happened a number of times after that, enough that we were able to deduce that wherever you were, the people who captured you had no problems killing as many phoenixes as they needed in order to keep you trapped. We gathered intel as best we could, since around that same time Punz came forward with a report of a stolen little brother, and our investigation was in full swing by the time Tubbo revealed Ranboo to us. It was the final push we needed to finalize our attack.”
Tommy wasn’t even listening anymore.
He was too focused on the warm planes of his forgotten Flock’s face.
Suntanned skin, dotted with freckles and a dimple on one side, sharp green eyes the colour of dandelion stems and swirling shades of gold and powder blue that only Tommy’s phoenix vision could see, with rich blonde hair that shone like buttery soft gold atop his head, and a shy, crooked smile smoothed over wide rows of exuberant teeth that loved to flash in the light when he laughed.
And, of course, the wings.
Phoenix wings, bold and bright and outstretched like banners of pride, dripping in colour and a strong softness that carried him leagues higher than any other avian on the playground, he was the fastest and most agile hybrid who ever lived—Tommy’s brother, the phoenix.
Tommy’s Flock, the face he cried out for each night without ever understanding why, the presence he yearned after in every death that ripped it away from him.
“Dream,” he breathed.
Dream’s tentative smile broke out into a broad grin. His eyes flooded with tears. “Tommy!” he warbled back, and a flurry of feathers and colour later, they were thrown into each other’s arms.
Tommy clung to Dream’s shoulders with all the strength in his frail and starving arms, tucking his jagged and neglected wings tight around their frames while Dream reciprocated, massive pillows of multicoloured snow shielding Tommy from the whole wide world and anything within it that would dare threaten to harm him.
“I missed you,” Tommy managed through shuddery sobbing gasps. “I was so lonely—I didn’t even understand why.”
Dream’s arms tightened around his middle, fingers grasping the scratchy cotton of his jumper and not letting go. “Me too—so much, Tommy. You have no idea how much I— fuck—!” He cut himself off with a wheeze, shoulders trembling beneath Tommy’s lanky embrace.
At the edge of the cell, Tubbo and Ranboo stood and watched the reunion unfold, both pretending they didn’t notice the other’s quiet tears.
“Good work today, Agent Tubbo,” said Ranboo, nudging his best friend’s shoulder with his elbow.
Tubbo giggled. “Same to you, Special Agent Beloved.”
Ranboo rolled his eyes at the nickname but didn’t protest, instead content to soak in the happiness pouring out in a room that was once filled with so much fear and chill.
He hoped that they would never have to associate the Facility’s stark shade of porcelain with loneliness ever again.