Work Text:
Your name is Wilbur. You’re an actor, and the world is a stage.
You play your role, and everyone else plays their own. And as the stages change, and the characters exit stage left or enter stage right, it all comes so naturally to you to do the same. Your movements are fluid and practiced, your costumes are perfectly tailored, and each role you craft for yourself is the perfect compliment to the story you see before you. You are who you want to be, and you write yourself as such.
You put on your uniform, polished and patriotic. You're a revolutionary, you're a leader. You craft yourself a home worth fighting for, worth calling yours. You make it a worthy reward for your victory. You’re a hero, with villains to fight. Tyrants to put in their place. Your pen flows like your tongue, crafting grand tales of victory in the songs you spin. You’re the hero who defeated the villain. You move to claim your prize, the one you built so perfectly, just like how the stories always end. And to your horror, your storybook ending burns, its ashes staining your earth.
When your uniform no longer commands respect, you discard it. Shed it like a skin. It serves no use, having failed you so profoundly. But you persist. You are who you say you are, and you are not a failure. You did, however, make a mistake. You are not the hero, you realize. You’re the villain. Because villains lose.
You let your plain coat empty of anything patriotic weigh heavy on your shoulders, and you let your brown hair stay unclothed, so everyone can watch it grow more unkempt by the day. Your tongue still silver, even if unpolished, never stops its stories. You reek of cigarettes and gunpowder, the smell making your friends flinch when you draw near. You take pride in your descent as you grow darker, your shadow growing, looming like a hurricane. You let the story swallow you whole, as penance for being so wrong about who you were meant to be. (And for the moments when you’re alone with your pen and paper, you take care to keep your hand steady and your own story straight. Your father asks about you, and like a good son, you tell him what he deserves to hear. Until the leading role demands too much of you.)
Your ending is simple, storybook. You set the trap you fall into, and you fall in it, as you were always meant to. And you burn like your fantasies, bright and loud and poetic. Your death is poetic. It was the only thing you could make poetic.
You died wearing the mask you made, and so, you were buried in it. Concrete greets you like a blackout when you wake up. It’s a train platform, as uniform as it is unchanging. There are no trains. No distant sounds of chugging or flashing red lights down the dimly lit tunnels. The walls don’t crumble when you pound against them for hours. Days. Months. Years. No one calls when you yell. No one saves you. And no one saving you turns into wondering why they won’t save you. Why they didn’t want to save you.
It’s poetic, you think. How very poetic that your life goes on forever in a place you can’t change, when your whole life was spent flipping on a dime to whatever you needed to be to get what you wanted. To be what people saw in you. What the story prompted you to become.
There are words on your tongue that leave a bitter taste in your mouth, ones you’ve always suspected but never felt brave enough to say. The stagnant air of your personal hell lets them fester, weaving through you like a blunt sewing needle to seal your cracking seams. How pathetic. How pathetic of you to act for an audience who all fucking hate you. How fucking pathetic of you to put on a show for anyone but yourself. How miserably, fucking pathetic must you have been all these years to stitch a costume by hand for every role you wrote yourself, and to have none of it matter in the end.
And it’s here, when you’re receiving your poetic justice, where you finally start to see how wrong you were for trying. All your life, every miserable second of it, meant nothing if someone other than you couldn’t appreciate it. No costume or act could ever measure up to what they’d want, so why did you even try? You did all you could to be what they needed, what the story demanded of you. And when the story demanded you suffer, you suffered, because that’s what you were supposed to do. And you suffered, and you suffered, and you made everyone else suffer, because you were suffering. And because your suffering wasn’t good enough, wasn’t quiet enough, wasn’t kind enough, it did not matter. Your suffering was cruel, and so, it would be forever. This was the rule you were not privy to, and everyone but you seemed to agree. You suffered for the story, and you’ve nothing to show for it but a purgatory of perpetual monotony. Pathetic.
And it’s these thoughts that haunt you when you look at him. This thing that wears your face. He's soft and kind and sweet. He's weak and open and wears his heart on his sleeve so much it should have been bleeding through his skin. And they love him! They love him like they never loved you. And it stings, at first. It digs into you like a disease, poking through your skin like hives. But like most things, it soon becomes clear. It all makes sense, as it should. Because everything happens for a reason, because the story keeps going, even if you aren’t there to write it. And stories make sense, they always do.
He’s another man, you think. Another me. A different me. This thing they love, it isn’t me. They love something easy. They love something they can fix. They love something that doesn’t exist. He has my face, and he speaks in my voice, but he isn't me. He is wanted, I am not. He is loved, I am not. He is who they want, and I am not. I am who I say I am, you remind yourself. And you are not loved. It's a mantra branded into your throat by endless unanswered pleas for help. A lesson taught through scars on your fingertips after your nails went blunt from scratching at the walls.
You are who you say you are. So when your hero saves you, the thing you shove deep, deep down isn’t you. You did not bring him with you. You don’t hear his voice in the rare moments when you speak your truth. You don’t feel his corpse decomposing inside you, like you’re nothing but a wooden coffin destined to join him. You're not that. You aren't. You are who you say you are.
And you're the worst. You're the worst fucking thing to ever happen to this goddamn server. To everyone's fucking life. Because you're you, you're the you that you say you are, and everyone else says you are, too. Because you wrote yourself the ending you deserved, and it deserved to be seen by everyone. And now that it's no longer an ending, you can only be who you always were.
You wear your coat that still reeks of cigarettes and gunpowder, and you fluff your hair out with your fingers to show off the streak. You let your father pity you. You call your old friend a brother, and you treat him like one. You tell your new friend you’re thankful for his kindness. And then he shows up, that miserable little good for nothing duck that makes you want to live. And you live, oh you live. You live to make him see you. You live to make him spit your name out like it’s dirt. You live to make him want to punch you hard enough you bleed. You live to make him dread the inevitable truth that you're more than he could ever hope to be. You live to make him hate you. Because why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t anyone?
Your name is Wilbur. And you hate him so, so much.