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“Wilbur,” he calls out with the barest hint of reluctance in his voice. “Is this...normal?”
Wilbur blinks out of spectator mode to see his brother, his Tommy, peering at him with those precious doe eyes, the ones he had chosen for him. He allows a friendly grin to envelop his face, completely unshaken at the sight of his still-injured brother who barely reaches out more than a head and arm of movement before collapsing against the bed he lays on, lethargy coursing through his body.
“What do you mean, normal?”
He only spares half a consciousness for Tommy, allowing the other half to re-enter the mental spectation, images flitting through one eye at speeds that one not used to it would never be able to comprehend. Tommy notices instantly, his eyes drawn to the new vacancy of Wilbur’s face as he gives away his concentration. He doesn’t mention it.
“I’ve seen what you do. What you allow. Some of it— it’s cruel.” Tommy hesitates at the last word, dragging out the vowels in a tone that betrays both confusion and stress. So the bird’s finally noticed its cage, has it?
Sparing a second to thought, Wilbur cocks his head pleasantly, grin ever present as he moves toward the bed and curls his voice with a sweet lilt, an indulgent lilt. He ignores the dried blood burned with age against the hardwood planks and easily steps over the newer splattering, careful to avoid dirtying his freshly cleaned shoes. Each step clacks against the floorboards, announcing his presence until he reaches his Tommy. “Is this about Ranboo?” His lips bitter with the name and it’s all he can do to prevent himself from spitting it out. Control. He’s in control. “Dove, you don’t need to worry about him. He’s gone now.” Tommy’s face twists. “What now? What’s bothering you?”
“But I saw what happened to Ranboo—that was unfair, Wilbur. I—”
“Tommy, Sweetheart, you know the rules. If he dies, he’s gone. It’s not like he died permanently, he’s only banned from the server for a couple months. Even I can’t control that, it’s part of the rules.” Wilbur doesn’t mention that the Enderian is blacklisted from the server. Permanently. Tommy doesn’t need to know that.
Centum Histriones is their home; it’s a place of violence, yes—a place of vengeance, even—but it’s their home. Wilbur would go so far to say it’s his paradise. A land just for himself, owned and governed by him personally. The place he had met Tommy, and the place he had killed him.
He has to admit, part of his fondness for the kid comes from his willingness to die. Tommy is a puppet fully aware of his strings, but he doesn’t care because Wilbur is the one who owns them, dragging him to his will with no resistance. Wilbur is the only god of this land and his word is law. For all intents and purposes, his Tommy simply kept coming back to the Games, each time more and more distressed than the last until he’d begged Wilbur to remove the temporary server bans from himself, barely able to survive in the months he’d had to fend for himself on other servers. Apparently 2b2t isn’t as nice a place as it sounds to Wilbur.
While the rules are unalterable during a Game, even by Wilbur himself, outside of the Games are carte blanche; he’d agreed to the whitelist him under the condition that Tommy would be his and his alone.
Tommy had accepted.
Every single time that he’d died, he always came back. What a loyal brother Wilbur has.
With a small sound of acceptance, the tangle of limbs beside him leans into his body heat, patiently waiting for Wilbur to relinquish his fingers and card them through hair—good, his Dove had obeyed him and kept the locks neat and unknotted. Wilbur runs his hand through Tommy’s hair, laughing as the kid blisses out across his side before pulling his focus back to the Game. He mentally projects his voice over the land, praising and scornful, proud and accusational of of those who have lived, those who have let others live, and those who have not yet died.
It is a pleasurable thing, being able to end a life with the blink of an eye. He breathes and five drop dead in an instant. They had believed themselves hidden, a resistance that could defy him in secret as they collected a swarm of other players in their own self-built haven. Wilbur holds himself from resetting the surrounding builds of this pathetic resistance there and then, from completely obliterating them like he does every Game, deleting code and melding a new world entirely from his own imagination. Instead, he lets their corpses sink into the ground, crumpled and sickeningly still where the players themselves have already been returned to the Hub, leaving behind their server-built bodies. There is no doubt in his mind that some may return in the months ahead; he looks forward to it.
But for now, Wilbur needs to prove a point, and it is a point he will prove with ease.
He takes one last moment to drag his finger through the ends of Tommy’s hair, whispering sweet nothings into his brother’s ear. His Tommy has done so well today. Suffering at the end of a knout had to have been very hard on his little Dove. Wilbur had watched it in glee. He’s long since given him a potion of regeneration, an enhanced one—personally made of course, he’s not cruel. There’s only a little bit of weakness slipped in too. Tommy is more fun when he can barely move.
“Sweetheart, I’ve got to go for a bit. I trust you’ll stay right there, won’t you?”
He doesn’t wait for a response as he blips away from the cabin he stole from some poor soul that didn’t survive to return. Their loss, he thinks, as the cabin has stood for the majority of the month this Game has lasted through. It was definitely the right decision to experiment with hooked weapons; the absolute carnage it’s spread is exhilarating.
“Greetings, denizens of Centum. I, your gracious ruler, have something to show you.” Wilbur’s voice spreads wide across the land to every space except the cabin. “Are there any questions or protests?” He breathes in the utter silence that follows. Wonderful.
The fifteen or so remaining players are teleported by a sharp command to the place where he now stands. It’s a decent number, not quite low enough for his liking but a significant drop from the hundred that he had begun with. The widespread murder always does slow down during the last couple days of the month. A shame, really.
His dear players hurry their eyes around the room before they all, one by one, reach the corpses lining the floor. Wilbur forces them watch as he summons a flame that spreads across the diesel he’s been waiting for at least a year to use. The fire licks at the bodies, tearing at skin and peeling it away as the bodies decompose in a mess of bone, ash, and oozing body fat that only serve to brighten the flames. It would have been better if they were alive, Wilbur supposes; he would have been gifted with their screams until their nerves had been severed and they could no longer feel the pain. He’ll have to try that another time. Instead, he settles for the guttural chokes of the players around him who do not care for the bodies shrinking under the heat but for their own lives. Well then, if they don’t care enough for the show he’s put on, they can perform their own.
“Mark my words, this is what happens to traitors.” Wilbur transfers a set of netherite armour to each of their inventories wordlessly; if they don’t notice it, that’s their own fault. “Now fight.”
They quickly devolve into a bloodbath and he enjoys every second of it.
Not one player is left alive—the way he likes his Games. Less people to reward. It’s yet again another successful fulfilment of his favourite rule. The final death of a Game must be brought by a player. He already has plans swarming inside his head for the next Game; maybe hypothermia would be fun.
Switching off the stream of Game information, Wilbur returns to Tommy. The boy lies asleep underneath the cover which barely hangs off his frame, a victim of his restless tossing and turning. Gentle hands tug the sheet into covering his whole body, careless of the blood that smears against the clean white.
When one of his admins teleport just outside the cabin, he feels it. Taking one last look at his Tommy, he forces his direction out of the temporary house to meet the stern gaze of his longest-standing and most dependable admin, JoshA20.
Josh waits for permission to speak, a habit that was easy to train into him, something that had endeared him to Wilbur from the very beginning. Wilbur waves his hand freely. With that, Josh reports the details of the Challenge and outlines the Game that’d played out for the past month. The admin is quickly dismissed once his report is complete, Wilbur tiring of the useless details with the Game already over. Tomorrow will be the time for designing a new Game, and overmorrow will be the start of the next.
His night is spent in reading, head pressed against the bed frame as his Dove sleeps, guarding over Tommy even though the only other beings roaming the server are his admins, and the only person of them who would dare to hurt Tommy is himself.
By the next day, his Dove is healed and as rambunctious as ever, throwing out ideas for a landscape with Wilbur following at his heel as the boy runs around the area and then flies once he’d tired himself out and Wilbur took pity on him. All that’s left is to determine the Challenge. As always, Wilbur hands the decision over to Tommy; as always, Tommy refuses him an answer. Alas, time moves on, like usual.
“So, Tommy. How do you like this one?”
“No more than the rest of them,” his Dove replies more scathingly than he’d meant it. Wilbur’s latest Challenge idea is one of TNT, arrows, and fireworks—a tasteful combination, if he does say so himself. The fireworks are the most dangerous aspect, indivertible once set on a path, while the TNT can be launched away with the true aim of an arrow (or launched towards another player, if used correctly).
Once the Game has been properly set up—weapons allocated and instructions given—Wilbur announces the beginning of the seventy-seventh Game. The grace period is boring, if anything. They have two hours before either Wilbur or the other admins are allowed to interfere, as per the rules, and PVP is only enabled at the start of the third day. It’s a slow set-up but one very necessary for bases to be built and bastions of defence created so that the players have any chance of survival.
He spends the majority of this time half paying attention to the Game, running a mental commentary to the opening sequence, and half preparing Tommy.
The best part of each Game, of course, is sending his Sweetheart into the mix. Wilbur doesn’t know how the Games were of any interest to himself before, when the server was new and preparations were young and undeveloped. Before, he’d be the one to commentate—the sole producer of each Game where he’d played master and judge, bystander to the Games as he leisurely floated around the areas and commented on the conflicts and rare peace (ruining the truces whenever they were found). Now, however, someone else is in charge of that, someone he doesn’t know and cares not to know. His live audience—the Games being broadcasted across other servers like some sort of twisted entertainment—are nevertheless immersed in his creations and he has more freedom in them.
Soon comes the time to release his Dove into the pack of snarling wolves that have been hardened and desensitised over the last week or so. Every single time it’s a delight to see how he reacts, how he fights, and how he loses. There are few who aren’t bitter towards Tommy, the teenager claimed by the infamous Wilbur Soot, owner of Centum Histriones. He never seems to fight the nice ones. Or at least, never used to.
The last few Games have been...tricky, to say the least. His Tommy found what he had deemed ‘friends’, including that Ranboo player who Wilbur ordered dead; luckily, this game is not to be another such repeat.
Wilbur teleports his Dove into a quiet area, somewhere he at least has a running chance in, nestled amongst a thick layer of trees. He doesn’t disappoint, however, choosing to leave the safety of the trees in favour of open land. Something more dangerous, something more risky. Wilbur gives him a set of iron armour for that.
His Tommy never fails to surprise him, especially when he strikes down his first kill of the Game in cold blood. And then a second. And then a third. His brother is adept with a bow and even craftier with his TNT, aiming for bases and sharpshooting to quickly eliminate opposition, provoked or not. Wilbur is even more impressed when he offers no mercy to one of those peaceful players, the kind that he can’t stand with their goodwill propaganda and their refusal to fight. Prime, he’s glad he’d killed off Ranboo; it would be terrible for his Tommy to have been corrupted like that. A firework to the head finishes her off.
Except, something changes as Tommy progresses through the month, staking it out in the woods at night and killing through the day, resorting to raw meat when a fire is too much of a risk and no admin bestows upon him cooked food. Wilbur doesn’t quite know what changed, but he doesn’t care to know so long as his Sweetheart continues fighting. He ignores when his Dove stops to lick his wounds, allowing himself a day to recover energy before carving a path through the server’s boundaries again, sometimes guided by Wilbur himself towards the next player.
Wilbur has always called Tommy his secret weapon; he’s never been let down. By the third week, his Tommy slows down, which is usual, of course, and Wilbur thinks nothing of it.
That is, until Tommy lets a player live.
The live audience gets pure entertainment; Wilbur takes his time punishing his Dove. He pulls him underground to caves of spawners, surrounded where he fights not players but vicious spiders, protective of their territory and unstoppable between the spawners, buried in webs that Tommy hasn’t the time to cut, and the dead being replaced as fast as he can kill them with naught but the wooden sword of mending Wilbur half-heartedly throws into his inventory. Tommy is saved by half a heart each time, but it’s not out of pity, only to allow him to heal again before being hurled into the next threat.
Once he deems his Dove appropriately disciplined, Wilbur teleports him back to the surface where he can continue to compete amongst the last remaining players. Wilbur hopes that his brother will die again. It would be deserved for defying his puppeteer.
But Tommy holds his ground once he has adjusted to being on the surface once again, directly placed in open land far from any water source. He doesn’t move, no matter how much Wilbur shouts at him, no matter the threats he spits, and no matter how many mobs Wilbur spawns as a warning.
“You hurt me, and I still trusted you.”
Tommy’s words are something contemplative, and something torn. Then, they are not.
He’s on five hearts, Wilbur knows that from the player data he had tapped into and pinned days ago. When his brother summons the fireworks he had in his inventory, Wilbur is glad. He’s finally learnt his lesson and he’ll ruthlessly hunt the other players because Wilbur wants it.
Tommy aims a firework at the ground beneath him. “I’ve learnt my lesson, Wil. And I don’t think I’m coming back.”
He lights the firework, and there is nothing Wilbur can do because he’s bound to the rules of the server. Once a weapon is swung or activated, it cannot be removed or taken—a sort of Chekhov’s gun.
Wilbur screeches for his admins, for Josh, for anyone nearby to fucking do something.
His brother erupts in reds, oranges, and blues.
The firework strikes the ground and rebounds with the force, claiming Tommy’s remaining hearts in one fell swoop. It takes all of Wilbur’s self-restraint not to leave the server right there and then, to stalk through server after server in the Hypixel Hub where he knows Tommy has set his spawn while Centum is set to hardcore. He cannot leave, however, as the final rule of the Games is that the host, Wilbur Soot, is bound to the server so long as a Game is active.