Chapter Text
There are flowers blooming in his lungs.
They are beautiful.
They will kill him soon.
It’s not hard to know who put them there.
But this is not where our story begins.
It begins with a golden-haired boy laying on cold concrete, surrounded by those he loves.
They are laughing.
His mother is dancing and living and perfect and she loves him back with every ounce of her soul.
His father’s eyes are twinkling with something between fondness and exasperation; he is unused to the gentleness that accompanies domesticity, but he will try to lay down his bloody sword of vengeance for the son he has been given.
Wilbur, his brother, his first love, calls him sunshine. If Tommy is the sun, then Wilbur is the rain; painting rainbows with his artful words and building Tommy up into something divine, worthy of worship and praise.
Techno, his other brother, his idol, chuffs. It is a short and happy sound. Tommy mimics it with his frail human vocal cords. It comes out mangled but Techno smiles encouragingly and he feels as though he’s the smartest kid in the world.
Tubbo, his honorary brother, his first friend, is laying next to him, a flower threaded in his hair. He’s clutching at his sides and giggling like Tommy’s just told the funniest joke in the world. (He has.)
There is a strange satisfaction in the brevity of it.
This is not a moment that will last forever. But as Tommy lays there, framed in golden hues with his spirit aflame, he dares to believe that it might.
--
This is where our story starts to rot.
His mother’s death crept up on them like a fox in the chicken pen. It struck with sudden delight and left each stranded by grief.
Tommy plants a rosemary bush in his mother’s garden and brushes off the way that his father no longer looks him in the eyes.
His father’s dismissal is easier to see coming, like a tapestry each day is one stitch closer to damnation. So yes, Theseus sees it coming but Tommy lets himself be deceived by the occasional kind words, muttered as an afterthought.
In the end, both Theseus and Tommy are the one to place a budding columbine next to the rosemary bush. They both ignore the prickling in their lungs.
Wilbur is… complicated. He switches from scathing insults to baseless flattery as if he is simply observing a change in the weather; his violent moods are not dissimilar in their nature. It is perhaps inevitable then that Tommy would fall foe to one of them, that he would wind up as collateral in Wilbur’s tempest.
He leaves fennel on Wilbur’s dresser as a peace offering; they are wilted by the next day. Tommy, too, is feeling fainter but he pulls on a brave face and continues his duties as prince.
If Wilbur is the swirling sky then Techno is the immovable earth; his face still carved in the same stern way it had been since the News had first arrived. As Wilbur became less stable, Tommy had turned to Techno for comfort in his rough, soothing voice and steady arms.
So when the door became locked at night and his requests to spar were continuously ignored, Tommy simply pressed pansies into Techno’s greek mythology books and left it at that. (If the pages were a little spattered with blood too, well, it’s not like they’re on speaking terms .)
Tommy has resigned himself to his fate by this point. Unable to look away, he watches as Tubbo befriends a visitor to the castle, some foreign diplomats’ son called Ranboob — a stupid name for a stupid person, he thinks. He watches as Tubbo stops replying to his letters and starts to spend his time making plans for the future with someone else, someone who isn’t him.
The next day he coughs up a rue flower; it tastes bitter on his tongue.
--
This is where our story unravels.
He’s in his mother’s garden when it happens, busy tending to the rosemary bush and it’s new accompaniments. Ranboo stumbles in, alone, and has the nerve to ask who the garden belongs too.
‘You shouldn’t be here!’ he goes to shout, but finds instead that it comes out as a choked, ‘Why do they love you ?’
It’s hard to hate someone when they hold back your hair as you vomit flowers.
It’s even harder to hate someone who cares enough about you to lie and say you’ll be okay .
--
This is where our story reveals itself.
They are in the royal court.
Wilbur is mocking him, Techno is watching, and Phil is pretending none of them are even there. Tubbo and Ranboo are off playing house somewhere in the town.
“Tut tut, Tommy, skipping your duties again? You must be losing your grip!”
—Anger boils in his stomach but he swallows down his retort and resolutely ignores Wilbur. Just one more hour and he can escape this hellish torture—
‘Mum would be so disappointed.’
Something snaps.
Tommy screams ‘I hate you’ in one breath and chokes up fennel in the next.