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When Wilbur was revived, it was loud and messy and terrifying.
When Tommy was revived, it was quiet, it was in the dark. It was days before anyone noticed, weeks even—and, really, with all the memorials that were never taken down and with the way people seem to look right through him now, he thinks, sometimes, that he might still be dead.
He’s not sure how much he minds being dead or a ghost or whatever he is these days. It’s quiet, most days. Peaceful.
Until this bastard fuck shows up anyway.
It begins with an overgrown vegetable garden and Tommy’s hands in the dirt, tending to a patch of carrots battling bravely against the weeds. The morning is a cool one and it finds Tommy on his knees in an oversized cardigan that would’ve once matched his eyes. There are birds singing and not much else in the way of noise.
Wilbur is a surprise. He’s loud and reckless, limbs flailing out like he’s forgotten how to work them. Unlike the rest of the server, Wilbur sees Tommy. He makes this obvious when he saunters over, almost carelessly throwing himself down into the grass at Tommy’s back.
“What are you doing?” Tommy asks. His voice is quiet, quieter than it used to be, and he hardly turns around, but Wilbur still hears him.
“Guarding you, obviously.”
Tommy snorts. “Why the fuck would you do that?”
“Because,” Wilbur says, “you keep looking over your shoulder like something’s out to get you. It’s enough to make me paranoid.”
It’s a joke. He’s joking. That’s new and familiar and strange. “You’re an ass,” Tommy says. “And you’re not funny.”
“You used to think I was,” Wilbur counters, like Tommy’s opinion is plenty enough to prove it.
He risks a glance over his shoulder and holds Wilbur’s calculating gaze for a moment. “I used to think a lot of things,” he dismisses. “Are you staying for lunch?”
Wilbur raises an eyebrow at him, casting a judgemental glance over Tommy’s bony form, poorly hidden under the shoddily knit cardigan hanging off his shoulders. “You eat lunch?” he asks, dripping with skepticism, and Tommy glares.
“I do if there are guests,” he answers. “It’s not polite to die with people watching.”
Wilbur laughs, surprised and delighted, like he does when Tommy says something wholly unexpected. He likes to be surprised, to be taken off guard, especially by Tommy. “There you are,” he says. “I was starting to worry you’d gotten dull.”
Dull, he says, like it’s a crime, like it’s a tragedy, like it’s almost unimaginable that it could ever be a label attached to Tommy.
He stays for lunch, and for dinner. When Tommy asks, he says it must be habit, making sure that Tommy’s eating. Something left over from a long time gone now.
Tommy thinks he understands the sentiment pretty well as he shifts seamlessly to make space for Wilbur in his cramped-but-he’s-calling-it-cozy home. Both of them are almost too tall, both of them are more elbows than anything else, but they still fit somehow, like lost pieces of a puzzle or two shards of broken glass, trying, always trying, to find their way back to being whole.
Wilbur leaves after dark and Tommy can’t sleep wondering if he made it home, wondering where he calls home now if it’s no longer at Tommy’s side.
He rises with the sun, and walks outside to find Wilbur sitting on his wall, waiting for him as the birds start to sing.
The first time they touch it’s an accidental brush of hands while Tommy teaches Wilbur how to best tend to the potatoes—something he learned by Technoblade’s side in the depths of the ravine—and Tommy flinches back like he was burned. Wilbur apologizes and carefully avoids contact for the rest of the day, and Tommy is grateful, he is, but-
But Tommy also can’t stop thinking about it. His mind is caught in a sadistic loop, replaying the moment again and again, the barely there warmth of skin against his hand before he’s broken it, jerking away.
He remembers being hugged before he became a ghost. He remembers- he thinks he can remember the warmth, the safety of being held in someone’s arms.
Tommy thinks of starving, thinks of exile and the way Dream could bend him, could break him with a single touch, brief as they always were. He thinks of hunger so painful he could only think of food with a stomach that churned with nausea at the thought of eating.
He doesn’t sleep that night, but then he rarely does these days anyway.
It’s a torrential downpour of unorganized, unrefined words that comes from a clear sky and hours of comfortable quiet. Tommy is not prepared for it, caught in a flood without high ground in sight, but the flood comes anyway, so he treads water and hopes that he doesn’t drown.
“You keep trying to pretend that Ghostbur, the person you were during the Revolution—that they’re different people, but they aren’t, are they? You act like you’ve gone through some monumental change, but you haven’t. You haven’t changed at all, and neither have I. I-”
He plants carrots instead of potatoes to try and hide from an unmarked grave his weary body was never buried in, but there are still potatoes in his garden and there is still a grave and still a body. Tommy does not like to think of the past, but he can’t move on from it either. He is not a ghost, but he is and he is a shadow as well. There are carrots where there didn’t used to be, but some things never seem to change. Potatoes, for one. Wilbur, for another. Tommy, himself, for a third.
“I don’t think we’re capable of it,” he says. “That’s our problem.”
Wilbur’s quiet for a moment, watching the side of Tommy’s face—he can feel the slight weight of it. “Where does that leave us then?”
Tommy shrugs. “I don’t know. Together.”
“Why do you still care about me?” Wilbur asks one day, apropos of absolutely fucking nothing.
Tommy, though—he takes it in stride as he always does. “Because,” he says plainly, like he’s discussing the weather, “I’m not sure I really know how to do anything else. It’s familiar, easy.”
Wilbur nods, taking his moment to digest the words, like he needs to take each one and break it down, like anything Tommy says is worth that effort. “Is that why you still pray?” he asks next and Tommy laughs, almost startled by the question—if anything about Wilbur could startle him anymore.
“Yeah,” he says, “I guess so. It’s like. It’s something to hold on to, something to believe in. The praying—and you too, I guess. There’s just- you can’t mess up faith, you know? So, yeah, I pray and I take care of you, like religion.”
There’s another stretch of silence, longer this time, until, finally, Tommy assumes Wilbur got the answer he wanted and the conversation is closed. He’s moved on from the carrots to the beets to the potatoes by the time Wilbur speaks again.
“So why do you knit?”
Tommy shoots him a bemused look. “What do you mean?”
“If you do these other things because they’re easy, why do you knit?” Wilbur clarifies, clarifying practically nothing at all. Tommy still answers, though, because that’s what he does.
“Knitting is easy,” he says. Then, “And it’s a good way to keep my hands busy.”
Wilbur tilts his head slightly, and shakes it. “It can’t be that easy,” he argues, “because you suck at it.”
Laughter bursts out of his chest, much louder this time, and Wilbur looks proud, if a little confused at what caused it. “Wow, thanks,” Tommy says, shaking his head at him. “Prime, I do not suck at knitting. It’s not something you can be bad at, Wil.”
Wilbur’s expression looks like a staunch disagreement which sets Tommy off laughing again. “You can, I think. Or else your sweater wouldn’t look like it’s ready to come unraveled at the slightest tug.”
“Alright, so I’m not very skilled at knitting yet—you can thank my hands for that, always shaking like they do—but I still made something, didn’t I?”
“Hardly,” Wilbur says, but it’s light, mostly teasing.
Tommy whacks his shoulder in retaliation. “I did, actually, and that’s all it is. You can’t be bad at making things as long as you’re making them.”
“Technoblade would say it’s not a very useful thing to be making.”
“Fuck Technoblade,” Tommy replies, grinning at Wilbur’s obvious amusement. “It’s warm, innit? Besides,” he says, glancing around his garden before settling his gaze back on Wilbur, “after everything, I think I deserve to make soft things that won’t hurt my hands when I hold them.”
Days later, Wilbur asks in a quiet voice, “Do I hurt your hands?”
And Tommy tells him the truth.
“Are you okay?” Tubbo asks, meeting Tommy’s washed out eyes head on, fearless and stubborn like he always has been.
“No,” Tommy answers. And then, “What do you mean?”
Tubbo’s gaze flicks over Tommy’s shoulder to land on the house behind them, Tommy’s house and, now, Wilbur’s too. “He’s been staying here.”
Ah, Tommy thinks. That makes sense then. “Where else was he gonna go?”
“I don’t know,” Tubbo snaps, sarcasm like venom. “Maybe with Phil and not the kid he fucked up?”
“Not a kid,” Tommy protests tiredly, and Tubbo scoffs.
“We were all kids, Tommy. We still are.”
Tubbo’s mistake is that he believes Tommy is still the kind of creature which flinches from pain. He understands the concern, understands why Tubbo glares and asks lowly voiced questions, prodding and prying at Tommy’s ribs until they are pulled open.
“I think he was a kid too,” Tommy says eventually, days later, and Tubbo frowns, but doesn’t argue. Even months later, they’re still cleaning those old war wounds. The blood stays fresh and Tommy thinks the sutures pull every time they try to breathe.
Michael plays in the garden, chasing ladybirds through rows of carrots planted in tidy order. Ranboo’s memory is a fragile thing still, but it holds better these days, better than Tommy’s at least, and he’s quiet, which makes him easy to exist around. Tommy is a startled cat of a thing, but he tries. Tubbo doesn’t understand the silence, but Ranboo’s known more of him after exile than before. Michael pounces and snorts happily, drawing soft encouragement from Ranboo. Tommy thinks of his childhood, and finds a similar warmth, but the details of it are faded and distant today. Sometimes he wonders if those scenes are only stories he mixed up for memories, but he tries not to think too much these days.
When Wilbur comes around that afternoon, smelling of nothing familiar, Ranboo doesn’t glare like Tubbo does. He doesn’t watch with sharp eyes as Michael brings his treasures to show Wilbur. Tommy asked him once, why, and he remembers the exact sound of it when Ranboo answered, “He seems to be trying. I know that he did things, hurt people, but I’ve only ever seen him try.”
Watching Wilbur gently accept Michael’s gift (a leaf he must have liked the color of), Tommy thinks that Ranboo had it right. All Wilbur’s ever done is try.
There are days when he doesn’t get out of bed. There are days when someone has to gently coax him down from a ledge. He wishes for wings and spends too much time thinking about falling. Tubbo takes all the sharp things out of his house one afternoon. Ranboo raises his voice for the first time that Tommy’s ever heard when Sam tries to come by another day. Wilbur lingers like a shadow on the worst days, tending the garden when Tommy is washed out and painted in greyscale. He forgets who dragged Technoblade down the Prime Path in the end, if it was Wilbur’s smug smile or Ranboo’s subtly pleased expression accompanying the guarded steel of Techno’s. He sits with them in the garden and looks like he has a million things to ask, but doesn’t speak.
He doesn’t apologize, but Tommy doesn’t ask him to. Tommy doesn’t ask him to come back either, but he does do that once every few days. He is always armed, but he helps with the potatoes, and Tommy learns not to feel shaky at the sight of his armor.
The first time he sees Tubbo smile in months is the day he plops himself down in the grass at Tommy’s side soaked and stained in blood. He looks far too cheerful to be bleeding out, but eventually Tommy still has to ask.
Tubbo just hums, tilting all the way over until he’s leaning his full weight against Tommy’s side, staining his clothes now too for certain, but Tommy doesn’t bother trying to push him away.
“I found a way into the prison,” he says, and Tommy understands all at once and nothing at all.
He doesn’t ask. Instead, he checks on the only part that matters. “Are you safe?”
Tubbo softens and his eyes are equal parts wildfire and hearth. “I’m safe,” he says. And then, “We all are.”
“Have you ever thought about leaving?” Phil asks and Tommy doesn’t answer for a long time. He isn’t sure how to answer without the words being a lie.
Of course he’s thought about leaving, planned the whole thing out, drafted letters and endings where he lives and ones where he doesn’t. Of course he’s thought about leaving, but the same way he thinks about the house where he grew up. Leaving is a long ago thing. Leaving is not a choice he has anymore. His clothes are too heavy with water, his feet are nailed to the ground.
Of course. Of course, but leaving is not something left for him. He is a haunting of a creature. He is a scar and he is a healing wound. Little ghost that he is, there is nowhere else for him to go.
“Doesn’t it hurt to stay?” Phil asks. “Doesn’t it kill you? This place, this land.”
But the land has done nothing and the place carries as many scars as Tommy does. He kneels in his garden and buries his hands in the dirt.
It feels like medicine.