Work Text:
[CLICK]
Wilbur
What the— Who— Oi, take your feet off the desk, how did you get in here? Who are you?
Tommy
Your locks mean nothing to me, is how I got in. I’m a cat burglar, I am, I’m light on my feet like a ninja. There’s a sex joke I can make here.
Wilbur
You missed the chance to say “pussy”.
Tommy
Fuck you.
Wilbur
Oh, pardon me, I guess you could also have started with a nice, shouted cunt --
Tommy
Don’t fucking call security! I see you, Wil, I know there’s a button there! Don’t press it. I won’t let you. No one’s pressing any buttons.
[STRUGGLING; SOMETHING IS KNOCKED OVER]
Wilbur
Is that a fucking knife?
Tommy
It’s not for you. I like holding it in my hand. Feeling the weight of it. Do you want to hold it?
Wilbur
If I may. [Pause] Oh . Thank you. Remind me of your name again?
Tommy
Tommy Innit. You know it, you just don’t remember. You’re the Archivist, yeah? Of the wherever we are?
Wilbur
The Herobrine Institute, yes.
Tommy
Are you in charge of it?
Wilbur
The board of trustees is in charge of it. Before that it was the Head of the Institute, but Eret—
Tommy
The traitor’s here? Never meant to be, men coming out of the walls, all that shit?
Wilbur
Eret?
Tommy
That’s who I said.
Wilbur
No. Not anymore.
Tommy
Well, good. I’m here to make a statement, and I didn’t want to look at their creepy eyes while I did it. Can I sit in your chair?
Wilbur
Fuck off, I earned this chair.
Tommy
I could fight you for it. We could duel, man to taller and fitter man, I have another knife right here or maybe a gun—
Wilbur
No! No, we are not doing that, I am not fucking up my office because some infant wants to fight me over a chair.
Tommy
You’re such a bitch, Wilbur.
Wilbur
Sit down. [Sigh] Look at me. Now, you wanted to make a statement?
Tommy
About a book. It said it was from the library of the Herobrine Institute, and it sent me to war. You were there, too. That’s how I knew to look for you.
Wilbur
Okay then.
Tommy
Can we hurry up? I saw a spider outside and I wanted to capture him in a jar.
Wilbur
I’m gonna be honest, that would not be a good idea, this close to the Institute, it would— fuck it. Sure. Statement of Tommy Innit, regarding another shitty book from our fucking library that didn’t have the good taste to go up in flames with the rest of it. Statement taken directly from subject on November 17, 2022. Statement begins.
Tommy
Does that mean I can talk now and you have to listen?
Wilbur
Yes, Tommy Innit, that’s what it means.
Tommy
Pog. [Nervously] Right, so, how do I—
Wilbur
Tell me how you found the book.
Tommy
I guess the first thing you need to know is I’m an absolute genius, amazing really, but I’m not so good at the whole school thing. I’m fucking aces at learning and mathematics surrounds me and all that, but they want you to sit still in school! Really still! And if you talk to your mates you get in trouble, and if you skip detention they fucking scowl at you like you shit in their pancakes and they didn’t notice till they ate it, and anyway I didn’t want to go to tutoring ‘cause no one explains things right so I went in the basement instead.
The library has a basement, see. It has a big door that’s always locked ‘cause that’s where they keep a lot of the school records, like who went there back in 1979 and shit, but I’m good at lockpicking, better now. So I pick the lock and I hide down there playing Minecraft on school wifi— d’you know Minecraft? You look old, so if you don’t know I can explain—
Wilbur
It came out when I was like 14, I’m not some geezer.
Tommy
You dress like one. You dress like a little bitch, a weakling.
Wilbur
What the hell do you have against jumpers? It’s fucking cold out, do you think I’m— no, wait, we need to finish this statement. Go on.
Tommy
Do you have any candy? Talking makes me hungry.
Wilbur
You don’t strike me as someone who doesn’t talk much.
Tommy
Yeah, but I’m always hungry.
Wilbur
Didn’t you want to hurry?
Tommy
Okay. Okay, yeah. So I’m playing Minecraft, except the WiFi’s spotty so I’m bored, and I go to look at the books. There’s weird shit in there sometimes. One time I found this manual on puberty from 1921 and it kept talking about avoiding smoking and drinking, and then it said that if a pregnant woman had a vision while she was pregnant her baby would come out strange. It said she saw a man with long fingers and her baby had long fingers, except his fingers had been too long and he’d watched her from a doorway and no one else had been able to see him, not at all. And no one had been able to see how weird her baby was, either, even though she kept trying to tell them and its crying didn’t sound like crying. But that was a fucking creepy book and I was thinking I saw things, right, so I burned it right there—
Wilbur
You burned— what was it called? Was there a book plate under the front cover, did it say anything?
Tommy
It said from the Library of Herobrine, just like my journal did.
Wilbur
And you just put it down and burned it, after reading.
Tommy
Well, I’d picked up my journal first. That one seemed more interesting.
Wilbur
[Softly] Ah.
Tommy
The other book, though. The journal. I’m here to talk about the journal.
Wilbur
Continue, if you please.
Tommy
It was bound in leather. It smelled sooty, burnt, and it had these strange brown stains I thought were something else at first, but now I know were blood. And inside of it was a bunch of letters someone had sewn into the shape of a book, written all old-fashioned-like with a quill pen.
It was a man talking to his father. He’d moved away to make something of himself, and the place he moved to went to war. He believed in the cause, though, so every time he talked about a battle he’d describe it and say how it was worth it and he wasn’t hurt that bad really, and none of them sounded like actual countries, so I thought it was fictitious, but he had such a way with words…
I was sucked in, I guess. Like when you read a good book and you forget the outside world. Except the outside world was a different outside, now, and I was in uniform.
Fighting for my country. For L’Manberg.
Wilbur
I’m sorry, I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that.
Tommy
You do. You just— you’re a little confused, that’s all.
I don’t know how to say it. It felt more real than standing here feels, you know? Realer than real. Like I was living in technicolor there, when before everything was black and white— like I was Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, except better looking and without the drugs. I do different drugs. Or I would if I wanted to.
L’Manberg’s walls were black and yellow, and I helped build them with my own hands. That was my first memory when I was there, that I’d built the walls in front of me. My uniform was dark blue, and some white, and I remembered sewing the little flag to it above my chest pocket. I had a big triangle hat and an axe. Not armor, though, because citizens of L’Manberg fought with words, with diplomacy: it was our enemies who fought with blades.
That’s what you told us, at least. What you told me and Tubbo, and Eret and Fundy. You said we didn’t need armor because we could debate our way to victory.
Wilbur
Wait, wait, what I told you?
Tommy
Yes. I found Tubbo, even though he didn’t remember either, and now I’ve found you. Is Fundy here?
Wilbur
[Strangled] Keep going with the story.
Tommy
Months passed, wherever we were. We got into more fights with the people who owned the land L’Manberg stood on. We had a debate and they blew up our gates, and we decided to declare independence, make a brand new nation separate from the rest where we could be one big family and have each others’ backs always so it wouldn’t matter that we were weak on our own—
And that’s when it got bad, ‘cause our enemies declared war after that. They said they wanted to see white flags by dawn or they’d destroy us, and we didn’t listen.
D’you know the different ways people break their bones? How they can crack a little or snap in half, or twist so the pieces aren’t lined up anymore, or shatter so they cut your skin? Or all the ways you can get hurt when you fall over— scrapes and deepening bruises, burns and cuts and wounds that have such a tiny opening but strike through your organs?
Arrows snag your flesh when you yank them out. If they go through your shoulder, it’s easier to snap them and push the rest through. It bleeds, but it comes out. Your skin turns weird colors after, though, especially if you don’t clean it. And don’t get me fucking started on axes, ‘cause it feels like a blunt instrument at first and then your arm’s on the ground and you’re bleeding, but you can keep fighting if you really want to, if you want to make the other guy bleed more.
I think I lost count of how many times I died in that war. I fought a duel and got an arrow through my throat, once— that was odd because of how it felt breathing my own blood, like drowning but warm. I remember that one pretty well.
It was normal that we didn’t die in the war. We were meant to be coming back, we planned around it, and our enemies came back, too. Like a video game, innit? We respawned.
So Tubbo got cut to fucking pieces, but he’d passed on crucial information first. Fundy drowned, and you were shot down where you were pacing the walls, and Eret— nothing ever happened to Eret— and I died to an axe and to swords and to monsters and to my enemy’s fists, ‘cause he kept beating me and smashing my head against a rock no matter how much I screamed.
Our uniforms were brown and red after a while, instead of being blue. Our flag burned so many times I forgot what it looked like. The declaration burned, the one you wrote and proclaimed so proudly. It was like we were fighting just to fight, and yesterday and tomorrow were just— today, but different. Smearing together. There was less time between each battle, until it felt like we were constantly under siege, constantly battling. Constantly losing.
But it didn’t matter, because we were comrades in arms.
You give such wonderful speeches, Wilbur. You were our General. You had the dream, the fiery will. You saw a golden city far away, waiting for all of us to bring it into existence, and we fought like demons for it.
We weren’t winning, though. We never lost forever, since even when we were all slaughtered we’d come back and rebuild the walls again, but we never gained any ground. We just huddled together and shared rations, and went out to die again, until food tasted like blood in our mouths .
I don’t know if that’s why Eret betrayed us. It makes me so fucking angry to think about, like if I saw them now I’d strangle their stupid fucking traitorous neck until they stopped breathing, but I don’t like how it feels, being that angry, so I don’t think about it.
Eret was different from the rest of us somehow. More distant. They never died when the rest of us did. And they had weird eyes. White eyes from corner to corner, like staring through a telescope onto the surface of the moon. They hid them most of the time, but I saw them clearly in the end.
Eret told us they had something that would change the tide of the war. You weren’t sure about it, Wil, but we went along because it was war and we were desperate, and we trusted them. They’d never led us astray before. So we followed Eret into a little room, and they turned and looked at us and said, It was never meant to be, and then they pressed a button and men came out of the walls to slaughter us all.
And I woke up in the library, just like that. I had to break the hinges on the doors to get out, since it was locked, and when I broke out completely, I saw that it was winter, even though it had been spring before. My face was on a poster in the lobby.
I never went back home. I’m in the system, so no one missed me much when I disappeared, and anyway I’m not a kid anymore. I’m a soldier.
I found Tubbo a couple weeks after I left, and when I looked up Wilbur Soot I saw the Herobrine Institute, and that felt right, you know? So that’s how I found you. It took a while, but I’m here now. We can be comrades in arms again.
I can’t get it out of my head, though. What Eret said. They said It was never meant to be, like none of what we fought for ever mattered. We bled rivers, we died in agony, we burned and exploded and choked on ash, and things just reset. We were never independent, not really. We never had our golden city, our time in the sun. Just slaughter— just pain. And hate.
I still have the journal. Sometimes when I sleep with it under my pillow, my throat hurts like I’m screaming.
[CLICK]
[CLICK]
Wilbur
[Strained] Tommy insisted on sleeping in the back room. He’s asked to be hired on as an assistant, since Fundy vanished without any notice and we have all this shit to sort through. There’s no way in hell he’s old enough to be living on his own, but I don’t think he’s entirely human anymore. Letting him leave could be asking for trouble, I suppose. And he thinks he knows me, which is— great. It’s just fucking terrific. God.
I’m afraid that the journal he refers to is an artifact from the Institute’s old library, likely lost when it burned down. It’s a vessel of the Slaughter, one that swallows anyone who’s come into contact with it. I’ve never heard of someone getting out of the book— at least, not of someone remembering getting out— but I suppose it isn’t impossible. I have a gap in my memory of about nine months, though mine ended somewhere around when Tommy’s began, and it’s possible that whatever Eret– or Eret’s impression– did was enough to break the cycle of violence. And perhaps the first ones in were also the first ones out, leaving Tommy to head up the rear, as it were.
I don’t know. I’m not sure I know anything, recently.
[Hums] Tommy could be lying , but it does sound like me, heading a hopeless revolution. Sprinkling in Hamilton quotes. What’s the lyric— or will the blood we shed begin an endless cycle of vengeance and death, with no defendants? That sounds like me, now that I think of it. And unfinished symphony, that’s fucking poetic. My unfinished symphony, forever unfinished.
My L’Manberg.
I’m not sure I believe him, but personally. Well.
I like to think I’d look good in a uniform.
[CLICK]