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Tommy wakes up.
The house is silent.
He sighs.
Sam comes for him like he does every morning, making sure he’s up even though he already knows Tommy is ready to go at any given moment, especially on a day like today. Tommy’s duffel is already packed (though it never really gets unpacked). He slept in his shoes, and there’s a granola bar in his jeans pocket for the road, because Sam’s meals are never all that filling, especially on a day like today. Tommy would say it’s the nerves, but after so many repetitions of this same scenario, anxiety has left him entirely. He’s only faintly worried that Sam’s going to forget his glasses halfway into the drive and make them take the hour journey back to his house, but even that might be an interesting development in his monotonous life.
Sam offers to hold his hand as they walk up to the house, like he does every time, but Tommy passes it up. His duffel is heavy with nothing, he needs to carry it with both hands. The stitching on the fabric handle was old and itchy against his palms, but he gritted his teeth and bore it. He could dump it in whatever room he was slated into once he got inside.
They get up the steps and to the front door, and Sam lifts a green-tinged hand to knock. His knocks are always loud and official sounding, but he guessed it came with the job.
He and Sam were let in, non consensual hugs given by people he didn’t even know, papers signed, and soon enough Tommy found himself sitting on a bed that was far too firm in a room that was far too red for his tastes. When he put that his favorite color was red on that form all those years ago he didn’t think it would result in every foster family painting the walls of his rooms garish shades of blood red. He never said he liked it on walls.
There was someone knocking on his door.
“Come in,” he said passively, and the smiling foster mom that you see on every adoption poster walked into his room. She was a quadruped hybrid, like Sam, with flecks of calico coloring around her eyes. A horse hybrid, or as they liked to be called, centaurs.
“I’m just about to go to our son's basketball game, would you like to come along?” she asked, all sunshine and roses, but Tommy knew she’d be disappointed if he said anything other than ‘yes.’
It was his first day though, and Sam always told him to give the families a chance, so he shrugged and said,
“Sure.”
The basketball game wasn’t all that interesting, a decent team facing off against a decent team. Tommy didn’t have to struggle to find the lady’s son, as she pointed him out immediately, and it would’ve been easy to find him anyway seeing as he was the only centaur on the team. He saw him shoot a look at him during one of the time-outs. His gaze looked…faintly disgusted.
Tommy curled his lip. Just because he had fur and a tail did not mean that he was lesser than a horse hybrid. Regular horses just [s…t] all over the place anyway, at least racoons were cute . And it’s not like he had the whole shebang, just the tail, the ears, and the temperament.
Needless to say, when they had to get in the car together, Tommy didn’t bother making conversation.
Dinner that night was…odd. They made him come to the family dinner because of course they did, and he was the only one sitting in a chair instead of kneeling on a pad, like the rest of the family. He was slightly taller than them all, which instead of giving him any kind of power trip just made him feel awkward. And they made him take off his shoes. He hated taking off his shoes.
They were talking about something boring, like the kid’s grades or something, and Tommy wasn’t really paying attention, until he heard the most outrageous sentence come out of the dad’s mouth. So of course, he started laughing uproariously.
“That--” he got out when he could breathe again, “--was so [f…ing] funny ,”
They didn’t seem to think so. The dad and the kid were looking at him with that same expression of disgust, and the mother was staring at him open mouthed.
“We. Do not . Use that kind of language in this household.” she said, and she sounded absolutely livid.
“Well, good thing I’m not a part of this household then,” Tommy said flippantly, turning back to his food. This was obviously not the right thing to say.
“Wh--you are now , and while you are here you will not use such--such,” she spluttered for a second more. “ Foul language!”
She was standing up now at her full height, looking down at him with such disdain.
Tommy felt anger boil up inside him. [F…k] this , he thought.
And then he said it.
“[F….k] this,” he declared, standing up without bothering to take care of his plate. He did take his shoes from the front door though.
“You come back here this instant!” the mother yelled, and when Tommy resolutely did not , she screamed. “I always knew racoons were filthy!”
Geez.
Sam wasn’t exactly surprised when Tommy showed up at his door in his battered red converse, but that wasn’t to say he wasn’t disappointed. Sam was always disappointed when these things didn’t work out, but he made him a cup of chocolate milk and got him a cookie from the box like he always did, and they watched a Disney movie together like they always did and they talked about anything other than the stupid centaur family.
A week later though and he’s standing on the front porch of another family’s house. The door is green, and it stood out against the log-cabin aesthetic of its exterior. They had had to walk through a fenced in garden to get to the door, with a white picket fence and a wooden gate that creaked when it opened. It was very…quaint.
Sam knocked, and it took a few seconds for someone to make it to the door. Tommy could hear things falling over from inside the house, and what he assumed to be multiple pairs of voices. He actually hadn’t read the file Sam had handed him (he never did), so he had no idea how many people he was gonna have to deal with. He hoped this wasn’t a god[d…mn] Fuller House situation.
A middle-aged man opened the door, hopping on one foot while trying to get a slipper over his toes.
“Hi hi hi!” he said breathlessly, straightening and holding out his hand. “You must be Tommy! My name’s Phil and I’m gonna be your foster guardian for the time being,”
Tommy looked at him blankly, but Sam spared the man the embarrassment and shook his hand. “And I’m Sam, I’m his agent. Let’s get inside and I’ll just need you to sign some papers before I leave him with you,”
They stepped inside and Phil led them out of the entryway and into an adjoining living room where he and Sam could sit down and finish up the paperwork. Tommy collapsed in one of the small reading chairs off to the side, looking around the room. The coffee table was glass and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a while, judging from all the coffee rings and fingerprints. There was a TV mounted on a fireplace on one wall, and the artificial hearth was going. The mantle had stockings hanging from it, and Tommy realized with a jolt that there was one week until Christmas. He had totally lost track of the days. Also on the mantle were a collection of framed photographs, and Tommy could see more dotting the walls and in the hallway. So Phil was the sentimental type.
He stood up to take a closer look, leaving his duffel at the foot of the armchair. Immediately, the first framed thing he saw wasn’t a picture at all, but three feathers. One white, one brown, and one dark black, all varying in size. Fascinated, Tommy absentmindedly tapped the glass, tilting his head to see the hues in them shift.
“Ah, I see you like the feathers,” Tommy heard, and turned around to see Phil looking up from the paperwork at him. “Those are mine and my sons. I had ‘em framed when they first started their teenage molt.”
“You’re an avian?” Tommy asked shortly.
Phil grinned and with a quiet woompf , giant wings burst out of hiding from his back and nearly reached the span of the whole couch. Just as quickly though, they were gone, leaving only a slight breeze in their wake.
“I don’t take them out indoors much,” Phil said sheepishly.
Tommy just nodded and turned back around to the pictures.
Now he could see that in all the other pictures, Phil’s wings were typically present. There were one’s by himself yes, but also many, many with two other, younger boys. A brunette and a pink-haired dude who looked pretty similar. They had the same open smile and the same curly, wild hair. They too were avians, with wings to match the colors of their hair; the brunette’s a slightly more caramel shade of brown and pinky-boy’s a nice salmon. There were pictures of them holding flowers up to the camera, them posing in t-shirts at what was obviously a summer camp, them dressed in all black with instruments, a french horn for the pink-haired and a clarinet for the brunette. There were individual shots of them too, looking older than the previous ones. The brunette was posing in a bright green field, a guitar laid casually across his lap, with an action shot of him strumming it and singing it framed next to the other. There was one of the pinky, looking grim with some kind of silver stick held out in front of him.
“Alright then, that’s all of them,” Sam said, and he stood up.
He and Phil didn’t shake hands again, just nodded before Sam moved back to the entryway.
“Tommy, one,” Sam said warningly, standing at the door as Phil rushed over to be a good host and open it for him. “Make it to one this time,”
Tommy nodded, hands in pockets.
Sam left. He watched his car retreat out of the driveway.
“So.” Phil said, spreading his hands out. “I can show you to your room?”
“Where are they?” Tommy asked, pointing at pictures on the mantle , and Phil looked only slightly perturbed that he’d avoided the topic.
“Upstairs. In their rooms.” Oh no. Was Phil the type to “discipline” his kids? Tommy [f…ing] hating those sorts. “I told them they shouldn’t be out and about until you felt more adjusted.”
Tommy’s eyebrows furrowed. This…was an interesting development.
“I feel more adjusted now; you don’t have to keep them up there,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Phil asked, eyebrow raising like he doubted Tommy.
“Yes, of course I’m sure,” Tommy said, somewhat exasperated. “Would I say I was if I wasn’t?”
Phil considered this for a moment.
“...Well…I suppose not.”
Even though Phil supposedly released his two sons back out into the wild again, Tommy actually didn’t see them until he was called downstairs for dinner. Phil made it pretty clear that if he didn’t feel “adjusted enough” that he was welcome to take dinner up in his room and not at the table with the rest of them, but the last thing Tommy wanted to do was eat dinner up in his room alone. So he went downstairs.
And there they were, sitting at the dining room table. It was definitely weird, seeing the people he’d only “met” in pictures. The 2D had now become two very 3D, very real people, staring at him standing in the doorway.
Then, suddenly, the brunette became animated all at once, straightening, eyes glimmering, saying,
“There he is!”
He was more…round, in person. He had these big circular Harry Potter-esque glasses sitting on his nose that he hadn’t had in any of the pictures Tommy had seen. His hair was wilder, and he slouched more than the straight-backed kid in front of the camera let on. The pink-haired one too--his hair was obviously dyed and not a product of him being a hybrid, because his brown roots were showing along his part. His nails were painted black where they cupped his steaming mug, and he too was wearing glasses, though they were more square than the others. His hair, which had been closely cropped in the picture, was at his shoulders.
“Wilbur! Don’t be rude,” Phil chided, before smiling sheepishly at Tommy. “These are my two sons, Wilbur and Techno. Wilbur and Techno, this is Tommy, and as you already know, he’s gonna be staying with us for a little bit.”
“Hi! It’s nice to meet you!” the one named Wilbur said, still energetic, putting his elbow on the table and stretching his hand out for what was obviously meant to be a handshake. Tommy didn’t accept it. Wilbur took the hint and withdrew his hand.
“Yeah, what he said,” the one named Techno said, and took a disinterested sip of whatever he was drinking, being smart and not bothering to extend his hand. Tommy gave him an eyebrow. “What?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he muttered. It’s just that he was more expected to people falling over themselves to talk to “the new guy”. This was an approach he was not as accustomed to.
“Sorry I called you down now,” Phil apologized, waving around a spatula. “Dinner’s actually gonna be a couple more minutes. You’re free to go upstairs if you want, but personally, I wouldn’t even make the trip. Going up and down all those stairs is too much work for a couple minutes.”
He made a good point. The stairs in this house were strangely steep, not enough to be a health concern, but just enough to make your legs ache after going up them once. Tommy shrugged and took one of the seats at the table, across from the pink-tipped one. Techno. He didn’t dare take one of the heads of the table, that was far too much of a power play for the first day.
“So!” Wilbur began. “What’s your favorite color? Go.”
He pointed at Tommy in a grandiose fashion, obviously waiting for an answer, and who was Tommy to deny him one? He was just asking his favorite color, after all.
“Red,” he answered. “But for the love of [f…ing] God don’t ever paint any walls that color, it’s not a good color on walls. I should know.”
“Oh! He’s got a history with the color!” Wilbur exclaimed, eyebrows catapulting upwards.
“You could certainly say that,”
“No painting bedroom walls red, got it,” Phil remarked from the kitchen. “What color would you paint your walls, if any?”
“Blue,” Tommy remarked instinctively. “Blue’s a nice color.”
“The color of your eyes,” Wilbur commented.
His brother slapped him on the shoulder with the back of his hand, turning to give him a look.
“What?” Wilbur asked.
“Dude, don’t be weird. Why’re you looking at his eyes,” Techno drawled.
“They’re blue, it’s hard not to notice!” Wilbur exclaimed. “Have you ever looked at someone with blue eyes in their actual eyes before? They’re piercing!” He paused, looking at Tommy. “In the best way, of course.”
Tommy just looked at him. He wasn’t quite sure how to respond.
“Oh, his are ‘in the best way’ but mine are ‘unnerving’,” Phil scoffed, and Tommy turned to see him with an expression of open-mouthed indignation. He noticed then that Phil’s eyes were blue too, though slightly paler than his.
And Tommy started to laugh.
“Oh my god I’m gonna [f…ing] [s…t] myself,” he swore, tears coming to his eyes as he doubled over.
Wilbur too began laughing, but it seemed more like he was laughing because Tommy was than because he found the situation truly funny.
Tommy paused for a moment.
“You’re not going to box my ears for the swears?” he asked, the question pointed mainly at Phil.
He shrugged.
“I [f….ing] cuss all the [f…ing] time mate, so don’t worry about it,” he said nonchalantly.
Tommy was, to put it simply, flabbergasted.
The rest of the week was much the same. All three of them would do things that absolutely did not fit into the “norm” Tommy had fabricated during his many foster home experiences. They were erratic, unpredictable, and absolutely delightful . Tommy hadn’t had this much fun in years.
Phil was firm in his rules (no being out without notice after dark, lights off when you’re not using the room, make sure to put things back where you found them or there would be hell to pay, to name a few) but his fun side more than made up for it. He kicked all their [a..ses] in Mario Kart and made sure to lord it over them for the rest of that day. He somehow roped them into throwing the dishes around during cleanup like the dwarves in The Hobbit and only laughed when they inevitably broke one of the plates. “Plates are temporary, that face you made is forever!” When he realized that Tommy’s extreme metabolism made him hungry every couple hours, he made a whole barrage of quick snacks for him so he wouldn’t have to make something himself every time he was hungry.
Wilbur and Techno too--they didn’t treat Tommy like he was some fragile little kid; they treated him like the regular sixteen-year old that he was. They let him take their car out for a spin, with Techno in the passenger seat and Wilbur backseat driving constantly (though they wouldn’t let him leave the empty mall parking lot they had found, and when he tried Techno grabbed the wheel). When they said that they were going to a party and Tommy showed even the slightest interest, they let him tag along. He knew nobody, and the lights were bright and the music loud, but they made sure that he was never alone and that when he needed fresh air that he got it. And no one, no one was allowed to give him anything to drink. He didn’t even think they had anything, even though they were seniors and probably could’ve gotten away with it. And one night, they assaulted his sparse room with a barrage of blankets and pillows and made him watch How To Train Your Dragon with him. And if Phil found Tommy in the middle of their nest in the morning, he didn’t say anything.
But when Sam showed up on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Tommy didn’t know what to think.
“Tommy, are you ready to go?” he asked, peering around Techno, who had opened the door.
Tommy was like a deer in headlights. He was…leaving?
“You said you wanted to spend Christmas with me, remember?” Sam said, and now everyone was in the entryway, Phil Wilbur and Techno. They were looking at Tommy. “Unless--” Sam looked unbelievably hopeful for a moment. “--you wanted to stay with them?”
Tommy looked between Sam and the others. Sam, or Phil Wilbur and Techno? Security, normality, or uncertainty? The unknown?
The choice was obvious to him.
“Let me get my stuff,” he muttered, and headed upstairs without looking at them.
“I totally lost track of the days, and I totally forgot Sam told me you’d be leaving today,” Phil said. “You enjoy your Christmas, yeah?”
And then he pulled Tommy into a hug.
And even more surprising, Tommy returned it.
And when Wilbur and Techno joined in, it wasn’t surprising at all.
“You take care of yourself Toms, you little [s…t],” Wilbur whispered affectionately, messing with his hair.
“Keep safe, and make sure you warn the next person you drive with that you’re an absolute maniac,” Techno warned.
“Bye guys,” Tommy said, his voice cracking, and he didn’t know why.
Sam was oddly quiet on the drive back, and Tommy watched the light from the street lamps flicker over his face before he turned to stare out the window.
When they got back, Sam immediately moved to get the Disney movie up and running, but Tommy grabbed his arm when he reached for the remote.
“Um, you don’t need to pull it up,” he said quietly. “I think I’m just gonna head to bed.”
“Okay,” Sam nodded. “Okay. Good night Tommy.”
“Good night.”
He climbed the stairs in his bright red converse. It felt weird wearing them now. He’d started taking them off at the Watson's’.
His room was dark and cold. No blankets on the floor, no popcorn hidden under the bed because Wilbur didn’t feel like grabbing the broom, no dented lampshade from Techno demonstrating fencing techniques a little too passionately.
He crawled onto his bed, sneakers still on. There was no one to poke him and ask him if he was still awake. No one to throw a blanket over his face and tell him he looked cold. No one to hold him like he was a teddy bear and refuse to let him go because they were pretending to be asleep. No nest. No Christmas lights. No pounding feet on the stairs and the smell of breakfast cooking downstairs in the kitchen, no laughter surrounding him on every side.
Tommy curled up into a ball.
He didn’t know why he was crying.
The next morning dawned quiet and blue. Tommy felt slow. He knew it was Christmas day, and that Sam had most certainly gotten something for him, and he should be excited out of his mind like every other kid, but he just felt so…tired.
Sam came up to check on him.
“Oh you’re awake! Good,” he said, sitting on the edge of his bed. “I got you something!”
“Sam, I’m actually really tired, can I sleep a little longer?” Tommy muttered, turning over in his sheets so as not to face him.
“Mmmm, I think you want to see this present really badly,” he said, nudging Tommy’s shoulder with an elbow.
Tommy looked at him. Sam was smiling, almost conspiratorially.
“Just come downstairs bud, I promise it’ll be quick,” he said, softer now.
Tommy sighed.
“Fine.”
He rubbed the last remainder of sleep from his eyes as he followed Sam down the stairs, turning to go into his small living room where the small Christmas tree was.
“Uhhh it’s not quite in that direction Tommy,” Sam said, still at the bottom of the stairs by the door.
Tommy just looked at him.
“My Christmas present isn’t under the Christmas tree?” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“Nope! Look outside,” Sam said, gesturing to the front door.
Hesitantly, Tommy moved towards the door. He looked at Sam. He looked at the door. He opened it.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS [B…CH]!!” someone yelled, and all of a sudden there were arms around him and there were feathers in his face and it was Wilbur and he started to cry.
“What? Why are you guys here?” he asked, wiping the tears from his eyes after Wilbur finally put him back down.
Phil also had tears in his eyes as he held up a stack of papers.
“Adoption? Hopefully?”
“Say yes. Say yes say yes say yes,” Wilbur urged, bouncing up and down.
“I agree with Wilbur, you should definitely say yes,” Techno added.
Tommy looked at them, and then at Sam. Familiarity, normalcy. Back to them. Warmth, family. Sam had been good, so good to him all these years, and he’d really done his best trying to be that person for Tommy, but it just never cut it for whatever reason. But now, he’d brought Tommy the only family he thinks he’d ever be accepted by, and it’s the greatest Christmas present he’d ever gotten.
The tears start anew again.
“You know what Wilbur, you do make a very convincing argument,” he says, sniffling, and all three of the Watson’s cheered.
Papers are signed, emails are sent, copies of the files are printed for safety’s sake, and then everything’s in order. Tommy is still packed from the night before, and he’s all set and ready to go in less than five minutes. Well, except for one thing.
He pulls Sam into a tight hug.
“Thank you Sam. For everything. For trying for all those years. For believing in me. For bringing me to them,” he says quickly. “You’ll always be so special to me, you know that right?”
“‘Course I do,” Sam said. It sounded like he was crying. “And I’m sorry I couldn’t be the father figure that you wanted. But now it’s time; go be with your new family.”
“Come on Tommy!” Techno called from outside.
“Yeah, move your [a..s]!” Wilbur yelled. “We got [s…t] to do! More presents to open, bedroom walls to paint, furniture shopping to complete! Come on!”
“Well, that’s my ride,” Tommy said, moving to the door.
He couldn’t help it. He ran to give Sam one last hug before just as quickly running out the door.
“Visit once in a while! Phil has my number, you call me once a month buddy you hear!” Sam called from the doorway as Tommy loaded himself into the car, Wilbur already grabbing at the aux cord.
“Bye Sam!” Tommy called one last time, and then the door was shut and he couldn’t hear him anymore.
Phil turned around in the driver’s seat, eyes still red from happy tears he had shed.
“So Tommy, you ready to go home?” he asked.
Tommy smiled.
“Step on the gas, old man.”