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"Hey Tommy," Tommy looks up from the book he is writing," what do you think about fighting?"
"What do you mean?" Tommy asks, not fully paying attention to the fox-hybrid preteen.
"Just, what do you think of fighting like in war and such?" the fox-hybrid offhandedly explains. Auburn curly hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. The kid looks tired, a lot more tired than usual.
Tommy just sighs, "You have to fight to get what you want, that's just how the world works."
"Thank you Tomster," the teen wolfishly grins, grabbing a cigarette from his pocket, "you don't know how much you've helped me." He says while lighting said cigarette up.
Tommy rolls his eyes, before going back to writing in his book. "You shouldn't smoke." Tommy impulsively adds, "it's bad for you."
The preteen only laughs, waving the slightly older child off. "Nah, this," he waves the cancer stick around," won't be the thing that kills me."
Tommy shrugs, and the other walks off.
“Hey Fundy!”
“What Manburg?” Fundy snaps, gritting his teeth at the annoying kid that has taken to following him around.
“Yeesh no need to be so snappy, just wanted to ask you something,” Marburg whincs, slinging an arm around the slightly taller man’s shoulders.
“Okay what do you need to ask?” Fundy shrugs the others arm off.
“What do you think of fighting?”
Oh
Fundy hadn’t thought the kid would ever have the capability of thinking about something rather deep, but hey things can change.
“Fighting isn’t the first choice, should never be the first choice - if you can solve the conflict without resorting to violence then you never need to fear,” Fundy says, thinking about broken peace treaties and betrayal that didn’t go too well in the long run.
“Ahh, okay thanks man!”
The fox-hybrid bounds off, only then does Fundy realize he is a few coins shorter.
“That mother fucking fox, i am going to skin him next time i see him.”
“Hey WIlbur, what do you think of fighting?” a short dirty blonde kid asks, legs dangling dangerously over the edge of some ravine.
“Fighting? Fighting is great, it's amazing - everyone should fight!” WIlbur proclaims.
“Violence is the universal language.” Technoblade adds.
The kid nods, before jumping up and running to a deeper part of the ravine. The men only await for their little brother, who has gone off to meet Tubbo. A weekly check up on what is going on inside Manburg.
Drista gets the last laugh; she is all smiles and teeth. Sharp manic laughter ripping through the night sky. Her ‘brother’ stands over her, clutching one side of his face. Blood dripping from the left side of his face, splattering onto her face.
“Revolution bitch,” she hisses, before she succumbs to her wounds. Dream doesn’t bury the closest thing he had to a sister, vision obscured by tears as he does.
Clay does.
Drista is an oddity to the personification, and something to be feared by the mortals.
“So you're telling me that Dream is your brother?” Lands asked, downing another cup of lemonade.
“Mhm,” the young girl humms, a mask hiding her features. They stay in silence like that for a while, Manburg smoking his stolen cigars (“they were on sale, bitch no one was going to miss them anyways!”) , Pogtopia playing around with the grass, and Lands drinking her lemonade (which is actually alcohol but no one cares).
“Can I have one?” Drista suddenly asks. Marburg raises an eyebrow, before laughing.
“Hell no! Your brother already wants to kill me, not going to give him any more reason to by killing his sister!”
Lands smacks the cigar out of the fox-hybrid's hands, stomping it out.
“You fucking bitch,” he hisses after she “accidently” stomps on his fingers after trying to retrieve the cigarette.
The preteens only laugh.
“No, no but listen,” the teens and preteens gathered around rolled their eyes at the fox-hybrid’s slurred speech.
“Child soldiers aren’t bad.”
He’s met with laughter by the other nations, and stony silence from the mortals.
“What do you mean by that?” Tubbo asks rather stiffly.
“Think about it this way,” Drista explains, there's a scar across her neck, pale against tan skin, “child soldiers are pretty useful because of how small they are, not to mention how easy it is to replace them.”
Tommy rapidly stands up, teeth gritted: “What the hell do you mean by that?”
Manburg looks at him with disinterest.
“Dude, half the L’manburgian army was kids around your age.”
“No. It wasn’t,” Tommy cuts in, voice angry.
Pogtopia looks at them confused.
“He’s right, Pogtopian soldier comes from kids a bit younger than you, like 14 at most.”
“The BadLands accept soldiers at the age of 17,” the brunette chimes in.
“That’s pretty shitty,” Drista remarks.
“Oh come on! it’s only a year younger than 18 —”
“It’s one thing to have child soldiers slip in because they lie about their age and another for it to be legal.”
“Hey, where else are we supposed to get our manpower from? I don’t know if you haven’t realized it but people tend to die before their 40th birthday. ” Manburg slurs, a tense silence overtakes the bonfire, but he is only taking another sip of beer.
Tommy stands up, as does Tubbo — the rest of the group look at him with mild interest. Tommy looks angry, like he is about to say something — instead just storming off. Drista sighs, before dusting herself off and leaving as well.
“You didn’t tell me we had people under the age of eighteen in the military,” Tommy confronts Wilbur the next day.
“We don’t,” Wilbur pats his the boy’s shoulder, and the person he was talking to, a tailor, says nothing about how the man asked him to make the uniforms smaller.
“Apart from you and Tubbo, ” goes unsaid.
Pogtopia probably should've told them that people lie to get out of shitty situations.
“Hey, how old are you?” Tommy asks.
The boy looks no older than 15, he is smoking a cigar - something the soldiers have begun to do much to their displeasure.
“Oh I’m 16,” he winks, the others around him snicker. A girl just rolls her eyes.
“He’s 14,” she casually says, the others slug her shoulder, playfully jeering at her. She elbows a boy in the gut, before plucking the cigar from some other guy's hand and taking a drag.
“Surprisingly there are a lot of us here,” her accent is heavy, though that could be because of the smoke. She isn’t from around the area.
“They lie about their age,” Tommy says.
“What?” Wilbur asks, tiredness hanging off him as smoke.
“Their 14, Wilbur, 14,” the group of hassling soldiers, sharing stories in a foreign tongue and passing a bottle of amber liquid suddenly don’t seem like normal soldiers anymore.
But Wilbur has always been an actor.
Tommy stiffens when he finds the nation, it's odd to think of them as that. As something not human, when they act and do things so completely human.
"Leo," Manburg calls after Tommy's retreating form, voice oddly vulnerable — different from the cold character he plays now or the joking kid he was as L'manburg.
Tommy doesn't turn around, just files the name as another thing to put in the special book he's kept hidden from everyone on the server.
"Do you have a name?" Tommy asks the laughing fox-hybrid.
Immediately the other's laughter dies down. He looks into the distance with a thoughtful expression on his face.
"L'manburg ," he then casually replies.
Tommy rolls his eyes, missing the way the preteen tensed up.
"No a real name like Tubbo or Tommy," he elaborates, prying for more information from the personification.
"No," he firmly says, " L'manburg is my name."
Tommy tries not to think about how the fox hybrid walks into the cavern with his jaw in one of his hands. Face hurt, but also apathetic to it all. Tries not to think of how he disappears into his bedroom and walks out of his room without looking like he suffered at all.