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Sometimes Wilbur gets the coffee right. Most of the time. Not today, however.
He pours the creamer into the cup, watching the smoke rise and cool like it does everyday. Sometimes he puts just the right amount, and sometimes he pours too much. He takes a sip. It burns, and behind the heat is a sickly sweet aroma that fills his nose.
Taking another drink, this time not bothering to take it slow to avoid the sting, he can feel the dark circles under his eyes. He’s sure he looks about as shitty as he feels.
Because beneath the fluorescent lights of a lonely gas station in the middle of fuck-all nowhere, stands a man that's seen too much.
A man with droopy eyelids streaked red, with hands that constantly shake, a man that carries the things he’s lived and experienced on his back with a heavy load.
His eyes settle to the ground of the convenience store, he blinks in fatigue.
He barely slept last night, and when he did he was haunted with ghosts of the past, both figurative and literal. The dream was more precarious than usual, and although the image’s are blurry and disjointed, the feelings stay. It was something different, fueled by long lost memories and his typical fever-like state.
Avoiding thinking about it like the plague, he drags over to the front of the store, sliding back to his permanent spot for the rest of the day.
He looks at the clock on his desk. 6am as usual. Why does he even bother checking anymore. This is his life, he knows how it works. He wakes up at the arse-crack of dawn at his little hut of a home and walks to work. He unlocks the store and waits. And waits. And waits.
Occasionally, he’ll see a few customers come in and look around, some buy things and some don’t. He usually doesn’t see them ever again after that.
Another worker comes in a little later in the day, they say hello, and that is where the interaction stops. They hardly talk. Wilbur asks himself where his words have gone; how they’ve disappeared since he’s arrived in this strange present.
It’s hard to believe that he was once a leader, a president, no less. And now he’s here, with no escape, and no purpose.
There was a clear fate for him back then. He had a sort of meaning to be there. Now life is a waste, and he’s figured out that maybe he’s not so special after all.
People from this world come to terms with death so easily, that’s all they’ve known. Before he’d gone into Limbo, he hadn’t an idea either. It was all one big unknown. But now he’s coming to terms with death again, re-learning the concept of going away and never coming back.
Maybe just disappearing is better than going back to that train station, with its deafening silence and cold touches of the grave that Wilbur could barely even feel.
Another thing he’s had to get used to since coming back is how much empty space is around him. How little of the world he seems to occupy.
Sure he had the knowledge that the SMP was bigger than any of them, bigger than L’manburg or Pogtopia or anything else, but everywhere you look here is free space.
Very rarely, on bad nights when he can’t go to sleep and the voices are too loud (an unfortunate side effect of Limbo), he’ll stay up to watch the sunrise just to remember that he’s still alive despite being such in a different world, nay a different reality.
A question he asks himself most days is whether it was all worth it. Worth leaving everything he had ever loved behind for an unforgiving reality that he thought he knew. For a plastered sake of normalcy.
There’s no going back. There’s no way, even if he did return, that things would ever be the way it once was. The revolution was an event in history that will never occur again, not in Wilbur’s lifetime. Sometimes he wishes that he could’ve held onto it a little longer.
He tilts his head upwards, feeling his aching neck stretch out. He can feel the stitches ache when he does this.
In the first year or so that he’s been here, he’s gotten accustomed to them. At the beginning, he loathed them. The way they reminded him of everything he wanted to forget. The stitches aren’t all random; most of them correspond to places that had been scarred during the war. Meaning: his chest area is a gateway to his death. The very death that haunts him every day of his life.
During especially bad moments he can almost feel the searing pain, the fuzziness of his brain as the sword stabs into his stomach, maybe even reaching his soul. His fathers face flashes in his mind, a mix of horror and dread rolled up into a man that he will never see again. Those moments make the guilt increase tenfold, but also somehow the hate too.
His very own father, the man that had taught him how to walk, how to love, how to make things, was the very man who had taken his last life. And he had wanted that.
Back then he was like glass, so fragile despite the fire in his eyes, one step away from falling to shards. He broke on November the 16th, when the porcelain of his body and mind had shattered out of his own accord.
Now he’s sewn up, only whole by the needle and thread tethering him together.
The people that enter the store sometimes eye him with an uneasy expression, as if he’s a zombie from their movies. It’s true though, he scares people like the undead and looks like one too. No one has ever bothered to ask him about it though, maybe they already know that they won’t like the answer.
He’s sorting through lottery tickets out of boredom when he hears the bell on the door chime, signalling him to stand up straighter and try to put on his happy face as he continues looking down. An actual happy face might as well be nonexistent, but he can try.
Greeting the customer absentmindedly with a small ‘welcome’ and receiving no response, he continues his sorting. In the beginning of all this, seeing new faces was a blessing; not only to look at but observe. It was the same faces over and over again, trapped in the SMP. It got old quickly. Now though, everyone that comes through here looks the same. Same tired gaze, same scruffy appearance, some reminding him more of himself than others.
“Hey, Mister?” He hears. He doesn’t lift his head, just lifts an eyebrow. A cue to keep talking.
Barely no one talks these days; it’s hard to believe there are people in this world that are strangers. Everyone back in the SMP knew each other, and they all had their own personal vendettas.
“D’yu happen to know where the deodorant is around here?” He looks up. The man– no, not a man. A boy. A boy with blonde hair and blue eyes is looking straight at him. He almost hurls the coffee he’s just drunk.
“There's no deodorant here,” He says breathlessly, still looking over the boy with wide eyes. He’s so oddly recognizable with the scars littering his arms, a bandanna tucked into his shirt and around his neck. He looks older though, aged. Still quite a boy despite the eyebags.
“What the hell kind of convenience store doesn’t sell deodorant? I walked all the way from nowhere to get to this fucking town,” He mutters the last part, his lip curled.
Wilbur’s hand is shaking harder than usual. The resemblance is uncanny. His voice, his face, his everything. Even with years of time and remembrance lost, he could recognize this person immediately.
“I- uh, I-”
“Just ring this up for me, yeah? The person I’m looking for isn’t here, don't think. Gonna have to go to another fuckin gas station,” He sighs loudly. Obnoxiously. Just like he used to in the depths of Pogtopia. Time has worn this boy, but he’s still so… alive. Wilbur looks like a walking corpse, which he technically is. He doubts anyone from his past life would be able to recognize him. Even his voice has lost its curve, reverting to a more american-sounding accent.
“W-who are you looking for? Maybe I’ve seen them,” He says, voice stuttering. It has to be him that this boy is talking about. Tommy. The name burns all the way down to his stomach.
“Hmm,” He says, squinting, like Wilbur might not be trusted. “Well he's a lanky fucker, for starters. Like you, I guess.”
“Like me?” He croaks.
“A lot like you actually, but he’s got a bit of a british accent so you know…” The sentence leads off.
“Describe him more-?”
“Yeah, wouldn’t you like to know,” He snarls in a joking way only Tommy would. “Tall, British, what else. An ass, I’ll tell you that. And he wears this odd trench coat that makes him look like a sewer rat. You’d know if you saw him. I’ll bet he passed through here ages ago though.” A twinge of disappointment bleeds through his words.
“And what’s his name?” He asks, and he does truly sound desperate. His gut already knows the answer, but how is he here?
“Wilbur. Wil. He’s my brother,” Tommy says, and he swallows to hide the tremble in his lip.
“Tommy.”
The boy blinks– his brother blinks, and there’s an echo of pity on his face. Oh to see what he has become.
“Is this- you can’t be-” He gasps, and Wilbur stays frozen in his place.
“Gods, you’ve grown so much since-” He says, and it's true. He’s gotten taller, his scars have gone grey, and his features have matured. His voice is the thing that’s stayed the same.
Tommy’s head snaps up, his eyes crinkle like tears are forming, and he walks towards Wilbur.
How long has it been? He’s lost track. It’s been years, he knows, but how many years is still unknown. A certain haze seems to have swallowed up his sense of time.
“Since L’manburg,” He breathes out. Wilbur finds his legs moving without his permission, towards the boy he had abandoned on that beach years past. His mind’s eye had faltered, but now that Tommy is here , now that he is tangible, hold able, he lets himself dream.
It’s a dream he thought he would never have.
“How many years-?” He asks, not expecting the answer.
“Four years, Wil. Four bloody years.”
Tommy stands closer to him, and within a mere moment he’s holding Wilbur close. His nerves are on fire from the touch, he’s not sure how long this will last. He’s thought about this moment a lot. He holds on tight.
“I really fuckin’ missed you, Wil. You just- you left,” He says, and the sound of his voice mixed and muffled by tears brings him back to the war, back when he had to bandage him up after the festival. He had cried like this, but it wasn’t because of Wilbur. He feels his heart break.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” He says, because that's all he can say. There’s no excuses to be made, nothing that can possibly excuse the things he did. No reason is possibly good enough for the things he’s done.
“I thought you’d be back by now. I thought you’d be back for me.”
“I don’t know- I don’t know why I left. Ho-how are you here ? How do I get back?” He says, grasping onto Tommy like he’s trying to get back years worth of touch in this very second.
Tommy doesn’t pull away. “I didn’t think I could wait any longer.” He’s not answering the question.
“I don’t know how to get back, Toms. I’ve stood in the same spot before, n-nothing happened. I just want to go back,” He pleads, sounding more like a child than even Tommy.
“We can go back. I promise, we’ll go back,” He says.
And. Then. The. World. Stops.
He grasps at the threads of Tommy’s sweater but the world is slipping away so rapidly, making everything seem so far away. Far from Tommy . He can’t leave, not again, not now, when he’s been waiting so long.
Please, not today. Tomorrow. Just one day. He’s pleading to a god that will not answer. A god that spares no one and gives no mercy.
“Please!” He screams, louder than he has with more force and longing since the day he took his final breath.
And the world has ended.
And then he wakes up.
His eyes adjust to the darkness, his eyes blinking and his heart beating a fast rhythm. It takes him a moment to understand where he is.
Sitting up in his bed, he can feel the covers draping over him. The air is thick and sickening, the only comforting thing he can feel being the trench-coat he’ll never take off. In some ways, it still smells like the remnants of his home now blown to smithereens in a server far away.
He lays a hand over his heart, feeling his pulse, knowing now that he is indeed alive. Alive but pooled with dread and unfulfilled longing.
The thing that just transpired, that felt so real like a vivid memory, was a dream .
He bites his lip hard. Tears are pricking his eyes from the mere sensation of loss. He feels unravelled like a ball of yarn. Can he ever be put back together?
A slick tear falls down his cheek. He clenches his fist.
Why does the universe have to work this way? Why must it separate him from the people he loves? Why did it give him what he thought he wanted, and why does he regret it so much?
He wants to scream, let out everything that's been boiling inside him for so long. Wants to thrash until he’s somehow satisfied or too tired to care anymore.
Letting his head fall back onto his mattress with a thump, he wonders how this life has gone so wrong. He’ll treasure the time he spent with Tommy for as long as he can, until just like time, everything falls away and he’s left with only a vague remembrance of what occurred.
There’s no out for him. He’s had this dream for a long time, on and off for the last few years. And Tommy, just like in his dream, has grown without him.
With no way to reach the place he once called home, the place he once called a traitor, the place he once called hell , it's the feeling of being incomplete that will be the death of him.
He’s cursed to this eternity, and this dream will remind him of what he’ll never be able to have again.
Looking to the side, he can see his small, scrappy looking clock staring back at him. It’s 5:30am.
He shifts onto his feet, rising steadily. He’s thrown up after having dream’s like this, and he doesn’t have a bucket.
Stepping over scratched lottery tickets (something he does every time he misses someone; it dulls the pain better than drugs), he goes to his door.
His room is a mess of sheets, dust, and dirty clothes. Cleaning it is no use, it'll just get dirty again.
Opening the door, his face is brushed slightly by the wind, dark clouds beneath moonlight shining brightly.
The sun will rise soon.
He closes his door and makes his way back to the corner of his room, only bits of light illuminating his pathway so he doesn’t trip. He snatches a halfway decent uniform from the ground. He tries not to think about how many times he’s worn this same outfit before. He wears it practically everyday, to the point that it feels like everyday repeats itself.
Same uninteresting faces, same fatigue in his bones. He’s stuck on a loop. Sometimes its hard to believe that this isn’t just some elaborate trick that Limbo made to fuck with him.
Once he’s fully changed, without brushing his hair or caring to look decent, he takes a step outside, to the great big world that he feels banished to.
He walks on, looking around for only a moment. No one is out this early. It's silent.
There’s a million things he could be thinking about right now, but during these hours of the night, thinking may as well kill him.
The houses are briefly outlined around him. It feels like deja vu. He’s lived this moment so many times that the entire world feels like an infinity symbol.
A few minutes from the gas station is his usual spot. He stops every morning when he wakes up this way. When he dreams.
He stands for a moment, and realises that he’s come at the right time. The sun is rising in the sky, and the dazzling orange that mismatches across. It doesn’t fit the mood. He enjoys it anyway.
The red behind it is somehow the sun. It’s Tommy’s colour. He can see Tommy in that sun.
Nature takes notice.
After the sun has shifted to its painfully mundane yellow, he resumes to his usual route.
The bland nature of the building–his hell, his groundhog day personified–urges him to frown when he finally reaches its doors.
When he jabs his key into the hole and twists, the establishment is dark. When he turns the light on it is blinding.
His eyes burn, he can feel their redness. He rubs his eyes. There is never any feeling in his body except tiredness. If he felt this in Limbo, it would’ve been something. Not the same thing he feels all the time. There is no normal now.
It's a watercolour blur, this grand existence of his.
Fluorescent lights blare down on him like a hawk to its prey. He turns on the ‘open’ sign in front of the building, blue and green neon lights flashing around the word as if it's the most wonderful sign in the world.
He tugs his legs to the coffee machine and picks up a cup.
The options for coffee are the same and he’s memorised them by heart. He picks the one he wants without thinking about it.
The machine whirrs to life, and he watches as a stream of liquid drops into the cup until it's full.
He picks it up and sets it down next to the creamer, but not before staring into it, watching his reflection ripple in the brown-ish fluid.
The creamer is tipped carefully into the cup, turning it a lighter shade. He tries to pour it the best he can. Too much will be sickening, and too little will be tasteless.
He blends using the stirring stick. It’s the only thing he ever looks forward to doing.
Turning to look out the windows into the almost dark sky, just light enough to see out and not into a void, he takes a sip.
He sighs.
The coffee is bitter; today is not one of the days he gets it right.