Archive of Our Own ^beta

It ended with a flash of light and sirens screaming in his ears. His heart pounding, Tommy called out his apologies--he knew it was too late. For him, for Dream, his greatest enemy, his most terrifying nightmare, or for Punz, who walked with open eyes between their war. 

They say your life flashes before your eyes in the moment before you die. This hadn't been the case for Tommy for any of the times he'd died or nearly-died before. He'd thought about much while he was trapped in Limbo, but when Dream had murdered him, all he'd seen was that horrible gritted-teeth grin shooting through the black fog that had covered his vision as he lost consciousness--maybe some part of him had known that Dream wouldn't be content to let him go out just like that. Consciously, he'd thought that that was exactly what Dream would've wanted his fate to be; his body lying crushed and broken in a prison cell he'd engineered for him, the fly in his convoluted spider's web. Or maybe that web was never even all that complicated--maybe he was just stupid enough to follow expectations, every time (not this time.) Everything between them had been lies and manipulations and desperate posturing for control, from both sides. It was the only thing either of them knew, probably. 

But Tommy remembered a better time--and he was willing to bet that Dream did too, even if he wouldn't admit--and that was what he saw when he died. Random afterimages jumped before him like animals in the path of a minecart, hypnotized by torchlight and not understanding that their fate would be so painfully obvious if they stayed; they were just as tragically stupid, memories of friends and family and a childhood that had been so, so far from perfect--but at least back then he'd had potential. At least back then fate had not yet taken its due.

His father, black wings still beautifully unmarred, swooping through the sky as blue as his eyes, holding young Tommy in strong hands and letting him feel the wind--Techno called him Theseus but back then he was Icarus, naively trusting in his father's wings, the sun warm above him and the sea dark below. Pulling on his cloak as he left, clamoring to come along like he had on smaller trips. Listening to his stories, and making up his own in the warm light of sunset, full of heroes and justice and adventures. Childhood is fear without the words to explain it, but Tommy never needed words. He just needed his family.

Wilbur had grown up beside him, the both of them as lanky and awkward as each other--Tommy sometimes felt like it was only Wilbur who was really responsible for their height and he'd just pulled his baby brother up behind him, needing someone to share the world he'd created even if he was too controlling to let him take the reins. They'd played war games in the field behind the cottage they lived in back then, swinging sticks like swords, the blood and bruises a cheap price to pay for laughing until their ribs hurt, their eyes watered, collapsing on the grass in a pile of limbs. Wilbur was stronger and quicker and bigger, of course, but Tommy learned quick and their matches were usually much more equal than most would expect from two brothers five years apart. Wilbur always said that he went easy on him. Tommy was vicious even then, biting and kicking as frequently as he swung the stick he was supposed to be using, and Wilbur usually at least tried to play by the rules—the rules he made, so Tommy thought he was plenty justified in bending them—so maybe that actually was true. When Tommy sprained his ankle that sunny day when he was nine, Wilbur was the one to wrap it, the one to give him ice and tell him everything would be okay. He still remembers exactly how his older brother had said those words: like him saying it was enough to make it so, like he had his hands on reality itself. He'd believed him, back then (and he didn't tell Phil about it, when he came home a month later). 

He'd heard stories about Technoblade from Phil for most of his life, but he didn't actually meet the man until his fourteenth birthday. He'd come out of his room for breakfast, and the Blood God himself was sitting at their kitchen table, drinking tea--when he got over his shock, he'd had no shortage of questions about Techno's life, all of his adventures and all of the people he'd fought. Techno had answered them patiently, if awkwardly--hey, Tommy couldn't blame him, not when he'd never met him before and didn't know how much of a Character little Tommy could be. Techno had appeared sporadically after that; Tommy called him his brother because it was fun to see his spluttering reaction at being a centuries-old god who was really more of a family friend than anything else referred to as the brother of a fourteen-year-old human boy, regardless. He always knew that Techno would protect him and the rest of their family, and that made him family enough in his eyes. 

When Wilbur ran off to seek his fortune, Tommy had been the first to follow, but he knew that if he really needed them, Phil and Techno would come along too. The two of them were mostly capable of getting by on their own, they thought--they'd been taking care of themselves since they were knee-high, in some ways (and then more, and more, more, more). When Wilbur started cracking, desperate to control the nation he'd made just like he'd reigned over their yard with an iron fist, Tommy hadn't understood the danger. Not really. When Wilbur hit him to shut him up--well, they were brothers, they'd always been playfully violent with each other. He'd always had strong emotions, alternating between manic hubris and depressed frustration and despair. Tommy could still follow where his big brother led. 

When Wilbur tried to lead him into a grave, he would've followed. It was only Phil that saved his life, and even Phil couldn't save Wilbur.

So Tommy knew the rot had started long ago. He knew most good fathers didn't go off on their own months-long campaigns and leave their kids to fend for themselves--there were always excuses, of course: most fathers didn't have wings and a flock of crows that would report any actual danger the boys got into so Phil could come back and save them from themselves (not that he ever did), and most fathers weren't warlords whose children were actually probably safer kept as far away from him during wartime, so they wouldn't be targeted. But none of those excuses seemed to mean much to Tommy at six, crying over a scraped knee, or Tommy at eight, reading stories out loud to himself and imagining that someday, someone might actually listen to him, or Tommy at eleven, talking about families to his first-ever friend, Tubbo, who was the same age as him and had stubby horns and a tail like him (though Tubbo's was brown and ended in a tuft of hair like a lion's, instead of red with a diamond with serrated edges at the end)—who didn’t have his father around, either—or even Tommy at fifteen, watching his brother's hope—his brother's life—bleed out through his fingers, asking the crows whether Phil would come, whether they were really in dire enough straits to justify him taking a break from whatever the fuck he did when he wasn't home, trusting at first and then doubting, helplessly doubting—his fear was useless, so he ignored it (Wilbur wouldn’t really do it, he was all talk, always had been (right?))—if his father’s continued absence meant that they’d be okay.

But here, trapped in the prison that would be the setting of his second time dying for good—but this time it was real, horribly real, because anyone who could bring him back was dying with him—his heart called out one last time to his family. He never got the chance to say goodbye, not to anyone but Tubbo; he hadn't thought Techno or Phil would care, and Wilbur was already gone. He hadn't thought that it would be important. None of them would know what was happening until it was done, anyway. And then Tommy would be stuck in Limbo with Dream and Punz, and Schlatt and Ghostbur and Ranboo and all the other horrors that plagued his dreams and he knew that if he spent too long saying his goodbyes, he might lose the will to actually go through with it. Tubbo understood. Tubbo wouldn’t argue with him, not about this. Tubbo would launch the nuke—he’d be willing to help him make the final sacrifice to let the rest of the server live in peace. He’d sacrifice him for the server (after all, he already had, back when he'd exiled Tommy on Dream’s orders).

It seemed too much to bear to never see them again.

It ended in a flash of light—and then it didn’t. Pain stabbed at Tommy’s skull, but from the inside—he was sure of that, but don’t ask him how—like his brain was expanding and pressing into the jagged edges of bone, his meninges cracked and spilling out fluid. Every barrier in his body ripped itself open. There was someone screaming, somewhere.

In the dark, he put a hand to his eyes. His fingers came away warm and wet.

Tommy felt the warmth of the blankets around him before he was conscious enough to even think about opening his eyes. The clinginess of them on his skin, the fabric soaked through with sweat, irritated him. His hands moved to push them off.

He felt weaker than usual, his whole body aching like he’d been run over by a train.

“Hey,” Phil said, his voice soft. Like Tommy was so fucking fragile he’d break if he spoke any louder; to be fair, maybe he would. He certainly felt fragile, at the moment. “How’re you doing, mate?”

“I’m—”

As soon as he tried to push himself up, his stomach lurched violently. He barely managed to lean over the edge of the bed before the contents of it spilled out onto the floor—wait, was that blood?

Phil winced in sympathy. “Lemme get you some water. Just lay there, okay? Try to relax.”

Tommy didn’t dare—or couldn’t find the strength, and he wasn’t sure which option was worse—to try to speak again, so he just nodded, one slow dip of his chin as he lay back, curling his fingers in the sheet below him.

Wilbur had read him a poem once, about how you know you’re still alive or something like that. He didn’t remember most of it. But he remembered the trick the poet had written about—how you know you’re alive as long as you can still make a fist. Tommy as a child had giggled and slugged his brother in the shoulder, but Tommy today had nobody left to fight. He didn’t think he had the strength to fight anyone anyway, but still. He’d become so familiar with his anger, his rage like a spitting wildcat in his throat, in his fists; his fear was a constant companion, too. Not even in the latter stages of his exile had he felt so… empty.

But he could still make a fist.

He stayed still, just as Phil had told him to—he wasn’t partial to the idea of vomiting again—eyelids growing heavy and then closing. There was nothing to look at but the ceiling, anyway.

Phil’s footsteps grew louder as he came closer. He could walk completely silently if he wanted to and he usually did, Tommy had seen it many times, but his socks brushed carelessly against the floor with almost every step. Was he truly just being careless, or was it an intentional choice to let Tommy know where he was when he wasn’t looking at him? It was nice, anyway—it was nice to feel like he was being noticed, his needs paid attention to even though he couldn’t really do anything about it whether he did or not. He didn’t even think he could say ‘thank you’ without getting sick again.

The water was in a little kid’s cup, with a lid and a small hole to drink from so he wouldn’t spill it all over himself. Tommy half-cringed at the—the infantilization, but he knew even as he did it that the assumption wasn’t an incorrect one. He couldn’t sit up.

He hadn’t expected Phil to have a… a sippy cup. It seemed foreign, somehow, in his hands.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re a ‘big man’, I know. This is just all I had.” Phil rolled his eyes. “Drink the damn water.”

Tommy could hold the cup. He swirled a few sips of water around his mouth to clear the bitter taste.

“Thanks,” he said. “S—sorry I puked on your floor.”

Phil shrugged. “I’ll clean it. Just wanted to make sure you were okay, first.”

Tommy suddenly saw the dark circles under his father’s eyes, his half-brushed hair, his nightclothes. He’d been too tired and sick a few minutes ago to really look, but now he wondered what time it was, and—

“How long was I out?”

“A few days.” Wow, Phil, way to be specific. “It’s—we’ve been taking turns. Techno, Will, Tubbo, and I. They’ll want to see you, now that you’re up.”

“Actually, I’m feeling pretty down,” he joked.

Phil smiled back at him, though it was only a small quirk of his mouth upwards. “Awake, then. Do you, uh—do you want me to get them? After I clean the floor?”

“Running away already?”

It came out more bitter than he’d meant it—he hadn’t really meant it at all actually. It had just slipped out of his mouth without any input from the conscious part of his brain. He told whatever was responsible for that to fuck off.

“I—” Phil started, then stopped, then tried again, looking like a fish trying to breathe out of water, “Mate, I—”

Tommy interrupted him. “It was just a joke, man. Go get them if they’re around.”

While Phil got the mop and cleaneed up, Tommy let his eyes fall closed again. He wanted to see the rest of his friends, sure, but he was truthfully worn out. His fatigue, mixed with the desire for them not to see him so weak he can barely lift his head and his general uncertainty about what’s happened since—gods, the nuke—he passed out, curdled into something like dread in his gut. He ignored it.

His head was pounding.

“Do you have any fucking healing potions?” he asked

“Can’t give you any more,” Phil said. “You’ll get magic sickness. Besides I don’t know if—”

He cut himself off.

Tommy frowned. “You don’t know what?”

The sound of water dripping from the mop onto the floor was ridiculous in the silence.

“I just don’t know if it’ll help, mate. This is something your body’s gonna have to do on its own.”

“Tell you the truth, Phil,” Tommy said, trying again for levity. “I don’t think my body’s up for doing pretty much anything. I think my body’s being a real—a real bitch, right now.”

“It’ll figure itself out eventually.”

“Or what?”

Phil inhaled sharply, and instead of answering, he asked his own question: “Why did you do it, Tom? You—you knew you were going to die and you still…?”

“It’s not—I wasn’t—” Tommy tried. Now he was the one out of water. “It’s not like that. Like, I know what—what that feels like. Wanting to die, y’know? This wasn’t that. I wanted to live—I do want to live. I just wanted him dead more.”

Phil sighed. “This again.”

That pissed Tommy off, for what he thought should be obvious reasons. “What else was I supposed to do, Phil? He was never going to stop. He fucking deserved to die, and you know it. He…”

He trailed off, remembering the time he’d spent in Dream’s limbo, the laughter of George and Sapnap chasing him through the wilds the server had once been, the odd sense of knowing he’d felt for Dream after that, like maybe they both only ever really wanted the same thing. ‘I don’t ever want to be alone,’ Dream had said, and Tommy—Tommy had agreed. It was the first time in a long time that he’d actually agreed with Dream. It was the first time he was ever sure Dream wasn’t lying to him.

Then he remembered Exile. Remembered all the tears, all of the confusion and fear and that feeling that had taken fear’s place once he no longer cared about what happened to him. The helplessness. The hate pointed in too many directions, like he was some kind of fucked-up cactus that grew back in on itself, stabbing out and stabbing in: he’d hated Dream, when he didn’t love him, and he’d hated Tubbo, and the rest of the whole damn server, and himself, more than any of that. He remembered how Dream’d blown all of his things up, over and over and over, forcing him to remake even basic tools every day—he was possessive over his stuff before Exile, but after it had reached a whole ‘nother level. His attachments—he refused to call them addictions; they weren’t—to golden apples and invisibility potions proved that. He still struggled to spend real effort on getting nice things, diamonds and shit, too. Whenever he thought about going mining, a voice in his head would ask what the point was, since he was just going to lose it anyway?

“He was too far gone,” he said.

That statement was much more forgiving than most of the things he’d thought about Dream, lately. He thought it was true enough, though: there had been some version of Dream that could’ve been good, could’ve been a hero, even. But that Dream was dead long before the nuclear bomb went off. It would take some kind of—of reset to bring them back to that good time. But that wasn’t possible. The past was dead and gone forever, and all they had was the echoes it left in its wake.

“Why couldn’t you two have just left each other alone.” Phil’s tone was flat and sharp as a blade, clearly not expecting an answer. “He just had to go—mess with you. I remember when you came by, after he escaped—”

“After you helped him escape.”

“—how scared you were. Why couldn't he just cut his losses?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said, but he didn’t think Phil was really talking to him, anymore. Really, how would he possibly be expected to know why Dream did what he did?

“And you,” Phil’s voice had taken on a distinctly scolding element. “You couldn’t think of any way to avoid him that wouldn’t also kill you?”

“No, Phil.” He wanted to get up so he can stand and argue with his father properly, but resigned himself to merely glaring at him. “I couldn’t. It was Dream. You can’t fight him—I’ve tried, okay? And every time, I lost. And even if I could’ve killed him, I couldn’t fight both him and Punz. If either one of them was left alive, they’d just revive the other one and then we’d be right back at the beginning. They were better armed, they had better armor, and they had fucking magic. What was I supposed to do?”

He was breathless with the exertion of talking for so long, but Phil doesn’t let him catch his breath, doesn’t let him take a break from this argument. Tommy wouldn’t have either, in his father’s place.

“Get help!” he snarled back. “Ask me what to do! Ask Techno! Ask—ask someone. None of us would’ve just let him—”

“You and Techno let him out of prison. You’re the only fucking reason he was even able to go after me! Why would I ask you?”

There was a long quiet after that, like Phil didn’t know what to say, whether he wanted to defend himself or apologize—Tommy knew exactly how he felt, because he was feeling the same way. It was the same way he always felt when he was a child arguing with his father or older brother.

He broke first. “I’m sorry, Phil.”

Phil didn’t apologize—what was Tommy expecting, after all? But he finished mopping without asking Tommy any more pointed questions, and the resulting silence was as close to a companiable peace as he’d known in a long time, so he accepted it for what it was. Phil didn’t always apologize, but he’d never been the kind of parent to stay mad. In a few hours, or minutes, even, he’d end up pretending it never happened.

Tommy was too tired to push him on it.

Once the floor was clean and smelling more like soap than vomit, Phil left without another word (and his steps were perfectly silent as he went, just to add insult to injury). He didn’t bother even telling him who he’s going to get to see him. Hopefully it wouldn’t be all of the people he’d mentioned sitting by Tommy’s bedside earlier. He didn’t think he could handle three more people bothering him at once, not when he’d just argued with his father—not like it was the first time or even a particularly rare occurrence, but somehow it still felt the same every time—and he kind of just wanted to fall asleep and deal with all of this another day. Fuck the consequences of his actions.

But really, it was so unfair. He hadn’t expected there to be consequences! That was the whole point of blowing that fucking prison up with a nuclear explosion—none of them were supposed to survive. Not Dream, not Punz, and not fucking Tommy.

He’d made the decision out of desperation, so there hadn’t been too much time between realizing that he’d have to kill both Dream and his sidekick and the end, and he’d tried not to think too hard about how the rest of the server would react to what he’d done. Well, to his death, specifically—he’d expected the server to be happy that Dream was dead and had left it at that, as far as that part of it went. Really, did anyone like the guy anymore?

The part of him that was born in Exile expected people to be happy that he was dead, too. But since some of them had grieved when Dream killed him in Pandora’s Vault, he had more ammunition to use against those thoughts than he used to. He’d still thought that they would get over him pretty quick. Maybe they’d be sad for a couple weeks or a month or something, but not too much longer than that. Maybe someday they’d be talking to some new people on the server and share a joke that he’d started and have to tell them about the dumb, loud blond kid that had fucked things up and then fixed it. He would be content with that. He never really cared about his legacy like Wilbur or Quackity did. He just wanted the people he knew to like him, to be able to keep his friends and family safe and happ. He couldn’t care less about future people he’d never meet.

Phil and Techno, being ageless, might meet those people, though. Huh. That was a weird thing to think about.

“Hey,” he said as Techno followed Phil back into the room. “what’s it like watching people die? Or—that came out so wrong. What’s it like, fucking, knowing that you’ll meet people that I never will?”

“I’ve already met a lot of people you never will,” Techno said. “Some of them were pretty great. You’re missin’ out. Yeah, you’re missin’ out, man.”

Tommy grinned. Phil was getting too fucking serious on him, but he could always count on Techno to be cool about things.

“None of them compare with me, though, right?” he asked, pouting a little in fun. “Right, Techno? You’ve never had a friend better than The TommyInnit. You couldn’t have.”

Techno huffed. “Guess you’re feelin’ better now, if you can be this annoying again.”

“I’ll have you know that it takes a lot of fucking energy to be this cool and fun and—and have this much gumption. Do you know what it’s like to have so much gumption?”

“I don’t think you’re using that word correctly, mate.”

“Dictionaries are for pussies,” Tommy declared. “I’ve never even looked at a dictionary.”

Phil and Techno shared a long-suffering look.

“I guess some of them were worse than you—”

“Some of them?”

“—right, Phil? Remember that guy with the market that accused us of stealing from him even though we actually didn’t that time?”

“Oh, yeah.” Phil groaned at the memory. “That guy sucked. He followed us for, like, a week, trying to get somebody to arrest us. If his shop was so important to him, he should’ve just stayed there, but he decided to go chase after two random guys instead. I told you we should’ve just killed him.”

“Bruh. We were undercover,” Techno argued—it was clearly an argument they’d had before. Tommy let his head fall back onto the pillow, listening in peaceable silence. “You can’t just break cover for one guy. And I would’ve killed him if he actually made any trouble. He was just annoying, not a threat. Man. But he was really annoying.”

Phil made an unconvinced sound. “You would’ve killed him? Mate, I wasn’t going to let you get the chance. The second you said I could do, I would’ve had him dead at our feet. In a second, Techno.”

“You could only kill him that fast if Kristin helped you,” Techno teased. “I could’ve killed him all on my own. All on my own, without any god’s help.”

“You’re a god, Techno! Technically, anything you do is with a god’s help.”

“Pshhh.”

“When did you meet that guy?” Tommy asked.

Phil hummed thoughtfully. Tommy could almost see him flipping through the many, many files in his brain, going through years, decades—centures, maybe—to place the event—“2014, maybe?”

“Oh. I was—ten?”

He didn’t quite realize what he’d said—what it meant—until Techno echoed him. “Oh.”

Phil was staring at the floor, fidgeting at the edge of the robe he wore to bed—he still hadn’t changed. He still hadn’t had time to change. “Tom, I—I’m sorry.”

“What?”

Something pained came over Phil’s face. If Tommy had been looking at him, he’d see a similar one on Techno’s too.

“I don’t say it enough, but I’m—mate, I’m not proud of how I raised you and Wil,” he said. Tommy’s eyes widened. “I wasn’t ready to be a father and I didn’t really understand kids and… I just—I wonder. What might’ve happened if you had someone better. If he and you still would’ve—”

He cut himself off. Tommy was distantly aware that that was the most freely his father’d talked to him in years, maybe ever, but in the moment, he couldn’t think of any adequate way to respond, so he just said, “It’s fine.”

“No, Tommy. It’s—”

Phil was clearly hurting, as he talked, and suddenly Tommy couldn’t bear to listen, so he interrupted: “I said it’s fine. You did what you had to do, and you kept us safe and fed and clothed and whatever. You never, like, hit us or anything.”

“Father of the year, aren’t I,” Phil said drily. “I never hit you.”

Techno wasn’t saying anything, which seemed odd considering that he was Phil’s best friend for all of those years. If anything, he was the one that pulled Phil away from his kids—at least, when Kristin wasn’t; Tommy’s childhood was just the natural consequence of having a father that was so close to two gods. He’d accepted that a long time ago.

“Wilbur took care of me,” he argued, weakly.

“He shouldn’t have had to. He was just a kid, too, and I left him alone for so long and I never understood—” Tommy tried to verbally step in again (he was afraid he knew exactly where this train of thought was going), but Phil held up a hand just as he opened his mouth to speak. “Please, let me—let me get through this, mate. I didn’t—I didn’t help him. He left to go make a new country, and the next time I saw him he was begging me to put a sword through his chest. And I—I’ve seen people die before. I’ve killed plenty of them myself. But he… He was my son.”

“He’s alive, Phil,” Tommy said. “D—don’t say ‘was’. He’s alive. He’s back.”

Phil nodded, though it didn’t clear the agonized look on his face.

Tommy looked at Techno for rescue. “I mean, isn’t your guys’ whole thing killing tyrant leaders?”

Techno looked almost as pained as Phil was, though his seemed to have risen from awkwardness rather than guilt. “Bro, we—yeah, tyrants have gotta die, that’s true. That’s a pretty important part of my philosophy. Wilbur did a lot of bad stuff. I was on his side in blowing up the country, but—not the other stuff. And my issue was with L’Manberg, y’know? Not Wilbur specifically. Like—like, if I really wanted to kill tyrants, I would’ve killed Tubbo.”

“You did,” Tommy pointed out.

Techno groaned in exasperation. “We’ve been over this. We’ve been over this a couple times, I think, actually. I was peer-pressured.”

And Tommy knew then that that was just his way of avoiding saying that he’d been too afraid to die, so he let the excuse lie; it was true—they had gone over it.

“If you still think I wanted to kill Tubbo, why didn’t I kill Schlatt, then?” Techno asked. “You know no one in that lame excuse for a cabinet could actually fight me—and who d’you think of them would’ve appreciated my dentistry skills? I don’t—it’s not always about killin’ the people responsible. If you can make them stop without killin’ them, you should.”

“Annnnd now I’m getting moralized at by a warlord.”

“I didn’t mean—” Techno stopped. A few moments later, he began again more firmly, some kind of fire lighting in his eyes. “I wish Dream wasn’t dead, yeah. He was a good ally to have on our side, and I didn’t—I didn’t just free him from prison because I owed him a favor or because I think prison’s inherently oppressive or because they were torturin’ him in there or whatever—all those things are true, though, by the way. I freed him because he—he was my friend. And I’m—I’m not going to apologize for that, for carin’ about the guy, but I’m sorry he hurt you.”

“Do you think that’s even close to enough to making it okay?” Woah. Tommy was right back to being pissed—man, it was difficult trying to argue with two people while you were laying flat on your back in a bed after being nuclear-exploded, but he was making a valiant attempt at it. “He—he fucking traumatized me. I still can’t fucking craft shit without feelng like he’s gonna somehow take it from me! I still have to keep arguing with myself about whether any of my friends even care if I’m alive or not. All of that is because of him!”

“No,” Phil said. And Tommy was ready to jump right on him, the sympathy of earlier be damned, but he continued before he could, “No, it’s not Dream’s fault. It’s mine.”

Techno protested, “Phil—”

Phil crossed his arms, looking straight into Tommy’s eyes, who shivers at the ice in them—the ice, or maybe the melting of it, faced finally with the fire of all the emotion he so rarely showed. His voice was trembling with it, rising in volume until he was nearly shouting, “You would never have trusted Dream like you did if I didn’t fucking abandon you when you were a kid! If I was around and raised you like—like a real father should, then neither you nor Wilbur would’ve tried to kill youselves—”

The words cut off abruptly, like a disc being plucked from a jukebox before the resolving of the musical phrase—Tommy realized just a beat later that Wilbur had come in, had said sharply, “Stop talking, Phil,” and that was exactly when Phil had gone silent—or been silenced.

Wilbur smiled down at Tommy. “Figured you probably didn’t want all of that shouting when you’re trying to rest.”

“Are you here to yell at me, too?” Tommy grumbled, and Wilbur just laughed.

“No. No, Tommy. I’m not going to yell at you,” he said (Tommy hated it, but he couldn’t help the buzz of pride warming his chest—what had he come to, that being told that he wouldn’t be scolded felt the same as being praised?). “Actually, I’m proud of you. I’m proud of you for finally standing up for yourself and putting an end to that asshole.”

Tommy said, “Thanks, Wil. See, at least someone understands.”

Techno didn’t respond, and neither did Phil. Something felt wrong about Wilbur’s praise, like maybe he didn’t entirely agree with it, but he couldn’t quite figure out what the problem was. Dream was an asshole, and now he was dead, and Tommy didn’t regret it!

… at least, he didn’t think he did.

But the argument was over; nobody seemed to have changed their minds on whatever opinion they came into the conversation with, but somehow that never seemed to happen when they fought. They’d all just given up on getting anyone else on their side. And Tommy was kind of sick of listening to people argue, like Wilbur had assumed—especially with Phil’s guilt making him feel uncomfortable, on uncertain ground, and with Techno arguing in favor of mercy for the man he was convinced had been the main one responsible for ruining his life. Maybe he knocked over the first domino and started the conflict, but Dream was the one that had made it serious, more than just a kid fucking around with his friends. He’d done the same kind of shit to Tubbo, back in the day, and he wasn’t proud of it, but Tubbo had been chill about it and talked to him and he’d stopped—

“So, uh. Do any of you guys know, like, how I survived?” he asked, partially to change the subject and partially because he was genuinely wondering. “Because as far as I’m aware—and I’m aware of many things, they call me the—uh—the Wary-er. The Warier—for a reason—” Techno snorts. “—people don’t just survive nuclear explosions. Not without fucking PPE or some shit.”

Wilbur grinned. “Three guesses.”

Tommy growled at him, but he just raised one eyebrow, clearly refusing to tell him the truth until he played through this little game. Come on, were they fucking twelve?

“Give me your three guesses,” Wilbur ordered.

They all came rushing out at once, the words practically tripping over themselves in their haste to follow Wilbur’s instructions: “Uh—gods fucking around, Tubbo didn’t actually make a nuke ‘cause honestly I have no fucking idea how he learned how nuclear physics fucking works—like, do we have textbooks and shit around here? Or did he just fucking guess?—or, I don’t know, did we all get superpowers? Because that would be fucking cool, and I don’t think this server is capable of doing cool things to us.”

“Ding-ding-ding!” Wilbur loudly imitated a ‘correct’ buzzer. “Superpowers, I mean. We got superpowers!”

Tommy blinked. “Wait—really? Fucking—shit, man. I guess that’s what always happens when nuclear explosions go off in stories. But what’s everybody’s power?”

He hoped he got a good one, something powerful. Something he could beat people up with, perhaps! Nobody would dare to fight him if he had The Best Power Ever. Not even Technoblade. Not that he knew what kind of superpower would be enough to win a fight against the Blade.

“We’re still workshopping names for some of them,” Wilbur explained. “because I don’t know enough about superpowers to know what all of them are called. And neither does Techno, for the record—”

“I told you we can just describe them. They don’t need names, just—"

Wilbur ignored him. “But I’m calling mine ‘Siren’! See, I can just—give someone an order and they have to obey. They have to obey me, no matter what. But I think it’s only one at a time. Like, I can’t tell Techno to both ‘spin in a circle’ and ‘sit down’.”

Techno was busy spinning in a circle like Wilbur told him to—which was fucking hilarious, and Tommy couldn’t suppress his giggles at watching the fearsome Blade twirl on one foot, his pink braid sweeping around his shoulder—when the second command was spoken, and so when his spin was completed he kept standing, just glaring at Wilbur like he’d kicked his puppy.

“Really, bro?” Techno grumbled. “Man, you couldn’t think of anything cool for me to do? Just spinning in a circle—what am I, a top?”

“I’m not really interested in your preferences, man,” Wilbur joked, and Techno growled in exasperation.

“What about you, Phil?” Tommy asked. “D’your wings work, now?”

Phil shook his head, and a pang of guilt hit Tommy suddenly, though he ignored it—he knew how much his father loved flying, back before Wilbur’s explosion got him so injured that he couldn’t balance in the air anymore. He never talked about how much he missed it, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel that way—"I can, like, shadow-travel? Teleport from one shadow to the other. It feels like a strange power for me, but I guess it would be weird for them all to be connected to our characters.”

“That—that does not seem as strong as Wilbur’s. I think you got scammed, Phil,” Tommy said. “I think the nuke fucking hated you in particular.”

Techno laughed. “Ask Tubbo what his is.”

“Well, Tubbo’s not fucking here,” Tommy pointed out. “so I can’t, actually. But you can tell me yours! I bet you have a shit power. I bet you—fucking—you didn’t even get a power.”

He shrugged. “You can believe that if you want.”

“No! I didn’t mean that, I didn’t fucking mean that. Tell me. You gotta tell me, Big T. What, are you going to deprive the sick little boy of getting to know your secrets? I’m so sickly I might not make it,” he riffed. “and what if my dying wish was to know what your power is? You going to refuse me this very reasonable request while I’m on my deathbed, Technoblade?”

Techno rolled his eyes. “If you were dying, maybe you’d shut up.”

“Tell meeeee,” he whined.

“Fine, fine. It’s not that good of a power, anyway. I can change temperatures.”

“Huh?”

Wilbur said, “Techno’s underselling it. He means he can make fire. I saw him do it.”

“It’s not makin’ fire,” Techno protested. “It’s changin’ temperatures. I can’t start fires out of nowhere—it has to be flammable materials and there has to be oxygen and all of that. So it’s not really makin’ fire.”

“You can take things that are not on fire, and make them on fire,” Wilbur argued. “I think that counts. Right, Tommy? That counts as making fire.”

“I’m a glorified flint and steel!”

“Wait,” Tommy started. “can you cool things off, too? ‘Cause my sheets are really fucking sweaty and I think I probably have a fever.”

“Probably?” Wilbur whirled on Phil, glaring down at him. “You didn’t check his temperature when he first woke up?”

Phil spluttered, “Wh—I—you—there wasn’t really time! I had other things to do!”

“Huh, like we’ve never heard that one before.”

“Wil, stop,” Tommy said. He’d already had this argument with Phil, and he was very much not interested in hearing it again. The past was in the past. All they had was the present, and it was stupid to get mad at Phil for things he couldn’t change.

Wilbur sighed.

“Phil,” he said, more softly but with the same tone of cool command he’d used earlier, when he was using his siren power. There was nothing forgiving in that voice, nothing that could be argued with, even by Tommy—he’d think about that more when he was done with this conversation. “go get the thermometer. I know you have one.”

Phil obeyed, of course.

“You don’t gotta—” Tommy said. “You don’t gotta baby me. I’m fine. I’m awake, I’m talking. I’m not fucking delirious or whatever. I’m fine, Wilbur. I’m just—”

“Also,” Techno piped up. “I haven’t tried changin’ the temperature inside of a person, yet. My powers aren’t precise enough for that to be anywhere close to a good idea. I think it actually would count as a bad idea. A really bad idea. You’re just goin’ to have to sleep it off like a normal person.”

“Can’t really do that with all of you fuckers around,” Tommy pointed out, and Techno immediately looked like he was going to ask if he wanted them to leave, so he answered that question before he could even start to ask it. “But—no, don’t leave. I don’t—I want to know what’s going on. I got fucking blown up, and I still don’t know how I survived. I know you have theories. You’re the kinda guy that always has a fucking theory.”

“I have a hypothesis,” Techno corrected.

“Same difference.”

“No, it’s not—whatever.” Techno looked at Wilbur, for… confirmation? Help in explaining, maybe—but was it really so unbelievably complicated that he couldn’t explain it by himself? Did Tommy really fuck up the world that much? “We think—and I’m emphasizin’ that this isn’t set in stone, because we really don’t know that much more than you do about what’s goin’ on—that whatever your power is… stopped the nuke from killing you. Or brought you back, maybe?”

“That’s actually what I wanted to ask you about, Tommy,” Wilbur said. “What—what happened, before the nuke hit? Did you feel weird? Or, like. Did you feel like something ‘turned on’ inside you—like a lightswitch or like something warm spreading through your body?”

“I felt…” Tommy tried to remember, struggling to push through the cobwebs that had built up over the memory of that horrible prison and the mess that its ending had been. He’d just been so scared. “It just hurt. Like someone was stabbing me in the brain. And my skin hurt.

“It kind of felt like—” he glanced up at Wilbur, knowing he’d understand the feeling and neither Techno nor Phil would. “like being revived.”

Wilbur sucked in a sharp breath, seemingly remembering his own limbo and the revival that had ripped him out of it—Tommy had always thought it must’ve been worse for him, both the dying and the coming back, since he didn’t even know that the Revival Book was a thing. But it was bad, regardless. It fucking hurt, to be dragged back from Hell. To break the rules of life and death themselves, even though he wasn’t the one to mess with that shit.

Well. Maybe he had, now. If Techno was right.

“So I’m like a fucking—a living Revival Book?” he asked. “I brought myself back from the dead, you’re saying?”

“We don’t know,” Wilbur answered, looking profoundly uncomfortable. “Maybe you brought yourself back. Maybe you just never died.”

Tommy thought aloud: “I don’t—I didn’t go to Limbo. I don’t think so, at least, unless it was really fast. But my limbo’s not—it’s not like yours, you know? It’s just a black void. So maybe I did go there, and I just don’t know I did. Or—it was a black void, the first time.”

“They’re different every time?” Techno asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t fucking—” Something was pressing between Tommy’s eyes. He took a deep breath in, trying to settle his nerves. He didn’t want to think about this. He didn’t want to! But he had to say it, even if his voice was quiet and faintly trembling: “Dream would know. He—he and Punz. They were experimenting with the Revival Book, trying to figure out how it worked. He killed me in the prison before the nuke and then they brought me back, and my limbo was different that time than it was the first time.”

“What was it like?”

“It was—it was weird, Wilbur,” he answered, still not daring to raise his voice, not looking up at the man he was talking to.

He hadn’t gotten the chance to really think about all of the implications of what he’d seen, before—obviously—and now it was all crashing in on him, with no care for importance or comprehendibility. Just one chaotic tide of emotions and thoughts and fears that he could barely even begin to sift through. There was something important there, he knew—some realization he’d had that he’d lost when the nuke hit and everything he knew ended—but it was like a needle in a haystack. He couldn’t find it again.

He kept talking, though. “It was so fucking weird. Because I don’t—I don’t think it was my limbo, really. I think it was Dream’s. ‘Cause it—it was memories that I wasn’t there for. Memories from before I came to the server. And it wasn’t—I wouldn’t have imagined something like that.”

“Like what?” Phil asked softly from the doorway.

“It was… It was before I came. Back when it was just Dream and George and Sapnap.” The words poured out of him relentlessly—if he thought about what he was saying, he’d probably stop. But did the river think about the water that flowed through it? “They were just fucking around. Having fun. They—they seemed happy.”

“Happy,” Wilbur echoed.

“It wasn’t really like—nothing was happening, even. Nothing important, nothing that I really needed to know about.” Nothing he wanted to know about. “I guess it just—he was a person, you know? A pretty shit person, tell you the truth, but… I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel anymore. Stop asking me about this,” he ordered—pleaded.

His family was quiet, then. Tommy still didn’t look up from where his hands twisted in the sheet he’d pulled into his lap—he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t fucking know what was going on, and he wasn’t even sure he knew what had happened before the nuke! Maybe he didn’t know anything at all about the people he’d loved and the people he’d hated—he was pissed at Wilbur for leaving, both when he’d died and when he went to fucking Utah (which, again, what the fuck?), but he couldn’t help but feel grateful that he was here to take care of him, to remind Phil to take his temperature and ask him questions in that gentle way that he could refuse but tricked him into thinking he didn’t actually want to refuse to answer. He was pissed at Phil and Techno, for their general godly-bitchness and for letting Dream out of prison even though they should’ve know that it was only going to make Tommy feel worse and for neglecting him and Wilbur as kids—but he also just wanted them to stay. To take care of him. To use all of their strength to fucking protect him, for once, instead of leaving him to fend for himself. Techno was the only person of the server that Dream had been too scared to fight—he was the fucking Blade, but for some fucking reason he just let Dream get away with everything he’d done. And Dream—

Tommy didn’t fucking want to think about Dream at all. Didn’t want to think about all the shit Dream did to him, how he manipulated and twisted his emotions, played with Tommy’s attachments like they meant nothing, like it was a fucking game. Like Tommy, just like the rest of the server, belonged to him.

But maybe… maybe Dream really had just wanted to fix his server. Maybe he did just want to go back to that paradise he’d had before Tommy, back when it was just him and his friends and everybody did what he wanted (what if he just wanted what Tommy wanted—didn’t he exile Tommy for the same motivation that had caused Tommy to want Dream put in prison, and didn’t Tommy want him dead for the same reason?)—did that absolve him? Was that enough to forgive all of the horrible things he’d done? Tommy had nearly killed himself because of Dream. He’d—he'd nearly killed himself twice. And Dream didn’t even fucking care, because life and death were nothing to him, just states of being you could hop between at his will; he didn’t understand how terrifying death felt—even when you knew that somebody was capable of bringing you back, you could never really trust that they would. And Tommy would never have been happy to put his life in Dream’s hands. If Dream died and he had the Book, he wouldn’t have revived him, after all.

While he was thinking, Phil approached with the thermometer. Tommy opened his mouth and closed around it, still not paying attention to his surroundings.

“99.3,” Phil said. “Not bad, but I’ll get you a cool cloth—I mean, if you want, I—”

“Go,” Wilbur told him, sparing Tommy the trial of telling him himself.

“Is every command you give magic, now?” he asked Wilbur. “Or do you have to, like, make it that way intentionally?”

Wilbur’s head tilted to the side, considering. “I… I think so? I haven’t really tried to give a direct instruction that someone could refuse. Not yet. Usually, when I’m telling people to do things, I’m intending for them to actually do it. My intention is all that matters though. My intention gives the command its power, without my having to expend energy though—it doesn’t feel like… like I’m more tired after using Siren, anyway.”

“Try it on me,” Tommy suggested.

“If anyone could resist mind control, it would be Tommy,” Techno agreed.

“Wait—so do you want me to try to make you do something?” Wilbur asked. “Or do you want me to give you a command that I don’t actually want you to follow and see what happens with that?”

“You should try the latter one, first,” Techno said before Tommy could think of what he would answer—his brain felt like goop, anyway, like every thought had to come through dial-up internet instead of being transmitted as quickly as normal. “Since it would probably be easier. Practice makes perfect, right? And baby steps are good.”

“Don’t call me a baby.”

“Okay,” Wilbur said. “Here goes: Tommy, put your hand on your head.”

Both of Tommy’s hands jolted, and he gripped the sheets with white knuckles to keep them from moving—wait, which hand did he mean? And where on his head? He clung to the uncertainties inherent in Wilbur’s statement as his lifebuoy from drowning in the desire for obedience. His nervous system felt like it was on fire, overwhelmed by the sensation of disobeying. Terror seized him. He was getting it wrong. Dream was going to be so pissed at him for that—Dream was going to blow up his stuff and there was nothing he could do about it, he was helpless and obedient and ashamed and no one was going to help him, and—

“You don’t have to do it,” Wilbur said softly, though just as powerfully—maybe even more Siren was in those words than the earlier order that had been meant to be, he remembered now, his choice. It was supposed to be the easy one to disobey and yet he’d struggled so much he’d nearly had a panic attack in front of his brother—and “brother”—and father.

He flushed.

“Don’t feel bad about it,” Phil tried to reassure him (huh, he got back quick—oh, yeah, shadow-jumping. That would probably help him move throughout the house more speedily). “You’re trying to fight against mind control, mate. None of us were able to.”

Tommy shrugged.

“Seriously,” Wilbur said. “He’s right. Don’t—”

He cut himself off sharply. It took Tommy a few ticks to realize why: Wilbur was trying to avoid ordering him not to feel the way he felt, since he knew that Tommy’s brain would have no choice but to obey. That—that was kind of him.

Phil placed the wet cloth on his forehead, and he shivered at the ice-cold feeling before relaxing into it. It felt like ice cream on a hot summer day, like jumping into a lake to escape the sun. It was a gentle balm to the headache that was starting to pinch between his eyes.

“Rest, Tommy,” he said. “We can try again later.”

“Wait—can someone stay with me?” he asked, suddenly nervous.

Normally, he wouldn’t ask—he’d either refuse to admit that he wanted the comfort of someone watching the door while he slept or refuse to sleep unless someone did (undoubtedly with some blustering about how lucky they must be to spend so much time around him, or how they were boring him to sleep so it was only fair that they keep being boring while he slept). But he was feeling unsure of himself, currently. A lot had changed, and, for once, he really just wished someone else would give him the answers. And it wasn’t as if they hadn’t seen him scared, anyway.

“If you insist,” Wilbur agreed, sitting in the chair beside the bed without waiting for anyone else to respond.

And even though Tommy knew that Wilbur was definitely the least physically-powerful person of the three—although with Siren, the balance had shifted some—he couldn’t help the flicker of relief that curled inside of him that it would be his brother who was staying by his bedside while he slept. There was something cruel at the tail of that relief, but he resolutely refused to acknowledge the feeling.

They left, and Tommy’s eyes dropped closed as he listened to both Wilbur and his own breathing, soft in the quiet like a blanket. Wilbur’s palm rested on the back of one of his hands, like he was reminding himself that Tommy was still here, that he would never go away again—he’d always been possessive over the things he loved and especially the things he’d created (and there was never an argument that Wilbur had been the one most responsible for creating the person that Tommy was). Normally that would chafe. But, again, things were very far from normal at the moment.

“You’re gonna be okay,” Wilbur said softly. “You’re going to be just fine, king. We’ll help Tubbo and figure out all the details of everybody’s powers, and we’ll be all good. We’ll be as happy as can be, you and I—happy as a dog with a bone.”

And even though that was almost word-for-word what Wilbur had said when the two of them had left to go to the server way back when—and even though this was the first mention of Tubbo needing help with something he’d heard since waking up and he knew that after he’d rested he was going to yell at someone (probably multiple someones) for not telling him as soon as he was conscious that his best friend was in trouble—he couldn’t help but believe his brother’s words. In that moment, trust was so easy it was blameless.

When he woke—consciousness returning soft as a sunrise or a yawn, his limbs sprawled and loose on the bed, his foot falling off the side—Wilbur was gone.

Irritation growled in his throat like a dragon spawning fire. He’d said he’d stay. Normal people didn’t think that ‘stay with me while I sleep’ meant ‘leave before I wake up’, right? He definitely didn’t, and he was willing to bet that Wilbur hadn’t innocently misinterpreted his request. Not like it’s the first time he left.

He drags himself out of bed and stands alone in the room, bare feet on wood planks.

The room he’d been sleeping in for days now but hadn’t yet had the chance to explore is small and devoid of decoration: just four white walls, chair and a little nighttable with a burned-out candle, plus the white bed on the spruce plank floor. The color scheme matches, but he doesn’t remember Techno and Phil having a room so barren. It didn’t match them—they always had things hung up on the walls, at the very least: posters and paintings and things of that nature. Was this a newly-constructed room, made just for him? Made as if—as if it would be permanent.

Last time, he’d been stuck in the basement.

The only person he really wanted to talk to is Tubbo—the only person he knew that stuck around after the nuke fell but he hadn’t spoken to yet. Phil, Techno, and Wilbur were nice, sure, but he had more than enough of his family yesterday. Tubbo was always something like a brother to him too, anyway. And if anyone knew what was going on here, it would be the guy who was part of the plan from the beginning; Phil had been so upset about Tommy not asking him for help before jumping to the nuclear option, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel too guilty about leaving him out.

His communicator had been left in the drawer of the nighttable, along with the cloth that Phil put on his forehead the last night. He tapped out a message to Tubbo: ‘Whrre are yoy’. He couldn’t give less of a shit about the typos—Tubbo should know him well enough at this point to feel lucky that at least one letter per word was correct.

He shoved the communicator into his pocket and pushed open the door to the room.

It led into a narrow but well-lit hallway with another door on the other side, which he walked down as briskly as his still-weak legs would allow. Prime, did they not know how fucking eerie a narrow hallway with no windows was, expecially when you couldn’t see what was behind the other door? Fucking immortals. But the door was just spruce wood and not locked, so Tommy opened it, resisting the urge to sneak in like a thief or a wild animal—he had a right to leave his room! He was going to walk in with his head held high and give his family a piece of his fucking mind and—

And no one was there.

The room was the main one in Technoblade’s cabin. It seemed like he hadn’t changed the interior around at all since Tommy sought refuge here after escaping from his exile. Chests lined the white walls—the same walls as in Tommy's room, because Techno was not as creative as he liked to act like he was—along with a crafting table, a few furnaces, and a brewing stand. Tommy stared at the trapdoor he'd hid behind when Dream came to look for him for a long moment. Techno had protected him then, but it had just been a surface-level thing, not a real alliance. The second Tommy decided he cared about Tubbo, cared about more than Techno's little crusade of "justice", the Blade had run right back to Dream. Had fucking blown up L'Manberg with Dream. Let Dream out of prison, and still, even now he was still trying to excuse his behavior with ideals and principles and petty philosophies that meant nothing in the cold light of reality. The weapon and the wielder—was it a fucking coincidence that they would always pick each other's side? Tommy knew better now than to trust Techno. 

Tubbo had sold him out to Dream too, once. But he apologized, and Tommy knew why he did it, anyway—Tubbo didn't have the physical strength or fighting prowess to fight Dream, like Techno did, and he had a country to protect. He made a bad choice, but not even Tommy knew what Exile would take out of him before it happened (you could argue, probably, that they both should've—that it was actually pretty obvious that the guy who's brother had just killed himself and nearly taken him and his whole country down with him wouldn't be likely to respond well to being thrown out of that very country, the country he'd loved mostly because of it's association with the good days of messing around with his brother and his friends). Tubbo always tried his best.

If there was anyone Tommy could trust with his life, it would be Tubbo. 

He snuck a few bits of steak and a couple golden apples—sue him—out of Techno's chests for safe-keeping, and checked his communicator. No response. That was fine. He'd just have to go look for Tubbo on his own! The server wasn't that big, and there weren't that many places Tubbo would go if he needed safety, which, given the nuclear explosion he was directly co-responsible for, he'd probably want. Tommy knew a little something about trying to find safety. But while he tended to search for other people that could protect him, like Techno and Phil, Tubbo felt better when he was on his own in a familiar place. So. He'd be in Snowchester. Which was… he opened a couple more chests before he found a map of the server he could take—luckily, not super far from Techno and Phil's base!

Tommy's smile wiped clear off of his face when he opened the door to the cabin. First, the arctic was cold—he was wearing a thick sweater and pants, but the freezing wind felt like it stabbed through all of that like it wasn’t even there to cut into his bone as soon as the door opened a crack—but more importantly than that: what the fuck happened?

Well. He knew what happened, obviously. The nuke happened. But he hadn’t—Prime, the sky was black—he hadn’t expected this incredible degree of devastation, especially not so far from the site of the explosion. He thought he knew how bombs worked. He’d watched a country fall twice, and neither time had been anywhere close to this. Smoke curled in his nose, covering the whole scene in a fog of bitter wrongness.

How had he survived the blast?

And what made it worse was that while Tommy wasn’t great with directions, he was pretty fucking sure the map in his hands showed that he’d have to go closer to the prison to get to Snowchester. Fuck. Sure, he was a little curious, morbidly, about what the aftereffects of the bomb looked like when you got closer to the true epicenter of the blast—how impossibly powerful Tubbo had made his deterrance weapon—but fear was building ever stronger in his chest. Sure, he had survived the initial explosion but that didn’t necessarily mean he was invulnerable to everything nuclear weaponry did to the world. Breathing in smoke would be bad enough on its own, considering that it was noticeable even here and would surely only get thicker, but he wasn’t super stoked to get cancer.

He'd never expected to live long enough for that to matter, before. It seemed stupidly arrogant even now to think that it would—that a disease would be his end and not some asshole with  grudge, like he’d always thought before. He’d always thought that Dream would be the one to put him down for good. Dream probably thought that too. He almost did—Tommy almost died to kill him. But now Dream was dead, and Tommy had to find some kind of life in the aftermath of the server that seemed so… unfinished, without him. It was the Dream SMP after all, but now—now it really could be the Tommy SMP, instead.

Or maybe the fucking Nuclear Fallout SMP, as things might very well be. As funny as it would be to rename the server after himself—in one final fuck-you to the green boy—he didn’t really think he deserved to lay claim to it. Not after what he’d done.

He decided against borrowing one of Techno’s horses to add to the map and food he’d taken from the chests. Carl was a fast horse, but he was just as loyal to his master as he was to him in return. Tommy had tried to ride him once and promptly got bucked off. He wasn’t in the mood to mess with a hostile horse, and it was quick enough to just run on his own legs. They’d been stiff and kind of weak when he first got out of the bed, but he felt better in the—well, not fresh—air, so he was going to blame it solely on staying still in bed for so long and ignore it. He’d walk if he got tired of running, but he was adamant that he’d get to Snowchester without any external help.

And so, he set off.

It was easy on the packed-down snow inside the fence that surrounded Phil and Techno’s base, but once he left the gate and had to contend with snow that went up to mid-calf, he was moving a lot slower. Running was completely out, then; he’d walk.

And walk.

And walk.

And walk.

Seriously, this trek had never felt anywhere close to this long before. Maybe it was the bad air, maybe the heavy snow, maybe his body still recovering from the explosion he’d magically survived—that was one point in the ‘never died’ column, actually: he’d felt almost back to new—physically at least—only a couple of hours after getting revived the first time—but his feet felt like they were made of netherite. The wind was whipping him in the face, because of course he was walking upwind. He would have a lifelong grudge against snow and arctic environments after this, swear on his life.

But he saw the huge building of Snowchester on the horizon, so he kept pushing forward—also, he couldn’t exactly turn back.

Wait, where were all the trees? Weren’t there usually more trees here? They’d been replaced with gray stumps of ash dotting the snow, burned away to nothing. He took in a deep breath and cringed at the sting at the back of his throat—this was not going to be good for his future lung health. All that avoiding Wilbur’s secondhand smoke, and it wouldn’t even matter.

The door was open. Not like it had been done purposefully (as if anyone would leave a door open on purpose in this server or this freezing climate—you’d be letting both thieves and the wind in, and neither one would you ever be able to catch after the fact), but absently, half-open more than anything and swaying in the wind.

Tommy nudged it open with his shoulder.

“Tubbo?” he called as he entered.

Probably not a good idea to announce his arrival so obviously, but Tubbo still hadn’t responded to his message and anyone who would be here for malicious reasons would have had the wherewithal to close the damn door. He crept over the wooden floors either way, eyes scanning for Tubbo, for anything. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. Though he hadn’t spent too much time in Snowchester—it belonged to Tubbo and Ranboo, who both once would’ve been fine with him breaking and entering in search of a good time but as of late hadn’t been so chill about it. It was fine. They were married, and Tommy wasn’t interested in being their third wheel, so he kept to himself and hung out with them in common spaces, like their well-loved bench that was the undisputably best place on the server to watch the sunset.

Prime, this place was massive. Rich fucks. Didn’t they ever worry about who might be hiding in any of these dark corners, or whether they’d even notice if someone stole from their chests or set up a trap?

When he reached the stairs, he shouted again, “Tubbo? Ranboo? Don’t fucking tell me you left, too. You made this fucking nuke, you hear me! If I have to deal with it, so do you, bitch!”

No one responded but the echoes of his words bouncing against the walls.

He ascended the stairs, heart thumping anxiously in his head as he half-walked, half-pulled himself up with the railing. No one came out from the bedroom. No one said anything. The mansion was massive and majestic and empty—horribly, eerily empty. The kind of empty where it was painfully obvious that there should be someone there. It gnawed at Tommy’s ribs even when he rubbed a hand over his sternum to try to quiet the nerves.

A few minutes and rooms later, he was forced to accept that Tubbo wasn’t here. The strength went out of his knees and he collapsed into a sitting position on the floor, back pressed against the wall. He stared down at the stairs he’d have to descend to get out of here. He’d been so sure, was the thing,and now he didn’t have a snowman’s chance in the Nether of finding Tubbo. Phil was probably just wrong and he’d already left with Ranboo. Maybe he’d even lied from the start, and Tubbo had never cared enough to sit by his bedside as he slept off the consequences of the plan they’d made together. He was probably ecstatic to run off with his husband and never have to deal with Tommy ever again—

But that didn’t matter. Okay? It didn’t fucking matter what Tubbo thought, or what Tubbo did. Tommy was his own fucking person and he was done with trying to chase after people that didn’t ever give a shit about him!

His face pressed against his knees, Tommy ignored the stinging behind his eyes, the heated frustration that made his face feel uncomfortably warm. He ignored the wetness that dripped into the fabric of his pants. He ignored the way his next inhale sounded suspiciously like a sniffle. And he definitely ignored the shaking of his shoulders with every quick, shallow breath. He wasn’t crying, he wasn’t. He was just… sitting here. To get his bearings.

And if when he finally got up he had to rub his eyes—well, no one was there to see it, were they?

He glanced down at his communicator, not expecting anything, just betting on the slim chance—and saw a message from Tubbo reading, ‘if you wnnt to see me dont’. ‘don’t what?’ he wanted to respond but didn’t get the chance before Tubbo sent another message ‘im in pandrra’.

Tommy’s eyes widened.

Pandora? Why would Tubbo be in the Vault, the very center of where the nuke had been exploded? That was so obviously the worst possible place to be right now, and Tubbo would know that. So either he was lying—for as much as Tommy’s trust in Tubbo seemed to rise and fall dramatically he was, like, ninety-eight percent sure he wouldn’t do that just to hurt Tommy—or the Vault actually was safe. Maybe it could function as a nuclear shelter or something? But then wouldn’t Techno, Phil, and Wilbur be there too? Tubbo wouldn’t abandon all of them, even if he was pissed at Tommy for some reason. So that also couldn’t be it, and the only logical conclusion left was that Tubbo was right smack in the middle of the highest nuclear radiation zone on the server and that he wanted Tommy to go there too. Yeah, he told him not to come see him (or at least, that was what he was interpreting from that annoyingly-vague message), but he should know by now that Tommy’s curiosity would overwrite any warnings he received. If he really didn’t want Tommy to find him, he wouldn’t’ve told him where he was at all.

In the end, it didn’t really matter what Tommy thought was happening with Tubbo. He didn’t have anywhere else to go, and his best friend was hurt. Nothing would stop him from finding Tubbo: not radiation, not another fucking crater, and definitely not Tubbo himself.

The map showed that it was directly south but it would be all a water trip, so he took some wood from a chest to make a boat, and soon he was standing on the beach, his little boat half in the water and swaying with the gentle waves.

He didn’t know how much time he had. He had no idea what was going on, the same as it’d been since he’d woken up from certain death, but not knowing if Tubbo was okay was definitely worse than just not knowing if he himself was okay. Tubbo deserved better than this hot mess of a server. He kept paddling, eyes trained on the horizon, on the sharp black rectangle that expanded out from it; the silhouette was usually ugly even to Tommy’s unrefined architecture taste, a half-formed black mold on the blue sky, but with the gray smoke clouding out most of the light, it seemed to fit. It was menacing. He’d promised himself that he’d never go back inside that place, and yet he was still driving directly towards it.

At least it was for a good reason, this time. His motivation was to help a friend, not crush an enemy—he was too cynical now to believe in karma, but he thought it would be nice if it was real. This should give him points, if anybody cared enough to track them.

He hadn’t really spent the time to worry about how he would get into the prison, since nobody with the keycards for it was still on the server, but it turned out not to be a problem. The walls of the prison were mostly intact, if shortened and battered, but the roof was completely gone. It must have been ripped off by the nuke like a kid breaking a toy in half or a person tearing bread to eat.

He stared up at the ruins of the server’s most terrifying structure and felt distantly satisfied. Then he started digging sand.

Building up to the top of the wall adjacent to where he stood was both painfully slow and disappointingly quick—Tommy needed to get in there, but that didn’t mean he was necessarily excited about it. Some of his worst memories were born in that cell. He died in that cell, and he was scared some days that parts of him were still stuck there, bits of his broken souls absorbed by the obsidian walls, his skin and blood cells crushed into them by Dream’s fists (he wasn’t the only one to bleed on that floor, as long as Dream and Techno weren’t lying about Dream being tortured in there, but that didn’t make him feel any better about it)—and once he got to the top, he forced himself not to hesitate before pouring out his water bucket and jumping into the falls it made.

No sooner had his feet hit the obsidian floor than he was stepping down in the crater. Water and lava was puddled on the low spots of the dirt in places, but mostly it was solid, if a little muddy. There was more dirt below the prison than he’d expected for something that looked from the outside like it was mostly floating over the ocean.

Salt and smoke and ash mixed in Tommy’s nose, stinging with every breath as the polluted air went down his throat and into his lungs. If it had been noticeable at Phil and Techno’s and annoying at Snowchester, it was just plain bad here. So bad that he ripped a rectangular stretch of fabric off the end of his shirt—he was still wearing the sweater they’d given him in the arctic over it, so he wasn’t really just wearing a crop top (not that there would’ve been anything emasculating or wrong about it if he was—Tommy was too much of a manly man to ever be emasculated)—and put it over his nose and mouth. That was what Wilbur told him to do when he was a kid if he was ever near a fire, so it probably worked here too, right?

As much as anything would.

Tubbo was sitting cross-legged in the very bottom of the crater, water swishing up over his legs. He was watching Tommy, but he was too far away for him to be able to read anything in his eyes. He raised one hand, slowly, and waved.

Tommy waved back; the ridiculousness of the situation was not lost on him, but there was nothing else he could do. He kept walking down into the crater like he was magnetized. He couldn’t turn back now even if he wanted to. Even if it felt like he walking directly into his own doom, descending into Limbo with his eyes open and his heart pounding in his ears.

“Tubbo?” he asked as he got closer. “What are you doing here?”

He was only a few blocks away now; he still couldn’t make out anything but cold deadness in Tubbo’s eyes.

His voice was just as flat, devoid of affectation. “Hey, king. I told you not to come, didn’t I?”

“You told me where to go though,” Tommy pointed out. “You wouldn’t have done that if you really didn’t want to be fucking found. You know me better than that.”

“Do I know you?”

Tommy took a step back, hackles rising. “Excuse me?”

Tubbo averted his eyes. “You should go. You shouldn’t be here. It’s not—I don’t have anything for you.”

Oh.

“Who fucking told you I want shit?” Tommy plopped his ass down beside Tubbo, not waiting for a response. “You’re my best friend, even if you’re obsessed with bees and too fucking cautious about shit. I’m not going to just leave you here.”

“I’m poison.”

Huh? Was that metaphorical, or—regardless: “Do I look like I give a fuck?”

“I’m going to hurt you if you stay here,” Tubbo said. Now, his eyes looked haunted.

Tommy didn’t budge, but his next question was quieter, more unsure. “Is…is that your power? From the nuke?”

Tubbo laughed without mirth. “My power. More like my curse.”

“Can you—can you tell me what it’s going to do to me if I stay anyway?” Tommy asked—getting clear answers out of Tubbo right now felt like drawing blood from a stone. “Because, man, if it’s just a paper cut or a stomachache or whatever, I think I’ll—”

“It’ll kill you,” Tubbo said.

Call him a coward, but he just couldn’t stay down any longer, after that. He didn’t start climbing up out of the crater, though; he was utterly stuck between his love for his friend and his fear for his life—let Phil see this, if he was so worried about whether Tommy wanted to live or not. He did, and that was the problem. He did want to live, so desperately he couldn’t stand it. He just never knew he did until he was staring Death Herself in the face, on a cobblestone tower or a prison cell or here, in the ruins of everything he’d broken with all of his mistakes and all of his selfish misdeeds. But it was never over until it was over, Tommy believed. He’d seen people come back from the dead and he’d done it himself. He’d survived a nuclear bomb directed right at the building he was in. He was friends with gods. He’d seen the unimaginable, the kinds of things normal people would call miracles.

So he just stood there, staring down at Tubbo with narrowed, worried eyes. “What—you… It’ll kill me? How do you know that?”

Tubbo was glaring now—Tommy couldn’t help but feel grateful for it, for the barest look at some kind of emotion, even if it was an angry one. At least it was something. He remembered Exile, after all; he remembered how anger kept him alive when he had nothing more positive or kinder left in him. At least he’d managed to make Tubbo feel something. He stood, pointing a finger a few inches away from Tommy’s chest.

It was trembling. Tubbo was trembling. With rage or fear, Tommy couldn’t tell—but he wasn’t sure it mattered; people acted the same either way. They lashed out to hurt, to protect themselves, to break somone else into dust beneath their heel; they picked whichever motivation they thought would absolve their shame, but they did that afterwards. The action always came before the judgment. If Tubbo really would kill him like he claimed he could, like he claimed he had no choice but to—he would do it now, or he would do it when Tommy continued to piss him off. He wouldn’t premeditate it. He would just do it, and Tommy didn’t think he could fight back. He didn’t think he could run, either. He didn’t want to die, but his fate was sealed unless Tubbo was proven wrong—and any smart gambler would bet on Tubbo being more aware than Tommy, but Tommy had no choice but to bet on himself no matter the odds, like he had his whole damn life.

Tubbo still wasn’t talking.

“You gonna do it?” he asked Tubbo, smiling like the heroes from the stories, smiling like he wasn’t fucking terrified. “You’re so fucking sure you can kill me, but I seem pretty alive to me. I think therefore I am, or whatever the fuck—you ever heard of that?”

“I won’t kill him,” Tubbo breathed. It didn’t sound like he was talking to Tommy at all, anymore. It sounded like he was talking to himself, or maybe his power—convincing himself that he was strong enough to resist… whatever he was busy resisting.

Tommy waited.

Tubbo’s face suddenly screwed up as if he was in pain. “I’m not—I’m not going to kill him. Not going to kill him, not going to kill him…”

He repeated the chant—the commandment, almost—over and over, desperate like if he stopped for just a moment, the deed would be done with or without his permission. His voice stayed at the same unnervingly quiet volume, and the cadence and the pitch of the words was ever identical too. He sounded like a broken music disc, repeating the same snippet of sound in agonized perpetuity.

Even when he collapsed to his knees, hugging them to his chest, he sounded exactly the same.

Tommy wanted to help—not just for the sake of his own life at stake, but simply because his best friend was in obvious pain—but something told him that this battle was something that Tubbo would have to fight alone. He couldn’t join the forces in Tubbo’s mind, after all. But he didn’t run. He had no idea if that was the right choice or not, but he couldn’t just leave Tubbo alone, fighting some horror in his brain. Those demons were his alone, but Tommy could stay by his side.

Just that morning, he had woken up and discovered that his family had abandoned him while he slept, and, while the stakes had been nowhere close to this dire, he knew that anger, that betrayal. The feeling of knowing you should’ve known better than to trust them, the hatred for your own weakest self—the side of you that expected to be treated kindly, and never quite learned that that wasn’t going to happen—and the tiny voice in your head whispering, ‘you deserve better’.

That was the first time Tommy had learned the lesson that anger was better than nothing at all, because at least your anger knew you deserved better than you got, even if you wished nothing more than that you could just accept the way things were, the way they were. And he knew that Tubbo knew that feeling, too.

The very first time they’d met, Tubbo was a bright-eyed kid with a rat’s nest of brown hair that no one bothered to brush for him. He’d been left on Phil’s doorstep in a cardboard box. He didn’t know his father’s name, just that he was angry and drunk and had massive ram horns. Tommy didn’t know anybody who got drunk, since Phil never kept alcohol in the house, as he told Tubbo back then while they both swung on the swing Wilbur had put together in the backyard. He told Tubbo that he thought Phil didn’t keep alcohol because he didn’t want Wilbur drinking it when he wasn’t around.

Little seven-year-old Tubbo had asked him how often Phil was gone, and Tommy told him the truth—he didn’t know it could be seen as something to be ashamed of, back then, that his father went off on his own adventures for months at a time and left his twelve-year-old son to take sole care of his six-year-old brother, that he came home for birthdays but once left just the day after, while there was still cake left (he and Wilbur ate all the leftover cake at once that year, because nobody was around to stop them; they both threw it up afterwards, but it was still one of Tommy’s most cherished childhood memories—they’d grabbed handfuls of cake with their bare hands instead of bothering to cut slices, and he kept eating even after his stomach hurt and the sugar felt so sickly sweet that it hurt his teeth).

Tubbo had gone quiet then, all serious and sympathetic like he was when he was worried about something but didn’t want to admit it—Tommy didn’t know that specific mannerism then, but he would come to figure out all of Tubbo’s tells soon enough—and he’d just said, ‘my dad left too.’

That was the first time Tommy ever really considered that Phil might not actually come back, someday. That if his father could bring himself to abandon his kids for that kind of time, there was nothing those kids could do to keep him from deciding that he actually didn’t want to return. Someday, the crows might just fly away to their master, and there would be no link at all between them. It would be like Phil had never had kids at all. He’d had a nightmare about it that night, and woke up sobbing in Wilbur’s arms as he rubbed his back to try to settle him. Wilbur had yelled at Tubbo about scaring his baby brother, and Tubbo just said, ‘doesn’t he deserve to know?’—a phrase that wasn’t so different from ‘doesn’t he deserve better?’.

Tommy didn’t get better, of course. He got Phil in the gaps between his wars and his forays into the realm of gods and he got Techno when Phil was there and Techno bothered to come with him and he got Wilbur until Wilbur got himself killed. But he got Tubbo, too. Not as a caretaker, but as a friend. The only person he’d known as a kid that could be described as his equal, the only one close to his age. Tubbo wasn’t his brother because Tubbo deserved better than a family as dysfunctional as them, and besides, he wasn’t Kristin or Phil’s kid. But he was the family Tommy chose, without any need for labels to define what they were to each other, just love. Impossibly powerful love.

It was that love that bound Tommy’s feet to the earth beneath him now, that kept him from abandoning Tubbo here like so many people had done to him before.

Suddenly, the chanting that had been repeated so many times that Tommy had been actually able to tune it out cut sharply off. The silence was jarring, broken only by the whistle of the wind through the ruins of the prison and crows cawing overhead. Tubbo was still curled up in the dirt. He was crying, Tommy realized. There was still fresh tears on his cheeks, and his face was red. It must’ve taken a lot of effort to resist whatever it was, especially since Tubbo still wasn’t moving. He was crying, but his shoulders didn’t shake and his body didn’t rock with the emotion; he was crying completely silently and while completely still. Tommy had seen a lot of horrifying shit in his life, especially in the last few years while he was on Dream’s server, but he didn’t think he’d ever witnessed something quiet as unnerving as that.

He knelt beside Tubbo and began to gently comb through his hair with his fingers—Tubbo had always enjoyed that sensation when they were kids, and though it had been a while, Tommy’s hands still remembered exactly how much pressure to use, how much he should let his nails scrape against his friend’s scalp while he did it.

“Guess I was right,” he said softly, just because the silence was starting to irk him and they needed some aesthetic of normalcy even if none of the reality they were in felt like anything less than pure fever dream material. “I told you so, didn’t I? I knew you weren’t going to kill me. You wouldn’t. You like me too much. You wouldn’t let the one actually fun member of the Triple Ts die.”

He jumped subjects abruptly, since Tubbo was obviously not going to respond to anything he said—hell, he probably couldn’t even hear Tommy right now, lost in whatever he’ll his brain had created for him. “I remember when you dyed your hair blond for the first time. Wil was so annoyed about it, remember? Because he thought you’d done it to look more like Phil? He loved you, but I don’t think he liked Phil all that much, back then. I guess I can’t blame him. I’d probably hate Phil too, if he made me have to be responsible, ew. I know it was more than that—I know it was fucked-up for him to leave the three of us alone half the time to fend for ourselves. He probably fucked all of us up in fun and unique ways, huh. But you always knew what was happening, didn’t you, Tubs? Even before I even started to understand that the way we were raised wasn’t close to normal, you always got it. I never really asked you why that was, did I? ‘Cause you were raised by Schlatt and then Phil, so you never had, like, an ideal father. But you knew that things were supposed to be better, even all the way back then.”

He leaned back with a sigh.

The crows were circling above them, but he couldn’t bring himself to care whether Phil found them or not. He wasn’t a boy trying to sneak out of his bedroom window at night after all (for some reason, he only ever did tried to sneak out when Phil was home—maybe it was because he didn’t want to make things harder for Wilbur when he already dealt with so much, or maybe it was just because getting caught causing mischief was one of the only times in the day that Phil’s attention was solely on him). If Phil found him, maybe that would even be good for Tubbo. He could get away from this fucking crater at the very least; who knew how much radiation they’d already absorbed just by sitting here? Not fucking Tommy, that’s for sure. Almost definitely not Phil either—he would be shocked if Phil had encountered nuclear weapons before. He was an old man already, and it made sense for new technologies to have eluded him—but at the very least Phil could help him pick Tubbo up and take him somewhere safer. Kicking and screaming if necessary.

Tubbo still wasn’t moving by the time Phil appeared in one of the shadows arcing down from the broken prison walls.

Tommy nearly jolted back when Phil teleported into existence in front of him.

He’d forgotten that he could do that, now, or maybe he just hadn’t been expecting him to do it now. For some reason, his mind had pictured him soaring overhead with the crows even though he obviously hadn’t been able to fly for years now, diving down to land gracefully with his wings held open wide, creating his own shadows for his boys to hide in like he did sometimes when they were little kids. The shadows had always felt as soft and safe as a blanket—everyone knew that the monsters under the bed couldn’t get you if you were under the blanket, and everyone knew that you were safe as long as your dad was around (even if Tommy didn’t always trust Phil to stay, he always knew he was safe with him; even when Tubbo told him about the similarities between Schlatt and Phil as parents, he never feared that Phil would hurt with anything more severe than his absence). Phil had said that he thought shadows were a strange power for him, that they didn’t fit his ‘character’, but Tommy didn’t agree with him.

But if Phil was the type to hurt his kids, Tommy would’ve been afraid of the way he looked, then. He wore full enchanted netherite (the same set as he’d worn on Doomsday, Tommy realized suddenly), and it glowed darkly in the shade. He was holding a sword.

“Tommy!” he snapped. “Get behind me! Get away from him.”

Tommy didn’t move. “He’s not going to hurt me.”

Phil’s face darkened even more ominously, even while his voice softened. “Yes, he is. I know you two are friends, but he’s dangerous now, mate. He could kill you without even breaking a sweat. He can’t control it. That’s why we’ve been hiding out in the cabins without him, you know—we couldn’t leave you around him.”

“You said he sat by my bedside.”

“I lied,” Phil said gently. “and I’m sorry about that. I shouldn’t have. But I didn’t want you to worry about him so much that you’d go try to find him or anything like that. Besides, it’s not his fault. He just can’t help it.”

Nothing in that story lined up the way it was supposed to.

“So why did Wilbur say that he needed help, once you were gone? Why didn’t you just tell me, if he was so dangerous?” Tommy glared up at his father, feet still glued to the floor—he wasn’t moving an inch until he got some fucking answers. “Why didn’t you fucking tell me anything? You’re still not telling me what’s supposed to happen to me if I stay here!”

“You’ll die!” Phil snarled, taking a step forwards. “What else do you need to know?”

“What the fuck? He’s my best fucking friend. I need to know what’s wrong with him,” Tommy argued. “I need to know what you think will happen to me! I need to know if this can be fixed, or if I just have to—to say goodbye to my best friend—”

His voice was beginnning to shake embarrassingly at just the notion of never being able to talk to Tubbo again. He’d hated him once—hell, he was still holding a chip on his shoulder for the whole Exile thing—but he was his best friend. He was the one that had made his childhood bearable, that had been his sole ally once Wilbur began to deteriorate in Pogtopia. He was the only one that was willing to put in the work to fix things, the only one who was willing to stick around long enough for Tommy to try to forgive him, even when he yelled at him and blamed him for shit—everyone else just pushed the wrongs they’d done under the rug, but Tubbo cared.

But Phil interrupted him before he was able to say any of that. “We don’t have time! I’ll explain everything, but you have to do what I say first. Please, Tommy. Please don’t—please don’t let me watch you die, son.”

And that was what almost made Tommy move—he hated to hear his father sound so hurt, so desperate; he was practically pleading and for a moment, Tommy wanted nothing more than to run into his arms and give him all of his trust, all of his fragile heart to hold. Almost.

But he still just stood there, half on purpose and half trapped in inertia. He’d been by Tubbo for minutes, now. He’d watched his best friend fight back the demons in his mind to make sure he wouldn’t hurt Tommy, and he’d seen how much pain it had brought him—if Tubbo was trying that hard, Tommy owed him the faith to stay and keep hearing him out. If Tubbo’s power (or curse, as he’d said) was truly that uncontrolled, truly so deadly and powerful that Phil was begging him to move with the tone of someone who thought that one more minute would spell his certain end, then he would’ve killed him already, right? Tommy would already be lying lifeless on the dirt, in the ruins of the prison and the server he’d torn open with his war and his hatred, and maybe that would be a fitting end to him—but it wasn’t the end he expected.

He just knew somehow, that Tubbo wasn’t going to hurt him.

That tiny weak part of him, the part that was soft and vulnerable and expected to be treated well—it was curled up like a kitten in Tubbo’s sharp teeth. It slept on naively, but Tommy—Tommy didn’t think it was exactly wrong this time. Instead, his intuitive suspicion, the sense he’d lost in the dark days of Exile and regained on the top of that damned tower, had landed firmly on Phil. He’d trusted Tubbo for far longer than he’d trusted his father, after all.

“Tommy,” Phil urged him.

“No,” Tommy said.

The word felt horrible and final in the air. It felt like when he’d stood on the ruins of another building—the Community House—that belonged to his greatest enemy, and been told that his best friend was actually his villain. But he wasn’t a hero now, if he ever was. He was just a boy in a broken world, trying his best to keep the people he loved safe through it all. He’d trusted Tubbo then, even though he’d hated him more than he did now—even though he was so awfully close to killing him over those fucking music discs, he’d realized just a hair shy of too late that he was better on Tubbo’s side. That he wasn’t a hero, and Tubbo wasn’t his jealous sidekick. They were equals, like they’d always been, and goddamnit he trusted his best friend.

“No?”

“No,” Tommy repeated, his voice as cold as ice. “No, I’m not going to leave him. He didn’t kill me. He’s not going to hurt me. I want answers, and I’m going to get them whether you fucking like it or not. I’m done.”

He wasn’t shouting, but he saw every word hit Phil like an arrow to the chest and he thought savagely, ‘good’. He shouldn’t be so grimly satisfied by that. Maybe he really was becoming the villian he’d always feared. Maybe it made it worse that he wasn’t even all that worried about becoming that villian, right now.

“You want answers?” Phil said. He sounded defeated, but Tommy knew his father well enough to know that that didn’t necessarily mean the fight was over—Phil was an immortal, after all, and he was good at bringing things back from the brink of failure. Especially when he could make the tides turn in his favor. “Fine. I’ll give you answers, mate.”

He wasn’t looking at Tommy anymore. “When the nuke went off, Tubbo was the first to look for you in the ruins of the prison. He found you, half-dead, bleeding from your eyes and ears and nose, and he called Wilbur for help. And Wilbur came. When he passed over the border of the server, he got enough radiation to also develop his power, just like you and Tubbo and the two of us did. Everyone else on the server left. We stayed, for you. You were unconscious for so long, and we couldn’t—we couldn’t take you off server, mate.

“We tried, a week in.” Wait, wasn’t it—Phil had told him he’d only been out for only a few days (but that was just another lie, of course). “The second we carried you past the border your heart stopped beating, and when we went back it started again. You—your power is the only thing keeping you alive. If you leave, you’ll die. And I swear to all the gods that I’m telling the truth this time, so please believe me.

“But anyway, Wilbur came to help Tubbo and he found the two of you here in the crater. And Tubbo’s power is—mate, I wasn’t lying when I said he was dangerous. When Wilbur found him, he tried to tap his shoulder, just—just to, like, let him know he was there or whatever. His hand burned off. The only reason he still has that hand is because your power let it regrow.”

“So I’m a…”

“Yeah. You’re a healer.” Phil tried to explain, “We don’t really know how it works. That’s why I said more healing potions wouldn’t help you recover any quicker—Wilbur used healing potions on his hand and it didn’t do anything. Your power is something stronger than that. It kept you alive through a nuclear bomb going off, after all. What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that you shouldn’t do anything too stupid while we figure all of this mess out.”

“I know you won’t listen to me,” he added with a small smile. “But I have to say it, anyway.”

“I still don’t understand. Why didn’t you just fucking tell me what Tubbo’s power was?”

Phil took a deep breath, and fear plunged into Tommy’s stomach—it should’ve been there before, really, but now that he knew he was going to get the answer, or at least the answer Phil thought was true, he couldn’t help but realize that sometimes the truth was harder to bear than lies. “Well, we… After Wilbur got hurt and you healed him, he—he didn’t know what his power was, then. He wasn’t being very careful with it. And he asked Tubbo, you know, sarcastically, to kill you.”

Tommy blinked. What the fuck?

“He didn’t mean it, obviously,” Phil said hastily. “You know he would never actually wish you harm. But the power didn’t care. It compelled Tubbo to at least try to kill you. When Wil saw him reaching for your throat, he picked you up and enderpearled away. As Tubbo ran over the grass towards the two of you, every step he took the grass died. You can see it at the top of the crater, past the beach—every single one of his footprints is a completely bare spot, just dirt and rocks. He was—and you were—lucky to escape. Once you were out of sight, Siren stopped being so powerful and Tubbo stopped the pursuit. Or that’s what Wilbur thinks happened. That’s what he told me, when he came to me and Techno with you unconscious in his arms.

“And we didn’t tell you because…” Phil trailed off, and then started again, sounding like he had to force himself through every word—this clearly wasn’t an easy thing for him to admit—“Because we knew you’d try to get to him if you knew. You’re too kind for your own good, Tommy, and I—I didn’t want to lose you. You’d try to figure out some way to see him, but if there’s one thing that has always, always been true about safeguards, it’s that they eventually get broken. And I couldn’t let you die.”

“So you lied to me,” Tommy said.

That explanation was at least more understandable than he’d feared. It was pleasant, even, to know that his family had been trying to keep him safe—even if he was rankled by the idea that they’d thought they’d have to lie to him to do it, he couldn’t be entirely sure they were wrong, either. He was here, after all. And he was probably always going to have ended up here. He couldn’t imagine a world where he just left Tubbo here to—

“Yes,” Phil replied.

Wait.

“So you decided to just—what the fuck? You just left Tubbo here?” he asked, suddenly furious again. “He just nearly killed me and almost amputated Wilbur’s hand, and you just fucking abandon him in a crater to fend for himself?”

“He’s dangerous—”

“Not to you!” Tommy shouted. “He was ordered to kill me, but if you just fucking didn’t touch him, he wouldn’t have done anything to you. He hasn’t fucking talked to anyone since then! Do you know what that can do to a person? Do you even care? You were planning to fucking leave him in solitary confinement, basically, and—and you know he has problems with abandonment. What. The fuck. Is wrong with you?”

He was panting, almost—half-catatonic with protective rage.

“People think Techno’s dangerous too,” he said, his voice hot with accusation. “You told me, when I was a kid, that people didn’t trust Techno because they thought he was deadly, uncontrollable, basically an animal. That he’d just lash out at everyone, no matter what they did or how they treated him. That it was just a matter of what he was. You told me that that was a lie, that all of those horrible things people said were just their fear talking, or their way of excusing the shitty things they did to him.”

He continued, telling Phil’s own story back to him like he didn’t know it just as well—Phil had lived for centuries, but even Tommy knew he wouldn’t have forgotten the day he met Techno (just like he would never forget the day he met Tubbo). “But you trusted him. You were the only one who thought he could be more than just a Blade—more than just a weapon. That he was just as kind and smart and considerate as any human. That he was able to choose his own fucking path through life just like any human is capable of. You told me that, Phil. And—you know what? I trust Tubbo.”

Before Phil could protest, Tommy knelt back down beside Tubbo. His friend was no longer crying, nor was he completely still like he was before—he was still laying down, curled into a ball like he was scared he’d kill someone by accident if he dared to lift a finger. But his foot had moved, slightly, onto the ground instead of staying in the water, and Tommy pointed at the tiny sprout of grass coming up. It was touching Tubbo’s bare ankle.

“Look,” he said triumphantly, almost reverent in his joy and pride. “Isn’t he supposed to kill everything he touches? Didn’t you say he destroyed grass and plants and shit too, as he chased after Wilbur and me?”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“He’s not going to hurt me. I—I believe that with my whole fucking heart.” He repeated something like one he’d once said about Wilbur, “It’s not about giving him a chance, Phil. It’s not—I’m not taking points away from him. I don’t think life works like that, not anymore. I think we just… We just have to keep trusting each other. We have to keep looking out for each other and shit, because who else is going to?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Phil answered it anyway: “Your family, Tommy. Your brother. Me. We’ll look out for you. We—I know we’ve failed you before, that we’ve all failed each other in so many ways, but, please, Tommy. Please give me the chance to make this right.”

Tommy didn’t look up. A horrible suspicion was forming in his chest, and there was a lump in his throat when he voiced it: “You… you knew that Tubbo might not kill me, didn’t you?”

“What?”

Phil sounded incredulous.

But before he could feel too reassured, he heard steps coming down into the crater, the skittering pebbles that avalanched down from every one. Wilbur and Techno were there. Techno was in armor, Wilbur… wasn’t.

Wilbur spoke up first, striding closer with his head held high and his legs moving in the same too-confident gait he always had, as if with every step he was exerting his control over everything he walked over. He said, “I knew.”

The words fell from his lips like a guillotine.

Tommy looked at his brother in horror; he couldn’t—he hadn’t heard that right, had he? Wilbur didn’t just fucking say that he knew that Tommy’s best friend wasn’t necessarily deadly to him—he should know how much Tommy cared about Tubbo. He’d watched as Tommy nearly fought Techno to avenge Tubbo’s death at his hands, even when Tubbo had accepted it. How had he possibly imagined that Tommy would just—

“Tommy.” Wilbur’s voice was just as soft as when he’d asked Tommy if he wanted to be the ‘bad guys’ all those lifetimes ago. He couldn’t help the shiver that ran up his spine at the memory. Was it just his bad memories clouding his judgment, or did Wilbur sound just as malignant now as he had then too, like he was trying to convince Tommy he cared even as he dragged him down to hell behind him? “Tommy, you need to make a choice. Tubbo is… He’s a nice kid, you know I like Tubbo. I’ve always liked Tubbo. But he’s hurt you. He’s going to keep hurting you, and these powers are making it so much worse.”

“Hurt me?” Tommy retorted. “Like you hurt me?”

Wilbur stiffened. “I—I’m sorry, okay? You can be mad at me for the rest of your life if you want—the gods know I deserve worse than that. You can fucking kill me if you want, Tommy. I won’t fight back, because you deserve to be able to take whatever you want from me. But you’ve told me, over and over, that you don’t want that. That what you really want is for me to stay. So I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving you with your so-called best friend, the guy that left you with Dream in Exile, the guy that has hurt you over and over again. I won’t abandon you again.”

“I don’t want you to leave,” Tommy said, suddenly desperate.

As if Wilbur hadn’t already left. He couldn’t help but remember that morning. It was stuck in his head like a string of food stuck in his teeth that he kept rubbing his tongue over to see if he could pull any meaning out from it. It seemed stupid and unbearably childish in the light of day, so he knew better than to say it aloud—Wilbur would just laugh at him and call him a child—but there was something about it that felt important. Like maybe it mattered more what people did in the small, unemphasized moments than what they did when the spotlight was on. And Tubbo had always been good in the small moments.

Techno was looking at him with something unreadable in his gaze. Tommy’s mind scanned back over every moment he’d had with Techno, every word he’d said since Tommy had woken up—Techno always seemed to have things he wouldn’t admit, or have motivations he wouldn’t let on about until the keystone moment of the story. He’d been brought into the server on a literal deus ex machina, after all, and there was a part of Tommy that still looked to him as a savior.

Techno had been the first to bring up Tubbo’s power, responding to Tommy’s joke that the nuke hated Phil in particular by not giving him back the one extra skill everyone knew he wanted back—the ability to fly—by saying that Tommy should ask Tubbo what his power was. He’d interpreted that in the moment as meaning that Tubbo had some shockingly-weak power.

Had Techno expected for Tommy to process his words that way? Had he meant for Tommy to go look for Tubbo?

Wilbur had said that Tubbo needed help, which was the other unexplainable gap in the story that was obvious to Tommy at the moment. But it would be very like Wilbur to try to push the ending he wanted on his own terms, so he might’ve wanted Tommy to go find Tubbo so that he could have this very conversation. Always the mastermind. He would’ve known Tommy well enough to know that he couldn’t keep him away from Tubbo eventually, so he did what he always did: dropped a salacious hint that he knew would stir up Tommy’s curiosity in the direction he wanted to steer him in, and then feed the flame of his emotions by leaving before he woke up, knowing that that would piss him off enough that he would go straight to Tubbo and not ask anyone what was wrong with him.

Any other brother might take the facts at face-value and come to the conclusion that Wilbur was trying to get Tubbo to kill Tommy—but Tommy knew his big brother better than that. He knew what Wilbur would really be trying to engineer: this. This very conversation, this very choice. He would’ve known that it would have to happen eventually, and he was trying to make it happen the way he wanted it done. Had Tommy done anything today that Wilbur hadn’t predicted?

But the why he still couldn’t figure out.

“Techno,” he addressed instead. The Blood God shifted from one foot to the other. “You basically told me to go find Tubbo—why? You knew I’d go after him, but you wouldn’t… Did you want him to kill me?”

“No!” Techno blurted out quickly.

Then he looked at Phil instead of explaining, and Tommy found himself impatiently snapping, “Is he your fucking handler? You can speak for yourself, can’t you?”

“No,” Techno repeated. “No, he’s not. I… Man, I do not do well in stressful situations—”

“I don’t give a shit. Focus on me.”

Techno growled. “Fine. Yeah, I knew that Tubbo might be able to resist Wilbur’s power. He was able to before, when Wilbur told him to touch me when I said I didn’t believe him that Tubbo was that dangerous. He didn’t do it.”

What the fuck, Tommy thought again.

“I don’t—I believe that people can make their own choices,” Techno admitted. “Tubbo’s always been a good kid, even when he was the president of an unjust nation. He… I just didn’t think that he would spare me and then kill you. And every other one of our powers can be controlled, somehow—I guess we don’t know about yours, yet, but, uh, other than that—so I thought that it would be weird if his was the only exception. And, besides, you’re a healer. You healed Wilbur, so it seems only logical that if Tubbo did hurt you, you could heal yourself from it, too. But Wilbur—"

“Techno,” Wilbur hissed.

But Techno didn’t stay quiet. “Wilbur lied to Phil when he said that he hadn’t meant to tell Tubbo to kill you. I saw it happen and—I don’t think he meant for you to actually die, but he wanted, well. He wanted to scare you into picking us, and not Tubbo.”

Tommy’s eyes were wide as they scanned the faces of all three men that had been willing to lie to him to make him hate his best friend. If they were his family and they kept saying that all they wanted was to protect him, why did they keep doing nothing but hurting him?

“So,” Techno said. “If—if you want to stay with Tubbo, we’ll leave. I’ll make them leave, if they refuse to—yeah, I’m looking at you, Wilbur. Man, you really messed up this time. But we’ll leave you alone, if that’s what you want. I think—I think that’s more than fair, considering.”

Tommy couldn’t move.

“We’ll come back,” Phil offered. He sounded pathetic (so this was what Phil really sounded like when he was sure things couldn’t come back to suit his will; Tommy had never heard his father sound so genuinely lost before). “For visits. But Techno’s right. Wilbur’s not safe to have around you, not if he’s being this possessive. I thought… Well, it doesn’t matter what I thought, does it, mate? We—we’ll leave if you really want us to. But I promise we’ll come back for visits. More often than when you were a kid, I’ve learned my lesson.”

Tommy nodded silently, but his internal monologue just had to get the last word in: ‘have you?’

Wilbur was staring back at him with a mix of horror and rage, but he didn’t do anything. He just blipped away beside Techno and Phil, and left Tommy, still kneeling beside his best friend. The implosion of his family felt just as decisive as the nuclear bomb he’d been half-responsible for dropping on the server.

And finally, Tommy could take a full deep breath.

He put his hand gently on Tubbo’s, still scared that they would all be wrong and it would kill him. It didn’t. It didn’t even hurt. Tubbo’s skin felt warm.

“Guess this really is the Tubbo and Tommy SMP, now,” he said, watching the now-empty space where his family had left the server from. “Guess we’re on our own, now.”