Chapter Text
Wilbur never wanted to come back.
After dying for the third time and having a part of him break off to become a ghost, he decidedly didn’t care about that anymore; there wasn’t a point in lamenting his existence when there were more pressing issues at hand, like a blue sheep and blue dye and blue, blue, blue, or on the flip side of himself, silence and unending darkness and rest, eternal fucking rest.
Every now and then, though, during his rare moments of calm and quiet, the part of him in limbo would be wracked through with longing, a loss that cut so deep, so cleanly through that he felt it like a hole in his body.
He’d never been one to believe in the supernatural, but a part of him had become an honest-to-Prime ghost, an actual real fucking ghost. Sometimes he’d sleep to the sound of darkness and dream of grey fingers and unfinished business, and then he’d wake up and wonder which part of him lost the coin flip that decided who had to move on and who got to stay.
Suffice to say, being resurrected fixed nothing.
He didn’t want to be here, was the thing. He was dead and happy to be dead, now he’s back, and they didn’t want him either, he’s sure of it.
But the devastation that he woke up to proved otherwise — he opened his eyes to the sunrise, to a crater in the ground, and then to two figures hovering close by. Tubbo, he recognised, and Ranboo, his brain supplied, and Wilbur opened his mouth to speak but his eyes wandered down and locked onto the body that Tubbo clutched to himself.
It didn’t quite click into him, not until he registered the pain in Tubbo’s eyes, the way Ranboo set one foot in front of the other and hunched over his friend protectively. Then he saw the blood, matting a head of golden hair, clumping the strands together, and he knew, he knew, he knew and he hurt and he-
Wilbur was not a monster. Wilbur was not a saint.
Wilbur was not a lot of things — when he was alive, really alive, he used to have more to his name: musician, general, traitor — but now that he was back the only thing he thought he should be and yet wasn’t was brother.
He was human, painfully, a reminder of everything he couldn’t make himself into, and it started like this: Wilbur fell to his knees.
He held a hand out to Tubbo, the tips of his fingers trembling. Tubbo’s face hardened and he wrapped his arms tighter around the body, but he stepped forward, breaking away from Ranboo, and kept stepping forward until he was face-to-face with Wilbur.
He reached out, slowly, ran a shaking hand through locks of golden hair, and it felt like a thread wound around his body, pulling at his bones, unspooling him slowly, inch by aching inch.
A part of him, drenched in blue and surrounded by a black void, was no longer alone.
The rest of him shattered freely, swathed in the kind of emptiness that pressed in from everywhere, all at once, every side of him squeezing infinitely inward, and he was breaking but first and foremost he did not want to be here. So Wilbur broke, he sobbed, he screamed, “Tommy,” and there was blood on his hands, “wake up, wake up-!“
Tubbo hugged the body ever tighter.
“Are you seriously implying that I can’t raise a child all by myself?”
“I’m not implying shit, idiot,” Tommy retorted. “You’re actually reading too much into it.”
“It’s not called reading into it if you’re literally saying it.“ Wilbur swung open the door to the caravan and stepped outside. Tommy followed him and made sure to close the door softly. “Okay, semantics, whatever, what the fuck are you trying to tell me, then?”
“I’m trying to tell you that you can’t raise a child all by yourself,” Tommy snapped.
The night air pressed into him from all around. Wilbur felt suffocated by the sound of cicadas and rushing water as he strode away from his caravan and towards the river. When there was nowhere else to go, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his frat jacket and whirled around to glare at Tommy.
“You don’t even know where its mother is — and you seriously didn’t fuck a salmon, don’t try that shit on me,” Tommy continued, crossing his arms as he scowled. “And then you brought it here to the Dream SMP. The fucking Dream SMP! Are you insane? You’re living out of a- a stupid drug van, Wilbur, and I got arrested yesterday, again, because I tried to cover for you and your kid! What the fuck are you doing with your life?”
“I don’t know!” Wilbur yelled, throwing his hands up in the air. Tommy tensed, eyes darting back to the caravan, and Wilbur lowered his voice immediately. “I don’t know Tommy, I don’t fucking know what I’m doing, okay?”
He stepped back to look at Tommy better. The heel of his shoe broke the riverbank and hit water.
“Look, I’m sorry I dragged you into this, alright?” he said. “You don’t have to- to stick around me and Fundy if you don’t want to, Tommy. I’m not asking you to do anything you don’t want to, right, you can fuck off for all I care and-“
Wilbur stopped himself. He dragged a hand down his face and sighed in frustration.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Look. I didn’t mean that last bit, I’m- I’m sorry.” His breaths started coming quicker, wetter, more salty at the back of his throat. His voice was thick. “You can leave if you want to, man, it’s okay.”
Tommy scoffed, but his eyes softened. “Fuck you,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. You can’t make me.”
Wilbur shook his head. There was no breaking Tommy away from him — the both of them had been etched into stone the moment Wilbur decided that this kid was his kid. His chest quieted into fondness, and he exhaled his frustrations into the night air.
Tommy didn’t deserve his bullshit.
“Let’s go back inside,” he said, and Tommy followed him back into the caravan.
It was only by a miracle that neither Tubbo nor Ranboo turned him away; there was a sword at his back, made of Netherite and bursting with enchanting magic, but it didn’t press into him, and when he followed them out of the remains of his country, they didn’t protest at all.
The trip they took to a ‘Snowchester’ was long, loopy, and they vehemently avoided the Prime Path. Wilbur didn’t need to question it — there was a house at the intersection they would’ve passed, a house and a bench and a little farm tucked into a hillside, a house with its doors forever left half-opened — so he followed them and he ignored the sword behind him.
The sight of Snowchester hammered in just how much he had missed, being dead for thirteen years. It was a snow-clad village separated from the Greater Dream SMP by an arm of the sea, and Wilbur found himself hugging and rubbing his own arms, though he couldn’t tell whether the cold was as physical as he would like it to be.
A mansion came into view, towering far above the spruce trees growing out of the sheet-white ground, and there was a wall — because of course there was, it looked like Tubbo had learnt his lesson on walls and self-defence — half-built and missing at places, but a wall nevertheless. Everything else was made of spruce and bricks, and all the houses faced away from the Greater Dream SMP.
Tubbo stopped at an intersection by the mansion, face grim.
“We need to bury him,” he said.
“Okay,” Wilbur said. His throat hurt as he spoke. “Where?”
Tubbo turned to him, as if only realising that he’s followed. His expression darkened in disdain.
“We need to bury him,” he spat, “exclusive. And you, you need to- you need to, to fuck off. I don’t know.” He stepped back, clutched the body closer to his chest. Neither of them dared to look at Tommy or Tommy’s face. “We have a couple guest houses around. Go- go, fuck off, leave us alone.”
Wilbur felt sick to the bone. “But that’s-“ he cut himself off. “That’s- Tommy, that’s my brother, you can’t, he’s my brother-“
“And you weren’t there!” Tubbo wrapped a hand around Tommy’s head, clutching his hair, while his own face streamed with tears and snot. “You- you weren’t there, were never there for him, you don’t fucking understand, you don’t get to say that anymore-!”
“He’s my brother,” Wilbur said weakly, “I need to be with him now-“
“It doesn’t matter, Wilbur!” Tubbo shouted. “None of this, all of it doesn’t fucking matter! Now it doesn’t! He’s dead, and you- you weren’t there!”
Tubbo stopped to breathe, face flushed. Wilbur shrank away from him; he couldn’t blame the kid. He couldn’t blame him, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t breathe. He- he couldn’t- anything at all-
“You did this,” Tubbo seethed. “I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking end you.” A sob tore itself out of him. His lips were trembling. He turned away, his back to Wilbur, head down as he spoke again. “Ranboo, please escort Wilbur Soot to a guest house and keep him there. If I see him out at any point today, you have my full permission to hunt him down and kill him until he is completely dead. Again.”
The tip of a sword poked at his back and Wilbur suppressed a full-body flinch. He gave Tubbo’s back one last look of longing before he reluctantly headed down the path to Snowchester’s residence area.
Ranboo led him towards a house — empty, perhaps deserted, he thought, judging by the dust that had settled on the outer windowsills, and the unlit interior. Its raised balcony looked out to the sea, and Wilbur would’ve stopped to appreciate the beauty if he wasn’t so- if he- if the situation wasn’t as dire as it was.
“You can stay here,” Ranboo told him, unlocking the front door to reveal the foyer. His mismatched eyes, eerie as they were, held deep fatigue in them, and they were fixed onto the floor. “This is supposed to be Tommy’s house, but…”
Ranboo gestured lamely. There was a house tucked into a hillside, a little ways away from Snowchester. All of them knew this. None of them dared to say it.
“And… and you’re just gonna leave me alone?”
“Yes,” Ranboo replied after a pause. He hovered by the doorway, one hand on the handle, the other around his sword. “You heard what Tubbo said. I’m going to lock the door from the outside, and if you try to hurt any one of us, we’ll kill you.”
“I won’t,” Wilbur muttered, shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat, “hurt anyone, I mean. I’m sorry, Ranboo. I won’t hurt anyone, I- I don’t even know what’s happening, why I’m here, what I’m supposed to do and-“ he blinked hard and quick, “and I won’t try anything. I’m sorry.” He didn’t know why he apologised. He wished there was a fireplace in the guest house. “Lock the door. I’ll stay here.”
Ranboo nodded. He backed away, still refusing to look at Wilbur. He opened his mouth, looked like he wanted to say something — maybe a threat, a question, maybe he would have liked to tell Wilbur to go back to whatever hell where he had come from, but then he shook his head and closed the door.
There was a series of clicks, locks sliding into place, and then footsteps moving away from the house.
Fundy slept soundly through the sounds of Wilbur and Tommy’s arguing, tucked comfortably under the covers of his cot. His russet-furred ears stuck out from his auburn hair, and for a second Wilbur was struck with nostalgia, with an age-old pining for the sea, because his little baby boy looked so much like his mother that sometimes it hurt to even look at his face.
Tommy was right — Wilbur didn’t know what he was doing, raising a child all on his own. He was far too young to be doing any of this, and he should’ve gone literally anywhere else in the universe, but the truth was that when he had nobody left, there was really only one person left he could count on to support him.
Wilbur sat down next to the cot and looked at his son, then — his beautiful, beautiful son — and he was suddenly consumed by a fire that spoke of a love so bright and so fierce that he wouldn’t know how to put it out if he wanted to.
“I need to protect him,” he whispered. “And I need to protect you.” It was a constant, his constant, as kind and faithful as the sea, and he would never love anything as strongly as he did now, looking at his brother and his son. “I may not know what I’m doing, Tommy, but I need to be strong enough to protect the two of you.”
Tommy sighed and reached out to Fundy to brush a strand of hair out of his face. Wilbur’s heart squeezed. “Wil, Wilbur, you already are,” he said. “And you’re- you-“ he gestured, face pinched, “you’ve done enough. You’re enough, or fuckin’ whatever.”
Wilbur nodded, but his head was elsewhere. Tommy wasn’t a parent — he didn’t understand the way Wilbur felt his stomach being upended at the thought of Dream, or Sapnap, or anyone else he didn’t fully trust, walking into his caravan and finding his son alone and defenceless, or deciding that sixteen was old enough an age for Tommy to die.
He couldn’t bear it. Tommy didn’t understand, Tommy would never understand. Tommy was young, was naïve, was bright-eyed and strong and hopeful, and his optimism spilled its way into Wilbur, took root in him and began blooming into visions of grandeur.
He needed to protect them. He was going to protect them, and he was strong enough to do it. He had to be.
The very next day, Wilbur started a nation.
Snowchester was lonely.
There was Tubbo, there was Ranboo, there were the thumping sounds coming from the attic of their house beside Wilbur’s, and then there was nothing else but snow.
The void had been lonely, too.
(He’d been alone and he’d been lonely but there was always someone with him, someone with the cosmos painted on her skin and death by her footsteps, and she had tried to cradle him but he’d been hateful and he’d been bitter and he had shied away from even the touch of the universe.)
Sometimes he slept for hours, days, weeks, months, and then he would open his eyes to the dark, yet darker, stars too far away to reach and memories slipping from his fingers like sand. He was fine with the loneliness, for the most part, though he wouldn’t deny the fact that he’d missed the people he cared about — but death, peace, silence, it all had been worth it.
Silence. After a while, the silence started to bother him.
(This was what he told himself: he used to be a musician, long ago.
He used to be a musician, before explosions and nations and wars and even children, he was a boy made of music and mahogany, his voice that of a siren’s and ears tuned to the melodies of the world.
He used to be a musician, and now he couldn’t live without noise in his ears.)
White noise was no substitute for music. He had forever to listen to the sound of his own voice, intermingled with the static of the void, the humming of the universe, but the sounds in his memories were the first to go. A quick two years postmortem and suddenly he woke up realising he had forgotten the sounds of his friends’ voices. Two years of bliss, and then eleven years of longing for something he had made peace with the fact that he would never get back.
And as he stood in an empty house, he couldn’t help but think that snow was the perfect sound dampener.
So yes, it was the silence that bothered him the most.
Wilbur rummaged through chests and built a furnace from the ground up, shuffled about the house and made himself busy, all if only to drown out the vacancy in his ears, the void that Tommy used to fill with constant chattering and happy little bullshits, back when they could still look each other in the eyes and not flinch away.
He explored the guest house and made a note of everything. The house was relatively small, though much spacier than whatever he had in Pogtopia; there was a foyer, a ladder leading to a small basement, and a staircase to the second floor. Upstairs was a bedroom that looked like it was built to be an attic — a bed that was a little too short for his height, and a window with a good vantage point overlooking the rest of Snowchester from a decent height up.
He looked outside, at the snow hugging the landscape, and his eyes found their way to two figures gathered next to a tower on a little hill, one kneeling over a hole and one not.
He looked away. It was something he wasn’t allowed to witness.
In limbo, it had taken him two years to realise that he had forgotten the sound of his friends’ voices.
And now, it took him no time at all to think that he would never hear Tommy’s ever again.
Wilbur laid down on the bed and closed his eyes. There were no tears at the corner of his eyes, there were no tears running down the sides of his face, and there were no tears at all because he wiped down his face and his hands were not wet.
They couldn’t be.
The silence returned.
“Let me rehash this, okay, no, don’t pull that face on me-“
“You’re obnoxious, you’re annoying, you’re dumb and wrong and I don’t like you-“
“-no, hey- fuck off, dude, you literally- you just died, you got shot and you literally just died, which one of us is the dumber one-“
“-memememe my name is Wilbur Soot and I hate people who look different than me-“
“-don’t, don’t fucking say that! Tommy! You- stay the fuck still-“
Tommy yelped as Wilbur tugged at the ends of his bandages. He cursed out Wilbur’s bloodline, but he at least stopped moving. After a while, his cursing subsided into angry silence as he sulked and Wilbur continued wrapping his torso in gauze.
“Was that so hard, Tommy? Was that really so hard?” Wilbur said, pinning the end of the bandage and cutting off the excess. He reached over for a bottle of healing potion and pressed it into Tommy’s hands.
“Yes,” Tommy deadpanned.
He sniffed the potion, face twisting into a grimace, before he tipped the bottle into his mouth and chugged down its contents in three seconds flat.
“Cheers, Wil-bah,” he said, and then he belched, loudly and shamelessly so.
“You’re actually disgusting,” Wilbur said, scrunching his nose.
He stood up to open a window as Tommy shrugged his shirt on. Outside, Fundy and Tubbo bickered over a blueprint for L’manberg’s rebuilding plan, standing a little too close to a still-open crater. Fundy caught his gaze from the corner of his eyes, and he turned to Wilbur to smile and wave, which Wilbur returned.
The war was over, finally. It had taken too much out of the L’manbergians, too much out of Wilbur, but it was over. He couldn’t stand the sight of blackstone and the smell of gunpowder, but they were free, and it did them no good to dwell on the past. He thought about his father, his friends, and oh, Prime, perhaps Niki would love to see L’manberg, perhaps she would love to see him because he would love to see her too, perhaps he could ask Dream further into peacetime to let her in.
Wilbur sighed. He could almost believe that things were going to be alright.
But someone was missing, as someone always was and always will be.
For a second, he felt a sad pang in his heart at the missing spot in their nation, before that pang was stamped down by a dark rage, bruised and snarling, teeth bared and claws out for the lashing. There was cowardice, there was betrayal, and then there was aiding in the murder of your friends for the empty title of ‘king’.
However mad Wilbur was about it, though, he couldn’t deny the valuable lessons that Eret, that Dream, had taught him. Because their attempts at diplomacy were met with death, with betrayal, with the destruction of their nation, and it was only through death that Dream allowed them to be independent.
The server was cruel, Wilbur realised, and L’manberg was built to be kind. They needed to learn how to be cruel, if not them then their leader, the person who needed to be strong enough for them, or the whole country might as well go up in flames-
“You’re thinking about it again,” Tommy said.
Wilbur turned around, meeting his brother’s gaze with an easy smile. “Thinking about what, sorry?” he asked.
“Dying.”
Wilbur faltered.
“Not like that,” he said quietly. “Don’t- don’t say it like… that. I’m not- that’s not how it is and you know it.”
“What are you thinking about, then?” Tommy asked, quirking an eyebrow up at him. “And the answer isn’t nothing because I know you, I know when you get all… thought-y and shit.” He paused, squinted at Wilbur. “I’m right here, you know. You don’t gotta be all cryptic and closed off and all that. I can see directly through your bullshit, you prick.”
Wilbur wasn’t being cryptic. Wilbur wasn’t being closed off. He was being… careful, is all, and Tommy made lots of assumptions, too many for comfort, and some of them just happened to land on Wilbur’s shaky little bullseye.
“You died, Tommy,” he said quietly. “You died, and I had to watch you die. Twice. You died twice, and I’ve got two chances left for me but you’re- you-“ he shut his mouth.
“But I don’t,” Tommy finished for him, just as sombrely.
Breathing felt difficult. All of a sudden, he found that he could no longer hold Tommy’s gaze. For all that he was a naïve and idealistic little kid, Tommy was anything but stupid when it came to other people. His eyes, bright and smart, drilled directly under Wilbur’s skin and walls, and surely he was smart enough to realise a denial when he saw it.
“And what am I going to do when- if I outlive you?” Wilbur asked.
“What will I do if I outlive you, too?” Tommy replied.
This wasn’t something that felt as cut and dry as he wanted it to be. Death was a constant, but it came at all the most inopportune moments, and Wilbur hated the unpredictable more than he hated himself. He felt his one missing life like an open wound in his heart, and he would never understand how Tommy felt with two.
Tommy shrugged half-heartedly, leaning back in his seat. “I don’t know, Wil, neither of us can really answer these kinds of questions,” he continued. His eyes dimmed as he looked away. “I don’t think anyone can.”
Hours later he woke up, jolting awake to the sound of furious knocking. Wilbur blinked the bleariness out of his eyes, stood up with his head spinning and his back hurting — he had fallen asleep against a wall instead of on the bed — and stumbled downstairs to the front door clicking open to reveal Tubbo.
And Tubbo looked exhausted.
His eyes were bloodshot red with grey bags under them, face flushed and hair messy. He stood swaying on his hoofed feet, looking like he would topple over with the slightest nudge.
There was still blood on his clothes.
Tommy’s blood, Wilbur realised. He blinked rapidly.
But Tubbo didn’t look like he was there to commit murder. He didn’t look angry in the slightest, just tired. And Wilbur wasn’t afraid of him, just tired. He wasn’t sure which was the better alternative.
“Hey, big man,” Tubbo said. His voice was rough. Rough, but much kinder than it’d been before.
“Tubbo,” Wilbur greeted curtly. His own voice wasn’t any better, morning rasp mixed together with thirteen years’ worth of disuse.
“Look, I’ll be frank — I shouldn’t have snapped at you.” His hands were clenched together by his sides. “We- we clearly got off on the wrong foot, there, so, I came here to… clear the air a little.”
“Okay,” Wilbur said. “It’s okay. I shouldn’t have… intruded.”
Tubbo nodded at him. “Right.” They lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. Tubbo cleared his throat, then said, “How’s being alive treating you?”
“I don’t know,” Wilbur replied honestly.
(Tubbo’s horns had grown out, Wilbur realised.
He thought that maybe he should recoil in disgust at the way they curled around his head, behind his ears, reminiscent of another ram hybrid he would be glad never to meet again.
But here, now, looking at the way Tubbo’s shoulders sag, at the way he looked up at Wilbur in caution, in hope — he couldn’t feel anything but the same utter exhaustion.)
Being alive was… it hurts.
Limbo was dark, yes, and limbo was lonely, boring, was nothing but a long wait that amounted to jack shit. But it gave him the rest that he wanted. Limbo was the void that ate at his rough edges to smooth them over. It snaked its fingers in his fire-riddled memories, it cleared his head for thirteen long years, and it embraced him like a mother would embrace her child. It was the home that he stumbled into unexpectedly — there he did not need to belong; he only needed to be, and after a while he did not even need to be anything but a sleeping speck of the universe.
Wilbur grimaced, and settled on, “It’s cold.”
As if to prove his point, his body shivered.
“I’ll get you some thick clothes,” Tubbo offered. By the way he trembled, too, Wilbur wasn’t sure whether thick clothes would help at all. He half-expected to look down and see frostbite eating away at their fingertips. “There’s a communal bathroom by the farm — you can freshen up, wash your clothes, maybe take a shower. You, uh, you look like you need one.”
Wilbur nodded. “Thank you, Tubbo, but… I’m good.”
Tubbo looked at him for a moment. His eyes narrowed just the slightest bit, and his mouth thinned into a line.
“There is a communal bathroom by the farm,” he repeated, and Wilbur knew a command when he heard one, “you’re going to wash your clothes and take a shower.”
Underneath that, which they both heard: you will not waste away like you once did.
And unspoken, which they didn’t: he wouldn’t want you to.
Tubbo’s eyes were fixed on Wilbur’s hands — Wilbur’s hands, which were also stained with blood.
Tommy’s blood, he remembered. His head spun.
“Okay,” he said.
Tubbo nodded and started to turn away.
“Wait,” Wilbur blurted out, because there was something he didn’t quite understand yet, “why do you trust me?”
Tubbo stopped. The shadows under his eyes were dark, were deep, were mirrored under Wilbur’s own eyes. And there it was again, that deep festered anger; his features contorted into a mix of disgust and discomfort, and he looked like he would rather be anywhere else. Wilbur didn’t blame him this time, either — he seemed to have that effect on people.
“I don’t,” Tubbo said. “I don’t trust you not to hurt either me, or Ranboo, or, or.” He paused. “And I don’t trust you not to be the selfish piece of shit that you were.”
And the truth was: he deserved it. He deserved it, and he knew, and the admission didn’t hurt him like a needle wouldn’t hurt a man on fire.
He knew that they didn’t want him back, and this was the only affirmation he needed to be sure of that fact. They didn’t want him here, and neither did he, but he was alive anyway despite all odds — he was alive, and Tommy was not. Tommy wanted to live, Tommy was a better person than Wilbur could ever pretend to be, and the fact remained that he was alive but his brother was not, and Wilbur hadn’t seen him for far too long and would never see him again.
But there was something else- something else that kept his breath from freezing in his chest, a sentiment held back by the rift they dug between them. This something felt like kindling; it was the kind of old, weary bravery that formed his words for him and lined his throat with spikes all the way down to his diaphragm.
And Wilbur felt tired, despite his best efforts, tired and hurt in way too many places all at the same time. He learnt, a long time ago, that he was not strong, despite his best efforts, at least not strong enough to take all of that pain in stride.
So he nodded.
“I’ll kill you,” Tubbo whispered. “If you try to hurt me or Ranboo, if you leave Snowchester without either of us, if we even suspect you trying anything.” He paused. His eyelashes were wet, clumped together, bits of frost hanging onto the sides of his eyes. “I’ve lost- I’ve seen enough death today.”
Wilbur waited. This was that something else, hidden far beneath layers of skin and layers of grief.
“Don’t- don’t make me kill you,” Tubbo said.
There were no façades between them, no fronts to maintain when the both of them had been flayed a thousand times over. Tubbo was an honest person, and right now he was too tired to lie; here’s the twist: so was Wilbur.
“Will you trust me,” Wilbur asked, his voice far steadier than he felt, “to be hurt enough?”
A long time ago, Tubbo had been his brother too.
A long time ago, unconditional trust had felt like unconditional love, and Wilbur found it a lot easier to pretend like he had always been a hateful person.
A long time ago, Tubbo wouldn’t have hesitated to say yes.
Now he hesitated. Now he looked Wilbur in the eye, mirror to mirror, a shade to a shadow, unforgivably human in the way he trembled. There was conviction in his eyes, studying and searching and gears rusted and straining to turn. In a way, he was the only person that could understand Wilbur, the only person that Wilbur could understand.
The both of them knew this.
“In a few days, I’m going to go to his house and sort through his items,” Tubbo said, after a long, tense moment.
It was not a no, but it was not a yes, either. Wilbur read between the lines; it was an invitation. Tubbo might not trust him, but Wilbur knew that he trusted the fact that loss was a language they both needed to speak.
Tubbo swallowed, hard, and Wilbur took the invitation like a beast left to starve for weeks.
“I want you to come with me.”
“Well,” Tommy started, “that was a fuckin’ mess.”
Wilbur clenched the ballot in his hands, knuckles turning white from the force of his grip. They’d started with a single party, their party, and Wilbur was stupid because of course he was — he made a mistake, and he thought he could get away with it, and now he was paying the price for it — and now he had not one, but three competitors.
“I feel like ‘mess’ is an understatement, Tommy,” he said. He exhaled and closed his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “I can’t believe it, Quackity and his- and- and now Schlatt too, how are we going to-“
“Niki and Fundy, Wilbur,” Tommy muttered. “they’re running against you, too.”
Wilbur opened his mouth, then closed it. Outside the walls, he could hear Fundy and Niki laughing and celebrating together with Quackity.
His heart twisted in his chest and he pressed his mouth into a thin line. He was scared, yes, but most of all he remembered how Fundy looked like up on the stage with his chin tipped towards the sky and his eyes glimmering with defiance, and he couldn’t tell his son ‘no’ when Fundy was every bit a wild thing with mischief in his bones and ambition in his bared teeth. He looked at Niki, righteous fire burning in her, the drive to change things, the drive to make better, make good, and he loved her because she was his best friend, his equal — he wouldn’t dare bar her from her own dreams.
“So they are,” Wilbur said, “and that’s fine- it’s whatever, they… Fundy and Niki can make their own decisions, Tommy.”
‘Pride’ was a reach and ‘approval’ felt scant — whatever he felt towards the pair, he felt it right alongside hurt unfurling in his chest. For Fundy, for Niki, for his people, anything, and for as long as he was alive, everything.
“But what are we gonna do, Wil?” Tommy asked. He had his back turned to the entrance to L’manberg. He couldn’t see the joy in their competitors’ faces at the prospect of wrenching his nation from him.
Wilbur could.
“We’ll be fine,” he said, wrenching his lips up to a smile. “I mean, people like you a lot, Tommy, they’ll vote for us. We built this place, right, we’re worrying about nothing, man.”
“And what about you?” Tommy asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
Wilbur shrugged. His cheeks were beginning to hurt and his hands shook. “I’m their President,” he said easily, because it was true, and it explained everything he didn’t want to admit. “Look, it’s going to be fine, right Tommy? You trust me, right?”
“‘Course I do,” Tommy said. “Do you?”
Wilbur sucked in a breath.
“In you?” he said, instead. “Sure. Always.”
A few days turned into a week, and in that week, Wilbur learned how to live again.
The first time he got around to taking a shower, he stood under the water for far too long and didn’t get out until the pads of his fingers wrinkled up and his back felt numb. He washed his clothes as Tubbo had told him to do, wore a thicker coat and thicker pants and felt only marginally warmer.
He worked for Tubbo and Ranboo. Every day without fail, Ranboo showed up at his door and gave him a task for the day — he’d have stone to mine for the wall or wood to chop for the mansion or crops to harvest from the farm, and sometimes Tubbo would find him and get him to help them build their wall or ask him for advice on décor.
In exchange, they allowed him to wander Snowchester to his heart’s content, as long as he never wandered beyond its borders. He frequented the shorelines, toeing the waves and letting the freezing water lap at his feet to chain him to reality. He avoided a grave next to a tower on a little hill, though, kept away from it like the mere thought of being within its vicinity felt like venom dripping into his chest, burning him through down to his stomach. Whatever he needed for food and tools and blocks, they let him take from their resources, too, as long as he provided them their fixed quota daily.
And laborious as it was to get up everyday and undertake physical work, he found that he enjoyed the repetition, the intimate effort of figuring out how to work his fine motor skills once again.
His body had forgotten how to be alive, and so had he, but neither of them had a choice in the matter.
When his hands proved to be too uncooperative, this was where Ranboo came in. The hybrid was always there at the corner of his eyes, pretending like he wasn’t watching Wilbur’s every move. There was always a sword strapped to his side, still made of Netherite and still bursting with magic, but he never took it out to use against Wilbur again. Instead, he descended their quarry and helped Wilbur carry the weight of stacks of stone when he shook too hard, wracked through with tremors that rooted from the heart.
This was how Ranboo, for him, stopped being a memory and started being a reality.
(A companion. He didn’t dare say ‘friend’.)
Ranboo was eighteen, first of all.
He was a kid, and there were scars beneath his eyes, lines stretching all the way down his cheeks like tear tracks.
He was an enderman hybrid, which explained the scars, and everyone in the server liked him, which didn’t.
He was married to Tubbo, and the both of them were trying to learn Piglin. Wilbur thought about the thumping sounds coming from their attic and in a bout of courage, he offered to teach Ranboo the basics of the language.
By no means was he good at it, let alone fluent, but judging by the way Ranboo’s lip twitched with something like genuine gratitude, he was sure he made the right call.
Most importantly, Ranboo was a good kid.
He was a tentative person, careful with his words and careful with the way he held himself around other people. He spoke to Wilbur kindly; no doubt that he knew what kind of a person Wilbur was, but Ranboo never judged him beyond how he treated people. His eyes shone when Wilbur began thanking him for help and scary as his threats were, Wilbur noticed they always began with ‘If you hurt anyone here’.
Tubbo was lucky to have him, Wilbur thought. They needed more good people in the world.
“Day of reckoning, big guy. You excited?”
Tommy grimaced at the audience. “More like batshit scared,” he grumbled, “but you didn’t hear it from me.”
“Didn’t hear anything,” Wilbur said, chuckling.
He met Tubbo’s eye in the audience and waved at him as the president of clean-pressed suits and charming grins. Behind his ramrod back, he held the ballot in stiff hands, trembling fingers; he could still feel the tear tracks down his cheeks from the night before, counting votes and feeling his heart plummet to his feet.
He looked around himself at the other parties — at Schlatt and the horns curling around his ears, at Quackity and George smirking back at him, at Fundy and Niki and the determination on their faces — and then he looked at the audience, his people, his trusted, loyal people.
A low anger simmered in him, flickered to life months ago when he died in a blackstone room, and as much as he tried to contain it, he couldn’t ignore the toxic fumes it sent up his lungs.
L’manberg was his and his alone — its values his to uphold, its foundations his to build on, its people his to protect, their ambitions his to fulfil, their fears his to quell, their burden his to carry, his and his alone — because he swore, anything and everything, and he was the only one who realised this, who was strong enough to realise this.
And yet he held the results in his hands. He felt the nation’s heart beating beside his. He knew how tonight would end, and the people wanted what the people wanted, so he’d give them everything they needed.
“We’ll be fine,” he said, reaching out to squeeze Tommy’s shoulder. “Have a little faith in me, big guy. Whatever happens today, Tommy, you and me — we’re both in this together, alright? We’ve always got each other’s backs, yeah?”
Tommy nodded and straightened his back. He puffed out his chest and beamed up at Wilbur — Wilbur’s eyes couldn’t help but flick down to the edge of a scar poking out from Tommy’s collarbone.
“Good lad,” Wilbur said, and he stepped up to the podium. He looked out at his people, gave them his best smile.
Wilbur opened the envelope, and history was sealed.
After almost two weeks of avoidance, Tubbo showed up at his doorstep and told him to empty his inventory of everything. He carried a trident and wore Netherite boots that glimmered with enchantments, and the set of his jaw clued Wilbur in to the idea that he was probably carrying a whole set of weapons, either to protect them from the world or to protect the world from Wilbur.
Still, he obliged, and he carried with him nothing but the clothes on his back. Tubbo led him to a water tunnel and instructed him to hang on tightly, putting emphasis on tightly.
Wilbur wrapped his arms around Tubbo’s torso and interlocked his fingers for good measure. Tubbo thrusted his trident into the water, and-
-for a second Wilbur couldn’t breathe-
-then they fell over onto solid ground, and Wilbur ate dirt as inertia flung him off of Tubbo. He heaved himself up on one elbow and breathed for a second — hacked out water from his lungs and swallowed down the burn at the back of his trachea.
“You good?” Tubbo asked, already on his feet. “Should’ve warned you, sorry.”
“I was a corpse not two weeks ago, Tubbo,” Wilbur replied. He pushed himself up to his feet. No matter how much he inhaled, it felt as though he couldn’t quite fill up the entirety of his lungs. “I still haven’t quite gotten used to, to being alive.”
Tubbo nodded at him. His face was pinched. “Right.” A pause. “Let’s go.”
He led Wilbur onto the Prime Path, and it felt like coming home. It felt like the world was clicking back into place and the world was wrapping around him, like he had been a cardboard cutout of the server and it was only now, as he stepped back onto the familiar oak planks, that he felt the SMP welcoming him back as one of its own.
(At the end of the day, the SMP was home, and its members were family. A family, yes, but a broken one, a family that hated each other and had, on much more than one occasion, taken each other’s lives.
There was merit in holding onto family and never giving up, but there was also merit in knowing when you have lost a fight for good.
Tubbo and Ranboo were expanding the walls of Snowchester. Wilbur recognised a demand for solitude when he saw one.)
In death, there was more than just grief.
There was the emptiness, the waking up in the morning to silence, the glancing to his right only to find no one there, the expecting someone to finish his sentences.
There were the routines, the rituals of cleaning the body and burying it and holding a funeral for someone who wasn’t even there to witness it, the eulogies and the obituaries and the deconstruction of someone else’s life into ink and paper.
There was the anticipation, and Wilbur felt this most of all as he stepped into Tommy’s house and braced himself for a tackle or a shout, but there was nothing, no one to greet him.
In front of him, Tubbo breathed, hands white and clenched around his trident.
“Look through his- the basement,” Tubbo muttered. “I’ll look through the chests here. And the contents of his enderchest too.” His head was turned away from Wilbur, eyes fixed onto the floor. He paused, and then added, “I have emergency access to it.”
Wilbur nodded. “Okay,” he said, weakly, “what are we looking for, exactly?”
Tubbo made a noise at the back of his throat, and gestured lamely with a hand. “Just, you know,” he said, “anything that might’ve- I don’t know, meant something.”
His shoulders were tense, legs locked stiff on the ground, and Wilbur understood his loss for words, because there weren’t any words to describe a ritual beyond it’s what we have to do.
He nodded again anyway, and left Tubbo shivering at Tommy’s front door.
As soon as he breached the basement, the temperature dropped a dangerous amount. Wilbur didn’t know how much of it was in his head. He shivered, pulled his Snowchester coat tighter around himself, and stepped further into the room. He spent a long time standing with his eyes locked on the floor, imagining Tommy here, Tommy alive, Tommy sorting the junk in his chests, before he stirred his limbs into action.
The first chest yielded nothing but stacks of dirt, wood, and stone.
The second was a chest of tools, none of which were named or enchanted or looked familiar enough to feel sentimental.
The third was filled with building blocks and several empty potion bottles.
The last chest was full of cobblestone.
He allowed himself a moment of wistfulness as he stared at Tommy’s favourite block in the world, then sighed. His breath came out fogged. There was no way a basement was that cold, especially considering the warm biome that Tommy had built his house in.
(Not unless there was something else here with him.
Memories crept into the edges of his consciousness, memories of grey skin and floaty thoughts and feeling- being ice-cold everywhere he went.)
He pressed his lips into a thin line, took a deep breath, and closed the chest.
There was nothing here. Nothing in these chests that meant anything, and his inventory stayed empty and all of him felt empty, too.
Wilbur buried his head in his hands, rubbed the corners of his eyes until they hurt, and then dragged his hands slowly down his face. He looked up. The chest was open.
A part of him fell to the bottom of his feet.
He clenched his fists — his palms were fucking freezing — and counted backwards from ten. He closed the chest with a determined sort of finality, and stepped away for good measure.
The chest clicked open, and Wilbur felt faint down to the bone.
“What the fuck,” he said quietly. He stared at the cobblestone stacked up in the chest, he stared at all the memories of watching Tommy build his annoying little towers with the material, and they stared back at him.
He shut his eyes as his throat closed up. Blindly, he reached forward and slammed the lid close, putting all his body weight on it.
A cold feeling pressed on his forearms, and Wilbur flinched back in time to hear the chest creak open once again. He staggered backwards, swallowing down something sour and hysterical that rose up in his throat.
“No,” he muttered, shaking his head wildly.
His back hit the wall, and he let himself slide down its length until he was sitting, clutching his hair in his hands and trembling violently from the cold, from the fear, from the sinking knowledge that was all-too-desperate on latching itself to him.
‘Wilbur,’ whispered a familiar voice, too distant and too close to his ears.
He cried out.
Something stood just over him, a pair of boots that flickered in and out of vision, greyed out, far too transparent to look right, and the hairs on the back of Wilbur’s neck stood rigidly up.
‘Wil-buh,’ said the voice again, light and mocking, almost sing-songed his name for him, ‘Wilbur!’
“Fuck you,” Wilbur gasped, “fuck off,” before he lost all the breath in his chest and passed out.