Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Wilbur, Ghostbur falls through a black void, their two separate strands of memory threading together until they merge and they merge and neither of them can tell where one ends and the other begins and they’re falling and falling-

And then they land.

Ghostbur takes his last breath, and Wilbur takes his first and for a split second there are two of them and then there is one and they are together, together and whole again-

And Wilbur is back.

Wilbur sits upright, clutching his chest and gasping for air like he hasn’t taken a breath in months because he hasn’t. He forces the air in and out of his lungs like he can breathe through all these memories, his memories, that are rocketing back into his brain with all the subtlety of an explosion. The ground around him is littered with dust and chinks in the smoothed stone that catch his hands when he moves them to push himself upright.

He raises his body first, then his head, up from his position on the floor, the same pose he died in. Maybe he should have stayed dead. The memories of what he did after death are fuzzy, for a lack of a better descriptor, but if he tries, he can push through them. The worse they are, the clearer they get, but even the best of his ghost-self’s memories are clear enough to make one thing painfully obvious. Ghostbur was the better one of the two of them. Ghost made people happy. All Wilbur did was destroy things because… why? Because he was angry that he couldn’t have it? Because his vision for L’Manberg had been twisted until it was no longer the same place that he regarded so fondly? Because a certain green bastard had pushed and prodded at the mind of a broken man until he willing tied puppet strings around his own limbs? He didn’t even know anymore. 

The only thing that comes out when he opens his mouth to speak is a squeaking sound, and Wilbur’s throat burns like the desert. Of course. It’s been months since he’s been alive, it's been months since he’s had anything to drink, because Ghostbur couldn’t touch water without it hurting ( he remembers pain as snow burns his skin and he’s lost and he doesn’t know what Dream wanted him to see but he’s lost and it hurts and he can’t even die to escape it because he’s already dead and he can’t die again but he wishes he could he’d take the pain of a sword over this any day ). Wilbur should have known better than that, and his face flushes in humiliation as he finally takes stock of the people around him.

Eret, Fundy, Phil, and someone else. His memories inform him that the final party watching him is named Ranboo. There are… almost no clear memories with Ranboo, so Ghostbur must have liked his company a lot.

It takes him a good three minutes of pantomiming before someone (Eret, of all fucking people) realizes what Wilbur’s trying to communicate and gives him a drink of water. He gives them a thumbs up in the place of a verbal thanks, considering that his throat is still dryer than it’s ever been, and drinks the entire water bottle that he’s been handed in one quick motion. He regrets it as soon as the water hits his stomach because, unsurprisingly, his stomach is really fucking empty. The bile that tries to creep back up his throat stings, but Wilbur clamps his lips together and struggles to keep it down. Almost everybody here has already seen him at his worst, but he still has his pride.

Leaning on the wall for support, Wilbur slowly makes his way to his feet. He breathes, and takes in the ruined scenery, the nation that once was, but will never be again. Eret drew first blood, Wilbur wounded it, and Dream, Techno and Phil struck the killing blow to L’Manberg. He supposes that the first words that he says after his resurrection should be something grand, like one of the speeches that he used to give. It would be fitting.

Instead, Wilbur looks his father dead in the eyes, and very casually asks him, “Hey Phil, what the fuck?”. It seems even more fitting than a speech. His last words were directed to his father, and now his first words are too. 

He means it. Why, he wants to ask, why did you bring me back? Why did you destroy the last concrete memory that everyone had of me before I went down the wrong path? Why did you side with your friend over your last living son? Why the fuck did you kill Friend? 

He asks none of the questions on his mind, and he gets no answer. Not from his father. Not from anyone. 

Eret finds him hours later, sitting at the edge of the crater. Considering how close Wilbur is to the castle, he’s really not surprised that they found him. Maybe he wanted to be found. 

Neither of them speak, There are no words to express the complicated feelings of grief and self-hatred that Wilbur feels, and he’s relieved that Eret doesn’t try. There's a crater below them and a castle towering far above them, and the ruins of a rebuilt city somewhere in between the two. L’Manberg was Wilbur’s second son, one that he raised with his own two hands and a little help from others, one that he bombed into submission. 

The feelings are more complicated than mourning. L’Manberg died when Wilbur called the election, he knows that now. The second he tried to force any kind of real power into L’Manberg, he betrayed the very principle that the nation had been founded on, freedom from tyranny. He’s already mourned the loss of L’Manberg, back when he was a broken version of himself, and maybe it was fitting how L’Manberg died a second time, a broken man destroying the broken nation that he’d founded. He hates himself for what he’s done, but he doesn’t regret what he did, just the way that he did it. 

Instead, he mourns Ghostbur, the pale reflection of himself that might just have been a better person than he could ever hope to be. He knows that Ghost built New L’Manberg from the ashes of a nation, he knows that Ghost was hurting so much, but decided instead to make sure that he was the only person who felt that pain. He knows that Ghost was forgetful, but that he did his best, and that his best was probably better than anything Wilbur could have done. 

Wilbur sits on the edge of a crater where his dead nation once stood, and Eret stands behind him, dwarfed by their castle, and maybe it’s symbolic of something. Maybe it's the setup to a joke, two traitors walk into a crater, or something like that. He’d laugh if his body remembered how to. 

Instead, he cries silently. L’Manberg is gone, this time for good, and maybe it was never meant to be. There will be no funeral service save for this. 

Chapter Text

Wilbur spends the next few nights at Eret’s castle. He’s not avoiding his brother, not exactly. It’s just that he has no idea what he’s going to say to him. ‘Hey, whats up. Sorry I fucking snapped and tried to drag you down with me.’? Or maybe ‘ I’m going to skin Dream alive for everything that he’s done to both of us.’? Everything that he could say comes off as too much, too late.

You could tell him that you’re sorry, something inside Wilbur whispers. You could tell him that you love him and you do believe in him. You could start mending the goddamn shaky foundations of his self-esteem because you’re the one who broke it first. He knows what he needs to do, he just doesn’t know how to do it.

It’s complicated, okay? And Tommy has enough to deal with right now, he doesn’t need any more of Wilbur’s bullshit hurting him. Because Wilbur fucked up, really, really bad, and he’s not quite ready to face the consequences (Eret has no fucking moral ground from which to judge him, and both of them know it. That might be another reason why he refuses to leave the castle. Eret has no room to judge Wilbur. Everybody else does ).  

It does, eventually, get too hard to stop ignoring the hints that Eret keeps dropping. The ones that become less and less subtle about Wilbur getting the fuck out of their castle for at least an hour. He supposes that he should probably try to maintain a working relationship with the person who owns the place that he’s currently crashing at. Good manners and all that jazz. So Wilbur decides that he will, in fact, get the fuck out of the castle. 

“You need a support system,” Eret tells him. Their voice fractures with all the things left unsaid, like how Eret knows that Wilbur needs a support system because they needed one once too, and they never got one. Like how Eret cannot be Wilbur’s support system because both of them have their own shit to deal with. There are so many things that get left unsaid between them, but are understood nonetheless. When Eret finds their voice again, they watch Wilbur for a second, before deciding on what to say. They tell him that he needs to talk to his brother, in many more words than that, and Wilbur tells them that he can’t. 

He passes Eret on the way out. He’s honestly offended by the sheer surprise on their face when he tells them that he’s going out, and that they shouldn’t wait up for him if he’s not back by sundown. They may like to think of themselves as unreadable, but Eret’s always worn their heart on their sleeve, and once you learn how to read them, it's pretty easy to tell what they’re thinking most of the time. Wilbur has only ever failed to read Eret once, and that was due to the sheer fatigue that he’d been feeling at the time, not Eret’s nonexistent acting skills. 

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Wilbur mutters, “I’m not going to see Tommy. I’m going to go yell at my dad until I find some catharsis. Maybe I’ll kill god. Maybe I'll go find Friend. I’ll figure it out on the way”. 

He walks off with an iron sword slung haphazardly across his waist, and only a leather cap for protection. If Eret has anything to say about this, then their reply is lost as Wilbur marches towards the nether portal. He almost wishes that it was raining, just so that he could be a little bit more dramatic about his exit.

The snow is a welcome break from the oppressive heat of the nether, and for a second, Wilbur tries to float over so he doesn’t get his boots wet, before remembering that water no longer hurts him, and floating is something that he can no longer do. It’s not snowing yet, but something in the way that the wind is blowing tells him that the snow will be coming down before he finishes what he came here to do. 

Technoblade’s house puffs smoke out of its chimney like a dragon with a lung problem, and Wilbur wonders if Techno ever really meant to stay hidden out here on these plains. There is a sprinkling of trees around his house, sure, but the human taming of this land is unmistakable. As Wilbur gets closer, he can see the house that Techno lives in, as well as the half finished house that he once started building. That Ghost started building. He really needs to work on deciding if Ghost is a separate entity from him, considering his dead self’s insistence that they were not the same. Wilbur wishes that he could separate himself from the past that easily. 

Ghost might have started to build a house, but Wilbur has no intention of living here. He holds onto that thought like a lifeline as he comes closer and sees a farm, made in Phil’s signature style. Of course. Of fucking course Phil would be living here, with his friend . His fucking friend who he cared about more than either of his sons. The thought of Phil running away from his responsibility as a father makes Wilbur see red, and he has to force himself to push that aside for now. There will be plenty of time for anger, he tells himself, when he’s face to face with Phil again. 

He expects the door to Techno’s cabin to be locked, and knocks just a little bit harder than strictly necessary. Apparently, Techno is shit at making doors, because his knocking sends the door gently swinging open, revealing a very surprised Technoblade, who might have been in the middle of brewing potions or organizing his chests, considering all the supplies laid haphazardly around him.

The way that Wilbur feels about Technoblade is… complicated, to say the least. He’s mad at Techno, sure, because Techno betrayed him and betrayed Tommy when Tommy needed him, but at least Techno has always been upfront about everything. Even in Pogtopia, Technoblade had made it very clear that they might be friendly, but they were not friends. They were allies, and they would only ever remain allies until their goals diverged. Techno has always, in the time that Wilbur has known him, been upfront about his intentions, and Wilbur can respect that. 

Besides, Wilbur can’t judge Technoblade for blowing up L’Manberg when he did it first. Well, he can, but that would make him a hypocrite. 

“Hey Will,” Techno mutters, his attention fixated on the items in front of him. “Feel free to sit down or whatever, just not on any of the chests. Phil and Ranboo let a creeper in here and mixed up all my items trying to hide it.” Techno’s tone is fond, taking on a quality that could only be described as soft compared to his normal deadpan, but is soft nonetheless. 

Wilbur moves to sit on a furnace, picking his way around the items strewn around the floor. Techno’s lack of surprise tells him that somebody, probably Phil, has already told him about Wilbur’s resurrection. Techno has a lot of high quality items, he notes. In fact, almost half of his things are healing potions, the drinkable kind, though he can’t make out how long the effects of each will last at a glance. Techno grabs his hand without bothering to look at Wilbur as he reaches to check a healing potion. 

“They’re for Phil. Don’t touch ‘em.” He warns gruffly. “Best quality that I can make out here, don’t worry. I can organize my items by myself, Wilbur.”

That creates more questions, and answers nothing, and Wilbur is very tempted to say that out loud. He wants to know why Techno needs to brew what looks to be over a double chest of healing potions for Phil, and why so many items around the room are health related upon closer inspection. Techno has gapples, health and regen pots, and sky gods is that a fucking totem? He thought he’d seen Techno use one when the butcher army tried to execute him, but Ghost had been too distracted by Friend to form a reliable memory of the trial (or lack thereof). 

The soft sound of footsteps outside halt any questions that he might have asked. Phil appears to be back, and Wilbur has more important things to use his breath for than questioning Techno’s improvised hospital setup. 

“Heya Techno, I’m bac- Wilbur?” Phil calls as he steps through the door. He seems shocked that his son has come to visit, and Wilbur really doesn’t blame him. He doesn’t know why he’s here, just that something in him needed to come. For closure maybe, or to hear the whole story, but he had to come back to the cabin one last time. 

“Hey dad,” Wilbur starts, and then falls silent. He’s always had a complex relationship with family, but never one quite this strained. He searches for the words that he’d crafted in his head earlier, biting and meant to hurt, but he can’t find the bitterness he needs to deliver them. 

“I was just wondering, y’know, why you picked the sides you did? Why you spent so long making Tommy think that he could trust you, think that he finally had adults in his life that he could depend on, and I know I dropped the fucking ball on that, I know that, but I want to know why you cared for him, and then turned around and picked his abuser over him. And you might not have been there for him when he was exiled, but I was, and I saw what Dream did to him. I saw how little by little, Dream eroded his confidence that anyone could care about him, I watched him get broken down. And you both turned your backs on him when he needed you.” The words rush out of Wilbur’s mouth before he can stop them, before they can get in line. They aren’t the ones he’d rehearsed in his head during the walk to Techno’s house, but they feel right.

Judging from the expressions of both Phil and Technoblade, it’s obvious that nobody ever bothered to tell them the full story of what happened during Tommy’s exile. Who would? The only people who could have told them were Tommy, Dream, or Ghostbur, and none of them would have. Ghost lacked the memory and the emotional and social awareness to understand what was happening, Tommy had been gaslit into oblivion (and had never been good at sharing his trauma anyway), and Dream had nothing to gain from telling anyone what he’d done to Tommy. 

Wilbur wants the anger to drain out of him, he really does. He wants to be able to forgive, to let bygones be bygones. But the Wilbur that forgives died in an obsidian room to a metaphorical and literal knife to the back. So he forces his face into the best imitation of a smile, and recounts exactly how broken Dream left Tommy. He leaves out some of the more personal details, the ones that he thinks only Tommy should share, but most of it? Most of it gets recounted to his horrified audience of two.

He lets the door slam on his way out, and begins his trek back to the castle. Maybe this should feel like a weight lifting off of him, but it doesn’t. It doesn't feel like anything.