Chapter Text
Wilbur Soot–Craft was sixteen, turning seventeen in a few more weeks, and currently he kind of hated his life. There wasn’t anything wrong per se, nothing like that. He had plentiful food, the house in the woods he’d lived in all his life was warm and welcoming, and he had plenty to busy himself with between housework, books and his budding enthusiasm with music.
Wilbur was just utterly, incredibly bored.
It had been nearly a month since he’d last seen his father. Long trips to who knows where were fairly common for Phil but the man always refused to take him along, citing long distances and Wil’s wings still being too small to properly support him, along with seemingly whatever other excuse happened to pop into his mind. The best the teen had managed to get was the occasional day trip to the core region of the server they lived in, the area a respectable if modest trading town. Never further.
It chafed Wilbur to be left behind, though he also understood Phil’s need to travel – the same wanderlust had slowly been brewing in his own blood after all. Like father like son. But whenever he had broached the subject of travel, it was always the same song and dance. He was too young still, he didn’t know how to defend himself well enough, his wings needed more time to grow before they could carry him the way travelling with his father required.
All that made sense but it wasn’t much of a comfort for the young avian, especially paired with restrictions of how far he was allowed to wander on his own even within the borders of their home server.
He could always break some of Phil’s rules, like head for the core by himself, but the icing on the cake was that Phil never actually left him truly alone. Oh no. Not even now despite Wilbur being nearly an adult.
The brunet threw a half-hearted glare at the black shapes fluttering from treetop to treetop as he walked the forest. It was unfairly hard, really, to try and be a rebellious teenager when your father had an entire flock of birds he could command and who would tattle to him anything Wil did that was even remotely out of line.
Even though, he knew, some of the crows Phil always left to keep an eye on him seemed to encourage those actions more than anything else.
Well, this time Wilbur was being perfectly within his rights. The nearest village was only a few hours’ walk away from the house, and he liked spending time there besides. The local librarian even had a spare bed for him, for when he forgot himself and had to choose between staying the night or braving the forest and its mobs past nightfall.
And sometimes there were travellers, eager for a captive audience for their stories of distant lands.
Alas, there were no strangers passing through this time, according to the village blacksmith. Wil had asked at the earliest opportunity while stopping by to negotiate the price for repairs on some kitchenware he’d brought. (See, crows? Legitimate business.) There were always some new faces, but they were just boys from other nearby villagers come help with the harvest.
Thanking the man for the chat – and the significant discount on the repair work – Wil left the forge behind to wander the village, just basking in the presence of people, in the way sounds of the village blended to a pleasant hum that paired with the warmth of sunshine on his back – the way it seeped through his overcoat to soak into his folded, hidden wings, another rule of Phil’s – and let himself relax. Maybe in a little while he’d set himself up on a corner with his guitar like he sometimes did and entertain the children, or just watch as life went on happily and peacefully.
Something brushed against Wilbur’s coat and his feathers puffed up under it. Reflexes forcibly drilled into him took over (If you can’t at least react quickly enough to the hiss of a creeper or twang of a bow, you won’t be able to go anywhere alone) and the brunet spun on his heel, instinctively grabbing hold of a wiry wrist before even fully registering what it was he was seeing.
“Fucking ow! Let me go you bitch!” The screech that resulted stung his ears, let out by an absolutely feral-looking boy, his fingers still halfway into Wil’s pocket.
What the hell. An actual pickpocket, in their little village? The kid couldn't be more than a handful of years younger than Wil but he was filthy, in that specific way vagabonds with nothing to their name often were. Ragged, ill-fitting clothes haphazardly patched in places, a mop of blond-ish hair and a gaunt face with a vicious snarl on it as he tried to pry Wilbur’s fingers off his wrist.
“You... were you going through my pockets? Since when has the village had a thief problem?” Wilbur blinked incredulously. What was the local peacekeeper doing? What was anyone in the village doing, really, having an actual child on the streets picking peoples’ pockets?
“I didn’t do shit, now let me go!” The boy gave up on trying to pry himself free of Wilbur’s grip, his shoulders sagging a little, and grumbled. “Bet you wouldn’t even have noticed one or two emeralds gone.”
“That’s all you’d have taken? That’s barely enough to barter for food, let alone...” Oh. Oh. It was all starting to click – the boy was clever. Wil was willing to bet anything that this was exactly how he operated; choosing targets that were doing business with the traders and taking so little his victims wouldn’t even realise that at the end of the day they had a couple emeralds fewer than they should. Barely scraping by day to day, but reasonably safe and able to stay in any given town for as long as he wished.
Unless someone caught him in the act, anyway. Like now.
Guilt over stopping himself from getting robbed was a new feeling, and not one Wil much appreciated. It was his money after all, earned through chores and the occasional stint of busking.
But still, looking at the feral looking boy – something oddly familiar in those blue eyes past the shine of hostile bravado – the brunet couldn’t help but wonder when the pickpocket had last had an actual meal, and felt the first inkling of a plan forming. See, Wilbur did have money. He’d earned most of it himself, always reluctant to touch the emeralds Phil kept leaving for him ‘in case of an emergency’, but even without those he had a decent amount. There wasn't much to spend it on in the village, and he was so incredibly bored, most of the time. One could be used to rectify the other now, at least for a while.
“How about this: if you behave, I won’t turn you in to the local peacekeeper.” He grinned, holding back a snicker at the look of utter suspicion that his words sparked from the blond boy. “And, if you’re willing to tell me the story of how you ended up here, picking my pockets in a remote village on a back country server, I’ll get you a full meal.”
The boy snarled at Wil noiselessly, baring his teeth but nodded curtly with a hunger in his eyes that told the brunet that he had him hooked – the temptation of milking a free meal for all it was worth must have been too much to resist.
“Deal, bitch. You better be ready to shill out, it’s the kind of story you’ve never heard before! Those don’t come cheap.”
Wilbur smiled. There it was, hook line and sinker.
The village wasn’t large enough to have an actual inn, but it did have a pub. And while said pub mainly catered to thirsty villagers after a long day or work, it did also have a selection of foods on offer and an owner with a soft spot a mile wide for Wilbur. Case in point, she’d taken one look at him, bringing in a half-starved looking smaller boy and wasted no time in ushering them to a corner table before, on request, filling said table with plates of food – the kind that wasn’t too heavy for a stomach used to get by with less, while still filling. Fluffy, airy bread, steaming baked potatoes glistening with fresh butter, and a whole plate of fresh slices of watermelon.
Wil very nearly burst into laughter at the face the would-be pickpocket made at the relatively simple spread, his eyes wide like saucers and mouth opened to a small o.
“So. Your story. You’ll have to talk in between your bites, but that should help with pacing yourself anyway. We don’t want you puking all this up and messing up miss Clara’s floor.”
The tale of daring and adventure the blond launched into, trying to simultaneously stuff his face like there was no tomorrow, was obviously fake but Wilbur enjoyed trying to figure out what the truth hiding behind the story was. No one could weave together a narrative like that out of nothing, and the boy made sticking to his story harder on himself by going about it backwards, starting with how he’d found the village.
That part of the story was at least believable if Wilbur disregarded the bits where the boy supposedly intercepted a Pillager patrol about to find its way there – all that remained of the grey-skinned barbarians on the server was a handful of ruins. The only other part that didn’t quite line up in Wil’s mind was the boy’s insistence that his presence was coincidental. No one in their right mind would leave the server’s core area without a cause, especially if they were a pickpocket reliant on wealthy wanderers for survival.
Curious on how far he could push before the story started falling apart, Wilbur kept questioning the blond thief for details, eventually prompting the other to ‘admit’ that he’d been a soldier. Which had to be complete bollocks. He was a child, even moreso than Wilbur himself!
The avian’s incredulity was faced with nonchalance and a vague change of topic, the younger going off on a tangent to complain how rural even the busiest places of the server were, and Wilbur realised he wasn’t a hundred percent certain that it had all been a lie anymore. He couldn’t believe the other boy to have been an actual child soldier, but maybe he had been part of something. And that meant there was a mystery there to solve, even if it was just by convincing the boy to actually share his story.
“I just realised I never asked. What’s your name?” Wilbur needed to ensure this wasn’t just an one-time meeting. He wanted to know.
“...Theseus.” The blond grimaced, pronouncing the name in a way that made Wil think of foreign languages, the T sharp and the vowels garbled. “But I don’t really like using it if I don’t have to.”
“Right.” Wil grabbed his communicator and typed in the name, getting.... nothing. “Uh, I can’t find you on the comm network.”
“I don’t have one of those.”
Wilbur stared. What did this kid mean he didn’t have a communicator? They were required by law to be provided by the server administrations everywhere. For free too, unless you wanted fancy additional widgets. The blond shifted under his stare, blue eyes flicking almost imperceptibly towards the door and Wilbur decided he could only push so far in one sitting.
“You know what, I’m not gonna ask. People tend to get a bit rowdy in the pub so I bet Clara has a few extras. It’s an older server so you can’t even leave without one, you know.” Not exactly true, but not having the digital identification would definitely make things more difficult. The teenage avian wondered whether Theseus had lost his inside, or if being comm-less meant he was from one of the technologically advanced servers where a face or fingerprint or even less was enough for identification.
He waved the pub owner over and explained the situation, the blond quickly catching on when Wil explained the younger's communicator had fried in a thunderstorm and playing his part by doing an incredibly good impression of a lost puppy. Soon the boys had a brand new – if an older model – communicator on the table between them, and Theseus was carefully going through the registration process.
“It doesn’t accept my name.” The blond grumbled, and Wil peered over his shoulder at the tiny screen.
“Theseus isn’t the most uncommon of names so it might— wait, that doesn’t say Theseus.” What by Ender was that string of symbols on the screen? The blond was supposed to be inputting his name, not password.
“Look, these things tie to your identity permanently, right? Theseus is just a nickname. Kind of. I can’t just... I mean, I don’t wanna give up my actual name.”
“Wait. Is that your name?” Wilbur tried to make sense of what the other boy had typed in. It was no wonder the communicator was having trouble with it, the text was more symbols and numbers than letters. “Who the hell named you?”
“Dunno.”
Wilbur wasn’t sure he wanted to be involved as deeply as he’d planned, anymore. The kid didn’t know who named him? Did he not have parents? Anything? The code was almost like....... like.....
A serial number. He’d said he’d been a soldier, or at the very least something like that. And wouldn’t being a runaway explain going this deep into an out-of-the-way, no-name server with seemingly no reason to?
T00-M1-NN1-T. That was no name at all. But the boy did say he didn’t want to get rid of it, either. Moot, really, since a basic comm wouldn’t accept something with that few letters as a name. Wilbur looked at the code, serial number, whatever it was, and considered. The kid had said he didn’t like using Theseus, but his only other option was this. So, what he needed was a third alternative.
“You know... if you ignore that they’re numbers, the start looks kind of like it says Tommy, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah... it is kind of like ‘Tommy’, innit. Not a bad name.” Theseus – Tommy – tilted his head at the text before nodding thoughtfully and erased the odd code he’d put down as his name. Wil had to quickly bite back a snicker at seeing the blond only pause for a second at the error buzz signifying a taken name before confidently tagging ‘Innit’ to the end to form his identification.
.-.-.
Turns out helping Th– Tommy get an official identity into the server records like that crossed some mysterious bar, because after the meal and exchanged contacts, the blond seemed to have most of his wariness towards Wilbur, acting like they’d known each other for years. He still threw around outrageous lies, but there was a lighthearted cheek to them that made them sound a lot less like he was trying to hide something.
The two of them were seated on the guest bed the village librarian kept for Wilbur, facing each other. Evening had snuck up on them like it often did for Wil in the village, and the librarian had been kind enough to dig out an extra mattress for Tommy when the two – or Wilbur really, Tommy had been ready to go back to sleeping inside a hay stack – explained the blond was homeless.
“So. Questions for questions, yeah? No judging.” Tommy shifted, eyes darting around the room. Wil was proud of his idea of figuring out more about the strange kid, even if it meant he’d have to answer just as many questions as he asked. It wasn’t like there was much anything here he should be worried about revealing.
His wings shifted minutely under his coat, flat against his back. It was fine. Tommy would have to know to ask.
“And no lying. Skirting the truth is fine, everyone has sore subjects and all that, but no outright lies. Deal?”
The boy nodded. “Only if I get to start. Why the fuck did you decide to do all this?” He gestured vaguely, but it was easy to see what he meant. “You literally caught me with my hand in your pocket, and you’ve just been helping the whole day since.”
Wilbur shrugged. “I was bored.”
“What the fuck, that’s not a–”
“I wasn’t done answering. Tommy, nothing ever happens here. It’s the same faces, same routines every single day. Someone trying to pickpocket me was the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in weeks. I wasn’t going to just get rid of you and return to the mind numbing drudgery that’s life around here.”
“Oh.” Wil could tell Tommy wasn’t convinced that he’d been entirely truthful, but accepted the answer anyway.
“Now, my turn.” What should he ask? There were so many options. But maybe it would be easiest to star with something a little simpler than the blond’s real motives. “Are you actually alone? As in, do you really have no one anywhere? Relatives, caretakers, compatriots, that sort of thing.”
Wil didn’t expect the harrowed, uncertain look that flashed across the younger boy’s face, but maybe he should have. Did whoever he maybe probably was running from count as a caretaker of compatriot to him?
Then why would he be here and not there?
“I’ve got you don’ I?” Tommy’s flippant smile was obviously strained, and when he hesitated to continue Wil just kept silent, raising an expectant eyebrow.
“...okay, fine. I don’t think I’ve got... I mean, there’s one. Probably. Only ever seen ‘em once, and we never spoke. But I’m his blood. Least they told me so.”
Oh. There definitely was a story behind that, but Tommy had so obviously forced the words out, and was eyeing Wilbur with barely concealed caution now instead of the cockiness from before, so the young avian just nodded thoughtfully. “Your turn to ask again.”
“If it’s so boring here why haven’t you left?”
That... was a good question. It wasn’t like Wil didn’t think about setting off on his own often. But... as annoying as his dad could be about things, Phil never lied to him. If he said Wilbur would be targeted out there for having wings, no matter how small, it was the truth. If he – and especially Technoblade, whenever he was around – said Wilbur couldn’t fight well enough to protect himself against people who’d see him as nothing but a paycheck, then it was true. The young avian shrugged.
“Someone has to make sure the place doesn’t go to shit. And besides, if I just off and left, the family would tear half the world apart looking for me.”
“Oh...” There was something in Tommy’s voice that made Wil almost regret mentioning family. Something incredibly lonely.
“So... about that mystery blood relation of yours.” Wilbur started, almost – but not quite – regretting his chosen path of inquiry when the blond tensed. “Anything more you know about them? Or him? It’s a bit far-fetched a thought, but maybe I can help.”
Tommy was silent for a good while, long enough that Wilbur started to think that maybe he’d misjudged the boy after all, that he’s ended up pushing too far too quickly, and Tommy would clam up and probably be gone by morning.
“I... I guess I know a name. Kinda.” The blond wasn’t meeting Wilbur’s eyes, instead shifting with clear discomfort, gaze flicking all over the room but focusing at the door and window the most. Making sure his escape routes were open, maybe? Wilbur let out a soft encouraging sound. Tacking on the offer to help had maybe been a bit much, as all he had was the library of a backwater village and a couple of seldom-used contacts to friends that had passed through at one point or another, but hey, you never knew.
“D’you know anything ‘bout... about the Angel of Death?” Tommy looked up at Wilbur, sky-blue eyes almost shy as they peered from under his sandy-golden fringe, clouded by wariness and something deeper. Something like desperation. A singular, innocent question, and Wil’s whole world flipped upside down.
What the fuck.