Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tommy is at swordpoint. Again.

Listen, it isn’t his fault he pulled the axe out early. Dream was right there leering at him and all Tommy did was jump the gun by a few seconds. Big deal!

But now he’s here, and Ghostbur’s there, on the other side of the fucking lava with Dream, and the kind Sam who built him a robot and a hotel and gave him protection, even companionship, isn’t here. No, this is the Warden, with grim eyes and a monotone voice, and he’s pointing his sword at Tommy, and Tommy is trying so, so hard not to be afraid.

It isn’t working.

“Sam, Sam,” he pants. “You have to let Ghostbur back. Dream is going to revive Wilbur. He’s going to bring Wilbur back. He’s going to kill Ghostbur.”

Sam shakes his head. “I can’t send the platform across.”

“Sam!” Tommy exclaims, and somewhere in the background Dream is saying something mocking and Ghostbur is hyperventilating and Tommy can’t—he can’t breathe right. “You have to let me across, Dream’s going to—he’s going to kill him, Sam, let him back, let me go, let me go—!”

“You’re going to free Dream,” Sam says. “You’re an intruder in the prison, Tommy. I could kill you right now.”

This is ridiculous. Tommy would never, he could never—“I would never free Dream! I’m here to kill him, Sam, I put him here in the first place and it was a fucking mistake and now I’m here to kill him. You have to let me—”

He lunges for the platform, scrabbling at the buttons that must control it—they have to—he needs to save Ghostbur and kill Dream and do what he came here to do—and then Sam is there, pinning him to the wall, sword digging into his throat. Tommy inhales sharply.

For a long moment everything is silent, save for the quiet bubbling of the lava separating Tommy from his greatest enemy and the ghost of his brother, who has become far more than just a ghost to him. He will be able to reach neither. Not like this.

He meets Sam’s eyes, pleading. “Sam. Let me go.”

Sam closes his eyes. “Tommy, you’re in the prison with a weapon, trying to reach the prisoner. I am authorized to terminate any threats to the security of this establishment.”

Tommy’s crying now, just a little. He pretends he isn’t. Flicking his eyes over Sam’s shoulder, he can see Ghostbur, blue tears streaking down his face, and Dream, standing at the edge of his cell, untouchable. It pierces Tommy to the core, how completely unfair it all is, the utter hopelessness of his plans, as ever, amounting to nothing. He cannot save Ghostbur. He cannot rid the server of Dream. He cannot even save himself.

Acceptance settles into his bones mere seconds before it happens—Tommy, wriggling against Sam’s hold, growls, “I need to get to—”

And then Sam, all jerky motion, grips his sword tight and slashes across Tommy’s throat. Tommy gasps; Sam lets go hastily as Tommy’s head lolls back against the wall, his mouth opening and closing uselessly.

Faintly, he can hear Dream laughing, Ghostbur sobbing, Sam whispering, “Oh, god. Tommy. Oh, god.” He scoops Tommy into his arms. “I—I didn’t mean to—”

“I think you meant to,” Dream says lightly. “Look at what you did. You went and killed Tommy.”

Sam whimpers. “I’m so sorry.” Tommy can’t breathe. He chokes on blood. He is outside of himself, yet he still feels it as Sam runs a shaking hand through his hair. “Tommy, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” Dream continues, and Tommy’s vision flickers out but he can still hear the damn smile in Dream’s voice. “I’ll revive him. When I feel up to it, of course.”

It clicks. Tommy is dying. Dream will revive him.

Sam chokes on a breath. His voice thick—is he crying?—he sounds all too hopeful as he asks, “You will?”

Dream chuckles, then. “Send Tommy on over. I’ll revive him after I—come here, Ghostbur, that’s right—do this.”

There’s a snap and a shout and a gasp and then Sam whispers, “You killed him. He’s a ghost, how did you kill him?”

Ghostbur, Tommy thinks, fading. Ghostbur, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s my fault, I brought you here, I’m sorry.

Just one more person he couldn’t save.

“Send him over, Sam,” Dream repeats, singsong. “Unless you don’t want him back. Unless you don’t want to fix what you’ve done.”

As Tommy is lowered to the floor, he finally loses consciousness.

It hadn’t even hurt as much that time, he muses. It hadn’t hurt much at all.

...

Tommy wakes in the void, and immediately he remembers why he had been so afraid of pain, of sound, of light when first he awoke in the land of the living.

It is a dark beyond dark. It is a silence beyond silence. And in any given second he is being both shattered and unshattered, pulled apart and pushed together.

He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead, and Dream is going to revive him.

His eyes flicker shut. Tubbo and Ranboo, waiting outside the prison. Seeing the death messages, one after the other: Tommy killed by Sam, Ghostbur killed by Dream. Tubbo and Ranboo, praying the deaths aren’t permanent, holding each other’s hands far too tightly. Sam walking out of the prison as the sunset begins, eyes dull, to deliver the news.

He cannot tell if it is guesswork or genuine sight that gives him that particular mental picture. He’d rather see void than Tubbo’s face when it hits him that Tommy is permanently dead again, though, which makes something deep within him twist. He wants to be there with Ranboo, holding his best friend. Tommy is being shattered and unshattered, doubly and triply, and he’s dead once again but Dream is going to revive him.

Tommy is, as far as he knows, the only person to have been here twice. He knows how it works, sort of: Wilbur had been able to manipulate it into manifesting things, into feeding him information that he shouldn’t have been able to know. Tommy, armed with the knowledge that his time here is finite, will be able to do something similar. He’ll teach himself to make it brighter, teach himself to ease the pain. He’ll make the void tell him what he wants to know.

He’s never been able to save the server before, not really. But if he goes through with this plan, he can unite everyone as Dream thought was only possible through cages and death and destruction. Attachments and peace coexisting, and all Tommy had to do was permanently die twice.

Only if he can pull this off, of course.

It’s far more unsettlingly quiet without Wil here to be terrible company. In an awful way, Tommy misses him.

He puts that aside to focus instead on the idea of light: the sunlight pooled in the center of a tulip, the glimmer in Tubbo’s eyes right before he’s about to laugh. Shatters, unshatters. And then there it is: from somewhere above, light.

Tommy laughs, giddy, as he examines the palms of his hands, the old familiar red and white fabric of his T-shirt. Dream said he would revive Tommy when he “felt up to it,” and he’ll want to keep Tommy from Sam for as long as possible. It’ll definitely be some time before he’s brought back.

That’s all right. After all, he has things to do. A void to manipulate.

“Wuh—wuzzat?” slurs a voice from the shadows. “Tommy? T’mmyInnit?”

No.

“‘S—is s’meone there?” A yawn, like they’re waking up.

Tommy has a sinking feeling he knows who the voice belongs to. The only person who could completely foil Tommy’s new plan. Who has haunted him even in death. Who had slept through Tommy’s last visit, and who Tommy had foolishly believed would sleep through this one too.

“I know y’re here, kid. ‘M not goin’ back to sleep.”

Schlatt.

Chapter Text

“Fuck off, Schlatt,” Tommy says, clipped. “I need to focus.”

The man in question steps into the light, squinting. “What the shit? Since when can you make light in this godforsaken place?”

“Since I died twice. Now let me do this,” Tommy snaps. The pain is getting overwhelming. He squeezes his eyes shut, taking a deep breath. Golden moments come to mind: a picnic on his tenth birthday; Wilbur at the founding of L’Manberg; Punz leading the whole server in to save him and Tubbo; Techno giving him the Axe of Peace, telling him he’s worthy; Ranboo’s allium at the bottom of a chest, its petals only just beginning to wilt. Tommy will not allow his happiness to be tainted.

He breathes in, then out. For the last time, he shatters, unshatters, and then—the pain recedes. It’s more like pins and needles than anything else now. Tommy lets out a whoop and finds that he’s grinning, something he’d never thought was possible in this hellhole of a place.

And then the bubble bursts. “What’s got you so happy?” Schlatt asks, his voice gravelly from apparent disuse. It makes sense. He’s been sleeping for the better part of a decade.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Tommy grits out. He doesn’t want to deal with a dead dictator. He needs to figure out how to wrangle the void, and fast. “I told you to fuck off.”

Schlatt’s grin can barely be called a smile, all bared rotting teeth and lips chapped to bleeding. “I don’t think I will.”

“You look like shit,” Tommy tells him, unapologetic.

Schlatt rises to the bait, retorting, “So do you.”

“Fuck you,” Tommy snaps, and he can’t deal with this, he really can’t, he’s a big man and all but he’s dead and he never wanted to die and it’s his fault Ghostbur died too but he was a ghost so Prime knows if he even gets an afterlife and he can’t do anything about it because he always ends up powerless, he’s here in the dark while Wilbur’s alive and he’s left Tubbo and he’s left Ranboo and he—

—comes back to himself, gasping for air, to find a hand on his shoulder, warm and heavy. Almost comforting. He catches himself leaning into it before jerking away, because this is Schlatt. Got Tubbo executed, caused Wilbur to start losing it, ruined L’Manberg. That Schlatt.

“F—fuck off,” Tommy stammers, and fuck, he’s tired of being afraid.

“Breathe, kid,” Schlatt says, taking exaggeratedly long breaths as if to guide Tommy into calming down. When did he become some sort of therapist? Why is he helping Tommy?

He breathes. It works. He hates that it works. Steadier, he says, “Get away from me.”

To Tommy’s surprise, Schlatt immediately backs off. “Who are you and what have you done with JSchlatt?” Tommy asks, eyes narrowing. “Why are you helping me? Why are you listening to me?”

“I’ve seen what happened to you,” Schlatt starts, and oh, fuck, the look in his eyes is all pity.

“No,” Tommy breathes. “No, no—”

“I’ve seen what happened to you,” Schlatt repeats. “Not too much, mind you, but I’ve seen enough.”

“I hate you,” Tommy growls. “I hate you, I hate this.”

“I know,” Schlatt replies, and for a moment it’s reassuring before Tommy forcibly reminds himself that this is Schlatt. “I’m unforgivable. I know that better than anyone,” he continues with a bitter laugh, “but I figure you’re here and I’m here and I might as well help you do something good. For once in my miserable life, huh?” He looks up at Tommy, hopeful, practiced, expectant.

“You piece of—” Tommy hisses, then cuts himself off. Pauses. He should take what little peace he can get, and continually trying to piss off his one companion is only going to slow him down. “Fine,” he concedes. “What do you want?”

It isn’t possible that Schlatt wants nothing in return, after all. Maybe he claims to have had a change of heart, but he can’t have changed that much. “A cigarette?” Schlatt asks, hopeful. Tommy knows immediately that it’s a lie.

Still, it’s a good opportunity to practice his manifesting skills. Eyes closed, he casts his mind towards Techno telling a good story on the other side of a campfire, freshly lit torches used to light up a room, the burner beneath a brewing stand in an old van, and between one second and the next, there’s a cigarette in Tommy’s hand, already lit.

He passes it to Schlatt. “You want to try that one again?” he says.

Schlatt raises an eyebrow. “You don’t believe me?”

“Not for a second.”

“Try me.” Schlatt spreads his hands, smoke curling gently from between his fingertips. “What do I want, then?”

Tommy supposes this is practice part two: getting knowledge from the void.

I am not the void, a voice whispers. Tommy casts his mind towards it. I am in between. I am liminality. I am there and here and nowhere at all. I am Limbo.

He doesn’t care about Limbo, he wants to know about Schlatt—

He does not see me like you see me, the voice says. I am different for all who linger.

That’s—interesting, if not completely useless at the minute. Tommy wonders, briefly, what Wilbur saw in his Limbo. What Schlatt sees. Why Tommy’s is just a void of endless, excruciatingly painful dark. Is it just what he expects it to be? Is it what he thinks of when he imagines death?

Is it what he deserves?

He shoves the thought aside, pushing his consciousness towards Schlatt.

What does he want? he thinks at the void. Sorry, at the voice. Limbo. What a dumb name. He’s just going to call it the void.

Why should you get to know? the void replies. What are you to me?

Tommy collects himself. Recalls everything Wil taught him about diplomacy, then immediately discards it, because Wil is a tosser and Tommy can make up his own pretty words. I am TommyInnit. I am the only person on this server to have visited you twice. I have returned. I am going to live again. I am going to carry a piece of you with me, even when I am gone from this place.

You would carry a piece of me within you when you live again? the void echoes, questioning. You would pay that price?

Tommy doesn’t know what he’s agreeing to, but he needs this. So he agrees. I would.

So will it be, TommyInnit, the void declares. We are thus bound in death and in life. You are the traveller and I am the between. You will know all you wish to know and more.

Thank you, Tommy thinks at the void, with which he has just made a binding vow. Well, if this is a thing that’s happening now, he might as well make use of it.

He looks at Schlatt—really looks at him—pulls from his own deep well of longing, of wishing, of want—

“You’re so tired,” Tommy murmurs, and he’s filled with it: Schlatt’s utter exhaustion, his years of trying desperately to rest, to fall asleep, to find true oblivion, all wasted on a useless in-between state that’s part coma and part stasis. Never true sleep.

Schlatt’s eyes widen. “How did you—?”

Tommy smiles, soft and true and wild. “I know things, Schlatt. I know you.”

“Unbelievable,” Schlatt mutters. “What, I spend years trying to get the damn thing to work for me and you just waltz in here and talk it into helping you on day one?”

“Yeah, bitch!” Tommy says brightly.

Schlatt shakes his head. “I know sleeping here isn’t possible. You can’t do anything about it.”

There’s a solution to every problem if you’re looking, the void whispers. Images flash through his mind, rapid-fire: Dream holding a book with a green and gold cover, Ghostbur in the prison, a bright flash of light, Wilbur watching the sunrise over the glass-enclosed crater of L’Manberg, and what looks like a greyed-out version of Schlatt, translucent red horns curling from his temples.

Lights flash through the darkness, green and then gold. Just because Tommy wills it so.

“Schlatt,” he says. “How do you feel about being revived?”

Chapter Text

“Revived?” Schlatt echoes.

Tommy nods. “Would you accept that? Your company, your cooperation, and your assistance for a second shot at life?” He struggles to hold back a smile as Schlatt scrutinizes him, trying to determine his sincerity.

“What do you mean, revived?” Schlatt asks.

Tommy claps his hands together, loud and jarring in the silence. Schlatt doesn’t flinch. “I mean I can get Dream to bring you back to life. You’ll be able to sleep perfectly fine then, I’m sure.”

“You—what?”

“Deal or no deal?” Tommy presses. He is channeling Wilbur in his dangerous confidence, Techno in the way he holds his shoulders, unafraid. He is Tubbo in his too-sweet smile, but he is himself in the stupid, inadvisable risk he’s taking. Not only promising to somehow manipulate Dream, who’s never once been inclined to give Tommy what he wants, but promising to bring an abuser and former dictator back to life? All him.

But Tommy has nothing else to give someone already dead, whose cooperation he needs if he wants to follow through on his plan, whose companionship he needs in order to stay sane in the void. He can only pray that the years here have truly changed Schlatt, and that he’ll remain that way once revived.

No going back on it now.

Schlatt takes a long drag from his cigarette, then drops it to the ground, where it disappears immediately. “Deal,” he says. They shake hands.

How long will I be here? Tommy asks. 

One year and two months, the void answers promptly. But it will go by too fast.

He can hear the warning in the void’s tone: use his time wisely, get going, don’t waste what he’s got. What he really wants to ask is whether he’ll succeed, but—he finds that he doesn’t really want to know.

You do not need to ask, says the void.

It isn’t as comforting as it should be.

And it goes like this: he manifests Schlatt a pack of cigarettes (Wilbur when they founded Pogtopia, planning an uprising, smelling of smoke) and a lighter (the brightest star winking to life in the night sky at dusk).

(Be cautious not to get lost, the void has told him. You will need to return to yourself every so often. If you become more in-between than boy, there will be no going back.

Tommy wondered how he knew, all this time, that he would need Schlatt’s loyalty.)

He tells Schlatt to shake him out of his void-trance every so often and doesn’t tell him why. They have a truce, sure, but they do not have trust. Schlatt is still himself, thirteen and a half years removed from his sins or not. He is not drunk here, on power or drink or otherwise, but Tommy has no reason to believe it isn’t for lack of trying.

(I’m unforgivable. I know that better than anyone, Schlatt had said, and Tommy will not doubt this of all things. For Tubbo, for Wilbur, for Quackity and Fundy and Niki, he will not forgive him. Tommy has made a deal with he who is no longer the devil, but only by merit of there being someone worse.)

It goes like this: Tommy closes his eyes and delves into the minds of those in the Overworld. He starts small, thinks of Tubbo, hair in his eyes, mischief in his smile. He opens his eyes and Tubbo’s mind spreads out before him—and then Tommy is drowning.

He is not just looking into Tubbo’s mind. He is Tubbo, feels everything he feels, knows everything he knows and will ever know, does everything he has ever done or will do. He cannot breathe but for when Tubbo breathes. He is sobbing or maybe dry heaving though he has no physical form to speak of. He is nothing but the scream of the wind on Doomsday and the piercing silence after a nuke explodes. He is nightmare echo lightning strike—he is beehive cracked mirror firework—

Run! something screams, and it is not the void.

A second voice, louder and distorted, says, This is checkmate. This is checkmate. This is checkmate.

Tommy sees himself, again and again and again. He sees himself until it all blurs together: light and laughter, grief and giddiness, fear and faith. Tamped-down resignation and loneliness and love bleed into an old familiar heartsick voice saying, What am I without you? 

Yourself. 

But who am I? 

The last voice knows his name, even if he no longer does. He strains to hear it, strains to block it out, thrashes in rising wrongness, relaxes into suffocating otherness—he doesn’t need to be himself anymore, doesn’t need to bleed anymore—he can be Tubbo instead, eternally here, fluid and simple—

Tommy! Tommy! Tom—

“—my!” Schlatt shouts, and Tommy snaps back into himself. He coughs, choking on air, and jerks away from Schlatt as he stumbles to his feet.

“Oh, shit,” Tommy breathes, and he feels awful, feels dirty. He just crawled around in his best friend’s mind until he lost himself almost entirely. And the only thing between him and that eternity he’d wanted had been Schlatt—Prime, does he owe Schlatt a life debt now? He supposes he’s already dead, but— “Fucking shit,” he says again, through his teeth.

Schlatt is looking at him appraisingly, like he’s some sort of object. Tommy still can’t quite catch his breath, and he doesn’t know if it’s a lingering effect of the void or a product of Schlatt’s heavy gaze. “What was that?” Schlatt asks, considering.

“I—” don’t know, Tommy doesn’t say. “None of your business,” he tacks on weakly.

“Sure, kid,” Schlatt scoffs, “like I didn’t just save you from whatever the hell you threw yourself into.”

There is darkness at the corner of his eye. He inhales, exhales, refuses to shatter again. “I was somewhere else,” Tommy says, tone level, “and I have to go back.”

Schlatt purses his lips and says nothing.

You need not drown yourself in the depths of others’ oceans, the void whispers, making its entrance. You need only break the surface to allow yourself through. To know but not yet understand.

Why? Tommy asks. It’s daring, to question the void.

It still smiles, though, Tommy’s light pulsing bright a single time. I will be with you Up There, it replies, soft. You will still be able to see. You will still be able to understand. But you will need to already know.

And that will be enough? 

That will be enough.

He trusts the void implicitly; something tells him that it will not be just someone else who lies to him, makes him empty promises, breaks vows or cuts ties. Strange, that he can feel so at home in the dark, so—at peace.

So he dips into their minds, one by one. Ranboo, Techno, Phil, Jack, Niki—all the usual suspects. It’s a little harder to reach those he doesn’t know as well: Karl, Sapnap, Connor, George, Puffy, and the rest. He breaks through the walled-in minds of the Eggpire, he glimpses beneath the surface of Sam and Eret and Foolish, saves Wilbur for last. Sometimes their thoughts tangle with his own, making it easier to forget. Sometimes he wants to forget. Sometimes he wonders if he is trying to forget.

(Once, in between, Tommy had gasped back into the void from someone else’s consciousness needing human contact to come back to himself. Almost drunkenly, he’d reached for Schlatt—only for him to step swiftly back, away from Tommy’s outstretched hand.

“Please,” Tommy slurred. “We h’ve…a deal.”

Schlatt had sighed, as if Tommy was the inconvenience and he merely had to tolerate him. “Teach me how to do what you do and I’ll help you.”

That had cleared Tommy’s mind a little. He’d squinted. “What do I do?”

“Don’t play dumb,” Schlatt snapped icily. “You know full fucking well what I mean.”

Tommy was still shaking, but he’d looked Schlatt in the eye and said, “I can’t teach you shit if I forget who I am in the next ten seconds. Bitch.”

“I can figure it out myself. I don’t need you,” Schlatt hissed, and Tommy had felt the pinpricks of the void’s pain returning, his light flickering out completely, the darkness blanketing them once more. His breath grew loud and heavy in his ears and Schlatt hadn’t moved, hadn’t said a word, hadn’t—

A hand in his, rough and solid. It was too dark. Maybe he was imagining the comfort, the anchor, the breathing of a second body beside him. Maybe he had lost himself already. Nightmares end too, after all.

“You gonna turn the lights back on, kid?” came Schlatt’s dry voice, vaguely to his right.

Dandelions outside his house when he came back to life. The sunrise—no, no, that was Wilbur’s memory. Phil’s wings catching moonlight—maybe that was Techno’s. Was it possible, he’d wondered, for the dark to get darker?

Please, Tommy had thought, desperately afraid, the way he always seems to end up, please let there be light.

As you wish.

And there was light.

Tommy looked at Schlatt. “You fucker,” he breathed, gearing up. “You—

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t mean shit,” he’d said hotly, because it was only his luck that the only person who could help him in this fucking void was Schlatt, proving himself again and again a traitor.

Smiling wryly, almost sheepish, Schlatt had said, “I got greedy, man. Old habits die hard.”

“Just think of memories that remind you of what you’re trying to manifest,” Tommy told him, perfunctory, “and keep doing it ‘til it appears. It’s really simple, you’d have to be quite stupid not to figure it out on your own.”

Schlatt couldn’t even glare at him, because Tommy had followed through on his end, and that was what he’d wanted. “Thanks,” he said instead, trying and failing to sound genuine.

“Good talk,” Tommy had replied sarcastically, closing his eyes once more. He learns the same lesson every time: no matter how many chances you give them, people don’t change. For the better, anyway. They certainly change for the worse.)

It goes like this: he makes do with what he has and tries valiantly to harden his heart. Life and death both try to make him a cynic and he is no longer just himself, not anymore; he cannot say for sure that the outcome will be bright.

Some part of him still thinks of Wilbur and shouts, ugly: Love me. Why won’t you love me?

Tommy cares too much and not enough and that has always been what killed him.

That’s how it goes.

Chapter Text

There’s not long left, the void tells him after a while, or maybe just after he’s finished with his...research. Time here is hard to discern when you haven’t been counting the days.

He lets Schlatt know. “I’ll be gone soon,” he says. “Dream’ll revive me, and I’ll go do my shit, and I’ll get you resurrected when I can.”

Schlatt considers for a moment. “Our deal will be up the moment I’m alive again, you know.”

Oh, Tommy knows. There has been a surprisingly large amount of time for agonizing between mind-dips. Maybe planning is a better word for it. For once in his life—his death—his whatever, he refuses to fucking wing it. He’s decided it’s going to work this time. All of it. 

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Tommy replies, “because I am not a traitor. I don’t break promises.”

“I see where you’re going there,” Schlatt says with a grin that once might have been suave, had he all his teeth. Now it’s just mildly shiver-inducing. “But it worked out, didn’t it? Now you can go make up with your friends and defeat the big bad Eggpire and everything’s going to end happily for you.”

“Good things don’t happen to heroes,” Tommy murmurs, and it strikes him that perhaps after all this time he finally believes it to be true.

Schlatt reaches out a hand to pat him on the shoulder, then seems to think better of it. “Listen, kid. I’m not jealous of what’s happened to you or what you have to do. But I’m also not you.”

“That makes no sense,” Tommy snaps.

“Let me finish!” Schlatt says, placating. “Things happen the way they happen for a reason. I’ve done fucked-up things and I know it. I’ve had fourteen goddamn years to think about it. With all my sins I should have passed on ages ago, not stayed tied here in some in-between state.

“But I was stuck here, and I couldn’t figure out why until you came along and offered me a second chance at life. I am the villain—” he spreads his arms wide, and Tommy flinches back—“and everyone knows it. But here I am anyway. Here you are. It all happens for a reason.

“And if my reason was to help you towards yours, well, I’ll be damned if I don’t help you get there.” He chuckles to himself. “Damned. Literally damned.”

“You’re saying it’s fate,” Tommy says.

Schlatt nods. “Or something like it.”

“That’s—”

“—bullshit?” Schlatt says, taking the word out of Tommy’s mouth. “I would’ve agreed with you before I died. Hell, even a year ago down here I might have. But I’ve seen what you do. You lit up the place, made two deals with two devils. Didn’t you get exactly what you came here for? This fourth death of yours. Isn’t it the first one that doesn’t seem pointless?”

Schlatt’s gaze is keen, unsettling. Tommy can’t think about fate for a moment longer, can’t entertain the possibility that a universe that is supposed to love him would decide this was the destiny he deserved.

“How’d you know about the Eggpire?” he blurts.

“What?”

“The Eggpire,” he repeats. “You’ve been dead since before the Egg showed up, but you said I had to go back and defeat the big bad Eggpire.”

Schlatt laughs. It’s more of a cackle. “Glatt!”

Sputtering, Tommy blusters until he remembers he can, uh. Functionally read minds. He focuses until the answers filter in. “You have a ghost?”

“I’m dead, aren’t I?” Schlatt says. “He visits once in a while, I get his memories, he gets mine, and then we part ways for another year or so.” He ponders. Tommy can feel his odd fondness for this ghost—he isn’t going to be the one to tell Schlatt that in order for him to live, Glatt has to die. “He was here while you were out, you know.” Schlatt waves a hand. “Finding yourself.”

More like losing myself, Tommy thinks wryly.

“So where’s mine?” he asks instead. “Ghommy? Prime, that’s awful.”

Schlatt snorts and shrugs. “Probably on his way.”

Tommy addresses the void. Do I have a ghost?

Everyone does, it answers. All the while, it echoes: There’s not long left—not long left—not long left—

Suddenly Tommy’s on the floor, curled up. The pain returns, jarring and a hundredfold, a year and two weeks in the making, and he knows pain, he knows Schlatt’s pain, he knows Tubbo’s and Ranboo’s and Techno’s and Phil’s and Quackity’s, he knows all of their pain and he feels it all at once and he shatters—

“Tommy!” Schlatt shouts, trying to grab his wrist, trying to wrap an arm around his shoulders, but he phases right through. He blinks, looking right at—no, through him. “Tommy?”

Tommy is so fucked. He’s so fucked. He’s going to die; he’s already dead; he’s already died. How much worse can it possibly get?

As if in answer to his unasked question, the world goes dark. The pain stops. Everything stops.

Hello? he whisper-thinks, far braver than he feels. What’s happening to me?

I am you and you are me, comes the answer. That was the part of you lost in exchange. The part you will leave behind.

Okay. That’s fine. He’s going to be alive, and he’s going to be part void, and he’s going to be somewhat all-knowing and not at all traumatized, and it is going to be fine.

Your ghost approaches. I have an opportunity for you, if you will consider it.

He hadn’t even gotten to finish his deep breath. What is it?

You will get to live the past two weeks the Overworld experienced in his form. There will be limitations, but you know better than most that time is worth more than anything. They will listen to you, though you will be quieter. They will believe you, but you cannot lie. You will keep your memories, but you will lose time. Do you accept?

They’ll listen to him. Fuck, but that’ll feel good. Maybe he should think this through a little more, but—I accept, he says.

Good.

What now?

We wait.

The last few days pass like whole years, infinitely longer without any company.

He tries to sleep, but is instead bombarded with nightmares, horrors, memories on top of memories, and he cannot tell whose are whose, cannot tell their fear from his own. He wakes up repeating his name just to remember the weight of it on his tongue. On the last day, he tries speaking to the void again, though it hasn’t responded before. There isn’t anything better to do anyway.

Helpless, he thinks, Why did you choose me?

Because you did not want to be chosen, the void replies at last. Because you are quicker than you look, and cleverer than you believe, and because you did not want to be a hero.

Why did you make me yours, then? he asks, letting the darkness grow closer. Maybe he doesn’t have a choice. It still feels like an embrace.

The void says: I am all the answers, child, but you are the only one who asked. I am the darkness, and you are unafraid to carry both dark and light. You are neither hero nor villain.

He’s in between. Always caught in the middle of things. Always too loud to be listened to, too quiet to be heard. Only missed after he was gone.

We are liminality, they say as one.

Between the night and day is dawn.

Chapter Text

The ghost arrives not long after. He glows faintly in the dark, a pale blue light, and his eyes are fully void-black down to the sclera; he sluggishly bleeds black from the neat slit across his throat, but he is unmistakably Tommy.

“Hello,” Tommy whispers, awed.

“Isn’t this poggers?” his ghost replies.

Tommy grins. “Fuck yeah,” he says, still whispering. It seems wrong to shout in his ghost’s presence.

“We don’t have much time,” he says, and the mood sobers. “Listen carefully, okay? You only get to hear this once.” Tommy nods. “Our name is Theseus. We cannot be loud. We cannot lie. We have time when we’re awake—that’s when you speak with the people, they have to hear us—”

“Hell yeah,” Tommy says, a quiet cheer.

“—and we have time in between. When we wake up it can be anywhere from days to hours that we’ve lost. We have time to talk to everyone we need to no more than once. We don’t need luck: we’ve already done it, so we can do it again. Got it?”

“Got it.”

Theseus puts his hand out to shake. As Tommy takes it, light flashes, searing and bright. He squeezes his eyes shut and says, fervent, Thank you, Theseus!—

Turning back instinctively on his way to the light, he swears he can see his own silhouette, waving cheerfully as he disappears from sight.

…

When Theseus wakes, he is floating slightly above an obsidian floor. He braces himself immediately. Not Dream, not Dream, not Dream—there’s a sharp intake of breath.

“Tommy?” says Sam incredulously, and Theseus opens his eyes.

Floating towards Sam, he says, enthusiastic: “Sam! Hello!”

A bolt of pain rushes through him and his knees buckle briefly. Not too loud. Got it.

More mildly, he continues, “It’s actually Theseus.”

Sam’s face falls. “You’re Tommy’s ghost.”

Theseus nods in confirmation. “That I am, Warden Sam.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “Hey, remember when you killed me?” He dips into Sam’s mind briefly—it was only yesterday that he died. He has two weeks, then, a little more if he’s lucky.

The stoic expression on Sam’s face crumples, then smooths out. “I’m sorry, Theseus,” he says. “I didn’t mean to, I just wanted to warn you, but I had to protect the prisoner, and I—it was an instinct. I would have let you go.”

“I signed a contract,” Theseus says with a shrug. “You fulfilled it. I understand.”

Sam has no right to look that hopeful.

“That doesn’t mean I accept your apology. First you let me die, then you killed me. Not only that, you let Ghostbur die. You let Wilbur be brought back. You have played into Dream’s hands so many fucking times, Sam, you don’t deserve the title of Warden anymore.”

It takes far more effort than Theseus would have thought to stay calm and quiet through his rage. 

The warden in question looks away; Theseus imagines it is hard to meet his eyes, wholly and impossibly black as they are.

“I felt safe with you, once,” Theseus murmurs. Sam looks up again, trying to hold on to a straight face but looking like he’s about to cry. “You signed a contract too, d’you know? Saying you would be my friend. I paid you diamonds for it. But you broke it anyway, because in the end you’re just another person I trusted who betrayed me. I told you what I wanted and you didn’t listen and because you had the bigger weapon I had to lose.”

Sam says nothing.

“This isn’t the first time it’s happened,” says Theseus, “but it’s going to be the last.”

“I never wanted to mourn you, Tommy,” Sam says, so quiet Theseus almost cannot hear him.

He doesn’t correct Sam’s use of his name, even though it prickles down his spine when it’s said aloud. He doesn’t say, Then you shouldn’t have killed me. He doesn’t say, You didn’t have to mourn me.

His kindness will be the death of him. It already has been.

“After this, you won’t have to,” he says firmly. “I’m going to save everyone I can. Don’t worry, I won’t try to kill Dream again. He’s all yours.”

Saying he won’t kill Dream again pangs in his chest, a half-truth; it’s not enough of a lie to truly hurt him.

Sam’s eyes skitter across Theseus’ face, taking in his wispy body, his slightly glowing translucent form. He’s still bleeding, and he suspects he will continue to do so as long as he’s a ghost.

“Thank you,” Sam says, hollow.

“Your prison is a fucking death trap,” Theseus tells him. “And for Prime’s sake, stop letting Quackity in to torture Dream, will you? He isn’t going to get the book and you’re blatantly breaking the rules you just killed me over.”

Taken aback, Sam asks, “How do you know about—”

“Does it really matter how I know, Sam?” Theseus asks, and he is tired. He is so tired.

“Yes, it does,” Sam says adamantly. “That’s a breach of security.”

“Fuck breaches of security,” Theseus hisses. “You killed me over a breach of security. I’m dead. Why does it fucking matter to you how I know your dirty secrets? What are you going to do, cut off my incorporeal arm like you did your boyfriend’s?”

Sam reels back. Theseus coughs, doubling over. He can’t afford to get riled up, apparently. When he drags the back of his hand over his mouth, it comes away black.

“It had to be done,” Sam says, monotone, his face newly blank. His eyes, though—his eyes are lined with grief. Theseus can imagine. He can do more than imagine; he feels that same grief in his bones, dragging him down. The story is always the same.

Theseus closes his eyes and does not cry. “No, it didn’t,” he whispers, and flickers out.

It’s jarring, this first brief return to the dark, and he panics until he remembers: We have time to talk to everyone we need to no more than once. The conversation was over, then, or at the very least not going anywhere. Right and wrong are never black and white, and Tommy has been put through that particular wringer four separate, painful times. Sam can’t—Sam won’t understand. Refuses to.

Theseus has said his piece and so he lets himself go, lets time slip by him like—like water off a duck’s feathers. (He pauses, then: he had not known that before. There’s no way to know whose memory it is, not really. It’s possible he will never be completely himself again.) 

In those in-between seconds, he chuckles. If only they could see the selfish one now: a self-made tragedy, a life he might have had laid down for others’ potential happiness. Trying and trying to escape a circular ending, to break the cycle that dooms him to be Theseus.

He is Theseus.

But the story is far from over.

Chapter Text

Theseus wakes in the foyer of Tubbo and Ranboo’s Snowchester mansion. Neither of them are here, but he still pauses for a moment, just to let the cold air wash through him. If he doesn’t think too hard about it, returning here feels like a sort of homecoming.

He’s here to see his best friends, though, who he’s missed more than words can say. He steps outside into the flurrying snow, and sure enough, there they are. Ranboo’s talking animatedly, his gestures characteristically wild, and Tubbo’s nodding along, tossing a snowball from hand to hand.

It only takes a moment of watching them, for his darker thoughts to creep in. They don’t need you, see? They’re happy without you. They’ve got each other.

But he remembers the film of grief over Tubbo’s mind, and dips into Ranboo’s, too, just to see—apparently he can do that even as a ghost. Ranboo is thinking of a time he saw Tommy fail to catch a snowflake on his tongue, apparently hilarious at the time but in retrospect tinged with melancholy.

They are incomplete without you, a voice whispers within him, and for once it isn’t the void’s. It’s his.

He isn’t ready, but he steels himself and clears his throat.

Tubbo whirls around, dropping his snowball, and Ranboo startles. Their eyes widen, and Theseus feels a split second of hope in the air before Tubbo’s expression darkens, and Ranboo’s face falls.

“You’re not Tommy,” Tubbo says. Ranboo slips a hand into his. “What are you?”

Not even a who. Sure, Theseus floats several inches off the ground, but it still hurts. Tubbo is threatened, threatening, already on the retreat; Theseus feels guilty for having made him grieve again.

Still, he forces a smile. “I’m Theseus,” he answers, “and I’m here to apologize.”

“Are you like—like Ghostbur?” Ranboo asks, his voice soft, as if he’s speaking to a child. “Can you remember what happened? Can you tell us?”

Tubbo taps his hand, and Ranboo turns. Theseus wishes he could understand the wordless conversation they’re having, rapid-fire just like he and Tubbo used to.

He lets his mind filter into theirs. Don’t push him too much, Tubbo’s telling Ranboo, and Ranboo replies, This is Tommy. It’s different.

They’re both so guarded, so reluctant to hope. Theseus feels the same.

Tubbo doesn’t press Ranboo, instead turning back to Theseus. “What do you have to apologize for?”

“I—” Theseus starts, then hesitates. Now isn’t the time to make it about himself. “It was my plan, and I pushed for it. I was the one who led Ghostbur in, and I was the one who messed it all up and got us both killed.”

Wilbur, a part of him whispers. Ghostbur’s dead, Wilbur’s back, why are you here when you could be with Wilbur? 

He remembers! Ranboo is thinking. He is quick to hope, quick to take Theseus at his word.

They’ll choose each other over you when it comes down to it, says that part of Theseus again. You have no one. Why do you waste your time?

He owes it to them. They have followed him and trusted him and given him their loyalty when it would have been far easier to abandon his jagged remnants for someone more fit to be their friend.

“It’s all fucked,” Theseus says, “but you stuck by me, and it only led to harm for you, and I’m sorry. I couldn’t save Ghostbur, and I couldn’t even fucking save myself.”

Tubbo makes an aborted motion toward him, and whispers, strangled, “Tommy—?”

“Theseus,” he corrects gently. A second homecoming: Tubbo accepting him again. Fear has long had root in his heart—Tommy’s heart—that maybe everyone leaves eventually after all, that a fourth death is one too many, that the gap between them has grown too wide.

“It isn’t your fault, Theseus,” Ranboo says. “You were doing the right thing.”

“I was doing what I thought was the right thing, big man,” Theseus says. “It isn’t the same.”

“What happened to you?” Tubbo asks. There’s a note of desperation in his tone, and Theseus has been here before, hasn’t he? Died and been told he isn’t real. Died and been questioned on what it was like rather than how he’s doing.

Theseus is fine with it this time. He’s fine! He was messed up before, but now his blood is black and he’s better. He isn’t traumatized anymore. Doesn’t need to force himself into cowardly versions of the places he’s died anymore. He’s better now. He doesn’t need them, and they clearly don’t need him.

“I pulled the axe out too early, and Ghostbur got stuck on the other end with Dream, and I tried to get to him but Sam got ahold of me, and I—and he—” he falters, gesturing to his throat, which oozes black, an imitation of his gruesome death.

Ranboo averts his eyes.

“He killed you,” Tubbo says dryly.

Theseus nods. “But that isn’t the point, Tubbo.”

“Isn’t it?” retorts Tubbo, all sarcasm. “You’re dead. Sam killed you.”

“And then I went back to the void—or rather to Limbo—because I was too attached to the living world ‘cause I knew Dream would revive me, and then I bargained with the void to give me knowledge, and now I’m here.”

“Now that’s a point,” Ranboo tacks on, and Theseus chokes out a laugh. Prime, he’s missed this. Missed them.

“Shut up, boob boy,” Theseus snarks at him, and Tubbo giggles. Now these are the memories he wants associated with his death. Not darkness, not Schlatt, not the dirty invasive feeling after crawling through someone’s mind—no. This is what he’d thought of Down There to keep that very darkness at bay.

Tubbo looks thoughtful, then furrows his brow. “But if Dream’s reviving you, how are you a ghost?”

“It’s part of the bargain I made with the void,” Theseus explains. “I lived through my whole time there—a little over a year—and now I get to be a ghost for the time I was dead Up Here whilst the rest of me was in the void getting shit done. Should be about two weeks. Dream wouldn’t want to play his hand that quick.”

(The quick maths are useful, at least. Maybe they’re Quackity’s, or Punz’s, or—he shudders at the thought—Dream’s.)

Exhaling shakily, Tubbo seems on the edge of horror, and Ranboo’s watching him, face blank. “What did you give up?” Tubbo asks, as if he’s afraid of the answer.

Theseus knows exactly what Techno meant on the sixteenth, now. He’s living it. He wants to scream, Don’t you see what’s happening here?

Don’t you see history repeating itself?

“Myself,” Theseus says. It’s a simplification, but true enough. Doesn’t hurt, which means—well, fuck him, he doesn’t want to think about what it means.

“What?” Ranboo breathes, at the same time as Tubbo half-shouts, “Why would you do that?”

“I’ll still be me, just—a little bit void, a little bit other.” A little bit wrong, he doesn’t add. “And besides, it’ll be worth it if I can use it to bring peace to the server. I’ll be a hero now. Like everyone always wanted.”

“You didn’t want that,” Tubbo protests.

“Who would I be if I just let everyone fight and suffer and die when I could’ve helped them?”

Tubbo’s eyes are wet. “Yourself.”

Everything’s just another fucking echo. He’s sick of it. He’s so sick of it.

“But you have us,” Ranboo points out, and he sounds genuinely hurt. “This wasn’t something you had to do alone.”

“Wanted to spare you,” Theseus says. “Did it work?”

“Is this about not needing us?” Tubbo accuses, all barbs and shuttered eyes and raised-up walls.

He needs them. Surely they know he needs them. He peers into their minds—they don’t. They think—they think he’d leave them. They’re wrong.

It’s always other people leaving him.

“I need you,” says Theseus, a non-answer.

Ranboo asks, “Then why couldn’t we have helped you?”

I was dead, Theseus thinks, and I had no other options. I was dead, and purpose is what saved me. 

“I’m too clingy, and I always drag you down with me,” Theseus answers instead, and it stings somewhere beneath his ribcage. A half-truth, then.

Tubbo scoffs. “I swear, Tommy, you’re always trying to sacrifice yourself. I choose to follow you, time after time, and you’re always taking all the blame, giving yourself up to take the blow. It doesn’t have to be all you. The rest of us are here too.”

“But the bad things—they’re my fault. I have to fix them.” This time, it feels like something within him tears, and he gasps, winces, wonders which part is untrue: that he has brought pain, or that it is his duty to suffer in recompense. 

(His first instinct is that the new vocabulary is Wilbur’s, but then again, suffering in recompense? Sounds more like Techno.

And this new emotional vulnerability? This unfamiliar catharsis from confronting things rather than repressing them? Is it Puffy’s, Niki’s, even Sapnap’s?

Here’s something he has yet to confront: he was never enough to make a difference as only Tommy, never enough to win a permanent victory, never more than a nuisance to the powerful. And so he sacrificed himself, as perhaps he was always meant to.

He knows, now, that Techno had written that speech beforehand, revised it and polished it and set off to war by his side with wither heads in his pockets, the decision long ago made. Techno had watched Wil betray them, hesitated, and gone through with it anyway.

I didn’t want to be a hero. I died like one. Are you happy now, Technoblade? Is this how you wanted it to end?

I didn’t mean to be poetic. I lost myself in between life and death. I don’t know who I am anymore. Wilbur, are you proud of me?)

Tubbo huffs a sigh. “You fought in wars, you didn’t start them. You’re not the villain here! None of us are! That’s the point, Tommy, that’s what I wish you’d get through your head. We’ve all done awful things in the name of what we care about. 

“It isn’t just about what we’ve done. It’s about who we become, it’s about—what we choose to do with what they’ve done to us.”

Theseus is breathing through the lies, now, thick in his throat, black and suffocating and indiscernible from truth. Doesn’t matter; he believes it. “I ruin everything I touch. I lose what I love. It might as well be for the better of everyone else.”

“But we love you, Tommy,” Ranboo says softly, catching him off-guard enough that he listens. “Theseus. We love you anyway. Not even anyway, we—we know you, the way you care so much it hurts, I’ve been there, Tubbo’s been there, it’s a part of us. We love you because you care.”

Tubbo nods, solemn and earnest and—

Nausea sets in. This is all the time they get, Theseus realizes, and he starts to fade.

“I—I’ll be back for you,” he vows, and what he really means is I love you too, what he really means is Thank you. He closes his eyes. The darkness welcomes him home.

…

Where Theseus was standing before he returned to the void, a torn scrap of paper drifts down and lands in the freshly fallen snow, the ghost having left no footprints.

Tubbo reaches down, picks it up. The handwriting is unmistakably Tommy’s. For Ranboo’s sake, he reads it aloud:

Please tell Jack and Niki to meet me tonight. Sunset. The place where it failed, they’ll know what it means. I w

The writing ends there.

“He said please,” Ranboo notes. If it’s a joke, it falls flat. Tubbo’s...not sure it was a joke.

Biting his lip, he pulls out his communicator, fingers flying as he types the message. He can’t bring himself to smile; he feels, rather than sees, Ranboo’s heavy gaze land on him, Ranboo’s fingers entwining with his.

“Two weeks,” Ranboo says, hushed, nudging Tubbo with his shoulder.

“Two weeks,” Tubbo echoes, and allows himself to hope.

Chapter Text

The third time Theseus wakes, he is surrounded by spruce trees. When he parts the foliage, he can see them, sitting on the edge of the crater, legs dangling over the side.

The sunset’s almost through; the world sits on the precipice of night, and Jack Manifold says, “He’s not coming, is he? I knew this was a stupid idea.”

Niki laughs, like Jack has already made this declaration several times and been ignored. Theseus wouldn’t put it past him.

He considers making them wait a little longer, but as much as he wants to get petty revenge, he is on borrowed time; and so he floats out from behind the trees until he is right behind them, then says, brightly and a little too loudly, “Hello, bitches!”

They both jump, and Jack almost loses his balance. Theseus snorts, hiding a wince. Honestly, being quiet just isn’t in his nature. He coughs a bit and tastes blood. Maybe he’ll be a bit more careful going forward.

Who is he kidding? He definitely won’t. The loudness is a part of him, it’d take something seriously awful to rid him of it—

Dream, TNT in hand, Dream, leaving him with nothing but the smell of smoke, Dream, laughing as he tells him no one cares, as he pushes Tommy from the edge, not to stop him, only to postpone the inevitable—the inevitable–

No. People care. They care. He’s seen it, they’ve thought it, he knows. He’s fine. He’s fucking fine.

Good to know those memories are intact, at least, he thinks dryly.

“What the fuck?” Jack shouts.

“Tommy?” Niki whispers at the same time.

Theseus grins, roguish and practiced. “It’s Theseus, actually. Did Tubbo not tell you?”

“Tell us what?” asks Niki.

Jack furrows his brow. “He was incredibly cryptic, come to think of it.”

He’d sort of banked on Tubbo doing that, actually, telling half-truths with his patented innocent smile. It’s possible Jack and Niki wouldn’t have come at all if they’d known it was him they were meeting.

Before he can even get a word out to answer, Jack says, “And what do you mean, ‘Theseus’? It’s clearly you, Tommy, I don’t know what trick you’re trying to pull but I’m not falling for it—”

“I’m dead,” Theseus tells them, and Jack falls silent.

“You’re a ghost,” Niki says, realizing. A note of disbelief still lingers in her voice. Theseus would reassure her, but he’s feeling a bit petty at the moment, seeing as this is the spot where they’d tried to kill him with a nuke.

He channels his old overconfidence, summons a shield of devil-may-care attitude, and says, “That’s what you wanted, right?”

“Who—how did it happen?” Niki asks, and if Theseus isn’t seeing things in the absence of sunlight, her eyes are glittering with tears.

“Sam, actually,” Theseus answers. “Tried to break into the prison to kill Dream, got caught, Warden killed me for my troubles.” He steps forward into the light, gesturing to his throat. Niki lets out a sob at the sight of him, a hand over her mouth. Jack looks away and says nothing.

“It isn’t, Tommy,” she says, wetly but still as fierce as ever, “it isn’t what I wanted at all.”

Jack turns his head back towards Theseus, his face unreadable and layered with shadow. “Why’d you bring us here, then? If you’re—dead?” He sounds like he’s forcing the words out, like they don’t quite fit in his mouth. “What, are you trying to guilt us?”

Theseus laughs darkly. “I know your guilt, Jack Manifold,” he says. “I know you mourned me the first time when you thought I was gone. I know you think I deserve what I got because I never really cared about you, but if that’s the truth then you never really cared about me either, did you? And we both know that’s not true. That’s not what friendship means, is it, Jack?”

“How do you—” Jack sputters. “What?”

“And Niki,” Theseus continues, ignoring Jack’s stammering, “it’s rather pogchamp that you’ve started baking again, really it is. And that you’ve—Jack, cover your ears—”

It’s a testament to how genuinely afraid Jack seems to be of Theseus that he covers his ears immediately when asked. It’s unlike him to be anywhere near compliant.

“—that you’ve joined the Syndicate, and that you have something to fight for again, people to fight alongside again. That’s all you can really want, isn’t it? Flowers on your doorstep, a place to call home, people to call it home with. Peace, you might say.” He gestures at Jack till he gets the message to rejoin the conversation.

Niki’s looking at him like she’s never seen him before. “Thank you,” she whispers, her voice shaking. “You deserve peace too. I’m sorry that we—that I ever tried to take it from you.”

“Is this your unfinished business, then?” Jack asks, brusque and cutting. “Telling us off? Come back from the dead just to haunt those who wronged you? I wouldn’t have taken you as vengeful.”

Theseus shakes his head. “Who’s vengeful here, really? Me or you?”

He doesn’t want to torture them or anything. He doesn’t need them to apologize, or feel guilty, or cry over his spilt black blood. He just wants to know.

Jack gasps, affronted, his face twisting into a familiar expression. Before he can burst into an angry rant, Theseus says, as steadily as he can make it, “It’s not unfinished business. I brought you here because I wanted to ask you why.”

“Why what?” Jack snaps.

“Why we were trying to kill him, Jack,” answers Niki, her voice gentle and splintering and as much as Niki has burned bright with her anger and her thirst for revenge, out of the two of them she is not the one Theseus would rather hurt. Not to play favorites or whatever.

Jack is thinking so loudly that Theseus can hear his answer without even trying. Because he fucking sucks, that’s why!

That’ll be in the dictionary under ‘most unsatisfying answer’ for sure. (Yes, he knows that’s not how the expression works. No, he doesn’t care.)

Instead, he tilts his head and widens his eyes, leaning into the uncanny nature of his appearance. Their unease would be apparent even if he couldn’t read their minds.

“You ruin everything,” Jack answers finally, and he’s already sneering, like he thinks he’s won with one line. “Destruction follows you like it’s at your beck and call. The server would be better off without you here. It already is! We’re at peace, aren’t we? You were the one picking fights all the time. You, and Wilbur, and—”

“Stop, Jack,” Niki says, and her voice trembles, but she looks horrified at Jack’s words all the same. Theseus knows Jack wasn’t telling the whole truth; he can’t help feeling reassured by Niki’s contradiction anyway. He hates how deep his insecurities run. How much of him still believes they’ll all be better off if he’s gone.

He hates the part of him that agrees whole-heartedly with Jack Manifold. That part can rot. He hopes that’s the bit the void took.

(In memory, Wilbur’s voice echoes: Me and you were never good for that server.

In memory, Tommy’s breaths shake, and he feels utterly, utterly powerless.

Wilbur finds it all hilarious. You’re lonely, you’re so lonely, Tommy crows, trying valiantly to mock him. 

Everything that’s gone wrong, it’s down to us, Wilbur says, and he’s gleeful, and he’s wrong. If it weren’t for me and you dying, the server would be in shambles.

That’s who he chooses to love, after all this time: the vengeful, bitter, void-hardened version of Wilbur Soot. Whose unique talent was twisting optimism till it fit into the dark he called home.

I know what I’m like, Wilbur tells Tommy, and laughs.)

Theseus knows the void would never be so kind as to let him forget all of that.

“You agreed with me,” Jack Manifold argues. He’s talking to Niki, not to the Wilbur who lingers in Theseus’s memories. He’s talking to Niki, who blames Wil now for all the things she once tried to kill Tommy over.

None of them are who they once were, are they?

“You agreed with me, Niki,” Jack repeats helplessly. “We worked together, we were—”

“I don’t believe in what we said then,” Niki says, cutting him off. “Not anymore.”

Jack sputters, “But he—he’s such a fucking dick to everyone! He takes and takes and expects us all to fight for him and meanwhile he’s starting all the fights, he—he thinks he’s the main character, he thinks he’s some hero—”

“I’m right here,” Theseus interrupts quietly. “And I never wanted any of that.”

He doesn’t feel like explaining himself to Jack, who would’ve been a murderer if he’d had his way, who would always have been too scared to go through with it anyway.

“Excuse me if I don’t believe that for a second,” Jack spits, affronted.

“He’s a child, Jack,” Niki pleads. “And no one deserves to die, much less for being a soldier at sixteen.”

Jack bares his teeth, eyes flashing. It’s an expression that would be scary on nearly anyone else, but on him it’s just kind of…sad. “He asked. He wanted to know.”

They both turn to look at him, one glaring, one apologetic.

“You’ve been doing a good job with the hotel, Jack Manifold,” Theseus says, meeting his eyes. “I know you’ve had to mourn and un-mourn me, and that I lashed out and killed you and pretended it never happened. If you’re sorry about what you’ve tried to do to me, I’m sorry about how I’ve affected you. If you’re not, then fuck you.” He takes a deep breath, the taste of sharp spruce replacing bitter blood in the back of his mouth. “Some of us are trying here. That’s my unfinished business.”

Niki’s looking at him, biting her lip, and Theseus floats down and gives her as much of a hug as he’s able, incorporeal as he is.

“It’s been an honor,” he whispers. “Go fucking get ‘em.”

“I will,” she whispers back. “I will.”

As quickly as he arrived, he dissolves into the wind. Like an exhale.

Chapter Text

Theseus would know the view he wakes to anywhere: two snow-dusted cottages connected by a bridge, the whole scene picturesque. This sort of peace only belongs to the powerful.

He hopes, secretly, that Phil and Techno aren’t home.

But apparently the void thinks this is a conversation he needs to have, because the moment he floats through Techno’s front door he is confronted with both of them, sitting in the kitchen chatting over breakfast.

Is it the next day, Theseus wonders, or has he missed several? There’s no way to know how much time he has left, how many more people he gets to talk to.

The conversation screeches to a halt as soon as Phil sees him.

“Tommy?” he breathes, a look of horror in his eyes.

Theseus wrinkles his nose. “It’s Theseus,” he says. “I’m dead.”

He tries not to feel anything when Techno doesn’t even flinch, or when Phil’s expression turns to pity, but the anger simmers low in his gut nonetheless. They’d cared about him, once. Were his choices so unforgivable they couldn’t even be bothered about his death?

“I can see that,” Techno deadpans, rolling his eyes when Phil coughs pointedly.

“What happened?” Phil asks, all politeness.

“I snuck into the prison to kill Dream. Got caught. S—The Warden killed me.”

Theseus watches as Techno’s eyes catch on the slit in his throat before sliding back up to his face. “You,” Techno says, slow and incredulous, “tried to kill Dream?”

Theseus scoffs, stung. “I know you two are all fucking buddy-buddy, Technoblade, but he’s—he’s manipulating people, even from in there. He’s going to get out, and then he’ll—” He stops short, heaving deep breaths. Fucking ghost rules.

Phil blinks. “Dream’s not getting out, mate, what are you talking about?”

Laughing humorlessly, Theseus says, “Funny you’d say that. Techno, given up on that favor, then? Not helping the green bitch out anytime soon?” A pause. Phil and Techno exchange a glance. “Phil, you don’t owe him anything for reviving your son, right? He isn’t possibly a necessary evil?”

Phil opens his mouth, presumably to ask how Theseus knows their thoughts so well, but he continues before Phil can speak. “You never think about how effective a team you made on Doomsday, I’m sure. Or about how if he joined your little Syndicate—” he makes sure to inject as much mocking into his tone as possible, which at last makes Techno narrow his eyes— “you’d be basically unstoppable. He can’t use you if you use him first, huh? But you haven’t been considering that at all, have you?”

Theseus smiles wide and unsettling as possible, letting the weight of his words sink in.

“How—?” Phil asks.

“Ghostbur forgot,” Theseus replies, simple and devastating. “I remember.”

I am not the Tommy you knew, he does not say, because it would be useless and change nothing. I’ll never be him again.

Perhaps the sentiment shows in his eyes all the same, because for a split second Phil looks absolutely gutted. Theseus can’t deal with both of them at once, two versus one, when they’ll only back him into a corner and leave him no choice but to be aggressive to stand his ground.

He fixes his eyes on a point in between them, meeting no one’s gaze. “Can I speak to Techno alone, please, Phil?”

Phil nods, eyes still trained on Theseus’s barely-floating figure, and closes the cottage door on his way out.

Techno arches an eyebrow. “Are you going to apologize, then?”

Theseus’s anger swells within him, raring to strike. He takes a fortifying breath, exhaling through his teeth. “Fuck off, Techno,” he says, steady with false calm.

The other eyebrow follows the first. “So you’re here to what? Pick a fight?” Techno chuckles.

Prime, if he were alive right now—

Right. Maybe the ghost rules have some merit after all.

“I don’t want to be your enemy,” Theseus answers, calmly as he can.

“You sure have a way of showin’ it,” Techno drawls. The man can be fucking infuriating when he wants to be.

“Techno, I fucking—I idolized you, growing up. Even if we weren’t brothers, we were, I don’t know, friends. You cared about me. I know you cared about me. Why would I come here to pick a fight with you? I don’t want—why would I want to be your enemy?”

Techno cocks his head. “I tried to kill you?”

“And I came crawling back,” Theseus snarls. “There I was, after exile, on your doorstep.”

“Don’t you think I betrayed you?” Techno pushes. It comes off as more coy than curious, like he’s just playing with him. 

Theseus boils with it. “Don’t you think I betrayed you?” he mocks, ignoring his nausea as his voice rises. “Didn’t I make a deal with you saying I’d help you destroy my home in exchange for my discs back? Didn’t I turn my back on you when I chose my best fucking friend over the borderline manipulation that was going on between you and I? Oh, but you would’ve fought them all for me, right? You would never have sided with my abuser to destroy that same home? Get over yourself, Technoblade. This isn’t fucking about you. So get off your high horse and—“ He breaks down coughing, choking on words, black blood hitting the floor in clumps.

Techno’s gaze is complicated. He opens his mouth, closes it, runs a hand down his face. Seems to steel himself. “I’ve held grudges for hundreds of years,” he says, low, a confession, “but I forgave you the moment I pearled away.”

Theseus opens his mouth to argue. “Ah-ah-ah,” Techno says, cutting him off. “You’re right, Theseus. This isn’t about me.” He meets Theseus’ eyes, then, red and black reflecting in each other ad infinitum, their own little paradox. “Forgive me,” says Techno, and it zings through Theseus, electric; he floats that much higher above the ground. “Forgive me for all the things I did. But mostly for the ones I did not.”

He blinks into Techno’s thoughts, and true to his word he’s thinking about all the things he could not do: save Wilbur from that dying blow—visit Tommy in exile sooner—he wants to wrap his cape around Theseus, now, yet cannot bring himself to say the words I’m sorry—

He feels, rather than hears, the voices swelling. Placing a hand on Techno’s shoulder, he wills them to subside. It’s worked, he knows, because Techno pivots to look at him, questioning—disbelieving, even. Theseus waves a hand, then sighs. “I can’t forgive you, Techno. But I hear you,” he tells him, hoping it’s enough to say what he means and still stay truthful. I see you, he doesn’t say, because it’s one thing to quiet Techno’s voices and another to tell him he’d read his mind and heard an apology Techno is too afraid of vulnerability to ever give. “Thank you,” he says instead. For hearing him out, perhaps; for letting him in from the snow. It is both of their faults and neither, but they can start over. They can go from here.

Techno breaks eye contact, forces an awkward laugh. “Chat’s sayin’ it’s sellout time, I’m gonna go ring the bell. You comin’?”

“No,” Theseus replies, still buoyed from the catharsis of just—letting all his thoughts loose and being listened to, “I think I’ll talk to Phil.”

“Suit yourself,” Techno says, tusks bared good-naturedly, and climbs up the ladder to his attic bedroom.

Theseus knows Phil’s been listening the whole time; that’s why he’d talked to Techno alone, knowing Phil would understand far more if he didn’t have to reply, and could only hear him out. Sure enough, when he phases through the wall, he finds Phil on the other side of the door.

“Tommy—” he says, looking up from the floor, “shit. Uh, Theseus. You—I am sorry. You know that, right? You know all the shit we’re thinking.”

“Something like that,” Theseus concedes.

Phil sighs. “I—there’s no point in me defending myself then, is there? If you already know.”

Theseus laughs dryly. He doesn’t have to read Phil’s mind to know just how much he wants to be done with the conversation before it’s begun. “Sure, Philza,” he says. “If that’s what you’d like to think.”

Look, Theseus knows he looks awful—he’s a ghost! he’s bleeding void-blood all over the place!—but it still stings that Phil won’t meet his eyes, won’t even look at him. It’s not personal, though, not after the way he’d treated Ghostbur.

Besides, Theseus has been in Phil’s head, and to say the man represses more than is healthy would be the understatement of the century. Boxes upon boxes of crammed-in emotions, of guilt and rage and fear he cannot face. To ask him to voice genuine regret for his actions would be—unthinkable.

So Phil goes on averting his eyes, and Theseus goes on asking nothing of him.

Ruffling his wings, Phil asks quietly, “So is this permanent? Are you…?”

“Don’t worry, Phil,” Theseus says lightly. “I’ll be back soon.”

Back soon. Click-boom. So the story goes.

“All right, mate,” Phil says with a smile. Theseus wonders if he thinks that this is a haunting, now, or if he understands Theseus is to be revived. “Stay safe.”

From upstairs, Techno calls, “So long, Theseus!” Even fading, Theseus begins to laugh.

Chapter Text

It’s less of a waking, this time. More like one moment he is somewhere else, and the next moment he is standing next to Wilbur Soot, who is sitting on an old familiar bench outside Tommy’s house.

How long has it been since Tommy sat on that bench beside his best friend and was allowed to just—be?

He finds that he can’t remember the sound of Mellohi mixed with Tubbo’s laughter, or how the sunset over an untouched L’Manberg once looked. Everything that used to be his, pristine and preserved in his mind even when the reality was destroyed, is muddied, now. Sullied by the memories of friends and enemies and strangers alike.

Wilbur sits, unmoving, staring into the distance. He hasn’t noticed Theseus at all.

“Hello, Wilbur,” he says softly. Wilbur doesn’t startle, or gasp, or shout. He only turns, slow, his expression unchanging. “Have you missed me?”

Wilbur exhales, amused, a half-smile crossing his face. “Tommy.”

It doesn’t hurt when Wilbur says his name. It feels right. Still: “It’s Theseus.”

“Have you come to say you’re proud of me?” Wilbur asks mildly.

The way he speaks sends a chill through Theseus. Like this is all some sort of game, like Wilbur’s just saying what he thinks Theseus wants to hear. He won’t play into Wilbur’s hands, though, not after—not after—

He really, really wants to play into Wilbur’s hands.

“You’re alive,” Theseus breathes, and he wants to reach out and touch Wil but he can’t, and besides, he shouldn’t want to anyway. His smile’s all wrong, and his eyes are faraway, and fuck, Theseus hasn’t felt this much like himself since he died.

Wilbur laughs aloud at that, a bitter, jagged thing. “I hear you tried to stop it.”

“I—What?” Theseus sputters. How is it that Wilbur can pull the conversation out from under him in just a few words every time? It’s Theseus that holds all the cards here, surely, not—not Wil, who’s just come back from the dead.

“Dream told me about how you died,” Wilbur says, and when he says Dream, his whole face brightens. It’s fucking awful.

Tommy scoffs. “Why’re you all happy about Dream? He—”

“He’s my hero,” Wilbur says, cutting him off.

What the fuck?

“What the fuck?” he yelps.

Wilbur’s smile is wide and present and real, realer than it’d ever been on Ghostbur’s face or even on Wilbur’s own, at the end. “Dream saved me,” he says. “He revived me, he freed me from that awful place.”

I am that awful place and that place is me, Theseus thinks at him, glowering. How d’you like that?

What he says is, “But what about what he did to me? To us?”

He sounds so fucking weak and trembly. It’s embarrassing. He’s a semi-all-knowing ghost, yet he’s terrified of his own brother figure and an archenemy he already imprisoned.

“It doesn’t matter, don’t you see?” Wilbur breathes. “I owe him my life, Tommy.”

(Tommy had tried so valiantly to save Wilbur from the fate he believed inevitable, from the room and the button and the final blow. He’d begged, pleaded, and cried; he’d tried guilt and empathy and remorse; every last persuasion tactic in the book hadn’t moved him a bit. And here he is, revived by the same man who manipulated him into destroying himself and his nation, saying Dream is his hero.

Theseus wants to cry. Would his tears be that solid void-black, just as Ghostbur’s had been blue? he wonders.)

“He killed me, Wil,” Theseus says. Wilbur doesn’t react. “He pushed me up against the wall and bashed my fucking head in and laughed while I bled out on the floor. He treated me like some sort of sick fucking toy. And before that, he—he beat me half to death every day just because he could, and manipulated me till I—till I almost—” His breathing’s shaky, labored as it always is when he tries to speak about this sort of thing. “And you’re telling me,” he finishes, voice breaking, “that Dream is your hero?”

He spits black blood on the ground to really punctuate his point. Wilbur, of all people—it’s unthinkable. Dream has taken everything from him, and now Wilbur too?

Of course Wilbur too. What else has he left to lose? Dream took his lives—Dream took his life from him. Broke him beyond repair in more ways than one. What’s a brother worth when you’re past the point of no return?

Everything.

The void realizes what Theseus is about to do the moment before he reaches for Wilbur. Stop! it screams, the pure sound of it sending a sharp shock of pain through his skull. You cannot force him, you cannot do this—

Theseus presses a palm against Wilbur’s forehead, straining with the effort of remaining solid. Wil’s eyes fall shut.

“I can,” Theseus grits out, “and I will. Bitch.”

Because it may be an impossibility for anyone not void-touched to receive a set of someone else’s memories, but in Wilbur’s case the solution is simple, obvious. Ghostbur’s memories would have integrated with his eventually, Theseus is just…speeding it along. Packing what might have taken months, even years, to swallow into a single mental push.

Wilbur’s eyes flash black, his mouth parting, and Theseus feels it all rushing out of him: the sting of tears mixed with rain, the permanent hoarseness of his voice, the dreams of blue and the swallowed sobs and the holes in his memory that only ever seem to grow, and just how much it hurts to smile when you feel so empty you could swallow yourself whole.

When Theseus blinks back into reality, Wilbur’s head is lolling against his chest, and a steady stream of blue blood drips from his nose.

Do you see what you did? the void hisses. Look at him, child.

Wilbur looks impossibly determined in unconsciousness, a furrow between his brows as if he’s particularly focused on something beyond Theseus’ reach. The expression reminds him suddenly of—of—

(—a memory: Running from L’Manberg just after the election results, Wilbur’s voice low and steady and sure, keeping them together as everything else fell apart.

His voice echoes now, the same timbre as the void version of him. The Wilbur he lost and the Wilbur who remained. Tommy, I am not gonna die with you out here, he says, oddly intense. We need to stay alive. That would be enough.

Would it have been enough? Living for each other? They won’t ever get to know, not after—everything. After they’ve both so blatantly broken this tacit promise.

Stay alive, Tommy repeats. In hindsight, he can see how futile it is, how pointless. Just a platitude. I’ll stay alive.)

Tommy had trusted Wilbur, once, and loved him, and then he’d gone and died; Ghostbur had trusted Tommy in return, and loved him, and left him all the same.

Theseus has neither of them now. Still, he stands his ground. It had to be done, he says to the accusing voice in his head. You know I had to do it.

So be it, the void replies, and he must be imagining the undercurrent of approval in its tone.

In his sleep, Wilbur smiles softly as the world around Theseus fades to black.

Chapter Text

Before he is somewhere, he is nowhere.

Why Theseus? he asks the void. He might’ve said it aloud; it’s hard to tell in here. If where he is can be defined as a here.

There is a silence so long and loud that Theseus thinks the void must not have heard him. But then he begins to glow, a pale blue light that’s just bright enough that he can see his hands before him and nothing else.

And the void says, You chose it yourself, did you not?

Our name is Theseus, he’d been told before he became a ghost. It’s a name they share, then. Like faeries’ true names in fairytales, a certain darkness come to light.

Theseus laughs quietly. Can you blame me? Ghommy sounds fucking terrible. And Phantommy makes me sound like a prick.

He wonders when he made the choice. It’s a loop, of course, so he won’t ever know, but the irony—the irony stings a bit, if he’s honest. Fallen hero naming himself after fallen hero. He could have been Icarus, but his death was graceless, clumsy. Theseus, killed by someone he once called a friend: it’s fitting.

He’s been trying not to think of Sam.

Tommy arrives moments later. He is shrouded in shadow, just barely illuminated by the dim light Theseus emits; he looks so small, and so afraid, and Theseus wants to shake him and say Where did your fire go?

It is darkness and danger now. It twists and whispers in his mind, in Tommy’s mind, in anyone’s mind he likes. Battered as he is, Tommy still has that unmistakable spark in his eyes, and Theseus half-smiles at the sight.

“Hello,” Tommy whispers.

“Isn’t this poggers?” Theseus replies, and so the loop begins. He introduces himself, explains the ghost rules to Tommy, and puts out his hand for a shake to seal the deal.

He’s going to be revived now, isn’t he? Something in him doesn’t quite believe it. The Overworld had seemed duller through ghost eyes, not to mention the year and a bit he’d spent surrounded by utter darkness. The idea of living again doesn’t feel…real.

He thinks, achingly, of Wilbur on that bench staring blankly into the distance. Ghostbur’s memories wouldn’t help cement him in reality one bit. Theseus hopes to Prime he’ll be all right; if he doesn’t wake up right, doesn’t wake up Wilbur, doesn’t wake up at all, it will most certainly have been Theseus’ fault. He doesn’t think he can live with that.

Tommy reaches for his outstretched hand, and Theseus is ashamed to say he almost stops him. He doesn’t want to know what comes after this. He wants to stay here, cocooned in a darkness that loves him in its way, and never again act for the greater good. Fuck, he wants to be selfish.

When they touch, light beams bright and searing from their joined hands, and something in Theseus tears irreparably. Of course he’d never pull away. He has to want to live, otherwise all of it means nothing anyway.

Shoved unceremoniously back into his body, Theseus—no, he’s Tommy again, though he has been both and now he is neither—makes sure to wave as Theseus looks back, makes sure to feign a cheerful smile.

He holds off on the urge to break down into tears. When he is once more plunged into complete darkness, he begins to sob, ugly, until his vision fades to a blissful black.

...

Tommy wakes, and he’s alive. Tommy wakes, and it hurts: the crackle of the lava, the heat of the obsidian floor, the weight of an atmosphere on his void-adjusted shoulders, but at least the light doesn’t sting his eyes this time.

Dream’s there, shit-eating grin and all, so Tommy feigns a wince anyway. He’s got this. He’s fucking got this.

“D—Dream?” he stammers, willing his voice to shake, willing his pupils to dilate in fear. “What’s—how am I—”

Dream spreads his hands wide, as if welcoming Tommy to his own personal show, eyes glittering with poorly-concealed excitement. “You were dead for two weeks, Tommy. And now I’ve brought you back. How does it feel?”

Tommy hyperventilates, running his hands along the walls as if in disbelief. “I can’t—you don’t mean two weeks,” he gasps out. “It was months! It was years! It was fucking ages, Dream, you—you killed Ghostbur, I almost got you, I—it was so dark, you did that to me—”

It’s admittedly a bit unsettling how easy it is to settle back into the guise of the Tommy he used to be, a shaky mess with not a coherent sentence to show for it, desperate for someone’s approval, someone’s unconditional love. He hadn’t anticipated just how effortlessly he could tremble and cut himself off and flit from thought to thought and fear to fear without once saying what he really thinks.

Dream seems to be buying it, though. He laughs, and what was chilling the last time Tommy woke up like this just seems a bit pathetic, now. This is a prison cell, and Dream’s only audience is a fucking teenager, yet he’s laughing like there’s a whole damn amphitheater someplace Tommy can’t see.

Except he’d know, is the thing, because he can see what Dream sees and hear what Dream thinks and feel what Dream feels. He doesn’t even need to turn around. He doesn’t even need to blink.

“You really should be thanking me,” Dream admonishes him. “I revived you. Sam killed you, not me.”

Tommy’s vision is blurring a little with how much he’s hyperventilating. He angles himself just so before digging his nails into his palm to steady himself, and feels the warm rush of Dream’s triumph as he notices. Honestly, the man is so fucking predictable, it’s amazing how many people he manages to manipulate.

“I’m not fucking telling you anything, you bitch,” Tommy spits. “Everything’s so loud now, it was so dark in there, you sent me back there, you could’ve brought me back the whole time but you left me, I thought we were f—” He cuts himself off, feigning a realization. “No, no, we’re not fucking friends, Dream, what are you—I’m your enemy, I’m your nemesis, I’m—you’ve manipulated me so many times, I’m not telling you shit.”

Dream chuckles. “It’s all right, Tommy. But tell me, did you speak to Schlatt? Was that ghost of Wilbur’s there?”

Schlatt.

For a handful of seconds, Tommy considers breaking the deal he’d made. It can’t be good for anyone to bring Schlatt back to life, right? But he’s TommyInnit, and he doesn’t break his promises, not if he can help it, so.

“Schlatt—” Tommy’s chest heaves. “Schlatt knows what you did for Wilbur, and he said—he said he knew you’d do the same for him eventually, I—you can’t revive him too, Dream, you can’t, I’ll do anything, you don’t understand what he said he’d do if he were back. Dream, please. Please.”

He’s panting by the end of it, exhausted. Dream looks delighted.

“Oh, Tommy,” he croons, and Tommy’s gut twists in revulsion, “of course I won’t.”

“Thank you,” Tommy gasps out, and he is filled with relief of a sort, because that look in Dream’s eyes? The thoughts running double-time through Dream's head? That means Tommy’s won. “Thank you.”

Dream tilts his head. “I think you might be the only person to have died and come back twice. It’s changing you, Tommy. Look at yourself.” He gestures magnanimously to the cauldron filled with swirling, nearly opaque water on the other side of the cell. “Go on.”

Tommy obliges, making sure to stumble on his way over. The basin is full, with unidentifiable chunks floating at the surface, but it’s clear enough for Tommy to glimpse his reflection. The choked sound he lets out is the first genuine reaction he’s had since being revived.

His right eye is pure black, sclera and all, just as Theseus’ eyes had been. The scar across his throat has healed gnarled and ugly, an unnatural shade of grey, and black-tinged veins spiderweb outwards from it in all directions. Not to mention he’s so pale he looks almost like he’s still dead.

If people had thought him a ghost after the last revival, their looks of pity this time will linger longer, their averted gazes weighing heavier than before.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Dream asks him expectantly. He’s such a prick.

“Fuck off,” hisses Tommy, tearing his eyes away from his reflection. This is—this is good. He’ll be able to guilt Sam more easily looking this awful. Speaking of which: “Sam!” he screams, loud as he’s able. “Sam! Get me out of here!”

Laughing, Dream says, “Really? He’s the one that killed you, do you really think he’d just come and get you that—”

Without so much as a crackle of static, the lava begins to rise.

“—easily?” Dream finishes, stunned.

“Hold on, Tommy,” comes the Warden’s monotone. “You’ll be out of there in a minute.”

So far, so good.

Chapter Text

The platform ride is short, and Dream watches him go without a word. Tommy doesn’t bother to check what he’s thinking; he’s had more than enough of the bastard for a lifetime, thanks very much.

When Sam catches sight of him, his whole body language changes. The wounded noise that escapes his mouth is not unlike that of a small animal’s, and Tommy thinks for just a moment, Must be something awful to make the Warden lose his cool, and then he remembers.

His eyes catch on the spot of wall where Sam had held him up and—and cut his throat. It looks like every other part of the wall: dark, shimmering, spotless obsidian. He wonders idly how long it had taken Sam to clean up the blood.

“Sam,” he says. Though Sam’s face cannot be seen from behind his mask, he is visibly shaking.

“Tommy, you—I—” Sam whispers, and Tommy’s vision blurs and clears, blurs and clears, and he really fucking needs to get out of here. As if in response to this thought, Sam straightens. “I really should put you in a cell, too, Tommy. You may have been revived, but you still broke into the prison.”

Guilting it is, then. Tommy swallows.

“Have you seen me, Sam?” he hisses. “Have you seen what you did to me? Don’t you feel guilty for killing me, for committing the same crime that Dream did, just as bloody and just as fucking unfair? Has being Warden of this shithole messed with your brain enough that you can’t see how fucked-up it is, me coming back to life after you murdered me, and you telling me you ought to lock me up?”

Prime, he’s glad he can be angry again.

“You committed a crime, Tommy,” Sam says desperately.

It’s working. Tommy’s tearing himself apart for Sam to see, but it’s working.

“You couldn’t have known for sure Dream would bring me back, could you? Didn’t it eat at you, knowing if I died permanently it would be on you? Once, you offered me food and shelter when everyone I loved cast me out, and now you’re the one I need to be scared of.”

He’d loved Sam too, once. Sam knows. Sam—is reaching for his sword. Fuck.

“You let me die twice, Sam. You’re a failure at your one job twice over. You’re meant to be keeping Dream safe for me. You’re meant to be keeping me safe!”

This raw honesty hurts almost as much as his ghost’s inability to lie did. Like his heart is clawing itself out of his chest. He isn’t built for this.

He needs this.

“I’m a monster, Sam,” he says, and on monster his voice breaks. “And it’s your fault.”

The worst part is that when he spoke to Dream, he was pretending, but he means all of this. The part of him that is void is screaming, True, true, true.

Sam takes a deep breath in, but his exhale sounds more like a strangled sob than anything. Tommy swallows and tries not to feel pity, tries not to feel too guilty. Why couldn’t his superpower have been not to care so much? Sam had killed him, Sam had fucking killed him, and here Tommy is feeling sorry for him.

But it is Sam’s fault. It is. And Tommy is a monster. He looks undead, unnatural; he looks like the child of some dark unwanted thing.

Still, when Sam lets out another quiet sob before straightening, turning his back on Tommy, and says in a low, flat voice, “You should go,” Tommy’s heart wrenches painfully.

I wish I could have kept you, he thinks, swallowing his own tears. I wish you’d never built this Prime-forsaken prison.

“Thanks,” he mutters instead, and Sam jerks his head in a nod.

They don’t speak on the way out. Sam keeps glancing at him, then quickly tearing his gaze away, as if he forgets the extent of his own damage when he isn’t looking at it but can’t stand the sight of it when he does.

Tommy might not know the feeling, but he understands the sentiment.

It’s bright outside, the sunlight a foreign warmth on his skin, and he lets a small smile flit across his face when once he might have whooped with joy.

Sam is gone when he turns back.

He takes his damn time on the way to Snowchester. He’ll admit it, okay? Not that he’s catastrophizing or anything—he knows Tubbo and Ranboo will accept him no matter what, he’s felt their fondness and known their loyalty to him—but no amount of mind-reading will prepare him for the looks on their faces when they see him. When they see the way he has been ruined by the void.

Tommy remembers so very clearly the look on Tubbo’s face when Tommy said he gave up part of himself to the void: a pure, distilled horror. And now he bears the consequences of his sacrifice on his face.

It’s not even that he’s vain. He just really, really hates pity.

The sensation of being alive is…different than he’d remembered it to be. Nothing is overwhelming, or overstimulating; none of it hurts. After taking a stumble, he instinctively flinches back, expecting the pain to sting and linger, but the sensation is dull.

At first he’s relieved, but then it occurs to him—what if everything is dulled? What if the void—his eye—the darkness—

He’d assumed it was just a cloudy day, but he glimpses a brighter white shape against the expanse—no, the blue of the sky is a faded, greyish hue, and Tommy’s breath catches in his throat. He digs through his pockets and finds some slightly-crushed sweet berries, popping them in his mouth after a cursory glance. They still taste sweet, but there’s no longer a punch of flavor, no tang against the roof of his mouth, no aftertaste.

The true implication of it sinks in, then. Tommy is incomplete. His whole world is incomplete. All he has left of sharp pain, and the wind through his hair, and the brilliant blue of the sky are memories. His, and the others’, and the void’s.

You agreed to this, child, the void whispers, apologetic.

You never fucking told me this would happen! he retorts. He’s shaking. He’s—

You offered this, TommyInnit. You cannot go back on your word.

I know, he says, gritting his teeth and brushing away a tear as he approaches the bridge to Snowchester. His hand comes away streaked with black. I know.

In the foyer of Tubbo and Ranboo’s mansion, Tommy stops, summons all his courage, and shouts at the top of his lungs, “Boys! I’m back!”

Tubbo comes running down the stairs of a tower to Tommy’s right, Ranboo close behind. “Theseus,” he’s shouting as he approaches, “we thought you’d never—”

“Tommy?” Ranboo breathes, and Tubbo stops short.

Their eyes bore into Tommy, and he fights the urge to cover his face, his throat, his too-pale skin. Weakly, he says: “Missed me?”

“Fuck, Tommy,” whispers Tubbo.

“It’s not as bad as all that, big man,” Tommy says grandly, not meaning it a bit. “It’s sort of our brand, innit? We all look fucked up, look, we match now—Ranboo, I can’t promise I won’t steal your whole black-and-white aesthetic since I have the double revival thing going for me, but I suppose you’re a bitch and I don’t care about offending you—I mean, you two did see my ghost, didn’t you? Compared to him I’m barely fucked up at all! Sure, I may no longer have my devastatingly good looks, but—”

Tubbo barrels into him, wrapping him in a tight hug and pulling him close. Maybe it’s not as warm as it used to be, but the wave of comfort that the contact sends through him is just as devastating. Tommy holds him in return.

“You’re real,” Tubbo is murmuring into his shoulder. “You’re actually here, you’re actually back, you’re actually real.”

Tommy has no idea what to say to that. He already feels more solid, though, here in a warm house in his best friend’s arms. He feels real. Even before he died a second time he hadn’t quite felt this...wanted.

Tubbo pulls back, eyes skimming over his face, before smiling to himself and stepping back.

“What—?” Tommy asks.

“I know you think you’re fucked up or whatever, but listen, Tommy, I know you’re real ‘cause I could never imagine this on my own. I couldn’t hallucinate you looking this way.” Tubbo grins roguishly as if to soften the blow. “Plus, it looks fucking cool. The black eye? Damn.”

Tommy laughs, incredulous. True, says the void in him. True. He’s already hugging Tubbo again when he begins to cry.

“Get over here, Ranboo,” he says into Tubbo’s shirt, and feels Tubbo’s shoulders shake as he giggles.

Somehow it devolves into all three of them in fits of debilitating laughter: Tommy’s still half-crying, and their limbs are all tangled together, but for the first time since he bargained himself away to the void, he feels—whole.

Chapter Text

Tommy tells them everything. The deal with the void, and his powers, and his newfound knowledge; the deal with Schlatt, and his manipulation of Dream; even his time as a ghost.

They listen. They ask questions, they crack jokes, they smile. After the initial shock fades, they treat him just as they used to before. Not like a frail creature, not like something that might splinter if they misstepped, or disappear if they turned away, but like he’s Tommy.

Without them, he would have been lost, probably. More void than boy, with nothing to anchor him. This mansion is not his home, but Tubbo and Ranboo? Tommy thinks that perhaps they could be.

Between one blink and the next, Tommy opens his mind and feels it: their happiness, golden, radiating outwards and mixing in midair. He doesn’t pry any deeper, but—he doesn’t have to. He already knows what’s beneath.

There are things he wishes he didn’t have to say, certainly. Tubbo goes pale when Tommy tells them he’d both agreed and followed through on getting Schlatt revived; Ranboo looks taken aback as soon as Tommy mentions a solution to his enderwalk.

“Maybe we could even get your memory back,” Tommy muses, and Ranboo’s eyes go wide. “Or not! Or not, I’m not forcing anything on you.”

“Except Schlatt,” mutters Tubbo darkly.

Tommy’s heart sinks a little. “He—he promised he’d stay away once he was back.”

“And you think he’ll actually do that?” Tubbo snaps, scathing. “Have you forgotten who we’re talking about, Tommy?”

A shock of disbelief runs through him. “Of course I know who we’re talking about. Of course I know he’s fucking never going to follow through. But he damn near killed me once or twice, and that was after we made the deal. What would you have had me do?”

“I don’t know, think things through for once? I mean, look at yourself! Have you seen what the void did to you?” Tubbo demands. He’s standing, his chair pushed back behind him, scraping against the wooden floor as it goes.

“Believe me, I’ve looked,” Tommy answers darkly, rising to meet him. Ranboo hurriedly stands as well. “And I know it’s my fucking fault, it always is, I just thought maybe you of all people would understand—”

“What’s that supposed to mean, then? Just because I’m scarred across the face from being executed by the madman you fucking arranged to resurrect? We match, is it? Do you like that?”

“Prime, Tubbo, you know I didn’t mean it like—”

Tubbo shakes his head, red in the face. He looks about ready to spit on the ground and storm out. “Maybe I’m tired of following your stupid fucking plans that only ever get me killed. Ever think of that, Tommy? Was it just a lie when you said I wasn’t a yes-man, that I wasn’t a pawn, that I was never a sidekick? Because it really feels like I am right now! And things were supposed to be better. Things were supposed to be okay. But you—now you’ve come here with another half-formed plan you already gave your all to, and what are we supposed to do but go along with it? What are we supposed to do but try and try and try to save you, when you completely fucking refuse to save yourself?”

“Tubbo,” Ranboo says placatingly.

“Tommy,” says Tubbo, voice wrecked, ignoring his husband. Tommy notices for the first time that Tubbo’s on the edge of tears, rocking back and forth on his heels. There’s a lump in Tommy’s throat, and he swallows. “Tommy, you make it so hard to care about you.”

“I’m sorry,” Tommy whispers, and reaches for him anyway.

Tubbo reaches for him too, because he’s Tubbo, and he says, “Don’t be,” because he’s Tubbo, and Tommy is so, so grateful.

He flicks his eyes up to Ranboo, who is hesitating in a ridiculous echo of a few hours ago, and raises his eyebrows.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ranboo mutters as he joins them, but he’s smiling.

“Wish you’d look before you leaped, though,” Tubbo says somewhere to Tommy’s left, somehow on the other side of Ranboo now.

Tommy laughs as Ranboo adds, “Can you imagine?”

“Hey!” Tommy says, mock-offended. “That’s what you two are for, innit?”

Tubbo sighs, fond, and Tommy cares so much—cares too much—but he has them, and they have him, and Tubbo says, “Of course.”

Tommy’s heart, a black-blooded thing, wrenches itself into place. “Thank you,” he says. Maybe he just thinks it. Maybe he’s been screaming it this whole time, with his eyes, with his hands, with his shoulders, with his smile.

“Who else would fucking save you?” Tubbo says, and it shouldn’t be funny but they all burst out laughing till they can’t breathe.

When Tommy can at last open his mouth to speak without one of them—or, let’s face it, all of them—being overtaken by a fit of giggles, he blows out a breath, sobering. “Boys,” he declares, with the tone of one announcing a death sentence, “we have to go to Phil and Techno’s.”

“We?” Tubbo questions incredulously. Ranboo nods, as if to say, Yeah, what?

Tommy sighs dramatically. “Listen, I just, like, died, and then came back to life, so I’d really appreciate some moral support right now, Tubbo, Ranboo. Your little baby son is sleeping, because that’s all he fucking does anyway—I’m sorry, actually, I love him, he loves me, that’s because I’m fucking poggers—but you should come. Both of you. I’m not forcing you, if you’ve got trauma, or—or reservations, but—”

He’s overenunciating by the end, compensating for Prime knows what. Tubbo has that glint in his eye he gets when he psychoanalyzes people, and Ranboo—well, Ranboo will come with him if Tubbo does. Ranboo would come if Tommy mildly threatened him with a punch to the stomach, though, so it doesn’t count for too much.

Neither of them say anything.

“Well,” Tommy says, drawing the word out, ending with an awkward cough, “we’ll be off then.”

“Yep,” says Tubbo, all sarcasm.

“An adventure!” Ranboo says. His enthusiasm is false to the point of hilarity, so of course they laugh almost all the way to the tundra.

It must be cold, standing in the snow with nothing but a T-shirt and ratty old trousers on, but Tommy doesn’t feel it much anymore. He should probably be shaking from it, trembling just trying to keep warm.

Maybe the wind stings his skin, just a little. He’s probably imagining it. Yeah. He’s probably just trying to make himself feel better.

Tommy’s reaching up to knock on Phil’s front door—it had looked more friendly, or something, he doesn’t think too hard about it—when a deep voice directly behind him says, not a trace of surprise nor welcome in his voice, “Hey, Tommy.”

He whirls around.

“Ranboo,” says Technoblade, inclining his head in a meager sort of greeting. “Tubbo.”

“Hey, Technoblade!” Tommy crows, pasting a wild grin onto his face. “How’ve you been?”

Techno frowns and doesn’t answer. “What are you doin’ on my property, Tommy? I hope you’re not attemptin’ to steal from me again, it was enough trouble to stock up after last time. Well, I guess you wouldn’t have brought friends if you wanted to steal my stuff.” He sighs and casts his gaze up to the sky. Mechanically, he says, as if rehearsed, “Won’t you all come inside? It’s warm, and we have tea.”

Tommy arches an eyebrow. Techno coughs pointedly.

“All right, Phil,” Tommy says, and follows Techno into his cute little fucking cottage. Phil’s sitting at the table, and he half-rises upon seeing Tommy before his eyes catch Techno’s and he relaxes at whatever he sees there.

They all file in, sit down, and Phil pours them each a cup of tea. None of them say anything. Ranboo stares at the floor, Tubbo glares at a spot between Phil and Techno, and Tommy cocks his head as if to ask, Don’t you have something to say?

Honestly, Tommy’s pretty sure he senses Tubbo and Ranboo holding hands under the table.

“We’re sorry about what happened to you,” Phil offers, all politeness.

“Well, what’s done is done,” Tommy replies, letting a bit of void leak into his voice, ugly. “I have all of Theseus’ memories, after all.”

He takes a cruel sort of pleasure in seeing Phil flinch at that.

“What happened to you?” asks Phil dutifully.

“Got revived,” Tommy offers. As if that’s all there is.

Silence.

It’s Techno who breaks it. “Haven’t seen you around here in a while, Ranboo.”

At the mention of his name, Ranboo shrinks back. “Well, I’ve been—uh, I’ve been staying with Tubbo, since—”

“You abandonin’ us after everything?” Techno says with a laugh, and Ranboo somehow manages to recede further into himself, muttering half-formed words as he does.

“Are you going to let them speak to you like that?” Tubbo demands.

“I just—uh, I—” Ranboo stammers.

“You did sign a contract, Ranboo,” Phil points out, and Tubbo’s head snaps toward Ranboo at that.

“That wasn’t—I didn’t—” says Ranboo.

“A contract?” Tubbo repeats, incredulous. “For what?”

“It wasn’t a contract, I—it was just—”

Techno snorts. “So you’re goin’ back on your word.”

Phil sighs. “Techno,” he says reproachfully.

Ranboo makes a little whimpering sound, and Tubbo’s shoulders are drawn up with tension, his eyes darting back and forth.

Then Phil’s gaze lands on Ranboo, heavy and accusing, and Tommy’s heart stutters. “You wanted to choose people, not sides,” he says, slow and measured. “We offered you that opportunity, but it seems you’ve made a different choice.”

“No, I—” Ranboo breathes, and his eyes flicker bright purple, just for a moment.

Seeing this, Tubbo’s mouth parts, his hand darting to his sword—Techno moves to follow suit, baring his teeth as he does—Phil’s wings spread menacingly, feathers ruffling as the room seems to darken—

Prime, this was such a fucking bad idea.

“Everyone stop!” Tommy shouts, and—miraculously—they all do. His voice rings on unnaturally in the silence, doubling, tripling. Phil tilts his head as if listening for overtones, mouth parting.

Peacemaker, the void whispers, something compelling and melodic in its voice. Chosen one.

You shut up too, Tommy thinks fiercely. He is left abruptly cold as the void complies, receding.

“Techno, stop playing into Tubbo’s insecurities, you’re being a dick and you know it. Tubbo, Ranboo only joined Techno’s little anarchy club because he wanted to protect Snowchester, and honestly, it—kind of worked? He didn’t fucking betray you or anything, that never even crossed his mind. Phil, stop seconding everything Techno says just because he said it, will you? Sometimes he’s just an arsehole. You should consider standing up to him.”

He stops, waits. Ranboo’s looking at Tubbo with a guilty sort of fear in his eyes, and Tubbo pauses in his slow edging towards the door, looking back at him.

“Okay,” Tubbo says quietly.

“Okay?” Ranboo asks, voice shaking.

“I trust you.”

Tommy lets out a breath.

See? the void says, making its return.

Yeah, yeah, Tommy replies. I know.

“There’s something else,” Phil says quietly.

An instinct deep in Tommy’s chest tenses, uneasy. There can’t be something else, can there? He knows the rest of it. Surely the void would have told him.

The contrition that rushes through him, sudden and foreign, tells him otherwise. Fuck.

“What is it?” he asks. He doesn’t even want to know, but he has to—the need is caked in his throat, bleeds between his teeth. It hits him, of course, just before it passes Phil’s lips, the name which has always heralded Tommy’s doom, spelled out his tragic fate again and again.

“Wilbur,” Phil whispers, and Tommy—Tommy aches with it, with the knowing. “He was possessed by the Egg.”

Someone makes an awful sound, choked and pitiful.

Levelly, Tubbo asks, “When?”

“He was stayin’ with us, up in Phil’s attic,” says Techno, “and about two days ago he wandered off and didn’t come back. We went lookin’ for him, and, uh, there he was. Walkin’ circles around...what are they callin’ it?” He chuckles darkly. “L’Manhole.”

L’Manhole. Tommy fucking hates it—the rotten sound of it, the ashes that remain after desolation.

But he swallows, steadies himself. “You’ll help us, though, right?”

“What?” Phil says, startled. He’d clearly been expecting Tommy to take it much harder, pitch a fit or some shit.

Just to be clear, Tommy is going to pitch a fit. Not here, though, not now. Not in front of Phil and Techno—he has to be unexpected, different, knowing, keeping them on their toes; not in front of Tubbo and Ranboo, either—he has to seem cool, composed, whole.

He is none of these things. The next time he’s alone, he’s going to pitch such a fucking fit, the likes of which this stupid little server has never even dreamt of. He’s going to cry himself to sleep, and no one is going to judge him or worry about him or care, because he’ll be alone. He’ll be by himself, in the dark, and he’ll be able to pretend that he’s in the void again, that hollow embrace he called home for long enough that he misses it even when he blinks for a second too long.

“To fight the Eggpire and save Wilbur,” Tommy answers, but in the way one would say Duh. to Is the sky blue?

“Well—” Phil starts, “I—we—”

“Oh, come on, really?” Tubbo says, incredulous. “You haven’t been at all concerned about your son being possessed by a brainwashing alien egg? You have no plan?”

“Well,” Techno hedges, “I wouldn’t say we have no plan.”

Tommy sighs. “Listen,” he says, “since apparently I have to do everything for you two dickheads, I will forgive you for not having any sort of plan to save Wilbur. Because I do. It’s called—” he pauses for dramatic effect, spreading his hands through the air as he names it— “Project ‘Everyone’s on the Same Side Because They Have a Common Enemy, Part Two: The Eggpire.’ You know, ‘cause Part One was that time I paid Punz to come save Tubbo and I from Dream and then—and then fucking everyone came, and it was really rather poggers? I guess you wouldn’t know, you weren’t actually there, were you? Well, this time we’ll need some more networking, some more manpower, so Tubbo and Ranboo and I, we’ll be out recruiting, so just—sharpen your swords together, or whatever it is you two do up here that keeps you from being really fucking bored. I don’t know. Sing some really old songs ‘cause you’re really old. We’ll meet at mine in two days. Sunrise, day after tomorrow. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Phil says faintly. “Got it.”

“We’ll be—” off then, Tommy begins to say, but he’s struck with the strangest sensation, like his eyes and his mouth are both open wider than he thought possible, through no input of his own. For a few breaths, something else is controlling him. He is not his own.

He gasps in a breath at last as Ranboo says, “Whoa.”

“What was that, Tommy?” says Tubbo, face pale.

“What do you mean, ‘Don’t you want to know how it happened?’” Phil demands.

“That was the void,” Tommy tells them, still a bit short of breath, “not me. I don’t—” know, he’s saying, and he’s saying it, he is. His mouth is moving, and sound is coming out but it’s fading, fading as the world goes dim and then, all at once—it flickers out.

Chapter Text

Wilbur doesn’t mean to listen to the vines.

It’s just—they whisper to him. He can’t stay cooped up in the tundra forever, trapped as he is between Phil’s concern and Techno’s calculating eyes, isolated as he feels by the distance between him and a family with which he once was…happy. Growing up, he had been so happy. Now, thrice dead and impossibly alive again, adrift and anchorless, the very idea of that happiness seems foreign to him. That he could deserve such easy, wondrous things. That they could even exist.

What naïvete. He’s long since learned the truth of things.

Anyway—he goes for long walks, but the snow is unsuitable, and the siren song of his nation’s ruins is irresistible. He spends hours standing on that glass surface staring down. He spends hours lying on fractured ground, eyes closed, pretending he can still feel the warmth of those halcyon days when the walls were black and yellow and he had believed himself safe.

The vines whisper to him all the time. They curl toward him when he passes, only intensifying when he nears where they must originate. The root of a poisonous growing thing—he has to fight off the urge to investigate at the sudden kinship he feels. He can’t quite bring himself to be disgusted.

It has a consciousness. It has a voice. The vines are an extension of something greater, something knowing, and it wants him. It wants Wilbur, and Wilbur alone.

His own father doesn’t want him—he’s seen the look in Phil’s eyes when Wilbur wakes him up with screaming nightmares, all disappointment mixed with pity—so can he really be blamed for being easily persuaded? For letting himself be tempted?

The vines whisper to him. No—the vines sing to him. The vines know him.

The vines know Wilbur and Wilbur knows the vines and two weeks pass in a flash as it takes more and more willpower to return to the snow and the cottage and the ever-present weight of quiet disappointment. He knows it’s wrong, of course: vines shouldn’t have consciousness. He knows it’s alien, that it wants to control him, to have him all to itself.

He wants his mind to be his own. Wants to be able to trust himself, to be strong enough to live again.

But the vines whisper, and Wilbur doesn’t want to tune them out anymore. The vines sing, and his heartbeats slow as they tangle around his ankles, through his fingers and his white-streaked hair, and he lets them. They caress him, and the whisper grows louder, intensifies until he can almost make out words, distinguish sound from the constant rush of air, the static filling him to the brim.

Wilbur, they are saying—it is saying, the growing thing that poisons him, knows him, loves him. Wilbur Soot, are you listening?

“I need to go home,” he manages hoarsely, his throat dry. “I need…” 

Listen, it hisses. Listen to yourself. What home?

“Phil?” Wilbur says, but his conviction is slipping away from him by the second. “Techno? The snow…” Something occurs to him, something important. He reaches for it, the memory of—“Tommy. Tommy visited me, he made me remember…I need to wait for him. I have to…”

He can’t remember what he has to do. Why was he waiting for Tommy? Why does he need anything when the Egg is here for him, when the Egg will love him more, love him better than his family ever had?

Yes, the voice hisses. The Egg? Is that it? An egg, the seed of a hundred thousand poisonous things? There is nothing for you there. There is no one waiting for you.

“Wait,” Wilbur murmurs. Surely someone is waiting for him. He is—waiting for something. Tommy, he’s waiting for Tommy. But where is he, then? Why is he not here, when Wilbur is so alone—he is so alone—

If you join us, you will never be alone again, the Egg says. It sounds so sincere, so certain. You will love us, and we will love you, and we will never leave you.

“Tommy didn’t—he didn’t leave me,” says Wilbur. He can barely hear himself think, the whispering is so loud, the white noise spilling from all sides. “He loves—”

If they loved you, Wilbur Soot, why are you alone?

“The snow,” Wilbur whispers. There was something about the snow, but he can’t quite remember—someone’s love, someone’s laugh, someone waiting for him—he cannot remember who. He grits his teeth. “Tommy. Tommy loves…the snow.”

And you?

“What?”

This Tommy of yours, this anchor. Does he love you? Does he love you like we do? Like we always will? Does he love you like we love you, Wilbur Soot?

It hurts. It hurts. The whisper chokes him, digs its thorns into him, and for a moment he could swear he bleeds not red but blue, and then his mind is too clouded with pain to know anything but—

“Stop,” he gasps out. “Please, no, he doesn’t, he doesn’t. I—”

Good, says the Egg. Its voice is soft, kind. Wilbur’s pain recedes until it disappears entirely, and he sags with relief, reaching out to steady himself on—

An egg. The Egg.

Somehow, entranced, he’s made his way into a man-made cave: cleared out by hand, massive, and absolutely covered in vines. They grow thick, cracking the stone of the ground; lava springs around them, but they do not burn. The whole damn place feels suffocatingly wrong, an echo chamber for all the thoughts he’s never dared to voice, all the fears he can never bring himself to say.

Maybe he wants to run. Maybe the rush of adrenaline that fills him means danger, panic—some cocktail of emotion his static-filled brain cannot even begin to comprehend.

He does not need a weak human boy to anchor him, not when he has vines intertwined with his sinew, not when the Egg before him is flesh of his flesh, ever so poisonous and yet so very loving.

His heart beats unreasonably fast for how safe he feels here. How safe he is here. He never has to leave. He will never need to leave.

Tommy isn’t weak, he thinks to himself. You are.

The thought disappears in a split second; he does not have time to understand its meaning. He aches for it all the same, this unknown final tie to consciousness he has unwittingly lost.

Wilbur, Wilbur, the Egg hisses before him. It rises to thrice his height, deep crimson and splendid, and he can’t quite get his eyes to focus on it. He can’t quite summon the strength to lift his hand from its unsettlingly warm surface. Though it speaks in a whisper, the volume this close up is overwhelmingly loud. Have you decided? it asks. Will you love us as we love you? Will you listen?

He feels hot. He feels—unmoored, somehow. Like he is free-falling, and he cannot breathe, and anything could happen if he could just be strong enough to resist.

What if I— he thinks, haltingly, what if I don’t want to hear?

Oh, says the Egg, and it has no mouth but Wilbur’s skin crawls to hear its semblance of a smile, you do. You want. You want so much that it’s killing you. It already has, and yet here you are, still wanting. There is nothing for you here that we cannot achieve together. There is nothing you desire that I cannot provide. And it will not matter if you deserve it.

It’s the last line that clinches it for him. Because he doesn’t deserve the lot of it, does he, but the big fuckoff alien egg doesn’t care if he’s killed a hundred men with his bare hands or if he’s blown up a country he built up from the ground. The Egg wants him, him and all his flaws and shortcomings, and he is so tired of resisting. He is so tired.

There is nothing here for you. They are nothing to you.

The world has a red tint to it now, a crimson film creeping over his vision.

Look at what they think of you and all your devotion.

He can see it. See them. He can see—

Fundy’s at his feet growling, “You’re no father of mine.” Tommy’s on his right, grinning wide, arrow protruding from his forehead, beaten bloody and bruised, throat slit, hand held up in a stiff salute. He turns to Wilbur and his eyes flicker red-blue-red—he turns to Wilbur and he is bleeding-healing-broken—he is dead, he is dead—he turns to Wilbur, whole again, and opens his mouth but cannot speak. He turns into Niki, whose throat has been torn out, and she opens her mouth and screams.

I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, sobs Tommy from somewhere behind him. Wilbur closes his eyes; they were already closed. Wilbur opens his eyes. Phil’s there, suddenly—stabs him clean through the chest, pulls his sword out, stabs him again—they are all there, falling upon him like Caesar—he looks up for Tommy to deliver his final line (You too?—but of course him too—there has never been anyone truly loyal). Instead he meets Eret’s gaze, pure blinding white—

You will never have to bleed again, comes the whisper. And we will always win.

When Wilbur opens his eyes, they are already red.

Chapter Text

Tommy jerks back to consciousness gasping for air. He’s being supported by Ranboo, but he shoves him away as soon as he can focus his eyes on Techno’s steady, inscrutable gaze, boring into him from across the room.

“Get off,” he chokes out. “Get off.”

“Sorry,” says Ranboo, taking a step back.

Tubbo turns to him, eyes widening. “Tommy, you’re shaking, are you all ri—are you crying?”

Tommy tries to laugh, but it catches in his throat, becoming a sob halfway. “No. Fuck off.”

He scrubs at his face with both hands. For a moment, he is Wilbur, eyes going red, and he fights the urge to scream, and then he looks up and the light is filtering in from the windows and he is Tommy. He is Tommy, and he is his own.

“Your tears are...black,” Techno points out, an unspoken question in his voice.

Tommy does laugh this time, a bitter, humorless thing. “Yeah. Am I too fucked for you now, Techno? Would you rather I walk out of here right now and join the Egg like Wilbur did? I bet that’d be nice and convenient for you.”

“I—” Techno sputters, but Tommy isn’t finished.

“D’you know why he listened to it, in the end? Because it said it would never leave him. Never let him bleed. He thought—he thinks he doesn’t deserve us, that we’ll just always leave, but doesn’t he know that he’s the one always leaving—leaving me? It’s not fucking fair—fuck.”

I don’t want to tell the truth anymore, he thinks violently at the void. Stop it. I’m not Theseus.

Oh, child, it whispers. You know you are.

“Tommy,” Tubbo says softly. Nothing more.

Tommy’s eyes are fixed on Phil, who is staring pointedly out the window.

“You can pretend I’m not here all you want, but I was there—I was him, I felt it happen. He gave in, Phil, and you fucking let him go. You just—you just—” He runs out of steam, wrung out and exhausted from not just seeing through Wil’s eyes but being him. He sighs, long and harsh. “We should go.”

Tubbo nods, and Ranboo—twitches, which Tommy takes as agreement.

“You two had better be there,” he says, hand on the doorknob, not bothering to turn around. “We are getting him back.”

All three of them are gone before Phil or Techno can reply, though Tommy’s honestly not sure they were going to.

As they descend from the bridge and begin their trudge back through the snow, Tubbo turns to him. “Where to now, bossman?”

Tommy sighs, considering. “I reckon we should split up,” he says. “You two go find Jack and Niki and Fundy and tell ‘em where and when we’re meeting. I’ve got to see a man about his relationship issues.”

“Jack and Niki?” Ranboo says skeptically. “You sure they’ll be on our side?”

“They’d better,” mutters Tommy. “Niki at least will be. Jack Manifold’s a prick, so if he doesn’t want to come then honestly fuck him. Tell him I said that. Tell him I said fuck you.”

“Even if he says he’ll come?” asks Tubbo with a grin.

Tommy huffs. “Yeah. Even if he says he’ll come.”

Ranboo snorts. Sometime between leaving the cottage and now, he’s unfurled, the tension lifting from his shoulders.

“Meet back at my house when you’re done,” Tommy directs them.

“You got it,” Tubbo says. He turns to Ranboo. “Race you to the portal!”

“Hey—” Ranboo protests, but Tubbo’s already taken off. He sighs good-naturedly, then races after him. “Bye, Tommy!” he calls over his shoulder.

Tommy watches them go till they’re specks in the distance. As he begins to pick his way through the snow, he turns back to look at the cabins behind him, whose warmth felt just as faint as the cold outside feels now.

The snow beneath his feet is very white, and his shadow grows darker the longer he stares, and if he never looks up maybe he can pretend that all the colors are still vivid and all the world is just as bright as it ever was.

Big man that he is, he wasn’t really built for pretending. And besides, he—he has all the memories he could ever want of a brighter world. Sunny days and rainy days, blizzards and sunshowers—anything someone on the server remembers, he can see anytime he wants.

No reason to miss it, then. None at all.

This isn’t how he wanted it to happen. This isn’t what he fucking wants. Wilbur’s gone, and Dream’s antsy, and the Egg, and Schlatt, and he’d wanted to take his time for this confrontation, not patch together another ragtag army to fight a battle they’ll inevitably lose.

He can’t take another loss from the jaws of victory. He can’t survive another fall.

Wilbur’s fucking gone. They need to fight the Eggpire now, get him back. They need to—

Rest. Get their shit together. Talk about it tomorrow.

Get as many people behind him as possible, more like.

If he starts thinking about it—Wilbur’s fear, his desperation, his betrayals—Wilbur giving in—

Tommy can’t breathe. His own emotions are muted, faraway, but Wil’s—Wil’s are sharp and distinct and painfully bright. He keeps reliving the moment of surrender. He can’t bring himself to leave the memory of that room.

Please, he thinks at the void.

Silence, then—

Walk on, child. It will be all right.

It won’t. But it’s a nice sentiment all the same.

He’s so tired. Would his dreams be his? Would he dream in color, still, if he even dreamed?

There is too much to mull over, too much to hyperventilate himself to tears about, too fucking much to think straight.

So he starts walking. He picks a damn direction and he starts walking. He’s got places to be, people to see. A fighting chance, maybe.

You are more than what you must do, says the void softly.

“Yeah,” Tommy says aloud. His breath fogs the air, the cloud expanding out and out and out. “We’ll see.”

Chapter Text

It’s cold in Las Nevadas. Tommy doesn’t have to go far to find who he’s looking for—Quackity is perched atop a ladder, touching up the paint on the welcome sign.

“Big Q!” Tommy calls.

Right  before Quackity twists around, he remembers: Quackity hasn’t seen him like this. The version of him that exists in Quackity’s head is still the Tommy he was before, the whole one, with a white streak in his hair and nothing more.

He almost wants to call out again. Don’t turn around! he might say. He could—fuck, he could run, hide, take it all back before Quackity sees him, before it cannot be undone.

This is who you are, the void says. Tommy…

Oh, shut up, he thinks sharply, and in the time it takes to form those words within his mind, Quackity has already turned around.

“Tommy!” he greets, his signature wide smile spreading across his face—and then, all at once, falling away. “Hey, what happened to you, man? Your—” He gestures about with the hand not on the ladder, splashing a bit of paint on his white shirt.

Tommy’s hand goes to his throat self-consciously, tracing over the scar there, the spiralling veins. “Sam didn’t tell you?”

Quackity tenses, expression flickering dark for a moment before returning to its usual levity. “Tell me what?” he says.

He tucks the paintbrush in his pocket and scales quickly down the ladder, leaving it leaning against the sign.

Up close, Tommy watches as Quackity’s gaze skims all over him—his eye, his ruined throat, the greyish hue of his skin. He swallows. Suddenly he can’t fucking say it. Not here, not to Quackity.

“He—I—” he sputters, then all in a rush: “He killed me. I died.”

“Again?” Quackity says. Then it seems to hit him. What Tommy had said. What Sam had done. “Wait. Wait. Sam killed you? Fucking—Sam? Are we talking about the same—”

Tommy’s so fucking tired of telling and retelling this story. He cuts Q off anyway, because he’s here and he’s started it. “Yep. Broke into the prison to kill Dream, Dream killed Ghostbur, Warden killed me, Dream revived Wilbur, Dream revived me, now I’m here.” He ticks each one off on his fingers as he goes, spreads his hands as if to say And that’s all, folks.

Quackity stares at him. Unabashedly, like he’s some foreign object placed before him, some tangled-up problem he can’t solve. Tommy’s skin crawls.

“Now you’re here,” he echoes. “What the fuck, Tommy? You broke into the prison and died? Why would you—why the fuck would you try to kill Dream, man? He’s already locked up. You already locked him up.”

Tommy barks out a laugh. Time to show his hand. “You’re one to talk, Big Q. I’m not the one torturing him every day.”

“You—” Quackity sputters. “I—no, I wouldn’t—”

“Honestly,” Tommy says, “there’s no point lying to me. I’ll know.”

“You’ll know?” Quackity repeats. “How—”

Tommy waves a hand. “It’s a long fucking story. Listen. Dream isn’t going to give you the revive book. He just isn’t. And I’d like to believe that by now you can admit that it’s not really revenge anymore, either. It’s just nice to feel that powerful.

“That’s all right. I understand. More than you’d—more than you’d know, Big Q. But I need you to stop—stop going in there, yes, but also just stop and—and think, because you think you have nothing but really it’s all there, you just have to—”

Quackity’s mouth is parted. He’s speechless.

“You built them a city,” Tommy says. “You built them a wedding venue. You built them a life, and when it was done, they didn’t want you anymore. Yes?”

“I don’t—” Quackity hisses, expression gone stormy. “Tommy, I have to go. I have to—I don’t know what’s happened to you, but I can’t—you can’t just come here and—you’re always welcome, you know? But this new you, whatever the fuck’s inside you, it’s—it’s not.”

“Except,” continues Tommy, blithe, “they did want you. Karl didn’t invite you to Kinoko—why? He’s a fucking time traveller, that’s why. He’s losing his memory. He forgot.”

Quackity has a hand on his sword, a dangerous look on his face. Idly, Tommy muses that he should probably be far more afraid than he is—what has he to protect himself? Knowledge? A sharper tongue?

Theseus, Theseus, who have you become? comes the void’s ever-familiar whisper.

Shut up, he retorts, nearly fond. Nearly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Quackity says in a warning tone, “but I suggest you stop. I have no reason to believe you.”

“Why, Quackity,” Tommy wheedles, “are you threatening me?”

Quackity’s eyes narrow, his fingers curling around the hilt of his sword. “Leave.”

Tommy puts his hands in the air, lets his smile spread wide. “Hey. Hey. I’m telling the truth, Big Q. I want you to have your fucking—your happy ending. Isn’t that what you wanted too?”

Wanted. Huh.

It’s the truth.

“I don’t have any reason to believe you, Tommy,” Quackity repeats. He’s baring his teeth.

Predator, prey. Tommy has him backed into a corner. But he doesn’t want Quackity afraid, he wants Quackity to hear him.

I care about you. I wouldn’t lie. That’s what he should say, but he knows, he knows Quackity won’t listen to that. He’ll pretend he sees right through it.

Tommy sighs. He’d been trying not to pull this card, but—he concentrates on the memory of blood on obsidian floors, the steady drip of crying obsidian tears, the smell of a cell occupied for far too long—and there it is, the memory: “The last thing Dream said to you, when you were in there—you took the shears, just the shears, you’d just sharpened them and they were so shiny they glittered in the lava-light—he said, ‘That was fun. See you tomorrow?’ and he grinned, and there was blood in his teeth, and you thought to yourself, What if this was all for fucking nothing? And you’d had that thought before, of course, but you were still thinking of Dream’s fucked-up smile the next day when Sam told you he wouldn’t be letting you back in, and you threatened him, and you pleaded with him, and you said—”

“Stop,” says Quackity. “Stop.” His hands are clenched into fists, knuckles white, but he’s not clutching his sword any longer, so Tommy’s damn well taking this as a win. “How?” he demands.

Tommy shrugs. “I let a part of the void stay inside me when I—when Dream—after I came back. Living kinda sucks, but I know fuckin’ everything now, so.”

“Everything?” Quackity says. Tommy’s been trying not to read his mind, but it’s hard not to reach for the burgeoning hope in him, for the questions bubbling to the surface.

Tommy bites his lip and meets Quackity’s eyes meaningfully. “Karl time travels against his will, and he’s slowly losing himself in the process. Sapnap doesn’t trust you because you’ve spent so much time pulling away; also, you’ve been fucking torturing his best friend.”

“Ex-best friend,” Quackity bites out.

Tommy arches an eyebrow, as if to say, See?

He’s cool. He’s so fucking poggers now. He knows things. This situation is his. The conversation, the outcome—

Still, his exhale is shaky. “You still love them, they still love you. Reconciliation is still possible. You just have to talk to them. Tell them how you—” he thumps his chest, one-two— “how you feel, Big Q.”

“You just told me Karl is forgetting who he is,” Quackity snaps. “That Sapnap doesn’t trust me anymore. How can I just—waltz back into their lives, when I—when they—”

Tommy laughs, quiet. “I can fix him.”

“What?”

“Karl. I can fix his memory.”

“You—” Quackity’s hand goes to his necklace, and he toys with the rings that hang there compulsively, seemingly unaware.

“But,” Tommy says, and Quackity’s open expression flickers, “I need you to promise me two things.”

Quackity sighs. “Go ahead.”

Tommy wonders what Quackity thinks he would ask of him, what a void-child would want from a gambling man. He could know, of course, blink and be shown it in an instant, but there’s no fun in that.

“Okay, first thing,” he says, “I’m getting the server together to help me fight the Eggpire. So far, Tubbo and Ranboo are coming with, Phil and Techno have agreed, and Jack and Niki will probably come too. I need you and the rest of Las Nevadas to come and fight—we’re meeting at my house, sunrise, day after tomorrow.” He blows out a breath.

“What’s the rush?” asks Quackity. His fingers are tapping a rhythm against his thigh—that means he’s considering.

“They’ve got Wilbur,” Tommy says.

“Oh,” Quackity says, his hand stilling.

“He gave himself to the Egg—willingly,” Tommy manages. “Well, he, er, gave in. Because he thought—no one wanted him. But I wanted him. And I’m getting him back. So.” He lets himself smile, a small, self-aware sort of smile that has followed him through revolutions and exiles and peacetimes and wars. “Are you coming?”

“What’s the other condition?” Quackity says measuredly. But his eyes say Yes, I’m coming. Yes, I’ll bring my people with me. For Wilbur.

For Wilbur. Tommy answers, “You go make up with your fuckin’ fiancés, Quackity.”

“That’s it?”

“Is it so hard to believe that you deserve happiness too?” Tommy says. “After everything?”

“You sound like Wilbur,” Quackity says. What he’s thinking is, How can you possibly think I deserve them, knowing what I’ve done?

“I think we both do, big man,” Tommy replies.

(He thinks he doesn’t deserve us, that we’ll just always leave—

He thinks—)

Something in him goes blurry, unfocused—he’s saying something, saying—

Quackity’s gone pale and drawn when Tommy squints his way back into seeing straight. “You’re—you’re fucking possessed, Tommy, did you know that? It—you—”

Tommy scratches his head. “I feel like I told you that before, Big Q.” He pauses. “What did it say to you, then?”

“I—” Quackity huffs, fidgeting. “This is ridiculous.”

Tommy raises both his eyebrows in an expression he knows looks stupid; he also happens to know that Quackity finds it endearing, the fucking softie.

“Fine,” says Quackity, giving in. “It told me I deserve them, okay? It said Quackity, you deserve them, believe it, and I don’t fucking believe it, but if you’re just letting some alien entity possess you and that’s what it chooses to tell me then maybe I should! Maybe I should listen.”

Tommy grins. “Great! Glad we’ve come to an agreement, big man.” He sticks out his hand. “Deal?”

Quackity looks away, craning his neck to look at the Las Nevadas sign, its partly-touched-up paint job long since dry. Then he looks back at Tommy, eyes flicking up and down—Tommy’s outstretched hand, his ruined body, his knowing smile—and then he says, “Deal.”

The look in Quackity’s eyes is inscrutable, mouth twisting as he nods once, short, and shakes Tommy’s hand.

Chapter Text

Places to be, people to see—Tommy tries not to think about what’ll happen once he’s met everyone he needs to meet and said all the things he needs to say and shuts himself up, alone in his bedroom in the dark, waiting for the memories to at last crash down upon him—

Wilbur with the Egg, lonelier than he’s ever been; Quackity, surrounded with allies and still so afraid; Tubbo and Ranboo, clinging to each other, to a fantasy of normalcy—and on the outside watching it all, Tommy. Always Tommy.

He takes the long way home. There’s one conversation he still has to have—not one he’s looking forward to, but a necessary one all the same.

Closing his eyes, he tries to focus on a memory, just to see if he can figure out where—surely it would be faster if he could find—

But when he tries to picture sunglasses, he can only see white eyes, blindingly bright, fading into a background of red, blood-red, Egg-red—when he tries to grasp onto a happy long-ago memory, surrounded by walls of yellow and black clay, all he can picture is one hand holding a carrot, half-eaten, the other hand reaching out toward a wooden button on a too-polished blackstone floor—

And then he’s sitting in the grass outside a familiar castle, on his knees, gasping for air. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. They’re all going to die in L’Manberg and it’s because of Tommy, he pressed it, he pressed it—Wilbur’s going to give himself up and it’s because of Tommy too, he wasn’t there, he couldn’t save him, he left him—

There’s a hand on his shoulder. Warm, and distantly familiar.

“Hey,” says Eret, and Tommy can’t even react, that’s how fucking panicked he is, that’s how fucking—he can’t even hear Eret properly. His hearing has gone all faded, his vision is staticky, the world’s glowing at the corners, and—and—

“Hey, Tommy, breathe with me, okay?” Their voice is soft, soothing, like Tommy is a small and frightened woodland creature, ready to bolt into the woods again.

Still, he matches Eret’s breaths, counts the seconds as their chest rises and falls.

This is your fault, he imagines saying. His mouth is woolen and he cannot feel his lips. This is your fucking panic attack, Eret.

But blame will get him nowhere, will it? Blame got him here. Blame makes him angry, and he has nowhere to put it; blame makes him push people away, and he needs people. He needs to be caught when he inevitably falls again, and here’s Eret, catching him. 

He’d be an idiot to lash out at them now, after all they’ve done to try and mend what they’d broken so long ago.

Tommy sighs, letting the gathered tension leak from him, and looks up at Eret.

“Ayup,” he greets them, trying for a smile.

He barely has to reach to feel Eret’s—surprise? They’re projecting it all over the place, an oddly cautious hope, a sense that they’ve been caught off-guard by Tommy’s lack of a violent reaction.

Oddly enough, there’s not a trace of horror at Tommy’s appearance, just puzzled curiosity with a hint of concern.

Eret reaches out a hand to help him up, and he takes it gratefully without a second thought, struggling to his feet.

Tommy doesn’t bother dusting off his clothes. A little bit of dirt never hurt anyone, or something like that. Sometimes it even helps. He kind of hates feeling too clean. “Thanks,” he says, making a second attempt at his usual grin.

“Of course,” Eret says. Their voice is deep and warm, and despite himself, Tommy feels comfortable.

He wishes he felt steady enough to laugh it off. Wishes he had the courage to say, here, now, out of the blue: The rest of us are traitors, too.

“Long time no see,” Tommy says.

Eret smiles, like they know Tommy’s trying and—and they appreciate the gesture. Imagine that. Maybe Tommy should’ve been appreciating Eret all this time.

Your mind is like a blackstone room, he imagines himself saying. Did you know that, Eret? Always just a hairsbreadth away from the trigger.

“Well,” Eret says, “you’ve been—”

“Dead?” Tommy finishes wryly.

Eret laughs. “I was going to say ‘busy.’”

“Still am, that,” says Tommy.

“I figured as much,” Eret says.

Tommy bites his lip. “Why aren’t you asking?” he says, all in a rush. “You want to know. I know—I know you want to know.”

Eret adjusts their sunglasses. “Two reasons—first of all, I never want to push you to tell me anything. You would tell me if you wanted me to know, and I hope—I hope that if you needed it, you would ask me for help. Secondly, I’ve seen something like this before. Someone like you.”

“When?” Tommy says. “Where?”

“It was a long time ago,” answers Eret, “and a different server. I don’t really—remember. It’s a long story.”

“You don’t remember,” Tommy echoes. “Real problem with amnesia around here.”

Eret tilts their head. “Who else?”

Tommy counts off on his fingers: “You, Ranboo, Karl, Ghostbur if that counts, and—Puffy.”

Puffy, huh? Tommy hadn’t known that.

“Anyway,” he says quickly, before he starts having flashbacks into Puffy’s past, or worse Eret’s, “here’s the gist: I died and got revived again. Sam killed me, Dream revived me, I can read minds now.”

“Right,” says Eret.

“And as for the second part,” Tommy says, “I do need your help.”

“Oh,” Eret says, like they hadn’t been expecting Tommy to be so forthright. He supposes it is a bit out of character, but he’s fucking tired, and his vision is still kind of blurry at the edges, and he really just wants to get home. He just wants to rest.

“Hey,” he says anyway, trying for levity, “don’t sound so surprised.”

Eret laughs a little. “I didn’t think it would be right away.”

Tommy shakes his head. “It’s, uh, it’s Wilbur. The Egg’s possessed him. I’m getting the gang together to get him back.”

“Wilbur,” Eret repeats blankly. “How—?”

“Haven’t you heard, big man?” Tommy says. Playing it up for the views, or whatever.

Eret mouths ‘big man’ and seems to suppress a smile.

“No,” they answer. “Was he really—”

“Revived?” Tommy runs his tongue over his teeth. “Yep.”

Popping my P’s just to feel something, he thinks to himself. Prime, if only someone were reading his mind.

“Wilbur’s alive,” Eret says wonderingly, and Tommy is trying not to read their mind, he really is, but their hope is all over the place, infectious and bright, some sort of emotional sunrise. He finds that what he really wants to do is give them a hug. Tell them it’ll be fine. Tell them Wilbur will forgive them someday, somehow.

But—it still hurts when he lies, a little bit. Or maybe he’s just been imagining it. 

“If you help us save him, I’ll put in a good word for you,” Tommy half-jokes.

Eret’s barely listening. “I didn’t think—” they start to say. “I never thought—”

“Look,” Tommy says. He reaches out, puts a hand on Eret’s shoulder, and tries to calm their demons just for a moment, to quell that tide of guilt they carry everywhere they go.

(I should have done more done better, it hisses in the back of their mind, day and night. I should have turned back warned them intervened. I should have fought back taken charge protected them—

Tommy wishes he could reach out with more than just one numb, cold hand. Wishes he could say: Me too, Eret. Me fucking too.)

Instead, he says, “You deserve a second chance. From me, from Wil, from all of us.” He tries to sound like he means it. He does mean it. “I can’t promise he’s going to forgive you, but—”

“It’s enough,” Eret says quietly. “Thank you, Tommy.”

“L’Manberg’s gone,” Tommy replies, “but we aren’t. We still have something to fight for.”

For the first time, Eret smiles like they mean it. “Each other?”

Tommy smiles back, tucking his hands behind his back. The sun has begun to set, and the castle’s imposing figure is cast in stunning shadow. “Sunrise,” he says. “Day after tomorrow.”

It’s a meeting, a future, a hope. This is what they do, after all: build and destroy, make and break and remake.

“My house,” he finishes. “That’s where we’ll be.”

He raises an eyebrow: Are you in?

“I’ll be there,” says Eret.

For some reason Tommy feels relieved. Just relieved.

“Good,” he says. “I—I’m glad.”

Eret’s expression flickers for a moment. “Yeah?”

Biting the inside of his cheek, Tommy wishes more than anything he could know the right thing to say. No use knowing what someone wants to hear if you can’t ever find the words to tell them.

“Yeah,” he says instead.

And Eret’s thinking: A second chance. I get a second chance.

Don’t waste it, Tommy doesn’t say.

Eret dips their head, just once, then turns and walks away.

Chapter Text

The note Tommy leaves for Puffy reads as follows:

CAP’N PUFFY!

your name sounds like it could be a Brand of Cereal. did you know that? also we need your help. tubbo and ranboo and me but mostly me. not the therapy sort, I’ve got Superpowers now and I don’t need therapy any more.

come to my house tomorrow at sunrise, we are saving Wil from the egg. the big red one underground. you know the one.

Be There or you’re a pussy

big Tom

Just to really cement that the job’s been done, he clears his throat like the big man he is, dusts his hands off, then stalks the rest of the way back to his house with his back perfectly straight.

It kind 0f hurts by the time he gets there. But no matter, because there’s someone waiting for him outside, shrouded in shadow. Must be Tubbo, or Ranboo, or even—ugh—Jack Manifold.

Trotting up to his door, he finally sees who it is, and it’s—it’s—

“Hey, kiddo,” says Schlatt.

Tommy sputters. “I’m not a child,” he retorts.

“Sure, Tommy,” Schlatt says with a smile. “Look, I just wanted to come by and thank—”

The gravity of Schlatt’s appearance sinks in, suddenly. “Holy shit,” Tommy breathes, cutting him off. “Holy fuck. You’re back.”

“So I am,” Schlatt agrees.

“It worked,” says Tommy. Wonder mixes with horror in the pit of his stomach. He manipulated Dream—he pulled it off, he won—but this is Schlatt. “That was pretty easy” Schlatt. “Old habits die hard” Schlatt. Back from the dead. “It fucking worked.”

Schlatt’s grin is unbearable—just the sight of it has Tommy smelling phantom smoke. “Sure did. And it’s all thanks to you.”

Would anyone blame him if he punched Schlatt in the face? Maybe his hand. Maybe Schlatt. Eh.

As he pulls back to swing, Schlatt raises his hands in a universal surrender. “Hey,” he says, “hey. I’m not threatening you or anything, all right? This is a genuine thank you.”

Tommy scoffs. “You? Genuine?”

“You got him to revive me!” Schlatt says, almost giddy with it. “I’m here, Tommy, and I’m alive, and it’s even better than I remembered. I don’t know how I can possibly repay you for the opportunity, I mean seriously. Have you seen this place?”

“Cut the bullshit,” Tommy says levelly, “and listen. You can repay me by going far away from here and leaving everyone alone. Got it? You don’t owe me anything. But if you try anything on anyone I care about, I will send you back to fucking Limbo without so much as a how-to on manifesting void cigarettes.”

Schlatt takes a step back. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking,” he says.

“Shut up, Schlatt,” Tommy says. “We had a truce then, but I am happy to deck you right now.”

“No, no, listen—”

Tommy shakes his head. “Nope! We’re done. That was the deal.”

“I’m staying!” Schlatt exclaims. He doesn’t look like he’s bracing for a blow, but he does continue in a rush, so maybe he does know what’s good for him. “I’m going to help you fight the Eggpire. Get Wilbur back. I owe him too.”

Tommy pauses mid-swing yet again. “How do you know about Wil?”

Schlatt sighs. “Glatt.”

“Glatt,” Tommy repeats. Then he remembers. “Your fuckin’ ghost? How does he know all this shit?”

“He was near the ruins of L’Manberg when the Egg took Wilbur,” says Schlatt with a shrug. “No idea why.”

The ruins of L’Manberg. Never underestimate Schlatt’s ability to read you, that’s what Tommy always says. Never let him in. But—Tommy hates calling it L’Manhole, and Schlatt always called it Manberg when he was alive, and maybe he has done some thinking, maybe—

Maybe Schlatt would be valuable to have on their side. At least in name. At least—

“Fine,” says Tommy. “Stay if you like. But we don’t need your help, got it? You’re a creep. If you hang around here I won’t hesitate.”

“All right, all right,” Schlatt says. “I deserve that.” He snickers. “I’ll see you around, kid.”

As he starts making his way down the Prime Path, Tommy mutters under his breath, “I fuckin’ hope not.”

“Heard that!” Schlatt calls over his shoulder, still walking at a leisurely stroll.

“Fuck off, bitch!” Tommy shouts back. “I’ll kill you!”

Schlatt’s laughter carries all the way back to Tommy till he disappears from sight.

Ducking inside, Tommy is immediately greeted with the sight of his two best friends, just fucking standing there, heads tilted at exactly the same angle.

Tubbo brightens visibly at Tommy’s grumbled sigh, while Ranboo just looks sheepish.

“Were you two listening?” Tommy demands.

“Nope,” says Tubbo with a grin. “Who was it?”

“Schlatt,” Tommy replies. “He’s alive. He came by to—to thank me.”

“Just to thank you?” Ranboo asks, suspicious.

“No, no,” Tommy waves him off, “he said he’d had a ‘change of heart’ and wanted to stick around to help us fight.”

Tubbo stiffens, smile wiped away, nails digging into his palms. “And you said yes?”

“Of course not!” exclaims Tommy. “Tubbo, Tubbo, I told the prick to fuck off. I told him if he so much as looked at you I would fucking kill him, that’s what I said. I’m a big man, I can take it.”

“Tommy,” Tubbo says, ever reproachful. “You didn’t have to—“

“Oh, yes I did,” Tommy cuts him off. “You’re not the only one who gets to go up to bastards who’ve killed us all ‘Mimimi, this is check-fuckin’-mate.’ You protect me, I protect you, all right?”

Ranboo’s brow is furrowed. Checkmate, he mouths. Checkmate?

Tommy inhales, and the realization comes to him: Ranboo was there, yes, he might have been told about it, but he doesn’t remember.

“Here you go, Ranboob,” he says with some glee, pressing a hand to Ronboo’s forehead and closing his eyes. “Ready?”

Ranboo sputters. “Ready for w—”

Tommy exhales, picturing it in his mind’s eye: Ranboo, enderwalking through the snow; Ranboo, stepping through the portal in Punz’s wake, Ranboo, eyes wide as Tommy swung down with the Axe of Peace, down at Dream, dealing him a second killing blow, the gravity of the falling blade almost too much to stand—

He snaps back to reality.

“Fuck, man,” he breathes, heart thumping, the adrenaline of that moment still rushing in his ears. “Those memories are—not poggers to relive, let me tell you.”

Ranboo’s mouth is parted in perfect surprise. For a single terrifying moment, his eyes are a familiar bright purple, and Tommy steps back—and then Ranboo blinks, and he’s back. 

“Holy cow,” he breathes. “I remember.”

“Holy cow,” Tommy mocks in a higher-pitched voice. “I’m Ranboo, and I—”

Tubbo shoves him. “What do you remember? All of it?”

“No, not all of it,” Ranboo answers quickly. “But the obsidian room—the Hall of Attachments, Punz leading us all there, the axe, the elevator, you guys didn’t have any armor, Drea—”

He cuts himself off as his eyes glow that dangerous purple once again. Tubbo’s eyebrows shoot up.

“That’s not suspicious at all,” he says.

Tommy laughs it off. It works fine, all right? Fuck you. “Not at all,” he says, poking Ranboo in the chest. “Hey. Hey boob boy.”

Ranboo shudders back to life. “He was going to—he was going to kill you, Tubbo, I—”

“But he didn’t,” Tubbo says softly, reaching out and taking Ranboo’s hand. Something in Tommy expands—hot air balloon on a summer’s day, air growing thin on a mountaintop—something terrible and lonely and joyful too.

“He didn’t,” Ranboo agrees, swallowing as he looks down at their joined hands. He’s thinking so loudly Tommy can’t help but hear. He’s thinking My fault. He’s thinking If he dies—one life—protect him—enderwalk—couldn’t save him—my fault my fault my—

Tommy slings an arm around Ranboo’s shoulders, which is frankly a feat at his height, and says a bit too loudly, “Boys! Why don’t we take this downstairs? We have plans to make, gear to grind, drugs—”

“No drugs,” Tubbo says, shaking his head over-exaggeratedly. He’s caught on.

“Tubbo,” whines Tommy, long and drawn out. Even the puppy eyes make an appearance.

Tubbo pulls at Ranboo, and the three of them begin descending further into the house.

“Fine,” Tubbo says. “Some drugs.”

Tommy fist pumps; Ranboo chuckles. Another successful scheme.