Archive of Our Own ^beta

I. THIS IS MY BODY

When you find your first grey hair, you almost don’t believe it’s real. You stare in the mirror for a little while, tilting your head to get a better look, not comprehending the sight. Not quite believing that, even after all you’ve been through, you’re going grey at sixteen.

“Soldiers get scars,” Wilbur told you once, brushing brown hair dye over his roots, “Presidents get wrinkles.”

You think, if you were the person you were last year, you would cry. You are not the person you were last year. You are hardly the person you were last month. So instead of crying, you put your hands on the bathroom counter, taking deep breaths in and out. You look back up again.

You are a president and a spy and a soldier. You have scars on your face and grey hair at your temples. You are sixteen. It doesn’t matter.

II. I AM RUSTY WHEN I TALK — IT IS THE STORM IN ME

You are talking to your cabinet about financing for a new housing complex, and your voice cracks. They have been silent since you started speaking, but suddenly it feels heavier.

“Sorry,” you say, because it’s all you know how to do. Sorry for being here, sorry the table isn’t clean, sorry that I’m not good enough, but I’m the only thing you’ve got, so stop making me feel sorry for it.

Quackity used to tease you about your voice cracks. Poke at your ribs and chuckle, back when you weren’t president and vice, just two people in the eye of the same hurricane. He says nothing, now, and you can’t remember what his laugh sounds like.

“Trust no one,” Quackity will tell you, a long time after laughter. And then, very quietly, as if afraid someone else will hear it, “I’m glad you’re alive.”

You love him as thoroughly as you hate him. He is your brother — not because you are friends, but because there is no other word for the kinship between witnesses. You think, in some moments, that he might hate you too.

III. MY WANTING BLOOD, MY HALF-TAMED ADDICTIONS

You still cut your hair like a soldier. Short and trimmed, to keep from lice. It had started growing out when you were a spy. They cut it off when you were burned, and you’ve kept it like that since. 

You hope, for diplomacy reasons, it makes you look older.

Your cabinet prefers you grey-haired and firm, most of the time. They only want you to be young when it helps make a point. A voice crack is only a flaw in your speech if they don’t like the argument — a wrinkle is only a tragedy when they want you to look sympathetic.

Your enemies are similar. Old when you’re a threat, young when you’re a fool. Technoblade will call you tyrant or boy-king, but never both.

You wish they would make up their minds already. It’s rather frustrating, trying to figure out what they want from you. When your scars contract and your body trembles, you call it a growing pain, but they only wish you happy birthday if you don’t say which one.

You blame a squeaky syllable on new cigarettes, and for the first time, all of their shoulders relax.

IV. THIS IS MY HEARTBEAT

Here is a harsh truth about this body: It is good at getting brothers, but not very good at keeping them. You had one, then two, then three, and then you did not have any at all. You do not know if this makes you an only child, or just a very lonely one.

Here is a harsher one: You have never had a family in fullness. You are not capable of it. You pick up and loose these things in pieces, never all at once. When you are seventeen, you gain a son and a husband in the same month as you lose your other half. Even your body, that hurt and wretched thing, does not know how to hold them all at once. You only have so many hands, only so much heart to lose.

You are a former younger brother who is still unsure of the right words, and you come to both love and fatherhood with an unpracticed clumsiness.

V. LIKE YOURS, IT IS A HATCHET

IT CAN BUILD A HOUSE, OR TEAR ONE DOWN

When you are first made president, your nephew gifts you a chess board.

“Here,” he says. “In case you wanted to play.”

You’ve always loved chess. It made things seem easier. Thoughts and politics and war alike felt so much simpler when you could see them as moves on a board, A4 to D4, B6 to A5.

When your opponent invited you to play, you think you might have misunderstood. You always thought it was a game between equals. That no matter how much he hated you, he still thought you were a person .

You were wrong, of course. Although you have tried to kill your optimism, it still gorges itself on your leftover love, makes a feast out of nostalgia and childhood frailty.

Optimists are never right, Wilbur used to joke. But one day, we will be.

VI. OUR KNEECAPS ARE OUR PRAYER BEDS

EVERYONE CAN WALK FARTHER ON THEIR KNEECAPS THAN THEY CAN ON THEIR FEET

The first thing you do when you gets to your new home is dig a grave.

Your skin is burning in the cold, scar tissue sensitive, even after all this time, and you dig. It takes hours to crack the frozen dirt open.

You don’t know how Ranboo kept the body, but you’re grateful. The little fox is too small, too light in your hands. It smells of death, but you do not mind that anymore.

You lay your fox down in the shallow grave. You would have dug further, but your hands have gotten too numb to pick up your shovel. They twitch, scars contracting in on themselves, making your fingers go straight. You set the fox in the hole and then hammer a sign into the space above the grave.

Here lies Squeeks: the best pet ever.

You pick up the shovel, drop it, pick it up again. Your numb, shaking fingers shovel dirt over top of once shiny fur, watch it go dark with mud and then disappear.

Maybe you should have eaten it. Turned it’s pelt into a rug, or a cape, fed the meat to someone who needed it, swallowed it’s heart in one gulp. Maybe you should have turned it’s bones into knives, or sold it for spare parts.

But you have salvaged so many things. You are so tired of picking up the pieces.

VII. SAFETY IS NOT ALWAYS SAFE.

YOU CAN FIND ONE ON EVERY GUN.

“Are you scared?” Jack asks, some time after blueprints and pet eulogies.

“No,” you respond with a shrug, even though you mean to say I’m scared every day of my goddamn life . The truth doesn’t come out of you easy, not like it used to.

Jack laughs a little. It’s almost strained. You wonder if they will make a coat from your fur. If they will sell you in the market and play with your bones. Will your death bring a funeral or a dinner party?

“Good,” he replies obstinately, refusing to meet your eyes. “I’m not either.”

You cannot imagine you will be pleasant. This is all you have ever been, so you assume it is all you will ever be. Gristle and sour meat, a bad cut made worse by neglect. You wonder how your heart would taste, were someone to burst it between their lips like a ripe cherry. Who would get the right, at your desecration? Well the rest make a mockery of the platter, who alone will earn the privilege to swallow down the very centre of you?

Tommy, because you’ve wronged him, or Ranboo, because you haven’t? Is consumption an act of love or vengeance?

Maybe one day you’ll figure it out.

VIII. I SAID TO THE SUN

“TELL ME ABOUT THE BIG BANG."

Your husband combs through your hair with his fingers, and he does not say anything about grey hair or love or consumption. You don’t know if he does this for your sake or his own, because you have read his diaries, so you know he worries about it quite a lot.

Or, at least, he used to. You try not to read his diaries any more. You couldn’t help it, when he’d first come to your new city. You have never learned to trust without reservation, but you are trying, and he has learned by now that this is the best you can give him. He loves you anyway. You’ve never figured that one out, either.

You still keep your wireless radio under your bed. You have not been a spy in years, but you still cannot toss it out. Sometimes, after particularly bad nights, you will sit by it and wait for a message to come through the tinny receiver and tell you what it all meant, or when the next attack is coming.

You still throw your president’s uniform in with the wash, and you sleep with a pistol under your pillow. Some things you cannot get rid of.

“It’s not a linear process, is the thing,” Tommy tells you, when you ask how he started gardening. “Your plants still die, you still fuck up, you still think maybe I can make a mint bush work .” He turns his head quickly, finger pointing at your chest. “You can’t, by the way.” Then, he turns back to his plants. “But then you replant, and you try again, and you keep failing. But getting better too. Kinda how life works, innit?”

The first time you told Tommy you’d die for him, he said “I never asked you to do that.”

IX. THE SUN SAID

“IT HURTS TO BECOME.”

Your son draws your family for a class project. He scribbles your scars in pink crayon and turns your cold metal fingers into small grey sausages. He does not love or hate these things. They are only pieces of his father, as normal as his eyes and ears.

Although you have never hated your body, you have never loved it either.

You hear a tapping noise, and it takes a long moment to realise it is your own knuckle, rapping against the counter-top. Dot, dot, dot, dash, dash...

You almost laugh. You’re tapping out the number thirty.

It’s morse operator shorthand, from the old days. This is the end of the message. I have no more to send.

“Do you like it?” Michael asks.

You stick the drawing up on the fridge, and you are exactly as old as you are supposed to be.

“It’s perfect,” you reply, and you mean it.