Chapter Text
They’ve decorated the beach and made the cake and widened the nether path. Now they’re just twiddling their thumbs/antennae. It’s half an hour past the time on the invitations.
“No one’s coming, Tommy,” says Clementine.
“The fuck do you mean?” asks Tommy.
They’re interrupted by, unfortunately, Dream, who spirals in over the water via trident. He doesn’t even have the decency to be breathless as he zooms over Tnret, somersaults out of the sky, and lands on his feet. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” says Tommy.
Hope sticks her head out from under Dream’s chestplate, looking woozy. “Tridents are the worst,” she announces.
“Amen, brother,” says Tommy.
“Where is everybody?” Dream asks, ignoring Hope. “I’m running a little late, I’m sorry.”
Tommy has been wondering exactly the same thing.
He gets his answer: anywhere but here, apparently. Nobody else shows up.
Dream and Hope hang out, at least. Dream gives them a trident, though, and when the rain sweeps in in the evening, they use it to spiral high, high, up; enough that Logstedshire looks tiny and obscure, as small as Clem at the end of their bond. Nothing awaits them, and nothing makes a sound at all, and they miss it when they start to fall.
Sapnap comes once, arguably to visit him, and more accurately to hang out with Dream, since they go to L’Manberg when Tommy specifically isn’t allowed to follow them. While he waits on the edge of the portal, he swivels in place, and finds himself looking into the sea of lava. It goes directly below him, and out for a long, long ways. He can’t see the portal back to L’Manberg from here, or the footpaths, or anything else – just the sea. It’s golden, hot, and it would eat him up into nothing at all very quickly. Clem flutters out a few yards further, looking down. It’s all updraft and makes her flight dizzy and fast.
Then he’s yanked backwards, by the collar of his shirt, fast and hard enough to pull him off his feet. Clementine squeaks. Tommy crashes into someone else, who doesn’t stumble at all. He sees netherite and the hem of a green cloak.
Tommy hadn’t even heard Dream come back through the portal. He swallows.
“Come on,” says Dream, amused, a smile in his voice. “It’s not your time to die.”
Tommy doesn’t object when Dream puts a hand on his shoulder, like a brother, and keeps it there as he steers him back toward Logstedshire.
After Clementine drowns one night during his sleepwalking, Tommy bends a reed into a little waterproof Clementine-bunker, and ties it around his neck when they sleep. He raids a beehive and fucks up his face and arm in exchange for wax to seal it with.
“We really doing this?” she sighs at him, looking at the finished product. It’s scuffed as anything but it’s the best they can do, Tommy’s never been a master carver and his hands are too unsteady to figure it out now.
“What, you want to go through that again?”
“...Passes the time,” she mutters.
“Jesus christ, Clem, that’s fuckin' dark.”
It’s nice to pretend that it’s totally commonplace to seal one’s soul in a grass tube at night so that you don’t crush her or drown her when the two of you go on your nightly sojourn into the fucking sea. Like you’ve found an IQ 5000 life hack, take that, cruel world! Things really can get better!
His last visit from Ranboo passes, as most last visits do, totally unmarked. Tommy finds him fishing in the nether – seriously, sitting on a ledge, his long-ass legs dangling off over the lake, trying to hook ghasts on a fishing pole. His daemon-cloud of purple particles seems to have dripped down to the edge of the fishing pole, presumably to look below the netherack into the lava-lake.
“Hello, Ranboo,” says Tommy.
“Oh, hi!” Ranboo jumps to his feet, daemon-cloud floating up to be a vaguely-coalesced weaselish tube by his feet. Ranboo’s got pep in his step. Or anxiety, but same deal, right? He’s got something for sure.
They go back to Logstedshire. Tommy can’t keep it in any longer. “I’m mad at you!”
“Oh - ” Ranboo doesn’t miss a beat. “Why?”
“You didn’t come to my, to my settling party.”
“Your what?”
“Oh, your what – don’t, listen, I don’t want to talk about it, I’m just upset!”
“Okay, but – what? I didn’t get an invitation.”
Clementine sighs. “We know you got an invitation, Ranboo.”
“I didn’t, though, I don’t -”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” says Tommy. “I don’t want to, I don’t want to.”
“Okay, we don’t have to talk about a, a party.”
“Good.”
“But you said settling, though? Isn’t that a big deal?”
“Yes Ranboo, ” Tommy spits, “It is a big deal!”
“Congratulations...?”
“Thanks,” Tommy deadpans.
“Did, uh – so that means Clementine’s stopped changing, right?”
“Yes, obviously that’s what it means.”
“Oh. Cool. You know Cons - Connie - just settled too, right?”
“Do not,” says Clementine in a voice so hard it barely sounds like hers, “talk to us about Cons.”
“Oh. Oh. Okay. Yeah.”
“We had to hear it from fucking Ghostbur,” says Tommy.
“They didn’t tell you themselves?” Ranboo sounds really confused.
“Ranboo, Tubbo and Connie haven’t visited us once,” Tommy says.
“Wh- really?”
“Do not talk about them,” says Clementine.
“Right! Right. Um.” Ranboo fidgets.
Tommy flicks his shoulder where Clementine sits, like, stop yelling at our guests, you bitch. She yelps and takes flight. But he doesn’t object out loud either, it’s not like he wants to talk about Tubbo.
“So,” he asks instead, “What’s the worst word you know?”
Something about Ranboo’s questions makes Tommy think, though. Reminds him that there’s a world outside the wild patch of land that’s kicking his ass. He starts to dig a room out below Logstedshire, just, just a little place to keep some items that might be useful, maybe, in the future. Clementine scoffs at it but she can’t stop him either. They’ve been fighting more lately. He puts in a couple chests, stores some enderpearls he’s gotten from the villagers, some diamonds.
“You won’t tell anyone, right?” he asks Ranboo.
Ranboo shakes his head. “No way. I don’t even know who I would tell.”
“Promise?”
“I promise."
“What do you say, Clem?” Tommy asks her as an olive branch.
She takes the bait, thinks about it. “I reckon we can believe him.”
Ranboo nods earnestly.
He says he’ll come back, too, but Tommy doesn’t know how much to trust that. Even if he really means it, they don’t know how much time they have left. Gotta keep it realistic.
Quackity visits a while later, to laugh at them. He shows them a picture of Tubbo. Tommy digs a hole, and Clementine sits in it, and Tommy pours a bucket of water on top of her. Quackity and Eulalia laugh, and Eulalia fishes her out roughly with a paw after Tommy doesn’t try. Can’t keep anything around here.
Clementine tells him to get rid of the room, or at least hide it deeper down. She’s being paranoid, probably, and besides, it’s Tommy who’d have to actually do the work, so they compromise by not doing anything and feeling resentful at each other.
Clementine was right.
Dream can be as still as anything when he wants to be, and when Tommy finds him in the secret room, staring into an open chest, he… freezes too. Fawns. Apologizes. Offers Dream soup for some reason, which was a bad idea because it didn’t work, but a good idea in spirit because Tommy knew in his heart the instant he heard the chest open that any distraction is preferable to whatever Dream’s got coming for him.
Dream decks the room with TNT and Tommy steps back, but Clementine is on one of the chests with photos inside, and Dream lights it without checking how far away she is. When it explodes, she’s seared up in an instant.
They respawn in tnret. He doesn’t think it’s canon, because it doesn’t hurt like a canon death would - which is all the better because Dream is already there and dragging him up by the arm. He pulls him toward Logstedshire before Clementine is fully roused, and Tommy is at the edge of their bond and has to scream before Dream stops long enough to let her catch up.
Then he kills Mushroom Henry while Tommy watches, explodes Logstedshire too while Tommy watches, breaks the portal while Tommy watches. He is back to nothing and this is Dream’s design. No more visitors, no Wilbur, no nether, no leaving, nothing of his own that Dream can’t vet. Just Dream, and even less of him than before.
“I thought things were going really well,” Dream sighs. “You settled, you were getting better... but you’ve been hiding things from me, you’ve been… plotting or whatever… you didn’t listen.”
“No,” says Tommy, “They were, we were, I just -”
“We’re really sorry though,” Clementine chimes in, pleading.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it anymore,” says Hope levelly. She’d been silent since they found the secret room. “Start again.”
Tommy picks up blocks from the ruins of Logstedshire, dully, after Dream leaves. Clementine could I told you so about it, but she’s silent instead, on Tommy’s shoulder, barely there. Is it better? Is it worse? Who knows. Eventually he just sits down on the dirt at the edge of the crater and stares at it.
“We’re really alone,” says Tommy.
“I said I was sorry,” says Clementine once she finally speaks, and her tone isn’t snide, it’s worse, just muted horror. Local moth who thought she’d lost all hope loses last additional bit of hope she didn’t even know she still had. “We meant it.”
Bits of dust continue to flutter out of the sky. They have nothing and no one. Hope’s optimistic. They’re not going to start again.
Without a word to each other, they make their way to a half-finished buildsite, and Tommy starts towering.
“Dream’s gone,” Clementine mumbles, as they go. “He’d visit us every day, and - we’d laugh, and he’d bring Hope so we could hang out…”
“And he’d dig a hole and have us throw our things into it,” Tommy argues. He’s not really disagreeing with her, though.
“They said they’ll come and see us every week,” Clementine says. “They'll. They'll come back to watch us. That was the last thing he said.”
Tommy nods. They’re high above the isthmus now. The strip of land that’s constrained their existence is tiny from up here, with big ugly chunks scooped out by TNT, and it’s surrounded by so much ocean and fuck-all.
“That… means we were friends, right?”
“Of course,” says Tommy. “Why else would they come - ”
“And watch us.” Clementine finishes the end of his sentence.
“But not anymore,” says Tommy.
There’s the path he built, the broken portal, the beach Dream helped terraform. He stands up, light-headed from the view and the respawn.
“They were literally here to watch us,” says Clementine. She crawls into Tommy’s coat pocket, tickling his neck on the way. (Well, it was Wilbur’s coat, but it’s Tommy’s now.) No daemon-bunkers for protection here. She just, very reasonably, doesn’t want it to hurt.
It’s cold but nice up here. The stars are far lovelier than the rainclouds were, on that night they rode a trident up into the sky. Tommy swallows, and jumps off the tower.
Then Tommy realizes he would actually, probably, prefer not to die for this. He angles towards the coast and he’s on track to hit the deep water, but of course, Clementine is burrowed up in his coat, no way she’ll get out, and the impact will probably crush her anyhow.
There’s just enough time to feel disappointment followed by a golden ounce of relief, that their fate is sealed and they can’t make their way back from this.
Then the freefall is over and they’re out of time.
The water is a punch to the fucking face. There’s another punch too, and like that rainy night again, the quiet and the cold are absolute.
Tommy reaches the surface, gasping. Slamming into his torso and pushing him up, keeping him up there so he doesn’t bob and choke, is Clementine.
She’s a dolphin.
She ripped the coat pocket as she changed. Tommy will have to sew that up later, he thinks, and he has no idea why that’s his first thought: both because it’s inane and because he hasn’t bothered to think about repairing his clothes for weeks.
“Swim, you bitch,” Clem screams in his ear. So Tommy swims.
He hits land and sits in two feet of water on the beach. Clem, still dolphin-shaped, swims up so that she can rub past him, all seven feet of her gray and smooth. Then she turns into a huge skate and makes circles around him.
“Tommy, they didn’t want to be our friend,” she says, urgently. “They were - he said it, they were just here so they could watch us!”
Tommy nods, dizzily.
“What did he say on the first day?” she all but yells, thrashing fins against the water. “We’re like - a little bug that he can’t flick off. We’re the only person who doesn’t do as he says. He said that.”
“He said that,” Tommy repeats. He can kind of remember it. He’s also shivering because it’s fucking cold, and probably no other reason, but the cold definitely isn’t helping. Clementine shoves him with her snout, towards the shore. “You can’t stay here. Get up! Come on! Get to the torches.”
Dripping saltwater and teeth chattering, Tommy climbs out of the sea. Clementine is beside him as he goes, now some kind of tall stork, nudging him with her beak.
He makes it to one of Ghostbur’s weird tiki torches and starts warming up. Clementine’s energy is hitting him and his brain starts catching up.
“Clem. Clem, we almost - ” Tommy’s voice falters. “Earlier today, I almost said they’re just discs.”
Clem shakes her wings and screeches, some strange, loud, warbling call that’s new to the both of them. Then she sprints in circles and yells. “This place is a shithole!”
Tommy is frantically trying to wring out his coat, his clothes. He finds a piece of wool blanket that was destroyed in the explosion and tries to use it as a towel. It’s an old routine now, using whatever shit is around to dry off in the middle of the night, but he finds that laughter is bubbling out of him. They have nothing! They have no one! Clem is changing again!
“A fuckin' moth, eh?” Tommy giggles, as though it’s a joke they’re both in on. “They almost had us.”
“For a little second there.” She fondly rams a feathery head into him, then becomes a fluffy hyena and presses against him. “Christ, you’re freezing. Warm up! Come on! We gotta go!”
“Go where?” asks Tommy.
“I don’t know! But if Dream’s, if Dream’s coming once a week, we - we don’t have to stay here! We can be a million chunks away by the next time he’s round! The world’s our oyster, Tommy!”
“We can’t go back,” says Tommy. “He’d see us there."
“Fuck no! Remember when we visited - they were all at our throats. But we don’t have to be here!”
“We - okay, but we have nothing.”
“Yeah!” Clementine stamps her feet. “Nothing to lose, baby!”
Well, she’s fucking right, isn’t she? They spend the last of the night scavenging Logstedshire. They find the prime bell and some shitty armor Mexican Dream left behind.
Once the sun rises, they steal some food from the village nearby. Tommy eats recklessly, until his stomach hurts and doesn’t hurt, eats his damn fill.
They run aimlessly, through the fairy forest on the village outskirts, then a plain. Then they reach mountain foothills and start climbing. Clementine celebrates her refound freedom by refusing to stay still - she’s a lion, a deer, an eagle, an otter, a horse, each shape vivacious and nothing like a moth and beating at the earth or sky like she owns it.
“We’re gonna get back the discs,” Tommy tells her, “and then it’s all over for him.”
“Pogchamp!” shouts Clementine. “Get logs! We’ll need tools.”
When night falls again, tiger Clementine kills a wild pig, and Tommy skins it badly and eats shitty unseasoned ham charred on a shitty campfire, and it’s gross and it’s amazing.
“I know you’re all happy and shit,” Tommy tells Clementine, leaning against her massive side, “but we have nothing. We’re gonna have to build an awesome base and keep it secret and everything.”
Clementine purrs. “Maybe not. Didn’t Dream say Technoblade lived nearby?”
“I hate Technoblade!”
Clem tilts her head, asking, really? Then she shifts out from under him. Tommy falls backwards. She climbs on his chest as a racoon, and makes little grabby hands. “Nothing ever stopped the girls from doing a bit of the R to the -obbery.”
“Ahhh.” Tommy gets it. “We could be little raccoon girls.”
Clementine nods. “Nobody ever said we gotta do the work ourselves.”
“Fuck,” says Tommy, appreciatively. “Techno’s probably loaded, too.”
“We could get the discs back like this,” Clementine says. “We’re still exiled, but - ”
“It’s - it’ll be better,” says Tommy. “It’s a start.”
Tommy hugs Clementine as they fall asleep that night, and they dream of Dream and Hope and Wilbur and Cressida and Tubbo and Cons and everyone else, all in a maelstrom, grieving and happy, terrifying and reassuring. And they don’t wake up drowning.