Chapter Text
After the first night spent together in the arctic, full of firelight and hot chocolate and a growing damp spot on the shoulder of his sweater that Wilbur tactfully chooses to ignore at Tommy’s glare from his position nearly glued to Wilbur’s side, things settle into a kind of rhythm. Techno’s house is small, but not too small. Phil starts planning an extension the morning after his and Wilbur’s arrival, saying they’ll all have rooms of their own, but for now, Wilbur volunteers to sleep in the main room by the hearth.
It's a challenge, learning to live with each other again. So many things are the same, and yet still more have changed. It makes a kind of shame squirm in Wilbur’s chest that he can recite Techno’s favorite myths by heart and yet doesn’t know how his brother likes to take his tea now, or if Techno even cares for tea at all anymore. For the first few days, they’re all dancing around each other, treading as though on the thinnest of ice, waiting for the inevitable crack and plunge into icy frothing waters.
But the thing is, they’re trying. They’re trying, even if Wilbur snaps and Tommy flinches and Techno storms off to hunt for hours at a time by himself, even when tempers rise and arguments break out and they are forced to plumb the depths of just how much hurt they have caused themselves and each other.
Sometimes, that’s all anyone can do. It might not be enough—and who can say if it is?—but it’s all they have.
“Techno,” Wilbur says, trudging through the snow to stand near where his brother is chopping wood behind the cabin. Techno grunts in vague acknowledgement. A splinter flies up from his downswing, landing on the sleeve of Wilbur’s coat. He flicks it off and says Techno’s name more insistently.
“What,” Techno says after a minute, longsuffering, finally straightening to look Wilbur—well, not in the eye exactly. More like vaguely over his right shoulder. At his ear, maybe. He doesn’t let go of the axe.
Wilbur thinks it best to cut to the chase with this one.
“You’re avoiding me,” he says decisively.
“I’m not avoidin’ anyone,” Techno says.
“Bullshit.”
“I’m not,” Techno insists. “It’s just…”
Wilbur folds his arms and raises his eyebrow. “Just what, exactly?”
Techno gestures dismissively with the axe. “It’s just that Tommy keeps givin’ me that look of his, an’ you follow him around like a lost puppy half the time, and the other half he’s followin’ you, an’ sometimes all I can think about is”—here, he exhales sharply, bites the words out with something between embarrassment and regret—“the way everythin’ went wrong, all right? I’m not avoidin’ you, Wilbur, it’s just. It’s a lot, sometimes.”
“Me?” Wilbur asks.
“All of us,” Techno answers, “here. At once.”
That’s fair, Wilbur supposes. It’s been years since the four of them were last together for more than a few days.
Techno stares down at the pile of firewood he’s amassed, the ends of his hair swirling around his jaw, and Wilbur feels a kind of ache looking at it. Techno hasn’t mentioned it, but the angle of the cut, the severity of the edges, the way Techno will turn his head suddenly and flinch when he thinks no one can see him—it says enough.
“I just feel like,” Techno says slowly, “Tommy hasn’t forgiven me. Like he’s still angry, sometimes. An’ maybe you are, too.”
“I don’t know if I have a right to be angry at you,” Wilbur shrugs. “Considering, well, everything.”
“And Tommy?”
Wilbur bites his lip. “He’s got as much reason to be upset with me as he does you,” he says evasively.
Techno snorts. “You’re not answerin’ the question.”
“Do I really need to?”
His twin sighs, clearly frustrated. “He’s still angry about L’Manberg, I know that. Maybe about the Pit.”
(Wilbur does not say, He should be angrier at me about that.)
Techno hesitates. “About the Festival. He still hasn’t forgiven me for it.”
“Well,” Wilbur can’t help but say, tart but not entirely hypocritical, “you haven’t exactly said you’re sorry for it.”
“Maybe I’m not,” Techno bites.
“Then why are you looking for forgiveness?” Wilbur challenges, and Techno doesn’t have a response to that.
For a moment they both stand quietly, thinking back to a crisp October day marked by brilliant autumn leaves and the searing explosion of fireworks, the scent of burning flesh and singed hair overpowering the syrupy smell of candied apples and half-gutted pumpkins. The Festival, Wilbur thinks, was a turning point for all of them.
“I didn’t think you would do it,” he finally admits, voice hushed.
Techno’s hands are shaking, or maybe Wilbur is imagining it. “I didn’t think I would either.”
“I’m sorry,” Wilbur says at last, “for dragging you into all this. I know the ravine wasn’t good to you either. I know I wasn’t good to you. You deserved better than that.”
Techno gives him a crooked half-smile, the axe disappearing into his inventory with a flash. “We’re family, Wilbur. Isn’t that the definition of draggin’ each other into things?”
From Techno, it’s as good as forgiveness. Wilbur can’t help the grin that grows on his face in response.
“Now come on, lazybones,” Techno says. “Help me carry the firewood inside.”
(Violence is the only universal language—or so they say—but does a language have to be universal to be understood? What happens when you lay down your sword and sit down beside another person, allow them to put the words of their language between your teeth, sweet and gentle upon your tongue? What happens when you choose to learn instead of hurt?
Language is not universal. Language is so incredibly, infinitely finite, and perhaps that is the beautiful thing about it.)
Wilbur carries armfuls of split logs into the house alongside his brother, his twin, and today he breathes easier with something like forgiveness sitting between them.
(Being alive isn’t all sunny days and hot chocolate, is the thing. Some days are harder than others, filled with a grey haze that makes getting out of bed too massive a chore to comprehend, where talking is miserable and thinking is worse. There are days when Wilbur is paranoid or prone to speaking more harshly than he intends, and on those days, Tommy is skittish and that hurts, hurts more than it should, because Wilbur knows exactly what he did to make things this way.
Being alive is hard more often than not, but Wilbur isn’t ready to give up on it. Not again.
The worst part, he refuses to admit, except on those days when he can’t bring himself to get out of bed for the pain, or during nights spent folded into a frosty window frame with fingers itching for a cigarette he cannot smoke—the worst part isn’t even all he remembers. It’s all the things he doesn’t.
Memory is a slippery thing, as slippery as self, sometimes, and sometimes Wilbur wonders if he has a grasp on either.)
The snowball fight isn’t entirely expected, though perhaps it ought to have been, considering it’s the four of them together in one place again, and they’ve always been prone to mischief in their own individual ways. Either way, they’re all caught off-guard, except for Tommy, who throws the first snowball.
It starts like this: Phil is working on the extension, sunhat protecting his cheeks from the glare of sun off the snow, and Techno is grooming Carl in his stable. Wilbur was sitting on the porch and staring at the horizon—no it is not moping, Tommy, shut the fuck up—but now he startles out of his trance when a packed handful of powdery snow explodes against the side of his head with a great whump, leaving him shocked and dripping with snowmelt.
He looks up and locks eyes with Tommy out in the yard, arm still extended, expression caught somewhere in a conflict between laughter and worry that perhaps he’s gone too far.
“Oh,” says Wilbur, “you’re on.”
He launches off the porch and hurls a messy fistful of snow at Tommy, laughing as Tommy shrieks, and it all dissolves into the best kind of chaos from there.
(This is what it means to live: laughter and numb fingertips and wet hair and the sting of flying snow hitting his cheeks like a comet tail when he hurls a snowball at his father or his brothers.)
The world is alive with sensation and sunlight like diamonds across the snowdrifts, and later Wilbur stumbles his way inside with his family, cheeks raw from laughter and cold, and heaves a contented sigh into a mug of cocoa. Days like this, he muses, are what make living worth it, I think.
(You shouldn’t have done it, he rasps into Phil’s shoulder on a bad day, feeling the kind of wrung-out exhaustion that comes with having a particularly good cry.
I already told you I don’t regret it, Phil tells him, rocking him back and forth like Wilbur’s just a kid again and not a fully grown adult who probably looks quite silly right now. He doesn’t think he really cares, but the thought still occurs to him, unwelcome as it is.
Maybe you should, Wilbur says, and Phil doesn’t have a reply for that. Then, I’m sorry I ever asked you to kill me. No one deserves that.
And no one deserves to die at the hands of their father.
This time, Wilbur is the one who doesn’t have a reply.
Phil hums, resting his chin atop Wilbur’s head. If Wilbur closes his eyes, he can almost pretend he’s eight years old and Phil is wrapping him up in his inkdark wings, shielding him from anything that could hurt him. If only they could have known then that Wilbur himself would be the thing to cause the most harm to himself.
Do you remember, Phil asks, what you told me about L’Manberg that day in the market, with the note blocks?
When I was Ghostbur? Wilbur asks, but really, it’s so much more complicated than that. He was Ghostbur and Ghostbur was him and neither was the other, and neither could survive without the other, half-lives that they lived in hell and on earth, and it is too complex a thing to summarize the self in one sentence, so this will have to do for now.
Yes, Phil says. You told me the circumstances of L’Manberg’s existence shouldn’t affect my opinion. That I ought to give it a chance despite what it did or didn’t do.
Wilbur is silent. He has a keen feeling he knows where this conversation is headed, and it’s not as though he can fight the logic.
The same applies to you, Wil, his father tells him. It doesn’t matter what happened to get us here. You’re here now, and that matters to me. It matters to your brothers, too. I will never regret what it took to bring you here to this moment.
Wilbur rests his head on his father’s shoulder and hopes that someday he can believe it.)
Tommy is an enigma some days. He is at once exactly the child Wilbur left behind not so long ago, boisterous and indominable, brash and brave, and yet quieter now, solemn and unexpectedly fragile. Sometimes, Tommy throws back his head in summerbright laughter Wilbur knows so well. Sometimes, Tommy moves as though the air is glass and the slightest wobble will leave him bloodied.
Wilbur wonders if it was the ravine that did this to him or Wilbur’s own decisions. He can’t help but feel like he missed too much, and yet hardly any time has passed since Phil led him from the magic-soaked clearing to his little cabin in the woods.
They talk about it, eventually. Tommy doesn’t share all the details—Wilbur tries not to be too bitter about that; he’s done it to himself, after all—but he recounts enough. It fills in the gaps Phil couldn’t and comes without Techno’s distrustful bias. Coming from Tommy, the way Tubbo exiled him atop Dream’s walls just sounds sad.
It all comes spilling out after a foiled attempt to jumble all the contents of Techno’s chests to annoy him—he’s insufferable about his organizational system—and he threatens them within an inch of their lives if they don’t put everything back the way they found it. Ten minutes of awkward silence and Wilbur’s half-hearted humming pass before Tommy drops a stack of gapples into a chest and sighs forcefully.
“Tubbo exiled me, you know,” he says quietly. Bitterly.
“Yeah?” Wilbur replies gently. He doesn’t say I know, even though he does, a bit. He doesn’t prod. He just disentangles a stick from a lead and tosses it towards their stick pile, waiting.
“’S not really his fault, I guess,” Tommy says, staring unseeingly into the depths of the chest. “It’s mine, if anything.”
(No, Wilbur thinks. It’s mine, for not being there. Mine for putting Tubbo in charge. Mine for not realizing you stubborn, wonderful people wouldn’t give up. Mine for foolishly thinking Dream would leave you alone.)
“It’s not your fault,” he says fiercely, swallowing down the guilt and self-loathing that churn in his stomach. Now is not the time for his self-pity. “It’s Dream’s. From what Phil’s told me, from what he said—Tommy, there’s nothing good that could have come of that exile. He was up to something. I don’t like it. And it’s not your fault he’s up to no good.”
They’re both silent for a moment. Tommy seems almost taken aback at Wilbur’s conviction, or maybe that Wilbur’s on his side in the first place. It’s a terrible thought, and Wilbur wishes he could unthink it. He can’t, is the thing.
Wilbur sorts different types of wood into piles. Tommy idly spins an empty potion bottle on the stone floor.
“I don’t really care whose fault it is,” Tommy says finally, spinning the bottle around and around and around. “It’s just—just that Tubbo said he wouldn’t exile me. And then he did.”
He lied, goes unspoken. He lied to me, just like you did. Even if neither of you meant to.
The bottle keeps spinning, rattling against the stone bricks.
“I thought—” Tommy cuts off. He exhales shakily. “I trusted him, but it—it just hurt, man.”
His eyes tear away from the bottle to peer up at Wilbur, hesitant and half-afraid.
“Can I ever trust him again?”
Wilbur reaches out and wraps his fingers around Tommy’s wrist, stilling the frantic movement of his fingers. The bottle spins around once more, bumping against their hands and clattering to a stop. The silence that fills the room is deafening, all-encompassing, like the first moment of stillness after a winter storm, right before the wind rattles through the trees and sets the ice-covered boughs cracking.
“The fact that it hurts means there was something there to break,” Wilbur says softly. “It means you trusted him. Pain is an indicator that something is wrong. It means you can heal, someday.”
Tommy’s pulse beats against Wilbur’s fingers, one-two-three-four, steady as breathing. Sure as the sunrise.
“I don’t know,” says Tommy, “if I can offer a second chance. Because the first one fucking hurt.”
“That,” answers Wilbur, even quieter, “is a decision you have to make on your own.”
Both of them know they aren’t just talking about Tubbo anymore.
It’s on one of his bad days when it happens.
His head has been full of smoke and trains all day, his mood foul enough that he feels he could chew nails if he tried. Wilbur doesn’t want to chew nails, is the thing. He doesn’t want to be angry and miserable. It’s draining more than cathartic.
He shuts the door to his room, freshly finished by Phil a few days before, and struggles to steady his ragged breathing.
There’s no reason I should feel like this, Wilbur thinks, a little desperately. Today has been fine. Nothing has happened.
But logical or not, his mood is black and his temples are tight with pressure, so Wilbur sits cross-legged on the floor of his room, the wooden floor cold against his calves through his pants, and cradles his guitar in his arms. He strums it, once, twice, and something in his ribcage loosens.
Playing helps with the bad days.
Everything is fine until he tries to tune up a half step to try an old song he remembers, tightening each string little by little until the notes are right. Everything is fine until his B string snaps as he tunes it, whipping across his hand with a painful sting, leaving a gap on the neck of his guitar, a thin white line on the back of his hand, and something tangled tight in his chest.
He thinks about smashing the guitar, or maybe punching the wall. He thinks about wrapping the broken string around his own neck, matching the phantom garrote he swears he can feel there some days, choking as the arrow Punz sent through his throat. He thinks about a lot of things.
In the end, Wilbur Soot curls tighter around his guitar, pressing his forehead into the cool wood of the side, and weeps, weeps for that broken string, and for so much more.
Living is a complicated thing, and healing even more so, and forgiveness just as much. Wilbur’s not entirely certain he knows how to handle any of them, but he’s trying. By Prime, whether She be his Lady or not, he’s trying.
He wants to say I’m sorry a thousand times, repeat it for each and every wrong he’s ever done, every way he hurt his family—for begging Phil to kill him, for lying to Techno, for everything he said to scare Tommy in Pogtopia—the dozens of things he remembers and the hundreds of things he might have forgotten.
He doesn’t have enough breath to manage it, Wilbur knows, and heaven knows he doesn’t have enough time, but he’s going to try. Maybe he needs to say it more than they need to hear it, but he’s going to try.
Growth is not a one-and-done deal, not something grand and flashy, and immediately a man can be forgiven, can become a better person. It is slow and steady, the tortoise not the hare, the gentleness of flowers unfurling in the spring, braving the first frosts and foragers. One grandiose apology does not tip the scales, cannot equal the dramatic finale of destruction three of them wrought and all of them suffered. It will not fix their broken parts. A single expression of regret cannot even begin to cover how Wilbur feels, so instead he will break it down into thousands of smaller moments, offering each one with honesty, tender shoots poking through ground which is not as unforgiving as winter would have it seem.
Wilbur says I’m sorry, and Phil is sorry too, and together they will be okay.
Wilbur says I’m sorry, and Techno forgives in his own gruff way.
Wilbur says I’m sorry, and Tommy accepts it. Again and again and again, Tommy hears, and accepts, and someday, he’ll even forgive. Wilbur will keep saying it until that day, and he’ll keep apologizing every day afterwards, in a million little ways, until he learns to accept it too.
A hand ruffling Tommy’s hair. (I’m sorry.)
A music disc found triumphantly in a mineshaft expedition, pressed into Tommy’s hands. (I’m sorry.)
Letting Tommy creep into his room and cry on his shoulder on the bad nights, rubbing slow circles on the kid’s back until the terrors pass. (I’m sorry.)
Wilbur will say all the ways he is sorry for as long as Tommy needs, and then, as long as he himself needs. And he will relish every second he gets to be alive to do it.
(Some day, Wilbur will say I’m sorry and he will be able to forgive himself, too.)
“What’ll happen,” Tommy says one night, surprising them all from his spot curled up by the fire, “if Dream comes back? What do we do?”
Phil smiles sharply. “He’ll have to get through all of us first if he wants to bother you, mate.”
Tommy looks uncharacteristically small as he says, “And if he does?”
Techno snorts from his spot sharpening his axe. “He can try.”
Tommy doesn’t look convinced, so Wilbur scoots over across the fur rugs laid out before the hearth and elbows him gently.
“Sometimes,” he says, meeting Tommy’s gaze, “having something to fight for makes you stronger than someone with nothing to lose.”
It’s not a perfect assurance, Wilbur knows, but Tommy gives him a smile that’s halfway to normal and Wilbur knows they’ll be okay.
Here is the thing: Wilbur misses Niki. It’s been far too long, he thinks, since he got to talk to her without war and blood and rebellion and his own paranoia getting in the way. He misses their late night talks in her bakery, the walks she used to drag him out on during his presidency. He misses her stubborn optimism, her refusal to stop being friends with Eret, the way she insisted her bakery was open to all who came through its doors.
He hopes she’s doing well, but Wilbur is scarred and Wilbur is jaded and Wilbur doesn’t exactly rely on fickle feathered things like hope these days, so he decides to write her a letter. It won’t be the first.
And maybe he doesn’t have the best track record with letters, but maybe a part of healing is giving himself a second go at it.
So he picks up a pen one morning in the grey predawn light, and he begins to write.
Niki, he pens, I hope this letter finds you well. I don’t know if you’ve heard anything from Eret or Fundy, but I thought you deserved to hear it from me directly that I’m alive, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry for a lot of things.
It’s quite a long letter by the time he’s done with it, longer than most of the ones full of lies he used to send to Phil during even the most golden days of L’Manberg. Wilbur hopes that’s a good sign.
He attaches it to the leg of one of Philza’s crows and sends it off with something like a prayer—for Wilbur, perhaps the closest thing is a wish—and tries not to think about it too much. He fails.
(He doesn’t know it yet, but in a day’s time, Niki will send a very angry, very relieved, very hopeful letter back to him. This time, it’s a correspondence Wilbur intends to keep up.)
It’s doesn’t have a name, their little cottage out on the tundra with a room for each of them and a room to spare for anyone who might come by and a nether portal within walking distance for the day they’re ready to venture back to the home some of them so sorely miss. It’s not a base, nor a headquarters, nor an embassy. It’s not L’Manberg or Pogtopia or Logsteadshire, and it doesn’t try to be either. It’s no nation.
It's simply a house, a home.
For now, that’s enough.
And one day, when Techno is reading and Phil is carving and Tommy lying with his head on the floor and feet on the sofa while he messages Sapnap or maybe Tubbo, when Wilbur is penning a letter to Niki to say you know, I think it might be good if we came back for a visit soon; I miss you, Wilbur will look out the window and see a familiar fox-eared figure trudging towards them through snow and the last dying rays of the winter sunset, following the needle of a glowing compass, and he will know: it’s time to go home again.
It could be any day now.
And all will be well.