Chapter Text
When Tommy wakes, it’s dark and he has no idea how much time has passed. It feels like he’s been asleep for decades, but he’s just as tired as he was before Techno finally stopped fussing and allowed him to rest.
It’s quiet, save the soft wheezing sound of his own breathing (that he hates, he hates, he hates) and a deeper, once familiar rhythm beside him. He doesn’t have to turn his head to find that it’s Wilbur at his side, but he makes the monumental effort anyway.
He looks exhausted, is the first thing Tommy notices. He looks younger too—or not so much younger as lighter, like he did before the election, before the revolution, before L’Manberg was even a whisper of a melody in Wilbur’s head. Curls fall over his eyes, moving gently with each soft exhale.
His body is curved around Tommy’s side without touching, like there’s some invisible barrier separating them and he’s gotten as close as it will let him.
Tommy stares for a moment longer before closing his eyes and reaching again for sleep.
He drifts for three days, in and out of restless sleep, avoiding conversations and confrontations alike. People come in and out of the room, he notes, but he’s never left alone. Wilbur sleeps at his back for hours at a time, Techno cradles his head in his hands during his bedside vigil, Phil brings food and water and he begs and he prays.
Tommy ignores all of them and sleeps. He did not ask to be saved, nor did he want it. They chose to take his own death away from him and he hates them for it. Freedom was, as it always has been, an illusion. Tommy does not get to make his own choices. He is not allowed to even die.
At the very least, he thinks, things are clear now. The curtains are drawn back and he can see the truth of it all in violent clarity.
There is nothing left in the world that is his to choose.
Apparently, including whether or not he has this particular conversation.
He feels more than hears that there’s someone in the room. Unlike Phil or Techno, they don’t take the chair and Wilbur only just left a few hours ago, so Tommy blinks his eyes slowly open to stare dully up at a seething Tubbo.
A sigh escapes him and he pulls himself up to where he’s sitting with his knees to his chest and his back to the headboard. “I’m guessing you have some sort of speech rehearsed, so if you want to just skip the preamble and start yelling at me, go ahead.” His voice is scratchy, both from the potions and disuse, but it holds steady and doesn’t break.
“Great,” he says, faux cheerful in a grating way. And then, all pretense stripped, leaving only anger, “You don’t get to fucking leave. Not after everything, not after all that we’ve been through. You don’t just get to fucking check out on me, Tommy Innit.”
He snorts. “Figured you wouldn’t care too much seeing as it saved you the effort of exiling me again.”
“I didn’t have a fucking choice, Tommy! I was scared and I had a whole goddamn country to consider.”
“I would’ve chosen you. Every time, I would’ve chosen you.”
“Then where the fuck were you during the fucking festival, huh? Where were you, Tommy? Who did you fucking choose then? And where are you now? Ranboo is fucking dead and I need you and where are you?”
Tommy barks a harsh, hollow laugh. “The prison, Tubs, I’m a goddamn corpse still rotting in that fucking cell.”
“I always knew you were selfish,” Tubbo says, “but I didn’t take you for a coward.”
“Maybe I am,” he sneers, “maybe I’ve always been one.”
Tubbo throws an arm out to gesture in the general direction of the L’Manberg crater. “Not then! You were never the type to just cut and run when shit got hard.”
“Haven’t I? I almost killed myself in Logsted. I was on my way to die in the nether when Technoblade first dragged me back here. So I guess you don’t know me as well as you think.”
“You know what? You’re right. I don’t know you. The Tommy I knew would never have given up.”
He laughs again. “The Tommy you knew died a long fucking time ago.”
There are new rules now—or the same rules as before, but so much stricter. No sharp objects, no closed doors, no potions .
It’s infuriating like it never was the first time. The first time he found the thread of care under it all and used it to tether himself in a world where his family still loved him, but this time he’s just angry. He wanted out, he wanted to be done, but they took that from him and he doesn’t know how to forgive that.
He hates them. He hates them so much he can’t move, but Technoblade washes his hair and Phil brings him food three times a day and pleads with him until he eats. Wilbur doesn’t move from the space next to him when he can help it, and Tommy hates him because it reminds him of being little again, but he isn’t little and he doesn’t want to love them because he hates them, he hates them, he hates them.
“How is it fair,” Tommy says, voice hoarse and cracking with disuse, “that Phil killed you, but he saved me?”
Wilbur hums, opening his eyes to find Tommy’s grey ones. “It’s not really, but here we are.”
Tommy snorts. “You’re an asshole.”
“Yeah,” Wilbur agrees easily. “But if it makes you feel any better, Phil did try to bring me back before you managed it.”
“Dream,” he corrects.
But Wilbur scrunches his face up and shakes his head. “No, you. It was you. You’re my hero, Tommy. I’m sorry it took so long to realize.”
Tommy doesn’t answer, just lets out a breath and closes his eyes. He has time to sleep before Phil brings dinner.
Wilbur doesn’t seem to mind, though, just quietly says, “Goodnight, Toms.”
He wakes to the feeling of twin ram horns digging just this side of uncomfortably into his collar bones. Tubbo’s shaking and his tremors echo through Tommy’s frame.
“Please, don’t go away,” he whispers into Tommy’s chest, his breath warm through the thin fabric of Techno’s sleep shirt. “Please,” he begs, quiet and cracked like spring ice over a pond, “don’t leave me.”
Slowly, Tommy moves his hand to cup the back of Tubbo’s head. It’s a loose hold, but it’s enough, it seems, to prompt Tubbo into burrowing closer. “I don’t know how to promise that,” Tommy whispers back and Tubbo’s grip tightens.
“Lie.”
“Okay,” Tommy lies, “I’ll stay.”
“Do you ever miss being alive?” Tommy asks with a voice that he hardly recognizes as his own.
He hears Wilbur shift behind him, hears the rustle of the sheets and the quiet popping of his joints as they turn from stone.
The answer doesn’t come right away, but Tommy doesn’t mind the wait. These days Wilbur is only ever quiet around him. Before, he would never speak without careful consideration, but these days he talks like he’s running out of time, like he has to fit as many words into each second as possible, like that could save him from the silence that’s waiting patiently in the dark.
But where he rushes to fill the silence with everyone else, Wilbur lets it linger when they’re alone. It’s something like trust, Tommy thinks, or maybe familiarity, comfort.
“We aren’t ghosts,” Wilbur says after a while and Tommy breathes slowly, silently.
No, he thinks, ghosts can’t be this heavy. His eyes drift closed. “You know what I mean,” he says and, for a long time, Wilbur doesn’t reply.
It’s hours later when he finally answers, “Yes.”
In the end, he gets up because he’s thirsty and Wilbur drank all of the water Phil left on the bedside table and fell asleep because he’s a prick who doesn’t subscribe to the idea that being suicidal should get you special treatment. Tommy debates for a while between kicking Wilbur’s ass and making the trip downstairs. Unfortunately, the former would take more energy than Tommy has, so he settles on getting it himself.
Slowly, he reaches for his prosthetic. It’s leaning against the wall, comfortably within reach after Phil had lectured Techno about taking it away again. Muscle memory takes over as what’s left of his thigh fits snuggly into the padded socket. He fumbles with the buckles, but after a few tries he manages to first secure the strap around his upper thigh and then the belt around his waist without waking Wilbur. Hesitantly, he pulls himself onto his feet, sending a quick prayer to Prime under his breath that he doesn’t crash to the floor.
His first step is a shaky thing, but it holds and he doesn’t smile but he thinks that he could have. The journey down the stairs is slow and exhausting, but he gets there eventually and when he does it’s a choice he made all himself. It’s not much, it’s hardly anything, but it’s his.
There’s water in a jug on the counter and Tommy very nearly spills it everywhere, but he manages only a tiny puddle and slightly wet socks as well as a full cup. Small as it is, he counts it as a win.
No one’s downstairs to witness it though. Phil had mentioned earlier that he and Techno had business to take care of today and would be gone for a couple hours. It’s a wordless day today—since Dream escaped, more of his days have been than haven’t—but even if he could dislodge his voice from its place in his chest, Prime herself couldn’t have convinced Tommy to venture down those stairs while they were here.
He hasn’t forgiven them. Mostly, though, he doesn’t have the energy to be cared for and they are relentless with it.
That doesn’t change, unfortunately, the fact that he doesn’t have the energy to make the return trip back up the stairs. He feels frantic, panicked, hating that he’s trapped, but trapped all the same. There’s no way out, so he sits on the counter stiff with forced nonchalance. He sips at his water and tries to ignore the urge to gnaw off his own leg to free himself from this snare.
It’s a close thing, Tommy decides, whether the pain of literally chewing his foot off would’ve been better or worse than the visceral discomfort that comes when Phil and Techno find him. They stop short, mouths falling slightly open with shock that crawls like spiders over his skin, staring like he’s a ghost and not a living breathing teenager capable of getting his own goddamn cup of water.
It’s a quiet day again, so he leaves the silence for them to grapple with, and takes a slow sip from his mug, watching them with wary disinterest from over the rim. Phil, to Tommy’s surprise, is the first of them to catch on to how very little Tommy plans to acknowledge this event. He shuffles Techno out of the way to begin cooking dinner, avoiding touching Tommy with a deft sort of grace. Technoblade struggles for another long moment before apparently giving up on attempting to process this new development.
Really, you would think he would be less stalled by the appearance of someone in the kitchen of the house he’s been living in for weeks now, but then Techno has always been an odd one. Tommy doesn’t plan to waste his energy worrying about him, so he watches idly as Phil busies his hands.
He knows, realistically, that they both are going to take this as a monumental step forward as it’s the first real attempt he’s made at taking any amount of care of himself since drinking those potions. He also knows that it is a step, loathe as he is to admit it or even remotely think about it.
So what if he improves? So what if he heals. Dream is alive and Tommy knows how he dies.
He hopes, though—a betrayal of his own weary heart, yes, but still he hopes—that he can trust these fragile things he has been given, that he can live, instead.