Chapter Text
Wilbur has been king for thirty minutes, and the castle is falling.
Chaos consumes the throne room, an ungovernable wildfire of red bandanas and silver blades. It’s only by pure luck and Tommy that he is able to make it away from the fight breaking out. Still, he stumbles: the euphoria from finally claiming his title replaced with a marrow-deep fear that deteriorates him.
Fear that this is it, that they’ve lost. Fear because he was torn away from Technoblade’s side, from his father’s side. Fear because the rebels are attacking and his ankle had sprained during the initial spark—slowing his escape—and fear because his coronation is in flames.
Nestled in his curls, Wilbur’s new crown feels worthless. Worse than worthless, it’s as good as a target, in all its gold, emerald-encrusted glory. He doesn’t have time to toss it aside, though, because Tommy is tugging on his arm and pulling him towards safety, if such a thing exists anymore, and all Wilbur can do is run.
His shoes slap unevenly against the throne room tile as the walls shake and shake and shake. His head spins, ears ringing with echoes of explosions as smoke stings his nose and eyes. His chest aches, lungs convulsing.
Every step he takes sends a bolt of white-hot fire up his ankle to his calf, repeatedly stealing his breath, and between all of this, it’s all he can do to keep going.
(It’s almost amusing. He thought he’d have more time before his rule was baptized with blood.)
“This way!” Tommy yells over the noise, arm fit snugly around Wilbur’s shoulder. “There’s—”
Boom!
Something explodes near their feet, and the world pitches to the side.
Wilbur gasps as he’s flung into the air. His body hits the floor limply and brokenly, pain skittering up every limb as all the air is shoved from his lungs at once. He thinks his head might’ve cracked against the marble, but he loses every sense of orientation too quickly for him to tell. Exhaling out something resembling a whine, he curls his arms up near his head, blinking lethargically.
He hardly has time to comprehend the heat curling over him and receding just as quickly, sulfurous gunpowder heavy in the air, before there’s a presence at his side. Frantic hands pat over his torso, ghost over the back of his head, slide up to cup his cheek.
Wilbur blinks again.
Tommy’s face, etched with concern and streaked with soot, appears in front of him: blurry and abstract and hard for Wilbur’s unfocused eyes to grasp. He’s yelling something that Wilbur can’t hear. And though Wilbur thinks he sees his lips form the shape of his name, he can’t be sure. He’s hardly sure of anything, really.
Once Tommy realises that—that the words coming out of his mouth aren’t pervading Wilbur’s eardrums—he swallows hard, throat bobbing fearfully.
Wilbur is able to catch a flash of his frown, the way his lips tighten into a firm line, and then small, steady hands are wrapping around his arms, hoisting him up.
Wilbur gasps as a faint wash of soreness rolls through him. He slumps against Tommy’s shoulder, limbs clumsy beneath him. His ankle, particularly, smarts the moment he’s upright, and he slouches forward with his wince, ending up hanging onto Tommy, just as tall as he is. But he tries to cooperate, a desperate sort of energy allowing him to break through the haze that threatens to consume him absolutely.
Danger, his brain screams, as if Wilbur doesn’t feel it vibrating in every cell of his body, rattling his teeth even in the moments when the explosions cease. Run.
He’s trying.
Tommy is unwavering beside him, doing most of the work as they wind through the halls, and Wilbur has a few, evanescent seconds to be hopeful as they round the corner into an empty corridor before, suddenly, it’s not so empty anymore.
Three rebels stand before them: men in black outfits with red bandanas wrapped around their wrists, swords hanging menacingly from their hands.
When they see the injured prince and his guard, they grin, eyes flashing hungrily. Wilbur knows what they see. A meal and a bounty and the spark of a revolution, all at once.
Tommy’s eyes widen, and he reacts while Wilbur—thoughts on delay—is still processing.
His arm slips from around Wilbur’s shoulder, reaching for the dagger sheathed at his side. Without the support, Wilbur falls, landing hard on his knees, and he can only watch as Tommy advances forward, blade flashing as he swings it up.
If the rebels anticipate a fight, they don’t anticipate the dangerous grace with which Tommy moves.
He is moonlight and darkness, sunlight washed away, deadly and lithe. One is dead before Tommy’s blade is finished arcing through the air, clutching his throat as he crumples to the ground like a stringless puppet. Crimson waters the marble at his feet, spilling outward in a dark puddle.
The others yell, limbs puffing up, weapons rising, and suddenly there are two blades meeting Tommy’s one.
Tommy holds them off—barely. As his dagger catches another in a deadly embrace, metal crossed with metal, Wilbur sees him grimace, wrist starting to shake as he attempts to fend off two assailants at once.
Wilbur feels infinitely useless, knelt like a prisoner on the floor. His heart shakes in his chest, aching for him to do something, but the impulses don’t connect with his brain. All he can do is observe.
Somehow, Tommy manages. A well-placed kick earns him the breath he needs to stumble back—and then sink his dagger into a rebel’s chest. Blood sprays over him as he yanks it out gruesomely. As the man falls, Tommy takes the moment of reprieve to whip his head around, wild eyes finding Wilbur’s.
“Run!” he yells. “Get out of here!”
Wilbur’s chest heaves.
The words roll over him, a black hole opening up somewhere in his ribs. Tommy is already turning, expecting him to listen—waging his blood and his life on the assumption that Wilbur is listening—and that’s when Wilbur realises that Tommy had only bought himself enough time to warn him. And not to save himself.
A shout tears from Wilbur’s mouth involuntarily as Tommy is slammed back against the wall. His head bounces off of it. He is valor and he is strength as he tries to pull himself upright, but he is cornered. A blade swings down, and Wilbur nearly collapses as it approaches the pale valley of Tommy’s throat—
Except Tommy throws his arm up at the last second, catching the gash on his arm, below his elbow. It’s hardly any better, because the second that the blood is finished soaking the blade, Tommy’s arm spasms. A hoarse cry is ripped from his throat as his own blade falls from between limp fingertips, tumbling to the floor.
He slides weakly down the wall to avoid a strike that would’ve otherwise carved a chasm through his face, but then it’s over. He’s cornered, and hurt, and weaponless—and if Wilbur doesn’t do something right now, then he will die like that.
Reality melts around him as Wilbur forces himself to feet that are determined not to sustain him. His ankle doesn’t hurt anymore, and that probably has something to do with how awfully disconnected Wilbur is from the present as he lurches forward.
Through the film obscuring his vision, and the exhaustion filling his limbs with lead, Wilbur is able to catch sight of a pile of bricks—shaken from the walls by a stick of dynamite at some point. He stumbles toward it, only mildly aware of the way his fingers wrap around the closest brick, and the weight of it in his hand restores some of his lucidity.
The next time he blinks, the brick is connecting heavily with the back of the rebel’s head, and the rebel is falling. Tommy gasps as he is saved, jerking back. He slumps against the wall, relief still filtering over his face even after the rebel has fallen.
Wilbur blinks quickly, stumbling backwards. The brick falls from his hand, even though there’s a vicious, curling sense of anger, blooming inside of him to keep going—to make sure. Anger that he almost hadn’t been fast enough. That he’d almost lost Tommy anyway.
He doesn’t have time to contemplate this mounting rage much further, because the rebel is groaning, trying to stand. Fear strikes through Wilbur’s chest—he doesn’t want to keep fighting, he wants to leave. He needs this to be over. And yet, despite the way his blood sizzles in his veins, he doesn’t want to be the one to end it.
It’s Tommy who deals the final blow—protecting Wilbur yet again, in another way. This time, it’s from the weight of the dagger in his palm and the weight of ripping a human life away.
Wilbur doesn’t know if he’d regret doing it himself. He’s hardly capable of concentrating, so there’s no way for him to grapple with this now. But Tommy takes care of it for him, anyway.
“Come on,” Tommy croaks, voice broken and hoarse but no less determined. “We need to go.”
Wilbur doesn’t remember him standing, but Tommy has seemed to snap back into that automaton-like version of himself in the time it took for Wilbur to slip back to the present. Coincidentally, that’s also about the time that Wilbur’s ankle gives out on him.
Tommy catches him, and it would seem effortless if pain wasn’t inscribed tensely in every line of his body. But he takes Wilbur’s weight like it’s nothing, like he’s shrugging on a coat. Wilbur feels blood press into the back of his shoulder as Tommy slides his bloody arm behind him to keep him steady.
“Sorry about this Wil,” Tommy grunts, and then they are moving—faster than before.
Each step ignites a blistering heat in Wilbur’s ankle, but numbness begins to overtake it the longer that they run. Around them, the castle starts to lose the signs of the fight. The walls become gradually more intact, the floors steady. The explosions fade, and then stop, even as Wilbur’s ears continue to ring and ring and ring with them.
He tries to tune it out and remain vigilant, but he doesn’t have to for long.
With another quick, needless apology, Tommy deposits him in front of an unassuming hallway. Rolling his head around, Wilbur figures that they’re near to the kitchens, the typical fancy wallpaper from before having been replaced with sturdy brick.
Wilbur grunts as he’s released, fingers digging into the wall but still barely able to hold his weight. He forces himself to pay attention to the way that Tommy slides his hands over a section of the brick, face cooled into concentration. It’s hard to make out his expression, through the soot and the blood and the bruises marring his face, but Wilbur sees it.
Something clicks, and suddenly, the brick that Wilbur is leaning against swings open.
The bricks retract with a harsh, mechanical grind, forming a small door into a hidden bunker. Tommy is yanking him forward before he can fall, and Wilbur is grateful, until he’s distracted with relief.
They’ve done it. They’ve made it out of the fire and into a safe room.
It’s over.
“The door,” Wilbur croaks, as Tommy helps him limp over to the closet cot, easing him down. Taking the pressure off of his ankle is euphoric, and a shiver rolls through him as he’s able to relax. “Tommy—”
“It’s fine, Wilbur,” Tommy murmurs. His face, normally bright and open, is set and intense as he looks Wilbur over. “Are you alright? Anything that I need to treat?”
Wilbur shakes his head tiredly, leaning against the wall. He’s breathing hard, lungs intent on protesting each jagged breath, and he yearns for the chance to close his eyes. His head has begun to ache, probably from where he’d smacked it on the floor, and he just wants to rest.
But Tommy is still standing.
“Come on,” Wilbur mumbles, uncaring that he is totally unravelled.
It is jarring to think that he is a king now. No longer does his heart beat for himself, or his family. It beats for his crown, his people, his kingdom.
(It takes everything in him to tuck down the looming dread that he may not have a kingdom when the smoke settles.)
“Tommy,” Wilbur rasps, eyelids drooping. “Close the door and sit.”
But Tommy doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. And Wilbur looks up.
He sees, instantly, what he had been too relieved to notice before: the way that Tommy has stepped back, lingering just barely in reach but still too far for comfort. His back is straight, chin tilted up, and Wilbur’s heart attempts to sink down to his stomach.
Somehow, call it intuition, Wilbur knows what he’s thinking. Dread knits a scarf out of his intestines.
He straightens as best as he can, hand shooting out to snag the bottom of Tommy’s uniform sleeve. Tommy looks at him, and his eyes are shrouded with grim storm clouds as they fall down to where Wilbur is holding onto him. Wilbur can’t see past them.
“Wilbur?”
“You’re not going back out there.”
Brief. Commanding. All that he can manage, if he wants to contain his composure—and thus the tide of fear threatening to spill out of him.
Tommy blinks at him. “What?”
Wilbur sighs, fear wrapping a hand around his heart and squeezing, an icy vice. “Stay in here, with me.”
Tommy hardly gives the words a chance to settle before he’s stepping back, Wilbur’s hand slipping forcefully away from his sleeve. Wilbur resists the urge to chase it, suddenly frozen in place beneath the face of Tommy’s serious look.
Even before he’s said a word, Wilbur feels like he’s facing a gorgon: body slowly being encased with cold stone.
Tommy shakes his head, slow and regretful, and that is the hiss of snakes he’d been expecting.
“Wilbur,” he begins quietly, gravely. “You know I can’t do that.”
His heart pounds. “Tommy—?”
But Tommy steps… away.
“The castle is falling, Wilbur. I can’t stay here. I need to help fight.”
Wilbur’s chest seizes, and he inhales harshly, desperately. “Your job is to protect me.”
Tommy’s eyes are two shards of grief. Wilbur feels a canyon start to ripple through his chest.
“This bunker is hidden and impenetrable from enemies once that door closes. You’ll be safer than anyone.”
He says it like a eulogy, like a goodbye, and a burst of helplessness skitters through Wilbur. The stone breaks and he can move again.
Heart leaping, Wilbur jerks to his feet—all of the fear and panic and rising dread combusting inside him at once. He is fast, even with his ankle, but Tommy is faster. He is out of Wilbur’s reach—outside the room, in the doorway, miles apart—before Wilbur is properly upright.
“Tommy,” Wilbur begins, fear sharpening his name. It’s all he can say. Tommy’s name, whispered like a prayer, is all his lips know how to form. “Tommy.”
“I’m sorry, Wil,” Tommy murmurs, but Wilbur hates him for it, because apologies won’t keep him alive. “I’m so sorry.”
Wilbur’s eyes flash, heart beating fiercely. It assaults his ribcage, trying to break free, and Wilbur feels dizzy.
The room is crumbling—it must be: ceiling warping in, bricks wrapping around him, crushing him, killing him. Frantic pleas pound at his skull relentlessly but he can’t summon the breath to say them, scream them. Pleas like You can’t do this to me. You can’t. Pleas he can’t voice through the ash dragging him down, down, down.
He is a sinking ship and Tommy is holding his head under the water.
Instead, he defaults to the barest of his instincts, his last hope.
“As your King,” he starts, balling his fists, relishing in the sting of his nails carving miniature trenches into his palms, “I command you to—”
“I’m sorry.”
Tommy cuts him off instantly, and Wilbur recognizes the action for what it is. A horrible, paradoxical mix of cowardice and bravery—because Tommy is throwing himself to the wolves, is throwing himself on a blade, and yet he won’t let himself face the fury of Wilbur’s terror.
“I’ll see you on the upside,” Tommy breathes, summoning a shaking smile. “Yeah? Wait for me.”
A shout gets lodged in Wilbur’s throat and he chokes on it. “Tommy, if you step out the door, you’ll die. You’ll— Don’t—”
His knees give out, toppling like his own throne, and terror drags him under. Tommy salutes, eyes scrunching wryly, smile fleeting and grim. Shadows drape over his face, and between the light spilling in behind him, he is silhouetted in black and gold.
Distantly, deliriously, he can’t tell which image Tommy resembles more: a sunrise or sunset. Does it matter? He’s losing both. Still, Wilbur kneels before the beam of sunlight, captured between darkness, too far away to bottle it, and he tries to burn the image into his memory before he loses it.
Somehow, he knows it’ll be the last image of its kind.
Tommy lowers his salute, grin fading into near-transparency, a summer whisper.
“It’s been an honor serving under you, Your Highness.”
The bricks whine, Wilbur’s mind shatters, and the door closes.
The door closes, bricks folding in over each other, stealing Wilbur’s sunrise. Sealing him inside. The grinding of the lock stops just as Wilbur manages to throw himself against the door.
He grunts as he meets hard brick, but he raises his shaky fists and hammers at it anyway. Again, and again, until crimson splits and smears his skin.
It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t feel it. He hardly feels anything at all. So he keeps going, even as all he earns himself is more blood and bruises, painting his knuckles. Even then, he keeps going. He’ll break himself for this. He will. He is.
But the brick doesn’t budge, and Wilbur’s knees barely catch him as he falls.
An impenetrable bunker, Tommy had called it. But that’s not what this is, is it? Tommy hadn’t led him to a safe room. He’d led him to a tomb. Wilbur’s grief paints the walls in bloody streaks, and safety has never looked more like a mausoleum.
Desperation raking claws across his chest, Wilbur screams. Anguish shreds against his throat, but the only thing that meets his cries is silence. Cold, oppressive, empty silence.
Tommy is gone.
— ♕ —
In the time it takes for actuality to find him, Wilbur has screamed himself hoarse.
He hardly minds it. The ache in his throat only bothers him for how it forces him to be present here, rather than allowing him to waste away in this spontaneous grave. His ankle went numb years ago. His other bruises don’t exist.
All that exists is the flickering lamplight from the metal lantern he’d barely been able to convince himself to crawl over and light, and the echo of his heartbeat, reverberating off of the walls. He’d kept quiet, as the hours had crawled by, and tried to become it.
He liked the quiet. Liked the way that the emptiness of the room made the quiet loud. There, his thoughts didn’t have the chance to spiral. There, he was safer.
Until, like most things in Wilbur’s life that he yearned to hang onto, it was broken.
Here it comes, he thinks, as a muffled blend of rapid footsteps and harsh voices filter over him. If he hadn’t grown so accustomed to the silence, he wouldn’t have heard it through the bunker walls at all. Death, or salvation.
Something scrapes against the bricks outside, and Wilbur flinches. Fiddling with his hands, his thumbnail pricks the top of his middle finger. He presses them together and holds his breath. He’s almost, deliriously, surprised he still remembers how to do that.
“King Wilbur?” a voice calls, a familiar voice calls, knuckles rapping against the outside of the door. Wilbur startles, head jerking up. “Are you here?”
That is all it takes to put him together again.
Wilbur lunges to his feet, stumbling as he forces his limbs back into use, the broken pieces he’d become fusing together to morph into something usable. Something vaguely lifelike. Something that will get him out of this room.
“I’m here,” he screams—though scream is a generous word for the pitiful rasp he is able to produce. “I’m here.”
There’s a scuffle outside the door, and each second that he waits stretches into an infinity.
Come on, he breathes, heart strumming in his chest. Come on.
The door slides open, and the first thing that Wilbur sees are the windows: lining the hall in front of the bunker, large and wide. The harsh, streaming sunlight stings his eyes. Glass is shattered in the panes, offering no protection against it.
It’s midday. The night had passed. He’s been in the bunker for hours.
And they’d won. The Guard wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t. Somehow, the knowledge barely changes anything. It should be grandiose, accompanied by a palatial fanfare, but it’s not. It is a paradox: the culmination of months of bloodshed and fire, and yet it’s nothing. It’s a hollow victory that he barely clings onto.
He still only has one goal in mind.
Wilbur stumbles back, blinking hard. If it weren’t for his heart, beating rapidly in his chest, so loud he hears it like a melody, he would think he was a corpse, reanimated.
Then, the light is snuffed out, as the Guard closes around him.
“Your Majesty,” Sam breathes, right in front of him, and the sight of his navy uniform sends a shock through Wilbur. “Are you—”
“I’m fine,” he hisses, rolling his head around until he finds a direction to set off in.
The throne room. That’s where the chaos had broken out. That’s where Tommy would’ve gone. Wilbur is sure of it, but still, Sam may know better—
So Wilbur rounds on him, chest heaving as words burst from his throat. “Have you seen Tommy? My knight? I need—” He inhales, exhales. “I need to find him.”
Confusion rages across Sam’s face, followed swiftly, by concern, but Wilbur ignores it the minute that Sam shakes his head, a sorrowful and unmistakable no. No matter. Wilbur intends to find him himself. He brushes right past his outstretched arms and hesitant protests. There’s a pulsing in his heart that tugs him forward, and Wilbur intends to follow it.
He makes it half a step before arms are wrapping around him—Jack.
Wilbur thrashes, the contact abrasive. Jack’s eyes widen, and he stumbles back, looking torn on whether or not to hold Wilbur back or let him go.
“Your Majesty, he’s not—”
“Come with me or get out of my face!” Wilbur shouts, whipping furiously around to direct that shout at all of them. He’s well aware that he seems crazy. He doesn’t care. “I have to find him.”
And the Guard has no choice but to follow.
Wilbur pretends he knows what he’s doing, or even how he’s doing, but he doesn’t. He thinks if he stops to contemplate it, he’ll unravel at the seams. So he doesn’t, only runs and runs and prays and breathes.
He’s going to be okay. Tommy will be just fine.
Wilbur refuses to accept anything else.
He follows the path of destruction all the way to the throne room, only faintly aware of how it grows both thicker and more contained. The bodies of the rebels that Tommy killed are gone from where they’d fallen, but the blood creates a crimson inkblot that Wilbur recognizes. Someone had tried to clean up—more evidence that the rebels had been defeated.
Good, a voice in Wilbur’s head hisses. Good.
But even indulging that is too much of a distraction, so Wilbur doesn’t. He directs his focus to the tile beneath him and the hallway in front of them and the doors growing closer to him—
He slams through the doors and into a graveyard.
Bodies litter the floor, most of them wrapped in white sheets, and Wilbur swallows down nausea before it has a chance to become real in his stomach. He can’t fall here. Still, it’s enough to give him pause.
He feels the Guard enter right behind him, gathering at his back. Wilbur takes a deep breath and sweeps his wild gaze around the room, searching and searching.
The room is not completely lifeless. More of the Guard, and twice as many servants, roam the room: cleaning rubble, sweeping piles of dust, covering bodies.
Wilbur doesn’t see Tommy among them, but he squashes down the flood of emotion that threatens to shatter through him. No use grieving when there isn’t a place for it. Tommy is fine.
But he’s not in front of him, which only stokes the desperation weaving between his ribs. Luckily, his eyes land on someone else before he can fall too far.
“Techno!” Wilbur shouts, taking three long strides forward the minute he sees his best friend and—
Technoblade jerks his head up, locking eyes with him.
Before Wilbur’s eyes, his expression shatters. His face morphs into something utterly grave, and cold. He swallows, and then grapples, near-imperceptibly, for composure.
It’s then that Wilbur realises what Techno is doing.
No, he thinks, as Techno finishes draping the sheet over the body he’s knelt in front of. No.
Techno sees the realisation slam into him, and pity consumes his face. He rises slowly to his feet, hands extended in front of him like a surrender. Hands that are coated in red. Red that came from the body beneath him.
The body that—
Wilbur catches a glimpse of the spill of blonde hair, the flash of a navy sleeve, before everything lurches sideways. Reality distorts. Bile shoots up his throat, stinging his tongue, and Wilbur staggers.
“Wil…” Techno begins, voice taking on an apologetic shake. Apologetic—not gruff, or commanding. Just quiet. And that’s how Wilbur knows. That’s how he knows what he is seeing is real. “Don’t…”
It’s stupid. If, this entire time, Wilbur had truly believed Tommy to be dead, if he had truly let the grief drown him, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, so jarring, seeing him now. It wouldn’t destroy him so completely.
But Wilbur hadn’t. He hadn’t meant to, but at some point, he’d let hope carve a place for itself in his chest. As he wasted away in that bunker, some part of him had believed that Tommy would be okay, that there was a good reason Tommy hadn’t been the first to come back for him, after it had been so long.
(“Wait for me?”)
He had let himself hope.
And now that hope was breaking with him.
“Fuck,” he whispers. “Fuck.”
This is his fault. His fault for letting Tommy leave. His fault for not sending him away sooner. His fault for loving him.
His fault. His fault. His—
“Wilbur!”
That’s Techno, yelling again, and he can distantly appreciate what a sorry sight he must be. A king with a new crown, splintering, crumbling like a glacier. He’s content with falling, at least until arms wrap around him, attempting to drag him back, and that is what lends him the energy to fight.
He pulls free, trying to surge forward— needing, suddenly, to be at Tommy’s side because he owes him that much, if debts even extend past death, but—
“Keep him back!” Technoblade bellows, stepping cleanly in front of Tommy’s body as if that could ever stop Wilbur from reaching him. “Wilbur—”
Wilbur ignores him. His mind has been reduced to less than mush, and all he is capable of doing is thrashing, and flailing, and fighting. He doesn’t care that he is hemorrhaging grace, he doesn’t care that his crown finally gets knocked off of his head.
The only gold, the only treasure that matters, is broken on the ground in front of him.
And finally, Wilbur is able to break away.
Techno catches him. Techno must hate him, because he catches him, tugging him into his arms, stopping him.
Wilbur slams into his chest, and sobs are ripping out of him, before Techno can utter a word.
“Let me go to him!” Wilbur screams, slamming bruised fists against his broad chest. It feels like a wall, like a hard brick wall, in a hollow bunker, and Wilbur’s mind threatens to split. “Tommy— let me see him! Techno—”
“Wilbur, stop—”
“Techno, please—”
The pleas that want to spill out of him are too swollen and ragged for him to produce, but they shove at his brain with the same fury that he shoves at Techno’s arms.
Let me go to him. Let me hold him, one last time.
“Wil—”
“—get the fuck off—”
“It’s not him!”
Wilbur stops. Everything stops.
His mind converges on itself: equal parts unrelenting disbelief, crippling sorrow, and breathless shock. Not hope—shock. Shock enough to slow his struggling.
Breathing hard, Techno catches his wrists delicately in his callused hands. He stares down at Wilbur, worried and understanding, all at once.
“It’s not him,” Techno repeats gently. “It’s not him. That’s not Tommy.”
Wilbur doesn’t believe him. He doesn’t believe him. He hadn’t— he’d— he hadn’t seen his face but he’d thought— he’d thought—
His knees buckle as his mind tries to stitch itself back together. Techno swears as he cradles his weight, guiding him gently towards the ground. He not-so-subtly shifts to the side, so that Wilbur’s knees don’t land in a blood puddle.
“Where is he?” Wilbur croaks, fingers seizing Techno’s sleeve desperately. He’s never felt less like a king. “If he’s not— then where—”
“He’s fine,” Techno assures him, eyes combing over Wilbur’s ruined face. “He’s— Wilbur, you were the one I was worried about. Nobody knew where you were.”
“I’m here,” Wilbur rasps, because his mind has latched onto the first part of his sentence—he’s fine he’s fine he’s fine—
He chokes, a cough rattling his lungs as he hunches over himself. Lingering panic tangles his lungs, and he presses his forehead into Techno’s shoulder, endlessly grateful for the pressure it supplies.
He’s fine he’s fine he’s fine. He’s not here but he’s fine.
But then, before he has a chance to come down, a cruel voice whips through his head, weaving like thorns—
Is he? Are you sure?
An incoherent spark shooting through him, Wilbur lifts his head, displacing Techno’s hand, pressed firmly against his back. He yanks his head over Techno’s shoulder, tries to see, but Techno’s face hardens. He pulls Wilbur back.
“It’s not him,” he repeats, holding Wilbur firmly in his eyes. “You hear me? That’s not Tommy.”
Wilbur just breathes, chest rising and falling raggedly.
“Do you trust me?” Techno asks, and that’s easy for his addled mind to digest.
He hardly has to work to answer that. Wilbur nods, clipped and stiff.
“Then trust that that’s not him. Don’t make it worse on yourself by looking.”
He makes it sound easy. As if Wilbur’s mind isn’t tearing him apart, stretching him in so many directions, barraging him with so many half-formed shreds of emotion that it makes him tremble.
But Wilbur does what he wishes Tommy would’ve done in the safe room. He nods, and he lets go.
Techno’s face softens, light peeking through his otherwise firm facade.
“Jesus, Wilbur,” Techno whispers, brushing his thumb worriedly across Wilbur’s cheekbone as Wilbur sags in his arms, eyes fluttering shut. “You’re a mess.”
A laugh bubbles past Wilbur’s cracked lips before he’s aware of it. It shakes through his head, all bitterness and vitriol and painful relief.
“He left me in that fucking bunker.”
Techno’s eyes take on a knowing glint. “He protected you.”
Wilbur shakes. “He made me think he was dead.”
“He’s in the infirmary,” Techno informs him lowly. And then, before the panic that threatens to burst in Wilbur’s chest can take on any opaque form, “He’s okay, but he’s banged up. Phil hasn’t let him leave.”
Wilbur manages to frown. “Why—?”
“We wanted to find you first.” Techno cracks a wry grin. “Which is why he sent the Guard to bring you to him.”
At that, the lightest emotion yet manages to prick through Wilbur’s disorientation. It’s something like embarrassment, but it’s gone as soon as it can form. Flattened, in the face of everything else. Mostly a heady combination of relief and exhaustion.
It’s about then that his thoughts catch up with his brain.
“Dad,” Wilbur interrupts quickly, throat convulsing as his grip on lucidity strengthens. “He’s okay then?”
Techno nods. “Everyone’s okay.”
Wilbur’s shoulders slump. He feels hollow, and he can’t tell if that’s a good thing or not. All he knows is what he wants. And what he wants—
“Take me to them,” he demands quickly, because he knows—as awareness settles over him, bringing with it a myriad of aches and stings of pain—that he can’t do it alone. He thinks he’ll collapse if he even stands up too quickly. “I need—”
“Woah,” Techno says, hands coming out as Wilbur lurches unsteadily forward. “Take it easy, Wilbur.”
Wilbur is already shaking his head, feeling that wild sense of yearning return. He has to see them.
“I can’t,” he half-gasps. “I have to—”
“Okay,” Techno interjects, before Wilbur can work himself up again. His emotions feel loose and colorful and messy. He can’t contain them. “I’ll take you to him.”
Wilbur breathes out a wobbly sigh, wishing he could offer Techno the thanks he owes him.
But all he can do is sag against his best friend and send a grateful prayer to every god that will listen, because Tommy is okay.
He can deal with the rest later. For now, he has a knight to find.
— ♕ —
The infirmary is full, but the doctors seem to have been awaiting his arrival.
Techno has hardly helped him into the room before he’s being swarmed, shouts of his name going up so loud that his shoulders hike up towards his ears. But Techno is quick to tug him closer, eternally stabilizing.
“Follow us,” Techno tells the doctors, tired but commanding. “He’s not going to listen.”
On any other occasion, Wilbur probably wouldn’t let Techno get away with that, but this time is different. This time all Wilbur cares about is getting to Tommy.
“He’s in the back,” Techno informs him lowly, once the doctors have shifted back to flank them at a distance. “A secluded room. I figured you’d want to see him.”
I do, Wilbur thinks, and it feels like another plea. More than anything. When Wilbur takes a step too quickly, nearly tripping before he can snap back into focus, Techno sighs and steadies him.
“Be careful, Wilbur,” he chides, and though it’s chastising, it feels forced. Still too brittle for Wilbur’s comfort. It’s a stark reminder that nothing is even close to fixed. “Your ankle is sprained.”
Wilbur nods, hardly hanging onto the words. Because now they are approaching a door, and Wilbur knows who is behind it, and his thoughts begin to converge on each other, a whirlpool and riptide all at once, and the pain in his body is fading to a distant ache, and he’s pushing open the door, and—
“—your Grace, please,” a ragged voice pleads. “They should have found him by now, it’s been—”
Tommy.
Tommy is in front of him.
Tommy is in front of him, standing beside a medical bed—hunched over it, leaning against it for support, but seemingly intent on leaving. Blocking his path stands Wilbur’s father, arms crossed and expression hard with the kind of anger that Wilbur had only seen reserved for him, for when Wilbur was young and causing trouble.
It’s a tense standoff—the former king versus an injured knight with a stubborn streak—but it doesn’t last long.
When the door bangs open, and Wilbur staggers to a graceless halt in the doorway, their conversation ceases.
Tommy whips around, and his eyes widen.
“Wilbur,” he breathes, a blinding expression of relief shining at him. “Wilbur.”
Techno was right—Tommy is banged up.
Traces of a fight that Wilbur hadn’t gotten to see play out across his body. If Wilbur was feeling more self-destructive, he could almost try to map it out just from the marks it had left.
Bruises that he hadn’t had before tessellate his face, and a thin line slices across his soot-streaked jaw, red and angry. His hair is a mess, His right arm is in a fabric sling, and white bandages poke out from beneath the collar of his shirt.
But his ephemeral examination ends there, because all that Wilbur really sees is Tommy, whole and standing and alive, and it’s all he’d ever dare to ask for.
Looking at him, Wilbur expects to feel angry. And, oh, he is angry. His chest broils with the force of it, fury swirling like an ocean of magma beneath his skin. He is a flood of emotion, a contradiction of feelings. He could write a million poems and never come close to capturing the sensations using his heart as a battlefield.
But the sight of Tommy, smiling worriedly at him, eyes just as stormy as Wilbur feels, blue irises the exact shade of hesitance—
It punches all the bad out.
“Tommy,” he whispers, and the two-syllables fall out of his mouth like a prayer. “Tommy.”
Tommy blinks, lips curving up properly. “Hi, your Majesty.”
He doesn’t mean to make Wilbur flinch, but the words shock through him like a javelin.
“Don’t,” he manages to choke out, as his ears ring and ring and ring. It’s been an honor serving under you, your Highness. “Just— Tommy.”
“Wilbur,” Tommy amends carefully, and he tries to straighten, wincing with the motion as his eyes comb over Wilbur.
Wilbur catches the movement, even though Tommy hardly pays attention to it, and his heart performs a funny little jump in his chest, like a court jester skipping across marble tile.
“How hurt are you?” he manages, swaying in the doorway.
He can’t bring himself to make the full assessment. Partly because he doesn’t want to guess, lest his mind supply images too bloody for him to want to handle right now, and partly because his eyes are having trouble focusing. It’s like everything has melted down into just the brightest of colors, the sharpest of sounds.
But he needs to know, needs that strand of logic to stop him from falling further.
His own heartbeat throbs in his ear, sounding awfully like a clock. Waiting and waiting as the seconds tick by, as Tommy tilts his head down to appraise himself, as Wilbur gets stretched like taffy in the intermission—
“I’m okay,” Tommy answers quietly. “It’s just flesh wounds, all of it.”
Just. Just just just just. As if his skin was made to hold them, as if it’s okay because he’s standing.
But, if there’s anything good to come from his statement—
“Good,” Wilbur breathes. Tommy’s words, however mildly concerning, settle over him like a cool balm, a cold rag pressed to feverish skin. “That means I can do this.”
Tommy frowns, the bruised skin of his face scrunching into confusion.
Wilbur has only a second to see it—to burn this new image of his knight into his brain, erasing the fading sunrise he’d memorialized before—before they are colliding.
It’s a perfect collision.
He’s careful, impossibly careful—with Tommy, at least, not himself—as he pulls him into his arms. He crushes Tommy to his chest as soft as he can manage, and Tommy sighs, colliding with him just the same, clinging tightly to Wilbur with his one good arm.
Wilbur lets his eyes fall shut, face pressed into the top of Tommy’s hair, and breathes.
Breathes because he can, breathes because Tommy is breathing, breathes because he’s not etching a name into a concrete angel, breathes because he’d challenged fate and won.
Thank you, Wilbur sends up to the universe, feeling the sharpest shards of his grief flake away, for letting me keep this.
He doesn’t intend on moving, or even breaking the silence, for at least a lifetime or two, but Tommy shifts restlessly in his arms, and Wilbur can feel him start to shake.
“...This is nice,” Tommy mumbles, face muffled into Wilbur’s shoulder, good hand fisting Wilbur’s sleeve, trembling as he clings and clings.
It draws a semi-delirious laugh past his lips. If there was even an ounce of doubt left in Wilbur’s brain that he has Tommy back, it’s erased just like that.
This is nice. That’s what he has to say?
An idiot. That’s what he is, an idiotic child.
Wilbur adores him.
“Hush,” he laughs out, and it feels so strained it may not even be a laugh at all, but it’s an effort.
It’s more than Wilbur thought himself capable of.
“Am I allowed to hug the king?” Tommy wonders quietly, and there’s a smile crawling into his voice that shouldn’t slot together with Wilbur’s jagged emotions, but does. “Is this treason?”
Wilbur chokes, pulling back. “Treason? Why would this be treason?”
Tommy’s smiles crookedly up at him, unbothered by Wilbur’s strangled disbelief.
Tommy shrugs with one shoulder. “You never know.”
It’s absurd. It’s— more than absurd. It’s nonsensical. Wilbur laughs anyway, choked, and drags Tommy forward again.
“I’m the king,” Wilbur informs him tiredly. The title rings over him with a heavy weight. “I make the rules. And,” he continues, brushing a loose strand of hair out of Tommy’s eyes, “I say that you are almost obligated to hug me right now.”
“Then as your knight,” Tommy says, fingers digging into the back of Wilbur’s waistcoat as he tucks his face against Wilbur’s trembling collarbone, “I guess I have to listen.”
Wilbur’s chest seizes. He tries to push past it.
“You do,” he whispers, and then, failing to lift himself out of the spiral he is tipping towards, words no louder than a whisper, “I am so mad at you, Tommy.”
Against him, Tommy tenses.
“I know,” he rasps, just as quiet.
“I thought you were dead.”
“I know.”
“I was so scared.”
Swallowing, “Me too.” Then, looking up at him earnestly, “I’m glad you’re okay, Wil.”
The tension eases. Wilbur nods, letting the simplicity of that statement fill him up where his complicated thoughts want to cut him down.
Unfortunately, Tommy seems to catch onto the irony of his words, because his eyes land on Wilbur with a new sense of pointed focus. Wilbur sees him scan him over, the way he always does, and sees him frown, teeth worrying his lip. Of course, ever intent on protecting him, he hides it. Wilbur, too tired to tell him not to, allows it.
“Go get treated idiot,” Tommy finally says, shoving lightly at Wilbur’s chest. “You look dead on your feet.” He says it lightly, but worry continues swirling in his eyes. “I didn’t do all this for you to die on me anyway.”
When Wilbur doesn’t move, Tommy sighs. “You’re too soft. Go.” And then, face twisting into something a little bittersweet, a lot tender, he tilts his head and says, “Go, Wilbur. I’m not going anywhere.”
It’s the exact right thing to say, and Tommy knows it. Wilbur leans back, letting Techno pull him fully upright before he’s even aware that he’s stepped forward.
“Never again,” Wilbur adds, hedging on a question as he is eased backward towards the door.
“Never again,” Tommy agrees, eyes shining, and—
That’s all Wilbur needs to let himself let go.
— ♕ —
“My turn,” Phil murmurs, the minute the doctors leave them. “Let me hold you for a second, please.”
Freshly bandaged, ankle splinted, Wilbur turns. His father pulls him into his arms, and Wilbur is warm all over again. He sinks forward, sighing. Phil holds him, and Wilbur feels like a child again.
Even as a king, newly crowned, he feels small.
“Is it over?” he whispers.
It comes out quieter than it means for him to, but that’s okay. Wilbur spent what could’ve been the collapse of his kingdom locked in a crypt, tucked away like an expensive jewel. He needs to know, more than he needs to retain any sense of pride.
(His crown still lies, abandoned, in the cemetery that his throne room had become.)
“Yes,” Phil exhales. “As far as we can tell, yes.”
Wilbur squeezes his eyes shut, and the reaction that he’d missed having in front of the safe room hits him now.
“Any resistance that rises from the ashes will likely be isolated, and weak,” Phil informs him, just as gently. “With any luck—” Wilbur almost snorts, because his luck is always impeccable, “—there will be no more bloodshed. Not like this. Not ever again.”
“Good,” Wilbur breathes, stepping back and straightening as he takes his first full breath since all of this began. “Good.”
He tries to step away, siphoning any ounce of composure that he can manage, but Phil stops him, gently catching his arm.
“I’m glad you’re okay, Wil,” his father tells him, eyes scrunching with a glacial mixture of relief and exhaustion. “And I’m proud of you for getting this far. Wherever you go from here, son, I know that you will lead well.” He takes a deep breath, mustering a smile. Wilbur tries to mimic it. “The kingdom will continue to prosper under your reign.”
Wilbur dips his head. “Thank you. I will do my best.”
“You will,” Phil agrees, and his take on an amused cerulean sparkle. “And while there is still much to discuss, I see that you are distracted.” He jerks his head towards the door. “Go.”
Wilbur freezes, feeling like he’s been caught even though he’s hardly moved. “Dad?”
“I know you want to see him,” Phil tells him, just a touch dryly, as he glances at Wilbur’s jittering hands. “Go. The kingdom will be here for you when you’re ready.”
Wilbur smiles—bashful, guilty, grateful but happy.
“Thank you,” he repeats. “Thank you.”
And, acquitted by the graceful bow of his father’s head, nudging him towards the scrap of gold in the other room, Wilbur goes.
— ♕ —
It’s late by the time he makes it back to Tommy’s room.
Or well, the medical suite that he’s taken over. It’s fit for a king, because it was made for Phil, and now Wilbur, but Wilbur had offered it to Tommy and batted away his protests until he finally caved and accepted it (not without making his grumbled annoyance clear, of course.)
When he eases the door open, footfalls silent, he expects Tommy to be asleep, but he’s not.
Propped up on the bed against the pillows, exhaustion carved into his face, his right arm is extended so that Techno has room to change the bandages. Wilbur winces when he catches a glimpse of the ugly gash beneath the unwound bandages, careful sutures crossing over it.
This injury is one that he had seen Tommy earn. Even so, the concern bubbling in his stomach isn’t quelled.
“Ow,” Tommy hisses quietly, teeth sinking into the inside of his cheek. His left is tangled in the bedsheets, knuckles bleached of color. “Shit.”
“Sorry,” Techno grunts softly, ministrations impossibly gentle.
Tommy doesn’t say anything, not at first. He is so tense that Wilbur fears he’d snap in half if someone blew out the candles on the table beside the bed. But then, he sighs.
“Are you just going to stand there, Wil?” Tommy asks, not looking up. “You can come in, you know.”
Wilbur startles. Techno’s eyes flick up, and he snorts at the reaction. A faint flush colors his cheeks. How had Tommy even seen—
“Your shadow,” Tommy supplies him, turning and meeting his eyes with a faint smile. He jerks his head towards the opposite wall. “It was obvious.”
Techno huffs another laugh as Wilbur steps properly into the room.
“...Right,” he eventually says. “Obvious.”
Knights, he thinks with an amused sort of bitterness. He and Techno are too similar.
Tommy beams at him, and even though it’s dim in the room—the only light from the lantern in the corner and the candles at Tommy’s side—the room feels lit.
“All done,” Techno informs Tommy, breaking the short bout of silence. “Next time, do have the doctors tend to your wounds.”
Tommy grins at Techno. “What would be the fun in that, Technoblade?”
He says it like he’s known him all his life, and Wilbur vaguely has a chance to wonder how exactly they’d known each other before Wilbur had met Tommy before Techno is standing.
“Rest up, kid,” Techno tells him, brushing past him, but not without ghosting his hand over Tommy’s hair. “You’ve had a long day.”
“Tell me about it,” Tommy grumbles, eyes flickering down to his lap.
Wilbur remains in the doorway as Techno approaches him, preparing to be met with amicable silence, but he’s not.
“Go easy on him,” Techno tells him lowly as he passes by, stopping right before he’s out the door. “He saved dozens, coming back to the fight like he did.”
Wilbur pauses, before he clasps his hands in front of him.
“I was planning on it,” he tells him softly, truthfully.
Techno grunts a vague affirmative, and then he’s gone, presumably to resume his post at Phil’s side now that the favor Wilbur had asked of him has expired.
Wilbur blinks, watching him go before turning again. Tommy is watching him when he looks his way, the side of his face bathed in flickering orange light. It almost makes Wilbur want to wince.
Wilbur swallows hard, nearly missing the way that Tommy’s shoulders curl as he rounds the bed and places himself gently in the chair beside it.
He gets only a moment of silence to think. To wrangle his thoughts in, sifting through the messier emotions and searching for the easier ones. He doesn’t want to mess this up, doesn’t want to cave to the shreds of grief that still cling to him, needlessly, like a second skin.
But he doesn’t get the chance to break the ice, because Tommy is speaking before he has a chance to draw in a breath.
“I’m not sorry,” Tommy blurts, freezing Wilbur’s words where they sat poised on his tongue. He seems nervous, but his shoulders are squared. “If that’s what you’re here for. I did what I had to do. I don’t regret it.”
Wilbur flinches, despite himself. “Tommy—”
“I told you I would save you,” Tommy continues, breath starting to shake. “No matter what.”
Pain sears through Wilbur’s chest. “Tommy, it’s—”
“And,” he interjects quickly, “I do wish it could’ve been… prettier, but I was needed, and—”
Wilbur reaches out and grabs his hand, squeezing it. Tommy stops, eyes flicking over to him. He cuts himself off, and it looks like he’s holding his breath to do it.
Wilbur feels, overwhelmingly, sad. It’s a different tint of sadness than before, different because it’s made up of all his adoration and all his concern and all his grief, a vicious cocktail.
“Tommy,” Wilbur begins tiredly, “I’m not here to chastise you.”
Tommy swallows, staring blankly at him. Confliction rages across his face, and he lifts his left hand.
“Does,” he begins hesitantly, “Well, chastise, does that—”
Wilbur snorts. He hardly hears the noise.
“I’m not here to yell at you,” he amends. “Just, please… relax.”
Relax, he pleads internally, with more vigor, Before you shove me back onto the brink.
Tommy relaxes, or it looks like he tries to. Tries to follow Wilbur’s command, rather than listen to him. His shoulders loosen, but his eyes betray his anxiety. Heart aching endlessly, Wilbur tries to throw him a bone.
“I wish,” Wilbur forces out, “that things hadn’t happened like they had.”
It’s grossly simple for what he wants to say.
I wish you had stayed.
I wish you had been selfish.
I wish you had never made me grieve.
But Tommy doesn’t deserve to bear the burden of his broken thoughts, and Wilbur finds that he hardly has the energy to sustain them. They pile up in his lungs, making each breath sting, and all he wants is to do is cast them away.
“But,” he wavers, clearing his throat. “I’m too grateful that you’re alive to stay upset with you.” He turns to his knight. “Does that make sense?”
Tommy’s breath hitches.
“Yes,” he whispers. “It does.”
“Good,” Wilbur sighs, leaning back in the chair. Messy thoughts are always best pondered when things aren’t so brittle. “So then, I was going to ask about your arm.”
“My arm?” Tommy echoes, blinking hard. The perplexion consuming his complexion makes Wilbur want to keel over, just a little bit. “It’s— it’s fine.”
Wilbur raises an eyebrow. “Fine?”
Tommy looks down, lips parting uncomprehendingly. “I— I mean, I won’t be able to wield a dagger until it heals, if that’s what you’re saying.”
Wilbur’s heart squeezes at the way his throat threatens to close around the words. This kid.
“I’m not,” he answers carefully, watching Tommy helplessly search his face for answers. “I’m asking how it feels. If it hurts, if it’s okay.”
Tommy blinks. “Oh. You’re— oh.”
Wilbur smiles stiffly. “Yeah.” Then, when Tommy continues to stare, almost wondrously at him, Wilbur nudges his shoulder gently. “Well?”
“It hurts,” Tommy admits, looking like it takes everything in him to admit that. “But the doctor says it’ll heal just fine. I’ll be back to annoying you in no time.”
He smiles as he says it, eyes lifting into something bright. Which means that when every ounce of that faint joy slides off his face, Wilbur sees it like a falling star against black velvet sky.
“Well… I mean,” Tommy laughs out, quiet and free of mirth, “until I leave.”
Time stops.
In the space of a breath, every word, every flowery lyric, every gentle ballad, that Wilbur had prepared for this conversation is punched out of him. Horror ravages him, a self-contained tsunami, and he is sure that if he was standing, he’d be swaying on his feet.
“Leave?” he echoes, head starting to pound.
His vision narrows down to just the boy in front of him, to just the golden candlelight and smudged bruises. The sensation of his heart pounding is felt in every inch of his body. Wilbur can’t stand it.
“Yeah,” Tommy agrees quietly. “I mean, the rebellion is as good as dead. I’m not… I’m not needed here anymore.”
He says it with a rattling sort of certainty, but his eyes don’t leave Wilbur’s face. For Tommy’s sake, Wilbur swallows down every protest that threatens to rise. Every bit of hope that he’d spun into a fantasy—of Tommy staying—dissipates. It leaves him hollow, and reeling.
He cannot let Tommy see that.
“Right,” Wilbur manages. “Of course.”
He draws his hand away from Tommy’s, ignoring Tommy’s frown as he clasps them together in his lap. He’s partially convinced that his hands have been replaced with blocks of ice, because he can’t feel them.
All he feels is stupid—stupid for hoping, and more stupid for coming here so soon.
At least, if he had waited, he could’ve drawn this out. They could’ve lasted longer. But was a slow death any better? He’s not sure. He’s hardly sure of anything.
Tommy, he thinks bitterly. Always finding ways to undo him.
“Wilbur?” Tommy asks gingerly, leaning forward.
He looks concerned, on the brink of reaching out, maybe—which means that Wilbur is failing. Christ.
“My offer still stands, then,” Wilbur tells Tommy, the moment he has figured out how to restore moisture to his mouth. He sidesteps cleanly over Tommy’s worry. “You are free to travel wherever you wish. I will make sure you are taken care of.”
His heart pounds, screeching protests with each syllable that tumbles out of him. But Wilbur owes it to Tommy to stay calm. So he does.
Even as he feels himself come apart, he does.
Tommy leans back, and Wilbur tries not to be completely foolish in convincing himself that the weird expression that flies across Tommy’s face is disappointment.
“Right,” Tommy says, almost a croak. His eyes hover on Wilbur’s cheekbone, not quite meeting his eyes. “That’s— yeah.” He exhales shakily, teeth worrying his lip. “Well, Techno was telling me about a city. On the beach.”
Wilbur tries to appear interested. “Yeah?”
It’s fake. The levity in his voice is fake, his composure is fake, everything is fake and Wilbur is slipping. Tommy’s words are only accelerating his descent.
Tommy nods quickly. Too quickly?
“It’s warm there, apparently. Warmer than here.”
“Ah.”
“L’manburg didn’t really have beaches.”
“No?”
“It would be nice.”
Nails digging into his palm. “It would.”
“I could go there.”
Wilbur exhales heavily. “You could.”
The selfless thing to do, here, would be to leave it at that. To weigh down Tommy’s pockets with gold and silver, to send him off—away from blades and bloodshed and battles—and let him be happy.
But Wilbur is a selfish man. And he can’t do that.
“Or,” he adds quickly, panic tinging his words. He doesn’t look up—can’t. “You could… stay.”
Tommy tenses. Wilbur catches the motion in his peripheral and pretends it doesn’t deflate his lungs.
The pause stretches into an eternity. Wilbur writhes beneath it.
“As your knight?” Tommy asks.
“No,” Wilbur answers, perhaps a bit too harshly. He tries to soften his voice. “As yourself. As Tommy.”
Silence blares loudly over them. Wilbur keeps his head down, the picture of repentance. He gives Tommy the space he needs to answer, even though all he wants to do is beg.
He doesn’t expect for Tommy to start to waver with him.
“What are you saying, Wilbur?”
His voice shakes. His voice shakes.
That’s enough to draw Wilbur’s eyes back up. He looks at him, looks at Tommy, and that’s when he wonders if this is another moment where Tommy’s knowledge fails him.
He hadn’t known, before, that Wilbur had cared for him. Maybe that is true now.
Maybe Wilbur hasn’t made it clear enough since.
(He hopes. He prays that’s what it is.
Because if that’s the case, then Wilbur can fix it.
Easily, eternally, he can fix that.)
“I’m saying,” Wilbur begins, swallowing hard against the knives in his lungs, “that the most scared I have ever been in my life was watching that door close behind you, yesterday.”
Tommy’s breath hitches. Wilbur keeps going.
“I want you to stay, Tommy,” Wilbur confesses. “I don’t want to send you off to the beach. I want you here, with me.” He cradles Tommy’s uncertain face in his eyes. “I’m… selfish. And I don’t want you to leave.”
Tommy is still. Deathly still.
Dawning hope is frozen on his face, but his eyes continue swirling and swirling, two hurricanes of doubt. Tension is etched in every line of his frame, but it’s not the same as before.
It’s tension like a starving dog, presented with a plate of meat. Tension like a flinch, bracing endlessly for a blow. Tension like a boy who has never had the chance to be loved.
Tension like a knight before a king, who is promising the world to him.
“I—” Tommy begins, inhaling carefully. His left hand twists in the blankets on his lap. “I— I wouldn’t have a purpose. I’d be useless.”
Wilbur sees his words for what they are: a test. One last push, to see whether Wilbur will hit, or break.
Wilbur doesn’t just break—he melts. And he gives all his broken pieces to Tommy to hold.
They were always Tommy’s, since that day in the library. The same way that they are Techno’s, and his father’s.
“Is it not purpose enough to be loved?” Wilbur asks genuinely.
He sees the way that Tommy’s eyes flash with a restrained sort of desperation, with want, and has to tuck away a smile.
“Because that’s what you would be, Tommy. That’s all I’d ever ask of you.”
Tommy’s chin trembles. “I don’t know if I’d be any good at that.”
Wilbur gives his smile to Tommy too, lets it curve his lips. “Tommy, you’re already doing wonderfully. You wouldn’t have to try.”
That is what does it.
When Tommy topples forward, face crumpling as his resistance falls, Wilbur is there to catch him.
“Then please,” Tommy whispers. “Please, let me stay.”
Wilbur hooks his chin over Tommy’s head, holding him close. His eyes fall shut, and all he can do is hold and hold and hold him.
“Forever,” Wilbur promises.
It’s a dangerous promise. Forever is everything, is all of him.
Wilbur parts with forever easily.
His hands cradle the back of Tommy’s head, threading loosely through messy curls. “You’re family, now.”
Tommy laughs, and it’s wet with tears and muffled against Wilbur’s shoulders, but it’s everything. He pulls back, eyes shining as he wipes his good hand across his teary cheeks. Wilbur lets him go reluctantly, but he doesn’t protest.
He’s got all the time in the world, after all.
“I’ve always wanted a brother,” Tommy croaks, a hesitant smile pulling on his face.
“Good,” Wilbur breathes. “Because I really don’t know what I would’ve done if you had left.”
Tommy snorts, eyes taking on a spark that has Wilbur’s heart swelling.
“Probably been really miserable,” he offers cheekily.
Wilbur doesn’t even want to joke. He’d gotten a taste of it in that bunker, a glimpse of what that would mean in the throne room. He can’t imagine the rest of his life like that.
“I think it’d be easier if the sun disappeared.”
Tommy looks at him, and Wilbur is both endlessly amused and perpetually saddened by the way he recoils whenever Wilbur is good to him. Always surprised, always suspicious. Never just accepting.
No matter. He consoles himself with the knowledge that, eventually, Tommy won’t be. Wilbur will make sure of it.
The look disappears quickly anway, replaced with a playful disgust. “Yeah, yeah, go tell that to your poetry notebook, prick.”
Wilbur rolls his eyes. “Glad to see you’re already back to normal.”
Tommy’s eyes glint. “Annoying you is always the best part of my day.”
“Right,” Wilbur remarks dryly. “Well, today, the best part of your day is sleeping, so you can continue to annoy me tomorrow.”
Tommy grins drowsily as Wilbur nudges him back, slumping against the pillows. But it’d be too easy to simply close his eyes and rest, sparing Wilbur’s heart the turmoil, because he hesitates.
“Does this mean I’m a prince?”
“No.”
Tommy’s bright expression doesn’t falter. “Do I at least get a crown?” Wilbur opens his mouth to protest, but Tommy cuts him off. “Come on. A crown for my service. Seems fair.”
Jesus, Wilbur thinks.
“No jokes this soon,” he rules instantly, rubbing at his temple. “But,” he adds, before Tommy has a chance to pout, “That can… potentially, be arranged.”
Wilbur’s mind, indulgently, flashes towards his old crown… encrusted with sapphires. It would suit Tommy well.
The victorious smile on Tommy’s face rivals the sun. “Epic.”
Wilbur sighs. “Sleep, child.”
Tommy mumbles out something vaguely disagreeing, and probably vulgar, but his eyes flutter closed. Wilbur is able to ignore his protest from there, so he does, standing and stretching. He prepares to head towards his room, get some sleep himself, before he collapses on the infirmary floor, but he doesn’t make it another step before a hand shoots out, closing around his wrist.
Wilbur stops, startling when he sees that the sleepiness on Tommy’s face has been instantly replaced by sharp panic.
“Stay,” he rasps imploringly, eyes far too unsure for Wilbur’s comfort. “Please.”
Wilbur only hesitates for another second. There’s, really, only one thing he can do. And, well, the look on Tommy’s face pains him more than spending the night in a stiff chair will.
“Of course,” Wilbur murmurs, and Tommy sags against the pillows, relief radiating off of him, as Wilbur reclaims his spot in the chair. “Anything.”
And Wilbur means it. He may be a king, but he means it. For as long as time will let him, he will stay.
Anything is only the beginning.
— ♕ —
“News of the attack has reached the outer cities,” Techno informs him one day, and Wilbur freezes. Techno’s face is totally blank as Wilbur meets his heavy gaze. “They’re worried.” Exhaling roughly, “The people need their king.”
Wilbur looks down again, threading his fingers absently through Tommy’s hair as the boy naps on the grass, head pillowed on Wilbur’s lap.
Tommy needs me, he thinks in sorry justification, though he’s not sure that it’s true. Even then, Wilbur clings to the idea, because it’s easier. Because he wants it to be. Because he has another few days of solace, of serenity.
And he intends to use it.
“The people can wait.”
Techno’s heavy sigh carries over the gentle wind. “Wilbur—”
“Please.”
He wishes the small prick of shame was enough to make him change his mind. But Phil had promised Wilbur time—time to breathe, time to recuperate after the attack. He may not be the king anymore, but he is Wilbur’s father, and his words matter still. He’d offered to stand in just while the dust settles, as was customary during conflict, or the aftermath of conflict, and Wilbur had accepted.
Wilbur can’t bear to don his crown again so quickly.
His shoulders curl, anticipating a sharp reaction from Techno, but—
He doesn’t get one.
“That’s what I thought you’d say,” Techno grumbles, but when Wilbur looks up, surprised, he offers him a gentle smile. Wilbur thinks it has something to do with Tommy, because his eyes flick down and back up. “I’ll tell them to give it another week.”
Gratitude surges through him, intense and all consuming. “Techno.”
He stops, turns. “Yes?”
Wilbur smiles, barely-there but so sweet it’s syrupy. “Thank you.”
Techno nods, lips tilting up just for a second, and then he’s gone.
Wilbur sighs, looking back down. Safe with him, Tommy sleeps, face peaceful and smooth. The scar on his jaw has faded, hardly visible beneath the slowly-darkening smattering of freckles there.
His skin hasn’t seen blood for a week. It’s the least Wilbur could hope for, but he treasures it. Treasures it the way that one treasures clear skies after rain, blossoms after a fire.
There is no such thing as simple anymore. There never has been. But things are quieter.
Far from fractured, nowhere near whole, but quieter. A week from now, he’ll resume his reign. A week from now, the peace won’t be something given to him, but something he has to maintain.
But a week from now, he’ll still have his family. He’ll have Tommy. So for now, he can afford to appreciate the quiet.
He thinks, head tipped back, a fallen ray of sunlight sleeping beneath him, that that’s all Wilbur needs right now.
— ♕ —
“Wilbur, you’re going to be late,” Tommy hisses, shoving at his arm. “The gala—”
Wilbur turns, raising an eyebrow. “Are you my handmaiden now?”
Tommy’s face flattens. “No,” he drawls, “I’m just trying to be responsible. You’re a king, you can’t just—”
“Exactly,” Wilbur interjects, with a feline grin. “I’m the king. It means that I can stop the world for you, if I want to. And I want to.”
It’s not a principle he applies to any other aspect of his rule, it’s not one he can afford to indulge in frequently. But for his family? Wilbur will neglect a single gala, endlessly.
Tommy stills the minute that Wilbur’s words roll over him.
“For me?” Tommy asks, brows scrunching.
“For you,” Wilbur agrees, lifting a black box off of the vanity table.
Tommy’s eyes follow each movement, and Wilbur almost has to bite his cheek to hide his smile.
“If you insist,” Wilbur starts, eyes combing distastefully over the navy uniform that Tommy is wearing, “on remaining intent on chaperoning me—”
“It’s not chaperoning, Wilbur, I just don’t want any repeats—”
Wilbur waves a hand. The fear that comes from Tommy’s insistence is sharp, but muted. He can bear it. And for Tommy, he must.
“Then it’s only fair I reward you.”
That’s enough to snuff out Tommy’s complaints. He perks up, bouncing on the balls of his booted feet.
“Reward me? Does that mean I get my salary back?”
Wilbur tosses him a dull scowl. “You don’t have a salary because I’m not employing you anymore. I told you that if you’d like an allowance—”
But Tommy’s bluff gives out instantly. “Just give me the present.”
It speaks volumes that Wilbur is unperturbed by the demand. He just sighs, some excitement of his own strumming in his veins, and passes the box over to Tommy.
Instantly, Tommy’s peppiness dims. Replacing it is careful anticipation. He glances up at Wilbur questioningly as he takes the heavy box into his hands.
“Open it,” Wilbur instructs softly.
Tommy swallows, and nods. His fingertips brush delicately over the satin ribbon tying the box shut. He is silent as he untangles the delicate knot. The hesitance lingers, and Wilbur steps closer, his hand finding purchase on Tommy’s shoulder.
Tommy inhales, exhales. He opens the box.
Wilbur hears his hitched breath clear as day. “Is this…?”
When he looks up, his eyes are bright—glimmering like the rubies encrusted in the silver crown.
Wilbur finally lets his smile out properly. “Most people receive medals for their service to the Crown. I figured I’d go with something a little… different.”
Tommy blinks, looking between Wilbur and the crown in the box incredulously. At once, he shuts the lid, and Wilbur’s eyebrows lift a fraction.
“I can’t— Wilbur, I was joking,” Tommy stammers out. “I can’t take this.”
That gives Wilbur pause. He glances at the box in Tommy’s lap, a tiny frown playing on his lips. His heart skips once, slightly embarrassed.
“Ah,” he says, having… not considered that. But the stunned expression on Tommy’s face seems too hesitant for his comfort anyway, so he straightens, tilting his chin up. “Well, it’s too late. It’s yours.”
Custom-made, he doesn’t say, because he figures that Tommy can recognize that on his own. Wilbur has always favored sapphire and emerald, but when he had designed this with the jeweler, it was rubies that had felt the most right.
Tommy’s hands, holding the box, spasm, like he isn’t sure whether to open it or throw it to the floor. Wilbur hopes he opts for the former.
“I’m not a prince,” Tommy strains eventually, nearly imploring in the gaze he shoots at Wilbur.
Wilbur shrugs. “You’re my brother. It’s close enough.”
Tommy falters, resistance crumbling. But he looks back down, fingertips hesitating over the lid, and opens the box again. Wilbur decides to ease his uncertainty before it can keep ravaging him.
“We’re going to be late if you don’t put it on,” Wilbur reminds him in a playful drawl. “The gala, remember?”
Tommy startles, and his hand jumps forward, seizing the crown. Wilbur grins as he lifts it out of the swaths of soft fabric.
Wilbur waves his hand towards the mirror. “Come on. Once you’re done with that, we can go.”
That’s all the invitation Tommy needs. He stands, stumbling over to the mirror, and placing it atop his head. The crown nestles in his curls like it was always meant to be there. And when he turns, he’s smiling, like it’s all he knows how to do.
“Thank you,” he says, hushed and heartfelt, and Wilbur nods.
He hears what Tommy doesn’t say, everything that the quiet thank you captures. His lips curve. Wilbur tries to return that same adoration. He’ll keep trying, for the rest of their lives.
And as Tommy’s excited rambling floods his ears with noise, and the echoes of a regal fanfare from downstairs float into the room, Wilbur’s heart is full.
He has never known peace like this.