Chapter Text
The next morning, Tommy looks like he’s not all here. His eyes are distant as he fidgets with his hands, and his mouth is pulled into a confused frown.
Phil passes him a cup of tea and a bowl full of porridge.
Tommy is sat at the table, his wings hanging limp behind him, and Phil’s shoulders ache for him. Once those stitches heal, he’s gonna need to remember how he taught himself to live with them, and give Tommy all the tips and tricks.
How strange. He finally has something to teach to his children that he’s known almost all his life, and it makes him want to cry.
“I can’t eat this,” Tommy mumbles, pushing the bowl away with his fingertips. Phil makes a mental note to ask about those bandaged up palms. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, you’ve done nothing wrong,” Phil says lightly, but Tommy’s shoulders bunch up to his ears anyways. “Why? Would you like me to make you something else?”
“No, this is—great—but I can’t eat much of anything right now.” Tommy folds his bony hands on the table and averts his gaze. “I’ll throw up.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to try?” Phil prompts, gently as he can, but there’s a concerned furrow in his brow so deep it pulls his whole face down. “Porridge is really gentle on the stomach, it’ll be a good starter food to get you back into shape.”
Tommy stares at the bowl. Steam curls up from the center, warm and innocent, sugared perfectly to Tommy’s tastes. It smells like safety and kindness and nausea.
Phil is giving him a pleading look, and it makes Tommy want to shrink away and hide. Instead, he pulls the bowl a little closer to himself and takes a bite.
He needs to go slowly. He can’t eat like he wants to—devouring it whole, rampaging through the entire serving until he’s full to bursting and the stitches holding him together snap against the pressure, and all the stickiness inside him spills out and stains the wooden floors.
The bites crawl down his throat.
He finishes half the bowl and closes his eyes. The spoon clatters against the glass, and the leftover porridge cradles it tight. Techno emerges from the library, the rungs of the ladder squeaking with each step.
“Have some tea,” Phil nudges the warm mug into Tommy’s wintery hands. “I added some regen, it’ll help you heal.”
“I don’t deserve this,” Tommy whispers. His voice is carried away by the sound of Techno brewing his own tea, pouring hot water into a mug, dropping the little bag of dried leaves inside to bleed away their colors.
“What was that?” Phil hums. Tommy wants to drop it, wants to shove the truth aside, but he’s spent too long paying for his crimes beneath Dream’s heel to let himself start it all over again. He needs to repent.
“I don’t deserve this,” Tommy says louder. He needs to be strong. This ends now. “You’re too good to me.”
“Don’t say that,” Phil chides with a laugh, but it’s strained. “Of course you deserve it.”
Tommy doesn’t respond.
“Tommy, I’m serious,” Phil goes around to Tommy’s side of the table and places a hand in Tommy’s hair. “Why do you think that?”
“You—you don’t need to put up with me anymore,” Tommy blurts. “I’m just walking trouble. I know that now. I don’t deserve this.” He scrubs at his eyes with his unbandaged fingertips. His chin droops down to his chest. The facade is breaking down, he can feel it in the palpable silence that stretches over the room, thinner than the soft blades of his feathers.
“Dream tell you that?” Techno asks. His voice is cold, and Tommy wants to disappear. He wants to die, right here. He wants to vanish and never bother them again.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Tommy huffs. “All I’ve ever done is cause you guys trouble. You were right, Tech. I shouldn’t get a happy ending.”
Three voices speak at once, but Techno’s rises above the clamor.
“Tommy, I was just being an overdramatic jackass—”
“As usual,” Ghostbur adds sagely. Techno scowls but doesn’t respond to the jab.
“Yeah, I was upset, but you’re here now, so there’ll be plenty of time to talk about it later, once you get better. You’re not ‘causing trouble’ just by existing, Tommy.” Techno scoffs, as though it’s supposed to be obvious, but a sound gets caught in Tommy’s throat and bubbles into an incredulous laugh.
“That’s so funny,” Tommy giggles, because he doesn’t think he can do anything else. “Dream said literally the exact opposite.” He puts his head into his hands, and his hands down onto the table so he’s almost folded in half. His next words are nearly silent. “I was supposed to just kill myself.”
Not silent enough, apparently, because suddenly there’s hands in his hair and panicky voices shouting over his head and it’s just too much. They’re asking him what he just said, but they know, they heard him. They’re really asking why he said it in the first place. They don’t understand.
It’s just too much.
“No!” Tommy insists, pulling himself up. His spoon gets jolted in the chaos, and it tumbles to the floor. “No, you’re not listening to me! I am poison, I’m a parasite! Who cares if it was Dream who told me that, I would’ve figured it out on my own, eventually—after everyone pushed me away, I would’ve realized why—I would’ve known! I don’t get to go back to normal after this, I don’t get to ‘recover,’ or—or get better, or whatever you’re saying. I didn’t even mean to come here after I ran, I only left because Dream was going to cut off my wings and I wasn’t—thinking straight—I wasn’t thinking at all, really. Maybe I deserve to get them chopped off, I don’t know, this part is new to me—but the other stuff isn’t! I don’t deserve to be here, and I don’t deserve your kindness, and I should just get out of your hair and run away or kill myself before I infect everything again like I always did before!” He gasps, and chokes back a sob. “Like before!”
He staggers off the kitchen stool, hiccuping, and sticks his hands into his hair. His stupid clumsy wings get in the way of his feet, and he collapses to the ground.
A hand settles awkwardly on his bicep, a careful distance from the bandages on his shoulder. It’s calloused and scarred, and Tommy doesn’t need to look up to know it belongs to Techno. Why is he here? Why is he being comforting? Tommy just told them the truth, and they’re comforting him, as though he’s the victim of something, rather than the other way around.
His back is cold—too cold—and there are chilly fingers combing through his feathers. Ghostbur.
“Tommy—Tommy, listen to me,” Phil appears by his side, framing Techno, and the light around them goes dim when Phil’s wings stretch over the four of them, blocking them out from the rest of the world. “I know you might not believe me when I say this—not right away—but the things you’re feeling right now—the guilt, the self-hatred, the fear—that’s all a product of Dream’s manipulation. He was lying to you.”
It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true.
“It is true,” Phil’s voice breaks. Tommy didn’t realize he said that out loud. “I know you must feel it, somewhere deep down and hidden so Dream couldn’t see. You know that he was hurting you. You know that even if he was nice sometimes, he could be twice as vicious, and it confused you, didn’t it? It was easier to just believe him, and go along with whatever he said, because then you’d have less to fear. He wanted you to feel that way, because then he could control you. People try to control what they don’t understand, because what they don’t understand frightens them. You frightened him, and you had power over him, so he did everything he could to take that away.”
“But he was the only one that was there,” Tommy sniffs. Techno’s hand stutters against Tommy’s arm. “What else was I supposed to believe, when he told me that he was the only one who cared enough not to lie to me, because he was also the only one that cared enough to stick around?”
“That’s my fault,” Phil says fiercely. “Not yours. I could give you a million excuses for why I never came to visit you, but none of them could ever— ever make up for what it’s done to you. Tommy, I’m so sorry. You’re my—you’re my son. I should’ve been there, but I wasn’t, and now you think you’re some awful little thing when instead you should be soaring.”
Tommy thinks Phil is crying, but he can’t be sure. He doesn’t want to look up from his hands, folded between his drawn up knees. He’s just so confused, and everything hurts.
“Dream can’t hurt you anymore,” Ghostbur murmurs. His hands are absently working through Tommy’s feathers, and every brush of his chilly fingers makes the tension in Tommy’s shoulders unwind more and more. “He’s gone now, and he won’t take away your wings. We’ll keep you safe.”
Tommy’s breath shudders in his chest. “Really?”
“Really,” Techno says. “Phil grounded his ass straight to hell.”
Inexplicably, Tommy begins to laugh. He shouldn’t—Dream was his friend—but the flood of emotions feels like relief.
He really shouldn’t be so relieved to hear that.
But Tommy is swept away by memories—the ones where Dream taunted and mocked him, and gave him food just to watch Tommy scramble for it. He sees himself, screaming out for help in the cold confines of the mine, only to be dragged out by the collar and thrown to the ground, punished for daring to question why Dream would hurt him. He sees fists and blood and bruises, threats veiled by praise, kindness dangled before him as a way to demand compliance. He remembers isolation and fear, contrasted by his first days in exile when all he’d wanted was for Dream to leave him alone.
Maybe Phil has a point.
“Oh,” is all he can say.
“Yeah, ‘oh,’” Techno laughs, but it’s not at Tommy’s expense. “You don’t have to believe us now, but I hope you can at least trust that we’re not going to hurt you. That’s gotta be a step up from before.”
Tommy wipes his eyes. He’s still crying, but he doesn’t feel like he’s going to drown in it anymore. “It is,” he sniffles.
“Then let’s settle for that. Let yourself relax, and let us take care of you. You can doubt and wonder and do whatever you want after.” Techno’s hand pulls away from Tommy’s arm but it returns a second later, pressing something cool and round over Tommy’s head. “We’ll keep you safe.” He echoes Ghostbur’s words, and Tommy looks up. He recognizes the comforting weight of Techno’s crown over his head.
Techno only lets other people wear it when they’re having an exceptionally terrible day.
Tommy must’ve really scared him.
A warm mug is being pressed into Tommy’s hands.
Tommy looks up, and Phil is smiling at him. His eyes are watery but his grin is sincere.
“Drink up,” Phil prompts. It’s not an order, or a strict command. It’s a hand, reaching out to help Tommy up when he stumbled in the dirt by their old house. It’s a fatherly touch, pressing bandages over Tommy’s scraped knees.
It’s home.
“Would you like some blue?” Ghostbur asks quietly over Tommy’s shoulder.
Tommy brings the mug up to his lips and shakes his head.
“I don’t need any right now,” he says gently. “Maybe later, but not now.”
It’s not a lie.
Tommy knows he isn’t better. He’s not going to magically start trusting other people overnight, and he’s still going to have nightmares. He’s still going to look at his reflection with disgust, and he won’t be able to go into the nether without wanting to sink into the lava’s warm embrace. He will have to reconcile his tentative alliance with Techno, and he will still look at Ghostbur sometimes and ache for what he’s lost. He will start conversations with Phil and suddenly lose his ability to speak, crumbling beneath a mountain of messy emotions.
But he can deal with that later.
Right now, he’s going to drink the warm tea in his hands and let the magic sew his skin back together. Then he will take the hands Techno and Phil extend in his direction, and they’ll pull him to his feet. Then he will put the empty mug in the sink and try to rinse it out himself, but he’ll accidentally whack Techno in the face with his wings. Then Phil will laugh and help him learn how to control them, going slow so he doesn’t hurt himself.
Someday, he will learn how to fly.
For now, he just needs to take life as he’s always done.
One step at a time.