Chapter Text
There’s nothing, Tommy thinks, in his great wealth of life experience, that’s been as hard to endure as this is now.
Frigid wind whips through his dirty hair and torn clothes as he stands in front of a familiar pit. Dream stands menacingly on the other side of it, waiting expectantly for him to follow the orders given. Every second that passes between them is tense, wind rustling the sunbleached, torn tablecloths that were once bright with color adorning painstakingly-crafted wooden tables and benches. A backdrop to his misery.
“Tommy,” Dream warns, and Tommy startles out of his hazy, clouded thoughts. He doesn’t know why, but his mind picks the most inconvenient times possible to space out, making him drift through the days as if he’s an outsider to his own body. Like now, with an increasingly impatient Dream standing right in front of him, with a hand ghosting over his axe like a second longer without obeying will cost him his last life. No glorious, heroic end, no grand act of destruction or villainy. Not even the selfless ending, a fast fall to the molten grave he’d been dreaming of lately. The charitable act he deserves to carry out for the benefit of everyone on the server. Of course, though, his life will meet a pathetic end, struck down for the third time by the man in front of him for failing to do the one thing asked of him for his own good. If not right here, right now, it will be soon that Dream decides its his time and delivers the justice he deserves to get, but Tommy can’t bring himself to carry out.
His hands fly mechanically to the straps of his chestplate and Tommy thinks he should have stopped making armor by now. The hastily, messily forged iron chestplate hits the cold earth at the bottom of the pit with a dull clunk and the rest of his items follow it without complaint. His back hurts way too much lately to wear chestplates comfortably anyways. Sleeping on the ground does that to you, he guesses mirthlessly as he watches Dream light a stick of dynamite with a well-worn flint and steel.
Tommy’s hands jerk up to cover his ears in time for the short fuse to light up the explosive and destroy the meagre supplies in the pit with a resounding boom, sounding like thunder after a crack of lightning in a storm. The scraps of chicken he’d managed to catch and cook without burning, lay at the bottom of the blackened hole, smoldering like charcoal with small specks of orange flame licking the sides. A poor imitation of anger fills his heart like water would fill an empty stomach in a desperate attempt to stave off the dull ache of hunger pains. His dull eyes raise from the pit to meet Dream’s smiling mask.
“Fuck you,” he spits, and Dream tilts his head minutely in response, the only indication he heard the insult. The anger, if it can even be called such, is already draining from him, and all he’s left with are the various aches and pains that are his only company.
“I thought we were done with this,” Dream comments lightly. There’s a hint of exasperation in his tone that is nothing but condescending, as if Tommy is a petulant child that refuses to behave.
Isn’t that exactly what he is, though?
Exile has made it very clear that a troublesome, annoying child is what the server sees him as, and Tommy has never done anything to disprove that, but not for a lack of trying. The old him, the one who knew green bandanas, fire, and anger, real anger, would have argued against that with a fierceness that’s now been beaten out of him. He would argue that no child has fought two wars, no child has won the independence of a country at the cost of two lives, and no child has accomplished all he has accomplished in sixteen years of life, but then what would that make him? He’s a child, but he’s a soldier. He’s a man, but he’s sixteen years old. He’s horrible, annoying, and impossibly selfish, but he gives everything he has for the people he loves and the things he believes in. He’s too much, and too little. Tommy is all of these, and none of them.
Despite everything--all the fuss over what neat little box he belongs in to make sense to people, for people to care about him--he just wants to know why he’s alone.
He wants to scream into the sky and ask whatever’s listening why he’s so unlovable. Why Dream is the only person who seems to give a shit about what happens to him, and that's only because there's something he wants to fix about him.
Tommy hates Dream. There isn’t a question about it, yet Tommy finds himself questioning it more and more. The hatred coexists with this weird sort of companionship that he despises, yet finds comfort in. He wonders if it's because they both know what it's like to be hated by everyone else on the server.
Tommy can hold grudges a mile long. One of his odd collections of traits that comes from some part of him which cannot be compromised with. It’s a simple fact for him, that if he is wronged by someone, he will rarely forgive it. Dream is no exception. No matter what odd companionship Dream seems to be pushing in his direction, it will not overshadow the hatred. Not completely.
“I hate you,” Tommy mutters for the hundredth time since the boat docked on this island and likely for the millionth time since the first revolution. He’s made it no secret, but Dream only chuckles.
“You don’t hate me,” he responds lightly. Tommy grits his teeth but doesn’t bite back. They’ve had this conversation before many times, less and less with each day--Tommy being less inclined to fight as exile whittles down his spirit. At this point, with the wind buffeting his dirty skin, scraped raw from the wilderness and standing too close to explosions, he’s run out of rebuttals and the energy to say them, so he turns away from the pit and leaves Dream standing there without a fight. He stalks over to his tent, stubbornly ignoring the sound of heavy boots treading on the cold, dead grass behind him, following behind loosely. The flaps of the tent flutter in the wind, and Tommy doesn’t bother to catch them, only ducking under them to enter--grimacing at the way the movement pulls at his aching shoulders. He drops bonelessly onto the pile of wool imitating a sleeping bag that he has pushed into the corner of the tent and watches listlessly as Dream grabs one of the fluttering door flaps and pins it to the side, gazing inside at him like a bug under a microscope. A twinge of familiar humiliation at the examination rises in Tommy’s gut, but it's nothing compared to the burning flame it used to be. The dirty wool pile he calls his bed is stained an ugly shade of dark green on some patches from the grass and exposed earth it’s laying out on, but it’s not like Tommy’s much cleaner.
“What the fuck do you want,” Tommy says to Dream, who’s still taking in the sorry state of the tent. He just wants the man to leave. Let him stew in his own misery. His stomach folds with a sharp pang of hunger that Tommy knows he’ll be dealing with the whole night until it gives way to an empty nausea, but he doesn’t have the energy to get up and hunt for food. “Leave, bitch.” The insult has no bite to it, only a tired pain. They both pick up on it, but neither comment.
“What, I can’t just hang out with you?” Dream crouches in the entrance like he’s talking to some sort of stray dog and a small, quiet part of Tommy bristles. “I thought we were friends, Tommy, I’m hurt.”
“Good.” Dream goes dangerously quiet and Tommy disguises a shiver by moving to wrap his arms around his stomach, like putting pressure on it will stop it from hurting. The silence is even tenser than when they were standing at the pit, somehow, and Tommy fights back the vicious urge to apologize. Every time ‘sorry’ tries to escape his lips he thinks of the scraps of food still smouldering in the pit outside and swallows his remorse, even if his submission will make Dream less mad. He refuses to tear his eyes away from the rustling cloth of the tent wall across from him, glaring at it like it’s the reason he’s here, and not because it’s his fault. It's comforting to pretend that he doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him, like he’s being wronged in some deeply unfair way, but he knows it’s not true. Dream’s made it clear that no matter how much he might delude himself, he’s no victim. But it’s nice to have delusions sometimes. At least here, unlike the cold, dark ravine like a weight in his memory, his insanity won’t hurt anyone else.
“Tommy.” Dream’s low voice has a dark, threatening edge to it and fear flares up in the front of Tommy’s brain, rising from its ever-present, constant hum in the back of his mind. He fucked up. This is bad, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad--
Dream reaches his arm towards him, and Tommy tries to jerk away, but Dream’s grip lands firmly on his shoulder. His fingers dig mercilessly into his aching shoulder as they pull Tommy forward to reprimand him, and his vision whites out with pain. Somehow, through the pain, he thinks that a grip on his shoulder, no matter how firm, should not be hurting this fucking bad.
“Listen to me,” Dream says, and Tommy barely hears it through the piercing ache in his shoulder underneath the unrelenting grip. He feels his breathing stop, as if his body is trying to stop the pain by passing out. “You may not like it, or believe it, but I am the only person on this goddamn server who still gives a shit about you. You’ve finally pushed away the few people who could stand you, yet you keep going even once everyone’s realized that you’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
The words cut through the air with a cold finality that hurts almost as much as the blinding pain lacing through his back. Dream’s hand tightens with a final squeeze before letting go, and Tommy sways, dangerously close to passing out. The pain from Dream’s grip webs through his aching shoulders, somehow spreading all across his back as if the bruising touch was a lit match dropped in oil.
Dream stands, looming over Tommy at full height and continuing his verbal dissection.
“I am trying to help you, Tommy. Help you become someone worthy of other people’s friendship. The best way to help you, I think, is to be your friend, and teach you how to behave. I’m finding it to be the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do.” To his embarrassment, Tommy fails to blink back the hot tears welling up in his eyes from the throbbing pain in his shoulders and the cutting words from the man looming over him.
“It’s hard because you’re too self-absorbed to realize that people have limits to how much charity work they’ll do for an ungrateful, selfish, greedy brat that does nothing but destroy everything they’ve worked hard for.” Dream takes a deep breath, and Tommy barely hears it. His eyes are glued to the imposing shadow on the bare ground of the tent, trying desperately to hide the tears rolling down his face. He doesn’t know if it’s working, because the droplets drip from his chin and land on the ground with a tiny patter, soaking quickly into the dark soil. If Dream sees that he’s crying, he obviously doesn’t care.
“Tommy, you play hard to get with everyone around you, expecting they’ll chase after you and care about you after everything you put them through, but you forget that you’re not much of a prize.” It feels like a shard of ice is lodged into his heart, and Tommy manages to choke back a sob.
It’s true, and that's the worst part. Dream may have been his enemy more than a couple times in the past, may have been scheming, cruel, and underhanded, but he was never outright dishonest. The most damning lies coming from him were lies of omission, and Tommy had never considered those as real lies anyway. Dream was cutthroat and brutal, and would never bother to sugarcoat the truth, or shy away from calling it how he saw it.
So for him to say that Tommy was never anything more than a thorn in everyone’s side, a rude, selfish child—
It was only confirming what Tommy had already feared, deep in his heart. The insecurity that stated clearly that he was far too much for anyone to handle, and not nearly enough to love.
That fear’s always been there, of course, nagging in a quiet, looming sort of way, but it was easy to make it quiet. A soft hug from Wilbur (before Pogtopia, nothing that happened in Pogtopia was ever comforting, but that’s just another thing that’s his fault, isn’t it?), a reassurance from Phil, a small but genuine smile from Techno, but most of all, the quiet conversations he and Tubbo used to share in the dead of night, whispering their fears to each other, always followed by fierce support. Tommy remembers the nights when he would heatedly swear to Tubbo in as quiet of a whisper he could manage, that he would personally beat Schlatt’s face in, and Tubbo would know without Tommy ever saying a word about it, that being on Wilbur’s side wasn’t much better those days.
It hurts like nothing Tommy’s ever experienced before to realize that the cold emptiness in him from his broken friendships is his fault. He poisoned everyone he loves by just being around them. Too much to handle and not enough to love. Maybe that’s what’ll be carved into his gravestone after this all ends.
Dream seems satisfied with his pained silence, and Tommy risks a small glance up from the ground in time to see him duck under the tent flaps and exit.
“I’ll be back to see you in a few days. You need some time alone to think about things, it seems,” he announces, and Tommy curls in on himself a little tighter. It feels like all he has is time alone, but he can’t bring himself to break his silence and beg Dream to stay with him a little longer in his selfish desperation to have someone around to poison.
He must be some kind of parasite.
Boots crunch on the cold ground outside the tent, receding from Logsteadshire, and Tommy hears the distant whoosh of the nether portal transporting someone into it. Dream left, and now Tommy is alone.
Everything hurts.
Hunger pains are returning viciously, ripping through his gut and bringing even more tears to his eyes. Coupled with his back, of course, which feels like it’s been used as a target for throwing bricks. Tommy moves from his curled up sitting position—hugging his knees and burying his face—and tries to gently lower himself onto his bedding. Every movement is like fire arcing through his back, but he manages to lay down on his side.
If he closes his eyes and just breathes softly, his body feels almost blissfully numb. As he falls asleep with frigid wind blowing through his tent that doesn’t make his body shiver anymore, he wonders if he’ll ever wake up.
Maybe he doesn’t want to.