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Tommy really had to have the world's shittest luck. He's being serious. There was no way his life could get any worse than what was going on right now.
The stupid rain kept making so he could barely see, and something was following them. Just as it had been all the way from Atlantic City. It had nearly caught up to them a few times, and had a couple of days ago when they got lost in Newark, but according to Tubbo, the thing following them was slow. It really didn't seem like it at this point in time because it had definitely caught up, and Tommy had to fight a German shepherd turned freaky nightmare fuel two days ago. Tommy had incapacitated the thing with a trash can, but it was still following them.
It didn't help that Tubbo wouldn't give a name to it, so he took up calling it a freakish dog, but according to Tubbo, it never failed to find and hunt its prey. Which was Tommy.
See, how shitty his luck was?
They were almost to where they were supposed to be, according to Tubbo. They'd managed to get to Montauk via the light rail train system that Long Island had. The train had partially broken down, but that was okay because Tubbo had immediately made them get off in the pouring rain, saying that it was close. Whether that was wherever they were going or the monster following them. To be honest, it was probably both.
Apparently, Tubbo was keeping him in the dark because the more he knew, the more danger he'd be in. A bunch of shit like that. Subsequently, there was a lot of shit he was going with just so he wouldn't get mauled to death by this larger than him and Tubbo combined dog. He was also apparently just a monster beacon so they might have been fucked anyways.
To be honest, the rain wasn't as bad as Tommy wasn't making it out to be. At least not now, because it slowed down a little, as the mud began to splash everywhere, and they had to pick up pace because a large bark sounded from behind him. There wasn't a trash can to beat the dog up this time so they were just going to have to book it otherwise they were fucked. Tubbo had some sort of dagger type thing, which was crazy looking, but they quickly learned it wasn't effective against this thing despite the fact that it was supposed to be effective.
"There!" Tubbo sputtered, rain water flowing down his face.
It was the first time he'd managed to see his best friend's hair completely soaking wet without the hat he always wore and the horns he saw when glancing at him made him want to pass out. He had no clue what the hell Tubbo was talking about; he was more focused on the fact that his friend wasn't human.
"Tubbo." Tommy managed to say despite his heaving breaths. "You have horns."
"Yeah, I noticed, boss man." Tubbo said, moving some tree branch out of the way of where they were going.
The growling got closer and he heard Tubbo begin to mutter prayers in the language he'd never learned but figured out he understood as of a week ago. That did not fill him with confidence. It really didn't.
It also didn't help that the moment he saw what Tubbo had been pointing to, a giant pine tree illuminated by a strike of lightning, he tripped on a tree root and was sent tumbling into the ground. Which hurt like a bitch.
"Damn it." Tubbo cursed, helping him stand up and get out of the mud he'd dropped himself in.
Footsteps hit the ground in front of them and they looked up at the dog that had been following them for hundreds of miles. It was just as terrifying as it had been last time, except it looked more pissed off than it had last time. It growled, and Tommy slowly took a few steps backward. Tubbo moved with him.
Something stepped out from behind it. More dogs. Wonderful. They had glowing red eyes like the dogs from Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters dogs. That was a good thing to call them.
Except for the fact that it warranted an, "Oh shit." From tubbo. Which just made him accept his fate as dead. They had no weapons that would kill these things. It wasn't fun.
"Hey, uhm, so I think we're about to fucking die." Tommy said, continuing to back up as slowly as he could while keeping the illusion of staying where he was. He was a bit shit at acting though, so it wasn't like he could just pretend to be fine with this.
If he turned his back and ran then he'd immediately get mauled by one of the things if not all of them. It didn't make sense that all these things were after him. They all looked straight at him. They didn't even seem to want Tubbo. He could feel them staring into the depths of his soul with those beady red eyes.
"Nonsense. We got this. Just move very slowly." Tubbo breathed out.
"Why are there more of them?"
"You're powerful. Too powerful." Tubbo said, finally answering one of his questions from the last two weeks. That was honestly the worst answer he could've gotten. He hated this.
"What should we do?"
"You run ahead. I can stay here." Tubbo said.
"Oh hell no." Tommy's foot hit a dead branch and despite the fact that it was raining. It snapped with a loud crack and one of the smaller Ghostbuster dogs that seemed more around the size of an actual dog bounded towards them.
Tommy stumbled back a few meters dragging Tubbo with him, before the hound got to them, pouncing on Tommy's chest and knocking him to the ground. He kicked the dog in the gut and tried his best to get it off him, but he wasn't having much luck. Its claws dug into his arms when he moved its face away from his neck, trying to keep it from going after the jugular. The Ghostbuster dog snarled and snapped at his face.
Something happened after that.
Tommy wasn't entirely sure how.
The clouds above them hammered out more rain and thunder crackled. Something hit him and the dog. It left him breathless and dazed, but he could get up. His skin was burning, almost sizzling it seemed and it was like the world had set his body on fire and yet he couldn't feel it. It didn't really hurt. He wasn't sure if that was supposed to happen, but he felt energized. Which was probably the opposite of what was supposed to happen.
He felt electric.
It was a very weird feeling.
Tommy might have just gotten struck by lightning.
The dog that was on top of him was next to him, slowly dissolving into dust. Tubbo was next to him, mouth agape and staring at the rest of the monsters who seemed intrigued and then decided that was their cue to come kill him.
Yeah, that was when the two of them turned and started running again. They were so close, and yet he felt the deep sense of something being wrong the moment they hit the threshold of the camp. The monsters hit the barrier that was apparently there and clawed at it, snarling at him and Tubbo.
He felt stronger. Getting struck by lightning definitely wasn't supposed to do that. He might still pass out but at least he felt better.
There was a house, and Tommy started to move towards it with Tubbo, only to stop halfway there. The effect of getting struck by lightning definitely hit there because he crumpled in on himself and passed out.
xxx
Tommy did not wake up on the grass dozens of feet away from some weird house. Instead he was in the house. At least he assumed so. He was in a room and a bed. It was a pretty nice bed for barely sleeping in the past two weeks, and when he did it was in the seats of bus stops or train cars. So, it was a pretty comfortable bed.
Tubbo wasn't in there but someone else was. Someone familiar. They had the same face as his brother and yet he knew it wasn't because his brother didn't have pink hair. At least not that he remembered. His brother was dead anyways and the last time he'd seen him was at age six. He'd moved on from that. It was eight years ago. At least he thought he had but he knew the nightmares about the different ways his brother could've died had come back even if he refused to acknowledge them.
The person seemed interested in him though.
"Ah, good." The person muttered. "I was getting tired of waiting for you to wake up."
"What?" Tommy managed to mutter but the person helped him sit up.
"I'm Techno. The best medic you'll get right now because all the Apollo kids are sick." Techno apparently said.
He didn't even know what the fuck Apollo kid meant. Like the Greek god? Greek themed place was where he ended up? He'd love to say that last night was a fever dream but he genuinely had no fucking clue how the last two weeks could've been real if it was. He couldn't dream up two weeks of constant terror, so it must've been real. Maybe he was dead, and that lightning strike had been what killed him.
"Where?" Tommy trailed off as some drink was put into his hand.
"Camp Half-Blood. You're lucky you survived those hellhounds and getting struck by lightning."
"The Ghostbuster dogs?"
"Oh my gods, I've told tubbo a million times to stop just not telling people. It's never worth it in the end." Techno huffed.
"You know Tubbo?"
"Yeah, we go back aways. Drink that."
That… shouldn't be possible. Tubbo was fourteen and this dude was like eighteen. How the fuck would they know each other? That shouldn't be possible.
Tommy finally did as the guy asked, drinking the strange liquid. He was expecting something like apple juice but instead tasted something akin to his moms brownies. God, he felt horrible for disappearing from his moms house just like Wilbur had, but there wasn't much he could do about that. Even if she had been the single mom of them both before it was just Tommy and then through years of school getting him kicked out and thrown into other schools' hands for the next year. He still missed Wilbur sometimes. Which was clear considering his nightmares were back.
"Alright, let's go through the basics. Do you know who you are?"
"Tommy Innes." He wasn't sure why he used his middle name but it always felt better to say.
"Is that your first and last name?"
"No." His last name always got him in trouble because Wilbur got into fights in middle school and so all his old teachers thought he was trouble too.
"Do you know your last name?"
"Do you?" Tommy retorted and Tehcno huffed, clearly already getting tired of him.
"Suppose not. What happened before you passed out?"
"There were the Ghostbuster dogs. There was also a big dog that had been following us since Atlantic city and then lightning hit me." He explained.
"Lightning sucks to get hit by." Techno muttered, sounding like he was speaking from experience. He didn't know what being hit by lightning actually felt like. He was pretty sure last night had been a one off event.
"It didn't hurt though. It just felt weird." Tommy muttered, drinking more of the drink. It was good. He liked his mothers brownies.
Good enough that he almost missed Technos eyebrows knitting and looking at him like he was nuts. That was still something noticeable so he glanced at the dude standing next to his bed.
"It didn't?" Techno sounded confused when he said that, and when he shook his head, he had the look of realization and asked another question. "What's your last name?"
"Why does it matter?"
"Humor me."
"Craft, why?"
"Holy shit." Techno was out of there before Tommy could even ask what that meant. How the fuck was his last name important enough that this dude went running off the moment he heard it?
He supposed it might have just been a common last name, but he'd never met someone else with the same last name as him. Whatever. He continued sipping on his drink and somehow it made him feel better. Tubbo came in eventually to check up on him and holy shit was Tommy glad to see him. Even if he had little horns on top of his head and he had what looked like goat legs instead of a humans. What could be weirder?
His best friend at least provided a little sense of normalcy, and he could try to pretend the last two weeks hadn't happened.
xxx
Tommy soon learned that he was right in assuming he had the world's shittest luck. He was at camp with people like him apparently, and that meant he was half-human, half-god. Likely of some big one because he managed to get hit by lightning and live and arrived with a multitude of hellhounds and Laelaps. A dog that apparently still hadn't left the edge of the camp because it was determined to get to him. They were going to have to send out something to kill it.
Tubbo and him were lucky to be alive according to Chiron the centaur that ran it. He was apparently going to come do a house call and scope Tommy out but stuff happened here he hadn't been able to. Which seemed like it was for the better at this point.
"Finally… there's something else you should know." Tubbo admitted. "It's honestly something we should just show you."
They were back in the big house that Tommy had woken up in, and Tubbo was about to let him in somewhere. He presumed it was some sort of living room. The door opened and Tommy was let out instead. It was more of a back porch that showed the forest that they entered the camp through. Tubbo didn't go out and he understood why almost immediately.
There was a person there. With the same face as his brother, and it wasn't Techno this time. The guy with the pink hair that he'd met earlier was nowhere to be seen. This time he actually looked into the eyes of his brother.
Brown met blue and he swore the world stopped moving. Not in a good way.
The brother who he saw come home from school every day stood in front of him. The one he saw refused to eat broccoli because it made his stomach feel weird. The one he went to a funeral for two months after he went missing. The one who he had nightmares about him dying for weeks as each unfavorable situation he could've possibly ended up in ran through his mind. The one he had nightmares about dying even now.
And yet, eight years later, here stood Wilbur Soot.
Definitely not fucking dead.
"What the actual fuck." Tommy breathed out.
For a moment he could forget everything he'd just been told and everything that had happened for the last two weeks. Just a moment that he forgets all of that, but Tommy can't forget the crushing of his soul when he got told that his brother was dead.
His walking corpse of a brother stands in front of him, fully alive, looking as if he'd never been dead. Looking better than he had eight years ago. Looking a lot better than Tommy surely was just mere days ago.
"Tommy, Hi. It's… been a while." Wilbur said, as if trying to play off that nothing was wrong and he hadn't just been dead for eight years.
Or maybe Wilbur had been here the entire time. Tubbo told him that people usually only stayed during the summer and could go home during the school year. Only people who didn't have the space to or couldn't stayed. Wilbur could've come home the entire time if he had been here. His brother left for his life and never looked back. He just abandoned him like that.
"What the fuck." Tommy repeated. "What the hell is this? How the fuck are you alive?"
Wilbur opened and shut his mouth a few times, "It's a long story."
"Really? Is it? Is it eight fucking years long, Wilbur?" Tommy scoffed. "You've just been here the entire time? Didn't even give us a sign you were alive or anything? That would've been real fucking nice. Rather than thinking you were dead."
"Tommy, by the time I could've, you guys had the funeral, and it was way too long after it to be able to explain properly. How was I supposed to explain it? I was declared dead, and dead people don't just crawl out of their graves." Wilbur said.
"You can change those if they're wrong y'know." Tommy said, walking forward. Anger and bitterness slipped into his voice. "You just left us. You saw a better life and took it."
"Oh, that's real rich, Toms."
"Don't you dare call me that." Tommy hissed, anger boiling up his gut.
Maybe it was just the fact that Wilbur had been here, clearly enjoying the finer luxuries in life that pissed him off the most. Maybe it was the fact that his brother that was supposed to be dead was alive. Maybe it was the stress of the last two weeks building up and the fact that Wilbur apparently thought he could just waltz back into his life after being gone for eight years. Maybe it was the fact that he'd been having nightmares for nothing that finally pushed him over the edge.
"Tommy, I can't survive out there." Wilbur said, his expression changing to something akin to pleading and he pointed towards the forest. "I can't leave. I tried. Twice. The first time I almost died and I didn't even make it to the trains that would take me to Atlantic city the second time. I literally can't be anywhere but here because I'm a walking monster magnet. I wanted to come home, I swear to you. I just couldn't."
"Then send a letter. An email. Anything that would've proven to us that you were fucking alive instead of giving me nightmares because we didn't know you fucking died and buried an empty goddamn casket." Tommy cried out. Wilbur had the option to reach out and he hadn't.
"What? What do you mean?"
"That's not important. What's important is that you've been here the entire time."
"No, what's bothering you?"
"My problems are none of your business. You don't get to just waltz on in like nothing fucking wrong. You don't get to hear about my problems. Not after eight years." Tommy snarled, pointing a finger at Wilbur.
There's a large crackling sound in the sky and his brother gets hit by a lightning strike. It doesn't come from the sky though, it comes from him and it only sends his brother stumbling back a few inches unlike the few meters normal people probably would've been blasted. At least he assumes they would. He's not actually sure.
Holy fuck, he just sent lightning at his brother and he didn't even react. It didn't even affect him. What the actual fuck. What was wrong with him? Was this a side effect of the whole being a demigod thing? Did everyone accidentally hit their brothers with lightning? Is that why the lightning didn't kill him last night?
"Fair enough, although you're like me Tommy. You don't get to have a normal life. Just try not to be angry about it." Wilbur said softly.
"I don't care. I will be angry. How the fuck would you feel if I fucked off and died Wilbur? Huh, and then you get taken to some weird place being chased by a giant fucking dog all the way from your house and you find me alive. After eight years. I have every right in the goddamn world to be mad right now." Tommy said, before turning around and storming off. He could figure out the whole electricity thing in a moment, for now, he was going to ignore his brother, and try to process what the hell was going on.
xxx
As it turned out, it was going to be impossible to ignore his brother. Almost the moment he was back with Tubbo and Techno a floating lightning strike appeared above his head and he was claimed by
Zeus. The same godly parent as one other person in the camp, and maybe the entire world.
Wilbur.
Tommy was not enjoying all the looks he got. Especially considering while growing up, his blonde hair had faded a little to look more brown and he was much taller than he had been last time he saw Wilbur. So, they were almost the same height, even if they both had a lot more time to grow. The fact that they had similar haircuts helped neither of them.
Basically, it was very easy for people to tell that they were brothers, and not just by godly parents.
Since there were two of them now, Wilbur was the senior counselor by default and Tommy couldn't be more miserable. He wanted time to process that his brother wasn't fucking dead. Not just get shoved into trying to live with him and do basic everyday camp things.
Tommy had mourned for months and he's now finding out it was all for nothing. He doesn't get how Wilbur could do that. He doesn't get how anyone could just pretend that everything was fine and that they hadn't just left their family with no warning. Then, never come back. Tommy had already talked to Chiron about sending his mother a letter. Which was more than Wilbur ever did apparently.
"Well, this is it. I did some remodeling to this half." Wilbur murmured, opening another door in the cold temple-like cabin.
It led to some sort of bunk room. There were two beds, and a smaller room that held a toilet so that they wouldn't have to leave in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.
"He was a little upset that I took up some of the space, but the other part still looks nice enough." Wilbur said. Wilbur was talking about their father. It made the entire experience more surreal.
Tommy still didn't respond. Wilburs bunk was decorated from his time here at the camp. He clearly had friends and he saw at least two different people with heads of pink hair. One he recognized as Techno the guy from earlier and another was a girl. There was even a picture of Tubbo.
Tubbo knew Wilbur was alive, and just… hadn't told him. Maybe it had to do with the fact that Tubbo didn't even know his last name. At least not properly as he thought it was something different because of his dyslexia.
He looked over at the dreary bed and saw that there were sheets on it, and a few folded up camp shirts that he would probably be wearing over the next few weeks of his life. Maybe forever. That was ominous. He didn't like the idea of that.
"You don't always have to wear the camp shirts. It's just preferred. We do wear them on Fridays to capture the flag. Although that's not happening this week because of what happened last week." Wilbur explained to him.
Then Tommy said the first words to his brother in hours, "What happened last week?"
"Some shit. It's not worth explaining. It's a mess." Wilbur dismissed.
He wondered if Wilbur had anything to do with it. Wilbur didn't start fights though. Not that he remembered. He got into them, and finished them coming home with a bleeding nose and scraped up knuckles more often than not. That he remembers about Wilbur and later as they're getting ready to go to bed in silence, he glances over to see his brother's knuckles are still permanently red. His nose was fine though, so maybe he was getting better at that. Wilbur might have been the reason that the camp wasn't having a game of capture the flag this week. It wasn't a very dangerous sport, so he didn't get how.
Tommy climbed into bed at the same time Wilbur flicked off the lights and walked over to his own bed in near silence. The only way he knew he was walking was the fact that he could see the silhouette through the light coming from the window.
He couldn't really sleep, even though he probably should. He needed it. He's pretty sure it was nearing nearly thirty minutes without going to sleep when Wilbur spoke.
"Hey, Tommy, I know you're probably asleep but for what it's worth, I'm sorry. For leaving. I really am. I wanted to come home, I really did, but I had a full meal for the first time in years here and i- I," Wilbur paused for a moment, "I was twelve. Twelve year olds are really stupid and make stupid decisions, no offense. Maybe I'll say this when you're awake sometime soon, so you actually know but… I don't think either of us could handle that right now."
Tommy gave no indication that he heard Wilbur for a moment. Maybe that's all it took. Listening and ignoring, and yet Tommy knew how Wilbur felt.
Their mother was no longer in the same dead-end job that she had been. She got a better one, and they were no longer stuck under the roof of poverty as they had been for years. Tommy had been eating full meals for a few years now, but he knew how Wilbur felt.
The first full meal he'd eaten had been heavenly. He still remembered it.
He doesn't really blame Wilbur, he supposed, for that at least. Eight years ago… would he have done the same? He remembered the desperation for anything they'd both gone through, and he remembered the hunger. No, he couldn't really blame Wilbur for that.
He should probably actually try to get some sleep.
xxx
The next few days, Tommy fell into some sort of routine. Ignore Wilbur, acknowledge that he hung out with two pink haired kids pretty often and that the other one's name was Niki, a child of Demeter, while Techno was a child of Athena. Then he'd listen and ignore Wilburs' attempts to get any conversation out of him, and when he asked about what happened to him during his travels here, Tommy just gave him a look. Which was probably the most acknowledgment that Wilbur ever got from him throughout the day. Wilbur didn't get to know his business.
Subsequently, Tubbo ended up hanging out with him pretty frequently. He knew Tubbo and honestly felt like he could talk to him about anything.
"Are you ever going to talk to Wilbur?" Tubbo asked, opening a whole new can of worms as they watched Wilbur challenge Niki to a race of who could get to the top of the climbing wall faster. He'd nearly died on that thing, and Wilbur was so much better than him at it. It was probably the years that he'd spent here.
"I dunno, maybe. I'm thinking."
"You've been thinking for three days."
"I thought he was dead, Tubbo, and I came here after a freaky dog from hell broke into my house and tried to kill me. Which, by the way, someone else had to go out and dispose of. I found my brother, who I thought was dead for years, and he's fine with it. He let us think he was dead. I just don't get why. I'll probably find out if I talk to him, but I don't know if I can do that." Tommy sighed. "It's not like we can just go back to being brothers. I was six, and he was twelve. He's twenty now, and I'm fourteen."
"Wilbur's actually eighteen."
"I think I know how old my brother is."
"Well… there was an incident a few years back. When he first got here, actually. He got a prophecy pretty quickly for some reason. I never got the details but Niki and Techno had to go with him, and then shit happened during it, and he spent four years as a plant. Kinda like the tree that protects the camp. Techno and Niki were alright. They got back fine. Wilbur was just… I don't know how to describe it. He was a plant for a while, and we couldn't really do anything about it. He was in this weird state of being dead and not dead. They figured out how to fix it, and he's been back for a few years now, but they don't talk about it. Niki and Techno never even told anyone but Chiron how Wilbur even got like that, so I couldn't tell you how." Tubbo said. "Plants age differently."
"So, he's just two years younger now?"
"Pretty much. Both physically and mentally. It's like he just didn't exist for two years. It's rather complicated so we try not to think about it. Plants are weird sometimes." Tubbo said.
"Doesn't change the fact that he could've sent a sign he was alive before he went on his quest." Tommy murmured.
"Look, Tommy, Wilbur doesn't know how to deal with this either." Tubbo sighed.
"Did he move on?"
"I don't know. He knew he couldn't go back, but I'm gonna be honest with you, I think there was a part of him hoping that you'd be like him and you two could be proper brothers again. You'll have to talk to him to get any actual answers, I hope you know that."
"I'm not ready to talk to him yet." Tommy admitted. "I've just gotten through the fact that he's actually alive, let alone the fact that he basically abandoned us."
"Just don't hit him with lightning again, will you?" Tubbo asked. "He's got a dangerous habit of messing with it since he's got abilities like yours."
"The hand lightning?"
"Yeah. He… well, I'll let him explain if he ever does." Tubbo said. "It's difficult to explain if you're not him. Even then, I don't think many of us really get it."
"Alright." Tommy said, looking up and seeing that Niki had beaten Wilbur to the top. Wilbur was being dramatic because of that. That was a little funny. "I'll talk to him eventually. I promise. Just not today."
"I know."
xxx
Today didn't come for several days. They were going to bed after his first capture the flag game when Tommy finally cracked. They'd been on the winning team, and he'd done almost nothing except get his ass beat, which was apparently pretty normal for new kids. This version also included armor, shields and swords so he could see how they had to stop it sometimes.
"Were you actually going to come back?" The lights were already off, and he was pretty sure that Wilbur was awake. He sounded like he was awake.
"Yeah." Wilbur said. "I just couldn't, and then this whole thing happened where I turned into a plant. It did fuck you up didn't it?"
"Yeah. I… actually the nightmares came back when I was traveling here. I kept dreaming about what might have happened to you again except you were running from the same creatures I was. It was terrifying." Tommy admitted.
"Gonna tell me what happened?" It was an almost mirror situation of when Wilbur started asking about his problems and Tommy had said that it wasn't his business.
"Maybe." He felt more open now. Maybe he did miss his brother a bit. Over the last week he began to see why Wilbur had stayed, except he'd sent a letter to his mother explaining that he was okay. "Mom got a better job a few years after you left."
"Did she?"
"Yeah, we moved a few years ago. I didn't want to leave even if it meant a better place to live. The little apartment that the three of us lived in. She still has the little that you had." Tommy told him.
"Seriously?"
"Yeah. I don't think that helped my nightmares, but I guess what happened on the way here was that there was this freakish hell dog thing. It kept following us, Tubbo said it was trained to never give up until it found us. It nearly caught up a few times. I had to fight it off with a trash can when we got lost in Newark." Tommy said. "We're pretty sure it crashed the train we were on when we finally got on the island. Then it caught up and I think you know the rest."
"It brought hellhound friends and one attacked you and you hit it with a lightning strike although I think we both know that it wasn't intentional." Wilbur finished the story.
"No, I just got scared." Tommy said.
"I'm sorry I never came back. Techno was my one friend in town and the two of us were a massive beacon considering I was starting to become an issue. Tubbo found us. Satyrs age… differently, he was hiding in Technos grade at the time. Fourth. He happened across me and then the museum incident happened and we had to leave." Wilbur said.
"I remember hearing about the museum." Tommy said.
"What happened to it? I just know one of the exhibits caught on fire. I never heard the rest of the story."
"Oh, the entire thing burnt down. No, you got really lucky that it was just a small history museum. There was nothing important there. They spent weeks looking through the ashes for you two. I knew you didn't die there though. You're too stupid to die in a fire, and they got footage of you two getting on a bus when you left the city." Tommy said.
"Huh… why did they declare me dead then?"
"I don't really know. I think the case ran cold but for some reason they didn't just leave it open. I was six so I didn't get told a lot about this stuff. Not many answers out of me." Tommy shrugged.
"That's… something." Wilbur said eventually.
This was a start. They were talking again. This was a start. Tommy could deal with this. He might not be emotionally over Wilbur leaving but he could start talking to him again.
xxx
The days after that got better.
It still surprised him some days when he dreamt of one of the ways he'd convinced himself Wilbur died and then looked over to the other side of the room to see his brother sleeping away peacefully. It was a nice thing to see. It helped him stay calm whenever he woke up from a nightmare.
He started talking to Wilbur more, and he could tell that it was good for both of them. He met Niki who was very nice and was able to talk to Techno again. Where he learned that them appearing to have the same face was genuinely a coincidence and had nothing to do with any fancy magic they'd run into on their one quest. Which, per expectation, they didn't talk about.
Then most nights they'd both go to sleep immediately, but some nights Wilbur apologized again, and Tommy had yet to forgive him. Until tonight at least. It had been a good few weeks since he'd met his brother again and they'd had to relearn how each other acted because they'd both wildly changed since they last saw each other. They both had to familiarize each other with the idea of seeing each other again as well. Tommy would say, he was pretty used to seeing Wilbur again now.
"If you apologize again, I'm punching you in the face." Tommy said as he took off the shoes he wore in the shower. He trusted Wilbur, but not enough to break the habit of wearing shower shoes.
"Seriously?" Wilbur asked, raising an eyebrow from where he'd been tuning a guitar. Tommy seriously had no clue where he found that thing, but he'd been having one of the Apollo kids teach him how to use it apparently for a couple of years.
"I mean yeah." Tommy pulled his legs up onto his bed so he could sit criss cross while he talked to Wilbur. "I kinda get why now. I don't blame you. I was… just angry and confused. It's hard to explain that you aren't dead to people when you might go missing again at a moment's notice. I'm still a little upset that you never contacted us, but I understand."
Wilbur hummed, thinking for a moment, "Yeah, I'm going to be honest with you Tommy, I don't think there was a week that went by where I didn't think about asking Chiron to go home and get my regular life back. I just wish that maybe I tried more than that one time to go home, but Chiron was pretty clear about it being a pretty good idea for me to not leave camp. He was right of course, but I always wanted to come back. I missed so much of your life but I knew it was better if I stayed away. For your sake and mine."
Tommy nodded, "I think I get that now, but the first statement still stands. You start apologizing again, I punch you."
Wilbur snorted but said, "Alright. Whatever gremlin child. It's time to go to bed."
With that Wilbur put away his guitar without playing it once, and went to turn off the lights.
"Alright, Mr. Senior counselor."
"Don't call me that. It makes me feel old." Wilbur huffed, turning off the lights to the cabin.
"You're an adult. You're old." Tommy said, sticking out his tongue even though he knew Wilbur couldn't see it.
Wilbur, ever the nice brother, came over to his bed and put his hand on his head. Sending static shock all over his head, making his hair puff up everywhere. Wilbur laughed at him even though he couldn't see the damage, and Tommy grumbled, shoving his brother's hands away from his hair and kicking around the area of his knees a few times for good measure. He got one of them when Wilbur turned around, and he felt Wilburs leg partially buckle.
"Damn you." Wilbur murmured, no hatred in his voice, but instead, it sounded like he had a smile on his face.
Tommy grinned to himself and climbed underneath the covers, getting situated just right to go to sleep. He missed messing around with his brother. God, was it something he missed dearly, just as much as he'd missed his brother.
"Good night, Toms."
"Night Will."