Chapter Text
It was dark.
Very dark.
It was hard to breathe.
It was worse than the train station.
Wilbur could feel his heart beating too fast and too slow at the same time, the panic quickly take control of his supposed revived body right before he looses consciousness.
What he didn’t know was that not so far from him, Tommy, Tubbo and Ranboo were running in his direction, wondering if he had been revived.
Arriving where his grave was, Tommy didn’t know if he was relieved that Wilbur hadn’t be revived, or sad that it meant he was really dead, and that from now on there would be no Ghostbur around.
- "Looks like there’s no life here.." Tubbo said hesitantly, trying to comprehend Tommy’s emotions
- "Maybe we should open the coffin ?" Ranboo added. "To make sure your friend is still dead ?"
They both looked at Tommy, waiting for a reaction.
He finally regained composure and turned around with a forced smile, holding tightly Friend’s leash
- "Let’s not profanate a grave guys…Let’s be honest, it’s relieving that he isn’t alive." Tommy explained, trying to let out a little laugh to prove his words. "Let’s go now."
And just like that, the three of them left, not without one last nostalgic look at the monument where Wilbur Soot, ex-president of L’Manberg and madman, had been buried under.
Hours after, Wilbur starts waking up again.
This time he takes a minute to acknowledge his new limbo, and notice some faint light in a corner of his prison.
He tries to push up what’s keeping him enclosed and manage to get out.
After falling on the floor, he looks around and tries to acclimate his eyes to the brightness of the torchs around, brighter than any lights he encountered for the past years on that train platform.
He looks back to the box he fell from- no, not a box, a coffin, his coffin.
He was dead, and supposedly revived by Dream.
But he still doesn’t quite feel alive right now.
He felt pretty dead to be honest.
Still looking around, he notices his own clothes. A costume, the kind you wear when you’re dead and buried.
That’s what he is, dead.
And he was buried.
Until he wasn’t.
He tries to sit up, maype he isn’t that dead, and take off the black jacket too tight for him.
Leaving it there, he tries standing and walking away of the proof he’s dead.
While looking around for something to put his weight on it, he sees the chest and opens it.
There’s a few useless things for a dead man, but there is also a book.
He grabs it and read the text inside.
It was from Quackity.
The man he might have loved when his heart was still beating, and capable of doing such things as loving someone.
He put the book back in the chest, as the message inside was meant for the Wilbur who was alive, before trying to stand up with the help of said chest.
Finding his balance, Wilbur does his best to remember how humans walk, breathe and speak.
One hand on the walls of the cave, he hesitantly walks out and stop, breathless, seeing the massive crater in front of him.
"I fucked up, no. Wilbur fucked up" he thinks.
Who was he right now ?
A pale copy of what he used to be when he was still alive.
Falling to his knees under the emotion he contemplates his goal, his roman empire he worked so hard for, his symphony, forever unfinished.
Ruined by his very own self.
Suddenly, he feels something wet on his cheek.
Wiping it off with his hand his first toughts is that he’s crying.
But dead bodies don’t cry. Right ?
They have no more water in their body, they cannot feel.
And that’s what Wilbur is, dead.
And that’s what he feels, nothing.
It’s only when more droplets stains his cheeks that he understand.
It might just be raining, because dead bodies are dead, emotionless.
After one last look to what had been the biggest work of his life (but not of his death), he decides to leave what has been his home, while cursing Wilbur, the one that had been alive, for messing everything up that bad.
Yet, the more he was getting away from L’Manburg, the more his vision started to become blurry.
It felt like he was slowly getting back on that train platform.
He tried to focus on his hand to stay in this new place, but he coudn’t, and he felt himself becoming more numb and less aware of his surroundings.
He was glad that he was dead, at lest he didn’t have to deal with the pain of panic attacks.
It was as if he could see himself walking from a third person.
Like watching a movie, nothing felt real.
So he watched, as he was walking away in some random direction, only stopping when his body dropped dead, as it should be, on the floor.
It stays like that most of the time, he watches his body move around without having any control on it, or sometimes he would just stay dead on the floor for a day or two, or even three.
Sometimes he doesn’t even see the time passing, just a few flashes of it.
It’s when he notices for the first time in days someone walking in the distance that he tries to get back onto controlling his dead body.
He had to pretend he was alive, because a dead body walking meant no sense.
And he didn’t want to know what would happen if someone knew he was dead inside of this flesh prison.
So he tried his best, slightly combing his long hair (way longer than he used to have them, dead bodies still grow hair and nails for a moment, he knew this, that’s why his hair was still slowly growing).
He tried to adjust his white dead man’s shirt and look alive.
Taking big breaths like the livings do and putting on a smirk, like he used to do.
He needed to look the same as he did when he was alive, putting on a mask of his confident and snarky self, to hide everything behind it.
Anyone noticing his vulnerability would probably take advantage of him.
Even dead he wouldn’t be left alone by the others.
So that’s what Wilbur did.
Playing a role, performing his whole interactions with a maybe too big smile, and maybe too much energy.
But everyone believed he was crazy anyways so it didn’t matter to him.
People who tought Wilbur was still clinically insane would leave him alone, and that’s all he wanted.
To be dead in peace.
However, he did always feel some ache in his body to be all alone again after having some company.
The curtain had fallen on his stage, he could put off the act and go back to be some dead thing on the side of the road.
At night, the memories of the train tracks were always present, like a living..no, a deadly nightmare, still too fresh in is mind.
He would feel the rough concrete of the platform instead of the grass he was supposedly laying on, hearing the sound of a train afar, never getting closer, he could smell the place too.
At night, Wilbur was back in his limbo, his own designated hell, and he feared he would never be able to get out.
Being lonely again accentuated the idea that nobody would stay forever and that it would always end up being him, just him, stuck on the concrete, unable to escape and forever waiting for a train that won’t come no matter how long he waits, how hard he regrets and how bad he is feeling.
This little game of playing a ‘normal’ human lasted a while.
Some days, Wilbur could pretend to be alive even if no one was around, sometimes even going to different places and do human things like drinking water !
On the others, he was stuck between watching the movie of his dead body rotting or nothing, just the dark.
That second option was pretty comforting, maybe that was the afterlife, a comforting space where you cannot see anything, cannot feel anything, you’re just floating around in peace with nothing else to do.
But today was a day where he could walk around, and that’s what he did.
Wilbur had no idea of where he wanted to go, but he knew he had to leave the last place he stayed at before people started asking weird questions like
« why is there a body laying there ? »
When he had no idea on how to answer.
He was drifting away from reality, thinking about how to be dead around people without having them knowing when he realized he was walking in sand.
He tried to situate himself, but he started to feel dizzy, probably his death situation coming back to him as he was struggling more and more to walk.
He squinted his eyes seeing a big sign, trying to focus on it to read.
It was written in very big ‘Las Nevadas’.
This name reminded him of something, but he couldn’t exactly remember what.
It was even harder to think about it while he was loosing consciousness.
His last tought was that he hoped the person he saw afar in ‘Las Nevadas’ wouldn’t see him collapse, dead, on the floor.
Unluckily, or not, for Wilbur, said person saw him and quickly walked into his direction.