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Shroud is a small child. She cowers back under the small stone outcropping he found her under, when he moves closer.
She is small in every way. Standing, he doesn’t think she’d reach his knee, and her arms are so thin and the bones beneath so small, that he worries they’d snap if she tripped.
She has thirty bony fingers, five on each hand, and when he asks how old she is, she holds up only four of them.
Tommy was four when they found Tubbo in a box just beyond the front step of their door, just outside the cover of the little awning, completely soaked. Tubbo was five then.
Tommy doesn’t think he’d looked this small.
Tommy had been bigger than Tubbo then, had always been at least half a head taller than Tubbo.
They hadn’t been this small, though, Tommy doesn’t think.
It takes a great deal of coaxing to get Shroud out from under the stone, and even more to get her out of the stone’s shadow.
She scuttles back inside when he moves closer, until he gives up on carrying her, and begins the long slow journey of coaxing her back to his house.
She likes the berries he’d filled his pockets with, red juice staining her fingers and dripping all down her arms, or maybe she’s just so hungry she doesn’t care.
Tommy was a picky child. He wouldn’t eat bread if it was more than a couple days old, no matter how careful Wilbur was to keep it fresh. He turned up his nose at every single vegetable, and refused to touch meat that he’d decided through some arbitrary scale hadn’t been cooked enough.
It didn’t matter how long it’d be until they reached the next village, and that the stale bread was all they had. It hadn’t mattered that vegetables were all they’d been able to afford for weeks. It didn’t matter that the deluge had completely extinguished their fire and there wasn’t a thing Wilbur could do to relight it to cook Tommy’s now wet meat just a bit more.
It didn’t matter how much Tubbo or Wilbur cajoled him. He wouldn’t eat, even in the face of Wilbur’s exasperated shouting or frustrated tears.
There wasn’t a man in the world who could make Tommy eat what he didn’t want to. Not when he was little.
Well, maybe Phil or Techno could have. He’d always thought the world of them when he was young, they were like legends straight out of the stories Wilbur would tell him every night.
But it didn’t really matter if they could have or not, because they weren’t around to help Wilbur set up their little camp, and start the fire, and wrestle Tommy away from it, and reluctantly allow Tubbo to help set up their only pan by the fire. They weren’t there to keep Tommy from cutting all of their food into more manageable pieces with the small shitty knives Wilbur had forged. They weren’t there to set up a leaky lean-to over their sleeping bags (or just a pile of leaves and pine needles, during worse times), and they were not the ones who sat Tubbo down in front of the fire to massage his budding horns every night, lulling Tommy and Tubbo to sleep with stories and ballads.
Tommy barely remembers those first days, when Wilbur would still tell him stories about Phil and Techno, before all his stories had to feature a more mythical adventurer.
Tommy didn’t really understand the way Wilbur and Tubbo would eat just about anything. Not until he was older, when there wasn’t anything left to fall back on, and he was using his old picky habits to insist that Tubbo ate the last piece of bread instead.
He doesn’t like seeing that in someone as small as Shroud.
She should be allowed to be as picky as she’d like, to have a favourite food and insist on eating that, to have a whole list of least favourites she could refuse to touch.
He gives her a slice of bread when they finally get into his house, remembering something about kids getting stomach aches if all they ate was fruit. It’s not very good bread. Tommy made it, and he’s a shit baker.
There’s clumps of flour throughout, and parts of it are so dense they’re practically inedible. He gives her one of the only pieces that looks alright, and knows as soon as he tries another that he’s done something awfully wrong.
Shroud doesn’t seem to notice. She’s swallowed the whole thing by the time he’s started his second bite.
Someone should tell her that she won’t be hungry for longer if she takes longer to eat it. Tubbo gave Tommy that secret when they were seven.
No.
Shroud doesn’t need to know it. He’ll give her plenty of food, and she’ll never have to go hungry.
Not ever again.
Shroud is young, younger than Tommy really remembers being.
Tommy realises, once he has her settled into his bed, that he’s not prepared for a child. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and surely there must be someone more capable of caring for her than he is.
Except, Tommy doesn’t know them. Phil had left his own children once, he was hardly fit for another. Techno’s retired from war, and his reputation ought to be enough to ward off any outside threats, but he lives too far, and he doesn’t like Tommy around, not anymore, and he’s busy with his pets, his bees, his turtles, his polar bears and arctic foxes, the entire army of war dogs and whatever else he’s acquired since then. Maybe a pair of cats or a dolphin or something. Tommy doesn’t think he’d listen long enough for Tommy to explain the situation and argue his case, and then what? He’d have braved all that cold and snow for nothing. He’d have carried Shroud through all of it for nothing.
Tubbo has his own kid, and they don’t see much of each other anymore. Ranboo lives with Tubbo, and he’s far too forgetful; he’d forget to feed her, and Tommy isn’t sure she’d survive much of that.
Jack hates Tommy worse than Techno does, somehow, Niki doesn’t want anything to do with him, Tommy hasn’t seen Fundy in months.
He doesn’t really know anyone else enough to trust that they’d care for Shroud.
Wilbur had raised Tommy. It seems the obvious choice, except Tommy considers Quackity before he ever considers Wilbur.
He wouldn’t put Shroud through that. He isn’t even sure what ‘that’ is, just that Shroud doesn’t deserve that.
Tommy loves Wilbur, he does. He loves his brother a great deal, certainly more than he loves most people. Tommy had helped him fight more than one war.
Still… not Wilbur.
It’s left up to Tommy.
He glances around his little house and sees how woefully unprepared he is. He’ll make it work, he has to. (It can’t be worse than his own upbringing.)
He makes a trapdoor and installs it over the ladder to the basement, so that Shroud won’t fall down it, and adds a lock in case she tries to explore.
Tommy had been an explorer. He’d insist on climbing any number of trees, every boulder that crossed their path. He’d trek through every stream and jump over every ditch unless there was a log over it, and then he’d insist on balancing his way across. He’d fall almost every time, but he didn’t care about the scrapes on his hands and knees.
Tommy doesn’t need a bed, he mostly kept one as a respawn point (before), and now because it’s a fixture of a home. There’s no home without a bed. He doesn’t sleep in it, he isn’t sure he knows how.
They had bedrolls when he was little, and they were travelling all the time. During the war, he’d slept where he could, lying down, sitting, leaning against a wall, it hadn’t mattered. When they had time, he’d make a little nest of blankets and pine needles.
Exile was… worse, somehow.
And Tommy didn’t live in New L’Manberg long enough to really establish anything. He’d been exiled again far too quickly.
It hadn’t mattered where he fell asleep then, because he’d always wake up having walked himself into the ocean again.
After that… well, he had a nest of blankets on Techno’s living room floor, a couch in Tubbo’s place, and then a hard obsidian floor with obsidian walls to match and a constant sense of doom clawing at his throat, that if he fell asleep he’d wake up with real hands around his neck.
(Tommy doesn’t like the dark anymore, when he sleeps, he sleeps curled up around a long-lasting lantern.)
He starts making a second bed. Shroud should have her own bed to herself, proof that she’s welcome here.
He falls asleep some time in the early morning, a wool blanket barely started and a lantern pressed against his chest and tucked under his chin.
Shroud isn’t picky. The next morning, she eats the rest of yesterday’s awful loaf, some berries, and a bit of cooked sheep he finds. Tommy starts another batch of bread, trying harder than he had before to mix it well. He’s not the one subject to eating it, after all. Not anymore.
He turns back to the blanket while he lets it rise. Shroud occupies herself with stray bits of wools and random bits and bobs she finds in his chests.
It isn’t a good blanket, it’s too thin in some spots and too thick in others, the dye gets everywhere and refuses to dye evenly, he’s stained purple up to his elbows and probably on his face.
(He’d started with blue, and then added pink to chase away his teary vision and trembling hands.)
Tommy should be better at this by now. As many times as he’s had to remake bedding and blankets and clothing, he should probably be an expert, but armour and weapons had always come first.
Tommy is an excellent forger, the metal seems to heat easily under his instruction and it takes its shape quickly. He doesn’t struggle to balance a sword, he doesn’t even need to test and adjust armour he makes for himself anymore. It’s nearly second nature.
Techno has hundreds of years on him, but Tommy thinks he’s probably just as quick as Techno, even if Techno often slows himself down to add detailing to his creations.
Tommy’s clothes are shoddy and patchy, they rip too easily and stain too quickly and he still just keeps wearing them because his next pair won’t be much better for long.
He’s been wearing his current pair for far too long. They’re the ones Techno gave him, so so long ago, before the final destruction of L’Manberg.
Tommy died in these clothes, they’re stained with his blood and that of others, with grass and Ghostbur’s blue and every other dye Tommy’s used since, and he’s still clinging to them.
Techno is a better weaver, a better sewer, his clothes are sturdy, durable, and thick enough to almost keep him warm. The next pair Tommy wears will have to be by his own hand, and he’s dreading it.
He’ll have to learn now. Shroud deserves better than what he can make her, and she’ll need it soon.
Tommy wishes he weren’t so annoying, that he had more people to count on, that he didn’t drive everyone away from him so easily. He wishes that he could just make a trip over to the arctic and ask Techno to make her something, hell, maybe even to make him something.
He wishes that he could ask Tubbo for some of Michael’s clothes for Shroud until Tommy learns to make something better, that he could ask Niki for some of her pretty patterned fabric so at least Tommy would only have to sew something.
But if he had any of those people, he wouldn’t be here, Shroud wouldn’t be here, she’d be with them.
Tommy needs to learn.
He makes a little farm, more of a garden really, behind his house and plants what he hopes is enough wheat. He fertilises it all with bonemeal and waters it thoroughly.
He can’t afford to run out, Tommy can go more than a week without food and barely even notice, but Shroud needs something steady. He’s doing his best to get that for her.
Tommy has plenty of wool, and even more dye. He makes so many shitty blankets that he builds a linens closet for them. He makes a couple shirts for himself, figures at least he knows his own measurements and can wear his shoddy attempts at clothing instead of forcing Shroud into them.
She can get the later iterations that don’t look so shit.
Tommy gets a pair of sheep so he doesn’t have to leave Shroud alone so often to go hunting for wool.
The bonemeal in the garden soil makes up for whatever deficit Tommy’s lack of farming skills provide, and Tommy wakes up one morning to realise he’s spent months like this, just farming, baking, weaving, and sewing.
It’s the most peaceful months he’s ever had in his life, he thinks. Except maybe when he was very little, before Phil and Techno left, before Wilbur decided he wasn’t sticking around either but at least brought Tommy and Tubbo with him.
When Tommy is eight years old, Wilbur decides he’s bored. He teaches Tommy and Tubbo to make potions in the back of a poorly ventilated caravan, and then he starts a war.
He drags other friends into their faction, so that it isn’t just him and a pair of children, and then they go to war.
There’s a poorly balanced iron sword pressed into Tommy’s hands, and he’s been like that ever since. The only difference between then and now, is that the sword is forged under Tommy’s skilled hands, the edge is sharper, the blade evenly balanced, and it’s diamond instead of iron.
Shroud turns five a handful of days before the prison alarms blare deafeningly across the server.
Tommy’s first thought is that Dream can’t hurt Shroud. Tommy can’t let that happen, he won’t let Dream get anywhere near Shroud.
His second thought is that Dream knows where to find him. Tommy’s been living in the same place for so long that everyone knows where he lives.
His third, almost a desperate prayer, is that this was all supposed to be over. He’d decided it had to be, once it had killed him.
Dream was in prison, Tommy had lost Ghostbur trying to kill Dream, and then he’d lost his last life.
Yes, Dream had brought him back, some old insistence on playing, but Tommy had been ready to be done.
He was tired, he wanted it all to be over, he didn’t want to go looking for war anymore.
Was this how Techno felt, when he’d left to the arctic and never once returned of his own volition?
Tommy’s only sixteen to Techno’s hundreds. That’s awfully young to feel so tired.
Maybe if Tommy didn’t have Shroud, he wouldn’t even consider leaving. He’d build a wall like it might somehow protect him, go dig up some better armour and forge himself some better weapons and wait and hope that it would somehow be enough.
Instead, he’s making a makeshift bag out of one of his earlier blankets and shoving in essentials. He packs seeds and wheat and yesterday’s bread, he breaks down his loom into pieces and packs wool, he packs the couple clothes he’s made for shroud and a couple blankets, he packs his tools, his shears and his axe, his pickaxe and his shovel.
He makes a little set of armour for a four-armed child and repairs his own.
He grabs his sword, insisting to himself it’s only for protection against zombies and skeletons and nothing else, no one else.
Tommy isn’t doing this again, he is never putting Shroud through all of this, war is an awful thing and she doesn’t need to see it.
He wonders if he’d see it differently if she were a little older, if she were eight years old with bigger fingers to wrap around the handle of a sword. He doesn’t think he could, and he wonders how Wilbur had done it, folding Tommy’s fingers around the iron and telling him to attack their enemies and kill them.
He wonders what Wilbur had thought, seeing Tommy stumble back, with blood staining the front of his shirt and cuts on his arms.
“Alright, Shroud.” He says, carefully fastening her chestplate for her. “You shouldn’t need this, it’s only a precaution, but we’re going to move today, okay?”
She gives a little nod, smiling up at him, and he wonders if he smiled like that while sliding a sword into his belt for the very first time.
He hadn’t, he’s pretty sure. He hadn’t understood what was happening, but everyone around him had been grimly serious.
Leaving, as it turns out, alarms still blaring, even louder outside than they had been inside his home, is almost upsettingly easy.
He doesn’t see anyone he knows, no one tries to talk to him, no one tries to stop him.
The only arguments against this course of action are his own.
This fight with Dream has always been Tommy’s, even when it was Wilbur’s it was Tommy’s. How can Tommy just abandon something he has spent so much of his life doing? He’s put so much effort into fighting Dream, how can he just leave when he hasn’t won yet?
Won’t Dream go after someone else when he can’t find Tommy? What if he tries to hurt Tubbo or Ranboo or someone else? Just to play with them, or to demand to know where Tommy has gone?
But Shroud deserves to sleep in a bed every single night, and she shouldn’t need to worry about someone attacking while she sleeps, and she should never feel she has to keep a sword under her pillow and a shield next to her bed, just in case.
She should be able to leave food in the kitchen instead of always keeping it on her person just in case she needs to run.
She deserves to be safe, and Tommy can’t find that for her here.
They walk for days. More accurately, Tommy walks for days, carrying Shroud for most of it. She sleeps in his arms, and he walks for days and nights, stopping only long enough to catch short naps when he needs it.
Tommy loses time easily when he’s just doing the same thing for days.
He doesn’t accurately know how long any war he’s fought was, beyond the years marked by his birthdays, careful track of them kept by Tubbo. He doesn’t know how old he is now, he could be seventeen, or even already eighteen. How long has it been since he’s seen Tubbo?
So Tommy doesn’t know how long he walks. It must be at least a week, but it could have been a whole month and he wouldn’t really know.
He just walks and walks and walks until eventually he stumbles on a village. Shroud looks around in wonder at the bustling people and their closely grouped houses, their animal pens and their farm fields, and Tommy decides that this is far enough.
He couldn’t find his way back if he wanted to, he’s been walking for long enough that Dream would surely spend months or even years walking in different directions until he found Tommy.
He makes camp at the edge of the village, starting a fire to keep them warm for the first time since they left, instead of just bundling up in the blankets he packed.
They sleep under the stars the first night, and the next morning he builds a shelter. He means to build a tent, it’s faster and then he can start building them a house, but he starts pulling the fabric over the tent poles and he finds that he can’t breathe at the sight of it, so he decides on a lean to instead.
It takes him weeks to finish the house, between baking them bread daily and having to cut down and drag over so many trees.
Once the house is built, it still needs to be furnished, but they move in and he tears down the lean to.
The inside of the house is well lit, perhaps too well lit, a lantern hanging in every corner of every room and another in the middle of every ceiling. But some things are a necessity, and Tommy will take frequent mining trips for coal over sleeping in the dark.
He had to build the house from scratch, so he may as well give Shroud her own room, and then if she has one, he probably should too, and maybe they should have a storage room as well. It comes out to four rooms in total, the main room being an adjoined kitchen and living area.
He sets up a bed in Shroud’s room, and nest of blankets in his own, and then he sets up his loom in the main room. He adds counters and a sink and a furnace, then a table and a couple chairs.
He finds a pair of wild sheep and builds a pen for them, then adds a pair of cows. He hoes a garden, much bigger than their last one because they have the space and he might as well, and then he’s back into the same routine he’d built before.
He bakes and gardens and weaves and sews.
He improves, slowly. He expands from the daily loaf of bread into sweet cakes and fruit tarts, his shirts improve and so he learns to make trousers and dresses, then he learns knitting so he can make socks, gloves, and hats.
They’re self-sufficient, mostly, but he sells the baked goods and extra clothes and blankets to the villagers anyway, keeping a little stash of savings he doesn’t know what to do with.
Shroud doesn’t ever start speaking, something he’d mostly expected when she hadn’t begun speaking within a month of living with him.
It’s one of the villagers who suggests it.
“Does she write to speak, then?” The woman asks, making simple conversation while he bags up a couple loaves of bread for her. She’d started telling him about her small son’s escapades, and then had begun asking about his daughter.
Shroud is his daughter, he realised with a start, and then he’d kept the conversation going.
“Ah, no,” He tells her sheepishly. “I don’t know how to teach her.”
“Well, you teach her reading first, don’t you?” She jokes, and Tommy winces.
“I don’t really read well.” He admits.
When Tommy is five or six, Wilbur realises that neither of his two charges can read, and he sets about remedying it. The attempts don’t last long. He teaches them both the alphabet, then their numbers, and starts on small words until he realises Tubbo’s dyslexic.
Tommy thinks Wilbur might have gotten sidetracked looking for a solution to that, but whatever had happened, they’d never learned to read much beyond it. Tommy’s better at it than Tubbo, by virtue of not being dyslexic, but not by much.
He can read signs and the words on maps, and puzzle through simpler books, but beyond that, he’s a lost cause. He’d tried to hide it, before, bragging about how he was simply too good for books, joking around to distract anyone who tried to get him to read something, or pressed him on it, and he’d gotten by.
He thinks Techno might have gotten an inkling. As much as Techno loved reading, he noticed more when Tommy didn’t.
“Well,” The woman pats his hand sympathetically, “John, the librarian, would probably teach her if you asked.”
Tommy pays the librarian in a mix of money and baked goods, and when Shroud has finished learning, the man suggests teaching both her and Tommy a sort of hand speech, and Tommy pays for that too.
Shroud is a quiet girl, and not just because she doesn’t speak. Her footsteps are light and nearly silent, and she’s learned to walk on the walls and the ceiling. Tommy learns to expect her to come towards him from any angle before it becomes an issue, too terrified that he’ll panic and swing at her. He digs a hole for a chest under his bed and puts his sword in it. It’s more symbolic than anything. He carries an axe when he goes to the woods, and that’s just as much a weapon, but there’s something to be said about leaving the sword behind.
He’s putting down the sword for the first time in over ten years.
Shroud is eight years old and she’s become friends with the handful of children in the village despite her silence.
She doesn’t cling to any of them like Tommy clung to Tubbo. She doesn’t need to, he figures. She’s got a number of friends and she doesn’t need to worry about losing them. It’s more than Tommy ever had, a father who left too soon for Tommy to know him, a brother who wanted little to do with him, and Tubbo, who had even less.
Shroud has so much more, a half dozen friends, their parents who are kind and welcoming to her, and Tommy, who hasn’t left her since he got her.
Shroud is eight years old, and she’s as tall as Tommy was at that age, but nowhere near as thin.
Her hair is dark and long, braided back to keep it out of her face, and she’s wearing a light blue poncho shirt with a pair of deep purple skirt-trousers. She runs easily despite their length.
She snickers silently behind her hands, her eyes alight with mirth. She’d scurried up a tree and jumped down in front of one of her friends, startling them. Tommy watches from the little stand he’d set up near the other shops in the market.
It had taken some convincing, but he’s integrated easily into the village. They’re a kind and accepting sort of people.
He sells breads and pastries and cakes, and socks and gloves and hats, and he’ll take orders for clothes and blankets.
Shroud has never known the sword. If Tommy has any say in it, she never will.
On bad nights, Tommy wonders how much longer he’ll have until he’s discovered. On those nights, he considers dragging himself out of his nest of blankets to mutter old and almost-forgotten prayers to Prime.
He never does, unwilling to draw the attention of anything that lives where he used to. Too, Prime had abandoned him along with everyone else during his second exile; Tommy knows better than to count on a god for help.
He doesn’t ring a bell either. That god, at least, was never his. It has no hold on him.
Tommy’s own hair is braided, finally grown out of that ratted shaggy look it had always seemed so determined to keep. He thinks it had been the wars, and how little time he had to care for it. It’s different now, heavy enough that the curls are limited to the last few inches, the rest of it wavy. It’s dyed in different spots, especially the ends, from where it falls into a dye barrel while he was working.
He’d only learned to braid hair when Shroud’s had gotten long enough, and that hadn’t happened for a while. He’s allowed to feel comfortable without it being a protective curtain around his face.
No one in his village has ever seen him with any other face. The scar tissue that makes his wider smiles pull oddly doesn’t disturb them. They don’t stare at him like they’re seeing flickers of a younger face that never pulled like this.
He knows there’s more than he can see, he’s felt it sometimes, on better days when he just wanted to know, and on worse ones when he could feel it happening still. He knows there’s a grouping of raised scars by his left temple, and an old cut he doesn’t remember getting that feels dangerously close to his right eye.
His arms are the worst of it, but he can see those, the patches of burns and old cuts and over and under all of that, all the little white burns that could be acne scars if they weren’t just from the hours he’s spent in makeshift forges too close to an open sparking fire.
He’s got scars on his chest, from both his first and second deaths, but they’re hardly alone, Tommy has been injured too many times to count.
He’s got a patch of withered skin on his right hip from where he caught a wither’s blow, it extends up to his ribs and down his thigh, and of course his knees are scarred from taking too many scrapes and his calves aren’t any better, from running around fighting in shorts.
Everything aches every once in a while. His shoulders from taking heavy hits to a shield, his knees from jumping off of too many heights with nothing to catch his fall, his wrists from swinging heavy weapons before he was really strong enough to hold them.
Only the children ask about it, and he tells them simply that he fought in a war a long time ago. The adults know better, and they scold the children for asking.
The children are too young to see Tommy’s age. To them, he’s as old as their parents are as old as their grandparents, because to children, adult is a singular ambiguous age.
They don’t know that he was their age when he started fighting, but he thinks their parents do. They know he was young when he arrived, and he’d already had all his scars by then.
“It’s admirable that you took her away from all that.” They tell him sometimes, and he gives them a stiff smile and changes the subject.
He doesn’t want to be admirable, he wants to be safe. He wants Shroud to be safe.
The village doesn’t get many travellers, but a handful a year are expected, adventurers and explorers, or people just going to visit distant family and stopping in for the night.
The butcher, Ezra, has a couple rooms for them to rent for a night, a sort of temporary inn.
Most travellers look almost like everybody else. They’ll have a horse maybe, and they’re carrying all their possessions, but if everyone in this village didn’t know everyone else, they could blend in easily enough.
This man isn’t like the others. He looks more like Tommy, more scars than real skin. One eye is a milky white, an old pink scar running through it, reaching from past his hairline to his upper lip, disfiguring it enough that his mouth doesn’t close all the way.
The rest of his face is scarred enough that Tommy thinks he’s lucky to have kept the other eye. It’s cuts and abrasions mostly, but he’s got burns on his hands and arms too.
His hair is streaked heavily with white, more likely to be from stress than age, given the lack of wrinkles. The rest of it is blond, and all of it is long, falling over his shoulders and down his back. It’s kept out of his face seemingly only by a crown. It’s a pretty gold thing with green and blue gems placed into it, almost familiar, though Tommy couldn’t guess why.
His cloak, an old thing that has seen better days, was likely green once. It’s somewhere between dark green and brown now, the edges frayed and tearing. He’s armed, with a netherite axe on his back and a sword at his hip.
His horse is gray, with a blaze and white socks. He packed light, only a pair of saddlebags on the horse.
The man stops at his stall and stares for an uncomfortably long moment.
Tommy wonders how long this man has been fighting to look worse than Tommy does, and figures it was probably all his life. He imagines that the man must have never stopped, never left the war, unlike Tommy.
He hadn’t thought it possible that someone could hurt worse than he does, but looking at him, Tommy doesn’t envy him his nights or days.
“Good afternoon.” Tommy finally says, awkwardly, and hoping it snaps the man out of whatever trance he’s fallen into. Tommy doesn’t think he’s blinked.
“Sorry.” The man says, startled, and Tommy shrugs and smiles.
“It happens.” He feels more charitable than he usually would, and he doesn’t know whether it’s because it’s a better day pain-wise, or if it’s because this man is sort of like him. He doesn’t feel much like a freak when the man is surely only staring because they look so similar. “War, too?” He asks, for lack of anything better to say.
The man startles again, and blinks a couple times, before giving a jerky nod.
“Yeah.” His voice is rough, and he clears his throat quickly. “A few.”
“Yeah. Me too.” Tommy nods. The silence stretches for a long moment, two creatures of war staring at each other like they’ve never seen one of their own before.
Tommy wonders if it’s a thing he’ll someday not feel is a part of him. If one day he could pull the bed he never sleeps in away from the wall to access the chest underneath and have the sword feel foreign in his hand.
Maybe war was woven in him too early for him to ever get it out. He’d have to unweave so much of the tapestry that there’d really be nothing left of him by then.
But he changed the thread he’s weaving with, and this man hadn’t.
“I sell clothes and baked goods.” Tommy says after a too long moment. It isn’t real silence, not with the regular bustle of the market around them, but it feels like it is.
“I don’t have much.” The man says, reaching for his pouch. He pulls out a dozen emeralds and sets them on the table.
Tommy has a dark blue cloak he’d made just to see if he could stomach the colour. He could, he’d learned, but barely. He hadn’t been able to stomach the stains on his hands the next day. He certainly wasn’t going to wear it, likely not for years, if ever.
“This should last longer than the one you’ve got.” He says, sliding it over. “And it’ll be warmer too.” He gives him half a dozen loaves of bread, and a little fruit pastry because he can.
“Thanks.” The man says, and he sounds a little choked up. Like the cold is always digging into old wounds and leaving him with unbearable agony. Like where Tommy can just remain in his nest of blankets for the day, he is trapped on a cold and unforgiving path with nothing to do but keep moving.
Tommy knew the feeling once, so he just nods.
“It was my brother’s colour.” He says, because he wants to say something, anything, to distract the man from the tears Tommy can see welling in his eyes. “He died, but I try to make things with it every now and then.”
“I’m sorry.” The man says, maybe a little too heartfelt for a general sentiment, but Tommy accepts it anyway.
“I’m alright. It was a long time ago.” The man nods, taking off his old cloak to wrap the new one around his shoulders.
“You didn’t deserve any of that.” The man tells him, turning back to meet Tommy's eyes firmly.
“Neither did you.” Tommy answers, tilting his head in confusion.
“I think I did.” The man answers, somehow both hesitant and confident.
“No one deserves what happens in war.” Tommy’s sure.
Shroud bounds up, her hands flying through the signs as she tries to tell him what he guesses is her latest adventure, but her fingers are moving too quick for him to make much out.
She figures that out quickly, starting over.
“Your daughter?” The man asks, quizzically.
“Yeah, this is Shroud. She turns eleven next week.”
“Happy birthday.” The man tells her, and Shroud signs back thanks. Tommy translates, but the man just nods.
“I should probably get going.” He says, stepping back, taking the bread to slide into his saddle bags. “I have a while more to go today.”
“Alright.” Tommy agrees easily. “Ezra’s got a couple rooms if you’re staying in town tonight. He’s the butcher.”
“Thanks.” The man nods, glancing back. “It was nice seeing you.”
“You too.” Tommy answers.
‘He looks like you.’ Shroud signs, when he turns back to her.
“Yeah. That’s ‘cause he’s kind of like me. Except I had you, and he didn’t.”
‘Okay.’ Shroud signs, nodding, before she launches into her tale of having won hide and seek.
The traveller doesn’t stay the night, but he stops by every couple years.
Tommy never remembers to ask for his name until he’s already gone, but Tommy really only thinks of one traveller, so it doesn’t really matter.