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Amidst the rubble his brother had created, Tommy found the true meaning of misery.
A sword now jutted out of his chest and back. The pain wasn’t akin to any he’d felt before. His first two deaths had been quick. An arrow through the skull and water entering his lungs to finish off the job. A decapitation carried out with surgical accuracy. Dream, for as cruel as he’d been, had shown him his own type of mercy. His father, distracted by his brother’s inflammatory taunts and aiming for him, either to scare him or to silence him at long last, didn’t get the luxury of choice.
Having been stabbed through the guts, Tommy knew that his death would be a long one. No vital organ had been hit, but in that little alcove of madness his brother had carved out in the hill behind the presidential podium, there was no one with healing potions at hand. Just him, his family, and their deafening grief.
Distantly, he could hear his brother ranting. Something about how that was supposed to be the crescendo to his forever unfinished symphony. His little brother’s demise was meant to happen, of course. Tommy was too much of an extension of Wilbur to be spared at the end of his tragedy. However, his death was meant to be a far-off thing. Down among the people he’d sacrificed two lives for, at the hands of the Blood God maybe. Or perhaps due to one of the explosions his older brother had set off himself. He’d been meant to die as the president of their fallen country, and he found some satisfaction in the knowledge that his refusal of a title he’d never wanted in the first place somehow disrupted the flow of the narrative. His brother’s hands must have been twitching in irritation when Tommy stepped off that podium and handed that role right back to him to do with as he pleased.
His father was more somber. He was clutching Tommy to his chest with trembling arms, begging his wife not to take their youngest yet, promising as many sacrifices to her as it took to work that miracle. Phil wasn’t a bad man. But he bore the same fatal flaw as the rest of them: he was selfish. He begged for a divine blessing to spare his son, as if that wouldn’t have made his sacrifice null. Maybe it was because Tommy still held the stubbornness of a child, what with being only fifteen and all, but he resented that. The people down below them, fighting off Techno’s Hellish hoards, were his people. They’d been his friends, his comrades, some had once been his enemies, but through communication and a shared experience of the horrors of war, they’d now come to an understanding. Their lives were worth a thousand of his. At least that, Wilbur had gotten right.
Perhaps that was just the pain speaking. It turned Tommy far more bitter after all.
Instead of the pity and apologies that he was receiving from his father, he would have preferred a final mercy. A quick delivery into the arms of his mother.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t speak to request as much.
Blood was clogging his throat. Every time he opened his mouth, more bubbled up, so all he could manage were some weak gurgles. Had he been able to speak, he would have used his final moments to tell his brother to get his head out of his ass and go be the president he wished he could have been before they’d been exiled, before his son burned down the flag, before Quackity was executed at the Red Festival, before it all. And then, if he had any energy left after knocking some sense into him, he would have assured his father that his forgiveness could be earned if he simply stabbed a sword through Tommy’s neck next. That hadn’t been his favorite way to go in the past, but now that blood loss had been put on the table as an option, he’d come to appreciate the efficiency of it.
His father had run out of tears by the time darkness enveloped him. His arms still held Tommy to his chest tenderly, and his upper body was still shaken by his sorrow, but acceptance had draped a veil over his face. He was no longer begging. He was quiet.
Wilbur was too busy ranting about narratives and unsatisfying endings to notice the moment Tommy slipped away. It was better like that. For some reason, he didn’t want to find out what his brother’s final words to him would have been otherwise. Trapped for four years down in a damp, narrow, and dark ravine with him had given him enough of an insight into his mind to know that it wasn’t a place he wanted to venture in ever again.
Sight left him first, then sound. When the warmth of his father’s arms abandoned him, he grieved the loss more than he’d grieved for his own wasted life.
The last sensation to go was the taste of blood on his tongue.
Tommy had always been a religious guy. Growing up with a goddess for a mother tended to have that effect on people. In a way, he had always known that death wouldn’t be the end for him. He grew up on stories of gentle embraces and eternal peace, and he’d fantasized about talking his mother’s ear off as she accompanied him to his final resting place plenty of times. He thought he knew what to expect.
And yet the other side was nothing like what had been promised to him.
It was calm, sure. An endless expanse of flowers in full bloom. It was beautiful, maybe. But there was no warmth to it. It lacked a sky, a horizon, and a clearly defined source of light. There was no pleasant fragrance wafting through the air, nor any air in general to fill his lungs. There were no other souls there waiting for their turn to be reaped. And, worst of all, his mother wasn’t there.
For a moment, he wondered if she was just too busy. He knew he wasn’t the only one who had fallen to the war that day; the explosions Wilbur had set off had been devastating, and so had been Techno’s betrayal. What once had been a flourishing small town was now nothing more than rubble, and all of those who’d fought to free it from tyranny or who’d simply come around to see what would happen after were caught in that devastation. It was the ultimate proof that Death always discriminated in its picking. The powerful and cruel remained untouched while the common soldiers fell like flies. That was the truth behind war.
But, even after waiting for what felt like forever, weaving together useless flower crowns (he stopped having someone to gift to once Fundy decided he was too much of a grown-up for it and could no longer wear them if he wanted to have any hope of earning his father’s respect), nobody came.
How foolish it had been of him to hope for some mercy in death when life had never shown him kindness.
---
Gods of Death were a dime a dozen.
Each with its own specific role. Some were deaf to the cries of grieving mothers. Some had stone-cold hearts to remain indifferent to the youth of the fallen they were in charge of escorting to their final resting place. Some had no hands to avoid the bribes of the greedy. Some wore veils to avoid giving clues to those with more manipulative souls. And then there was Tubbo.
Among the gods of death, he stood out like a sore thumb.
There was no darkness to his appearance. He didn’t decorate his horns with sorrow, nor did he carry around mighty weapons to forcefully reap what would never be freely given. He always found such displays of power and violence to be gaudy and excessive. Besides, he needed no force with his charges.
Tubbo was in charge of the animals. All those beings who didn’t fear death one bit. Who couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t see it coming. He carried the oblivious, the lost, the innocent. He was the busiest even among his coworkers, and he buried himself in his work with as much gusto as he’d seen from some of the gods who created all the beauty of nature he was in charge of disposing of. It was easier to act as if he was satisfied with the lot he’d been assigned in his existence than to bemoan the complete absence of connections he’d been cursed with.
Efficient as he was, he’d been left to work alone. And none of the souls he met could hold a conversation. They just followed him, silent, content, finally at peace. There was nothing more he could have wanted for them, and yet, in a way, he resented them for their silence.
Now, imagine his surprise when one day, like so many before and so many after, he found in his Limbo somebody new. They were young, their spirit was that of a fighter, but they seemed happy at the idea of letting that go. They were tired, disappointed, and sad. But none of those feelings were connected to the loss of their life. That seemed to be nothing more than a mundane task for them, no more heavy in their mind than having to decide the pattern in which they wove together the white chrysanthemums within their reach. Although the thing about them that stuck out the most to Tubbo was undoubtedly their species. They were human-adjacent. Pure humans no longer existed; however, they were close enough to one that they undoubtedly understood the implications of death.
And yet there they were, making crowns that they refused to wear upon their head.
What an odd sight that was.
Curious, Tubbo approached them. He made sure to stomp his hooves upon the ground so as not to startle them by speaking too suddenly into their ear. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to keep them from jumping at all, but he wasn’t quite sure what else he could have done to alert them of his presence more softly.
The boy’s eyes were wide pools of deep blue terror. Tubbo’s first assumption was that he must have realized then who- or better what he was and where they were. But, as it turned out, their fear was more akin to a child being startled by finding a stranger suddenly in their home when they’d been expecting to find their mother behind them. “You’re not Kristin…” they whispered.
Kristin… Tubbo vaguely knew that name.
She was one of the veiled goddesses of death. She took on the clever ones. Those who boasted about their ability to bend existence to their will. Those who defied fate at every chance given. Who escaped the reaping once or twice, or were bold enough to claim they’d chosen the moment themselves. She was there to remind them that Death wasn’t to be trifled with. As reapers, they weren’t their friends or allies; they were simply their chauffeurs. And to think them moldable was a sin of hubris.
Among them, Tubbo vaguely remembered hearing rumors of Kristin being an outcast as she’d fallen for a mortal and blessed him with eternal life. A gift that wasn’t hers to give. And, as if that wasn’t enough, she’d given him two kids as well. Most gods regarded those cursed creatures with open disdain. They were a blemish on their perfect order, a mistake.
Tubbo was not one such god. He couldn’t care less about the gossip they all circulated or the cracks that revealed themselves in their facades with every century that went by. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why he was left at the fringes of their kingdom to work in solitude.
Gingerly, he strode toward the other while producing a sunflower from his palm. He hoped that a flower that symbolized longevity so strongly wouldn’t be too inappropriate at such a time. The bright golden hue of its petals just reminded him of the young fallen soldier in front of him. He offered the other the flower with a smile. “I’m not, my name’s Tubbo. But maybe I can help you as well!”.
The boy accepted the flower with a small smile, which immediately fell once he heard Tubbo’s offer. He sighed, something so resigned that it made him look far older than he likely was. At that moment, his death seemed even more unjust. Knowing as he did that it hadn’t even been in the plans for that day but had been supposed to come a couple of years down the line didn’t help the twisting in his guts.
Every reaper, upon spotting a soul, knew the story of their life. Tubbo was no different. He could recite every detail, he could untangle every string that Fate had masterfully tied around him, and he could tell, without a shadow of a doubt, that he’d taken someone else’s place. Mortals were not supposed to be able to do so, but, he supposed, being the son of a goddess had to have its perks.
“There’s not much help that can be had now” the blond boy pointed out. There was none of the bitterness Tubbo had expected accompanying that sentence. It was stated as a fact, just as nonchalantly as one would the color of the flowers all around them. Truly, this mortal had accepted the fate that had befallen him, even if it was not his own. He was ready to take it in stride and only truly let down by the wait and the absence of his mother’s welcoming arms.
Tubbo understood then why he’d been assigned to this boy.
There was no deception to ignore, no deafening cries that needed to fall on deaf ears, no bribery he intended to trust forward, and no pity to be had that was wanted by the other. By all accounts, the boy standing before him was no different from every bee, wolf, cow, sheep, and whatever other animal one may think of that he’d once escorted to the other side. First of his kind to achieve that. How remarkable. How sad.
His death would soon prove to be pointless, and he would one day be forgotten by the history books once even the flame of his immortal father was extinguished. Perhaps so, even before that. And yet, he’d accepted as much, and he did not resent Tubbo for being the manifestation of that unremarkable ending.
As kind as it was, that forgiveness hit Tubbo in a way he didn’t think was possible.
They were alone in that Limbo. Two souls nobody would miss if they were to vanish one day. Entwined only in that one moment in time. And yet, a small treacherous voice in the back of his mind whispered: ‘What if?’. It didn’t have to end there. More influential gods than he had defied the order before. They’d involved themselves with mortal matters at their own detriment. They’d followed a longing that was so intrinsic to their nature and yet never meant to be satisfied, the desire to belong.
One day, Tubbo would likely regret his decision.
One day, he would look back and think it silly to threaten his position among the mighty for one chance at a connection with a boy who was not perturbed by death.
That day was far into the future, however. For the time being, his smile grew wider and he offered the boy a hope life had never deigned itself to give him.
“I want to give you another chance”.
The soldier boy looked at him in shock. “What’s the point? I don’t regret taking my brother’s place. I will not make a different choice” he boldly claimed.
“What if, next time, you’ll have a friend by your side that you won’t wish to part with?” he inquired.
The boy gave him a skeptical look. “And who would that be?”.
“It could be me”.
He laughed. “How forward… why?”.
“You’re just as lonely as I”.
No more needed to be said.
---
When Tommy stepped foot into the Dream SMP for the first time once more, there was a short brunette by his side. A promise, a bet, a longing, that was all there was tying them together. However, one day, maybe, there could be a beautiful friendship there too.