Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It is the day after the sixteenth of November—a Tuesday, not that anyone particularly cares, given the events of the previous day. It is November the seventeenth, the third day of the week, and Wilbur Soot is quite dead. He knows he’s dead, too, and in all honesty, he likes it. Being dead, while not quite what he expected, starts loose and easy, free of the crushing weight of expectation and responsibility he’s grown so used to bearing, and Wilbur is more at peace than he’s felt for months. Maybe since he joined Dream’s miserable server, even.

The first few hours—or days, maybe; time is difficult now, or perhaps it isn’t real anymore—he thinks he’s dreaming. He comes to slowly, finds himself lying flat on his back somewhere chilly and dark, dark enough that Wilbur closes his eyes again and drifts. He doesn’t sleep (later, he will realize that sleep is not something he is allowed here) but he floats, half-conscious, hardly registering the noises of this new environment.

It takes him a long time, but when Wilbur remembers, he sits bolt upright with a gasp, hands flying up to claw at his shirt. His hands come away unbloodied, and the shirt itself is intact. Both stand in direct contrast to Wilbur’s last memory, edges sharp-cut as crystal in his mind: gunpowder in his nose, blood on his tongue, one end of the sword in Phil’s hands, the other plunged right into his heart. Maybe one of his lungs, too—he thinks he can remember, past his fading vision and the jumbled noises of withers and screams and Phil’s you couldn’t just win, the sensation of drowning on dry land, blood filling up his lungs and dripping down his chin as he gave his father, his blown-open tomb, and the corpse of his country one last smile.

(Drowning is a feeling Wilbur Soot is all too familiar with. He used to have nightmares about election night, about Punz’s arrow striking him in the throat, sending him lurching to his knees in the water, unable to scream, to breathe, his last words nothing more than a pathetic gurgle past the blood choking his lungs.

At least, he would tell himself, you were invisible. At least no one could see it happen. It was just Wilbur and the graceless brutality of his death, one damn lucky shot through the neck as he ran.)

He drowns as the president, he drowns in his dreams, and he drowns in Pogtopia too. It’s fitting, he supposes, that he drowns this final time too, hemorrhaging out in his father’s arms, the smell of his own burnt flesh, singed from the fire aspect of the blade, filling his nose. Refiner’s fire, he thinks, and my great finished symphony.

Wilbur wakes up in limbo, and at first, he thinks he’s dreaming. But the dead, he soon learns, don’t dream.

*

The afterlife is—well, different from anything Wilbur might have expected from an afterlife.

Truth be told, he never expected an afterlife at all. Wilbur does not believe in gods or higher powers of mystical bullshit, not even now. Especially not now. (He tried to pray just once, in Pogtopia. He built a shrine to Tommy’s god, to Prime, bent his knee in the absence of a bell to ring, looked to the ceiling of the ravine and prayed for Prime’s protection, or maybe for forgiveness. In death, he learns he was right—there is no such thing as gods. There is no one to hear him scream.)

The void—or limbo, as he’s taken to calling it, not at all fondly, isn’t mystical at all; it’s just bullshit. It’s a fucking train station, grimy and dark and impossibly infinite, with the constant echoing of dripping water and rumbling trains, with shadows that whisper and undulate in the corner of his eye but disappear when he turns to look at them, with dim red light and swirling smoke and nowhere to sit but the uncomfortable benches no one ever cared for in a train station.

Hell is a train station, one Wilbur can never leave, and he tries not to think too deeply about the implications of that. He dubs it limbo because that’s what it is, really, an endless wait for a train that will never come.

The funny thing is, he likes it at first. It’s almost peaceful, sitting there in the dark and the near-quiet, no one to put on a mask for, no expectations to live up to.

That’s the thing that gets him, in the end. The loneliness of it all. The endlessness. That’s what he wanted out of death after all—an end. The final chapter, the last movement of his symphony, finally completed and laid to rest alongside him. Wilbur wanted to rest, and there is no such thing as sleep in limbo. There is no end, no freedom, no peace. There is only Wilbur and the endless, ceaseless horror of existence. There is only Wilbur and the weight of his regrets.

(In the empty darkness of a forsaken train station, Wilbur falls to his knees and weeps. The only good thing about being so alone is there is no one there to watch him break.)

*

The thing about humans is they are perhaps the most stubborn creatures in entirety of the universe, and the thing about Wilbur Soot is that he’s got a stubborn streak a mile wider than most everyone else. When he sets his mind to something, he is not easily dissuaded. And so it is that even his misery and the itching, burning calling of business unfinished—words unsaid, family missed, apologies owed—are still no match for his conviction that he cannot go back, and more than that, he does not deserve to.

He's nothing but bad for that server and its inhabitants, he tells himself. He hasn’t done anything but cause pain and suffering to everyone he cares about, and all the others besides. No one should or would want him back, surely. (Perhaps this is Wilbur’s fatal flaw: his refusal to ask the opinions of others. Or perhaps it is simply his fear of what their response might be.)

But in a moment of weakness, as he lies prostrate on the empty tracks in feverish hope that a train will finally come and end his suffering, Wilbur wishes for a second chance. Perhaps somewhere, a god he does not believe in or some crumpled tinfoil idol is listening. Perhaps miracles are things that exist, or perhaps the universe is whispering: here is a new game; play it well. Either way, his wish comes true.

*

Later, after a press of a button and the devastation of withers and betrayals, but not before the stench of smoke and gunpowder has fully faded from the new hole torn in the earth, Ghostbur wakes up.

I’m barefoot, is the first thing he registers, staring blankly, curiously at his feet below him, standing with toes curled at the edge of a precipice.

The precipice, he next notices, curves around and on and away from him, and is actually a crater or perhaps a canyon of sorts. It’s not entirely interesting, so he moves on, flexing his fingers and peering up at the overcast sky above him. His chest hurts, he notes dully, but the observation sort of floats up and up and up and away from him, and Ghostbur finds he doesn’t really mind.

Ghostbur, yes, that’s his name. Or at least—he thinks so.

(There’s another name in him, one that lingers behind his sternum, pressing at his aching ribs and leaving a taste like ash and soot bitter on the back of his teeth, a name that rolls like quicksilver on his tongue. It feels just as deadly as mercury, this name.

Wilbur, some corner of his mind whispers. You were Wilbur Soot. You are Wilbur Soot.)

Ghostbur, he decides, is his name. It’s what he tells everyone as he meets them, voice echoing oddly in his own ears as though he’s underwater, or in a very deep cave, or perhaps has ears that ring from being too close to a blast.

That’s funny, Ghostbur thinks mildly. I haven’t been near any explosions lately. Or maybe ever. I think I would remember.

Because that is the thing about Ghostbur, really: he does remember things. The others might not think so, but Ghostbur remembers everything he needs to, everything important. He remembers Niki and her bakery, the smell of bread and salt from the sea, the wind in his hair and Tommy at his side. He remembers L’Manberg, and the Camarvan on late summer nights, and so, so much more.

(He remembers his father, letting him crawl into his bed during thunderstorms and night terrors and anxieties alike, shielding him from the world with his stormdark wings, driving a sword into his chest with eyes overbright but cheeks bone-dry.)

Ghostbur remembers, and what he remembers, he writes down, recording all the best, most important things in a cloth-bound book, corners smudged with his beloved blue. Yes, some of the details slip away from him, trickling through his fingers like smoke or gunpowder or perhaps sand (sand through a shattered hourglass, sand stained yellow with dandelion dye, sand poured in careful amounts to make—to make—) but he’s never been much of a details person, he doesn’t think. It doesn’t matter if he can’t remember the things people talk about, or why Eret is bad, or the reason why he’s come back. Aren’t ghosts supposed to have unfinished business, and all that? Ghostbur can’t remember his at all. But if he can’t remember it, surely it must not be important.

He forgets quite a lot of what Fundy yells at him, and he can’t quite recall the way Phil looks at him some days, and sometimes he can’t look at Tubbo in his ill-fitting presidential uniform, hair mussed up in an attempt to mask the horns on his head, but the important part is that he’s here, that they’re all here. They have a home again, a safe one, one he helped build, standing tall and proud on its stilts like a leggy newborn fawn. They’re safe, now. They’re home.

Aren’t they?

(After the sixteenth of November, after scars left by betrayals and swords and deaths and TNT alike, Ghostbur wakes up—or perhaps he has always been dreaming.)

*

(The rain pains him, he finds. It itches and burns against his skin, hissing like poisonous tears on his cheeks and soaking his tattered sweater. It hurts, but some far-removed part of him is used to that. To hurting. The feeling of burning, he finds, is a haunting kind of familiar he wishes he could forget as easily as the rest.

He remembers to stay out of the rain after the first time.

He forgets the way no one seems to care when he melts.)

*

Sometimes, the sad things stick, wrapping burr-stickler arms around his defenses, refusing to fall through the cracks and holes left in him from…something he can’t quite remember, really. It’s easier, Ghostbur finds, not to question it.

Listen, Fundy yells, angry tears slipping down his cheeks, and look at me! (He looks, and later he forgets what he sees.)

At some point, Phil murmurs mournfully, you took a turn, and things got messy. (He stands in the perfect preservation of a dead Pogtopia, dust undisturbed by his slow footsteps, and wishes to remember, if only for a moment. He doesn’t.)

Ghostbur’s getting quite good at pulling out sticklers, he discovers. It’s better to let them go, he reasons, than to try to cling to them, stinging nettles that they are. He lets the sad things slip away, but he never questions where they might be slipping to.

*

There are times when he doesn’t feel entirely himself. To be fair, self is a tricky thing for Ghostbur. He’s never been an entire person in and of himself, really—something between a lingering memory and a bundle of good intentions, a fragment of a greater whole, a wish—and that makes everything so much more complicated. But there are times when he knows that whatever he is, he is also something other, if only for a few moments. When the veil thins and his mind stutters and there is the hum of something infinite in his ears. When he feels, just barely, like he is more substance than phantom.

Fundy deserves a dad, whispers someone who is not just Ghostbur in the mildewing darkness of Pogtopia.

If you’re coming, you have to come now, Dream says, impatient and menacing, and something compels him to walk; someone else grins and shows Tommy all the tools smuggled in his inventory after Dream disappears into the mist and rain of the wilderness.

Someone else opens his mouth and sings L’Manberg’s anthem in hollow tones as Technoblade’s execution fails spectacularly.

That other presence is not there for Doomsday, not there to witness the destruction and the loss and the agony that Ghostbur feels for it. He is sunlight and laughter and childish hope for good things to come, and to see this place, this nation he rebuilt with hands stained with blue instead of gunpowder or blood, utterly razed?

One might say it broke him, but here is the thing about Ghostbur: he has never been whole enough to break.

He screams at his father, weeps tears as black as the scorch marks and the smoke all around him. He tries to sing the anthem one final time, only to find that the lyrics evade him in his sorrow. He watches one of the lanterns that has somehow escaped the destruction unscathed drift out over the wreckage, slow and sad, a beacon from better days.

It is then that Ghostbur makes the first decision of his own, wholly unto himself and no one else.

“Tommy,” he whispers, and the words are bittersweet on his tongue, “I take it back.”

“What do you take back, Wilbur?” Tommy asks, and Ghostbur does not correct him on the name, not anymore.

“Tommy, I want you to bring me back to life.”

(Maybe if Wilbur were alive, none of this would have happened. Maybe if Wilbur were alive, he could protect people better than an amnesiac phantom who can hardly lift a sword. Maybe if Wilbur hadn’t asked Phil to kill him, Phil wouldn’t have—he wouldn’t have—)

Ghostbur is first and foremost a creature of restoration and preservation. He wants things to endure, and he wants them to be okay, he wants those he loves safe and happy and content, and if he alone is not enough for the job, then he will find someone who is.

They go to talk to Phil.

*

There is a sword, and lines recited like a prayer, and the rain burns against his skin almost as badly as the fire aspect of his old sword as his father thrusts it into his back (as though piercing him where he cannot see will somehow spare them both the pain of remembering, of what they’ve already done on this very spot, of the true meaning of the scene they are playacting) and Wilbur Soot’s ghost dies, then, in the rain and the ruins and the corpse of a land he once loved, still loves, twice-rebuilt and thrice-slain.

It's fitting, he thinks, since he’s always been a shadow, a memory, an echo of something more, never a sound or person in his own right. A person with half of his soul hollowed out and removed, a one-part harmony with no melody to support.

The sword pierces him through, as cleanly as pinning a butterfly to a page, and he reaches out through the dark and the light and the pain and the void and there is a single glorious moment of starlit wings unfurling in blue and black galaxies and supernovas of light and Wilbur Soot wakes up.

The thing that calls itself Ghostbur sees, for that one moment, that chime of a bell suspended in darkness and inhalation, ribs expanding to accommodate life and lungs and being, and one final breath before death and after death at the same time, the other part of his soul. Ghostbur looks at Wilbur, and Wilbur looks at Ghostbur, cracked mirror to a shard, a reflection stretching into infinity, and the man who tore his very soul clean in half in a twisted, self-loathing attempt at salvation and redemption smiles, just a little.

It's a tired smile, one of realization and resignation bundled into one.

Go back, Wilbur whispers, hands on the shoulders of everything he almost wanted to be, everything he thinks he is not, this creature he perhaps didn’t even mean to make, all of his best intentions embodied.

(But what use are intentions without commitment to solidify them? Just as faith without actions is useless, so is Ghostbur a creature of light and air and fairy dust, and he will never be able to grow and learn and change, not really. The bad things simply seep out of the many holes left from his many missing parts, leaving him exactly as he was before. He and Wilbur are the same in that respect: as they are now, they both stagnate.)

They need you back, Ghostbur tries, confused, and his other half shakes his head.

The server is better off without me. Go home. (The way his voice wavers on the word home sticks in Ghostbur’s mind for but a moment, and then it is gone.)

I’m not enough, he pleads, voice breaking, broken, just like the rest of him, just like both of them, and Wilbur’s smile falters.

No one, he says tiredly, ever is.

As half of him is ripped away into a world of light and sound and sensation once again, as the memory begins to fade from Ghostbur’s ink-black eyes, Wilbur stares after him and whispers, Look after Tommy for me, won’t you?

Ghostbur thinks he can do that.

*

(There comes a day, a little ways in the future—or quite a long ways, for the Wilbur who wanders in a darkened limbo, clawing at the walls and the weight of his regrets—when a space begins to grow, and Ghostbur relinquishes himself to a dreamless sleep so Wilbur can dip his fingers up to the knuckle in the veil between worlds and try to say all the things he always meant to tell Tommy.

He doesn’t say them all, in the end. A single I’m proud of you will never be able to span even the space between two stars in the galaxy’s worth of things Wilbur wants to say, should say, a hundred thousand unsaid encouragements and apologies and confessions mapped out in foreign and unreadable constellations. For all his silver tongue and honeyed words, Wilbur Soot has never quite figured out how to say the things he really means, and so it will have to do for now.

There comes a day, a longer ways after that, when Tommy stumbles into that space in limbo made just for him, wobbly and wide-eyed and spooked as a newborn deer. Wilbur is there to greet him when he comes, and Ghostbur sleeps on.

There comes a day when the puppeteer pulls the strings once again and Tommy is ripped back to a world of life and light and pain, and Wilbur rends himself in two once more without a second thought. Ghostbur wakes—or perhaps, just perhaps, Ghostbur is the dreamed and not the dreamer.)

*

How are you here? Ranboo asks Ghostbur curiously, peering at this remnant of the leader, the son, the brother he never knew, the man whom everyone knows and no one wants to speak of.

Oh, says Ghostbur brightly, I heard Tommy needed me. I try and do the best I can to help!

Somewhere dark and lonely, the other half of his soul smiles.

*

(There comes a day still later when Wilbur Soot closes his eyes in a train station and opens them with a gasp in the predawn light of a server he thought he’d never see again.

This is my sunrise, he says, reverent.

The dreamer is finally awake.)

Chapter Text

When he sleeps, Wilbur dreams of Ghostbur.

It doesn’t happen on the first day after his revival, nor the second, nor the third. It’s not an immediate thing. It starts on a Tuesday, and isn’t that appropriate, isn’t that ironic, because Wilbur knows, Wilbur remembers, that his body, bloodied and greyed by ash and dust, climbed out of the rubble it had been abandoned in, clothed itself in a new sweater not rent and charred by his own blade in the hands of his father, and walked barefoot to the edge of a precipice.

Tuesday, the seventeenth of November, Ghostbur woke up.

Tuesday, six months later, Wilbur Soot is dreaming.

*

(There’s a streak of pure white in Wilbur’s hair, and seeing it makes bile rise in his throat as he thinks about it, as he looks at Tommy in the light of the rising sun and sees the matching streak marring his curls, physical evidence that Death has touched them both, that limbo has left its mark.

He’d tried to cut off his hair, long and tangled as it was, the only thing about him that ever seemed to change while he was dead. It makes sense, really—isn’t hair just more dead and dying cells? Some part of him will always be dying, it seems. He’d held a knife to it with a trembling hand, and then shears in a half-assed attempt at safety, but in the end, he let it be. Washed it, combed it, braided it, relished in the feeling of being clean, of the grounding feeling of hair twisting neatly underneath his fingers.

It reminds him a little of when he was a child and Techno would let him brush and braid his hair with clumsy fingers. When he grew older, better, nimbler, and Techno would sit patiently while Wilbur’s hands dipped and twisted and weaved.

(Techno doesn’t let him braid his hair anymore. It’s shorter now, shorn at his shoulders, and something inside Wilbur aches at the sight of it.)

The hair stays, and he tries to ignore the white, ignore the way Tommy’s eyes catch on it and his entire body shudders, if only a little.

Look me in the eyes, says Wilbur, and it’s only half a plea. It’s an offering, an outstretched hand, an invitation. Look me in the eyes, see me and not just the thing that marked us, the place that hurt us, the way I failed you. See all of me.

Look me in the eyes, Tommy, it’s been so long since you did.)

*

He wakes up in limbo, sitting back on that shitty plastic bench, back and knees protesting, and he does not cry.

Wilbur never dreamed in Limbo, never slept, so he’s pushed down that part of him that whispered slyly, even as he stared in wonder at a rising sun, you know this can’t be real, right? Why would anyone rescue you from a hell of your own making? It’s all a dream, a fantasy, and you’ll come home soon enough. You’ll be back where you belong.

He pushed it down, but it wasn’t enough to sustain the fantasy in the end, it seems.

Wilbur falls asleep in his father’s attic and he wakes up in limbo choking back sobs, coughing on the stale air and the smoke that shouldn’t even be in a Tube station, and part of him—most of him—thinks he deserves it. He certainly never did anything to earn a ticket out of his own personal station in hell, and why should Dream of all people be the one to let him out? Here Wilbur is and here he will stay, right where he always knew he’d end up.

Everyone moves on without him; Fundy grows up and Phil needs only the tiniest push to take up his sword and Tommy comes to visit but he’s more than happy to leave Wilbur alone in the dark and the rumbling and the dim red light. Everyone leaves and Wilbur stays, unchanging, stagnating, struggling to breathe as rot sets into his lungs and his fingertips, eating his heart that lies still and cold in his chest, until his fingers are clattering bones and his lungs are black from smoke and—

“Oh,” says a soft voice from the other end of the bench, and Wilbur flinches violently. “It’s you.”

He looks up to see himself.

Himself as he always felt, hollowed and grey and wan, fingers twisting nervously in his sunflower yellow jumper in a way Wilbur never allowed himself once he reached the age of fourteen and decided anxiety was not something he intended to display outwardly in the slightest. Himself as others must see him, a monster with fathomless black eyes, inky tears streaking his cheeks, half-substance half-smoke and all lies, smoke and mirrors masking the same old falsehoods, a smile with teeth that turned blood-stained when you blinked. Himself as he never allowed himself to be—all soft edges and gentle hands and heartbreaking kindness.

Himself, but not. A warped reflection, through a glass darkly.

(Or maybe he is the twisted mirror, the shattered shadow of all he was meant to be.)

Wilbur Soot sits on a bench in limbo and Ghostbur faces him from the opposite end, hands painted blue and eyes dripping black, and Wilbur could swear he can feel the rot of this place whispering around him, caressing his knuckles and gnawing his fingertips.

“Sorry to disappoint,” snaps Wilbur, curling stiff fingers into his sleeves—they’re not bare bones, they’re not decaying, they’re not a mess of blood and bone and pain from days of clawing at tacky tiled walls.

Ghostbur’s face falls, and an ugly part of Wilbur which might be all of him hums in satisfaction. Even your ghost, it croons, even your ghost can’t stand the sight of you. You were better in death than you ever were in life. This is where you ought to be, void-child.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Ghostbur murmurs, and Wilbur clicks his tongue.

“Yeah,” he says, bitterness ebbing into his voice through the thousand tiny cracks in the demeanor he’s so painstakingly rebuilt since his abrupt revival, “sure you didn’t.”

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Wilbur is bitter, as biting and acrid as ash on his tongue, down his throat, in his lungs. Ghostbur was everything Wilbur could never be, and everyone liked him better, and then he died, because no version of Wilbur Soot is absolved of blame, no version of him gets things like love and mercy and happy endings (but oh, how Ghostbur tried).

Wilbur was great and shining and golden and then he wasn’t. He was suffocating and breaking and spiraling and then he was dying, Phil’s blade through his ribs, crying with pain or maybe relief. Wilbur was never good, and then he was dead. Ghostbur was soft-spoken and thoughtful and innocent. He turned a blind eye when Fundy stole his potions for mischief without ever once looking him in the eye; he spent hours stitching banners in his sewer home; he hung lanterns in the sky and made stalls for the market and pressed enchanted compasses into the hands of those who needed to remember true north. Ghostbur was nothing but good, or at least he tried to be, and he wound up dead too.

(Darling, dearest, dead.)

And Wilbur is bitter.

He hunches his shoulders against the ever-present damp chill of the station and props his elbows on his knees, trying to ignore the way his back aches and his knees protest and all of his joints feel stiff and swollen in the way he had assumed was old age or some bullshit like that until Tommy socked him in the arm and told him to shut the fuck up about being an old man, you’re like twenty-five you bastard, you’re not allowed to complain about your dumb joints yet and Wilbur risked a brief glance in the mirror to realize he in fact looked quite similar to the last time he bothered to look at himself, during—was it his presidency?

Either way, he has the same bags under his eyes, the same face, largely unlined, if a bit hollow, the same exhaustion evident in every line and angle of his body. (He ignores the stark evidence visible in his hair that he is not the same man he once pretended to be.)

It’s simply that every part of limbo, it seems, just fucking hurts. Shitty benches that destroy his back, smoky air that clogs his lungs, dim red light that strains his eyes, the cold that creeps in through his tattered coat and leaves him shivering and miserably numb. Everything is hostile.

Ghostbur reaches out a hand, and Wilbur flinches away instinctively, recoiling from this soft and kind thing that he cannot reconcile with himself.

But Ghostbur only smiles.

“There’s a hole in your coat,” he whispers, sounding very, very far away. “You ought to get that fixed.”

Then his fingers brush Wilbur’s shoulder, and he jerks awake, safe and sound and alone in his father’s attic once again. No one is there to hear him sob. No one has been there for a very, very long time.

*

The hole in Wilbur’s coat is more than just a hole, really. The entire back panel is singed and tattered, hanging open to frame a gaping wound that is no longer there. He remembers scattered and oftentimes useless things from Ghostbur’s memories, but the coat’s journey is one he can recall quite well.

(This isn’t very warm at all, thinks Ghostbur, folding the coat away to exchange it for his favorite sweater, and I hid it from Dream, Tommy! Vacation is cold, you should wear it, pressing it into Tommy’s hands in a darkened shack.

Can I keep it, Dream? I was thinking of mending it. Tommy kicking hopefully at the ground, and then, a disbelieving laugh.

Mend it with what? Your shirt? Tommy, the entire back needs to be replaced. It’s ruined. You’re lucky I’m even letting you keep it.

You’re—you’re right, Dream. Thank you.

Then, through the gaps, he remembers the smell of ozone and smoke, the weight of the material settling over Ghostbur’s shoulders, shielding him from a downpour, remembers Tommy’s hands shaking as he tugged the coat over the ghost’s form, eyes red and cheeks smeared with soot.

This is yours anyway.)

It’s been through the wringer, this coat. A little bit like Wilbur himself, really, he muses, absently rubbing at his chest, tracing the edges of the burn scars that stretch across his torso beneath his sweater. They align perfectly with the ruined back of the trench coat, with the blue-stained patch job on the front of his sweater.

You ought to get that fixed, Ghostbur’s voice whispers in his memory.

It’s cold here in the arctic with his father and Techno and all of their secrets. It’s cold near Las Nevadas, with snow dusting the dead sands and icy winds howling between the shining white buildings. It’s cold, and Wilbur needs a proper coat, because there’s no sense in him freezing to death right after being revived, right? The touch of gentle fingers, cold through the coat and sweater on his shoulder; Ghostbur’s words—they have nothing to do with it. It’s just practical.

That’s what he tells himself, anyway, setting off to forage for materials in the Greater SMP. He’s sure Phil would give him anything he needs if he just asked, but Wilbur Soot has never been good at asking for help. He can mend his own damn coat.

*

He gathers thread from the spider spawner and digs up a needle from the chests in the Community House, and before he can think of where to get fabric to patch up the back, Wilbur finds his feet have brought him to stand before Eret’s museum. He stands, dwarfed in the shadow of the great quartz columns and stone-brick walls, and quite suddenly he feels very small.

Through the pillars, he can glimpse flashes of blackstone, hear the familiar crackle of ever-burning netherrack atop an achingly familiar van. He came here before, once, with Tommy at his side, the weight of words like family and brother heavy on his tongue. Now Wilbur stands on the steps to a monument built by a fellow traitor, alone, and finds that he is scared. He’s scared to go into this place on his own, to see the van and the walls and the replicas of rooms he remembers all too well, rooms he spent an impossible thirteen years trying not to think about, rooms that haunt his dreams still. He’s scared to remember all the things he lost, all the things he ruined.

He climbs the steps anyway.

(It doesn’t make him any less of a coward, he thinks, as he avoids looking at the room of chests and the room with lyrics scribbled on the walls in an attempt to replicate his looping hand, as he stands looking at the Camarvan for one long moment, and then two, but turns away before he lets himself feel.)

Wilbur finds what he’s looking for hanging right by the entrance, draped innocuously on the wall.

L’Manberg Flag reads the sign, lettered in Eret’s neat cursive. The fabric is soft between his fingers. It smells faintly of smoke.

It’s not the original, the one he spent hours sketching and drafting and crumpling up and restarting. There is no band of gold, no three X’s he added for his son. There’s a single golden heart against the black semi-circle, and Wilbur touches it gently, thinking of the time Ghostbur must have spent making the new flag. (He thinks he can remember sketches spattered with blue and pots of dye cluttering a little sewer room. He thinks he remembers careful stitching and fingertips that couldn’t feel the prick of a needle. He thinks Ghostbur was happy.)

This is not the flag of his L’Manberg. His L’Manberg died a long time ago, even before he pressed the button to blow it all to hell. Maybe it never existed in the first place.

This flag is not his and the country that rebuilt itself wasn’t his and the warmth that gathers in his chest as he looks at it and remembers things he did not do is not his, but Wilbur Soot has always been a bit of a thief, really, so he unhooks the flag from the wall and bundles it to his chest, feeling almost protective of it, which is stupid, he tells himself, because it’s a piece of fucking fabric.

(A piece of fabric he designed and dyed and stitched and mended and hung lovingly in the city he called his home, the nation he loved. A flag that mattered enough that someone cared enough to salvage it from the wreckage.)

He itches to leave the museum, to unhook himself from the claws of the memories that sleep restlessly in this mausoleum of stone and quartz and soaring ceilings, but still, Wilbur tarries a moment more.

He finds himself stopping in front of the wall of maps, eyes raking over all the ways the server has changed since he died. It’s grown, really, builds and paths sprawling outwards, with portals and roads, Las Nevadas and Snowchester, a trident highway, a giant sandy complex he’s never seen in his life hanging in its own map to the side, almost like an afterthought, which is startling given its sheer size.

Here, the arctic commune. There, what he knows to be what remains of Logsteadshire, though he strains to recall exactly what happened to it. To the right of the main map, there hang two smaller ones, with just as much attention to detail and vivid color.

(Eret always was one for details. She and Wilbur both loved maps, lists of places they’d never been, places they wanted to go. They used to spend nights atop the Camarvan when the boys where asleep, parchments spread out between them, mapping the constellations by the light of the ridiculous flaming hot dog they had built.

It had all come to an end, after—well. Most people know the story, to some extent. It’s recorded in this very museum, built into three blackstone walls, five devastatingly empty chests, and one wooden button.

Idly, Wilbur wonders what happened to the star maps. If Eret kept them. If he wants to know the answer.)

He recognizes these maps, if only by the surrounding terrain.

In the first, the crater that remained of L’Manberg after he detonated it. It matches up with his foggy memories of standing barefoot on a precipice, idly wondering where it had come from. His eyes trace the neatly inked lines of the edges, the stylized little buildings on stilts, the lettering of New L’Manberg signed with a flourish.

They really rebuilt it all.

And next to it, a newer one, an enlarged version of the current map. The crater is more like a canyon now, devastatingly large, embellished with jagged strokes of ink. Eret has included the obsidian grid in the sky and the tiniest flag drawn in the center of the hole. Wilbur notes with the smallest note of satisfaction that it has been labelled merely L’Manberg, rather than L’Manhole or whatever other bullshit people have been calling it these days.

It’s L’Manberg. It always will be, really, Wilbur thinks.

He lifts fingers that most definitely are not trembling and presses them against the rough parchment, index finger coming to rest over the M, thumb tapping the flag, pinky resting on the uniform lines of the grid. He wonders how long it will be until all that’s left of L’Manberg is ink lines on a map in a dusty museum where no one comes to visit. He wonders if anyone will care.

Wilbur bundles the flag tighter to his chest and hurries out of the museum, the echo of his footsteps falling to rest with the memories of all his failures.

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, Wilbur Soot was skilled at sewing. He mended all his clothes, made a jacket for Fundy to match his beloved cap, spent hours patching and stitching and hemming.

He was the one to design the revolutionary uniforms, putting thought into every line, every stitch, every golden button. He still remembers summer nights sitting in the van with the windows propped open, patterns and fabric scraps strewn around them on the floor, teaching Tommy and Tubbo how to pin and stitch and hem while Fundy slept in the back.

(Tommy kept stabbing his fingers with his needle, which meant Tubbo was always ragging on him for not using a thimble while Wilbur tried to convince his brother to let him bandage his bleeding fingertips.

You’re getting blood on the fabric, gremlin child.

So? It looks manly and strong now. Uniforms are supposed to get bloody, bitch.

He never could quite get the pinprick stains out. By the end, well. They certainly weren’t the most noticeable stains of the bunch.)

Tommy’s jacket had been too broad in the shoulders, Tubbo’s just a little too long, but none of it really mattered, because they all matched in coats of royal blue, sashes and boots and shining epaulettes.

So yes, once upon a time, Wilbur Soot was proficient with needle and thread. And it’s not that he’s forgotten any of that. But sewing is admittedly difficult to do when your fingertips sometimes go numb and your hands ache with the memory of days spent trying to break through impenetrable subway walls, when sometimes you look down at them and could swear that they’re nothing but bloody bones, that rigor mortis has set in and frozen them into clenched fists and curled claws.

Wilbur’s hands shake even on the good days.

He’s not as good a tailor as he once was. Now his stitches are crooked and clumsy and his fingers ache when he shakes his wrists out and the patch job on the back of his coat is messy and subpar. When he slips it on for the first time after mending it, he can still feel the cold seep in through the gaps in the seams, but it’s better than it was before, at least.

Ghostbur’s flag covers the back of his old coat, and even if it’s not perfect, it still keeps out most of the cold. It still covers the burn marks.

That’s enough for now, he supposes.

*

When he wakes up in limbo again, it’s less of a surprise, but just as unwelcome as before.

It’s the same as always. Bloody light, stale air, floor trembling faintly beneath his feet. The tally marks are new, though. Hundreds of them, smeared across the walls, the floor, in neat rows and scattered groups. They’re all stark blue, almost glowing in the darkness of the station. One for each day here since Wilbur’s resurrection.

Ghostbur sits silently on the bench, shaking hands folded in his lap, waiting for a train that will never come again.

Wilbur opens his mouth, tries to say anything at all, but he blinks and suddenly the blue lines of the tally marks have warped and blurred into smears of red across the tiled walls. Handprints. Bloody handprints.

(It doesn’t matter what I did, Tommy. I could claw at the walls. I could bash on the doors. I could scream for help!)

Another blink, pressing away what is definitely not the beginnings of tears, and they’re back to tally marks again, blue as summer skies, as lapis runes, as his old L'Manberg uniform.

(Nothing ever comes. Nothing ever helps you, Tommy.)

Wilbur’s hands curl into his coat sleeves—always the damn coat, here, always smelling of gunpowder and smoke no matter how much he washes it, and yet he can never bring himself to be rid of it—and his fingertips burn. He shuts his eyes tightly, swallows hard. His throat feels like two pieces of sandpaper scratching together, but he refuses to cry. He’s shed far too many tears in this godforsaken place. He won’t lose anything more of himself to limbo.

“You fixed your coat,” says Ghostbur quietly from behind him, and Wilbur’s hands spasm. Ghostbur’s fingers are cold through the gaps in the seams as he traces the edge of Wilbur’s ugly patch job, but he doesn’t say anything about the quality of the stitching.

“I did,” Wilbur confirms. His voice is raspy.

“I’m glad. It’s a terrible thing to be cold all the time.”

Wilbur closes his eyes again, tips his head back with a bitter laugh and a frustrated exhale all in one. His grip on his own arms loosens. He can’t feel his fingertips anymore.

“Why am I here, Ghostbur?” he asks, refusing to look at the spectral figure standing beside him. “Why am I always fucking here?”

Ghostbur says nothing, and Wilbur moves a hand to his hair, dragging it from the roots until his fingers are too snarled in tangles to go any further.

“I spent thirteen fucking years here,” Wilbur continues, pulling at his hair until it stings. “Thirteen years in this place, sitting on that stupid bench, knowing I did this to myself, knowing I’d never get out.”

Ghostbur stands in silence as Wilbur leans forwards, shakily bracing himself on the wall, hating the feeling of the grimy tiles beneath his palms.

“Sometimes,” Wilbur whispers, listening to faraway rumbling and the steady drip-drip-drip of Ghostbur’s blue onto the floor, “I think I never did.”

And still, Ghostbur says nothing at all. There’s the shuffling of feet and the rustling of fabric, and when Wilbur looks down, he sees Ghostbur sitting on the floor, knees drawn up to his chest. How many times had he sat in that exact position? How many days spent huddled on the floor, seeking any kind of relief from the cold, the damp, the endless aches and pains of sitting on the bench or trying to sleep on the concrete floors?

(Enough that he nearly sobbed with relief to lie in a real bed again. Enough that even one of the stern straight back chairs Phil had borrowed from Techno for Wilbur to sit in was a delight. Enough that Wilbur sinks to his knees now as they buckle beneath him and curls his fingers into a fist against the blue-stained wall.)

There is a long moment of silence shared between them as eerie sounds echo down the fog-obscured tunnel and Wilbur rearranges himself to sit, shuts his eyes against the almost-darkness.

Finally, Ghostbur speaks again. It’s almost a welcome relief.

“Have you seen Friend?”

He says it like a name, not just the word, and it rings familiar in Wilbur’s muddied mind. Something soft. Something…blue?

“Who?” he asks, opening one eye to peer at Ghostbur around his knees. He must look ridiculous like this, huddled on the floor like a scared eleven-year-old, terrified of the crashing thunder outside the walls of his bedroom, waiting for his father to come rescue him from the noise of the storm.

Ghostbur props his chin on his blue-stained knees, humming a little sadly. “Friend. They’re a sheep! And also my friend.” He says it completely seriously, and Wilbur holds in a sigh. A sheep, huh. Ghostbur chatters on, fingers playing with the cuff of his sweater absentmindedly. “There’s a sign, see, and things scroll across it a lot, and I can’t always remember what they say but that’s okay, I’m used to it.”

He points up to a flickering LED sign in front of the tracks. It’s blank, occasionally flashing with a jitter of red light.

“Tommy said he had Friend,” Ghostbur says, and there’s a fondness in his voice that makes something open up in Wilbur’s chest, a yawning, aching emptiness. It’s been a long, long time since he felt safe enough to show that kind of vulnerability. “I left Friend, but that’s okay, because Tommy said he’d get them to me.”

Wilbur doesn’t want to say anything, but he doesn’t think sheep go to limbo, and he doesn’t think Tommy’s going to be able to get Friend to Ghostbur.

“I haven’t seen Friend,” he says roughly. “But I’m sure Tommy’s taking great care of them. You know how he is with animals.”

Ghostbur nods, satisfied, and turns blank black eyes back to the blank black screen, looking for all the world like he’s simply waiting for the next train announcement. He looks. Wilbur thinks, like a taxidermied animal, black glass eyes and limbs posed in a fascimile of life, frozen in time and death for all eternity.

“Why is it blank?” Wilbur asks suddenly, peering up at the sign. He can feel Ghostbur’s startled gaze on him. “You said things scroll across it. What kind of things?”

Ghostbur’s fingers pick at the fraying cuff of his sweater. “Whatever people are saying about me. And sometimes about you, too.”

Oh.

“Why is it blank?” Wilbur repeats. He thought…surely people were talking about Ghostbur. He was the better of the two of them. It's not like Wilbur can ever forget it.

Ghostbur shrugs, a miniscule movement, hesitant and heartbreaking all in one silent admission. “If people don’t say anything then I suppose there’s nothing to show.”

And Wilbur, hardened and insecure and, yes, jealous as he is, feels an inexplicable surge of something—anger? protectiveness?—in his chest, white-hot and snapping.

“Well they should talk about you more,” he says fiercely. “You never did anything to deserve being forgotten.”

“Neither did you,” Ghostbur whispers sadly. “Neither did they.”

Wilbur ignores him, looking down at his hands, clenching and unclenching in the fabric of his coat. “You’re the kind one, not me.”

Silence falls between them for another immeasurable stretch of time, letting the weight of Wilbur’s words sink in. For a long moment, Wilbur wonders if he pushed too far, if Ghostbur forgot what they were talking about and will pipe up with some cheerful comment any minute now. And then—

“Where did he go?” Ghostbur asks suddenly, and his voice is less hollow than Wilbur has ever heard it, his black eyes unfathomably deep and searching.

Wilbur leans away from him the slightest bit. “Who? Friend?”

“Where did he go, Wilbur Soot?” Ghostbur says. “Where did the man with kindness in his eyes and calloused fingers stitching together a nation he called happy and free go?”

It’s the same question Wilbur has asked himself over and over and over again, in late nights in his office, in the twisting passages of Pogtopia, in this forsaken train station for thirteen lonely years. He swallows hard and finally lets himself answer it.

“I think he’s dead,” he admits. “I—I think I killed him.”

There is a horrible silence, then, one that makes Wilbur want to scream, shout, anything to break it, because the silence is as good as confirmation that he’s right. But in the end, he is not the one to break it.

“No,” says Ghostbur, tipping his head up to look once again at the flickering sign, the roiling mist, the dark and dirty ceiling. “No. You can’t see it, because you never look in mirrors, because you can’t stand the sight of yourself”—Wilbur flinches, unable to look away from Ghostbur’s profile, from the single black tear coursing its way down his ashen cheek—“did you think I didn’t notice? Did you think anyone could miss it? You can’t see it, but that man is you.”

He turns to face Wilbur, then, reaching out to pull one of Wilbur’s hands out of the depths of his coat and grasp it tightly, reassuringly. Instinctively, Wilbur threads their fingers together, holding onto Ghostbur’s hand like it’s a lifeline. It has been a very long time since someone initiated physical contact with him.

“I think,” says Ghostbur, deadly serious and yet cheerfully mild all in one, “there is kindness in you yet. And someday, they will all see it.” A quiet inhale, a shaky exhale. “Someday you will see it.”

I hope so, Wilbur wants to say, but the walls of his throat have closed up painfully, and he cannot get the words out. He merely holds Ghostbur’s hand a little tighter.

Days or maybe minutes pass, and Ghostbur blinks.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “but what were we talking about?”

Wilbur clears his throat harshly, trying to steady himself. “Friend,” he croaks. “We were talking about Friend.”

“Oh!” Ghostbur perks up excitedly. “Have you seen Friend?”

Wilbur shakes his head. “I haven’t, but I’ll keep an eye out. I’ll—I’ll ask Tommy about them.”

Ghostbur smiles. “Take care of him for me?”

Wilbur isn’t sure if Ghostbur means the sheep or Tommy, or maybe both, but he nods nonetheless. “Of course.”

(When he wakes up this time, his hand is stained blue from fingertip to heel where Ghostbur held it. The color flakes off easily enough, but Wilbur can still feel phantom fingers wrapped reassuringly around his.)

*

The woods are quiet this time of year. The leaves underfoot aren’t yet crunching with the onset of fall, but the buzzing chorus of midsummer bugs has quieted, somewhat, and so the soft rustling of branches in the breeze and the whisper of his footsteps in the grass are the only sounds as Wilbur walks. He knows this journey well. Through the forest, past torches burnt out long ago, across the stepping stone path through the river, making sure not to trip on the wobbly fourth stone. And then, suddenly, he’s there, face to face with the deteriorating dirt wall of the entrance to Pogtopia.

The doorway has lost its shape, crumbling away into an outright hole in the hillside. The torches inside are cold and unlit, probably snuffed or used up months ago, leaving the entrance a yawning gap of darkness before him, the dragon’s open mouth, ready to swallow him and leave him drowning in the memories locked within its twisting rock-walled esophagus, suffocate him with his past mistakes.

(Here’s the thing about Pogtopia: it was a dead thing, a dying thing, and sometimes it felt like it was trying to kill all of them as well. Even at the start it was a doomed thing, a perfectly preserved ruin, a monument to their inevitable failure. Nothing good ever stayed in Pogtopia, but the bad things? The shadows and the memories and the smoke and the fear?

They loved to linger.)

Wilbur takes a breath of fresh, crisp air, savoring the scent of oncoming autumn on the back of his tongue, and then he descends into the dragon’s maw.

Sunlight spills into the entrance room behind him, limning the unmade bed and chests hanging open in liquid gold. His footsteps kick up a stirring cloud of dust and dirt. It doesn’t make him wheeze like it used to—lungs laboring under the strain of too many cigarettes and rock dust and smoke and the gunpowder that stained his fingertips and worked its way under his nails—but he coughs at the gritty taste on the back of his teeth.

Pogtopia, it seems, has been rotting in silence, largely undisturbed.

(Maybe this ought to have been the grave he never had.)

He takes the spiraling staircase down in silence, listening to the rebound of his footsteps fading out into nothingness. The ravine is pitch-dark, but Wilbur knows the way by heart, footsteps sure and steady. When he feels the walls open up around him, he pauses, pulling his matches from his pocket and striking one against the rock wall beside him. It sparks to life, and in the tiny bubble of light the flame provides, Wilbur takes in the crisscrossing walkways and the stairs that twist away below him.

The walls are still covered in splintery wooden buttons of every color. The sight makes him feel distinctly ill. It’s been so long, and yet no time at all, since he wandered the walkways and pressed random buttons numbly, hoping for—what? The click-hiss-boom of rigged TNT? The final pull of Chekov’s trigger? That he would feel alive enough to kill?

The match burns down to his fingers, and Wilbur shakes it out instinctively, hissing at the searing heat. Darkness presses in around him, and his breathing echoes out into it. Pogtopia is a long and narrow space, far too similar to a train tunnel for Wilbur’s liking, and it’s an echo chamber as well, meaning he can hear his breathing easily as it grows rapidly more ragged.

His hands are shaking as he strikes another match, shaking so badly he drops three and breaks a fourth before managing to light the fifth.

This time, Wilbur kneels on one of the creaking walkways and pulls a lantern up by its chain to light it. The darkness recedes a little in the face of the flickering light, and he takes several moments longer than he’d like to admit to steady himself, sucking down the stale, damp air before he moves on to the next, and the next, and the next, until all of Pogtopia’s lanterns are burning once again, casting a dim golden glow into the cracks and crannies.

The darkness is still there, lurking beneath steps and huddling in chiseled-out nooks in the stone, but it’s bearable now.

Wilbur stands at the foot of the stairs, surveying the dust, the fallen rubble, the remnants of a life half-picked up and abandoned all at once.

“’My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,’” he murmurs, and he wonders if the dragon has shut its jaw just yet.

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair…

When he exits Pogtopia, climbing up into fading sunlight and autumn breezes, shaking the dust from his feet, Wilbur leaves behind him the smell of smoke, a smoldering pile of embers, and walls stripped bare of every button in the ravine. His fingertips are bloody and there are splinters worked underneath his nails, but something in his chest has finally come loose, setting free his lungs from its iron grip.

He doesn’t extinguish the lights behind him. Every lantern in Pogtopia is alight, and alight they will stay until they burn out for the last time, a dead thing finally put to rest.

The earth breathes easy, and Wilbur with it.

*

(In his old room in Pogtopia, he finds something he did not expect.

His bed, which Wilbur swears he left with sheets tousled and blankets hanging half onto the floor, is neatly made up. There’s a burned-down candle on the nightstand and a handful of dried poppies beside it. On the bed, under a tattered L’Manberg flag, rests the familiar shape of his guitar.

“Oh,” Wilbur breathes.

Carefully, he pulls the flag aside, takes in the shining wood, scuffed in all the same places, his name carved into the neck when he was nineteen and idealistic and setting out to see the world. There’s a polaroid tucked between the strings at the neck, and he tugs it free, sucking a breath through his teeth as he takes in that sunny summer day, all six of them grinning brightly in their uniforms, Tommy hanging off his past self’s shoulder and Niki’s joyful salute.

We used to be so happy.

He tucks the photo into his breast pocket, right over his heart, and lifts up the guitar.

Folded underneath it is a rumpled jacket of blue and gold, with pinprick bloodstains around the cuffs he never could quite get out. Wilbur knows it’s too short to be his own, knows it can’t be Tubbo’s because Schlatt made Tubbo burn his after election night. It’s just a little too big in the shoulders when Wilbur picks it up with trembling hands.

Oh, Tommy.

It looks like he got a bit of a grave after all.

And if he half-collapses on the bed biting his knuckle to muffle his sobs, well, there’s no one around to see it.)

*

Tommy wrinkles his nose when he sees Wilbur’s repaired coat for the first time, but otherwise he doesn’t say anything. Wilbur finds that a little disappointing, oddly, but mostly relieving. He’s not sure he cares to explain why he used the flag of a nation he pretended not to care about to patch his coat. It’s a lot of effort to put in rather than just getting an entirely new coat. But Tommy huffs and Tommy pointedly looks away, and Wilbur tugs the coat tighter around his shoulders and decides to take what he can get.

Tommy’s come to see him at the burger van, except there’s nothing to do, really, because Ranboo’s not about and apparently Wilbur’s not allowed to try to cook things without him anymore (you burn enough steaks and you get grill privileges revoked, it seems) so they’re both just wandering the woods around the van and Fort Big, picking their way beside the Las Nevadas borders in silence or meaningless idle chatter.

The sandy plains are icy cold, and Wilbur feels it in his bones. Tommy seems fine in his over-large coat, covered in some kind of messy stitching—is that fucking embroidery?—but a strong wind howls against his back, kicking up sand and snow flurries, and Wilbur can’t tamp down a shiver as it cuts through the messy seams.

“You’re stitching’s a right mess,” Tommy says, casting a baleful eye at Wilbur’s back.

“My stitching,” snaps Wilbur, very much not cold, thanks, “is fine.”

“I’ve seen children with better stitching,” Tommy replies, and Wilbur elects to ignore him, rather than point out that Tommy is technically a child himself. “I’ve seen fuckin’ zombies with better stitching, Wil. Techno sews better than you, and he’s got big fuckin’ hands, ay?”

“I’m not listening to you,” Wilbur says, marching past Tommy, headed back towards the van. “You are annoying, and this is me, ignoring you.”

“I could give a drunk ghast a needle and thread and it could make a better seam!” Tommy calls after him, jogging to catch up.

“Fuck you!” Wilbur yells, and somehow it turns into a race back to the van, sand dragging at their shoes and the cold biting at their limbs.

*

In true Tommy fashion, he doesn’t let it go.

He blusters and nags and badgers until Wilbur gives up the story, or most of it anyway, and then the prick steals Wilbur’s cigarettes and demands Wilbur come with him.

What the fuck, Wilbur complains.

Tommy harrumphs and rolls his eyes and says just fuckin’—just follow me, bitch, and eventually Wilbur does, because do you know, people think it’s always Tommy being the right-hand man and Tommy following Wilbur, but lately Wilbur’s been wondering if it hasn’t been the other way ‘round for a while now, and what exactly that entails.

They end up in Tommy’s dirt shack, and Tommy practically wrestles his coat off him and starts digging around in his chests until he comes up with a needle and thread, muttering things like incompetent and fuckin’ ugly and stupid face and who put this fucking thimble in my chest I’m gonna fuckin’, fuckin’ box Tubbo, I am, and there’s a warm familiar feeling curled tightly behind Wilbur’s sternum.

Tommy, is there a reason you’re holding my coat hostage? he grumbles.

Tommy swivels to face him, coat in hand and needle held threateningly in the other. Apparently he doesn’t get “coat privileges” back until Tommy has fixed the seams.

They sit on the floor of Tommy’s shack, Tommy stitching, still without a thimble, still pricking his fingers every four minutes, and Wilbur trying to remember songs on his guitar. It’s warm and golden and nice and reminds Wilbur just a little too much of those early revolutionary nights in the Camarvan, enough that he doesn’t bother trying to sing past the lump in his throat. When Tommy’s done, he thrusts the coat into Wilbur’s hands, swearing and grumbling about letting me do all the work, yeah bitch, I see how it is, and Wilbur ruffles his hair and slips on the coat over the sound of Tommy’s screeching. The stitches aren’t perfect, but perfect isn’t what he needs.

It’s better than before, and Tommy cared enough to help, and Wilbur thinks, just a little, that might be enough.

*

(Tommy finds him again the next week, inventory full of threads and needles, and at Wilbur’s raised brow proclaims he’s been trying to learn embroidery—look, see Wil? I’ve been practicing on this coat after I fixed it up, Connor told me it’s good to have something to do with your hands, and he’s a bit of a pussy but I reckon he’s all right—and Wilbur does not cry when he recognizes the coat Tommy holds up underneath the sprawling patterns of thread and the missing epaulettes, will never admit the tightness in his throat at the way Tommy embroidered over the hole from Punz’s arrow on election night, covered it with a crooked poppy in scarlet thread.

Figured it might help with your dumb old man hands, he says by way of explanation, and against all odds, Wilbur finds himself sitting on the floor of another van with a coat in his hands, but this time it’s not a nation, still not a home, and he’s attempting to embroider flowers rather than make a uniform.

It does help, over time. His hands grow more steady with the back of his coat as his canvas and Tommy as his very grumpy teacher. It feels a little bit like starting over.)

*

The last time he dreams of Ghostbur, he finds himself not in limbo, not on a train station out of hell, but rather standing at the edge of a very familiar crater. Beside him, a stream rushes, rocketing over the edge and arcing down, down, down into a waterfall that cascades over the rocks towards the bottom. Far below, there is bedrock and a single flag, still in the sheltered air of the canyon.

Beside him, Ghostbur stands in the orange light of sunset and smiles softly.

“Hello again,” says Wilbur, turning away from the ruins that overflow with life against all odds.

Ghostbur smiles softly.

“The lanterns are still floating,” he says, by way of greeting.

And he’s right. Far out over the crater, bobbing between the low-hanging vines, there are yet a few colored lanterns, glowing softly in the dusk. Faintly, Wilbur recalls lapis runes painted painstakingly onto the paper. Protection. Unbreaking. Mending.

“So they are,” he agrees.

The sun is setting. The water gurgles. Somewhere in the crater, a chorus of crickets starts up.

“Do you know why I’m here?” Ghostbur asks. “Why I’ve always been here?”

Wilbur swallows, unable to turn away from the lanterns and face himself. Because that’s who Ghostbur is, isn’t it?

“I think I do,” he whispers. “You’re me.”

“And you’re me,” Ghostbur agrees, “and neither of us is the other.” He reaches out, and Wilbur reaches back. Ghostbur’s fingers are cold.

“We’re two halves of a whole, you and I,” says Ghostbur. “You just need to let me in, really.” It’s a scary thing, to let someone in. Wilbur doesn’t say it, but he thinks Ghostbur knows it, because he continues. “I’ve always been here. I’ve always been a part of you. You just…forgot, is all, and that’s okay! I forget too.”

Wilbur forces down a lump in his throat, looking down at their interlocked hands. “Won’t it be like dying?”

“I imagine,” says Ghostbur mildly, “it’ll be a lot like living.”

“Okay,” Wilbur says. And that’s that.

*

Self-love and self-acceptance are not the same thing, Wilbur Soot has come to learn. Most days, he’s not sure if he understands either, but he’s trying.

Today he stands at the edge of a crater with a lantern in his hands. His palms are stained with lapis and his fingertips are numb.

You do not have to love yourself to first love others, he has learned. Love is a difficult and often fickle thing, and who can be harder to love than yourself, who you know most intimately, or maybe not at all? But perhaps he wants to try.

(If you will not let anyone else love you, then first love yourself, whispers a softer side of him, a hopeful side of him. And if you cannot love yourself, then accept yourself for who you are, and for who you will be.)

Wilbur Soot in his entirety stands at the edge of something that once was, that maybe still is, still could be, and he lights his little paper lantern, painted with swirling runes that are only the slightest bit shaky, and then he lets it go.

It’s a bit paradoxical, to make a lantern in memory of someone who never died—living men bear no ghosts, after all. Hell is empty, empty of its devils, because perhaps they were never there. The train station is quiet and empty. Ghostbur is not there, and he never will be. Ghostbur is not dead, and neither is Wilbur—but Wilbur isn’t exactly the most rational person. He did start a nation from a drug van, once.

He watches as the lantern floats out across nothingness, across devastation and ruin, across a special place that refuses, against all odds, to stop living.

He can smell flowers. The sun is rising. His coat is warm around him.

(Forget-me-nots cover a flag covers a hole covers a scar on a no-longer dead man’s chest, and forget-me-nots grow in the remains of a home, and in both cases, the hole is becoming a memory.)