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There are Christmas lights around the L’Mantree. 

Wilbur thinks Eret put them up. He remembers thinking about Eret sometimes in the dark of limbo, and when he did he always shook his head and scoffed to himself and muttered, “Remorse is a slippery slope, my friend,” and then Mexican Dream would start shouting or Schlatt would mutter shut the fuck up, dumbass, I’m sleeping (as if they could sleep in limbo) and Wilbur would banish those thoughts. Though perhaps that wasn’t particularly about Schlatt or M.D., he thought, but maybe because of the anger still present for Eret after all this time, despite the never-ending train tracks and the pain and the loneliness.

How the Wil of limbo would laugh at him now, he thinks, and presses some sunsprites into the tree’s branches.

Footsteps behind him. In the wars, he would have drawn his sword. He hardly twitches now. “Wilbur,” came Tommy’s voice, rising as if from a great distance, from a valley or trench. Strangely, the calm greeting makes him shiver.

“Tommy,” he acknowledges. His hands are stained yellow—his fingers like rays of sun. The bandages across his chest carry old blood like the essence of poppies.

“How long ago did you get back?” Tommy asks faintly. His weight draws nearer; Wilbur can sense it, in the same way he could sense the love of the universe in limbo. 

Wilbur prods the rest of the flowers into place and spins to watch Tommy. The boy is ghostly and armed. He looks like he’s still fighting a war, Wilbur thinks privately. Or like he lost the most important one. “Just a few hours,” Wilbur responds, similarly quiet. “Thought I ought to take a tour. Crater’s shallower than I thought it would be, have to say. This tree, though, it’s quite the same.” He grins with all his teeth.

Tommy had been moving closer during this entire rant. Now, he strikes out at Wilbur, and punches him.

Wilbur reels back. Stares. “What the fuck was that for?” he asks, rubbing his nose, indignant. 

“For—for dying, dumbass! You left—you left Tubbo alone with that green bastard! And—and Fundy misses you. Misses, because you haven’t told anyone—”

Wilbur holds up his hands. “I wanted to visit the tree,” he says, gesturing to the flowers. “I thought you wouldn’t be too interested, anyway—”

“Interested?” Tommy almost roars. “I—I loved you! I—” He pauses, as if something had just occurred to him. He’s looking at Wilbur’s hands. He continues, hushed, “How much do you remember?”

Wilbur considers. Here’s a sensitive spot, he thinks. What to say? I remember the unrest, is what he wants to say. I remember the way you looked at me, tiredly, hopefully sometimes, like I was still that—that Pogtopian general, that madman. And I remember Philza in his house. And the rainfall burning me. And being very sad, for such an oblivious spirit. He says, instead of any of those things, “I remember blue.”

Tommy’s eyes blaze with something distantly unpleasant, and very scorching. It’s refreshing after Schlatt’s drunken stupors and Mexican Dream’s—the best term is psychotic episodes, Wilbur supposes. After the cold, passive, empty void. Tommy snarls, “Yeah. I thought you would. Ghostbur died, you know. Got lost in the rain. Just like that.”

“Sounds like him,” Wilbur murmurs, glaring at the lines of silver on Tommy’s arms and distracted by trying to identify the new ones. 

“Fuck you!” Tommy hisses, like a feral beast. Wilbur looks up at his eyes again. “Ghostbur—he wasn’t you. He was nice. And maybe he was confused and couldn’t keep a thought process to save his life, but he—” Tommy stops, almost flinches. Continues quieter: “He never pulled me into some drug war, not once, Wil.”

Oh. Wilbur looks at him, assessing. I see. “You prefer him,” he states, matter-of-factly. Like it didn’t crush something buried very deep—the only hope that survived the void. “You prefer my ghost over me.” 

“No!” But Tommy looks as if he is fighting a war. He says, again, “He just wasn’t you, okay? He was—different.”

“Better,” Wilbur adds helpfully. He turns back to the L’Mantree, his hands curled into fists because—oh. He didn’t know things could still hurt like this, like the drug van falling. Like Eret’s betrayal. His nose was bleeding, still. “Well,” he muttered, almost mutinously. Folding with yellow fingers one sunsprite’s petal in on itself, like parchment. “I think he was quite stupid, really.” 

Tommy approaches and stands beside him, almost touching. The fight dead in him. “He wasn’t stupid,” Tommy insists, almost dreamily. Bitterness is a tree sapling in Wilbur’s throat, only growing. “He was forgetful. But I think only knowing all the nice things did him good. And I think forgetting all the bad things—there were times,” he goes on, “when he forgot what he’d just—what—” Tommy sounds choked, pained. “Dream would do things, you know. In exile. Burn my shit. Call himself my only friend. And it hurt like hell, Wil, it hurt like the sky falling, like lava, like Eret’s—” 

“Tommy,” Wilbur interrupts softly. And he almost says I remember. And he almost says I’m sorry. And he almost says I would have done anything, Tommy, anything—but he can’t. After all, he is the villain. He is the second traitor. And he is the better one. 

“No, Wil—shut up. I’m saying—he saw all of it. And he was my only friend when I wasn’t sure if Dream really was. And he didn’t have any fucking agenda. I could always trust that, at least. He—he saved me.”

“By doing nothing,” Wilbur says skeptically. 

“Yes,” Tommy snarls. “Yeah. I—I guess so. He didn’t need to. He was just—there. And, see, you’re plotting murder right now. I can see it. When I held that bow up to Schlatt’s podium and had that shot, the shot—you told me not to take it. But you had this same look in your eyes, like if you were—I don’t know. If you weren’t you, you would kill him. But I don’t need Dream dead, not like Schlatt. I just need…”

“Ghostbur,” Wilbur finishes, the void in his voice. Limbo in the cut of his shoulders. And instead of the million things he wants to say instead—things like I wish, like Prime, like sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry!—he says “Fuck.” And he turns away. Tears in his eyes, and they don’t burn this time. 

“Wil,” Tommy calls after him. “Wait, Wil—”

But Wilbur is pained. There might as well have been an arrow through his heart. Because he knows better than anyone the price of another man’s tyranny. He pays that price in the quiet pain of every crisp Pogtopia morning, when he is woken by the persistent ache in the tendons of his shoulder—remnants of respawn. He pays it in witnessing Tommy’s fear of Dream and Schlatt and him. He pays it in mimicking it, making that cruelty his, and then demolishing the man he was before. He pays it by looking into his father’s eyes as he dies.

Limbo is penance. 

He should have stayed in it.

“I’m—” he says, stops, chokes. I’m sorry, he would say, if he wasn’t so cruel. If he wasn’t as much of a traitor as Eret. “I’m going, Tommy. Find me if you want. I guess.”

The morning greets him stiffly. The sunsprites on the L’Mantree rot under the Christmas lights. And Tommy stays under the branches, looking at them.