Work Text:
From the beginning, he knew things were different for him.
Out of all the people in the Glade, he never had a name.
Never blurted out the core sense of his identity as he regained consciousness in The Box and gazed upon the Maze. He didn’t have anything the others did. Everyone’s memories were muddled, wiped even, yet there was a semblance of something under all that nothing.
Techno remembered golden medals, trophies of sorts. Prized possessions and titles. Quackity always fiddled with his fourth finger, as if two rings should be on there. Tubbo with his random facts and details of worldly items the Glade didn't offer. Shelby’s yearning for a pet she had left behind. And Phil reminisced of a blank face, a woman, someone he loved deeply and grieved even deeper.
Though, he had nothing. Not the knowledge of his brown hair and browner eyes until the reflecting water told him so. No recall of anyone important in his life—only gaps and ripped seams.
So the Gladers, Phil in particular, picked a name for him. Dubbed him Soot after the dark marks that stained his face when he first appeared to them.
With this, he lived on.
It wasn’t living, to say. More, enduring. He endured a routine in this fielded hell. With the morning visits to Techno, a farmer in the Gardens, the evening conversations with Quackity by the campfire over a cup of moonshine, and the nightly talks with the Glade’s leader, Phil. Then, in between all this was running. Running through the Maze Walls that encased them inside this off-grid home. Mapping the left, right, lefts; noting each turn and corner so one day, they would find an exit.
Despite his busy routine, the hollowness always made time for him.
Sunrises with Soot swinging in his hammock, thinking back on empty dreams as the horizon bled orange. Months spent mulling over what he had lost, what was taken from him.
Limited progress with the map-working, cycles of living off weekly supplies, training the Newbies that arrived each month too. Everything stood at an impasse.
But then he showed up.
Accompanied by a loud siren, a boy rose from The Box.
Blond hair, wispy and loosely curled. A pale face with a cleft chin. And those blue, blue eyes. Eyes that reflected the sky and all its clouded crevices.
The boy, much younger than the last, panicked. Something in Soot squeezed as this boy whimpered at the harsh sun rays and hotter glares from the Gladers surrounding The Box.
“Where the fuck am I?” the boy spat. Layered and matted. Fear stationed in between that façade of confidence and demand.
His voice. Such roughness, such familiarity.
“Will anyone answer me or what?” he continued, fear seeping further into his tone.
Wil.
As Phil heaved the boy out of The Box, a wedge lodged itself inside Soot’s head.
Something sharp and cold. Flashes his eyes couldn’t keep up with, neither could visualise nor understand. Echoes of dead conversation and simpler times. Times involving this boy.
“Do you remember your name?” Phil gently asked, waving off the crowding Gladers.
Soot clenched his fist tight. Tight enough so his fingernails pierced his palms and itched against the trickling red.
The boy’s face furrowed. An expression too close to Soot’s own. The creased brows that enriched with every passing moment of nothing coming to the mind. Bitten lips of sudden frustration. Wrinkles to the forehead as concentration lead you nowhere.
Then it stopped. The boy’s face slacked, brows twitched back to their normal position. Something Soot wasn’t acquainted with. An expression of remembrance.
“Tommy,” the boy bit out. Certain in his word yet uncertain where it came from.
And the veil shattered.
The simple utterance from a stranger. It hauled another hit to his head, digging the hole even bigger. Cutting into his skin with more incompletion. More reason for Soot to believe something was missing. A part of him misplaced, absent from fulfilment.
With this expanded emptiness, it brought something else. A word he could only hear leaving Tommy’s lips. A name.
Wilbur.
The next hours hurt more than the years without answers in the Glade.
He didn’t know what to do. The key to his identity, to his own self, his name, had been lost to him for two years.
But now the name Wilbur tasted sweet on his lips. It felt right. Slithered some solace into the vacant spots. All because a Newbie sparked something in him. A Newbie with a face too familiar.
Wilbur watched from afar as Tommy handled the news. His new fate of nothing but the Glade from now on. The three rules they had, the jobs and routines. He couldn’t look away from him, from the back of Tommy’s head.
His eyes watered at the unmatched gaze. It bothered him too much. Everything about this kid, his speech mannerisms, the way he moved, fiddled with his hands, tapped his foot to a steady beat on the floor, tousled his hair out of nerves. It wasn’t new.
A hand clasped on his shoulder, causing him to flinch.
“Soot, you alright?” he twisted around.
It was Shelby. The only woman in the Glade, second-in-command to Phil, who stood beside her. They both anchored him in his moments of panic when he came up The Box years ago. Shelby steadying his breathing whilst Phil stayed by his side for it all.
“It’s Wilbur,” he blurted out before he could stop himself.
“What?” Phil asked as Shelby softened her grip on his shoulder.
“My name,” he pushed, “my name is Wilbur.”
Instead of the relief he thought would free from his chest, it made it heavier. Anxiety sunk deeper inside of him, doubt and concern following closely. A burdening weight pressed against him.
Shelby’s face broke out with glee. “You remembered?”
He faltered, nodding as his hands shook.
“Wilbur,” Phil stated with a growing smile. “Wilbur,” he repeated, sounding giddier as he did. He laughed, breathy and full of toothful grins. “Nice to meet you, Wilbur.”
He didn’t share their smiles or even the enjoyment at this breakthrough. He felt sick.
“What provoked it?” Phil replaced Shelby’s grip on both of Wilbur’s shoulders, holding him still with an open expression. “A dream? Nightmare?”
His eyes flickered away from Phil’s. Though, Shelby’s gaze wasn’t any better. He trusted them both, more than himself. More than the Maze pathways, the water in the forest streams and the sunsets. But the thought of saying it aloud stung. It scared him.
If he voiced it, then it was real. Then it wasn’t just mindful speculation, a mad man’s conspiracy.
“It’s okay. Take your time, Wilbur,” Shelby said, giving him a patient smile.
He sighed and averted his eyes once more.
“It’s the kid,” he whispered, voice wavering. “Tommy.”
“What about him?”
“I remembered my name because of him.”
“Soot- Wilbur,” Phil corrected himself quickly, “why would Tommy cause that?”
“I don’t know,” he muttered, lost. Conflicted by every new thought flying past him. At all the arguments and possible reasonings. “But he did.”
Phil hummed shortly, pondering something. “Well, my next order will be useful to you then,” he said as his eyes wandered to where Tommy was with Sam. “You’re the one in charge of training the Newbie.”
“Phil—” Shelby attempted to interrupt.
“He has to.”
Wilbur froze. “No, no, no,” he begged, shaking his head with a wince. “Phil, no.”
The grip on his shoulders tightened. An anchoring hold against the riptide pounding in his head.
“If Tommy is the cause of you remembering your name, then something is up with you and him,” Phil said earnestly.
“Phil, please,” he pleaded, throat constricting. He looked over to Shelby, who shrugged, face remorseful. There was so much a second-in-command could do.
"Start with a tour. After that, it's dinner, the campfire and then set up where he sleeps. Tomorrow you'll show him the jobs," Phil listed off. "You're doing all of this, Wilbur."
With the ending note of his new name, he gritted his teeth.
It was a taunt, a test from someone. The people that sent up the supplies and Newbies through The Box, the Gods who opened up those Maze Walls each morning and closed them every night. Their presence summoned this. His regaining memory tied to puppet strings, pulled and tugged at the River Lethe’s tides.
“If it gets too much, I’ll come and join you.” Shelby gave him a reassuring nod. “Now go and give him the tour,” she finished as Phil pushed him towards where Tommy stood.
He hid his hands in his trouser pockets. Fingers trembled against the fabric. He stepped forward, each taking him closer to the kid that rustled his normalcy.
Wilbur stopped in front of him, drawing the Newbie’s attention.
Tommy looked up at him, head tilted far further up than it should be for Wilbur’s height. It was weird. Similar to if you misjudged how tall someone would be; remembering them to be taller or even yourself as shorter.
Blue met brown and Wilbur grimaced at the shade. Such a simple colour, the blue in everything in the Glade—the water, the sky, Quackity’s beanie, book bindings and mushroom tops. But here it meant something else.
“Who’re you?” Tommy asked, tone challenging.
“Wilbur,” he supplied, stuttering as he almost said his prior nickname. The name Tommy’s presence destroyed. He kept his face blank, devoid of any strains. “I’m here to give you the rundown.”
“The old guy already told me the rules,” Tommy said.
His lip twitched. “So if I were to leave you and ask all the other Gladers to not answer any of your questions, you’d be able to navigate your way around here?”
Tommy scowled. “Big Maze, forest, buildings and a farm. How hard is that to navigate?”
“Fine then, I’ll just leave you—”
“Wait!” a shout stopped him in his step. He fought off a blooming smile. A smile he hadn’t known before, one almost reserved for a single person. “Come back and tell me shit.”
The tour didn’t go as Wilbur expected. They were always awkward. Uncomfortable under the blaring sun, filled with unnecessary questions and philosophies of why they were here. But Tommy subverted his expectations.
They kept close to the shade at all times, Tommy bouncing around in the forest shadows; he made interrupting comments instead of questions. Quick-witted jokes and inappropriate remarks as Wilbur explained the ways of life in the Glade. Quips that amused him, statements which he laughed at until his stomach ached.
The kid was funny. It was nervous humour, he could tell. A coping mechanism to deal with having your memory stolen and forced into close proximity with strangers in the middle of nowhere. But slowly, when Wilbur joined in on his jokes and even became the subject of them, the nerves between them both eased.
And Wilbur loved every second. Despite how he winced every time Tommy's arm brushed against his, how he fought to bury the softness that prodded at him with a single touch, he still loved it.
As they reached the Gardens, Wilbur waved at Techno, the Track-hoe who dyed his hair with pink flowers and would spade you to death if you somehow got it wet.
“So your job is farming wheat?” Tommy asked as he picked up a hoe on the floor. “I could do hoeing all day.”
“Don’t word it like that,” Techno said, disgusted.
“Why not?” Tommy quipped back, smirking. “Why can’t I hoe? It would be inappropriate if you’re misinterpreting my words, Technoblade, especially since you're—”
Wilbur placed his hand over Tommy's mouth before Techno had enough reason to hit him across the head with a shovel. Wetness slimed against his hand.
"Tommy, what the fuck!" he wiped the spit on the other's clothes, glaring at him.
"It's what you get for silencing me," Tommy said, his grin widening at Techno's amused huff.
He hated this, he hated this so much. Not because of the teasing or laughter mocking him, but because it felt so familiar. So homely and normal. A daily occurrence. It tormented him.
Wilbur shrugged off the storm in his head. “I’ve still gotta finish the tour before dinner.”
Surprisingly, Tommy let himself be dragged off into the distance, feet stumbling over the long grass. His compliance didn’t help Wilbur’s growing headache.
At the tour’s end, Wilbur managed to convince Tubbo to take Tommy for the rest of the evening. Having someone around his age should help. Plus, his headache had emerged into a migraine. He left the campfire early, pointedly avoiding Quackity and the cups of moonshine left undrunk.
Wilbur lay in his hammock gazing up at the dark sky. No stars ever inhabited the black. No constellations or patterns that Tubbo had drawn out for him once from his fractured memory.
Every time he closed his eyes, the pain soared. Flashes hid under his eyelids, white specs and moving pictures. He rolled to his side, face pressed against the sheet. The coldness worsened too. The feeling as if someone should be tucked to his side, a hand clasped around his arm and a face buried in his chest.
He loathed it. So fucking much.
“Wilbur Soot!”
He flinched at Tubbo’s loud voice. Head still pounding, he sat up and two kids stared back at him.
“Shubble said she won’t tell Phil you ditched your duties if you set up where Tommy sleeps,” he relayed. “Apparently she still remembers the time I got trapped in a hammock so I’m not allowed to touch them.”
Wilbur sighed and nodded, waving goodbye to Tubbo. Leaving both him and Tommy alone.
“Can I have a hammock close to yours?” Tommy asked, startling him.
“You can but…” he trailed off, not sure how to word that he didn’t know if Tommy wanted to be near him. If his weirdness all day hadn’t driven the kid off. “I’ll set it up.”
He chose the trees to his left, a small distance from his hammock. Wilbur slept on the edge of the forest, close to the building where others slept in beds and sleeping bags by the Gardens. He preferred to be woken up by the bird’s songs and the sun peeking through gaps in the forest ceiling. Not the Maze Walls movement.
As he finished setting it up, Tommy jumped into his. Only to twist and fall straight into the mud. He scoffed out a laugh and got into his own hammock, not even attempting to help the boy up.
“Goodnight, Tommy,” he mumbled, his smile stretching as Tommy grumbled back a bunch of unrelated swears.
For the first time in all the years he spent in the Glade, Wilbur fell asleep with that same smile on his lips.
He didn’t think anything of bringing Tommy to the Wall. It was a tradition for Greenies to carve their names on the Maze Wall, to reclaim the identity stolen from them. He thought it’d be a normal visit, a trip they do before he showed Tommy the jobs he could begin to train for if he liked it.
But, of course, it wasn’t.
As Tommy gripped the knife and etched his name into the brick, the throbbing in Wilbur’s head returned. Sharp intervals of thuds, aches and splinters.
Flashes pricked at his eyes.
Spliced images of a pencil gripped awkwardly in a fist, a shaking misshapen O and a Y that looked more like an X than anything else. Hours spent at a wooden table, books in front of them, a larger hand pointing at sentences and sounding out each syllable, waiting for the younger to repeat with their mispronunciations and flaws.
It hurt. It hurt to see, to envision and blink away. For it to mesh with the sight of Tommy struggling to perfect the circular O on the Wall.
None of this made sense.
“Wilbur!” he rubbed at his eyes until he was back in the Glade with Tommy, who pointed a knife in his direction. “I did it, look I even put a smiley face.”
He snatched the knife off him, not trusting Tommy with the weapon. “Nice,” he mumbled, still slightly out of it.
“Now what?”
“Now I take you to people who do different jobs around here,” he explained as he began to walk away, Tommy quickly following behind him.
“Can I be a Runner?” Tommy asked.
He stilled. Wilbur turned around, eyes lowering to Tommy’s face. No child should be a Runner, should have the responsibility of leading the Gladers through their escape from this place. The danger of the Grievers festering inside the cracks in the Walls, their deadly sting and sharp claws.
Wilbur looked down at Tommy’s untied shoes.
“No chance,” he scoffed as he bent down to tie them up. “How many times do I need to show you the real way to tie them? You always do the bunny method and—” he cut himself off, mouth dry.
Where did these words come from?
The flashing memory of a kid with scraped knees, plasters over his cheek and sunburns on his nose.
“Wilbur?”
A child finally being allowed shoes with laces instead of Velcro. Proclaiming himself to be big now, a big kid, a man, despite how he was half the height of the elder. The teasing and ruffling of the younger’s golden hair—
“Wilbur!”
He blinked, no longer fuzzy. He stared into Tommy’s face, rather than the grass beside his untied shoes. Tommy peered at him differently than usual. Eyes filled with slight concern. Confusion in his frown and curiosity with his tilted head.
“You back with me?” he asked, softer.
Wilbur cleared his throat. His fingers ached, prohibiting him from finishing off the laces.
“I’m fine, I’m good,” he mumbled, more to himself than Tommy. His head spun. “Sorry, I don’t know what got into me.”
“If I knew my shit tying skills would make you practically have a fit, I would’ve asked Big Q to do them for me,” Tommy said. “And what did you mean by…” he paused, stopping himself. A breath lodged in Wilbur’s throat as he prolonged his silence, face scrunched up with uncertainty. “Nevermind, you’re just weird.”
Relief flooded through him. Relieved that Tommy didn’t question something Wilbur didn’t even understand.
He knew of parapraxis—a slipup in speech, revealing an unconscious wish or internal train of thought (all thanks to Tubbo’s random facts)—but this was more than that.
He bit his lip and got up off the floor.
“Come on, I’ll show you the Map Room.”
The Map Room was the building near the centre of the Glade, close to The Box. The room in which Runners relayed the memorised pathways and build the outlines of the Walls that encased them inside.
Tommy gaped at the creation in the middle of the room. The unfinished Maze model made of sticks and tree sap. His fingers trailed on the paths, brushing along the stick-tops.
“Why’d you want to be a Runner anyway?” Tommy asked, eyes still on the Maze. “Tubbo told me about the monsters. The things that have killed people before, stung them.”
Wilbur stepped forward, joining him by his side. “I don’t like staying in one place. This,” he grabbed Tommy’s hand and placed it on the perceived exit point of the Maze, “is the closest I’ll ever get to freedom.”
Tommy’s gaze lingered on Wilbur’s hand before he turned to face him. “But you could be a farmer like Techno which is so much cooler.”
“Then go bother Techno.”
“He won’t let me.”
Amusement flared in his chest. “Am I the second choice then?”
Tommy scoffed, fingers poking at the sticks. “You’re my first target. I’ve known you for two days and you’re the easiest to piss off.”
For some reason, his words filled Wilbur with warmth. Rather than annoyance or anger at being chosen to be tormented by a child, a lightness freed the tension in his shoulders. All because it was Tommy doing it.
“So you’re saying I’m your favourite?” Wilbur teased.
Tommy’s face flushed red.
“No! No way, fuck off. Tubbo’s my favourite,” Tommy argued, though his words were empty.
“Sure, sure,” he said, grinning.
Tommy glared and shoved him. “Shut up,” he whined. “You’re not my favourite.”
“It’s okay if I am, Tommy,” Wilbur continued. “I’ll accept you either way—”
“Shut it! You don’t even know me,” Tommy yelled with his own laughter.
Yet with those words, Wilbur’s grin began to fade.
You don’t even know me.
But he felt like he did. Like he knew why there was a small scar underneath his eyebrow on his eyelid, the origin of the little braid at the back of his hair, why it felt so normal for Tommy to push him and whine so childishly.
Feeling was different to knowing. To knowing why.
And that was something Wilbur couldn’t figure out yet.
He remembered more as nights quickly passed.
There was a guitar. Light brown glossed wood and strings. He sang someone to sleep. Hair brushed against his cheek as a smaller body hugged his side. A polaroid camera he brought everywhere with him—and someone always begging for photos. Printed pictures connected with fairy lights. One laid on his desk, it crumbled and chewed up, almost eaten.
He didn’t understand any of it. The unconnected streams should link to one big river, an ocean. But instead, it only brought draught.
It pained him to even think about, to ponder and try to recollect during the daylight. Tommy’s presence sometimes made it worse. His bright grins and infectious laughter. Everything made it hurt more.
Wilbur sat on a tree stump as Techno watered the carrot patch.
“Please take him,” he repeated for the tenth time in the last hour.
“No.”
“Technoblade—”
Techno splashed his watering can onto Wilbur’s trousers, wetting them. “No amount of your whining will get me to train the kid,” he said. “Tommy’s your problem.”
“He’s messing with my head,” Wilbur stressed as he pinched the bridge of his nose.
Techno quirked an eyebrow. “You’re letting a ten-year-old bully you?”
Wilbur groaned. “He’s not- he’s not bullying me. And he’s not even ten!”
“How would you know that?”
“Because—” he halted.
—because I helped light those eleven candles on his birthday cake.
It was a chocolate cake.
“I’m remembering things because of him, Techno, and I don’t like it,” he whispered, hoping for his quivering voice to be lost to the light wind.
Techno frowned, his expression darkening. “You’re complaining because you’re remembering?” his eyes narrowed. “Do you know how many of us would kill for that kinda thing, Wilbur?”
Frustration heated the back of his neck.
“Not when I don’t know why it’s happening! I don’t know why it’s him that’s causing it all.”
“Suck it up and make sense of it then,” Techno retorted. He peered over Wilbur’s shoulder and gave him a rounded look. “Tommy’s just finished with Foolish, it’s your turn.”
“Techno please—”
“Go.”
As he filled his buckets with the forest stream water, Wilbur hoped it would be over soon. After today, he’d be back to his daily running in the Maze. Though, he’d still be responsible for Tommy whenever he was free in the Glade.
He hummed a melody he had forgotten where from, four chords on an alternating cycle.
“I get the feeling you don’t like me that much,” Tommy said absently as he dipped his hand into the river. Wilbur stopped humming. “I tend to annoy people when I first meet them. And it’s been a while now.”
He froze. Body mimicking the coldness of the water.
Wilbur had heard those words before. Said exactly the same yet in a joking pretence. An inside joke, all humour with no doubt nor insecurity.
The river reflected gold. Tommy’s reflection.
“I don’t dislike you,” he muttered as he finished filling up his final bucket.
“But you don’t like me, do you?” Tommy persisted. “I irritate you, give you a migraine or something.”
An unwanted silence settled between the running stream and tweaking birds. There was some truth to Tommy’s words—being close to Tommy did something to his head. The migraines, the pain, headaches and aches. But he didn’t hate the kid. Nothing about him was hateable.
It was something else that caused this pain. A longing that only led to emptiness and more questions.
Wilbur shuffled and picked up a rock in the river. He placed it in Tommy’s hand, the water dripping onto the other’s clothes.
“Want to see who can get the rocks to bounce the most on the water?” he asked.
Tommy’s mouth parted open, almost to continue their previous conversation. The want to conclude whether Wilbur hated him, to rinse an answer from him. But his fingers close around the wet rock and he nodded.
“I’m gonna wreck your shit at this.”
It didn’t take long for Tommy to give up.
All his rocks sunk, no bounces or skips along the water’s surface. Whilst Wilbur’s reached the other end, skipping to the opposite side.
“This is rigged.”
Wilbur laughed warmly. “How is this rigged?”
“You’ve- you’ve coded this against me. Tampered with the rocks,” Tommy insisted, glaring at him and the rock that had just sunk again.
“I’ve what?”
“You’re purposely doing this to embarrass me."
He rolled his eyes, an inkling of a smile adorning his lips. “Have you ever considered that maybe you’re just bad?”
“Never.”
“Then start to.”
Hands shoved at his shoulders. Wilbur grinned as he fought against the other’s grip, pushing him back. Tommy shoved him again and he fell into the river. As Tommy snorted, Wilbur dragged him down with him.
The two giggled as their clothes soaked in the water and hair wettened. Yellow splices of the sun sought through the branches above them, shining solace onto his cheek. He floated on his back, despite the shallow depth. Tommy floated too, silent beside him.
“I don’t think you’re annoying, Tommy,” he whispered. Bleeding truth and fondness in each word. “It’s just complicated.”
“Good or bad complicated?”
He closed his eyes, embracing the flashes that hovered over him. Wilbur had skimmed stones with Tommy before on a beach, though this beach didn’t have sand. There was a special laugh kept aside for him—a spark of laughter that descended into breathless cackles. A warmth in his chest.
“A good complicated,” he murmured as the same warmth resided all over him.
Tommy hummed a response, a tune similar to the melody that wouldn’t leave his dreams.
Whenever he took breaks from running, Wilbur always found it hard to sleep the night before he returned. There was an itch in his legs, begging for the sun to already rise so the Walls open. Yearning to count the corners, note down the directions. For his chest to burst with breathlessness and stamina to be tested against the time of the Maze.
Just as his eyes closed on their own, his face pressed against his hammock sheet, crying came from his left. He sat up, alert, eyes straining in the darkness.
New whimpers sounded closer. Rustling of sheets and body movement. All spouting from the hammock closest to him.
Tommy.
Wilbur stepped out of his hammock. He moved over to him. Sweat dampened Tommy’s face. Golden strands stuck to his forehead. His eyes were clenched shut, wincing, and nose scrunched up, almost in pain.
“Don’t leave me here,” mumbled into the dark, a hiccup breaking the plead.
He reached a hand down to comb through Tommy’s hair. As his whimpers grew louder, he hushed him gently, attempting to wake him up.
“Tommy, hey, it’s okay,” he whispered close to his ear.
“Don’t—” Tommy squirmed against his hand. Tears rolled down the younger’s cheeks, whimpers caving into sobs. “Don’t let me forget—”
He woke up with a gasp. A gasping breath, air that wouldn’t inhale.
“Hey, hey, you’re alright,” Wilbur said softly, gripping onto Tommy’s hands. “It was just a nightmare, it was a nightmare and nothing more. You’re with me, you’re okay.”
More sobs left Tommy’s throat, more distraught than the last. He caved his head forward, leaning into Wilbur’s chest.
Wilbur moved closer, knees digging into the ground. He let Tommy wrap his arms around him, wetting his t-shirt with his tears.
Eventually, the sobs turned back to whimpers, then to the occasional sniff.
“Sorry,” muffled against his chest, a voice stricken and tired.
He threaded his fingers through Tommy’s hair. “It’s fine.”
Calming silence perched between them. Filled with Wilbur humming and Tommy’s steady breathing. As Tommy leaned away from Wilbur’s chest, he got up from the floor to get back to his own hammock. Yet a hand stopped him.
He looked down at the smaller hand latching onto his wrist. Tugging at him to stay.
Watery blue eyes peered in the darkness and Wilbur needed no words to know what Tommy wanted to say, what Tommy needed.
Without a moment of protest, Wilbur slipped inside Tommy’s hammock, squeezing into the gap the other left for him. It was warm.
He arched his arm around Tommy’s back, moving on instinct. Then let the boy lean forward before engulfing him to his side.
For as long as he knew, as long as he could remember, there was an emptiness each time he slept. A vacant space that no amount of bundled sweaters or jackets could fulfil.
Yet, all it took was Tommy tucked into him for the void to dull.
“I’m not leaving you,” Wilbur whispered, holding him tighter. “Go to sleep.”
And Tommy's breathing finally evened.
Wilbur thrived on the strain in his chest. The ache in his lungs and burst of energy in his legs.
The Maze Walls, although trapping him here, were also his only outlet. Sprinting past the cracks and cervices in the grey stone. Numbering the left and right turns he took as more moss and vines infested the Walls with every hour spent longer inside.
There was no talking in the Maze. No thinking either. Nothing except numbers and tallies were quickly jotted onto the notepaper. No contemplation of memories, of blue eyes and golden hair. Of Tommy and whatever he meant to him.
As the sky began to fade, Wilbur circled around Sector Four until he headed through the Maze Wall entrance to the Glade.
Phil waited outside with a canteen of water.
“You don’t normally stay out that late,” Phil muttered as Wilbur downed all the water.
He shrugged, still catching his breath. “The Walls don’t close for another five minutes.”
“You’re keeping it pretty tight though, aren’t you?” Phil frowned at him. He had that look on his face again, concerned disappointment. “You usually get out half an hour before.”
“Why does it concern you when I get out?”
“It concerns me in case you get trapped in there overnight, Wilbur,” Phil stressed his name, a glint in his eyes.
Wilbur clenched his jaw. He knew of the risks of staying out too late, he knew of the names crossed out on the Wall, that Phil and Shelby had to cut out themselves. Gladers lost to Grievers, to time, to disease and injury.
He knew. He knew too well.
“Every minute I’m not in that Maze, my head kills me, Phil,” he admitted. “When I have time to think, when I see that fucking- when I see him, it gets so much worse and I don’t know what to do.”
Concern flashed over Phil’s face.
“What’s wrong? What’s causing this?”
“You know!” he shouted, arms waving about in anger. Anger at himself, at the Walls, at that innocent boy that wouldn’t leave his dreams and filling memories alone. “It’s Tommy, it’s always been him.”
“Are you remembering more than just your name?”
He scoffed harshly, glaring at the man. “Phil, you don’t get it, he’s someone special to me but I don’t know who. And not knowing is fucking killing me. Tearing me from the inside.”
“You’ve known this kid for three weeks.”
“I’ve known him here for that long. Not outside, not—” he cut himself off, rubbed harshly at his face. “Not from before.”
Phil paused. “Before?” he stepped closer. “You think you knew him before all this?”
He doesn’t answer because he doesn’t know. He must have, he must have known Tommy. A younger version of him or someone strikingly similar. Another golden-haired boy. Another boy he taught to read and write, sang to, let order him about with a polaroid camera, tackled to the floor and teased to no avail.
But no one else came to mind.
He just wanted to cry out from frustration. Shout out to the skies until the birds fled from their nests, rip out his hair and kneel to the floor, dig into the mud and grasp at grass strands, for any answer. Anything at all.
“Wil?” a hand pressed heavily on his shoulder.
He wiped his bleary eyes, keeping them unshed. “Something’s wrong with me,” he muttered. “Something’s up with my head, Phil, and I don’t know what to do,” his voice broke.
Phil's arm curled towards him and he flinched from the contact.
“I can’t,” he whispered. He shook his head until his ears rang.
He walked off, his step breaking into a run. Wilbur ignored Phil's calls for him to come back, ignored the orange hues from the campfire and laughter that surrounded it. He needed the adrenaline to forget. To forget it all and not let anything unknown in.
Wilbur sat by his own little firepit. A pathetic fire made with loose leaves, sticks and bordered stones. It provided no heat, no warmth nor enjoyment that the campfire in the centre of the Glade brought. No laughter or shared stories of the day, jokes and spilling of moonshine. Nothing but empty flames glaring back at an emptier man.
Sticks snapped from behind him. Footsteps in the forest. He twisted around, neck aching at the sudden movement.
Tommy stood next to a tree, hands thrown in a mocked surrender.
“I was just told something really interesting by Big Q,” Tommy began as he rushed to sit next to him. Their knees bashed against each other.
Wilbur bit on his inner cheek, trying to keep his hands from trembling again.
Tommy didn’t take notice of his silence or the tense arch in his shoulders. Instead, he tilted his head to look directly into Wilbur’s eyes.
“Quackity told me you didn’t remember your name for a while,” Tommy stated. “Why?”
He sighed and picked at his fingernails. Hoping for it to bleed, for any other pained distraction rather than the constant throbbing in his head and heart.
“It was blank,” Wilbur whispered, voice hoarse and rough. “For years, I had nothing attached to me. No name, no family or friends, no possessions that I’d missed. Just… nothing.”
Tommy shuffled closer. “Then how’d you remember?”
“You showed up,” was what he wanted to say. He yearned to see if there was any shared recognition in those blue eyes, any familiarity, similar feelings of I know you but I don’t know why.
Instead, he swallowed it down and went with the alternative.
“You remind me of someone,” he said vaguely, avoiding his eyes and staring into the yellow flames. “And my name just came to me.”
“Who do I remind you of?” Tommy asked, soft and eager.
The yellow flames twisted to gold.
“Someone who meant a lot to me.”
Tommy’s shoulder grazed against his. “Like a brother?”
Wilbur winced. The word leaving Tommy’s lips cut deep. Screeched his eardrums, screaming white noise into his skull. He turned away. Though, not before seeing hurt flicker on Tommy's face.
“Or not,” Tommy mumbled, disheartened.
He winced once more. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I just don’t know.”
Tommy stayed silent. Only the crackling firepit and swaying leaves in the wind echoed around them.
Eventually, the burning in his head left.
“Come on, it’s getting dark, we should sleep,” he muttered, beckoning Tommy to follow him.
Yet, he didn't budge.
“Tommy—”
“I’m going to stay out here a bit longer,” he bit out, tone stinging and bitter. “You go. We both know you’re just dying to get away from me anyway.”
Wilbur sighed, too tired to argue and too tired to disagree. The buzzing under his skin swelled as he even attempted to think to defend himself from an argument he didn't understand.
He draped his jacket over Tommy’s shoulders before he left without a goodnight.
Coldness chased him to his hammock. His jacket covered another’s body instead of his own. But the lack of warmth came from the inside. His heart.
Flashes haunted him in the night. Flickers of tears in his sleep, of heated arguments, misunderstandings between two children, only slightly older than the other. Words of reconciliation and apology as the younger one buried himself into the elder’s arms. Guilt on the elder’s face and trembling fingers stroking through golden locks.
Wilbur awoke with a wet face. A face that bled more tears at the sight of Tommy hugging his jacket to his chest in the neighbouring hammock.
Tommy began to avoid him after that night. No longer did he wait outside the Maze Walls in the evening to pester him with how his day went or talk for hours in their hammocks. He didn’t sit next to him during dinner or visit the Map Room with him anymore.
Instead, he stayed with Tubbo. Clinging to his side and adverting his gaze whenever brown met blue across the Glade. He even started to bother Shelby. Walking with her around the fields, collecting water and probably skimming the rocks too.
Wilbur tried to pretend it didn’t hurt. But it did. It hurt more than the pounding emptiness in his head and flashes that pricked behind his eyes.
Especially during the campfire before Tommy’s one month anniversary in the Glade.
Tommy sat on the log beside Shelby and Phil. His hair was different. Still golden but cut shorter. Styled differently.
Wilbur leaned his back against his log, Quackity to his close right. Two glass jugs of half-drunken moonshine between them both. His eyes, glassy and fuzzy, never strayed from Tommy. It was different.
A shove to his shoulder snapped him out of it. Quackity elbowed him, “You haven’t even drunk that much and you’re acting as senile as Phil.”
He scoffed out a laugh, though he found no humour in anything tonight. “I’m just tired.”
“You’re still caught up on the argument, aren’t you?” Quackity rolled his eyes and took another sip of his drink. “Tommy looks like you, you know?”
Wilbur scowled. “I don’t see it.”
Quackity sat further up and pointed over to them. “Shubble cut his hair earlier after he begged for two days straight. Picture him with brown hair and it’s you.”
His scowl narrowed. “She cut his hair too short.”
“He asked for it that way,” Quackity said, grinning. “He asked to look like you.”
“Bullshit,” he grumbled and downed the rest of his drink. Quackity quickly snatched it off him.
“Oh come on, Wilbur! It’s normal. Purpled wouldn’t leave me alone for the first month, as were you to Phil. Techno was… Techno and even I was a bit clingy to Karl,” he exclaimed. “Tommy has just attached himself to you.”
“It’s different,” Wilbur whispered lowly.
“Different how?”
“Just…” he trailed off, a slight slur to his words, “…different.”
Later that night, when Wilbur failed to fall asleep, he didn’t stay silent as Tommy returned to his hammock.
“I remember you and that’s why it hurts to look at you sometimes,” he uttered lowly.
He let it simmer in the air and boil in the humid forest heat.
“That’s why I left you alone last week by the firepit,” he continued, “it’s why I stay longer in the Maze, it’s why I can’t think without my head trying to kill me. Because every single part of me wants to remember you.”
He ignored the sharp intake of breath from his left.
“Do you remember me?”
It was a simple question. One that had hounded him ever since he remembered his name. It kept him awake some nights, kept him running when his chest screamed for rest.
“Do you remember someone like me, Tommy?” he asked aloud, voice whimsical and fatigued. He sounded as sick as he felt. “Anyone before all this?”
Tommy didn’t answer.
“Maybe someone who loved you no matter what problems you caused, who made sure you didn’t starve or be bored for a single minute. Do you remember being the reason this person found their passion for music again?”
Eyes shut with exhaustion.
Wisps that enticed him in the dark swirled. Of times when only one person meant the world to him. Times similar to now.
“Sometimes I’d play alone and you’d sit there nodding your head to the beat. And then one day you were allowed on the piano. You and me, singing together, harmonising, you creating your own melody as you improved. I smiled at you when you didn’t see. I was so proud, so proud of you.”
He could almost see it. The practice room, the guitar in his hands, the hug they shared before they walked home.
“Do you remember that, Tommy?”
Tommy gulped.
“I remember, Wil.”
And that was all he needed to hear before passing out.
The next morning pained him in more ways than one. The headache of two causes: the drink and what he said at night. The memories he blurted out, the whinging of a broken man.
After breakfast, he approached him. Cornered him almost because he needed this to conclude.
“Look, Tommy about yesterday—”
“How’d you know?” Tommy interrupted, desperate and pleading. “How?”
Tommy looked as if he hadn't slept. And he probably hadn't. Those words he spoke, the memories he muttered into the air with a drunken breath, kept him up until the sun rose.
Wilbur bit on his inner cheek, curling his shaking fists so these words spat out of his mouth.
“Because I have those memories too.”
Tommy froze, eyes widened in something. In fear, astonishment, care.
As he reached a hand to grip Tommy close, the sirens from The Box sounded. He jerked backwards and followed the rest of the Gladers to the centre.
There was a girl inside. Younger than Shelby, a late teenager with blonde hair. Her name was Niki.
Tommy ran forward after Shelby calmed Niki down. Wilbur failed to hide his smile, it was finally Tommy’s turn to not be the Newbie.
“I’m Tommy!” he introduced, surprising Niki at his loudness. “I was the one before you,” he rambled more, occasionally letting Niki get a word in. Though his excitement made it impossible.
“This is my older brother, Wilbur,” Tommy exclaimed, smiling as bright as the sun pestering on the back of his neck. The heat soared, burning him.
Older brother.
His older brother Wilbur.
Tommy turned to face him, his smile faltering at the stunned expression on Wilbur's face. Yet then that questioning glance switched, his own words soaked in. How he said my older brother so casually, as if it were a fact, a normal thing to share and not something that had been echoing in Wilbur's head ever since Tommy arrived a month ago.
“You’re—” Tommy stumbled over his words, no longer concerned with the Newbie. Blue eyes suddenly watered, waves in the sublime. Wilbur’s chest constricted. “You’re my brother,” he whispered. “You’re my actual brother—”
Wilbur cut him off with a hug.
Tommy continued talking into his chest. “I always thought you were like a brother to me but I never said anything because I didn’t want to be weird,” he sniffed. “It’s real, isn’t it? That's why the memories and...”
Wilbur kissed the top of his head, eyes clenched shut and holding him, face brushing against his hair. “It’s real,” he whispered back, fond and complete. “You’re my little brother.”
They stayed there, holding each other tight with no intention to let go.
With every progressing day, that statement, those words of my older brother fixed deeper into his heart. Even when Tommy revealed to him one night, tucked to him, "I remember doing something bad with the Maze," Wilbur kept it to himself and gripped him closer. Then with the next Greenie coming up The Box in the passing month, one with black and white hair, gasping out Tommy's name, face full of a past life and unwiped memories, Wilbur did not care.
Because all that mattered was that every night a new memory of a blond boy with bright blue eyes swept him into the sunrise. A memory of his little brother. Tommy Soot. The same brother that planted potatoes with Techno, caused all the laughter around the campfire—from Shelby’s chuckles, Phil’s snorts to Tubbo’s breathlessness.
The one who completed that hole in his head, the emptiness that bled to his heart. A vacancy now filled.