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naoknowswhat · 2 days ago

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Homesick

a fanfic for @rozugold's protege!tommy au, taking place after this comic. thank you rozu for letting me write this; twas an honor :D (disclaimer: just because a coping mechanism is presented does not mean it is a healthy one!!) the songs i had on repeat while writing, if you want music to accompany your reading: x x x

The first morning in his own home, Tommy is quieter than he needs to be.

He gets up just before sunrise as usual. He eases out of bed and laces up his boots and has already tiptoed halfway to the door when he stops. He . . . doesn’t need to be quiet anymore. The shuffle of shoes, the creak of the door––they don’t threaten to wake up another person because another person isn’t here.

It’s just Tommy, alone, in his little dirt house. Like he wanted.

Right?

Yes, of course, exactly like he wanted. Tommy shakes his head to clear the thoughts, certainly just scraps of doubt left over from the night’s bad dream. He lets the door slam shut behind him to prove he can be loud.

But the nagging feeling doesn’t go away as he starts his walk. The air is softer here, almost warm. The dirt gives way under his feet, unlike the rocky shores of Snowchester. As he watches the sun start to rise, he half expects to hear Tubbo calling him with another stupid nickname and an overly cheerful grin.

But Tubbo’s not here to call him inside. That’s his own job now, to snap himself out of staring into empty space, to shut off the nightmare replaying in his head like a scratched disc stuck on repeat. It’s his job to go back home, to make breakfast, to start the day’s chores. Normal life things. Things he needs to be able to do.

So Tommy goes back to his little dirt house and bakes a potato and works on organizing one of the chests he had dumped his things in after leaving Tubbo’s cabin in the snow.

———

He doesn’t sleep well that night, to say the least.

Tommy lies on his back on the mattress he’d shoved into one corner, staring at the ceiling. The dirt looks wrong, out of place, not the familiar wooden beams whose knots and grooves he had memorized. It’s too quiet. There’s no soft snoring to fill the silence, and when Tommy reaches across the blanket, the space beside him is empty.

He’s cold too.

Which really shouldn’t be a surprise; Tommy’s been cold for a long time now. But here, on the floor of his dirt shack, it’s different. It crawls under his sweater, clings to his bones. There’s nobody to shift closer to for warmth, no one to tug the blanket away from halfway through the night.

It’s . . . lonely.

Tommy shuts his eyes and rolls over. He’s just not used to it yet. It’ll be better in the morning.

———

The next day, he spends his time on his dirt floor, stacks of cobblestone and old pieces of armor scattered around him as he tries to make sense of the clutter. These chests are a mess. It would be easier with another pair of hands, someone to talk with to make the time pass faster. He can feel his communicator in his back pocket, but he pushes the thought away. Tubbo’s probably busy with nuke preparations anyway.

He doesn’t get much done so he keeps at it the next day, and the next, until the chests are meticulously ordered and his chores are agonizingly boring and the silence makes him want to scream.

That’s why he finally comes up with a new plan. It came to him on one of his walks as he stared out at the once-familiar landscape, now filled with buildings that had sprung up when he was gone. What better way to feel normal again than to start a new build? At the very least, it will get him out of the house and keep him occupied, keep him doing something.

———

Work on his hotel starts the next day. Sam keeps him company while he completes his tasks, foraging for flowers and chopping down trees. It’s nice to have someone to talk to. He’d missed that.

It’s nice to have something productive to do again too, something to justify lying in bed at the end of the day. His time at the worksite lengthens. He realizes that if he just goes straight to the hotel on his sunrise walks, he can squeeze more work in before breakfast. Or during breakfast, since by the time he starts working it’s too much hassle to pause to eat anyway. But it’s fine, he tells himself. He’ll eat an apple once he finishes this stack of wood. He’ll go to sleep after the floor is finished, after the first walls are done, after he’s so tired he won’t need to lie awake for very long.

———

It’s a few hours after sundown, Tommy standing in the middle of a field looking for poppies per Sam’s request, when his communicator vibrates. Tommy’s breath catches, but he lets it out again when the screen reads awesamdude instead of Tubbo_.

awesamdude: HELLO TOMMYINNIT… ARE YOU STILL WORKING?

TommyInnit: YEP

Tommy smiles. He has a feeling Sam adopted his “robot builder” persona to cheer Tommy up, and he can’t help but admit that it’s been successful.

awesamdude: YOU HAVE WORKED HARD. PLEASE REST, TOMMY

awesamdude: TOMORROW WE WILL MAKE THE DYE

TommyInnit: noooo i’m getting the rest of the flowers rn just hang on

awesamdude: IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU SLEEP

awesamdude: YOU HAVE WORKED HARD. PLEASE REST, TOMMY

Tommy scowls. He feels a familiar heat rising in his chest, the same feeling he’d get when Tubbo tried to push too hard during one of their talks. The same feeling he had when he . . . when he last talked with his friend. It’s been almost a week now.

“I just– I need some space, man!” he’d said, words tumbling out of his mouth before he had time to think, chest hot and hands clenching. He’d never been good at thinking before he spoke, even with Dream. “I can’t learn how to take care of myself when you’re always trailing behind me! I don’t need you to baby me anymore, okay?”

Tommy can still see Tubbo’s reaction in his mind. The shorter boy standing there frozen, mouth open to say something before snapping it shut. If only Tommy had been better at doing the same.

Tubbo had sheepishly toyed with the edge of his sleeve, eyes on the floor. When he spoke, his voice was so much gentler than Tommy’s had been.

“Yeah… No yeah, I– I’m sorry ‘bout that. I’ll stop.”

Tommy glances back down at his communicator. Something mixes with the heat inside him, a sick feeling twisting up from his stomach. He squeezes his hand into a fist, bruising the flowers he’d gathered.

TommyInnit: i’m fine

He shoves the communicator back into his pocket before he can read Sam’s response.

It’s sometime past midnight when Tommy finally heads home.

———

On his walk back from the meadow, a drop of rain hits his face in the darkness. He flinches, swipes at it, pulls his scarf up higher. What starts as a light drizzle quickly turns into a downpour, and before he can find a tree to hide beneath, he’s soaked. His sweater clings heavy to his skin, water seeping through the green button-down underneath. His arms are drenched and freezing. The sick feeling returns.

Dream’s gonna be upset when he has to repaint them.

Tommy freezes.

No, that’s not right. Dream is dead. Nothing needs to be painted ever again.

He shakes his head, water spraying from his hair as he does so, as if that will clear Dream’s voice from his brain. He walks faster, gripping his own shoulders to try to stop his shivering.

When he finally makes it home, there’s something disappointing about the empty house. Almost like a tiny part of him had anticipated another presence in the room, a cheery greeting, a cup of warm tea with too much honey held out by familiar hands. Instead, the silence sounds a bit like a bunker he used to know. His shivering won’t stop.

He dumps his tools on the table, next to a forgotten slice of pie Sam had given him the day before. He peels off the waterlogged sweater, tosses it over a chair to dry, and sits on the edge of his bed. His fingers shake as he toys with the sleeve of his button-up. He should return it to Tubbo. Make more of his own clothes, stop freeloading all the time.

He’s not sure how long he sits there, staring at his hands. The static in his head gets too loud for awhile, makes time all fuzzy and blurred. The static keeps building, his teeth chattering, the dirt walls doing nothing to keep out the chill of the storm. He knows he has to do something, that if he keeps sitting here it’s only going to get worse, that this is what he’s supposed to be working on––

Without thinking, he puts one palm on top of the other. The fingers curl around themselves. The hands are too similar in size, instead of one smaller and scarred from burns, but he squeezes them together anyway. He falls asleep that way, trying not to cry.

———

Ignoring the occasional shutdown, Tommy’s doing great. His hotel is coming along quite nicely, which is what’s most important anyway. He knew the long hours of work would pay off; Sam just didn’t have the same drive that Tommy did. He’s sure Tubbo would agree that the exercise is good for his body, and besides, Dream had always said that food tastes better once you’ve earned it.

awesamdude: HELLO TOMMYINNIT… THE HOTEL IS ALMOST COMPLETE. I WILL TELL YOU WHEN IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO REMOVE THE SCAFFOLDING.

TommyInnit: YEEEEAHHH

awesamdude: I AM LETTING YOU KNOW SO YOU CAN INVITE ANYONE TO THE UNVEILING IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO.

Tommy pauses, rereads the last text. He sighs.

TommyInnit: sounds good sam nook!!!!

He grabs his tools and sets out down the Prime Path for the day’s tasks. The door slams extra loudly behind him.

———

Tomorrow is the hotel’s unveiling, and Tommy can’t sleep. He’s just excited, he tells himself, like the butterflies you get on the night before your birthday. Or maybe the sleeplessness is from the old mattress on the dirt floor, lumpy and uncomfortable. He used to be fine sleeping on hard bedrock; when did he become such a baby?

He sits up with a sigh, running a hand through his hair to get the curls out of his face. The candle beside his bed flickers weakly. It casts distorted shadows across the chests stacked against one wall and the workbenches lining the other. His house is smaller than Tubbo’s cabin, smaller than he had remembered. It’s snug, cozy even.

It’s suffocating.

It’s nothing like the spacious bunker.

Tommy’s head jerks. No, no. This is his home. He should feel happy, safe, content.

That’s how he felt in L’Manberg at least, and that’s the last time he’s felt at home, so shouldn’t it be the same now? He doesn’t know. He’s not sure Tubbo would know either, running away from Doomsday to build a new life where its smoke couldn’t reach. Well, what does he know?

He misses L’Manberg. He misses the bunker.

He misses Tubbo.

Tommy lies back down and squeezes his eyes shut, but the back of his eyelids just look like L’Manberg’s walls, Wilbur’s uniform, Tubbo’s laughing grin. The light from the candle flickers like the lanterns in Pogtopia and suddenly Tommy’s crying without knowing why.

He reaches for the communicator lying on the floor. Hesitates. Takes it.

Maybe he left the closest thing he has to home in a snowy cabin twenty miles away.

TommyInnit: hey bee boy

TommyInnit: are you busy tomorrow

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