#I will sprinkle in the fact that Tommy and tubbo are a qpr

[moltengoldveins]

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I blink, and the sticky-penny taste of blood burns the back of my tongue. My side is in stitches. One of my fingernails is cracked. That’s not the most painful thing about me right now but it’s just so annoying, and it catches on the leather of my axe hilt as I raise it to shield my eyes from the trailing light. White flashes against a graph paper sky, and I can’t see the city any more for the explosions. I can smell rot, and burning phosphorus, and wet dog. There’s a slight whistle in the air that means duck, now, Theseus, bend your knees to absorb shock- and a scream overhead as a skull lands close enough to rattle my head and pelt the back of my neck with gravel, right where the turtle shell of my helmet doesn’t cover. Over the ringing in my ears and the screaming I hear a steady tread, and I know it is my brother. His feet in those boots, his hand on that sword. His face in that mask. I raise my head. Chin up, jaw forward, shoulders loose, or the epaulettes will crease, Tom, stand up straight - and press my palm to the back of the other half of my soul. He shakes beneath it, tattered suit threads catching on fresh sparring calluses, the ones my brother gave a rare smile for. I scream at my brother. Obscenities, slurs- anything I can find to throw, accusations of broken promises. You said we would meet such and such time, I cry, you are early. As if he has done something surprising. As if I haven’t clawed, with stripped and twisted nailbeds, through the muck for the slightest hint of an advantage. As if the axe I hold isn’t stolen. As if I don’t know who taught me the art of deception. All is fair, I remember shrugging. All is fair. Tubbo’s shoulderblade shakes beneath my palm and I am a traitor, yes. But I could not in good conscience have been anything else.

-ometimes, you do the right thing and it hurts someone, kiddo. Doesn’t make it not the right thing. Doesn’t mean you didn’t hurt ‘em. Just means you gotta live with the-

My soul shakes in my hands as his home burns behind us. More than burns. It curdles. It twists and writhes in the unholy fire as the very earth beneath it is scraped away, and I want to weep. I am weeping, I realize, beneath the hoarse screaming - and so is my brother. There are tracks of clean white bone carved through the splattered mud across his mask. He weeps for what he is doing, for what I have done. Traitor, he calls me. And so are you, I reply. I’m a person, he cries. And so are we, I beg, we’re just like you. It isn’t true, I feel it in my gut as soon as the words leave my mouth. None of us have ever been people like my brother. I raise my hand to shield my soul as he thunders down on us and- 

there was a moment in the Pit, half an eternity ago. before our nation killed its dreamer. My brother had killed my soul, and he hadn’t even apologized. I’d been so angry. I’d wanted to kill him. I’d wanted to rip and tear and hit until he lost that damned look in his eye, and he’d shrugged his cape off like my hatred weighed less than the fur at his collar and I’d looked into his bare face and known he was a monster. Smug sonuvabitch, I’d thought, look at his eyes. He doesn’t even have the decency to have normal eyes. His fist connected with my face and Honestly, what was Will thinking, letting a fucking pig plan our war for us? He’d kill us all and he wouldn’t give a shit-

- he passes us by. Like a cannonball ricocheting past a fortification, he slams against my shield and is gone, barreling past us both and into the crater of my former home. To an untrained eye, it looks like he’s slipped and fallen down the uneven slope. 

My brother never slips. 

The stench of blood hangs heavy in the air, his footprint scraped through the mud by my knee like the trailing claw of some ponderous beast, and my brother never slips. He is no mortal man, no fallible creature, nothing weak enough to make a mistake like that. But he is a person. And people, unlike monsters, have the capacity for mercy.

“Tubbo,” My voice scrapes the raw skin of my throat. I grab my soul’s shoulder and pull him upright. “Tubbo, run.”