Annihilate

As soon as Tommy closes the door to his foster family’s apartment, he’s greeted by Wilbur.

Admittedly, Wilbur is Tommy’s favorite. Because he’s also adopted. Techno is Phil’s only biological son out of the three of them – sometimes Tommy feels like Wil and him might do him a little wrong for that.

Though he also adores Techno. He’s a quiet, reserved sort of collected and calm, and Tommy admires him for how knowledgeable and well-spoken he is while still always up for the driest of jokes and dumbest of pranks. He loves Techno to bits, but sometimes Wilbur knocks shoulders with Tommy and he catches a sort of defeated look in their brother’s eyes, like he thinks he’ll never be part of what they have.

It makes him feel kind of shitty. Tommy is used to feeling left out in foster families, it’d been that way for as long as he could remember before he came to the Minecraft household, and he doesn’t want Techno to feel even a fracture of that pain.

So, it makes his mood lift when Wilbur’s “Oi, Tommy!” is instantly followed by Techno’s laugh and a mocking imitation of Wilbur’s accent, then again followed by the unmistakable sound of pillows hitting heads.

Tommy grins and peels out of his jacket and shoes. He can smell Techno’s cooking, which instantly makes his day a lot better, and as he walks into their dining room and drops his backpack, he’s met with his wonderful older brothers having a pillow fight that looks a little too brutal to be anything but fun.

He clears his throat. “Hiya, dickheads,” he greets.

“Language,” Techno yelps before hitting Wilbur in the face in a borderline life-threatening attack, to which Wil promptly plays dead, dropping to the floor in a heap of limbs and sticking his tongue out. His glasses are askew. Tommy snorts out a laugh and can’t stop when Techno triumphantly raises the pillow above his head and bellows, “We win these!”

Ten minutes later, all pillows are back in the living room, Wilbur’s glasses are straight on his nose again and Tommy is contently devouring a plate of Techno’s legendary mac and cheese. Wilbur is animatedly talking about the new song his band is working on (Tommy only has half an ear for it, as he’ll get to hear it first anyway because he’s Wilbur’s favorite) while Techno shares his analysis of his songwriting style. This is the one thing him and his brothers are divided on fully. They’re all for the words while he’s for the numbers. Tommy could talk about physics for hours the same way his brothers can talk about literature.

But they don’t ostracize him for it. Which is also a first. When Tommy first met Wilbur and Techno (feels like it was ages ago when it reality he’s only been living with them for some seven months), he rarely ever talked to them because he was terrified of getting made fun of by these obviously so smart and talented people. He still remembers how he had sleepily wandered into the kitchen for a glass of water one late night and found Techno peering over a college math assignment; when his brother had gotten up for a pee break just a minute later, Tommy had taken a look at the sheet and solved the equations before yawning and going straight back to bed. 

That marked a change in how he saw the family, because the next day he’d woken up to Wilbur loudly declaring to Phil that they had adopted a genius and that they were not allowed to make him anything but comfortable with expressing his talent in mathematics. Tommy had sheepishly corrected him on it, as science was where it was at for him, and boom, Phil had enrolled him at the academy.

Now, he can’t imagine being nervous about talking to his brothers. He might still be hesitant to call Phil Dad and he might still call the apartment his foster family’s apartment and not just his apartment, because at the back of his head there is always this fear that everything is going to fall apart eventually, but Wilbur and Techno make him shove that fear aside.

“Hey,” Wilbur breaks him out of his thoughts by snapping in front of his eyes. “Earth to Tommy. Dad told us you went on a field trip to Oscorp today, how was it?”

Tommy exhales through his nose. Techno snorts. “Oh, wow. That bad?”

“The tour was great,” Tommy amends his initial annoyed reaction. “I got so many good pictures, I was actually really proud. And you know I love listening to Dream. But I swear to fuck, Oscorp is just… I dunno, something about the place gives me hives.”

He’s not exactly alone in that. Oscorp may be as technologically advanced as it gets, but ethically, they’re pretty barbaric. Hell, Tubbo is an Osborn and even he thinks his family company is shady. And of course, Ranboo takes great delight in tagging Oscorp’s facilities whenever they possibly can. They’re basically a trio of Oscorp haters at this point.

Also, Tommy just really fucking hates Schlatt.

Wilbur hums in understanding, nodding. “The heebie-jeebies?”

“The oompa loompas,” Techno says.

Tommy points a fork at him. “Now there’s a reference that I actually understand.”

Wilbur laughs. “I heard they’re looking into genetic splicing or some shit like that. Man, I feel sorry for the poor animals they test that on.”

“Miss me with that vegan shit.”

“What vegan shit? Hindrance of animal cruelty?”

“I know what you mean,” Tommy exasperatedly says, “and you know I’m not the biggest fan of the company.”

“Your best friend is an Osborn,” Wilbur points out. “You’re a fan by association.”

Tommy shakes his head, suddenly losing his appetite. He thinks of how many times Tubbo has crashed at this place in the last six months, the Christmas Eve he spent with Ranboo instead of his family, the way he flinches when someone raises their hand at him too fast and unexpectedly. He knows what broken families look like, all too well. He knows Tubbo would give an eye to be anyone, everyone else.

“It’s not that simple,” is what he ends up saying before he gets up and shovels the last of his macaroni into his mouth. He puts his dish and fork into the dishwasher, picks up his backpack and attempts to make a break for his room, unwilling to continue the suddenly too tense conversation.

“Hey,” Wilbur stops him. “I’m in the studio tomorrow, and Techno has lectures. Can you cook yourself lunch? Or I can tell Dad to make something for you to warm up.”

“I’ll make something,” Tommy says, “don’t worry about it.”

He’s up the stairs before he can hear Wilbur’s reply, backpack in hand.

His room is next to Phil’s on the second floor, and he really loves it for one very special reason: his balcony has a fire escape ladder. That ladder goes all the way up to the roof, which is his favorite place in the world. Up there, the view’s insane, and he can think in peace without being interrupted.

Tommy grins when he sees lightning striking in the distance, his mood lifting. He throws his backpack to the floor once again and hops over his dirty laundry basket, opening his balcony door to howling wind and snow pelting down from the sky.

Snow storm. Hell yeah.

He pulls a thick jacket out of his closet and pokes his head outside. It’s fucking freezing with January cold, and he makes sure to properly cover his ears with his hood before he closes his door and climbs up the fire escape. Lightning is still cracking on the horizon, lighting up the New York skyline. It looks sick as fuck.

Tommy raises his camera to take a picture and that’s when he sees it; a big spider, sitting on the back of his hand like it’s a public beach.

He startles – obviously – drops his camera – obviously – and slaps it off, jumping away from it and barely catching himself on… something before he falls on his ass. Jesus. That scared the holy hell out of him.

And then, because someone out there seems to fucking hate him, he gets struck by lightning.

No, literally. The thing he’s holding onto? That he caught himself on? Yeah. That’s the lightning rod.

There’s a flash of light so bright that it blinds him. Pain rips through his entire body as his arm goes completely numb, and then he’s falling. From one second to the other, he’s lying on his back, ears ringing as his heart pounds a worryingly irregular rhythm. His sight slowly fades back in.

He has no idea how long he lies on the roof. He just knows that from one second to the other, he feels something on his face. His mouth tastes like copper. He thinks he might’ve just almost met God.

Is that the fucking spider on his face?

His question gets answered a second later, because it bites him.

Tommy takes a breath and suddenly he can move again. He slaps himself in the face so hard that it actually hurts (ouchie), effectively squashing the fucking gigantic spider (ew) and he gets the disgust-zoomies abruptly. He fights himself to his feet, almost tips over, and shakes his entire body out.

Fuck. What the fuck. What just happened?

He smells burnt. His hand is blistering when he looks at it, but he’s too hopped up on adrenaline to care. His camera…

“Oh, fuck.”

His camera’s fried. Shit, the pictures. Oh, no. Oh, shit.

Wait. What is his list of priorities right now?

Tommy’s mind is tumbling into total disarray, chaos overtaking his thoughts. He stumbles to the fire escape ladder, cheek aching like all hell, and climbs onto his balcony with trembling limbs. He brings a wave of snow and cold into his room when he comes in and leans against the door heavily, shutting it behind him.

The room is swimming. Oh, fuck. This isn’t good.

He suddenly makes the connection between the missing spider from Oscorp and the one he just swatted off his face. He’s so fucking screwed. As his thoughts continue spiraling, he manages to somehow make his way over to the mirror on his wall.

The spider bite is swollen, the indents of its teeth in his skin clearly visible and dripping with something green and oozy. Fuck, is that venom? Is he going to fucking die?

A wave of nausea and dizziness hits him. The room starts spinning now. Oh God, he’s going to fucking die.

Damn that stupid Oscorp lady that acted like everything was all well and good when he pointed out one of their genetically enhanced spiders was missing.

Tommy passes the fuck out.

He wakes up with a massive fucking headache.

His mouth tastes like something metallic still, and he comes to slowly, blinking his eyes open. It’s wonderfully dark, a mercy on his pounding head, and he groans in pain before rolling over.

Ow. Just… fucking ow.

Tommy closes his eyes and opens them again, slowly remembering what happened. He tries to get upright, but his hand scrapes against his carpet and the sound is so loud that he halts and holds his breath.

He can hear his own heartbeat. Way louder than usual. He can hear the motors of cars outside and the touch of his fingers to the carpeted floor. He flinches hard when tires screech outside.

His clothes are burnt, which, recollecting the fact that he got fucking struck by lightning, doesn’t surprise him. He looks over, but the burns on his hand are… gone. They’ve disappeared. Frowning, he stares at his arm, trying to figure out if he imagined the blisters and the smell of burnt skin.

He shakes his head, trying to clear it, and focuses on his heartbeat and breathing, trying to drown out the suddenly so sharp noise of everything else. His clock says five in the evening – he slept for three hours, the sun probably just set. He’s disoriented as hell, and it really doesn’t help that his vision is weird too; he can see in the dark alarmingly well, something he could never do before.

A car honks. He jumps. His headache worsens with every moment, and nausea is starting to swirl in his stomach again. He tugs off his charred clothes, glad he wasn’t wearing shoes, and changes into something comfortable and clean, glancing at the mirror and stopping short.

The spider.

He completely forgot.

The bite looks even angrier than it did three hours ago, a somewhat dark purple color instead of light red. Tommy experimentally pokes it and grimaces at how tender the skin is. Ew. He prods at the swollen injury, pressing down on it until whatever venom the spider had drips back out of the bite mark green and blue, running over his cheek. He wipes it off with his ruined shirt, since that’s going in the trash anyway, and very nearly faints again.

It feels like it’s pulsating. Fucking hell. Ew, ew, ew.

Tommy sways and stumbles out of his room, into the bathroom on the first floor. Everything is spinning again, but he manages to get a plaster and slaps it over the bite. Boom. Out of sight, out of mind.

He can hear footsteps, and his stomach drops so fast that he spins on his heel and barely makes it to the toilet before dropping to his knees and throwing up. He doesn’t know what the fuck happened to his senses – he knows it’s Phil resting a hand on his shoulder and murmuring soft reassurance because he can hear the creak of his stiff uniform, the way it moves against the metal of his Captain badge. He retches until nothing will come out anymore, and then he slumps, shaking.

What the fuck is even happening?

Phil gently scoops him up and sets him down on the bathtub. He brushes Tommy’s sweat-damp curls out of his mouth and looks at him with an emotion that makes his heart ache. “Oh, Tommy. You’re burning up.”

Tommy almost tips forward. “Tired,” he manages out. “Hurts.”

“You’re in pain? Where?”

“Ev’rywhere,” he mumbles. “Ow.”

Phil is worried about him, that’s what that look in his eyes is. He cares about him. Tommy wishes he could get his head on straight and tell him what happened, something like I got bitten by a spider that I accidentally stole from Oscorp on our field trip right after I got struck by lightning on top of our roof, but he can’t open his mouth for the life of him. Everything is getting blurry again. He doesn’t know what the fuck his body is fighting, but he’s pretty sure it’s royally losing.

“–ommy? Tommy? Can you hear me?”

“Hmmm?”

“You… have a fever of one hundred and fifteen degrees Fahrenheit.”

Tommy needs a bit to do the math, but then he blinks.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Uh. You should be dead right now.”

Tommy yawns. “Nah,” he decides, “that’s impossible. Thermometer’s probably broken.”

Phil glances at the thermometer and shrugs, his worry dissipating in face of this logical explanation. “Alright, I’ll buy a new one. Come on, let’s get you to bed.”

He lets his foster father pull him upright and steady him as they walk back to Tommy’s room. He collapses straight into bed, ignoring the barely concealed burned clothes he tossed into the trash on top of his fried camera. He’ll coerce Wilbur into buying him a new one. Or something. Early birthday present.

He’s drifting off to sleep pretty instantly, but he still registers Phil pulling additional covers over him, tucking him in like he’s six years old. He doesn’t really mind. It feels like he’s six again, and his parents are still alive, his father reading fairy tales to him as he shuts his eyes, safe and loved and unaware of the years he’s going to spend alone and cold. Sleepily, he reaches out when Phil tries to leave, and catches his wrist in a surprisingly strong grip.

“Dad,” he mumbles, “can you stay?”

Phil is quiet for a moment, but then he settles down on the floor next to Tommy’s bed and starts carding his fingers through his hair, muttering a quiet, “Okay.”

Tommy closes his eyes. He’s six years old, and nothing bad has happened to him yet.