Annihilate

Tommy has no idea how, but he gets home.

His room is dark and quiet as he jumps down from his fire escape on soft feet and opens the door. He stops in the doorframe – he can make out Wilbur’s figure in his bed, curled up under one of the blankets Tommy left lying around. His heart hurts, but he feels empty.

The apartment is silent. He peeks into Techno’s room and finds him sleeping as well. No wonder – when he looks at the clock in his room, it’s way past midnight. He had no idea how long he was breaking down in the streets.

It’s still raining out. The background of noise and greyscale of the dark world creates a weird atmosphere. He feels something underneath his skin that he can’t place, not his usual restless energy but something else; but he ignores it, too tired to care. He’s going to go to sleep and he’ll wake up tomorrow, and the world will keep turning.

It feels like it shouldn’t. How can the world keep turning even when Deo isn’t on it anymore?

He just keeps replaying it in his head, over and over again. And it’s his fault. If he hadn’t been so desperate to try out his agility, he would’ve never fought with Wilbur, never gone down to the subway tunnels, never showed up at Deo’s apartment. And he could’ve saved him. He knows he could have.

It’s all his fault.

He wanders around the house like a ghost and he feels like it too. But he’s hungry, so he walks into the kitchen despite how much he feels like he doesn’t deserve to do anything but suffer for letting Deo die. He quietly opens their fridge, then does a double-take and closes it again. There’s a sticky note on it.

Tommy, I’m looking for you, call when you get home please. I love you. – Phil.

Tommy doesn’t feel like calling him. He actually never wants to speak again. Opening his mouth feels like a chore, and he doesn’t want to explain why he chased after Deo’s killers or what he did afterwards. He pulls leftovers from yesterday out of the fridge and warms them up, sitting down to eat them.

Deo is dead.

It hits him anew every couple of seconds. Phil probably took care of his body, since Tommy ran away like an idiot. He’s gonna have to bury him.

He’s never coming back.

Tommy wishes he could still cry, but he can’t feel anything anymore.

He eats and puts his dishes away mechanically, mind wandering into the endless abyss of his grief and guilt. He could’ve saved him. He could’ve saved him. He could’ve saved him.

In the end, he picks up their landline and calls Phil. It goes to voicemail, thank fuck. Tommy has to clear his throat before speaking, and yet his voice breaks.

“Hey Phil, I’m… uh, I’m home. I’m gonna take a shower and crash, so… I’ll talk to you in the morning, I guess. I’m just… I’m sorry. For running away. And, I– I just wanted to say I love you too.”

He hangs up and goes to shower in the downstairs bathroom. He takes off the bloody and dirty bandages on his hands and hops under the spray of hot water. It doesn’t chase away the cold deep in his bones.

When Tommy was six and his parents died, he didn’t understand it. He didn’t get why they would never come back and why he had to live in a big scary house with bigger scarier people all of the sudden. Deo was the one that introduced the concept of death to him. They’re not coming home, Tommy, he said. You can miss them forever or find new people to love, new things to own, new places to see. You have to know they’re watching over you. Make them proud.

How does he move on? He still misses a mother he barely even remembers, and Phil may be the closest thing he has to a father but he still aches for the man who taught him long division when he was still in kindergarten. How can he not miss them forever? How can he not miss Deo forever?

You’re a good kid, Tommy. Always have been.

Promise me you’ll do good.

Make them proud.

Tommy’s grief and pain is good at one thing: turning into anger. It turns into burning hot rage that makes his throat tighten and his chest hurt. Someone has to pay, for all of it, and he knows just the company.

Oscorp.

Deo said he can’t take them on, but he has no idea what Tommy can actually do. He wasn’t there when he fought off that lizard, when he saw New York in free fall, when he beat the everliving shit out of the guy that killed his oldest friend. Schlatt Osborn ordered the hit and he needs to know why. What made Deo a target for these people? And how can he prove it and get Schlatt arrested?

He needs do to something or else he’ll go insane, that’s for sure. He’s still way too much in the dark for his own liking. There are so many questions that need answering, and so many things he needs to do– and on top of all that, he needs to buy a new phone, copy Ranboo’s notes, write that stupid essay, and tell Mr Nook about the fried camera and therefore nonexistent pictures for the science paper.

Once he’s showered and changed into his pajamas, he re-wraps his hands with clean, fresh bandages and goes to Wilbur’s room since Wil is sleeping in his bed.

Tommy loves Wilbur’s room, it’s full of cables and instruments his friends forgot or are just storing at their apartment. If his vision weren’t as good as it now is, he for sure would’ve tripped over something, because he usually always does. He steps over his brother’s guitar, spots the sticker that Tommy slapped onto it years ago easily. His bed is cold, but he pulls the covers over himself and closes his eyes anyway.

He’s so fucking tired. Sleep catches up to him instantly. He dreams about blood on his hands and slit pupils, spray-painted spiders on the walls of New York’s skyscrapers and the shadow of the Vulture against them.

When he wakes up, he wakes up to noise.

Someone’s making scrambled eggs, he can smell them. He hears newspaper rustling and Techno and Wil talking to each other, although he can’t fully make out the words for a moment. Then he understands that they’re talking about Hamilton, of all things, and smiles into his pillow. For a moment, everything is fine.

Then he remembers and his smiles drops.

But the world keeps turning anyway. He keeps breathing anyway. Deo is dead and maybe it’ll haunt him until kingdom come, but the world won’t stop to make space for him and his grief. It’s not considerate like that.

Get up,he tells himself, you have to get up or else you’ll stay missing him forever.

So he gets up. He meanders into his room first. It’s pure chaos in there, Wil left his bed unmade (dickhead) and four out of five blankets are thrown haphazardly on the floor. Tommy looks into the mirror and frowns. There’s a scrape on his cheek that he doesn’t remember the origin of anymore, but it already looks halfway healed so he just leaves it be. He gets dressed and brushes his teeth before finally feeling ready to wander downstairs, peeking into the kitchen.

Phil spots him first as he’s sitting with his face to the doorway and puts down his newspaper, attentively surveying him. Probably for signs of injury. His eyes linger on the bandages covering Tommy’s hands, the scrape on his cheek, and he watches as Phil’s brows crease in concern.

He’s so fucking sick of everyone worrying about him and at the same time he can’t get enough of it. Of the love stored in the hearts of all these people, his family, reserved only for him.

“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty!” Wilbur hollers from the kitchen. Seconds later, he sticks his head out of the doorway and grins at Tommy. “And here I thought you’d never come home again.”

Tommy lets him walk over to him and pull him into a hug that feels like warmth and safety and home, and god, he really doesn’t feel like talking. He manages out a response anyway, because it’s Wil. “Nonsense. I’ll always come home.”

It sounds so nonchalant, but Tommy tries his hardest to put an undertone of apology into it. He clings to Wilbur like a lifeline anyway, maybe a tiny bit too strongly. The words he said on the phone yesterday hurt in his memories. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. Please, please don’t hate me.

Wil squeezes him and says, “Good, that.”, and Tommy hears something like It’s okay.

He relaxes, lets his brother actually let go of him and step back, and follows him into the kitchen where Techno is now dealing out scrambled eggs for everybody and Phil has gone back to reading his newspaper. Tommy sees the front page and blanks.

CHEMICAL ACCIDENT AT OSCORP CAUSES PIPE DAMAGE: SUBWAY CLOSED, the headline reads.

That’s what they’re saying? Chemical accident?

Phil puts his paper down again. Tommy needs a moment to realize that he said that out loud. He hunches his shoulders instinctively and looks down at his hands.

“Are you going to school today?”

Again, he needs a moment to realize he’s being asked. He glances at the clock. It’s barely six-thirty – he does have the time to go to school. It’d take his mind off everything, and he’d see Tubbo and Ranboo… yeah. Going to school sounds awfully good, for once, it sounds like normalcy. “Huh? Uh, yeah, I’d like to.”

“Alright then. I didn’t want to do this in the morning, but alas. What happened yesterday?”

Tommy groans. “I changed my mind. Can I stay home?”

“Nuh-uh.“ Phil leans back and crosses his arms. “Okay, I know you fought with Wil– you made up, right?”

Tommy throws Wil an unsure glance, but his brother nods. “We did.”

“Good. Okay, you had a fight, so you met up with Ranboo and Tubbo and you went down to 91st street. I don’t want to know what you were doing down there. You’re not in trouble, okay? I just wanna know what happened after Tubbo and Ranboo left, because all I know is that Tubbo called me in a frenzy and said your call with him cut off and that you were still at 91st. When we sent a team down there, you weren’t there anymore. Next time I saw you was with Deo, and you were injured and lost your phone and your keys–”

“I didn’t lose my keys,” Tommy mumbles. That was just a white lie to explain why he went to Deo instead of home. Because I panicked after getting mauled by a humanoid lizard seems a bit outlandish. “I thought I lost them, but they were in my backpack the entire time.”

“Bruh,” Techno says, eating his scrambled eggs without a care in the world.

Phil waves his hand around. “Okay. Doesn’t matter now. I don’t believe that whatever happened at Oscorp yesterday was a chemical accident. Fill me in, please, so I can figure this out. What happened down there?”

Tommy stares at his hands. He could tell him. Phil’s a police officer, a captain. He could tell him and he wouldn’t be alone in knowing what he knows. A cold shiver runs down his spine. And Schlatt Osborn could order a hit on his foster father, too.

He clears his throat and starts lying his ass off.

“Tubbo got a call from Dream about what happened, and Dream said that Schlatt would ping his phone if he wasn’t home in ten minutes. Tubbo panicked, obviously, cause you know he would’ve gotten in trouble if Schlatt saw where he was, and I told him and Ran to just leave cause I could pretty directly take the subway back anyway. So they left and I packed up our stuff. I fell and scratched up my hands pretty bad on the rails–”

“The rails? What rails? Were you in the subway tunnel?”

Shit.

“Yeah,” Tommy admits.

“Tommy, that’s dangerous–”

“There were no trains coming. That’s why I went onto them in the first place, I was looking for a sign of any subway, but nothing came for like ten minutes and I knew something was wrong. Then Tubbo called me and it startled me, and I tripped and fell,” Tommy keeps spinning his lie like a web and he wants to laugh at the irony of it all. “I started walking up and down like you do when you’re on the phone and then I dropped my phone into the rails like an idiot. Must’ve disconnected the call. I tried getting it out of there for a bit, but I didn’t know if the trains would start coming again, so I just abandoned it and dipped. Couldn’t find my keys, so I went to Deo’s because I wasn’t sure if Wilbur and I were alright.”

Wil makes a dejected little noise that makes Tommy feel like the biggest fucking asshole that’s ever lived. He looks up at Phil – he can see in his eyes that his foster father doesn’t quite believe him. He’s just not buying it.

“That’s all?” he asks. “You didn’t see anything? Hear anything?”

Tommy holds the eye contact easier than he thought he’d be able to. “That’s all,” he echoes, then he grabs the spoon and shovels some scrambled eggs onto his plate. He feels Phil’s gaze on his face, but he concentrates on getting some food into him, which also proves easy because he’s starving. Still. It probably has to do with his metabolism. Which is logically spider-fied.

He thinks he might need to break into Oscorp. Eh, he’ll look into that later. One thing at a time: first, school.

Tommy inhales his breakfast in record time and jumps up the stairs for no reason other than because he can. He packs his shit and skips downstairs again, stealing a coat from Wilbur’s room that’s too big on his frame on the way down. As he pulls on his shoes, he yells to the kitchen, “I left my camera out during the thunderstorm! Think it got struck by lightning, I’m gonna buy a new one after school!”

He shuts the door behind him, but hears Phil laugh incredulously all the way to the staircase.