Annihilate

Deo did not sell antiques.

Tommy is running on three energy drinks and pure spite at this point – he’s hanging upside down from his ceiling, pouring over the papers he took from Deo’s apartment, half-finished essay about Oscorp’s genetic splicing abandoned on the carpet. The bank transactions aren’t his, they’re Oscorp’s, and they’re are mixed with floor plans for the company’s facilities. The longer he looks into it, the more annoyed he feels.

Very obviously, Deo led a life of crime. Very obviously, he deliberately hid it from Tommy. Probably to protect him, but fuck, it still hurts to read his friend’s notes about where to best break into a building and steal shit. But then again, the buildings were all Oscorp.

Deo seemed to have had some sort of vendetta against them. He wonders what exactly he was looking for – because all these coups seem to have the goal of finding something, and the bank transactions are a piece of the puzzle he has no clue what to do with – and how the fuck he never connected the dots on it.

That’s what’s annoying him. How in the fuck did he never put two and two together? Deo with the ‘I’m out of town for a couple days’ and ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve met Vulture before’ and the constant apologies for seemingly nothing. Tommy doesn’t know how to feel about any of it. A life of crime and deceit and connections to the very underground, and yet he always protected Tommy from all of it.

He doesn’t know what to think about Deo anymore. They were brothers in all but blood for so long – before Wilbur aged out, Deo and him were friends too. He’s the reason why Wilbur even suggested adopting Tommy to Phil. He’s the reason he’s here now, in every imaginable way.

But he was a criminal. He was a liar. And then again, he stole from Oscorp. Who gives a shit about Oscorp? It looks like he was trying to get dirt on them, which Tommy commends, but what was he trying to steal? From what he gathered from Vulture and Shocker, he stole technology, but why sell it then? It just seems like he was looking for something, but what? None of the plans have notes on them other than occasional scribbles about guard shift changes and alarm systems.

The bag he picked up had some kind of weird suit in it, a flexible and comfortable material that Tommy thinks he could use for himself. He definitely won’t be returning this shit to Deo’s apartment for some court-ordered people to find. Who knows how much an investigation would delay his inheritance? He’s fucking with the law, but eh, who really gives a shit. He’s building a track record of that anyway.

As he flips through the stack of bank transactions he’s still puzzled about, he notices another floor plan folded neatly in between them. He unfolds it, raising his eyebrows when he realizes that it’s a detailed plan of the tower – full even with the underground floors that generally aren’t available to the public.

A red circle around one of the large rooms catches his eye. LABORATORY C, it reads. Deo wrote CHECK HERE below it.

Tommy startles when his brain unfortunately does its job and connects the dots.

He drops the floor plan he was looking at to the ground and stops short when he sees something taped to the back of it. Pushing off his ceiling, Tommy neatly lands on his feet and picks it up again.

What the fuck?

Taped onto the back of the plan is a sheet of paper with his handwriting on it. That’s his chicken scratch. He stares at it for a couple of seconds before he recognizes it: it’s the equation George gave them on the field trip to Oscorp, hastily solved with his name at the top. Deo wrote down one singular word below the solved equation – and a name.

SOLUTION – SAPNAP

Sapnap? What the fuck does Sapnap have to do with this now?

Tommy’s brain starts to hurt. He should probably go to sleep, but as he starts pacing up and down his room, he also feels like he couldn’t fall asleep if he tried. He hasn’t seen Sapnap in a while – the third member of what Tubbo jokingly calls ‘the Dream Team’ wasn’t showing them around at the trip despite the fact that he works at the tower. How does he fit into all of this?

And why did Deo steal this equation from the tower? Tommy only solved it a couple days ago. Did he break into Oscorp in the same night that Tommy was bitten by the spider or on the next day? On the night that he died?

Did he break into laboratory C?

Was he the one that freed the lizard?

Tommy looks at the equation – really looks, for the first time. It’s an algorithm that describes a biological procedure. He blinks at the way he simplified it and drops the sheet in shock.

Or tries to. The damn thing sticks.

Oh, shit. It suddenly dawns on him. The equation George so off-handedly gave them was the key to genetic splicing that they couldn’t figure out. To gather new perspectives, maybe. And Tommy, in all his squirrel-brained, photography-focused, inattentive glory, solved the damn thing without really thinking about it.

He stares at the sheet of paper sticking to his fingers and wants to punch his wall. But he’d probably punch a hole through it. Not a great idea.

The lizard. Genetic splicing. What are the chances of this thing breaking free at most a mere day within Deo stealing this one exact equation? What are the odds of this being right and what are the odds of it being completely wrong?

Either they made the lizard using his equation; or, and Deo’s notes certainly suggest that, it’s the key to curing it.

And Tommy is holding it in his hand like an idiot. Knowing that Vulture and Shocker were looking for the reason why Schlatt ordered a hit on Deo. Who had either stolen the cure for a terrible accident or the base of an inhumane crime. This is proof of whatever happened to the lizard, dead proof that their research was venturing into human experimentation.

Tommy is holding Deo’s death sentence.

And he was the one that wrote it.

The paper finally peels off his fingers and lands on the ground silently. Such a little piece of paper taped to the back of a floor plan. Such a tiny thing with so many terrifying big consequences.

He doesn’t know if he should laugh or cry or throw up. All three would adequately convey how he feels. Be safe, the Shocker told him, like he somehow knew that Tommy had unknowingly stuffed the equation into his duffle bag along with the floor plans. Be safe, as if Tommy didn’t killhis friend.

The rational voice in his head says that he didn’t know. That he had other things on his mind when he put down the solution, the missing spider, taking good photos, plans with Ranboo and Tubbo. He’s just a kid at the end of the day, and he had no idea what he was doing when he solved that equation, no idea that Deo was some kind of Oscorp-specialized burglar that would steal it and consequently get himself murdered. But the larger, emotional part of him says that he could’ve just as well pulled the trigger himself. 

When does this stop being him stumbling into things and become him being the reason why all this happened?

With great power comes great responsibility.

And how is he honoring that?

Tommy is so fucking emotionally exhausted. The last couple of days have been a rollercoaster like nothing he’s ever been on before. He feels so out of control in his own life that he doesn’t know what to do anymore. In lieu of anything better to do, he sits down on his floor and buries his face in his knees, hugging his legs in an attempt not to burst into tears. A few come anyway, hot on his cheeks as he takes deep breaths, one after the other.

He has to do something. He has to at least try. It may feel pointless, but when he stops trying to rectify this, the guilt will hit him a thousand times harder than he can handle. And he’s not powerless.

In any way, really.

Because he has the damn equation. In a stroke of pure luck after terrible event after terrible event, he stole back his solution after Deo stole it from Oscorp. He has leverage here, evidence. He just definitely needs more.

Tommy glances at the scattered papers on his floor. What did Deo print out these bank transactions for? It’s all private accounts to the company, anonymous donations, shady bullshit like that, but he doesn’t know the fucking context. He has to stay on his dead friend’s trail for a while longer, it seems, and retrace his steps.

He has to attend his funeral in two days. He thinks Wilbur is organizing the thing and everything. How does he deal with all this? Wil is so… at ease with his grief. He doesn’t know how his brother does that.

It probably helps that he isn’t drowning himself in guilt like Tommy currently is.

In conclusion, his life is garbage and he hates everything. If he blocks out all the insane bullshit around Deo’s assassination and his best friend’s family company, it’s just typical teenager shit, right? Hopped up on caffeine and crying in his room at four in the morning. Seems almost normal.

But that isn’t a thing in his life.

Tommy sighs and gets up. He wants to reach for his phone at first, but then he remembers that he built web-shooters out of its corpse and sighs again in defeat. He ends up grabbing his new camera and snapping pictures of every single receipt he has lying around now, then plugs it into his laptop and chucks the photos onto a USB and his laptop’s hard drive. Then he mails the pictures he took of the Shocker and the Vulture to the Daily Bugle with a request for anonymity (and his money) and picks up his essay again.

Genetic splicing. He gets a sour taste in his mouth reading over it again, but keeps going anyway, writing down what he finds interesting about the topic and how the tour interested him and yada yada. He’d rather be done with this and then never think about it again. He’s honestly just spitballing it, he does not want to also edit this bullshit.

He pieced his alarm clock back together haphazardly, and once he’s done, he takes a look at it and realizes it’s five in the morning. No point in going to sleep now. Eh, it’ll be fine, probably. He’ll just leave for school now and stop by some grocery store on the way to buy more energy drinks.

It still ceases to make sense to him how Sapnap is involved in all of this. He had no idea Deo knew him, but then again, he’s starting to think that he knew very little about Deo’s associates and acquaintances overall. He said he knew the guy who shot him, for fuck’s sake. Or maybe that was just another lie.

This is all so confusing and complicated. Tommy feels like he’s just beginning to uncover a conspiracy that he has no business being involved in. Deo’s death and the lizard and the two vigilantes trying to find the truth just like he is – all he knows is that, whatever this turns out to be, he doesn’t want his family or his friends to get hurt because of his part in all this.

That’s why he can’t tell them. He can never tell them, not until he’s sure that he won’t be holding his brother’s lifeless body next, or his dad’s or Tubbo’s or Ranboo’s. Tommy needs to do this on his own.

It’s fine like that. He’s always been good on his own, living by his own law. In that regard, nothing has really changed.

And he actually knows where to start for once.