Annihilate

He fucking hates funerals.

Tommy used to like going to church – he had this religious foster family once, and his ‘mother’ had dressed him up every single Sunday and sat through the service with him. He’d never actually listened to whatever the preacher was saying (he was like seven years old, after all) but he was content with sitting with his thoughts and stare at the cross up front unseeingly.

He doesn’t know if he believes in God. He’s an aspiring scientist, and science says religion is a social construct. But he finds the idea of it all nice, even though years and years later he only goes to church when he has to bury someone. He thinks it’s nice to imagine that someone out there is holding their hand out over him, that all of his struggles will have a place. That he’s never truly alone.

Deo didn’t have family, and Tommy doesn’t know any of the people that showed up regardless. He supposes Wilbur invited them, so they’re probably friends. He leans on Techno’s shoulder for most of the funeral service and lets his brother sling his arm around him supportively.

His thoughts are swinging like a pendulum between Come on, Tom, don’t be a bitch,and Fuck, I can’t do this, I can’t, I can’t. His stomach is turning and twisting even though he couldn’t get food down the entire day. He thinks about his school day in an attempt to distract himself, but for the first time this week, nothing weird happened.

He’s left only with the stupid tears that won’t stop welling up in his eyes and the knowledge that this is his last goodbye.

Tommy tries to pay attention to what the preacher is saying, he really does. He just keeps looking at the casket. It’s not open, thank fuck, he’s heard that open-casket funerals are the literal worst shit ever. The flowers on it are lilies and sunflowers, orange and yellow. He thinks Deo would’ve liked blue flowers better. But he can’t exactly ask him now, can he?

Techno nudges him. He realizes that the preacher has gone silent and startles out of his weird trance, moving to get out of the first row he and his family are taking up.

The preacher steps aside to make room for him at the lectern, and Tommy unfolds the piece of paper he’s been clutching in his hands with trembling fingers. He takes a deep breath, eyes wandering over the lines Wilbur wrote down in his nice cursive, and readjusts the microphone to his height mindlessly.

“Deo Time was one of my oldest and best friends,” he starts, and he hates how his voice cracks, how it hurts to speak. “He lost his parents at a young age and…”

Lost his brother to the foster system, it says. Tommy stares at the line for a moment. He read through this a million times up until now, but it’s only starting to hit him as he looks up. Deo’s brother isn’t here today.

He meets Wilbur’s eyes. Techno and him look equally as worried.

Tommy breathes out and folds the paper closed with two snappy motions. He looks at the crowd for the first time – only a handful of people, unfamiliar people staring back at him, Ranboo and Tubbo as his emotional support in the back, and starts improvising.

“I’m guessing none of you were related to him,” Tommy says to them. “Just like I wasn’t. Family’s a complicated thing, ‘specially if you lose yours as early and tragically as he did. It takes a load of determination to get through loss like that. And to keep going. And to help other people through the same thing. Deo did that, he picked people out that he saw weren’t dealing well, and he helped them deal.”

A lady in the first row on his left smiles to herself. Tommy has to smile too, suddenly.

“He was a good friend,” he says. “He loved cats. He listened to weird 2000’s emo music for no discernible reason other than because.” That earns a couple snorts. “He… he helped me up when I was at my lowest. And I think he just lived to do that for people. To help them, always.”

Smiling hurts. He drops it, has to take a forceful breath.

“I don’t think he would’ve liked me moping around over him very much. He always said dwelling on sad things is stupid. But it’s hard not to dwell on losing someone so bright, and…” He has to swallow. His throat feels raw, but he forces himself to speak anyway. “And I hope he knows, wherever he is now, that I’m mourning him because he was all the family I never had, for a long time.”

Wilbur wipes at his eyes. Phil rests a calming hand on his arm. Tommy’s heart aches looking at them.

“He lived a lot, but still too little,” he shakily says. “And I miss him. God, I miss him. But he was never even close to forgettable, so even though he’s gone… I’ll remember him. As long as I live. And I know that, if you’re here today, it’s because you won’t forget him either.”

He looks through the rows, lands on Tubbo.

“Thank you for that,” he manages to say. “Thank you for being here today, for one last farewell to a friend and protector and… brother.”

He takes his shitty little piece of paper and he goes. His head is spinning and Wilbur looks proper concerned about him, and he feels like he might throw up. He sits down next to Techno and he’s just so glad that the preacher starts talking again because that way he can bury his face in his hands and focus on his breathing not devolving into a full-blown panic attack.

Techno places a comforting hand on his back and rubs circles over his spine as he trembles and barely manages not to embarrassingly sob. It’s an uphill battle to fight the tears, but he surprisingly prevails. He doesn’t really know why – aren’t funerals the one place where you’re supposed to let your ugliest sobbing go free without any judgement? But he hates crying. He hates crying in front of people he doesn’t know even more.

He’s spiraling, a bit, and he wants to be anywhere but here. In an attempt to drown out the world around him, he closes his eyes and tries to think of something, anything else. He thinks about embroidery patterns and sunsets he’s photographed and everything but this empty feeling in his chest that he doesn’t think will ever really go away.

Before he knows it, the service in the church is over, and he walks with Techno, following the four people carrying the coffin. His brother grasps his hand like he’s a small child, but he barely feels it. He barely feels anything all of a sudden, and he’s so horribly glad.

It all goes fast from there – they lower the coffin into the open grave, and he’s too busy staring off into space to sing along to the choir of people singing their blessings. He doesn’t think he believes in God anymore. No one’s holding a hand over him as he stops feeling the cold of early January in his fingers. Tommy blinks and then they’re starting to shovel the earth back into the grave, closing it.

Some people have joined them outside the church, he notices absently. They stick a provisional cross into the fresh earth once the grave is closed – they still have to commission a proper gravestone, so for now, there’s only the cross and the flowers that have been brought by various people. There’s a lot of them.

Tommy keeps losing little droplets of time, and suddenly he’s shaking heads and saying thank you to condolences like he really was Deo’s family. Wilbur is doing the same thing a couple feet away from him – where did Tech go? He misses the warmth of his hand.

And then, just like that, they all go. He stays right where he is, in his white shirt and nice dress pants and the blazer he borrowed from Techno and that makes him feel like a kid because the sleeves are slightly too big on him. He doesn’t know what to feel or what to think, really. He doesn’t know if he’s even feeling anything.

“Tom?”

He blinks and turns. Ranboo is dressed in dark purple instead of black, and it almost makes him smile. They look more solemn than he’s ever seen them. Tubbo next to them looks tired as all hell.

Tommy momentarily allows himself to forget everything surrounding Deo’s death – to forget the weird looks these two always pass between each other when they think he isn’t looking, the lies and the conspiracy surrounding Oscorp and all the bullshit of the worst week of his life. For a moment, he lets himself be a grieving kid, and he raises his arms in a helpless cry for comfort.

Tubbo’s eyes shine with something sympathetic, and he steps forward and hugs Tommy. Ranboo follows suit a second later, encompassing them both in his long arms, and they stay like that for a while as Tommy rests his head on Tubbo’s shoulder, Ranboo warm at his back.

There’s something nameless and tight in his throat, and he has no idea how to get rid of it. He did the breaking down and the picking himself back up already, spedran it, in fact, so what now?

What’s he doing here now? Is this an aftershock of the rattling earthquake that was losing the person he looked up to the most in this world? A ripple in the surface of his grief, smaller than all the ones before it, and that’s why he can’t really feel anything? Is this strange void in his chest going to last?

Tommy closes his eyes. He can’t seem to get his own opinions into his head. This will pass, like everything in life does. It’s funny like that. He can let his sadness swallow him whole or move on from it, he already established that.

But, well. It sounds so easy in concept, but it’s harder than he ever thought anything could be. What if he can’t get over it? What if the world keeps spinning and he keeps stumbling over his own feet trying to keep up with it, just to find that he simply can’t? Is this naïveté, thinking that he could ever really heal from seeing his oldest friend die right in front of him?

He has no fucking idea and he doesn’t want to think about it any longer. Tommy has mastered the art of ignoring his problems, the ‘out of sight, out of mind’-approach, so to speak. Point in case, the time he ignored the venomous and radioactive spider bite in his face and just slapped a bandaid onto it. He takes a deep breath of icy air that aches in his lungs and forces himself to focus on what matters.

That being, he’s going to concentrate on becoming the utmost worst version of himself in order to fuck up Oscorp as much as possible. Tommy doesn’t deal well with emotions and never has, and he’s made it this far, so why start now?

Commence, step one in his plan of only slight (complete) self-destruction. Isolation.

Tommy moves abruptly, winding himself out of his friends’ combined embrace. He wipes at his eyes even though he thinks he’s run out of tears and looks at the fresh grave, burying his hands in his pockets.

“You alright?” Tubbo asks almost softly.

Tommy laughs. It sounds about as rough as it feels. “Yeah. Peachy. What do you fucking think, asshole?”

Tubbo frowns. “Okay, chill out. I just asked.”

“And I just answered. Sorry for being crass.” He doesn’t have to muster up energy for anger. It comes to him so easily. “It’s just… I know you two are keeping something from me.”

Ranboo’s eyes go wide, which is kind of funny to him, so he laughs again, something derisive and so bitter he wonders how he doesn’t poison himself with it.

“I get it. You two are fine on your own. You don’t need me, huh? Well, guess what. I don’t need you much either.”

“Tommy,” Ranboo makes an attempt, at least, where Tubbo is standing stone still with shock written all over his face. “Wait. It’s not what you’re thinking, we–”

“You have no fucking idea what I’m thinking,” Tommy hisses. “None. You know why? Because in the last four days, where I’ve been trying to get somewhat even with what happened, you didn’t bother checking up on me. Not even once. And this has been going on for a while. You think I don’t notice the way you make excuses about what you’re doing all the time? How you look at each other? Do you think I’m fucking blind?”

On one hand, yes, he’s doing this to cut them off. For their own safety. On the other, he’s also genuinely pissed and sick of shit being kept from him.

Ranboo shuts their mouth incredibly abruptly when Tubbo reaches for their elbow and just holds them back from saying whatever they were going to say. Tommy feels another laugh bubbling in his throat, but he holds himself back in favor of listening to what Tubbo has to say.

“Tommy, you’re our best friend. I don’t want you to think anything else,” he says, with that so typically Tubbo earnest look in his eyes. “We…”

Then he looks up at Ranboo and they share one of those glances that seem to convey entire conversations, and Tommy very barely manages not to lose his shit on them both. Instead, he just laughs again, and ignores the way it chafes in his throat.

“Too late,“ he says. “You know what? Have fun with whatever secret you’re keeping. I don’t have the will to give a shit anymore. Because trust me, Tubbo Osborn, I have thought of every single other thing, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want to be friends with people who lie in my face so often and so comfortably.”

It feels kind of like airing his frustrations and ripping his own heart out at the same time. Tommy ignores how crushed both of them look, ignores the way it hurts to turn away, but he does it anyway.

His family is on the other side of the graveyard by now, left to give them privacy, probably. He digs his hands deeper into his pockets and looks up at the gray sky – it hasn’t stopped snowing and raining the entire week, and the white flocks drifting down from the heavens are thick and catch in his hair. He feels that weird thing in his bones again, something that calls to him, but he can’t understand it yet.

Tommy leaves his heart at the fresh grave, leaves it where he left his best friends, all three of them.

He needs to forget how love works. Attachments are weaknesses that certain people will exploit mercilessly. He can’t afford to be careless with who he gives his heart to any longer. It cost Deo his life.

If he has a say in it, it won’t cost anyone else.