Annihilate

Tommy is small again and his world is on fire.

He’s sitting on a creaky bed in a desolate room, faded tapestry coming off the walls and floorboards that groan under every single step. His knees are still bruised from a fall he took when the world was still alright – when he was riding his bike on an uneven road and his mum was there to patch him up when he fell.

He can barely remember her face. It blurs in his memories, as does her voice. He doesn’t even have a picture. Everything he knew, everything in his small world is gone.

He’s hugging his knees to his chest and trying his hardest not to burst into sobs. He doesn’t understand why he’s here, ‘too young to understand’, the desk woman had said with pitying eyes when he was first brought here. He doesn’t get what she meant by that. He just wants his parents.

He can barely remember them now.

The room doesn’t get any less bleak the longer he stays in it. Eventually, the well of his feelings spills over, and he starts to cry onto his knees, trying to stifle his sobs in them. He wants to go home. He’s too small to know his address.

Tommy startles when the door opens. It creaks, like everything here does, and in pops a boy who looks a little older than him – eyeing him with concern, he closes the door behind him softly and approaches Tommy like he’s some kind of scared animal.

He hugs his knees tighter. The boy stops before him and offers him a hand.

“Hi,” he says. “My name’s Deo. They told me you’re my new roommate, since Wil got adopted. What’s your name?”

Tommy’s lip wobbles, and he doesn’t understand the world anymore, but he fights through it. “I’m Tom,” he says.

“Tom,” Deo nods to himself like he just said something that made an incredible load of sense. “Tommy, aye? It’s nice to meet you.”

He startles out of sleep, his dreams already fading from his memory. There’s a hand on his shoulder and Tommy is disoriented as fuck for a moment, but then he remembers.

It’s Monday afternoon. He’s in his bed, in his pajamas even though it’s just four o‘clock or something like that, and Phil is gently shaking him awake. He rubs a hand over his face as he comes to, the remnants of the dream slipping through his fingers just like that.

“You awake?” his foster dad asks.

Tommy groggily looks up at him, then remembers that he was doing science homework in bed and sits upright, cursing when he catches sight of the wrinkled paper he rolled over on. God fucking damn it, now he needs to rewrite that shit. Mr Nook despises wrinkly paper.

“Heya,” Phil greets with a small smile. “How are you?”

“Exhausted,” he mutters. “Depressed. Stressed. What do you want me to say?”

Phil sits down on the edge of his bed. He’s in his uniform – oh, so it’s later than four already if he’s back from his shift. Tommy wonders if he’s gotten wind of the parkouring nightmare he’s become to the cops in the last three days, spending six hours every night swinging through the city and rifling through Deo’s stuff. He’s been looking for a copy of his will, but the paperwork in Deo’s office is a nightmare to get through.

So far, he’s only found blueprints for Oscorp tech, stolen goods, and money. Which don’t help him in the slightest in figuring out his dead friend’s last mission. On top of that, Sapnap hasn’t responded to his emails yet, not even after he wrote him again asking for a chance to talk. He has a bad feeling in his gut about it. A really bad one.

Good news are, he got the photographing gig. They specifically hired him for skylines, building shots and good photos of entities like the Vulture, the Shocker or the lizard. Tommy snorted at that (the interviewer gave him a weird look). More good news, he’s managed to complete his outfit by now. He used a combination of red, white and black to create the base layer of the suit and wears the black hoodie over it. He made the right move with the expressive eyes, they look funny as all hell and he loves them.

He wanted to go on a mission today. Talk to the guy that murdered Deo, to be exact. But that thought fills him with pure dread. When he closes his eyes, he can still see the terrified look in his brown ones. So he’s just been doing school work and falling asleep in the middle of it because he’s exhausted and overworked and keeps loading himself up more and more shit.

“…I’ve been thinking that we haven’t really been spending a lot of time together,” Phil eventually says, tearing him out of his thoughts. “As a family, I mean. Do you know what’s happening this weekend?”

Tommy has to think for a moment. “Uh… the Chinese New Year’s parade?”

“Bingo,” Phil smiles. “Wilbur and Techno want to go. I figured we could keep them company.”

Tommy huffs a weak laugh. “Keep them from getting any fancy ideas like overthrowing the government, yeah?”

“Precisely. So you’re coming?”

He has to yawn. Setting his pens and homework down on his nightstand, he pulls a blanket over himself. He’s sleeping in tonight. No funny vigilante business. “Yeah, of course. Would love to.”

Phil nods, seeming satisfied, and gets up from his bed, making to leave. Tommy doesn’t know what drives him to it, but he suddenly calls out for him.

“Phil?”

His foster father – his father – stops in his tracks instantly and turns, a questioning look on his face.

Tommy is so tired. “Sorry I haven’t been around a lot lately,” he quietly says. “I’m out a bunch, I know, I’m just… tryna find something distracting.” Like leaping from fifty stories into a fall that would kill me had I not been bitten by the most fucked up spider in existence right after getting struck by lightning.

Phil gives him a little smile, a sad one, but still a smile. He sits down on his bed again, looks at his poster-full wall. “I know. It’s hard to handle grief. I’m just glad you’re still up and doing schoolwork and going out and… dealing somehow.”

Tommy takes a deep breath. When he closes his eyes, he sees blood on his hands, sees the lizard’s slit pupils, sees the graveyard all over again. “It’s not the grief I’m trying to deal with,” he mumbles. “It’s the guilt.”

He has to talk about it eventually. He can’t ignore it forever, what happened on the night of Deo’s death. Wilbur’s words have been following him everywhere he went since that night, Do you think you’ll ever talk about it? Honestly, he really doesn’t want to still. But he figures it could maybe help.

“Oh, Tommy,” Phil quietly says. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

“You don’t even know what happened,” he mumbles, and I can’t tell you the whole story even if I want to. “I just wanted to go home. If I hadn’t shown up at his apartment and asked him to bring me home, he would’ve never…”

“Tommy,” Phil says with a note of something harsh in his tone. “Stop that. Don’t think that. He was murdered, and as far as I’m concerned, you weren’t the one holding the gun. So you’re not guilty, do you understand that? You’re not.”

He stares at the ceiling, trying to believe that. How can he believe that?

“And what about the murderers?” he whispers. “You arrested them. You know what I did.”

“Yeah, you beat the shit out of them. Which was stupid and reckless considering one of them had a gun. And considering one of them had a gun, I’m considering it self-defense.”

“That’s not what happened and you know it.”

“Yes, I know,” Phil sighs. “I just don’t care very much. They murdered your friend. You’re sixteen. You lost it. I don’t blame you.”

Tommy inhales and exhales heavily. Something about the way Phil says these things helps loosen something inside him. He blinks away tears that spring to his eyes uninvited.

School was weird today. Life is weird without Tubbo and Ranboo, or maybe not without them, but the way he’s awkwardly avoiding them like they have the plague. He found himself thinking of jokes in the middle of a lesson and having no one to tell them to. He doesn’t have friends, just acquaintances. No one like them, anyway. He feels like he cut off one of his limbs and the phantom pain is killing him now.

He’s too much of a people person. He can’t stand being alone. But it’s the price he pays for their safety. He can’t be spending hours stealing stolen goods from his late friend and then high five his innocent best friends the next day. He just can’t.

I don’t blame you, Phil said. He wonders if they would.

“Thanks, Dad,” he mutters.

Phil halts for a second. Tommy closes his eyes. He’s so tired, and it hasn’t really gone away ever since he lost Deo. At this point, he doesn’t think it’ll ever go away. He’ll just have to live with it and this ball of hurt in his chest.

“I don’t say it enough,” he says, “but I love you. And I’m so glad, every day, that I’m here.”

There’s a moment of silence, then Phil leans forward and presses a kiss to his temple. “I love you too, Tom. I couldn’t be more proud of you.”

He gets up, shuts off the lights.

“Goodnight,” Tommy mumbles.

“Sleep well,” Phil softly says. He shuts the door behind him with a soft click.

Tommy’s laptop screen lights up in the darkness. He sighs to himself and gets up to close it, but the desktop catches his eyes. There’s an e-mail from Oscorp on it. He frowns and sits down at his desk, clicking on it. It’s from Schlatt, once again.

Hello Tommy,

I’m terribly sorry, I won’t be able to make it to that interview on Tuesday. Do you mind a reschedule? Friday afternoon would be good, I’m having a pretty busy week. Sorry again for the short notice.

Regards,

J. Schlatt

He stares at the e-mail for a moment, then he shakes his head and starts typing out a response saying it’s no problem. He sends it and looks through his spam on instinct, checking his inboxes.

There’s an e-mail from Deo in his spam.

Tommy freezes for a long moment.

His heartbeat speeds up, and for a while, he just sits there listening to it pounding in his chest, staring at the e-mail. The subject line reads To Thomas Innit, and if anything, his birth name is what makes him open the damn thing.

Hi Tommy. If you’re reading this, then I’m dead.

He takes a while before he can keep reading.

This is an automated message, it’s going to be sent to you exactly five days after my confirmed death, since I assume that’s how long it’ll take for me to be buried.

Tommy, I’m going to be honest here, really honest. I know I’m going to die soon. Someone placed a hit on me, and I have enough enemies in the underground that it won’t be long before someone shoots my place up. I’ve been prolonging it for a hot second by pretending I’m out of the city, but I can’t hold that ruse up forever. I know too many people who won’t have qualms about killing me. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to it.

He… knew?

Deo knew. Tommy thinks back to the fight he had with Wilbur on the top of the skyscraper, how Deo hadn’t picked up when he’d called. His voicemail. I’m out of town for a while. I’ll call you back.

When had he written this e-mail?

A shiver runs down his spine. Is he reading what might as well be Deo’s last words?

I‘m getting my last affairs in order right now, and I’ll leave everything to you, but you’re not eighteen yet and therefore I’m writing this e-mail to get my will to you this way. I want you to know the truth. The whole truth, no more lies, no more guilt.

I always had a knack for doing crime. I don’t sell antiques. I’m running something of a black market for technology, mostly Oscorp. There’s a reason for that, why I have a vendetta specifically against this company.

Your mother and my father were scientists at Oscorp. I looked into your family when I met you, I just wanted to know where you’d come from – and I found out that your mother was working with my dad. Tommy, they were collaborating on a project with Schlatt, and they both died for it, first my father, then your mother. I can’t tell you what happened. All the records I found were sealed and encrypted to the nines. All I know is that Oscorp covered it up to the point that it never even hit the papers.

I’ve been trying to find out the truth ever since. Why cover it up? What even happened? Your dad and my mom didn’t work for Oscorp, so what happened to them? So I broke into facility after facility and stole data, plans, projects, whatever I could get my hands on. Nothing. For years over years, nothing, until a couple days ago, when I finally found their files.

They were working on genetic enhancements and splicing across different species. Your mother was working with spiders of all kinds, something that Oscorp still does today, and my father with lizards. The official report states that they died in a lab accident. It doesn’t even mention their respective partners.

I think Schlatt killed them, Tommy. I think he killed them because he was the only one out of the three of them that was pushing for human experiments. Your mother strictly forbade him from using her spiders for that purpose, told him she’d go public with it if he ever used human beings for the project.

I broke into the laboratories of the Oscorp Tower yesterday and found terrible humanoid experiments that I think might’ve been human once. One of them was gone – I took the formula to cure it and plan on returning, but I don’t know if it’ll be there. I don’t know what its escape will do except prove how deep Oscorp’s corruption runs. They cover up every last bit of their inhumane methods.

I have a hard drive with all of the information I gathered about Oscorp. I hid it at our spot yesterday. You have to get it and give it to Phil. Don’t do anything else. I beg of you, do not do anything else. Do not involve yourself with Oscorp. They will kill you. They will kill all you hold dear. They will erase your name from history like they did with our parents.

I’m sorry that I won’t be at your graduation, Tommy. I’m sorry that it got this far. I wonder, if Schlatt hadn’t murdered both our families, would our parents have introduced us? Would we have grown up together regardless? I’m going to die, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week, but I never once regretted being your friend, and I don’t know anyone else who I’d entrust with this. I don’t know who else deserves this knowledge anyway.

I love you, Tommy. You’re a good kid.

Your dead man walking,

Deo.

Tommy closes his laptop and leans back hard. His heart is still beating too fast in his chest, and he needs a minute before he can open his laptop back up and read the wall of text again. His brain is going into overdrive with question after question, but he reads the e-mail over and over again, until his sight blurs.

He’s crying, he realizes belatedly, tears are what’s blurring his sight. He remembers the night Deo died all too well. You’re a good kid. Always have been. God, he must’ve written this e-mail moments before Tommy knocked on his door that night.

And Oscorp didn’t kill him for the damn formula. Tommy barely manages not to sob, clasping his hands over his mouth. Fuck, he had it all wrong. Deo didn’t free the damn lizard, he stole Tommy’s solution to cure it but never got to. But then who freed it?

His mother created the spiders. Is that why the bite didn’t kill him? A million thoughts get jumbled in his head, and his room suddenly feels suffocating. Tommy gets up and slams his laptop closed, stumbling over his feet as he tries to get away from it. Deo had told him what he wanted to know from beyond the grave and he doesn’t know how to cope with it. Schlatt murdered his parents. He murdered both their parents and then Deo because they all threatened to expose him for his crimes.

He murdered their parents and then Deo because Deo found out the truth.

Something hot and burning coils in his gut.

Tommy kneels down and pulls out the box under his bed he keeps his vigilante stuff in. He pulls out the mask and the suit he has yet to debut. He’s sure as fuck not sleeping tonight, not after that.

Might as well get good in the process.