Annihilate

“What the fuck do you mean, you can’t tell me?”

Tommy flinches when Phil raises his voice at him. He can’t help it, but he wishes with everything he has that he could. He’s not afraid of Phil, he couldn’t be farther from it, actually, but there have been too many foster families where he was afraid of even looking at his ‘father’ or ‘mother’, too many times where the tears in his eyes stemmed from pain in his face, too many returns to the foster home where he never even dared to tell the story of what happened to him again and again.

He doesn’t think Phil would ever hit him. He still can’t help the way he flinches when he yells at him, every single time.

Sometime along the line, Wilbur and Techno showed up, though they’ve just stood shoulder to shoulder and stared at the air uncomfortably while Phil asked Tommy every single question under the sun and he gave vague to non-answers. He doesn’t know if it would be worse if they got involved instead of standing there in silence.

No, it would definitely be better if they got involved. He keeps slipping back into old memories of his fake siblings silently watching as his fake parents screamed at him – this feels too much like that, and he can’t stop himself from fearing that.

Phil is pacing, so he doesn’t see the way Tommy’s eyes are starting to fill with tears.

“You sneak out in the middle of the night, then I wake up to intruders in my house–” wow, that emphasis hurts so much more when it’s anyone other than himself using it, “and the only thing they took was stuff from your room. They destroy your laptop, take whatever all those papers in your room were, and then they leave again. I wake up and you are gone. I told you before and I will tell you again, Tommy, you can tell me if you’re in trouble or need help, but you’re not telling me anything and you’re obviously sneaking out to do something that gets you targeted– and you’re saying you can’t tell me what it is you’re doing?”

Tommy is trembling. He feels like he’s going to be sick. He would really like not to throw up on the nice carpet in their– Phil’s kitchen. He keeps feeling cold and hot shocks rippling through his body like he’s just now processing, well, everything. The world around him feels more and more unreal with every second.

“I can’t,” he still says, somehow, desperate to hold onto that strand, that rule he made for himself. He can’t tell anyone. He just can’t. “I just– I can’t.”

But is it even worth keeping from them at this point? Schlatt obviously left him a personal message. All of his material on Oscorp is gone. They know that he knows.

Phil looks more angry than worried now, running his hands through his hair again and again and just making it look more of a mess.

“Did I do something?” he asks, and the cold washes over Tommy again, followed by heat down to his fingertips. It’s the desperation in his voice, and the lingering anger, and he’s so loud, too loud for Tommy’s freak ears. He doesn’t want to be here. He wants this to be a bad dream. “Do you think you can’t trust me or something?”

“I do trust you,” Tommy croaks out, but it feels like a lie and he doesn’t even know why. He does trust Phil. He just sounds too much like… every other one of his fathers right now. He sounds like he’ll slap him in the face if he makes one wrong move. “I still can’t tell you.”

“Because you think you’ll endanger me,” Phil concludes; why does he have a fucking head on his shoulders? Tommy wishes more than anything that his dad was just like all the other airhead cops right now. But no, he has to be smart and compassionate and not like his pig coworkers. “Because you think whatever mess you got yourself wrapped up in will put my life and Wilbur’s and Techno’s in jeopardy.”

Tommy weakly shakes his head. Phil, of course, doesn’t look at him to see it, and if he did, he probably wouldn’t believe it one second anyway. Old memories are flashing before his eyes and his breath is coming too short and he can’t handle this, he doesn’t want to be here anymore, he would like to go to bed and sleep and forget that all of this ever happened.

But then he’d be the only person knowing everything. And the truth would never see the light. In a way, he’s doing this for his parents. For Deo and his parents too, of course, but he’s doing this so his mother – dead as she is – will find peace. So everyone will know who she was, what she did, what she refused to do. And that she didn’t die for nothing.

He’s doing this for these fleeting warm memories of his parents he’s clung onto since he was six years old; and in the process, he’s hurting the very real family he found years later.

He feels like throwing up.

“Tommy, please,” Phil pleads. “Whatever it is, we can figure it out together. I know what you’re going through, what you have been going through since your parents died, but you can trust me, I swear. I’m your father.”

That, of course, is the breaking point. Cold washes over Tommy again, everything in him pulls together, and suddenly he’s doubling over and the carpet bites the dust. It’s just too much, suddenly, the contents of Deo’s e-mail just catch up to him. Their parents died for nothing. He’s killing his new family for nothing. He vomits on Phil’s carpet and wishes he couldn’t feel anything, because nothing would be better than the memory of fear deeply engrained in his heart.

I’m your father. How many people have told him that since his real father died? And it’s never felt true.

He flinches when someone touches his shoulder, hiccups, barely aware that he’s sobbing in between his heaves. Someone shoves a bowl into his hands and he has half a mind to vomit into it until his nausea comes down enough for him to go into a full-blown panic attack.

He’s barely aware of anything, really – just that he’s talking in between sobs that feel like he’s tearing himself apart, pleas that feel like his younger self is possessing him to talk to Phil as if he’s someone else. He’s barely aware of what he’s saying, too, something like please don’t hit me, please don’t hit me, I swear I won’t do it again, I did it for my parents, I just wanted my parents, I want my parents, I want my parents, I want my parents.

His parents have been dead for over ten years. It feels like he’s only now realizing it, and it hurts like someone stabbed him in the heart and twisted.

Tommy loses himself in the dark abyss that opened in his mind, too shaken up by all the buzzing in his head to come back to himself even when Wilbur and Techno both try to calm him down, Phil standing a couple feet away with guilt on his face and the vomit bowl in his hands. Tommy feels like he’s six again, and his world is on fire, and nothing will ever be okay again.

He doesn’t know how long it takes for him to get his head above the dark water of his memories. One second he’s crying out for the father that kissed his skinned knees better and barely even exists in his memories anymore, and then he’s in his bed and his father is gone. Techno and Wil are curled up left and right to him, and he’s tucked into his bed, and the sun is going up outside.

His breathing evens out. He doesn’t know what the fuck just happened – that’s never happened to him before, that the past caught up to him like that. He really just fully blacked out. What the fuck was that?

Tommy stares at the ceiling of his room. It’s not his room. It’s Kristin’s – Phil’s dead wife, who opened up the space in the perfect family that he filled when she died. He doesn’t want to be here anymore, he thinks again, stronger than before. He can’t be here anymore. He’s not good enough to fill the hole she left.

“Tom?”

He can’t really relax, but the sound of Techno’s drowsy voice manages to put his running thoughts into a short standstill. “Yeah?” he asks, voice cracking a little.

Techno sighs and snuggles into him, obviously not fully awake. He’s warm where Wilbur is cold at his side. Tommy realizes that he will still never fit in between them and what they have. He doesn’t belong here and he never did, and it breaks his heart but it’s the truth. He’s too damaged, too dangerous, too… him.

“I was worried about you,” Techno mumbles.

“I’m sorry,” he says into the quiet dark. “Didn’t mean to worry you. Any of you.”

“We were worried anyway,” Techno says drowsily. “I was worried you wouldn’t come home.”

Tommy can’t breathe. He needs to get out of this apartment, right now. In the following silence, he tries his best not to burst into tears again, concentrating on Wilbur’s steady breathing instead. Once Techno has also fallen back asleep, chest rising and falling evenly, he moves. He rolls out of bed and, for the first time since he was bitten by the spider, shudders against the cold.

This was never meant to last anyway, he tells himself. It hurts, but he was never meant to be loved.

He tip-toes through his room and picks up his backpack soundlessly. Packing is simple enough. He’s done this a million times before, the motions are robotic and easy to go through. He doesn’t even really register or think about what he’s packing – toothbrush and toothpaste, disinfectant, washcloth, a spare change of clothes. His suit comes in next. He glances at Wilbur and Techno, soundly sleeping on the bed, as he pulls the box with it out from underneath it.

They look so peaceful. He feels numb. He’s been feeling numb for a while and it keeps getting worse.

It’s storming outside. The wind whips snow against the windows, but he doesn’t need to see that to know that there’s a storm. He can feel it deep in his veins, as if the turmoil he should be feeling is manifesting in the form of snow pelting down on the earth. And he’s left feeling absolutely nothing.

Water bottle. All the money he has lying around. His camera. Tommy decides to stop for a bit in Wilbur’s room and loads the pictures he snapped today and the few leftover ones he had from earlier onto Wil’s computer. He saves them in an innocuous little folder titled ‘from tom’ and then pulls that folder onto a USB drive just to be sure. He drops the stick into one of Wilbur’s guitars and done it is.

Wilbur’s room is full of posters and pictures. He’s on so many of them, grinning and looking annoyed and laughing hysterically at whatever they were doing when Wil snapped the picture. He stares at them for a long while before he shakes his head.

He takes one last look at the apartment he spent the last year in. It feels like home, more than any of his other foster homes ever did. It feels like he’s hurting himself with leaving the warmth of this place, these people. But he has to. He doesn’t belong here.

He’s felt it countless times before. When he has to talk about his parents in school, when he mentions he’s adopted, when someone asks him what he’s getting his mother for Mother’s Day. Under Schlatt’s scrutiny when he first visited Tubbo’s house, the look he gave him when he mentioned off-handedly that he’s an orphan, the silent judgement in his eyes after that. In Ranboo’s loving home, where he didn’t know how to react to kind eyes and gentle words so soon after getting adopted by Phil.

There are a million ways he doesn’t belong. A million places he’s never fit into. This is just another instance of the same old spiel, he tells himself. Just another case of him being a freak and an outcast.

Tommy doesn’t have a home. He hasn’t had one since his parents died. This is, and has always been, playing pretend. No point in fooling himself into anything else. Tommy looks back at his brothers and wonders how they could’ve ever seen him as anything else other than an intruder, an impostor filling the hole Kristin left.

They don’t deserve this. He just keeps making everything worse and worse, and he needs to end this once and for all before they can get hurt. So he slips his web-shooters on, pulls his hood deep into his face, and steps out into the storm.

He climbs up to the roof as the world brightens around him, nighttime slipping away fully. The electricity crackling in his veins keeps getting stronger, and he finds himself on the edge looking down. It’s hard to see through the snow, but Tommy doesn’t really care to see clearly anyway – he doesn’t need to. It’s hitting seven in the morning and he needs to go to school.

What a weirdly mundane thing. Run away from home, go to school, meet with the man that killed your parents and oldest friend. One of those things ain’t like the other.

Tommy can only wonder what exactly will await him at his supposed job interview at Oscorp.