Work Text:
It’s gone.
Tommy swallows dryly, looks at the jagged, uninviting crater where L’Manberg used to be, and he feels…
(He feels the rumble of explosions, blind screams, cries of anger, TNT under the walls and under a stage and raining from the sky.)
He looks at the ruins of the nation he helped create, and he finds that he feels nothing. He finds that he feels empty, and then he needs to feel something because otherwise this, all of this was for nothing-
Smoke rises from the collapsed buildings. Tommy breathes, backtracks.
L'Manberg was there, and now it’s gone. L'Manberg was there, and Tommy can almost see the rolling plains that used to be there, the lake, the blackstone walls, and then the images flash before his eyes.
Spruce trees by a lake, shielded, safe.
A courthouse in the sky, ruining the skyline.
A goddamn ugly rollercoaster that doesn’t even work.
A flag flapping in the wind... no, two. One is red-white-blue and proud and the other is lava-orange, obsidian-black.
No, no, that’s wrong. There’s no flags because it’s not a country at all, but a tiny little van full of laughter and brewing stands and giddily-committed illegal activity. It’s a bench by a wooden path with a jukebox and two disks and two friends. And-
And Tommy looks at the remnants of what was once his home, and far from blinding rage or burning passion, all he feels is a deep-seated regret that this is how it ended. He closes his eyes, breathes in the ash-laden air and remembers a time where the fields didn’t smell like wood smoke and war.
Then he grabs a disc (Techno’s disk), places it in the jukebox, and lets it spin into the ghost-filled silence.