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“So I'm, uh.” Grian sighed and laced his fingers together, eyes pinned to the fire pit. “I'm what's called a watcher. Kinda. Do you… know what that is?”
“No.” Tommy replied shortly, eying Grian through his lashes. He kept the fae man within his peripherals, tracking him as he polished his sword, half buried in the wheat blooms.
“A watcher is…" Grian groaned loudly, pushing his glasses off his nose as his pressed his hands to his face. "Oh I do not want to be having this conversation.” He huffed, dropping his head. “A watcher is a being with the ability- the ‘responsibility’-” He thinned the word mockingly. “-to watch other worlds, to gather knowledge, to observe, but not interact with them, at least not directly. Or with players.”
Tommy remained silent. Grian's cranial feathers twitched inwards, shading his dark eyes. He remembered Phil doing that, although he was never very expressive with his feathers. Not really.
“Well, obviously that's not always the case, since well-” He tossed a hand towards Tommy, and then gestured to himself. “This happens. And I wasn't always a watcher. Someone else broke the rules and… I decided to go with them- and they took me along.”
“And you took me.” Tommy said lowly, keeping his voice as level as he could. His gut churned with apprehension and he fought to keep it off his face. He wouldn't show fear. He wouldn't, he couldn't. It would get him hurt.
“No.” Grian's face paled. “No, no, no- I'm so, so sorry, Tommy. I didn't want it to go this way- I- you were suffering. I-”
“It's fine.” Tommy huffed, breaking eye contact. “It's fine.”
“It's not.” Grian's voice crackled. His wings curled a bit tighter to his back.
“I- fuck.” He swore. "Fuck, man. You shouldn't have seen that- you shouldn't've had to.” He growled, and looked away, eyes darting out the charred window, past the broken glass. He wasn't really looking through it. He couldn't quite do it.
“Well that's-” Grian barked a laugh, a harsh, sharp, pained thing. “That's what watchers do. They see things. I- I'm not very good at it. In fact I'm rather abysmal with the whole thing.” He gripped his hands together. “They made sure I knew before I left. I'm a dropout, I guess.”
“You dropped out of fucking watching people creep school?” Tommy asked dryly. "You must've been shit."
“Yeah.” His lips twisted into a wry smile. “I dropped out of watcher creep school, got these later down the line,” He shook his wings behind him, ruffling his feathers with a sweeping sound. The fae man looked up from his blade with a frown, but went back to cleaning in his tiny corner of Tommy's vision. “Which are apparently part of the tuition fee. But uh, one day, I woke up on your server.” He didn't meet Tommy's eyes.
“We never… saw you.” Tommy furrowed his brows, eyes tracing up and down Grian's wings. They were mainly brown, but sunflower yellow towards the peaks, and blotted with blue-green the closer the feathers were to his body. He wasn't sure if he'd ever seen an avian with such colorful wings. Phil's were black, through and through. He squinted at Grian's feathers. Irises were blue. More violet though, Grian's were too green for that. Sunflowers and seafoam, maybe. Phil's were… Phil's were coal and ash. Soot. Witherblooms and soot and jagged feather vanes.
“No…” Grian looked down at his hands. “You wouldn't have. Your admin maybe, but you wouldn't.”
Tommy scoffed. “I sure hope not. He's a bitch.”
“Yeah,” Grian grimaced. “Well I was… around, every so often. And I saw you. I saw your home destroyed.” He looked Tommy in the eye, something dark and grief-ridden in the way his face fell. “I saw your friend exile you- and for a while I thought… I thought it was just one of those roleplaying servers, you know? Where you all have roles and- and a storyline- but it's not, is it.”
“Fuck no.” Tommy looked away. A- a role playing server? A game? Wasn't it supposed to be that at some point? “It was just an smp.” He huffed. “It was just some fucking smp. Something went wrong- something went fucking wrong.” Somewhere between the wars and the running and the games and the craters.
“Yeah.”
“You were fucking there for my exile, weren't you.” Tommy said quietly, not quite asking. He looked down at his hands, eyes catching on the scars lining his palms. The room smelled like gunpowder, all of a sudden. He shuddered.
“I was.” Grian reached out for him, but pulled back. The feathers around his head swept over his face, carving shadows under his eyes. “I'm sorry.” He whispered. “I'm so sorry, Tommy. You should never have had to go through that.”
“I-” Tommy squeezed his eyes shut against the cotton in his throat. “Yeah. Yeah it fucking sucked. And I didn't even realize.”
“That guy-”
“He's the admin.” Tommy choked. “Dream. He told me… he told me we were friends. That he liked me, that he was going to be there for me. He told me that no one else cared.” He clenched his hands into fists on his knees. He felt his fingernails digging into the flesh of his palms. “He destroyed all I had left.”
“Tommy-” Grian reached for him again, stiffly, awkwardly settling a hand on his fist. “You- I got you out. You're out now, you- I got you out of there. I care. I know you don't really know me, or anyone here, but I can promise that we will not let him take you back there.” He gently uncurled Tommy's hands and wrapped them in his own. They were smaller, calloused in different places than Tommy's. He had a builder's hands, a crafter's. Not a fighter's. Not like his. Not like Techno's, not like Wil's. Not like Tubbo's hands, ensnared by angry, puckered skin.
“I don't want to go back.” Tommy breathed. But Wilbur was there. Wilbur was dead, Philza- his own father killed him. Wilbur asked for death. And then he was gone, and Tommy's brother had finally shattered. “I-” Tubbo- Tubbo exiled him. He- Dream lied. Dream lied about Tubbo, Ranboo said so, but Tubbo was busy- he had to run L'manburg. New L'manburg. He… “Dream lied to me.” Techno wanted nothing to do with him anymore. “Dream has everything, under his control.” He whispered. “I don't want to leave them.”
He remembered Wilbur, back when he was good. Before the acrid scent of gunpowder and Pogtopia and cigarette smoke. Before the paranoia. Before Dream went bad, before Eret betrayed them. He remembered Wilbur's smile, his guitar. He remembered his big brother's voice on cold nights, intertwined with the crackle of the campfire, when it was just them.
He remembered Wilbur, eyes glassy with tears that slid across a smile too big for his face. The explosions that tore across his body like morbid splashes of mottled paint. Phil's sword had slotted neatly beneath his ribcage, right under his yet beating heart. He had been left to bleed out in his father's arms, grinning through burns and blood and raw, unadulterated joy.
He screamed for him. He screamed for his big brother until his throat went out. Until his heart grew numb and he ran out of tears to cry. Until Philza stood, his mangled wings dragging limply behind him as he carried his son's body away.
Tommy sobbed. Grian squeezed his hands tight.
“I'm sorry I couldn't get you out sooner.” He apologized thickly. His wings crept skywards until they blocked out the thin, silvery moonlight, and rested just above Tommy's shoulders. “I couldn't- I was only ever meant to watch.” He bitterly recited. “That's what watchers do.”
Tommy cried. The tears burned as they rolled down his face. Grian's hands tightened around his own as he curled around himself.
“I'm sorry.” Grian whispered. “I'm so sorry.”
Tommy has cried a lot, over these past three years. He cried for Wilbur, for Tubbo, for L'manburg, for himself. But he thought he had bled himself dry of tears. He thought Dream had burned them out of him. He thought his eyes had grown so clouded by gunpowder and soot, that he couldn't possibly have any more tears to shed.
He was wrong.
Damnit.