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It's fine. This was fine! He hadn't seen Tubbo in days, even as the day of the Festival crept steadily closer, but he was probably just busy with festival preparations, Tommy reasoned. It’s not like Tubbo had never been held up by his duties in Manberg before; he had a cover to keep, after all. But Tommy still couldn't help but worry.
The day of the Manberg Festival arrived, and he slipped through the shadowy alleyways of his former home alongside Wilbur, heading towards a building whose rooftop would give them a view of the stage set up in the main square, as they had planned. Tommy kept low on the roof, the short wall around the edge the only thing hiding him from the crowd below. Schlatt gave a speech, and Tommy rolled his eyes as he tried to ignore the way he spoke about Manberg, and its so-called democracy, as if he hadn't declared himself emperor the moment he was elected, as if he wasn't ruining the very things that once made this nation his home.
Schlatt was still talking. “…And I am happy to announce that our efforts to stop our enemies in Pogtopia from destroying what we’re working for here have not been in vain.”
Tommy snapped back to attention, glancing nervously at his brother. What is he talking about? his expression asked. Wilbur shrugged, shaking his head. There hadn't been any major actions taken between Manberg and Pogtopia in quite some time now, with most of their time spent lying in wait and planning their next move. If Manberg had made progress in stopping the movement to take back the nation, it’s not something either of them were aware of. It’s something on the inside.
“Bring him onstage,” the president ordered.
There was a movement of white to the side of the stage, and a man in a white hoodie approached the stairs. What's Punz doing here? Tommy thought wildly, but had no time to wonder further about his involvement, more focused on the kid he was dragging along in handcuffs.
Tommy couldn't stop himself. "TU—!" Wilbur’s hand covered his mouth before he could even finish shouting his friend’s name. No one seemed to have noticed them, anyways, attention devoted fully to the events onstage.
Tubbo, for lack of a better description, looked like shit. His suit jacket was gone, only wearing a stained white shirt and his trousers. His face was beaten badly enough that Tommy could see the bruising even from his distance, with a black eye and bloody lips. He was walking with a limp and his eyes seemed intent on studying the ground.
“What the fuck happened to him,” Tommy hissed under his breath. Wilbur didn't answer.
“Come up here, yeah, up to the podium,” Schlatt was saying to Punz, not directly speaking into the microphone but still audible. Tubbo stumbled along, and Tommy watched as his handcuffs were clipped to the railing along the front of the stage right in front of the podium. He let himself slump to the stage, only held upright by his chained hands, looking completely exhausted.
Schlatt turned back to the crowd. “A bit over a week ago, I discovered that this traitor has been conspiring with the idiots, with the tyrants that we kicked out of this server, that we kicked out of this great country months ago.”
Murmuring and whispering immediately spread through the audience, and Tommy’s stomach plummeted. They caught him. Tubbo had known spying would be dangerous if he was ever discovered, but they’d never really seriously considered that it might actually happen, even with the number of close calls there had been.
“There’s, there’s these fucking tunnels all underground, he kept sneaking off and missing meetings, and I didn’t want to believe that my own secretary of state—my right-hand man at that!—would betray his nation but—well, let’s just say I caught him sneaking off one too many times and put the damn pieces together! Hey. Hey, Tubbo, you got anything to say for yourself?”
Tubbo’s tired, swollen eyes lifted from the ground to scan the crowd, and he shook his head.
“Well then. Hey. Look at me now, yeah. Tubbo, you know what happens to traitors, don’t you? You know what we’re gonna have to do?”
Slowly, staring up at the man towering over him, Tubbo nodded.
Schlatt looked back out at the crowd, gathered for what had been supposed to be a celebration but quickly had gone south. “Is—is Technoblade in the audience?” he asked.
Tommy watched the piglin shift nervously in his seat like he was trying to make himself look smaller, but it wasn't exactly easy for him to disappear into a crowd.
“Technoblade, could you come up to the stage real quick?”
He hesitated, glancing up towards the rooftop for a split second, before drawing himself to his feet and walking slowly past the rows of chairs, so neatly lined up beneath the banners and hanging lanterns and the red and black flags. It all looked far too cheerful for the increasingly dire scene unfolding. His blood-red cloak swept ominously behind him as he approached the stage.
Tommy elbowed Wilbur’s side, whispering, “He won’t hurt him, right? He’s still on our side?”
Wilbur nodded distantly without looking at him, hands wringing and fidgeting.
“Tubbo, as the enemy of the state, and as a perpetrator to these awful, awful people that you are helping—Technoblade please, if you would, if you would be so kind, take care of this traitor. Take care of him.”
Techno’s response was picked up by the microphone, ringing faintly with feedback. “You mean, uh—he looks pretty hurt, you want me to help him out with his injuries? Shouldn’t you get Ponk for that?”
Schlatt shook his head, laughing. “No. No, Technoblade, I need you to uh…I need you to take him out.”
Techno shifted back and forth on his hooves, holding the tiller of his crossbow where it hung at his side. “Take him out, like—to dinner?” he asked. Stalling. Buying them time?
Tommy quietly pulled an ender pearl from his pocket, but for the first time since they’d gotten to the rooftop, Wilbur spoke, arm in front of Tommy in the universal gesture to—“Wait.”
And as Tommy watched in horror, Techno loaded a firework into his crossbow and turned to aim it at Tubbo, chained to the railing and helpless to defend himself as he struggled against the handcuffs keeping him in place in a desperate attempt to squirm away from the rocket pointed at his face. Tommy saw the piglin’s mouth move, but whatever he said wasn’t picked up by the microphone. It was for Tubbo’s ears only.
Tommy would never forget the shrill scream that rang out after Techno fired. And then fired again. And finally a third time before Tubbo stopped twitching and lay limp on the stage, clothing in tatters and blood and soot staining the stage around him. Before Schlatt could commend him for giving in to the pressure to execute Tubbo, though, he whirled around, firing another two fireworks in quick succession at Schlatt and Quackity. The audience erupted into chaos, Tommy watching from above as people scattered, tripping and trampling each other, more explosions going off throughout the crowd. Screams echoed off the buildings surrounding the square, people laid injured and dead throughout the brightly decorated festival grounds, and Wilbur took the chance to tell Tommy, “Now.”
It was all he had to say.
Tommy threw the pearl at the stage and stumbled to Tubbo’s mangled body. The respawn would take effect any moment now, he knew, but he had to get out of the crossfire first. He managed to break through the handcuffs with a couple blows of a pickaxe and pulled Tubbo into his arms. He was much lighter than the last time Tommy had picked him up like this, but on the bright side, it made it easier to carry him as he ran for the tunnel to Pogtopia to wait for his respawn.
Tommy didn’t know what to do. Tubbo was alive, his injuries no longer fatal thanks to the respawn magic taking effect, but he was still covered in burns from the firework explosions and likely injured from whatever had been happening to him in the week leading up to the festival. Wilbur hadn’t gotten back yet, but Tommy had been watching his comm for death messages so he knew he was alive. Tommy even had considered begging Ponk to come look at Tubbo’s injuries, but he knew from witnessing the massacre at the festival that Ponk had their own gruesome injuries to tend to.
Tommy settled for peeling off the charred remains of Tubbo’s shirt and binder, and cut away the parts of his pants that had melted into his skin, before digging through a chest until he found a regen potion. Tubbo was still unconscious, so instead of having him drink it, Tommy began pouring the potion directly into his burns. There were many fresh-looking scars on Tubbo’s chest and arms that Tommy had never seen before, he noticed now. Had they been—
Tommy forced the thought down before he could finish.
He felt Tubbo twitch, and then groan softly before suddenly flinching away from Tommy. He assumed, sympathetically, that it was just from the salty potion being applied to his open wounds, until he heard him actually speaking. “I told you, I don’t know,” he whined, clearly delirious and not fully awake yet.
“Tubbo?” Tommy asked, “Tubbso, can you hear me?”
“Tommy?” Tubbo whimpered.
“Yeah, yeah man it’s me. You’re in Pogtopia, you’re gonna be fine.”
“Can’t really hear you,” Tubbo winced. “Can tell it’s your voice, though.”
It made sense; he'd just had several firework rockets explode directly in his face, it would be a miracle if he could hear perfectly fine. Even Tommy's ears were still ringing faintly from the number of explosions that had gone off, somehow all without triggering the TNT rigged under the stage. Speaking of which—there were footsteps echoing from above as the missing members of Pogtopia descended into the cave.
Tommy scrambled to his feet. "Be right back," he told Tubbo, hoping he caught his meaning, and dashed off through the cavern to confront his brother and Techno.
The first thing Tubbo was aware of when he woke up was pain.
It wasn't like the past—week, he thought; he'd lost track of the days—had been pleasant by any stretch of the word, but nothing they'd done to him compared to the white-hot pain that sank into his skin and sat there like it was burning him alive from the inside out. This was new, beyond Schlatt's cruel fists and Punz's cold blades. He thought they were done, that they'd given up on him having any useful information about the rebellion. Schlatt had told him that, that they would—
Oh.
The Festival.
They'd had him executed.
Was he still dying, was this some horrible, stretched out, torturous death they deemed a traitor worthy of? His last death hadn't been nearly this painful; Sapnap's sword had been so sharp, he barely even felt it, only the coldness as he bled out before waking up with a scabbed-over wound that quickly faded to a pale scar.
He managed to open his eyes. His left eye was too swollen to open more than a squint, and he couldn't see at all on his right side. His surroundings were dark, but with a warm flickering light that lit up the blurry person leaning over him enough that he could see their mouth moving. His ears were ringing too badly to catch any words, but he could faintly make out a familiar voice that sounded like it was coming from underwater.
"Tommy?" he managed to force out. Moving his mouth tugged painfully at his face, sending new steady pulses of fire through his skull.
More muffled noises as Tommy spoke. Even if he could hear, he was sure he wouldn't be able to keep up with Tommy's rapid words in his current state anyway.
“Can’t really hear you,” Tubbo said when Tommy seemed to have finished talking. “Can tell it’s your voice, though.” Even unable to tell what Tommy was saying, it was still comforting to hear his voice as he fretted over his injuries. But it didn't last. Tommy jumped slightly like he had heard something and glanced over his shoulder before looking back at Tubbo and saying something, which Tubbo guessed was something like be right back.
And then Tommy was off, leaving Tubbo alone with a lantern lighting up a warm circle in the darkness around him. Tubbo let his eyes close—or eye, he supposed, with no sensation of whether his right eye was open or closed or even still there at all.
It wasn't long before he slipped into a restless sleep.
The next time Tubbo woke up fully—he remembered faint moments, drifting in and out of consciousness; half-heard arguments, sweet melon barely covering the sour taste of nether wart, glimpses of Tommy's face, and the occasional moment simply waking alone in the dimly lit cave—Tommy was leaning against the ravine wall next to him, fresh scrapes and bruises on his face and a wad of gauze shoved up his nose.
"Tommy?" Tubbo said, and Tommy snapped out of whatever daze he was in and was at Tubbo's side in a moment.
"Can you hear better now? Techno said the healing pots would help with that but you haven't really been awake enough to tell in a while, are you feeling better? Does it still hurt bad? I can grab some weakness or something if you'd rather just sleep more, I hope the bandages aren't too tight, we had to make sure they'd stay on because a damp musty cave is just about the worst possible place to have a bunch of open wounds—"
Tubbo cut him off. "What happened to your face, bossman?"
Tommy froze, then laughed rather awkwardly. "You're seriously asking me—Tubbo, you died, you've got burns on like a third of your body, hell half your face is burnt off, don't worry about my face, man, alright? See, I don't even need this anymore," he said, pulling the bloody gauze out of his nostrils and tossing it over his shoulder, "Techno kinda broke my nose yesterday, it's been bleeding off and on, I guess, but it's nothing, really," He paused. "I guess your hearing is better now, yeah?"
"Yeah, just take it slow, man, my head hurts like a bitch still."
Tommy nodded. "Wilbur said he thought you had a concussion the moment they brought you onstage, before they even—" He winced. "Before shit went to hell, I might say. What—what happened to you?"
Tubbo shrugged, a motion he regretted when it pulled the bandages around his chest tight against the burns there. "I mean, you heard him on the stage. They caught me sneaking off, didn't like whatever excuse I thought up, and well, once they knew I was spying for you guys they wanted to know if I knew anything. It was just Schlatt at first, and he really wasn't too bad, it was worse than usual but nothing terribly new, but then I guess he started paying Punz to—y'know, get me to talk. I didn't, though, I swear—they figured I just didn't know anything useful, and decided to—well, make an example of a traitor." He gave a pained, half-hearted chuckle, hoping it would ease the horrified expression that had fallen over Tommy's face.
Tommy looked like he was near tears. "They—you're telling me, they fuckin' tortured you? I don't care if you told them anything or not, Tubs, that's—what the fuck!" he cursed.
"Eh, I mean, they wanted information and thought I had it, and to be fair I was actively committing treason—"
"Don't make excuses for them, seriously? Oh my god, they—I've half a mind to just let Wilbur blow it all up next time!"
Tubbo sighed. "So how am I looking, bossman?"
Tommy grimaced. "I mean, you'll live, we've made it far enough that that's clear, but you're not looking great, Tubbso." He counted off on his fingers as he continued. "You've got, ah, some pretty nasty burns from the fireworks I've been putting regen on since they're too deep to heal on their own, but even with the pots you're probably not getting vision back in that eye, you do seem to be hearing better but I doubt your ear on that side'll ever be the same, and you—lost a couple fingers on your left hand, I dunno if you'd noticed that but I reckon you tried to shield your face which honestly might've saved your other eye, they were pretty much charred to the bone which was quite a smell, I'll tell ya, goat-boy roast mutton—"
Tubbo raised his left hand to examine it for the first time, thickly padded with bandages. He might've not even noticed that his pinky and ring finger were missing if Tommy hadn't told him, the shape of his hand so thoroughly disguised by the wrappings.
"—while you're up, do you wanna take care of your regen now? It's this, uh—Niki helped put it together; oh yeah, she fled Manberg after the festival, it's been a wild couple days—regen mixed with thick potion to make it easier to apply, but it probably will sting pretty bad 'cause of the salt in the ghast tears, I was putting some plain regen on when you first woke up and I wouldn't be surprised if the pain's what—"
"Wait, Toms, slow down, can you?" Tubbo reminded him, eye squeezed shut as he tried to keep up with the other boy's rambling. He kept tugging at his hair with his good hand for a moment before he was able to relax and answer. "Yeah, yeah you can do it now, get it over with and all."
Tommy started with his chest, where most of the burns weren't as bad. The rockets had hit his hand, face, and side of his chest, in that order, but the damage was more spread out on his torso than the other locations. After rinsing his hands in the clear, cold water of the underground stream that ran through the caverns, Tommy unwrapped the bandages around Tubbo's chest. It was a painful mess of blisters, many of them burst and oozing clear fluid and the occasional trace of blood, but a small area on the upper right was whitish and more leathery in texture. Tommy prodded at it cautiously.
"Yeah, can't feel shit there," Tubbo said, mildly unsettled.
Tommy hummed a vague noise of acknowledgement. "Yeah, that's what this shit" —he gestured with the jar of regeneration salve— "is supposed to help with. Not the numbness itself, I mean—it's just, that means it's too deep to heal on its own, I guess, so if you, y'know, wanna have skin there again you need potions to grow it back, basically."
Tommy opened the jar, its contents slightly bluer in color than the usual pinkish-purple of regen and with a faint luminescent shimmer from the added glowstone.
"Sorry in advance if this stings, Big T," said Tommy sympathetically, before scooping some of the salve up with his fingers and smearing it onto the raw, blistered skin.
Tubbo wouldn't say he screamed, he's not that much of a pussy. He yelped at most, the salty stinging of the potion mix just as bad as Tommy had warned.
"Fuck, shit—" Tommy let out a string of curses as he jerked back from Tubbo's cry of pain and almost knocked over the glass jar of regen. He tentatively reached back towards Tubbo, saying, "Don't worry, I'm not touching it again, I just—are you alright?"
Tubbo reached out and gripped his wrist. "'s fine, keep going. I've had worse, a little stinging's hardly a reason to stop now."
Tommy took a shaky breath in and out. "Alright, man, if you say so."
Tubbo braced himself and clenched his teeth as Tommy finished applying the regen. It really wasn't so bad after the initial stinging; if anything, once the actual magic of the potion took effect, the throbbing heat of the burn lessened and the raw skin and flesh looked a few shades less red, and unlike a healing potion, the soothing feeling stayed there.
When Tommy finished with his chest, he helped Tubbo sit up to reapply the bandages around his bare torso. "The, uh—I don't recognize a lot of the scars here, they look recent—are those from, uh—"
Tubbo nodded. "Yeah, i—yeah, interrogation, all that; comes with the job, spying and all, y'know?"
Tommy didn't seem to know how to respond, looking down in a rare moment of silence and continuing to wrap Tubbo's wounds. The bandages weren't pure white; they seemed used. Pogtopia had pretty limited resources; they were probably having to boil bandages to sterilize and reuse them, Tubbo guessed.
"We can do your legs another time, they don't really need bandage changes as often and they should heal alright on their own but it'll go faster with pots, y'know?" said Tommy as he worked, and Tubbo nodded. The motion still made his head spin, worse now that he was upright.
Next were his arms and hand. Tubbo tried to look away from his hand as Tommy gently unwrapped it, but once he caught a glance of it, he couldn't look away. It was a patchwork of blisters and the same leathery skin as the place the firework had exploded against his chest, and where the two fingers should've been, his hand ended at the knuckles with a rather sloppy row of stitches marking where the charred remains of his fingers must've been amputated. It didn't even hurt particularly badly compared to the deep throbbing heat of the burns, but the sight still made his stomach twist itself in knots. It just looked wrong.
He just tried to focus on breathing as Tommy rubbed the regen into the burns on his hand, and then up his arms, before rewrapping them with more bandages, along with an additional layer of gauze around the stumps of his fingers.
Tommy tousled his hair with his knuckles lightheartedly. "Just your face now, Tubs, we're almost done."
He couldn't exactly see the state of his own face once the bandages were off, which Tommy seemed to consider as he rambled about it. "Your ear's pretty fucked up, man, it's only like half as fluffy now, what the hell," he was saying, "that's gotta be like the worst part of all of this, how could they." His voice had that joking edge it got when he was nervous, but Tubbo went along with it.
"Oh god, yeah, who cares about fingers, what will I do with only seventy-five percent ear fluffiness, it's a travesty," he giggled, laying on his side as Tommy applied the potion. The burns stretched up past his hairline, but his bangs would be long enough to hide the missing hair once they grew back out.
"Keep still, man, I don't wanna jab out your eye or some shit, you're lucky you didn't lose it entirely already."
"Yeah, alright, sorry." Tubbo's voice came out sounding much smaller than he meant for it to.
"It's fine; honestly, I'm just glad you're doing well enough to joke around and all. I mean, you're alright now, or as alright as you can be, but—it was a scary couple days there, I won't lie. You've only got one life left, I don't know what I'd do if you got—like, an infection or something and died again."
He knew Tommy was right; it was rare, since respawns almost always healed fatal injuries, but it was possible to die multiple times to the same injury if the remaining wounds got infected or if they were simply too severe to be fully healed to a survivable point in the respawn. With how much was still left to heal after his respawn, he didn't want to think about what his body had looked like beforehand. He shuddered.
Tommy finished with the regen and moved on to dressing his eye and even more bandages. Tubbo wouldn't be surprised if Pogtopia's whole supply was either on his body or being boiled to be ready to swap the next time they needed changing.
By the time Tubbo spoke again, there had been a long and quiet pause. "I mean—you've only got one life left too, man."
"Yeah, yeah I guess I do." Tommy wiped his brow with the back of his hand. "Anything else you need?"
Before Tubbo could say anything, a low rumble growled from his stomach. There was a beat of silence before he and Tommy both were laughing again. "Oh my god, yeah, I'm starving. How long's it been since I ate?"
"Well—the festival was on Friday night, and it's Sunday evening now; you ate a little while you were in and out but it wasn't much, and I kinda doubt you were eating well when you were in—in custody or whatever, right?"
(They didn't even have him in a real cell, didn't need to; he was just locked in a closet in the White House and every day Schlatt would stop by to kick his ribs and punch his face and spit questions and insults in his face with breath that stank of alcohol. Or, well—one day Schlatt kicked him in the head just a little too hard and Tubbo blacked out and when he woke up with a throbbing headache he was in a larger room he didn't recognize, and that one did look more like a proper cell. That's where Punz visited the first time, and sure he never cut that deep with the few knives he brought but it still hurt when he'd pin him to the floor and demand he tell them where to find Pogtopia's hideout, reveal what the rebellion was planning, anything Manberg could use to hurt his friends and stop their mission and he told him he didn't know. Either they knew he was lying but decided it was hopeless to get anything out him, or they believed and just thought he was useless to keep alive. Schlatt came by one last time and told him—the festival he'd never even gotten a chance to start planning was still going to happen. But, he said, he figured that Manberg needed a message sent. An example made. A display of the consequences of treason. On the day of the Festival, he was marched out of what he now knew was a newly-constructed basement of the White House. Tubbo walked onto that stage knowing he was going to die.)
"—bo! Tubbo."
That was—that was Tommy.
"Tubbo, Tubbster, c'mon, breathe, just breathe, you're alright."
"Tommy," Tubbo gasped, breathless.
"Yeah, it's okay, we're in Pogtopia, you're fine." Tommy had his hands on Tubbo's shoulders, and Tubbo brought his own hands up to rest on top of his. "Flashback, mate?"
Tubbo nodded, trying to breathe. "Yeah, just—I dunno, it wasn't the first time you mentioned it, I don't know why that's the one that got me spiraling like that. But, uh. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I ate a lot."
"Well then, if you're alright now—Techno's potato stew should be ready soon, and Niki's baked a bunch of bread so we've got more than just potatoes now, which sure is an improvement."
Tubbo couldn't really move around yet, so Tommy brought two wooden bowls of stew and half a loaf of soft, warm bread back to Tubbo's bed to eat with him, instead of the usual spot for meals outside the potato farm. It was the part of the cave Tubbo usually stayed in when he spent the night in Pogtopia, a small opening off the main ravine not far from Tommy's "room". Tommy had actually dragged most off his bedding off his own straw mattress to form something between a sleeping pallet and a nest across the chamber from Tubbo's, and he was pretty sure that Tubbo hadn't noticed it yet. He'd grabbed two spoons but hadn't realized how awkward eating would be for Tubbo. His dominant hand was the less injured one so he could hold the spoon without much trouble, but then he was left trying to balance the bowl with his mangled left hand, so he instead opted to just drink straight from the bowl.
Tubbo fell asleep not long after dinner, body exhausted and trying to heal, and Tommy followed suit soon after him without even bothering to clean up from dinner. He'd barely slept the past two nights, between trying to make sure Tubbo was alive and the internal conflicts in Pogtopia. Laying in the pile of blankets against the cave wall, he rubbed his still-swollen noise and winced at the damaged cartilage popped. Still, as badly as Techno had beaten him in the Pit, he knew it was nothing compared to the pain Tubbo was suffering from the injuries Techno had inflicted on him. His eyes fell upon Tubbo, breathing steadily in his sleep, one last time before he too closed his eyes and gave in to exhaustion.
Tommy woke up to the sound of gagging and heaving and, after a couple failed tries in the darkness, manage to light the lantern sitting on the rough stone floor. Tubbo was bent over his empty bowl left from dinner, using it to catch the contents of his stomach as he vomited.
"Shit shit shit," Tommy cursed under his breath. "Ay, what's going on, you alright?" he asked, maybe sounding a bit more irritated than he meant to; he was across the small stone chamber and at Tubbo's side in hardly a blink.
Between dry heaves, all that was left with his stomach already empty, Tubbo choked out, "'m good."
Tommy shoved his hands in his pockets, sitting on his heels and leaning back. "Yeah, Tubs, I'm kinda having a hard time believing that, given that you're up in the middle of the night puking."
"Well—I, I think I'm done now?" Tubbo said, as if that meant it hadn't happened at all. He glanced at the bowl with an expression that looked like a combination of disgust, exhaustion, and shame. "I'll, uh, get rid of that nasty shit," he added, and started moving like he was going to stand up and dispose of the contents of the bowl himself.
Tommy stopped him. "C'mon, you're kidding, right? You can barely sit up, I dunno where you think you're gonna take that but if you think you can make it more than like, three blocks without passing out then go right ahead. I've got it, man, sit down."
Yeah, it was gross, so what. Tommy had been around animals and all the waste that came with them for years; his best friend's vomit wasn't really any worse than cow shit. He lit his spare lantern so Tubbo wouldn't be left in the dark when he left, dumped and rinsed the bowl at the furthest point downstream on the underground river where it flowed back into the ground, and returned to Tubbo after rinsing his hands and filling a water bottle at the opposite end of the stream.
"Here, y'think you can keep water down?" he offered, handing the bottle to Tubbo who nodded and sipped from it. That was probably good, he didn't want to chug it only to immediately throw up again.
After drinking maybe half the bottle, Tubbo paused and wiped his mouth. "Sorry about that, I think it's just, like, nausea from the pain or something. Dunno why it just hit me now, though."
"You sure you don't want something to help you sleep through it? Y'know—weakness, slowness, there's seriously no shortage of that shit around here. I've actually got some right here," he added, kicking the bag of bandages and healing potions at the end of Tubbo's bed.
Tubbo sank back against his pillow. "Yeah, it might be for the best, now that you mention it again."
Tommy pulled a blackish weakness potion from the bag and grimaced as he thought of the taste. "Hey, Tubbster, I've got an idea. I know these taste like shit so what do you say you chase it with some healing?"
Tubbo grinned.
A few more days passed (not that it was easy to track them, deep in the caverns and ravines) with Tubbo largely bedridden but gaining more and more movement as the worst of his injuries healed. He'd given in to sleeping with the help of weakness potions whenever he wasn't awake to eat or have regeneration applied to his burns, which worried Tommy a little. Sure, Tubbo needed the rest and wouldn't get it if he woke up in the middle of the night throwing up from pain, but outside of the little chamber where Tommy and Tubbo had been staying, the other members of Pogtopia weren't doing well either. Tommy had to go out one night to hunt spiders after he discovered that Wilbur had drank through half their potions stash in a single night—and if there was any doubt that it had been him, he'd passed out right next to the pile of empty glass bottles.
A week or so after the festival, however, Tubbo was able to limp around Pogtopia as long as he had a wall to lean on for balance, and large parts of what had been raw skin were now scabbed over. It was a good sign, he was healing, but now that he was moving around more it did mean the scabs would occasionally split and bleed through his bandages. The lack of depth perception was new; navigating the rickety staircases and wooden walkways was a bit nerve-wracking with half his vision.
Wilbur had confronted him once—the first time Tubbo had seen him since before he was arrested, in fact—just to ask if he'd given up any sensitive information during the interrogations. He said he hadn't, but Wilbur wouldn't stop berating him until Tommy found Tubbo near tears and chased Wilbur off through the tunnels of the caverns, close on his heels and shouting a near-constant stream of less-than-polite words at his back.
The leaders of the rebellion were more divided than ever, Tommy told him afterwards, not just in goals but fractured and distanced even further. Wilbur still wanted to destroy L'manberg for good, and Tommy was growing tired of talking him down from the suicide bombing he seemed so eager to complete; Techno was still helping with resources even after his apparent betrayal at the Festival but wasn't excited about any nation existing in L'manberg's borders at all; and Tubbo and Tommy were left holding the last hope for their once-great nation.
(Despite that, he still felt a strange sort of relief when he caught word that the White House he'd been imprisoned in for that awful week had been torn to the ground. If only it could've undone what happened there.)