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brick-a-doodle-do · 1 year

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AGHHHH IT'S HERE!!! I AM SCHEDULING THIS FOR LATER BC I FINISHED IT EARLY BUT AHH @beckyu I HAVE FINISHED THE FIC >:]

also HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO SHROUD YOU SAVIOUR !!!

ps becky i completely forgot about my plan for chapter two until i was one scene away from finishing...so let's just say this can be an au and it will happen at one point 😭🙏 for now tho this is just a rewrite of chapter one but with a LOT more content :]

(read the og fic here ! ao3 link to this fic !)

shroud, you...savior?

words: 4590 (LENGTHH!)

cw: panic, description of a panic attack (-ish? idrk how to write panic attacks), spiders, swearing

—–—

Trust. It was a vulnerable thing to play around with, he knew that. Yet still, Wilbur continued to show up behind the “Ranboo” plushie on Tommy’s bookshelf. Day after day.

It had been almost a month since he and Tommy had met, and already his mind had already sworn the kid to be trustworthy. But logically, he knew that the risk factor of revealing himself went up and far beyond the skyline he’d grown to know as Tommy’s ceiling.

True as that may be, though, a part of Wilbur still liked thinking of Tommy as a gentle human, rare as they may be…and never as young as Tommy. He had all the doubts in the world that this human wouldn’t be just like the stories. It only made sense.

He wonders how much Tommy really cared about his situation, because he knew that so much of his life’s curtain had been lifted, but for some reason the human only sympathised with him. It frustrated him to not understand such a massive thing.

Wilbur knew it wasn't worth it to dig deeper, because all it took was one unthought sentence to tip the boat and send Tommy off. His entire world would clatter around him, every minute he spent making sure he wouldn’t be seen, finding the right way to borrow food without any trace, to make his own tools and his own home—just like a borrower should. Every delicacy he’d been trained to follow. It was exhausting, but that’s how it has been, and Wilbur doesn’t hope to change the fact just yet.

Instead, he followed through with offering up a system that he explicitly said he expected Tommy to follow; a simple “keep your hands and eyes to yourself”.

It had been a risky card to lay on the table, but Tommy respected it.

So far.

And he enjoyed their talks, for the most part. Occasionally his voice would run dry when Tommy would ask a question that made the hair on his neck stand, and he never misses the awkward pauses between their responses when Wilbur trails off as he thinks he’s talking too much or revealing too much or about to reveal something important.

All in all, other than that insecurity, it was nice to have a responding voice to relax with.

Settling down against the wood of the bookshelf was a rewarding thing, something like a gift for his hard work. And a good fifty percent of the times he’d done it, Wilbur avoided thinking about how convenient it would be to get Tommy’s help with what he spent unnecessary time on.

Unfortunately for him, this time was the calm before the storm.

That was impossible to tell at that point, though.

It was quiet as he approached from the hole he’d carved in the back of the bookshelf, save for Tommy wrapping his stream up with drawling out his goodbyes. Stars danced in the sky from what he could see without the glare from the warm fairy lights that Tommy had lit. He can just barely see between the plushie without risking being spotted. And from what he could see, Tommy had ended the stream by now and was only sitting with himself in the camera view.

He closed down the camera and returned to Minecraft. He barely knew what it was, though it seemed Tommy enjoyed it a lot. And it seemed nice, like…clean? Smooth? Wilbur can’t exactly find the words to describe something out of his range of knowledge.

“Wilbur?” Tommy calls out, voice raised.

“Hi, Tommy,” Wilbur replies softly—though he keeps his volume up for the sake of Tommy. It echoes around the closed off shelf just slightly, repeating back to him twice. “Was your stream good?” he asks, crouching down and shuffling his legs so he’s leaning against the same wooden wall he’s always on, head turned to watch Tommy’s fingers tap against the rectangular thing he always uses. He used to know the name of it, but it’s vanished in his head for the time being.

It’s lulling to listen to.

“I think it was? I don’t know the word for it, it was fuckin’ weird, Tubbo wouldn’t stop punching me the entire time.”

“I don’t expect you to know the word, you’re too young to know big words,” Wilbur hums.

It was risky, but the sound of Tommy’s huffed laughter let his nails stop digging into his palm.

“Piss off, you don’t even know what a keyboard is, ya’ dick. Don’t make fun of my lack of vocabulary, I have more important things to do than learn fucking English—like attend to my many many women, yeah?”

Wilbur bites at the inside of his cheek, combing desperately through the tone of Tommy’s voice, how it spilled into lilting syllables at some points and how his voice raised at other times. He seemed sarcastic…but he could never be sure. And it made his voice run dry. He closed his eyes and pushed the side of his forefinger against his temple, sighing in regret. Or maybe relief of the tease in part of his reply.

The silence drew out awkwardly, Wilbur sat with his eyes closed and only the sound of the keyboard clicking. Before the rubber band could snap back on the both of them, Tommy chimed in. “Hey, Wil, y’know I was just joking about that, right? I’m not mad at you,” he reassures. It soothes him so quickly.

He opens his eyes again and returns his hands to his lap, ready to reply when he sees something shift in the shadows. Jumping, his hands instinctively reaching to his side for a needle, where he finds himself defenceless against whatever was there. The scent of rot runs in his senses. He wrinkles his nose at it, chest already heaving.

“Wilbur?” Tommy cuts in, but he can barely hear it over his head spinning

Wilbur stays still, moving slowly. He can barely get halfway to his feet before something pushes on his chest and he slumps back against the wall, his head pushed down awkwardly. He pushes his vision up the best he can, what little light that floods in from Tommy’s room displaying a creature he could just faintly recognize.

A spider.

Stories of the beings come to a slamming halt in his head. It pins another leg onto him, and he bites his tongue hard, saliva pooling in the bottom of the mouth he struggled to keep from screaming. He keeps his hands to himself, one pressed flat against the sleek wood and the other clamped over his mouth.

Spiders…shouldn’t be that big. He’s never met one before, but it screams unnatural. It screams monster. Fittingly, Wilbur screams for a monster.

“Tommy—oh fuck—Tommy!” Wilbur yells out, his rules clambering to the ground with an inaudible shatter. The spider above him hisses in reply, the red glint in its many, many eyes making his blood run cold. It doesn’t do anything, it sits there, while Wilbur is defenceless. The predator has his prey, so again, in a last ditch effort, he calls for its predator. “Tommy!” again he yells, as if somehow the human could be able to help him.

Fuck his rules! Why was hiding one of them?

Why does he never plan for the worst?

Tears that fall to his agape expression, making his strained eyes stinging and his throat run dry. He swallows, shuddering at the lump he can't find a way to get rid of, and if somehow it was possible, the spider pushes down harder, hissing at him again. Its eyes burn into his head. Wilbur huffs nervously and sinks further down the bookshelf wall.

Whatever Tommy’s reply is goes in one ear and pours right out the other, his senses a garbled pit of smog.

The spider above him twitches, vibrating through it's body where Wilbur can feel it in his core.

And before he can call once more for the human, the warm lights that look like orange spots in his teary vision are pushed into view as the contents on the shelf are shoved to the side to fix a problem Wilbur should've been able to get himself out of.

—— — ——

Tommy shoved everything to the side of the middlemost shelf, not bothering to acknowledge the bits and pieces that fell to the hardwood floor with a clatter. The only thing his instincts care about is the tiny thing that lay in front of him, barely the size of his finger, crumpled near the edge of the shelf with Shroud standing proudly on him. Wilbur’s curls barely obscure his wet cheeks that only get worse by the second.

Tommy stands for a moment, hands making useless efforts to find a way to get the spider off of Wilbur without startling the tiny. He doesn’t deserve that.

Eventually, he pinches the sides of his body and brings his other hand underneath, barely grazing Wilbur’s torso in the process. Tommy’s heart twists when he steps away with Shroud and more importantly his raging head which makes him feel awful for breaking the second of Wilbur’s couple of simple rules.

“Shroud, fuckin’ dickhead, don’t do Wilbur like that,” he scolds the arachnid, slipping him into his cage and sealing it off.

He’d been completely mindless to let it be on the shelf.

He runs a hand down his face and returns back to the bookshelf, where Wilbur still was, chest still heaving from the scare and eyes absolutely fixed on him. They never left him, and he felt awful. It got worse with every step he took closer to the tiny, no matter how slow he approached and no matter how high he raised his hands in defence.

Tommy couldn’t blame him. He had lied to Wilbur. Let him sit in faux comfort.

Wilbur coughs, choking on the tears that don’t stop rolling down his flushed cheeks. Tommy’s expression twists, plummeting deeper in concern. He swallows, nervous.

“Hey, uhm, Wil?” he asks. Wilbur flinches at it, shuffling away from the edge of the shelf and further and further into the corner until his body is pressed up against the fold of the two wooden boards. “Hey, nonono—it’s okay, you’re fine,” he tries. “It’s—you’re fine. Shroud’s gone, yeah? He’s in his cage.”

There is the daintiest moment of silence before Wilbur bursts,

“Had you known? Did you know that entire fucking time?” Wilbur demands, his voice shaky, and not only because of his uncertainty.

Tommy had always hated how unsure he felt around him, even in the safety of the bookshelf, a place that he, at the time, had felt safe at. But he has bigger problems to address head-on than Wilbur’s wavering trust with him. Like, how heavy his chest was.

“Wilbur, breathe in,” he says, ignoring the question. Wilbur obliges startlingly quickly, taking in a deep, quivering breath. “Okay, uhm, breathe out. And then in again—out,” he demonstrates, watching as Wilbur takes what he says to heart, not without a scowl on his face however.

Tommy stands back quietly as Wilbur sorts through his emotions. He watches with his breath held, and when tiny eyes connect with his own he releases it. Wilbur’s lips curl in on themself, then open like he’s going to say something.

Tommy listens.

“Answer me,” Wilbur says.

Tommy swallows and stays quiet, guilt pecking at him like a crow.

Finally, “Yeah, yeah I did. But trust me when I say I didn’t want anything to do with you! I—I mean I like talking to you ‘n all, but I respected your personal space, y’know?”

Wilbur considers it for a moment, eyes staring beyond Tommy, down at his hands, then back to Tommy. “I wasn’t safe, and you let me think I was! You’ve gone and what, let me go weeks thinking I was safe?”

“You were safe!” Tommy argues, brows furrowed, shallow in thought as to why Wilbur refused to believe what he said. Maybe he needed to be more convincing. “Seriously, Wil. Think about it, man: I knew where you were pretty much every day, and I didn’t make one move for you. I let you think you were safe, because you were. I literally own a spider, people hate those fuckin’ things, I’d never hurt him, let alone you.”

Wilbur stays quiet. Tommy can’t exactly say that he looks convinced or is even processing anything Tommy said to him, so Tommy lends him the time to. The borrower intertwines his fingers around his legs, nails tugging up his skin as he tightens his grasp.

Tommy’s hands twitch.

Slowly, attention never leaving the tiny, he inches his hand up and moves it closer to Wilbur, knuckle extended just barely so he can nudge the man. Tommy’s finger rubs against the soft material of a shirt that was once his as he tries to soothe Wilbur, grazing barely at his impossibly small and fragile torso.

Instantly, borrower startles, hands unlinking and rushing to his side, only for his tense shoulders to slump for some reason. Then Wilbur’s face twists into a deeper scowl and his hands, each barely the size of his fingertip, push at his knuckle. The feeling makes the fan in his mind whir loudly and his eyes go noticeably wide, the feeling of an entire hand against centimetres of his finger plays with his head.

“Sorry,” Tommy murmurs above his crowded thoughts.

“Don’t fucking touch me, yeah? You’ve done enough, you don’t get to fucking—" Wilbur pauses suddenly, his brows furrowing as he silently negotiates something, which ends with a quippy: "get the hell away from me, actually! I don’t want to see you right now.”

Tommy’s face, somehow, falls even further.

—— — ——

Wilbur watches with bated breath as Tommy walks off without sparing another glance at him. A part of him is rewarded at the sight of the human taking his demand, while the other worries for what might be to come.

Perhaps something awful that Tommy wanted to keep a secret by playing along. He doubts that fact, because in the back of his mind he knows Tommy, amusingly enough, would never compare with the mercilessness (or, respectively, the brains) of someone who could torture such a conscious being.

When the door to Tommy’s bedroom finally closes softly, he feels like he can breathe again; his muscles ease and the smog in his mind wipes away slowly. It still stands, but he doesn’t have it revving at every little insignificant movement Tommy had to offer.

Wilbur sighs and drags his hands along his face, sore eyes and tear-dried cheeks making his skin scratchy. He shuffles up, standing in the place that just moments ago he would’ve considered his safe haven. But dwelling on it didn’t appeal to Wilbur, so he found his way out of the stream of soft lighting and back into the shadows, the fairy lights covered by the thing Tommy had shoved to the side.

He steps carefully along the small board installed between the back of the bookshelf and the wall, ducking as he approaches the small hole. It’s equally as dark inside, and without the usual chatter as Tommy streamed or talked to friends it felt suffocatingly quiet and isolating. Contrastingly, at the very same time, he thinks the sound of it would make him sick.

Call him dramatic, but he has every right to be right back at square one with Tommy.

Wilbur walks silently towards the lit part of the walls, where he’d hung a piece of excess cloth to section off his living quarters with the rest of the tunnel systems. He ducks under it, and instantly a matchstick-box bed with a portioned sponge as his mattress calls to him to rest his sore eyes.

He slumps on the makeshift bed. It sinks just slightly after it gets used to his weight, and a notable rarity of physical tire creeps along his aching body.

He eases his muscles to the best of his ability as he drifts, flexing his fingers and rolling his wrists. Wilbur can’t recall a time where his hands had been that tight or when they’d dug into his skin like that.

To put it simply, he felt betrayed. And maybe he shouldn’t, but he did.

Wilbur’s eyelids hung heavy over his eyes as mentality seeped into physicality. He shuffles his position, laying the length of the makeshift bed with hands crossed over his chest while he stared up at the almost endless ceiling. It climbed higher and higher until it was too engulfed in shadows to see properly.

He imagines Tommy’s ceiling, white and smooth. He wondered what it would be like to fall asleep under that roof instead of…well, truthfully, he doesn’t know if he considered the abyss to be a roof.

Sure, in most aspects it was. It sheltered him from the rain and kept him away from the blazing sun, and the walls around him made the temperature bearable, but he can’t say it’s exactly the most…relaxing thing.

Wilbur can mark many occasions where he’s walked past a motionless Tommy who stared up at his ceiling. At the time he’d assumed the kid to be asleep, but now he reconsiders. So, he supposes he wished to have a place to think. Because staring up at the same towering wooden panels that shoot beyond his vision is never calming. It’s effortless to imagine a thin, woolly, pitch-black leg creeping out of the shadow, then another one, and another, and another as eight beady red eyes blink simultaneously blink, and the hiss of it echoes through the caverno—Wilbur squirms uncomfortably and tries to blink away the vision. It fades as he tosses to his side and grabs aimlessly for the crumpled clump of sloppily sewn together pieces of cloth, something he thought would look appealing, but really looked untidy. Finally, his fingers grab at it, pulling the weight up to toss over himself.

His overheated body is cooled by the cold feeling of it having rested on the dusty floor. It feels nice, it almost distracts him from the impending doom that his mind can’t shake the feeling of.

Wilbur's fingers curl into the cloth.

Minutes pass, the lulling sound of something being on a raging absence for such a peculiar and melancholy evening.

Maybe an hour passes, perhaps three or six. There was one constant during his wakeful period: Wilbur could barely sleep. No matter if he shifted his body just barely or assumed a million different positions, if he kept his makeshift lights on or off, or if to soothe his restless mind he hit himself in the head.

Every time, he’d end up on his back, staring up at an abyss. Something in him wanted to seek out Tommy. It was an abrupt thought, and frankly a startling one, and he certainly weighed the possibilities of it for a long while.

Somewhere along the way of deciding, his head stopped buzzing and he found a means to sleep.

Wilbur isn’t entirely positive it was morning as he wakes up to a thump! that rattles the fragile insides of his nook.

He jolts up, anxiety scaling his spine and foraging his bed-ruffled curls, and right down to his eyes, which flicker with the same uncertainty that was in his limbs when he shoved his bedding off of himself and stood to his rickety feet.

Thump!

Wilbur jumps, the noise sounding strangely close—oh.

Tommy.

For a split second, it had just been him in the universe. He had forgotten about Tommy’s piss-poor scheme of letting him bathe in the lie, fermenting it just right until it was inevitable that the betrayal would sting just a little bit more.

“Wil?” Tommy calls out, tapping at the outside of the walls again. “I’m not gonna try anything, I actually don’t even want you to come out. It’d be nice to physically make up with you, but words are good too. Just tell me you haven’t gone and left,” Tommy says. His voice echoes down the hallway, and Wilbur can imagine how close he must be. How far he’s leaning over the bookshelf just to get a shot at his crumpled trust. Bullshit.

He considers it, standing in the middle of the hall. It’s tempting, he can’t say he doesn’t still yearn for the feeling of just sitting with Tommy, being with another person instead of alone.

But, then again, he knew the risk, and it skyrocketed.

So, Wilbur stayed quiet until he could get his shit together.

Tommy disagreed.

“Wilbur,” Tommy drawled sourly, “come on, man, I don’t want to make this a bigger deal than it already is, but just–” his voice is cut off as he stops talking. There’s a pause, a pleasing one, but it’s cut off with an abrupt “sorry”.

The borrower sighs. “Are you trying to make me feel bad?” he asks.

“Not really.” Tommy pauses shortly. “Maybe.”

Wilbur huffs, amused. “Well it’s not really working.” It is.

Barely, there’s the echo of a sigh.

Through the weight of their silence, Wilbur considers his options: life over Tommy.

It’s not exactly apparent to him, yet still he chooses something and throws all of his cares away to walk down the hall and closer to Tommy.

“Well then I’m not trying to make you feel bad, because you know me, I never fail,” Tommy jokes, laughing at his own attempt at humour. Wilbur snickers quietly, trying to remind himself that Tommy is an absolute traitor. But he doesn’t have it in him to care.

“That is presumptuous of you to say,” Wilbur muses, a grin appearing as he imagines Tommy’s face as he reacts to Wilbur’s comment.

By now, the borrower is moments away from the bookshelf opening.

He pauses, standing in the middle of the hall as he contemplates going any further.

Tommy, now sounding closer than ever, where Wilbur can hear every shuffle of his sleeve against the polished shelf, inhales sharply. He lets it out in a slow sigh, and Wilbur anticipates their witty conversation to halt.

“I gotta apologise, man,” Tommy confesses.

Wilbur perks, folding his arms over his chest to hear what Tommy has to say.

“Go on,” he urges.

He can hear Tommy swallow thickly and sigh again. “I know I broke your trust, or whatever,” Tommy says, his voice muffled like he’s cupping his hands, “and I moved too quickly when you needed help—which in my defence I wasn’t thinking, but it still isn’t a proper excuse. I don’t…apologise for saving you or knowing where you were in case you did need my help, but I apologise for just fuckin’ not telling you so you could re-whatever yourself to feel safer.”

Wilbur blinks, tightening his fingers around the fabric of his sleeve and curling into his skin. Guilt clawed at him. He hadn’t known Tommy for very long, but he’s gathered enough to know he didn’t apologise very often—or so he’s heard.

Before Wilbur could comprehend what just happened or even start to reply, he heard Tommy walk off.

So now, the only thing left in the air was Tommy’s echoing apology and the lingering product taste of Wilbur’s dramatised overreacting,

Guilt.

Wilbur spent the rest of the day taking care of the things he didn’t have time to do before. He fixed the bulk of his weapons—sharpened the lead of a pencil and swept the remnants of it up, then went to hell and back trying to clean the deep grey off of his palm and fingertips.

He hadn’t left the walls though. Tommy leaving had made him feel beyond awkward, and no response he could think of portrayed how he felt or conveyed a proper response to an apology from the non-apologist.

And by the time he could hear Tommy pile into his room for the night, Wilbur decided to give up on his fake conversation and simply face his fears. Mental or physical ones, he hadn't decided yet.

He shuffles up from his bed and starts down the hall. As he does, he listens intently for Tommy’s boisterous streaming voice. He hoped he could catch the human before he started his daily streams.

Thankfully, it seemed like an easy task, because although Tommy had already situated himself at his desk and booted up a game, he made no move to his streaming gear.

Wilbur wonders intrusively while drifting down a rope he’d installed to the bookshelf if perhaps the skip in his schedule was because of him.

The borrower, swiftly, moves onto the lower shelf and disappears back into the walls, the only difference being that he's travelling down the path to Tommy’s desk, which he’d made the opening a while ago when he’d considered visiting Tommy once. (It was a futile attempt.)

He travels down the walls, and when he gets to the abandoned opening, he finds it unblocked, completely visible unlike how he distinctly remembers leaving it.

His eyes narrow at Tommy.

The human notices him quickly, eyes prying away from the screen to catch sight of the unsure borrower.

Wilbur tenses.

“Hey, man,” Tommy greets smoothly, “I didn’t think you used that tunnel—opening–…thing.”

Taking a deep breath, Wilbur shakes his head. “I don’t. I made it a few weeks ago and left it alone, I found no use for it. I do distinctly remember covering it up, though,” Wilbur points out. Tommy shrinks back a bit.

“Yeahh,” he drawls. “Sorry.”

Wilbur shakes his head. “I don’t give a shit anymore.”

“Fair, fair,” Tommy says, glancing at his game and back down to the borrower. “Well, uh, did you need anything, then?”

Wilbur shrugs. “Well—I couldn’t sleep,” he lies. It wasn’t entirely a lie—although he hadn’t really been trying…oh well, Tommy’ll believe it.

“Did’cyu want to have a chat then?”

Wilbur eyes Tommy’s hoodie pocket, knowing he wouldn’t get over his fear if he didn’t try. “Actually–uh, could I just try to fall asleep in your pocket instead? Would you mind?” he asks.

Tommy frowns. “Really? You trust me for that?”

“I want to,” Wilbur admits, shifting from the cutout in the wall and down onto the desk, following along the wooden surface cautiously. He stares up at Tommy, who in return stares back down at him.

“Yeah, sure, then, just—come here,” Tommy says, moving his hands from his mouse to the table, laid flat only an inch from him. Wilbur stares at the intricacies in it, each line that is spread taut and each colossal finger laid steady for him.

Sighing, Wilbur places an unsure hand to Tommy’s skin, the contact being the first human contact he has ever had. Wilbur can’t even describe the feeling, something faint of a spark or a fan whirring. His eyes narrow as he concentrates on continuing on, pulling himself onto Tommy’s hand until he’s sat in the middle.

Tommy curls his fingers just slightly and lifts it off the table. His gut churns with a new sensation as he watches the ground extend from him as he’s lowered to Tommy’s abdomen, the red cloth of his hoodie’s pocket soon encasing him when Tommy tilts him just slightly inside. He tumbles off and onto the unstable surface.

At this moment, he is infinitely close to Tommy. He can hear the subtle churning of his gut, which had startled him, but held a strange comfort.

He’s resting with a traitor, who in his mind posed as more of a saviour at the moment.

—–—

#mw #brickfic #mcyt g/t #mcyt gt #dsmp g/t #dsmp gt #dream smp g/t #dream smp gt #t!wilbur #g!tommy #ee t!wilbur content for the SOUUL <3 #anyway hope you enjoyed this :D i broke my rule and wrote past 2 am....it's 4 am atm #also sorry to deprive you of this for another 3 days (as i type this it's the 12th) but it had to be the 15th sdfjfdsj

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