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One day, I swear to all my abandoned gods, I’ll be able to breathe the air of my hometown and it won’t feel like dying.
- Neurotic Girls, Fray Narte
Stories do not unfurl neatly from beginnings, nor do they tie themselves up with proper ends. They exist like constellations — scattered, shimmering — awaiting a storyteller to make sense of their shape. This story, too, has many entrances, each one hidden and shuffled like a card from a deck. So, let us draw one at random and pretend, just for now, that it was always meant to be the start.
Here’s how it starts:
Tommy is a sun in a little boy’s body. He burns. With fire, with sunlight — liquid and gold, seeping from the seams where his too-small body cannot quite contain him. There are stars in his marrow and diamonds lodged behind his teeth. If he were to be cut, he’d bleed as blue as a midsummer twilight. Though, he won’t know it yet. Not for some time.
For now, he is only a only a boy of the streets, pockets full of stolen time — metaphorically and literally. The king’s pocketwatch ticks against his skin, suprisingly warm despite the numerous emeralds embedded in it. It should have been a seal to his fate — he is caught, knees bloody and fear thrumming — instead, it earns him a bath drawn with rose-scented water, a meal plated like ceremony, and a seat in a drawing room with two children who do not ask for his name before orbiting around him like planets suddenly given purpose.
They make him their axis, their golden sun.
They are not the ones who will make him bleed.
That part of the tale waits behind another card. One we will turn over later. Much later.
This is how it ends. Or rather, how one ending chooses to unfurl. It curls like smoke around the shape of a boy who once burned too brightly to hold.
Tommy stands in the ruin of what once was — of kingdoms, of childhood, of brothers turned into gods with blood-crowned heads. He stares into Dream’s eyes, those treacherous mirrors that reflect every betrayal twice. His brothers’ blood clings to Dream’s hands. Their sins live in Tommy’s heart, etched into his veins and his dying breath. A hymm gone wrong. His fingernails is thick with the dirt of a grave for a father he helped bury.
Once, they had been boys. Big-hearted, bright-eyed, wild with dreams and greedy with want. And then, they became something else. Divine in the cruelest ways. He had known. Even as cities fell and throats were slit like offerings. Even as ribcages bloomed open like grotesque flowers. He had known. But none of that cruelty had ever touched him. Not really. Not ever. They had stroked his hair with bloodless hands. They had cooed his name like a prayer. He was the sun they revolved around. A beloved constant in an ecosystem of war.
And oh, how he had basked in their warmth. Even when it scorched others. He wishes he had enjoyed it more, wishes he had never let the guilt swallow him whole.
Now, he wonders — just before the end — if the sun ever feels guilt for what it shines on. If it ever grieves the shadows it creates, or the flowers that wilt beneath its relentless gaze.
That is the last thought he has.
He sneers at Dream with a mouth full of old ash and broken stars, calls him a prick with the same irreverent fire he wore as a crown in his younger days.
Then comes the end.
“To ensure that the bloodline ends with you,” Dream says as if his brothers and Tommy shared the same blood. As if the only thing they had in common wasn’t the fact that they were all from the streets.
Tommy only sneers.
He wakes.
Not with a gasp or a start, but with the slow bloom of awareness that tastes of ash and gunpowder and something coppery on his tongue. The world is still soft with the lull before revolution, fragile and gold-lit. He remembers what comes next. He tries anyway.
He works harder this time. Stitches himself into speeches, into trenches, into the hearts of people he swears are starting to love him. His brothers are dead. He is not. Not yet. Tommy tries — god, does he try.
Sam kills him.
He wakes.
He wakes again. His brothers live, barely. Locked behind bars and fed subpar meals. Their faces gaunt, not from consequence, but from dehydration, of all things. Tommy joins the revolution, bleeds for it, screams for it. Still, they execute him. He watches his family’s faces through the fog of his own ending.
There is no hatred in their gazes, no disgust curls on their mouths and their eyes do not even narrow in anger. Instead, there is pure horror painted on, like it a tragedy that Tommy lies, here, hands bound with his own doing.
Condemnation is what he deserves — not from the world, or heaven forbid, Dream — but them, he deserves to be spat on, for writing letters inked with treason to the revolution. For sabotaging their plans. For doing everything and anything for a future he hardly believes in.
And yet, there is not even an inkling of the hatred that comes so easily to humans. Not even a drop. Only. love.
And Tommy, with a heart straining like cracked glass, wonders if the sun is not made of fire at all — if perhaps, it is made of love so bright it burns the world to feel it.
He wakes to a war horn.
For such pretty things — decorated with delicate, trailing forget-me-nots and peace lilies; the artist taking great care to ink them softly, lovingly, as if they did not know what it is to be used for — for such pretty things, they sound incredibly ugly.
There is no love in war.
He wakes to them — blaring and ringing in his eardrums long after they have been blown — and he stares at the world he can see from the flap of his tent, a slit of greens and a pale blue sky.
He wakes to it and turns around and sleeps.
He dies anyway.
He wakes, and he wakes, and he wakes.
Wilbur is dying in his arms again. His breath rattles like a broken clock, blood painting poetry across Tommy’s shirt. He chokes out Sunshine and Love like apologies and Tommy sobs in a forgiveness Wilbur doesn’t get to hear.
Technoblade’s mask is gone, broken and brittle from where Dream had stepped on it, crushed under his boot as though it was nothing more than paper. Technoblade’s arms are around Tommy — they’re always around Tommy — and he kisses Tommy’s forehead and tells him the story of Theseus and how Tommy was the best sounder a piglin could ever have as the place crumbles around them.
Phil’s wings are bloodied and shredded and yet he still attempts to fly. He holds Tommy tight like that might save him, gets him halfway up the sky before he crumples. He cups Tommy’s face with a gentleness Tommy does not deserve and says, I’m so sorry, baby, in the way only fathers can say it — soft and failing — and Tommy chokes out an apology in the way only sons can — grief-stricken and stitled, a broken boy with no stolen time.
This time Tommy kills himself before they can kill him.
Still, he wakes.
He screams.
At the gods. At the sky. At the dreamers who built altars of gold and blood and dared to call it divine. He leaves his offerings in the cracks of marble, in the gold-threaded floors, in the thorns of white roses and crystalline chrysanthemums.
He bleeds on their altars and whispers his family’s names.
Is there a way, he asks them, knelt and broken at their jewelled feet, to be good and end good?
Keep trying, they sneer, radiant and cruel. A short, solemn response to the paragraphs he has spilled at their feet. There is.
Something in him breaks, sharp and final.
Dream kills him. Tommy does not flinch.
Perhaps there is a world where there is no bloodshed. Where he can, as the gods say, be good and end good. Where Wilbur sings to him and the world. Where Technoblade raises his sword not for war, but to teach. Where Phil is a benevolent king, not only to them but to his subjects. Where Tommy is not just a boy who dies, over and over and over.
But, he thinks of Wilbur, his throat slit and tongue burned to ash, never being able to sing until Tommy dies to come back to him. He thinks of Technoblade and his cold, dead hands and how they will never move to gently correct Tommy’s stance until Tommy dies to come back to him. He thinks of Phil and thinks of the sky he’ll never be able to touch or the wings until Tommy dies to come back to him.
He thinks of the small boy who ran the streets, pockets full of stolen time and was given a family. He thinks of that boy looking at the sky and asking the stars will it be worth it, he thinks about how he’ll never be able to ensure that it is until he dies and comes back and becomes him.
If he must suffer return again and again, then let it be his story.
Let him decide how it ends.
When Tommy wakes this time, he is eleven.
Eleven, though the number means little — his soul worn smooth by repetition, age blurred by blood and memory and the echo of deaths he hasn’t yet lived. The revolution is still five years away. Dream has yet to kneel beside him with promises sweet as poison, whispering you could do good, Tommy, as if the world hadn’t already asked too much of him.
Now, the clock resets. Wilbur and Techno are fifteen. Phil is still indulgent, still soft around the edges with affection, his gaze only sometimes shadowed by unspoken concern. There is still time — if someone wished to stop it. Phil could, maybe. Wilbur might try. Even Techno would listen, if it was Tommy asking.
And for one breathless second, Tommy considers it.
But he is a sun in a little boy’s body, burning too bright for hesitation. Wilbur calls him radiant. Techno calls him fierce. Phil, with a laugh in his throat, calls him lovely — our little sunshine. And Tommy is tired. Tired like only someone who has died a hundred times can be. A tired sun, aching for rest.
He thinks. He considers. He lets the moment pass.
Instead, he clutches Henry — his threadbare, beloved toy — and races down the hallway. His feet slap against the polished wood loud enough to drag Wilbur and Techno from their rooms, blinking and confused.
He doesn’t stop.
He flings himself into Phil’s office, into waiting arms and a heartbeat he knows better than his own. He buries himself in the steady warmth of his father’s chest, and the moment the black wings fold around him, he breathes out a broken sound and begins to sob.
It doesn’t take long. Seconds, maybe, before the wings shift again, reluctantly parting to make room for two sleepy, protective brothers. Wilbur's fingers are already on his damp cheeks, cupping his face and whispering soft coos. Techno’s voice is a grumble in his ear, but his hands are careful, carding through Tommy’s hair, brushing curls from tear-slicked skin.
Bad dream, love?
No, don’t cry, baby.
We’re here, treasure.
He is theirs before he is the revolution’s. Before he is Dream’s. Before he belongs to death again.
And that—that—is where he wants to stay.
Later, after Phil stops the argument between Wilbur and Techno, declaring that Tommy can sleep on his bed — that ridiculously large thing — Tommy lies on his chest with Phil chirping softly. Tommy’s hands are held by his brothers — Wilbur murmurs adoring words, awe in every word like Tommy is a miracle and Techno tangles his under hand into Tommy’s hair, combing through it softly.
He tilts Tommy’s head up and promises — with a voice that would be terrifying to anyone who is not Tommy, Wilbur would call it dramatic, maybe, Phil would smile — to murder anyone who made Tommy scared. Wilbur volunteers to make the list, and Tommy doesn’t need to turn his head to the bloodthirsty smile that’s on his face.
It should scare him. Prime knows it has before. It’s made him get up and write letters, spilling secrets with streaming tears down his face. Made him draw plans and buy flowers for people the world will want dead. For people that Tommy wants to stop and save. For people the earth will soon swallow as soon as the sky spits them out.
But, sandwiched between them and cradled on his father’s chest, warm and whole, Tommy wonders how he could’ve possibly been scared in the first place. So, instead, he closes his eyes.
He thinks of the golden cause of the revolution, of ideals sharp enough to kill and dreams heavy enough to drown. He lets it all go. Casts it off like ill-fitting armor.
He has been a terrible sun, he thinks, tired and held.
But this — this softness, this family, this quiet —
This is worth fighting for.
A story begins in a multitude of ways, and this is one of them:
Tommy is twelve, and he’s just killed a man.
There is no rage in it. No shaking hands, no tremble in the aftermath. It is not the first time he’s thought about doing it — nor is it the first time he’s followed through. The man had a name, once. A face. But Tommy no longer sees people in that way. They are weight and threat, and insult, and Tommy is small only in frame.
He tears the man apart with precise cruelty, a lesson half-learned and half-remembered. His fingers dig into ribs like they are just puzzle pieces, like he was made to unmake people. Blood pools beneath him, hot and thick, staining the tile. It climbs up to his wrists, his elbows. It soaks the front of his shirt — white, once, long ago.
He stands in it. Shining like something holy.
When they find him, they do not scream. Technoblade arrives first, sword already drawn but quickly lowering, as if this is exactly what he expected. His smile is quiet and proud when he ruffles Tommy’s hair, despite the gore, despite the metallic tang in the air.
“Well done, Theseus,” he says, voice so proud and so affectionate that Tommy nearly cries.
Wilbur is next, eyes soft, laughter bright. He wipes blood from Tommy’s cheek with a thumb and tsks at the ruined shirt like it’s an inconvenience, not a corpse cooling three feet away. He calls him brave, calls him our clever little sun, cups his cheeks in both hands and presses his forehead to Tommy’s like he’s grounding a live wire.
Then they ask — idly, lazily, as if it’s the weather — why he did it.
Tommy doesn’t flinch. “They insulted me.”
And Phil, who has been silent at the doorway with unreadable eyes, finally stirs. The faintest startle flickers across his face. But his smile never fades. He watches as Techno pulls Tommy in closer, and Wilbur makes a dramatic sound about having been robbed of the opportunity to kill the man himself. They are loud with love.
Tommy does not smile, but he leans into it.
He hands over the dagger, Phil’s dagger, with blood-slicked fingers. A gesture of something childlike and terrible.
Phil accepts it wordlessly, wipes it clean.
He kneels before Tommy like he did when he first met Tommy, who was small and seven with scraped knees. His wings rustle behind him, black and soft, brushing the floor.
He kisses Tommy’s forehead, reverent and weary.
“I’ll run you a bath,” he says.
And the bath is exactly the same as that day, rose-scented water and fancy shampoo and gentle hands. It’s Phil cooing as Tommy shuffles. Wilbur and Techno arguing about which body wash to use.
It’s love, constant and unchanging.
The manor smells like iron.
Tommy notices it first in the hallway, copper hanging thick on his tongue, sticky in the back of his throat. There is no sound save for the steady tap of his boots on marble. Then — around the corner, down the velvet-lined corridor once meant for courtiers and diplomats — he finds the Duke and his family.
Or what’s left of them.
The bodies are beautiful in the way broken things sometimes are. Arranged almost artfully, blood painted like garlands across the polished floor. A child’s shoe lies discarded beside a woman’s outstretched hand. Eyes wide. Mouths parted. The kind of picture that would make poets weep and cowards vomit.
Tommy steps around them neatly, the way one might step around a spilled drink.
“Techno?” he calls.
“In the drawing room,” comes the reply, cheerful and echoing off the high ceilings.
Tommy finds him seated on a ruined settee, red staining his front like it’s been painted on. One gloved hand still drips, and the other holds a peeled orange, which he eats casually. He looks up and beams when he sees Tommy, something warm and proud flickering in his gaze.
“Thseues, you’re back,” he says, bright and beaming, as if he’s not just repainted the floor with a noble bloodline.
“It’s almost time for dinner,” Tommy replies mildly, eyeing the mess.
“Good.” Techno grins wider, pops a slice of orange into his mouth, and nods. “I was getting hungry.”
At dinner, Techno eats with blood beneath his nails. Neither Wilbur nor Phil mentions it. Wilbur keeps up conversation about a poet he drowned for bad rhymes. Phil passes the salt.
When it’s bedtime, Techno wipes his hands clean and reads stories. His voice is soft, careful on the consonants, the way it always is for Tommy. He skips the gory parts. Or not skips — alters. Makes monsters into misunderstood things and keeps Tommy safe in the story’s spine. Tommy listens, warm under his blanket, and watches Techno’s face by candlelight.
He is content.
Wilbur ruins men with words.
He smiles when they beg. He pens letters that turn kings to criminals and generals to ghosts. He’s ruined alliances with a wink and started wars with a flourish of ink. Today, he’s collapsed a city’s economy with a deal struck behind someone's back and a betrayal sung into someone else’s ear.
And yet when Tommy walks into his room — Wilbur sprawled across the settee like a lazy god — his whole face softens.
“Sunshine,” he purrs. “Come here, darling. Sit with me. I’ve missed you terribly.”
They play cards. Tommy always wins, even when he doesn’t. Wilbur coos over his pout, ruffles his hair, calls him treasure and heartling and my sweet prince. His hands are stained with ruin, but never so much as smudge Tommy’s sleeve.
Later, Wilbur hums lullabies and sings soft as clouds. His voice never wavers, never strains. The madness in him — the sharp teeth, the glinting eyes — vanishes at Tommy’s bedside. For Tommy, there is only warmth. There is only love.
Tommy falls asleep with a smile pressed to his cheek.
He is content.
Phil allows it all.
He does not deny what his sons are. He doesn’t flinch when the manor smells like blood or when Techno’s skull collection grows bigger. Drawers filled with jewellery that doesn’t belong to him. He doesn’t wince when Wilbur betrays yet another long standing informant or when he hangs up newspaper cuttings on his bedroom wall of all the people he’s disgraced. Their eyes seem to follow the person watching them. The collection only grows.
He sees everything. He sees too much.
And still.
When he takes Tommy flying, the world falls away. Up, up into the open night, where the stars feel close enough to pluck from the sky and be swallowed whole. The wind sings through his feathers and Tommy laughs, breathless, arms around Phil’s neck as they cut through the air like blades through silk.
There is no apathy in Phil’s eyes when he looks at Tommy. Or Wilbur. Or Technoblade. No cold acceptance, no weary resignation. Only wonder. Only love.
“You’re so tiny,” he says once, as they stare at the moon.
“I’m twelve,” Tommy says, grinning into his shoulder.
“You’ll always be small to me.”
And Tommy, aloft on wings black as night and broad as myth, looks up at the stars and dares to believe they belong to him.
He is content.
Dream comes to him like a serpent in the garden — soft-eyed, silver-tongued. His blonde hair flops into his eyes, which reflects the sickly sweet in his grin. He coos at Tommy - mockingly, humouring - as he kneels down to where Tommy is sitting, reading one of Techno's books, wrapped in Wilbur's sweater and Phil's crown. His grin is wide as a gullotine's blade as he looks at Tommy.
“My boy,” he says, voice dipped in silk and arrogance. “You could be so much more. You were meant for more. You’ve seen it. Felt it. All that power in your blood. Don’t you want to be free? Don't you want the world to be golden, again?”
Tommy smiles at him, sharp and serene. The kind of smile carved for gods who’ve forgotten their place.
“Of course,” he says, voice lilting, almost sweet.
And then he tells Wilbur and Techno.
He tells them with the ease of one confessing a dream, head tilted, eyes wide, and their rage is cathedral-wide, holy and wrathful.
Wilbur doesn’t rage, doesn't even scream — he laughs. Laughs like an orchestra unravelling, wild and melodic. Head thrown back and cheeks flushed. “He tried to what?” he asks, as if Dream’s nerve is the most amusing sin in the world. “Oh, how funny.”
Techno is already moving. He doesn’t speak. He sharpens his blades. He ruins all the training dummies within one afternoon. He dresses Tommy in even more gold.
When Dream is dragged to the square, chained and bloodied, Tommy stands front row. His brothers flank him like wolves. There is no grand speech, no false mercy. Only the sound of steel sliding through bone, and the wet, final quiet of a tyrant's last breath.
Dream’s head rolls to the floor.
Tommy does not flinch.
His hands are clean, this time. His conscience lighter than it has ever been.
The wind is soft. The sun is warm.
And for the first time in all his lifetimes, Tommy watches a monster die and feels no guilt — only peace.
He has never been more content.
The world kneels now.
It kneels in crumbled cities and scorched fields, in ballrooms where lords beg for clemency and temples where gods have been dethroned. It kneels before the names etched into every mouth like commandments — Wilbur the Siren, who sings as he dismantles nations; Technoblade the Blood God, whose definition of justice is arterial red; and Philza, the Angel of Death, wings dark as absolution, who sees all and says nothing.
They are the ruling trinity of an empire built on quiet bones.
And orbiting them — burning at their center — is a boy.
Tommy.
The sun in a little boy’s body, still bright, still burning. His light is no longer innocent, but it is still his. He is the axis around which the empire turns. He is still called treasure, sunshine, heartling, darling. The crown never touches his head — he doesn’t need it to. He is adored. He is kept.
Wilbur writes his speeches in gold ink and builds whole cities in Tommy’s name. He sings Tommy to sleep even after ordering ten executions before dinner. His voice is always soft when he says, “Come here, my light.”
Technoblade teaches him about flowers and kisses his temple before he sets off for war. He washes the blood from Tommy’s hands even if it’s not his own, even if it never was, and tells him bedtime stories without a single scream in them.
Phil carries him through the clouds when the weight of it all grows too much, and lets him scream at the stars when he needs to. He never once tells him not to cry.
Dream is dead. Buried and forgotten, just another name on the long list of those who tried to take the sun and burn it for themselves.
The world fears them now, sings of their cruelty in cracked voices and prayers. But in the heart of their bloodied kingdom, Tommy is safe.
He has watched a hundred lives end beneath his family’s hands, and still they hold him like something sacred. Something untouched. As if the sun has never scorched a thing in its life.
And Tommy?
He is content.
Because he has been a terrible sun, and a tired one, and a righteous one. He has risen and fallen and risen again. He has tried to be good. He has tried to be just. He has died for it.
And now he shines only for them. For the family that burned the world and built him a throne in its ashes.
The sun does not ask if it deserves to shine.
It simply does.
This time, when Tommy sleeps, it is not with fear in his throat or the echo of a blade behind his ribs. He is sixteen — sugar-spun and spiteful, stitched together with Greek fire and sunshine. Technoblade calls him that, doesn't he? Made of war and sun, right, treasure? And Wilbur always coos, Sweet as spun sugar, my little brother, my softest storm. And Phil, ever steady, tucks his hair behind his ear and murmurs, My little songbird, as if Tommy's voice could still bring spring to the world, even after all it's burned.
This time, when Tommy wakes, it’s not by force or fate or death’s cold breath.
He wakes because he chooses to.
The world is his — red and gold and trembling under the weight of his name. The war is over, or at least sleeping with one eye open. His family reigns and rages, and the world bows not out of reverence but because it must.
But Tommy walks.
He walks alone to one of the last temples. The same marble halls where he had once wept until his throat broke, pleading for salvation, for mercy, for a way out. It's crumbling now — forgotten like a prayer gone stale. Phil wanted to level it, and Technoblade had grand designs to salt the earth. Wilbur planned to build a stage over it.
But Tommy had said, No. Let me.
And they had obeyed, of course they had — just like oceans obey the moon.
Now he stands in the shadow of the forgotten gods, no offerings in his hands, no sacrifices on the altar. Just him, sun-eyed and fire-blooded, a boy who has died too many times to be anything less than divine.
The statues are cracked. The floor is dust. And the gods, if they are still listening, are very, very quiet.
Tommy looks up at them — abandoned and tired, as he once was — and smiles.
“I’m not asking anymore,” he says, softly.
And in that moment, beneath a broken roof and a sky blooming with dusk, the sun does not rise.
It answers.
Tommy does not respond.