Chapter Text
Tables, chairs, the kitsch paintings on the walls, lamp fixtures, even bottles of condiments. They all flew in a whirlwind as Wilbur and Niki teamed up against the humanoid cursed spirit.
She ended up wasting her first move to block a sickle that suddenly flew straight to her head. As sparks flew, Wilbur pressed his assault only to be matched blow for blow by the curse. It (“Or he, for all I know. Does that matter?”) looked unfazed by the fact that he could strike him from afar, using the changes in momentum as its weapons were knocked away to launch attacks at odd angles, forcing Wilbur to be on the back foot.
Barely a minute passed, and Wilbur already felt tired. The adrenaline no longer buffered the leaden weight in his muscles. And the sight of the curse keeping its vigor furthered his exhaustion.
Worse, it seemed to pick up speed. Every time he blinked, it produced an entirely different weapon from its mouth. The air rang with the sound of chains, poles, and blades pressing in on all directions.
Unfortunately, Wilbur could not afford to falter. Niki was there, jumping in the fray every chance she could. He was eternally grateful for her aid, blocking blows or forcing the curse to step back. But every second she spent here in the cramped, collapsing restaurant pushed her chances of survival to the absolute limit.
Fuck it!
Wilbur decided to take a risk. He poured a ton of his cursed energy into a wave of sound that stunned the curse in place. Then, he lunged forward, aiming to send a second blast straight for its head.
His shoe caught on a shard of glass on the floor, crunching it.
It sounded like stepping on snow.
Wilbur’s focus wavered, then he slipped.
Corpse watched as he tipped forward, baring the pale skin of his nape. As soon as feeling returned to his right hand, he swung down with a Bowie knife.
“Mine!”
But in his excitement to kill Wilbur, he failed to watch out for Niki, who pulled back her bat as she came up to his back. “Full Charge!” she cried. There was a sharp crack and clang, and then his skull got buried three feet into the wall.
Wilbur remained where he was, half-crouching while standing. The guitar felt extra heavy in his clammy hands as he panted.
“Are you alright?” Niki asked, coming up beside him. She took one look at her trusty bat and gasped. It bent out of shape as if it struck something extremely hard. Clucking her tongue, she threw it aside.
“That’s that,” she sighed. “Best get a move on, Will.”
“Will?”
Wilbur looked transfixed by something on the incapacitated curse’s body. The leather jacket it wore slipped open, baring a boney yet wiry torso. A collection of oddments dangled from the inside seams, including jewelry, toys, and coins.
At the end, close to the zipper, hung a familiar, fox-shaped earring.
Wilbur’s blood ran cold.
The curse’s feet began to twitch.
“Shoot! We gotta go, Will!”
“W-Wait!”
Before he could continue, he found himself getting dragged outside the restaurant, too weak to resist. His guitar banged against his hip with every step. The continuous destruction of the cityscape around them fell upon his eyes and ears. But they felt distant as a pitch-black fog filled every corner of his mind.
Then, a fire roared in its depths. “Where are we going?” he screamed, his eyes wide and twitching.
“To Jeb. His truck will make it easier to find the boys. Then, we’ll leave this place!” Niki replied.
“We have to go back!” Wilbur snarled. “It’s the thing! The thing that killed Fundy!”
Niki’s head twitched in disbelief. “What?!”
“We have to go back! We have to kill it!”
“Will!” Niki cut him off, her voice high and shrill, sharing in the desperation that gripped Wilbur. Her hold on his hand tightened to a vise grip, then loosened. “Let it go,” she urged him in a soft voice, picking up the pace.
Wilbur could not believe what he heard. He drove his feet hard to the ground, wrenching his hand from her grasp.
“What are you doing?” he cried. “This could be our only chance!”
“Not now!” Niki cried back, anger boiling over her voice. She strode toward him and then jabbed her finger into his chest. “Not with all of this going on. Not with you like this.”
Wilbur was about to argue, but his gaze fell on the hand with which she poked him. His breath hitched. It looked gray and cracked like withered tree bark, red sores in various sizes bubbling through the knuckles. The fingers were spindly, the pinky almost bent at an odd angle away from the rest.
“Niki…” he whispered.
She blinked silently at him, then followed his line of sight. With mist in her eyes, she pulled her hand away from him and held it up.
“This,” she sighed. “The block where I came from had a bunch of kids trapped by a cursed spirit. This is what I got for saving them. Funny how it works.”
Wilbur trembled, his disbelief growing threefold. “Why?” he creaked.
Niki scoffed. “Because I could, Will. I used the bat to take it down.”
“How did you even get it? I didn’t see you carry it,” Wilbur added, saying now only the most coherent thoughts in his head.
“Oh, that!” Niki chirped, rummaging through her pockets. She then pulled out a minuscule Rubix cube with all the faces solved. “A little gift from Phil years ago,” she explained. “Once a day, it lets you summon anything you need when you solve it. I had to check out a tutorial hours ago. Neat, huh?”
She beamed at him. It struck Wilbur wrong. Terribly wrong. Here was Niki, glibly describing how she put her life at risk for a bunch of strangers in a place overrun by curses. A block away, the target of the hate he had been stoking for a while since the death of his friend remained alive. How could she act as if the loss of Fundy was just another obstacle to move past? How could she talk cheerily, smile even, as if she was ignorant of how mad, how perplexing this whole thing was? As if the world did not vomit out all its vile monstrosities to make corpses of them all?
It made him sick.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that, Will,” Niki whispered gently, seeing how his face contorted. “Call it larping if you will. But I did it because I could. Most of them were saved anyway.” Then, a hint of sadness flickered on her face. “Most.”
Wilbur’s body spasmed. Then, he snatched the Rubik's cube and flung it far out of sight, much to Niki's surprise.
“This has to stop,” he muttered grimly.
“What does?”
“This!” Wilbur cried, waving his arms around. “At first I thought you were just bored or showing off. But I see how it is now. It’s Tommy’s bullshit, isn’t it? His bootstrap bollocks got to you, too! It got you acting like you’re some kind of superhero. It got you thinking that you’re special and have to do special things to justify it! And I thought tagging along with Techno was bad enough. Look what it got you!”
“Yeah, Will,” Niki answered back. “Look what I got me. But it’s not because of Tommy’s bollocks as you call it, or Techno’s, or even Phil's. All Tommy did…”
She stopped, looking away as she mustered her thoughts. The hum of destruction was broken for a while by distant screams. The curses must have been occupied.
“All he did,” she resumed, steeling her voice while looking into Wilbur’s eyes. “Was make it all the more clearer to me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When I came here, I did think I was special. My parents were glad when the Institute approached them to offer a place for me. What a rush, to learn that I wasn’t just another crazy girl. But then, we all saw the world as it was. I realized I wasn’t special at all and that I signed up for a thankless life of misery. I don’t even have the strength you, Minx, Techno, and Phil have, so it was worse for me. Still…”
She smiled again, her eyes shining. “I couldn’t shake the need to lend a hand with what little I can do. I had to think it all through again, you know? Everything we said to each other back in Vermont. When Tommy came.”
She snickered at the tremor that ran through Wilbur’s arms. “Who would’ve thought, huh? Some stray Techno picked up at the Pit making such a difference to me? But he affected everyone if you think about it. He’s got lots of heart. Kinda like you, on the day we first met.”
“You’re unbelievable,” Wilbur breathed.
“Oh, believe me, Will! I’ve seen what he did for Tubbo. Techno looked lighter on his feet when he was around. He even brings Phil’s spirits up. And Jeb? I mean, he’s still pretty much a dirty, self-gratifying jerk who’s incapable of doing anything right to save himself. But he never managed to turn a new leaf until Tommy came around. Now, he tries hard to do good with everyone. I admire him for it. You call that bollocks?”
Niki stretched out her ruined hand to Wilbur. “I would never call it that. That’s how I plan to make my stand against this absurd, cruel, unfair reality. This is what I want to do, Wilbur. What I realized I wanted to do after meeting you: to do good with what little I can, whether that means cheering people up with cinnamon rolls or saving lives.”
Wilbur jolted as something crashed against skyscrapers several blocks away. Meanwhile, Niki held her gesture, continuing to speak.
“Right now, those lives are Tommy’s and Tubbo’s. Won’t you help me, Will? I can’t do this without you.”
“I don’t…”
Niki blinked in surprise as Wilbur fell to his knees, driving his fists into the ground while his back shook with sobs.
“I don’t want to do this at all!” he cried. “I’m done with this life. I’m done with everything! Please, Niki. I just want to never go through all of this ever again!”
She watched with pity as he gurgled through his tears, the guitar leaning heavily by his side. Taking to her knees, Niki cupped Wilbur’s head and raised it, pressing their foreheads together. “I know,” she whispered. Then, she closed her eyes, taking a deep breath.
She opened them and said, “So I’m making a Binding Vow.”
Wilbur locked eyes with her, feeling suddenly breathless.
“We will find Jeb, then find the boys together. After that, we’ll leave. And once we reach Manburg, we’ll run. Run, Will! Wherever we could until our legs tire. We’ll leave it all behind, curses, the Institute, the feds, all the terrible things in this world. Even if it’s just a little while. Even if it all comes back to us with a vengeance. Just a semblance of peace and happiness together.”
She chuckled. “Of course, we’ll have to factor in Minx with that. What do you say?”
Wilbur struggled through the sobs in his throat. Then, he swallowed, clasped Niki’s hands, and nodded. “Okay.”
They rose together, hands still entwined. Without warning, a towering curse fell over on the neighboring block, clawing sluggishly toward them while more curses rounded the corner. The sound of their excited trilling drowned out the noise of a horn from a truck.
Niki and Wilbur set off at once, the girl taking the lead as she struck out a path that should put distance between them and the gathering of the creatures. As they made their first turn into 3rd Street, Niki made a noise of surprise and began fishing something out of her pocket.
Wilbur’s disbelief skyrocketed. “Oh, Niki.”
Out came a black armband bearing an old insignia of the Institute. Niki clasped it to her left sleeve and saluted with her right hand.
“Auxiliary-in-Training Nikita Halle, reporting for duty!”
Jeb had been zipping his way through the streets, doing his best to evade any curses that looked like they had nothing drawing their attention. The windshield wipers were on; he made the mistake of passing by a bus of people getting sandwiched. It seemed the creatures figured out that cars usually held humans and began snatching vehicles right off the asphalt like hawks picking at poultry.
It was a morbid thought, but Jeb admitted that it helped make driving quickly easier.
He took a desperate chance by turning back into 2nd Street through San Antonio. Most of the buildings along Colorado and Lavaca were empty after the shoppers fled north or eastward. As Jeb sped along, the fire from the ship curse rose into view. Cussing under his breath, he slowed down to observe his surroundings carefully.
It was only in a heartbeat, but Jeb was sure he spotted silver hair in the distance. He quickly shifted gears and hammered the horn with his palm.
But a massive cursed spirit suddenly fell sideways yards away from the truck, shaking the ground in a loud crash. A cavalcade of other curses flanked it immediately, making a shrill din.
“Fuck.”
Jeb put the truck in reverse and backed away through where he came, planning to meet the person with silver hair at the 3rd. But to his dismay, another horde was running amok along that road.
“Fuck!”
He screeched to a stop in the middle of an intersection, pulling frantically at his hair while yelling at the top of his lungs. His head met the wheel, and he stayed in that position for a while, taking big gulps of air as panic squeezed his chest tight.
“It could be anyone.” “It could be her.” These two phrases played over and over in his ears, a torturous loop that threatened to drive him mad. He had the dire urge to run out or bash his head in, and desperation darkened every course of action in his mind.
But there’s still…
Jeb looked westward. The roads looked clear there. For now.
He dashed his nose on the back of his hand, wrapped his slick hands on the wheel, and stepped on the gas.
I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.
Tubbo could do nothing but watch on his toes as Tommy and Slimecicle went at it. The blond did not give the curse even a second to talk, charging like a frenzied animal and making the pipes ring and scaffolds clatter wherever he went.
While he was disappointed at the lack of chitchat, Slimecicle still enjoyed the fact that Tommy put all his effort into their clash. He could tell from the focus on the boy’s face and the precision of his movements that he intended to finish him right here, right now.
I always appreciate a good game, even when the other side isn’t being sportsmanlike, baby blue.
He cackled, incensing Tommy further. They both began to break the locks on the pipes, flinging and clashing them against each other in the hopes of catching their opponent at range. The din made Tubbo cover his ears.
You’ve gone a long way from the last time we fought. Good thing I did the same.
Slimecicle ducked from a kick from Tommy, letting himself get run through the stomach with a pipe. His hands came together to make a seal, and his eyes flashed at the sudden wariness in Tommy’s eyes.
“Let’s play Whack-a-Mole!”
Flesh Manipulation: Mobile Mitosis
Pop! went Slimecicle, scattering his entire body into pieces. Each gob of slime moved in different directions, carrying a different article of clothing with it as his voice cackled tauntingly at Tommy. Meanwhile, the boy yelled in anger, darting this way and that as the gobs crawled swiftly and deftly along the pipes.
“Don’t wait! Get a hit in while you can. I won’t!” Slimecicle jeered.
Tommy leaped off a beam he was balancing on, landing on a scaffold with a loud thud. “Fuck you!” he spat.
“Why are you so worked up?” the curse egged on. “You were doing so well seconds ago.”
“Don’t worry,” Tommy snapped, taking a fighting stance while keeping track of all the places where the gobs went. “I promised I’ll kill you even if it’s the last thing I do! That way, I’ll save everyone!”
“Save everyone?”
Tubbo yelped in fright, hearing the voice coming from above him. Tommy quickly dashed toward him, ready to strike as soon as the curse showed its face.
“Save everyone?”
The voice now came from a distant corner to their right. Tubbo huddled up to Tommy, grabbing his shoulders.
“Everyone? Like those people in the buildings dying left and right?”
Tubbo felt Tommy stiffen under his grip. He looked at the blond with worry, watching his blue eyes crackle and his lips pull back.
“Like those people in the streets getting flayed, crushed, and torn apart?”
A choked whimper escaped his lips. “Tommy?” Tubbo asked.
“Like all those people running for their lives, only to still get snatched up and killed because they couldn’t leave the Veil in time?”
“You… It’s all you…” Tommy gurgled as tears began to streak his face.
“Like these?”
Tubbo watched in horror as a long, slimy tendril unfurled from above. It pulsed and bubbled as faces and limbs pooled at its tip, reaching outward in blind agony and fear. He listened to the frail voices creaking from misshapen mouths, and he had the sudden inkling that they were somehow still alive.
Bile backed up in his throat.
“Hate to break it to you, baby blue,” Slimecicle called out, keeping the tendril in place. “But this isn’t a videogame where you take down the boss and solve everyone’s problems. With thinking like yours, you’ve set yourself up for failure! To us curses, it’s just another day. But to you…”
Tommy hunched over, clenching his fists and his feet.
“It's life or death,” Slimecicle purred, his voice suddenly coming up to their ears as if he stood behind them. Tubbo leaped back while Tommy swung his fist with a cry, hitting nothing but empty air.
“Watch!” he added in a savage cry.
Flesh Manipulation: Instant Decay
There was a loud, sharp hiss. Then, from somewhere in the ceiling, a jet of foul liquid shot out. Tommy snatched Tubbo out of its way. As they skidded into a nearby wall, they watched in horror as everything the jet touched melted away. Concrete or steel, they all turned into smoking slop that dripped down to the floor below the one they stood on.
The jet crisscrossed its way to the boys like a searing probe while the floor collapsed in its wake. They ran, Tubbo thinking of nothing but escape.
Tommy, on the other hand, still kept his eyes peeled for the cursed spirit. He observed the trajectory of the spout and figured that a well-aimed throw of a steel pipe should stop it.
Pulling Tubbo along, he leaped across a chasm that opened up from Slimecicle’s attack. More steel pipes clattered along the concrete, rolling off into it. Tommy caught one, almost tripping over in a hurry. He turned and aimed, pouring his cursed energy all over its length.
“I said: watch!”
He threw. But the tendril that hung from above earlier thickened into a wall of flesh, catching the pipe mid-throw and bursting from the impact.
Tommy spat a swear out loud. There was a shuffle of movement. Tubbo turned to the sound.
Then, he saw green eyes, a grinning mouth…
And a pale hand, fuming with dark energy, rushing toward Tommy.
He did one of the few things he learned to do during their curse patrols back in Manburg.
He shoved Tommy aside, letting the curse’s palm collide with his left shoulder.
The left side of his torso exploded, his arm flying off as he screamed in pain.
Tommy froze. So did Slimecicle.
But not Tubbo. He grabbed the curse’s arm to keep him on the spot. Then, he turned to Tommy, whose face was a mask of utter shock painted with his very blood.
“Noooooow!” he screeched. Tommy matched him, nearly breaking his vocal cords as he elbowed Slimecicle in the jaw.
The curse went flying into a wall, splattering all over a crater. His arm ripped clean off, plopping on the floor and then turning to dust.
Tommy then turned to Tubbo, wondering how he could help him with a lost arm and a burst torso, as well as how he could ever repay what he just did. One could only imagine how deeply he sighed as the swathe of blood on his face streamed back into Tubbo’s body, along with bits of bone, tissue, and even shredded clothing, all shimmering with green light.
“Tubbo, how cracked can you get?”
The boy whimpered in pain as his arm popped back into his body, clutching it as he wheezed on shaky legs. But a smile split his sweaty face.
“That’s not fair.”
They tensed. The spot Slimecicle hurtled into was obscured by shadow, the lights having failed seconds ago. But they could tell that the curse was taking to its feet already.
Tubbo put himself in front of Tommy, looking determined. But the latter was not having it.
“Quit it, big man!”
“It’s as you said! I gotta be a medic and a meat shield. I won’t stand around any longer.”
“You can’t get lucky a second time,” Tommy insisted, pulling Tubbo to the side. “Just leave this to me. I’ll—”
He heard Tubbo cry out his name as air rushed out of his lungs. Slimecicle had launched himself like a cannonball into him, cackling with glee as they both hurtled toward the edge of the chasm.
Rage flaring once again, he flicked his right hand into a seal. Boom went the barrier, snapping out of his body like an elastic band. As the curse was pushed back, Tommy quickly found his footing inches away from the yawning gap and aimed a punch for his head.
Tubbo watched all of this happen as he ran toward them. He felt a rush of elation as it seemed that Tommy was going to knock the curse away again. Slimecicle wobbled about, making a desperate swing at the blond’s exposed chest with his sole arm. But Tubbo was sure that Tommy would come out on top.
A wild cheer climbed in his chest as the curse did get flung back.
It turned into a scream as Tommy then fell to the side, his face twisted in shock. His ribcage was open, and everything around him was red.