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When he wakes up again after the fall of L’Manburg, he cries.
He cries because he can still feel, because he is alone, because it did not end. Wilbur cries on the empty train platform he woke up on and mourns living.
Later, he cries because there is no one here to talk to, no friends or family to find comfort in. Maybe that’s for the better, though. He’s already burned every bridge possible, so it’s good that they’re not here. He doesn’t want them to feel burdened by his presence.
However, Wilbur is lonely. Wilbur is achingly lonely, surrounded by unfeeling concrete walls and skin sallow under flickering dim lights. He misses his father, his brothers, his son. He misses Tubbo and Quackity and Niki. He even occasionally finds himself missing Schlatt. Wishing that someone, anyone, was here with him.
Not that he deserves the company after everything he’s done.
Wilbur knows he is dead. He knows it because he knows the feeling of a blade sinking into his chest, cracking ribs and burning flesh as it sheathed itself into his torso. He knows the memory of his father’s grief-stricken face as the world around him turned black, the memory of feeling his heart stop beating around the blade of his father’s sword.
He feels it in the way he can count every death of his on three fingers, and know that there is never a fourth.
He knows he is dead because when he jumps in front of the next oncoming train, he blinks back awake on the station bench, perfectly fine and just as alone as always.
He spends the first year crying and shivering in that cold and empty concrete station, watching trains pass but never stop, never opening their doors to take him onwards.
The second year, he tries to see if there is any way out on his own. He tries the doors at either end of the platform, jiggling their locked knobs like trying them again will yield different results. He tries breaking them open by force, but all he gets is a dull pain in his shoulder when he throws himself up against it. He claws at the seams of the doors, bangs on them while screaming for help, but no one comes and his voice grows hoarse.
Following the tracks into the tunnel brings no new result, simply bringing him back to the same empty station platform with the same ads plastered on the walls. It is always the same, and Wilbur is always alone. He rages.
By the end of it, he starts to lose track of time. His tally marks on the wall, scratched in with the nail keeping his boot together, stop making sense. He can’t remember: is this Day 710 or 711? Time is irrelevant in The Station, the clock on the wall never yielding the correct hour, always stuck at half past noon. Half past noon on the day he died.
A constant fucking reminder of his failures. He throws a rock he found in the tunnel at the clock.
It is somewhere in the third year when he loses his good memories. One day he wakes up on his bench, and everything is gone. The day Tommy was born, exploring the woods with Techno, the red beanie his father bought for him, Sally? The memories, no matter how hard he tries to hold onto them, slip away like mist. It is as he is gasping for breath in the thin air of the subway, that a train stops for the first time.
As he stands there, breathless and dumbfounded, someone else steps out from behind him. It’s him, but younger. Younger, with a fresher face, eyes black but warm and happy. Without even a glance back, “he” steps onto the train, and the doors close behind him.
Wilbur bangs on the closed door, begging for it to open, begging to trade places with the imposter. Begging to let him go anywhere but here.
“Come back here! Let me on the train! Please!”
The train takes off without him, and he is alone again. Alone, and that much colder.
He screams into the silence of The Station until he can’t anymore.
His all-consuming despair eventually morphs into anger. Anger at the conductor of the train. Anger at himself for not moving faster. Anger at the imposter of him. Anger, anger, anger.
The next day, he rips all the posters off the walls and throws them onto the train tracks. They don’t come back, and he feels vindictively glad. At least something in the damn place can change. The fourth and fifth years, he does nothing. He doesn’t move from his bench at all, just stares at the passing trains with vitriol in his eyes and a slow flame licking at his hollow chest, burning everything in its path. He learns that he doesn’t feel tired when he doesn’t sleep. His eyes don’t dry when he doesn’t blink. He doesn’t feel stiff when he doesn’t move.
In fact, he doesn’t feel anything except the anger eating him up inside.
Everything else is just cold.
Days tick by like grains of sand in an hourglass. He starts scratching his tallies into the bench so he doesn’t have to move.
In the sixth year, he finds a pack of cigarettes under one of the benches. There’s a lighter in his jacket pocket, just in case he’d have had to set the bombs off manually, all those years ago. When the smoke fills his lungs and clouds the air around his head, he feels a little better. A little less attached, less aware. It feels like a peaceful death should probably feel. He wouldn’t know, but he hopes.
It’s comforting, he thinks, to have to focus on breathing again. The peaceful in and out that he lost when he died. The dead have no need to breathe, after all.
It’s the seventh year when She arrives. She doesn’t come on a train, or walk through the station doors, or come from further down the tracks. No, She just appears one day when he isn’t looking, beautiful and tall and familiar. Her hair is like the iridescence of a raven’s wing; Her cloak shimmers with the folds of space and time hidden within; Her eyes contain the tragic beauty of every dying sunset all at once. She doesn’t speak a word, instead passing him an oddly familiar old guitar from within Her cloak, well cared for and loved in a way that brings a smile to his face.
He does not know why, but when She looks at him expectantly, he knows She wants him to play for Her. So he plays. He plays songs he doesn’t ever remember learning, melodies he knows by heart without having to recall a single note. The Station is filled with the soft music of his guitar that year, and the flame that eats at his heart subsides. It never goes out, but at least he can’t feel it burning him quite as darkly as before.
In Wilbur’s eighth year, She starts to sing. Her voice is lovely, and warm, and he doesn’t complain when She pulls him in close and pets his hair as She lilts along to his melodies. If She notices when he starts to cry, She doesn’t say anything, instead running a soothing hand down his back. He cries more than he plays that year.
He cries because he knows Her, he does, but he can’t remember. He cries for every memory that his greyed-out imposter took with him, for every bright moment he knows he should have had to hold onto. For everything precious that he cannot recall.
Every time she sings, he can almost hear the words hidden in the symphony of her song.
You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.
At the beginning of the ninth year, a train stops, but doesn’t open its doors. The Woman doesn’t complain when he scrambles out of her embrace to stand in front of the train, waiting. When he peers inside impatiently, he sees a boy with hair like spun gold and eyes like the endless summer sky. It takes him a second, but then he remembers.
He remembers, and he wishes he could forget.
It’s Tommy sitting there, curled up on a seat inside the car, covered in blood with his skinned knees tucked into his chest. It’s Tommy, his brother, who he failed to protect. Who he remembers hurting time and time again. He remembers his brother’s eyes in Pogtopia, round and broken and afraid every time they caught his own in the torchlight. He remembers pleas that they didn’t have to be the bad guys, the villains, that they could just be normal. That they could live for themselves. He remembers the first time he hit his brother in the caverns, and the shocked look in those blue eyes that followed. The disbelief, the affront, but most importantly the hurt and the fear . Afraid of him , his older brother, who was supposed to protect him.
He had hurt his brother in too many ways in his final days, those eight years ago.
Now Tommy is sitting alone on the train, covered in red, red blood , dead. His brother is dead, and Wilbur isn’t there with him. To tell him not to worry. To tell him, “I love you.” To say, “I’m sorry,” until his breath runs out and all he can offer is his arms and what little comfort they can hold.
She seems distressed to see Tommy as well, from where She has come up behind Wilbur to look inside the car alongside him. Then, before either of them can do anything, the train rattles on and Tommy is gone.
He hadn’t looked up once.
Then the ninth year begins, and She says She has to leave. She makes apologies the day before, and Wilbur understands, he does. Tommy is more important than he ever would be; he knows that and agrees with it. Before She goes, however, She presses a kiss to his forehead, filled with love and hope and a warmth that spreads through his chilly bones and reminds him of every good thing in the world. Tears spring to his eyes, and they come to Hers as well.
“I love you,” She says, and then She is gone.
She is gone, but the guitar remains there on the bench waiting for him. It remains, and he plays all of Her favorite songs, over and over and over until his hands cramp and he can’t pluck the strings anymore. The silence in The Station has never felt so loud before. His tenth and eleventh year pass by in a similar manner. He plays until he can’t play anymore, then spends the rest of the year drowning in cigarette smoke and drifting away from his unfortunate reality.
She never comes back. He misses Her, but really, it makes sense. Why come back for him when there’s Tommy?
He wonders for the first time if he is mourned by the living. If his father visits his grave on his birthday, if his twin thinks of him when planting potatoes in the fall. If anyone still thinks of him fondly, or if they only remember the madman he had been at the very end.
He hopes they remember him.
Then, in his twelfth year, something changes. When he wakes up, there is a new addition to The Station: a display. There is a dot matrix display, and words on it that have nothing to do with arriving or departing trains.
“He’s a selfish bastard who never cared about anyone but himself!”
“I don’t have a dad.”
“Why do you still have this picture of him?”
“Phil, what was he like? Y’know, before he became Ghostbur?”
“I don’t want to be like him.”
Then, most strikingly, “I miss him, Tubbo. I miss him, but I don’t...y’know?”
He doesn’t know why that one hurts him so bad. All his questions are suddenly answered, and he wishes he had never asked them at all. He doesn’t want to know every bad thing people think about him, but like an addict, he can’t get enough of the pain. His twelfth year is spent like his fourth and fifth, staring at the ever changing display, never blinking and never sleeping as he greedily drinks in every statement shown. Towards the end of the year, there is a spike in strange messages like, “He would be a useful piece.”
Concerningly, the number of messages grows to a speed where he almost can’t read them anymore as his thirteenth year in The Station begins.
“I need him here. He could help me-”
“He’s strong, they wouldn’t stand a chance-”
“I’ll bring him back, I’ll do it-”
“I just need an opportunity-”
It gives him hope, a dangerous and dark sort of hope, as he catches bits and pieces of the messages as they flash by. Someone is thinking of him, someone is thinking of “bringing him back”. He grins, and it is something almost feral as the dormant flame in his heart roars back to life, scorching him from the inside out.
He relishes in the burn, finds comfort in it the same way he finds comfort in the clouds of thick smoke that saturate his lungs.
His thirteenth year passes quickly, as enamored as he is with the dot matrix display. It speeds by, until he sees its last message, thirteen and a half years since his death.
“If you don’t let me out, I’m gonna revive him! He’ll help me! Wilbur’ll help me!”
Then the board is silent. The lights power down, and a sparking noise signifies the end of the display’s electric life. He barely has time to despair, to grasp what that means, before a train pulls into the station. The brakes squeal, and it stops. At his platform, it stops.
The doors slide open, and standing there in the threshold is “him”. That desaturated, bright-faced him from so many years ago, the imposter that took his place. Except this time, “he” is crying. There’s a little vindictive pleasure in Wilbur’s heart. Tears are steaming on “his” face, sizzling at the corners of his black eyes as the imposter steps off the train.
Wilbur can’t help it. He laughs.
He laughs, and laughs and laughs, until his voice is hoarse and he can barely breathe. A hysterical, mad sort of laughter, ringing with joy and disbelief and even a little bit of fear.
He laughs because he knows. No one has to tell him, he knows. This train, it’s for him. This time, the train is for him. Finally, finally! After thirteen and a half long years, it’s for him. When he steps toward it, though, a hand holds him back. A perfect, manicured, soft hand, attached to a cloaked arm. Even before he turns, Wilbur knows who he’ll see.
She stands behind him, as lovely and warm and familiar as ever.
“Are you going to stop me?” He asks, voice rattling in his chest and raspy with ages of smoke and anger and silence.
She shakes Her head. “No. But I am here to rectify a wrong before you depart.”
With that, She holds out Her other hand to his imposter, and the soft-eyed ghost takes it with hesitance. She shifts Her grasp on Wilbur himself, letting go of his coat to grab his clammy palm. There is a bright light, and when Wilbur opens his eyes, “he” fades away like cigarette smoke into the chilly station air and Wilbur remembers. He remembers it all.
When Tommy was born, the storms that had been rattling the windows the whole morning gave way to a beautiful rainbow. His father had laughed from inside the birthing room.
When he explored the woods by their childhood home with Techno, they found a creek that yielded the best and roundest pebbles to skip. They skipped those stones for hours.
When his father bought him his red beanie, it was a gift to celebrate the first time he won first prize with his songs at their local festival’s talent show. He had been so proud.
When he first met Sally, it was on the shore of the beach he carved his guitar at, and he had promised the girl with red hair like a sunset that he would marry her when they grew up. She had simply smiled in response.
But there are even more, memories that never happened to him flooding in in quick succession.
Rebuilding L’Manburg from the crater he had created. Tommy’s exile. Getting sent into the rain to die. Finding Friend. Watching his twin get executed. Handing out blue. Watching his father and Techno destroy the nation he rebuilt. Friend’s death. Visiting Dream in prison. Counting to ten as he pleaded with his baby brother not to let him die.
Seeing his own face, soot-streaked and manic with dead eyes staring at him gleefully as he steps off the train.
He comes back to the present when he feels a hand petting his hair and teardrops splashing down the collar of his trenchcoat.
“I’m so sorry, my son.”
Mum. Wilbur—past and present all at once—opens his eyes to meet his mother’s own. He remembers! He remembers Her!
“Mum!” Then his arms are wrapped around her waist, and his face buried in her bosom as his shoulders wrack with sobs. She smiles wetly against his hair, her embrace warm like every spring under the sun, strong like the bough of a tree he climbed in his youth.
“Your Mama’s here, my darling. I’m always here, even when you can’t see me.” He sniffles, and she pulls him in tighter. “I’m here, my darling boy.”
There is the sound of the train’s horn bellowing, and she smiles one more time as she presses a kiss to the top of his head (as tall as she is). “You must go back, Wil, but I will be waiting here for the day when you return. Mortals are not meant to have more than three lives, but I hope you live this extra chance well.”
He hugs her tighter one more time and then lets go, wiping his tears off on his sleeve. Throwing a last smile her way, he steps backwards onto the train with wet eyes. “I love you, Mum.”
Before the doors close, he hears, “I love you too, my son.”
The train pulls out of The Station, and after thirteen and a half years alone surrounded by concrete walls, he is headed home. God, he can’t wait to feel the sun shine on him again.