Staying around the edges of a disaster is not even remotely in Tommy’s nature. Too many years training himself to react the moment someone was in trouble, of putting himself between people and danger. Between people and death.
The last few days have been impossibly hard by those standards. Each person that Billy gets alone is a life that Tommy knows will be lost. They are weights that will always rest on Billy’s mind, and now Tommy’s as well. They are lives he could save, people he could spare this terrible fate. Lives he doesn’t touch because if he does this becomes an alternate reality and so he loses the man he loves.
Which makes him complicit in every life lost. No matter what he tells himself about causality and the flow of time and how things work, these lives are on his hands too. These people are his mistakes too. So each time he sees one Tommy makes sure to learn their name. If he carries the weight of them for the rest of his life, he will make sure they are remembered properly.
Even that resolve doesn’t make a moment of this any easier
Tommy eats mechanically, he showers mechanically, he cries as the hot water runs down his face because he did this too.
He’s a monster.
Why is he shocked by that? How could he ever be shocked by that? His soul was a fragment of Mephistopheles’s. He is broken if he can just stand back and let all of this happen.
There is no way he can be a hero again. Tommy knows that now. While Billy was a hero born from their mother’s magic and a god to be, Tommy Shepherd, he was born from her darkness, from the moments she was held by Chthon, from her days in the Brotherhood. Tommy Shepherd was born of Ultron and the darkness of his destruction.
He is unforgivable.
And yet he knows he won’t stop, because Billy? Billy didn’t deserve this. Billy deserved to live. And so he would give Billy that. Give Billy his chance to be better than his father, better than the creature that possessed him, and better than Tommy Shepherd.
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branchandroot
July ???, 1985
Date: 2023-10-01 04:02 am (UTC)The last few days have been impossibly hard by those standards. Each person that Billy gets alone is a life that Tommy knows will be lost. They are weights that will always rest on Billy’s mind, and now Tommy’s as well. They are lives he could save, people he could spare this terrible fate. Lives he doesn’t touch because if he does this becomes an alternate reality and so he loses the man he loves.
Which makes him complicit in every life lost. No matter what he tells himself about causality and the flow of time and how things work, these lives are on his hands too. These people are his mistakes too. So each time he sees one Tommy makes sure to learn their name. If he carries the weight of them for the rest of his life, he will make sure they are remembered properly.
Even that resolve doesn’t make a moment of this any easier
Tommy eats mechanically, he showers mechanically, he cries as the hot water runs down his face because he did this too.
He’s a monster.
Why is he shocked by that? How could he ever be shocked by that? His soul was a fragment of Mephistopheles’s. He is broken if he can just stand back and let all of this happen.
There is no way he can be a hero again. Tommy knows that now. While Billy was a hero born from their mother’s magic and a god to be, Tommy Shepherd, he was born from her darkness, from the moments she was held by Chthon, from her days in the Brotherhood. Tommy Shepherd was born of Ultron and the darkness of his destruction.
He is unforgivable.
And yet he knows he won’t stop, because Billy? Billy didn’t deserve this. Billy deserved to live. And so he would give Billy that. Give Billy his chance to be better than his father, better than the creature that possessed him, and better than Tommy Shepherd.