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The gods are all wanderers, in their own rights. War roams where his domain takes him, and Death is everywhere at once. Technoblade revels in the violence and the glory, and Philza does not even have to see the loss he sows in the wake of his reaping.
And as for Famine? What of Wilbur Soot?
Famine is a wayfarer far more than the rest of his family. The roads are his second home, boots eternally caked with the dust of a thousand places. He moves as a ghost through fields and cities and empty streets, watching the sorrow his presence brings, face shielded safely behind masks both physical and emotional.
(As though any mask could truly protect him from the pain his very existence wreaks upon the world.)
Wilbur is a god, and by nature, he hurts. Whether the hurt is greater for him or for the world, well, who can say?
(Sometimes, it seems that pain is all he has ever known, and all he ever will know. The life of a god is one laced with agony of a thousand souls, pressed like a flower between the pages of your heart and mind.)
His is a life of wandering, aimless pain, for a stretch of timeless, formless years. It seems like it might never end, but everything is different when he meets Tommy.
They meet a few times before that last all-important time, Wilbur and the boy. Even though he wanders anywhere and everywhere, he still finds his feet following familiar paths, treading roads he knows by heart, knows as well as the crow’s feet of Phil’s smile, or the contours of Techno’s mask. It helps, sometimes, to see faces he vaguely recognizes. To see people who have kept on living despite food shortages and poverty, disease and injustice and pain.
To know everything isn’t his fault. He doesn’t get everyone, in the end.
That’s Phil’s job, and Wilbur has no idea how the older god copes with it. He’s just grateful it’s not him.
(He’s grateful for a lot of things about Phil, but that doesn’t stop the way he looks at Phil’s scythe some days and wishes he had simply chosen death. The way he hates that Phil saved him. And so he wanders.)
The first time they meet, it’s no more than a passing brush. The kid barges by him in a back alley, barefoot and covered in grime, and Wilbur can feel the way the hunger gnaws at his skinny limbs and aching stomach.
But it’s not enough that he’s truly starving, not enough for Wilbur’s domain to sap him of the fire in his blue eyes, to summon Death with his terrible wings and terrible scythe and terrible kind smile.
Wilbur keeps walking.
He doesn’t look back.
The thing about gods is that they are far more human than mortals would give them credit for. After all, so many of them started as mortals themselves before the burden of divinity settled into their bones and sinews, curling into ribcages and twining round throats.
Gods can weep and rage and love. Gods have morals. Gods can feel pain—and oh, what pain it is for an immortal to suffer.
Gods can bleed, and gods can die.
Wilbur really wouldn’t wish divinity upon anyone, because in the end, it is naught but an extended existence upon this earth, with very few perks to compensate for the pain and the loss and the decades that crawl onwards with no discernible end in sight.
And yet he can’t quite bring himself to regret reaching out to take Phil’s hand, all those years ago.
The second time he sees the kid, he does a double take, jerking out of the haze he’s been in for days of aimless walking. He’s on a cobbled street somewhere, autumn air just beginning to curl at the edges with the faintest nipping of frost as winter knocks at the door.
The dirt-smudged child is bearing down on him with a determined look in his eyes, clutching a loaf of bread and grinning fiercely.
He runs right through Wilbur, this time, and Wilbur hisses in a breath at the strength of his hunger, the way it claws through his chest and stomach like the early days. Days when he couldn’t stand from his bed, when he hid his face in Phil’s chest and sobbed.
(Days before Phil, when all he knew was hunger and weakness and pain, with no hope of ever feeling anything beyond that.)
Behind his mask, Famine blinks hard, trying to ignore the faint pricking of tears at the corners of his eyes.
He’s dizzy and still doesn’t feel fully there, properly in his own body, but when Wilbur sees the shouting man chasing after the boy, eyes ablaze and face red, he thinks of the bread grasped in shaking hands, a smile tinged with desperation. He sees an echo of his past self in this strange and wild child he’s encountered once before, and before Wilbur can even think, he’s extended a foot as the man runs by him.
Wilbur spends most of his time intangible and invisible to all but those who are most affected by his domain, preferring to be as insubstantial to the rest of the world as he feels. But he has enough presence of mind to concentrate, and the boy’s pursuer goes sprawling to the cobbles, foot connecting with Wilbur’s unseen ankle.
“Fuck you, bitch!” the boy yells gleefully, disappearing around a corner.
Wilbur’s scale is heavy at his hip.
He can’t help but smile.
“I don’t understand,” Wilbur says, one hand fisted in Phil’s robes, the other twisting at the hem of his new sweater. It’s the softest piece of clothing he’s ever owned. Maybe the cleanest, too.
“What don’t you understand, mate?” Phil asks him.
He cocks his head, looking up at the older god through his fringe. “Why do I have to make people hungry?”
Phil breathes out, short and sharp. “It’s…it’s a part of your domain, mate. It’s your bound duty.”
Wilbur doesn’t understand why he sounds so choked.
“But I don’t like it.”
Phil’s hand cards through his hair, gentle and reassuring. “Sometimes what you like doesn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things. I don’t wish to watch the suffering of others, but I must go where I am bid. As gods, we follow our domains as needed.”
Wilbur considers this. “Shouldn’t a god be able to go where they wish? Aren’t you supposed to be powerful? I thought gods could do anything.”
Phil shakes his head, a stray lock of hair catching on the edge of his new blindfold.
Wilbur doesn’t like the blindfold. He doesn’t get why Phil has to wear it. He misses the kind eyes it hides, the warm gaze that soothed his trembling fear when he first met it, not so long ago. It was Phil’s eyes that convinced Wilbur that he meant him no harm. That reassured him enough to take Death’s unexpected offer, along with his hand, and let newfound divinity wrap around his shoulders like a heavy cloak.
“You’ll learn in time, Wil,” Phil says, and his voice is tired and resigned. “A god is nothing more than what mortals choose to make of him.”
(Later, Phil explains that the people will be hungry whether Wilbur is there or not. That famine and starvation are bound up in the threads of the world they live in, and it’s better to have someone in charge of it than to let it run rampant.
Later, Wilbur hears Phil slam his fist against the wall and stand there, raging to no one, or perhaps the world, must it always be the kindest souls who bear the hardest jobs?)
It’s a lesson Wilbur has never forgotten.
Their final meeting is also their first, in a way.
Autumn has given way to winter in full, snow drifting up on sidewalks and in gutters, frost decorating windowpanes with intricate patterns. The chill sinks its sharp teeth into unprotected skin with a vengeance. It’s a bad day, for Wilbur. The hunger is back, chewing and tearing at his insides, making his head pound and his limbs shake, stealing the clarity he yearns for. He takes stumbling steps, unaware of where he’s going but unable to stop because he can’t go home, can’t look Phil in the face right now.
That’s how he finds himself in a back alley, by a mound of crates, feeling a tug at his soul.
He blinks, runs a hand through his hair, rubs fingers over the handle of his sickle in an attempt to ground himself, and when he looks down—
Over the edge of the crates, he sees blond hair. A red shirt, ripped and torn. Stick-thin limbs and feverbright eyes. Breath rattling in a way that Wilbur knows all too well from a past life of sickness and disease.
It’s the boy again. The boy he’s seen time and again, fighting so fiercely to stay alive.
The boy whose blue eyes and blond hair look so much like Phil’s.
(The boy who reminds him of himself.)
As Wilbur watches, his chest rises with a shallow breath.
It falls.
It does not rise again.
Something twists behind Wilbur’s sternum, within his ribs, sharper than any hunger pang, sharper than the words he holds in his mouth every time he looks at Phil’s scythe with longing, words that cut his tongue and gums and throat like shards of glass until he runs away rather than spit them, bloody and harsh, into the open at his father's feet.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Wilbur jumps, breath hitching tight in his throat. He turns to see the boy sitting on a crate, arms crossed, glaring suspiciously at him. A wispy trail of light connects him to his body.
He’s not quite gone yet. Not until Phil severs the connection.
“Wilbur,” he says, and he sees the way the boy flinches at the movement of his head, the glint of sunlight off his mask.
His mask is his shield, the barrier he places between himself and the world. He can see others, but they can never fully see him, and that’s how Wilbur likes it. The mask is safe, and he only takes it off around Phil and Techno anymore.
And yet—
Almost on instinct, Wilbur reaches up and unbuckles the strap, pulling the insectoid gas mask from his face.
He blinks, eyes adjusting to the lighting now that it’s not tinged with red; takes in a deep breath of unfiltered air. Somehow, a breeze finds its way into the tight space of the alley and curls across his bare cheeks, icy and unfamiliar.
How long has it been since he last took it off?
He can’t recall.
“I’m Wilbur,” he repeats, unsure, hands shaking as they grip his mask.
“Tommy,” the kid says, still looking guarded, but his posture has relaxed somewhat. “You’re a god.”
It’s not a question.
Wilbur swallows. Nods.
“And I’m dead.”
“Sort of.”
“The fuck do you mean, sort of?”
That tears a surprised laugh out of him. A million thoughts tumble through his head at once, scenarios and consequences, offers and counteroffers, potential backlash. He weighs his options.
He’s good at that. Considering consequences, fairness. Famine carries scales for a reason.
In the end, it feels like the decision was already made a long time ago. Before Wilbur opened his mouth, before he took off his mask. Before this meeting, even.
Maybe it was decided when he first saw Tommy, bright-eyed and determined to live.
“Tommy,” he says, taking a seat on a crate across from the spirit.
Between them, the body cools rapidly in the frigid winter air.
“How would you like to be a god?”
(He leaves that day still barefaced, cradling Tommy’s small body in his arms after taking his bright soul by the hand and carefully tucking it back into Tommy’s chest. The air is freezing, but in his arms, Tommy is just barely warm.
Wilbur goes home.)
Wilbur used to think Phil knew everything there was to know. He thought his pseudo-father was the smartest, wisest person in the world, and though he knows that’s not true now, he’ll be the first to admit that Phil knows a great deal more than he does, and somehow, Phil always seems to know what Wilbur is going to say before he ever opens his mouth.
So when Wilbur shows up on the doorstep of their old home after weeks—months? How long has it been?—cradling the body of a child hovering on the line between disease and death, it’s no surprise that Phil doesn’t even have to ask what Wilbur wants.
Gods are formed in any number of ways. If enough of a domain arises, if mortals have enough belief, it is entirely possible for a god to come into being by sheer faith alone. Sometimes they arise by great feats, or by a council selection.
Gods can be made by other gods, as well, should they choose to give up a piece of their own power and domain. This is not often done, because gods, like all humans, are selfish at heart, grasping the power they are given and refusing to let go.
Phil is a disruption to the order of things.
Years ago, finding a child broken and bleeding on a battlefield, he carved out his own domain, and War was born. And again, meeting a starving child in rags and tatters, he gave up more of his power, and Famine arose. Phil is change, and the gods are not fond of change.
(Was it not the sun which claimed Icarus, albeit helped by his own hubris? How ironic that the life-giver should burn and kill, and yet death, this current Death, has never been anything but kind.)
Wilbur arrives home, maskless and looking more aware than he has in months, and all he says is please.
And what is Phil to say to his second son but yes?
Recovery is a slow process, even more so for Tommy than it was for Wilbur, and Wilbur spends nearly every second of it by Tommy’s side. He talks to him for hours, until his voice has gone hoarse, and then he talks some more.
No one said becoming a god was an easy or pleasant transition.
The first night, when divinity wracks his frail body, Wilbur picks up his guitar and plays until the pain eases enough for Tommy to fall asleep.
(If Wilbur falls asleep soon after, guitar nearly slipping from his grasp and head pillowed on his arm, no one mentions it.)
Their family is an odd one, cobbled together from loss and pain and hardship, made up of beings who should never have had to oversee such suffering.
Techno still bleeds from old wounds, some days. Oftentimes, hunger wracks Wilbur’s frame, and he can’t rise from his bed. Tommy, the newborn Pestilence, spends many days coughing, breath rattling in his chest. Phil watches it all without seeing how he used to, and though it pains him to see his family, his sons, suffering, he doesn’t regret for a minute what he has given up for them.
(Though they hate being gods themselves, neither do they regret their choices.)
The kindest souls bear the heaviest burdens, the most wretched of domains, but better them than someone else, no?
If they have nothing else, at least they have each other.
(We’re like brothers! Tommy declares one day, and Wilbur’s breath catches in his chest, fluttering behind his ribs like a caged hummingbird.
Don’t start, he says, pretending to jest, but he’s so, so serious. I will cry.
I’m going to be like you, decides Tommy, swinging his legs beneath his chair. I’m gonna ask Phil for a mask and everything.
Wilbur doesn’t get to respond, because Techno flicks Tommy on the back of the head teasingly, and Tommy shrieks, and everything dissolves into chaos as it usually does when Tommy is around, but he doesn’t stop thinking about it.
When Tommy parades in front of him wearing the familiar bird-shaped mask of a plague doctor sometime later, Wilbur can’t help the proud grin that stretches across his face.
He’s glad he found Tommy.)
It’s one of the bad days, again, when Wilbur is hungry and Tommy is coughing in fitful splutters, and Tommy has crawled up into Wilbur’s bed with him, forehead leaned against Wilbur’s shoulder.
“Tell me the story of how you found me?” he rasps quietly.
Wilbur shifts to wrap an arm around the younger god, leaning his cheek into Tommy’s hair, trying to ignore the ache in his bones.
“Sometimes,” he says, “I think you were the one to find me, instead of the other way around.”
And so he tells the story, as he has a hundred times before, as he will a thousand times more, until Tommy stops asking, and even beyond that.
(It doesn’t hurt quite so much, with Tommy here, he finds.)