Chapter Text
Wilbur
A bundle of papers drops onto Wilbur’s desk, and for a moment he only wants to breathe, gathering himself together, before reaching over to pull it in front of him. His coworker stands by the cuticle, giving him a look that Wil doesn’t bother to return.
“Boss wants those papers back by Wednesday.” She tells him before turning to pace away.
Wilbur looks away, pulls his hands over his face and through his hair, allowing the momentary darkness to swallow his vision away from the gleary overhead lights of the office.
He didn’t know what day today is, or when Wednesday is, and he doesn’t want to know. He’s lived this day about a thousand times before, nothing can really go wrong in his barren life at the office. He sometimes thinks he was put under a curse the second he was born, or that maybe he was the curse himself. Every moment in his life was laced with sickness and born from mistake after mistake. There was poison in his veins somewhere.
A day looks like this:
He doesn’t sleep, not really. He’s suffered from severe insomnia since he can remember, he used to be able to sleep when he was very young. A small baby, deaf to the noise of the world. But he had to start listening sometime. He lies awake most nights, if he’s lucky he’ll get five or six hours of restless sleep, awakened with a headache and pressure above in his teeth and pain behind his eyes.
Wilbur gets up long before the sun is in the sky, he doesn’t really need to get ready that early, but he does anyway, lying in bed gets him nowhere. He brushes his teeth, combs his hair with his fingers, gets dressed in a white button down, slacks, and a tie. He doesn’t really eat breakfast, in his time in the foster system he wasn’t allowed to eat a lot, and even after he turned eighteen and got a place of his own, he couldn’t seem to grow out of his old habits. It’s not like he’s complaining, though, he saves money.
He knows he looks like a mess when he looks in the mirror, dark bags hang heavy under his eyes and he doesn’t own a hairbrush or shampoo that compliments his curls, so his hair is frizzy and sits like a cloud of curls and tangles in front of his forehead, slightly more overgrown then he’d prefer but unbothered enough that he won't call a hairdresser. He’s too skinny and lanky and awkwardly tall, he hates showers and seeing the way his skin dresses his skeleton. He often wears a coat, even on hot days.
He takes the train or bus to work, he’s always tired and wants to sit down but he always ends up giving his seat up to the woman he sees most mornings. She looks around his age, he doesn’t know her name, but he always catches himself looking at her. Hair red like fire, sometimes fixed into a ponytail or complemented with a headband, shimmering like gold in the sun. Her freckles dot like stars, forming invisible constellations all over her face, and her eyes are green and blue like the ocean. Wilbur thinks she might be the prettiest person he’s ever seen. She gets on the stop after Wil, and when he sees her step up the train stairs, he takes the strap on his bag and stands up. Then she’ll meet eyes with him and smile fondly, whisper a thank you through a slight bow and sit down.
He gets to his work building at 8:30 every morning, thirty minutes before he’s meant to, but he’s got nothing to fill the time, so he’ll sit in the lobby and close his eyes and imagine he’s living a different life. A life where he wasn’t born into nothing. A crying baby in a pristine hospital, a man typing numbers in a cluttered tiny office cuticle. Where had the time gone?
Wilbur sometimes wonders what life could be like if he had an ounce of instigation. He’d ask the woman on the train for her name and maybe if she’d like to go for a drink with him. He’d quit his dead-end job and pursue something he loved. First he'd figure out what he loved. Music or art, maybe. And maybe he’d end up marrying someone, maybe they’d start a family. He would finally have a family. He wouldn’t abandon his kids the way his father abandoned him. He would protect them with his life, hold them close the way he imagined his late mother would’ve done if she lived one day past his birth. He wouldn’t fuck them up the way the world had fucked him up.
A buzzing against his leg will snap him out of his dream. And the clock will read 9 AM.
His job isn’t really difficult, just tedious, mostly busy work his boss dumps on his desk. He doesn’t make friends with his co-workers, they give him an uneasy vibe he can’t shake, they look at him like kids did back in grade school, like he was the class freak everyone treated like a dog. He knows they’re judging him, he knows it.
He gets off at 5 PM, he doesn’t have friends to hangout with so he just goes home. His coworkers sometimes invite him to the bar with them, but he always turns them down. He knows a pity invite or a prank when he hears one, and he wants nothing to do with it.
At his apartment he cooks himself instant ramen, eats the noodles and tosses the rest, showers if he’s up for it, then lies against his floor, staring at the ceiling until all the light drains away.
Sometimes when he’s half-conscious, he almost thinks he’s back in a foster home, he slept on the floor for most of his life, so he never bothered buying a mattress or a bed if he was more comfortable on the floor, didn’t see a point in the waste of money, not that he really spends it anyways. Most foster homes he was in, there were too many boys and not enough beds, some boys shared a bed but nobody wanted to sleep next to Creepy Wilbur who smelled like a wet dog and cried every night. Beds brought him unease anyway. You’re born in a bed, you die in a bed. Not Wilbur, though.
The loop of days is endless, and sometimes he wonders when it will break, if it'll be loud and shattering like breaking glass or if it’ll be slow like a burning candle. If it never comes, and he lives out his desolate life with nothing, he supposes he’ll just drop dead one day, and that will be that. But it won’t matter, no one knows him, he wasn’t beloved in his lifetime and he did nothing to change the world, he was just another crying baby in a hospital, another man without a name.
He used to cry a lot. Most of the time there was nothing to cry for, he’d curl into a ball on the floor as he had done his entire childhood and wished he was warm, wished he could feel the beating heart of another living being. All he could think about was if his mother hadn’t died because of him, if his father decided to stay. He could’ve lived a life where he didn’t dread the morning, where he had something to hope for, to miss, a future to believe in.
He doesn’t cry much anymore, over the years he’s learned that you aren’t meant to cry, you’re meant to hold your tongue and let itsink, let it melt into your skin and dissolve. Sometimes he can’t hold it and tears slip loose into the night, but it’s okay, no one is there to see. No one is there to snap at him and give him chores and hold his arm so tight he thinks skin will break, no one is there. No one is there.
Most of the time, Wilbur Soot mourns the death of the life that could’ve been his.
“Have a good day, Soot.” His boss gives a smile that falls short from reaching his eyes and does a sort of solute sort of wave as he passes him.
“Thanks. You too.” Wilbur murmurs back, but he isn’t sure he said it loud enough, but his boss is already down the hall and turning a corner.
When he reaches the elevator, it’s full and the doors are already closing, so he changes course for the stairs. He’s only on the third floor, but he gets tired easily. Suck it up , he tells himself, and then starts down the stairs.
Walking down isn’t so bad, he just wishes he could pull his own weight. Maybe that’s it, maybe noodles aren't the best to eat. Or maybe he's just eating too much. He pauses at the base of the last set of stairs and tries hard to remember what one foster mother taught him. Five bites, she said, he doesn’t remember her face, but he remembers her thick American accent. All that matters is to stay beautiful. Beauty is pain, William, and you’ll find most only love for beauty.
Most of the time he just ate until he felt full, which never was enough.
Sometimes he thinks the world can see his imperfections just as clearly as he could, like every passerby on the street had x-ray vision that could see right through his coat, and he wanted nothing more than to disappear, melt into the ground and become nothing. It wounds him a little that he probably could if he really wanted to.
Something shoulders past him and he stumbles forward into a door frame. He takes a second to gather his bearings before looking up.
It’s Schlatt. “Watch it, Soot, quit standing in the doorway like a freak.”
Schlatt is the only one besides his boss who really addresses Wilbur, and that’s what Wilbur appreciates, even if it’s only to insult him. He’s also the only one who’s made it openly clear his disliking of Wilbur, rather than hushed whispers and dirty looks from their other coworkers, which Wilbur respects. He’s never really liked nice people, anyways, he grew up around boys that would torment him for fun and adults that punished him for every step out of line, a pleasant facade didn’t really seem to sit well with him and he’s learned that it never lasts long. He’d rather they show their true colors right away.
He respects Schlatt, even though Schlatt might not respect him.
“Also you smell like shit. Maybe shower once in a while.” Schlatt sneers, his bag strap over his shoulder. It’s meant as a hurtful comment, but Wilbur swears he saw Schlatt’s face shift into concern for a fleeting moment.
Wilbur goes to say something back, but Schlatt’s already gone out the door, flicking his yankees hat over his hair before disappearing down the sidewalk.
Wilbur now just desperately wants to be home. His tiny apartment that smells like bleach isn’t home to him but he doesn’t exactly have anywhere else. He wishes he did.
Before he knows it, a cigarette is clamped between his lips and he’s reaching for his lighter.
Right as he flicks the flame up, something moves past his eye and he pauses. A cat. It scurries past his leg and into the alleyway next to his office building. He knows the alleys in this city aren’t the safest or most clean, so he definitely shouldn’t follow the cat in, but his feet are already moving and he is already turning the corner.
The cat is small, fur mustily matted together in wide clumps, dirt stains around its muzzle and paws. The cat stretches and jumps up on a dumpster when it hears Wilbur stepping towards it.
“Hey, friend,” Wil softens his voice, bending his legs and outstretching his hand for the cat to sniff. talking to a cat is easier than talking to people. “I’m not here to hurt you. Do you have a home?”
The cat sniffs him and then gives his finger a lick, inviting Wil to bring his hand up over it’s head and gently pet it. He wishes people were as easy as this cat.
A car horn blares suddenly behind them and the cat frantically flattens itself and dives off the dumpster, sprinting to the street on the other side of the alley.
Wilbur goes after it before he even thinks about it, swerving around trash bins and old boxes to reach the street, his cigarettes and lighter long forgotten behind him.
The cat stops in the middle of the road, eyes wide like full moons staring at an oncoming car, a deer in headlights, prey to the predator.
If Wilbur knows anything, he knows death, and if this is how his story ends, so be it.
The cat is clutched in his arms against his chest when the world ends.
For the first time in his entire existence, Wilbur feels alive.