Predator (DWT x OC)

Epilogue

We didn't bury Dream in L'manburg. 

He would've hated it, and so would all the other people that died there. 

He gave us a complicated legacy to deal with. I guess it was kind of on par with him, always a pain in my ass. I buried him in the same plot as Quackity, and Jack's empty grave. 

There's a million things we could have put on his stone. 

Kidnapper. Murderer. Tyrant. Psychopath. A man who ruled many and ruined lives. 

The man I loved. 

I hate him most days, especially the ones I miss him. The ones I end up sitting in front of the grave with my chest cracking open. The ones where grief sneaks up on me out of nowhere and grabs me by the throat. 

I love him on the others. When I look at Punz, asleep on our couch, lit up by the afternoon sun. When I watch Tommy trail after Sam, a lanky teenager and a grumpy man. When Niki comes over for dinner and brings our cat to say hello. When Tubbo smiles. 

He saved them. Took the bolt for Punz. Got the message out to Sam quick enough for him to disable the connectors to the TNT in all the tunnels. Kept the kids back at the base. 

There is a lifetime I can never forgive him for, and so much I don't have the right to. Other lives, other countries and villages and towns. A legacy of brutality that a few acts can never erase. 

But I don't live for checks and balances anymore. I can't. I've spent the last long, horrible years of my life tallying it up and trying to be right. I'm too exhausted. I just feel. 

It was Punz who suggested it, when I told him about it. The guilt, the way I'd list things out in my head like an equation to see what I could let myself feel. Do I deserve to feel angry, or happy or sad? That it didn't matter anymore. People will deal with what he did by themselves, and I should too. 

I don't forgive him for Ixia, or his role in Jack's death. What he did to our lands, and to me. 

I still love him. Always, just like I said in that meeting room. I don't know why. I stopped trying to find it out. 

Sapnap got out, the Badlands. Punz found him a job where he can move. He sends postcards with bad puns and we save every single one. 

Eret stayed. He's close with Niki, comes to dinner sometimes. Familiar. 

They found George's body in prison, with the others who were jailed. Murdered. We buried him somewhere beautiful, near Dream's old house. I planted a garden nearby, visit it every week, prune, weed, cry into the dirt. 

L'manburg has so many scars, but there's a lot who stayed, crawled out of those tunnels and back home. New leaders, democratic votes, petty politics that I stayed out of, harmless enough when you compare it to what once was. 

The only wars they fight are elections, the only battlegrounds parliament and the stage. 

I went back to the clinic. Boring stuff. Safe stuff. Dislocated shoulders and runny noses and headaches. Treat people who don't flinch at the scars on my arms because we've all got them now. 

I have nightmares sometimes. Fundy. Explosions. Underground rooms. 

But Punz is always there, when I wake up screaming, or shaking or crying, Holding me, the steady, strong beat of his heart I thought I might never hear again. Whispers soft nothings into my hair until I drift off again. 

I know he gets antsy sometimes, staying still in one place for so long. I asked him about it once, and he just smiled and kissed me. 

"I get an itch, sometimes, and then it passes when I see you smile."

He works with Sam and Tommy, rebuilding L'manburg. New houses, new facilities. Most of the old damage has been repaired now. 

Tubbo and Niki reopened the bakery together. It's good, keeps him busy, distracted, keeps them both occupied. 

The people we lost are in everything. Wilbur is knitted into the foundation of this place. The name, the borders, its history. Jack's with us at every dinner, every time we're all together. Quackity's in the White House and the stage and every single petty political argument that makes me laugh. Ixia's in the stars of the night sky and the brass tones of trumpets. George is in the dirt on my gardening gloves, the leaves of my tomato plants. 

We don't let the world forget them. We carry them wherever we go. 

I'm not so angry anymore, I don't think. Not as violent. There's still those gnarled broken parts of me. They're ugly. Awful. I yell sometimes. Throw things. Shut down. Find myself screaming. It's less, easier to manage. Maybe there's a day I don't feel like this at all. 

We didn't make it out of the war unscathed, but we did make it out. 

And so when Punz wraps his arms around my waist and kisses my jaw and tells me he loves me?

I tell him I love him back. 

- Fin Book Two -