"He's out there again."

When Tommy leaned against the window, he could just barely watch Blade at work in the potato field outside. It sprawled way beyond where their garden used to end. Phil said they had to put up a fence soon. Wilbur agreed.

It was more or less the only thing those two could agree on in the past week.

"So? If it makes him happy I don't see the harm," Phil pointed out from the table. He was sorting through a box he had found in the storage room the other day. More books. It was always more fucking books with Phil.

Wilbur made a noise that was closer to anger than anything else. Phil did not acknowledge him.

"I'm not sure it makes him happy," Tommy said softly to himself. Well, it was meant to be for himself but he didn't care if the others heard. They were too up in their own asses to really pay attention anyway. Tommy had missed most of the fight so he had no fucking clue what that was about. He just knew it had been a week and they were still going at it. It sounded exhausting.

"Then you should go and tell him to come inside," Wilbur told Tommy. He glanced at Phil, a silent challenge. "He'll obey."

"Don't use that word," Phil said - voice cold. Colder than usual.

Wilbur scoffed. "Why? Isn't that what you did?"

"Ignoring the way he thinks the world works isn't an option either, Wilbur. Even if he's wrong. The man needs some fucking guidance, at least until we can figure out how to snap him out of it properly." Phil closed his book in annoyance. Tommy sighed and started to put on his shoes. He didn't feel like dealing with this.

"Your 'guidance' made him farm until his hands were all messed up and bleeding."

"I didn't-" Phil stopped, and closed his mouth. His expression turned darker. "What is this actually about?"

"Can you two make sure you've knocked it off by the time I get back?" Tommy asked. He slammed the door behind him without waiting for an answer, knowing it would get his point across. He stood outside with the satisfying bang of the latches still echoing in his ear, looking at the barn. Tommy wanted to go in there really bad. He could snuggle up with Henry and comb her fur maybe. Settle in the hay so it doesn't itch anymore and fall asleep. Hope that Wilbur and Phil had sorted their terrible crap out by the time sunset came around.

Then he looked at the field, where Blade was painstakingly working on tilling another row of potatoes.

Tommy trudged over, mindful enough not to trample any crops on purpose but also too lazy to take the long way around. "Hey, Blade! What's up?"

Blade stopped what he was doing to look at him, wiping some sweat from his face. Man, he must have been at it for hours again. His eyes flicked up towards the sky, Tommy braced himself for the obvious joke he could see coming from a mile away.

("What's up?" was something Wilbur used to say a lot. And then Tommy would giggle, before even being able to bring himself to answer.

"The sun, dummy!")

Except it didn't happen. It was as if Tommy could see a thought be formed and then dismissed in real-time. Weird. Everything about this guy was weird.

"How are you doing?" Tommy asked instead.

"I'm fine," Blade said. He was always fine. Tommy had never not known him to be fine.

"What about your hands?"

Blade put the hoe into the ground, letting it settle in the pushed up the earth so he could show Tommy his hands. The bandages had come off and the wounds were mostly gone. There were scars, but it was impossible to say if they'd been there before. Blade was kind of littered with them.

"Phil told me I have to stop when they are about to bleed," Blade said simply.

"Good call," Tommy said. "Kind of weird you couldn't have figured that one out yourself. Are you a masochist or something?"

"A what?" Blade asked automatically, then snapped his jaw shut. He picked up the hoe to continue working. If Tommy didn't know any better, he'd think Blade was trying to distract himself from talking out of turn.

(Or maybe Tommy did know better.

Maybe Tommy did know just like he knew exactly why Phil and Wilbur were fighting.)

"You know, somebody who enjoys getting hurt," he said.

Blade kind of scrunched up his nose. "I don't enjoy getting hurt. Nobody should."

"Some people do," Tommy insisted. When he was so small he still fit on Wilbur's back with ease, he'd woken up in the middle of the night sometimes and watched his brother stoke the fire in whatever little cabin or half-destroyed building they'd commandeered for them to survive the winter cold. Then Wilbur would reach out his hand and hold it close enough to have the flames lick at his skin.

Tommy always had to close his eyes when he did that. He didn't like fire.

"Then they are idiots," Blade said suddenly. He was frowning down at the earth as he worked, turning the tool over so deftly Tommy couldn't really follow the motions. He never considered that anybody could be good at farming before. To Tommy, working the fields had always been a chore, not a skill. Blade was proving him wrong.

"Dude, why are you like, weirdly passionate about this?" Tommy laughed.

Blade's scowl deepened further. His words came out not quite as a stutter, but kind of cut off and short. Like he wasn't allowing himself to think about them. Tommy had the impression that if Blade did think, he wouldn't be saying anything. He'd just get all quiet and demure again. So Tommy much preferred this.

"Wanting to be hurt. It makes no sense," Blade insisted. "It's… antithetical to survival."

"It's what?"

Blade blinked, stopped farming to look at him. "Antithetical. It means, like… the opposite of something."

"How can you not read but you know the word anitiletical-"

"Antithetical," Blade corrected. "I've heard it. It's a word lots of people use."

Tommy choked out a little disbelieving laugh. "No, it's not, nobody ever uses that word?"

"My master uses it all the time," Blade said with no hesitation. And then froze.

Tommy watched him hunch in on himself. The hoe slipped out of stiff fingers and tumbled to the earth. Blade's eyes flitted to it, watching it go, caught between picking it up or maybe throwing himself after it. To grovel on the ground for mercy from Tommy because he mentioned some dead guy.

Tommy swallowed away the nausea quickly building in his gut.

"It's whatever," he said quickly. "Anyway, if you really think that getting hurt makes no sense, why didn't you stop it with the potatoes sooner?"

Blade slowly - so slowly the action could only be described as calculated and unnatural - picked up his tool. "Wanting to be hurt is antithetical to survival," he said again. "Survival is what most people want, what they're instinctually drawn to. It makes sense for them." Then, eyes drifting away as if he remembered something, a vague smile graced his lips.

Not the kind of smile Tommy liked. No. Somehow, every bland disinterested look Blade had ever shown him did not feel as hollow to Tommy as this vague grin did.

"Survival is not a weapon's reason for existing," Blade said.

The silence that hung over them after that statement was awkward and tense. Tommy was not one to mince his words so he wasn't even going to try. The first thing out of his mouth was his most honest reaction.

"That's fucking stupid."

Blade looked at him, the farming tool clasped firmly in both hands, forgotten for the moment. He was stunned enough to forget about his task too, apparently. "What?"

"That's fucking stupid," Tommy repeated. "Even if you were a weapon - which you're not-"

At that, Blade made a face Tommy was deciding stubbornly to ignore.

"-then wouldn't it be smarter not to die? You can't really protect anybody when you're dead."

"Yes, well, that is…" Blade stopped himself. "A weapon doesn't question the commands it's given. Obedience trumps survival."

Tommy suspected that Blade could tell he didn't like him saying that. 'Didn't like' might be an understatement, honestly. It was this kind of faulty thinking that made Tommy's head hurt and his gut burn. He didn't know how to change it though. How could he start to explain every single bit that didn't make any fucking sense about how Blade saw things.

"Maybe your 'master' was an idiot too," Tommy said eventually.

Blade turned around, lifting the hoe again. "I need to continue with this." The way his hair fell over his face hid his expression from view.

"Wait, hold on." Tommy grabbed the handle. Blade let go instantly, backing away. Tommy awkwardly held the tool up. "Let's go do something else."

A moment of Blade's eyes darting at the house passed. Tommy had the sickening thought that he didn't know whose opinion would win out, his or Phil's. Would Blade refuse to listen to him because he still thought Phil wanted him to farm the potatoes?

Before he'd made up his own mind, Blade relaxed his stance. He silently waited for Tommy to direct him on what would happen next.

Swallowing, Tommy's appetite for doing anything had already drained. That hay in the barn seemed mighty comfortable to his imagination. But he ignored that.

"Let's go find that Squid guy and rub it in his face that you won."

"Won?" Blade asked. "It wasn't really a competition."

"It is one now," Tommy said, "Have you seen his fields? He's been scrambling to get back at you. We should go gloat."

"If that's what you want," Blade shrugged. It was as if their earlier conversation hadn't happened.

Well, Tommy didn't hold any specific desire to dig back into that can of worms so he would let it go. Where would he even start?

Blade followed him as they walked the road into town. Tommy sometimes felt like he could travel every inch of it blind. Like all those years before coming to live there were a dream and he actually always grew up in Phil's dumb little cabin. Sometimes, that almost made him kind of sad.

"Say, you're very, very old, right?" Tommy asked. "Like, Philza old. And that's very old."

Blade nodded. "Yes?"

"Do you still remember everything?" Tommy kicked at a rock, watching it careen off in front of them. "Because I don't think that's really possible. If you've been alive for ages, that's a lot to remember."

They reached the rock again. Tommy kicked it again.

"I don't know," Blade said.

"What do you mean? You don't know if you remember?"

"I don't know if I remember." Blade kicked the stone this time. The boots he was wearing used to belong to Wilbur and they were slightly ill-fitting. But Phil said he was worried about Blade's feet getting messed up if he kept walking around barefoot.

"That probably means you've forgotten some stuff," Tommy said - because that made sense to him. "Man, that sucks."

"Why?" Blade asked.

Tommy looked at him but Blade seemed too concentrated on finding the stone and kicking it out in front of them before Tommy did, to really notice he'd asked a question. So Tommy answered quickly before it did occur to Blade that he'd done that and he'd get all weird about it again.

"Because you might forget something important," he said. "Or something good. That's even worse, really."

Blade didn't answer. He kicked the stone one last time but then it flew off into the tall grass on the edge of the path. And his lips pulled down into an almost pout that had Tommy chuckling at his expense. Blade glared at him. Again, without really seeming to notice he'd done that.

It made Tommy grin.

"There's probably a lot of stuff I've forgotten," he admitted. "And when people always say you are made of your memories and your experiences and all that fucking shit, it sucks. If that's true, you can forget who you are."

(Sometimes Tommy stayed awake at night and wrote in his journal all the little things he remembered from before they met Phil. So that those little things couldn't leave him. Every cold winter and day of them going hungry. Every time Wilbur's coughing fits got so bad blood stained their blankets and Tommy was sure his brother would die. He wrote about it because that fear shouldn't be allowed to fade.

How could Tommy be grateful for what he currently had if he forgot?)

"You are what you do," Blade said.

Tommy blinked up at him, pulled from the maelstrom of his thoughts. "Hm?"

"You are what you do," Blade repeated. As if the second go around would suddenly make it all clear for Tommy.

"So if I did something bad yesterday but something good today, I'm a good person?" He couldn't quite keep the disbelief from his voice.

"It means you're a better person than you were the day before," Blade said.

"Huh…"

Tommy found that hard to wrap his head around. But maybe it was a nice idea.

They came upon Squid's farm, now pushing against the boundaries of his plot of land. He'd really gone overboard in the past week or so trying to keep up with what Blade had been doing. The rumor mill in town had started turning - mostly in amusement and some disbelief that this was the hill either of them wanted to die on. What would Phil even need that many potatoes for, they whispered. At least for Squid, it was a profession. He sold his potatoes to nearby stores and traveled to markets far and wide. In trying to best him, Blade was just being petty.

Tommy loved that for him.

"Hey, look at that," Tommy said loudly. He put one foot up on a lower part of the fence. "It's the second-largest potato farm in town!"

"It's big," Blade said. Objectively, that was true.

"Ours is bigger," Tommy answered.

"You!" The back door of Squid's house flew open. Tommy saw the man squint at them over the plants, trying to make his way through without trampling them. Kind of like Tommy had done before, but a lot less elegant if he'd dare say so himself. He marched all the way up to the fence too, nose to nose with them. Mostly Blade. "You're the one making my life a living hell!"

"Isn't that a bit dramatic? It's just potatoes," Tommy said. Squid was too busy wagging an accusatory finger in Blade's face.

"Why did you even do it?" Squid asked. "Do you actually care about who has a bigger potato farm? Who- who does that?" He threw up his arms. "You'd have to be some kind of- You'd have to be a total bozo!"

Tommy laughed so hard he doubled over and had to use the fence for support. Squid glowered, turning on him. His arm kind of moved down, maybe to push Tommy off because he was bending the wood under his weight. Before Squid could come anywhere near him, Blade had intercepted it with his own hand.

Squid made a sort of uncomfortable squeaky noise, maybe because Blade's grip looked less than gentle. But the man had already let go again, once he'd confirmed Squid wasn't actually trying to touch Tommy.

"You seem to care very much," he said. Tommy could almost hear the smirk in Blade's voice despite how unaffected his expression remained.

"I don't," Squid said, getting a bit flustered. Seeing him like that was hilarious. "But if I did, I would want you to know it's not over yet. You might have won the battle, but not the war."

"Did you just call this a war?" Tommy asked. "Like, a fucking potato war or something?"

"That's exactly what it is."

"It's really not."

"Heed my words!" Squid waved his finger again, before turning around and rushing back into his house. Presumably to start strategizing for this alleged self-declared potato war.

"Well, he sounds like he'll be completely normal about this," Tommy mentioned.

"I'm not worried," Blade said. His serious gaze drifted over the field in front of them, assessing it with the same scrutiny and tactical insight as a general preparing themselves for a siege that could change the course of history. "His farming technique is imperfect. Exploits will be easy."

Tommy shook his head, turning around so they could start heading home. "You're so fucking weird man."

Maybe he should tell Wilbur he was wrong about what made Blade happy, though.

The tension in the house had not lessened much by the time dinner was served. Tommy was seriously considering the barn after all. Maybe he could sleep there. Wouldn't be the first time and Henry's body kept him decently warm despite the harsher temperatures. It couldn't be much colder inside what with Wilbur and Phil's frigid moods.

But as they were sitting at the table, Wilbur cleared his throat.

"Pack a bag when you're done because we're leaving early in the morning."

"What?!" Tommy dropped his fork onto the table. "Where are we going?"

"The capital," Wilbur said. "Niki has some stuff to attend to and we're joining her."

"Who's we?"

"You and me." Wilbur nodded at the only person left at the table since Phil was already over at the counter. "And Blade."

"What about Phil?" Tommy asked.

"What about him?"

"It's fine, I'm staying here for a job," Phil said - apparently within earshot. "Don't worry about it, Tommy. I think it's better for you all to be gone a while."

As if his saying that wouldn't make Tommy worry about it more.

"You guys are acting so fucking stupid over this," he said. Blade glanced at him from his spot at the table. Then he kind of lowered his head and paid full attention to his food again. Tommy bit his tongue.

Yeah, fighting with each other in front of the guy who totally thought they were all his owners or something similarly messed up was a great idea.

So he held his tongue all evening, no matter how much he wanted to scream at them. Often, Tommy felt like the only sensical one in this family. And it didn't even matter, because all his complaints would be dismissed anyway. Wilbur and Phil must have both missed the memo about him growing up. The memo that was supposed to remind them that Tommy was totally a big man now and didn't need them to keep all the secrets between them two.

(Wilbur reached out and ruffled his hair and back then it made Tommy feel safe rather than dismissed.

"It'll be okay. Don't worry." Wilbur's words were so reassuring to him.

It didn't fucking feel like that anymore, did it?)

But when he had grabbed his blanket and was on his way to the front door, he crossed Wilbur in the hallway and couldn't help run his mouth.

"Do you really think this is how you can fix things?"

Wilbur didn't look at him. "I'm not trying to fix anything, Tommy."

He sounded tired.

"Liar."

"Go to bed," Wilbur said in a harsher tone. "We have a long day ahead of us."

Tommy just scoffed as he walked past him.