Wilbur’s been thinking.
He’s not stupid. There are lots of criticisms people could make, and most of them would be true, but he’s not an idiot, he’s not blind.
Here are the facts:
1. They—not Tommy and Niki, but the rest of them—voted for Schlatt to be president over him.
2. Not a single one of them—even Tommy and Niki—stood up for him when Schlatt told him to leave.
Here is the obvious conclusion:
3. They wanted him to leave.
This realization comes with a few others:
4. They are entirely within their rights to want him to leave or step down. He’s the one who held an election. It was fair; Schlatt and Alex didn’t threaten or bribe or do—much of anything, really.
5. They all knew that he wouldn’t do well without any help. That he might die. Tommy, at least, has been giving him mana. Niki, Alex, Schlatt—they saw last year how bad he is in a fight. Toby and Tommy have known him since they were little kids. It isn’t exactly news to anyone.
6. Either they wanted him to leave more than they cared about his life or they wanted him to die.
Toby and Alex are good at sounding clever, but he’s been away from them for a few weeks, and he gets it now. Things are finally making sense. It’s the same reason Eret betrayed them. No one cares. The important thing is power, is clawing your way to the top, and if that kills a few friends in the crossfire, so be it. As long as their corpses will give you a leg up, nothing else matters.
(…Tommy still cares. Tommy still looks at him like he believes Wilbur is going to save the world. And so Wilbur visits him in the mornings and tries to explain that he’s not.)
He’s had a more recent revelation, though, which is that he’s not going to be remembered for starting a study group. Seems stupid, in hindsight, but he had tried. He had believed, on some level, in that motto: to offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world. He thought he could help the Scholomance live up to that ideal.
There are two ways to be remembered: as a hero or as a villain. He tried to be a hero, and twice, they tried to kill him.
He’s not sure yet on the details. He’ll figure it out as he goes. But—if he’s going down, he’s taking everything he worked for down with him. If he can’t make things better, he’ll make them worse. If he can’t be happy, they can’t, either.
Maybe he’ll make a deal with Clay. It worked for Eret.
“Knock knock,” he calls outside Tommy’s door, before letting himself in.
