Summary: You’re the first one Thomas sees when he dies. Naturally, he clings to you
Warnings: gn!reader (terms of endearment are used but none of them are gendered), ghost!reader (probably dead between kitty and Thomas but it’s not important lmao), talks of death and dying but overall it’s really just fluff
Word Count: 875
A.N: Thomas is ooc in this IM SORRY LMAO, idk how but the little freak turned became really suave and not pathetic, to be fair though this is my first Thomas/ghosts piece so don’t be too harsh on me lmaoooo, lowkey the reason it’s short is because I don’t really like poetry (because I’m shit at it) and Julian and Humphrey are my number one pookies so gg. Anyway, enjoy!
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You had witnessed Thomas die. It was a dreary English afternoon when you and the other ghosts gathered in the gardens to watch the duel take place and you were only a few meters away from his slumped body, gasping for breath. The others found it amusing, how Thomas had clutched at his torso in an attempt to slow the bleeding, but failed to truly realize that the man was slowly dying all alone.
It had pained you that his cousin had abandoned him in his last moments and the woman he had fought over had barely spared him a parting glance.
So while your friends were occupied with their bets and jests, you had fallen to your knees beside him. He was muttering under his breath as his color drained away from his already pallid skin. Your hands hovered atop his as if you were comforting him. He couldn’t feel it, of course, but the sentiment was there. And when his breath finally left him and his hands went limp, you were the first one he saw.
His eyes had caught yours—a rich brown with a lighter ring of bronze around the pupil. The eye contact had made you gasp for air you no longer needed.
"Are you an angel?" Thomas had asked, faintly as if he wasn't believing what he was seeing. Instead of pain in his eyes, there was a familiarity—a softness—that seemed to fit him.
With him finally dead, your hands could finally meet. His skin was cool against yours as he shifted them to cling back onto yours.
In the days following, while he was getting used to being a ghost, he was always one step behind you.
"Are you sure this is not heaven, and you my guardian angel?" He would ask.
"I would not be a very good guardian angel considering you're dead, Thomas."
He would pout and sigh and gaze out the window of the estate, watching as people went about their normal, living days. The other ghosts liked him well enough; Kitty was fascinated with the wound in his torso, Humphrey had new ankles to gaze at, Robin had another soul to play pranks on, and Annie and Mary were just excited to finally have another person to talk to. Thomas was like a breath of fresh air to you and it was something you didn't want to let go of.
"I wish I were still able to write my thoughts down." He complained to you. "I finally have the muse I spent my life searching for and yet I am unable to compose anything."
"A muse?" You had asked, interested. Thomas had taken up flattering you on a day to day basis but he never called you his muse until then.
"An angel has presented themselves to someone as unworthy as this poet, you are certainly the muse I needed." His hands, still chilled with the blood loss he sustained during death, had clutched yours. "I shan't let this go to waste! Every stanza will be devoted you, my dear."
"Oh, Thomas...you flatter me so..."
"You are heaven-sent. Ethereal in the way your skin glows in the afternoon light, otherworldly when your eyes glimmer with the moonlight." His tone breathy in the emptiness of the house.
His words draped over you like a sweet song without even trying. When he was trying, however, his verses were clumsy and wordy, but you never minded. They still held the devotion he held solely for you and you always loved it no matter how many metaphors he jumbled up or phrases he never quite used correctly.
"If you are not an angel," he started one year after he had died while looking out into the gardens from a second-story window, "then why were you the first thing I saw after passing?"
His eyes were trained on the tree he was left slumped against a year earlier. The melancholy hung over him like a rain cloud. That was typical for death anniversaries but poets always managed to feel more than the average person, you found.
You had taken up the spot next to him, standing so your shoulders were touching.
"I know what it is like to die alone, Thomas. No one deserves that cruelty." You watched a game of croquet being played on the lawns with little interest.
"And the others do not?"
"The others are...more desensitized to death by now. To them, you were just another person passing on. They were more concerned with whether you were going to join us or pass on to whatever comes next immediately."
"You are very kind." Thomas says after a brief moment of silence. "You have not yet convinced me you are not an angel." He smiles for the first time that day, brown eyes finally meeting yours.
"You poets and your sweet talk." You laughed.
"You angels and your beauty." He had countered.
You had hummed in response, relishing in the quiet of the room. Faint laughter was heard from below, the players on the lawn having a grand old time, unknowing of the ghosts watching over them.
"My angel..." Thomas had sighed out, the hand at his side moving to press closer against your own. The backs of his fingers brushing the gaps in between your own.
of Thomas absorbing other people's idiosyncratic speech patterns without meaning to and being annoyed with himself about it. Like, on paper, it's not roll-you-on-the-floor funny right away like so many other Ghosts bits, but it's one that will spiral inwards and kind of insist its humor and poignancy on you through sheer determination (just like Thomas).
It signals from episode one that he really does have an observant nature and an ear for language. It implies that, even though he is his own biggest blind-spot, he does listen to others and notice things, and his memory is just as voracious and capacious as his imagination.
He goes for "wazzock" when he's groping for an ultimate insult, even if he can only define it as something Pat says. His brain absorbs "Lucky in Love" like it was born there, and he's shocked to be told that it wasn't. He romantically reimagines his death-day to Alison, but when it's a question of fact he clearly recalls the ink on Francis' fingers.
He recognizes gangsta rap's raw passion despite the dense cultural idioms that would barely be vibes to him and thick layers of bravado that many find confounding. But... then he mostly only replicates that idiomatic bravado when he tries to tap into that raw passion.
He remembers his entire grand tour despite not having written anything down about it, and he can tell Alison how he'd love to show her the things he'd seen... but can't articulate why.
He can recite Hermione and Roger (which is hours long) from memory, and is genuinely shocked that the others can't quote it back to him, like a person would only ever fail to memorize a poem out of contempt.
He recalled (or extemporized) several works for "Button FM", and has apparently written Alison a new poem every morning for years, but the moment Alison praises him for being poetic his brain short circuits and he reverts to stilted couplets.
Everything audible and visible around him goes in, but it only gets out again when he's not throttling himself with his own bullshit. The emotional acuity is there, the ability to decode experiences in real time is there, the prodigious recall is there, but his self-confidence is purely at random and he's scared to death of... something.
I absolutely get why people read him as trans, and/or OCD, and/or some form of autist/savant, and/or suffering from CPTSD. That he comes across as good at heart despite his chronic obnoxious-at-best interpersonal behavior is impressive. The shorthand for him is very "world's worst arrested pubescent" but the show never forgets how that's still a genuinely human thing to be.
All that being said I don't think he gets a real arc. He changes the least of any character whose performer was also a writer (specifically the most writer-credited writer on the show). He has brief moments of insight, but it's still heartbreaking in the finale when he says "Why did I agree to this, I hate this" with the exact sort of rigid, whispered dread he had in response to the solder's assent to duel.
I get the on-paper difficulty of inviting an audience to the redemption of an overprivileged sex-pest in the year of our lord 20XX, but even so, they managed it for Julian. I get that British modesty and good ensemble etiquette demand that you only ever draw attention to yourself if it makes the whole better, but Jim is the second-most credited writer in the show, and Pat's arc-moments are some of the best in the series.
Don't get me wrong, they do a lot of brilliant stuff with Thomas. I feel like they did a lot with his character to reassure chronically-in-their-own-head/way art geeks that they're not hopeless or unlovable. They gave us a humorous tough-love demonstration that what insufferable artists need isn't to just stop trying or caring or creating or being, but to grow out of insisting narratives onto themselves and others. They do amazing show-don't-tell that it's toxic behavior that's the problem, not artistic temperament or big feelings or even wanting attention. That's wonderful, excellent work. But it's also a lovingly loaded gun that gets left on the mantlepiece through curtain call and is still waiting there under the ghost-light. We get shown all these things THROUGH Thomas, but we don't get to see him learn them. We don't get shown the relief that waits on the other side of change.
I wish we'd got to see him admit to himself some of what was really eating him up inside like Pat and Kitty did, or find genuinely transformative self-esteem like Mary, or transcend his vengeful conformity like Fanny, or even truly confront and regret what short-sightedness or complacency or egotism had cost him, like Humphrey and Julian. It wouldn't need to be a justification of his behavior towards Alison, or played for the kind of poignancy that The Captain's arc required, but I feel like there was something more there to say, specifically through Thomas, about the art of loving people, or how art reveals us, and is more about noticing than seeing. About seeing and imagining and seizing at grandeur but also really noticing the grandeur of small moments and strange friendships and the love therein. About how the work of making art is in what you become and discover, not what you are.
We see him wander that direction. We're given good reason to suspect that he eventually would make it. He does sometimes try. Yet at the end of our time with him, his capacity for love is still merely tragic, a thing of fatal grand gestures and mislaid messages that inside he is screaming to take back.
Still, it was honest, at least. Giving him Robin's same epiphany right at the end wouldn't have felt earned, and I respect the Six Idiots' willingness to make things hurt that ought to hurt. I just wanted more for him, and this is me devoting real effort to getting my head right and not making fixing-this a condition of my appreciating the upcoming movie.
Because after all, THAT'S WHAT FANFICTION IS FOR! :)
love the implication in woodworm men that thomas actually can be incredibly poetic when he's not thinking about it. he would genuinely be a talented poet if he wasn't such a fucking suck-up wannabe, and idk i just think that's beautiful. talent assassination via being a try-hard.
I've been making these and reading them with the character's voices for the last 30 minutes.
edit : You guys have no idea how heartwarming your reblogs are, seriously I had no clue that this shitpost would be so well received 😭love y'all, take care 👻🏠
