Chapter Text
March 3rd, 2021
Arctic Commune
Dearest Tubbo,
I thought it was health my letters brought me, but a reminder every day of a wound I cannot bandage is my own torture.
This is my last.
Not that I could ever think you torturous. The joy the mundane has brought me, if only you could know. Writing of the parceled sweets Niki sends or the grueling training Techno assigns is its own escape, nestled away under brass box until I unlock it, set pen to paper and let you free.
I wish our time together was measured in sweeter things than the smell of dead flowers.
And then I feel like a child again.
Both because it feels so silly that such a thin slice of a life is what weighs the most, and because the idea of what I lost is such young thinking. I have learned much of anger and hurt, how silent they can be.
Puffy said I idolize you.
Which is true, honestly.
You'd laugh if you could hear me talk the way I do about you, reach up and hit my shoulder and tell me I didn’t know what I was saying. Like you weren't a hero. That's probably why I do it, because I know you wouldn't believe me.
And because I know if you heard me, it would make you smile.
In any life, the universe will never wait for us to say hello but I would still say it every time. It never mattered how it ended. It never will.
And when I am laid down and forgotten, I will have achieved something that lasts longer than the fading of purple ink. I will have had something.
I’m not incomplete without you but maybe there’s a little bit more meaning in sharing yourself with someone else. I've been thinking about that recently, how people mean things to one another, what you mean to me.
I learned long ago that words have more than one meaning. I think you are the same.
I think you are an end, a hatred of the other, a silent cry in an empty home as embers take your lungs and rot your bones.
You are also a beginning, my beginning.
You are the song in prose and bravery in handshakes and details in a garden and security under an umbrella. And while the world forgets you I paint you into everything around me until I can no longer forget what that brilliant boy taught me years ago.
You are not wasted, my friend. I hope I meant something to you too.
Maybe someday I will have hope again. But I'll survive without it.
I remain, dearest sir,
Your obedient servant through death,
Ranboo