Chapter Text
(This thing hurts like Hell.)
He takes the walk to the Boots a few streets over once he decides the beard bit has run its course. He’s making a YouTube video where he goes on Tinder as “Minecraft Man,” and has a whole elaborate joke planned out. That and at this point, he’s desperate to get this shit off his face.
Boots is nearly empty when Tommy walks through the automatic doors, just a few employees and an older woman at the pharmacy in the back. Besides that, the aisles are empty, just rows and rows of shelves stocked with burn creams and paracetamol and overpriced snacks he could get cheaper at Tesco and every manner of over-the-counter curatives for mild ailments.
The shaving razors are towards the back of the store, near the shampoos and deodorants, so Tommy starts to make his way back. Bright white and similarly bright colours catch on the corner of his eye as he passes the third consecutive shelf of sweets. On the endcap, bracketed by powders and liquids in various shades of cream and tan, is a lipstick display case.
His pace stutters, stops.
Metallic, shiny tubes with stickers on the caps in various shades of pink and red and brown stand, lined up, on the multi-tiered display. Little labels underneath each slot with the colours’ names line up with the chrome cap of the tube above it. A huge photo of a pair of full, painted lips tops off the display, the logo of whatever the brand is placed beneath.
Tommy’s palms are getting sweaty. His face heats. He’s going to die of embarrassment right here. He has no fucking reason to be standing here for so long, no reason to be staring at make-up. And yet, here he is, feet stuck firmly to the floor. Every molecule in his body desperately wants to run, frantically trying to escape his physical form and seep into the linoleum tiles. At this point, Tommy would welcome that fate.
Shit. There’s a set of footsteps coming towards him. Fuck, shit, balls, fuck!
He scrambles at the display, managing to grab a tube of something in the space between light pink and bright red. His hands are clammy—the tube slips. With a sharp inhale, he tightens his grip. It stays, doesn’t fall. Thank God.
Nonchalantly as he can manage while actively freaking the fuck out, he ducks into the next aisle, clutching the tube to his chest, training his eyes on what look like pencils organized on the shelf in front of him. The footsteps approach. Tommy spares a glance at the person passing by—it’s the older woman. She shoots him a judgemental look but does nothing more than huff as she heads to the till.
Yep, this is where he dies: in the Boots makeup aisle holding a tube of cheap lipstick while shaking like a chihuahua, glared at by an old bag. Tommy knows damn well what he looks like here. He’s a nearly one-hundred ninety-centimetre beanpole of a teenager with the most generic gamer clothes conceivable and a shitty excuse for a beard looking at women’s cosmetics at two-fifteen P.M. on a Thursday afternoon. He looks like a right creeper, a degenerate, a wrong’un. Some kind of fucked-up weirdo poisoned by the internet who gets his rocks off by fantasizing about looking like a woman, and then actually following through with it.
Goddammit, he will not cry. He will not.
He smacks his free hand over his eyes, pressing until he can see the flashing lights and colours behind his eyelids. Breathe in, breathe out, just like his therapist said to. In, out. Focus on the way his chest swells and falls with each breath, focus on how long each cycle takes.
And that’s enough to bring him back to stable ground, thank goodness. Gives him enough awareness to take stock of his situation.
He looks at the tube in his hands. A large “X” is etched into the cap of the chrome gold tube. What he thought was a sticker on the side turns out to be glass, or maybe clear plastic, where the colour of the lipstick shows through. Printed at the bottom, in black text, reads “Bewitching Coral,” a weirdly flirty name that has the heat threatening to return to his cheeks.
He holds the clear bit of the tube up to the inside of his wrist—something he’s seen girls on TikTok do—but has no idea what he’s supposed to be looking for. He squints. The colour isn’t bad against his skin, probably better than the red was. It’ll do.
His eyes drift to the display next to him, a few shelves of black and brown eyeliner pencils, and his mind drifts to dark lines drawn around Bill’s eyes and the confidence he practically oozes and—
Shaving razors. He’s here for shaving razors.
For reasons Tommy doesn’t know himself, he doesn’t put back the lipstick. He, in fact, does the opposite, and continues to carry it, tucked in his palm with his fingers curled around. He carries it with him to the back of the store, to the shelves with the deodorant and body spray and shaving foam. He grabs a package with his free hand of the razors he usually buys, ones tucked in steely blue plastic packaging. Last minute, he plucks a can of Lynx from the shelf as he heads to the aisle’s exit, tucking it under the same arm he’s holding the razors with. The can in his bathroom is nearly out.
And he stops. And his eyes drift slightly. Drift slightly to the shelves opposite the ones holding the blue and grey and black packaging. Drift slightly to the shelves of shampoo in white bottles with accents of green and orange and pink.
His hand moves on its own, reaching out towards a bottle of “curl care” shampoo with citrus fruits at the edges of the label. The tube of lipstick stays in the web between his thumb and index finger, pushed into his palm as he lifts the shampoo.
Tommy doesn’t need more shampoo—the bottle in his shower isn’t even a third emptied. Even so, he brings it level to his face, delicately pops the cap open. He inhales. The shampoo smells like citrus, like tangerines, like something slightly floral in the background. It smells fucking good, like someone pretty. He cradles it in his arm. He’s Eve reaching for the forbidden fruit.
And when he’s paying at the self-checkout till, he wonders how the comparison came to him so easily.
When he gets home, he stashes the shampoo under the sink, but leaves the lipstick next to the faucet.
Hey, is this Tom? a text he gets from a number he doesn’t have saved says. Against his better judgement, he responds.
Who is this
This is Millie
The one you played truth or dare with at Benji’s a couple weeks ago.
I asked him for your number so I could apologise
What is there to apologise for
For laughing at you
Benji thought it’d be funny to embarrass you with the lipstick, I guess. He’s been laughing about it since the party
It was a shit thing to do to you
If I had known he’d be such a prick about it, I would have never gone along with it
And Tommy’s not sure how to respond to that. So he lies.
It’s alright. I don’t even remember any of that shit.
Whole night’s a blur
Oh, Millie texts back. Sorry for bugging you, I guess.
Tommy puts his phone face down on his dining table, beside his plate of microwaved freezer meal. He leans back in his chair, presses his hands to his face. Breathes in, breathes out.
He almost wishes that lie was the truth.
He films his Minecraft Man Tinder video—finally shaving his face in the process—and sends it off to Editor Larry for him to do his magic. His team wins MCC Twenty-Two—breaking the Captain’s Curse, as it had been dubbed. Works on the quote book. Coordinates VidCon stuff. Thinks of possible vlog ideas. Obsesses over analytics. Typical behind-the-scenes YouTuber stuff.
A few days after the win, he feels like he needs to stream again.
He’s filled with more nervous energy than he knows what to do with. It’s too early to get shitfaced, and too pathetic to do it alone. He can’t keep his brain focused enough to answer the emails undoubtedly piling up in his inbox. There’s no one in town free to hang out with him, to work him down from the frenzy he’s brought himself into. He needs to do something—anything—to keep his mind occupied, keep himself from thinking. Thinking about why the skin wrapped around his bones feels too tight, too rough. Thinking about why his clothes feel more like costume than casual, how they never seem to lay right. Thinking about why he feels like his body is taking up too much space.
He's lying on his bed, face up, staring at the ceiling. His setup taunts him from where he can see it in the corner of his vision, against the wall. It’s like it knows he needs an outlet, somewhere to channel the noise buzzing in his head. Needs the almost-comfort of the larger-than-life persona, that bombastic “Big Man YouTuber” schtick that’s been feeling more and more like an ill-fitting suit jacket—far too tight in some places and far too loose in others. Pinching at the shoulders and baggy at the waist.
A Discord notification pings on his phone. He picks it up—it’s from Tubbo.
Wanna stream in a few?
And that settles it.
I’m down, he sends back.
With a dramatic groan for nobody but himself, he rolls out of bed, landing on his feet. A single step to start up the PC, then another two out of the room. Four steps to the bathroom for his pre-stream shit and preening.
He’s washing his hands when his eyes land on that tube of lipstick, sitting upright beside his hand soap and the caddy holding his toothbrush and toothpaste. The light above the mirror barely gives it a shadow on the ceramic, close to the wall as the tube is.
It’s probably good that he hasn’t had anyone round recently, with the lipstick as proudly sat on the counter as it is. They’d have questions, absolutely. Maybe even questions about him. And wouldn’t that be fucking horrible? Bring his masculinity into question. Maybe he could play it off like he had a girl over, that she left it after a night of passion, or some shit. But how well would he be believed? Would his friends question it? Would they question him? Would they—
Water splashes on his shirt. His hands are shaking where they’re still under the faucet. Tommy rushes to turn off the tap, to look away, to dry his hands on a towel. He needs to do a load of washing soon. That hand towel’s been beside the sink for a few weeks more than it should. He’s running out of clean socks and trousers too.
A nervous hand twists the earring in one of his earlobes. He really does not want to do his washing. He’s not sure if he likes any of his clothes anymore.
And he still hasn’t bothered to get rid of the mould on the ceiling.
A loud buzz from the phone rattling on his desk in the other room sends a jolt through Tommy. Shit, he’s got shit he still needs to set up. Tubbo’s probably getting impatient. He’s probably been live for forever, doing one of his trademark hour-long stream intros.
Tommy splashes water on his face like he’s seen people do in movies, but all that does is get his shirt even more wet, so he scrambles back to his room and grabs a different tee, checking his phone as he changes.
Bossman? Tubbo had said.
Tommy struggles to type back a response one-handed, the other adjusting how his shirt lays. Setting up now. What’re we playing?
Didnt think thta far, Tubbo replies as Tommy opens StreamLabs and Discord on his PC. I could find a bad game on steam or we could dick around in Minecraft survival.
Minecraft works, Tommy types back. Feel like chilling today.
He quickly shoots a message to his mods’ Discord as he sits down. He pulls up his YouTube playlist of stream music, turns on his camera, adjusts the lights in the preview. He’s got a new keylight he’s trying out, one that uses a fancy bulb and an umbrella thing. It’s supposed to work better at diffusing the light on him, better than bouncing Elgato lights off the wall behind his desk, that is. He adjusts the mic boom attached to his desk, fiddles with the dials on the GoXLR, checks that the StreamLabs chat widgets are working.
He’s as ready as he can be, and he’s stalled enough. He starts the stream.
And he’s going through the motions, greeting the offliners, playing music for the “starting soon” screen and talking over it, letting people filter in. At the three-minute mark, he ducks out and grabs a Diet Coke from the fridge, plonks it on his desk just as the intro song ends. When it’s been long enough, he transitions to the facecam, playing the intro song he’s used for years, cracking the can open at the beat drop.
“Welcome back to the stream, boys!” he shouts, boisterous persona out in full force. “I know, I know, another stream? Who am I and what have I done with the great and powerful Tommyinnit?!” He adds a dramatic flourish, for the drama. “Cherish this, boys. It’s almost like I’ve got a schedule, for once.”
Chat’s moving fast, as usual, all giving some greeting or another. He can’t read it now, but they’ll chill out a bit once he gets into the stream.
“We’ll be playing some survival today with Tubbo, you all might know him.” He laughs at himself, sending the guy in question a message on Discord that he’s ready.
Tubbo replies almost immediately. Still setting up evertyhing crashed aaaaaaaaah.
Tommy chuckles a bit. So Tubbo wasn’t live after all. “He’s apparently forgotten how to stream, so we’ll do a few minutes of Just Chatting, I suppose.”
Tommy scans chat, trying to find anything he could grab and relate to some anecdote, but before he can get anything, he’s interrupted by a robotic voice in his headphones.
“Woo, thirteen months pog,” the text-to-speech he apparently had on says, completely devoid of emotion.
“Holy shit, man! I forgot I had TTS on!” Tommy shouts, exaggerating his surprise. “Alright, we’ll roll with it. Send in TTS, I guess. Ha!”
“Are you playing DreamSMP today?” a dono asks as Tommy opens the Minecraft launcher.
“Nah,” he says, switching installations from the DreamSMP-specific one to 1.18.2. “Just some Realms. No lore today. Just some good ol’ regular mining and crafting.”
The game starts up, and he quickly makes a new survival world on his Realm. It’s probably stupid to start a new world with 1.19 coming out in just a few days, but whatever. Tommy needs the distraction.
Tubbo still hasn’t told him he’s got his shit fixed, so Tommy keeps answering TTS, giving kind of half-assed answers that are clearly stalling for time. Nothing particularly interesting jumps out at him, nothing particularly entertaining comes to mind. It’s harder than usual today to keep up the act.
The light flickers, and with an audible pop, the bulb goes dead. Tommy groans, played up for stream.
“Fucking, goddammit,” he says, “Now my lighting’s all fucking gross and shitty. Lemme see if I’ve got a spare somewhere.”
He rifles around the boxes by his desk, donos continuing on in his headphones.
“Are you excited for VidCon? Will you do a meet-and-greet? tmmyHeart.”
He’s leaning away from the mic now, fully aware that the noise gate is probably making him sound like he’s speaking from the bottom of a well. “Yeah. I’m doing one, Ranboo’s doing one, I think Will and Jack are too. And we’re doing that DreamSMP creator hour thing. Christ, man. Do I not have a fucking spare bulb? This is fucking awful.”
He shoves a box as hard as he can, sending it sliding towards the bunk bed. A glance at the monitor shows that the only things visible on stream are the back of his chair and a hint of the box’s flaps. Awesome. Ten-out-of-ten comedy.
Another dono pops in. “SBI stands for Straight Boys Inc. Thanks for being our token straight king.”
“You know what, chat?” Tommy says without thinking, elbow deep in a box of miscellaneous cables. “I’ll get back to you on that.”
And his brain catches up to what he said just a moment too late. Bolting upright, he watches Twitch chat accelerate from its usual speed of fast to a new record of crazy fucking fast. Words cross the screen so fast that StreamLabs can’t keep up. Entire blocks of messages start disappearing from the stream widget. A flood of “WHAT” and “HUH” barrels through so quick Tommy’s head spins.
Just as soon as the chaos starts, the mods more-or-less contain it, setting the chat to emote-only. The chat instantly fills with hearts and every single pride emoji available.
“Wait, fuck,” he mumbles, then, a bit louder, “Uh. Ignore that.”
Chat does not ignore that. Tommy worries a hand at his chin, leaning forward to use his keyboard.
“…Let’s call Tubbo,” he mumbles, tabbing into Discord.
“They’ll forget about it eventually,” Tubbo says, once the both of them have stopped streaming barely an hour later. “None of these guys believed me the first, like, three times I tried to come out. Some of them still don’t.”
The stream had sucked. It had sucked so fucking bad. Tommy was completely off his game the whole time, jokes landing flat and forced, every laugh too exaggerated. Chat could tell something was off, in that freaky way they always do, saying shit like “Drink water king!” and “Don’t push yourself” and “Take a break if you need to less than three.” Tommy just felt exposed the whole time, like he showed up to stream in only his pants again. The one saving grace was Tubbo, bless him. He just rolled with Tommy’s desperate attempts at comedy, turning bad, horribly unfunny attempts at bits into something actually entertaining.
Tommy doesn’t know what he did to deserve Tubbo. He ought to buy him a game on Steam as a thanks. Or maybe a really fancy bottle of whiskey.
Nah, he’d hate it.
“I know that,” Tommy mumbles, then groans into his hands covering his face. “Fuck, man. This shit sucks.”
There’s a loud crinkle through the mic as Tubbo grabs a handful of crisps from the bag he somehow acquired halfway through the stream. “Next time I’m in Brighton, we should go clubbing or some shit.”
“Seriously? I accidentally come out on stream and your first reaction is taking me to a gay club?”
Tubbo crunches loud as fuck. “I never said anything about a gay club, bossman. And you would’ve begged to go anyway.”
Tommy groans again, leaning back in his chair. Unfortunately, Tubbo was absolutely correct. “Fuck you, man. I’m having an actual crisis over here.”
“Wait, actually?”
“Yes, ‘actually!’”
“Oh. Shit,” Tubbo says. “Don’t open Twitter.”
Tommy groans so loud it’s practically a shout. He can almost hear the ghost of that awful, awful red phone ringing in his head.
“Hey,” Tubbo says calmly, placatingly. “It’s alright, man. If you’re gay, or something, that’s fine. Who gives a shit? You’re still my friend Tom Simons.”
Tommy scrubs his palms across his face. That’s opened a pit in his chest, for some reason.
“Somehow that doesn’t help, Toby.”
“Well, fuck, man. I’m not quite sure what you want from me here.”
Tommy drops his hands to the arms of his chair. “I’m not sure what I want either. ‘m not sure of much at all, really.”
Tubbo hums but doesn’t say anything else.
Tommy keeps talking. “I visited home a bit ago. Saw my parents; saw the dogs. Hung out a bit before we went on holiday. And I went to an old secondary school mate’s birthday party. It was fun, I think, but I was reminded of how…mean they could be. Homophobic, I guess.”
There’s a sharp breath from Tubbo’s end of the call.
“None of them know who I am now. To them I’m just ‘Tom from school,’ y’know? Just the ‘gay’ one in theatre that they invited to laugh at, because look at how he thinks he’s one of them. And usually I don’t give a shit, but this time…”
Tommy swallows. Swipes at his eyes. His fingertips come away damp.
“This time, I think they might be kind of right,” Tommy says quietly. “I’m not really sure where I fit anymore. And that scares the shit out of me.”
“Damn,” Tubbo says.
Then there’s silence for minutes, hours, days—Tommy would think the call’s dropped, but a Discord-distorted rustling refutes that. He breathes in, looks at the clock. Just twenty-two seconds. Twenty-three.
And then Tubbo explodes. “Y’know what? No! Who gives a shit what those fuckers think!? They’re all probably going to work shitty jobs and get married too young and cheat on their wives and lose the kids and then wonder why they’re so fucking dissatisfied when they’re forty and haven’t even left Nottinghamshire. Fuck that, they’re assholes!” Tubbo’s fired up. Righteous fury, Tommy hopes.
And he laughs softly, in spite of himself.
“You’re my best friend,” Tubbo says after a moment. “If you’ve got nowhere to fit, we can not-fit together.”
Tommy sniffs. That does help, somehow. “Thanks, Tobes.”
The call ends an hour later, when they both run out of things to talk about and Tubbo loudly announces that his social battery is drained, which Tommy cackles at. They exchange goodbyes, but Tubbo speaks again before they end the call.
“I hope shit gets better for you, man,” Tubbo says. “Figuring yourself out sucks sometimes, but once you know, it’s the best shit ever.”
“Like when you figured out you’re gay?”
“Like when I figured out I’m gay. Shit sucks until it doesn’t, then it’s awesome.”
“Yeah,” Tommy says, head full of thoughts that haven’t quite taken form.
“I’ll see ya, man,” Tubbo says, then leaves the call.
“See ya,” Tommy says to no one.
He doesn’t open Twitter.
Instead, that night, before he goes to bed, he moves that bottle of women’s shampoo from under the sink to the shower, putting it next to the grey and blue bottles.
It doesn’t suck at all.
There’s a character he’s built up around “Tommy,” around the concept of “Tom Simons.” Brash, rude, loud…masculine. Masculine to the point of parody, at times.
Somewhere in there, he’s just “Tom.” When the lights are off and the cameras are disconnected, when it’s just him by himself with no one watching, he can almost see past the tower he’s built around himself, can almost see what lies below the sea. Strip away the bravado and the fame and what are you left with? At the end of the day, he’s just a goofy guy that knows how to use a computer.
And yet, maybe the two sides he thought were the whole of himself have blended together more and more, to the point where “Tommy” is nearly indistinguishable from “Tom,” in his mind. The self he portrays to his audience is big and loud and an exaggeration of the version of himself he is in real life, in his non-streaming life. Still loud, still over the top, but less so. Except, now, just putting on the stream persona feels less and less like playing up for the camera and more like harnessing someone else’s character in a theatre performance.
And the worst part is, he’s putting on that face outside of streaming too. He puts on that theatre character when he’s just hanging out with friends or chatting with his mum or even ordering a fucking coffee. He acts more brash and rude and loud and…
And…
And he sits on his bed, and he thinks.
Maybe “Tom” doesn’t fit him as well as it used to.
“Ranboo?”
“Yeah, Toms?”
“Does being out make you…happy?”
“The happiest I’ve ever been.”
“What does it feel like?”
“What does it feel like? Like, being happy?”
“I guess.”
“It’s like…like I don’t have to pretend to be someone else anymore. Like I don’t have to keep up an act. I can drop this mask that everyone wants me to have up and just be.”
“…Okay.”
“Why do you ask?”
Another sleepover. Ranboo’s lying on their couch, Tommy’s lying on the floor. It’s late; there’s no light coming from the window. Tommy’s facing away, towards their empty takeout containers that have joined the pile on the coffee table.
Ranboo can’t see his face.
“Just wondering.”
And they don’t talk for the rest of the night.
He has the dream again.
The next day, Tommy runs out to Curry’s to see if they had a bulb for that key light that wasn’t working. They didn’t, so he leaves empty-handed like a fool. He’ll have to order it online once he gets to his flat.
In a moment of weakness, Tommy ducks into a charity shop on the walk home and grabs the first skirt he sees that he thinks will be in his size. It’s black, made of something knit with a scalloped bottom edge and an elastic waistband. It’s simple, just a bit of fabric. Nothing dramatic, nothing flashy, nothing particularly fashionable.
He, after several minutes of deliberating in the aisle and probably weirding out the two other customers in the shop, takes it to the lady at the till.
“That’ll be four pound fifty,” she says. Tommy hopes she’s not judging him.
He fumbles for his wallet, pulling out five quid, which he shakily hands to her.
“A gift for a friend?” she asks, and it feels like she’s giving him an out.
“Yeah—yeah. A friend of mine,” he stammers.
She nods, eyes saying nothing, and hands Tommy a paper bag and his 50p change. “Have a good day.”
Tommy takes it. “In a bit,” he says absently.
He walks back to his flat as quickly as he can, face warming slightly with each step, a feeling that can only be shame washing over him in waves. He’s done it—he’s bit the apple.
He shoves the skirt in a random drawer in his dresser the moment he walks in. He’ll deal with it later.