Chapter Text
New L’Manberg’s suburbs sprawled out from its center like arteries from a beating heart. The streets were alive, passing sleepy breakfast nooks and wooden homes and breathing into the cold earth. The further out they stretched, the thinner they became, bleeding from concrete into brick into wood and then to dirt, until they were narrow paths winding through wheat fields on the far corners of the horizon.
Here, the trees grew thicker, healthier than they were on the hill. The wind wasn’t as violent where the forests could be cradled by steep drops and languid inclines. Between the trees, quaint brick houses sat smoking, bathed golden in the light of a fading afternoon. Rooves tapered into pointed black spikes, trimmed with metal like lace, pouring neatly over newspaper lawns and paved walkways that carved the folds.
Tommy led Tubbo down these quiet roads as shadows quickened under their feet. There on the pavement, they stretched longer and longer, two ghosts wrapping tired bodies over curbs, around iron-wrought lampposts. Each step shifted their darkened shapes until they became dancers with an audience of two.
A left off his and Tommy’s street, another left and they were on the main road, straight past the little park with its stone stairs. Linger just half a step longer at the dead spider of an oak tree that curled splinters into the sky. Then the path dropped out from under them in elegant, geometric patterns as the houses grew taller and sturdier along the base of the hill. Tubbo was lost, just like that.
He might’ve known where he was, but there was a brooding tension at the base of his skull, and his voice was glaring in a way that made Tubbo distinctly aware of just how out of place his surroundings were.
Too much change. Unnatural. His voice was sour. Tubbo cast a stern glare towards his feet.
“How long has all of this been here?” He asked, swallowing hard against the aftertaste that it left in his mouth.
“I dunno. Forever, probably.”
Something told him that Tommy wasn’t entirely correct. “It looks new, though, doesn’t it? None of it’s worn yet. The bricks are all freshly…”
Tommy narrowed his gaze, scanning Tubbo’s face in his periphery. Tubbo swallowed again. “I just mean everything in the city is so old. The hill is old, too. At least, some of it’s old. The foundations are old. But this isn’t old. None of it is– are you listening?”
“You are just so weird.”
“I– sorry.”
They were silent for a few steps. Rubber soles on concrete were thunderously loud.
“I didn’t mean that.” Tommy’s voice was awkward around the syllables in his mouth. They watched his words hang in the air on a clouded breath.
Tubbo bobbed his head. “No, it’s okay.” He cleared his throat. “Do you– uh, did you say where we were going?”
“I didn’t.”
“Care to enlighten me?”
There was a quirk to Tommy’s lips when he responded: “No. You have to guess.” He turned now to face Tubbo fully, and something playing in Tommy’s expression threatened to swallow Tubbo whole. Something hot and searing against his skin.
Guess. Hopeful. Meagerly hopeful.
“I… Alright. Yeah, alright. We’re, um…”
Tubbo glanced to his left, where a brick wall lined the path, and trimmed hedges sat plump and happy against the warped masonwork. There was a comfortable red-roofed cottage beyond it. “We’re getting desserts?”
“Not even close, pal. Guess again.”
Tubbo pursed his lips. “We’re…” A florist’s shop pressed itself between two lush spruces. The ghosts of rose bushes climbed its walls. “We’re getting… uh… salads?”
“What is wrong with you!? Why would you even suggest that? Dear Prime, never say that again. Not in my vicinity.” Tommy’s face twisted into a scowl.
“I quite like salads!”
“That is just wrong.”
Tubbo huffed. “Fine! You’re going to dump my body in the woods and you’ll use my wallet to buy yourself ice cream. How’s that for a guess?”
“Not so loud, Tubbo, we can’t have any witnesses.”
I could take him.
“I could take you! You don’t scare me.” Tubbo bolded his words around the smile splitting his lips.
“Oh, I should,” Tommy retorted, and it came out gravelly and filtered by laughter. “I’m a wrong’un, you know. I do drugs and fight people with my bare fists! I’ll break a bottle over my head! I’ll sell cocaine to your dog!” His tone suddenly lightened to that of casual interest, and he straightened his posture. “You a big cocaine fan, Tubbo?”
Tubbo hiccuped out a laugh, and couldn’t find the words to respond. Tommy’s own laughter found the air, too. Their two voices mingled in the strangest way, familiar like a song he’d only heard while fast asleep. It was light, though, and it lifted off above the treeline before he could catch the melody. The chorus muddled. Then there was quiet again.
They walked on, and Tubbo stopped counting the houses they passed, stopped waiting for them to peer through the woods with wide eyes and tall, thin mouths. There was hardly anything to count at all, save for the path as it crept tirelessly ahead of them, hand over hand through the brown grass.
When Tommy did stop, it happened so abruptly that Tubbo barely noticed it at all. He caught himself a few seconds later, jerking to attention as the other boy’s presence faded from his side. Tubbo turned, and Tommy was posed with his arms across his chest beside a short, rusted gate, puffed up under his jacket with an air of importance. He threw his arms out to his side, then, and with a rolling gesture of his left hand, he announced: “We’ve arrived.” He dipped his head in what might have been reverence but could just as easily have been the thickest sarcasm that Tubbo had ever heard.
He desperately hoped it was the latter.
Ahead of them sat Hutt’s Pizza, a smashed, crumbled, architectural nightmare of a building. It was something out of a horror story, rotting and festering and sinking into the earth unlike anything Tubbo had ever witnessed.
He turned to Tommy, tried desperately to collect the whirring thoughts and emotions that flew through his mind. None of them found his lips. It was all he could do to watch the quiet satisfaction as it rested on Tommy’s face.
“It’s cool, huh?”
Tubbo did not respond. Instead, he gaped at the diner which gaped right back at him in all of its disrepair. The sides were crooked and misshapen, folding into the center like a flattened cardboard box. They were caked with years of grime, in rolled, matted spiderwebs, and wrinkled by wind and rain. The structure itself was concave, weighed down by a waterlogged roof which sagged out of view. The windows were tinted black, whole and unbroken, somehow. They were sealed thickly with clotted white paint. It stared out with the empty eyes of a corpse.
“I didn’t actually think you were going to murder me,” Tubbo finally said. Then, through a strangled laugh, “Do you have some sort of obsession with abandoned buildings, or is this just a coincidence?”
“What, you don’t like it?” Tommy’s arms fell to his sides. “It’s not that bad! You haven’t even been inside!”
“I think I’d get tetanus!”
“I think you’re overreacting on purpose to make me upset.”
“I think there is no conceivable way to overreact in this situation.”
Tommy threw his head back to face the sky. His mouth moved like he was counting under his breath. Tubbo eyed him warily, and then turned once more to face Hutt’s. He wasn’t sure which of the two he was supposed to worry about more.
“Fine!” Tommy said after a minute, shrugging his shoulders up to his ears and then letting them fall back down. “You win! We’ll just walk all the way home, go our separate ways. Maybe I’ll send you a postcard from now on instead of taking time out of my day to bring you places.”
Tubbo pressed his lips into a firm line.
“This must be lowbrow for you. I should have known you were too good for the likes of me. ‘Don’t try being friends with Tubbo!’ They warned me! ‘He’ll just break your frail, fragile heart!’ Poor, poor Tommy!”
He blinked slowly.
“I will never stick my neck out again!” Tommy let out a high-pitched sob and threw a hand over his forehead like he might faint. “Poor Tommy!”
“I’ll eat your stupid pizza.”
Tommy’s composure returned immediately. He clapped his hands together, grin conflagrant across his face. “After you, then.”
Tubbo rolled his eyes and crossed the distance between them to stand at the entrance. The gate was only as high as his waist, and though it had been chained shut, it wasn’t difficult to step over it. He took his time, cautious over the chipped red iron.
Ahead of them, a sunbleached lot blistered against the soil. The shadows of a hub of activity were pale and faded along the edges, as if even their memory had been washed from the grass. Whatever they had been, they hadn’t survived. They hadn’t had the strength to. Tubbo’s voice talked about them in a hushed whisper that he couldn’t quite make out. He could feel its warm, thin breath on his jaw.
This is old. This is very old. Tubbo shuddered into the whistling caution.
“Tommy, are you sure they’re open? This doesn’t feel… normal.” He tugged his sleeves over his hands until his fingers disappeared into the fabric, like he might cut himself on the frozen air.
“I’m sure,” came Tommy’s immediate confidence. “I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. Longer than that, even! You know, this place burned down about four times before they finally figured out how to stop that from happening.” He shouldered past Tubbo to lead the way, clucking his tongue. “Really a shame, I bet the original was quite the sight.”
“Wh- four times!? When was the last time they rebuilt it?”
“How long have you been here?” Tubbo balked. “Kidding.”
But Tommy kept moving, and Tubbo stumbled into place at his heels. Fat-stemmed dandelions splintered the pavement and bristled their tanged leaves as the two of them passed. It was late in the year, and they had long since gone to seed, but Tubbo had a hard time believing that they could be killed. There was a violent resilience to their growth. It made him nervous.
Tubbo stepped over them the best he could, but they quickly bled into a weeded lawn, parting clumps of thick-bladed crabgrass and twiggy shrubs which had succumbed to the frost. Soon he was wading through their masses, kicking away the vines that tugged at his shoelaces.
His voice, winding through his legs in cautious circles, hummed pensively. There was warmth here, but it was dry and cracked like cement. It crumbled, static and confused, in the dark corners of Tubbo’s vision. Stale, stringy, sitting in his throat with a weighted sorrow. It was leaving, and coming home, and finding a portrait that might have been a mirror once — all of it was enough to choke him.
It wasn’t always bad, his voice murmured, and it was barely audible over the crunch of vegetation. Not always.
“I mean,” Tommy started, leaping with exaggerated agility onto the raised patio. “It’s not in operation, or anything.”
Tubbo stopped. “What?”
“It hasn’t been, uh, a restaurant in… a few years. Not that long. Obviously, I mean, it hasn’t been condemned yet.”
“Yet!” Tubbo repeated. “‘Yet’ implies that there are plans! Tommy, are you serious? Won’t we get in trouble? That’s illegal! That has to be illegal.”
Must be illegal.
“Must be illegal!” Tubbo agreed.
Tommy huffed and turned to face Tubbo fully. There was charged tension in his expression, but also a posture that suggested that if Tubbo chose to leave, he wouldn’t think anything of it. As if his decision didn’t even matter. “Are you coming or not?”
He blinked, swallowed, scanned Tommy’s face as if he might find an answer there. His voice had gone still and quiet in his mind. He stepped back. Stepped forward again. Idled. Far off, something small skittered across dried leaves.
Then Tubbo bobbed his head and stepped up onto the patio.
He didn’t look up to see Tommy’s reaction. He heard him hum, though, with a carefully guarded neutrality that might have made Tubbo laugh under different circumstances. They stood in front of the peeling door.
Tommy pushed on it, and it swung stiffly on its hinges. The metal squealed.
Immediately, Tubbo was met by the smell of decay. It fled through the doorframe as if it had legs on which to run, and it passed over him but did not fade. It lingered there, wholly present, until Tubbo blinked the wetness from his eyes. Beyond it, the interior was dimly lit; shafts of sunlight filtered in through worn cracks in the ceiling, turning slivers of dark air golden. In them, dust motes hung suspended like loose tea in syrupy water. They spilled over the floor, where cheap tiles patterned a checkerboard that stretched to the back wall and disappeared into gray shadows.
He took a tentative step forward. The building protested with a low, whining groan. Another step. This time, the dissent was quieter, more reproachful, petulantly complaining. Tubbo held his breath against the rot and waited for the room to stop shifting.
“And you said this place wasn’t condemned?” He hissed over his shoulder.
Tommy stooped under the doorframe, folding through the space to stand next to Tubbo. “Not that I know of. It’s still here, isn’t it?”
“Barely.”
Slowly, Tubbo’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and the blurred shapes started to make sense. The room was larger than he had expected it would be, somehow expansive despite what Tubbo had assumed from the outside. There was a kitchen in the far corner, and a counter where guests might have once placed their orders. Through there, Tubbo could see a line of counters, and an empty space where a grill had once been, the outline caked in muck. The chalkboard menu dripped with the pastel deposits of melted words.
Most of the furniture was gone. There was a table laying on its side beside the counter, and three chairs in various states of disrepair; one stood crooked on three legs, leaned up against the wall next to a second that was torn open in the center, splintering out like it had bloomed into some broken, wooden flower. The third was faced into the back corner, pointed towards a thick pane of glass, which was clouded over with something dark and uneven.
Tubbo took a step towards it, and Tommy supplemented, “That was a fish tank. There used to be a pufferfish, Hutt. Dad always said that this was his restaurant. My brother and I– oh, he loved Hutt. He was the funniest looking thing.” Tommy cut himself off to puff up his cheeks in a crude imitation. “Big, too. Biggest fish I’ve ever seen.”
“When was the last time you were here?” Tubbo asked. He spoke quietly, but it still felt too loud for this place.
Tommy looked down at his feet. “I come here a lot.”
“When was the last time you came here with your family?”
His eyes hardened. “They went out of business when I was six. We had my birthday here, me and Dad and my brother and his friends. And then we never came back.”
Tubbo cast another glance around the room. Everything was so broken that it was hard to imagine food, or people, or parties — anything besides their two silhouettes pulling memories from the walls.
“But you came back,” he said.
“I always come back.”
It was the truth. It was simply put. But something warm reverberated in Tubbo’s skull at the admission.
They stood in silence for a minute, watching time paint scars along its tired canvas. If he squinted, and if he held his breath, Tubbo could almost see what Tommy had.
“We can sit down,” Tommy said, and Tubbo voiced his consent.
Tommy crossed the room to the counter and pulled himself up onto it, feet just barely skimming the floor as he swung his legs. Tubbo mirrored him awkwardly, scrambling onto the ledge, and then they sat beside each other.
There was a moment before they spoke again, where Tommy kicked his legs against the wall, and Tubbo sat in tense stillness.
Ask him , his voice whispered, slinking through the heat with relative ease. Ask Tommy .
Tubbo did not want to ask Tommy.
Ask him.
“Tommy, can I– uh, ask you something?” Tubbo fiddled with his hands in his lap.
“Yeah,” came Tommy’s reply. He pulled something squished out of his pocket. “Turkey sandwich?”
“No, I– well, if you’re offering, I guess–” Tubbo took the wrapped package. “I need to… Something is– no, I guess…” He made a strangled noise at the back of his throat. “Prime, why is this so difficult?”
“You’re not a drug dealer, are you?”
Tubbo snorted. “No, that would be easier.”
He eyed the sandwich in his hands. It had been messily-constructed to begin with, but prolonged exposure to Tommy’s pocket had pressed the bread in the wrong direction until it had wrinkled flat.
“I’ve seen you before,” Tubbo finally said.
“Well, we are neighbors,” Tommy commented flatly. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“No, not like that. Not like… Not like that.” He tore half-heartedly at the crust. “I mean… something weird is going on. With me. And I’ve seen you… before.”
“I don’t think I’m following.”
Tubbo looked up to meet Tommy’s eyes, and there was something raw like concern in them. “I know things I’m not supposed to. I know people I’ve never met. I have this… this sixth sense where I– I understand this place like no one else, and I’ve only been here for– what, four months? It isn’t normal, and it scares me sometimes, but what really scares me is that you’re a part of this .” The words came tumbling out of Tubbo’s mouth as if they had been scripted for him, as if he wasn’t the one saying them at all.
“And all of it– it makes no sense except that it does, and I don’t know why or how or what even needs to make sense in the first place. But I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you and it’s like I know you, but it isn’t you . It isn’t you, and that’s not me, but it is us . I think we’re… connected, somehow.”
He took a deep breath in. “I need your help. Because I don’t understand it, and I’m praying that maybe you do. Or maybe you could at least tell me who would, because I don’t even know where to start. I’ve sort of been…” He chuckled to himself. “I’ve just been waiting for things to happen to me. And I’m tired of not having any control.”
Tommy said nothing. Tubbo held his breath in the aftermath. He felt like he might choke on the coals of what his words had burned into the wet wood around them.
“You’ve hardly touched your sandwich, big man.”
Tubbo closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have–”
Tommy lifted his hand, and Tubbo stopped himself. There was a moment of pause where Tommy seemed to taste his next words before they came. “Are you messing with me? This isn’t funny, so you might as well confess now if you’re just lying.”
Tubbo shook his head. He didn’t know the words that would prove himself.
“Then this is all real? And you’re actually telling the truth?”
He nodded this time.
Tommy set his jaw. Tubbo followed his gaze out the darkened windows, past the gated lot, through the treeline across the path. Like arteries from a beating heart. They pulsed with memories that weren’t his own. Tracked bloody footprints into the place that could have been a home, once.
“Tell me everything.”
And Tubbo did.