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Intricate, thinks Tubbo, the clicking and the grinding as the prison slides open and shut to accommodate them. The vault is not so much a building as it is a set of gears, an ever-shifting labyrinth. “The corridor unseals,” he asks the Warden, “when you push that button?”
“Only if I deposit the proper key.” Sam reassures him, “and a cipher, changed daily.”
“That’s cool. That’s really cool.” He admires Sam’s engineering prowess; they’ve worked together on massive hydropower projects, drained a cylinder of ocean. Now Tubbo’s limbs are heavy with the curse of the prison guardians, and also with dread. “Mining fatigue will stop Dream from breaking out?”
“Yes,” Sam drawls, “That’s what it’s for.”
“He can’t escape? You’re sure he can’t?”
Sam puts a hand on Tubbo’s shoulder. “The prison is very secure. But if you’re afraid, we can turn back.”
“No.” The boy swallows around his dry mouth. “I have to do this. I want to see him one last time.”
“You keep your armor on,” warns Sam, “Comms in. If anything seems wrong, if he tries to hurt you, just call out to me and I’ll be there immediately. I promise that to you.” And he always follows his rules, keeps his promises.
It hadn’t been easy, convincing the Warden to let him visit. But he’s bundled up in full netherite plate, Dream’s armor: the black metal glossy with enchantments; he’s safe.
The first time he wore Nightmare he was scared out of his mind. But he kept it, kept it on as a sort of exposure therapy. After it had deflected enough zombie teeth and skeleton arrows, Tubbo’s started seeing it as something that will protect him rather than harm him. The gunpowder smell is fading.
He signs the waivers. He reads them carefully. Tommy probably just skimmed. Tubbo knows exactly what he’s signing.
How slowly the lava drains. Tubbo has plenty of time to collect himself, gather his thoughts, steady his breathing. He is silent and stares straight ahead without having to be told.
Dream kneels in his cage, leaning eagerly on the netherite barrier. But when he sees his visitor, he looks disappointed: the spark goes out of his eyes. He makes no move of greeting.
That’s fine. Tubbo will say what he needs to say, and Dream will hear it, even if he tries not to listen.
“You really were going to kill me, huh?” He laughs lightly and steps forward on a diagonal, keeping his distance from both the lava curtain and the prisoner. “Did you think I deserved to die? Because I thought so. But you don’t care either way.” The words are rushing out of him like they never have before.
He’s always bottled up his emotions inside. But Dream already thinks of him as less than a toy. Tubbo can’t get any lower in the man’s estimation, so he speaks without reserve, without dignity. “You would have murdered me without knowing who I was or what I loved. And now, before you die, I need you to know who I am. This matters.”
He sits down, leaning against an obsidian corner. His armor clanks as he does so like the exoskeleton of a bug that can’t be squashed. “It’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it?”
Dream finally acknowledges him, face furrowing in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“You were a bully before you ever were a monster or a God.” He folds his hands. Do you remember my beehives?”
Dream shakes his head.
“Well, I kept bees. For honey, but I really liked them. Named them. I was attached to them. And, well, one night, you opened the hives, sprayed the bees.” Tommy had found him that morning, in the garden, distraught over broken honeycomb. I’m so sorry, Tubbo. Why’d you let Dream know you cared about them? “And I learned.” To feel but not to show. To keep his heart safe in his chest. “It started small. It always does. Killing animals. Killing sidekicks.”
Dream yawns. “I don’t care.”
“Treat it like a story. Write it down in one of your books. You must get pretty bored in here.”
He sneers. “Just get to the good part.”
“Fine. How about L’Manberg? The drug van? The revolutionary war?”
He smiles. “The Final Control Room.”
“I died,” Tubbo admits, “And you killed him. Killed Tommy. Targeted him specifically. I was gone first but I saw you grab him, put your knife to his throat. Why Tommy?”
“He’s so much fun.” Dream reaches out for Tubbo, who recoils. “Oh, you’re not fun.”
“Yeah, you’ve told me.” He sighs, reaches up under his helmet to scratch his face. The scars still itch. There’s another scar, from a sword, on his flank, a thin white line that’s nothing in comparison. “Eret betrayed us. I never expected… Wilbur didn’t trust anyone after that. I couldn’t trust either, and yet I did, anyway. I chose friendship.” He accepts the inherent risks of closeness. “I think that was the right choice...even if I’m vulnerable, even though I still get hurt.”
“That’s why you’re weak, Tubbo.” Dream still speaks with an easy purr, though his cheeks are gaunt and his hair all scraggly split ends. “And when I escape from the prison, and I will, I will; I’ll get my revenge. I’ll go after you and I’ll finish the job.”
He purses his lips. “I don’t think you’ll get the chance. We have no more use for you, Dream.”
“You won’t kill me.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure they will.” For half a second, Dream looks scared, and Tubbo feels an unfamiliar ache of satisfaction in his chest. But that’s not the point of this visit. “You took Tommy’s second life that day. In the span of, like, an hour, you killed my best friend twice.”
“It was a duel.”
“He turned and shot. You dodged his arrow.”
“That’s perfectly legal.”
“He was angry, he was inflamed. He didn’t want to kill or die. You were calm, knew exactly what you were doing. You’re always calm.” And so is Tubbo, on the outside. Made him a better spy. People talked in front of him, forgot he was there.
He’s still not sure how they caught him. But it took three blows to kill him: he’s strong like that. A pickaxe to the chest to soften him up. A firework that struck his jaw, filled his vision with red white and blue, and a second firework to finally carry him away. Painless and colorful don’t fit together. “People keep telling me I’ll be okay.”
Dream nods. “They’re lying.”
“Tommy told me to be safe. Wilbur said he wouldn’t hurt me. Technoblade said it would be painless.” He licks his dry lips. “Everybody saw. Nobody stopped it.”
“Because they don’t care about you.”
“They do, though!” He’s utterly sincere. “Even then they cared, and that was the worst part. Quackity was my friend, and all he did was stand close enough to hear me breathing, and take off his sunglasses.”
“What did you expect from him?” There’s malice in the prisoner’s voice, fear in his eyes. “He’s weak.”
“Stronger than me. That’s what you’ve said.” Dream belittles Tubbo, brags that Quackity pushes him around, and maybe that’s true. But Q is strong in other ways, like an older brother, someone clever and clear-eyed whom he can lean on. Or he was, for a while. Now he’s scarred and half-blind and there’s dried blood on his clothes and his hands twitch. He seems far away, lost in another time. “Tommy cared.”
“Sounds like him,” Dream mumbles, “He’s angry. Has no control of himself.”
“Cared so much he was going to fight Technoblade, maybe to the death, over my lost life. I asked him not to. Wilbur dug them a combat pit.”
“Wilbur was crazy,” Dream says.
“Fucking crazy.”
“It was awesome.”
“No,” says Tubbo, “It was sad.” Sometimes he stares off high ledges or runs his hands along his nuclear missiles, undoing the hatch to reveal the deadman’s switch. He wonders if he’s as far gone as Wilbur, but he knows better. When Tubbo dies, he’ll do it in a way that helps his friends. “I forced myself to forgive Technoblade, to stop the violence.” But it hadn’t worked. “He hit Tommy, over and over again. Tommy landed a few punches and then he was unconscious on the ground.” Not dead, though. “Techno stopped.” He stares pointedly at Dream. “Didn’t kill him.”
“He wanted to keep him around longer,” the man reasons, “Wasn’t done playing with him.”
He wrinkles his nose. “You make me sick.”
“Tommy is entertaining.”
There’s a difference; he thinks, between Tubbo, who would follow his friend to the end of the earth just to laugh at his jokes; and Dream, who’ll never let his victim rest as long as he can still use him like a laboratory mouse. That’ll end soon. Maybe this is closure.
But it’s no fun. It makes Tubbo want to vomit and scream and cry. But he knows better. He’s been taught. “Schlatt told me I was like a conch shell. He could put me to his ear and instead of the ocean he could hear me whining. Maybe that’s how he found me out, how it all happened. I couldn’t speak about my feelings, couldn’t even think of them. Still felt.”
The next weeks had been the worst and best at the same time. He lay in a bleary haze on a stolen mattress. Tommy slept on the rocky ravine floor, and Wilbur didn’t sleep. In pain, helpless as he recovered: at least he was no longer torn in two directions at once. He’s always despised lying. And he had his friend by his side again, even if Tommy had two shiny black eyes and a stiff neck and a perpetual nervous stutter. “I-I-it’ll be-o-kay,” he’d sworn, even as it was already wrecked, even when he removed Tubbo’s bandages to reveal a face that was nothing but salmon-colored scar tissue. “...Badass.”
“Yeah,” Tubbo had answered with a lopsided smile, and he’d started to feel proud of his markings. Never tried to hide them. Tommy has always been a light in his darkness, and months later Tubbo attempts to return the favor.
But Tommy doesn’t appreciate that. “Please, Tubbo, don’t be so optimistic. We could die today. Tell me how you really feel.”
He tries, but he’s learned. The words don’t come to the surface. He’s buried them like corpses. He knows he still feels, the shadows and shapes of his emotions give him indigestion. The details are unidentifiable.
But he’s getting ahead of himself.
“I’m dead, and the war’s still on. I’m alive but sick, and I get to watch as our ranks swell and Wilbur loses his shit and Tommy keeps trying to wrap his arms around the whole world and fix it.”
“He never knows when to quit,” says Dream dismissively.
“I love that. Even you couldn’t break him.”
Dream smiles, and Tubbo thinks of a spindly wooden tower. “Oh, I broke him.”
“Maybe. But he fixed himself.”
Dream spits into his cauldron. Isn’t that his only water source? Well, Dream’s certainly the type to fuck himself over to make a point. Tubbo thinks that’s sort of hilarious.
“We fight. We win. I’m the president.” It’s one tiny moment of happiness in his joyless life (all his emotions are muted.) For just a few seconds, everything’s okay.
Like when Tommy gets his disc back, and Tubbo cheers, and then Dream puts a weapon to his throat. Like how Tommy chooses to save his friend, before Dream reveals that was never an option. Like putting Dream in jail, only to realize he can still hurt them.
He can always hurt them.
It’s never been okay.
The bombs detonate: the podium crumbles as he’s standing on it: another speech interrupted by an explosion. Technoblade has him on his knees, rocket launcher loaded, yelling to the crowd even as Tubbo squints and cowers. He’s the president now, not a detained traitor. As it turns out, assassination and execution burn the same.
Only one shot. He lives. Scars on scars. He has a duty to his nation, but that nation is a crater. His face is a crater. Never meant to be echoes in his brain, and he considers giving up on both counts.
Tommy is looking at him, helpless but for where his best friend is concerned. When Tubbo’s in danger, Tommy chooses to be so brave. They’ll force it to “be,” meant or no. “I was the president,” he repeats, “really.”
Dream laughs. “You had no power.”
“That’s true. I wanted it. Quackity told me how to get it. That was the point of the Butcher Army.”
“We’re not so different,” the prisoner purrs, “you and I. You understand. You’re no better than me.”
Tubbo shakes his head at the false equivalency. “It isn’t power you’re after. Not really.”
Dream looks puzzled, perturbed. “Of course it is. I said so.”
“If it was,” Tubbo reasons, “You’d take power from those who hoard it. You’d target the people who actually threaten your total control: Technoblade. Philza. Schlatt, the dictator.” He pushes himself off the wall and steps forward with a thin smile. “You can’t tell me that Tommy scares you.”
He scoffs. “Of course not.”
“Then why bother to torture him?”
Dream’s eyes go wide, like it’s a question he can’t answer.
“You want to feel powerful. You go after people who are young or weak or crazy or isolated because you want to have complete control, if not over the server, then over a person. You don’t want to admit, even to yourself, that this isn’t your dollhouse. Tommy’s fun to you because he wears his heart on his sleeve: you can get a rise out of him. You’re just a bully.”
“I’m a God!” he protests.
Tubbo shakes his head. “Not anymore.”
Dream wrinkles his nose. “I always will be.”
“You can tell it to Mexican Dream.” There’s bitter laughter stuck to the back of his throat. “We have the Revival Book. You’re an evil man who hurts people and you’ve shown no sign of wanting to change. You’ll be dead by tomorrow and that’s the only reason I’m speaking to you so openly.”
“So you’ll have me executed?” Dream taunts, “Who will you call in to do it? Technoblade?”
Tubbo’s face twitches. “No, I reckon it will be Sam.” Sam was Dream’s friend, once. It’s not so much sad as pathetic.
Tubbo still has his friends, even through death and betrayal and separation. He’s not like Dream and he never will be. He’s not Schlatt, either, despite the careless way his citizens compared him to the man who once had him shot. “Someone vandalized my official portrait. Ram’s horns in red paint.” When his horns do come in, they’re straight and slender. The devil is a goat but Schlatt was no lamb of God. If Tubbo makes decisions independently, he’s a dictator. If he consults his cabinet, he’s a pushover and still a sheep. “I couldn’t win. You made sure I could only lose, because that’s what you think a game is.”
Dream shrugs. “I have fun. That’s what matters, right?”
As if Tubbo would ever agree with him. Tubbo, who’s given up his life over and over for other people’s causes. He is a person, with thoughts and feelings; even if they’re erased, trod upon, disrespected at all times. But maybe it’s safer to be unnoticed. “What did you do to Tommy?”
Dream won’t meet his eye. “What’d he tell you?”
“Almost nothing. He doesn’t want to talk about it, and I can more than understand that. But I know some things.” He knows what he saw. He saw the tower. “Tommy’s afraid of explosions, now. Holes in the ground. Meadows.”
He waves a dismissive hand. “It wasn’t that bad.”
Tubbo looks at his feet. “I thought that Tommy killed himself.”
“He’s fine,” Dream says, “If he’d died, I would have just brought him back. No harm done.”
“No harm done?” Tubbo lies awake even now, thinking of how much damage he’s caused in his short life, twisting in circles, wondering how it could have been different if he were just a little smarter or braver or stronger.
Too late for that now. Time to try again. Do it all over. “And then I planned a festival.” Games and food and decorations. “It was all a cover to kill you. I would be the one to get close behind and deal the final blows. Two swings of an axe, if I timed it right. It had to be me, because I make people feel safe.”
“Oh, Tubbo. You couldn’t kill me.”
Tubbo says, “Hm.”
Every part of that day went wrong, save one. He had Tommy back. Even living under a probable death sentence, it felt better not to be pulled in two directions at once. “I guess I’m the worst President L’Manberg ever had because the country blew up twice under my leadership. Though maybe it wasn’t my fault. I’d ask my predecessors for their opinions but they’re both dead.” He’s the only man to outlive the position.
Is that a success? His reward is guilt and mourning, being chewed apart by half-tame dogs, and red-and-black sparkles that twinkle in his guts.
“After Doomsday, I founded Snowchester. To protect my new home, I invented weapons of mass destruction. I added a manual detonator, a suicide button. I told no one. The button was for me.” Hope for the best, plan for the worst. “You would have killed me and I would have let you.” His tone is accusatory, his hands shake.
“I gave Tommy a chance,” Dream defends himself, “to say goodbye.”
Tubbo just shakes his head in disgust. “You chose my end and I kept living. I adopted a son. I got married and fell in love in that order. I’ve never had a family. People like me don’t get happy endings. People like you make certain.” He takes a deep breath, imagines long ender-arms to wrap around him twice and steady his shoulders. “Michael draws my scars in crayon. Ranboo brings me bouquets of pink tulips. Sometimes I remember you would have taken all of this away from me.” Softly, he adds, “I hate you.”
Dream doesn’t hate him back. Dream doesn’t even care. Tubbo will sob, he will explain, he will beat his fists on the obsidian walls: anything to make this cold, callous, man understand, to force him to take Tubbo seriously.
A three-piece suit just made him look smaller. A nation wasn’t enough. He aims his nuclear missiles in threat and Dream doesn’t blink.
“You’re dying tomorrow,” he reminds, and Dream’s eyes flick to his golden clock. It’s Tubbo’s time to go. It’s been too long for you not to make this decision. I’m gonna kill him in the next minute. “Are you scared?”
“They’re killing me for you.” Dream scratches at his stubble. His nails are gone and won’t grow back; the skin is pink and pruned underneath. “Aren’t you tired of things happening on your behalf?”
Tubbo nods.
“You could stop them.” There’s a pleading edge to his words.
“Not sure about that,” he hums, “My authority has really been undermined lately.”
Dream sits close at Tubbo’s feet, almost like a dog on the toes of his boots. “We were friends!”
“I thought we were,” says Tubbo, “I gave you every chance. I tried to see the good in you and you showed me it no longer exists. You held a blade to my throat.”
“It was nothing personal!”
“I know!” he shouts, “That’s worse! Why can’t you see that?”
“You’re still a pawn,” Dream purrs, “Even once I’m dead. Everyone knows you’re a pushover to use and abuse. This is your chance, Tubbo, your time to take a stand. You believe in mercy, right?”
“Mm.” Dream needs to die. He deserves to die. But it’s true, Tubbo doesn’t like the idea of ordering an execution. He draws his axe. “I’m not a pawn.”
“Wha--what--” Dream scoots away with a nervous laugh, “what’re you doing with that?”
Tubbo rests the heavy blade on his enemy’s chest. “I’m not a pawn,” he repeats, “Or a king, a dictator, either.”
Dream’s eyes widen in terror, electric-green irises lost in a sea of white. “You don’t want to become a murderer, you don’t, you’re peaceful.”
“I’ve been a beekeeper, a drug dealer, a founder, a framer, a soldier, a lawyer” he lists, “a spy, a right-hand man, a message, a symbol. A president, a bad friend, a butcher, a victim, a failure. But that’s not all. I got another chance. I’m a witch doctor, a husband, a father, a nuclear physicist, a military strategist, a detective. Never a pawn.” Instead he’s Tubbo, the helpful, diligent, useful boy who can fill a hundred roles. Even if it’s an executioner’s hood, “what’s one more hat?”
It takes only two hits with the reforged Bane O’ Bees , and he can stomach both of them. Tubbo grants Dream a quick death: he has no desire to inflict the kind of pain that haunts his memories. The body bleeds, twitches, stills.
Tubbo pulls his wire back towards his mouth. “Sam? Can you come get me please?”
The response crackles through, breathless and immediate: “Did something happen? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Maybe he should be upset. Maybe Tubbo should fear small spaces, be more uncomfortable in the presence of death. But he just feels free, unburdened, like a huge weight has been lifted off his chest. “I’m finished here.”
He’s closed a chapter on his own terms.
At last he is able to move on.