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The rest of Doomsday is practically a blank spot.
It’s all a blur. All Tubbo knows is that, by the end of it, he is three quarters more burn scar than skin, covered in dust, and uncomfortably aware of how very alive he is.
He is alive. And many of his people, including the beating heart that was his country, are not.
Dream stands on top of an obsidian grid, pouring explosives down to bedrock. Phil and Techno stand at the edge, swords still drawn, firing arrows at anyone they see. Tubbo hasn’t hated a lot of people in his life but, in that moment, he despises them. His hands form fists. They shake.
Then, like air knocked out of his lungs, the anger vanishes. With nothing else to keep him upright, Tubbo Underscore, once president of a country, twice leader of a crater, collapses into the dirt.
He leans against a rock, heart empty and shallow. But he is alive.
Tubbo clings to that thought, to the memory of his mother. Of the fading warmth in his chest. He’s cold now, cold and hurt, but the warmth will come back. Love will return, as surely as a wayward bird returns to the nest.
The fighting dies down, eventually. Tubbo looks up when he hears footsteps.
Tommy crumples down beside him. They spent more of the fight together than apart, and now his friend has returned to his side again.
There’s so much broken between them. So many rifts, so many things still fractured, unhealed. But Tubbo thinks it may be fate that they sit together here at the end. He doesn’t know if any world, any goddess, any kind of villain or distance could really keep them apart forever.
Not even death could keep them from this moment. I’d go after you, Tubbo decides, without sparing a single thought to reciprocity. Even to Hell, I would follow you. There is nowhere you could go that I would not follow.
Tommy buries his head in Tubbo’s shoulder and cries.
Tubbo holds him. He always does. He always will.
Technoblade shoved him off the pier, sent him tumbling down a hole in the Earth. Tommy was screaming for him. History folded in on itself like a collapsing star, and Technoblade loaded his crossbow with a firework. Tubbo rolled out of the way of the cartdridge, of the direct hit that he knew, with a surety born from an intimate closeness to horror, would go straight through his chest.
He could not escape the sparks, or the burns. They used to be on his face. Licking up and down his arms.
They cover his ribs now. His chest and his back. They wrap around his leg.
He heard a story once, of soulmates connected by their ribs. They fit together like a puzzle piece, skin melding into skin, ribs sliding between each other. They would become one. A perfect picture. Tubbo, with ribs that now look like no one elses, wonders where that leaves him.
The fight is over. There is no time to wonder.
Tubbo picks himself up, ignoring the way Tommy whines, and starts to walk. He has people to take care of. A military force, one that fought valiantly, one that he needs to see.
It’s my duty to see them, Wilbur had said once, back when war still meant something. Every scar, every dead man. I’m the leader. If I can’t look them in the eyes, I don’t deserve that title.
Did Aeneas look his people in the eyes? Did he know their faces, know their cries?
How did Troy die? Slow or quick? In a blaze or a blast? With or without a fight?
You and your love, his mother had said. Can’t you just let it go? But she knew better than anyone that he couldn’t. And even if he wanted to, he never could. He owes his people this.
Someone gives him a once-over and then shoves bandages into his hands. “Can you-?”
He nods. He can’t tell if they recognize his face, covered in ash and red burns as it is. It doesn’t matter. His country is strewn out on the edge of a crater, still listening to explosives hit rock bottom, groaning and injured and needing care. He looks around and finds them being tended to by limping fellow soldiers. He supposes there are no uninjured to call on for the job.
Martyrdom, he decides, is a facade. Death could never be the hard part, not next to this.
Something wraps around his ankle. He nearly stumbles, but catches himself, and looks down to find a woman. Her face is bloody, streaked with ash. He can’t see her wounds through it, but her laboured breathing lets him know that they’re there. And he’s seen enough death in his life to know what happens next.
He should move on.
He doesn’t.
Tubbo kneels next to her body and grabs her hand, squeezing as tight as he can. She stares at him, looks him in the eyes. When she speaks, her voice is rubbed raw, shaking. “Sir?”
“Yeah, it’s me. What’s your name?”
He thinks he sees a smile on her lips. “Jess.”
“Jess? That’s a nice name. You have any family here?”
Her hand is loose around his. He squeezes tighter.
“I got a daughter,” she says hoarsely. “An’ a wife.”
Tubbo smiles at her. Look them in the eyes. “That’s good. I don’t have either of those yet. I think I’d like a kid.”
Jess’s voice is a little more slurred when she speaks again. “They’re good. First few… first months are bad. But ya gotta love ‘em. They left. Not here.”
“That’s good. What are their names?”
Her chest rises, falls, and then does not rise again. Tubbo puts both hands around hers like he’s praying. It feels like a prayer.
Tubbo’s lungs constrict, tears building up in his throat. He wonders what comes after the heretic’s apotheosis- if this is godhood, or if this is just the falling action after the climax. He wonders if anything comes after this.
He wonders, again, how Troy died. And somehow, despite centuries between them, he knows that Troy died like this: a woman and a leader, a hand between Aeneas’s fingers. Blood on the ground and wounded people.
He knows, despite lives between them, that Troy died quietly, in his arms.
He doesn’t know where Tommy has gone. He does not get to heal many people. There are not many people who need healing. They call him over and ask him to do what he did for Jess, for a woman he did not know, a woman he never will know, but who believed in him. In his ability to lead, to make things better.
They all believe in him.
Tubbo holds his people as they die, and he can’t help but feel like he does not deserve their faith.
Did Aeneas feel this, as well?
“Where’s Tommy?” he asks, voice sore. The doctor next to him shakes their head.
For a brief moment, instead of imagining blonde hair and blue eyes, instead of nicks and scars and a best friend, Tubbo imagines someone else. Brown hair, a hand on his face. Eyes that stare into his. And then comes grief so overwhelming it knocks the air out of his lungs. He heaves, desperate for breath, but can’t find it.
And then, just as suddenly as the image had come, it flees. He sees Tommy. He sees nothing else. But the memory is there, and the grief sits heavy in his body. His lungs and his body and his-
It releases- activates something. There’s overwhelming loss, like physical pain. He feels all of it. His citizens, his people. All of the pain in this crater sits on his shoulders like a boulder. Does apotheosis have an end? Is that even the right word? Is this an apotheosis or an epoch? A climax or a beginning?
He needs to find the rest of his country. All the citizens who evacuated last night. He needs them to know how he failed them. He doesn’t know if he feels their grief or takes it. He hopes it’s the latter.
He led his people to a new home.
There’s a camp set up in the woods. Children are playing in the river while the older folk stand in the campground, discussing something in hushed tones.
They all look up when he walks past the treeline. They look behind him, clearly searching for soldiers; loved ones, siblings, mothers and fathers.
There is no one behind him.
Tubbo stands in front of them. He has a speech planned, he had one. He made it before he got here, barely able to move his fingers because of the pain.
But he looks at all of them, at the refugees that make up his once great land, and the only thing Tubbo can do is kneel. His raw, tightened skin chafes at the stretch and he wants healing and burn cream and bandages but all he has earned is this.
“I’m sorry,” he says, too soft for it to matter. He says it again, louder this time. “I’m sorry. You all deserved better.”
There are shoes in front of him. They are pink. They are small. He watches them turn into knees as a little girl kneels. She takes his hands in hers. He looks up into her eyes and expects to feel pain, hatred, that awful grief coming back again.
He does not.
It’s like cold water in his stomach, fresh air in his lungs.
“It’s okay,” the girl says. She smiles at him. She wears braces. She holds his hands in hers, tiny fingers around his scarred and bumped and damaged ones.
He looks up at all of them. And he expects something, some kind of ire. “I’m sorry,” he says again.
It feels like forgiveness.
For the first time in months, Tubbo cries.