Work Text:
there is a room for tommy in the mansion. it is empty.
for now, of course. tubbo wishes it wasn’t, but these days, he’s way too busy to decorate it. not that there’s any need: tommy is still living in the same old dirt shack he’s always lived in, far away from snowchester, which came as a surprise to tubbo when he first found out about it a few weeks ago.
after all, he was making a new country, and they had almost always done things like new countries together. ranboo was coming, jack manifold was coming, why wouldn’t tommy? why wouldn’t his best friend?
well, his hotel, for starters. and a couple of vague prior obligations that were so obviously fake, they made tubbo embarrassed to have ever assumed that tommy would come to snowchester with him.
it all made him feel a bit pissed off to be honest, as well as perpetually just a little out of place, like something small yet fundamental was off. but a couple of days ago, he decided to push all that aside and ask tommy to move to snowchester one last time. he missed having him around, after all. maybe tommy felt the same way. maybe he had changed his mind.
he hadn’t. looked away, made a wide range of awkward expressions. “i mean, you know i’ve got my hotel, and i’m not into all that political shit-”
a weird feeling curled around tubbo’s heart then, and for a moment all he could think was this never happened before. he swallowed it all down and shrugged. “well, you’ll always have a place to stay there if you need it.”
he made good on this promise. an unfurnished room, a few doors down from his own in a mansion with more space than he’ll ever need. there’s nothing to indicate that it’s tommy’s. it doesn’t need it. it lingers in the back of tubbo’s mind, flitting to the front every so often whenever he passes by it. whenever the sunset catches his eye just so or he sees an animal that tommy would surely become attached to and forgets that he isn’t there with him. then he remembers, and then he feels very weird. but those empty moments pass by quickly, and the room is forgotten once again.
one night, he receives news from a prison. the empty room is all he can think about.
for the next couple of days, he has a routine. he wakes up in the morning. he puts on his jacket, his old, nearly forgotten red bandanna. he goes to tommy’s room. and he makes. he makes a bed, an enderchest, a nightstand. he puts up torches, hastily sews together some curtains for the windows. and the whole time, all he’s thinking is i need to clean this place up for when tommy gets back. when tommy gets out of that prison, he’s going to need a place to stay.
ranboo contributes one thing to all this. alliums in a pot. he sets it down on the nightstand as his husband lugs a chest into place. tubbo looks at the flowers, then up at him.
“make sure you write that down, bossman. can’t forget to water them.”
there’s no one to see it but us. you do know that, right? ranboo thinks. but he can’t shake the energy in the room for long enough to speak: it is frantic and heavy with years of shared history that he’s not in. and as one of tubbo’s hands raises to fix his crooked bandanna, he realizes that he will never understand this, that not even he can ever fully get tubbo’s decorations for a dead boy.
he will never see this the same way his husband does. he’s in the room but he isn’t really in it at all. and though he can barely see tubbo’s eyes from behind his bangs, he knows that they are definitely ringed with dark circles. so he just pulls out his memory book and nods.
and tubbo keeps working. he hangs photos on the wall. photos of them on the bench, of henry the cow, of everyone in their l’manberg uniforms. he actually finds an old l’manberg flag, and hangs that up as well. but the second it’s on the wall, something in him is pulled out of place, and he starts really thinking for the first time in hours. he snaps out of the working fog and everything comes into focus: the too-pristine bed, the photos of times and things long gone, the flowers that would look better on a grave, the flag of a dead country at the center of it all. he starts thinking that it looks less like a room and more like a memorial.
he takes the flag down. he puts his bandanna away. he doesn’t go into that room for weeks. he stops building furniture and starts building a grave. and his husband waters the alliums every day.
then tommy comes back, and the room becomes bearable again. but it stays empty. tubbo never mentions it to tommy: he knows it’s there, to some extent. if he wants to come, he will. sometimes, tubbo sits in the room to think. pulls his old bandanna out of the very bottom of his enderchest and fidgets with it. some days, it offers a strange sort of comfort. but others, it leaves him feeling emptier than when he came in.
time will go on, and some things will stay the same: ranboo will keep watering the flowers, tubbo will spend long moments sitting on that unused bed. and others won’t: soon, they’ll finally move into the mansion. michael will crawl up and down the stairs, guests will come visit and fill the echoey halls with laughter, and they’ll have more space than they’ll know what to do with. more than that, they’ll have a home that was built just for them, a place that is truly theirs. but all the space will stay empty and none of the guests will ever stay and dust will start to settle over old, worn pictures and shoddy, handmade curtains. maybe tubbo will ask his best friend to come fill some of that space. maybe not. it doesn’t matter either way.
there is a room for tommy in the mansion. it is empty.