Work Text:
This is the problem:
Your uniform is clean.
It’s been six months since L’Manberg died, and you still toss your uniform in with the rest of the wash. It’s been six months since L’Manberg died and only one year since it went free and you still haven’t let your President’s uniform get dirty.
You put it on in the morning and look in the mirror. You push your hair back with some gel. The smell of it makes your trachea go tight. You stare at the person in the glass.
He doesn’t look like you. You flick the mirror. So does he.
You feel empty.
(This is your problem:
You’ve never been the type of guy to give up easily.
Some things are not made to be scavenged. You did your best vulture impersonation regardless. Sometimes all a vulture can take is the marrow. It can barely sustain itself, and this little bit of food is not worth the effort, but it picks it out anyways.
Sometimes the forest is on fire, and the vulture is nearly burnt alive, but it still won’t just fucking give up.)
This is the problem:
Your ukulele is out of tune.
You take care of so little, these days. Your outpost is abandoned and dusty. Your bed is unmade. Your husband feeds your son when you cannot get out of bed, which is more days than it should be— than you have any right to.
Your ukulele is out of tune. So, for the first time in at least a month, you tune it.
Your predecessor taught you how to do this. Not the most recent. The first. The one who was dragged from perdition by the hand of the closest thing to a god you believe in.
(This is your problem:
It has been months since Tommy came back to life, and you think you are still grieving.
He is the only person you’ve lost since this started. It must be his fault that you still feel like a man in mourning.
But sometimes you don’t think you’re mourning a person at all. You think you are mourning an idea, mourning a past you will not get to have again. You think you are mourning the concept of the person you were a year ago.
You’re tired of the things that haunt you, of the mind you are stuck with. You do not want to be haunted. You do not want to hurt anymore.
A few weeks ago, you were digging through the shoe closet for your work boots when someone slammed a door. You became so desperate to be quiet you stopped breathing, and Ranboo found you a half-hour later, barely aware of where you were. You do not want to spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around landmines, barely avoiding disaster, footsteps dogged by the idea that anything could send you spiralling back into that feeling.
You do not want to be you anymore.)
This is the problem:
Nature is reclaiming your country.
You can’t be mad at it, not really. It’s nature. It’s taking back what it owns.
But you are mad. Your heart is stuck in your throat when you look at it, a fist wrapped tight around you. You hate what it looks like. You hate that you cannot stop looking.
(This is your problem:
You’re a scavenger. It doesn’t matter that moss has swallowed the corpse, you will try to get to it anyways.
“It’s mine,” you want to cry. “Give it back, let me have it. Stop taking what I love away from me!”
But you’re not an idiot. So, instead, you use the rocks as handholds, and slide down to a ledge.)
This is the problem:
The song comes easy.
You remember all the words. You have to look at nothing. They’re engraved on your bones, seared into your flesh, painted on the inside of your throat. You will never need to look for them.
This is all you were and all you are. At this point in your life, you have lived longer without it than with it. You have never stopped loving it.
You know the chords, even if your dexterity isn’t like it used to be.
It plays like a funeral dirge.
It might as well be.
(This is your problem:
You’ve never learned how to grieve right. That’s what happens, you suppose, in a world that does not let its people stay dead.
You never learn how to stop hoping, even when you shouldn’t.
You never know when something’s really dead. When you should stop trying to bring it back. When you should accept that it’s over, that it has been for a long time, now.)
This is the problem:
Your predecessor is alive, and he wants to speak to you.
You don’t want to talk to him. Your chest burns, itches. Your mouth feels dry.
“You rebuilt it?” he asks. There is a wonder to his voice.
“I can’t take much of the credit,” you say with a shrug. You wish the ghost were still here, that they could exist on the same plain. You want blue. You want it to drain your sadness until your hands are soaked through with indigo and you finally feel okay again.
“That’s my greatest achievement,” your former president says. “That I made something you loved that much.”
(This is your problem:
Your adolescence was built around the ideals of a crater. You don’t know what you have any more, now that you’ve let it die. Now that you’ve watched it fall so many times.
“I don’t think you’ll betray us,” Wilbur told you when you first became his spy— when he first sealed your fate. “Have you ever heard of the sunk cost fallacy, Tubbo?”)
This is the problem:
“I could have saved you,” he says.
And what you mean to say goes as follows:
“I know. I forgave you a long time ago, even if I can’t forget it. I’ve thought too much about the person I could have been if you did. We can’t linger on the past. I need to move on and I need you to do it too. I want to be free but I can’t be, not until you let me know that it’s not a big deal, that I should be over it. Tell me I’m better and then make me believe you.”
And what you say goes as follows.
“But you didn’t.”
(This is your problem:
Sometimes, the vulture has crawled into, through, and then out of a forest fire, just for some fucking bones, and it doesn’t need water, it just needs to be put down. Sometimes a thing is in so much pain that it’d be a mercy to kill it.
Sometimes, the vulture didn’t want the bones. Sometimes, someone set the vulture on fire, just because they thought it’d be fun to watch it burn.)
This is the problem:
Your predecessor knew you too well.
“Come to paradise,” he says, holding out his hand.
“It’s a revolution,” he’d said, a hundred years ago.
In all the time you knew him, he only lied to you once. You cannot take his word either way. You have known too much ache to put your heart in anyone’s hands.
In all the time you knew him, he only lied to you once. He told you that you would be safe.
(This is your problem:
The skeleton of your home will never leave you. The weight of your love will not stop hanging over it like a raincloud, and neither will the weight of your failure.
Your husband grabs your hand as the sob starts to build in the back of your throat.
“Are you sure?” he asks, always so gentle with you. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?”
You pull your hand away from him. “I think I just need to be alone right now.”
Some things cannot be scavenged. Sometimes, all there is to do is wail, because you are burned and scared and dying, and there is nothing left to save.)