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Tubbo sits on the edge of the hospital bed containing the man who both rebuilt and razed his home (and threatened to kill him, too—but many people have done that) and says, “Hey, Dream.”
Dream, bound in so many bandages that any kind of physical restraint would’ve seemed like overkill, lifts his eyes to Tubbo. “Hi,” he croaks, his voice rasping out of his horribly mangled throat. Only some of those injuries come from the potion overdose. The rest comes from the hand-shaped bruises latticing his neck like a gruesome noose. “Are you… here to kill me?”
“I’m still thinking about it,” Tubbo says honestly. It probably wouldn’t stick, not while they’re in the safe haven of Noxcrew’s oversight, but it’s tempting nonetheless. He looks down at the cup of ice chips that was shoved into his hands at some point, brows furrowed. He vaguely remembers someone telling him it was okay to give the patient one, if he wanted to. “Are you going to kill me?”
In his peripheral, he sees Dream close his eyes. A long, labored inhale drags in through his teeth. “I’m still… still thinking about it,” he says, between breaths.
Tubbo wonders what else he’s thinking of. For the first time in months, he can read clearly the exhaustion on Dream’s face. The pain, the cracked resolve, the bitter embers of defeat.
He can read the lack of regret just as easily.
“Do you still think it was worth it?”
“Yes,” is Dream’s immediate response. His fingers twitch, closing into a fist—Tubbo’s heart jackhammers up to a dizzying pace in his chest, nearly strangling him with remembered panic, and he doesn’t even register sliding off the bed and shifting into a more defensive position until he bumps into one of the plastic chairs someone left pushed up against the bed—but Dream is wounded and broken and still, too weak to even rip out the IV in his wrist.
Tubbo has had months to force himself to move on.
(Dream has had months to marinate in the consequences of his actions. They stain his skin in blood and scabs, unhealed, infected, a thousand ailments without a cure.)
Tubbo sits in the uncomfortable plastic chair, hand tightening on the plastic cup. The ice might’ve been meant for Dream, but it’s Tubbo’s now. He takes out a piece and crunches it between his teeth, loudly, to break the oppressive silence.
“I liked L’Manburg,” Tubbo says when the crunch gets no response, just to see the utter loathing flicker across Dream’s expression. It’s a terrifying look on him, but a familiar one. Better than the pain. And it keeps Tubbo feeling… like this is right. This is better. “I’m not—that doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I know how I was recruited.”
“Do you?” Dream murmurs, and turns his head away from where Tubbo is seated beside the bed. Everything in his slumped posture displays a sense of giving up, like he had when almost the whole server came pouring through that portal. It’s a weird look on him, and one that should make Tubbo feel good and strong. “Pand… Sapnap didn’t even know… how he ended up enforcing a… a rule that doesn’t exist.”
No stealing, no griefing, no going to the End. Not once had there been a ban on potion-making or cleric brewery. Tubbo had been given a light tap on the wrist, once, for trying to abuse the peculiarities of the world for his own benefit, but nobody had ever been scolded for potions.
Tubbo remembers Tommy echoing Wilbur’s claims, that they were oppressed and lesser because they weren’t allowed to craft potions. He remembers playing along to something—it’s a blurry memory now, but he thinks, he thinks…
“I think it was fun,” Tubbo says. “It didn’t make sense, but we let it happen anyway, because it was fun.” He remembers it clearly: the taste of rebellion, of independence, was so sweet in the summer heat. Wilbur’s need to make something his own, to make a story, was infectious. Even if it meant carving out the server’s peace and replacing it with dynamite and short fuses. Especially if it meant they could prove themselves greater than even the admin, than even the people who came before.
They didn’t know yet, the way that Philza always had, that Wilbur loves to destroy what he creates, loves more to see it burn and than to watch it flourish.
“Fun,” Dream echoes, muffled by the pillow. He makes a sound that might have been a laugh, but it shakes his frame like a sob, and he twists his fingers into the sheets. Tubbo surreptitiously scoots his chair a few centimeters away. “Yeah. It was… fun. Hunting my friends. Losing my family.”
Tubbo says, “That’s your fault.” It comes off more defensive than he means it to.
Dream says nothing.
“You know it’s your fault. And,” Tubbo says, picking up steam, “you know you’re just going to do it again. Because you’re awful, and you do awful things, and you know it’s awful but you do it anyway.”
“To bring my server together again,” Dream says, hoarse but level, “I would have done anything.”
What he means: I would have done worse.
Tubbo doesn’t flinch. He feels the plastic cup crumple up in his hand a little, sharp edges jabbing into his palm, and he says, “I hate you.”
“Okay,” Dream says, the same way he had when Tommy had called him a monster. Not with resignation, or anger, just… acceptance. Like it’s an ultimatum he’d come to terms with long ago.
Suddenly, Tubbo’s seized by another memory, of a claustrophobic box and an ally who stalled for just over two minutes before pulling the trigger anyway, the helpless acceptance that something bad must happen, and the uselessness of it all.
Tubbo has spent countless nights with starbursts painted on the back of his eyelids, wondering why Techno hadn’t just pointed the crossbow at the others to begin with if he was going to kill them afterward, wondering if the quaver of stress in his voice was worth the life Tubbo lost to the hungry, faulty server they lived on.
So what if he hadn’t known, if none of them had really realized how broken the server was before it forbade Wilbur from respawning.
He wasn’t supposed to have been hurt.
“You didn’t have to be a monster,” bursts out of Tubbo’s chest before he can think better of it. “You didn’t have to be. This isn’t a, a fairytale story, Dream, you didn’t have to—to do what you did. You chose to. You wanted to.”
“You know what I want,” says Dream. He shifts, fabric rustling, and Tubbo’s fingers close over nothing as he thinks about his netherite axe and armor and weapons. All he has is a stupid plastic cup. “I thought it would’ve worked. It was the only thing that… that would’ve worked.”
Tubbo doesn’t believe that. He refuses to. It hadn’t worked, after all. “Why couldn’t you have just let us—”
“Ruin everything?”
“—live in peace, after,” Tubbo says. “New L’Manburg never hurt anybody, Tommy wasn’t hurting anybody.”
Dream’s eyes narrow, and there’s real anger in them, for all that it fails to translate into his body language. “The Butcher Army,” he says, very precisely, enunciating every syllable.
“That doesn’t count.”
“Doesn’t it, now,” Dream says, a facsimile of a smile on his lips. He doesn’t elaborate, but he doesn’t have to; Tubbo has long heard from Ranboo in the soft of night about Techno’s list of grievances, about emeralds filling Tubbo’s pockets and the armor filling out the resistance, about Techno’s condition of anarchy that everyone assumed could be overwritten, that Techno thought was still a conversation to be had.
Ranboo still chose Tubbo over them, despite all that. He still came home to Tubbo and Michael in Snowchester, and never so much as looked askance in his direction.
Tubbo… thinks about a burger shop, and the first time their loyalties had truly been divided. But he’d only done it because it felt right, coming to arms again, butting heads with someone over something so small.
The Butcher Army isn’t like that. It doesn’t count. Tubbo doesn’t regret it. Can’t, because Techno had been a threat anyway, and the execution had been the only way, and besides, it hadn’t worked.
(Dream doesn’t regret it. Can’t, because Tommy had been a threat anyway, and the exile had been the only way—)
(Quackity doesn’t regret it. Can’t, because Dream had been a threat anyway, and torture—)
(Tubbo feels nauseous.)
“It doesn’t, and besides, it doesn’t have anything to do with Tommy,” Tubbo says, stiffly.
“Good to know that George’s house is so easy for you to forget,” Dream says, low, bordering on a hiss.
“You can’t say anything about George’s feelings,” Tubbo retorts. “Everyone heard you strip him of kingship.”
“And that I don’t value my friends at all, apparently,” Dream says, rolling his eyes. Another laugh bubbles up in his throat, morphing into a coughing fit as it hits his mouth. By the time it subsides, all of that fury has been drained away, and he barely meets Tubbo’s gaze. “I left my team, and they left me, and Sapnap watched me lose two lives and told me—”
Dream cuts himself off. His breathing rattles noisily in his chest as he catches his breath.
“It’s fine,” he says, at length. “I don’t have any attachments.”
“That’s really pitiful,” Tubbo says. Lacking loved ones and loved things isn’t a strength. It’s just sad. “And it’s not even true! You’re obsessed about attachments.”
Dream doesn’t respond, for a moment. And then he says, “You know, since I collapsed turing Parkour Tag, I wonder if I can just—”
He lifts a hand, and Tubbo moves so quickly he practically teleports to the room exit.
Suddenly, lines of code sprawl open at Dream’s fingertips. An admin’s console flickers to life, pale letters glitching through the language of the End before settling into something legible.
Tubbo flattens himself against the door, torn between getting the hell out of dodge and killing him before he can do whatever he’s going to do.
“Tommy was in here, earlier,” Dream says without inflection, but quickly, rushing through the words like he wants to forget them as soon as they leave his mouth. “With Scott, and Noxite, and… others.”
“I know,” Tubbo says, past the taste of iron in his mouth. It’s why he’s here at all; Tommy hadn’t told him anything at all before Philza and some of the other swept him away, fussing about one thing or another.
“We agreed it wasn’t working. That it should end. Scott said he could set something up… some contacts.” Dream waves his hand, and Tubbo sees just a glimpse of his name— Tubbo_ —before the console dissipates. “Another world. For you all. With something new. I don’t know.”
Oh.
“A new start,” Dream says. He sounds tired, and also like he’s being held at arrowpoint, somehow. “A new beginning. An origin story you can control.”
“You can’t just—”
“Dream SMP is closed,” Dream says. He does turn away now, and Tubbo finds himself staring at the unfamiliar nicks in Dream’s ear.
The plastic cup hits the floor. It spills cool water over the polished tiles, but he isn’t there to watch it.
The door swings shut behind him as he leaves, closing out one story—left incomplete, but maybe for the better.