Archive of Our Own

“ – who’s Michael? Why did he give me that?”

And, just like that, the world comes rushing back to Tubbo with a snap.

Technoblade is still standing in front of him, dressed down in a creamy-white peasant shirt instead of the gleaming netherite he’s usually wrapped up in – he’s shifting his weight from foot to foot, a hand creeping towards his hairline. Away from the weapons hanging from his waist, locked out of quick reach. His eyes are still flickering around Snowchester, which makes Tubbo’s chest seize – although now it feels more like spluttering, the constant coughing of a broken engine misfiring – but they return to Tubbo’s every time.

There’s something wet on his cheeks, stinging in the cold. He blinks.

“I just did a lot of emotional processing, sorry.” He’s still processing, he thinks. “Wait – how? How has this happened?”

“I don’t know – ”

“Why would Sam do this?”

The outburst makes Technoblade tense – and Tubbo tenses with him – but all he does is furrow his brow behind the reading glasses that sit on his nose, boar skull discarded and hanging next to the axe on his waist. There’s something heavy that sits behind his eyes, too, and Tubbo can hear the way it weighs down his voice. He resists the urge to let his hands stray for a weapon, knives tucked away, too small and brittle to do any real damage before the man could snap his wrists for the trouble. Technoblade’s trust in him is gossamer-thin on a good day, and Tubbo doesn’t want to give him a reason to go back on his word. Words are fragile – netherite armour and axes are not.

And today is a very, very bad day.

“I gave Ranboo, like, a full set of netherite – prop IV – he shouldn’t have been able to die! I don’t know why – I don’t even know why he was in the prison.”

Silently, privately, the part of Tubbo that still functions – that part that always does, rain or snow or dynamite hailing from the sky – agrees. Ranboo is kind, Ranboo is soft-hearted, Ranboo never picks fights with anyone. But Ranboo is dead and Technoblade is standing here in Snowchester with the news and a photograph of his son and confused-looking sympathy on his face. There’s no logical explanation. There never is.

Tubbo should be used to this feeling by now.

He isn’t.

The photograph sits thick and smooth between his fingers. Michael. Michael, Michael, Michael – he doesn’t have time for this, to sit around and feel sorry for himself, while his son is missing. Maybe dead, even. The thought makes him want to retch. It’s a thought he needs to start getting used to.

So he packs all thoughts of Ranboo into boxes, labelled and categorised, and shelves them away. Neat, tidy, practiced. Headspace free and clear, already drawing up string-linked connections in his mind’s eye, his brain settles onto its next task – Michael. Getting Michael home, whether that’s tucked safely into his bed or a too-small grave next to – next to his dad.

And Technoblade, the Blood God, Tubbo’s executioner and victim and the twice-destroyer of his country, is offering a hand in service.

(The selfish, stupid part of him quivers. It goes into boxes too, strangled to silence.)

He’d be a fool not to take it.

“Well,” Tubbo says, and Technoblade looks up – “do you want me to show you what this image is?”

“Boo?” Michael asks, bouncing up and down in his arms. He fits there like the missing piece of a puzzle, perfectly warm and comfortable and even putting up with the kisses that Tubbo can’t stop himself from pressing against his forehead. He’s gotten over his original upset, his brave little kiddo, stopped hiding his face in the fur of Tubbo’s jacket – which is good, because it stopped Tubbo from wanting to hide his face in Michael’s curls. Because for all Technoblade has helped him get his baby safe back into his arms, it just would have been a bit awkward to start hemming and hawing and hiding around the guy that’s killed him once and tried to repeat it at least twice since. Not good for the image. Not exactly intimidating.

(If Technoblade hasn’t made the connection yet – which Tubbo is coming to realise is actually painfully possible – well, Tubbo’s happy to use that time to scurry away and hole up in Snowchester, batten down the hatches, and not come out for the next ten years. Michael had better hope he enjoys homeschooling. Technoblade is being an awfully good spirit, just kind of staring at the wall awkwardly and mumbling something under his breath to himself, but who knows how long that’ll last.)

“No Boo,” Tubbo tells him, bonking his forehead against Michael’s. “We might not see Boo for a little while, bug.”

Michael huffs, pressing his little face into the crook of Tubbo’s neck.

“Want Boo,” he whines.

Me too, Tubbo quietly agrees.

But, then again. Stiff upper lip, Wilbur used to say. Tubbo can’t afford to cry, can’t afford to crack, because if he breaks down, he’s pretty sure it’s all over.

But a baby crying is kind of a different matter entirely.

Tubbo snaps awake – he’s always been a light sleeper, even if opening his eyes hurts and his head feels too heavy to lift from the pillow – to the sound of Michael’s sobs, distant from the attic but all-too-loud regardless. Michael’s taken to being back home better than Tubbo expected, honestly (maybe he’s just used to these escapades, which is a thought that makes Tubbo want to throw up), but he’s always struggled with sleeping through nights. He doesn’t know why. Maybe Sam’s fault. Maybe it was nighttime when Sam took him the first time, and maybe that’s what he remembers when the sun sets and night falls over the tundra – dark shadows, pines pointed like clawed fingers, and the midnight air biting at his cheeks.

Naturally, even though Tubbo has dodged the metaphorical bullet on passing down whatever has happened to his brain onto a biological kid, this place is hellbent on fucking up Michael anyway. Classic.

(Wilbur calls this the inevitability of fate, according to Ranboo – traces the stars with his spatula and explains how the burning lights above fucked them all over centuries before they were even born. Wilbur was always good for existential conversations like that. Midnight conversations lit by starlight, or shitty campfires on the colder nights. Limbo has apparently only made that better. Or worse. Tubbo might wonder what he’s like now, but realistically the answer is – disappointing, at best. So he doesn’t.

Tommy, though – he just shrugs and says that it fucking sucks, and then scoops Michael up from underneath the armpits and flings him around like a ragdoll, which doesn’t really address the issue but does make Michael stop crying and start huffing and giggling along with him in like, five minutes.)

He groans, pressing his face into the pillow, as if by squeezing his eyes shut the sound will go away – but it doesn’t, because of course it doesn’t, and Michael continues to wail. It’s not the first time he’s woken up in the middle of the night – not even the first time tonight, and Tubbo was the one who put him back to bed when he woke up a few hours ago, so he flings his arm out sideways to Ranboo’s side of the bed – 

And his hand falls onto a cold pillow.

Panic flares in his gut, sending him dizzy and upright – there’s an empty space, an empty space where his husband is supposed to be, and he’s already reaching for his comm before he remembers.

Ranboo’s dead. It’s not Ranboo’s turn to put Michael back to sleep, and it won’t ever be Ranboo’s turn to put Michael back to sleep again, because Ranboo’s dead.

He sinks down, down, until his head is sinking back into his pillow, staring up at the ceiling. Tubbo had known, obviously, when Technoblade broke the news, that he’s a single parent now. He was – maybe there were other things occupying his mind in that moment, other things that aren’t planning and productive and thinking about the future of his child beyond find him, bring him home, but it’s true. He hasn’t filed the paperwork yet, but that doesn’t make him any less of a widow, and it doesn’t make his husband any less cold and dead. And it doesn’t make his baby stop crying either.

Michael needs his dad. There’s no one else here. He needs to get up. Tubbo needs to get up. Michael’s cries are ringing in his ears, he can hear the sobbing, and the sound still feels like someone reaching into his chest and plucking out his heartstrings one by one. But he just – 

He just can’t get up.

He just lays there, hopeless and pathetic, pathetic, the sound of his son crying out for comfort ringing from upstairs and arm still resting on Ranboo’s cold, cold pillow. Sinking into soft sheets and pillows like something that’s died, curled up in a bed that’s too big for him.

Because here is the secret that he keeps under lock and key and rolls of duct tape, turning itself over in his mind as he stares holes into the ceiling, silent – this hurts. It bleeds, slow and sluggish, because thick skin still holds blood and just provides more flesh to dig a knife into. When he thinks about Ranboo, it’s as if his memory grabs the knife and twists it deeper into his gut.

He can’t afford to stall, can’t afford to stop. Blood and tears aren’t currency here – depending on who you ask they’re fake, crocodile tears, or painfully real and worthless and a waste of time, a waste of space. Better for nothing than oil in his engines, something to keep him moving. He can’t stop, because there is always something – someone – breathing down the back of his neck, sickly warm and too heavy against his throat, and if he stops the noose only serves to tighten. The gallows are awfully fucking lonely, he’s realised. The only thing that’s changed is that where once the noose was held by Dream, by Schlatt, by Phil and by Technoblade, it rests in his hands now instead.

He doesn’t like the weight of it. Even lying on his back he can feel the phantom sensation of braided rope between his fingers, rough and tearing at his fingernails. Every time he stops and thinks, remembers, feels that lump of tears start to rise at the back of his throat and the gears in his head stall and that knife dig deeper in his stomach, the noose pulls itself tighter around his neck. A dozen voices echo in his head – good soldiers don’t cry, we have to keep up a brave face for Wilbur, don’t I pay you too much to bitch? The country is yours now, Tubbo, and if they see you falter it will shatter and break in your hands. Michael’s worked himself up, he’s worried about you – go wash your face, I’ll be there with you in a minute.

None of that matters anymore. It matters more than anything. It doesn’t matter because he’s alone, he’s alone now, and because he’s alone it’s quiet and silent like the inside of a casket and he can hear Michael crying but there’s no one here, there’s no one around to help him care for Michael, so who’s gonna judge him if he lies here awhile longer?

The thought lands with a hit of nausea in his gut – your fucking son, Tubbo. Your fucking son is the one that’s gonna judge you. Maybe not now, maybe not while he’s still small enough to scoop into Tubbo’s arms and too young to know how cruel this place is to people like him – young enough that he still thinks his dad is out on a mining trip, because Tubbo can’t bear telling him the truth yet, but he will. When he realises what he lost, and what he got stuck with instead. Tubbo isn’t the parent who picks out the clothes Michael likes best, or can cook Michael’s favourite dinners. Beef stroganoff, that’s his favourite, and Tubbo could never make it quite right. That was Ranboo.

And now Ranboo’s dead.

No one’s going to warble lullabies to Michael in Ender anymore. There will be no more bowls of beef stroganoff, made just the way Michael likes it. There will be no more cups of tea steeped with spoonfuls of honey left out on the kitchen counter, no more stupid comm messages. No one who huffs at Tubbo’s bedhead until he lets them run a brush through it, no one who stays awake in silence for hours when he can’t sleep after a nightmare, no one to rest their head on top of his whenever he looks for something in the pantry because Tubbo always used to complain but Ranboo thought it was fucking hilarious. All of it, emptied out – abandoned cups and bowls set aside to gather dust.

(Selfish, selfish, selfish, his mind tuts, playing with threads of braided rope between its fingers. You were selfish, you were selfish, and you ruin everything you touch. Tommy, L’Manberg, Ranboo. Haven’t you learned by now? He’s radioactive in more ways than one – these things weren’t meant for him, and he took them anyway, and he burned them out from the insides and now they’re gone. His baby is crying, his baby is wailing, but part of his mind – the selfish part, the one taken up with Ranboo’s death, hovers in heavy silence.)

He counts the grain in the ceiling above, and his mind whirrs so loudly that it hurts. He wants to be angry with someone – with Technoblade, for letting Ranboo anywhere near Pandora. With Sam, for running him through. With himself for letting all those late nights and absences go on and on and on until Ranboo ended up in the prison, and all he did about it was sit around twiddling his fucking thumbs and wait for Technoblade to come tell him that his husband had fucking died. Still and stalled and useless. He needs – he needs something productive, something to set that heavy feeling of charcoal in his stomach alight and put it to work. Build a grave. Kick another one of Sam’s stupid robots down a cliff. Pick up Project Dreamcatcher again and drop a nuke on whoever caused this, and anyone who so much as fucking breathes in the direction of his family again. They’d deserve it. They’d fucking deserve it.

But he can’t do a thing. He doesn’t have the energy. He can’t even bring himself to get out of bed when his kid is wailing his little lungs out.

He just sits in this cabin, wasting away, living off of the casserole that Foolish left for them in the fridge and the knowledge that he’s gonna have to break the news to Michael someday soon that his dad is gone and he’s not coming back.

He can’t do this by himself. He doesn’t even know he’s going to look after Michael, not properly, not for years and years and years by himself. He wasn’t supposed to do this by himself, that was – that was the point. That was the point of splitting taxes – besides exploiting stupid legal loopholes for fun – that was the point of building a massive fuck-off mansion, that was the point. It was – it was a joke, and then it was for Michael, and then Tubbo took too much and it started being for himself as well, which was clearly too fucking much because – fuck, he was just lonely. Pathetic, and lonely, wasting away – because Tommy hated him or at least he fucking should have because he flinches at raised hands and shrinks back from raised voices like he never did before. Tubbo did that. He did that to Tommy and somehow he was still fucking selfish enough to ask for more, he was selfish enough to ask Ranboo not to leave, he was selfish enough to say yes when Ranboo proposed their stupid little marriage and to write vows and make rings and all that other stupid domestic shit.

When he wrote – when he said til death do us part, it was supposed to be a joke. It was a joke. It wasn’t supposed to be real. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Not to Ranboo. Gods a-fucking-bove, was he writing a fucking death sentence instead of his vows and nobody told him?

He should be used to this feeling by now. Alone is Tubbo’s natural state of being. Alone is when his little universe is in equilibrium. Made up of binary code – just him, one, alone, zero.

(Alone came before a stack of blaze rods, ones he left neatly arranged in the boot of Wilbur and Tommy’s van. Not alone somehow managed to withstand three explosions, two suicide attempts, a cabin in the snow and a ring on his finger. What he’s learning, slow and stupid, is that alone is the inevitability – if he asked Wilbur, maybe he would say written in the stars. Which is reason number, like, five that he doesn’t talk to Wilbur these days.)

It’s too quiet. Too cold. Tubbo used to read about – read about fantastical shit like the heat death of the universe, the big freeze, when the universe throws itself so far out of motion that all the starts and moons and planets die, split down the middle like fission til it blows and there’s nothing but dead ice and space. There’s nothing alive in here, no one next to him with a heartbeat – he’s alive, he knows he’s alive, but he feels dead. Even though he’s not, he’s not dead, Ranboo’s dead and Tommy died too and Tubbo just doesn’t unless someone can make it into a spectacle, unless it’s something he can bite down on his lip for and pretend to forget about and pick up the broken pieces to rebuild. There are no pieces to pick up here, no body, just a flimsy fucking photo that can crease and rip and tear in careless hands and what is he even supposed to fucking do with that?

That’s the question always, forever – what do I do with this? It rolls around his head like thunder, crashing and rising in time with his heartbeat – slow and loud and heavy and lethargic, clinging to life with fingernails bitten down to the quick, taking up permanent presence in the back of his brain. Runs on loop like a broken record. What do I do with this? What do I do with this? It echoes back at him, carving itself into the broken coffins he sits in, staring out at the blown-up remains of docks and waters and pillars that stretch into the sky and hotels left abandoned and the cold, cold pillow he clenches to his chest because he’s alone and lonely and he doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t ever know what to do, and he’s alone alone alone alone – 

And he – 

He needs to get Michael.

He needs to get Michael.

He comes back to himself, still half-floating, letting his heartbeat roll like thunder through his body. For a brief moment that’s all he feels, all that’s tethering him to the real world.

Tubbo less climbs out of bed, more rolls, barely catching himself on unsteady feet. That mechanical feeling washes over him, cool and comforting, locking away that part of him that keeps screaming – another box on the shelf – and guiding his feet into steady autopilot, instinctively weaving their way towards the ladder up to Michael’s room. Dimly, he notices that the house is quieter now. Even Michael’s pieced together how useless he is right now, apparently. Doesn’t need him. That should be a good thing. Reassuring at least. It doesn’t feel like it. Selfish fucking bastard, he is.

“Michael,” Tubbo calls softly, swallowing the lump in his throat, unlatching the trapdoor and pushing it open – you have to lean against the hinges to open it properly, otherwise it squeaks and he doesn’t want to wake Michael up any more than he already has – 

And his husband sits in the middle of Michael’s room.

Blissful, impossible – Ranboo faces away from him, curled up cross-legged around a sleepy Michael, clicking and warbling under his breath as a gentle, clawed finger lifts to tuck their son’s hair out of his face as he dozes. There’s just enough of his face visible – a moon-sliver – to see the small smile carving its way across his face, the gentleness in his cloudy red eye. It feels like staring into a painting, a reflection across a puddle – that if Tubbo steps across it, if he breathes, the mirage will wobble and fade and take Ranboo and Michael with it.

And yet, Ranboo flinches at the sound of the gasp he takes without thinking and turns towards him, smile lifting into a grin – and his eyes, red-green and blank, light up like Christmas lights when he sees him.

“ Tubbo!” His voice is still clear as a bell. “What’s up? It’s kinda late, man.”

His mouth is dry – his tongue is heavy in his mouth. He can’t speak. He can’t speak. Ranboo – somehow – watches him expectantly, tail flicking in a lazy arc across the floor.

He’s here. He’s here, in Snowchester, in Michael’s bedroom, with Michael curled up in his arms – he’s here, and that’s impossible, but – 

Tubbo’s eyes drop.

Ranboo is covered in blood.

Tubbo feels the heaviness in his hands, the dizziness in his head before he really registers his heartrate picking up speed – blood rushing past his ears, the steady thundering sound dragging itself out of lethargy, thudding against the inside of his head quick and unsteady like a set of particularly enthusiastic hammers.

“Technoblade said you were dead,” he manages.

“Uh, yeah,” Ranboo says, gesturing to the slash across his chest with a free hand. Oh fucking gods, that’s deep. It’s deep and spilling red and green in thick rivulets down Ranboo’s chest and it’s dripping onto Michael’s head , oh fucking gods. Tubbo’s seen a lot of gory shit – the sloppy remains of his face when he looked in the mirror the first time post-firework, tended to the half-healed aftermath of the meeting between Quackity’s face and the Axe of Peace – but this is somehow worse. This is worse than all of it. “Felt that was – felt that was a little obvious, but… yes! Hello! I’m dead.”

Upon closer look – he doesn’t want to look, but doing things he really doesn’t want to do is kind of second nature by now – Ranboo’s little suit jacket situation is gone, swapped out for something black and white and ruffly and smeared with blood, rolling down his chest. His eyes are blank, hollow – there’s a tear in the membrane across his ear, and thick lines from the corners of his eyes to his jaw. Lines that weren’t there before.

(Somewhere, in the back of his head, he can hear a box crash to the floor.)

“Hey, Bee, don’t cry,” Ranboo croons, shifting over with a grace that shouldn’t be possible, half sprawled out on the floor and Michael tucked under one arm. He makes more of those stupid fretting noises, and a thumb comes up to brush against the ice-cold feeling biting at the corners of his eyes. He can’t feel it. He can’t feel anything besides the chill on his cheeks and somewhere, distantly, his heart being ripped from his chest cavity. “Hey, hey, hey now, cheer up, I’m okay, okay?” 

There’s blood cascading down his chest and he’s dead.

(His shoulders are open, and the arm he holds Michael in forms a soft curve, balancing Michael’s weight neatly against his chest. The ease of his smile, the lazy stirring of the tip of his tail – it’s genuine. It’s all genuine.)

He’s going to throw up. There’s something thick lodged in the back of his throat, and his skin is bubbling and flushing ice-cold and he can’t even feel the wooden boards beneath him because his hands are so numb and he’s gonna be sick all over the fucking nursery floor.

“You’re not cheering up,” Ranboo observes brightly. “You can’t – you can’t talk right now?” Tubbo doesn’t even have it in him to nod. “Here, I – ”

And he reaches out to take Tubbo’s wrist, to pull his twitching hand away from where it goes to twist and scratch at raised skin (so familiar, it makes him want to be sick again), but his hand passes through Tubbo’s – clips through, little more than a chill breeze across his knuckles, pale skin sweeping through his own.

Ranboo frowns. “Oh. Oh, oh no.”

Oh. Oh, oh.

“Oh,” Tubbo says, frenzy setting into – into something. Ranboo looks up – that mechanical feeling loosens his tongue, keeps him running, keeps him going even as everything but his voicebox locks up and shakes. “This is all totally fake.”

No, because all the pieces slot into place, duh – he’s in denial. Of course he is. First stage of grief. He knows that. Ranboo was the one who made him step through all that when Tommy died. He already knew that. He laughs, and it tastes like bitter fucking irony.

“Tubbo,” the hallucination whines, folding itself cross-legged. For a figment of his imagination – because that’s what it is, it’s some hallucination his brain has built to battle the grief knocking his head sideways – it’s awfully, awfully real. Right down to the freckles across the bridge of his nose, and the way his right ear twitches downwards as he frowns. It’s weird, and too familiar, and weird and he hates it, it feels like he’s getting bullied by his own stupid fucking brain. Sounds about right. “Come on. I just wanna talk, we don’t have to do this whole, freakout thing – ”

“No, no, this is like – this is denial, man.” Tubbo settles himself a bit more comfortably on the top of the ladder, hands folded on top of each other and elbows resting on the boarded floor. Pain shoots through his elbows, like a key into a lock – and it settles him, knowing the answer to all this, even if his head still feels like it’s drifting sixty miles above Snowchester. “I’m making shit up again, ‘cause living in this house has driven me crazy finally.” He hums. “More fun than I thought it would be, honestly.”

“I thought this would happen less now,” it pouts – and really, with an attitude like that it must be fake, because that’s the exact type of shit Ranboo would get on his case for saying. “Tubbo, come on, you’re not gonna listen to your h – ”

“Oh, absolutely not.” Tubbo cuts it off before it can say – say that word, because he already feels dizzy and sick and hearing it might actually just push him over the edge. His nails, chilled ice-cold, catch on the raised scars on the back of his knuckles and it hurts just like it does when he’s awake but he doesn’t wake up, and the not-Ranboo is still sitting right in front of him – hollow eyes crinkled up, making this sad keening noise. His legs are burning from standing on ladder rungs, his face is stinging with cold, and he’s not waking up. “You’re not even real.”

“I am so real,” the hallucination whines.

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

“Am not.”

“Are too,” and it shifts Michael – another hallucination? Another mirage? – around in its arms, holds him out to Tubbo. “Here. Michael can see me, can’t you bug?”

Michael nods enthusiastically, reaching his arms out to Tubbo. His heart twists, but instead he clambers another rung upwards and cranes his neck to see – an empty racecar bed, blankets strewn over the sides. Where Michael should be, if he’s asleep. Where he isn’t. His heart pounds.

This tiny little vision, arms outstretched, falters a little – he tucks his chin towards his chest, and a little frown crosses his face. He looks so familiar.

But then again, so does – so does this thing pretending to be Ranboo.

“Bee…?” Michael mumbles, wide eye rapidly filling with tears. He reaches out a small hand and – and Tubbo should step back before it slips through his cheek and the illusion shatters and it clicks that he’s all alone again, but he can feel the warmth of Michael’s skin and the smooth keratin at the tips of the fingers on his cheek. It’s there. It’s real.

His arms move of their own accord – he reaches out before he can stop himself, because it’s Michael, and Michael smiles and climbs into his arms and squirms around in his lap til he’s comfortable. His head is resting on Tubbo’s chest, warm against the chill of the night. He can feel the shallow breaths Michael takes, the steady rise and fall.

Michael is real. If nothing else Michael is real, and safe, cuddled up in his arms and poking at his cheeks with his little fingers.

“Are you alright? Let me try that again.” It’s not – it’s not nice, but it’s not unkind either, and when Tubbo looks up Ranboo – whatever it is – has a fond smile on his face. “Hi, Tubbo. I missed you.”

“How,” he bundles Michael closer in his arms, tucking him under his chin until he squeaks in concern, “Ranboo, how are you even here?”

“Technically, it’s Ghostboo now, but like – how I’m in this realm, I don’t know. Got lucky! Don’t really wanna think about it, ‘cause who cares.” He stretches out into his stomach like a cat, nesting his chin on his hands a foot away from the trapdoor. Cold radiates off of him. Tubbo resists the urge to shudder. “Snowchester, I just wanted to come see you. I can just – I can just do that now, without sneaking off? I can just show up and nobody cares! And, I missed Michael.”

He reaches out a ghostly finger to tap Michael on the nose – Michael giggles, eyes fluttering shut, and Tubbo pulls him closer to his chest. The ghost frowns. “Come on, man.”

It dawns on him – Ranboo is looking him in the eyes. That’s what looks so wrong. He looks the same – so close to the same, he has the same nose and the same freckles that glow in the lowlight and the same crease in his cheek when he smiles, the one he’d always complain about whenever Tubbo poked at it because being a husband is kind of like being a professional annoyance anyway, but the bags under his eyes are gone. He should be happy about that. He should. But his face looks wrong without them, like something’s been carved out. His eyes still crinkle up at the edges when he smiles, but they’re blank and hollow. Chest-up, he could be alive – but he’s not. He’s not.

He is staring into the face of utmost certainty that there is no mistake, there’s no lie or fuckup or just plain stupid miscommunication – his husband is dead.

The face is staring back at him, and it is smiling. It opens its mouth to speak.

He is being haunted by the ghost of his dead husband. Ranboo is dead, he is not gone – this is Tubbo’s new reality, and he just adjust accordingly.

“How did it happen?”

Ranboo shuts his mouth with a noticeable lack of a click. “Hm?”

It’s morbid and it’s awful, but a part of him – some part of him has to know, the same way you have to find a body before you declare someone dead. It’s not like Technoblade would lie about something like this, he knows that, but the body’s just gone somewhere and he won’t ever be able to bury him probably and hearing it from his ghost is going to be – it’s going to be the closest he gets to a body, solid and real beneath his fingers, what the gears in his head demand to keep moving. Blood and bone crushed into oil.

“How did you die?”

“Oh, Sam.” He’s nonchalant. His tail flicks absently. “I was in the prison – he kind of just nabbed me, I guess? Never got an explanation for that one. Anyway, Techno broke me out, and then he broke Dream out, and he broke Connor out too because he was just kind of there for some reason, I don’t know. He whined a lot. And then Sam saw us getting away and was like oh, can’t let them do that or whatever so he just grabbed me to make Dream come back, and he didn’t – ‘cause, duh, right – and. Well.” He mimes a slash across his neck, tongue poking out the side of his mouth.

It should make sense, is the first thing Tubbo thinks. It should make logical sense. Sam is cutthroat, Sam is ruthless, Sam has let two of his friends die now to keep Dream in the prison (and failed both times, but it’s not like Tubbo’s counting) and kidnapped his kid as a joke and it should make sense, but it doesn’t. There’s a thread out of place, something pulling at the stitching.

“Why the fuck would Dream want you as a hostage?” Tubbo asks.

That causes the flicking of Ghostboo’s tail and the swinging of his feet to still, staring downwards – that same concentrated furrow in his brow, the way he chews on his lip as he thinks, and it’s so familiar that for a moment something in Tubbo’s chest just aches – and then the moment’s over, and he’s back to beaming.

“Who knows, man.” He looks carefree. That’s how he looks, without the bags carved underneath his eyes – he looks carefree. “I’m just happy to be here.”

It bothers him, tugs at something deep in the back of his mind. Something boxed up and untouched for months, months, left to gather dust back when L’Manberg was more than a hole in the ground and Tommy was less than – back when he and Tommy not talking was different, was bigger than it is now.

He hates it. But he hates all of this. That doesn’t make it any less real, less true, less something else he has to live with.

Ranboo is – he’s not tired, not as wound up. He smiles, and Tubbo knows he means it. It’s not brittle, stretched tight at the edges. It’s real.

“...okay."

“Okay?” Even Ranboo – Ghostboo, he supposes – looks kind of surprised.

“Okay.” And he clambers upward, throwing his legs up onto the floorboards, finally breaching the threshold of Michael’s room. It’s jerky, as much as he tries not to jostle the sleepy child in his arms – but Michael just snorts softly, pressing his nose to Tubbo’s shoulder in a quiet snore. “It’s late. We have to put Michael back to bed.”

Ghostboo stares up at him from the floor – not appraising, but certainly thinking – but doesn’t press the argument. Death might have taken memory from Ghostbur, and fuck knows what from Tommy, but it evidently didn’t rob Ghostboo of his common sense given that he stays near-silent while Tubbo tucks Michael back into bed. Mostly asleep, thank the gods above. Michael reaches out as Tubbo puts him back to bed, arm stretching softly over the covers, but a few whispered goodnights and a kiss on the forehead do wonders for getting him to crawl under the blankets and stay there.

Eventually – namely when his legs are numb from kneeling by the bed, and when Michael’s breathing has evened out into a steady snore – Tubbo tears himself from Michael’s bedside and crawls back to the trapdoor in silence. He sees Ghostboo out of the corner of his eye, and it takes him a second too long to realise that he’s hovering – floating just barely above Michael’s bed, high enough to observe without keeping him awake.

His gut rolls. He’s aware – thank you, Tommy, for explaining at-length how emotionally illiterate he is – that means… that means something. Resentment, maybe, but not of Michael, for Michael. The spectre hovering above his bed is a pale echo of what he – what Michael should have, and doesn’t anymore.

Poor fucking imitation, he thinks.

Or maybe not. He’s not exactly great at the feelings business, anyway.

He closes the trapdoor softly, because duh, sleeping child – but that upside-down feeling clings to his gut. He’s not going to sleep well tonight.

“Tubbo,” a soft voice interjects – “Tubbo, I know you don’t like, you don’t like to talk about things, but – ”

Tubbo resolutely does not want to think about the lack of a creak behind him as Ghostboo leaves the nursery, the silence that accompanies Ghostboo’s sudden appearance. So he doesn’t.

“We did talk, we talked just then.” When he turns at his bedroom door, Ghostboo is floating behind him – fucking floating, properly now, curled up like a cat midair. “You’re dead now. End of story. Goodnight, Ghostboo.”

And then he shuts the door in the ghost’s face. And retrieves the quilt from where he’d kicked it off the bed.

“Obviously not end of story, I’m still here,” Ghostboo replies, floating through the door.

Shit. Probably should have seen that one coming. Ghostbur did the same thing. 

“ – look, I figured you might be upset, so I wanted to come, just, talk about it. Communicate. Yeah. So – here I am.” He twists through the air, coming to cover right in front of Tubbo – winding like a current underwater, like a rip. “Tubbo, I’m happy, okay? All that fun stuff everyone wants to hear from, like, deceased loved ones – just, assume that’s me. Let me tell you, man – I’m happy, I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”

Tubbo’s hands tighten against the quilt, locked in his fists. He pretends he can’t feel them shake.

“...you’re happy now?” It’s meant to sound frank, disbelieving, because it’s impossible. Because Ranboo was murdered. He was murdered. But Tubbo’s voice is smaller. It shakes more than he wants it to, and he hates it. That was a real question. That was real, he meant that, and he doesn’t know if he wants the – 

“Yes!” Well, that train arrived at the station rather quickly. Gods, he feels like he’s gonna be sick again. “Aw, Tubbo, it’s like – it’s not a you thing, right? Because I know you’re thinking that. It’s like,” Ranboo flips onto his back, lounging on air. “You were happy in L’Manberg, right? Like, old L’Manberg. And I used to just cry and moan about it because I couldn’t make you that happy. But I get it now.”

His legs feel kind of weak, probably because he feels sick again, can feel himself floating away, but – it’s just Ranboo, who is nobody to be scared of and is also his husband and also dead, which his brain keeps repeating like a chant, like a prayer, so he plods his way over to the bed and lets himself collapse on the edge of it. Ghostboo floats unbothered.

“Complain, complain, complain,” he repeats to himself, hovering by the closet door, coiled like a snake. The face is engraved with chipped flowers and leaves – an afternoon spent indoors, because the winter blizzards were too thick to send Ranboo home in – and near a dozen sticky notes dangling from it in various states of suspension. Ghostboo raises a finger, flicks one – lets it flutter to the ground, discarded. “I don’t know how you put up with me.”

“Well, it’s not you, is it,” Tubbo points out. His voice still feels a bit distant. Not really like his own. Ranboo was always decently good at grounding him, but – well.

“...I’m me,” Ghostboo says, still staring up at the sticky notes.

(Tubbo can’t help but read the way his shoulders tense, the way that even facing away he can see how his jaw tightens, the little bounce of his dumb half-up half-down ponytail as he locks his chin. It’s like a switch in his brain that just won’t shut off. It’s the most careful thing he’s said since he appeared.

“You’re you, though, you’re not – ” Something catches in his throat. Stalls. “You’re Ghostboo. Not Ranboo. Like – you’re different people, is what I’m saying.”

“Well,” Ghostboo says definitively, “that’s not – that’s just not true, actually.”

“You literally died, bossman.”

“That doesn’t make me not me, that just makes me dead.” He peers back over his shoulder, sinking his heels down to the floor. His face – fuck. If Tubbo had a dollar for every time he’d seen that stressed out look on Ranboo’s face, he wouldn’t have needed Ranboo to make him a millionaire-by-marriage. It hurts. “No, because – no. I’m still the same person, Tubbo. I’m still – I’m still the same person.”

Which is not true, because Tubbo knew Ghostbur, and he was different. He wasn’t Wilbur, and that was the point he so obviously tried to make clear, even though they had the same mannerisms. Ghostbur was so resolute that he was different. He held all of the good things Wilbur used to have – his kindness, his thoughtfulness, his quiet smile and softly-given advice, all painted out onto a blank canvas. Equivalent exchange, not a continuation. Obviously, this – Ghostboo – this is the same thing, one piece of code swapped out for another, written backwards. The same pieces, a different picture.

“I have to be the same person,” Ghostboo keeps saying, “because – because now, now – I remember everything, Tubbo. I remember all of it.” Ghostboo turns – and as he talks his confidence grows, thrumming with something bright and golden. Tubbo’s mouth goes dry. “How can I – how can I not be myself, how can I not be, like, Ranboo – when I remember more of my life now than I literally ever have?”

“You’re kidding,” Tubbo shoots back, immediately, because he has to – “surely, surely not. You’re making shit up.” Messing with him.

“That’s the thing, Tubbo, I’m not.” His expression shifts, ripples – the stubborn set of his jaw melts away, replaced by that soft-warm-bright beam he wore when he was holding Michael. When he saw Tubbo. “I remember the day we met, man – it was, it was, it was the beginning of winter, right, and it hadn’t snowed yet, and you came out of your big fancy office and showed me around the place.” He reaches out – Tubbo jerks back. Like he doesn’t care that his fingers will slip through, that he won’t be able to feel anything. Ghostboo huffs out a laugh. “And you kept saying my name wrong.”

And Ranboo didn’t correct him, not for months – until after they got married, whenever Tubbo would say it wrong as a joke, because he didn’t remember.

“You really remember everything,” Tubbo says carefully. There’s a catch. There’s always a catch. Ghostbur was kind but remembered nothing, limbo is harsh and loud and angry, and Ghostboo – he can’t hang his hopes on that. He can’t bring himself not to be cautious.

“Yup! Sure do,” he looks proud of himself. His smile – it actually reaches his eyes, for once. “I can – look, I can tell you’re thinking about Ghostbur, but – he forgot things, and it was sad, right? I’m the opposite.” He shrugs. “Maybe this was like – maybe this was kind of meant to happen. Because – because he needed to forget all that stuff, but me, I needed to remember. Things like Dream, and – and the execution, Tubbo, god, I needed to remember that.”

Tubbo’s heart is – it’s racing. Beating like a jackrabbit caught in a trap, thudding against the inside of his head. He told Ranboo that in confidence. On five separate occasions, maybe, but in confidence – some fucked up kind of confidence where he thought he’d be able to repeat the story as many times as he wanted, filling in as many details as he wanted, because it would all leave Ranboo’s mind and he wouldn’t have to worry about being weak or pitiful or a crybaby or Ranboo hating him. Putting him in danger.

Because he’d just forget.

Feels fucking stupid now. Feels like just as much of a scumbag move as it always was.

“I lied to you,” he hears himself saying.

Ranboo stills, the way – the way he never did, not before he died. Solid, certain. The gold slips from his posture, from his voice.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you did.”

It’s cold. File away what hurts, focus on something else – it’s cold in here, with the freezing mid-winter and the ghost of his dead dead husband a few feet away. He shakes, because – it’s cold.

This is uncomfortably close to talking, really talking, the kind of thing he always hoped Ranboo would forget about whenever they veered too close. He knows Ranboo won’t forget this time.

“I know you’re the one who always wants to fix things,” Ranboo says, and Tubbo’s head shoots upward. He’s hovering – not just in a ghostly way, though his feet are tucked up beneath him again – and he’s looking Tubbo right in the eyes. His eyes are hollowed out, the pupils gone into some murky mess, and Tubbo’s skin crawls – like rope itching around his neck, hot and uncomfortable. He never hated eye contact, he put up with it, but – he and Ranboo didn’t ever need it. Staring him straight in the eyes is almost… overwhelming. Feels tighter inside, tense and caught. “But I don’t need fixing anymore.”

He’s still staring, and it fills Tubbo with this – with this stupid fucking feeling, all tears deep beneath the eyes and a lump in his throat (fingers clawing at his neck hot and bright and burning because it’s all his fault, it’s all his fault), because he misses Ranboo and he’s hovering right in front of him but framed wrong, and this is all just fucking cruel, really. He swallows a shudder.

“You didn’t – I don’t think you needed fixing in the first place, bossman.”

Ranboo laughs. It’s weird, rounded at the edges like always but still somehow sharp and unkind. It sounds like him in – in tone, maybe, but at the same time, it really doesn’t.

“Are you kidding me? I was a mess, Tubbo. A complete mess. You saw me in L’Manberg, right – you saw how bad it was. I’m just – god, you must have hated putting up with me. I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry you had to deal with it.” He flicks another sticky note off the closet and it flutters to the floor, lands face up – this one isn’t even in Tubbo’s shaking scrawl, written out in Ranboo’s neat cursive instead. Have a good day, in looping script, next to a drawing of a little lopsided sun with a smiley face – because Ranboo needed the sticky notes, he needed them to remember things and that was fine, but he always got – he always got a bit insecure about it. So they both wrote them. There are still scraps of paper in his drawers, stolen away for safekeeping when the adhesive on the back wore out, sheafs of words and drawings in Ranboo’s hand. “But it’s fine, it’s fine – we can, we can be better now. We can actually be happier now.”

He thought they were – okay, that’s kind of a lie. It’s a nice one, though.

But he really thought Ranboo was happy. That’s kind of – that was kind of embarrassingly important to him, actually, making sure Ranboo is happy. Real tripping-down-the-stairs feeling. Even worse was when he realised he could tell when he was happy, really, even over comm or when it’s bucketing down with rain or when Tubbo throws pieces of gold at him just to piss him off – not because that’s what he’s good at, but because it’s Ranboo.

This, this is just – it’s so weird and fucking unsettling. These stupid fucking smiles he keeps shooting around the place, all soft and open – the kind of thing that was precious, that only existed in fleeting moments. Now, though, Ranboo wears that look like a billboard. He makes eye contact – he never did that before, and maybe Tubbo should be happy that he’s comfortable now, that he’s confident, but it doesn’t feel that way. Even though he’s smiling, even though his eyes are locked onto Tubbo’s and the bags underneath them have been replaced with smile lines, even though he’s being so open and genuine when he talks about how much he hated himself. He didn’t – he remembers shit now, that’s the thing. That’s the thing. He didn’t change. Tubbo just never fucking noticed. He didn’t even know – his husband hates himself, and he didn’t even know.

He should have seen this coming. No – he should have seen that he wouldn’t see this coming, because he’s selfish and he’s not – he’s not built to be around other people. It’s not like he noticed it in Tommy, or in Wilbur. No shit he didn’t even notice the self-loathing eating his own husband alive. Fucking gods, he’s a horrible person – and he knew that, he knew that, but he just kept reaching for more and more and more and – 

Tubbo is not built to be comforting, or kind, or soft around the edges – all of that was burned out of him ages ago. He cannot afford to run on that because if he did rely on sweet words, or like, gentle touch or whatever, he would run out and break down. Inevitably. But for Ranboo, though – for Tommy, for everyone else – maybe if he did, he would hurt them less.

(This is why, by the way – his brain chooses to comment – this is why you were always better off alone. Because otherwise people get hurt. He gets hurt.)

“I’m sorry,” he can feel the words slip out of his mouth – they taste familiar, but rancid. Too sweet. Makes him feel sicker. “I’m – I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Tubbo," Ranboo’s voice is soft, that quiet kind of pleading, but there’s – there’s no touch under his chin, no hand against his cheek, just that absent feeling of cold against his skin. He lifts his head anyway, for the hell of it, and Ranboo is kneeling (well, floating low to the ground) in front of him. “This is good, okay? We’re good. I – I know you’re sad, and I – I don’t get it exactly, actually, I mean I do but I don’t, but – I mean, you don’t have to be upset.”

“How can I not be upset.” His voice sounds like it’s been stepped on.

Ranboo scrunches up his face into a frown. “...You could be happy for me?”

Tubbo lets out a bitter, harsh laugh – one that’s wetter that he’d like to admit it is. Ranboo’s face drops. “Sure. Sure. Surely. I’ll be happy that you’re fuckin’ dead, bossman.”

Fuck’s sake. Happy. What a joke.

Ranboo is still staring up at him – because he does that now, apparently – so for lack of a better escape, Tubbo tips his chin towards his chest. He can’t – the feeling of eyes on him constantly, it digs at him. Like nails on a chalkboard, except the chalkboard is his spine. Or something.

“...It is,” Ranboo declares, splitting the silence – “when you think about it, it is a little funny.”

“How?”

“It’s like, oh, I miss my husband so much.” Ranboo flops his arms folded onto the bed, dropping his chin onto the sheets. “I’m right here, Tubbo. I’m still here.”

“To be fair,” because that needs defence for some reason, apparently, “you are dead.”

“So what?” Ranboo raises an eyebrow. “Come on. What difference does that make, like, realistically.”

“You’re incorporate, for one – ”

“Incorporeal,” Ranboo corrects sweetly, like a bastard. “And aww. I didn’t realise you missed holding hands so much, Tubbo.”

Tubbo glares at him behind his hands, because he’s being a bastard on purpose and he deserves it. And because otherwise he might cry. But mostly the first reason.

“Okay, so I can’t touch things now. Whatever. Doesn’t mean things have to change,” he shrugs. “I know what you’re thinking. Oh, what about Ghostbur? He was different, right? I’m not Ghostbur, man. I’m – I’m me. He lost things, but, I dunno. I didn’t. I got things, I got my memories back. And like – okay, last week I saw Wilbur start crying because he accidentally scared off a stray cat, man. I wouldn’t be using him as like, my ultimate benchmark here.”

And okay, that does make Tubbo laugh. Almost. “You really don’t get it.”

“Pshh. Yeah I do. I’m dead.” He slumps over dramatically, staring up at Tubbo with wide eyes. “And like, think of the possibilities. If – if you’re gonna keep going on about how dead I am, you might as well milk it, right? Get one of those big hats with the veil on it.  Forget tax evasion, you can claim on life insurance now, man. We’ll be rich.”

This feels too close to normal. If he shut his eyes, if he pretended the last hour of his life, the last few days of his life didn’t exist – boxed them up, hid them away – he could pretend that Ranboo is here, and he’s not bleeding, and it’s just another night staying up late bantering because Michael won’t sleep. Fine. Normal. It’s – it’s so close to normal, and he kind of hates it, but it’s still making him feel even marginally less dead inside. Holding a lighter up to the charcoal in his chest, picking up flames slowly, small and delicate enough to warm the hands.

“You know you’re not technically my husband anymore, right?” He points out. “Like, legally. Probably. We said til death do us part.”

“Boo, you’re no fun,” Ranboo pouts. “Y’know what, I’m gonna propose to you again, and then I’m just gonna throw us a wedding so you can stand there in a big scary black dress and go oh no, my husband is dead. Woe is me. Give me money.”

“Disappeared under mysterious circumstances,” Tubbo volunteers. “But also, you’re being ridiculous. Stop.”

“You are asking entirely the wrong person not to be ridiculous,” Ranboo declares, and unwinds himself just enough to kneel down on one knee by the side of the bed, cold hands coming to settle next to Tubbo’s knees. “Hey, Tubbo Underscore – o light of my life, co-parent of my child, my tether to the living – will you marry me? Again?”

It’s entirely ridiculous, which is why Ranboo’s trying not to laugh with the corners of his eyes all creased upwards and why there’s a dumb fucking laugh catching itself in his throat. It’s a dumb joke, because he’s upset, and because Ranboo is trying to cheer him up – it’s the exact kind of dumb joke their marriage was built on in the first place, where Ranboo is laughing and Tubbo’s ring is sitting on his bedside table. 

But Ranboo is still looking up at him – all hopeful. Like there’s a chance he’ll say no. Like there’s a chance that it means something.

Maybe it does. It probably does – maybe he should say no, he should keep his distance, he should roll over and go back to staring at the walls and go back to being alone, alone, alone. Start planning for waking up alone tomorrow morning while he’s at it. Because Ranboo’s dead. He knows that.

He’s dead. 

But he’s still – he’s still here.

“Ranboo, my beloved,” he pauses, just long enough to watch Ranboo’s eyes light up – “I will marry you. Again. For the insurance fraud.”

(And really, nothing has to change.)

“He said yes,” Ranboo crows to absolutely no one, swooning back into a float.

“Yeah, sure,” Tubbo scoffs, and he would go to shove Ranboo off his balance, until he remembers that – he can’t. So he doesn’t, and just collapses back into bed with a thud instead. “It’s late. I’m going to bed.”

“You’re so lame,” Ranboo calls over his shoulder. “Goodnight, Tubbo.”

“Go fuck yourself, my beloved,” Tubbo replies sweetly, and he hears Ranboo chortle behind his back.

Nothing has to change at all.

There’s a clatter outside the door.

Tubbo’s hand twitches where it sits in the middle of his web, flying to the sword on his workbench – taking stacks of paper with it, photographs and scrawled notes that fan out across the floor. Threads catch and pull, tugging down on the prison map and the photograph of Tommy sitting in its centre. The sword is heavy in his grasp, spitting with enchantments, and it’s only when he creeps from his bench that he hears it – a too-loud, too-purposeful sound of surprise from outside, with a couple stomping and shuffling noises thrown in for good measure.

“...Ranboo?” he calls.

“Tubbo!” There’s another clatter outside the door, although this one sounds a bit less deliberate. “Can I come in?”

“Knock yourself out,” he calls back, placing the sword carefully back by his workbench as Ranboo slips inside. He’s wound up, that’s the first thing Tubbo notices, fiddling with something in his pockets – but then again, when isn’t he wound up – as he wanders up slowly, approaching wide from Tubbo’s left. He does that a lot.

A frown creases his face when he takes in the board – it’s definitely gotten bigger since the last time Ranboo would’ve seen it, denser and more tangled. Red thread carves lines in the wall, doubling back on itself and twisting into knots, like a photoboard made by a drunken spider with too much time on its hands. Tubbo is very aware of the fact that to an outsider, it looks mildly batshit insane.

He is not entirely convinced he is not going batshit insane, but Ranboo seems confident in his mental stability, so.

Ranboo wordlessly kneels down and picks up the photograph of Tommy from where it had flown under the bench – he’s careful with it, brushes the dust softly from the edges. It’s one from early New L’Manberg, one that Fundy took – Tommy holding a red lantern, the corner of Tubbo’s epaulettes visible at the edges. It’s a nice photo. It reminds him not to fuck things up this time.

“Do you want this one back up?” he asks, voice quiet.

“It’s fine,” Tubbo replies, so Ranboo hands the photo back – still careful, hands still soft, warm on his own. He places it face-up on the bench in front of him as Ranboo squints up at the board.

“That looks… nice,” he tries. Tubbo fishes around for the fallen string and pins it beneath Quackity’s name, rolling the thread between his fingers.

“Do you think Quackity has a motive to murder Tommy?”

“Quackity?” Ranboo asks. He takes the question in stride, to his credit – he leans upward, face screwed up in thought, although something behind his eyes stays blank. “Um. I might not be the best person to be asking here, Tubbo.”

“My old vice. The one with the,” and he gestures a jagged line down the side of his face. Ranboo grimaces in recognition. “He’s out building some city in the desert."

Threatened by the competition, perhaps? Chewing on his lip, Tubbo pins the loop of thread beneath a photograph of Tommy’s hotel – Jack Manifold’s name already sits there suspiciously.

Ranboo hums, tapping his index on his chin – Tubbo can tell he thinks this is all somewhere between pointless and overboard, but he makes a show of thinking about it. “We weren’t – we weren’t close, but from what I remember… I don’t think he’d kill someone over, like, a property dispute.” He stops himself, and looks down at Tubbo for approval, wide-eyed. “But, uh, I don’t know. I don’t remember this stuff.”

He’s smarter than he gives himself credit for, honestly, even if he is a little naive. “You’re probably right,” Tubbo concedes. He leaves the pin anyway.

Ranboo clears his throat. “Michael – uh, he’s in bed, he’s fine, but, um – he took a bit of a fall off the ladder, um. While we were getting ready for bed. I just thought I should – ”

Tubbo whips around, and Ranboo flinches – it’s not, it’s not supposed to be that late, is it? Surely not. Surely not, but when he grabs his comm the lights flashing up at him read past nine at night. Oh, shit. He’s been – he’s been working for hours. They slipped past him like seconds. He blinks, and it feels like walking into daylight despite the time – disorienting, with a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“Shit, I didn’t mean for it to get so late – ” and the rest of Ranboo’s sentence clicks in his head. “Is Michael alright?”

“Yes! Yes. I think. I – he wanted to climb up the ladder himself, and I – I was there, but he slipped and fell, just, right off.” Ranboo sounds a little wobby, and Tubbo reaches a hand out. He takes it with a shaky smile, although it slips off a second later. “He grazed his knee a bit, but – he’s fine, I think? I cleaned up the scrape for him, and gave him some harming potion before bandaging it up… and a couple slices of golden apple as well.” Oh, so Michael’s definitely fine. “He got to sleep pretty quick, I think the drama tired him out.”

He looks extremely apologetic – ashamed, even – which is kind of hilarious considering that Tubbo literally doesn’t know what he’d do without him anymore.

“Thanks,” he says, pushing as much – as much as he can into the word, and Ranboo perks up. “I guess – I guess the time got away from me.”

“That’s okay,” Ranboo says, lacing their fingers together, and it sounds so soft and sympathetic that for a minute the shitty veneer he coats himself in snaps and he remembers – properly, not just the drive behind his latest project, not a spare part in the workshop that he can fix back together – that Tommy is dead. And then he just wants to throw up again.

He doesn’t know why, but that – there’s something in that tone, the kind that brings a lot of fluffy words to mind like nice and patient and soft and caring and all that, that acts like a stick in his gears. Brings everything to a clattering halt, bends his brain out of shape, all gooey and helpless like something with its belly up and at the same time spiking with something – something angry. Something sad. He doesn’t know. It’s not like he hears that tone often – only when something goes really, really wrong.

It’s only been two days. He feels like he’s bleeding out. He doesn’t know how much longer he can take.

“Okay. Well,” he looks back up at the spiderweb that stretches across the wall, thick and twisted and calling to him. “Back to the grind, I guess.”

“Actually,” Ranboo cuts in quickly, “I was thinking we could. Uh. Go somewhere. Maybe?”

“Now?”

“Yeah.” Ranboo’s tail flicks. Tubbo raises an eyebrow. “Unless – unless, we could do it later, I guess, but – uh, I really really think, actually, it would be better to go now. I think.”

Hmm. Okay.

Ranboo is fidgeting from foot to foot, which on anyone else might look fine, but it’s not – it’s not something he does, specifically, unless he’s anxious. He’s dressed up nicer than usual, Tubbo realises, with his hair tied back and a flowy-looking white shirt on instead of the usual button-up. The sleeves are all open and drapey, with detailed embroidery up the sides. He keeps fiddling with the edge of his sleeves, when he’s not fiddling with whatever he’s hiding in his pockets, and his eyes – okay, well, Ranboo never makes eye contact anyway, but he’s usually alright with just picking a spot and sticking to it with Tubbo. But no, he’s peering around the room, unable to settle.

“You’re anxious,” Tubbo informs him.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Ranboo says with a stilted laugh.

“No, there’s something weird about you today.” Tubbo sits up on the workbench, and bravely resists the urge to chew on the string in thought. Ranboo’s shoulders climb even higher. “Something’s bothering you. Spill.”

“Whaaat? No way,” Ranboo says, and it is a little concerning how long he was able to stay a traitor in Tubbo’s cabinet with an inability to lie like that. Gods. “Nothing’s – nothing’s up. Actually. Just. Um. Stressed about – stressed about Michael. Poor kiddo.”

“Mhmm,” Tubbo hums. “So what’s in your pocket then?”

Ranboo starts spluttering immediately, and Tubbo cackles.

“I mean, are you hiding something? Or are you just happy to see – ”

“Ew,” Ranboo finally manages, face red. And green. “It’s nothing.”

Tubbo crosses his legs, stone-faced. “Mhm.”

“It’s – it’s nothing, really. Really. Yep.”

“Yeah, no, I get you.” He pauses for sincerity. “I believe in you totally, Ranboo.”

Ranboo lets out a sigh like a balloon letting out air, hiding his face in his hands. “You’re a menace, you know that?”

“Yeah, well,” Tubbo kicks his legs up, sitting criss-cross on the bench, face cupped in his hands. “That’s why you love me.”

(The words ring hollow, fake, and some fire in his stomach warns him not to get too complacent. Not to get too selfish.)

Ranboo just rolls his eyes, and Tubbo scoffs, affronted.

“Come on,” he says, sidling up to the bench – and he’s got that dumb soft look on his face, the kind that makes it hard to look at him dead-on without Tubbo’s stomach trying to crush itself into a cube. “I’ve got – I’ve got a surprise for you, actually.”

“Mmm,” Tubbo looks down. It’s – it’s a bit much, that’s all. The photograph of Tommy is pinned beneath his leg – he’s not looking at the camera, staring off at a figure in gold and navy to the left, but it still makes him feel… feel hollow. He holds his breath, and tells himself – mechanical, marching forward with wires of red string – that he doesn’t feel anything at all. “I think I’ve had enough surprises for a while, bossman.”

Ranboo’s face drops immediately – and there’s a hollow feeling in Tubbo’s chest for being the one to put it there, a moment where he remembers how much of a fucking loser he is – but it disappears as he blinks, perks back up into a careful kind of optimism. “Eh, I don’t know. You might like this one.”

“Give us a hint, then.”

Ranboo thinks for a moment, tail swishing. It whaps Tubbo lightly on the knees, and Tubbo swats at it aimlessly.

“Uhm… hm. Tax… tax fraud? Tax fraud. Hope that’s not too – hope that’s not too obvious.”

Tubbo wrinkles up his nose in thought. “We’ve talked about tax fraud, right? I feel like we’ve talked about tax fraud.” It was a while ago, it’s blurry – blurry like everything from more than two days ago is, honestly, all out of focus – but that’s definitely come up, probably.

“Maybe,” Ranboo says lightly, if very unhelpfully.

He looks – he looks painfully earnest. He’s still all tense and fidgety, and the bags under his eyes are still dark – possibly darker than usual, actually – but there’s something hiding in how bright his eyes look, fixed somewhere above Tubbo’s shoulder. He’s tired, he’s stressed, but he’s smiling easier.

“If I don’t like it,” Tubbo drawls, “can I have whatever it is you’re clearly trying to hide in your pockets?”

Ranboo chokes on another laugh, spluttering again. “Yeah, I – actually, yeah. Yeah. If you don’t like the surprise, you can keep what’s in my pocket. Sure.”

“Yesss,” Tubbo chants. “You’ve set – you’ve set a dangerous precedent, here, ‘cause really there’s nothing stopping me from just lying and taking all your stuff.”

“Nooo,” Ranboo whines, but he’s smiling as he leans against the bench, hiding his face again. “Please, you can’t lie about this one, alright? You take enough of my stuff already, just – please do not lie about this one. Pretty please. I’ll let you use my stuff. Just promise me.”

Tubbo takes his sweet time pretending to think about it, letting his forehead bump against Ranboo’s. But like, softly. “Mmm. Fine. I promise not to lie, unless it will be very funny.”

Ranboo lets out a soft laugh. “You’re going to be the death of me, you know that?”

“And then I get all your stuff, so – ”

“Okay, well,” Ranboo moves away, and holds out an arm instead. Fancy, he is. “Please try to withhold the urge to assassinate me on the way to the surprise, because then there will be no tax evasion, yes?”

He’s not entirely sure what Ranboo’s got planned, and he is… he’s being stranger than normal.

But still. He trusts Ranboo.

“Okay,” he hops off the bench, and interlocks his arm with Ranboo’s. “Lead the way, my little tax evader.”

The first thing Tubbo does after moving all their shit to the mansion, changing the locks, and shoving Ranboo’s insurance paperwork into a dusty ass cabinet drawer, is invest in a shiny black robe – the kind that drags on the floor as he walks, made of floaty material that clings to the denim of his overalls and feels funny between his fingers. There’s a huge fur collar that sits on his shoulders, pretty much hiding his face all the way up to the bottom edge of his sunglasses. It’s swishy, it’s dramatic, it makes Ranboo laugh his ass off when he sees it – it’s perfect.

“What,” Tommy bellows, watching Tubbo clamber up the black-and-yellow walls that now sit around the hobbit hole he calls a home. He’s been hard at work, apparently – the towers stand tall not only above Tubbo’s head (not that great of a feat, honestly), but Tommy’s too (much more impressive). “What is that."

Tubbo swishes his robe around a bit to demonstrate, pulling on the skirt when it catches on a nail sticking out of the treads of his snowboot. Already, the drying concrete is leaving pudgy marks like yellow fingerprints where it presses against the robe – it’s going to stain, he thinks.

“I’m entering my widow arc,” he explains.

“Prime,” Tommy says, scrunching his nose up at him. “Did you skin a spider for that? My poor little Shroud’s friends? Turned ‘em into jackets like – like Cruella duh Ville.”

“No,” Tubbo says, pushing his sunglasses up onto his forehead. “It’s chiffon. Fancy.”

“Fucked up of you,” Tommy sniffs regardless. “Wrong’un. Tory.”

“I’m like, a rich lady in mourning now,” Tubbo explains, kicking his feet. His boots go thunk, thunk, thunk against the obsidian. He clings to the feeling in his heels as he rifles through his pack for some obsidian bricks. “So I needed the big fuck-off dress thing. Y’know, so I look sus when people come ask me about Ranboo’s insurance payout.”

Tommy doesn’t really laugh at that as much as Tubbo kind of thought he would – he just puts down his cement scraper, letting the mortar drip off onto the bricks (shoulders angled downwards, tense and unhappy, carrying some phantom weight) with a funny look on his face. All – all concerned, which is a look that’s supposed to be for Wilbur or somebody, not for Tubbo. Seeing that directed at him feels strange.

“It’s huge, by the way,” he adds when Tommy doesn’t fill the silence. “The – the payout. I knew he was rich, man, but – Michael and I, we’re set for life, bossman. Moving into the mansion and everything. Extremely sus.”

“Tubbo,” Tommy says, all heavy and concerned. It weighs his brow down into a frown, the kind that makes the bags under his eyes look darker and the scars across his temple, the bump in his nose stand out more. It looks wrong on him, always has, even though it’s started wearing itself into the creases of Tommy’s face like cliffsides and he just looks like that so often, now. And with Dream out of the prison, logically Tubbo knows he’s gonna be seeing it a fuck of a lot more often than not in the next couple days. Weeks. Months, realistically. As for years, well – he’s a pragmatist, not an optimist, and he doesn’t know exactly how long he can keep up with Tommy. “Are you – are you feeling alright?”

“Yeah,” Tubbo replies. Thunk, thunk, thunk, go his boots. Thwick, thwick, thwick, goes the runny concrete, slapped onto the bricks. He’s not even lying, he doesn’t think. He feels fine.

“Right.” Tommy looks unconvinced. “I just – I wanted to ask you, because, y’know, your – Ranboo died.”

“I know,” Tubbo shrugs. “He’s over there, though.”

Ranboo looks up from the beehive he’s inspecting underneath a nearby tree, and waves. Tubbo waves back.

“Well – I guess,” Tommy says, face all scrunched up. He’s not happy. “But he’s not – that doesn’t mean you can’t feel sad about it.”

“I know.”

“Dream might not ever revive him,” Tommy continues. “He told me – he told me, in the prison, that he wouldn’t use the revive book on you or Ranboo or anyone else on our side. He’d only use it for himself. Not for Ranboo, not for you and me.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He slaps more concrete against the bricks. “I know.”

“Well, I’m just – I’m just checking, because. It sucks. It really fucking sucks. And if you want to, uh, talk about it, then it’s fine – it’s probably good, even, we should probably talk about it, yeah?”

Tommy’s always worn his heart on his sleeve – Tubbo has always been able to read him easy as breathing, because they’re so close, but Tommy has never made it particularly difficult. He’s stressed, Tubbo can see that in the rigid way he’s carried himself since the prison break, and the bags under his eye betray that he’s not sleeping. The jittering way his gaze keeps straying to the horizon as they talk suggests it’s intentional. The way it hardens slightly – his eyes narrow, and then his eyebrows furrow as if he’s supposed to feel guilty – when it lands on Ranboo betrays the quiet undertow of jealousy that seeps out of him, even when he tries to keep it hidden under lock and key. He wears his jealousy openly, Tommy does, just like he does everything else – although he tries to shove it down for Tubbo’s sake (for Tubbo’s sake, as if he deserves it) and it’s only the fact that Tubbo has all the keys to everything Tommy is that he can probably recognise it at all.

It doesn’t feel fair, to push his stupid complicated whatever about Ranboo onto Tommy when he’s already dealing with so much. It doesn’t feel fair when he’s always felt put out by Ranboo anyway, especially after the prison, especially after exile, and that was Tubbo’s fault in the first place which really does explain a lot.

Tubbo smiles, and pretends it doesn’t feel forced at all. “It’s fine, Tommy. I’m not even – I’m hardly even upset.”

He wears plain disbelief openly, too. “You’re not?”

“I mean, I am,” heart-crushingly, soul-rendingly upset, “but it’s fine.” He smiles again, really puts some effort into it – it’s the same sunshine-bumblebee-golden smile that always made Tommy perk up, but Tommy still looks grey. “Besides, Ranboo’s like – he’s different now, but he’s still here. He’s over there.”

“Tubbo, Ranboo’s not – that’s not Ranboo, Tubbo. It’s – it’s Ghostboo. Ranboo’s dead.” Uh oh. Tubbo can feel his face doing something weird, and judging by Tommy’s rapidly falling expression, he’s noticed it too. Tommy leans over a parapet, all eyes-wide and sincere, concern writ into his expression. It makes Tubbo’s skin crawl. “And it’s – it’s okay to feel sad about that! We can – we can talk about it, yeah? Puffy says – ”

“I don’t – ” care, he thinks. No, start that again. “I just don’t think Puffy’s whole deal is… is for me, man. I’m good.”

“Right, right, but,” Tommy struggles for a moment. Tubbo waits patiently, thwapping down slashes of mortar between the bricks. “Look, just because – just because you’re good at handling shit without talking about it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. Like,” he takes a shaky breath, “like we did – like we didn’t, when Wilbur died.”

It’s like a bucket of ice water, cast down his back – cutting cold slices down his spine, pulling on nerves that tug his head upwards in a reflexive jerk, numb despite the sun that beats down on them. Tommy’s still – still stretched across a parapet, sun-bearing, and looking a little squirmy and guilty but with that furrow in his brow that means he’s not about to let this go. The same stupid little dig in his forehead whenever he talks about family, about blood.

Tubbo hates overhearing these conversations, for the record.

“Ranboo’s not Wilbur,” he points out.

“Ghostbur wasn’t Wilbur either,” Tommy shoots back. “Wilbur was – Wilbur was gone, man. And now Wilbur’s back, and Ghostbur’s gone. He doesn’t – fucking hell, I hope he doesn’t remember anything that happened to Ghostbur.” Right. Another person Tubbo let down in exile. He’s still not entirely sure what happened to Ghostbur either, but – Tommy trusted him. He must have known something that Wilbur doesn’t seem to. He’s not going to question Tommy’s optimism right now, his trust in Wilbur’s blindness to whatever happened – but he’s still making Tommy bring it up anyway, dragging them over the coals when exile was his fault anyway and he’s making Tommy bring it up again, selfish, selfish, selfish. “Ghostboo is – he might be similar to Ranboo, but he’s not Ranboo. It’s not – and I don’t, don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s not fair to treat ‘em the same. Even if – even if you want to.”

“You’re thinking too much about this, bossman.” Tubbo goes back to his mortar-slapping. He ignores the sticky numbness of his fingers, the loud silence radiating from Tommy – pressing up against the quiet air, just barely managing to wait for his turn to speak again. He’s pretty sure if it were anyone other than him, Tommy would have erupted already. “Ranboo and I talked, we’re fine. He doesn’t care. We just,” he waves his scraper around, “he just wants it to go back to normal. Us and you and Michael and everything, like – ” he chokes it out, and it tastes like shit “ – like a family, y’know? Normal.”

“It’s not about what Ghostboo wants,” Tommy says. “I’m not – okay, I am worried about him, sure, but you’re the one I’m thinking about most now, alright? He’s – he’s in his own little world right now, whatever. They do that, they get all – all cloudy, but they’re not sad until you pull them down. But, but – it’s weird. It’s weird when they’re dead and they’re still around, and I know what that’s like, Tubbo, and it’s – it’s okay to talk about it ‘n all, right? Bottling it up just makes you feel like shit.”

“Tommy – ” that ugly jealousy is crawling up his throat, stopping up the back of it and sitting there like a weight. One of those boxes of poison Quackity leaves around for the rats. It twists his vocal cords, dripping with something cold and nasty, spits out something gross. “Tommy, I – Ghostbur was around in L’Manberg too, you know that, right?”

Slight affront, but Tommy doesn’t let it linger. “I know, I know he was, but – but that’s not the same.”

“Why not?” 

The words come out before he can stop them, clattering against his teeth in their haste to voice themselves.

“Huh?”

“Why not, Tommy?” Tubbo asks, dipped in mercury, coating his lungs – it tastes like orders and commands and what is wrong with him, he’s being selfish again, selfish – “why isn’t it the same?”

And that, like nothing else, gets Tommy to quiet for a moment.

There’s something heavy, awkward, unspoken that hands in the dead air between them. He doesn’t want to voice it. Tubbo can tell, neither does Tommy. But he stays silent anyway, staring at Tommy like he’s issuing a challenge – and he knows, he knows that Tommy knows exactly what he’s talking about because his fingers are twitching around the scraper that fidgets between his hands and he’s biting down on his lip the way he hasn’t since L’Manberg.

Tommy and Tubbo are a story of differences, stark and obvious and ninety percent of the time that is just fine. They exist in equilibrium, paired magnets with opposite polarities but on some deeper level still inseparably connected, down to the atoms that make them up. Tommy is brash, Tubbo is tempered; Tommy is sunstained blonde and freckled, Tubbo is dark-haired and burns in the afternoon sun. Tommy follows Wilbur and Phil and anyone else sufficiently broody-looking around like a kit that’s lost its mother, Tubbo…

(This heavy thing – it’s called family, and Tubbo has not felt its absence so keenly, stitches ripped open and left to bleed, in a long time.)

Tommy opens and closes his mouth, a bit fishlike, before clamping down definitively and puffing his chest out. “Because Wilbur and I – he’s like my brother. He’s family. He’s my brother, like you’re mine,” and he sounds less certain when he says, “right?”

Because he is right. Tubbo’s family isn’t Phil, isn’t Wilbur, and gods above isn’t Technoblade. They’re Tommy’s family – they all wear their hearts on their sleeves like he does, a matching set, down to the emerald that Tubbo knows is buried deep in a chest in Tommy’s house. They’re not his family because his heart is tightly guarded by presidential orders and house arrests and common fucking sense, and he’s glad. He’s glad! He's glad, because they’re – they’re dishonest and untrustworthy, every last one of them, and Tommy’s heartbroken always because of them and he’s not jealous. Why would he be? Wilbur still haunts Tommy – uncomfortably literally, at times. Wilbur’s not his brother (he might be the one he misses the most, but not his brother), and his disapproval – the flat fire in his gaze, the whispers that echo too loud in narrow ravines – that he’s a yes man – that’s branded into Tubbo’s brain. And that’s before he shook Tubbo’s hand on a stage and walked off to go blow them all sky-high. Wilbur’s bright, blazing and determined – he’s like Tommy, in that way – and just because he’s muted and he’s back doesn’t mean Tubbo trusts him. Technoblade and Phil can be as quiet and retired as they like, because he doesn’t trust them either. Technoblade was his ally when he killed Tubbo, and he was so-called retired when he planned to kill literally everyone else Tubbo cared about as well. So blame him for not trusting them. He doesn’t trust them around himself, he obviously couldn’t trust them with Ranboo, and he sure as fuck doesn’t trust them with Tommy anymore, no matter what Tommy says. They’re dangerous and he doesn’t feel safe even when his heart is twisting its way out of his chest and it doesn’t matter anyway because they all hate him too – and Tubbo can be Tommy’s familly, as godawful as he is, without having damn near anything to do with any of them.

He’s not jealous, and he’s not upset. He’s not upset because he has no reason be to upset, because Ranboo’s still here. He’s not going anywhere just because he’s – just because he’s dead. Maybe Ranboo is a little less corporal than normal, sure, but he’s here, and Michael’s safe in the mansion, and Tubbo’s building black-and-yellow walls with Tommy and there are nuclear weapons in his basement and Dream is never gonna revive Ranboo and when Tubbo’s through no one will so much as breathe in the direction of what’s left of his family ever again. Not Dream, not Sam, not Technoblade or Phil or Quackity or fucking Wilbur and his stupid burger van if that’s the line he has to draw in the sand. He has Tommy, and that’s enough. He has Michael and Ranboo, and at that point he’s just indulging, and that’s enough.

They have their little family, and Tubbo has his. And they’re fine.

“Right,” Tubbo replies quietly.

“Right,” Tommy barrels ahead. “And – when Wilbur died, it felt like there was a big empty hole in my stomach, and even when I was happy, or when I was – when I was around people who mattered, I was still just… bleeding, and I just felt sicker and sicker because I didn’t wanna touch it.”

It’s funny. Tubbo felt the same way when Tommy died. He nods.

Tommy shifts, swinging his legs over the side of the wall, where they hang next to Tubbo’s. “And then,” he takes one of those deep breaths of his, staring downward, “when – when I was in exile, when I was with Techno and Phil too, it was… it was worse a lot, but that, the bleeding, that felt a little better.”

Talking about exile – it makes him feel sick. It really does. But he can tell – he can tell, from the way Tommy’s hands shake and the sheen of sweat across his brow, he can tell – this is important. This is precious. This is something he needs to protect. So he ignores the churning of his stomach, and watches intently.

“I was,” he sucks in another shaky breath, “I was in a bad place. It was bad for me, it made me someone – it made me someone I wasn’t. And I miss – I missed L’Manberg, I missed everyone so much, even when I was really angry.” Tubbo doesn’t miss how Tommy quickly glances his way. “And Phil and Techno… I don’t know. I don’t – they’re both fucking weird, the two of ‘em, and I’m – I don’t even like them. I don’t even like ‘em. I’m still fuckin’ angry with them all the time.”

“No,” Tubbo sighs, because, well, if they’re gonna be honest. If they’re gonna be vulnerable. “No, you’re not.”

“They’re wrong’uns and I hate them,” Tommy says flatly. “But… they both, they both knew Wilbur, back even – even before L’Manberg, and everything. And it was like – it was like we were that little family again.” Tommy doesn’t look up – eyes locked on the grass below. “And – and even though I missed Wilbur, I was all jumbled up and I, I hated him even though I missed him, I knew – I knew we all felt the same way. And we could all be upset about it together, without worrying about being angry, or not being angry enough, because – because he all knew him before, and we could just be sad about the before instead of thinking about everything else that happened.”

He falls quiet. Tommy rarely does, rarely ever, and Tubbo can tell that it hurts him now from how he fidgets with the concrete scraper and struggles to keep it all – keep it all contained.

Tommy is – Tubbo clenches his teeth, and poison spills out – Tommy is naive, Tommy is foolish, like one of those little songbirds that sits in the jaws of lions just because they call themselves family. Tubbo is not as keen to get snapped down on. Especially when the one shared connection they had is snapped and frayed and – he peers over – sticking his ghostly hand into a beehive.

Tubbo isn’t so fortunate. Tommy says he has Phil, says he has Wilbur – breathing, alive Wilbur, brought back by Dream’s touch – and Tubbo doesn’t and never has. Half-fractured memories of learning guitar in the middle of the night and a suit jacket that doesn’t fit him and half-hearted advice doesn’t cut it. Tubbo is realistic, he’s honest (if with nobody but himself) and he hates to think it, even whisper-quiet, but he knows that the sticky nausea crawling up his chest, stirring his insides together, is jealousy. It’s awful, and horrible, because he burned those bridges – cut them off with an anvil drop, ran Wilbur’s country into the ground – himself. Tommy doesn’t deserve that. Tommy doesn’t deserve that blood on his hands.

“Yeah, well,” he kicks at a loose chip of hardened mortar, and it tumbles with a loud crack – down, down, buries itself in the tall glass. “Not like I have a lot of people to chat with, bossman.”

“Ranboo was part of the Syndicate,” Tommy points out. “Ask them, maybe. Phil, Niki, I dunno.”

“Mmm.” Oh, how he’d really rather not talk about either of them. He can picture them both easily in his mind’s eye – Philza, silhouetted and standing atop a grid of obsidian backlit by dynamite, and Niki, spitting and cursing at the edge of a crater, she and Jack acting like he’s dumb enough not to put two and two together eventually. “They’ve already been ‘round to Snowchester once, I’d rather not piss them off again.”

Tommy takes a big, thoughtful breath, which is concerning because Tommy pausing to be quiet is never a good sign.

“Phil’s not – they’re not… mad,” Tommy tries, with a pause that implies they are still pretty mad. “Like, Phil doesn’t care and he said that Techno – ”

It’s been near a full fucking year since the last time Tubbo had any kind of conflict with Technoblade, even something as stupid as throwing verbal jabs around, but the name still makes his heart leap into his throat. Stays there, thudding hard, infecting his brain with the need to – the need to look over his shoulder, or something. Keep his weapons close. Trauma, Tommy calls it.

It’s a little ironic. Tommy likes Technoblade just fine. Technoblade evidently cares for Tommy in some way, although he sure has a destructive way of showing it. Tubbo can, in fact, say with confidence, that Technoblade is a better person than like, Dream or something. He does actually believe that Technoblade has, like, real feelings about things.

But Technoblade has still tried to kill him more times than Dream has.

Whatever Tommy has, Tubbo evidently doesn’t.

(Tommy still chose you, something in the back of his head points out. He can’t parse whether that voice is judgemental or not.)

He laughs. “Yeah, right. He’s still probably my least biggest fan.” He pauses. “Smallest fan.”

“Shitty hand fan, with the paper handle,” Tommy agrees. “Yeah, I mean – well, you said he helped you get Michael back, right?”

“That was more for Ranboo, I think.”

“Yeah, but,” and that familiar stain of jealousy spills back into Tommy’s voice – maybe they aren’t so different, after all. “He really cared about Ranboo, ah – apparently. But he wouldn’t have helped you at all if he was still really mad at you. They’re all – they’re all chill now, I think, with this whole Syndicate thing, and they knew him, right? Like with Wilbur. Like, Phil was telling me about this time Ranboo got his cat stuck in their dumb meeting table, whatever that is…”

Tommy keeps talking. Tubbo checks out.

He doesn’t love – okay. Sue him, he does not love hearing about his husband, more frequently gone than he probably would have liked – there are massive chunks of time, now that he thinks about it, that they could have spent together before he died but they just didn’t – from people who, frankly, he still doesn’t trust. He’s stuck on the outside looking in – and that was fine, it was fine with Tommy because they’re his family but Ranboo is supposed to be his family. It’s – it’s childish to call it unfair. So he won’t. He won’t. But he promised himself he would keep Ranboo safe, and that included from the Syndicate, and now he’s dead and he wants to scream that it’s their fault even when he knows its wrong, fire bubbling up in his chest like fireworks, branded across his vision – and this time the clean sweep of a trident’s blade joints them, spraying red and green across the grass at his feet and when he blinks it clings, it stays, and Tommy just keeps talking and the thudding in his head is growing too loud to think – 

“Tommy,” he snaps out of his, clear and cold. His heart thuds. There’s a thin sheen of sweat across his knuckles. When he looks out into the open sky, he can still see the starbursts in red and navy blue. “I don’t – I don’t need all this, bossman.”

“I just want to help you, man – ”

“I don’t want them near my family,” Tubbo says.

The words spill over before he can stop them – bubbling, overflow – and Tommy flinches back.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

It means that he’s scared, and he’s scared and he’s alone now and that he still sees bursts of fireworks behind his eyes when he steps wrong, practically branded there – blasts of dynamite and fire that already nip at his heels. His family is too delicate for that. Michael is too young. There’s a cacophonous din in his head slinging blame for Ranboo’s death. He’s already had people use him to hurt Tommy and he isn’t ever going to let it happen again. It means that he doesn’t care about Phil and Technoblade and their sanctimonious fucking advice and it means that it doesn’t matter what Tommy says, he doesn’t trust Wilbur and he isn’t ever going to again so suck it and – it means that he doesn’t want them near Michael, he doesn’t want them near Ranboo, and he doesn’t want them near Tommy -

Oh.

Oh.

He keeps forgetting.

Grieving, like this, he keeps forgetting – Tubbo hates them, he does, but they’re just as much a part of Tommy as he is. They have arguably hurt him less. He’s forgetting. He’s getting selfish. His collar tightens, hot and itchy around his neck – the fur mats, scratches at his skin. At the scars branded across it.

Well, the hurt is already settling behind Tommy’s eyes, anyway. The damage is already done.

(The selfless part of him, the part that functions rain or shine, shrugs. At least it keeps Tommy away from the wreckage. Tommy can’t protect him, not from this. He shouldn’t even have to. He deserves to live cleanly.)

“It’s my marriage, bossman,” childish, childish again, pathetic tears stinging behind his eyes. He’s being honest, he’s being honest, because he’s fine. He doesn’t know why his eyes are watering, anyway. Stray dust, maybe. Amber dye, flung carelessly through the air. “I’ll figure it out. We got – we got walls to build.”

Tommy takes a deep breath, eyes still locked onto his until he blinks the moisture away, and the anger that lines his shoulders leaves him like smoke off of a campfire.

“Fine. Fine.” He kicks off the wall, leaping to the ground and landing with a soft thud in the grass. He turns on his heel, and stares up at Tubbo. “For the record, I know what you’re doing, and this conversation isn’t over.” He swallows. “But Tubbo? You’re always family to me.”

Tommy looks away, blinking hard, and Tubbo hates himself so much right now.

It’s necessary. He doesn’t get it, and it’s a good thing to keep it that way.

“I’m getting more obsidian,” Tommy bites out, and disappears into his little hobbit hole house – the same one that housed them, almost a year and a half ago, as they huddled together and hid from arrowfire hailing from the sky. Tommy, Tubbo, Wilbur, Fundy, Eret. Maybe they were a family once, too. An awfully short-lived one, then.

Tommy is kind. Kinder than Tubbo, with a heart that bleeds more than anyone else seems to care for. But he’s not – he’s not enough to carry Tubbo by himself, and they both know that. Tommy just hates it more than Tubbo’s come to terms with it. The reminder settles over him, cold and peaceful, turning up goosebumps across his skin despite the sun that beats down on his back.

Maybe Tommy can go talk to Phil about it. Or something.

Ranboo sticks his head over the wall, peering curiously after Tommy. “What’s his problem?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tubbo says, staring off into the sky.

The air is muggy and heavy as Tubbo picks his way down to the rivershore, despite how high the moon sits in the sky and the winking stars above.

Summer has snuck up on him, which kind of sucks. Hot all the time, even in the middle of the night. He’s finally stashed away his sleeping back until autumn, like Tommy did a couple weeks ago – Tommy grew up in the South, apparently, where it snows even in spring and buckets down with rain long into summer. He’s constantly swinging between adoring the fireflies and icey poles and paddling around in lakes full of weird fish, and bitching about the heat. It was Tommy’s thirteenth birthday like, three months ago, and all they had the collective energy to do was find the nearest lakeside and splash around until the sun went down.

Tubbo has only known Tommy for a couple months, but he’s coming to learn that Tommy has a lot of opinions on a lot of things. Sometimes even ones that don’t make sense when you put them next to each other. Like how he complains about the spiders and crawlies that hang around the water, but oohs and ahhs at their spindly legs when they emerge from the grass basically every night.

Tubbo, he just doesn’t like the weather. At all. End of story, too sticky, too gross.

The riverside is a bit nicer. He picks his way down the rocks – it’s a fast moving river, one that babbles loudly as it runs and kicks up spray round the bend in it that feels all itchy on his face but does cool him down. A couple fireflies nudge at his hair as he passes the flat-topped rocks to stick his feet in the water – not any further, because there are strong currents here and Tubbo’s not a very strong swimmer – and yeah, that is so much nicer than the sheets they’ve set up in the back of the van. Maybe he’s just used to sleeping rough but he does like it out here, really. Quiet, really quiet, he can actually think – not loud like the cities, not hot like the farms further inland and not both like Tommy’s brother’s shitty van. Because not to be a bad hanger-on, but – 

“Tubbo? That you?"

Tubbo just about jumps out of his skin and pitches into the water – he catches himself on a mossy rock, a few stumbling steps upstream, and a few seconds too late a hand comes to rest on his arm.

“Sorry,” Wilbur says, voice still a bit hushed. Tubbo looks down – the crook of his arm is filled with a loosely heaped pile of fabric, and two large, dark eyes that stare at him with a shiny kind of judgement. Fundy, his name is, he thinks – Fundy blinks at him, dark eyebrows raised.

“S’fine,” Tubbo mumbles, and politely removes Wilbur’s hand from his arm. Hopefully Wilbur doesn’t mind river slime, because he just kind of absent-mindedly rubs the residue on his pants. Either that, or he’s just very, very tired. The height of the moon above them kinda suggests that might be the case. And the whole baby situation.

Tubbo’s quick to clamber up the pebbly riverbank when Wilbur calls out after him.

“You’re welcome to hang around, you know,” he says. His voice is casual, but like, carefully so – and he’s watching Tubbo carefully too, big dark eyes that match Fundy’s. Tubbo can see the resemblance. “I was trying to get this little guy to sleep, but, well.” he bounces the baby in his arms, and Fundy responds with an awake-sounding giggle, “I think he’s decided to be a night owl tonight instead. Cheeky bastard.”

Well, it’s an invitation. It’s better than staring at the ceiling of the van as he tries to sleep through the stuffy heat, and Wilbur is – be cautious now, Tubbo – Wilbur’s alright. He’s older than Tommy, he’s an actual adult, but he doesn’t really talk down to them and when he calls Tommy a child it’s just supposed to be funny. Tubbo can respect that. He settles down onto a drier rock, a polite distance away, and Wilbur hums in response.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Tubbo mumbles, unfurling his legs again. The rocks – these flat, chunky ones, at least – overhang the river just enough for him to kick his legs out over the river, tall enough that his toes just barely skim the surface of the water when he kicks at the spray. “Too hot.”

“Feel that,” Wilbur agrees. “Think it’s bothering Fundy, too. He’s too fluffy for this weather, aren’t you?” The last bit is cooed at the baby whose tawny hair he’s gently stroking, and Fundy flicks a little ear grumpily. Tubbo, frankly, is still getting used to the idea that Fundy has ears that are fluffy and on the top of his head instead of… not.

“He’s a hybrid?” Because Wilbur sure isn’t.

“Not quite. His mother was a shapeshifter,” and Wilbur looks fond, “although I don’t think – I don’t think he’s quite figured out how to put the ears away, just yet.”

“Oh,” Tubbo says. Magic, then. “I thought – I thought shapeshifters didn’t, uh, didn’t really shift until they were a bit older.”

Wilbur’s gentle smile tightens, just ever-so-slightly. Tubbo stiffens. Oh no. “Well, I’m probably not a very good teacher,” he admits, petting back Fundy’s hair – his curls fall over his face as he looks down, obscuring his expression. “Maybe – he might get better at it when he’s older. Might – might come to it naturally, if his old man can’t help him out.”

Oh, oh no. This is already awkward. Mmm. Good job Tubbo. He can’t leap off the rock and scurry off, can he? That might make things worse. Yeah, that would probably make things worse.

Tubbo kicks at another wave instead. The water does not deign to break the silence.

“Why don’t,” Wilbur starts again, “why don’t I – I think some music might help him settle down, yeah? Could you hold onto him for a minute?”

Oh, yeah, totally. Because Tubbo definitely knows how to hold baby children, which is why he nods mutely and takes the proffered baby, and definitely not because Wilbur gets kind of tense and quiet whenever Fundy’s mum gets brought up and he feels really bad. He kind of just tucks Fundy into his shoulder, which is how it looks like Wilbur was holding him, except Fundy proceeds to flop around like a limp fish instead. Wilbur frowns a little, but not unkindly. Hopefully.

“You need to support his head a bit more,” he offers, shifting Fundy further down and resting the baby’s head more against Tubbo’s arm. He taps Fundy on the nose – the baby blinks – before clomping off into the grass towards the van. Tubbo looks down at Fundy, all dark hair and dark eyes and ears poking out at weird angles.

Fundy looks back up at Tubbo thoughtfully, wide eyes glittering in the firefly-light, and sticks his lip out in a purposeful, trembling pout.

“No,” Tubbo asks. Pleads, really.

Fundy whimpers, and takes a big, deep breath.

“No, no, surely – ”

Fundy lets the breath out with an earsplitting wail – the kind that almost sounds more like a squishy toy being stepped on, a high-pitched squeezing sound. And it’s not like Tubbo can just cover his ears without dropping him, which is definitely bad. Unhappy with merely screaming his lungs out, he starts squirming around – and Tubbo tries to squirm with him, anything to make him shut up, but he just keeps wriggling and flicking his ears around then he almost takes a dive right into the river, and Tubbo doesn’t know a whole lot about babies or particularly magical babies but he’s pretty sure they can’t swim, and then Fundy takes another deep breath and starts letting out these – these screeches like he’s being stabbed.

This baby hates him. This baby must hate him, and Wilbur’s going to hate him for making his baby cry, and then Tommy’s going to hate him because he worships the ground WIlbur walks on, and then he’s gonna be stuck absolutely nowhere just because Fundy decided to hate his guts. Tubbo even holds him away from his chest for a second – and the kid is heavy, he almost rolls right into the reeds – to make sure, he doesn’t know, that there isn’t a button on his shirt poking him in the ribs or something, but he just keeps screaming and Tubbo is pretty sure this baby just like, hates him personally, and when he tries shushing him and rocking him he just gets louder?!

(One tiny, tiny baby should not make this much noise, he decides. He’s not gonna be dumb enough to have kids of his own, that’s for sure.)

It’s at this moment – still half-holding Fundy away from his chest as he squirms around like a cat, screeching on tempo like he’s being shot, that Wilbur emerges hurriedly from the dark with a guitar slung over his shoulder. He rushes over right away, but he doesn’t look particularly surprised.

“Sorry,” he even says, prying Fundy from Tubbo’s grip – it’s not hard, he’s still kind of careening through the air – and Fundy shuts up and immediately starts cooing at his dad. Figures. “I probably should have seen that coming, huh.”

“I’m sorry,” Tubbo repeats, folding himself back into a small bit of origami on his rock. Well, there go his chances at getting along with Tommy’s brother. He gave it a good go. He should probably go wander off now. “I didn’t – I didn’t mean – ”

Wilbur waves him off with an arm that isn’t full of baby. “No, it’s not your fault. He gets like that sometimes, he can be – well, he’s a bit of a daddy’s boy,” and he taps Fundy on the nose again, and Fundy giggles. Wilbur looks down at Fundy with melty-looking eyes, soft and – and lovely, really, despite how dark the bags underneath them are. He’s probably a good dad. A very loving one, at least. Tubbo still feels kind of wobbly, but he can also feel the corners of his lips tugging up into a weak smile entirely without his permission – Wilbur notices, raising an eyebrow, and a smile spreads wider across his face as well.

“Y’know, I was going to play him some music, if he wasn’t feeling so clingy,” he says, “but you play, don’t you?”

Oh, fuck’s sake, what has Tommy been telling him? “I – ” honesty’s the best policy, isn’t it? “I. I play a bit. Or, I have, before, I don’t – I don’t have a guitar, or anything.” 

Wilbur hums, and it almost sounds approving – before Tubbo can decipher what the hell that’s supposed to mean, Wilbur is playing contortionist to unhook the guitar from around his shoulders while keeping Fundy un-upside down. Naturally, Fundy doesn’t even look bothered about it. Tubbo blinks, and when his eyes open again, Wilbur’s reaching out towards him with the guitar neck in hand.

“Give it a go,” he says, and waits for Tubbo to take the guitar – except that Wilbur’s guitar is like, sacred, if you ask Tommy, and Tubbo’s hands are full of river slime, so he doesn’t. Wilbur nods towards the guitar, beckoning. “I can teach you a song, if you like?”

It still feels kind of like swearing in a church, but Wilbur is looking at him all encouraging-like and Tubbo is pretty sure it’s just impolite to back out at this point. Also, he never gets the chance to practice guitar these days, and that sucks.

So he takes the guitar. It’s not as – not as smooth as he thought it would be, with varnish chipped and worn down around the edges. The lines in the wood show through in places, and the bottom curve of the guitar is all scratched up, pale lines bursting out like fireworks. There’s a clamp halfway down the neck – when he brushes his thumb across the strings experimentally, they sound higher than normal.

“Start off with the hand positions,” Wilbur begins, reaching a hand out – close enough to touch, but he doesn’t. Just hovers by the neck of the guitar instead. “You know C chord?”

“Yeah,” it’s like, the first chord he ever learned, probably. He strums up a C and Wilbur hums thoughtfully.

“Good, but I’m gonna show you a cooler one. Just put your fingers – kind of like this,” and he cups his fingers, second finger kind of reaching upwards while the next two sit next to each other and the pinkie kind of flexes out of the way. “Start with the index on the third fret, and put that on your fifth string, okay? And then put the next two on the fifth fret, third and fourth strings.”

It sounds a little strangled when he strums, because the bars on the guitar are kind of far apart and his hands are a bit small, but Wilbur doesn’t flinch – even when Fundy glares at him as the guitar squeaks. Wilbur suggests more, after that – moving the cup of his fingers up and down the neck of the guitar, from third to fifth to seventh to fifth again in a neat pattern. It still sounds squeaky and stilted at times, and he keeps changing his strumming pattern every little while, but he hits a steady rhythm. Wilbur looks kind of happy. Kind of proud, even, which puts a warm glow in Tubbo’s chest that absolutely shouldn’t be there and he should feel so pleased with himself for putting there.

“Where are you headed, Tubbo?”

He looks up, snapping himself away from the strings beneath his fingers – but Wilbur looks kind of welcoming, he guesses, and he let Tubbo play his guitar, so.

The answer is nowhere. Tubbo’s going nowhere, he just kind of hitched a ride (because Tommy’s the first friend he’s had in – in ever, quite possibly, and it seemed like a better idea than being by himself again, even if it can’t really last), but telling Wilbur that outright feels – bad. And he doesn’t want to do it. So he shrugs.

“Travelling,” he says instead.

“Very vague,” Wilbur replies, with that teasing lilt in his voice that says he is making fun of Tubbo a bit, but in like, a nice way. And he doesn’t press. Tubbo knows he’s young to be wandering, probably too young for it to pass as normal, but Wilbur still doesn’t press. Tubbo instantly likes him even more for it. “Well, you’re smart to be going south, given that summer up here is fucking insufferable.” He blows a tuft of fringe out of his face to make the point. “I’ll be – I’ll be visiting my dad, down in the Empire, taking Tommy and Fundy with me this time. So, I guess we’ll see how that goes. Frankly, I think Tommy’s going to try to rob him blind again.”

Oh, that’s – now hold on a minute. Tubbo scrunches his nose up. “Do you, uh,” hm. There might not actually be a polite way to ask that, actually. “Tommy and your dad aren’t friends?”

“Oh, no, they’re fine,” Wilbur says breezily. “They’ve met a few times – not many, but they get along perfectly well.”

Um. What.

“You alright, Tubbo?”

“I, uh – you’re brothers?” Tommy sure doesn’t let anyone forget it.

Wilbur gives him a strange look. “Well, yes? But we’re not – we’re not related. Not through my dad, god no.”

“You’re not?!"

Wilbur bursts out laughing, and Tubbo gapes more than he probably should, letting the guitar go quiet. Fundy flicks an ear in displeasure, rolling over in Wilbur’s arms.

“You’re not the first person to think that, y’know,” Wilbur snorts. “Not sure why.”

Because they fit together like – like puzzle pieces, that’s why. When he looks at them properly, yeah, they don’t look super related – Wilbur’s features are sharper than Tommy’s in a way that isn’t just because he’s older, like the lines in his face have a clear end point in mind, and Tommy’s curls are a little rounder and fuller than Wilbur’s frizzier fringe. They’re different, but next to each other, they fit together – form some matching picture, even if the pieces themselves are pretty different. Tubbo doesn’t know anyone else like that – he certainly doesn’t have anyone like that around, not him.

The warm feeling in his chest kind of – displaces itself, he guesses. Like someone took their hand and swished it all around inside his lungs. It doesn’t feel very nice.

“Tommy came from a lab or something, man,” Wilbur continues. “Not Phil’s, that’s for sure. Met him a couple times, thinks the world of him, but – no, no.”

“Oh.” Tubbo feels a little stupid. A little like he’s been left out of the joke, because he and Tommy are supposed to be friends – if he thinks about it, Tommy might be the only real friend Tubbo’s ever had – and he didn’t even know that.

“Hey,” Wilbur nudges his knee with a gentle kick, and Tubbo almost jumps straight out of his skin. “Don’t beat yourself up about it, yeah? My family is – well, Tommy doesn’t really have one, but my family can be… complicated. Tommy and I, we’re brothers where it counts.”

“Okay, okay.” That weird feeling is still kind of lodged in his chest, but it loosens a bit. And then his brain catches onto something, and he furrows his brows as he mulls it over – Wilbur, back to delicately rocking a sleepy Fundy, raises a brow. “...complicated?”

He’s morbidly curious. Can you blame him? Tommy’s family was weird enough already, with his weird older brother and nephew with fox ears and dad he’s apparently not even related to, which just serves to make things stranger.

“Okay, that makes them sound – that makes them sound awful,” Wilbur laughs. “They’re not, they’re just – we’re just very different people. Very different people than I. I’m a bit of the odd one out, at home,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. Wilbur is one of those people that gets on with almost everyone they cross – Tubbo can’t imagine him not being able to mold himself to fit in anywhere. “My dad – Phil, he, well… we have some political differences, I’ll just say that. I might be – I might be more of the constructivist of the party, so to speak.”

Politics kind of fly right over Tubbo’s head. Adults are patronising all the time, but you’d better believe that’s when they’re at their worst. Wilbur, though – his eyes light up when he talks about it. And he wants to know everyone’s opinion, even though Tubbo doesn’t really have one.

“He,” Wilbur says with a bit of pride, “stewarded a hardcore world for many years. Many, many – longer than I’ve been alive, by far, and for his efforts he won an elytra.”

“An elytra?” Tubbo resists the urge to gape again. Elytra – they’re unspeakably rare. He’s never even seen a set in real life, only heard stories – blessings passed down to champions of entirely different realms, turning into vibrant wings on the wearer’s back. They’re – they’re so cool, is what they are. And Wilbur’s dad has one. Wilbur’s dad.

“Mhmm,” Wilbur nods smugly. “And Technoblade – well, he’s kind of like a brother, really. Seems like a total hardass, but he’s a massive softie. The type that won’t tell you about it, but you just – you just know, man.” Something kind of wistful falls over his face. “I was – I was sick on my fifteenth birthday, because I was dicking around in the snow instead of staying warm, and he spent the whole time telling me to suck it up, yeah? But he spent the whole day sitting by my bedside, making sure I was well fed. Carved these little wooden birds to pass the time with. Ended up giving them to Tommy, he loves them.”

“They sound nice,” Tubbo says, because that’s really the polite thing to say to people about their family.

“Yeah, well.” Wilbur still looks a bit distant – eyes clouded over, like he’s thinking about something very hard. “I like to think that we try.”

Makes sense. Wilbur’s family sounds very nice, but there’s a reason, probably, that Wilbur is out here with Tommy and Tubbo of all people instead of his dad and his brother.

“You didn’t grow up in the south, did you?” Wilbur asks. 

“Nah,” Tubbo picks at the guitar strings again, trying to get his fingers back in the right shape to play those chords again. “Over east.”

Wilbur lets out a low whistle. “That’s a far place to travel from.”

“Not as far as the south,” Tubbo counters. There are all sorts of dangers in that direction – sprawling empires, and the rogues that skirmish for power and land at the borders. It’s cutthroat, just as much as the relentless snow that falls there. He knows that Wilbur’s from there, and he’s known for ages that that’s where Wilbur and Tommy and Fundy are headed, but he still hears things.

Wilbur hums. “True.”

“Not like you seem bothered,” Tubbo points out, when it doesn’t seem Wilbur’s going to elaborate on that.

“Let’s say,” Wilbur thinks for a moment. “Phil knows the land down there pretty well. We don’t – leaving wasn’t exactly difficult, yeah? Didn’t – might now have known he was helping me out, or that I was, uh, leaving, necessarily, but y’know. Details.”

“Doesn’t mean much when you’re going back.”

Wilbur laughs, waving Tubbo’s concerns away. “Let’s just say I’m pretty sure Tommy and I will be fine, that’s all. Doubt the Empire will be coming down on us too hard. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Tubbo shudders, because someone here has to be smart enough to be scared of what lingers around the Antarctic Empire, and it’s evidently not Wilbur and his bravado. Hopefully his confidence isn’t entirely unearned.

“You’re a clever kid,” Wilbur observes, derailing his train of thought with a crash. “You get people talking, y’know? You get to know what you want to know.”

Tubbo feels the tips of his ears flush red. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“I would,” Wilbur presses, “although you do have a right to know, if you’re sticking around. You’re still travelling with us after Solstice, aren’t you?”

It takes a second Wilbur’s words to sink in properly. He wants – well, he’s asking Tubbo to come with them. To where, he doesn’t know – it doesn’t matter, and maybe Wilbur knows that or maybe he doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter.

He should be careful. He should be – Tubbo travels by himself. He always has, just him and whatever he can fit in his pockets and shitty cardboard boxes to carry over his shoulder. He doesn’t know Wilbur, not really. He’s not – he’s not a part of whatever they’ve got going on, between Tommy and Fundy and Wilbur’s dad and his brother too. He’s on the outside, looking in.

“I don’t know – I don’t know how long I can stay,” Tubbo says. He doesn’t have anyone telling him not to, there’s nowhere that would be missing him as summer turns to autumn, but – he doesn’t know. It’s a backdoor. He needs it there, whether that’s for him or for Wilbur and Tommy – if he does something wrong, if they tire of him.

“That’s okay,” Wilbur says softly, and Tubbo gets the feeling it’s not just because Fundy looks almost asleep. “You can stay as long as you want.”

Tubbo thinks about Tommy, asleep in the van, and the guitar in his hands, and long summer nights. He thinks about pulling sleeping bags and blankets out of the boot when it gets colder, of sleeping with the boot open to the air and sticking his head out upside down and watching the constellations. Wilbur probably knows some. Tommy’s probably made up some of his own. Wilbur, Tommy, Fundy – and Tubbo too, maybe.

(He wants it. He wants it so, so badly. He doesn’t want this to fall apart again.)

“Yeah,” Tubbo hears himself say. “Yeah, I’m planning on sticking around. For – for now.”

A smile cracks its way across Wilbur’s face, pressing up against the undersides of his eyes. “Good man.”

Tubbo can’t help but smile back.

“Well,” Wilbur says, like that’s the end of something, “I think you’ve put the little guy to sleep, Tubbo. He’s knocked out.” Sure enough, Fundy is snoring gently, kind of sprawled out across Wilbur’s arm. Wilbur looks – relieved, mostly. “Should probably put him back to bed properly, this time. We’re back on the road tomorrow.”

“Alright,” Tubbo says, letting the music stutter to a stop as Wilbur stands, unwinding the guitar strap from round his back. Wilbur waves him off.

“Hold onto that til the morning, if you like,” he says. “You’re a good player, y’know. You deserve the chance to practice when it’s not stinking hot and you don’t have Tommy trying to make you go deaf in one ear.”

“Oh,” he pulls the guitar closer to his chest, feeling a new sense of – of something warm, something nice, wash over him. “Thanks, Wilbur.”

“Rest well, Tubbo,” Wilbur says, baby bundled up to his chest. He reaches out as he passes the bend in the river, and he – he pauses just a moment before reaching out, gently ruffling Tubbo’s hair. “See you tomorrow.”

Tubbo watches as Wilbur’s silhouette grows smaller and smaller, disappearing in the direction of the van. It’s cooler now, and so Tubbo keeps playing – the sound of string guitar chords rings off the open water, stronger and clearer with every verse. The sound of water crashing against the rocks provides the percussion, uneven and choppy, but just right. Fireflies light the way, a bobbing path from Tommy and Wilbur and Fundy to where Tubbo sits – and where Tommy finds him in the morning, curled around the guitar and dead asleep. 

(They split before L’Manberg – the chill of the Antarctic Empire is hostile to anyone born particularly far north, and Tommy’s family is complicated enough without Tubbo running around underfoot. He quickly finds other places to be, and Tommy stays with Wilbur, and Tubbo is alone again. 

But they still find their way back – to a different van, maybe, one that’s been cleared out to fit in furnaces and brewing stands, and Fundy’s taller than him now, and they’re all another step closer to death. Real, actual death. He can still feel the chill, can still feel the edge of a sword tearing his throat open, can still feel the terror that burned him up when he saw Tommy take an arrow to the chest. But they won. And the four of them, they – they’re tied together now. Permanently.)

From there, it’s just a matter of getting used to it, really.

He spends a lot of time at work. He grows out of the mansion within a few weeks, really – it’s massive, fortified like a forest, sparkling and beautiful, but… almost too much. It’s polished, perfect. Empty. There’s nothing to keep himself occupied with besides caring for Michael and halfway trying to keep things tidy, which is hard because Ranboo was always the one who was good at keeping things organised (side effect of being a glorified secretary, he guesses) and he just… doesn’t really care anymore. So the washing left strewn around on the floor kind of just feels like an extra rug. Quackity gives him more hours and even lets him take Michael to work along with him, which, thank the gods for that. If he had to track down a babysitter on this server – while Tommy is still toiling away at his walls, surrounded by people better than Tubbo could ever be – he might actually crack.

But no, Quackity said he can bring Michael, so he’s good.

So he toils the hours away through long shifts at the Tubburger. It’s calming. Methodical, even. Look, he’ll be honest – it’s not like the Tubburger was ever a particularly popular establishment, and now that Dream’s roaming the server people are even less likely to stray from their territory. So his customers are mostly the habitants of Las Nevadas, with a few delivery orders on the side. Snappy but without real teeth – they bite at his heels and it keeps him moving quickly, but without the sharpness of a blade to back it up. A comfortable busyness. The rest of the time is just cleaning, tidying – sometimes repainting the facade in different shades of bright green, or arranging flowers Ranboo brings into vases on the tables. They’re a classy establishment, goddamnit.

It’s not hard work, but that’s alright. It’s work regardless. Keeps the gears in his head satiated, directs the energy towards something even as he drifts into listlessness. He can just let his brain drift into mush as his hands toast buns and flip burger meat, making sure they don’t turn into mush.

It’s what he’s doing right now, prepping some more patties. He’s supposed to be running an order to Foolish – it’s late, but that guy builds late into the night, and he did build an entire mansion for them, so Tubbo can afford to bend the rules a bit for him, he reckons.

“Where’s my little man!” Quackity exclaims, pushing the double doors open with a flourish. He’s taken to hanging around the place towards the end of the night shift – Las Nevadas is on lockdown, but Dream is a sly bastard and Tubbo ranks pretty high as one of his favourite punching bags, so. Quackity hangs around. Michael, blissfully unaware of anything besides his cool new Uncle Q coming to visit them on shift, babbles at him excitedly from where he’s sitting on the counter – tripping over his words, half-formed nether syllables at breakneck speeds.

“Hey Big Q,” Tubbo offers, flipping a patty. Quackity grins at him, scooping Michael up into his arms and lifting him high into the air – but he’s careful, he always is. “Care for a burger?”

“Nah,” Quackity says, settling Michael on his shoulders. He doesn’t even flinch when Michael pokes at his feathery little wings – and he’s damn sensitive about those, too. Let the record show that Tubbo might not have always agreed with Quackity, or been on the same side as him, even, but – he does trust him, to some degree, with Michael. Even if it is in a pretty supervised way. “Not to slam your cooking, Tubbo, but I think I’ll have to give it a pass this time. Can’t stay long tonight.”

He’s lying, which Tubbo knows because he’s making too much eye contact again – Quackity tends to overcompensate – but also because Quackity literally never lets him leave the store alone, these days. Hm. He hasn’t been eating much since the prison break, either. Tubbo keeps poking at the burger patty, in case he can convince Quackity to change his mind.

(He’s a hypocrite, but it’s kind of how they function – Tubbo knows how Quackity overworks himself, and Quackity knows how Tubbo keeps his hands busy while his mind floats off elsewhere. They’re not the types to disturb the peace, disturb the process, but they sure do know the game well.)

“Ah, that’s a shame."

Quackity’s face twists up into something resembling sympathy. “Yeah, well, I know it’s a dick move. So I did grab some presents on my way over…” he deposits Michael down on the counter, by the broken-down cash register he spends the day playing with, and leans over surreptitiously. “As long as you’re doing alright, Tubbo?”

“Fine, Big Q.” He is. He’s even back to work. That’s how you know you’ve gotten over something.

Quackity purses his lips together – he’s skeptical, and for a fleeting moment it sends something ice-cold fanning out down his spine, and then he just gives Tubbo a jerky nod and straightens back up – donning his fun little persona again like a suit of armour. Absolutely impenetrable, that one is.

“Well,” he says, back to the theatrics, “I do have a couple presents up my sleeve actually – Mikey, buddy, you wanna show me all the work you’ve been doing today?”

Michael snorts affirmatively, leading Quackity over to the register – the buttons are broken but they still make noise, and the drawers still pop out with a clattering sound, so he fucking loves the thing. There’s a few gold pieces rattling around in the tray, and Tubbo watches as he carefully picks one up and shows it off to Quackity. Quackity makes sure to look very impressed.

“You’re gonna be coming for your dad’s employee of the month star soon, kid,” Quackity grins, ruffling Michael’s curls. “But before then…” he’s got something hidden behind his back, and Michael abandons the till in his curiosity. Honestly, Tubbo is pretty intrigued as well. “A gift for all your hard work, Michael.”

And with that, Quackity produces a messy little visor from behind his back – black and green, just like the veneer on the face of the building, with something approximating Tubburger sloppily embroidered on the rim. Tubbo snorts out a laugh – it’s clearly homemade, and Quackity’s no seamstress – but Michael’s face lights up in wonder.

“For me?”

“For you, buddy!” Michael reaches out immediately and takes the visor, trying to shove it on his head – Quackity reaches out, and helps him buckle the strap properly. It’s halfway falling in front on his face but Michael is absolutely fucking enchanted, and it doesn’t not make Tubbo choke out another laugh too.

“Manners, Michael,” he reminds him, feeling vaguely like a boss at this whole parenting thing.

“Thank you!” Michael exclaims, delighted, and Quackity melts.

“Aren’t you just precious,” he gushes, tweaking the front of Michael’s cap – the kid squeals with glee, reaching up to tap the tips of Quackity’s fingers with his own.

Tubbo feels – warm. Quackity’s right, Michael is precious – there’s no one, absolutely no one on this godforsaken server that makes him feel this kind of happiness like Michael does. He has Tommy, he has Ranboo – of course he does – but it’s just different with Michael. He can’t explain why, but it is. Looking at his kid, and his little cap and his wide grin, Tubbo is suddenly once again made aware of the fact that he would blow this place to smithereens to keep that smile on his son’s face.

Y’know. Normal parenting things.

“Hey, Tubbo,” Quackity snaps him out of his paternal reverie, leaning on the counter with that faux-casualness that he’s been rehearsing since Manberg. Truly, no one wears it like Quackity. “Anyone giving you trouble?”

“Wilbur came past earlier,” Tubbo says, not really because Wilbur gives him much trouble, but because it’s what Quackity wants to hear. Quackity hisses with brittle sympathy.

“And?”

Tubbo shrugs.

He still doesn’t trust Wilbur as far as he can throw him – he’s never going to trust that man again, he’s inherited enough of Wilbur’s things to be absolutely done with him, and the whole damn server might know about Ranboo and Michael now but that doesn’t mean he’s going to stop stashing Michael in the storeroom whenever Wilbur comes past to bother Quackity or steal their condiments. And if that makes him feel kind of sick, then fine. But despite all of that, Wilbur is… kind of harmless.

Kind of. He was never a fighter in L’Manberg either, Tubbo reminds himself. Didn’t stop literally anything that happened from happening.

(Wilbur’s hand-me-downs are still hanging in Tubbo’s closet. He probably should have burned them or something at some point, but he still wears them sometimes – because they’re his clothes, they were just Wilbur’s first. He doesn’t really think about it, except on nights where Michael won’t stop crying and he remembers how good Wilbur was with Fundy. He wasn’t even much older than Tubbo, he would probably get it. And then he remembers how Fundy turned out and dismisses the thought entirely.)

So sometimes Wilbur does stop by the Tubburger, and they exchange about three minutes of increasingly stilted conversation, and then Wilbur gets this sad look on his face (when he realises Quackity will not appear from thin air to be messed with, Tubbo is guessing) and leaves. Fairly standard. Case in point: this morning he shows up while Tubbo’s in the middle of putting together some burgers, slams the double doors open the exact same way Quackity does, and strides over to the counter with all the confidence of a man who is going to order twenty TubBoxes and ask Tubbo to deliver them to every far corner of Las Nevadas just to piss off Quackity.

(“Nice coat,” he scoffs, leaning an elbow on the counter to peer at the menus above their heads. His nonchalant attitude is pretty easily smashed by the very obvious glances that he keeps sending towards the Tubburger’s east window, the one that overlooks the needle where Quackity’s office resides. For all his villainous depravity, or whatever Tommy calls it, he is remarkably easy to read. “Very dramatic.”

“I’m a widow now,” Tubbo informs him, because, well, he might as well know. Wilbur chokes out a half-aborted laugh.

“Y’know, Tubbo, it’s not really f – ”

“Boo!” Ranboo shrieks, emerging from the wall with claws out and a victorious grin on his face.

Wilbur screeches – and it’s Tubbo’s turn to choke back a laugh now, because he looks like an idiot – before his gaze settles properly on Ranboo, hovering a foot off the ground and distinctly ghostlike, and his grin drops.

He leaves real quick after that – he can feel Wilbur’s eyes on him as he stares resolutely down at the counter, and he doesn’t look up until he hears the bell on the door jingle as he leaves.)

Which is fairly standard, and probably not what Quackity’s looking for. And maybe Tubbo is still secretly loyal to Wilbur, maybe he is still a yes-man, because snitching on him every time he looks kind of sad does feel a little bit cruel.

“Well, you let me know if he’s sniffing around here, okay?” Quackity huffs. “Don’t want him messing with you. I’m more than happy to tell him to fuck off if he is.”

“Mhm,” Tubbo hums. He’s not really a fan of where this conversation is going. “Anything else I can do for you, Big Q?”

“Yeah, actually.” Quackity settles more comfortably onto his elbows. Oh, so they’re having that kind of a proper talk today. “Is the hubby around?”

Quackity has a funny way of saying that – realistically, he probably did have an inkling that there was something going on before Ranboo died and the whole damn server found out what was going on, but it’s worse now – he’s always, like, weirdly avoidant of the fact that he so obviously does not like Ranboo. Which is fine, because Tubbo didn’t exactly pick out his spouse to win Quackity’s approval. Kind of the opposite, honestly, but it still makes his skin crawl. Makes his hackles raise in a way that makes him want to shout to the rooftops how kind and caring and worth it his husband is, actually.

He kind of wonders what Quackity would have said before Ranboo died, when his dislike wasn’t all twisted up with misplaced pity. Part of him really, really wants to hear how disappointed in him Quackity would be. Wants to hear how worried he’d be over nothing.

But that’s kind of stupid.

“Out,” Tubbo says. Ranboo floated out the door – rather, through it – shortly after Wilbur left, giving Michael a big cuddle as he left (perks of being an undead mob, apparently). Exploring the server. Getting a different perspective, Ranboo calls it.

Quackity hums. “And you’re not feeling – ”

“It’s not like that, Big Q,” Tubbo snaps – more than he means to. He can feel the kinship between them dripping from him like ink, as guilty as it kind of makes him feel. They’re not in Manberg anymore. Quackity forgets that sometimes. Which isn’t his fault, but the comparison still makes Tubbo’s skin crawl.

“Right,” Quackity recovers quickly. “Well. Anyways, there is some business I wanted to talk to you about. Some business to get done today.”

Tubbo raises an eyebrow. “About the Tubburger?”

“No, no,” Quackity replies. Tubbo’s hackles rise. His shoulders are low, scrunched in, and he won’t meet Tubbo’s eyes. That’s not good, not good for Quackity, especially not good for Quackity now. Something bad is happening. “Look. It’s about the little cookie shop you and Ranboo were making before – before, y’know.”

Tubbo drops his flipper onto the grill.

“Shit, Tubbo!” Quackity exclaims, reaching halfway over the counter – the flipper still tips onto the floor, flicking hot grease in a small arc. Tubbo feels the weight of it when it hits his arms, small and scattered, but not the heat – not until Quackity says something else, sharp and loud, and he looks over. Michael is babbling to himself, eyes wide with panic, but the hissing and popping of the grill is scaring him too much to approach.

“Tubbo? Tubbo?” Quackity’s clicking his fingers in front of Tubbo’s face, now – he snaps back to reality, stares into Quackity’s concerned face. He’s not very good at hiding his feelings, is he. “You alright, buddy?”

“All good.” He can’t feel a thing, really. Grease burns are not the worst thing he’s ever dealt with. Quackity tuts disapprovingly.

“I’m getting the first aid kit,” he grumbles, pushing through the little waist-high barn door on the other side of the counter and marching over to the stockroom. When Tubbo calls denial after him, he just grumbles louder. “Where the fuck do you keep that thing?”

Not really anywhere in reach, because he doesn’t really need it, but there’s no turning Quackity off the scent of blood – for better or for worse, sometimes. “Same shelf as the buns, bottom right.”

There’s more complaining noises as Quackity rifles through the shelves – the first aid kit is pushed to the back corner, if Tubbo recalls correctly, to give him more space to air out the buns. In the meantime Tubbo scoops Michael up off the counter, puts him in one of the booths closest to the counter with the plain backside of a menu and some crayons. Michael makes a worried-sounding murmur, and not even a kiss on the forehead can take the frown off his face. Well, not much he can do about that. He briefly considers calling Ranboo for help, but – no. It’s fine. He’s probably not carrying his comm, anyway.

When he returns behind the counter there’s an extra layer of dust across Quackity’s front and forearms, but the first aid kit is spread out on an empty counterspace. If Tubbo had lived a different life he might have called out how gross and unclean that counter is for first aid – he would know, he works here – but, well. He’s had burns treated in less sanitary environments, that’s for sure.

“This is probably against workplace health and safety, y’know,” Quackity says, holding a rag under a cold tap – although he sounds less stern, more just dully annoyed.

“Promise not to sue,” Tubbo says. Quackity rolls his eyes, wringing out the rag, and places it against the blisters already bubbling up on Tubbo’s skin. His right arm is pretty safe, on account of having already been burned to hell and back, but there are a few droplet-shaped burns on his left. He offers up his forearm to Quackity, practiced.

“You probably could, is the problem,” Quackity observes, fidgeting with the cloth. The rag is cool against his skin – relieving, especially in the heat of the kitchen. “You have a law degree.”

“Yeah, probably.” Tubbo does not have a law degree. “That’s probably why – that’s why you wanted me on your side, right?”

Quackity’s face quirks downward. 

“Tubbo, come on.” But he doesn’t say no, just pulls away the cloth and squints at the little droplet-shaped blisters left behind. He takes out the burn cream, which smells kind of like dead plants, and starts squeezing it out onto a stray corner of cloth. “Look, I wanted to talk to you about some important business, okay? About – about yourself, and about Ranboo as well.”

“Yeah?"

“Look. I had to seize the cookie shop for safety reasons, you know that. It was – it was just a lot of expansion, happening right outside my country, and it just wasn’t safe.” Hope he’s not waiting for Tubbo to agree, because he is going to be left hanging. “But since – since, y’know, recent developments, I think there’s more benefit in transferring – transferring that back under your ownership. How’s that sound to you, Tubbo?”

Sounds like there’s a catch he’s not mentioning, but that’s just the way Quackity works. “I’m just not sure what brought this all on, Big Q. You said what we had, that was a good arrangement.”

Quackity sighs. “I – I’m gonna tell you something, Tubbo. Things were – things were different then, right? It was a good arrangement. It was good for the time. But now… things are different, Tubbo. Dream’s out of the prison, and he – I saw the vault, man. He’s not your friend. He’s – he’s a very, very bad guy.”

“I’m aware,” Tubbo says drily. “The whole axe to the neck thing did – did kind of spell that one out for me, Big Q."

“Yeah, well,” Quackity shifts uncomfortably where he stands. Never a good sign. “I just think – things have changed, since Dream got out. Ma – Massively, I mean, and you know that for yourself. And because of that, the shop – look, I was real upset when you put it there, you know that, but – I trust you, alright? So I think it’s okay – it’s okay for you and, uh, Ranboo, it’s okay for you guys to take back ownership of that again.”

And then it all clicks into place.

There is no catch. There’s no catch at all, because the truth is almost worse – that Quackity is pitying him. That Quackity is only giving back their building because Ranboo died, and he – he feels bad. He feels bad.

“You can still be protected by Las Nevadas, if you want,” Quackity is saying, “but – if that space is gonna help you feel safer, ‘specially if you’re closer here than off in the snow by yourself, you underst – ”

“This isn’t about Dream, is it, Big Q?”

Quackity pales. It’s near-imperceptible, the way his mouth tightens, but Tubbo is used to seeing it on him – every time he opens his mouth and says something Quackity doesn’t want to hear. “What else is it gonna be about, man?”

“This isn’t about Dream,” Tubbo repeats. “This is about – this is about you, honestly, because you’re not giving back the outpost because of security, or whatever – you’re giving it back because you heard what happened to Ranboo, and you felt bad. You’re – you’re pitying me.”

He can’t even explain the red-hot core of anger that flares up in his gut – he really can’t. But he’s angry nonetheless, it still rubs him the wrong way. He doesn’t want to be pitied. There’s no reason to pity him, everything is fine, and maybe if Quackity had approved of his decisions for once – not that it even matters in the first place, because he doesn’t care about Quackity’s approval anyway – then Quackity wouldn’t feel so shit either. He wouldn’t.

“I am not,” Quackity says hastily. “I don’t – look, if I, if I don’t like Ranboo as much as you seem to think I don’t, then I wouldn’t be just giving him back a building, Tubbo, that’s – that’s shitty business.”

“That’s exactly why you’re fucking doing it,” Tubbo retorts – because Quackity never did like Ranboo, that’s the point – because Tubbo knows the way Quackity wears guilt. Embarrassingly strongly. He’s seen it after Schlatt, after Technoblade, after L’Manberg – it’s never spoken, but between the two of them, but it fills the air anyway. It’s why Quackity still hangs around on his late shifts, makes presents for his son, bandages up his wounds when he gets hurt. Maybe it really is just like Manberg, all over again, and maybe they never even left – 

And now Tubbo is very aware of Quackity’s hands treating his burns.

“I need to go,” he stumbles back, cutting off Quackity's rambling words and the hands on his forearms – they fall away, and when Quackity goes to follow he stays a safe few steps away, but he’s bubbling with energy. “Michael – Michael needs to go to bed, anyway.”

“Tubbo,” Quackity says, insistent – hands out like he’s trying to calm a spooked horse. “Tubbo, come on. Let’s talk this – ”

“We’ve talked enough,” Tubbo snaps – that was harsh, that was selfish, that’s why no one wants to be around you – and basically vaults over the counter. Michael looks up from his drawing in concern, and when Tubbo tells him it’s time to go home, he corrals his crayons into a hasty fistful. Quackity follows through the sidegate in quick succession, flinching like a jackrabbit in a gunfield when he hears the door slam open behind him.

“Tubbo, ” he calls to the other’s turned back – Tubbo walks straight on through the double doors, letting them slam behind him, ignoring the fervent sting of the cold on his cheeks. “Tubbo, just – come back, we can talk this out!”

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Tubbo hurls back over his shoulder, and storms off into the desert.

It’s a long and lonely walk back to Snowchester.

The sand grips at his boots, shaking each trapped boot free as anger whirls inside his stomach – because Quackity is a hypocrite and he’s pitying him, just like Tommy, just like fucking Technoblade, which is bullshit because he doesn’t need help. He doesn’t. He’s happy. He’s fine and no one fucking believes him and it’s unfair because it’s not like Ranboo ever blew up his home, or just blew him up in general – Ranboo listens to him, so what if he’s not perfect? No one here is. No one here comes even close. Fuck, Ranboo’s never tried to fucking kill anybody, and that makes him a better person than most of the server – that makes him a better person than Tubbo.

They – they’re all upset about what happened to Ranboo because they don’t get it, fine, because it’s not like Tubbo got it until Ranboo explained it to him either but they don’t listen. They don’t ever listen, and it’s all well and good for them to act like he’s crazy but Tommy has his family and so does Wilbur and Quackity has Las Nevadas and Technoblade has the fucking Syndicate, he guesses, and Tubbo never gets anything, he never gets anything at all. And it’s fine! That’s fine! He doesn’t bitch, he doesn’t complain, he keeps his head down and does his work. But when he does get something nice, all of a sudden everyone has to ruin it for him.

(And he remembers a guitar under his hands, words whispered behind a president’s back and bandages pressed into pockets, and the rough fabric of a messily sewn bandanna between his fingers and – and his throat doesn’t hitch, his eyes don’t burn, he soldiers on one-foot-in-front-of-the-other and feels absolutely nothing at all.)

He barely registers the feeling of loose sand transforming to hard-packed snow beneath his feet, Michael’s small hands clutching at his jacket. He only really comes back to himself – really comes back to himself, stops hovering a few feet over his own head – when his toes hit the wooden patio in front of the mansion, landing against the oak with a thud. It brings him to a stop, and he blinks, shakes his head – the brightness of the snow under the moonlight leaves pale afterimages across his vision, bright and burning. The sky is a black expanse, and – shit. It’s definitely past Michael’s bedtime. Time gets away from him so much easier than it does for Ranboo, and Ranboo just – he just cares about that kind of thing a lot less now.

He shifts Michael’s weight – sleepy and silent, staring out at the treeline – onto one hip and fumbles with the door. It catches when he opens it, and he looks down to see a basket at his feet, wrapped in pale pink ribbon, full of pastries and other little baked things that look a bit deflated in the cold. Nuggets of gold wink up at him from between the baked goods – Niki and Technoblade, then. Speaking of people that have gotten weirdly nice, and weirdly involved, since Dream broke out of prison.

He knows what they did. He knows Technoblade, obviously, because everything Technoblade has done is plastered to the front of his brain whenever he shuts his eyes – like the afterimage of the snow but mutated into starbursts in red and blue, accompanied by the snap of an anvil and the hissing of withers. He remembers when Tommy stayed awake late, buzzing from the potions they’d downed, and rattled off about how Niki had led them to the spruce forests right before the test launch. He’s not stupid, and unlike Tommy, he’s not in denial. He doesn’t want her charity either.

And he also knows they were both there when Ranboo died. So.

He kicks the basket past the doorway as he struggles with throwing off his coat, letting the door slam behind him with an almighty bang. Michael starts at that, seizing in his arms for a moment – blinking sleepily at the dark entryway before settling back into Tubbo’s arms.

Tubbo lets the fire inside him die a little, adjusting his hold so Michael can see his face instead of being hooked over his shoulder. “Alright, buddy?”

Michael doesn’t reply, just nods before letting his head fall onto Tubbo’s shoulder.

It’s a long walk up to Michael’s bedroom – the new one, much bigger with heating vents and netherrack built right into the floor. They’ve always had lamps, but never carved shroomlights into flower-shapes and planets hanging from the ceiling – it’s like a cooler version of the ceiling-sticker-stars Tubbo always wanted when he was a kid. Foolish is truly a master of his craft.

The bedtime process isn’t massively difficult tonight – Michael’s already pretty much dead on his feet, given that it’s already nine at night. Nobody’s going to be calling Tubbo father of the year, that’s for sure. Michael doesn’t even cry for a bedtime story after putting his pyjamas on, settling under the covers instead with a yawn.

“For Bee,” he declares sleepily, pressing something folded up into Tubbo’s hands. It’s the menu from the Tubburger, he realises – folded unevenly, with corners sticking out the side, and crayon staining the edge of the page.

Tubbo smiles down at him. “For me, Michael? Thank you.”

And he unfolds the page, and his heart drops into his stomach.

It’s ridiculous. He’s being ridiculous, he’s being irrational, he knows that – because there were dozens of Michael’s drawings pinned to various surfaces in Tubbo’s cabin, and the upgrade to the mansion has only given them more space. There’s probably enough of them to warrant an entire tree’s worth of a notepad, one of the tall pines out in Snowchester that’s been reaching up to the sky for hundreds of rotations. They’re – normal. They’re fine.

There’s a tiny, scribbly pink figure in the centre – always in the centre, so Michael can hold both his dad’s hands – and on the left a short and stubby stick figure in brown. Usually Ranboo is the long and lanky one, a black and white smear from the top to the bottom of the page, with maybe a red scribble for his tie.

Now, though – it’s the same black and white smear, and it’s not like it’s that weird for kids to draw stick figures floating, but this drawing of Ranboo has red and green scratched horizontal across the line that’s supposed to be his chest.

It’s stupid. Michael’s a kid. He doesn’t have an understanding of death, or the paranormal – he knows things go away, he doesn’t know that they die. Ranboo told him that his chicken went away to a chicken farm, when it died – Tubbo thought really hard about telling him that Ranboo was gone and wouldn’t be coming back, but then Ranboo did and suddenly that wasn’t a conversation he needed to have anymore. It doesn’t mean anything. Michael probably doesn’t know his dad died. Michael doesn’t know Tubbo didn’t stop it. Fuck, Michael probably doesn’t even know that’s blood.

But for some reason, he’s still gripping the page hard enough to tear it.

His heart thuds in his chest, heavy and loud, all-encompassing – he drowns in the sound, letting the blood rush past his ears and his vision fuzz over. He’s not looking. He’s not thinking. He’s not thinking about how Ranboo is dead, and – and different, and that Dream won’t ever revive him and this is how things are going to be forever.

Tubbo, Michael, and the ghost that haunts their home.

Shut up, shut up, shut up. He kicks the thought away as soon as it surfaces, boxing it up and taping up that box and locking it far, far in the back of his head – never to be opened, never to be touched. He forces himself upwards on shaking legs, ignores how he struggles to put one foot in front of the other, and sucks in a deep breath. It catches in his chest. He squeezes his eyes shut, and then squeezes them shut harder to block out the glow of blood and flowing black and white that brand themselves on the backs of his eyelids. He takes another breath, and this one slides down easier. It’s enough to walk across the room, shambling, enough to turn off the lamp on the bedside and enough to close the door behind him. Enough to stare out over the manor entry – stark, boxed in dark wood, empty.

He picks his way aimlessly to the kitchen – it’s the autopilot kicking in again, narrowing his field of vision down to the manageable. Michael is asleep. Michael drew a picture for him. Tubbo needs to put Michael’s picture on the fridge.

This is easier to approach than literally everything else his brain is trying to tackle right now, so. Kitchen it is.

His boots clack against the wooden boards – he still hasn’t removed them, even though he knows he’s tracking snow throughout the house. The kitchen is still, lights off, pristine everywhere besides the sink – he hasn’t cooked in… a while, just lives off the leftovers Foolish drops off. So, he crosses the kitchen, pins the page to the fridge door, and. Stares.

He stares – he stands, and he observes, because that’s what Tubbo does best.

There it sits, centrepiece, different to every other drawing pinned up on the fridge – different to every other drawing pinned up in this house. The only one that’s accurate to the way they are now. This is what his life is going to look like, for the rest of his life. His husband being dead. That is going to be the rest of Tubbo’s life, forever.

But that’s fine, he tells himself. That’s fine, because nothing has to change.

“That’s so cute,” Ranboo comments from over his shoulder.

He startles – visibly flinches, he can feel himself do it, and the adrenaline that shoots down his spine is abruptly chased by a hot rush of shame. He crosses his arms, pretending that he feels less shaky than he really does, and stares numbly as Ranboo floats past him – flowing like a river, brushing past with a hiss of cold air. When he turns back, he looks – confused.

“You okay, Tubbo?”

“‘M fine,” he replies mechanically. He’s still staring past Ranboo’s shoulder, at the drawing.

“Really? Because you seem a little,” he waves a hand vaguely around in Tubbo’s direction. “You seem a little upset.”

“It’s nothing, Ranboo,” Tubbo snaps himself out of his spaciness, shakes it off. When he looks at Ranboo, he’s looking at him all weird again. And with the fucking eye contact again, gods. “Promise you. I’m fine.”

Ranboo’s face falls into something that looks kind of like – disappointment. “Tubbo. You don’t have to – I’m not dumb enough for that to work on me anymore, right? I – you can tell me things, you know that, right?”

A pit in his stomach forms as Ranboo’s words wash over him, again – that distinct feeling that he could have done more, that he should have done more gripping at him like tar. It fills his lungs, presses down on his chest, makes taking in a breath feel like he’s gasping for air. It pounds through his head like a mantra – your husband hated himself, and you didn’t even know. Your husband hated himself, and now he’s dead. Just like Tommy, just like Wilbur, except this time you have nobody to blame but yourself.

He should know better. He should know better, because he’s seen how bad things can get on this server. He saw first-hand how Wilbur’s self loathing killed him, he called the order that left Tommy in exile with Dream – he should know better, but he doesn’t. Because he’s so fucking selfish.

“You’re shutting me out,” Ranboo says softly, but there’s – there’s frustration lining his tone.

Gods. It’s bad when Ranboo of all people is upset with him. He feels fucking terrible.

“I’m not shutting you out, there’s just – there’s nothing to talk about, bossman.” And now, if he could will his feet to move from where they’re planted in the middle of the kitchen, that would be great. “I’m going to bed.”

“No you’re not, you’re going to go stare at the ceiling for the next four hours, and then you’re going to go off to your lab and brew potions or something until the sun comes up.” Okay, well being read that easily stings a little. “Tubbo, I don’t – “ he’s struggling to put his words together, and he looks frustrated – frustrated with Tubbo, frustrated with himself. “I know – I know, I haven’t always had the best track record with… with knowing stuff, or with being trustworthy, but I promise, okay? I’ll be better. I’ll be better.”

He reaches out, and tries to interlace his fingers with Tubbo’s – but Tubbo’s fingers won’t uncurl from his fist, and it just feels cold.

(How is he supposed to tell him that better is the problem?)

“I know, Ranboo.”

“...do you?”

Tubbo looks up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you – like, I know, but I don’t think you do, actually.” Ranboo reluctantly drops his hand, but his expression stays steady. “I just – you don’t tell me things. You don’t, and it’s not – it’s not good, Tubbo.”

Tubbo glares at him, exasperated. Ranboo doesn’t even flinch. “Are we really doing this?”

“Yeah,” Ranboo challenges, shifting to move in front of him – coiling through the air like a current. “Because, let me guess – you were with Quackity, right? Was he at work again?”

“He is my boss," Tubbo snarks back at him.

“So yes?”

“Yeah? So what.”

“So," Ranboo points out. “I wouldn’t have even – I wouldn’t have even been able to like, put that together properly, if I remember all this stuff from like – L’Manberg, and everything. And now you’re upset so like, obviously, something happened, and you’re just not telling me what it is because – I don’t know. I’m not trustworthy or something.”

“Ranboo – ”

“I don’t – that’s not on you, man,” Ranboo says hastily. “It’s like – I, I understand why, but – I can’t help you if I don’t know this stuff. And I didn’t know literally anything before, and now – now I do. Now I do.”

“Where is this coming from?” He tries to laugh it off, he tries, but the sound comes out all twisted and wrong and Ranboo is still looking at him funny, but –  “I thought – I thought we worked out the memory stuff. I thought we fixed it. I thought you were fine with it.” 

“Well,” Ranboo shifts uncomfortably at that, eyes skittering away from Tubbo’s, “I wasn’t.”

Fuck. He should have noticed. He should have – he should have done something , but – he knew Ranboo wasn’t happy with the experiments, he wasn’t, so they had sticky notes and comm alarms and a thousand messages exchanged a day but it wasn’t enough. Every time, every time Ranboo beat himself up about forgetting something stupid and pointless – he should have said something, should have made it clearer how much that shit doesn’t matter. But he didn’t. He didn’t.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“Why don’t you ever say anything?” Ranboo exclaims. He whips back around, and Tubbo steps back, struck – Ranboo stares at him, genuinely, anger and sadness and frustration playing out plainly across his face. “I – now, right now, I remember now everything you’ve told me, every horrible, horrible thing someone here has put you through, and you downplay it every time, Tubbo. God, I’ve been living with Technoblade for months and you never said anything!”

“This isn’t about Technoblade,” Tubbo says.

“Yeah, it’s about you.” Ranboo counters.

“It’s not like I’m just gonna make you go and choose between your people, Ranboo.” It’s the polite, practiced answer, and it fits like an old hand-me-down coat. “That’s, like, your whole thing.”

“That’s not a call you get to make! Tubbo, I – ” Ranboo is hovering again, flicking his tail back and forth anxiously – as if he were pacing, if his feet were touching the ground. Oh, this is something Ranboo’s actually – actually really upset about. “Do you know how it feels to find out that someone you trust literally murdered someone you care about? It’s – it’s bad, Tubbo! It’s really, really bad! What if – what if Technoblade or somebody hurt you again, and I wouldn’t even know that they could because you didn’t tell me!”

“It’s not like he’s going to try anything,” Tubbo points out. “He already checked out Snowchester, it’s fine.”

“That’s not the point,” Ranboo says despairingly, pressing his hands into his face.

“I mean,” Tubbo says – and he fights to keep his voice level, to keep himself reasonable, “what actual benefit would there actually be if I told you? It’s like – if I told you, right, when you were – back then, then you wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway. I’d just be putting you through more of my bullshit.”

Ranboo scoffs, to his surprise. Zero hesitation. “I’d move here. I’d stay with you.”

Tubbo frowns. “Ranboo – ”

“Holy crap, Tubbo, of course I would stick around here.” He looks stubborn, and determined, and – there. There’s the issue, the puzzle piece placed in backwards. “You’re my husband. If they hurt you again – ”

“I didn’t ask that. I asked – ” he sucks in a breath, and it shakes – hah, just like Tommy does – “I asked who you would choose.”

Because, like, Ranboo is kind. And naive, and has the biggest bleeding heart Tubbo has known literally anyone to have. It’s the best thing about him, and it’s the worst. It’s the reason he has a son and a husband (and a family) at all, and it’s probably at least a contributing factor to how his country ended up blown to rubble beneath his feet. And Ranboo was there on doomsday, not because of L’Manberg, or because he thought it was worth saving, but because of Tubbo, and then he still stayed with Technoblade and Phil in the Arctic because he does what Tubbo really fucking can’t and looks past the furs and the armour to the people that he is, at least dimly, aware exist beneath.

He wants Ranboo to choose him. It’s sick, and selfish, a horrible rancid feeling trapped at the bottom of his stomach. He wants Ranboo to choose him. But Ranboo – Ranboo’s the type of person who wants the best for everyone. He doesn’t function like that.

That is the kind of person his husband was. Ranboo wouldn’t choose. He just wouldn’t.

And this is when he realises that the Ranboo floating in front of him, and the Ranboo that was alive – that he adopted his son with, that he married – are, in all honesty, different people entirely. 

They’re almost the same, kind of, because they have the same memories, and because Ranboo is wearing that same falling expression that he always did when he’s sensed that he’s said something wrong. Ranboo knows – this Ranboo knows everything about Tubbo. And Tubbo recognises him, sees Ranboo’s kindness and sharp humour and optimism in him, because of course he does.

But it’s not the same.

“Fucking hell,” he breathes. He doesn’t even know why they’re doing this. He feels worse. It’s like ripping out stitches, pulling apart a wound before it’s healed.

“Tubbo,” Ranboo starts, “it’s – I’m still – ”

“No, you’re not. Sam – Sam murdered you.” It’s the logical response. A recounting of the facts. It still feels wrong. It still leaves a lump in his throat, his eyes burning – and it’s an empty room, in truth, just him with a ghost, so he feels marginally less bad when he sniffs loudly and feels tears start to gather at the corner of his eyes, too many to swallow back down. Quiet and stubborn.

“Tubbo – ”

“Did I fuck up that badly?” The words stumble out before he can stop them, wet and disjointed. “I – you – he hated himself, so fucking much. And I never, I never said anything. It’s all my fault. It’s all – it’s all my fault.”

“No, no, it’s not,” Ranboo croons, and his hands are hovering near Tubbo’s shoulders again but he can’t feel them – all he can feel is the cold.

“I fuck everything up,” Tubbo says bitterly. He chokes, and feels tears start to make their way down his cheeks, burning hot against the cold air, and he hates it but he can’t stop. “I fucked it up with Wilbur, and with Tommy and – and fucking look at how that turned out.”

“Hey, hey, let’s – ” there’s still no pressure on his shoulders, as much as Ranboo wants to pretend there is “ – let’s sit down, okay?”

So he does.

“Tubbo,” and he looks up, and Ranboo stares back at him – dead in the eyes, wrong , but sincere nonetheless. For – for this part of Ranboo, this is what sincerity looks like. “He never blamed you, Tubbo. Never. It’s not your fault.”

Tubbo isn’t a touchy person in the slightest. He really isn’t. It bothers him more than anything. But he stares into his husband’s face, so close and yet so far – sitting right beside him, and he can’t touch him at all, and all he can think is, shit. He probably could use a hug right now.

But they can’t. So he just sits there and curls up in a ball and wraps his arms around himself and cries , and Ranboo sits silently beside him and just… lets him. He rests his head on his knees, and there’s a cold feeling on his shoulder – it could be a draft. But it probably isn’t.

“...I don’t get it,” the ghost beside him says quietly. It sounds – it sounds like a confession, for once. Not just – not pushing some fake sense of cheerfulness on him. Something real. “I don’t get why you’re not happy. I am. I – I want you to be happy. I wish you were.”

Tubbo swallows another throatful of tears, pulling himself out of the cocoon he’s settled in. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” The ghost leans his head on folded arms atop his knees, staring off into the distance. Ghosts – ghosts can’t cry, not that Tubbo knows of, but his face is all crumpled up anyway. He wants to reach out a hand, to brush the tears away before they fall and burn. He knows he can’t. “I wish you could be happy for me.”

He can't. He just can’t, because – he misses Ranboo so much. Ghostboo is happy, and maybe Tubbo should be happy for him – because he can tell Ghostboo cares, he can tell that he’s a part of Ranboo. He should be happy for him, but – his husband is dead. He can’t. Ghostboo – Ghostboo is a part of Ranboo, sure, but the rest of him is trapped in limbo.

He’s seen Tommy’s haunted eyes when he talks about it. He’s heard Wilbur’s stories through Ranboo. And Ranboo is going to be trapped there forever.

Ghostboo is kind, and good with Michael. Maybe he can even tell Tubbo how to make the stroganoff that Michael likes. He has a comm – there’s nothing stopping them from exchanging stupid comm messages again, every hour of the night. But it’s not the same. He’s not the same. Part of Ranboo is missing – the part that writes dumb little sticky notes, the part that fiercely believes that everyone is worth fighting for. Even the parts that were difficult. His inability to stick up for himself. The fact that he kept so much broiling self-hatred to himself. Ghostboo doesn’t have those, and maybe he should be happy about that, but he can’t bring himself to be.

“Ghostboo,” and Ghostboo flinches at the name, but he doesn’t correct him. “Where’s – where’s the rest of Ranboo?”

Ghostboo stays silent for a moment. “Does it – does it matter?”

It really does. “It does, it matters, it matters to me.”

Ghostboo buries his head in his arms. “You don’t – Tubbo, Tommy and Wilbur, they’ve both said – you don’t want to know. It’ll just make you feel worse, man. You don’t want to know.”

Yeah, well, Tommy and Wilbur came back. Ranboo won’t.

“Just tell me.”

Ghostboo heaves out a sigh, but he looks up – even if he doesn’t look at Tubbo, even if his eyes stay fixed on the kitchen window.

“I don’t. I don’t, I don’t know, fully. But I think – I think it’s somewhere warm. And I… I can smell flowers.”

For some reason, that’s what pushes him over the edge.

He wants to believe it. He wants to believe it – that maybe somewhere Ranboo is warm, and safe, surrounded by flowers. The odds are low. Limbo is, by all accounts, sadistic and awful. But he doesn’t deserve to be eternally trapped somewhere cold and dead and empty – he deserves, at least, a flower field.

He wheezes out a breath, and with it comes another wave of tears, tripping up his throat – he feels, stupidly, out of practice. He hasn’t cried since – fuck, gods know. Probably since Tommy died. He knows he shouldn’t, there’s still – there’s still a dozen voices in his head, telling him he can’t. Soldier, spy, president – there’s too much on his shoulders, too many people to let down if he cracks, but, but – now he’s alone, besides a cold feeling on his back that he can pretend is a weight.

He’s not a soldier, not someone’s aide or a spy or gods-for-fucking-bid a president anymore – he’s alone, sitting on his kitchen floor and bawling his eyes out, a ghost sitting beside him. The kitchen is gorgeous, and grand, because it was built for two – but no one’s going to make things here, no one’s going to besides him. This entire fucking house was built for his family, and it’s split into pieces, and he takes back every shitty thing he’s said about Phil and Wilbur and even fucking Technoblade because god, even he misses them right now. He can’t blame Tommy. He misses Tommy so much, and he fucked that up himself, just like with Wilbur and Quackity and Fundy and everyone else – and now they’re gone, too. At least they chose to leave.

The truth settles over him like a weight – cold. Ghostly, even. He’s never going to have that family. It wasn’t made for him. He tried – fuck , did he try – and it fell apart, every single time.

This is the closest he is going to get – baby asleep upstairs, his dead husband’s hand on his back (which he can’t even feel, as much as he pretends he can), and him crying his lungs out, alone. His universe, tipped back into equilibrium, magnets losing their charge and guitars warping permanently out of tune and every other little thing shattering to pieces in his hands. Alone.

This is what he was made for.

Ghostboo doesn’t say anything at all. He just breathes, measured and even, just loud enough that Tubbo can hear him – and it’s stupid, because ghosts don’t need to breathe in the first place, but it reassures him anyway.

Finally, his breathing steadies, and his eyes ache in the way that means he’s run out of tears to cry.

“Fuck, man,” he says, and flops back against the hardwood floor. 

The wood is cold beneath his shoulders, cutting through his thin shirt with ease. After everything, it’s grounding. Snowchester is cold, caught in the middle of the snow and dark pines. It’s cold and lonely, and he’s lying here colder on his kitchen floor. It’s cold, and Tubbo lives in it. And there are heavy quilts and jumpers in his closet upstairs, but he’s getting those later, because for now he just lets his head rock back against the floor and his eyes flutter closed.

“Are you okay?” Ghostboo asks, shifting his shoulders to peek down at Tubbo.

“No,” he admits. He’s probably not going to be okay for a long time. If ever. But that’s okay. Here, lying on his kitchen floor, that’s okay.

When Tubbo tilts his head back, he can see the kitchen window – it holds the starry night within like a picture frame, moon hung high and lonely in the sky. It casts soft moonlight downward, lighting up the dust in the air because he hasn’t tidied in a week, and the glowing particles light up Ghostboo’s cheeks like freckles in the moonlight.

He looks ethereal. He looks exactly like the dream Tubbo knew he would never be able to have.

“I really do wish you could be happy for me,” Ghostboo says quietly. He doesn’t even sound hopeful about it anymore.

Tubbo kind of wishes he could be too.

“I’m going to throw us that wedding, y’know,” Ghostboo continues, unfolding to lay back on the floor next to him – speaking with the exact kind of confidence Ranboo would probably never have. But it still makes him feel less drained. Less dead. “There’s gonna be – I’m gonna order in one of those massive flower arrangements. And a huge wedding cake. And Michael can be a flower boy. He would be so cute, we can give him one of those flower baskets to throw at people.”

“It wouldn’t be safe enough,” Tubbo points out tiredly. “Half the server’s gonna try and kill him.”

“Yeah, well,” Ghostboo hums. “I’ll vet the guest list.”

Tubbo snorts, despite himself. “Good luck, the only person here who hasn’t tried to kill either of us or kidnap Michael is like, Tommy.”

“Then we’ll invite Tommy. Just Tommy.”

“He will hate it.”

“That is, if anything,” Ghostboo announces, “a stellar reason to invite Tommy.”

He laughs. It’s bitter, it’s strangled, it’s still teary, but he laughs. Tommy would provide some fairly critical running commentary, obviously, but he’d be more offended if he wasn’t invited. He sticks to Tubbo’s side, even when Tubbo thinks he should hate him, even when Tubbo thinks he should know better. Even when Tubbo knows he’d be better off on his own.

He remembers their conversation on the wall.

Tubbo might – he might have hated it, he knows he doesn’t deserve it, but he knows Tommy meant every word.

And next to Tommy, even – there’s Wilbur and Quackity’s silent concern, there’s Technoblade concealing him in a cloak as Sapnap and Dream fought beneath his home. There are gift baskets at his door, and food left in his fridge, whether he wants them there or not. And there’s always Tommy. Always, always Tommy.

And Ghostboo, too.

He still feels so, so lonely – lonely in that large, ugly way, where he’d rather drown in it than pull himself out of it. But everything keeps going, keeps turning. Whether he wants it to or not. Whether it makes him worse off, or not.

“...are you gonna tell me what happened today?”

Tubbo sighs. “Quackity said he’s giving back the cookie outpost.”

“Oh.” Ghostboo settles back onto the floor. “I remember that. That was nice.”

He thinks of Ranboo, waving down at him from stone parapets – hot chocolate stirred over the furnace, sticking their tongues out at Foolish through the window, stupid messages set under the table as Quackity rambled on about security. Snow angels and mittens thrown at him as he leaves the house and bowls of warm stew in the evenings. Someone to curl up with after a long day, watching Michael warm his hands by the fireplace.

“Yeah,” Tubbo agrees. “It was.”