Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Calvino (for white rooks)

we should imagine a chess board as big as

a kingdom by shifting helmets and seashells successively

each piece rule-bound by the seasons’ weather

coherent yet always self-destructive reforming or reassembling

like the small worming path of a caterpillar

that passageway is not a deformity but rather

a necessary harmony, a melodic chorus tuned to

a keyboard clicking, a rook sliding, a crown

—

It is Wilbur and Techno who first teach Tubbo to play chess. 

He asks Phil first, of course, for he is six years old and has not yet learned that a parent, even a surrogate one (Wilbur’s father, Wilbur’s father, he will remind himself much later, watching a familiar green-robed figure stand above on an obsidian grid as L’Manberg crumbles around him, one hand clutching Tommy’s and the other wrapped around his sword. Wilbur’s, not mine. It doesn’t make the ache any easier to bear), is not an all-knowing, perfect being. And so Tubbo plops down the box at the table where Phil sits, reading a book and sipping his tea. “Teach me chess,” he demands, though his recently lost front tooth has resulted in a bit of a lisp, and it sounds like ‘cheth’ instead. 

“Where’d you find this, then?” Phil asks, setting down his cup to pick up the box. It’s wooden, and beautifully engraved, but the ridges are filled with dust and some of the detail of the carvings have worn away with time, making the blobs of leaves virtually indistinguishable from those of clouds. The pieces inside, when he opens it, are made of glass, half clear and the other clouded, both intricately crafted. These, at least, are in perfect condition, though the board underneath could use a repainting.

“Back of Techno’s closet,” Tubbo says, climbing into the chair opposite. He’s smaller than Tommy, despite being older, and his shoulders just barely poke up over the wood of the table. “Teach me,” he repeats, adding, “Please,” as an afterthought. 

Phil looks down at the box doubtfully. “Alright,” he says. “I’ll see what I remember, mate.” 

They get barely five minutes into the lesson before Techno and Wilbur come in from the garden, Tommy in tow, swinging around a stick like a sword. “Hey, Phil,” Techno says, glancing down at the board between them. “I didn’t know you knew how to play chess.” 

“I’m teaching Tubbo,” Phil replies. “He wanted to learn.”

“I’m sure he did,” Wilbur laughs, sitting on the counter. He and Techno quickly fall into an argument about whether or not he’s allowed to do so (“We make food there!” “Oh, fuck off,”), and Tommy is ignoring them all, playing tug-of-war with the dog for his makeshift weapon. Phil sighs, turning back to Tubbo. 

“And this one here,” he says, picking up a piece, “this is the horsey one. He moves like thi-”

“I’m sorry,” Wilbur interrupts, his argument with Techno forgotten for staring in indignant disbelief at Phil, “did you just call the knight the horsey one?”

“Yes,” Phil answers, unashamed. 

“Kid,” Techno says to Tubbo, pointing at another piece, “what did he tell you that one’s called?”

“The tower,” he answers, “like Rapunzel’s.” He has the vague sense something’s wrong, but both Wilbur and Techno are staring at Phil instead of him, so Tubbo’s pretty sure he’s safe from their wrath. It’s comical how similar they look right now, especially considering the fact that Techno is much older and much bigger and also a piglin, but their expressions match so perfectly (down to their right eyes, each twitching in anger), that Tubbo might believe that they were related if he didn’t know better. 

“The bishop?” Wilbur looks horrified. 

“Look,” Phil says, rolling his eyes, “it’s been ages. I can’t be expected to remember all the names.”

“Dad, I could maybe understand the rook, but the bishop is human-shaped and holding a bell, so how the hell-”

“That’s it,” Techno declares, snatching the box from the table and piling all the pieces back inside of it. “Clearly, you have no idea how to play chess anymore.”

“Yeah,” Wilbur agrees, helping Tubbo out of the chair, stage-whispering conspiratorially, “‘cause he’s too old to remember.”

“Hey!” Phil exclaims, though he makes no move to retrieve the box or even stand up, instead just taking a long sip from his chipped mug as he watches Tubbo be led away.

(Later, Tubbo will wonder if he had planned for that outcome all along; tricking his old friend and just-barely-teenaged son into teaching a kid to play chess certainly fits into what he remembers of Phil’s particular brand of chaos. He never does get up the nerve to ask Phil about it, not with how strained their relationship is by the time he’s old enough to reflect on such things. Still, he wonders.)

Techno and Wilbur usher Tubbo outside, taking seats under the big tree in the garden as Techno sets the box on the ground and the board atop it, protecting it from the grass and dew and dirt. After a while, Tommy follows them out, chasing butterflies with his stick while the dog bounds beside him. So does Phil, eventually, taking a seat on the swinging bench and watching the four of them with his mug clasped between his palms. 

“Okay,” Techno says. He’s sitting opposite Tubbo, on the side with the clouded glass pieces, and Wilbur plops down between them at the side of the board, a spectator bordered by rows of little glass figurines. “This, kid, is how you actually play chess.” 

Tubbo turns his attention away from the red ladybug that has landed on his knee, watching closely as Wilbur picks up two of the small pieces in the front, one from each side. “These,” he says, “are pawns. This one,” he motions to the clear, “is white. White always plays first. They're better, that way, easier to play. And the other is black.”

“Those aren’t white or black,” Tubbo points out as the ladybug crawls from his leg to his sock to his shoe, using the last as a stepping stool to a nearby dandelion. 

“Metaphorically,” Techno explains, which is his answer for a lot of stuff Tubbo doesn’t understand. “Black’s harder to play, because they go second. But black’s scrappier. Black’s unexpected. Black’s the underdog.” 

“You can play with white, first,” Wilbur says, “it’ll be easier-” but Tubbo interrupts him before he can finish. 

“No,” he blurts out, “I wanna play with black.”

They exchange a look over his head, the kind that always makes Tommy shout in rage about secrets. Tubbo isn’t quite as inclined to vocalizing his anger as Tommy, and he’s more patient besides: he’ll wait and let them tell him what they’re thinking when they’re ready to. He knows they’ll share eventually, even if it ends up being unintentional, and he’ll wait for as long as it takes, no matter how annoying their secret language of looks is. 

(It’s really, really annoying.)

“Alright,” Techno shrugs finally, standing so they can switch places. He looks almost proud. Techno has never referred to himself as one of them: he says he’s Phil’s business affiliate, and Phil says Techno’s his old friend, and that’s all. Still, Tubbo knows he’s practically family at this point anyway, no matter what he says, and he knows Phil and Wilbur and Tommy do too. 

(“He’s our brother,” Wilbur had decided months ago, the night Techno had finally arrived home from his latest adventure. The children were not supposed to be awake, and were huddled together at the top of the stairs, trying to be quiet as mice as they listened to Phil fuss over Techno’s injuries in the kitchen. “He protects us, and watches us when Phil’s busy, and teaches us stuff,” Wilbur had whispered as Tommy leaned into his side, half-asleep, and Tubbo tried to peek over the banister. “Our brother. It makes sense. Right?”

The two of them were tired, so Tommy mumbled his acknowledgement, eyes closed, and Tubbo only nodded: still, all three had taken it to heart. He was Technoblade, their brother in all but name, and always would be.)

So that almost-pride plucks at Tubbo's heart, making him forget his ire and sit up straighter, pleased with himself. And even though he loses the first and second and third games, his close-enough-to-a-brother’s half-smile when Techno sees how eager he is to learn keeps Tubbo playing.

Surprising them all, even himself, Tubbo picks up chess quickly. He has lived in the little house in the forest for barely a year now, and he is a child still; not even he yet knows how his mind thrives on patterns and puzzles and logic games, how he will one day be a spy and a strategist and the creator of the first nuclear weaponry in a land far, far away. Someday, everyone will know that Tubbo is clever, and that he is calculating, and that he possesses the intimate knowledge of sacrifice required for chess. 

But all that comes someday, comes later, comes tomorrow. Today, all that Wilbur and Techno know is that Tubbo takes to chess like Techno had to war, like Wilbur had to music, like Phil had to flight; he plays the game like he was born to, and soon surpasses them all. 

His brothers, despite being good at the game itself, are not always very good at actually playing chess. Techno gets too swept up into the bloodlust that haunted him even then, focused more on taking other pieces than winning, and Wilbur often falls into competing with himself instead, creating his own personal challenges that he often gets more invested in than the actual game. But Tubbo has always operated inside of the rules (even when it means stretching them to fit his whims), and so he is quick to memorize the laws of chess, learning first how to bend them without breaking, and then how to use them to his advantage. Soon, even when Wilbur and Techno are at their very best, focused and intent and thus formidable players indeed, he is beating them both. 

“Dad,” he overhears Wilbur saying one night a few months after their first lesson, when they think he and Tommy are both asleep, “he’s good. He’s really, really good.” 

“What do you mean?” Phil asks quietly, closing the chest he’d been rummaging in. It’s hard to see from where Tubbo is crouched at the top of the staircase, but the sound carries well enough to make up for it. 

“He’s kicking our asses,” Techno whispers, so simultaneously shocked and impressed that Tubbo’s heart warms at the sound of it. “We’re going to try playing against him together tomorrow, on white, but I think he’ll win then, too. You need to get him some books about this stuff, Phil. Maybe a proper instructor—pretty soon, we aren’t going to be able to teach him anything else.” 

“Is he really that good?” Phil asks, and Tubbo can practically hear him raising his eyebrows.

“He’s not just good,” Wilbur says, “he’s fucking brilliant.” 

While Phil is telling Wilbur off for cursing again (‘again’, because Wilbur, thirteen years old and glorying in his newfound vocabulary, seems to pepper every other sentence with language Phil would rather not have Tommy repeat even more than he already does), Tubbo sneaks back to bed. The compliments he’d overheard keep his heart warm as he falls asleep, like simmering embers in his chest, and his dreams are fuzzy and vague but pleasant nonetheless. 

The next day, Phil and Tommy sit in the grass nearby to watch the game, just close enough that all five of them are sheltered under the shade of the tree. Wilbur and Techno sit together at one side of the board, Tubbo at the other. The two of them are at their greatest today, singularly focused on winning and managing to work together in perfect tandem. Their teaming up allows them to see the board from two different perspectives, lending them an advantage, and their starting the game grants another. Techno gives them stability and logic, Wilbur provides creativity and innovation, and together they blend perfectly. 

The two of them combined are, in short, a formidable opponent indeed.

But even when Wilbur and Techno are trying to defeat him, their voices guide Tubbo as he plays. Move your knight, Wilbur urges him in his head, the unexpected opening, and he does. Sacrifice your queen, the imagined Techno tells him, you don’t need it to win, and he does. Sometimes, though rarely, even Phil will speak: Save the pawn, he interjects once, you’ll need it, and (though the figments of Wilbur and Techno both protest) he does. 

“Checkmate,” Tubbo says finally, as Phil lets out a breathless laugh and Wilbur and Techno grin as they reach across their makeshift table to each shake his hand. Even Tommy (who has stubbornly refused to learn chess, and likely doesn’t even understand what has just happened) bursts into cheers, pulling Tubbo up from his seat to jump around the others in joyous circles. 

“You won!” Tommy exclaims, and it becomes a chant: “You won! You won! You won!”

“Yes,” says Phil, “he did,” and looks so proud that, for just a moment, Tubbo can imagine that he’s not just Wilbur's father after all. 

Phil travels a lot, just like Techno. After that match, every time he leaves he comes back with a new book about chess. Tubbo pours over those books over for days after, the words often difficult to decipher but the pictures that accompany them slotting into his brain with perfect clarity. There is no tutor, for there is a reason Phil hides his family away in a forest, why he and Techno travel without them but leave wolves and cats and creatures of iron and snow to guard the house in their stead. But Wilbur and Techno are always willing to play against Tubbo, no matter how often they lose, and he eventually starts teaching them about the game instead, a reversal of roles. 

“I guess the student’s the master, now,” chuckles Techno once, after Tubbo finishes teaching them both about what his books call a ‘kill box mate’.

“Can’t have that,” says Wilbur, mock-threatening as he gets to his feet and lunges towards Tubbo, who is already giggling as he darts away. “Tech, we must take down this threat to our empire!”

“Yeah, sure, go ahead,” yawns Techno, unmoving, and from his seat in the grass he watches Wilbur chase Tubbo around the garden, the latter shrieking with laughter and Wilbur’s threats becoming both increasingly creative and increasingly absurd. Tommy steps in eventually, joining first Wilbur’s side and then Tubbo’s, and when all three of them end up flopping to the ground, recovering from the tickle battle that had ensued, they form an alliance against Techno, reasoning that he deserves it, sort of. “He’s a spoilsport,” says Tommy wisely, and it’s as good a reason as any. Techno’s expecting them, of course, but they manage to last an impressive six seconds before he has Tommy in the air by his ankle, telling Tubbo and Wilbur that they either surrender or “The pipsqueak gets it.”

“Pipsqueak?!” Tommy shrieks, outraged, and begins to thrash in Techno’s grasp. Wilbur takes advantage of the distraction to leap on Techno’s back, and Tubbo grabs Tommy’s hands to try and pull him free. They all fall to the ground in a pile of limbs, and they laugh and laugh and laugh.

Much, much later, the children are older. Still children, though, the lot of them—even Wilbur, who is suddenly in his twenties and has become the kind of person people can’t help but trust, just like Phil. He’s old enough now to start the journey that most begin even younger, off to find his own worlds to explore, his own land to make his own. Both Tubbo and Tommy know he’s only stuck around this long for them, especially now that Phil and Techno have been going away for longer and longer periods. 

So neither of them are surprised when one day Wilbur announces that they’re leaving. “An adventure!” Wil exclaims with a smile, one hand on each of their shoulders, “doesn’t that sound fun?” and Tommy and Tubbo agree, grinning back at Wilbur even though they both already know that they will spend that night holding each other close and crying themselves to sleep at the thought of leaving their home behind. Still, they know they must go: after all, it has become increasingly clear as the years wend on that if Wilbur was to leave without them, they might never see Phil or Techno again. Wilbur is the magnetic one, the true son and the true friend, but Tommy and Tubbo are nothing to Phil and Techno: familiar strangers, despite every effort. All they can do now is follow in his wake, letting him call them his brothers and trying to forget that that still doesn’t make them a family. 

(Sometime in the last few years, Wilbur, who had been a steady, reliable rook alongside Phil and Techno, changed into another piece entirely. A knight, decides Tubbo, the loyal trickster, a role that suits this newly unpredictable Wilbur. Either way, though, he is still Wilbur Soot, Tommy and Tubbo’s almost-brother, and he is as kind and as loving as ever. 

Not a rook, but perhaps it’s better that way.)

As he packs to leave, Tubbo does not take any of his books from Phil, for he has long since memorized them. In the same vein of thought, he decides to leave Techno’s chess set behind, too, and fills the space it might have taken with other valuables: gifts from Wilbur and Tommy, the sentimental trinkets that litter his bedside table, the tattered remnants of the bee toy he'd been found with. When they're leaving the next morning, though, he finds himself opening the worn box and slipping a pawn into his pocket, one of the clouded ones that are meant to be black.

Less valuable, he thinks, holding it as Wilbur locks the door behind them, the letter on the table the only goodbye they need. More resilient. There will be a gap on the board where it once stood, and yet he can’t bring himself to feel guilty about taking it. Tubbo, a boy once left in a box by the side of a road, is used to being out of place, used to being abandoned. Even if Wilbur’s presence means that neither side of his little family can completely leave the other behind, there is a part of him that insists he make the absence glaring, that he create an empty square in the space where his love used to live. 

Tubbo isn’t stupid, and he knows that Phil and Techno probably won’t care, won’t even notice. But he’s the brother of Wilbur and Tommy, even if he isn’t their family, and he has learned from their stubbornness. It’s a petty little thing, and yet it fills Tubbo with a fierce, vindictive joy. 

That morning Tommy, Tubbo, and the pawn in his pocket follow Wilbur away from the little house in the forest, leaving behind the only home they’d ever known. Wilbur is the Pied Piper with a magical flute, is a siren with a haunting voice, is Orpheus with lute in hand. There is nothing to do but follow him and his song, wherever he may go. 

So Wilbur Soot leads them to the Dream SMP, leads them to a country called L’Manberg, leads them to a brand new family that sings the song of their nation as one, a family that wears identical uniforms and identical smiles.

And then Wilbur Soot leads them to war, leads them to exile and pain, leads them to a stage in the center of a festival, blackstone and yellow concrete that muffles the sweet melody of their loyalty for the very first time.

Tubbo has a gift for predictive play, for seeing what his opponent will do next. Still, he could not have predicted the events that lead to him standing alone in a cage, pleading for mercy before a horrified audience. He could not have predicted Technoblade, the man he’d always considered a brother, pointing a crossbow loaded with fireworks at his head, saying that it would be both colorful and painless and lying through his teeth about the latter. He could not have predicted the three blows it would take to kill him: one from a pickaxe, slamming into his ribs to break flesh and bone, and two from bright stars of white and red and blue, their fire sinking into his skin and burning him up from the inside out. 

The stolen pawn is in the pocket of his suit. When he dies, his body is thrown back into the stone behind him before it dissolves to respawn, enough time for the piece to fall onto the stage and roll to rest at the feet of Technoblade, who, even as the voices scream and beg and demand blood, manages to scoop it up as he runs. 

(It is that tiny detail that will finally force Tubbo to tell Tommy and Wilbur and Niki that it's alright, that Techno should be forgiven, even if he himself doesn’t fully believe it.)

When Tubbo wakes up from respawning in Pogtopia, a figure of clouded glass sits on a table by his bedside. The pawn’s head has been lost, the shards crushed underfoot by a panicked, dying child, and the edges are sharp and jagged. Still, he finds himself clutching what remains of it in his hands as he begins to cry. Though the broken glass tears into his scarred palms, he does not let go, not until blurry faces burst into the room and shout his name and try to pry it from his frozen, bloodied fingers. He does not let go, not until Tommy says “Tubbo?” in a scared sort of way that makes him blink and look around, run a torn sleeve across his face, and lock the tears away with his memories of festivals and control rooms and cottages in the woods that were never really home. 

“Tommy,” he says, “Tommy, don’t worry, I’m alright.” He sniffles once more before he is done crying altogether, and then it is all yelling and fighting and Tubbo sitting beside Tommy in the makeshift infirmary as Niki silently bandages wounds earned in the Pit. They can’t hold hands, because Tommy’s are scraped and bruised and in need of tending to, and his own are already wrapped in bulky white bandages (a tad haphazardly, for Niki had never really been the one to patch up the others back in L’Manberg, that job almost always falling to either Tubbo or Fundy. He makes a mental note to teach her properly once his hands have healed—she’ll need the knowledge, Tubbo thinks, in this new war they’ve found themselves in) but he rests his head on his brother’s shoulder to make up for it. I’m here, he thinks, and he hopes Tommy gets the message, hopes he is comforted by it, hopes he doesn’t think of who isn’t here instead: of Wilbur muttering to himself about supplies and explosives and death in the main room of the cavern, of Techno crouched in his potato farm and letting the dirt coat his bloodstained hands, and of Phil, well, wherever Phil is these days, but somehow just as far from them as the two only a few steps away. 

I’m here, Tubbo promises silently, because Wilbur has now abandoned them too, and Tommy has always hated to be alone, just as much as Tubbo does. They are the last ones left, each others’ only remaining family, and so he vows again, I’m here. 

He’ll break that promise later, of course. Tubbo is, at heart, a player of chess, and he must rejoin the game eventually, must play alone once more, for (despite Wilbur and Techno’s alliance in that decisive game of long ago) there is no such thing as a team in chess, not even with the one member of his family who’d never really liked the game. I’m here is a phrase of grey words and grey hope and grey love, and Tubbo has always operated in the black and white; still, as he and Tommy and Niki reach out to hold each other in a quiet infirmary, he makes the meaningless words of mist and smoke his mantra, his hope, his dream, his endless, futile promise. 

I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.

—

Bergman (for black rooks)

from a monochrome viewpoint a plagued knight can

only be binary, dead or alive, pitch or

light and the intruding shroud only plays dark

the beach in background where we all washed

ashore by a violent storm crawl landward drag

ourselves from the sublime horizon of ocean pebbles

ground into palms small rocks in pores and

the dark that’s long been at our side

—

Tubbo has nightmares. This is no secret, and no surprise: children made to be soldiers and strategists and spies will have nightmares. It is the way of things. 

These dreams are haunting, all-consuming, and from them he wakes with a heart pounding like a drum, fear rippling throughout his entire being. They are memories, dragged up from the depths to torment him every night, and for a long while, Tubbo would forgo sleep altogether to avoid them.

On some nights, though?

On some nights, Tubbo’s nightmares give way to something far, far worse. 

On some nights, there is Dream.

Each time it happens, he finds himself at a table sitting across from his worst enemy. Between them sits a chess set: a board with polished, shining squares, and intricate, glowing pieces that seem to shift in shape as he watches them, taking on the faces of enemies and of allies, of friends and of family, of the dead and of the dying. It is a set that could not be further removed from that of Tubbo’s childhood, and yet it fills him with a strange, horrible feeling of familiarity, an overwhelming sense of the uncanny. 

Tubbo plays black. Dream always, always plays white. 

He is not a phantom, or a memory, or a figment of Tubbo’s sleeping mind. Tubbo knows that from the very first time they meet at the table, a conviction that fills his very bones as he stares at the man opposite him, whose white mask is the same color as his pieces. Still, he’d been sure to check. 

“I hear you’re hunting Technoblade,” Dream had said coolly, that first time. “Phil has a way to find him, a compass in his house. You have no way to know that; find it, and you will know I am the real deal, Mr. President.” 

They did not end up playing that night, as Tubbo was too busy trying to get himself to wake up, though no amount of pinching or thinking I am in a dream I am asleep I am dreaming get UP! had worked. Finally, Dream had sighed and waved his hand lazily, and Tubbo instantly found himself slumped over his desk, picking up his communicator to tell his cabinet to meet at Phil’s in the morning before he’d even fully processed that he was awake. 

He’d found the compass, and woken up at the board for the second time the next night. They’d played, then. Dream had won. 

Dream does not visit him every night after that, though his appearances do increase after his imprisonment. Tubbo learns a valuable lesson, the first time he meets the Dream of Pandora’s Vault: refusing to play now means refusing to wake up. He’d scrambled away the moment he’d realized where he was, fleeing into the void surrounding the table, but no matter what direction he ran, he had found himself right back before the board. He’d raged and ranted and cried for what felt like hours, while Dream just regarded him from behind his eerie mask. “There’s no escape,” he’d said, repeated it over and over far too gleefully. “The only way to leave, Tubbo, is to play!” Eventually, Tubbo had, returning to his seat and playing as best he could, desperate fury the only thing keeping his fear from freezing him still as stone. 

He’d won. It hadn’t felt like a victory, though, not when he woke up with a mouth dry as sandpaper and a stomach aching with hunger, or when he’d left his cottage in Snowchester and run into Jack Manifold, who asked where Tubbo had been and laughed incredulously when Tubbo said that he’d been asleep. “Sleeping Beauty,” Jack had teased, before asking, more seriously, if he was alright, if he’d been sick. “Tubbo, no one’s seen you in days.” 

“I’m alright,” Tubbo had told him, plastering on an embarrassed smile, “just lazy, I guess!” Even as he joined Jack in laughing at his lie, however, something cold was sinking into his chest, an arrow of poison through his heart. Before he’d fallen asleep, he’d had a long talk with Jack about the danger that Dream presented to Snowchester, discussing building walls or weapons to keep them safe, a conversation he doubts Jack could have forgotten. That means that if no one had seen Tubbo in days, then he’d truly been sleeping for all of that time—far too much of his life taken by Dream’s game. Sick, indeed; it was a miracle he hadn’t died of thirst. 

Much as he hates to admit it, Dream is the best chess player Tubbo has ever played against. They are well-matched, and though he had thrown the first few games (in the time when he was in awe of Dream, in the time when he had simultaneously hated and revered him, in the time when he’d thought of Dream as his only remaining friend, before he found Tommy again, before he fought for L’Manberg’s last life and lost, before he sung his country one last goodbye), he eventually becomes confident, or angry, enough to play to the best of his ability. He wins as many games as he loses, and wakes up from these dreams (which he still calls dreams, even though he already knows that that isn’t quite true) exhausted, as if he had not slept at all. Tubbo's only consolation is that he knows Dream must suffer from the same effects; after all, there must be a reason that the self-proclaimed god does not haunt his mind each and every night. 

“So,” Dream says to him one night as they play. They use no clock, but Tubbo can still hear the ticking of one somewhere nearby, and the sound rings in his ears. “Your family.”

“I’m not discussing them with you,” he states coolly, a well-practiced facade. It has been months since the beginning of their games, months since L’Manberg and Doomsday and the fight for the discs in Dream’s museum of attachments, and Tubbo has long since learned how to don his own sort of mask at any mention of those he loves. “Make your move.”

Dream considers this, lacing his fingers together and resting his chin atop the roof of their steeple. “Touchy,” he remarks, not even looking at the board, staring instead at Tubbo, who resists the urge to rub at the new ring on his hand, a nervous habit he knows he must not succumb to or else risk exposing his greatest weakness to Dream’s scrutiny. “What’s it like, growing up surrounded by gods?” Dream continues, and Tubbo realizes abruptly that he’s thinking of the wrong family, the one of Tubbo’s childhood, the one that never really was a family at all. 

All Tubbo says is, “They aren’t gods,” even though he knows that isn’t quite true.

“Oh,” Dream coos, for he, too, knows the truth already, “aren’t they? Your brother, the hero. Your brother, the warrior. Your brother, the poet. Your father, the angel.” He hums the words cheerily to himself, to the mocking tune of a hymn. “The stuff of stories, aren’t they? I wonder, Mr. President, how the likes of you could possibly fit in.”

Dream is the only person who calls him president anymore. The word makes Tubbo’s hands shake, his face burn, his heart freeze, and they both know it. 

They are perhaps the only two who do.

“I’m not like them,” he tells Dream, watching as his opponent moves his queen. Dream favors his strong pieces, queens especially: the most powerful of chessmen. “And besides, we aren’t really family. They’ve made that very clear.” 

Except Tommy, part of him whispers, he’s still your brother. Another, though, hisses Exile, one word that manages to contain the whole story. Tubbo does his best to ignore them both. 

“And yet,” Dream says, “death still follows you anyway, doesn’t it? Death and destruction and despair, their persevering legacy.” 

Tubbo does not rise to the bait, instead looking down to examine the board, playing through the game in his mind. Dream is finally quiet; he may be a cruel, vindictive, evil bastard, but for some unfathomable reason he respects chess enough to give Tubbo relative silence while he thinks. Once Tubbo moves his knight, however, he speaks again. 

“Who are you,” Dream asks, his mask’s painted smile mocking as he takes that same knight with his queen, “to walk among gods, Tubbo Underscore?”

If there is one thing that Tubbo has always known about the men that he had once called family, it is that the three of them are often the strongest pieces on the board. That is why Dream is so fascinated by them, of course, for he has always loved his strong pieces, almost as much as he loves the power found in controlling them. As it is, they’re all just lucky that Dream finds the Blade too valuable to waste on smaller things, deems the Angel of Death without his wings not worthy of his attention, thinks that Wilbur’s only use now is as a bribe and a threat. 

(Though perhaps they’re unlucky after all, for that leaves only poor Tommy to suffer the brunt of his manipulation, dragged into a game he never wanted to play in the first place.)

They may be strong pieces, Tubbo’s former family, but that does not mean he can rely on them, not anymore. Wilbur was taken and then returned newly loyal to Dream, Techno and Phil now play rooks of shining white, and Tommy is scared and lonely and trying to flee the game even as he clings to Tubbo like a lifeline. 

Tubbo has only ever been a pawn, far from powerful. He is the piece most commonly used to open the game, the piece most commonly used as a sacrifice, the piece so numerous and so strange as to commonly not be considered a piece at all. Beside Techno or Phil or Wilbur, he is insignificant, inadequate, infinitesimal, nothing more than a bug to be crushed beneath their feet. 

(Tommy, as always, is the exception: he may be strong, but he is not quite a god yet. People forget, Tubbo thinks, that Heracles and Psyche and Asclepius did not start as immortals, were only granted that power after they died. People forget, Tubbo thinks, that Tommy has already started down that path, though the white streak in his hair makes it blindingly obvious.)

But even when he was beating them at chess, it was the voices of Wilbur and Techno and Phil that guided him. Though the people have long since abandoned him, their imaginary selves remain.

You can’t win, Wilbur says, of Tubbo and the game played against the wider SMP, his voice fire and ash and sharp glass. Do not challenge gods, Arachne.

You’re Tantalus, you’re Pirithous, Techno adds, words punctuated with fireworks. You’re Icarus, and this is your sun. It is not meant for mortals like you. 

You’re all alone now, mate, sighs Phil, accompanied by the song of the void, and sidekicks are always weak on their own. 

But Dream is alone now too, Tubbo realizes, and watches Dream’s usual green cloak momentarily become an orange prison uniform instead, the change gone so quick he’s not fully certain he’d seen it at all. And he is just as weak as I am. 

“Who are you?” Dream had asked, sharp words intended to hurt, and Tubbo retaliates in kind. It is easy for him, perhaps even more so than it would be for Dream; though his teachers have always numbered in the few for things like chess or war or presidency, Tubbo Underscore-Beloved (not just Tubbo Underscore, not anymore, not with his new family) has always had willing tutors in cruelty.

“A supporting character,” he answers, picking up one of his pawns, which, for just a moment, seems to be lacking a head. “A sacrifice. A boy,” he adds, enveloping the pawn in his hands, “in a box.” He grins wolfishly, a practiced expression to match Tommy’s, as their blank surroundings ripple. Dream stiffens, and then nearly jumps from his seat as, for just a moment, the void changes to obsidian and blackstone and lava, a mirror of Pandora’s Vault. “Just like you.”

This altering of their isolated pocket world is not exactly original: it’s an old trick of Dream’s, one he tends to use far too often for Tubbo’s liking. It likely isn’t even a very good resemblance, as Tubbo has never actually been inside the main cell of the prison, all his knowledge second-hand or from photos on the grainy screen of a communicator. Still, his opponent is shaken. “You’re not supposed to be able to do that.”

“No,” Tubbo agrees, using the same tone Phil had often used on his children, so calm as to be infuriating. “But now I can. What else can I learn, do you think?”

“Nothing,” Dream snarls as Tubbo sets the pawn down, taking the white queen and avenging his knight. No doubt Dream had seen that coming; still, he finds himself feeling rather viciously victorious as he removes the knight from the board. Perhaps Techno’s love for taking pieces had rubbed off on him, after all. 

“Are you sure?” he asks, and though Dream retaliates (by changing their surroundings to mirror L’Manberg, by making the whole void smell of smoke and ash and gunpowder, by having the agonized screams of his friends and family echo around them as tears drip down Tubbo’s cheeks), all it really does is prove Tubbo right. Though he technically loses, it doesn’t really matter how the game ended: Tubbo had won the second he’d managed to make Dream afraid, and they both know it. 

Throughout the rest of the game, Tubbo feels like they’re being watched, like someone, or something, has appeared to play spectator. If Dream’s wary glances around them are any indication, he can sense it too. 

But Tubbo has spent months learning the ins and outs of this strange world of Dream’s, and he suspects he already knows what is lurking, invisible, in the void that currently resembles a crumbling L’Manberg. Taking advantage of a particularly loud illusory explosion off to their right, Tubbo snaps his head in its direction. To Dream, he hopes, it will look like nothing more than the actions of a terrified, traumatized child shocked by a sound. 

Whatever Dream might think, his ploy pays off, because for just a moment, Tubbo can see a being hovering at the edges of the world. They wear an outfit identical to Dream’s, save for the fact that, rather than a simple, cartoonish smile, the letters XD are painted across the white surface of their mask. 

They are gone the next moment, so quickly that, if he didn’t know better, Tubbo might wonder if he’d truly seen them at all. But he does know better, has for a long time, and he feels a strange sort of jubilation as he turns back to the board, barely hearing Dream’s mockery of his ‘fright’. 

It means something, if XD is watching them. 

After he loses and is free to awaken, he lies in bed for a long while. Ranboo snores softly beside him, Michael curled up into the space between them, and as Tubbo plays out the events of that night in his head, he pulls his son close.

Tubbo is only a pawn, but he is a pawn that, if only for a moment, managed to put Dream in check.

This, whispers Wilbur’s voice in his mind, with something close to delight, is a sea change.

Watch your back, Techno warns, but there is a pride in his tone that makes Tubbo think of days past, back when he wanted Techno’s respect more than anything in the world. Don’t get overconfident now.

You’ve done well, says Phil, though his voice sounds different, somehow, like someone else's words, someone achingly familiar and yet completely unknown, are bleeding through. You’ve done well, they repeat, the imagined Phil and that strange someone else, and then: Make me proud, Tubbo. 

They do not speak again. Still, the words will echo in his mind for a long while after. Make me proud, Tubbo. 

“I will,” he whispers to himself, and though he does not know who he is talking to, does not even know what it means, he makes it a vow. “I will.”

Chapter Text

Turing (for white knights)

a computable human is a calculable number if

a sequence of logic is infinite finite states

internal and interlocked then the machine moves cell

to cell similarly to how we might see

an apple and consider the variations of actions

in reaction or instruction move an apple two

cells left and execute the information within that

so we are always configured in dense relation

—

Eons and ages ago—before he is a father or a husband, before he is the founder of Snowchester or the president of L’Manberg, before the days of razed countries and revive books and either execution—Tubbo plays chess with Schlatt. 

Well, not really. They only get through half a game before the president passes out at the table, stinking of cheap cigarettes and cheaper alcohol. Tubbo sighs as he gingerly pulls the board out from under the drunk president’s cheek, collecting the pieces from the floor and lining them up neatly upon it. 

The set belongs to Schlatt, but since he doesn’t seem to be an especially good player (though it's hard to tell, as he’d spent the entire game drunk off his ass; for all Tubbo knows, Schlatt could very well be a grandmaster in his rare moments spent sober), Tubbo suspects it to be more of a theatric prop than anything else. Still, it’s a beautiful thing, bearing intricate pieces of quartz and obsidian atop a polished, shining board. Though the worn, battered set of his childhood pales in comparison to the work of art that sits in the office of the White House, Tubbo finds himself thinking of it still, fiddling nervously with the glass pawn in his suit pocket.

“Need some help?” Quackity asks from the doorway, uncharacteristically solemn. Tubbo has long suspected his exaggeratedly crude jokes and impulsive actions around their president tend to serve as Quackity’s poker face, a safe mask for his true feelings. The dramatic change that occurs in him whenever Schlatt isn’t awake to notice only serves to reenforce that belief. 

“If you don’t mind?” Tubbo says, trying for a smile, though he’s pretty sure it comes off as more of a grimace. They don’t have to worry about noise; Schlatt is nearly impossible to wake up, knowledge they'd acquired through far too many momentary scares. Once, Fundy had even knocked a paperweight onto Quackity’s foot when the cabinet had found Schlatt asleep in his office, resulting in much screeching and cursing, but the president’s only reaction had been to shift in his sleep and mumble something about protein powder. 

They work together to carry Schlatt to his room, the halls of the White House empty at this late hour. Every time they turn a corner, Tubbo half expects to see Tommy running towards them, overflowing with excitement, or Niki grinning and carrying a basket of baked goods, or even Wilbur strolling along, talking to Fundy about some project or another.

But this is Manberg, not the country of Tubbo’s memories, so it is just him and Quackity and Schlatt here tonight. George has gone home to sleep, Fundy had run off earlier with muttered excuses about feeding his pets, and Schlatt’s administration is much less welcoming than Wilbur’s to unofficial visitors, which Tubbo is reminded of every day he wanders the empty halls. 

“Chess, huh?” says Quackity conversationally a few minutes later, once they’ve left Schlatt slumped over the bed in his room and closed the door behind them. He's started to head back the way they came, and Tubbo follows close behind: Schlatt expects a clean office every morning, or else.

Besides, Wilbur and Tommy would kill him for passing up the chance to talk to the vice president in private. Pogtopia'll take any information it can get, these days.

“Chess?” Tubbo parrots, wide-eyed and innocent, the perfect imitation of the naive secretary of state Quackity expects. 

“Yeah, chess,” Quackity rolls his eyes, though not unkindly. “I saw you and Schlatt at the board. I didn’t even know he actually played.”

“Me neither!” he laughs, adding a tinge of disbelief to the sound, a shred of lingering doubt, a subtle between you and me, buddy, I still don’t quite believe it. He sells it: Quackity laughs too. “But he said he wanted to, so…” 

“Are you any good?” Quackity asks, turning so he’s facing Tubbo, walking backwards. He sticks his hands in his pockets, casual as anything. As an afterthought, he bends his arms like poorly-made replicas of the yellow wings on his back, snickering to himself as he begins to imitate a chicken, or perhaps a duck.

Everything about Quackity seems to invite Tubbo to laugh with him, and part of him wants to. The other part, the smarter part, reminds him that Quackity has a sword and he does not, that they are alone in these hallways, and that if he unintentionally insults the vice president, Tubbo could lose his second life right here, right now, and then where would he be? A teenager running on one life, on this server? He’d be dead before he turned twenty, would have to be lucky to even make it past eighteen.

(What about Tommy? that foolish, naive part of him asks. Tommy’s only got one life. Wilbur, too. What about them?

The other, more rational bit doesn’t bother to reply. There’s no need: Tubbo already knows the answer, whether he likes it or not.)

“I’m alright,” he shrugs, because the SMP had long since taught him to underestimate and undersell everything he does, and chess is no exception. “I learned when I was a kid.” 

“So did I!” Quackity grins, his false wings falling away as he holds out his hand for a fistbump. Tubbo taps his knuckles against the vice-president’s, plastering a matching smile to his own face. “Hey, man, you wanna play a round?” 

“Sure,” Tubbo says. Perhaps he can get something out of this for Wilbur and Tommy. Even if he can’t, he’d rather play chess with Quackity than spend yet another night awake in his room, alone with the dark and his restless mind. 

Quackity insists they use Schlatt’s chessboard. “Fuck that guy, amiright?” he laughs, and though he makes it out to be a joke, Tubbo knows him well enough by now to detect the hard nugget of pain and anger and truth in his voice. Tubbo, as always, offers to play black. “Nah,” Quackity says, “you’re a kid, that’s not fair. I'll go second.”

Quackity isn’t bad at the game, but Tubbo has not played chess in too long and has missed it dearly. Though he is far more careless than usual, he cannot resist stealing the win when he spots the chance. “Checkmate,” he says softly, and Quackity whistles. 

“Damn,” he laughs, “‘I’m alright,’ he says. You’re a fucking liar, Tubbo!” 

( “You’re a fucking liar, Tubbo,” Quackity snarls in his nightmares, a sword pressing against Tommy’s throat, "a goddamn traitor!” )

Tubbo stiffens, but Quackity doesn’t seem to notice, still grinning goodnaturedly. “We’ve got time,” he says, “play me again."

There's no use in arguing, really. Tubbo begins to reset the board.

"Oh," the vice president adds, "but we should switch seats. This time, I’m going first.” 

It’s too risky to win again—what if Quackity gets mad? What if he lashes out? What if he starts thinking about how else he might have underestimated Tubbo?—so he plays the fool. When Quackity checkmates him a short while later, Tubbo just shrugs. “Guess the first time was beginner’s luck,” he says, standing and beginning to reset the pieces in the perfectly orderly way that Schlatt likes. He's ready to go to bed and to escape the stuffy office, the smells of whiskey and cigarettes and the metallic scent of potions, the too-observant eyes of the vice president. 

"Yeah, okay, no," Quackity frowns, unimpressed. “That’s bullshit.”

“What?” Tubbo says, his blood freezing in his veins. He would be completely still, a statue petrified with fear, if his hands were not still setting pawns down onto their squares, operating on muscle memory alone.

“That’s bullshit,” Quackity repeats, louder. “Tubbo, whatever the hell that was, it wasn’t beginner’s luck. Play me again, and this time, don’t lose on purpose!” 

Tubbo sits back down into his chair, heart heavy and cold, because Quackity and Schlatt are supposed to think of him as an idiot kid, as nothing more than Tommy’s former sidekick, as a pawn. If Quackity knows he lost on purpose, his cover is already blown. The clouded glass piece, not yet shattered beyond repair, sits heavy in the inner pocket of his suit jacket as Quackity waits for him to open the game, and Tubbo, filled with a sudden desperate fury, decides he might as well go out with a bang. 

He beats Quackity in eight moves.

“Checkmate,” he says, signing his own death warrant, and Quackity looks up at him with his mouth wide open, shocked into silence. 

A week and a half later, Quackity looks at him the same way just before Tubbo’s world explodes into color and pain. When he joins Pogtopia soon after, he reacts to Tubbo's new scars (a long gash across his ribs, and large parts of his skin littered with dark burns that make smiling a special kind of agony) with that same, now-familiar expression on his face.

Tubbo will always wonder if it was that chess match that made Quackity decide to keep a closer eye on him, enough so to realize that he was a spy for Wilbur.

Go out with a bang, indeed. 

Despite it all, though, Tubbo isn’t quite sure that Quackity ever really stops underestimating him. It’s a funny sort of dichotomy, Quackity's blind naivete versus Tubbo’s persistent wariness around the man who eventually becomes his own vice president and ally and friend. He looks at Tubbo like he's a small, broken thing, and misses all the red lights. 

The thing is that he wants to trust Quackity, he really does. But that’s the worst part, honestly, because no matter how much Tubbo cares about him, one of the few people who really understands, he can’t stop believing the worst of him either. 

Maybe it pays off. Maybe he stands opposite Quackity, his back to the walls of the outpost Ranboo calls a cookie shop, and thinks, Wilbur, you look like Wilbur, what have you done? and that makes him careful and cautious enough to survive. Maybe he ends up allying with Quackity because of his own paranoia, intent on saving them both from what comes next, and maybe that’s good. 

Maybe.

Tubbo knows not to trust knights—not anymore, not after Wilbur—and he knows Quackity rides a horse of bone. Still, that doesn’t stop him from caring, from there being a place in his heart carved to fit men atop skeletal steeds, and it doesn’t stop him from being foolish enough to play by his side, even after everything. 

“Tubbo,” says Quackity one day, stopping in at the restaurant during a slow shift, “I’m really glad you decided to join me, man.” 

“Uh, yeah, ‘course,” Tubbo says, pasting on that same old canned smile. “No problem, bossman.” 

“It means a lot,” Quackity tells him, painfully sincere. “After- after everything- I’m just glad you could trust me enough to do this, y’know?” 

And Tubbo thinks,  Maybe. And Tubbo means,  No, I don’t, I’m a liar and I’m sorry. And Tubbo knows,  You have no idea why I’m here, and I can’t tell you, not until this is all over. 

But all he says is “Yeah, man, of course. What are friends for if not working for minimum wage at your burger joint?”

Quackity doesn’t laugh much these days, not genuinely, not since he built himself a desert in the snow. Still, he’s laughing now: a short, surprised thing, one that makes his four golden teeth gleam in the sunlight.

And then the moment passes, and the mirth vanishes from his face, hidden beneath a layer of sand.

It’s funny how the tables have turned, Tubbo muses, because now it is Quackity who hides under a fragile facade. His wings are polished and preened, and their beauty hides the missing primaries. His clothes are meticulous and spotless, and so no one looks close enough to spot the blood staining the cufflinks. His mouth curls into a smile, and it lets people pretend he isn’t baring his teeth. 

There is no grey on Quackity’s chessboard anymore, just black and white—or perhaps black and red instead, because as new and strange as it may be, there is something primal, something ancient about this sort of mask. 

The beanie, whispers the Wilbur of his mind, and Tubbo doesn’t understand until he blinks, because when he opens his eyes-

When he opens his eyes, for just a second, Quackity seems to be wearing a long brown coat, one stained with ash and soot. Tubbo blinks, and it's gone—but the thought remains.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? Sure, even the sandy foundations of Las Nevadas are a scam, a con, a lie, so much so that the country is named ‘the snowfalls’—but that doesn’t mean Quackity’s country isn’t a desert.

Once, when Tubbo was a child, Techno had told him a story about the Arctic. "You see," he'd started, "the coldest places in the world, the poles, the places where all lines of longitude meet, are dry. Impossibly dry, horribly dry, so that even snowfall is rare. They call them polar deserts, and though they feature snow instead of sand, they are a parallel kind of wasteland, equally harsh and arid and cruel." The tale had gone on, then, about an empire in the snow and a mirror and shards of ice in eyes and hearts, but the rest doesn't matter, now. What does is this:

Las Nevadas is still a desert. Quackity is still a knight. And Tubbo knows not to trust knights, not anymore, no matter how much he cares for them. 

So he does not trust Quackity, no matter what he might say or do, because he can’t trust him, not even if he was the man of his memories, the one without the metaphorical mask and the literal scars. 

Tubbo has been a soldier and a spy, a president and a parent. He is familiar with duplicity, as he must be, and so he looks at Quackity and thinks of sand and snow, of white and red, of old and new, of all things paradoxical and existing simultaneously nevertheless. 

Everything new stems from something older. That is the way of the universe, like the rings of a tree: expanding outward, change proving the existence of the past. If there is rot expanding out from the center, it has to start early, inside the trunk well before it can be seen on the bark. 

There are always threads of truth weaved into the most believable of lies. This new Quackity, strange and cruel and cold, is terrifyingly convincing.

—

Beckett (for black knights)

we invariably overlap on certain squares where we

watch in anticipation of an inevitable combination or

curtain slowly drawing down the winking out of

darkness pitch dark yelp “my kingdom for a

nightman” the drifting L-shaped path in opposition to

the absolutely straight verticals-horizontals-diagonals that clutter

or we choose to passively surround our kingdoms

retreat into a fortress of our own pieces

—

“What happened to you?” Tubbo asks, staring at Dream. He doesn’t mean to say it, but it slips out unbidden in his shock, because, well, Dream looks terrible. 

His orange uniform is dirty and torn and stained with dark patches that Tubbo recognizes as blood, and his mask is missing, revealing ugly bruises, lips split with cuts, blood leaking from his nose. The sight is enough to make him grin vindictively, just for a second; a part of him, one that sounds like Tommy, whispers, About fucking time. He’s careless and young, and like with his earlier surprise, cruel mockery escapes before he can stop it: “What, did Sam finally realize you’re more trouble than that stupid book is worth?” 

(Yes, taunting Dream is stupid, incredibly so. But Tubbo isn’t thinking: Tommy has just been brought back from the dead, he has suddenly found himself with a husband and a child and a family two larger, and the mansion that will one day be his home is taking shape by the shore of Snowchester. He’s even begun to think he might be able to escape the games with Dream. Life is good: no nukes have vanished yet, Ghostbur is alive and well, and he has never heard of a country called Las Nevadas.

He is careless and young, and that is because he is happy in a way that seemed impossible only a short time ago. The tide has been low, and Tubbo has been building sand castles where it was, has been dancing on the drying sand and reveling in breathing air instead of water. 

Here, though, is where it begins to roll back in.)

Dream scowls, waving his hand. The next moment, his glowing white mask is back in place, his usual green cloak replacing his prison uniform. “No,” he says. “No, Sam didn’t do this.” He opens the game with a pawn to e4; Tubbo counters with the Sicilian defense. He’s tenser than usual, he thinks, and it becomes obvious that he was right as the game progresses; Dream isn’t playing the long game or talking with Tubbo like usual, instead making short, aggressive, silent moves. Whatever happened, it has him shaken up. 

He takes Dream’s queen. In response, Dream looks up from the board, his hands clenched into fists. “You want to know what happened to me, Tubbo?”

Tubbo stills. Dream is clearly angry, hurting, and looking for revenge, which makes him volatile and vicious. Tubbo’s an easy victim, the only possible scapegoat he has these days. He has to tread carefully. “I-”

Dream doesn’t give him time to respond or placate, to try and save himself. “Remember your friend Quackity?” Dream snarls, spreading his arms wide and snapping his fingers, and suddenly the void is a yellow box. 

Tubbo’s eyes widen—instinctively, he reaches out to the side. This is no illusion: the yellow concrete is slick with water underneath his fingers, cold and hard and unbreaking even when he begins to scream and thrash and fight, his fists pounding against the walls. He’s trapped in his chair, trapped across from Dream inside of the yellow box, trapped with no escape, and the sides won’t break-

“You didn’t answer my question,” Dream says, cool and quiet and deadly and horribly, vindictively pleased. “Remember your friend Quackity, Tubbo?”

“Let me out,” he gasps, still slamming his hands against the concrete, the blood and pain as his knuckles split insignificant in the face of his terror, “let me out, let me out, Dream, fuck, Prime, let me out-”

“Tsk, tsk,” Dream sighs, in his element now, though Tubbo can hardly pay attention to that in his desperation. “Really, you’d think Schlatt, at least, would have taught you some manners. I suppose I’ll simply have to do it myself.”

The concrete crumbles under Tubbo’s hands, suddenly nothing more than dry yellow powder, and he nearly sobs in relief. He can see an opening behind Dream, now, a window to the world beyond-

Quackity is standing there. Quackity, and Schlatt, and behind them a crowd, staring up at a blackstone stage in confusion. He hears Niki shouting something faintly, watches Fundy’s eyes widen, sees Techno’s tusks gleaming in the sun. 

He blinks, and Quackity is filling in the gaps with more concrete powder, replacing what Tubbo had managed to tear away, boxing him in. And then comes the water, the water which transforms soft grains into an unbreaking solid, the water which soaks Tubbo’s suit and collects in a shallow puddle around his feet. It reflects his face, smooth, unblemished-

No, he thinks, raising a hand to touch the raised scar tissue on his face, no. He knows this story already, has danced to this tune before. This is a memory.

It has to be, because Dream is still here, sitting across from him where the podium should be. 

“Unfortunate,” Dream is saying, disappointment thick and slick as oil in his voice. “I had hoped to save this little trick for later, you know. Why’d you have to make me waste it early, Tubbo?”

He sees Techno behind Dream. He is climbing the stairs to the stage, and he is holding a crossbow loaded with fireworks. 

“Stop it,” Tubbo whispers. “Dream, stop it.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Quackity, can hear him arguing with Schlatt. He recalls then that Quackity had never wanted him to be executed, and the sight is comforting, albeit bittersweet. 

But then Dream waves his hand, and suddenly Quackity is grinning, holding a bag of popcorn, watching Techno draw his pickaxe and cheering loudly. Everyone is cheering now: Tommy and Wilbur are beaming with glee from the rooftops, Niki and Fundy are clapping joyfully, and even Techno (who had been nearly as scared as Tubbo was, who had stalled and joked and tried to find a way out, who had apologized even as he pulled the trigger) is laughing as he swings. 

The blow to his side is just as painful as he remembers. A few of his ribs shatter underneath the force, and the pickaxe carves through Tubbo’s flesh with ease. He thinks he screams, but he can’t tell: everything is muffled in the pain, and just as the world begins to return, the pickaxe is torn back out, sending him stumbling forwards. Before, he’d caught himself on the podium: now, he is shoved back by Dream, his back slamming into the concrete behind him, the instinctual steady footing he'd learned on the battlefield the only thing that keeps him standing. “Dream, please!” he shrieks as Techno raises the crossbow with a flourish, as Schlatt laughs, as Quackity leads the crowd in chanting, "Kill the traitor! Kill the traitor! Kill the traitor!”, as the fireworks surge forwards-

“Finally,” Dream sighs. The nightmare fades away, gone as quickly as it came, and Tubbo finds himself back to sitting on one side of a chessboard, the world returned to the white void he knows so well by now. “Manners.”

Tubbo’s side is in agony. His knuckles are bruised and bleeding. His throat aches from screaming. 

“How?” he rasps, eyes blown wide. He presses his hands to the ache in his chest, the same way he’d done in Pogtopia the first time, because though his death had patched his wounds with stitches of scar tissue, and the injury of his memory seems to have done the same, it still feels as though his organs are spilling out. “How did you-”

“Oh, Tubbo,” Dream says, “I did tell you that this is my world the last time we met. You couldn’t have been foolish enough to believe that my powers were limited to simply changing my clothes!”

“But those were- those were my memories,” he whispers, and his voice shakes to match the rest of him. Dream shifts in his seat, lifting an arm, and Tubbo flinches so violently that his head slams into the back of his chair. Nothing is damaged but his pride, but he still winces as Dream begins to laugh. 

“Your painful memories,” Dream corrects, leaning forwards to rest his chin in his hands, gleeful. “Those are easy to bring to life, you know. All I have to do is conjure up the basics, the things that remind you of the worst moments of your life, to call them to the front of your mind. It's simple, really: you do all the rest! I wonder,” he continues, a horrible smile spreading over his face, “if you might do the same for that little room of Eret’s?” 

“No-” Tubbo begins to shriek, though “It was never meant to be!” is already ringing in his ears. 

“What do we say?” asks Dream with Sapnap’s face, and the sword is through his gut, twisting and tearing, ripping him apart-

“Please!”

“Right!” cheers the masked madman, and they are back again, back to the white hell Tubbo had never before thought he’d be glad to see. Dream takes one of Tubbo’s pawns with his knight and leans back in his seat, comfortable, content. “Make your move,” he says. Though the mask obscures his features, it is clear he is smiling.

Tubbo loses that round, throws the game, too rattled to play well. When he wakes, slumped over in the chair in Michael’s room, the wound at his side is nothing more than the scar it has always been, and his face has no new marks. His throat still burns, however, and his hands have kept their bloody scrapes, nails stained yellow from the concrete powder trapped underneath them. 

He washes his hands until they are red and raw, trying to scrub away any trace of the nightmare, no matter how futile it might be. He drinks a healing potion, and the cuts close in a matter of seconds, not even a scar left behind; still, he does not sleep until the sun rises, sitting by his son’s bed as he shakes in fear, gasping for air. In for four, Ranboo’s voice whispers in his mind, hold for seven, but Tubbo can barely make it to three before he’s coughing, choking on panic. 

By the time Foolish arrives in the early hours of the morning, waving up at Tubbo as he strides towards the mansion, he’s regained enough control of himself to return the gesture before getting up to begin breakfast, leaving Michael to his oblivious slumber. When Ranboo visits that afternoon, he greets his husband with the same enthusiastic cheer as normal, though his throat burns as he speaks. When he goes to see Tommy that evening, he laughs at all of his jokes and rubs his sore hands together in feigned excitement for his best friend’s plans, the perfect imitation of his regular self. 

Tubbo has been haunted by his memories for a long time, in and outside of his nightmares. Still, what Dream had done was worse: not just reliving, but redying, too, with no escape, no way to wake up save for his mercy.

And Dream has never been a merciful man.

For weeks after, Tubbo is the politest he’s ever been. Manners, Dream’s voice hisses in his mind. Manners, and it makes Tubbo perfect, infaultable. That doesn't stop Dream, of course: just makes him harder to please. 

For months after, Tubbo is the angriest he’s ever been. Manners, Dream’s voice hisses in his mind, and he wants to punch that smiling mask in the face. That’s too risky, though, so instead he sneaks Dream’s words deep down into the dark spots of his heart. 

All I have to do is conjure up the basics, the things that remind you of the worst moments of your life, to call them to the front of your mind. It's simple, really: you do all the rest!

That, Tubbo thinks, deep in that hidden place, sounds like it could be a double-edged sword. 

He will not end up bringing about that particular sea change for a while yet. This is early on in his story, and it will be months before Dream brings up his family, before Tubbo manages to make Dream’s cell appear around them, before XD appears to take a look. But when he’s naming his new sword a few weeks later, etching the title into the blade alongside the symbols of its enchantments, he finds a certain catharsis in the carving of its nine letters.

They are thin and delicate, those runes, barely a scratch on the surface of the sword. They must be, to not risk damaging the blade. Still, for all their fragility, the word that they spell out is clear:

Checkmate.

Chapter Text

Alice (for white bishops)

if we purr in check then we must

confront the surreal as if it was stable

chase dormice like rabbits like a castled king

always a logical path along red and white

opposition, a path along a narrative operating system

a directory is not a promotion unless we

carve an open rank for queen-protected pawn

and it really was a kitten, after all

—

It is raining when Niki first asks Tubbo to teach her how to play chess. 

“Tommy told me you know how,” she explains, and though the world outside is drowning, lost in the grey mist of the downpour, in her bakery it is safe and it is warm, and the air smells of pastries. She hands him a slice of pumpkin pie as she takes the seat across from him, and Tubbo eyes it warily, used to Niki’s particular brand of bribery. “I want to learn, and it seems you’re my best bet.”

“I don’t have a set,” he tells her apologetically, but that isn’t a problem—she’s already borrowed Fundy’s. 

“If you teach me how to play,” Niki says slyly when he looks worriedly at the clock, afraid he’s going to miss his meeting with Wilbur and Tommy, “I’ll teach you to bake.” 

Well, who is Tubbo to turn down that deal?

Niki is, well, Niki: she throws herself into chess like she does everything else, determined to succeed. By the end of that day in the bakery, she knows enough to play a short game with him. She doesn’t win, of course, but it’s a valuable learning experience, and she’s grinning when they finish. The rain has become a drizzle, so he holds his jacket over his head with one hand and holds the rest of the pie in the other to carry back to the Camarvan, where he’s promised to meet his brothers for a briefing on the work he missed. “Come back tomorrow,” she calls from the doorway as he goes, “we’ll make brownies!” 

Fundy never ends up asking for his set back, and so Tubbo uses it to teach Niki about openings and defenses and gambits, about outposts and fortresses and castling, about the difference between check and checkmate. In turn, he learns how to bake breads and pastries and extravagant cakes, how to whip cream and apply icing and make Niki’s infamous pie crust. It isn’t long before they abandon the table, playing on counters and kitchen islands, with strategies explained between the reading of recipes, pieces taken while mixing ingredients together, checkmate declared as the timer goes off. It is chess unlike any Tubbo has ever played before, chess not as a competition or as a test or even as a game, but as nothing more than a pastime. Honestly, he rather likes the inconsequentiality of it all.

They are raided—Tubbo swears Fundy can smell baked goods from a mile away, and Wilbur and Tommy and Jack Manifold are always close behind—so his and Niki’s lessons always seem to end with the people of L’Manberg sprawled across the small cafe, happily profiting off the fruits of their labour. For all that they may complain, though, these interruptions quickly become expected: Niki teaches Tubbo in double batches, and he does his best to ensure they have enough time to achieve checkmate before the food has cooled.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter who wins or loses in these early games with Niki. The point is simply learning, experimenting, having fun, so Tubbo starts to count how many times they laugh as his victories, instead. The first time Niki beats him at a game, they celebrate her victory surrounded by their friends and plates of krumkake, and as Niki brags about her win, Tubbo finds his face splitting into a grin.

And then Wilbur loses the election, and Niki is deemed untrustworthy by Schlatt, and Tubbo is a spy for his brothers in the new president’s Cabinet, and they see each other less and less and less. To make up for it, though, she leaves him recipes in his chests, and he gets Fundy or Eret to give her any books about chess that he can find. Their lessons continue, even from afar, and he bakes ginger snaps as she learns about the Caro-Kann defense. The enemy buys Niki’s bread, and Tubbo plays with Schlatt and Quackity, and some nights he sneaks into the bakery and she makes them hot cocoa and they do paperwork (for fines, for festivals, for all the taxes taken from traitors) at opposite ends of the table. 

And soon after that, they find themselves in Pogtopia. 

Niki had known about the pawn in his pocket—they’d often used it to replace one of Fundy’s white pawns that had been lost in a particularly chaotic food fight, and he’d told her the story of it one quiet night, between games as they waited for the timer to ring—and so it is Niki that he trusts to gently pry the pieces from his hands after he wakes and promise him that they will save the remains, as Tommy hovers anxiously and Techno looks away and Wilbur watches with eyes cold as ice. Later, as Tubbo makes futile promises he knows he cannot keep to the last brother he has left and she bandages all the little cuts that will become scars, he stares down at his hands, and imagines their future. It isn’t a bright one, in imagination or reality: Tubbo’s hands are littered with scars after the execution, old (from baking with Niki and sparring with Tommy and all the little mishaps of childhood) and new (jagged, raised markings won in battle, and red, sensitive burns from the impact of fireworks, and tiny white lines left from the vicious remains of a beheaded pawn).

And it is Niki, too, who finally drags him from his bed and puts him to work. “Stir that sauce,” she says sternly, pointing to a pot above a makeshift stove. “I taught you how to bake, but it’s about time you learned to cook.” 

Cooking, Tubbo finds, is different from baking. Baking is a formula, a set code: experimentation is a risk, letting you either improve the recipe, or have it blow up in your face. Cooking, however, is far more lax, far more open to change. Niki looks down at their soon-to-be-roasted potatoes (for they have potatoes with nearly every meal in Pogtopia, thanks to Technoblade) and clicks her tongue, opening a cabinet. “Let’s try some rosemary,” she says, sprinkling the herb over the vegetables with reckless abandon. It is so different from the rigid rules of baking that he’s used to that Tubbo can’t help but stare.

It is a few days later, when Niki is showing him how to best chop the mushrooms Tommy had gathered for them, that Tubbo says “I’m going to teach you speed chess.” 

“What?” Niki says, turning to stare at him. He closes his right eye to see her better—ever since the execution, it has been far blurrier than his left—and her brow is furrowed, watching him worriedly. “Speed chess?” 

“You’ll see,” he says, flashing her a grin, even though smiling makes his cheeks ache. They finish the food, calling everyone to dinner, and it is then that he begins the process of acquiring a set. 

Fundy’s remains in Niki’s bakery, for there had been no time to retrieve it in the chaos of the festival, and no one in Pogtopia has had time to acquire another during their all-consuming revolution. But Tommy offers to help make the new one, and so the three of them spend their free time crouched beside the campfire, cutting shabby shapes from birch and dark oak. Eventually Quackity and Techno join, too, Techno’s steady hand producing simple but elegant rooks, Quackity’s less experienced one forming passable knights. Even Wilbur takes on the task, intricate bishops taking shape between his long fingers as he whispers to himself about TNT. And so Niki and Tubbo play their first blitz with pieces made by the members of Pogtopia, the unpolished wood rough against their fingers as they dance the pieces across the board. 

She takes to it faster than he had, back when Wilbur and Techno had taught this version of the game to him so long ago, so to keep things interesting he introduces other variants as well: displacement, multi-move, king of the hill. Techno watches them play near the fire from where he sits on the walkways above, occasionally calling down advice. Once, Wilbur takes Tubbo’s place at the board, playing a lightning-fast round with Niki. She wins, just barely, and Tubbo and Techno cheer. 

When Pogtopia is left behind to retake their country, the set is left with it, waiting patiently for the return of its players. When Tubbo returns for it a few weeks later, he finds that it has disappeared, lost with Wilbur’s L’Manberg, lost with Wilbur himself. For a brief moment he considers looking for it, but he is wearing a suit too big for him, a suit that still smells of soot and ash and gunpowder, and the longer he stands in Pogtopia the more he wants to start pressing the buttons on the ravine walls. In the end, he thinks it best to flee as quickly as possible, even if it means leaving the set behind. 

Time passes. Tubbo is president, and collapsing under the weight of his nation. Niki is grieving, and disenchanted with the country she once adored. Tubbo exiles his best friend, and Niki burns down the L’mantree. Tubbo forms a commune, and Niki begins to build a city under the sea. Tubbo goes with Tommy to fight Dream, and Niki arrives with Punz and the others just in time to save his life. Tubbo marries Ranboo in secret, for tax benefits and for their infant son, and Niki and Puffy draw away from each other, though they still wear their promise rings.

Tubbo wakes up one morning (from a Dream-less night, thank goodness) to find a small package in his mailbox. Inside rests a few of Pogtopia’s wooden pieces: three pawns, one of Quackity’s knights, two of Techno’s rooks, a white queen, and a black king. I visited Pogtopia yesterday, the note at the bottom says—though it is not signed, Tubbo recognizes Niki's handwriting. Found these. 

They are worn with time and neglect, dirty and still unpolished. Still, Tubbo holds them like tiny treasures, carefully cleaning them and lining them up on the windowsill of Michael’s room, crude wooden guardians. 

In return, Tubbo sends her an old notebook he’d recovered from the wreckage of L'Manberg, one filled with both of their handwriting, recipes scribbled down to help Tubbo remember them better. Bake a cake for me, he writes on the first page. 

The pieces sent by Niki are the reason why he starts playing chess outside of his dreams again, using makeshift pieces he and Tommy craft from pebbles or paper. He will later learn that the battered book he’d sent her was the catalyst for her baking again too. 

—

Kasparov (for black bishops)

an opponent is rarely oppositional but more likely

our other symmetrical half, a reflection slightly distorted

we each carry our own databases own software

but at our core are our negative, transposed

poor black, intuitive but resigned to hunching forward

staring unbelieving at what we thought was a

pond but was instead just a screen a

man from a country, machine from no place

—

“I think I know why you like chess so much, President Tubbo,” Dream says. He sounds sincere, which immediately puts Tubbo on guard; usually, the self-proclaimed god speaks like his every word is meant to make a mockery of the world, a scornful, sarcastic sound. 

This is before the prison. This is before Doomsday. This is before the Green Festival, and though Tubbo knows that Dream cannot be trusted, he is also one of the only people he has spoken to in weeks.

L’Manberg is quiet, these days; quiet, and near empty. 

Tubbo knows that Dream cannot be trusted, because he is not a fool, but he still has not yet learned to truly fear the man in the white mask. This is one of earliest games in the void, and Tubbo has not tried to escape the board yet, has not yet realized that playing is mandatory.

(He knows Dream was the one to help Technoblade survive the anvil, knows that Quackity wants him to murder him for it in a few days, but does not have the energy left to care. In fact, deep in his heart of hearts, Tubbo is rather glad that Techno hadn’t died; sure, he already knows that the man will likely bring about the downfall of both him and his country, based on his track record with both governments and Tubbo himself, but at least it’s a little less blood to coat his already dripping hands.)

“Do tell,” he says wearily, moving a pawn with a scarred hand. He’d fallen asleep at his desk again, still wearing his suit and tie and polished shoes. Not that it matters: if anyone besides Dream is even in the White House tomorrow to witness his disheveled state, Tubbo’s sure his surprise will be more of a tell than wrinkled cloth could ever be. 

“Chess pieces,” his opponent whispers, like he’s sharing some great secret, “can’t betray you.” 

Dream’s in one of his cheery moods, the ones where he tends to talk about George and Sapnap and Spirit instead of trying to mess with Tubbo’s head. It’s almost more unnerving than when he’s bitter and mocking and vindictive; at least then, Tubbo knows where he stands. When Dream’s like this, the very ground beneath his feet becomes a lake frozen over by ice, the kind of ice that is dark and thin and deceptively beautiful, the kind of ice where one wrong step could be his last. 

“Why would I care about that?” Tubbo asks, trying for nonchalance even as his hands curl into fists under the table. “I learned to play as a child, Dream. I didn’t even know what betrayal was, then.”

“You know, I’ve spent a lot of time with Tommy and Phil and Wilbur and Techno,” Dream reminds him, examining the board as Tubbo flinches at the sound of Tommy’s name. “They mentioned you a few times. Tubbo in a box, abandoned by the side of the road by your first family. And then, well, there was… well, all of your friends, really, waiting and ready to stab you in the back” 

“Ranboo never betrayed me,” Tubbo retorts. “Neither did Jack, or Fundy, or Niki.” 

“Oh, please,” Dream sighs. “I saw Niki and Fundy try to leave L’Manberg, for… what did they call it, Dry Waters? Aren’t they your friends?  Didn’t that hurt?” 

“They left with my blessing,” Tubbo argues weakly, but Dream just continues speaking as if he’d never spoken at all.

“Hurts, just like everything else,” his opponent hums to himself. “A trial can end with a variety of punishments, as I’m sure you, of all people, know. Execution is one. Exile another. And yet abandonment seems to be your most frequent sentencing, sanctioned by all of the people you called friends.” Dream twirls his queen in his fingers, and Tubbo can hear the kind smile in his voice, a light dangling before the maw of an anglerfish. “You keep forgiving them, because you have to, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t rip you apart inside. That, you see, is why you like chess: because in this game, there’s no such thing as friends, or trust, or forgiveness. You’re the only person that can be blamed for your failures, and you’re the only person who will care.” 

“No,” says Tubbo quietly, sure of this at least. “You can blame your opponent, or your teachers, or people around you for distracting you. There’s always someone else to hate for your losses, Dream.”

“And you’d know that too, wouldn’t you?” Dream muses, sounding so unbearably sympathetic that it makes Tubbo’s toes curl. “President Tubbo Underscore, never the hero, always the hanged man. Victim, villain; it all feels the same, doesn’t it?”

“I haven’t gotten anything I didn’t deserve,” he says, and tries to believe it. 

“See, this is why you’re so much less fun,” the other whines, throwing up his hands. “Tommy's all anger, all fire, all righteous belief in himself. But you… You’re a sidekick, Tubbo! You just accept whatever they tell you, even if they’re wrong. It’s boring, playing with you, because you never fight back.”

“That’s not true.”

“Oh, really?” asks a volatile, cruel man who may as well be a god, and, as if to prove his point, Tubbo throws the match that night, just as he had done the night before, just as he will do the night after. Caution, caution, say the instincts of a boy twice-dead already, play it careful, play it safe. Do not make powerful people angry. 

Do not make powerful people angry, say the voices in his head, but Tubbo is surrounded by powerful people. He is forced to make quick gambles, forced to make snap decisions, and often loses because of it, for Tubbo has always been a chess player and a strategist, operating best with time to spare, time to ensure even his bets have escape routes. 

There are no escape routes from L'Manberg, thinks Tubbo as he plans to run against his minutes man in the next election, agreeing to be named vice president even if he loses. There are no escape routes from L’Manberg, thinks Tubbo as he stands opposite his best friend for the first time in months, cruel words as much of a barrier between them as their armor and weapons. There are no escape routes from L'Manberg, thinks Tubbo as the withers scream and TNT hisses and he locks eyes with Niki, whose hair and skin and clothes are coated in ash as she watches their country die for the last time. 

“There’s no escape!” laughs Dream as he tries to leave the table for the first time a few weeks later, and Tubbo, although he’s wearing a parka and a worn green button-down, feels a tie tighten around his neck like a noose. When he finally sits down to play, the bishop he sacrifices to win the game seems to watch him with accusing eyes framed by pink hair, and makes his hands smell faintly of freshly-baked brownies when he touches it, a scent that doesn’t dissipate even after the game ends. The second thing he does when he wakes up from that night trapped at the chessboard with Dream, after he speaks to Jack Manifold and before he eats or drinks anything or even closes the door to his cabin, is run to the bay and try and scrub the smell of the first thing he’d ever made with Niki from his fingers. 

The water of the lake is freezing, and his hands are numb and shaking in mere moments; still, Tubbo isn’t satisfied until his scarred palms are red and raw and only smell of salt and ice. Then, and only then, does he stand up, stagger to his house, slam the door behind him, and eat raw carrots and gulp down water until the gnawing pit in his stomach is sated. 

Jack finds him in the time after, because Jack is no fool, just as Niki isn’t, and cannot help being kind, just as she can’t. Ah, bishops, thinks Tubbo. The most trustworthy of traitors. 

“You alright?” asks Jack, taking the only chair in the room as he watches Tubbo pace around the small kitchen, rubbing his hands together to try and warm them up again. 

“Fine,” Tubbo grits out, though he’s pretty sure the only thing preventing him from putting a fist through the wall or crawling into some dark corner to cry is Jack’s presence. 

“You were sick,” he says, and Tubbo wants to laugh. ‘Were’, he repeats in his mind, mocking, because if this is an illness it is of the chronic sort, inescapable and incurable. “Give yourself some time to recover.”

“Don’t need it.” 

“Right,” Jack scoffs, “and I’m the Goddess of Death!” 

This is comfortable territory: Tubbo is used to banter, to sass, to exchanging barbs with blunted blades. “I dunno,” he says, and the words are pulled from his mouth almost entirely on instinct, “I reckon she could be anyone under that hat. Maybe you are.” 

“Don’t be an idiot,” he retorts. “She’s got long hair in all the paintings and statues, and I don’t really fit that bill, you know.” He gestures to his head pointedly, having taken off his hood in the warmth of Tubbo’s home to reveal his buzz cut. 

Tubbo shrugs. “A wig,” he says. “I know you know what those are.” 

Instead of playing along with an indignant reply, Jack Manifold just sighs. “Look, Tubbo,” he says, far too sympathetic, far too serious, “I’m not stupid, you know. I can tell you’re deflecting. You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong, but… I’d like to help, if I can.” 

There’s nothing to say. “Well, y’see, I’ve been playing these chess games with Dream in my sleep, and I just learned that he might be able to keep me in them indefinitely, possibly killing me in the process!” would, at best, make Jack think him insane. And Dream’s just been locked in the prison, so mentioning meetings with him even in the general sense would be suspicious. 

Except-

Hm. 

“Hey, Jack,” says Tubbo, stopping in front of the window to stare out at the snow and the sea, “remember when I told you about Project Dreamcatcher?” 

“The nukes, you mean?” he asks. 

“Having them, it’s like castling,” Tubbo says, reaching into the cabinet under the sink to pull out the blueprints taped under the pipes, crossing to the kitchen table to roll them out for Jack to see. “And castling, well. Castling is the key to our survival. It’s how we protect everything we love.” 

“Do they even work?” Jack wonders, staring down at the graphs, though there’s already something like reverence in his voice. 

“That,” says Tubbo Underscore, pressing a keycard into his hand, “is exactly what we’re going to find out.” 

He knows Jack is friends with Niki, knows that he’s probably devoted the whole of his meager loyalty to her, knows Niki might not harbor the same friendly feelings as Jack towards Tubbo. Still, he wants to trust Jack Manifold, has to, even, and can’t find much guilt in trying to win a bit of that precious fidelity for himself. 

When Niki sends him the box of pieces recovered from Pogtopia weeks later, none of Wilbur’s bishops are included, though he recognizes the shape of one pressing against the pocket of her coat when he runs into her a few days later. He tells himself that things are better that way, and doesn’t send her the recipe for brownies, either.

Chapter Text

Man Ray (for the white queen)

sphere on round base sphere on round base

sphere on round base sphere on round base

sphere on round base sphere on round base

sphere on round base sphere on round base

perfect cube curl of seashell vase without flowers

cone cylindrical base wood grain to pointed apex

square pyramids are ancient tombs immobile across expanses

vase without flowers curl of seashell perfect cube

—

“Marrying you,” Tubbo says to Ranboo, “was the best thing I’ve ever done.” 

“Tubbo, we have a son,” laughs his husband over his communicator, voice a comforting, crackling hum that fills the dark room. Ranboo’s out mining again, as he is most every night, and since Tubbo’s got his own work to do and can’t accompany him, they stay together via the radio waves instead. I get lonely, Tubbo laughs when the other members of the server, amused, ask why he and Ranboo are on call so often. 

(Tommy doesn’t ask, of course, because Tommy, like Tubbo, has the same nightmares about rebellions in unstable caverns and countries felled by buttons and men dying at the hands of unkind fate. Tommy, like Tubbo, knows well how the pretty mirages of safety and hope glimmer, and how that fata morgana can disappear as you reach out to touch it. Tommy, like Tubbo, knows that if Ranboo was to get into danger on one of his faraway mining trips, they likely wouldn’t be able to do anything in time; still, his brother would drop everything to join him on a quest to save his husband, no matter how Sisyphean it might be.)

“Second best, then,” he amends, rifling around in his toolbag, his flashlight strapped to his shoulder to leave his hands free. “No, wait, third.”

“Third?” Ranboo asks, amused. “Ouch. What managed to beat our marriage?” 

“Boo,” he says, “I got a god to build a house for us.” 

“Demigod,” Ranboo corrects, “and I’m paying for it!” 

“It goes adopting Michael, conning Foolish, marrying you,” Tubbo decides, undeterred. “Don’t push it, boss man, or I’ll knock you to fourth.” 

Ranboo laughs again, and then says, “Hey, Bo, it’s your move.” 

“Is it?” Tubbo asks, picking up his communicator from where he’d left it on the tiles beside him and checking the program he’d coded himself, represented by a tiny icon of a pawn on his screen. It opens to a chess game in progress, pixelated pieces against a digital board. 

There are only three main differences between Tubbo’s creation and the similar version that had already existed on their communicators. Firstly, his is multiplayer and has no automatic time limits, so that he and Ranboo can play with each other on their own devices without worrying about penalties for getting distracted. Secondly, it has a button to automatically pull up a notepad on one side of the screen, so that the players can record their previous moves, their plans for the next ones, and their thoughts on the game as a whole. It’s an accommodation Ranboo often needs, especially considering how long their digital matches can go on for, to remember what has happened and how he’s strategized. 

And thirdly, when a game is won, there is a simple message saying only [Player] is the winner! That message, like most of the application, is almost identical to the original, save for the deletion of the two characters the original coder had included at the end of the winning text, a haunting digital smile made from a colon and a right parenthesis. 

Tubbo is the winner! :) would cheer the default program, and memories would tear away any sense of victory. 

(Though only Tommy, Ranboo, and Jack Manifold have Tubbo’s version, there are few people on the server with the original still on their communicators.)

Tubbo eventually moves his queen, and tells Ranboo it’s his turn; moments later, Ranboo’s fallen into his trap, just as he’d expected. Checkmate in four, thinks Tubbo as he moves again, and then sets back down his communicator. He can hear that Ranboo’s gone back to mining, his pickaxe ringing against stone, communicator no doubt resting in one of his jacket’s pockets. It’s how they usually play, stolen minutes used to make a couple moves before returning to whatever they’re working on, so Tubbo goes back to his own task as well, picking up a wrench. 

“I don’t think I’m going to make it back to Snowchester for a few days,” Ranboo says apologetically as Tubbo catches the first of the bolts he’s removing in a gloved hand. “I promised I’d help Phil with the turtle farm tomorrow morning, and after that I’m setting out to visit a few more mansions.”

“I thought you’d raided all the ones even remotely close by already,” Tubbo says with a snort, carefully putting the metal pieces in the bag beside him. It’s not like they’re delicate, and even if they were, they wouldn’t be hard to replace—iron is easy to get, especially after his marriage to Ranboo, and the bolts are of such a simple design he thinks he could make them in his sleep—but Tubbo will not risk any of his belongings getting damaged or lost, not anymore, not even if they are as small and as simple and as easily replaced as a bolt. 

“I have,” agrees Ranboo matter-of-factly, as if that’s not hundreds or even thousands of blocks of travel. “But I got a few more maps recently, and I thought it’d be best to stock up.” 

“Expecting an emergency?” Tubbo asks, only half-joking. 

“Better safe than sorry,” says his husband, which isn’t much of an answer. “Will you be okay watching Michael alone?” 

“‘Course I will, Boo,” he hums, setting aside the wrench with the last of the bolts, prying free the metal panel. “Michael’s my son, too. And he’s not the first kid I’ve helped raise, you know.” 

“I’m not worried about Michael,” Ranboo says softly, and then, distracted, “Wait, what other kids have you had?” 

“They weren’t mine,” Tubbo laughs as he adjusts his flashlight to see better, steadfastly ignoring Ranboo’s first sentence. (He’s good at that, pushing sad things aside and away, far into the darkest corners of his mind where only nightmares dare tread. He calls it prioritizing. Tommy, who has been visiting Puffy for therapy as of late, calls it repression.) “We all helped out with Fundy back in L’Manberg, for one, and I had Tommy as a little brother—and I practically raised myself, too, up until Phil and Wilbur found me!” 

“I don’t think you can count yourself, Bo.”

“Sure I can.” 

“No, you can’t!”

“Why not?” 

“Well, would you put ‘I raised myself’ on a job application for, like, experience in babysitting?” 

“...Yes.” 

“No!” 

“Yes.”

“We’re getting off topic,” Ranboo says, exasperated. “Just… be careful while I’m gone, okay?” 

“I’ll be fine,” Tubbo says as he peers into a complicated web of wires and circuitry, easily spotting the places where they’d been disconnected. His fingers work quickly in rerouting them, a practiced dance; a waltz, perhaps, like the one Wilbur had taught him and the rest of L’Manberg around a campfire by the Camarvan, but one too fluid and careful to ever resemble the chaotic, messy, happy thing he and Ranboo will sometimes perform for their son, a loose box step around the kitchen as the jukebox sings and Michael claps in glee. 

In what feels like no time at all, the last of the circuits are connected and the lights of the room around him flicker to life, the control panel a few feet away humming as it awakens. He crosses the room to stand before it; the screen and keyboard have much the same design as his communicator, though much larger. Please enter the passcode, it says, the empty box blinking helpfully as his gloved fingers fly across the keys.

“You sure?” Ranboo asks as Tubbo hits enter.

“Of course I am,” he answers. Though new text is scrolling across the screen, he finds himself looking at the weapon that rests only a few feet away instead, gleaming in the newly activated lights. It’s all alone now, the last of its kind left on its stone stage. He knows the feeling. “Really, I’ll be okay. I always am.” 

“But you don’t have to be,” says his husband softly, and Tubbo’s fingers still over the keyboard. “You’re not alone, Tubbo. You, me, Michael, Tommy: we take care of each other, okay?” 

Welcome to Project Dreamcatcher, reads the control panel when he looks at it again. Status: Offline. 

Tubbo does not like to lie. Perhaps that is difficult to believe, for he has been a spy and a soldier, a president and a parent, and those are all occupations that rarely call for candor. Quite the opposite, in fact. Whatever might be believed about the matter, however, the reality is the same: Tubbo does not like lying, and so he rarely does. 

But that does not make him honest. If Tubbo learned anything from Wilbur and Schlatt, it’s that honesty is a step away from vulnerability, and being vulnerable is a step away from being dead. Tubbo is sick of dying, and so, though he does not speak many lies, he does not speak much truth, either.

So if Tubbo Underscore-Beloved was ever to describe his husband, his answer would likely not be particularly satisfactory. True, yes, but the obvious sort of truth, something like “Ranboo is part enderman” or “Ranboo is kind and smart”: true but trite, nothing new, nothing learned.

But if Tubbo Underscore-Beloved was ever to describe his husband, and if he did so honestly and without omission, well, he might say something like this:

Ranboo is a study in contrast. 

He is a pacifist who spends his time crafting impossibly strong weapons and armor. He is a neighbor of anarchists and the husband of a former president, and, somehow, a friend to both. He is a farmer of totems, a brewer of potions, a person determined to protect those he cares about, and he is also the person whose unrest was a large factor in causing Tubbo to decommission their only guaranteed promise of safety. To the player, a queen can be both their greatest weapon and their greatest weakness: such is chess, and such is Ranboo. 

Still, as maddening as it can be, Tubbo would not want his husband any other way. Ranboo is found in his chiaroscuro; he would be incomplete without both his light and shadow, would not be right without contrast, would quite literally only be half of himself thanks to his two-toned skin. Tubbo loves his husband—no matter what sort of love it might be, something he thinks other people tend to care far too much about, especially in regards to taxes—and so he loves his husband’s incongruity. It’s as simple as that. 

The truth that Tubbo avoids, the honest and vulnerable and deadly heart of the matter, is that though their marriage may have started as nothing more than a mutually beneficial con, it has grown into something far deeper. Ranboo has become a person Tubbo loves and trusts more than almost anyone else, someone he’d die for and, perhaps more importantly, live for. When Tubbo calls Ranboo his partner, he knows it’s the indisputable truth; even when they are apart, Ranboo somehow manages to be at his side. They are Tubbo and Ranboo now, Ranboo and Tubbo. They are a pair, a binding contract, a unified front, easily distinguishable from each other but still inextricably linked by the intricate bands that rest on their left hands’ fourth fingers. Me and you, the rings say. You and me. ‘And’, a phrase used to connect words that fit together sequentially. ‘And’, the two of us linked together. ‘And’, for as long as we may live.

Tubbo loves Ranboo, and he loves Michael, and he loves Tommy, and he loves his friends and his home. He loves his family, as small as it is, his husband and his son and his brother. He would do anything to protect them, and he knows that they would do the same. Hard as it is, Tubbo even fights to live for them. 

He would do anything to protect his family, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is only so much that armor or potions or even love can do. No matter how many totems of undying he has around his neck, no matter the power of any of his pieces, no matter how much he fights, Tubbo knows that his third life is always in check, just a move or two away from the final checkmate. 

“Castling,” Wilbur had told him as a child, Techno setting up the board to demonstrate, “will be your king’s best protection, more than any other piece on its own. More than a queen, even. Rooks and pawns, Tubbo, strong walls and tall towers.”

“Castling,” Tubbo had told Jack Manifold months ago, unfurling blueprints for the killers of gods, “is the key to our survival. It’s how we protect everything we love.”

Tubbo is a pawn, but he is one in the center of the board. A typical starting piece, a frequent sacrifice, but useless as part of a wall or tower. And yet Tubbo is perhaps more valuable than either, because he’s the one that figured out how to build a castle, how to fortify it, how to make his walls into a defense and a threat all at once. 

He had once made his family a fortress with three towers, shaped like fireworks but bearing far more power. There is only one of them left, now; still, he believes it might just be enough. 

(If not, well, he can always make more, even without the blueprints. Tubbo has always had a good memory, and life does not have the same rules as chess when it comes to adding pieces to the board.)

“You’re right,” he says finally, making his choice, and begins to type once more. “We take care of each other. Always will.” 

“Always will,” Ranboo agrees, and Tubbo can practically hear the smile spreading across his face, can picture how his pupils expand and ears twitch and tail curls around the nearest object in a makeshift hug.

“Sap,” Tubbo teases affectionately. 

“You said it first!” his husband protests.

“Yeah, but you said it more sappily.” 

“I should think I’m allowed to be a bit of a sap,” Ranboo huffs. “I’m a dad, you know. And a husband.” Then, “Hey, Tubbo, why is marrying me the best thing you’ve ever done?” 

“Third best thing.”

“Okay, why is marrying me the third best thing you’ve ever done?” 

“Because of the tax benefits,” he answers automatically, and then hesitates. “And… and because you make me happy, Boo, more than almost anyone else.” 

“Aw,” Ranboo coos, “who’s the sap now?” 

“Still you,” Tubbo tells him, “will be until the very end,” and the screen asks for confirmation. He does not hesitate. 

“The end?” asks Ranboo, slowly, carefully. “And when’s that?”

Only one word is changed when the new text appears, but it is enough for something like hope to begin to fill his chest, enough to make him sincere when he answers, “Not anytime soon, I don’t think.”

Welcome to Project Dreamcatcher, repeats the screen. Status: Online. 

Tubbo cracks his knuckles, falling into a lighter conversation with Ranboo about their son’s latest antics as he gets to work. There’s a lot still to do. 

Next step, he thinks, twisting the totem he’s wearing as a necklace between his fingers absently as he looks down at the last blueprint spread across the workbench, one detailing plans for a newer, better type of bomb, it’s about time to promote some pawns. 

—

The Turk (for the black queen)

the deception is complete if we believe mirrors

ignore the obvious huddle of limbs and want

automatons that astonish beyond gears and mathematics and

obvious rotations of teeth and cogs or pulses

and conductors and strategically broken circuits then we

should weep over its cremated remains, whisper assured

eulogies because none of the departed’s family exist

a lonely fiery funeral, wood in our nostrils

—

“So,” says Dream, twirling his queen around in his fingers like a figure in a music box, “tell me about these nukes of yours.” 

Tubbo looks up from the board he’s examining. “How do you know about that?” he asks. There’s no point in denying it, not if the way Dream is acting, smug as a cat with a mouse squirming under its paw, is any indication. 

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” coos Dream. “I know a lot of things, Tubbo. So many secrets. How’s Michael, by the way?” 

Tubbo stills, and then surges into action; he lunges across the board, scattering pieces everywhere, slamming into Dream and knocking them both to the ground. “Leave my son alone,” he snarls, vividly aware that his real body is lying beside Ranboo in their bed in the mansion with the boy in question curled up between them, safe as can be in the cage of their tangled limbs. 

Dream just sighs. Tubbo blinks, and suddenly they’re back in their seats, everything where it was before, the queen still dancing between Dream’s fingers. “Very mature,” he chides, patronizing. “Really, can’t the two of us just act like adults?”

Tubbo stares at him. “I’m seventeen.” 

“Sure you are,” Dream shrugs, his bored tone contrasted by the eyes of the mask staring directly at him, its haunting grin boring into Tubbo’s soul. “Kids like you grow up fast. You’re as much an adult as me, Mr. President.” 

It’s not a compliment. 

“Who told you about him?” Tubbo asks. The list of people who know about either Michael or the nukes is not long, and the list of people who know about both is far shorter. None of them really seem like the type to spill those particular beans to Dream, though: even Phil, the most likely candidate, hasn’t told his closest ally about Michael, let alone an imprisoned murderer. Still, Tubbo checks: “Phil?”

Dream throws his head back and laughs. “Oh, no,” he chuckles, “Phil was always more Techno’s ally than mine. He thinks quite poorly of me, in fact. You know, I once heard him tell Techno that he thinks I’m ‘a bit too big for his britches, and too cruel for my tastes besides’? That, from a man who killed his own son! No,” he says, and though his fists are clenched tight from repeating Phil’s criticisms, his tone is as gleeful as ever, “your dear ol’ dad didn’t betray you this time. My little mole is someone else, someone worse, if you can believe it.” 

“He’s not my dad,” Tubbo mutters automatically, and ignores Dream in favor of working through this new puzzle in his mind. Who could it be?

And then he realizes and, well, of course. It’s rather simple, now that he thinks about it. 

“Ah,” he says, relaxing back into his seat. “It was Ranboo.”

By that, at least, Dream seems off put. “You’re- he’s your husband. Don’t you care?”

(Tubbo has known that something was wrong with his husband for months, and it wasn’t hard to figure out that it was Dream’s fault after Ranboo woke up in the middle of the night sobbing and told Tubbo that he’d done something horrible, terrible, that he was so sorry, Prime, Bo, so sorry. “He was in my head!” he’d cried, clutching at his skull, and as Tubbo wiped away his tears and gently tugged his hands free from his hair, he’d asked who he meant.

“Dream,” Ranboo whispered, eyes wide with fear and glowing a bright purple, and something deep inside Tubbo had ignited in fury.

The next morning, he had awoken with no memory of the night before, confused by the new tear scars on his cheeks. “You had a nightmare, bossman,” Tubbo told him. 

That night, he’d brought Project Dreamcatcher back online.)

“Oh, I care,” Tubbo hums, and does his best to mimic Quackity or Schlatt or Wilbur or even Dream himself: pitches his voice to be low and menacing even as he grins, foxlike and humorless. “I care about Ranboo, and I care about our son. I care that you’re still trying to manipulate him. And I really, really care that you tried to use him against me.”

Dream isn’t threatened. Not that it matters, since Tubbo hadn’t expected him to be; still, it’s eerie to watch him just get more joyful in the face of Tubbo’s ire. “Well!” he coos, leaning back in his own chair, the queen dangling between his fingers as his mask’s painted eyes bore into Tubbo’s soul. “That’s an even better button than I expected.” Briefly, the queen shifts to have his husband’s features, and Tubbo watches helplessly as the piece thrashes in Dream’s grip, scrabbling at the fingers against his neck and pleading soundlessly with Tubbo, red and green eyes wide and teary, before it is naught but a simple chess piece again, faceless and warmthless stone lacking in any sort of contrast. The sight, as much as it makes Tubbo want to scream, also steels his resolve. 

“I want you to leave him alone,” he says firmly, and his tone leaves no room for debate. 

“Oh,” Dream says, both thoughtful and mocking, “and why would I do that?” 

“Because,” says Tubbo Underscore-Beloved, used to signing his soul away for those he loves, “I’ll make you a deal.” 

He raises a hand before Dream can speak, and, for once, the masked man respects him enough to stay silent. “I won’t let you out of the prison, and I won’t hurt anyone for you. I’ll only give you in exchange something less than or equal to the price of leaving Ranboo, in any form or state of mind, well enough alone.” He cocks his head, thinks for a moment. “I’d reckon you’re using what lets you bring me here to contact Ranboo, yeah?”

Dream’s silence is answer enough. It sets Tubbo on edge, how intensely his opponent is watching him, practically salivating at the thought of this bargain, but he won’t back out now. He will do anything to protect his family, anything at all, but there’s nothing, not even totems or nukes or discs, that can save them from Dream creeping into their minds. Nothing, that is, except maybe Tubbo himself. 

It’s okay. He’s used to playing human shield. 

“You haven’t been trying to get at Tommy, and that means you probably can’t,” he says, mind running a mile a minute as he speaks. “And I haven’t heard of anyone else having meetings like this, either. You leave me alone more nights than not, and same with Ranboo, meaning you’re either in contact with even more of us, or you’re too taxed by doing this to use it every single day. I’d bet on the latter.” 

“You shouldn’t,” Dream interrupts, trying for coy and patronizing and just sounding desperate. He’s on edge, he’s losing control, he’s just the tiniest bit afraid.

Good. 

“Maybe not,” Tubbo agrees, “but I don’t quite care.” He cracks his knuckles in front of him, not caring if Dream can see how nervous he is. His apprehension is obvious, for one, and besides, it’s not like it matters all that much. By now, he’s faced down hundreds of nightmares in this realm. The festivals, his presidency, his first death, Wilbur’s death, Doomsday, the Disc Confrontation: they’re all old news, used too often by an angry Dream taking out his rage on the only scapegoat available to do much more than make his scars ache. He prefers that to them tearing open, at least. “Leave the rest of them alone, too. All of the other members of the server.”

“That,” says Dream, “is a much higher price than Ranboo alone.” 

“Is it?” asks Tubbo, and meets the mask’s stare with his own, a challenge accepted. “You don’t contact the rest of them anyway. Hell, I don’t know why you’re even still meeting with me.” 

“Our chess games are interesting,” Dream shrugs, the picture of innocence. Tubbo isn’t fooled. 

“Right, because you care about chess,” he says, thinks about it for what could be a second or an hour, and then laughs bitterly. “Oh, I see. You just like tormenting me because you know hurting me will hurt Tommy. It’s clever, I’ll give you that: he doesn’t need to know what’s happening, just has to notice how distracted and out of it I am after our nights here to start worrying that I’m sick or that I hate him or something. Crude, cruel, but clever. ” 

“Doesn’t it burn,” whispers Dream coldly, leaning forwards, “knowing that it’s always, always about him? It’s never been your story, Tubbo, and it never will be.” 

“What do you want?” asks Tubbo. “For your end of the deal, what do you want?”

“Hm,” he muses, leaning back again and finally setting down his queen in a new space on the board, completing his play. “Make your move, Tubbo, and I’ll tell you next time. How about that?”

In response, Tubbo takes the queen with his own. It’s a foolish move, playing into a trap that eventually loses him the game, but he doesn’t care. He refuses to watch Ranboo dangle under Dream’s control ever again.

It is a week until he finds himself sitting opposite Dream once more, a week of plotting and planning and worse-case scenarios, a week of distracting himself with his family. Ranboo still doesn’t know that his husband knows about the whole enderwalk thing, and so Tubbo treads carefully around the subject. As far as he can tell, though, both his husband and son are happy, content, and free of dreams—or, well, Dream. Tommy, who visits for dinner three nights in a row and spends nearly every day with them, seems to be doing well too. For the time being, it looks like Dream is finally leaving them alone. 

(Well, apart from his indirect responsibility for the actions of Wilbur Soot, newly revived dead man, who’s been trying to rope Tommy into his schemes again. But that, thinks Tubbo, is a different matter altogether.)

He falls asleep sprawled across the couch during movie night, with Michael curled up on his lap, Ranboo’s shoulder as a makeshift pillow, and Tommy leaning against his legs. He wakes up still in his pajamas, sitting before rows of shining pieces and, as always, Dream’s nightmarish smile. 

Tubbo has been doing this for months, and he’s well-versed in the rules of this place by now: he concentrates, and he’s in his worn, familiar button down and jeans. No matter that he can still feel the fabric of his pajamas against his skin in the back of his mind—perception is all that really matters in this pocket world of Dream’s. 

“You’ve decided,” he says, and it is not a question. 

“I have,” Dream nods, opening the game with a pawn to e4. Tubbo mirrors him, opening to e5. Dream moves his knight to threaten the black pawn; Tubbo moves his to protect it. 

“The Ruy-Lopez,” Tubbo realizes as Dream picks up his bishop. “Classic.” 

It is only after Tubbo makes his own move that Dream begins to speak. “The problem with this whole deal,” he muses as he takes Tubbo’s knight, “is that I can’t quite see what you have to offer me.” 

“Rude,” he says dryly, taking Dream’s bishop in retaliation. 

“If I left everyone else on the server be, you'd be the only person I’d be having these little meetings with. Aren’t you worried I’d get bored? Aren’t you worried about yourself?” Dream watches him closely, and then, before Tubbo can respond, shakes his head. “No, you aren’t. You picked up on that hero complex of Wilbur and Tommy’s, didn’t you? And just when I thought you couldn’t get any more stupid!” 

Tubbo doesn’t dignify that with a response. 

“Fine,” says Dream after a beat, “I know what you can do for me.” 

“What?” Tubbo asks, and braces himself, turns his face to steel. He won’t let Dream see him afraid. He won’t.

“Keep Quackity busy.”

There is a beat of stunned silence, and then he says “What?” again, suspicious and surprised, and then a third time: “What? Why?” 

“You know why,” Dream snarls, and, oh. Yes, he does. 

Now, Tubbo isn’t stupid enough to trust Dream, no matter what he might think. Tubbo isn’t stupid enough to trust anyone, save for Michael and Tommy and Ranboo. But he knows what it’s like to be hurting, and, well, despite his initial glee at the thought of Dream getting what felt like his comeuppance, despite the nights and nights of reliving his worst horrors at his hands, despite everything, Tubbo once vowed to himself, after hugging his best friend for the first time since his exile, that he would not be like Schlatt. 

Schlatt would let this keep happening, would let Dream keep being tortured. 

Tommy, thinks Tubbo, who knows Tommy Careful Danger Kraken Innit better than anyone else, would not. Because even Tommy, who wants Dream dead because he’s desperately scared of what might happen if he’s left alive, would want to make it quick and painless: nothing more than a clean slice with an axe, a death far more merciful than one by execution or duel or final control room.

A death more merciful than Quackity has made his life. 

“Okay,” says Tubbo to his worst enemy, his brother’s killer and country’s destroyer and husband’s puppeteer. “Leave everyone else alone, and I’ll do my best to keep Quackity away from you. Deal?”

“And what if I want more from this little bargain?” Dream asks, calculating and cold. “What would you do then?”

“You don’t have a choice,” says Tubbo, unfazed. He knows a bluff when he sees one. “You can’t risk me changing my mind.” 

It’s true, and they both know it. They’re very different, the two of them, but if there’s one thing they have both learned by now, it is the power of fear. So Dream doesn’t argue again, just holds out his hand.

The handshake is quick, fast, aggressive. Tubbo’s hands are calloused and scarred and lightning fast; Dream’s grip is tight and cruel and painful, of the sort that anyone would be desperate to escape. It’s barely a handshake, really.

Still, it’s enough.

The world starts to rumble around them, reality flickering like a broken street lamp. Tubbo’s ability to see and know and understand flickers, too, like he’s blinking rapidly and unpredictably, like his eyelids are possessed. It feels like falling, like drowning, like dying. 

When it all returns to normal, their hands still clasped over a half-played game, Tubbo gets the unnerving sense that the chessboard and its void look a bit more real, like their agreement has allowed the place, still dreamlike in nature for all its vividness, to finally solidify. 

That’s not good, he thinks first, and then, I think I’ve messed up. 

“Well,” Dream says, for once looking as shocked as Tubbo feels, “looks like we’re not going back on that deal.” 

“What just happened?” asks Tubbo, though he thinks he might know already. 

“I’m afraid this place appears to have taken a vested interest in ensuring that we’re both honest.” Dream turns to him, unblinking, and it is only then that Tubbo realizes his mask is gone, his wide eyes betraying his cool tone. No wonder he wears a mask, if he’s got that bad of a poker face, thinks a maskless spy and president and father. “Well. I suppose you’d best follow through with keeping Quackity off my back. Who knows how it’ll end for you if you don’t?” 

“Same goes for you,” Tubbo scowls, releasing Dream’s hand and stuffing both of his into his pockets, hoping to quell the shaking. He’s back in his pajamas, but Dream’s back in his prison uniform too, so at least they’re on equal footing. “Leave everyone else alone, Dream.”

“Watch it there, Mr. President,” Dream says, and beneath his pleasant tone is a much colder thing, lurking in the dark, waiting to strike. “This deal will trap you with me just as much as it’ll free your family. Are you prepared for what that means?” 

“Not particularly,” Tubbo shrugs, and his scars burn in anticipation, “but it doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t it?” asks Dream, and there is something in his eyes that makes Tubbo think that he’s asking less about Tubbo and more about himself. 

Tubbo’s sympathy for Dream is meager on a good day; considering they’re talking about him essentially being tortured, he’s just about reached his limit. “Hey,” he says, speaking before he can think, “remember those attachments you mocked the rest of us for? How you had that whole speech for me and Tommy about how you could control people through them?” 

“Of course,” Dream scoffs. 

“You were wrong,” he says. “Because my attachments just made me stronger, strong enough to go through with this, even. And as for you, well, if you hadn’t abandoned your friends for power, you wouldn’t need to ask a pawn to save you.” 

Tubbo only knows the barest details of what went down between Sapnap, George and Dream. Still, he knows he’s hit his mark when Dream’s face goes red with rage, eyes narrowed like slits. Holy shit, he laughs internally, his last thought as yellow concrete flickers into existence around him, the eyes are the windows to the soul. How did I ever think he was a good liar?

He finishes the game with fireworks ringing in his ears. But he’s used to that by now, has built up a numb sort of tolerance thanks to the many times Quackity has managed to anger Dream enough for him to take it out on Tubbo. Besides, though it may feel like he’s burning alive, he knows he can’t leave without an answer to his similarly burning questions. If this realm looks more real with the power of their deal, if something’s changed but Dream and his powers seem the same, then…

Has something about him been altered, instead?

“Checkmate!” Dream says, and waves goodbye to him cheerily, mockingly. But as Tubbo feels himself being pulled away, back to the waking world, he does his best to hold on. He’s swept into the void, hidden from Dream’s gaze, in the space between realms, and there he fights to stay—like how he’d fought to stay awake in the days after the Disc Confrontation or the first night Dream had condemned him to the fireworks, terrified of ending up at the board again. 

Then, he’d always failed eventually. Now, he’s fighting the opposite battle, in more ways than one: he’s willing to fail, now, expects it, even. All he hopes to earn with his struggle is a few moments to strategize for wider war. 

He senses Dream go, knows when he has finally returned to the land of the living, in the same way that he knows how to bring himself back to the board. “Whoa,” he breathes, unable to resist the urge to grin as he looks around, touching the chair, the table, the pieces, trying to make sure they’re real. “Whoa.”  

With Dream gone, he feels… He feels like more, somehow. ‘Powerful’ isn’t quite right, nor is ‘in control’: he simply feels more like a person than a puppet, more like a player than a pawn, more like Tubbo Underscore-Beloved than scapegoat or sidekick or sacrifice. 

“Um,” he says, and stares out at the strange white world around him. “Can- Can you understand me?”

He feels rather stupid, addressing the air, but as his surroundings turn green, just for a moment, that feeling begins to fade away. 

“Was that a yes?” he asks, and again, a flash of that same green. The same color as my shirt, he thinks. The same color as Ranboo’s eye. 

He rubs his hands together in nervous glee, a habit picked up from Wilbur. He hasn’t got much time, he can sense it—he’s clearly not meant to be here without Dream—but it might still be enough to give him the leg up he needs. 

“Can I see the terms of our contract?” he asks, experimenting, and moments later a slip of paper floats down from above him to land on the table, knocking over Dream’s king (for Tubbo had lost the game that night, and his is already on its side). 

He picks it up. Helpfully, the font is dyslexia-friendly, and the description of the deal is short, only one sentence long: The Black Pawn will do as much as is within his power to keep The Unchanged Knight away from The Opening Player, and in exchange The Opening Player will not attempt to bring any other pieces or players to the board. 

There are no signatures, only two symbols on the bottom, a black pawn and a white crown. He brushes the pawn with his finger, and recoils: it feels like him, like a piece of his soul torn out and painted onto paper. He does not touch the white crown, which he knows must be meant to symbolize Dream; he has enough nightmares as it is. 

He rereads it twice more, frowning down at the paper. Though the actual terms of the agreement seem to be about as he expected, the naming bothers him. For one, he can’t help but resent the whole ‘Black Pawn’ business. Sure, he’d expected it, but… Well, what rule makes Dream a player and him a piece? 

And then there’s ‘The Unchanged Knight’. It must be referring to Quackity, but ‘Unchanged’ compared to who? Wilbur? What does that make him—The New Knight? The Changed Knight? Or something else entirely? 

“Unchanged Knight, Changed Knight,” he mutters out loud, and then he blinks, staring out at the empty white world around him. “Wait, wait, wait- ”

If a void could smile mischievously, he thinks this one might. He blinks, and finds an afterimage burning against his eyelids: two shapes that look like letters, look like a smile, look like ‘XD’.

“Oh,” he says, and a triumphant smile begins to pull at the edges of his lips. “Well, then, thank you. Maybe you’re not so bad after all.”

He’s not so sure about that assessment when he wakes up (physically and mentally exhausted and in unbelievable agony), or when he just barely manages to pass off the pain from his re-inflicted scars as being from sleeping on the couch all night, or when his traitorous mind reminds him that this sort of rude awakening will likely happen even more often from now on. 

But, he thinks, watching Tommy and Michael chase each other around the kitchen while Ranboo keeps them away from both the knives on the counter and the pancakes cooking on the hot stove, at least they’re safe. 

His family is safe. That’s all that really matters.

Chapter Text

Elliot (for the white king)

games are always allegorical or apocalyptic particularly those

that demand the violence of conquering straightforward staircase

or the more subtle smothering mate of Spanish

Black Knight each in chase of lumbering crown

across unreal cities composed of ruinous shorelines of

of decomposing highrises of crumbling empires beware of

women who slide back to seventh rank or

diagonally at ease crippling good night good night

—

Tommy has always been a singularity. 

That much is obvious to anyone who has ever met him; of course it is, when even something as simple as his breathing is unique compared to all those that came before it. His very presence seems to herald change, like how a storm rising on summer winds is forewarned by sunny, still days, a breezeless and hot apology for the fury to come—days, like Tommy, that are different from all the rest, a new kind of weather. When else can you get air simultaneously humid and dry, or sunshine in whites and greys, or a sea both warm and raging? 

Such is Tommy Careful Danger Kraken Innit, always walking before the storm: the canary in the coal mine, the ticking before the bomb goes off, the boy with a laugh and a plan and an outstretched hand promising some new adventure.

You might imagine it to be hard, loving Tommy while always looking over his shoulder to try and catch a glimpse of whatever danger might be treading behind him, but Tubbo never even had to try. There are dozens of reasons why, hundreds, thousands, but he had only ever really needed one: Tommy, even when they were children, was always just as willing to follow Tubbo as Tubbo was to follow him. Tommy was Jason and Theseus and Heracles, adventurers and heroes and gods, and Tubbo was only ever a sidekick; he'd always known that, had accepted it young and early. But he was a sidekick loved so much that Tommy would abandon the path of the hurricane to do whatever Tubbo wanted, be it tending to bees or blowing up buildings or exploring all that the world could offer.

That was, incidentally, how Tommy ended up learning to play chess. 

Once upon a time, Tubbo was taught to play by two rooks and a knight, and so theirs were his guiding voices in every match after. Later, after he surpassed all three of them, he would be their teacher instead, the student becoming the master. 

But Tubbo’s teachers were not his first pupils. That honor, like so many others, fell to Tommy Innit. 

When Tommy first asks, on a cold, crisp night at the beginning of autumn, they are meant to be asleep. “Tubbo,” he whispers, “I wanna learn how to play.” 

“Hngh?” Tubbo mumbles. It takes him a beat to realize he’s been spoken to, and longer to understand what was said, since he’s sleep-addled and deciphering mumbles from his similarly sleepy brother. A minute or so later, he replies, “Play what?”

What Tommy says in response is not recognizable as words in any language Tubbo knows of. When he hears the faint sound of snoring from the bed on the other side of the room a few minutes later, he concludes it had only been Tommy talking in his sleep, a rare occurrence but not an unprecedented one. That decided, he follows his brother’s lead and falls back asleep. 

This theory is proven incorrect the next morning at breakfast, when Tommy bounds down the stairs and plops down the wooden box containing Techno’s chess set in front of Tubbo’s plate. 

“Wh’s ‘at f’r?” he asks around a mouthful of eggs, gesturing at the box with his fork. If anyone else were around, Tubbo would likely be scolded for his poor manners, but Wilbur and Phil are visiting one of the nearby towns to get Wilbur a new guitar for his birthday, and Techno’s been gone for weeks now, helping lead a revolution in an empire far away. As it is, Tommy just stares at him blankly until Tubbo chews, swallows, and repeats, “What’s that for?”

“Teaching me chess,” he says, like it’s obvious. “I asked you last night, remember?”

“What?” Tubbo asks. It takes him a moment to remember. “Wait, when you were sleeptalking?”

“Sleeptalking!” Tommy cries, indignant. “I never talk in my sleep, Tubbo!”

“Yes you do,” Tubbo tells him. “And even if you weren’t, you never mentioned chess.”

“Yes I did!”

“No you didn’t!”

“Well, I’m mentioning it now,” Tommy insists, crossing his arms over his chest and nodding at the box between them. “Teach me.”

Tubbo narrows his eyes, cocking his head. “Since when have you cared about learning chess, anyway?” he asks, taking another bite of his breakfast. 

“Why does that matter?” Tommy huffs. He’s acting confident and proud, but he won’t meet Tubbo’s eyes. “Will you teach me or not?”

He pretends to think about it. “Sure,” he says finally, imitating Techno’s casual coolness when he really just wants to jump for joy and dance around the room and flap his hands in excitement. Tommy wants Tubbo to teach him chess! Not Phil, not Techno or Wilbur, Tubbo!

Tommy doesn’t seem fooled, judging by how he rolls his eyes and repeats, “‘Sure!’” to himself. “I’ll let you finish eating,” he says then, graciously, like he’s doing Tubbo a favor. “I’ll even eat with you.” 

Conversation ended, Tubbo gestures to the second plate of eggs already waiting for Tommy on the counter and goes back to focusing on what’s really important: his breakfast.

After they’re done with their meal (and the consecutive arguing about who has to do the dishes) they meet in the garden, just like Tubbo and Techno and Wilbur had all those months ago. Instead of sitting under the shade of the tree, though, Tommy plops down on the swinging bench of Phil’s, motioning for Tubbo to join him as he sets the box down between them. 

“You want to play here?” Tubbo asks dubiously. “What if the pieces fall over?” 

“We’re big men,” scoffs Tommy. “We can keep a swing still, Tubbs. And I don’t wanna sit in the grass, it’s all wet and shit!” 

The ground is dewy, and soft and muddy thanks to a storm the night before to boot, so Tubbo doesn’t argue further, just begins to set up the board. The swing rocks slightly, but never so violently as to disrupt the pieces, so that is how Tubbo teaches Tommy chess: sitting beside him instead of across from him. It is how they will end up playing all their games, though neither of them know that yet, always side-by-side, on couches and floors and even on another bench, one that does not swing but will still seem to float sometimes, carried by the melodies of discs. 

Predictably, Tommy takes to the queen right away. He names his Lizzie, and will do anything to protect it, even at the cost of the game. 

“Dude, you need to protect the king, not your queen,” Tubbo says after Tommy’s lost his third game. “You’ll never win like this.”

“But he’s my competition!” Tommy whines playfully, glaring at his king and clutching his queen to his chest. “How am I supposed to win Lizzie’s love with that guy in the way?” 

Tubbo has spent the last three rounds trying to come up with an answer to that question, and so he does not hesitate before he answers: “You are the king, dummy.” 

“What?” Tommy asks, suspicious. Rightfully so, since Tubbo’s lying his ass off, but he was always a good liar, even before he was a soldier or spy. 

(Later, he will think about Phil and Techno and Wilbur, and he will wonder if he’d learned lying from them, too.) 

“The player,” Tubbo tells him, “is the king.”

“But he’s so weak!”

“Yeah, because you have to be strategizing! The king’s the brains of the operation, Tommy, he’s the mastermind. He’s all about strategy, just like the player should be!”

“...Is that why being in checkmate means you lose?” asks Tommy thoughtfully. “Because it means you’re dead?”

Honestly, Tubbo hadn’t even thought of that, but he’s not going to pass up the opportunity. “Yes,” he agrees. “So you can’t let the king die, can you?”

“You’re right,” sighs Tommy solemnly, and holds the queen up to his face. “I’m sorry, Lizzie, but a healthy relationship means that I must protect myself, too. Even if it means losing you. But there’s necromancy in this game, so I’ll get you back if you die, promise.”

“Promotion,” corrects Tubbo. “Not necromancy.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, waving him off. “I promise you, Lizzie, I’ll win this. For us both.” He kisses the little piece on the head, very solemnly, before setting it down again in its spot. 

“You won’t,” Tubbo says, “you lose every game.” 

“You take that back!” shrieks Tommy, holding his pointer fingers against either side of his queen’s round head. 

“What are you doing?”

“Covering her ears so she can’t hear this slander.”

“It’s not slander if it’s true.”

“Oh, I’m gonna beat you so bad-”

He doesn’t beat him, but he does take far longer to lose, which Tubbo considers an accomplishment momentous enough to warrant raiding Phil’s ‘secret’ cookie stash in celebration. 

Tommy never quite masters chess, and he never falls in love with the game like Tubbo did. Still, though, he never stops playing it with him, setting up the board between them on their bench or in a corner of Pogtopia or on the couch in Snowchester and asking what everyone else eventually stopped bothering to: “Do you want to play white today?” 

“No thanks,” says Tubbo every time, a practiced routine. Sometimes, he adds, “You’ll need all the advantage you can get,” and Tommy never fails to loudly gasp at that, looking so offended that Tubbo can’t help but laugh. 

“Why do you like playing black so much, anyway?” asks Tommy once as the two of them sit on their bench and listen to Mellohi play, the sun setting in the distance. They are a very different Tommy and Tubbo from those of their childhood, or even from those who first entered the server a little more than a year ago—they are scarred and they are scared and they are each others’ only brothers left—but they are, miraculously, children still. Nothing has truly managed to change that, not loss or leaving, not exiles or executions, not dreaming or dying, and nothing but time ever will. 

“I dunno,” Tubbo shrugs, the two of them both staring up at the darkening sky. They play with pebbles these days, now that pieces have become a rare commodity, and Tubbo rolls his king between his palms. “I’m used to it, I guess.”

“But isn’t it harder?” presses Tommy. “Don’t you ever want to be white, to have the advantage?”

“I’m used to it,” he repeats, glancing over at Tommy, who’s still watching the dark clouds brewing above, ones promising a storm. “I’m a pawn, I’m always playing at a disadvantage. It’s just more obvious in chess.” 

“You’re not a pawn,” scowls Tommy, finally looking away from the sky to meet Tubbo’s eyes with his own furious ones. “You’re not. Dream was wrong.”

“I am, though.”

“You’re not!” Tommy insists, and sounds so sure of himself that it seems impossible to argue. “You’re a king, like me.” 

“You’re a queen, Tommy,” Tubbo tells him. It’s not the first time he’s said it—he’d admitted having lied about the king-player symbolism many years before—but it is the first time Tommy shakes his head in response.

“Nah,” he says, “you were right when we were kids, Tubbs. I’m a king. I’m not a powerful piece, I’m not even a pawn; I’m a kid, a kid that a bunch of people care way too much about the actions of, so much so that they think I’m all-powerful and all-important, and then they make the whole game about me. And that’s what you are too, Tubbo—not a piece, really, just a kid. That’s what we are, and that’s what kings are.” 

A lot of people don’t actually listen to Tommy, because they underestimate him. They might hate him or love him, might revere him or abhor him, might think of him as a child or think of him as a menace: whatever the case, they all seem to forget how wise Tommy Innit can actually be. 

Tubbo does not forget (that’s his husband’s job), but he doesn’t always believe Tommy either, though he always listens. “You’re right,” he says, and smiles, and does not clarify that Tommy is right about being a king but wrong about Tubbo, who has never been as important as Tommy thinks he is. Because Tommy thinks the world of Tubbo, and always has, enough so that the hero’ll play a game he doesn’t like with the sidekick and will follow him on adventures instead of the other way around. 

Tommy, wise as he is, has only ever wanted to be a part of a family, has only ever wanted to be loved, has only ever wanted to be brothers. He glorified Wilbur and Techno and Phil, too, wanted to be just like them. 

Tubbo hasn’t forgotten that, either. 

So Tubbo lies about players and kings to Tommy once more, pretending to agree with him, because Tubbo refuses to be like any of the men they’d once called family, and he refuses to let Tommy feel as alone as they once did. So when Tommy smiles at him in a way that’s equal parts quiet gratitude and earnest belief and offers Tubbo his hand, Tubbo takes it. 

That’s another reason that Tubbo can’t help but love Tommy, perhaps the reason: that he’ll offer his hand to pull Tubbo along beside him in the perfect beginning to some glorious adventure, and then offer it again just to watch the sunset and listen to a music disc play, the perfect ending instead.

It’s all a lie, of course, because Tommy doesn’t really do endings, no matter how perfect they might be. But Tubbo has never found it difficult to love Tommy, even after everything, so he holds Tommy’s hand, and looks back up at the dark clouds gathering over the sunset, and he waits for it to rain. 

—

Deep Blue (for the black king)

the true terror rose murky from ocean beds

sublime and primordial the ghost of digital echoes

that collided each converging and informing the other

until a “human move” perhaps conspiratorial perhaps bug

but always the distinct move of a species

unto itself a genus rooted in binary evolution

half brute half artist not a mimic but

first of a bloodline, a series of kings

—

“You killed him.”

“Funny,” says Dream, thrice-murderer of Tommy Careful Danger Kraken Innit, brother of one and son of none and Tubbo’s best friend in the whole world, “I feel like we’ve been here before.”

“You killed him.” 

“Oh, of course,” he nods to himself, as if Tubbo hadn’t spoken. “After the whole Logstedshire debacle! But we set that right, didn’t we?”

“You killed him,” Tubbo repeats, and then: “Bring him back.” 

“Oh,” Dream muses, “I don’t quite remember you saying that, though."

The first time Tubbo had found out about the death of Tommy, it had been a false revelation, but one that had felt heart-wrenchingly real at the time, enough so to prompt him to take action the next time he woke in the void. “You killed him,” he’d said then, too. 

“No,” Dream had said as he stared down a boy drowning threefold, in his suit, in his country, in his grief. “No,” he’d continued, sounding both chastising and sympathetic, “you killed him, Mr. President.” 

Back then, Tubbo had been fraying at every seam, falling apart and desperately alone. When Dream had left his chair and opened his arms, it had seemed like a precious gift, even coming from his worst enemy: Tubbo had surged into the hug. They’d stood there for a long time, and though Tubbo did not cry, he shook as Dream rubbed comforting circles into his back, whispering in his ear, “You, Tubbo, you,” over and over. When they separated, taking their spots on either side of the board, neither of them spoke again until Dream ended the game by saying, “A dead position. Draw.” Still, repeated out loud or not, those five words had echoed in Tubbo’s mind all throughout the game and, for a long while after, in the waking world too:

You killed him, Mr. President.

But the Tubbo of today is not the Tubbo of yesterday. President Tubbo Underscore without Tommy was a tattered flag, one that nobody else was willing to mend but could not stitch himself back together alone. Tubbo Underscore-Beloved without Tommy, however, is a missile with a hair trigger, one targeting all those who had aided in the murder of his best friend. If the Tubbo of yesterday was torn apart, then the Tubbo of today is the one holding the cloth, ready to rend asunder. 

“Bring him back,” Tubbo says flatly. Tommy was his sun, his warm days before the rain, and without the sun Tubbo’s world has frozen over in glittering, deadly ice. So he does not scream or rage or cry, just speaks, even and cold, and tries to swallow away the frost clogging his throat. “I know you will, Dream. You’d never let Tommy die, wouldn’t when we came for the discs and wouldn’t now, so just bring him back.”

“You’re right,” Dream agrees, “I will revive Tommy. But why would I do it now, when I’m still imprisoned? What’s the point of that?”

He says it pleasantly, almost kindly, like a teacher prompting a struggling student. Later, Tubbo will look back at this Dream, clever and confident and cruel, and wonder what Quackity could have done to reduce him to a player that would make deals with pawns. 

That Tubbo of tomorrow, the one who already has his Tommy back and has just made a deal for the entire server’s safety, might have had a clever response. That Tubbo of tomorrow knows Dream well, can read him and can think like him, too, and perhaps he could have figured out a way to get Tommy back then and there, a promotion in one. 

But the Tubbo of today, for all his progress from Tubbo of yesterday, is not quite in tomorrow yet. He is slowly being consumed by cold, numbing grief, the pain of being stabbed in the heart by an icicle, and he isn’t thinking, so he only repeats, “Bring him back.”

Dream just clicks his tongue. “Oh,” he says, “that’s not how we ask for anything, now is it?” 

Tubbo is not the him that he will be, but he is no fool, either. He does not beg, but he does not rage; he simply retreats into his frost-coated mind, and thinks for a long while. He might think Dream kind for letting him have the time to ponder things over, but he knows that kind is one thing that Dream has never been: this is the product of his boredom. He wants Tubbo to figure this puzzle out, or he wants to see his reaction when he fails. The latter seems more likely. 

Eventually, Tubbo finally asks, “What else are you using the revive book for, then?” Dream does not respond, but he hadn’t expected him to, so that’s fine. “What can you use it for, if you’re not bringing back anyone? What kind of power does it give you?” 

The mask’s eyes are round, blank, unfeeling, like pebbles in the face of a snowman.

“You haven’t tried to kill me here,” he says for the first time, finally addressing the anvil hanging over his head that he’s been trying to ignore for months now. “You want me dead. Why aren’t I?” 

“Why, indeed?” Dream wonders, something hard and cold (the pebbles wrapped in snowballs now, projectiles meant to sting) in his voice. “Why not just kill you now, and be done with it, if only to shut you up?” 

“Because you can’t,” Tubbo replies automatically, and then blinks, turning his own words over in his head. He hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t even known to: the idea is new to his conscious mind, though from his own sudden surety, he suspects it’s been brewing in his subconscious for a while now. “You can’t.”

He stares down at the table, the table that holds a chessboard that remains eternally cold and chessmen that sometimes have his friends’ faces, and the pieces begin clicking into place. Months ago, at the very beginning of it all, he’d assumed that these visits, these ‘dreams’, were simply some unknown, ironic power of his opponent’s. It made a twisted sort of sense that Dream of all people could visit Tubbo’s mind as he slept, could walk in dreams and control them. The prevalent themes of chess and loss and Tubbo’s many families, the way Dream seemed to read his mind sometimes, the uncanny nature of it all—they had even felt like dreams, if their impact on the real world was ignored.

But that’s the crux of it all, because dreams are the furthest from the real world it gets. Dreams don’t mean waking up more exhausted than when you fell asleep. Dreams don’t mean aftereffects carried over into the morning, like the smell of brownies coating your palms even though you have not eaten them in months. Dreams don’t mean meeting your worst enemy—the real deal, not just some imagined night terror—every night to play a round of chess, or slowly realizing that you’ve truly been playing in some sort of basque tournament the whole time, one series of smaller rounds inside the void of your ‘dreams’ and one much larger game on the outside, a game featuring you and your friends and family as unwitting pieces manipulated by an ever-smiling puppeteer. 

And if Tubbo isn’t dreaming when he meets with Dream, then he probably isn’t truly asleep, either . 

He’s pretty sure his physical body stays where he left it. He always wakes up where he’d fallen asleep, and between all the times Quackity had chided him for sleeping at his desk during the chessboard nights of his presidency, the frequent sleepovers at Tommy’s house after Doomsday, and his new habit of falling asleep in Michael’s room, Tubbo reckons he has plenty of eyewitness accounts to support that theory. 

But that just makes things more confusing. How can his body stay behind as his mind journeys far away? How does Dream trap him in the void, no matter how much Tubbo fights? And how, how, can he still feel the aftereffects of those agonizing memories,

(-a less excruciating agony, perhaps, for he has not yet been subject to the fireworks again, so the pain is lesser and the possibilities are fewer and all he knows is-) 

the smell of brownies, or a tie tightening around his neck like a noose,

(-a less bloody torture, perhaps, but just as painful as an execution for every one of the Tubbo Underscores, scattered across time as they are, for a dream is harder to forget when it lingers-)

in the real world? 

“Let me tell you a secret about sleep,” Eret had said once, a long, long time ago, back when all of the members of L’Manberg still had three lives, back when she wasn’t a traitor or a king, back when the Camarvan and the growing country around it held not just drugs or declarations or deception but a family made up of its five founders. 

(Back when, thinks a Tubbo older, wiser, and more scarred, it was still difficult to think of Dream as the enemy—back when all their battles, no matter how violent, were dusted with the bittersweet memories of him as a friend. 

Those memories are only sour now, for both the Tubbo at the board and the Tubbo remembering this moment are far removed from them. Still, they remain, more painful and more haunting and more acidic with every conversation with Dream, until their pH has fallen to 0 and seems to still be dropping, until drowning in the Lethe seems like it might be a kindness.)

Back when Eret would sit with the children of L’Manberg on the Camarvan’s roof and tell them stories. 

For Eret was their storyteller, not Wilbur. Wilbur was their songbird, their musician, their leader, and he wove the symphony of L’Manberg into all of their hearts, but he left the fiction—fairy tales and myths and legends—to Eret, just as he had once left it to Techno or Phil. Often, Wilbur would use the time in which they were distracted to prepare dinner or brew potions or keep watch, but he did occasionally join them, holding his son in his lap and pulling his younger brothers (for they were brothers, then, memories that have remained even as all the others have begun to rot) close as they stared up at the stars, listening as Eret’s voice built kingdoms and castles in the sky. 

“Let me tell you a secret about sleep,” Eret had said; whispered, really, since they were the only ones awake, Wilbur and Tommy and Fundy curled into a snoring pile of limbs beside them. (Tubbo might have been more worried about the three of them sleeping on a roof if he had not both seen them do it before, and also watched each of them tumble off of the hotdog van more times than he could count and bruise nothing but their pride.) “It is perfectly natural to fear dreaming.”

“Really?” he’d asked from his spot leaning against Wilbur, Tommy’s legs thrown over his lap and Fundy’s head weighing down his arm. “Why?” 

He did not question how she knew what was worrying him. He was still young and naive enough to believe that Wilbur and Eret could have the answers to all the universe’s questions, and the reasons behind his self-induced insomnia seemed infinitesimal besides everything else grownups might understand. 

“Because,” they replied, “sleep is the closest we can get to death without actually risking our lives.” They too were trapped in the web of L’Manbergian limbs, but they still managed to navigate closer, reaching out to hold Tubbo’s hand and let his head drop against their shoulder. Their voice was a comforting rumble, harmonizing with the wind and the river and the breaths of their sleeping friends, a crackling fire against Tubbo’s cold, irrational fear. “But you have nothing to be afraid of, Tubbo. Death cannot reach you in your dreams, no matter how hard she tries, for she is trapped in the real world, and you will not die out here for a long time yet.” 

Eret had been wrong about that last bit, for Death would reach Tubbo two weeks later, his first life lost with Sapnap’s sword through his gut and “It was never meant to be,” ringing in his ears. But the rest of it, the connected nature of death and sleep…

“This,” says Tubbo in the present, eyes wide, staring at the void around him with new understanding. “This is what else you use the revive book for. We’re in the land of the dead, right? Some sort of purgatory?”

“Limbo,” Dream corrects smoothly. “My limbo.” 

“...Am I dead?” he asks quietly, a childish question, and Dream reacts to it as such, throwing his head back and laughing. 

“Don’t be an idiot,” he snorts. “You’re not dead. Neither of us are: the revive book makes me powerful, so powerful, enough so that I can not only visit this place while I’m still living but bring you along with me, too! That’s the power of gods, Tubbo, and now it’s mine.” 

“Wait,” Tubbo says, “is- is Tommy here?” He doesn’t wait for a response, just scrambles out of his chair and starts shouting: “Tommy! Wilbur! Tommy!”

“What did I just say?” Dream drawls, condescension practically dripping from his tone. He waves his hand, and Tubbo's back in his seat, an unwilling, captive audience. “Don’t be an idiot, Tubbo—it’s not that hard, even for you. If I let them come here, Wilbur or Schlatt or Mexican Dream would have been disrupting our every game.” Normally, he would stop there, withholding information to dangle over Tubbo’s head like the fruit of Tantalus’ tree, but it’s obvious that Dream’s wanted to brag about this particular stroke of genius for ages now, and can’t resist the opportunity to reveal the sheer depth of his power. “Limbo is supposed to be both hell and heaven, the cruelest of punishments and the kindest of gifts, built on your memories and your life to make your perfectly paradoxical eternity. Take Schlatt: his limbo is a gym. What a taunt from the universe, a gym for a man who thought himself so invincible that he drank himself into a heart attack! Yet it’s a gift, too: a way to finally make himself, at least physically, as strong as he once thought he was.” He spreads his arms wide, letting Tubbo take in the void- the limbo- Dream’s limbo. “When you’re dead, you can’t control your limbo, can’t change it or use it, can only sometimes leave it to visit the other damned. But I’m still alive, so this place isn’t finished. It’s still being formed, and since it’s being formed based on my life...” 

“You can control it,” says Tubbo, catching on, “using the revive book.” 

“Yes,” sighs Dream, triumphant. “Isn’t it glorious?” 

“It’s brilliant,” he agrees, and means it, though perhaps not in the way Dream thinks. Because Dream thinks Tubbo’s awed and terrified, thinks he’s distracted by his own fear, thinks his loss is a given. And perhaps it was for that game (who wouldn’t be distracted enough to lose after that kind of revelation?), but as for the rest, well-

Tommy comes back to life a few days later, his hair streaked with white and his eyes wide and scared and furious. He waits a week before he tells Tubbo a truth he already knows: that they’ll never be safe as long as Dream is still alive, imprisoned or not. 

“I’m afraid,” admits Tommy, letting himself be vulnerable in a way he rarely is around anyone else, a makeshift chess board squeezed into the space between them. “But we have to do this, Tubbs, or he’ll- he’ll- he’ll tear off our wings, I think. Like butterflies, or moths.” 

(‘Or Wilbur’ isn’t said, but it doesn’t need to be. Because in the end, Dream had grounded Wilbur, weighed him down with grief and fury and TNT, and Niki still wears their once-brother’s torn off wings in the form of a ragged brown coat. It is draped around her in the photograph that hangs on the wall only a few feet away from where Tubbo and Tommy are sitting side-by-side on the floor of a house in a hill, conspiring against a god and playing chess with pebbles as pieces, and it serves as a grim reminder to them both.)

“You in?” asks his brother, his king, his partner in every crime.

“Always,” Tubbo says, and smiles, wan and bittersweet. Tommy smiles back, and reaches out his hand, their fingers lacing together over their unfinished game. “Have you got a plan?”

“Not yet. The beginnings of one, though.” 

“Me too,” Tubbo nods, though he knows the scheme forming in his mind is nothing like the one budding in Tommy’s.

“It’s brilliant,” he’d said to Dream, and he’d meant it, but he’d also thought, Yes, it’s brilliant. Clever. Genius, even. Except.

Except you said limbo isn’t meant to be controlled. 

You said it is meant to be a paradox, a duality, heaven and hell in tandem. You said it’s meant to work for you, and it does, but you said it’s meant to work against you, too.

I wonder if it wants to.

That is what truly distracted him for the rest of the game: wondering about the nature of Dream’s limbo. He remembers the smell of brownies clinging to his hands and a total lack of escape, and wonders why he cannot leave until the game ends, wonders what sets the rules, wonders if he can change them. Later, he will begin to be subjected to the cruelest tricks of Dream, will be forced to relive his worst memories, those of pain and misery and death, and Tubbo will start to wonder if he might be able to do that, too: if he can change not just the rules, but the game itself.

Chapter Text

Duchamp (for white pawns)

there is a necessary slowness that creeps into

movement that matters the speed at which efficiency

transforms into product and we are just constructing

repetitions and then must resist the factory urge

and only do something once and never again

a ready-made is a purposely useless object or

a chocolate grinder is a mostly nude diagram

descending slowly in stages separate but unified, whole

—

Tubbo Underscore-Beloved has been a pawn, a president, and a parent. These are all professions for which you must learn to lie, to cheat, to know a good story inside and out.

Tubbo Underscore-Beloved has been through more as a child than many adults experience in a lifetime. He has created and led and destroyed countries, built weapons of mass destruction, found and lost and found and lost and found again more families than he can count. 

Tubbo Underscore-Beloved has become well-acquainted with storytellers. Enemy or ally, friend or foe or family, (sometimes, all at once), he's heard their tales, and he's begun to know their patterns. 

Tubbo Underscore-Beloved knows his stories, and so he knows that this one must end as it started: with a game of chess. 

But an endgame needs pieces and a board, and as of right now, he has neither. Though he’s played with many sets over the years, few have survived in any capacity, and none have been left unscathed, to the point where he hasn’t owned a full, proper set since his presidency. After all, Ranboo and Tubbo play their games on a pixelated program, and Tommy and Tubbo, accustomed to loss, make themselves flimsy paper boards and fill the squares with pieces made from whatever they can find. He’s never needed anything more than that. 

Now, though, that’s changed. A board and thirty-two men to stand on it are just as vital to his plans as codes and keycards or armor and weapons. He has no choice: Tubbo has to find himself a set. 

It’s clear that neither king nor queen can aid him in this quest, not without asking questions he doesn’t think he can answer. Instead, he turns to the bishops. Or, well, he turns to one of them: Niki has already given him eight pieces, and he will not ask her to sacrifice more for him, not ever again, not after everything. 

So Tubbo pays a visit to Jack Manifold. 

“I don’t have any chess stuff personally,” he tells him from the doorway, “but I’ll ask around a bit and see what I can scrounge up, send anyone who might have something your way.” Jack watches him with a frown, his eyes, though they are hidden behind lenses of red and blue, far too knowing for Tubbo’s taste. 

It makes him nervous. 

“Thanks, big man!” Tubbo exclaims, already turning to go. He’s got work today—though since ‘work’ really just means sneaking off to hang out with Ranboo and Tommy and laugh as they watch Quackity and Wilbur squabble, with the occasional mopping of floors or flipping of burgers when things are slow, any word implying labor feels like a lie.

(Despite the questionable validity of his job and the general apathy with which he regards it, Tubbo sports his apron with pride, keeping it cleaned and pressed, caring for the cheap bit of worn fabric with a devotion that confuses even Quackity. The familiar happiness he finds in wearing it is difficult to explain, so he doesn’t bother. Wilbur and Tommy and Fundy all seem to understand though, with or without an explanation. They, too, remember the safety and camaraderie and joy once found in wearing a well-loved uniform.)

“Hey, Tubbo,” he hears from behind him, and he looks back to see Jack still lingering by the door, though he isn’t wearing a coat and is shivering in the icy wind. 

“Yeah?”

“You okay?” asks Jack Manifold, the bishop who, if Tubbo were a king, might be called his right-hand man.

(As it is, Tubbo is a pawn, and so can do nothing more than move aside to let Jack sweep past him, watching him go with the knowledge that he, at least, will never tread on any butterflies. A bishop never leaves their path, you see, and Jack Manifold has only ever moved diagonally.) 

“Yes,” he says stiffly, and then, realizing his mistake, “Yeah! Yeah, of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You look tired,” he says, and though he tries for nonchalance, Jack has never been a good actor; his worry is readily apparent. Then: “Bad dreams?”

Tubbo had spent the night before playing chess in limbo, and he can’t decide whether he wants to laugh or cry at the irony. He settles for the former. “Something like that,” says Tubbo, and though he manages to conjure up a smile, it is devoid of humor. “Really, I’m alright! But I may not stay that way if I’m late, so-”

“Right,” Jack nods, returning the smile, though he’s obviously still concerned. “See you later, then.” 

“Bye, Jack!” Tubbo says, waving goodbye as he sets off for Las Nevadas. 

The whole interaction is quickly pushed to the back of his mind in favor of poking fun at Quackity and Wilbur’s latest petty quarrel with Ranboo and Tommy, and for the most part, he leaves it there. Proper chess sets are scarce on the server, and after a few days have passed, Tubbo concludes Jack hadn’t been able to find any, or at least none that their owners were willing to part with. He knows there’s not much point in asking anyone else if Jack Manifold (who throws himself into the most trivial of tasks with enough dedication and devotion to make acquiring groceries seem like a matter of life and death) had not managed to succeed, so there’s nothing to do but set about gathering materials to make one himself. 

Which is why he does not expect Quackity to barge into the restaurant at the end of his shift a week later and say, “Hey, Tubbo, you got a sec?” as he sets a large cardboard box down on the counter. 

“What’s that?” Tubbo asks, pausing in untying his apron to peer at it with interest. It’s old, clearly, covered in dust and soot and dark stains he’d rather not analyze. “If that’s a new shipment, I’m off work now, so-”

Quackity silently turns the box so Tubbo can read the words scrawled on the side in Quackity’s cramped, jagged handwriting. (His old handwriting, that is. The way he writes now is smoother, loopier, larger; more, thinks Tubbo, like Wilbur’s.) He barely notices as the strings of his apron fall from his fingers, too fixated on the label etched into cardboard with faded ink.

schlatt’s shit, reads the box, flimsy and old and damaged, and Tubbo looks between it and Quackity with wide eyes, inching closer to where he has weapons and armor and potions stashed under the cupboards, just in case. “What,” he asks again, cold and flat, all goodwill lost, “is that?”

“Calm down,” says Quackity, and though he rolls his eyes Tubbo can see how he’s watching him carefully, his eyebrow furrowed in the way that still, after all this time, spells out his concern. It helps, somewhat, knowing that Quackity is worried.

(Then again, he wore the same expression at the festival, so Tubbo can’t help but take it with a grain of salt.)

“Jack Manifold said you were looking for a chess set,” he continues, opening the worn flaps at the top of the box and starting to rummage around inside. 

(A part of Tubbo wonders why the tape at the top of the box has already been sliced through, clearly opened before this. Another points out that, more than just being open, it looks like it has been dug through many times. A third reminds them both of the revive book, and of Dream telling them about Quackity torturing him for it. A fourth tells them all to shut the fuck up.)

“Here we go!” cheers Quackity, jolting him out of his thoughts. “Hey, give me a hand, will you?” 

(Tubbo’s hands shake at the sight of that box, even with the rest of him tense and ready to move. But he is no coward, and he stills his hands with thoughts of nuclear missiles. He reaches into this box thinking of bombs, and if Quackity notices, he doesn’t say anything.)

So Tubbo helps him pull pieces of a board free (waterlogged scraps all that remain of the perfect squares of long ago), and beneath them lie shimmering chessmen of quartz and obsidian. They are less beautiful than they were to the Tubbo of yesterday—when he had two lives left, when they had not lived untouched in a box for months, when they were both a bit more whole and a bit less worn—but they are beautiful still, and as he and Quackity pull them from the box and set them down onto the restaurant’s counters, they do so in a silence charged with memories, near reverent and near repulsed, too. 

“Some of them are missing,” Quackity finally sighs as the two of them look across the counters lined with their bounty. “Shit, sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Tubbo tells him, reaching out to brush his fingers over the heads of the cold stone figures. “Thank y-”

“Well, well, well,” declares Wilbur as the door swings open, strolling inside. “There you are, Quackity! How are you and your- well, being generous, you and your hideous restaurant doing on this fine evening?”

“You run Paradise out of a tiny van! And throw your stale bread in the river!” Quackity snaps back. “That’s littering, you asshole!”

Just like that, all his attention is on Wilbur. Tubbo, used to this by now, just stifles a laugh, and begins untying his apron once more, only tuning back into their conversation once he has it off and folded over his arm. 

“-rich, coming from you,” Wilbur’s retorting as he gestures at the box on the counter. “That thing is filthy! It can’t be up to code to have it in here, whatever it is.” He frowns, seemingly taking in the box, the small figures lined up beside it, and the label on the side for the first time. “Which- which is my next question, I suppose. What is that?”

“That’s what I said,” Tubbo chimes in cheerfully, and waves. “Hello, Wil.” 

Wilbur is petulant, and stubborn, and a shadow of the man he once was, but he is a shadow that (somewhere, somehow) must still recall being a brother and a father and a friend, for the way he waves back, a reluctant smile tugging at the corners of his lips, is just how Tubbo remembers. “Hello, Tubbo.”

“That thing,” retorts Quackity, stepping between them in what Tubbo can’t help but suspect is a misguided attempt to protect him, “is there so I could give Tubbo a little, uh, gift! For being employee of the month, you know how it is. So if you’d kindly stop talking shit and get out of my restaurant-”

Despite Quackity’s best efforts, his deflecting and lies and misdirection, his trying to distract Wilbur from Tubbo in the same way that he’d once done with Schlatt, Wilbur is intrigued, and tall, and wearing his glasses. He peers over their heads, squinting, and then raises his eyebrows in surprise at what he sees. “Are those chess pieces?”

“Yes,” Tubbo replies for them both, though as Wilbur’s eyes land on him with unsettling scrutiny, he finds himself regretting opening his mouth, wishing that he’d taken advantage of Wilbur and Quackity’s simultaneous distraction to slink out of the restaurant’s back door and flee back to the safety of Snowchester. 

He doesn’t like how knowing Wilbur’s gaze seems. 

“...Why would Quackity need to give pieces to you?” Wilbur asks after a long pause, and, for once, Tubbo is the center of his complete attention. It isn’t a great feeling. “What happened to all the other sets?”

“What do you mean?” Tubbo asks, crossing his arms over his chest. Quackity glances between them like he can’t decide whether or not to end the conversation here and now or to keep listening and satisfy his own curiosity. For the moment, at least, he chooses the latter, silent but no less tense. 

“The one you and Tommy used, that little travel set, remember? Or the one with those pebbles that the two of you and Fundy made? Or that proper one we had way back in L'Manberg!”

“Gone,” he says, and as one, they remember buttons and bakeries and blown-up countries. 

“Then- then surely you had one as President, Tubbo, you must have.”

“Gone,” he says, and they now think of a crater. 

“The pieces I made in Pogtopia,” Wilbur says finally, triumphantly, “they must have survived!” 

“Gone,” Tubbo states; amends, “well, mostly,” but it doesn’t matter, because they both know that being ‘mostly gone’ is an oxymoron. Even if it weren’t, it still means nothing when it comes to things like chess, or childhood, or countries. 

Wilbur Soot, the knight that had been a rook, the knight that had been taken and returned, the knight that had taught a pawn to play, stares at Tubbo for a long while after that. He glances at the pieces on the counter, and Tubbo, who has been guided in chess by the voices of his first teachers for years, can practically hear him think, Too few to play. 

Finally, Wilbur looks up at him again and says, “Well, that just won’t do.”

Even with the pieces from both Niki and Quackity, Tubbo does not have enough chessmen to fill thirty-two spaces of a board—not that it matters, since he doesn’t have a board, either. He’s more than halfway there, and prepared to make up the difference, but he does not relish waiting longer than is necessary to carry out his plan. Dream has been crueler ever since they’d made the deal, and all the moreso since the day Tubbo showed his hand and made Dream’s purgatory into his prison. He’s scared, says some quiet part of his mind, trying to hurt you before you hurt him, and Tubbo knows it to be true. Still, that doesn’t make fireworks burn any less, or nights spent in the void any more appealing. 

So when Tubbo opens his door early the next morning to Wilbur Soot saying, “I know where we can get you a proper set,” he does not think twice. He’s already dressed, in coat and armor both (old habits die hard, especially ones formed by soldiers, spies, and presidents), so all he has left to do is write a quick note for Ranboo and Michael, text Quackity that he might miss work, and gulp down his tea before he’s closing the door behind them both, handing Wilbur a spare trident so they can hopefully move a bit faster. 

“Didn’t that hurt?” asks Wilbur slowly. “Your tea, I mean. You drank it so fast, and it- uh, it looked hot.”

“Not anymore,” says Tubbo, who had only been awake to hear Wilbur’s frenzied knocking because of a game in limbo played unusually quickly, waking him up in the earliest hours of the morning with burn scars prickling in remembered pain. There isn’t much that heat can do to affect Tubbo these days, not fire or lava or tea, not after burning alive so many times, pain that lingers even after the dream—after Dream—has gone. 

As they reach Snowchester’s harbor, Tubbo can’t help but touch a finger to his face, standing there even as his companion has already propelled himself into the sky. 

“What’re you waiting for?” Wilbur shouts from up above, turning abruptly to return. The unexpected change, or perhaps just his usual clumsiness, drops him into a snowbank instead of the water below; Tubbo can’t help but snicker watching his head emerge from the snow, frost blending his white streak in with the rest of his hair. “You alright, man?” he asks, playing at uncaring as he straightens, brushing the flakes from his clothes, but Tubbo knows Wilbur, and he knows when he is acting. 

He looks back down at his gloves, pressing them back against his scars once more for good measure. Still, they come back clean, unaffected, stainless: no tears, no blood, no dye from carelessly made fireworks. “Yeah,” Tubbo says. “Yeah, okay, let’s go.”

“So,” Wilbur shouts over the wind as they soar, “tell me about this Snowchester of yours!” 

On one hand, Tubbo knows he has to watch himself carefully, that he cannot give Wilbur any sort of advantage. On the other, he loves to talk about his new home, and Wilbur is the perfect audience: appreciative, supportive, understanding, laughing and gasping and scowling at all the right moments. It is a difficult task, censoring his own rambling, and one that consumes so much of his attention that Tubbo, who hasn’t slept well for months between nightmares and limbo, only realizes too late where they’re going. 

“Wait,” he starts, eyes widening in horror as he takes in the porch Wilbur’s led him up to, “no, Wilbur, don’t-” 

But Wilbur, intent on his quest, is already opening the door and gesturing for Tubbo to enter. “Don’t worry,” he says, “he isn’t home.”

“Wil,” Tubbo says. He can’t move, can’t walk, can’t follow, can’t do anything but cling to his trident (made for travel, not war: it will not save him, if things go wrong) and stare into the doorway. “Wil,” he says again, pleading. 

“Hey,” says Tubbo’s once-rook, once-president, once-brother, and holds out his hand. “It’ll be okay, Tubbo. I promise.” 

Tubbo is not an idiot. He knows not to trust Wilbur Soot’s promises, knows that only a fool would, knows this man is not his brother, not anymore.

Tubbo is not an idiot. But maybe he’s a fool, because he still finds himself sheathing his trident and taking Wilbur’s hand, following him into the boar’s den with a blind trust he had thought he’d long since outgrown. 

As he walks into the home of his executioner, Tubbo finds himself reaching up to touch his scars once again. Just as before, his gloves come away colorless, though his face still burns with phantom agony. Painless and colorful, he thinks, an old echo, and nearly laughs out loud. 

In the end, Technoblade had turned out to be quite the liar. 

“Down here,” Wilbur says quietly, climbing down the ladder into the basement. There isn’t any need for hushed voices, if he is to be believed about Techno’s absence, but for all his bravado, he seems to be on edge. When Tubbo replies, standing at the bottom of the ladder and watching Wilbur rummage through chests, his voice is just as low. 

“What’re we looking for?” he asks, glancing around nervously, hand on the hilt of his sword.

“I know Techno has a set around here somewhere,” Wilbur explains, abruptly closing the chest he’s digging through and moving to the one beside it. “Help me look.” 

“Won’t he be mad?” 

“Only if we get caught.” 

“That’s not very comforting.” Still, Tubbo obeys, opening the chest closest to him and getting to work. 

They search in silence, one broken only by the sound of boxes opening and shutting and Wilbur’s increasingly frustrated cursing. Though it’s tempting, Tubbo resists the urge to steal anything, even when he stumbles across three netherite bricks mixed in with Techno’s iron stash. He’s not a superstitious man, but he can’t help but remember that the last time he stole from Technoblade (glimmering emeralds taken just before a war, still stashed in his enderchest), he also lost Wilbur only a few hours later. Logically, Tubbo knows it was nothing but an unrelated coincidence, yet he still leaves the netherite be, opening the next chest while trying to ignore the cold fear lodged in his throat, a sensation that grows and worsens with every minute spent in this basement. 

“Fuck,” Wilbur groans finally, slamming yet another chest shut and running a hand down his face, suddenly looking infinitely older. “Fuck.”

They’ve searched the room twice over by now, and Wilbur has even gone upstairs to rummage around the first floor, but there’s still no sign of anything even resembling a chess set. Tubbo’s not sure how much time has actually passed, but he’s definitely late for work, if he hasn’t missed it altogether. “Look,” he says, “I appreciate you trying to help, really I do, but there isn’t anything here. Let’s just… Let’s just go home, okay?”

“No,” says Wilbur, because of course he does. He’s Wilbur Soot, after all, the most stubborn man alive or dead. “No, we can’t.” 

“Yes, we can, and we should,” snaps Tubbo, whose lungs are seizing with every breath, his fear sending creeping tendrils up from his heart to curl around his lungs and throat and squeeze. “This is too much of a risk, and I’m not losing another life for you, especially not for a fucking chess set!”

“Go, then!” Wilbur snarls, and his rage is a portal to another time. In the dim torchlight, with his brown coat hanging too loosely around him and clear desperation painted between the stark lines of his fury, Wilbur looks too much like he did in Pogtopia, too much like he did in the days right before he’d died. “Go! Go run and hide and surrender like you always do! Just give up, without what you wanted, because you’d rather be safe than take a few risks! Prime, Tubbo, I thought you’d at least manage to grow a spine with my death!”

Tubbo has heard too many biting words and cold cruelties to be vulnerable to them now; his skin is thick, even when it comes to insults hurled by once-brothers. So he is already turning to walk away, about to leave if only to spite Wilbur, when the last few words hit home, and fill him with a bitter, tired sort of rage.

“For fuck’s sake, Wil,” Tubbo says, cold and biting, his best impression of Wilbur Soot, “if that’s how you feel, why do this? What are you trying to prove? What are you doing here?”

Wilbur does not answer. Wilbur does not answer, because he’s too busy pulling Tubbo behind him, staring up at the trapdoor above them. Tubbo follows his gaze, and suddenly, he’s seeing yellow concrete.

“Funny,” drawls Technoblade, sitting at the top of the ladder, his sword resting on his lap, “I was just about to ask the same thing.”

“Wilbur Soot,” comes another voice, in a tone that makes both Tubbo and Wilbur take an instinctive step back, “get up here this instant.”

“Tubbo,” says Wilbur, “when they build me my new grave, can you tell them to add a fish tank this time? One with salmon in it.”

“Ten,” warns Phil, and Tubbo watches as green sleeves tug Techno away from the hatch, leaving the way clear. “Nine.”

“After you,” Tubbo says, and Wilbur flips him off before he scrambles up the ladder. 

They end up on either side of Technoblade’s surprisingly cushy couch, Phil sitting in front of them in a dark green armchair. His crows are perched around him in a way that would probably be more intimidating if most of them weren’t staring at Wilbur and Tubbo, tilting their heads, and then slowly, deliberately, winking at them. Repeatedly. 

They’re silent, sitting there, and it feels stifling. Wilbur has tried to pipe up twice now, and each time Phil has snapped “Shut,” in a manner so like those of the birds surrounding him that Tubbo has to press his lips together to keep from laughing. Still, despite his stifled amusement, he’s stone-still in nervous anticipation, watching the door to the kitchen warily, hand on the hilt of his sword. “We’ll wait for Techno,” Phil had said sternly as they were sitting down, before the silence fell, and Tubbo can hear the other man moving around in the kitchen, accompanied by what sounds like clinking china. 

He glances at Wilbur, who seems to be avoiding meeting his eyes. Prime, Tubbo, he had said, I’d have thought you’d at least manage to grow a spine with my death! 

Cruel, unnecessarily so, but Tubbo can tell he hadn’t meant it if only from the way he’s sitting, curled up on himself. Guilt is the only thing that can ever make Wilbur Soot seem truly small: guilt, and dying. 

Still, what Wilbur had said had hurt, no matter how used to it Tubbo may be, so though every fiber of his being urges him to go comfort his once-brother, he ignores it in favor of watching Technoblade return from the kitchen, carrying a delicate silver tray with a gentleness that rings strange coming from his scarred, calloused hands. “Tea,” he says as he sets it down, with a glance at Phil, and for a brief second he looks as uncomfortable as Tubbo feels. The expression is gone the next moment, though, and as Techno gestures to the steaming cups, it is with a half-smile that betrays no such unease. 

Wilbur snatches his up, chugging it down with a wanton abandon that makes Tubbo feel utterly unsympathetic when he tears his cup away from his mouth, letting out a startled screech of pain. “Fuck, my tongue!” he whines, and Techno silently hands him a glass of water that Tubbo suspects was poured just for this eventuality, taking Wilbur’s teacup in trade. “Thanks, Tech,” Wilbur grins sheepishly, giving him a thumbs up with his free hand before sipping at the water much more carefully.

Tubbo does not touch his cup. “I’m good,” he says when Phil looks at him, smiling in a way that he knows is not really a smile at all. “Had some this morning, thank you.” 

“Yeah, if by ‘had’ you mean you drank it faster than I just did. I doubt you even tasted it,” Wilbur points out, and Tubbo’s eye twitches as he turns his head to stare at Wilbur, fists clenching. To his credit, Wilbur seems to get the message, for he backtracks quickly: “I mean, uh, yes, sorry, none for Tubbo. Very particular about his morning tea, he is. Uh. Yep.” 

“Really, now,” Techno says, unimpressed. 

“...Yes?”

“Look,” Tubbo interrupts, getting to his feet, “this has been nice and all, but it’s about time we were going. Wil-”

“You were raiding Techno’s basement,” Phil states coolly, sipping from his own cup with a casual elegance that the part of Tubbo that still thinks like a president finds itself envying. “The least you can do is explain why, so sit down and drink your fucking tea.” 

The look he gives Tubbo leaves no room for argument. He reluctantly sinks back down into the unreasonably soft couch, picking up his cup gingerly, and, under Phil’s piercing gaze, takes a tiny sip. It’s infuriatingly good. 

“There we go,” hums Phil, settling back into his armchair comfortably. “Now, how about you tell us what you two were up to, Wil.” 

“If you needed somethin’, you could have just asked,” Techno mutters, awkward and stiff in his chair beside Phil’s, like he’s been rehearsing in his head. “You live here, y’know” 

“You what?” Tubbo asks, turning to stare at Wilbur, who looks uncharacteristically sheepish. “Since when?”

“It’s not like I had a place after I got revived,” he says, “not with L’Manberg gone-”

Phil silences them both with a glare. “How about you tell us what you two were up to,” he repeats, “Wil.”

“Well,” begins Wilbur, suddenly uncomfortable, glancing between Techno and Tubbo like he’s hoping for a way out. When neither speaks, he takes another desperate swig of his water.

“Preferably before Tubbo dies of old age, thanks,” drawls Phil wryly, and Tubbo just barely manages to turn his laugh into a cough. It’s not especially convincing, judging by Wilbur’s betrayed look and Techno’s own hand flying to his mouth too late to hide his smile. It dissolves some of the tension in the air, enough so that when Wilbur finally begins to speak, he at least looks a little bit less like a deer in headlights. 

“We were looking for a chess set for Tubbo,” he says, eyes darting between the three of them before finally settling on his father. “I figured Techno would have one. Didn’t think it through, I guess. Sorry.” 

Techno waves it off, but he and Phil are exchanging a look, brows furrowed. It is Phil who finally speaks, now not looking at Wilbur, but at Tubbo instead. “Wait,” he says, setting down his tea, “why would you need a set? Don’t you have your own?” 

“That’s what I said!” Wilbur exclaims as Tubbo’s grip tightens around his cup, knuckles as white as the snow that has begun to fall outside. 

“No,” he replies shortly. “I don’t.” 

“But-” Techno begins, hesitates, and then presses on, “what about that-”

“Gone.”

“I didn’t even finish.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Tubbo snaps, and sees not just red but white and blue, too. “They’re all gone. I wonder if you can guess why, Technoblade.” 

“Tubbo-” Phil begins, chastising, and firework fury burns the frost of fear away. 

“They’re all gone!” he snarls, but before he can say anything else the cup shatters between his fingers. Burning tea and shards of china and blood rain down across his lap, and he barely notices Wilbur leaping up from the couch beside him as he sighs, anger gone as quickly as it had arrived as he begins to pull free the pieces that are lodged in his flesh. “Shit,” he mutters. 

“Fuck, Tubbo!” Wilbur is saying, and reaches out to grab his bloody hand before recoiling. “Prime, that’s hot!”

“Is it?” he asks, taking the towel Phil had scrambled to grab him with a nod, suddenly glad he’d made his Snowchester clothes hydrophobic to protect him from the melting snow. “Sorry about your couch, Techno.”

“It’ll be fine as long as you stop bleedin’ all over it,” replies Techno dryly, and Tubbo barely manages to resist sticking out his tongue at him. 

“Go get some bandages for him, then!” Phil exclaims, his crows cawing and croaking, darting around the room in a frantic flurry of dark feathers to match the panic he’s clearly failing to repress. 

Tubbo finds himself and Techno exchanging a look, one exasperated and fond. Though they both immediately break eye contact, Techno practically running off into the other room and Tubbo returning his focus to holding the towel to the cuts still gushing blood, it is a painfully familiar reminder of his childhood, one that causes his heart to lodge in his throat and make replying to Wilbur’s worried questions difficult. 

It is Wilbur who ends up taking the first aid kit from Techno, and though Tubbo tries to insist he do it himself, it is Wilbur, too, who begins to smear his cuts in disinfectant and healing potions, wrapping his hands in bandages. It feels eerily similar to Pogtopia, especially with Techno pretending not to be watching in the doorway while twisting the bloody towel between his hands and Phil having disappeared a few moments before, muttering something vague about fetching something from upstairs. As he sits there, flexing his practically mummified hands and trying to ignore the smell of tea that is practically emanating from his clothes, Tubbo can’t help but think that if he blinks he’ll be back in the caves, Tommy on one side and Niki on the other, new scars burning with a heat he can’t seem to feel anymore. 

Once Wilbur deems his hands adequately bandaged, Tubbo stands up from the couch, brushing the few droplets that have clung to his coat free as he says, “I really should go home now.” No one protests this time, Wilbur silently following him out of the cottage, Techno hovering by the door. 

He is halfway down the porch steps when the door swings back open with a bang, crows pouring out of it as Phil comes skidding outside, socks sliding on the icy wood. “Wait!” he shrieks, and Wilbur, the closest, lunges to steady him before he smacks into his own cottage or tumbles over the railing. 

The sight is so comical that Tubbo can’t help but let out a snort of laughter, and, when he sees Techno standing in the open doorway, eyes wide and lips thinned with barely repressed amusement, he cracks, cackling so hard he’s forced to reach out and cling onto the railing or risk slipping too. The other two are soon laughing also, and it feels like the breaking of something, a latent tension shattering with their hysterics. 

“Really, now,” Phil grumbles, trying to free himself from Wilbur’s grip and nearly tumbling over for the second time, “Ack!- it’s really not that funny!” This just makes them all laugh harder, Wilbur wiping at his eyes, Techno leaning on the doorframe, Tubbo sliding down to sit on the stairs as he giggles helplessly. 

Eventually, they are able to regain enough composure for Techno to reenter the house and fetch Phil his shoes as Wilbur helps Tubbo up, the two of them unable to make eye contact for fear of breaking down all over again. “Are you little shits done?” scowls Phil when he’s finished pulling on his boots, and aside from a few stifled snorts, it seems they are. “Good,” he says, and it is then that Tubbo realizes he’s holding a box underneath one arm—a box he recognizes, one made of wood and sporting engravings that may be worn, but are beautiful still. His suspicions are confirmed when Phil sets it into his bandaged palms, and he slides it open to find chessmen of glass lying atop the board of his childhood. 

“If you want it,” he says, and Tubbo looks up to see Phil watching him with something careful and cautious in his blue eyes, “it’s yours.” 

“I-” he begins, but his heart has returned to his throat, and he has to shove it down before he can speak again. “Are you sure?” 

“We’re not using it anyway, and-” Phil laughs. “Honestly, mate, I don’t think it’s belonged to me, or Techno, or really anyone but you, for a very long time.” 

Tubbo stares at him, and then at Techno, who nods. Phil smiles down at him with an unbridled fondness that Tubbo recognizes, but can’t remember the last time he’d seen directed at him. “Thank you,” he whispers, holding it tight to his chest, and then again, louder, stronger, unafraid: “Thank you.” 

“Of course,” says Phil, in a way that makes Tubbo think that if things were a little different, if they were a little different, he might have hugged him. But not enough has changed today for that, not even with tea and laughter and a familiar chess set, so Tubbo just returns Phil’s smile and clutches the box to his chest instead. 

After saying “Wil and I need to have a little talk,” in a tone that makes Tubbo salute Wilbur the moment Phil’s back is turned (grinning as Wil mouths “Do something!” at him furiously), Phil insists that Techno go with Tubbo back to Snowchester, pointing out that between his injured hands and carrying the box, Tubbo can’t use a trident and will be vulnerable to mobs going through the Nether alone. No one is willing to start another fight over it and risk the delicate truce that the four of them have somehow fallen into, and so Tubbo just grits his teeth, holds the box close to his chest, and does his best to ignore Techno walking beside him. He’s silent, which helps, and the palpable tension between them feels much more muted than usual. 

“You know,” says Techno finally, when they’ve stepped out of the large community portal, the last remnants of the setting sun painting the sky the same colors as the Nether, “that still isn’t a complete set.” 

“I know,” says Tubbo. He’d been the one to steal the pawn, after all, and he’s honestly surprised any of the set had survived the journey here at all. Things like glass and wood and travel and war don’t usually mix well. 

“What’re you going to do, then?” he asks. A zombie appears nearby, summoned by nightfall, and Tubbo barely has time to blink before Techno has put his axe through its chest, the creature dissolving into dust and leaving behind only scraps of rotten flesh clinging to the blade. 

“I’ve got some substitutes,” Tubbo replies, not bothering to draw his own weapon. He may not trust Techno, but he trusts Technoblade’s skills and dedication to doing what Phil asks of him—even if it is keeping a former president safe from harm. Right now, he’s probably the safest person on the SMP, even if he doesn’t necessarily feel that way. 

“Substitutes?” 

Techno has always been a little too easy to talk to, and though he hadn’t intended to, Tubbo finds himself answering. “From Quackity and Niki. They both had a few pieces—not enough to form a whole set, mind you, but enough to fill any gaps in this one.”

Techno stops, turning to look at him. “You needed a whole chess set so badly that you were willing to raid my house instead of just making more to go with the ones you’d already borrowed?”

There’s no point in denying it, whispers Tubbo’s mind, and you can’t risk him taking away the one they gave you. That thought makes him clutch the box tighter, pressing it close to his chest as he replies. “...Yes.”

“Why?” 

Though Tubbo is watching Techno carefully, he can’t see any sign of duplicity, can’t spot any sort of intentions in him asking besides pure curiosity. It makes him comfortable enough to say “I’ve got… Well, I’ve got to play a game. A really important one. And I need a proper set for it.” 

Techno frowns at that, obviously about to question him further, but before he can speak they’re interrupted by Tubbo’s name being shouted by a very familiar voice. They both turn, and sure enough, Tommy’s sprinting down the Prime Path towards them, already holding his sword.

“Get away from him, Blade!” Tommy screeches, and Tubbo can tell the exact moment he spots his injured hands, because the sight abruptly transforms his worry to unbridled fury. “What,” he snarls, skidding to a stop between them with his back to Tubbo and his sword pointed at Techno, playing human shield, “did you do?” 

“Calm down, Tommy,” Tubbo says, grabbing him by the back of the shirt with his free hand and pulling him back. “And put down the axe, Techno.” 

“Is the gremlin going to stab me if I do?”

“I’m not a gremlin, you pig bastard! I’m a big man, bigger than y-”

“No, he won’t,” says Tubbo, glaring at Tommy, who, after a second, very reluctantly lowers his weapon. Techno does the same. 

“He hurt you!” Tommy whispers furiously, twisting so he can grab Tubbo’s bandaged hand and inspect it. “They weren’t like this yesterday!” 

“It wasn’t his fault,” he says. “Techno was just walking me home.” 

“Walking you home,” Tommy repeats, disbelieving. 

“Phil asked him to,” Tubbo explains. 

“Ah,” nods Tommy with sudden understanding, because if there is anything the two of them understand, it is Techno’s loyalty to Phil. It’s always been easy for the two of them to see that same kind of unfaltering loyalty in each other. 

“Well,” Techno interrupts, glancing between them awkwardly, “uh, Tommy’s here, so… I’ll be going, then.” 

“Alright,” Tubbo nods, as Tommy slings an arm over his shoulders. “Bye. And… Thank you, Techno.” 

Techno just grunts, and waits until Tommy has begun to guide Tubbo away, casting suspicious glances behind them, before he says, “Hey, Tubbo?”

“Yeah?” he says, and tenses involuntarily. This is the part where he kills you, his brain insists. This is the part where he kills you. This is the part where he kills you. This is the part-

“I’d wish you good luck with that game, but you don’t need it,” Technoblade, once-ally, once-friend, once-brother, tells him. “You’ll win.” 

“You don’t know that,” Tubbo says, and his mind is silent, every bit of him quiet with shock. Even Tommy is surprised, judging by the way his grip on his sword has relaxed, fear forgotten. 

“Nah,” says Techno, “I do.” 

Later, when Tubbo is home and in bed, with Ranboo on one side, Tommy on the other (he’d insisted on sleeping over in the mansion, and though he has his own room and bed, he always manages to migrate to Ranboo and Tubbo’s for an impromptu sleepover), and Michael sprawled across all three of them, that conversation repeats in his mind, the look on Techno’s face appearing every time he closes his eyes. 

You’ll win, he’d said, and the voice of Techno that has always guided Tubbo in chess agrees. So does the voice of Wilbur. So does the voice of Phil. So do the other voices, the new ones, the voices of Quackity and Niki and Jack Manifold and Tommy and Ranboo and more, too, Fundy and Puffy and Sam and Ponk and Foolish and Bad and Sapnap, like his head is filled with everyone Tubbo’s ever known or loved, filled with everyone on the SMP, aside from Dream. You’ll win. You’ll win. You’ll win. 

Tell me how, he thinks, and plays out the game in his mind, plays out round after round with their input. They remind him of openings and gambits and countergambits, of strategies and terminology, of the individual secret strengths and weaknesses of each piece and pawn. They’re not real, he knows, just his mind trying to process, plan, prepare: still, he listens, and he learns. He has no dreams that night, pulled into no nightmares or limbo, so by the time he wakes, he is ready. 

He waits one more day, a day that he uses to heal his hands with potions and assemble his set and play out his plan on a board, a day that he spends with his family. Tommy and Ranboo don’t ask about Techno or the new chess set, and Tubbo is grateful: instead, the three of them and Michael go out on an adventure. They run down the Prime Path, playing tag with Michael and showing him all the buildings; they play the discs and eat sandwiches at the bench, just big enough for all four of them to squish together; they meet friends and allies (and those who are neither now, but someday might be both) along the way. They talk and laugh and play, they take a day for themselves, Tubbo Underscore-Beloved and his family, and on that day, they are children, and it is good, it is great, it is glorious. 

The next morning, Tubbo wakes up early. He bids the three of them goodbye, pulling on his apron with one arm and carrying the box (now holding a full set) under the other, and he tells them that he loves them. 

“Love you,” Michael parrots, on the verge of crying—he hates it when people leave.

“Aw, bud,” coos Ranboo, bouncing him on his hip, “Bo’s just going to work, you know. He’ll come back!” 

“Yeah, ‘e will,” mumbles Tommy, still half-asleep, leaning into Ranboo’s other side. “All safe and sound, too.” 

“That’s right,” Tubbo agrees with a smile. “I’ll be home before you know it, okay? Safe and sound.” 

“Promise?” asks Michael. 

“Promise,” says Tubbo. 

He waves goodbye to them as he leaves, and keeps waving all the way to the hyperloop tunnel. It is only once he’s left his family far behind him that he pulls off his apron, leaving it buried deep in one of the chests at the community house, and begins walking again, though he is no longer headed towards Las Nevadas. It is early in the morning, too early for most of the SMP to be awake, and so no one is around to notice him, to watch him, to stop him. 

No one is around to see Tubbo Underscore-Beloved enter Pandora’s Vault. 

—

Borges (for black pawns)

if the rules of the riddle forbid the

mention of the word itself then we sink

into the labyrinthine forking paths made possible by

infinite variations around a central core full of

imagined authors with permanent memories and a tolerance

for unfinished works of strands forever dividing bifurcating

until the system itself contains every possible breath

every move every piece every person every god

—

What many people don’t understand (what many people, if they ever knew, forgot) is that Tubbo does not think like his opponents. 

Phil thinks in feathers on a wing, interlocking parts that form a perfect whole. Techno thinks in myths and stories and endings with meanings. Wilbur thinks in songs and symphonies and arias and notes like rain, a storm-born harmony swept away by drought but rising on the breeze again with his revival. Quackity thinks in odds, in the dealing of cards and poker chips, in the places where lighting strikes. Niki thinks in the rise and fall of bread, of waves, of empires. Jack thinks in the trajectory of a projectile, fireworks and nukes and bodies tumbling towards lava, the things that spell impending color and inevitable death. Ranboo thinks in slots and minutes and entries in a book, filling in the gaps of his memories where he can and jumping over the holes where he cannot, like a child dodging cracks in the sidewalk. And Tommy…

Tommy thinks in people. Tommy wonders “What would Techno or Wilbur or Eret or Puffy or Dream or Phil or Sam or Niki or Ranboo or Tubbo do,” and he is both fiercely loyal and desperately alone because of it, for though he does not have Techno’s audibly chanting voices, he has all of his friends and family and enemies and role models arguing in his head, screaming for a place at the table, pulling on his arms and tugging him every which way, uncaring when he screams that they’re tearing him apart. 

As for Dream, well, Tubbo doesn’t know how Dream thinks, and doesn’t particularly want to, but it doesn’t matter either way. Be they pseudo-god and president or player and pawn, Black and White do not, will not, can not think like each other, and the two of them are no exception.

But Tubbo does not think like his opponents, for Tubbo Underscore-Beloved thinks in patterns and puzzles and pieces on a chessboard, in priyomes committed to memory. They leave little room in his mind for smaller things, but he won’t let himself care—who has time for remembering your birthday or learning the ukulele or taking time to sleep when you have wars to fight?

(No wars anymore, Tubbo reminds himself. No wars anymore.)

(It’s a lie, of course, but one he wishes he could believe.)

Tubbo does not think like his opponents, and so Tubbo does not truly fear Dream. Everything follows patterns on the SMP, like sunflowers and galaxies and shells in golden spirals, in a Fibonacci sequence, and death is no exception; Tubbo’s deaths, his true deaths, are betrayals. The final control room and the execution were both products of traitorous intent, of trust lost just before the fateful moment of his ending. 

Tubbo does not fear Dream, because he has not trusted him for a very, very long time, and so he is not afraid when he enters the prison. He is not afraid to ride the moving platform to the main cell of Pandora’s Vault with a box clasped under his arm, he is not afraid to step off and send the platform away again, and he is not afraid to say to his worst enemy, “Let’s play a game.”

“How-” begins Dream, staring, and then he says, “I could kill you.” Though he does not show his shock, Tubbo knows him well enough by now that he can read it clear as day in his unmasked eyes. “I could beat you to death just like Tommy. I could bring you back a million times, kill you again and again and again, and no one would stop me. No one could stop me.”

“I guess,” he shrugs, stepping closer to the netherite barrier (which, though he has walked directly into danger, he is still not fool enough to lower). “Or you could play chess with me.”

“You aren’t scared of me anymore,” Dream realizes after a beat, almost impressed but far more angry.

“I trust myself,” Tubbo says, “not to trust you.” 

Though the two of them are far from the same, Tubbo knows they have both figured out the patterns of his deaths, and so he is not surprised when Dream just nods, sighs, and says, “Set up the board, then.”

“No,” he says, and sets the box on the barrier between them and the board atop it (just like his brothers had taught him, once upon a time), collecting the black pieces and handing Dream the white. “Set up your side yourself.”

Dream throws his head back and laughs and laughs and laughs, though it isn’t funny, not even to him. “How disappointing,” he finally snarls, false mirth vanishing abruptly as he unknowingly disagrees with Wilbur Soot: “You’ve grown a spine.”

“No,” Tubbo says again, pleasantly, like they are playing on a bench at sunset or on either side of a communicator’s screen, like they are sitting in a bakery or a White House, like they are outside underneath a tree with ladybugs crawling on their shoes instead of inside a prison of blackstone and obsidian and lava. “I've just started using it.”

“These are rather mismatched, aren’t they?” asks Dream as he picks up his pieces, examining them carefully, and then he looks up at Tubbo as if to question his very existence. Whatever he sees must not be much of an answer, for his next question is, “How are you here?” 

There are two questions he could be asking, two versions of here to choose from. The first is easy—“How are you in this cell? How are you in this prison? Why?”—but the second is trickier, both incredibly difficult to put into words and also unknowingly answered by Dream already in his first question.

But Dream means it in the former sense, the physical one. That much is easy to tell, especially with his unexpectedly expressive face, his eyes darting between Tubbo and the lava and the netherite and the control panel far behind him, distinctly Wardenless. So Tubbo answers accordingly: “I’ve had a backdoor into the prison’s security systems since Tommy’s death.” 

“What?” Dream asks, forgetting to place down the pawn he’s holding in favor of staring at Tubbo, slack-jawed with shock. “How?"

Dream and Tubbo do not think the same, and this is one area in which it is obvious. Unlike Dream, bragging about his limbo with careless pride, Tubbo likes to keep his accomplishments close to his chest, a surprise (trick or treat, gift or guillotine) to be sprung on a victim at their most unsuspecting. But Tubbo is playing a new kind of chess today, a game unlike any seen before, and so he lets Dream have the cheese from this first mousetrap. 

It had been easy, he explains as he sets up his half of the board. After Tommy had died, he’d needed eyes in the prison. He was trying to figure out who else had caused Tommy to be trapped inside, and he’d already wanted to keep a closer eye on Dream. 

(“That was Ranboo helping me, of course,” Dream interjects, aiming to hurt.

“No,” replies Tubbo, unfazed. “That was you using him.”)

The prison’s security had been difficult to crack, so much so that Tubbo had nearly given up—but then Dream had unknowingly given him a chance at the keys to Pandora’s Vault. 

“Quackity,” he says, grinning, and Dream raises an eyebrow. “You told me about Quackity, how he was coming into the prison to torture you. But that shouldn’t have been possible, not unless Sam was letting him in.”

I wonder if I can do that, too, Tubbo had thought long ago, near the beginning of things, and it was a question that, like Dream’s, doubled in meaning. The first, of course, was wondering if he too could manipulate Dream’s limbo, but the second, well-

I wonder if I can do that, too, Tubbo had thought long ago, and then: To enter the prison, Quackity has to have some sort of deal with Sam. Maybe I can use that. 

He’d known immediately that the warden wouldn’t have the time (or the stomach) to accompany Quackity for each and every torture session. And Quackity was more careless than Sam, was far easier to slip past—a potion of invisibility or two and a few minutes of unrestricted access to the prison’s main computers, and Tubbo had access to every camera and security system of Pandora’s Vault from the convenience of his communicator.

“And then you made the deal with me,” he explains. “To keep Quackity occupied? It was killing two birds with one stone: I built an outpost, called it a cookie shop and stocked it with weapons, and waited for Quackity-” (always paranoid, always watchful, always wary after Schlatt) “-to send a spy.” He chuckles. “Didn’t even take a day. Between that and Wilbur, all I had to do was get in on the inside, encourage their little burger rivalry, wait for a day where I knew both Quackity and Sam were busy, and, well.” Tubbo spreads his arms wide, flashing Dream a grin that imitates Quackity and Wilbur both, channeling his knights as he says, “It was easy, really.” 

Dream is less confident now, less cocky, but less bitter, too: he watches Tubbo with a sort of begrudging respect, too curious and too impressed for their mutual hatred to bury. “Not bad,” he says finally, and then, in the span of a breath, lunges forwards, his hands darting through the gap in claws to try and grab, to tear, to rip and to maim. Tubbo, unsurprised, steps out of his reach easily.

“Trying to grab my communicator?” He rolls his eyes. “Honestly, Dream, I’m not as much of an idiot as you think I am. Even if you could get it, none of the controls respond without individual passcodes and my biological signature.”

“Worth a try,” Dream sighs, stepping back and dusting off his uniform before resetting the pieces he’d knocked over, which, aside from the similarly pale coloring denoting them as white, each only barely resemble their fellows.

“These are rather mismatched, aren’t they?” he had asked but seconds ago, and then forgotten about it in favor of finding out how Tubbo had single-handedly broken into the impenetrable prison. Dream does not know, and will never learn, how important this new set is; even Tubbo might never know the full extent of it.

In another version of this story, Dream would not be alone in his cell. In that version, Technoblade, captured rook, would be standing beside him, staring at Tubbo in much the same way he’d done in the moments before lifting sword or skull or rocket launcher, in the same way he’d done each time he set Tubbo’s world ablaze. 

But the Tubbo of that story never played chess against masked men in his dreams, at least not that anyone ever knew. But the Tubbo of that story never wanted to visit the prison to begin with, much less with a chess set in a box under his arm. But the Tubbo of that story likely wouldn’t have the box at all, inside the prison or outside it.

It is a mismatched set, as it must be, one made up of the remnants of all the other broken ones, and Tubbo rather likes it that way. He could have just used Techno’s (which had, including the pawn he’d taken all those years ago, been missing only three pieces) with just a few substitutes to create a full board, but he’d found himself using the pieces Niki had given him as a base instead, filling in the gaps with sets more whole. 

In the end, Tubbo thinks he just likes the homemade pieces more. Sure, they remind him of Pogtopia, but he traces his finger over one of the pawns he’d made so long ago, surface still rough and unfinished, and he thinks that they remind him of family, too. 

That’s what the whole set does, really, and that’s the trick of it all. Because in this version of the story, Tubbo and Niki and Jack keep each other afloat, even from afar, with pastries and pawns and plans. Because in this version of the story, Tubbo has made sure Quackity and Wilbur are kept distracted, and thus kept away from Dream. Because in this version of the story, Tubbo still isn’t part of Techno and Phil’s family, but they’ve become friendly, amicable, enough so that he convinces Quackity that it is safer for them all to leave Technoblade be. 

(As for Ranboo and Tommy, well, some things never really change, and their friendship is one. They are a little closer, a little happier, a little less afraid, and those little things make all the difference. There isn’t a drastic change or major twist to their story, but there is a little more smiling. Perhaps that’s the most important alteration of all.) 

So they play with a set found in the scattered pieces of Tubbo’s weakest parts (broken trust and broken hope and broken love, all bound together once more), and the difference is worth worlds. 

“Odd setting for a game of chess,” Dream remarks, trying for nonchalant and resigned but just sounding nervous. “Should we be worried about Sam interrupting?” 

“Perhaps,” says Tubbo, and opens another mousetrap. “Should we play it like a blitz, then?” 

“Speed chess? Really?” sighs Dream, exaggeratedly condescending. Tubbo can practically smell his desperation, like blood in the water; he is so lonely as to cling to any sort of company, even if it is that of a pawn, not even a true piece. 

“Not quite,” he amends swiftly. “A blitz’s rules, but with time per move, not per game. Lightning chess. One minute each?” 

“Three.”

“Two.” 

“I’m sorry,” Dream smiles, too pleasant, the bared teeth of a predator, “is this a negotiation, Mr. President?”

Just because we’re awake doesn’t mean I’m powerless, that smile says. Just because we’re awake doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way forever. 

Tubbo falters. He can’t push, not now, not without risking everything. “Fine,” he agrees. “Three.” 

“Fine, then,” shrugs Dream, more comfortable now that he thinks he’s in control, more confident, more cocky. “Lightning it is.”

“One round,” says Tubbo, with an air of finality. “A tiebreaker.” 

It’s a proposal Dream can’t dispute without seeming afraid, lonely, weak, and they both know it. Not that it matters: he is laughably easy to read without his mask, and the scowl he’s trying to hide tells Tubbo everything he needs to know. “One round,” he agrees, and they shake on it. He doesn’t try to attack this time, probably because Tubbo makes sure Dream can see how his free hand is resting against the hilt of his sword, ready to strike. 

White moves his pawn, and the game begins. 

Since they are playing atop a barrier of netherite instead of a table, they are both forced to stand, chairs not exactly plentiful in a prison. They are both warriors, soldiers used to being on their feet for hours at a time, and so the lack of seating isn’t a hindrance: Tubbo’s muscles settle into a familiar stance, one first found by a boy on the midnight watch, safeguarding his country, prepared to fight any enemy to protect what he loved. They do not lean, do not slouch, do not let down their guard, and if it were not for their periodically reaching forwards to make a move, Dream and Tubbo might be mistaken for statues, larger pieces standing watch over the board. 

And maybe we’re not the only ones on watch here, thinks Tubbo, for the shadows are dancing in the corners, for the still air is moving, for something charged has joined them in Pandora’s Vault. White circles float at the edges of his vision, ones that make him think of the strange figures of the SMP’s whispered stories: spirits and devils and gods, all sporting that same eerie white circle. 

(“I wonder,” Tommy had mused once, right after recounting yet another of his encounters with the being called Drista, “which of them started it?” 

“Which of them started it?” Tubbo had repeated, staring at him.

“Haven’t you noticed them?” Tommy asked. “The masks?” 

Tubbo remembers recognizing the strange gleam in his eyes, the spark that makes blue look like purple, present whenever Tommy speaks of gods or stands in the lands of Church Prime. Once, Tubbo had belonged to a family of gods, and though it is only the two of them left now, that purple look of Tommy’s always makes him wonder if he still has at least one not-quite-mortal for a brother.

“They both wear them, Drista and XD I mean, just like-” There, Tommy had faltered, choking on his own words, like he always does when speaking about Dream these days, “-like him. But which of them started it? Was it- was it-”

The conversation was dropped there, because the thought of what Tommy’s alluding to—the possibility of gods modeling themselves after Dream—was one neither of them wanted to consider. They were young, and in pain: Tommy had only just been revived, Tubbo had only just begun to relive his memories. Dream may be in prison, but it is easy to imagine him as someone powerful enough to shape the gods, and so Tommy’s question is a problem neither of them wanted to solve. 

Now, though, Tubbo is older, wiser, braver. He has fought Dream, and he has won enough times to balance the scales. He has seen him at his worst, at his weakest, without a mask to protect him.

Now, though, he thinks he might know the answer.)

The game has the rules of a blitz, and so, unlike those of limbo, it flies by. Before he knows it, they each have only a few pieces left. 

This is the endgame, say the voices in his head, the manifestations of all his learning and teaching and planning. The pawn, they whisper, pawn pawn pawn, and at their direction Tubbo completely abandons his previous strategy, beginning to advance his pawn instead. 

Dream realizes what he’s doing almost immediately, for there is really only one thing Tubbo could be hoping to accomplish with this new approach. “Surely you realize you’re promoting at the cost of the game?” he asks as he makes his move. “I’ll take your pieces with my rook, you take the rook with your bishop, and then neither of us have any heavy pieces left—a near-certain draw.”

“Of course I do,” Tubbo says, and smells Niki’s brownies, feels Jack’s hand on his shoulder, senses their triumphant smiles. A matching grin pulls at his lips, and he moves his pawn again. “Dream, have you played much speed chess?”

“Some,” he replies, unfazed, “why?” It’s clear that he’s caught on by now, that he knows how high the stakes of this game truly are. There’s no way he hasn’t, for the shadows have grown to flood the room, for the breeze has become a gale, for the electricity in the air has begun to make the hair at the back of Tubbo’s neck stand on end. Still, Dream is confident, and not without reason: Tubbo has to win this game, and by the standard rules of chess he no longer can, not unless Dream forfeits. 

Except they aren’t playing by the standard rules of chess.

“A blitz’s rules,” Tubbo had said. “A tiebreaker.”

Dream has taken the bait. It’s time to spring the trap. 

“I reckon,” he says, “that you win just about every game you play. ‘Cause you’re good at chess, Dream, great at it—and sure, that doesn’t always translate to speed chess, but it’s not just chess you’re good at, is it?”

Dream raises an eyebrow as he moves his own pawn down the board, a pursuit they both know is futile. He doesn’t seem to care. “Flattery won’t save you, Tubbo.”

“Oh, I know,” says Tubbo, who was once part of a family of gods and is channeling two of them now, Techno’s confidence and Phil’s determination. He lets the smile he’s been hiding reach his face, and Dream flinches. Just barely, almost imperceptibly, but that’s enough. “You manipulated manipulators. You destroyed my country over and over again. You raised men from the dead. You built walls and tore them down, you started wars and stole discs, you hurt and you killed and you won and you lost and you didn’t care. And,” he gestures down at the board, staring Dream dead in the eyes as he continues: “you’re very, very good at chess. Good enough to beat me, even!”

“Get to the point,” Dream snaps.

“You like games,” Tubbo tells him, “because you win them. Always. Every time. And even when you lose to me, well, you’re not really losing, are you? At this point we just keep drawing, over and over and over again. Equally matched. Have you done that before, Dream? Have you done that in chess? In blitz chess?” He doesn’t wait for a response, just watches his opponents face carefully as he says, “Because there are rules about that, you know. Rules about tiebreakers, blitz tiebreakers specifically. Do you know them?”

“Do you know what an armageddon game is?” he asks, and as Dream’s face pales to a shade to match his lost mask, Tubbo moves his pawn forwards once more, his lips curling into a viciously victorious smile. 

They both know that it’s too late for Dream to do anything now. Still, they play.

The set he’d assembled reminds Tubbo of Pogtopia, of the games they played there, of the lessons he learned in those days of the second revolution. One of those lessons (or all of them, depending on your perspective) had been about armageddons. 

You see, Wilbur had always been competitive, even when they were children. With his declining mental health, however, his need to prove himself had only grown, and had molded his already rather black-and-white worldview into one entirely dichromatic. To the Wilbur Soot of Pogtopia, there was only winning or losing, with no room for draw or compromise.

So when Tubbo began teaching Niki to play speed chess, Wilbur had told them both about a common tiebreaker for both blitz and regular chess: armageddon chess, which eliminates the possibility of a draw by making a stalemate an automatic win for Black. 

“Armageddon games make winning completely black and white,” Wilbur had said reverently, like a prayer, like a promise, like a song. “They ensure only triumph or loss, glory or destruction, a player raised or razed. The perfect tiebreaker.”

(Perhaps they should have known what would happen next then and there. Maybe they did know. But the secret truth of Pogtopia was that all of its members, save for perhaps Wilbur and Techno, were just desperate, scared teenagers trying to protect their home, their family. Even if they had known, they hadn’t wanted to, and they’d reacted accordingly. Denial is the first stage of grief, after all, and it had held strong even when faced with armageddon.)

The set he’d assembled reminds Tubbo of Pogtopia, of being bruised and broken and burnt, of chiaroscuro and his family of mismatched puzzle pieces—and those memories had helped him figure out how to win back his sleep, his dreams, his freedom. 

The game goes on. Though it is clear Dream was right about the way it will end, it doesn’t seem to provide him any solace: he plays desperately now, plays frantically, plays like a man who feels the rope tightening around his neck. 

“Draw in four,” Tubbo says once his pawn is sitting in Dream’s back row, and though he’d thought he’d have to play the whole of it out (had thought he would at least need to promote the pawn), he knows the instant he’s won.

There is no brilliant flash of light or sudden storm, no crumbling of worlds or songs filling the sky, no applause or cheering masses. The changes are threefold and trifling, the sort that would only really be noticed by a boy who was once a soldier and a spy:

1. The white masks vanish from the periphery of his vision, there one moment and gone the next, nothing to signify their departure but their absence;
2. Dream stumbles backwards, clutching at his chest, face transformed by confusion and grief and rage so visceral that, for a single moment, he can’t help but feel a bit bad for his tormentor;
3. Tubbo breathes in, and there is something lighter about it, deeper about it, fuller about it, like a weight on his chest or a rope tied around his lungs has vanished. He breathes out, and breathes in once more, and does it again, and again, and again. He is breathing. 

“I win,” he says, and holds out his hand. Dream shakes it, so reluctantly and stiffly that it looks as though he might not be doing it of his own volition.

“You win,” he says, and Tubbo smiles, because he is breathing. 

He is breathing, and it feels like breaking free.

Chapter Text

The Game of Chess:

I

In their grave corner, the players

Deploy the slow pieces. And the chessboard

Detains them until dawn in its severe

Compass in which two colors hate each other.

Within it the shapes give off a magic

Strength: Homeric tower, and nimble

Horse, a fighting queen, a backward king,

A bishop on the bias, and aggressive pawns.

When the players have departed, and

When time has consumed them utterly,

The ritual will not have ended.

That war first flamed out in the east

Whose amphitheatre is now the world.

And like the other, this game is infinite.

II

Slight king, oblique bishop, and a queen

Blood-lusting; upright tower, crafty pawn —

Over the black and white of their path

They foray and deliver armed battle.

They do not know it is the artful hand

Of the player that rules their fate,

They do not know that an adamant rigor

Subdues their free will and their span.

But the player likewise is a prisoner

(The maxim is Omar’s) on another board

Of dead-black nights and of white days.

God moves the player and he, the piece.

What god behind God originates the scheme

Of dust and time and dream and agony?

—

When Tubbo leaves the prison, the sun is setting. Winning back his freedom had taken longer than he would have thought, even with their armageddon game, but he looks down at his communicator and thinks he should still be able to make it home in time for dinner. 

Sam is by his side, surprisingly quiet. He’d burst into the prison soon after Tubbo had won, so frantic he’d forgotten his armor, but who could blame him? Tommy’s death is still fresh in all of their minds, enough so that Sam’s eyes had first darted to Tubbo’s hair, searching for any trace of white and sighing in relief when he found none, before his expression hardened to become the Warden’s steely mask. 

“Tubbo,” Sam had called across the lava, “what are you doing? How did you get in here?” 

Tubbo had already safely returned his set to its box, and so he simply responded by entering the command to move the floating platform into his communicator. Sam had done a remarkable job of hiding his surprise, all things considered, and as the platform approached the cell he watched both Tubbo and Dream with narrowed eyes.

“Well, goodbye, then,” Tubbo said to Dream with a grin taunting, mocking, victorious: a Tommy Innit kind of smile. “And hey, sweet dreams!”

“Fuck you,” Dream snarled, and Tubbo responded by flipping him the bird (or the Philza, as he and his brother have joked too many times to count). “This isn’t over!”

“No, it is,” said Tubbo Underscore-Beloved, no longer president, no longer pawn, and better for both. “That’s what tiebreakers do, y’know: break the tie, bring about the end. Of course it's over. It’s over,” he’d said again, and then, with the smile of a wolf: “Don’t be an idiot, Dream.”

Dream lunged for the netherite, howling in desperate rage, a wounded animal out for blood, but too late: Tubbo had already stepped onto the platform, letting it carry him away. For a brief moment, he watched as the only prisoner of Pandora’s Vault screamed, arms flailing as he tried to grab at prey already too far away to have any hope of catching, and then he’d turned away and just breathed, in and out. Sure, the air of the prison was stale and hot and dry, more so than even Quackity’s quasi-desert, but it was still like sipping the most potent regeneration potion ever made, the waters of the fountain of youth turned to mist. 

“I’m going to call Quackity,” Sam had said quietly once he’d reached the other side. 

“No,” Tubbo said firmly. “No.”

Sam is smart, even if he did let Tommy die, and so instead of protesting, he’d asked, “Why not?” 

“I’ll tell you,” Tubbo had said, “I swear. Just not now, okay? Please, Sam.” 

Sam is smart, even if he did let Tommy die, and so he had just nodded and led Tubbo out of the prison, though not before demanding he wipe his communicator of all the codes and keys he’d used to enter it. That had been expected, and so he had obeyed: it’s not like he has any use for them now. 

(Even if he does, Tubbo’s certain that he can figure out how to get them back. Sam is smart, but Tubbo is really getting quite good at this whole ‘not being a pawn to be pushed around, not being a president to be pulled down, being the only person in control of his own life’ thing. If he can win against Dream, he can win against the man who, smart as he might be, had been stupid enough let Tommy die.)

So Sam guides him out of Pandora’s Vault and into the setting sun, and Tubbo basks in the warmth of a vanishing star. “This is my sunrise, Tubbo,”  Wilbur had told him all those months ago, and he sets his own stake on the sky now, telling Sam, “This is my sunset, you know.” 

“And why’s that?” asks the Warden. He wears a mask, but Tubbo has practice seeing through those now, and can see his concerned curiosity clear as day beneath the calm facade. 

“I won,” Tubbo tells him, patting the box he’s holding with his free hand, and he watches Sam’s eyes land on it. 

“...Tubbo,” he says slowly, “what did you win, exactly?”

“My freedom,” he says.

“Really?” asks Sam, not mocking or doubtful, simply curious in a way Tubbo can’t help but appreciate.

“Yes,” he says. 

“Good,” Sam replies, solemn and sincere. 

“But I need you to do me a favor,” Tubbo says. “For me to be free, for the server to be free, you can’t let Quackity anywhere near Dream. I’ll tell him that, too, but please, you have to trust me here: this is the only way we all stay safe.” 

The Warden studies him with narrowed eyes, and Tubbo gets the uncomfortable feeling that he’s looking directly into his soul, reading his every thought and feeling. Finally, he sighs, and nods. “Alright,” he says, “I’ll keep him away.” 

“Thank you, Sam,” Tubbo says, and means it. 

“You’re welcome,” says Sam. “Don’t break into my prison again, though.”

“No promises.”

“Tubbo.”

“Yes, yes, fine,” Tubbo sighs. “I won’t. Not unless it's necessary.” 

“It won’t be,” Sam tells him, like a promise.

“I hope you’re right,” he says, and looks back at the sky. “Sorry to cut this short, big man, but I’ve got to go. Don’t want to be late for dinner.”

“Have a good night,” says the Warden of Pandora’s Vault to the boy who’d broken into his prison. 

“You too,” says Tubbo to Sam, and with the box in his arms and a newfound lightness to his step, like Atlas set free of the sky, he sets off towards home. 

In the end-

No, not the end. After that: the epilogue, perhaps-

In the epilogue, life is good.

A tension between him and Phil seems to have broken. Though Tubbo suspects he will never think of him as a father again, it seems that the Angel of Death and his mortal ward have begun to remember what it was like to at least be friends, and perhaps someday they will even fall into being a new sort of family. For now, though, Tubbo wakes up to a container of tea sitting on his doorstep with a note telling him to not break any more cups. He begins to drink it in the mornings, and finds it is still infuriatingly good. 

As for Techno, well, he is not Tubbo’s friend by any means, but he isn’t Dream’s, either, and perhaps that is enough. Later, he and Phil will invite Ranboo and Tubbo to train with them in the cavern beneath their homes, and they will spar with no intent to harm, a welcome change for them both. Fireworks still make Tubbo duck for cover, but it does not escape his notice when they vanish from the house of the Blade. It isn’t an apology, but it’s likely the closest he thinks he’ll ever get, and more than he’d ever expected. The two of them are not friends, but they are not enemies, either, and that is enough: enough that someday, Tubbo will realize that his scars no longer burn with Techno around, and it will make him smile.

Tubbo tells Sam and Wilbur and Quackity pieces of his story, in return for the literal pieces they gave him—not all of it by any means, not in detail, not really much more than that he’d made a wager with Dream and needed a chess set to win it, but enough to have Wilbur looking gradually more horrified the longer he speaks. Afterwards, Tubbo sees him with Tommy, asking questions with a manner so frantic and desperate that Tubbo watches them carefully for a long moment, making sure Tommy will be alright before he finally walks away to give them some privacy. They show up to dinner in the mansion that night together, their eyes red and raw, but both smiling wider than Tubbo has seen in a long time. 

Once Tubbo tells Quackity how staying away from Dream and Pandora’s Vault is required to keep both the deal and Tubbo’s safety intact, he swears to do just that. Though Tubbo is glad he’d secured Sam’s cooperation beforehand, he finds himself believing Quackity’s promise, and feeling safer for it. The two of them have an old bond, one forged beneath Schlatt’s bloody hands, and the look in Quackity’s eye is familiar: a fiery, protective rage that had gotten him hurt on the rest of the Manberg Cabinet’s behalf far too many times. Not again, Tubbo thinks with a resolve that surprises even him, and he resolves to keep a careful eye on Quackity, if only to ensure he doesn’t get burned. 

After a while, Niki and Tubbo begin to fall back into their familiar patterns. They exchange books again, though they are no longer about recipes or chess, and that eventually leads to them meeting at the mansion or in her hidden city to talk about them. They see each other more and more often for what Niki calls their “spontaneous little book club” with a laugh. She doesn’t tell Tubbo what’s so funny, but he notices when the titles on his and Ranboo’s nightstands begin to overlap, and can’t help but laugh a little too.

Sometimes, Tubbo thinks Jack Manifold knows more about what happened than he would have thought possible. There’s this look in Jack’s eyes that reminds him of his own: the look of a man who has met Death. Neither of them ever bring it up, but when Tubbo begins to build a shrine to the goddess of death on Snowchester’s shore, Jack appears to help without ever having been asked, and they work together with a quiet sort of understanding. Project Dreamcatcher lives on, but both he and Jack know that they will probably never launch a nuke again. Neither wants to risk returning to limbo.

Eventually, Tubbo works up the courage to sit Ranboo down and tell him it all: not just about Dream, but about everything, about L’Manberg and the days before it and the ones after, about his deaths and his families and his lives. In turn, Ranboo tells him about his memories, about his fears, about his fragmented yesterdays and blurry todays. They hug, and they cry, and they frantically wipe away those tears before they can burn Ranboo’s sensitive skin, and they are the happier for it. They do not stop keeping secrets altogether, but they’re smaller and sweeter now, more surprises than safeguards, and trusting each other is easier than ever before.

And Tommy, is, well, Tommy. Things between them have always been easy, even when life was too complicated for ease to make sense, and that is still true now. Tubbo is healing, and Tommy is too, and they are growing together. “Like tomatoes,” Tommy muses one day at their bench, his pet spider Shroud weaving a web between it and the jukebox playing Mellohi to the wind. “Tomatoes or ivy or something, green things growing together, a support system of vines. Being each other’s trellis. You know what I mean?” And Tubbo does. 

But all of that is tomorrow. 

Tonight, Tubbo returns to limbo as a living man for the last time.

When he wakes up at one side of a chess board, staring into the painted eyes of a smiling mask, for a moment he thinks he’s failed. It is a crushing feeling, one that threatens to grind to dust all that he has become, reduce him to nothing but a pawn once again-

And then he realizes the void is no longer white. 

Dream’s limbo had always taken place in a colorless vacuum, a plane the ‘color’ of untouched snow. Yet now it is black as midnight, one that, despite its darkness, seems to glow. 

It is that realization that lets Tubbo see the being opposite him for what he truly is: not Dream, no matter how similar they might look at first glance. Sure, the green cloak and the white mask are practically identical, but there is an ethereal quality about him, something far more godly than Dream had ever achieved. His mask features an XD instead of a simple smile, one Tubbo recognizes from Tommy’s stories. Similarly familiar is the other masked deity floating beside him, thanks to the glowing trident that she carries, one that resembles a fork.

Drista waves, and he waves back. 

“Tubbo Underscore-Beloved,” says the god opposite him. 

Dream had never seemed to manage to learn Tubbo’s full name, not even after finding out about his husband and son. It is that, more than anything, that tells him who he must be speaking to.

“Dream XD,” says Tubbo. 

The god’s face seems to light up, even with the mask. “Tubbo,” he exclaims, “you won!” 

“I’d noticed,” he says, and perhaps he’s being a bit flippant, considering who he’s addressing, but it pays off. They both laugh, XD loud and jubilant, Drista in muffled snickers as she floats upside down. 

(There is a third voice chuckling warmly somewhere off in the dark, and if he squints, Tubbo can just make out a figure on XD’s other side. She wears a wide hat and a flowing cloak, almost like Philza’s, and though he can barely see her, what he can make out fills him with a strange sense of familiarity.)

“You’ve won! Do you know what that means?” asks XD, pleasant still but far more serious, his now words of weight. “They call it capturing, you know, when you take a piece. Replacing.”

Tubbo blinks. Blinks again. “What do you mean by that?” he asks slowly, for he knows his stories, and knows not to trust a gift without a price. 

“Isn’t it obvious?” XD laughs, spreading his arms wide. “This was Dream’s power, Dream’s gift. He controlled this space and more. But now…” 

A book appears on the board between them, set down in the space between the rows of pieces. A book Tubbo realizes he recognizes, a book that had once belonged to Schlatt, a book that he’d handled so casually: reshelving it with the others, arranging it neatly on Schlatt’s desk, even shoving it aside to make way for important paperwork or festival plans or chess boards. He knows what it is now, what its contents contain, and knows, deep in his soul, that he could read the runes inside as easy as breathing despite both his dyslexia and his never learning the language. 

“The revive book,” he breathes. 

“And that’s just the beginning,” XD tells him. “You know that, don’t you? The power this holds, Tubbo, is beyond even your wildest dreams. You’ve earned this! You’ve beat Dream, and now you can take his place!”

“I-” Tubbo begins, and then stops. Starts again: “I-”

He meets Drista’s eyes. While XD’s mask does not seem to really be a mask at all, a face made of porcelain and distinctly inhuman for it, there is something distinctly mortal about her features. She watches him with a cold sort of curiosity. Waiting, too, though it seems she has a different stake in this game than her companion. There is no joy in her face.

As for the figure in the dark… 

Though the rest of her is hard to make out, her eyes are clear, glowing: if he squints, he can see millions of swirling galaxies trapped within them. They are ineffably kind, her eyes, even with her inhuman nature, and he can’t help but trust her. He can’t help but trust her, so when she shakes her head at him slowly, a warning without words, he listens. 

“No,” he says abruptly. 

“No?” asks XD, and Tubbo finds himself shaking at the sound of that voice, like icy wind through the trees. One wrong step, he thinks, and I’ve lost everything. 

So he takes his time to think. He thinks, and he organizes his thoughts, and he sits up a little straighter. 

Once, Tubbo was President. He still knows how to act like it.

“No,” he repeats, unyielding. “I won’t take Dream’s place.” 

“I’m afraid you must,” says XD, and to his credit, he really does sound sympathetic. “That is how chess works. A piece must step onto the square of another to take them.”

“Not if they’re a pawn,” says Tubbo. “Not if it was en passant.”

The god stares him down, and Tubbo returns his gaze. 

See, that’s the thing about pawns. They are special pieces, strange pieces, ones so odd that they are sometimes not considered pieces at all. Pawns are singularities: they move differently than every other piece, they are the only piece that can completely change its form, and they are the only piece that can take en passant, in passing, without replacing the piece they’d taken. 

It is the only move that can take a piece without replacing it, and it is a risky one. To perform it, a pawn risks itself both by traveling the length of the board and in the move itself, since it is one that often leaves it vulnerable to being captured in turn. As only another pawn can be taken via en passant, it is commonly considered useless, not worth the risk outside of perhaps a blitz. 

But it is possible. 

“Dream was taken en passant,” he declares, quiet, sure. “I won, but without having to fill his space. This is not my power to wield, and I do not want it.”

“You’re sure?” XD hums, curious. “Just like that, you’d give up power most would kill for?”

“I’m sure,” Tubbo nods. “I don’t want the responsibility. I have a son, you know, and I think that’s enough for me. I’m tired.” 

“What do you want, then?” 

“A rest,” he answers honestly. “Sleep, real sleep, Dream-less sleep. Like I said, I’m tired.” 

XD exchanges looks with each of his companions, and then, shrugging, waves his hand. The book vanishes, and Tubbo suddenly feels like he’s beginning to fall, tumbling backwards as his chair vanishes beneath him, the gods towering above him as he sinks into the void.

“Wish granted,” says XD, and it sounds genuine when he adds: “Sleep well.”

“I’m glad you didn’t take the deal,” whispers Drista’s voice as he falls, like a cool breeze, and he closes his eyes.

“I’m proud of you, Tubbo,” he hears as he falls asleep, from a voice hauntingly, achingly familiar, a voice he remembers speaking to once before. “Say hello to Phil for me, will you?”

He wakes up, and, for the first time in a long time, he is rested. His nightmares lessen, his dreams are, if not good, then at least unmemorable, and he never enters limbo as a living man again. 

Tubbo closes his eyes once more, and he sleeps-

But that’s still tonight. That’s still tomorrow. 

In the today, in the now?

Tubbo runs. 

Tubbo runs, with a box clutched tightly in his arms. Tubbo runs, and does not bother to retrieve his apron from the community house. Tubbo runs, and does not stop running, because if he hurries he might just make it home in time for dinner. 

He can picture his family clear as day: Tommy helping Micheal set the table and sneaking him candies from his pockets whenever he thinks Ranboo isn’t looking, Ranboo heating up leftover stew from last night since Tubbo’s the only one of the three of them who can cook worth a damn (which isn’t saying much, since the bar is practically underground), and Michael babbling happily about his day to a willing audience as he stands on a chair to pour water in a glass. They’ve probably started wondering where he is. 

With that thought he runs faster, tumbling into the tunnel to Snowchester and skidding out at a sprint.

He glances down at the box in his hands. Briefly, he considers returning the pieces, and then the mansion comes into sight, and he can just make out his son’s face pressed against the window. Michael begins to wave, and Tubbo clutches the box to his chest with one arm as he waves back. 

So much will happen tomorrow. Life will be good, life will be great, life will be glorious, and Tubbo can’t wait. 

But today?

Today, Tubbo thinks, he will go home, and he will have dinner with his family, and then he will begin to teach his son about a game called chess.

Michael will not be a pawn, he knows that already. Michael won’t be a piece at all. Michael will be a player, White or Black, in control of his own destiny. 

But before that, he has to learn to play. 

I’m going to teach Michael to play chess, he thinks, and smiles, and for the first time in a long time, Tubbo Underscore-Beloved looks towards the future and finds that he can’t wait to see what’s in store.