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How do you grieve for someone who still lives?
What do you do when someone whose eyes you loved have been replaced with cold glass, whose hands that had once been warm now ghosted over your palms like a fall breeze, remembers you just the same as always, but to you feels like a stranger?
Tubbo plants flowers.
Niki had taught him, long ago, what each flower means. Whenever he stopped by the bakery, she had a new bouquet in a fresh vase of water, and each time he would ask what the flowers themselves meant. She told him every time, and eventually gave him a book on the subject, which despite the difficulty of reading, he studied every page of. He had something of a fascination for a language so silent but so pretty. Eventually, he didn’t have to ask Niki the significance of the bouquets on the counter, and just for a little while, they understood each other a bit better until they went their separate ways. Tubbo would never forget the doubled edged meaning of the lotus flower she had tucked in her hair on the day their old home ceased to be.
(self-healing, estranged love)
His own garden had changed plenty over the past year. It had begun with snowdrops that had stubbornly poked through the snow before the spring melt. They popped up around his house in Snowchester, before he had even made plans for a garden, but their presence was a beautifully welcome one.
(hope)
Not long after, Ranboo began visiting more, and Tubbo found himself keeping a small pot of lilac, their soft purple bringing color to the kitchen window.
(first love)
There were often times when Ranboo reminded Tubbo of a bush of peonies. When Ranboo stumbled over his own words, when they seemed so unsure of themself, it was almost as if he’d swallowed the petals and some had gotten stuck in his throat. That if they coughed, Tubbo might see a pink bunch of petals floating their way to the ground. And if Tubbo looked in the mirror, a boy with a peony flower tucked behind his ear would look back at him. Maybe they weren’t so different after all.
Tubbo planted soft pink peonies along the path to his doorstep.
(shame, shyness)
After his and Ranboo’s son finally had come home for the first time, Tubbo decorated Michael’s room with the highest honor he could think of since they were his favorites: pink tulips. When the frost no longer overtook the ground, he moved his flowers from the greenhouse to a plot he thought would look lovely with just a few daffodils and lilies of the valley spread out through a bed of crocus flowers. In a patch visible from a window in Michael’s room, Tubbo planted still more pink tulips and the start of cinquefoil that wouldn’t bloom until fall, but he was willing to wait.
(caring, affection; rebirth; returning happiness; new beginnings; parental affection)
The hydrangea bushes bloomed in summer, and Tubbo found himself making a bouquet for a grave.
(sudden, deep loss)
He started with chrysanthemums, which Tommy never pronounced correctly but loved because of their bright warm color. The red poppies fit in well, and the single peace lily stood tall in the center. He added dandelions, hardy wildflowers, and a few sprigs of arborvitae for more greenery. And zinnias. Tubbo’s whole life felt full of zinnias.
(end of life; eternal sleep; peace to the departed; hope; unchanging friendship)
(an absent friend)
He placed the bouquet and its vase on Tommy’s grave, which no teenaged friend should have to build. No one should have to bury their best friend, and worse, no one should have to make a gravesite for their best friend whose body couldn’t even be recovered.
But, of course, Tommy came back, and the mourning flowers dried up and were forgotten. His best friend had returned, yet part of Tubbo still mourned. The white lock of Tommy’s hair just showed that things would never be the same. Nothing will ever be the same.
The zinnias he kept in his room had lost their color, had dried until they were brittle, but Tubbo kept them anyway.
Ranboo started bringing him flowers. Pink tulips, alliums, sunflowers, dandelions, anything they found on their way to visit Tubbo. He was always thinking of their husband and son like that, always stopping in his path to pick a flower that reminded them of their family, regardless of whether he knew that flowers meant anything at all. Though Tubbo was partial to pink tulips, he felt so very warm when Ranboo brought home a large bundle of baby’s-breath flowers.
(unity; adoration)
(everlasting love)
He kept most of the wild flowers that Ranboo brought him in arrangements at the outpost. His own flowers at home could use a bit of care, and half of the arrangements still resembled grief in some way, but he would maintain those some other time. He would.
A year to the day that L’manburg was founded, Tubbo cut hydrangeas and dark red geraniums off at their stems and carried them in both hands to the crater that was his old home like a funeral march. He did not put them in a jar of water, he simply stood over the edge of the canyon and one by one dropped the flowers down, down, down, fluttering into the water below. He sat staring at those flowers for far too long.
(melancholy)
Later, Tubbo tried making a bouquet to have on the counter at the burger place in Las Nevadas, like the good old days of visiting Niki’s bakery and seeing her new arrangements sitting there right above the glass shelf of pastries. It was hard to keep up with, though. The flowers seemed to die faster in the heat of the artificial desert, and Tubbo had less cheerful flowers to work with. Even if no one else bothered to tell the difference between the flowers, Tubbo would know, and there’s something about having a negative bouquet of flowers rotting away in a week old vase of water that didn’t sit right with him. So, he stopped setting the vase out on the counter.
Ranboo couldn’t understand, nor would he remember, why Tubbo cried one night when Ranboo came home warbling in a language Tubbo couldn’t understand, holding a cedar leaf in his hand like a comfort item he had broken off to hold on his way there.
(i live for thee)
The first snowfall of the year in Snowchester was sudden and Tubbo had woken up and his son was gone, his husband dead. Killed. And just as suddenly, the only flower Tubbo knew was hemlock; hemlock blossoms in his hair, hemlock in his pockets, the smell of hemlock in the air.
(you will be the death of me)
Just like that, his plans for morning glories turned to mourning brides.
(the cycle of life)
(widowhood, unfortunate love)
He waited a few days. Tommy had come back, Wilbur had come back (though Tubbo thinks Wilbur would never stay away), so Ranboo would too. A whiplash of emotions was Tubbo’s new normal, abnormal was his usual.
It was weeks before he heard anything about his husband again. He tried not to think about it, opting instead to focus completely on finding Michael, but whenever he had free time, he dropped tiny blue violet seeds into a planter that he set in the greenhouse. It was the one place no one had touched when they took things from Snowchester.
(loyalty, protection)
When Tubbo went with Techno and Eret to find his son, he wore hemlock and baby’s-breath in his hair. To him, they seemed more and more like the same thing.
As they brought Michael home, Tubbo could only think about how relieved that his son was getting home safe. He softly spoke aloud his plans to make a safer place for Michael, and to never let him out of his sight, and to give him everything he could want; gold, more chickens, a bigger garden, anything. He wanted to give Michael the world he didn’t get to have.
And then there it was. The thing he knew would happen all along. Except, it was different this time. Ranboo wasn’t back, they were just… there. Like Ghostbur, Ranboo’s ghost just filled in the shoes of what he used to be. It was a part of them that was still there, sure, but it wasn’t the same.
Somehow, that almost hurt less.
‘Til death do you part, except when you don’t.
Maybe it was better this way. Tommy had come back different. Wilbur had always been some degree of fucked up, but he still came back different. Tubbo wasn’t sure he wanted to see how Ranboo would change. They would meet again when the time was right. Right now, though, Ghostboo was handing him a pink tulip, and Tubbo thought maybe things would be okay for a while.
The next morning, Tubbo got up early to go back to Snowchester, not that he slept for very long anyway. He wanted to save anything that wasn’t already stolen from the once nice little commune. He trudged up the path to the door, through the barren bushes he planted forever ago for someone who reminded him of peonies. He stopped at the greenhouse at the end of his trip, after going through every other chest in his house, the basement, everywhere he could think.
Dainty violets had finally started growing in their planter, and Tubbo thought when it warms up, he should start planting flowers again. He would work on Ranboo’s bouquet, hell, a whole part of his garden for them, when the ground was no longer frozen. He would keep building things for him and for Michael, and maybe — just maybe he would finish some of their projects.
He already knew that Ranboo’s bouquet would have lavender roses. It would have baby’s-breath flowers, like the wedding bouquet they never held. It would have a peace lily, white poppies, dandelions, and a single cedar leaf just like the one they had picked and carried home. And it would have one coneflower, replacing the peony that Tubbo was considering. Ranboo died for Michael. They weren’t all peony flowers after all.
(unique love; everlasting love; peace to the departed; rest; hope; i live for thee)
(strength)
In the spring, the snowdrops bloomed and a piglin child, a two-toned ghost, and a widower lived together in an arctic home. A locust sapling sprouted in an empty commune.
(affection from beyond the grave)