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Tubbo woke up feeling like a corpse.
The room was greying with dawn. He had drifted in and out of sleep during the night, never seeming to be able to quench the constant worry that ate at him. Rest was something he seemed to be unfamiliar with; every minute of sleep came with an hour of inertia in the morning, or a dreadful nightmare, or a mind-haze so dense he couldn’t think.
It didn’t help to wake up in a house that felt deeply unfamiliar. The mansion had metamorphosized in his eyes, skewing into a place that felt as far from a home as a swamp was from a prairie. Tubbo lived in a dark oak crypt, a ghost of a place that had all reason to be intimate but had distorted into the empty husk of a hearth. It left Tubbo wondering where the home he longed for even was, or if it existed at all. Every home he'd ever found had been an illusion.
Little feet shuffled on the wooden floor, and Tubbo pulled his eyes open to see that Michael had climbed out of bed and was tugging at the corner of his sheets, wide grey eye staring up at him. “G’morning,” Tubbo yawned, reaching out a hand. “Come on up, come on.”
Michael grinned and stuck up his little arms, running closer to be lifted onto the bed. His hoof feet scrambled up the side of the bed as Tubbo pulled him over the edge.
Michael pushed his face into Tubbo’s side and settled under his shoulder, sighing contentedly when Tubbo ran his fingers through his hair. His whole body was only the length of Tubbo’s torso, smaller than any toddling human child would be. Ranboo used to fret over it, but they chalked it up to a stunt in growth from the period of illness that had followed his first trip through the Nether portal.
Those weeks had been filled with so much worry that Ranboo and Tubbo never left Michael’s side. Once they brought Michael through the portal from the Nether, the damage had been done, and sending him back, even if it weren’t dangerous, wouldn’t help. They’d tried. They had both taken turns camping beside this tiny baby’s cot, watching his small chest rise and fall as he fought a blazing fever. The alkaline overworld air had made parts of Michael's skin peel away, bloody like a deer’s velvet--it’d made Tubbo dizzy with worry to see so much blood. The piglin's left eye had swollen shut, purple and green and oozing yellow. One night, Tubbo woke up to the smell of rot and found the eye dangling out of its socket, shrivelled like a fruit pit, and Tubbo had spent the rest of the night retching over a bin. It had been left as an empty socket after that, just a dry hole in his face. Michael’s remaining skin had healed on half his skull, leaving a soft division between smooth bone and downy, thin hair. Green veins cobwebbed across it, pulsing slightly. Tubbo rubbed his thumb over them now, unafraid.
He thought about those early days often lately. Ranboo had been scared Michael was going to die. Funny, he should have worried about himself.
Tubbo laid back down against the headboard and held Michael close. The blankets were hanging off Tubbo’s side of the bed. He couldn’t bear to think that the whole bed might be his now.
The mansion revolved around Tubbo and Ranboo like a snail’s shell. Without Ranboo there it deteriorated, crumbling where he used to hold it up. The kitchen was made for two, and the beds were pushed together in a pair. Tubbo knew he wasn’t enough to keep it going the way Ranboo could--he would forget the lights off most of the time, and the vines that grew on the exterior would never be trimmed, and the floors would gather dust that Tubbo wouldn’t notice. He missed when the house wasn’t falling apart.
Watching all of that hurt, it did. It hurt on his skin like a burn, but that wasn’t the half of it.
What hurt more was missing Ranboo’s quiet late nights, their treks through the garden to do chores. He missed the days when all Ranboo did was busywork, and all Tubbo did was make Ranboo laugh. He missed having someone to badger, someone to joke with; he missed having someone else to think about, and someone to think of him. There was a suffering that sat in his chest that Tubbo hadn’t begun to accept: somehow, somewhere along the way, Tubbo had lost his companion.
That was more than a surface burn; that was an ache, a full-body agony Tubbo couldn’t bear. He had lost his person. His company. His best friend.
And now he was awake, and his son was asleep under his arm, and he was alone.
Tubbo gently laid Michael down on his pillow and slid out of bed, walking dizzily to the tiny kitchen down the hall and picking up a lit candle on his way.
The room was something like a servant’s kitchen, or maybe just a storage nook, with a small furnace and devices scattered around and stored in the cabinets.
Behind a window in the wall, red and green eyes faded into view. He still wasn’t sure this recurring ghost wasn’t a hallucination--it surely wasn’t a trick of the light, because the eyes blinked when he walked in, crinkling at the bottom as if in a smile.
He frowned and ignored the black and white ghost, making a beeline for the brewing stand on the counter in the corner of the room. He filled the beaker over it with water and let the small flame bring it to a boil. A brewing stand was his haphazard solution to not having a proper place to make coffee, and lately he hadn’t found the time or the strength to leave the mansion to ask for a second opinion.
Tubbo pulled a cup from the cabinet and set it down, reaching up for the coffee powder he kept out of Michael’s reach. The thin sheets of filter paper stuck together stubbornly, sliding out from under his shaking fingers when he tried to grab one from the stack. He bit his lip in concentration, willing his weak hands to be still long enough to properly wedge the pieces apart.
The tremor in his hands never left. It might’ve been brought on by the knockback of some brain-scattering explosion or another, or it might’ve been from years of cuts and burns, the same ones whose scars crisscrossed his knuckles. He wouldn’t have known either way; it was only in this quiet, eventless life that he even noticed how much his hands shook.
It bothered him.
The window underneath the cabinet fogged from the heat of the candle that sat on its ledge. Tubbo looked up from where he struggled with the filter paper and caught sight of a hollow, fading person he barely recognized as himself. His face was built of patches of discolour: blue eye bags cut deep into his cheeks, and a purple, wrinkled scar cupped his jaw and pushed his mouth irreversibly into a frown. His lips were pale white, and the rest of his face had gone waxy yellow in the light. He shook his hair to cover his eyes and did not look up again.
Tubbo took the beaker off the flame, pouring the boiling water over his cup. It sank through the coffee powder, quickly turning a dark black. He threw the dripping filter into the cauldron he had been using as a waste bin. The candlelight lit the coffee up from behind and turned it gold, and Tubbo thought maybe it looked a little too beautiful for what it was.
He considered downing it now, hot, but he knew in the back of his mind there was something sitting on the shelf above his head that he wanted more. It was a part of a terrible habit, he knew, but it tempted him all the same. Filling with simmering guilt, he reached up to grab a little jar of blaze powder from the cupboard.
A part of him settled with satisfaction as he unscrewed the lid--the disgusting kind of satisfaction that comes from feeding an insatiable habit. He tilted it over his cup. The powder fell easily from inside, mixing smoothly with the coffee and leaving a gold sheen on its surface.
He took it like a shot of liquor, closing his eyes at the burning on his tongue and sighing when it settled in his stomach. It pumped energy into his veins, putting to rest the heavy worry that sat always in the back of his mind.
Something loathsome about himself knew that if he added gritty redstone, the high would last him the entire length of the day. He couldn’t bring himself to do it--that would mean becoming a little more alike to someone he wanted to forget--and he settled instead for the mere hours-long warmth that sat in his lungs.
The ghost was still watching him from the window. It was a familiar appearance, the black-and-white spirit with the red-and-green eyes. Sometimes it spoke, but mostly it just watched, grinning at him like it was now.
“You know,” Tubbo said, looking fully at it. Adrenaline sat tight in his throat, loosening his tongue--if he looked in the mirror he might have seen his eyes glow like toxic waste. “Wilbur taught me how to take a shot,” he said, his voice smoother than it was rough. “It was whiskey with him, though. Or fiery potions that we let brew for too long.” He hated that the skill still came in handy.
The figure nodded, face still spread into a wide smile. Like it understood.
Tubbo wasn’t sure why he continued. He had woken up today tireder than he did on most days. The words spilled from his mouth like dry ashes, coating his tongue in soot. There was no one important here to hear him say any of this; this phantom wasn’t Ranboo. “I would’ve smoked if it didn’t remind me of Wilbur. I don’t want him to think we’re the same, you know? Not that he doesn’t already try to convince me.” Smoke like Wilbur or drink like Schlatt? At least one was still dead and couldn’t see it. Ranboo would’ve flinched at the bitterness in the laugh he gave, but the ghost didn’t care, and Tubbo didn’t care either.
The spirit blinked once.
“Can’t have Wilbur’s eyes on me too much. I can’t do that to Michael. Wilbur would ruin him.” He laughed drily again. “Though I might be doing that already.”
He looked down at his empty cup with its soiled filter. The ghost met his eyes when he looked back up. “Sod off,” he whispered defeatedly. This ghost wasn’t Ranboo.
It smiled and disappeared.
Michael was snoring lightly when Tubbo walked back into the room. He sat on the edge of the bed, the scent of cigarettes on his mind.
It had smelled like smoke the day Ranboo died for the second-last time. First it was cigarette smoke, all the way through the tunnel where Wilbur had led Quackity’s horse. That should have been his tip-off that something was wrong, but he had been too nervous to notice. He barely remembered the control room, the bargaining. The fighting. His head was on his knees for most of it, his hands over his ears. His terror fragmented his memory. It was the tunnel, then the arguing, then the rumbles and crashes as Quackity and Wilbur launched themselves at each other and fought tooth and nail.
Then Ranboo, blurry in Tubbo’s memory from the panic that consumed him. Ranboo’s complimentary eyes. A warm hand on his shoulder, and a familiarness to go with it. Trust, comfort, surety--things he hadn’t felt in weeks.
Then the acid smell of TNT smoke, rushing up the ladder he clung to, filling his nose and his eyes. A terrible, terrible dread, one that ripped his stomach through his skin, that melted his brain into sludge and sent it down his throat. The moment was still vivid for him, clear as if it were still happening. It was pain that choked him until his fingers weakened on the rungs and he fell back down the ladder, landing in the earthy ruins of the room, hands sinking into the torn-up soil that Ranboo stood on seconds before.
It was radio silence from Ranboo until Technoblade told him he’d died for good. Gone forever.
Then it was numbness. Nothing at all. Tubbo had… detached.
He could not recall the days after that. He lived like a stranger watching himself, postponing the grief that had threatened to swallow him. He must have tended to Michael, must’ve farmed and harvested, must’ve written to anyone who wrote him first. He didn’t remember a single second of it, not until a week after when he came painfully back to consciousness and found himself sitting in Phil’s cabin, a cup of honey and a cookie in his hand.
Seems like this honey is curing a lot of heartache , Phil had said with a tired smile. Or I hope it is, anyway.
The sweetness had brought him back to the present, back to the anguish he had shut away. He cried at Phil’s that day.
Michael stirred next to him now, eye blinking open. His face pulled up into a small grin, little tusks poking up from his bottom lip. Tubbo smiled lightly down at him. “Let’s get up?”
He nodded sleepily, snuggling his face against the bed. Tubbo pulled him up and carried him against his shoulder with one arm, climbing out of bed.
“We’ve got to go out and get some potatoes for you, boss man,” Tubbo mumbled, reaching up to hold Michael’s drooping head as he walked down the hall. He talked absently, just to have a little company. “You want to go outside? Hm?”
Michael didn’t answer. Tubbo wandered into the foyer and found his coat. His boots were muddy from his trips outside in the garden, and they were about to be muddier. On the bench over his books lay a long circle scarf--it was Ranboo’s, for taking Michael around the grounds when he was a little baby. Tubbo never learned to use it. For a while, Ranboo couldn’t be seen without Michael on his back, and it made Tubbo smile.
Tubbo pulled on one arm of his jacket, then transferred Michael’s weight and put on the other. He found Michael’s tiny hat and put it on his head, covering his ear. He shoved on his boots.
It wasn’t painfully cold outside. Michael saw the sun and pushed to be let down, jumping in the mud and trailing behind Tubbo as they both made their way to the garden.
That was how they two would spend their morning, picking potatoes for a late brunch. They ate together at midday--neither were very hungry these days--and found themselves bored by evening.
Tubbo made up things to do. Not games, per se, not when exhaustion always lay so heavy on him, but he showed Michael how to build towers, how to cross his eyes. He showed him how to mash potatoes and lick the spoon. He showed him how to sort, how to sweep. When Ranboo was here, their days were bigger; they’d work together to make obstacle courses that spanned the halls, put together parties for made-up holidays. They’d make a messes readily, plaster drawings all over the wall, throw toilet paper over the balcony on the second floor.
Now Tubbo was tired, and things were quieter. The sun set.
He led Michael to his little cot, gave him a hug and a pat, and remembered, this time, to blow out the lights.
Tubbo fell asleep on his side of the double bed, hands clutching his sheets, and dreamt that there was someone at his side.
Miles away, an unfearing traveller set foot on Snowchester soil.
Tubbo woke up feeling different.
Michael was at his bedside again, nudging him awake. Tubbo pulled his blankets aside groggily, reaching with both hands to lift Michael off the ground and put him on his lap. He bounced him on his knee. “Good morning, big man,” he said, smiling with a yawn. Michael waved, head bobbing with each spring of Tubbo’s knee.
“You hungry?” Michael shook his head and pointed outside, legs waving excitedly. Tubbo stilled and looked behind him out the window. The roof was covered in a new, downy layer of snow. Thick snowflakes stuck to the glass. “Oh, did it snow?”
Micheal kicked his legs harder. Tubbo wasn’t sure what was special about this snowfall--they lived in a tundra, they had seen thousands of blizzards--but something like a vague excitement grew in Tubbo’s heart.
“Tell you what,” he said, mirroring the grin on Michael’s face. “Let’s go out in the snow.”
Micheal squealed. He wrestled his way out of Tubbo’s hands, hopping to the door. Tubbo laughed and climbed out of bed, following a running Michael through the hall and down the stairs. When he joined him in the foyer, Michael had found his jacket already and was dragging it on the floor.
Tubbo helped him into it, smiling at how thick and big it was compared to Michael’s little torso. He helped him step into snow pants and let him wrestle with trying to put on his hat while Tubbo put on his own coat.
They waddled outside once they were ready. In places, the snow reached up to Tubbo’s thighs, light and pure white. Michael jumped off the doorstep and practically disappeared in it--Tubbo had to fish him out of the snow by the hood of his jacket.
They played. Tubbo watched Michael run and plow through the snow, content as could be. Tubbo showed him how to make a snowball.
That was a dire mistake; by the time it had reached midday, Tubbo’s face was red with snowball assaults. Michael was sopping wet. Tubbo pushed his way through the dense snow that surrounded the mansion and struggled with the door, his freezing fingers slipping off the knob. He felt something around his legs and looked down to see Michael hugging his knees tightly, looking up with a grin on his face.
His heart ached with affection for this little toddler. He scooped Michael up in his arms and squished him tight, pressing his face against his son’s fuzzy head. Michael laughed and squirmed, wrestling his way out of Tubbo’s arms with an infectious giggle. He ran back into the mansion, tiny arms waving for balance, snowy boots leaving a wet trail as he went.
It was a bath and a nap for Michael after that. He settled in his cot and fell asleep within minutes, arms and legs splayed out like a starfish. Tubbo lay in his own bed and stared at the ceiling; he was tired again, but for a few hours he hadn’t been. He wanted to fall asleep and dream about it.
His mind had other plans. He laid awake for an hour, thoughts coming and going like drifting sailboats at sea. When his back finally grew sore, he pulled himself upright, deciding instead to wander the halls.
As he stepped out of his bedroom, a thump startled him, echoing from the entrance hall.
He followed the sound of it, running his hand along the railing of the balcony. Tubbo reached the crest of the grand stairs.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
A voyageur stook in his foyer. Pelts of different colours covered her shoulders like partly-cloudy sunlight, thick and lush and flowing into one another. Three haversacks hung off her back, held by ropes of leather, and she rested a spear on the ground like a walking stick. Her jaw was strongly set as she looked around the hall, her hat casting a shadow over her eyes. She looked up and met Tubbo’s eyes.
Her face split into a smile. Tubbo’s breath stopped.
“Bit chilly up here, isn’t it?” she called. Her face was older and sun-weathered, but the shining eyes that looked up at him were unmistakable; his fondest memories were weaved with their appearance, he wouldn’t ever forget his childhood friend. The mansion soared to life. The lights brightened, the floors warmed, and Tubbo felt his heartbeat in his ears.
“Aimsey!” he cried breathlessly, stumbling down the stairs, skipping steps and clinging to the handrail.
She opened her arms and caught him in a hug, warm and secure. A chunk of frost from her hat fell on Tubbo’s forehead. She laughed. “How are you doing?”
Tubbo pulled away, wiping at his face. “I-Good,” he said. “I’m good. What- you’re here? How are you here?”
She laughed again, taking in the room. “I’m here. I thought I’d pay you a visit. Was about time. Oh, that’s a nice chandelier.”
He nodded at it. “How did you find this?”
She shrugged, eyes twinkling. “Asked around.”
His head was reeling. She was the first person to step into his house in millenia; it felt like a cocoon being broken open, fresh air streaming in. It felt like nectarious sunlight pouring into a room in the morning, turning everything honey-gold.
The house felt honey-gold. He felt honey-gold.
“You’re staying?” he asked, giddy in a way he didn’t know he still could be.
She grinned. “If you’ll have me.” He scoffed playfully. Of course he would, of course. She punched his arm. “Show me around.”
He took her around. The lower floor was mostly empty, many of the rooms populated with stored materials and papers. He pointed out the gardens and the backyard, and then the rooms upstairs, the kitchen and the bedrooms.
“Who’s this?” Aimsey asked, stopping in front of a portrait in a golden frame. Tubbo hadn’t gone in this wing of the house in ages, he had forgotten the painting was there. It was of the three of them: Ranboo was looking adoringly at a baby Michael in his arms, and Tubbo’s face was split into a grin wider than the ocean. Aimsey pointed at Ranboo.
Tubbo opened and closed his mouth, finding a way to place the words. “My dead husband,” he said, spitting up the words like tonsil stones. The world had suddenly greyed.
Aimsey gasped softly. “Oh,” she said, eyes wide. “I- uh, and this?”
“Michael,” Tubbo said quietly. “Our son.”
Aimsey’s eyes only got wider. “Your son- is he… is he still here?”
Tubbo’s eyes caught for a moment on Ranboo’s expression before he turned fully to Aimsey. He forced lightness, as much as he could summon, onto his face. “Yeah, in the other room. He’s napping.” His smile hurt his face.
She smiled at the portrait. “He seems like a sweet baby.”
Tubbo’s heart was full of something like melancholy. He missed the excitement that had budded minutes before. “He’s older now than in there,” he took the chance to add. “He walks and everything, He’s not much bigger in size, though, he’s very little.”
They faded into silence for a moment. “Ranboo,” Aimsey said, and a shudder went through Tubbo. “Is that him?”
She was reading an inscription in the bottom. Tubbo hadn’t even noticed it. He nodded, watching Ranboo’s doting expression. His hair framed his face like a nimbus, overgrown but fluffy and soft to match his expression. He was leaning slightly toward Tubbo, their shoulders just touching.
Tubbo touched his own shoulder in turn. So familiar.
“You two were really close, then?” Aimsey asked.
She asked too many questions. Tubbo’s head was full of static. “Best friends,” he said numbly.
Her eyes were on him. “I’m sorry,” she offered.
Tubbo tried to shake off the vignette of grief at the edge of his vision. “Happens,” he said with as much lightness as he could muster. “You know how it is.”
Her eyebrows pinched in pain. She nodded.
He wasn’t used to having someone else here when he felt like this. It was nice, in a strange way. Took him a little bit out of his head.
He spoke before the lump in his throat could get any bigger. “Want to meet Michael?”
She did. He led her around the stairs and toward his bedroom where Michael slept. She admired the woodwork on the walls and the ceiling as the went, head craned up to see. Tubbo grabbed a lantern from the hallway and pushed the door open.
Michael stirred and made a little noise as they looked at him over the side of the crib. She beamed, taking in his small form. “He’s beautiful,” she whispered.
Tubbo paused and made a quiet decision. “Here, let me pick him up.”
She looked up at his eyes. “You sure?”
He nodded, smiling. No one but Ranboo had ever held him before. He deserved to have someone more than Tubbo to trust.
Michael’s eyes blinked open as Tubbo gently scooped him up from the cot, turning to show him to Aimsey. “You see, Michael? This is a friend,” Tubbo whispered to him, a million years of age lifting from his shoulders. “An old, old friend.”
Aimsey smiled and took him gently from Tubbo’s arms, smiling down at Michael’s soft face. She held him close to her chest. Tubbo watched Michael drift back into sleep, safe and shielded behind her furry cloak, and remembered, for a second, how it was to breathe.