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Springtime in Snowchester is wet. Melted snow glistens on the yellowed grass, crystalline and fantastical in the early morning sun. Crows sing— for the dead or for the new day, Snowchester’s citizens could never tell— and the monsters crawl back into the dirt.
There is a clothesline strung between an empty house and a tree. It’s old, barely used, and whistles when the winds pass over it. Tubbo stands in front of a it with a basket at his hip, goosebumps prickling his skin as the breeze fills his nose with the faint sting of salt. (He buried his husband three months ago. When the night was old and the rot had begun to set in, Tubbo buried Ranboo by the seaside. He took a spade to the frostbitten dirt and tossed the mangled body in, shrugged the blazer off its back and didn’t bother to mark the grave.)
Something melancholy hangs over the little country, dull and bittersweet. It is folded into the worry lines of Tubbo’s forehead, tucked behind the eaves of the cobwebbed houses, and lurks beneath trees that keep their leaves all year long. It’s been here for a long time, this distant sadness, and maybe it’ll always linger. Maybe it won’t. But Tubbo is doing laundry, so he doesn’t care.
He cleaned the house the day before. Dusted off the shelves, untucked the sheets, pushed around the furniture until the little cottage felt almost new again. His bedroom is empty and the kitchen is clear of dirty dishes.
Tubbo sighs, setting the wicker basket down and starkly ignoring the metallic twinge at the back of his throat. Do this one thing, and he’ll be ready. One more task, and he can go. He digs a handful of clothespins out of his pocket and starts to hang the laundry.
He never used to do this, before. Not in L’Manburg, not in Pogtopia, not with Ranboo— he never had the time, the money, the patience. Something was always in the way, wether it be Dream, or Tommy’s latest hole he needed digging out of, or a dying nation to rebuild. His clothes wore out and he tossed them in the bin, that was the way it went. How it always went.
He’s tired now, though, and his days are empty enough for chores.
He picks up a pair of trousers, fumbling a little with the clothespin but managing not to pinch himself. He is the last person left in Snowchester, the shell country he did not build to become a home. He is the last, and the houses are empty, the fields are overgrown, and the land has begun to reclaim the forgotten cottages once more. The mansion is cold. The tunnel to the mainland has collapsed.
Something is watching him pin the clothes on the line. It stares with hollow eyes, all blurry edges and the smell of ozone. Blood stains its linen shirt, the white-red-green shimmering ever so slightly against the horizon, and it could almost be a mirage if Tubbo didn’t know any better. But he knows better. He knows better, and he does not have room to love the dead. So he turns and looks the other way, pretending not to hear the pleads of his uninvited visitor.
(Tubbo has a feeling that Snowchester’s been haunted since the day it was founded. Ghosts are feelings, impressions, things left unsaid, and everything about Snowchester is an impression. A fading memory, graphite barely pressed into paper. Sometimes Tubbo wonders if he’s become just an echo, too.)
He inhales, closing his eyes and tasting the brine, sunspots swimming in his vision. He feels himself getting caught in a memory and he’s tempted to relax into it, to let simpler times wash over him even if it’s just for a moment. Inland summer breeze, floating lanterns, pollen and hand-me-down suits. Warm fingers laced with his own.
Scars are fading.
New callouses are blooming.
He’s still tired.
But he shakes it away, reaching blindly into the basket and biting his tongue to hold back the bile bubbling in his throat. L’Manburg is gone. It’s gone, and he’s still here, and— there’s a blazer in his hand. It’s black and smells of lavender, its elbows lovingly patched and cuffs too frayed to be new. Tubbo knows this jacket. It hung on his door for months, smelling of blood and casting shadows across his bedroom floor.
And perhaps his hands tremble as he hangs it on the line, and the back of his head burns from the gaze of the thing in the hills, and the chill in the air makes his hairs stand on end. But the wet earth beneath him has harbored his lies for too long, so his hands are still, his head is clear, and there is nothing but salt in the air.
Tubbo used to wish on stars when he was a kid. For freedom, for love, for peace. Grand things he couldn’t accomplish with his own two little hands. He thought that it was his fault when they slipped out of his grasp, his fault for not wishing hard enough after they’d won and he’d put down his sword. So when the Festival was over and there was nowhere else to go, he painted them on the ceiling of his room in Pogtopia and he wished on those, too. For smaller stuff. New shoes. Enough oil to fuel the lanterns. For the nightmares to stop. And still, they granted him nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing.
He doesn’t know when he stopped wishing.
All of a sudden his knees go weak and he swoons, the world wavering slightly as he tries to force himself back to earth. He catches himself on the line, the metal digging into his palms and head swimming as his eyes bore into the ground. The jacket rubs static into his hair but he doesn’t pull himself away. Breathe in, breathe out. Everything is fine.
“Fuck,” he says to no one in particular, because what else is there to say?
New beginnings. That’s what this is— that’s what hanging a dead man’s jacket on a clothesline you’ve never used is supposed to be. New beginnings.
Tubbo isn’t stupid. He knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Understands that he’s tied to this land, this earth, strung in place by fate and distorted beyond recognition by the packed ice. He knows he cannot go without leaving something behind.
But he has to leave, of course. And what stays here, the thing he must give up to be able to keep walking, will be both a reminder and a promise. A vow to let go softly.
And he will. He will let go. But for all his posturing, there is a tiny sentimental stone buried deep in Tubbo’s chest, and it aches at the thought of leaving his nation behind. But it isn’t his nation, is it? It’s a graveyard, a few hundred acres of haunted garbage he forged into a home against the wishes of the very earth itself. The mobs, the cold, the barren land— a warning that foolish boy did not heed.
He’s smart enough to listen, now. He exhales, letting his eyes shut for just a moment before letting go of the clothesline.
He’s ready.
Tubbo walks out of Snowchester alone that day, leaving behind a clean cottage and fresh clothes swaying in the wind. The grass leaves stains on his boots and for once, he doesn’t care. He does not say goodbye and neither do the ghosts.
But he thinks things might finally be okay.