Archive of Our Own

(1)

It’s hard to tell exactly what happened before he wakes back up. Everything before feels blurry, fuzzy, not quite real. Ranboo knows it was, though. Despite the issues it feels like it was seared into his mind.

He was dead, and now he’s not. He’s out of limbo. Ranboo is free.

It takes him a second to process that he’s lying on his back in the grass. It takes him another to realize he’s not consciously breathing, and the pressure on his chest after over two decades of not having to bother breathing feels like it’ll crush him. The air does too, though. He doesn’t know which is worse. 

There’s a voice, someone else present with a voice he recognizes instantly, but he’s not focused on the other person right now. He’s sitting up, planting his hands in the soil, levering himself upright just to see if it would help the way he feels. (It doesn’t, but he can still feel the sensation fading over time.) 

Prime. It’s been twenty three years, but he’s alive. He’s out of limbo. He’s not going to fade away into oblivion like he thought he might. 

Just focusing his eyes feels like a struggle. There’d barely been anything to look at in limbo, just him and his book and water as far as he could see (and then an infinity further past that) and so he’d gotten used to just… staring, as far as he could, or watching his own hands. There wasn’t anything in between the two. The wall of the prison in front of him, though, sits in a blurry wall of blacks, and he only knows that’s what it is because what else would be in front of the place he died? He’d been killed (slaughtered, sacrificed, shattered) on the grass outside the prison, with everyone watching, soaked in water with no armor to protect himself. Now he sits on the grass with no blade at his throat, alive, breathing, with only one other person standing in front of him.

Ranboo picks up his hands to move and gets distracted by something else that’s wrong. He’s not black and white anymore, the black lightened and the white darkened until they both end up as shades of murky gray: not the same, but similar enough that neither could be mistaken for their original colors. He’s not the same. He’ll never be the same again. It makes something sink in his chest that almost leaves him panicking for a moment, before he realizes he’s alive and the slightest hint of emotion isn’t going to lead to actual physical harm. 

He’s got a lot of adjusting to do, doesn’t he? 

The other person standing nearby crouches down next to him, waving a blurry hand a few feet in front of his face. They’re short, with hair on the longer side and a white hat that resembles bunny ears resting on top, and it takes Ranboo a second of blinking before he can process that they’re looking at him with what seems to be concern and speaking.

“Ran? Ran, can you hear me, are you alright?”

Things from while he was dead, from his ghost, are vague at best. All he’d had to go off while actually in limbo was his book, but now that he’s been revived… things, familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time, are filtering into his mind, and he’s got so much to sort through but only one person ever called him Ran. 

“...Aimsey?”

It hurts to force the word out. He hasn’t spoken in years. There hadn’t been a point. 

His vision’s cleared up now. It hurts a bit to refocus his eyes sometimes, but just the fact that he can is enough to see that Aimsey visibly brightened up at that, despite the fact that Ranboo had been audibly disoriented. 

“Yeah, Ran, it’s me. I’m here. So are you.”

Now that he’s got existing back under his belt, for the most part, next comes figuring out what had happened. His head’s still a bit fuzzy, and it’s hard to put together the pieces when he thinks that thinking too hard might just cause the biggest headache he’s ever had, but just bringing one hand up to his head makes him think his hair is shorter than he remembered and there’s still a trail of dark red leading down the leg of his suit pants. 

His crown is gone as well. It’s nowhere in sight. Neither is the sheet his ghost had worn, or his suit jacket.

Ranboo’s not focusing on those right now though, because the moment he’d realized, he’d processed that he remembered. This wasn’t the vague maybe-or-maybe-not memory from when he’d first been alive, but instead something that felt seared into the cells of his brain, something more like what he thought normal people experienced memory as. It was something permanent.

He could remember the feel of the sheet’s fabric against his skin, the seeing-but-not feeling of watching through it, the weight of a decaying crown resting on top. He’s not Ghostboo, but he remembers it all. It feels strange.

“Yeah… yeah. I’m here. We’re here.”

Briefly, he processes that it’s dark out. Usually he wouldn’t even pay attention to that. He’d been in the dark for two decades already. Before his death, Ranboo thinks it would have been much more of a bother than it is now. Back then, he’d hold torches to walk through tunnels. Now it doesn’t even feel like the light level matters. 

It does matter, though, because the sky is lightening and the stars are fading. The sun is rising.

Aimsey stands, reaching out a hand towards Ranboo. He takes it, levering himself upright onto unstable legs.

(He remembers that Wilbur had had a memorial where he died. There’d been a shrine, there had been a collection of the things he’d loved, there had been a mark. When Ranboo looks back down at the grass, it’s blank, and he doesn’t even know how to process the way that makes him feel.)

“Do you know what happened?” Ranboo asks, because there’s a gap in his memory for once since his death. He doesn’t know how he came back to life. “Who brought me back, or… anything?”

Aimsey pauses for a moment. “I don’t think so? I haven’t heard anything. I hadn’t even seen you in a while. I was just taking a walk around the area and… there you were. Here you are.” They smile, happy but a little sad. “I’ve never met this you before, although I’m pretty sure you knew that. I only really knew the other you.”

Ranboo makes eye contact, ignoring the shiver it sends down his spine. (It’s worse than usual. He hasn’t seen another pair of eyes in a long time.) “We’re not that different, but there’s never a better time to start.” He sticks his hand out, a mirror to Aimsey’s from earlier. “Hey there. I’m Ranboo. I don’t think we’ve met.”

Aimsey takes it, shaking it. “Aimsey. I think we have now.”

Ranboo thinks he should be angry. He should be upset at how long he was abandoned. He should be furious at how long it took for someone to even bother. All he can care about now, though, is that someone did care, and he’s standing in front of Ranboo right now.

“Do you have a place to stay, Ran?” asks Aimsey, interrupting his thoughts. “Because I don’t know if you’d want to go back to that empty mansion now that you’re not, yknow… dead? And I know you have a house, I’ve been there, you showed me the rug, I remember that, but…” She sighs. “I’m asking if you’d want to stay with me for a bit. I’ve got a new place, Daisy Hollow. It’s just me in there, over behind the castle.”

It makes him pause, for a second. Does he want to go home, right now? Does he want to go back to somewhere that’s been near-abandoned for twenty three years (nine months in the living world, he thinks it is) just to resume everything like nothing ever happened, just to have to face the people he cared about who barely even tried to look for him while he was gone? He’s barely even adjusted back to being alive at this point, maybe he can just… take a bit of time.

“Yeah,” is what he says. “I think that would be nice.”

(2)

Even just walking the Prime Path feels like a novelty now. It feels like forever since he’s just had the space to walk around, let alone somewhere this familiar. It’s been renovated, but the wood under his shoes is still one of the closest things he has to a comforting sound.

(And yeah, he snags a grass block from the side of the path as he goes. Prime, it’s been forever since he just got to hold a block of grass.)

The issue with the Prime Path, though, is that it’s not empty or in the middle of nowhere. It’s in the middle of everything, right where everybody is. Most importantly, it passes right through Tommy’s land. 

Ranboo doesn’t realize Tommy’s actually home until it’s too late. 

It starts with him and Aimsey walking past. Normally that would be simple, but Tommy’s walls are still up (Ranboo has a memory of helping with them, he thinks, right at the start of everything) and it takes longer to climb over them than it would to just break them and walk through. Ranboo’s not going to do that, though. If the walls are still up, there’s a reason for them.

(Sometimes even if the walls are taken down, they’re still up. Ranboo knows this for sure. Even if the walls aren’t visible, they’re still present.)

It starts with footsteps on the wood, and it starts with the opening of a door. It starts with just one simple word: his name.

“Ranboo?” 

Ranboo freezes mid step. 

“Tommy?”

He turns. There, standing in the doorway of his house, is Tommy. He’s gripping the frame with one hand, still mostly inside his home, with his mouth slightly opened in shock. He looks older, since the last time Ranboo saw him, with his hair grown out slightly more in a style closer to Wilbur’s,  and it’s only been nine months but it feels like forever.

“Holy fuck, you’re alive? How- what- you- how? How long, just… what?”

“I don’t know,” Ranboo answers, and he’s not sure which question that’s an answer to. It might be all of them. 

It feels like he’s frozen, with Aimsey beside him, like he knew he was supposed to keep walking and where he was supposed to go but his feet wouldn’t follow along with him. He doesn’t know what to say, how to hold a conversation, because Prime it’s been twenty three years of him alone and he doesn’t know what to do. It’s like he needs to relearn everything, all the secret unspoken rules of conversations and interactions and existing, because it had been decades to him since he’d needed to follow them.

Maybe, though, Tommy was one of the only ones who could actually understand. After all, he was the first out of all of them to be brought back to life. Ranboo had heard him talking about it all when he’d come out of the prison, unwilling to be touched and angry at Ranboo for taking what seemed like his only stability away.

“You don’t know how you got brought back?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“I just kinda found him in the grass over by the prison,” Aimsey chimes in. “Nobody else was there or anything. He wasn’t even awake at first.” 

Tommy pauses for a moment. “You,” he says, pointing at Aimsey. “I don’t think we’ve actually ever met, somehow.” He takes a few steps forward, out of his house, onto the grass, onto the path. Ranboo notes that there are alliums planted along the lawn, and Tommy makes an effort not to step on them. (He thinks he might have planted those flowers himself, back when Tommy was first gone.) “And you,” he says, turning to Ranboo, “I thought you wanted to be dead. Why are you here, then?”

“I… what?” says Ranboo, eloquent as ever. “I didn’t want it. Why would I ever want that?”

“That’s what you said right after you died. To me. To my face. You said you wanted to be dead, you were happier, and I should try it too. ”

Ranboo’s mind is still scattered, memories disjointed and disorganized, but oh no he thinks he remembers that one. He’d… said a lot of things on that first day. Most of them should have been red flags for his own stability in limbo right from the start, or just red flags for his stability in general. 

(He regrets most of that. Maybe, if he hadn’t said any of that, they’d actually have tried to bring him back.)

“I’m sorry,” he stammers out. “That was horrible of me, I just… I don’t know why I did that-”

“Good, dickhead. You should be sorry.” Tommy sighs, stepping forward within arm’s reach of Ranboo. Then, quickly, he throws his arms around Ranboo, pinning Ranboo’s own arms to his sides and squeezing him like he thought he’d never see him again, burying his own face in Ranboo’s shoulder. “I missed you,” he says, voice muffled, before letting go and stepping back again.

It was the first real human contact, not something like a handshake, that he’d had since his death, and oh man he’d forgotten how much he missed it. 

“I missed you too, Tommy,” he says, getting as close to looking at his friend’s eyes as he can without discomfort. “It’s been a long time.”

It’s been a long, long time. 

Tommy smiles, just something quick. Then he turns back to Aimsey, saying, “I still don’t even know who you are. Or how you know Ranboo. Or why you’re here.”

“I’m Aimsey, I’ve actually been around here for a few months, Ran welcomed me back when I joined and we hung out for like a week? Then I found out about the whole ghost thing and he left and I didn’t see him again until… now, actually. Like twenty minutes ago, maybe? I’m not quite sure. But I was just going to bring him back to where I live, because I didn’t know if he had anywhere to go and when I asked he said yes, so that was where we were going.” It comes out fast, a rush of words that Ranboo thinks they might have taken more time on if they’d realized and if Tommy hadn’t been watching and nodding along like he understood every syllable, because he definitely did. 

(Maybe letting the two of them run into each other was a bad idea, actually. Ranboo thinks if given enough time the two of them would probably get along like a house on fire, but hopefully without the fire this time. If there’s anything he wouldn’t want, it’s a repeat of how his friendship with Tommy had started.)

The sun’s getting higher in the sky now, and it’s all just starting to get brighter around them. Ranboo hasn’t seen the sun in a long, long time. He hasn’t seen this much light either, honestly. It’s starting to hurt his eyes a bit, but he’s forcing himself through it. If he can’t even tolerate daytime anymore… Prime, that would be annoying.

It’s Tommy who first starts to notice Ranboo’s obvious discomfort. Of course it would be Tommy. Tommy, who’d spent two months in a pitch black void as part of his own limbo, and Tommy who’d spent weeks locked in the prison outside of that. 

“Look, it’s nice to meet you and all that, Aimsey, but I’ve got things to do for the day, yeah? I’m not gonna keep you two here since you’ve got somewhere to go and everything, so just….” and he turns back to Ranboo, “I know. And you know that I know. So if you ever just want to talk, and I’m assuming you’re not ready for that yet, you know where I am. And Ranboob-” Ranboo stifles a groan, but does it with a smile, “-you’re still a bit of a dick. Just remember that. Always. At all times.”

“Of course, Tommy. I know. It was nice to see you, too.” It feels too normal, too usual, to just keep interacting with his friends like nothing has happened, but he kinda likes the familiarity. One of the things he’d hated so, so much as a ghost was being treated differently, like he wasn’t the same person at the core of it all. Yeah, things have changed, but… he wishes they hadn’t.

And now he’ll be able to see Tommy again, whenever he wants. (This one, though, is a change he welcomes. He’d been alone in limbo for so long.)

It’s one of the few reasons he doesn’t feel guilty when he’s turning down the Prime Path to keep walking with Aimsey. After all, Tommy’s not leaving any time soon.

(3)

Daisy Hollow is nice and all, but Ranboo’s pretty sure it wasn’t really built for more than one person. Aimsey has an extra bed, and his height isn’t even the issue in most places like it is sometimes (and he thinks it makes his chest hurt a bit when he realizes Aimsey might have even designed it like that with him in mind, because she doesn’t exactly have the same height requirement) but just… it feels strange, taking up this much of a place built for one person when he’s got his own perfectly good one sitting, empty, in the Arctic with Phil and Techno. 

It’s why after a few days he finds himself saying goodbye to Aimsey, just temporarily, to head back through the Nether back to his own home. He’d stayed away to avoid conversations, heavy questions, interrogations, but he’d survived a conversation with Tommy so… he should be able to handle it, right?

When he’d come back to life, he’d done it without any armor in his inventory, and he doesn’t know why. Just to be safe walking through the snow, Ranboo had borrowed a pair of iron boots from Aimsey, and it leaves him feeling the most exposed he had while alive since… he doesn’t even know when. He’d always had netherite. Always.

The boots are enough, though. They keep the melting snow from touching him, removing any possible risk of burns, no matter how low it had been in the first place. He’s not really in the mood to have to deal with water burns. He never is, really, but a little extra caution never hurts. 

The Arctic is quiet. It’s dark out, which Ranboo expected, because he’d purposely left at night when the light wouldn’t strain his eyes as much. (That particular bit of coming back from the dead hadn’t actually gone away yet. He really hopes it will. He doesn’t want to be stuck as someone nocturnal.) The lights in Techno’s house, though, are still lit, and smoke still curls from the chimney. He’d always kept odd sleep schedules, so it’s not unexpected.

Still, Ranboo just walks through the snow towards his house, back in the little nook in the mountain, partially blocked off from the rest of the world. It’s quiet and cold and dark in there, and he already knows that, but it’s familiar. It’s his, built with his own two hands, and not only that but it has Michael and his pets and the comfort that comes with the beings he’d want to be around most.

He doesn’t want to have to look at the rug on the floor upstairs (he’s not that guy anymore, hasn’t been that guy in years, and looking at the face so different from his own hurts ) so he’s glad he left a bed in the basement along with the rest of his mess. Everything he could want is already down there, and it’s so much more spacious than any of the rooms above. He has spare armor, his pets, his storage…. just about everything.

Everything except Michael, of course. He refuses to bring Michael down into the basement. Maybe it’s foolish, but he still hopes that one day he’ll be able to bring Michael back to Snowchester, one day when it’s safe and his son isn’t at risk of death from multiple directions. It’ll be easiest, when that happens, if Michael and his boat don’t need to be raised from the basement, so Ranboo’s set up another room hidden behind the walls for the piglin. 

It’s been a few days since he visited, and not by choice. He tries to keep the room supplied for as long a break as possible, just because he knew even before coming back to life that sometimes he wouldn’t even be able to show up, but nothing can replace Michael’s dad.

(He’s here now, though. He won’t leave again, not willingly, ever.)

It’s one of the best nights of sleep he’s had in forever. (It’s one of the only nights of sleep he’s had in forever.)

That is, until he hears a knock at the door above the next morning.

It’s barely even loud, or hard. Still, it feels like it rings through the house, interrupting the little bubble of peace Ranboo had managed to form. It sends a little bit of fear rushing through him, because who would know he was here? Who would find him? He climbs the ladder back to the entrance, opens the door… and it’s Techno. It’s his neighbor. It’s his friend.

(Techno had been the last thing he saw before he died, the last voice he heard as well. At least, if anything, he’d died knowing his friend cared, because just that admission from Technoblade was worth more than the world.)

“Oh, uh… hey,” Ranboo says, because when he’d opened the door Techno had imperceptibly frozen in place, eyes widening. “Techno… how are you?” 

It takes a second for Techno to speak. “Ranboo, how are you here?”

“How did you even know I was here?” Ranboo shoots back at him.

Techno raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Ranboo, you left footprints. ” 

“Ah. I may have forgotten that’s… a thing that happens.” He wasn’t even lying, he kind of had. He’d gotten used to just… not leaving a mark in the snow. That, or he’d spent so long not seeing it that he’d forgotten. Both could be true. Ranboo wasn’t sure which one was the true answer.

(Having what was basically two sets of memories of the same time period in his mind was definitely messing him up a bit.)

“Look, Ranboo, I just-” Techno starts, and it’s suddenly right then that Ranboo processes that it would probably be polite to invite his neighbor inside instead of leaving him out in the cold. After all, he’s a piglin from the Nether he must be freezing-

“Do you want to come in?” he blurts out, interrupting Techno mid sentence. “Like, it’s, um. Warmer in here, and all that? And cold out there. So if you want, you can just-” 

Techno steps through the door, fur-lined red cape swirling behind him. Ranboo doesn’t exactly have a place to sit, but standing in the warmth is better than standing in the cold. He steps back, perching himself on the stairs next to his old Live laugh love sign.

(He’d told Wilbur once that Live was the only capitalized word there because it was the most important one. Ha. That one aged well.)

“Now, Ranboo,” Techno starts again. “Last time I saw you, you were lookin’ a bit different.”

“Yeah,” says Ranboo. He looks down at his hands. (Gray. It’s all just gray now.) “Last time you saw me, I was also a bit more dead than I am now. So that’s changed, too.”

“You’re alive again.” 

“I am. Yeah.”

“How?” 

“Honestly, I don’t know. I just… woke up, outside the prison, three days ago. Then I came back home today, went to sleep, and you woke me up knocking on the door.”

Prime, this is awkward. He’s always been the most awkward around Techno and he’s not sure why. Maybe it’s their similarities. Maybe it’s the fact that Techno is just as awkward in return. Maybe it’s the fact that he got introduced to Technoblade the war criminal before he was introduced to Techno his friend. (Maybe it’s just the fact that he never knows what to say anymore.)

“I’m sorry,” Ranboo says suddenly, and he’s not sure what exactly prompts it but he says it anyway. “For dying, and all that. For getting arrested in the first place, even though I still don’t know why. It was all supposed to go smoothly and it didn’t because of me. So I just… I had some time to think, yknow? And I just… I don’t know, I just needed to say it.”

“No, you didn’t.” Techno sighs, bringing one hooved hand up to the bridge of his nose. “Ranboo, it’s not your fault.”

“It’s not?”

“No. If anythin’ it’s entirely Sam’s fault. Or partially Dream’s. Or the system’s fault itself. It’s not yours. All you did was die, it’s not like you could stop that.” 

(Techno thinks, maybe, he could have stopped it. If he’d moved a little faster, fought a little harder, maybe. Ranboo’s standing right in front of him alive, though, and the past can’t be changed anymore.)

“There’s no shame in death,” Ranboo murmurs. “Only shame in killing.” 

He was the one who’d said that, right? That had been him, weeks or months or years ago. That had been his ghost. 

It doesn’t stop him from feeling like he did something wrong, though. Techno doesn’t either. After all… wouldn’t they have tried harder if he hadn’t done something wrong? He doesn’t even know what he would have done, of course, other than die.

Ranboo finds himself looking at the floor. It’s easier than processing that he’s not alone anymore. (Just because he’s been telling himself that this all isn’t going to vanish in a moment doesn’t mean he believes it.)

“Listen, Ranboo, I’m gonna be honest, it’s cold out there, but it’s cold in here, too. If you wanted to, yknow, come into my house or somethin’ I wouldn’t exactly be opposed to that.”

Yeah, yeah it is cold in here, isn’t it? And dusty as hell as well, he hadn’t exactly cleaned in the past months. He’d come back out here to avoid taking up too much space with the others, to avoid people, but… Techno’s house was always warm, to him, and he can recognize an invitation when he sees one.

“Sure, yeah, I’ll- I’ll come over there. Just for a bit.”

(4)

The snow starts falling for real once Ranboo’s inside, an old blanket around his shoulders while he sits on the couch, just like old times. It’s almost enough to pretend nothing had happened, if he doesn’t look at his hands or his legs and doesn’t think too hard. Techno was right, it was warmer in his house, and it always had been. At least Techno’s was lived in, and was taken care of when it wasn’t.

He’d kill for a mug of hot cocoa right now, he thinks, even if it was just to cup it between his hands. Warmth felt foreign after that long in limbo. 

It’s after Techno ducks downstairs, though, looking for some thing or another, that the door opens.

Ranboo jumps. It’s not opened gently or quietly. There’s no warning. The loud noise feels like an explosion against his eardrums, and it leaves him wanting to cover his ears with his hands as if it’ll make the memory of the noise go away. (He catches himself halfway there.)

In steps Philza, shaking the snow off his wings. He’s not looking at Ranboo, but Ranboo feels like he’s frozen. Prime, he… really hadn’t been expecting another person today. His social battery is drained just from talking with Techno, he’s not used to people, he barely feels alive on the best of days right now- 

Phil turns to close the door and meets Ranboo’s eyes. He freezes in place, making eye contact. Skin prickling, it only takes Ranboo a second to break it.

“Ranboo…” Phil says, looking like the energy he’d had walking in had been drained right out of him. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. (He had.) “You’re. You’re here.”

At this point maybe he should just start shouting his return from the rooftops. Surely word should have spread by now, right? “I am. Yeah.”

“... How? ” 

“I don’t know. I woke up, Aimsey found me, I stayed with him for a few days, I came back here, Techno brought me in here. I don’t know what happened before that except on my end.” He thinks that’s the most condensed version of the story he can possibly give. Every single person asked, his explanation got shorter every single time.

“And you don’t remember who brought you back?” Phil questioned, bordering on concern. Ranboo thinks that’s a first. Had anyone else been concerned? He can’t remember.

“I don’t. Nothing. Just waking up.” Honestly, despite how clear his memory had been at the very start, it’s gotten frustratingly blurry again. Maybe he should invest in another memory book, just to note everything down before it all slips away again. He doesn’t want to forget any of this.

Ranboo ends up squeezing his hand a few times, wishing there was a pen or a quill or something in there even if just to hold. He misses the familiarity of being able to hold something.

Having thoroughly removed the snow from himself, Phil ends up walking further into the room, passing Ranboo on the couch and turning back to get another look at him. “You look like shit, Ranboo.” 

Ranboo chuckles, humorless. “Yeah. I do. Being dead for that long will do that to you.” 

Phil’s face drops for a second, imperceptible, except Ranboo’s looking. He’d spent years having nothing to do but watch for the slightest changes where there were none. Somehow, in two decades of isolation, he’d managed to get good at reading people, and it was strange. The moment passes and then it’s gone, with Phil back to his usual self, giving him a smile that feels just a bit forced at the corners. 

“If you want, I could try and figure out who did it,” Phil suggests to him, but something in his tone implies to Ranboo that it wouldn’t just be figuring out. It’s right then that it clicks that Phil was there at Ranboo’s death… and there after it, while he’d been talking to Tommy and telling him everything.

Every single time he thinks about that first day he regrets it, wants to apologize another time, because half his friends had spent nine months believing Ranboo was happier dead than he’d ever been alive, and here was Phil offering to hunt down whoever had taken that away from him. 

“No, no,” he says quickly, “that’s alright, you don’t need to, I don’t… mind or anything. This is better, believe me.” Every second in limbo had felt like a hell of its own. Prime, he’s glad to be out of there, and he’d never want to go back or send anyone else there. Nobody else would deserve that. Ever. No thanks, he’s sticking with pacifism, no killing for him.

“You sure, mate?” 

“ Yes. ” 

Phil doesn’t ask what limbo had been like for Ranboo, and he’s thankful, because just the thought of explaining the feeling of his soul slowly dissolving over the course of more than two decades is enough to send a shudder through him. He pulls the blanket tighter around himself, thankful for the warmth it leaves draped over his shoulders and the pressure it gives. 

It’s then that the sound of Techno climbing the ladder from downstairs drifts upwards, and as he sticks his head up onto the house’s main floor he turns to look at Phil and then Ranboo, then back to Phil. “Oh, uh… hey, Phil, didn’t realize you’d be back this soon. How was the trip?” 

“Went fine other than the snow. So, Ranboo?” Phil replies, pointing over at him, and Ranboo just sighs, because there’s no way he’s not going to be explaining this all night, to the very limit of what his increasingly spotty memory would allow. 

At least the blanket is warm, and Techno keeps the fireplace well stocked with wood. The light doesn’t hurt his eyes as much as it used to. Ranboo’s taking this as his win for the night.

(5)

Days later, he finds himself wandering over near Las Nevadas.

Ranboo’s not sure why he’s there, honestly. Maybe it’s just the urge to look around at what had happened with familiar places while he was gone. Either way, he’s in the desert, wandering towards that specific clearing across the river that he remembered so well. 

He’d died there, back when the crater had been a burger van. He’d blown himself up to save Tubbo. If he hadn’t died there, killed himself there, he’d never have ended up dying at the prison. He wouldn’t have spent decades in limbo.

Either way, he finds himself not regretting it one bit. 

The sun’s setting by the time he fully makes the trek from the Arctic to the former location of the Wilburger Ranvan, but it leaves enough to illuminate a figure standing by the edge, looking down at the crater. Ranboo recognizes him immediately, of course. Wilbur is the same man who’d laid the TNT there in the first place. 

He hadn’t expected to find Wilbur there at all, but Ranboo thinks it must be better to just get it over with. Of all the people to explain his life to… Wilbur would definitely be one of the more interesting conversations. He’s not sure in what way.

Ranboo stops right before the edge of the treeline, clearing his throat so he’s not catching Wilbur off guard. Wilbur straightens, turning, eyes widening behind the pair of round glasses he always wears. (Ranboo’s not sure why he does. Anyone who looks close enough can see they don’t even have lenses.) 

Ranboo smiles, tentative. “Hey, Wilbur. I’m back.” 

“Ranboo?” Wilbur gapes, mouth open slightly and eyes wide, before seeming to catch himself and recompose. “You’re here. I haven’t seen you in a while.” 

“Yeah, there’s… a bit of a reason for that. You see, I was- well. I was a little bit dead?” Wilbur hadn’t been there when he died. Wilbur hadn’t been at the prison break. Wilbur had never seen his ghost. The logical conclusion was just that Wilbur had no clue, because there was no way the communication on this server was anywhere near good enough for him to find out. 

Wilbur’s face drops. “You were dead?” 

“Yes.” 

“It was me.” It’s not a question, it’s a statement, and yet it can’t be farther from the truth. Wilbur doesn’t know that, though. Ranboo does.

“No. It wasn’t.” Ranboo steps out from under the trees, into the clearing. The sun’s still setting, and it leaves the clearing tinted orange with light. “That was a death. It wasn’t the death, though.” 

“That’s good, at least. That’s good.” Wilbur runs his fingers through the floppy edges of his hair. “I really though, Ranboo, when you didn’t come back, that I’d been the one to kill you.” He freezes for a second, before adding, “Not that it was a good thing! Obviously, dying isn’t a good thing, but just… it wasn’t me. ” 

Ranboo gets it. He does. There’s a relief in finding out that death hadn’t happened because of you, that you hadn’t laid the explosives that killed. (There’s pain in finding out the opposite, but he hasn’t stumbled across that just yet.) 

He’d thought the way he died had been alright. It had happened in front of everyone, executed in plain sight in the middle of the day for a crime he never committed, executed to save his son’s life, executed to bring Dream back to his cell. He’d thought it was enough to bring him back, because they’d watched him die. 

To some people, though, his death seems more like a rumor now. He’s not sure they even paid attention. Why would he have been dead for nine months otherwise? Why would they have left him in that much pain?

“Yeah, I get it,” is what he actually says. “I was dead. It wasn’t because of you. It was Sam, actually. In broad daylight. In front of everyone. And then they left me dead, for nine months, and I still don’t know why I’m back.”

Wilbur gives him a humorless chuckle, turning back to the hole, still standing at the edge of the crater he’d made. “When I told you we were similar, Ranboo, I didn’t mean you should die like I did too.” 

Ranboo joins him at the edge. The rock below is scorched dark, and he knows if he looked hard enough he’d be able to see the long-dried remains of blood. He remembers jumping off the pressure plate, being blown up. He remembers coming back weeks later when he could finally stomach the sight just to see what was left. It doesn’t bother him anymore, because it feels like forever ago. 

“I never even meant to die. He…” Ranboo abruptly remembers that he’d never told Wilbur about Michael, but there’s no point in hiding when Wilbur could just ask Techno or Tubbo or Eret and get the same information. “He had my son, and he was going to kill him if I didn’t comply. That’s why I was killed. I needed him to live.” 

“And then you were dead for… nine months, you said? That’s nine days, isn’t it?” Wilbur turns to look him in the eyes, and Ranboo’s reminded that out of everyone on the entire server, Wilbur probably understood him the best right now. He was the one who’d come the closest to the same amount of time in limbo as Ranboo and been revived. The only other person who knew was Tommy.

“Other way. Nine months in the living world.” He can’t hold eye contact for this one. He breaks it.

“ Oh. ” 

“Yeah.” 

Wilbur doesn’t speak for a second, but Ranboo can see the gears spinning in his mind, probably trying to calculate the actual amount of time Ranboo had spent in limbo. Finally, he just says, “That was longer than you were alive before that.” 

“Longer than I know about, at least. As far as I know, I died the day after my eighteenth birthday. Happy birthday to me, I guess.” 

The two of them are the only two on the server who properly know what it feels like to have years of their lives that were never truly lived. They’d each had over a decade in limbo, a decade remembered only by them. Honestly, they should probably talk about it more, but that can wait. 

Ranboo looks down into the crater left behind when he’d blown himself up, listens to Wilbur Soot apologizing for a death he hadn’t even been present for and couldn’t have stopped, and thinks he should be the one apologizing for it instead.

(+1)

He’s spent his entire new life avoiding Snowchester.

Maybe it was the amount of time Ranboo had spent there as a ghost. Maybe it was him being afraid of what he’d find. Either way, one day he finds himself standing at the edge of the water tunnel, fully armored, trident in hand, bracing himself to dive underwater.

(He knows the real reason he’d been avoiding Snowchester. He knows why he’s here now. It’s Tubbo. It’s all Tubbo. Of all the people he’d been afraid to see, Tubbo was at the top of the list, but now he needs to change that.)

The water is cold, as always. So is Snowchester. Ranboo’s slammed by the wall of cold air on the other side, launched into the snow with the speed. He stumbles, catching himself, before realizing that the wall he’d leaned himself against was Tubbo’s house. 

Was he really ready to do this? He’d been back for a week max, and he’d spent nearly a year avoiding Tubbo after the burger van incident at this point. It felt like a recipe for disaster to shove himself back into Tubbo’s life.

Still, that was his husband, and Ranboo still cared about him deeply. He owed it to himself to at least try and talk to him.

He leaves footprints through the snow while walking up to the front porch. It’s snowed recently, and everything’s covered with an extra blanket of white. Ranboo’s thankful for the railing up the side of the stairs, no matter how little he actually needs it, and then he’s standing there, in front of the door, staring at it, hand raised to knock.

It takes him a second to think through it. Yes, he wants to see Tubbo again. Yes, he’s afraid to see how he’d react, but it’s easier to pull the bandage off now than run into Tubbo by accident in a few months and risk even worse rejection. 

Before he can chicken out and leave, he knocks. Ranboo steps back a bit, leaving new prints in the fresh snow on the spruce porch, and waits.

If Tubbo doesn’t answer, or if he isn’t home, Ranboo can just leave and go home. He half wants to, honestly. This might be the most emotion he’s felt since his death, and it’s all going into making his hands tremble and his heart race. Prime, why did he- 

It takes a second, but the door swings open, leaving Tubbo standing there. They stare at each other, Tubbo at Ranboo and Ranboo at Tubbo. They don’t speak, until they do.

“You’re not real,” says Tubbo, and closes the door in his face.

Well, crap.

Ranboo knocks again, harder, and this time the door opens near-instantly. “What do you want?” demands Tubbo, looking him straight in the eyes in a way he barely would have before. 

“It’s me,” he says, before Tubbo can close the door again. “It’s me and I’m real and I’m here. And I’m alive. And I wanted to see you.” 

Tubbo moves to close the door again, but this time Ranboo reaches out to stop it in place before it can click back into the lock. Tubbo’s eyes widen for a second, looking shocked, before he stops pushing back against the door.

“I’m real, I swear,” says Ranboo. “If I wasn’t real, could I do that?”

The door swings back open, hitting the wall in the same place as an established dent in the wood. Tubbo doesn’t push it back.

“You’re…” Tubbo reaches out and grabs his arm, the lighter of the two. Ranboo doesn’t stop him. “You’re actually here. This time, at least.” 

“Yeah. I am.” Ranboo slowly lets a smile grow. “I’m actually back.” 

“How long?” 

Ranboo brings up his other hand to count days on his fingers. “Well, um… a week, maybe? I think?” 

Tubbo stares at him for a second, then drops the arm he’s still holding. “Come inside, then. It’s cold out here.” He turns away, walking further into his house. Ranboo moves to follow, but is stopped just inside the doorway by Tubbo pointing at his boots and telling him to at least wipe his feet, cleaning these floors every time snow is tracked inside is annoying, and it feels like he’s stepped back into a little bubble of his old life for a moment. 

There’s activity in the kitchen, and he knows it’s just Tubbo because he’d just watched him walk in there, but something deep inside him thinks it’s Michael, back in his original house to make their little family whole again. He knows it’s not Michael, because Michael is still back at Ranboo’s actual house in the Arctic. Still, he can’t help but imagine it. 

Ranboo seats himself in his old place on the couch in front of the fireplace, with the blanket he’d made himself still laid over the back (his first attempt at knitting, which hadn’t turned out all that good, but he’d decided to keep it anyway) and just lets himself get comfortable. It feels strange, finally being able to look at a fire again without having to close his eyes and look away, but also it feels right. 

It turns out what had been happening in the kitchen is hot cocoa, made the same way Tubbo always does. A mug is passed into Ranboo’s hands, warm against the lingering chill from outside. Tubbo sits next to him with a mug of his own, leaning against the opposite arm of the couch. 

They don’t speak for a while, sipping hot cocoa and just existing.

“Oh, fuck this,” says Tubbo, breaking the silence. “I don’t know how you can act like nothing’s actually changed here.” 

“I… what?” 

“I wasn’t even there when you died. I had to find out from fucking Technoblade, of all the people. I had to exist around your ghost for months . Then here you come, alive again because nobody knows how to just stay dead for some reason, acting like none of that happened. I don’t get it.”

“ Oh. ” His cocoa doesn’t hold the same warmth as it had before, he thinks. “I’m sorry.” 

“I didn’t even know you ended up in prison. I made you a cake for your birthday. I split it with Tommy after the death message.” 

“I’m sorry,” Ranboo replies again, not knowing what else he could possibly say. How would he even fix something like this? His mug has no answers, no matter how far he stares into the dark liquid inside. 

“Stop apologizing. What’s done is done.” 

(He shouldn’t be letting himself feel this angry, Tubbo thinks. After months, years, of pushing everything down to make everyone around him feel better, to make himself feel better, he doesn’t think he can stop the responsive surge of guilt.)

(Ranboo pushes down the urge to apologize again. It won’t do anything, no matter how much he thinks it will.) 

“What’s done is done, and the only thing left is to keep moving,” says Ranboo, looking down into his mug, “and it’ll happen whether or not the two of us are still here.” Here, together, he wants to add, but he doesn’t. The world keeps spinning either way, but I still missed you while I was gone. I think you missed me too.

He looks up at Tubbo, and Tubbo looks back. Reflexively, Ranboo avoids Tubbo’s eyes, but he has a feeling that just like before he died, he’d be alright looking into them. 

“I did keep moving,” says Tubbo, hair in his eyes, and it reminds Ranboo of the day the two of them met. Tubbo had been wearing a too-big suit and gave him a tour, and his hair had blocked his eyes. “I kept moving for nine months without you. You were supposed to be the one that stayed, and you weren’t.”

“I didn’t choose to leave. Not this time, at least. Not then, and not now. I came back. I’m doing my best.” 

They both are, honestly. Physically, they’re both only eighteen. Ranboo’s got a couple decades more than that in his memory, but all he’d been able to do during that was think. Ever since he’d woken back up, he’d been doing his best, and he thinks Tubbo had done his best to never stop. 

Tubbo bites at his lower lip, thinking. “I don’t think we can ever go back to how we used to be. I can try, though.” It’s an olive branch, one that Ranboo gladly reaches towards. One of the things he’d been most afraid of was absolute rejection from Tubbo. He doesn’t think he needs to be scared anymore. 

“I’ve been keeping Michael safe,” he replies, extending his own olive branch in return. “We can go visit him, if you want.” 

Tubbo smiles: small, but it reaches his eyes. “I think that would be nice, actually.”

Ranboo sets the mug down. It’s definitely long cold by now. He stands up, unfolding himself from the couch, and for a second he’s tempted to grab his blanket. He leaves it, though. It would just be something extra to carry through the snow.

He looks at Tubbo. “I missed you.” 

Tubbo looks back. “I missed you, too.”