Chapter Text
“Here’s the plan.”
Ranboo watches as Tubbo smooths out the creases in the large blueprint he’s just rolled out on the table. Machine parts labeled “A” and “B” are positioned next to strange symbols that Ranboo swears he once knew the names of, and diagrams outlining travel speed, length, size, and precautions cover the page from corner to corner.
This is Tubbo’s magnum opus. His pride and joy.
His Time Hopper.
“We go in, we watch the battle, we leave. No dawdling, no interfering, and most importantly —“ Tubbo’s glare darts over to Tommy, who makes a face in protest as Tubbo continues, “No interacting with the L’manburgians, got it?”
“Got it,” Ranboo nods. Tommy doesn’t respond and just grumbles, fiddling with a piece of crumpled-up drafting paper he found somewhere in the workshop.
“Tommy!”
“Alright, alright!” he exclaims, throwing his arms up in exasperation. “I just don’t see why we can’t even say hi. You said we won’t be in our own bodies, right?”
“Well, technically not, but—“
“ Meh meh meh meh meh,” Tommy mocks, “but what? Isn’t the whole point of this ex-cur-sion to show Boob-” he juts an accusatory finger in Ranboo’s direction, and Ranboo jumps back , “what L’manburg was like? What we were like, when we were there? How’se supposed to figure that out when he’s watching from some- some fucking hill?!”
A cold breeze blows in through the open window of Tubbo’s workshop, and Ranboo can see him shudder, hands folded into his scratchy oversized work coat as he rolls his eyes at Tommy. “I told you already, dumbass. We’re not just, like, visiting the past or some shit like that. We’ll actually be there. Travel in the fourth dimension.”
“Could you remind me how this…time-travel thing is going to work?” Ranboo asks, rubbing anxious circles into his arms as he stares at the large, portal-like machine occupying the back of the room. Tubbo’s baby. He’s been working on it for months now, locking himself up in his workshop for hours on end every day to polish it to perfection. Ranboo supposes he should be grateful. After all, the whole reason Tubbo built the Time Hopper was to allow Ranboo to revisit moments in the past that he’d never witnessed, or had simply forgotten (of which there are many). In reality, though, he’s more apprehensive than anything. Ranboo has heard his fair share of stories about L’manburg.
He doesn’t know if he wants first-hand experience to go along with it.
Tubbo runs over to a whiteboard towards the back of the room, Ranboo and Tommy catching up as he uncaps a marker. “Okay — so! There are four-”
“ Sparknotes version, please!” Tommy shouts, entirely too loud for the size of the room they’re in.
“Oh, fuck off!”
“I love you, Tubs, but I do not love you enough to listen to you talk about your sciencey shit for four hours!”
I do, Ranboo thinks, and almost immediately scolds himself for it. It’s a sappy thought, he knows — but it’s true. Tubbo has a mind for science in a way Ranboo doesn’t completely understand, but he marvels at the way Tubbo’s brain can take measurements and calculations and spit out real, tangible, working products. It’s awe-inspiring, if not a bit terrifying. He’s thought out the words “ Tubbo would make a scarily good evil scientist” more times than he’d like to admit.
“Fine,” Tubbo continues, grumbling under his breath as he roughly scrubs out the three lines of equations he’d begun to write on the whiteboard. “Sparknotes.”
“There are four dimensions,” he says, and he draws four large circles in the center of the board, filling them in with different letters as he speaks. “Length, width, height, and time. Normally, when we travel through three-dimensional space, our position changes in, like, a combination of- of those three. And three-dimensional space is-”
“Coordinates!” Tommy shouts out gleefully. “You mean coordinates!”
“I was going to say what we’re in right now, but yes, Tommy. Coordinates.” Tubbo reaches into his pocket, pulling out his old communicator and tapping a few of its green and yellow buttons, faded from a combination of wear and tear. Ranboo’s offered to buy him a new one more than once, but Tubbo insists on keeping his; whether out of sentimental value or pure stubbornness, Ranboo isn’t sure.
“Communicators,” Tubbo continues, staring at the tiny device’s screen as he waits for it to change, “work like - aha ! - work like GPSs. They display position based on length, width, and height, also known as-”
“X, Y, and-”
“ Tommy!”
“Sorry. Coordinates excite me,” he mumbles under his breath. “Like women.”
Ranboo hears it. Tubbo clearly does too, if the smile on his face is any evidence, but he doesn’t seem to know how to respond, and he sighs before turning back to his own communicator screen, a look of fond annoyance in his eyes. Tubbo and Tommy could go back and forth like this for hours if left uninterrupted. Ranboo has seen it. Ranboo has suffered it.
“What I was going to say before I was so rudely interrupted-” he continues, coupled with a pointed glare in Tommy’s direction - “was that travel in the fourth dimension is unique. We do it all the time,” Tubbo says, fingers fiddling together with a combination of excitement and nervous energy, “but we can’t really…like…control it. We can only go in one direction.”
“Forward!” Tommy shouts enthusiastically.
“Yeah, forward. So I figured, if we, like…isolate time? If we isolate travel in that dimension, and then implement teleportation tech, ‘stead ‘a trying to do it all at once…we might be able to go back. I think.”
“I don’t really — I guess I don’t really get it,” Ranboo confesses, shifting in his seat. “I mean — I know you’re doing this for me, to see, like, L’manburg and stuff. And I appreciate it -- actually, I appreciate it a lot. But what do you mean? Like, our bodies didn’t exist at…at this exact position, in the time we’re trying to go to. So just moving through time without…um…moving position? Won’t our…” Brains? No, not exactly. He’s not transporting our brains in time. Souls, maybe? But Tubbo doesn’t believe in that stuff. Too much of a man of science, too much for his own good, sometimes.
“Consciousnesses?”
“Yeah. Those. Won’t they just kinda — float? Without us to…uh…tether them there?”
Tubbo beams. “That’s what the vessels are for.”
Tommy had been slumped over the table as Ranboo spoke, sliding further and further across every time he said a word like “tether” or “consciousness,” but the vessels seem to have caught his attention, and he perks up. “Vessels? Like spaceships?”
“The other bodies, Tommy. Think of it as…” Tubbo pauses, glancing around the room for a moment and pointing at a computer in the far corner. “Changing file formats. We’ll still be us, but our files aren’t compatible with the past, so we just need to — tweak ‘em a bit.”
Tommy seems placated by this answer, Ranboo notes, though he does deflate a little when he realizes there will be no spaceships.
“Anyway!” Tubbo shouts, clapping his hands together. “Less chit-chat, more time travel. We gotta be careful when we go into this machine — no telling what could happen — so no cargo this time. Tommy, that means you.”
“Awww!” Tommy groans. “But I’m hungry!”
“Then eat now, you dipshit!”
Tommy mocks Tubbo’s admonition, voice lilting and nasally as he speaks. “ Eat now, you dipshit! Fine then, Tubzo! Now if you excuse me, I’m gonna go get a sandwich.” With that, he runs out of the room towards the tunnel leading back to the mansion, squeaky soles of his worn boots screeching across the floor.
“You alright, big guy?” Tubbo asks, and he’s clearly distracted by the machine, but his eyes are kind, so Ranboo nods.
“Yeah. Just- I don’t know, this is, like, a big thing. And it’s kind of…dangerous? I just don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to…to do this all for me.”
All Ranboo gets in response is silence. Tubbo is staring at him, expression near-unreadable, and Ranboo is worried he’s said something wrong until his husband bursts out into a laugh, loud and full and very not-angry.
“Ranboo, you idiot. I love you, but I didn’t do this just for you,” he says gently, “no matter what Tommy says.” And Ranboo feels a little stupid because of course he didn’t. Tubbo the engineer, Tubbo the genius, creator of nuclear power and former president of L’manburg, did not invent a time travel machine for me.
“S-sorry! I know it’s, like, a cool science thing, and- like- that’s probably-”
“Nah,” Tubbo continues, oblivious to Ranboo’s internal conflict, “it’s for me too.”
“Huh?”
“Well,” he says lightly, “well, sometimes I feel like, lost. Lost, since L’manburg. I always had a job. I was a warrior, then I was a politician, then I was a president, and I-” Tubbo looks down at his shoes, shakes his head with a smile seemingly nonchalant and grim at the same time. “I don’t know. I feel like I need to remind myself it wasn’t -- wasn’t all I crack it up to be. And also that I’ve changed a lot, in a good way. That I’ve grown.”
“Oh. Um. Yeah. I get it.” Ranboo doesn’t know how to continue from there, so he just nods. And then Tubbo nods back. And all of a sudden they’re nodding, back and forth, nodding aggressively and rapidly to the point where Ranboo’s neck is starting to hurt and this is stupid , this is getting stupid but Tubbo is just so into it that Ranboo can’t stop, not really. So when Tommy comes back into the room, wiping grape jelly off of his lips, that’s what he sees — Ranboo and Tubbo nodding at each other, eyes locked in an intense staring match, knees stiff and hands balled up in fists at their sides.
“What the FUCK are you two doing?”
Ranboo can’t help it — he bursts into laughter, finally breaking the never ending cycle of nods, and Tubbo crows in victory.
“I won!”
“ THAT DOESN’T ANSWER MY FUCKING QUESTION! ”
“Don’t worry about it,” Tubbo smiles. “Ready?”
“Uh, duh,” Tommy replies, staring up at the tall metal frame of the Time Hopper as he and Ranboo approach it. Tubbo smiles and joins them, pressing a few buttons on the machine’s mainframe and turning some dials as he squints to read what look like numbers (Ranboo isn’t wearing his reading glasses). Suddenly the machine is whizzing to life; sparks of color shoot out in every direction and a loud mechanical whirr fills the room.
“Tubbo,” Ranboo shouts over the noise, “have you - have you tested this thing? Is it safe?”
“Only one way to find out!” he grins, and before Ranboo can question his method of experimentation, everything goes black.