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Messing with your hair was less of an ordeal when you were younger.
You were thirteen. You just wanted to look like Tweek Tweak, and Tommy and Eryn told you it was kind of stupid, but you were teenagers, so who fucking cared?
Was it cringe? Perhaps. Were you delighted with the result? Absolutely.
When Tommy saw your bleached blond hair, laughed, and said you looked like you could be his brother, you were on cloud fucking nine.
You kept your hair blond for years. Every time the brown roots would grow out, you’d touch them up with whatever was the cheapest bleach you could buy, and most of the time it made your scalp itch and tingle and sometimes it left parts of your hair orange, but Tommy always joked that the two of you could be related, and just for that it was worth it.
Tommy would help you bleach it sometimes. You taught him how to mix the concoction, and he would complain loudly about the smell and cough if he got too big a whiff of it.
But he parted your hair with the same precision he used when sewing, carefully maneuvered around your small growing horns, asked you if he was doing it right every few minutes, brushed stray hairs out of your face whenever a strand dared to tickle your nose.
You travelled to the Dream SMP, one after the other. Tommy left first, promising to get you an invitation, and within the next week, there it was. The owner of the land had oh so graciously extended Tommy a single plus one.
Eryn remained behind. He had other places to be, things to do, adventures to have on his own. He ventured out alone the day before you departed.
Wilbur had been intrigued by the small new kingdom. At the time, you didn’t know what the gleam in Wilbur’s eyes meant, but you packed up as much of your belongings you could carry on your person and set off.
You brought bleach with you, as much as you could reasonably carry. And he continued to bleach your hair
Again
and again
and again
through everything.
Wilbur’s arrival? L’Manberg’s formation? Its independence? Didn’t matter. You’d find a time when there wasn’t walls to be built, or Wilbur shouting orders, or threats on your lives, or swords clashing in the dead of night or TNT exploding just outside your borders or or or
You liked your blond hair. You liked looking like a dumb little TV character you used to love. You liked looking like Tommy, despite your growing horns. You liked sitting on the edge of a tub in a shoddily built bathroom while Tommy mixed some bleach from an already open packet of powder and a bottle of solution, carefully measuring out the right amount into a bowl so he didn’t make too much or too little and none of it would go to waste. You liked Tommy muttering to himself as he parted sections of your hair so he could get at the roots.
It was... nice. Intimate? No. Affectionate? You’re bad with words. Something along those lines.
As Tommy carefully brushed some hair away from your horns to get at the hair near their base, a word popped into your head.
Brotherly.
That’s the word.
You stayed blond. For a while.
Until Wilbur and Tommy’s exile.
Schlatt was... well, he was bad. But not “bad” as in Bad, like, BadBoyHalo, no he was “bad” as in terrible, horrible, wretched, awful. A tyrant if there ever was one. If you looked up the word “tyrant” in a dictionary back then, and even now, you would not have been surprised to see a picture of Schlatt standing at his podium, eyes wild and angry, hair neatly pushed back between his horns
Horns.
Yours were growing. Had been for years, ever since they first poked out of your forehead at around ten years old. They grew slow, but they grew.
Oh, did they grow.
By the day of the festival, they were beginning to turn outwards, ready to curl around your ears to your jaw and perhaps continue, creating twin inward spirals at the sides of your head
just
like
Schlatt’s.
But they weren’t there yet! They weren’t that big. You could still file them down maybe, keep them from getting to that size, because you knew that when they did get bigger, which was inevitable, they would grow to look
just
like
Schlatt’s.
You died at the festival. A few well aimed fireworks burnt half your body and left you with wounds that festered even after you came back, your second life taken by some fucking pig in a crown and encouraged by a dictator gone mad with power.
Well, Techno wasn’t just some pig in a crown. That was rude. His ideals aligned with yours, for the most part. He was on your side. Techno wasn’t bad, he was helping you, and dealing with his own shit, and he knew, he knew that when all was said and done, a betrayal was coming his way anyway. There would be no anarchy in L’Manberg once its proper title had been reinstated.
And you took some solace in the fact that when you went down, so did Schlatt.
A small victory.
Didn’t take the pain away from your burns, though.
You remained in Pogtopia, for the most part, from that point on. Going back to Manberg would have been dangerous now that Schlatt knew you were a spy. Pogtopia was, unwillingly, your home.
You had no access to any mirrors, unless the side of a polished blade counted.
But you knew your roots were beginning to grow. They were always visible about two weeks after your last bleach, and you always waited just a week more to touch them up.
Brown roots, sticking out of your scalp, persistent despite your repeated insistence that they remain flaxen like Tommy’s or Tweek’s or
anything
but
brown.
You didn’t have time. Half your head was covered in bandages anyway, so maneuvering around those would be harder than trying to work around your horns that just wouldn’t stop growing
Just like your hair. Always growing, unstoppable.
Tommy trimmed your hair once, when you both had time. Stuck in a small damp room carved from stone, nothing to sweep the hair away with, only swords and shields and axes and TNT. Supplies for soldiers, not
this.
“It’s gotten so out of hand,” Tommy muttered as he snipped away singed split ends.
“And whose fault is that?” you said, teasing. Tommy cuffed you round the side of the head (the uninjured side) and called you a bitch.
You all marched on Manberg as a unit, watched as Schlatt died, reinstated L’Manberg as a proud nation, and you celebrated your victory with brown roots in your blond hair.
You all waited. For the betrayal they all expected, the one you knew was coming from someone within their midst, and you all suspected who, somewhere in the backs of your minds, and you would turn out to be
wrong.
It was Wilbur.
He pressed the button. His country went up in smoke. His father, appearing from out of nowhere, killed him, relieving them of the traitor within their ranks.
Tommy wailed.
You comforted him on the battle field as best you could, because there was still more to be done, more to focus on other than a dead brother. The second traitor hadn’t struck yet.
Fortunately, there were no other permanent casualties even when Techno released his withers. You reclaimed L’Manberg, and tried to reinstate peace. This was your nation now. You were its president.
They placed this responsibility in your burned, scarred palms.
The suit you wore was one of Schlatt’s.
Its sleeves hung down to your hands, and the shoulders didn’t fit quite right, and the pants were a touch too long. You donned a dead man’s suit, wearing his skin like a trophy, a sign of your victory.
Quackity did the same. He wore Schlatt’s suits, walking around as confident as ever, smug with triumph over his dead ex fiancé.
Easy for him.
He didn’t see Schlatt when he looked in the mirror.
Not like you, with your brown roots and red tie and the horns that just wouldn’t stop growing
just
like
Schlatt
They were past your ears now. Almost too heavy for your head.
When you exiled Tommy, you don’t even want to know what he saw when he looked at you.
You sure couldn’t look at yourself in a mirror after that.
During the time he was gone, you didn’t have time to cut your own hair. You were too busy trying to handle the country, your country, stand tall as its leader, keep it together, keep your people safe.
Sometime between Tommy’s exile and the Butcher Army, Quackity pulled you aside and asked if you were okay.
What were you supposed to say? No? Actually, I’m very upset about being forced to exile my own friend from our country? Actually, I got blackout drunk last night on some of Schlatt’s leftover booze and have a killer hangover right now? Actually, I understand why Wilbur went fucking insane and killed himself over this?
You smiled and said “Yeah, I’m great.”
You were not fucking great.
You were not even good. Barely even okay-ish.
“Your roots are growing out,” he said, oh so ever fucking observant. “Do you want help—”
“I’m fine,” you said, and retreated to your office to drink yourself stupid again.
The Butcher Army. Happened. You guess.
You took off the suit (finally, fucking finally) and replaced it with an apron already tastefully decorated with blood you hoped was fake. You asked Quackity where he got it from. He just laughed.
Technoblade’s execution failed. Really, you didn’t expect it to work in the first place, but Quackity was convincing. What were you supposed to do, not go along with it?
Still, you couldn’t help but feel everyone’s eyes on you as you made that speech before the anvil dropped, wondering if when they looked at you they saw him.
You think Tommy saw someone who wasn’t you, the next time you spoke to him.
You let Quackity cut your hair.
The injury from his death lasted as long as yours, healed enough to keep him from dying but not enough to prevent a scar. You saw it before he came back and bandaged it up. It wasn’t pretty, but death never was. You wondered what it would look like after he removed the bandages, once it was more or less healed.
He had trouble speaking now, missing about four teeth and parts of both his top and bottom lips. He was also missing an eye, so you were a touch concerned over what this haircut would look like, but you didn’t mind.
It was the first time you let anyone touch your hair since you exiled Tommy.
It felt almost wrong, letting Quackity do something you used to get your brother Tommy to do, but you and Q just.
He got it.
He got you.
No words needed.
He wasn’t a replacement for Tommy, not at all, no one could be, but he was the closest thing you had to fill that void. No one could truly fill that space, not Quackity, not Ranboo, not Fundy. No one. But you’d take whatever support you could get without having to ask for it.
The next bit... well, that’s a bit of a blur to you now.
The community house exploded, Tommy was there, fucking Technoblade was with him, Tommy came back to you, despite everything you’ve done to him, and then
Doomsday. The Disc Confrontation.
Physical appearances were the last thing on your mind.
You nearly died. Like, permanently. Forever. Gone. Can anyone blame you for being a little out of sorts and maybe not remembering all the details? You speedran the stages of grief multiple times in the span of time between Doomsday and the Disc Confrontation. You thought you and Tommy were both dead.
Your survival was not expected, but fuck if it wasn’t welcome. Dying in that obsidian bunker? That would suck. You’re glad you didn’t go out that way.
Following that, things... calmed down.
Dream was in prison. Tommy was building a hotel. And you
You made your own little place. Snowchester.
It was nice. A quaint little settlement way out in the north. Captain Puffy joined you in living there, as did Jack Manifold, and you commissioned Foolish to build a giant mansion for you and Ranboo and
Your son.
You and Ranboo adopted a small zombie piglin you found in the Nether. You can even really explain why, you just. Did.
You saw him and you knew he needed someone.
And that someone was you. Apparently.
You didn’t have time to get anyone to bleach your hair. You were busy running a small settlement and taking care of your kid, and Tommy was busy with his hotel, and Ranboo... well, you wouldn’t trust him to try bleaching your hair, to be honest. He barely knew how to take care of himself. Asking him to take care of you too would be unfair.
You just refused to look in mirrors from then on. That solved your problem entirely. Just don’t look at yourself! You never have to see the hair or the horns or the scars ever again!
You thought you’d be fine. There were no wars, Dream was locked away in the prison, Technoblade and Philza were retired, everyone was doing their own thing without worrying about the dire repercussions of simply existing on this hellscape of a server, and maybe... maybe everything would be okay, finally.
Tommy died.
you.
you didn’t know
what to do.
With that.
you couldn’t believe
after all this time
...
You lived through so much together
and
he was just
gone.
Just like that.
No fanfare.
No blaze of glory.
No major battle.
just
beaten to death in some shitty prison cell.
But it was okay, it was fine, you were fine, you were fine, you were fine. It wasn’t real, right, it was just some shitty prank he was pulling and then he’d come back and you’d yell at him for being fucking stupid and he’d tell you it was no big deal even though you saw the death message on your communicator when his heart stopped beating and Sam confirmed it, he spread the word, and it travelled around the server within a day and everyone knew and everyone mourned.
You mourned.
You grieved.
You built a memorial in Snowchester even though that was not his home, and you knew he’d much prefer it to be somewhere in L’Manberg’s crater but you couldn’t fucking go back there, you wouldn’t, not even to properly honour your dead brother best friend.
You thought about bleaching your hair again as some way to honour him, but the thought of doing that without him made you want to throw up.
So instead, you sat on the bench you placed at the memorial, slid a disc in the jukebox, and prepared yourself for a life without a crucial puzzle piece in your life.
And then, not two days later
He was back.
He was just
back.
Alive.
You didn’t really
know what to do about that either.
You went through this period of laying in bed for hours at a time, fully awake, staring at the ceiling and wondering what the fuck you were supposed to think. He was dead for two days, you grieved, and he was just back.
Death wasn’t permanent.
Could Wilbur come back?
Could Schlatt?
You tried not to dwell on that last option. It made the hair stand up on the back of your neck and your heart beat too fast and the urge to drink yourself dumb come back with a vengeance.
Tommy, to his credit, acted like he was much less bothered about the whole situation. He just seemed like the same old Tommy, but he did talk about it a lot. How it had been around two months in limbo for him when only two days passed here, how Dream wanted to keep killing him and bringing him back over and over, and his breath was shaky and his hands trembled but through it all he was just as loud and boisterous and Tommy as he had ever been.
You tried. You really did. You brushed it all off like it was nothing, because in your experience, there were a thousand worse things that could have happened. Tommy died, yeah, but he was back, and that’s what mattered. Nothing had to be different. Nothing had to change. You didn’t have to talk about it or think about it ever if you didn’t want to.
But you did.
You
you just liked to pretend you didn’t.
Tommy saw right through it, and so did Ranboo, and Michael always knew when you got too far into your own head because he would grab your hand and tug on it and give you a toy to play with.
You were fine.
You kept everything in, pushed it all down, because Tommy had it worse and Ranboo’s memory was deteriorating at a concerningly rapid rate and everyone else on this godforsaken hell server had their own shit to deal with, so what right did you ever have to bring up your own as if telling someone that you still have nightmares about
fireworks and
chasms and
explosions
would help anyone at all?
You built an outpost. You set it up near Las Nevadas, Quackity’s new nation, because you knew Big Q, and the presence of any new nation under his rule could lead to another war, considering how confrontational he was, how revenge resided in his head like an old roommate. He could get pissed about something and make it everyone else’s problem with a snap of his fingers.
He confronted you about it, of course. You expected that. You were mentally, emotionally, and physically prepared for it.
He laid eyes on you, and the first look on his face was fear.
You didn’t want to know who he saw when he looked at you in that split second. You were pretty sure you knew anyway.
You negotiated with Q, and Ranboo was no god damn help, as per usual, but you couldn’t hold it against him because fuck, he’s just some guy with a shit memory, what on earth could he ever do to back you up here anyway?
The meeting went sort of well, regardless. At the end of it, Quackity gave you that same look, the one he had when he first saw you again, that hesitance, the recognition, and you thought
Fuck it.
If that’s what he wants.
You left him with a threat. Not a direct one, but thinly veiled, a reference to something you knew he would understand.
“You know Gandi from Civ 5? I’ll just leave you with that.”
Adrenaline flooded your senses as you walked away, wondering why the fuck you just said that and why you haven’t said something like that to someone sooner, because GOD was it therapeutic to just utter one single little threat that wasn’t even really a direct threat. You’ve never really done anything like that before, you’ve always stayed inside the lines, followed in other people’s footsteps, stuck to them and did as they asked like an obedient dog, and this was rebellion.
At least to you, it was.
And it felt good.
You and Ranboo got home to the mansion that night and you beelined for the bedroom, still ecstatic in a nervous way, riding the coattails of that brief moment. You were still shaking from the adrenaline that you glanced in the mirror against the far wall without even thinking.
You nearly screamed.
You thought—just for a moment, a very brief millisecond—that the person in your reflection was
Schlatt
No
no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
You stood upon a pile of broken mirror shards.
The glass crunched beneath your feet.
Ranboo was sweeping it up, Michael held in one arm to keep him from stepping on the shards. Tommy stood in front of you (when did he get here, how long were you spaced out for, when did Ranboo contact him), holding you by the shoulders, saying your name. You raised a hand to grab his wrist, a sign you heard him.
He led you out of the room and into the bathroom, sat you on the edge of the bathtub, and rummaged around in your cupboards. He complained all the while about the mess, but his voice was soft, gentle.
He covered up the mirror with a towel.
The chemical smell of bleach hit your nose and you coughed. He patted you on the back until you stopped.
He stood in the bathtub and talked as he slathered bleach all over your scalp. He always did it without gloves, the idiot, but you couldn’t make yourself say a single thing about it. You couldn’t make yourself speak.
This wasn’t the first time your voice abandoned you.
He didn’t comment on it.
That’s good. You think if he tried to force you to talk, you would cry.
He just kept rambling, because he was Tommy, and that’s what he did best, and his voice flooded your ears to block out everything else. You just sat and half-listened, picking at the scars on your hand.
He tilted your head back and rinsed the bleach out with the showerhead, still rambling on and on and on. You heard him mention Wilbur and Dream and Pogtopia and you knew he was just talking about anything that popped into his head to keep you occupied, because not a day went by when he wasn’t thinking about a combination of those things, even after his revival.
He dried your hair with a towel and tugged you into a side hug. Your newly blond hair dripped onto his shirt.
You fell asleep that night sandwiched between your husband and your best friend with your son in your arms.
Wilbur used to call you “mini-Tommy” sometimes.
You managed to look in a mirror once without throwing a fit after bleaching your hair again, and looking at yourself
you just kind of
remembered that.
It was never a bad thing, not at all. You look up to Tommy. Sometimes he’d take a joke too far and you’d get pissed, or sometimes you’d piss him off doing the same, but you always come back around to each other, two planets constantly in each other’s orbit.
He’s like a brother, but different.
Wilbur was his brother, the one he looked up to, and by extension, you did as well, because anyone who was important to Tommy was important to you. And you saw the way they acted around each other, how the way they teased each other was so different from what you and Tommy had but also so, so similar. They were brothers in every sense but blood.
Tommy is your brother, you think, but not in the way he and Wilbur are brothers. They’re brothers in general, two different souls who experienced such different walks of life and stick together regardless, who follow each other to the ends of the earth no matter how wrong or bad one of them thinks the other is.
You and Tommy are more like... kindred spirits. Brothers in war, allies in politics, victims of abuse who pull each other up by your boot straps and lean on each other so you can keep going side by side.
It’s never just Tommy, or just Tubbo. It’s always Tommy and Tubbo.
Like one name.
TommyandTubbo. TubboandTommy. T+T.
Brothers in experience. Partners in life. Two sides of the same coin. Inseparable.
But that’s just the thing, isn’t it? You’re part of the same coin, but people look at you and see two heads, one on each side, no tails. Nothing at all to differentiate the two.
You could draw horns on one side and a white streak on the other, but at the end of the day they always see two copies.
When people run into you, they ask “Where’s Tommy?” “Do you know where Tommy’s been lately?” “What’s Tommy up to?”
You can’t always answer that.
For as much as you’re inseparable, sometimes you’re both alone for a bit. You always come back around like two magnets drawn to each other until something or someone yank you apart again.
You don’t like being a copy.
You don’t even know if Tommy realizes that’s what you are.
Tommy and Tubbo.
The main character and his sidekick.
He called you the main character once, during the Disc Confrontation, and himself the sidekick, and hearing that
it
actually made you
relieved.
Even if everyone else sees you as a second quieter Tommy, he doesn’t.
That counts for something.
You think you’d like to make sure everyone else sees the difference, too. They’re always looking at you like you’re someone else. Tommy. Schlatt. Wilbur.
You’re not them.
When you leave the bathroom, head wrapped in a towel to help it dry, a nervousness running through your veins that you haven’t felt in ages, and enter the bedroom where Ranboo is currently getting ready for bed, unwrapping the towel and watching his eyes widen as he sees what you’ve done
You feel satisfied.
He smiles and says “It suits you.”
You seek out Tommy the next day, and you know he’s looking for you too. After Wilbur’s revival, you’ve all been on edge, and he’s not doing so great, and it’s the pull of magnets that sends you out into the greater SMP to search for him, to see if he’s doing okay.
You pass others along the way. Eret compliments the new look with a smile, Niki says she likes it and to ask her if you need any tips to maintain it, Hannah thinks it’s cute, and some Eggpire members give you a weird look as you walk down the Prime Path.
You thank them for the compliments (and flip off BadBoyHalo, to which you receive an angry “LANGUAGE!” for your efforts), and head towards Tommy’s house.
He’s hunched over some chests, digging through them to search for stray resources. You knock on the door, feeling giddy.
He straightens and turns around. “What the fuck do you—Tubbo!”
His face brightens, then he furrows his brow, confused, and then he beams.
“Man, what the fuck did you to do your hair!” He darts forward and grabs your head by the horns, turning you this way and that so he can look at your bubblegum pink hair. “This looks sick, man, how’d you do this? When did you do this? That’s so cool!”
You laugh and bat his hands away. “I did it last night! It was impulse, really. I just thought it would look cool.”
“It does! Holy shit man, that’s so fucking awesome. Can you do mine? I wanna cover up this stupid fucking streak but I don’t know how to do it and I’m afraid I might burn my hair off with chemicals or something and I don’t wanna ask Niki. I don’t want pink though, I need a manly colour because I am a big man. You look really fucking cool with it though, holy shit.”
“Ranboo says it clashes with my green shirt, but I am not taking fashion advice from someone who walks around in the same ratty suit every day.”
Tommy barks out a laugh, and you
You’re on cloud fucking nine.
“What colour would you want?” you ask, sitting down on his furnace as he keeps going through his chests. “Blue?”
He hesitates. “I don’t know. What colours could you plausibly make?”
You open your inventory. “Any.”
A couple hours later, you and Tommy leave his house. You, with your bright pink hair, against which your brown horns stand out (but you actually don’t mind them now, to be honest, not with the way Tommy nudges them or gently grabs them when he looks you in the eye, because they’re not Schlatt’s, they’re yours), and Tommy with a bright red streak hanging over his eyes.
And you hope he doesn’t mind the streak now, because Wilbur may have one in the same place, but this one is Tommy’s, and it’s bright red and garish and loud and it clashes with his blue cardigan, and your pink hair will do you no favours whatsoever for camouflage or colour coordination when it comes to your outfits, but Michael saw the pink and got excited because you look a little more like him, and Ranboo said it suits you, and Tommy says it looks cool.
The two of you take the day off from building or working to sit in a field of flowers near Hannah’s base and he shows you how to weave daisy chains. He makes a couple smaller ones to put on your horns.
When you glance in the mirror that night, as you’re brushing your teeth and getting ready for bed, something looks different.
You’re smiling.
You go to bed without covering up your reflection.