Chapter Text
Over the past few months, Tubbo’s dealt with a lot of long silences. Awkward or comfortable, but always lingering, making him uneasily aware of how quick his heart beats or all the thoughts that flood his head, scattered and selfish and swarming.
In that sense, the lack of silence after his question is somewhat a relief.
“ What ?”
By the tone of his voice, Quackity doesn’t seem to agree.
But, hey, he’s always been proactive, and that’s what makes him a good person to have around. Tubbo is appreciating it now, warily standing in the school parking lot with an eye on the security cameras and random faculty wandering about, more than he’s maybe ever appreciated in the past. Probably why Schlatt loved Quackity so much, honestly, but that’s kind of a fucked up thing to think.
Tubbo’s said a lot of fucked up things, though, in the past tens of minutes. Debatably, that’s worse.
“Just, like, out of curiosity,” Tubbo replies. A beat of pause, and then he adds, a bit sheepishly, “Also, ‘cause I kinda need you at D’Essempi right now. Nothing bad happened, don’t worry-” that’s a lie, kind of, “-but I need to hitch a ride.”
“It’s eleven, Tubbo,” Quackity points out. Tubbo pulls away his phone from his ear for a second to confirm, huh, yeah, it is. And also, his phone has a lower battery than it should be. Did he forget to charge it overnight? Did he even, like, sleep overnight?
Whatever. That doesn’t matter.
“Seems like it is.”
“Are you fucking skipping school?”
Tubbo’s lip quirks up. “Maybe?”
“Why the fuck are you doing that?”
“Look, I’ll explain when you get here, just-”
“No,” Quackity cuts him off, voice firm. “You tell me now, or I’m not coming.”
It’s an empty threat. Tubbo knows that. Quackity gives too many shits to just leave him here if he even slightly thinks something is up.
However, he can’t say that Quackity’s above arguing with him for fifteen minutes about the subject, and Tubbo would really like to not be standing out here. Because, contrary to popular belief and, like, half of his most recent thoughts, now would be a really terrible time to get expelled. Or suspended, actually. Suspended is worse, because then he’d have to come back.
So he’ll bite the bullet then. Fine. “I got into a fight and faked sick. And now I’m hiding in the parking lot. Happy?”
“Of course I’m not fucking happy!” Well, Tubbo tried. “You got in a fight? Are you hurt? Who was the fight with? Is there some kid I need to know about?”
“You’re pretty well-acquainted, and it was a verbal fight, not physical. How far away are you?”
Quackity doesn’t answer the question, but Tubbo can hear the sound of a door closing, and the smile spreads on his face despite Quackity’s clear distress when he asks, “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“We had an argument.”
“No, I know what verbal means, Tubbo. The fucking- who did you fight with?”
“Oh, Tommy.”
“Tommy?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, your brother Tommy, or some random dipshit named Tommy?”
“Neither.” The smile’s gone, now. Good run, at least. “Your ex’s little brother.”
“Yeah, so also your brother.”
“We’re not brothers. If we were, wouldn’t I be calling Wilbur before I called you?” It’s a low blow, and Tubbo knows it by the way that Quackity sucks air through his teeth, seemingly an unconscious action. Tubbo knows Quackity enough to know that being compared to Wilbur is exactly the last thing he wants to hear, which, in an equally unconscious way, is probably exactly why Tubbo brought it up. Ends justify the means, insults justify the car ride back from school to God knows where. “Look, details don’t matter. I just can’t, like, actively be at school right now.”
“I’m fifteen minutes away.”
“Can you make it ten? Lunch is soon, and I don’t want to run into anyone out here.”
“I’m not going to break the law for you, Tubbo. Especially not over this shit.”
“Yeah, you’ve broken it for me over way worse.”
Quackity lets out a sound that’s some weird cross between a laugh, a scoff, and a growl. A pretty unique sound that Tubbo would prefer never having to audibly witness again, in all honesty. “What is up with you today, Tubbo?”
“Dunno. It’s cold out.”
“Yeah, you don’t get bitchy in the winter. It’s something else.”
“I just told you I got into a fight, man. Is that not enough to clue you in?”
“You haven’t told me what the fight was about.” Shit. Decent point. “We have time. Think I deserve to know why you called me and nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“Bad wording.”
“What?”
“Nevermind.” Quackity’s moved on, he guesses. “Tommy and Wilbur have just been on my ass over something lately. Tommy more than Wilbur. They don’t get it.”
“You know,” Quackity responds, not even giving the sentence time to ruminate. “Life gets easier when you accept that it’s kind of a good thing when people don’t get it. Like, some shit is not meant to be understood like that. I mean, it’s good to have people who get it, but not in the way you and I do. You know?”
Tubbo shakes his head. “Not at all. That makes no sense.”
“Alright, nevermind then, damn.” Quackity seems really pissed, which, to be fair, he has this entire time, but Tubbo figured he’d kind of calm down once they established that Tubbo isn’t in danger, everything is fine, et cetera. Seems like he was wrong, which is annoying. “What are you gonna do about it, then?”
“What do you mean?”
“About the fight.”
“Uh.” Tubbo lifts his head up at the sky, squinting a bit. It looks like it might rain, with the sun way too bright over clouds that lay atop a light grey sky. At least it won’t storm, but still, Quackity will kill him if he gets his leather car seats wet. It’s not the luxury cars that sometimes frequented Schlatt’s place, but it’s Quackity’s baby, and he’d kill Tubbo over it, probably. Tubbo gets it; material things are easier than people. “Kind of thought I’d figure that out once you got me, actually.”
Quackity sighs. “Okay. Well. You could start by apologizing, if you’re taking suggestions.”
“I’m not,” Tubbo says just for his pride’s sake, but he humors Quackity anyway. “Don’t think that’s gonna happen. We’re talking about Tommy and Wilbur here; they’ll just push their point if I even open up the topic.”
“Maybe it’ll be good to have another talk about it in a clearer mind, though. That’s a thing, right?” Yeah. Definitely better with material things.
It’s also kind of funny, the thought of a clearer mind, considering the context here. Which Quackity is aware of, so Tubbo may as well just bring up what the center of this all is, because what’s the fucking point of keeping it on the down low anymore? Pretty much everyone knows, more than Tubbo realizes if Tommy’s done the whole rumor-spreading thing that he probably has.
Tubbo sits down, closely squeezed between two parked cars, because he’s a bit tired of standing out here. As he does, he tells Quackity bluntly, “That’s a thing for other people, not me. They’re on my ass about the alcohol thing. They’re not going to drop it.”
Quackity goes quiet for a few seconds, before he states, “They shouldn’t.”
“What?”
“They shouldn’t drop it.” Tubbo suppresses a groan as Quackity continues, voice going lecture-y the way that it sometimes gets. “I fucking forgot you drank, but now I’m remembering. Have you gotten sober even once since you started? You’re going to fuck up your body doing that, Tubbo, you can’t drink while you’re going through puberty and expect shit to be fine-”
“I’m done with puberty, I’ve been sober plenty, and respectfully, you can fuck off about this,” Tubbo tells him plainly, agitation seeping into his voice.
“Well, why did you even tell me if you didn’t want me to say something?”
“I’m telling you because I thought you’d get it.”
“My ex-boyfriend killed himself by drinking, Tubbo,” not so over it then, huh, “I’m not exactly buddy-buddy with alcoholism.”
Tubbo thinks of saying something like, I thought him dying was doing you a favor, but that feels like a step too shitty to say, so he swaps it out for a more mild, “Yeah, and you think lecturing him about it did much of anything?”
“What the fuck do you know?”
“Kind of a lot, actually.” Tubbo wishes he had a drink with him right now, actually. “You could say I’ve been on both sides of the whole affair.”
Quackity lets out a sound like he’s about to start a sentence, but swallows it back. It happens again, and Tubbo gets the slight spike of excitement that comes from making Quackity feel lost for words.
Eventually, he figures it out, and naturally, it’s a topic switch. “What’s your plan, then? I pick you up, you hang at my place, I drop you back off at home, nobody has any questions?”
“I told you, I haven’t gotten that far in the plan yet.”
“Did you not think any of this out?”
“If your best friend was basically outing your addiction and interpersonal bullshit to a class of, like, twenty other people, you kind of take any out you can get.” And clearly, Tubbo picked a bad person to call and pick him up. Maybe he should have banked on Techno not asking this many questions, or talked Ranboo into something. Even though Ranboo isn’t here. Fuck. “I figured you would actually help me out with something.”
“I am. I’m literally on my way to get you now.”
“Awesome. Thank you.” Did Tubbo say that earlier? Maybe not. Whatever, they’re past politeness. “But if you have any actual ideas about how to deal with this shit, let me know.”
“I gave you, like, five. You just didn’t like any of them.”
“Yeah, because they were bad suggestions.”
“They were the most ethical ones.”
Tubbo can’t stop himself from laughing at that. “Big Q, since when do we care about ethics?”
“Speak for yourself,” Quackity says bitterly, “I’m trying to get into an actually good law school right now.”
“Nice. How’s that going?”
“Pretty good, actually.” There’s a pause, and Tubbo can hear vague car related noises before Quackity adds, “You’d be into law, I think. No pressure, but you’ve got the personality for it.”
He laughs again, a bit louder. “I think I’m gonna be at the other end of the legal system, personally.”
“You’re seventeen.”
“Yeah. Bit too young for law, isn’t it?”
“Bit too old to be acting like illegal shit has no consequences.”
“I’m aware that they have consequences,” Tubbo replies, a little offended. “I just said I’m going to be convicted of some crimes in a year or so, didn’t I?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you being a smartass about this?”
“I kinda have, like, three things that bring me any happiness in life right now. Being a dick is one of them.”
“That’s bullshit. It got you into a fight with your brother.”
Tubbo takes a deep breath, and decides to let that one go. “Yeah, but I don’t care much about that. I’m not gonna apologize, he’s not either, we’re never going to talk, it’ll be fine.”
“That’s a coward’s move, Tubbo.”
“Remind me, how many arguments did you and Schlatt actually resolve?”
“Tubbo,” Quackity warns.
“Or Wilbur. Or Karl, and that other guy you dated with him. If you’re gonna go into law, I figure you’ve got a high success rate of resolving arguments, yeah? So go on, Big Q, enlighten me.”
There’s a long silence following that.
Tubbo breaks it with a laugh, because he’d rather he break it than let Quackity blow up on him. “See? Told you. New pastime.”
“What are the other things that make you happy?” Quackity asks, enunciating his words slower. It’s kind of a weird thing to ask after Tubbo insulted him, but hey, maybe Quackity’s working on his anger management skills. Tubbo can’t get on his case for that.
“My cat and Youtube videos about chemistry hacks. You’d love them, Big Q, I can text you a few-”
“Whiskers is still around?”
Tubbo startles. “Yeah? She’s not dead. You saw her, like, a few months ago. With Wilbur.”
“I never really ran into her specifically,” Quackity informs him. “You know that cat hates me.”
“She hates everybody. She scratched Tommy a lot when they first met. It just takes some time, is all.”
“Well, she loved you damn near instantly.”
“Nah, she didn’t.” That’d be too perfect of a story. “She scratched me up for the first month. That was just before your time.”
Quackity seems to struggle to understand that, for some reason. “I was told she liked you a lot.”
“Yeah, of course you were.” Again, that’d be too perfect of a story. Which is exactly what Schlatt would tell Quackity considering how shitty everything else was at the time. “I just didn’t care about the scratches.”
“The thing you treasured more than anything scratched you a shit ton while you were already injured, and you still love it?”
“It’s a fucking cat, Big Q.” Has he really never had a pet before? Or seen an animal ever? Or like, lived in the real world for five seconds? Yikes, maybe not that last one, actually. But still. “They do that.”
“It just says a bit about you, is all.”
“If anyone would abandon a cat just because it got a bit pissed at them for trying to give it a bath, I think they’d be kind of a dick.”
“Guess so,” Quackity says, voice quieter.
Tubbo doesn’t get why. Whatever metaphor Quackity is trying to get at here, it seems pretty irrelevant. Quackity also lets the things he loves fuck him up, badly, probably more than Tubbo does. A pretty useless attempt at some awe-inspiring statement, Tubbo thinks, but he also has a complicated relationship with metaphors.
“How close are you?” Tubbo asks, because that’s at least objective.
“Close. Where are you in the parking lot?”
“Uh, just tell me when you get here, and I’ll find you.”
“Alright.”
There’s a bit of silence, one that Tubbo quickly fills with, “Thanks again, Big Q. I owe you one.”
“You do owe me one,” Quackity confirms. “You figure I could ask you anything, and you’d do it?”
Tubbo snorts. “Not promising that, sorry. You’ll ask me to do something stupid like apologize to Tommy or quit drinking. Think I’ll just stick to chauffeuring rides for you whenever I get my license.”
“Hm. Fine.”
The conversation ends there, a lingering silence staying on the line until Quackity pulls into the parking lot. Tubbo sees him immediately, of course, but it’s a matter of sneakily maneuvering to where he parked near the front of school, a complicated matter that involves Tubbo making it look like he’s exiting the school for the first time, that same nurse’s slip as if it were some permission-to-check-out form, and a lot of frantic reassurances to an increasingly impatient Quackity.
Eventually, he gets in, and he avoids Quackity’s glare as he crumples up the slip and shoves it in his pocket.
He keeps ignoring it even as he tells the other, “Hey,” because an appropriate greeting is in order.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Damn, nice to see you too.”
“Hi, Tubbo,” Quackity says with a heavy sigh. “Now I’ll ask again. Where do you want to go?”
“Where were you before this? Just take me back there.”
There’s a pause, one that Quackity holds his breath during, which feels like bad practice at the wheel but Tubbo can’t talk shit about that. It gets broken eventually, which is what’s important, and Quackity lets out a slow breath before admitting, “I was at Schlatt’s old place.”
Tubbo tenses. “Oh. Why?”
“I have to settle all the matters with the property,” Quackity explains. “That involves trying to figure out how to sell the damn thing. Nobody wants it, of course, because it’s in shit condition, so I’ve had to deal with contractors and workers to get it to look half decent and not like it barely escaped the suicide house marking. It’s been a fucking nightmare, because it’s not like he has any family around to help deal with the house, so it’s just been me.”
Tubbo holds back the fact that he, himself, is family, and lets Quackity conclude his rant with, “So, yeah. That’s where I was. But I figure you want to go somewhere better, so I can just take you back to my place.”
“Nah,” Tubbo says before he can think it over.
Quackity looks over at him. “What?”
Tubbo still doesn’t look up. He’s not sure what he’s more scared of, meeting Quackity’s eyes or meeting his own in the overhead mirror. “Just take me to Schlatt’s place. We’ll finish the work there.”
“... Okay,” Quackity concedes, faster than Tubbo thought he would. He has to give him a lot of credit for being as quick on his feet as he is. Wilbur would probably have made him sit in the silence for fifteen fucking minutes before saying anything, and when he eventually would, it’d be some follow up question or something.
Yeah. Tubbo’s missed Quackity these past few months.
“Thanks, Big Q. Appreciate it.”
“I hate this, by the way,” Quackity clarifies. “This idea, and you skipping school, and all of this. And I’m really fucking mad at you.”
“I missed you too.”
“Don’t even do that shit.” He almost has the heart to sound like he means it. “Don’t do that shit, Tubbo, it’s not funny or sentimental or whatever the fuck you think that is. I’m mad at you, don’t dismiss that shit. I’m serious.”
Tubbo laughs anyway, and lets the car fall into silence.
Because what does it matter, really, if Quackity hates the thought of this? Tubbo didn’t call him because he thought he’d be jumping in his seat to help him skip school and bail out of all his issues.
Tubbo called him because Quackity always does an excellent job doing the things that he hates. That’s all there is to it.
(In that way, Tubbo thinks as they drive down the familiar road to Schlatt’s place that’s only getting more busy with the lunchtime jam, the two of them are back in their element.)
–
Tubbo’s not expecting the tape that winds around the outside of the house.
He’s not sure why. It was, like, just a crime scene an uncomfortably short period of time ago. And now, like Quackity said, it’s going through renovations, so he should have prepared himself for the fact that things aren’t gonna look the same as they always did. And that's a good thing, more importantly, because the house used to look like shit and Tubbo isn’t going to miss it.
And he doesn’t miss it. Not really. That’s not the feeling he gets, looking at it.
It’s almost… possessive, is the best word for it, he thinks. Looking at somewhere he grew up in, somewhere shitty and awful and caused the worst memories he has, ones that he’ll take to the grave before ever telling someone, fuck that – seeing that place, and knowing that it’s about to get sold, knowing that the person buying it probably has no idea. Probably doesn’t deserve the damn thing, if they can’t handle how rotted to the core that place is, even with its new fancy hardwood flooring.
He doesn’t say any of this out loud, though. Because Quackity is killing himself over trying to get rid of this place, and Tubbo wants to think that he can help, take the burden off of him, but he’s constricted by his stupid ill-fitted age, and maybe the best thing he can do is let Quackity handle it.
Still. The worst parts of him think that maybe it’s not Quackity’s to give away.
Property’s property, though. He shouldn't have to consult Tubbo about it, it’s not a big deal, they aren’t business partners, they didn’t build this from the ground up, Quackity isn’t making any mistake getting rid of it.
If it really wasn’t a big deal, though, then why not leave the thing there? Let it rot to the ground, for all any of them care? Nobody’s eager to buy it, nobody’s eager to sell it, nobody’s eager to deal with the paperwork either way. Why not let it be?
Why put the effort into fixing something that can’t be fixed in any way that matters? Why not just abandon it for convenience’s sake, especially when it’s not even yours? Why hold that tension on your shoulders doing a thankless job, and a worthless one?
Unlike Quackity’s earlier non-statement, there is actually a metaphor in that. Low-hanging fruit, though, so Tubbo leaves it.
Just like he leaves the subject of the exterior alone, instead asking Quackity, “So, is nobody else here?”
Quackity levels him with an odd look. “... Who else would be here?”
“A… contractor? I don’t know, I wasn’t an HGTV kid.”
“Oh, no, nobody’s here.”
That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Because then, “Why were you here earlier, then? Wouldn’t you be having someone over to look at something?”
“I didn’t say anything about nobody being here earlier.”
“Yeah, but you left suddenly, didn’t you? Could you have really wrapped up all you needed to, like, in that time frame?”
Quackity sighs. “Okay, fine, I was here by myself the entire time, alright? Goddamn.”
“Cool.” Tubbo’s gotten good at winning conversations, he’s realized. “Can I ask why?”
“I just needed some time.”
“Time standing in your ex-boyfriend’s old house?”
“Time to think,” Quackity corrects, punctuated with a glare. “Where I wouldn’t be bothered. But it seems like that happened anyway, whether I wanted it to or not.”
“Hey, if I could have called anyone else, I would’ve.”
Quackity rubs his temple with his fingers for a few seconds, then flings the arm down to his side, clearly irritated. “There were a lot of people you could have called. Phil. Technoblade. Fucking- aren’t you friends with that tall kid? Rainbow?”
“Ranboo.” When did those two meet, again? Tubbo feels like he remembers the two being aware of one another, but when did that even happen? “Also, why the hell would I have called Phil or Technoblade?”
“You still had Ranboo.”
“I kind of don’t.”
Quackity’s staring at him, Tubbo can feel it. “You two fight?”
“Nope. He disappeared off the face of the planet.”
Quackity swears under his breath. For the first time in a while, Tubbo actually looks at him, feeling a pang of some oddly twisted guilt and frustration when their eyes meet. Tubbo swallows it back and asks, voice only slightly affected, “What’s your deal with Ranboo? How do you even know him?”
“We met at the funeral,” Quackity explains, which, what the hell, this is news to Tubbo. “He stayed longer than he should have. So did I. We talked a bit, then he left. That was pretty much it.”
There’s an edge to Quackity’s voice. Tubbo doesn’t know which is a worse idea: letting the opportunity of knowing what this conversation was go, or having to deal with hearing more about Ranboo when he’s already sick with anxiety over him any time he thinks just a bit too much.
Tubbo decides, after a few seconds, that he can take the discomfort. “What did you talk about that upset you so bad?”
“Nothing,” Quackity lies, quickly. “Just small talk shit. Bad weather out, yeah, hope it’s nicer next week. All that shit.”
“Big Q, you’re an awful liar,” Tubbo tells him honestly.
Quackity looks away for a few seconds, clearly hesitating, before saying slowly, “I gave him some advice. He gave me some back. We ended things there.”
“Alright. So why are you pissed with him?”
“Because clearly, he didn’t take any of my advice,” Quackity spits out.
Tubbo raises his eyebrow. “Did you take any of his?”
Quackity seems taken aback by that, even though that’s the most obvious question for Tubbo to ask, based on the build up, here. It takes him only a few seconds to get his footing, though, before he admits, “No. No, I didn’t.”
“Then there you go,” Tubbo concludes. “You’re a hypocrite, so is he, so is everyone. Nothing worth getting mad at him for, I reckon.”
It seems like a solid way to end the conversation, but Quackity’s eyes just narrow with suspicion. It seems definitely misplaced, but Tubbo humors him enough for Quackity to ask the question, “What is he to you, Tubbo?”
Tubbo feels the exhaustion more than the panic, his shoulders lowering as if they’re holding up something too heavy for his body to manage. In a lot of ways, they probably are, but Tubbo’s never been particularly good at taking care of himself in any meaningful way. Just enough to get by, he figures, which isn’t good enough when it comes to something like Ranboo. He knows that. Obviously.
What he doesn’t know is the answer to Quackity’s question. Not even the right answer to it, because he knows the right answer would be to say that they’re just friends, something that would satisfy Quackity and even make him feel a bit embarrassed for asking. The wrong answer, definitely, is to say that they’re way more than friends, but that’s not even accurate, so Tubbo wouldn’t lie to say it anyway. He’s not sure where, on the scale of right and wrong, falls an answer like it’s complicated and unrequited and pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things right now. Probably wherever people shove badly-worded deflections that are clung onto for the sake of a topic change.
Ultimately, though, there are things worth lying about, and there are things that he can feasibly succeed in lying about, and then there are things like these. So, after only a brief moment thinking it over, Tubbo admits, “It’s complicated. One-sided, I think, but complicated. It doesn’t really matter anymore.”
“Did he do something to you?”
Tubbo manages a rueful smile, despite the subject. “Nah. Ranboo couldn’t hurt me.”
“You look pretty hurt right now,” Quackity comments, and Tubbo will give him credit for that, that’s pretty insightful and entirely fucking true, regrettably.
It’ll do him some favor to admit that, maybe. “Yeah. I kind of am. But that’s not because he did anything to me.”
It’s because he’s doing something to himself, Tubbo thinks of saying, but he decides to strike that part from the record. It’s not like Quackity could help, anyway. For all of the parts of Tubbo’s life that he knows about, Quackity doesn’t know a damn thing about Dream. Never should, really; Quackity’s dealt with enough shitty guys in his life.
“I trust you,” Quackity says, and Tubbo believes him. “But I still don’t like the thought that this guy is giving you this much stress.”
“Do you really care this much about my relationships, Big Q?” Tubbo asks, just to be a smartass, as Quackity put it earlier.
Quackity shakes his head firmly. “I care about you.”
“Aww, Big Q…”
“What’s up with him? Seriously.” No appreciation for theatrics, huh? “What’s one-sided about it? I have questions, Tubbo.”
“You always do,” and he shouldn’t sound so harsh saying it, but hey, words are words. It happens. “He’s going through some shit. None of your business, and barely any of mine. I don’t think I should say any more.”
“Alright,” Quackity backs down civilly. “Hey, man, I get that. Just wanted to check he’s not hurting you. Or being hurt, I guess.”
“Everything’s fine,” Tubbo lies. “Now, are we going to go in the house, or just stare at the tape? Because it’s kind of cold as balls out here, dude.”
Quackity laughs. Tubbo hadn’t realized how long it’s been since he'd heard that sound until he finally experienced it again. Interesting how that works. “Yeah? I guess we go in, then. You can head in first.”
Tubbo would really rather not, but it’s one of few battles he has luxury not to pick right now, so he lets it go and sticks his fists firmly in his jean pockets as he steps into the house. The floors still creak under him, thankfully, and the wallpaper is still yellowed and peeling, thankfully, and the couch is still torn up beyond repair and beyond respect, thank you thank you thank you.
A house no one will want to buy. Let it bury its own grave and fall apart. Tubbo can’t understand why Quackity cares this much about preserving a dying thing, but Tubbo guesses that’s made that somewhat his profession for a solid few years. Old habits die hard.
“The place is still kind of a wreck,” Quackity states, and, well, that much is obvious. “Housing market has been fucking weird this year, but I have enough time to sort out all the repairs before it has to go. Getting some guys to deal with the flooring tomorrow.”
“Where are you getting the money for this?” Tubbo asks.
Quackity shrugs. Then, with a small smile, he says, “Calling in some favors. Also a massive fucking migraine, either way. But, yeah. We’re making it work.”
“Didn’t get the sense you had many favors to call in,” Tubbo comments, almost impressed.
He just shrugs again. “I know how to keep just the right people around me in case something falls through.”
“Really?” Quackity arches his eyebrow, and Tubbo takes that as permission to continue. “I mean. Like, nobody came to the funeral. And the whole reason you’re doing this house affairs thing is because nobody is here to do it for you. And you feel isolated as fuck doing it. I don’t think that’s what having the right people around you means.”
For some strange reason, Quackity looks more apprehensive than he did before to meet Tubbo’s eyes. It’s always been kind of easy to tell when Quackity’s lying; on a scale of Techno to Tommy, Quackity’s firmly on the side with the overly moral 17 year old. At least, to Tubbo, he is.
That doesn’t stop him from trying to avoid the truth, saying a little hesitantly, “I’ve got people, Tubbo. I’ve got people. With investment.”
“In you?” Tubbo asks, but before Quackity can answer, Tubbo adds, “Or in Schlatt?”
That shuts Quackity up.
Tubbo gives him a few seconds to say something, but he never does. Just shuffles his feet, looks way too ashamed than he should, and Tubbo figures there is a hell of a lot more in that, but he’s not going to push it. He’s been in this house for all of two minutes; he’d hate to get kicked out right now. Especially seeing as the school day isn’t even over yet.
He helps himself to sitting on the couch, Quackity watching his movements carefully before eventually leaning against the wall and saying, “So. What next?”
“You think there’s still food in here?”
Quackity looks somewhat aghast. “What the fuck? No! There’s no fucking food in here Tubbo, why would there be food here? Oh my fucking God. It’d spoil. ”
“I mean. Cheerios wouldn’t spoil.”
“You want to eat Cheerios in your dead cousin’s house?”
Tubbo nods.
Quackity runs his hand through his hair. “Right. Of course you would. Well. There’s no Cheerios here, so.”
“Dammit.”
“Any other food options you want to entertain, Tubbo?”
“I mean. Is there anything else here?”
“No. I cleared it all out.”
“Then why even offer?” Tubbo is in a state of anguish.
Quackity is forever uncaring. “Because I wanted to hear what your second food pick would have been.”
“Fairs.” Tubbo pauses, then decides, “Frozen pizza, probably.”
“You’re already set for college, Tubbo,” Quackity jokes, “all your favorites are the shit we have to fucking eat all the time.”
“Well, if I ever get to college, I’ll know exactly what to do.”
“What do you mean if ?”
Tubbo takes it as his turn to raise his eyebrow in Quackity’s general direction. “Like. If I get into a school. Or if I even go to one.”
“Tubbo, any school will take a kid with a 4.0.”
“True,” Tubbo agrees, “but what about a kid that definitely, uh, doesn’t have a 4.0?”
“You don’t have a 4.0?”
“... No? I never have?” Where is Quackity pulling this from? “Big Q, I get Cs in a lot of classes. Mostly English classes. I’ve, like, never had a 4.0. Ever. So. Yeah.”
Quackity frowns, like he’s trying hard to remember something that’s escaping his grasp. Tubbo wonders, idly, if Ranboo feels like that. He guesses he’s never seen him make that expression, though. Probably comes with the territory of being used to that sort of thing. Fuck, Ranboo, Ranboo , Tubbo still doesn’t know where he is and- “I swore to God Schlatt said something about you having straight As in school,” Quackity says, interrupting the spiral Tubbo teetered on falling into.
Tubbo snorts. “Fuck no. You think I actually told him what my grades were?”
“Did he never check?”
“Why the fuck would he check?”
“I don’t know!” Quackity throws his hands up, exasperated. “I just figured, y’know, since you were under his fucking custody, that-”
“That he’d give a shit about my grades? Big Q, are we talking about the same guy?”
“Yes! Somehow, yes, we are!” Quackity starts pacing, which Tubbo hasn’t seen him do in years, much less as a response to anger. Sitting on the shitty couch, watching Quackity get more and more frustrated, Tubbo feels more like his dead cousin than ever. May as well play the part, now that they’ve gotten this far. “Sometimes, I swear to fucking- Tubbo, I trust you. You know that, yeah? I trust you. But sometimes, talking to you about this shit- God, you fucking piss me off.”
“How so?” Tubbo asks, a measured calm.
Quackity seems to respond to that worse than he would have if Tubbo got all up and arms and started screaming. “What the fuck do you mean? You just- okay, okay, so you don’t have a 4.0, and you don’t think you’ll get into any college, or even want to go, and you skipped school and are getting into fights with people. You’re drinking again.”
Tubbo nods, and Quackity lets out a frustrated yell, muffled by him biting his bottom lip hard. He lets it go after a few seconds, red teeth marks along it. “What the fuck are you playing at, Tubbo? What the hell is all of this?”
“Well, it seems pretty straightforward to me,” Tubbo responds, voice still level. His fingers dig into the fabric of his jeans, however, from where they’re still in his pockets. “I’m not a straight A kid. I’m a delinquent. People are pissing me off. I’m pissing them off. Where’s the issue, Big Q?”
“ Where’s the- Tubbo, this shit isn’t like you, are you kidding? ” Quackity must have been penting up this rage all day, or at least for a while. Tubbo taking it instead of the poor floor-replacers coming in later to Quackity’s rage is probably one of the only good deeds he’s done in the past lifetime. “You’re a polite kid. Quiet, smart, respectful. Sure, you fuck around with your friends, but all teens do that. You’re just a kid. You shouldn’t be doing all of this.”
That’s kind of a shit argument. “Should or shouldn’t doesn’t really matter, does it? What counts is what’s happening. And what’s happening is all of that.” What does he expect, really? Tubbo to get valedictorian and roll up to a big-league university with shiny scores that never existed, settle down with some guy and live a pleasant life surrounded by platonic soulmates and perfect sobriety? A pipe dream; the first to ever come from someone else, desperate enough to be the real thing. “Man, I’m gonna be honest with you, sometimes you say things and it makes me wonder if you have any idea who I’ve been, like, all my life.”
“What do you mean?” Quackity’s face is turning red. “I’ve been here! The entire fucking time! I’ve seen you, Tubbo, I’ve seen the best and the worst-”
“The best happened, like, a week ago,” Tubbo confesses. “And the worst happened before you ever met me. So really, all you saw was the mess that’s in between. And I don’t really know if you saw that, either.”
“You would come home, go straight up to your room, do your homework, push your dinner around the plate, and then go to bed,” Quackity articulates. “After doing a damn good job at school,” he adds stubbornly, “and then that was that. No drinks, no fights, no giving up on your education.”
“You sound like such a dad right now,” Tubbo says, deflecting, but Quackity picks up on it.
“Yeah, well, clearly Phil’s not doing this shit for you.”
“Yeah, well, clearly Phil’s not my dad, then.” Tubbo’s voice raises in pitch and volume, just slightly. For a taste of variety, he tells himself, a bit stupidly. “In case you forgot, I kind of don’t have a dad. And never had a dad, actually, as a matter of fact.”
Quackity scoffs. “Tubbo, you’ve had a dad before.”
“I actually haven’t,” Tubbo repeats, starting to feel the heat in his face the second that Quackity stops ranting at the dead air between them. Kind of like a balancing act, in a way. Both can be pissed off, but each get their turn saying their piece before resorting to snippy come-backs. What fun. Tubbo hopes his own life never gets like this with Ran- nope, nope, nope, not thinking about that again. “In case you didn’t know, my biological dad bailed. Schlatt’s dad, who was my uncle, left too. And Schlatt, who was my cousin, is dead. And Phil, who is my friend’s dad , will go. So, where’s the dad, Quackity? Am I forgetting him somewhere?”
“Do you really not see Phil as your father?” Quackity asks, seeming a bit surprised. Or, at least, a bit something that isn’t anger. Tubbo wishes that were him. “Even after all this time? Like, it’s been years. And he’s trying to adopt you, you know that, right?”
“Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen,” Tubbo shuts down bluntly. “And no, I don’t. Because he’s not my dad. I don’t have one.”
“I mean, I get it, Tubbo,” Quackity tells him, “I don’t have a dad either-”
“You don’t get it, though. Not really.”
“My dad left me in the care of his parents to take a job somewhere,” Quackity explains, eyes shadowed over with some unresolved grief, or some shit like that, probably. “Then he didn’t come back. My mom’s health took a dive. What about that isn’t understanding, Tubbo? Enlighten me, what is it that I’m missing?”
“The part where your mom killed herself because she hated you.” Tubbo feels numb as he recounts it, because he swears to God he’s had to do this a lot lately, even if this is the first time he’s vocalized it. Maybe all confined in his fucked up brain, then. Forever reminding himself. “The part where your dad leaves before you’re even born. The part where your dickhead of an uncle leaves because somehow you’re the problem. The part where your cousin got a heart attack and left you all alone. The part where your adoption is fucking conditional, and you’ve fought with just about all the family members with a say in the matter, so there’s no fucking point wishing for it.”
Quackity, to his credit and Tubbo’s offense, doesn’t even feign shock for longer than a millisecond before firing back, “Okay, yes, that’s shit, Tubbo, that’s really shit and I understand that. What I don’t get is why you’re throwing Phil away like he’s not-”
“Throwing him away?” Tubbo’s starting to yell, now, judging by the way Quackity flinches. He doesn’t give a fuck. “I haven’t done shit to him. It’s his fucking fault for taking in his son’s best friend and expecting nothing to happen. He’s going to back out of adopting me because I’m too much work, and that’s gonna be well within his rights, and it’s not going to matter.”
“He was adamant about adopting you when I talked to him.”
“Yeah, shit changes.” Tubbo lets out a harsh laugh, shutting his eyes. “A lot of shit changes. I fought with Wilbur and Tommy. I stole his money and his alcohol. He’s not gonna want me.”
“You know Wilbur’s had shit go on in his life, right?” Quackity argues. “And Phil still loves him?”
“Yeah, ‘cause Wilbur’s his son.”
“And you aren’t?”
Tubbo slams his hands against the couch as he abruptly stands up, glaring at Quackity from where he still cowers against the wall. Why bother talking shit while standing all the way over there? What’s he scared of, touching parts of Schlatt’s house that he can’t easily override? Like the dead man’s entire fucking life?
Right now, Quackity looks more scared of Tubbo than anything. Fucking good.
Tubbo feels no shame in shouting, “Of course I’m not! I’m Tubbo Underscore-” and there should be something tacked after that, “-and I’m the only Schlatt out there-” because all of them are dead or done, every single fucking one, “-and I’m nothing like Tommy, Wilbur, and Techno, I don’t know shit about them-” but he knows exactly how to hit them where it hurts, “-and all I do is just live in their fucking attic, that’s it, just their attic-” and the floorboards beside where he has to sleep every night, “-of course Phil wants me, he takes charity cases, that’s it, that’s all,” why would he call Quackity if Phil was even an option, “-you don’t know a thing, Quackity, you really don’t. You really, really- ” his voice cracks, “-don’t.”
Quackity’s eyes are wide with fear, still not used to the experience of someone yelling at him. Probably thought he was rid of that. Poor fucking guy, being haunted by something dead, how absolutely unfathomable. It’s not like that’s the entire point of Tubbo’s existence. Not like Tubbo has had to deal with it, silently, because nobody gives a shit to hear about anything except themselves?
That fear melts, though, into something more controlled. Practiced, probably. Tubbo had to learn that, too, it’s not like Quackity’s special. Hell, he’s the most predictable person alive, same shit Tubbo’s dealt with and keeps doing it over and over, boyfriend to boyfriend to boyfriend to Ranboo and Ranboo and Ranboo-
His eyes are dark, and he stares Tubbo down, even as both of their chests heave around breaths, and after a few seconds of labored breathing, Quackity finally opens his slightly-bleeding mouth to say, quite plainly:
“You’re more Craft than Schlatt.”
Before Tubbo can realize what he’s doing, the two of them are against the front door, and there’s fabric in his fingers. Quackity’s face is directly in front of him, and both of Tubbo’s hands are shaking, and all that he can hear over the blood roaring in his ears is how dare he how fucking dare he does he even give a shit how can he say you’re not what you are while looking at you like you’re exactly that you’re playing into his hand everyone’s hand how fucking dare he how fucking dare he you’re falling into his trap fucking do something- and Tubbo drops him, stumbles backwards, feels the blood rushing away from his head as he holds it in his hands, squeezing at the strands of hair he can feel between bitten down fingernails, and he knows Quackity is still looking at him, and all he can think over the blood roaring away from his ears is you’re just like him you’re just like him you’re just like him you’re just like him all falling into these hands, hands that he’s bitten to hell and back, hands that have held Ranboo’s before, hands that cradled his own face when- when-
“I’m not,” he stammers out, spitting out every syllable that he trips on. “I’m a Schlatt. You wish I wasn’t. You wish I wasn’t.” I wish I wasn’t.
“Tubbo,” Quackity says, but the sound of his voice makes the anger come back shut up shut the fuck up you have no idea what you’re talking about- “You aren’t a Schlatt. You’re not even the last one alive.”
“I am.” Quackity’s out of his fucking mind, must be forgetting shit, who is Tubbo what’s his last name is it Underscore is it Schlatt is it- forgetting, forgetting, Ranboo, Ranboo- “I’m the last one. I’m- I- I’m the last one here. I’m- I’m not- I-” you’re not anything, you’re everything, you’re the only person that deserves a damn thing on this earth because you actually give a shit and listen and try to care, you’re the most worthless human being to ever exist you are a walking memory of everything people try to forget, and Ranboo and Ranboo and Ranboo- “You don’t know us. You don’t know us.”
“I know you, Tubbo.” Quackity takes a step forward. “I know a lot about you. We’re friends.”
“No,” Tubbo gasps out, watching Quackity’s eyes fly across the room. No. Fuck, those are black dots, aren’t they? When did Tubbo stop breathing, shit, he’s not supposed to panic, not supposed to be the one to, to watch it all, breathe breathe breathe Goddammit kid fucking breathe-
“Tubbo, breathe for me, holy shit,” and yeah, like that’s a fucking option, like Tubbo’s not trying, he’s not the panic attack kid, is the one meant to help out, so why can’t he breathe why is talking so difficult why is Quackity not leaving what the fuck is happening-
Suddenly, something cold washes over him, and Tubbo blinks rapidly as water slides down his face.
His vision clears, and Quackity is in front of him with a glass of water, eyes wide, and yeah, Tubbo’s fucking done here.
Quackity’s mouth opens to say something, but whatever he had wanted to say is drowned out to Tubbo as his hands start to shake violently at his side. Part of him is screaming to surge forward, to hit Quackity somewhere, to make him go away, but the other part of him knows that that’s not a good thing to do, he isn’t supposed to do that, far gone but not that far gone. Neither part reconciles and neither part cares about what Quackity has to say as Tubbo moves in an arc past him, shoulders far apart and not at all brushing, and Quackity is speaking but Tubbo doesn’t care doesn’t care doesn’t care.
The water is wet all over his head and top of his shirt, and the longer he walks the more words filter in– I know you, Tubbo, I know you and Don’t fucking leave, don’t you fucking leave and You could have hit me, why didn’t you?– but they all drown out as he slams the door shut behind him, freezing air washing over his body, and Quackity doesn’t try to open the door.
He’s sick of this fucking place. He’s sick of this house that is going to get sold, all the familiar parts of it and all the parts that feel off, the tape wound around the house in a way that screams that this is supposed to be Tubbo’s home, but it doesn’t feel like his. If he had to pick a home, it’s nowhere close to here, a twenty minute bus ride away if the red lights don’t run, but that’s not his home, either. It has to be this place.
If he thinks about himself, it’s just a spitting image. He and Quackity have no place that isn’t here, because both of them are the composite of familiar and unfamiliar things. Quackity’s the same bright-eyed kid he used to be, with that same streak of melancholy, but the law school sitch is new and he cares in a way that’s distinctly unfamiliar.
And Tubbo, a lot more simply, is all the parts Schlatt and all the parts who he used to be, but too many shoved together pieces of things that don’t make sense. He’s angry when he shouldn’t be, he’s sentimental over shit he doesn’t care about, he can’t live in the present even when he hates the past and hates the future because he’s stuck in some time limbo. Tubbo has no idea who the fuck he is.
All he knows is that he’s not a Craft. Or a Soot or an Innit or whatever the hell Techno made his legal last name, he’s not that. Has never been that. He’s just this. Just this.
He’s a Schlatt, but history’s adapting. And this house doesn’t feel familiar, like a slightly off replication of what it used to be. And he’s so sick of this, so sick of having to deal with this, and it’s freezing outside and he’s covered in water and there’s nowhere else for him to go except forward, into some unknowing future in the hopes that if he has to step through hell, at least the burn might feel better.
And so Tubbo, with no other choice, starts walking.
—
It’s kind of fucking disarming, how it always ends up hitting.
Sometimes there’s a prompt for it. Sometimes, even, a precedent— this is supposed to happen. On occasion, both exist at once; especially then, it’s hard to notice.
No matter how it happens, it tears everything apart. It starts with the sky, ripping it in clean half and dusting its fingertips with the thunderclouds. Then, the ground fractures and splits and shakes as its last respite before falling through into the pavement cracks of the sky, then into the astral vacancies of space that are pulling apart and pushing together like it’s contracting, giving way to the apocalypse of realization. It feels like an uprooted tree, a never ending flood, a storm on the horizon then finally, finally comes. Even then, it doesn’t stop— on and on and on until there’s nothing, the red giant has gone supernova and left nothing in its wake but anguish and fury.
Tubbo is standing in front of his old elementary school, only a ten minute walk back home assuming it’s bad weather out, when it hits him: I don’t have a home anymore.
The swing set breaks first.
Then, he’s running.
—
But there is nowhere to fucking run to.
His face burns. He’s seventeen; he feels ten years younger. His face is supposed to set aflame because his best friend caught him staring. It’s meant to be for when the AC breaks in the summer and the stack of incomplete homework he uses for a fan won’t work. It’s not supposed to burn for this. Not for this. Never for this.
Where the fuck does he go? The kid who craves the practiced compassion from a fucking pediatrician, the kid who visits the local pharmacy to grab a lollipop and suck on it like it’s a drug he’ll abuse when he’s of age, the kid who always steps on the sidewalk cracks because they’re even and he has no mother who’s back can break from that childhood superstition. Where does that kid run to? No playgrounds out here, no pharmacies and no hospital rooms and no homes. Thank God. God no. What does he say?
It’s January, his phone is buzzing with missed calls and emails saying Tubbo Underscore, I am sorry you were not able to make it to class, and his head is rapidly cycling between screaming at him in pulses of blood flow and going eerily silent, leaving him gaps of recognition where he is before submerging him in panic that can only be remedied by walking. He can’t stop walking, can’t fight the burn in his legs, because he has to be going somewhere, has to get away, can’t be seen.
But he can’t walk forever. Can’t run forever, either. Can’t hide forever, can’t run forever, can’t walk walk walk walk walk walk he has to keep walking, dammit, this is the easiest thing a person can do, and he’s still- he’s still-
He has no home. He has no father. He has no mother. He has nothing. All that he has left to his name is what is buried in his jean pockets right now, what he had in the floorboards that he can only maybe gain access to again (if he breaks in through the attic window, then maybe- ), and a smattering of people who like him in this town. Jack Manifold and Eryn and Aimsey– none of them able to really do anything– and Ranboo– who Tubbo would text if he was braver if he was better if there was anything of worth to him– and Quackity– who he left behind in that fucking house– and Tommy– who must hate him who must want him to come home who must be texting him a million times,
there’s nothing, though, aside from that. And maybe that’s a lot, more than he deserves, but it’s not enough. Nothing is ever enough. Tubbo needs something to crawl under his skin and rearrange him, then it will be enough. Then he’ll feel like this can be fixed, but right now, so long as he’s him, there’s nothing.
He can’t stop arguing with people. He can’t stop pushing people away. He can’t stop running.
There’s nowhere for him to go.
Standing in front of a crosswalk, he stands a few feet from the other pedestrians and pulls out his phone. So many texts from Tommy. A couple from Quackity. One from Wilbur. Fuck.
Wilbur: Hey, come home soon, and text and let us know where you are and when you’ll be back
Tommy: where the fuck did you go why did you do that
Tommy: Im sorry please come back lets talk
Tommy: I love you
Tommy: Tubbo where the fuck are you
Tommy: Tubbo
Tommy: Tubbo
Tommy: Tubbo
Tommy: Tubbo please
Tommy: Ok its been a whole period and you arent back you werent at lunch fuck
Tommy: fuck fuck fuck where are you
Tommy: Ok bus is here Im going home I love you so much please come back I wont say anything about what we talked about
Tommy: we dont have to talk about it
Tommy: please come back though please be safe
Quackity: if anything happens you call me.
Quackity: text me back in ten or else i’m going to look for you.
It’s been far past ten.
Something must have come up.
He feels dizzy again. He shuts his phone off. He has to keep walking, keep going, keep keep keep keep keep keep
He can’t do this forever.
He can’t keep fucking doing this forever.
He can’t keep fucking doing this forever but he has to because what is he going to do what else is there he has no father has no mother has no family has nothing has nothing no money has no has no has no has nothing has nothing has nothing.
The street light dings, and people start walking, and it takes ten seconds for Tubbo to realize they’re moving so he has to sprint across the street in under five, and the cars are looking at him like what the fuck is this kid doing out here, and Tubbo wishes he could say I couldn’t tell you if I tried. And they’d call out with their flashing headlights whose kid is this? and he’d say back I’m nobody’s kid. Nobody’s.
If he has no family and has no home, what’s stopping him? What’s stopping him from running back out into the street, getting hit by cars, searching through incomplete medical records for an emergency contact and who would they even find in there? What’s stopping him from standing dead still in the middle of the pavement until someone arrests him for loitering, waving a hand in front of his face asking him who the fuck he is, no answer on his tongue and no energy to say a thing. What’s stopping him from giving up entirely, what’s stopping him from taking up the job application he sees plastered on a pole near the gas station, what’s stopping him from calling someone and saying take me somewhere that isn’t here ?
Tommy used to take him around every damn place in town, showing him all the best parks and the nicest cafes and which libraries you could fuck around in and which ones you couldn’t. One time, Tubbo and Schlatt went on a joyride, Tubbo licking at an ice cream cone while Schlatt drove ten above the speed limit through long backroads until eventually his dad called and he turned the car around- did he want to go back? What if his dad never called? Could Tubbo and Schlatt have had a better life, cousin and cousin, somewhere that isn’t here?
If Tubbo had more time, maybe he’d ask Ranboo to do this for him. To pull him into his car and drive them out somewhere hours away, long enough that they barely feel the thrum of the car and the grit of the roads under them, until the two of them can breathe again. Fall into orbit in an easier atmosphere, the two of them, where Tubbo isn't a supernova and Ranboo isn’t the best and worst parts of the earth.
If only he had more time.
But what’s to say he’s out of time? Running through the streets– what if he could ask? What if he could go back? What if he can wait, wait, wait for Ranboo, because he always would. Wait at the ends of his own earth for him if that’s what it takes.
But he can’t wait. Because that means going back somewhere, and there’s no place that wants him.
Maybe, then, Tubbo’s found the point where he stops waiting. He’s found the point where he wants time to stop, to go into orbit, to explode as a supernova and stop existing. In simpler terms, maybe it’s finally time that he- that he tries to- that he finally-
Another crosswalk he barely makes it through, his mind in another place. He doesn’t want to die, not really, has always kept it in his back pocket like a self-destruct switch for when things get real bad, but right now, things still have room to get worse. Is that really what living is for, though? Sticking around just for things to get worse? Why the hell would anyone live for that?
… Why the hell does anyone live, anyway?
Jack lives the shittiest life ever. Not exactly the worst, but undeniably the shittiest, because he’s a decent enough guy in a pretty stuffy basement with an asshole of a dad and no real respect for himself. Nobody would care aside from Tubbo and a few of their mutual friends if Jack kicked the bucket, and over time the ache would ebb until nobody visits his grave. It’s brutal, but it’s true. Jack could kill himself if he wanted to, and Tubbo wouldn’t even blame him.
… So why hasn’t he?
Aside from the fact that Tubbo kind of pep-talked him into believing the world is a better place than he sees it as, or something like that, Jack seems to keep going because he’s kept going. Wake up and go to bed and wake up again, because that’s all he knows how to do. Listless, but still clinging, and for what? New video game releases, a pack of Budlight, a full-ride scholarship? A girl or guy to hang onto his second Wii remote?
It’s pathetic, but Jack’s still alive. So if that’s still going steady, then what excuse does Tubbo have to die? Why the hell does anyone choose to die, anyway?
That’s a shitty way of thinking about it, and Tubbo knows that. He doesn’t blame people for being in so much fucking pain that they can’t figure out a solution. All he can do is wish, like the rest of the half-compassionate people on the planet, that he could have been there to change their mind. But who the hell is he to talk, anyway? He’s the motherfucker standing out here with no home, no family, no life, figuring out if he should bite the bullet or not.
As he stands at another traffic light, accidentally having walked across the same three streets maybe five times at this point, he thinks about what Jack keeps going for. Games, beer, college, love. What does Tubbo live for?
… Well. Tubbo likes those NASA posters they drop every year on Halloween. The fucking cool things that look like movie posters but are even more geeky and very much curated to his specific niche of entertainment. He’s got a few already, but it’d be cool to see what they do next. Or what planets get explored. He kinda just wants to see what NASA does in general, since space travel is wild and shit. Part of him feels like he should be there, watching the stars on really advanced technological screens, but every kid has unrealistic dreams, don’t they?
That’s something, though. Unrealistic, but something. Stupid, but something. Tubbo is going to stay alive because he likes NASA. It sounds really pathetic in his head.
… Is there anything else?
Tubbo… likes animals. Maybe that’s another thing. Whiskers, the cat he has that is surprisingly still alive, he likes her. So. That’s kind of cool. He doesn’t really believe in an afterlife, and he isn’t exactly God, so he’s probably not going to get a say in whether or not he and Whiskers kick the bucket at the same time and go to the same place. He doesn’t want his cat to die, anyway. Kind of wants her to live for the rest of time, be cool and immortal and shit.
It’s been a while since he’s walked her. Maybe he should think about doing that.
On that note, Tubbo likes music. Shitty showtunes and weird alternative and sometimes synth if he’s feeling particularly edgy. He likes those technological beats in his ear but also random people bursting into song, so that’s pretty cool, he thinks.
He was listening to a musical that day ages ago, wasn’t he? That day where he and Tommy went to Wilbur’s place of work after school, and that’s where he met Ranboo. He… he was listening to a musical then. While he was waiting for Tommy to leave school.
… Tubbo wants to hear Tommy tell a story again. Something stupid, something that’s not even true, something obnoxious– Tubbo doesn’t care. He wants to talk to Tommy again, wants to laugh at a stupid bit and hate himself for laughing at it because Tommy’s sense of humor is so bad but cracks him up anyway, and he wants to get in on all his stupid ideas for pranks that they both pussy out of, and he wants to give Tommy a hug again and-
Tubbo leans his back against a brick wall of some for-sale vacant office, pressing his palms into his eyes to stop tears from falling down his face. People keep walking past him, ignoring him, nobody asking if he’s okay. He’s glad they don’t stop for him, because if they said that to him, he wouldn’t know the answer.
Tubbo wants to talk to Tommy again. He wants to hang out with Tommy in a cafe and get overpriced food like they did that one time with Ranboo, and fuck, Tubbo wants to talk to Ranboo more, to figure him out, to tell him how pretty he is again and again and again. He wants Tommy and Techno and Wilbur and Quackity to try and wingman for him and absolutely fuck it up, and he wants to have something with Ranboo anyway, unlabeled and confusing but theirs. He wants to go on a road trip with Tommy and Ranboo and hell, maybe even bring Jack, driving down some random roads until they barely feel the thrum of the car and the grit of the roads under them, until the four of them can breathe again-
Tubbo doesn’t want to die.
Tubbo really, really doesn’t want to die.
He has no home anymore. He has no family anymore. He has no life, but he’s got this. All these broken pieces of something that could be good, if he just tries to fix it, if he swallows his stupid fucking pride and tries to fix this, he could have something. He could have a reason to live.
There had to have been a reason that Wilbur didn’t attempt to end his own life twice in a row. There had to be a reason that he went backpacking across Europe instead, took the path that Tubbo thought was cowardly, running away from his problems instead of facing them.
But now that Tubbo thinks about it, he must have felt absolutely miserable, wanting to be done with everything and still pushing himself through life, getting through fights with his dad and older brother and plastering on a brave face for his younger brother to never let him see the pain behind it. Wilbur must have hated it, hated every second of being alive, in the years that everyone universally seems to think should be the best time of your life.
But Wilbur still did it. Wilbur still chose to stick around. Wilbur saw something in this bullshit mess, and he made a future out of it. A humble one, marked with road signs of failed relationships and shitty convenience stores, but a future nevertheless.
Tubbo pushes himself away from the wall, blinks his eyes clear of tears one last time, and starts walking again. He knows what he has to do.
And the thought of doing it hurts worse than anything. He cannot express how much he does not want to fucking do this, wants to snap forward to a time where everything is already resolved, want to go back before he screwed everything up.
But he’s going to do this anyway.
Because he’s Tubbo Underscore, whatever that means in the absence of everything, and he wants to live.
–
When Tubbo makes it to the front door of Tommy’s house, legs burning from exertion and his chest aching from the questioning he’s just spent his afternoon doing, all he can think is this isn’t home.
His second thought, much more desperately, is but it’s all I’ve got.
The door opens the second he raises his hand to knock, barely a sound coming from the impact of his fist to wood before he’s face to face with Tommy, his pale face near white with anxiety and his eyes blown wide.
I’m sorry, he thinks he should say. What he wants to say is sorry, wrong house, I’m your new neighbor, we’re strangers now. Under that bullshit, he actually wants to fall to his feet or something dramatic and say I don’t know where the fuck to go, if I’m here I’m hurting, if I’m away I’m selfish, if I’m dead I’m not able to fix it. But maybe he should just stick with I’m sorry or I love you or let’s pretend this never happened.
But of course, of fucking course, he finds himself unable to say a word.
In a blur of blonde and blue, Tommy moves from in front of Tubbo to being wrapped around him, face buried in his shoulder and lanky arms grasping at the back of Tubbo’s sweat-soaked shirt. A strangled sob escapes Tommy’s mouth, and Tubbo’s resolve cracks in half, because he can’t handle hearing Tommy cry, still.
He can’t feel angry anymore. There’s no place left for it anymore. He wishes he could, but he fucking can’t, and maybe that’s a good thing . He’s so sick of running, so sick of not knowing, so sick of being alone, and something clicks when he’s in Tommy’s arms, that his life is ending right now, not in the way he imagined.
Not some merciful death. A brutal, brutal light ahead.
The way that the world ends for someone who chose to live.
“I’m so fucking sorry,” Tommy chokes out. “We don’t have to talk. Just- just forget it, I was being- I was being a proper dick, I’m so- I’m so fucking sorry, Tubbo, I-“
“Tommy,” Tubbo breathes out.
Tommy looks up. “Yeah? Yeah, anything, Tubbo, I-”
“I’m ready to talk.”
It takes Tommy as off guard as it takes Tubbo, but he's ready for this. He’s sick of having no answers. Whether he has to leave or stay, he just needs an answer. He can’t rest without one. He’s fucking stagnant as is, and he can’t live with himself, not until he finds a way to be better, because he’s awful . But fuck , he’s sick of thinking like that, so sick of not knowing if he should hate himself or not. It’s so easy to, though, he’s half convinced everyone does. Maybe that’s a problem.
Tommy’s surprise shifts to apprehension. “Are- are you sure? If you think- if I- if you’re feeling pressured, then I-”
“ Tommy ,” Tubbo repeats, and that must say everything, because Tommy’s already letting go and walking the two of them inside before Tubbo can finish whispering, “I need to.”
“Okay,” Tommy takes a deep breath, then asks, “How do you want to do this?”
“Can you, uh.” This is so fucking awkward. It’s so fucking necessary, though, because he wants this to be over with so he never has to do it again. “Can you just get… everyone? Uh. If that’s- if- yeah.”
“Alright. Ahem. Watch this, Tubbo.”
Tubbo watches with a faint smile on his face as Tommy shouts up the stairs, “ BOYS! FAMILY MEETING! ”
“Fuck off, Tommy,” Wilbur shouts down the stairs, but he’s the first to come down. Tubbo kind of wishes he wasn’t, because Wilbur’s expression shifts from irritation to immediate understanding when he sees Tubbo. Tubbo thinks he should probably apologize, maybe, but Wilbur just acknowledges him with a nod and says, “We’re doing this in the living room?”
“What do you say, Tubbs?” Tommy asks before climbing up the stairs, presumably to get Phil and Techno, who hadn’t come back down yet.
Leaving Tubbo with Wilbur.
A little quieter, Tubbo mumbles, “The living room’s fine.”
“Alright, we can do that.”
And Tubbo thinks obviously you could, because it’s right fucking there, and he thinks so many things that get more and more disorganized, not sure when it became him and his thoughts and not all just him.
Tommy descends much faster than he went up the stairs, jumping two steps at a time as Phil turns the corner and comes back down. His expression morphs from apathy to surprise at Tubbo’s appearance, before it softens down to… something, as he says, “Hi, mate.”
“Hi,” Tubbo says, half-trying to be unheard.
At the very least, Techno doesn’t act weird about him, just comes down and walks towards the living room. He’s the first to sit, picking his typical armchair and snapping so Boreas paddles over, comfortable there with his dog. It’s also as if his kind of younger brother isn’t here to talk about his lifelong trauma, but, well, it’s kind of comforting, too.
Eyes linger on Tubbo, but he moves to sit on the couch, Tommy instantly at his side with an arm thrown around the back of the sofa. Wilbur sits cross-legged on the floor, because of course he does, and Phil sits in the other and slightly worse armchair. Nobody really sits there, especially because this kind of family meeting, with everyone sitting to look at one specific person, rarely happens. And also because Tubbo being here took an extra space, but maybe either way, that chair would get left the same.
Tubbo fucking hates metaphors.
Tommy hates silence more than Tubbo’s dislike of some figurative thing, though, so he’s the first to cough into his fist and go, “So… uh. Family meeting, yeah?”
“What’s the family meeting about,” Techno deadpans, less a question and more a prompt.
Tommy deflates a bit. “Right. Well, uh, Tubbo was gonna talk about it. Right, Tubbs?”
“Yeah.”
The room falls back into uncomfortable silence.
Tommy opens his mouth to say something, but Techno cuts in first, asking, “Would music help?”
“We’re not playing fucking music, Technoblade,” Wilbur says, equally scoff and laugh.
“Uh, actually, that might be good?” Tubbo counters, earning another round of shocked faces. For fuck’s sake. “Instrumental, though. I’m uh, I need to talk still, so. Get some vibes.”
“Does jazz work?”
“Yeah that’s fine.”
Another beat of silence, and then quiet jazz seeps into the room.
Tubbo barely hides his laugh, but Techno, face as serious as ever, tells him, “Alright. Talk time, now.”
Fuck.
“Oh. Uh, right.”
Where does Tubbo start? He- okay, Tubbo kind of had the vague idea of unhashing all his baggage and getting it off his chest, but he didn’t really think out the exact way he was going to do that? He was kind of just planning on rambling until someone cuts him off, but does he start from when he and Tommy first became friends? From when he was born? What parts does he skip? What parts does he say?
He’s never actually had to do this before. Sure, he’s recently had the experience of opening up to Ranboo a little bit, but those were smaller anecdotes, corner pieces to the puzzle.
Now, he’s trying to make the entire fucking puzzle, with an end-result the shifts in paint and plastic whenever he tries to make out what the image is, and the eyes of four other people watching him struggle to piece it together.
So yeah, Tubbo hasn’t really thought out how he wanted to do this.
“Right,” he repeats, half-stalling, half-figuring that maybe if he waffles enough he’ll figure something out. “So. I, uh. Kind of- I’ve kind of been a mess. Uh. Lately. Or maybe for a few years, I don’t know.” He lets out an uncomfortable laugh, and nobody interrupts him, and he hadn’t even thought about how it was going to feel to talk for an uninterrupted period of time. He doesn’t usually get to do this. “Things have been kind of a lot, and I know I haven’t explained very much, so I wanted to… to talk about it. ‘Cause, uh, I know that- well, there’s-” he clears his throat, before finishing, “There’s kind of talk about maybe- maybe adopting me? And I wanted to, uh, explain this before- before you commit to it.”
“You think that what you say is going to change that decision,” Phil guesses, phrased like a statement because he knows he’s right and Tubbo knows he’s right, too.
Tubbo nods. “Yeah. I mean, it’s not-” it is bad, though, he can’t wave it off like it’s not bad, because Phil is considering adopting a criminal that is always followed by death, so it’s definitely pretty bad, yeah. “It’s- yeah. That’s the idea.”
“Alright.” Phil seems surprisingly calm about this, but with a trio of sons like his, he’s probably had to deal with family meetings like this in the past. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s just good at keeping his emotions under wraps. “Start whenever, mate.”
“I, uh, don’t know how to start,” Tubbo admits, since that’s probably better than staring into silence while jazz music plays around them. “Like. Do I just go from, uh, birth?”
“You remember your birth?” Tommy asks.
“I mean. I don’t remember, like, the process of being born?”
Tommy sighs in relief. “Good. Because that’d be fucking grim.”
“Yeah. It would be.”
Tubbo takes a deep breath in, finding a fixed place on the floor that he can stare at, and slowly starts speaking.
“So, I had, uh, a mom and dad. My father was a deadbeat, so I never really met him, though I’ve seen pictures of him a lot.” A lot is maybe overkill for the two faded photos Tubbo saw as a kid in Schlatt’s place, but to be fair, two is a lot for a kid without a father. “My mother… she died. Uh. Pretty soon after I was born.”
“Childbirth complications?” Phil asks, tone twinged with sympathy.
Tubbo shakes his head. “Actually, suicide.”
“They let a woman who just gave birth commit suicide in a hospital?” Wilbur repeats, slightly incredulously but also. Well. There’s always an undertone of something in the way that Wilbur speaks, even if it seems obvious to figure out his intentions. There’s always a bit of something there. This won’t change that.
Maybe this won’t change anything.
“I guess the want to not be my mother was strong enough that she found a way,” Tubbo says with a self-deprecatory laugh.
Tommy huffs beside him. “Well, I think that’s stupid.”
“Maybe,” Tubbo says, before moving on, “Uh, she did one good thing for me, though. She gave me my last name. Underscore, that is. That’s my mother’s last name.”
Phil hums. “Did you ever know your father’s?”
“Yeah.” Here he fucking goes. “This is when shit gets a little crazy, so, uh, brace yourself.”
“Shit already was crazy, I thought.”
Tubbo guesses that’s fair, seeing as Tommy never exactly knew about his parents, and it’s kind of one hell of a confession to drop onto him. “To be fair, yeah. But, uh, yeah, my father’s last name was Schlatt.”
Tommy tenses up beside him. To their credit, nobody else in the room does.
Wilbur, though, swallows in a slightly-forced effort before clarifying, “Schlatt, but not the one that died a bit ago.”
“No,” Tubbo confirms. “Same family, different guy. The Schlatt that died was actually my cousin.”
“I’m sorry, mate,” Phil says, softly, almost like he’s cooing at Tubbo. Tubbo doesn’t like the feeling.
He just shakes his head before continuing, “So, my dad had two siblings, I think. I’m pretty sure he was the youngest, so he had an older sister, who kind of, uh, disappeared off the face of the planet. I’m pretty sure, at least. All I know is that she didn’t want me, and her siblings didn’t like her.” Tubbo doesn’t know, some days, if he wants or fears ever meeting her. “The other sibling, the oldest, was still around. And he was the guy who took me in, along with his son, J Schlatt. The guy that died.”
“The Schlatts are about to get confusing,” Tommy warns, which Tubbo figures is pretty fair of him. “Can we- so J is the dead guy, and the father is, uh.”
“I’ll just call him Schlatt, and his son J.”
“Cool. Okay, sorry, keep going.”
“It’s okay.” Good to clear that up, at least. “Schlatt didn’t really want me. Uh. He was kind of a shitty guy. So was Sch- so was J,” saying his first name feels sort of wrong, he’s realizing, but also a little cathartic, “but, uh, Schlatt was a lot worse. J was sort of just a teenager, pre-teen, whatever, who was a bit of an asshole. His dad was, like, bad . Bad to J and bad to me.”
“What does bad mean, Tubbo?” Phil asks, phrased gently, but Tubbo knows the actual question. Did he abuse you, or was he distant like me? Was he a bad person doing a good thing, a good person doing a bad thing, or a bad person with bad intentions and bad morals and were you a bad, bad, bad kid?
“He drank,” Tubbo confesses, “which, y’know, doesn’t make someone a bad person inherently. Y’know, you can drink and even have a problem with it and not be that shitty.” It’s just a Schlatt thing. Just a Schlatt thing. “He was a little, uh, physically- well, he’d be, uh. He was the kind of parent that, uh. He- yeah. To me and J.” He doesn’t think he can get out more than that. “J was kind of mean to me, too, but he also defended me. It was fucking weird, I could never- sometimes, I would think he’d step in, but he’d just laugh at me, and other times, when it was barely anything bad, just Schlatt yelling at me, he’d come in and tell Schlatt to fuck off. I never got it. I don’t know what- I don’t know.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t make sense,” Phil tells him. “Sometimes people do shit and you have no fuckin’ clue why they did it, but they did.”
“Yeah.” Fuck. Tubbo’s starting to feel a little too emotional, and it’s too fucking soon to be dealing with that, but the corners of his eyes are stinging and why is it so much harder to call him by his first name, to pretend there was something good, to realize that it was good some of the time and J would drive him- “I- okay. Sorry. Uh. Fuck, sorry.”
“It’s okay, man,” Tommy reassures before anyone else can beat him to the punch. “Would it help if I, uh, grabbed your hand or something? So you can squeeze it and shit. I dunno, it’s rough talking about shit, so- so if that’d, uh, help, then squeeze on, my friend.”
Tubbo considers it for a few seconds before tentatively saying, “Yeah. Uh, let me know if I squeeze too tight.”
“It’s okay,” Tommy repeats, offering his hand up and giving Tubbo a smile. It actually makes the emotions worse, seeing Tommy be so nice to him after all the shit that’s happened, and it’s not like this is going to fix what Tubbo’s done, but it’s an olive branch.
And if Tommy says it’s okay to squeeze his hand, Tubbo has to trust him.
Tommy does it first, once. Tubbo does it back. A silent agreement that this is okay, that Tubbo has a long way to go from here, but he’s not going at it alone.
With that, Tubbo has to carry on. For Tommy, if not for himself. “Okay. It kind of, uh. There was- fuck, okay. There was one day where things got really, really bad.” For Tommy, for Tommy, for Tommy. Tubbo has to do this for Tommy. Has to do this because it’s been haunting his dreams for months, years even, because Wilbur saw the aftermath of a flashback to it, because there’s no use avoiding it when it’s-
when it’s painted, just like that, across his face.
Across his cheek.
(He told Ranboo before about it, didn’t he? Sat in the passenger’s seat of his car, a place that felt like home before he even realized he didn’t have one, and held his hand as he talked about his lack of belief in God.
How God had been there once. How he knew he was never coming. Because Tubbo had gone through, had been through, had seen-)
He squeezes his eyes shut and grips Tommy’s hand tighter. He has to say it, because he needs to get it off his chest, has to tell someone about it. Because he’s sick of the only person knowing being someone buried under the dirt, sick of being plagued with the mark of it without ever explaining what it is, sick of- sick of-
He’s just fucking sick, isn’t he?
He can’t keep hiding it.
“I don’t know what happened,” and his voice is so quiet, it shouldn’t be this quiet, he can’t hear the music anymore and his ears are ringing and he can feel heat against his cheek, can’t do this anymore- “I think I pissed him off. But one second, I was fine, and then he-” a sob gets caught in his throat, and hot tears start falling down his cheeks alongside the burn already across it, and the sofa cushions are shifting under him and all he can feel is pain and the hand in his and he has to keep going- “We must have been in the- in the kitchen, because I just felt- just, something- it was hot, and it burned, and it felt like I was in hell, and I- J came, and someone was screaming, and I couldn’t- I- he-”
That’s as far as Tubbo gets before the tears get uncontrollable, and the room is dead silent aside from the faint voices he can hear in the back of his head and the way that his throat spasms around sobs, and it sounds like he’s fucking wailing almost, can’t focus, because he’s never had to say this before, never had to face the fact that he was almost killed and he- he was just a kid, fuck, he hadn’t done anything, he hadn’t done anything and he was already made unlovable-
“They didn’t take me anywhere,” he chokes out, red dots across his eyes in the darkness of his own closed lid. “J had to- to take care- and then Schlatt- the cat, he- he stayed then left, and it was- it was just us, and J was a teenager and I- I had this- I had a - ”
“Breathe,” Tubbo hears Wilbur say, voice softer than he’s ever heard it, except maybe when Wilbur’s talking to Tommy. Tubbo could be his favorite brother if he gave Wilbur the chance, could have this all the time, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck- “Breathe, hey, hey, we’ve got you. Can you feel me touching your knee?”
Tubbo can. Can’t tell if it’s Wilbur or J, can’t tell what year he’s in, doesn’t know where he is, where he is, where he-
“You’re Tubbo,” that same voice says. He swore to God he recognized it just a second ago. “Tubbo Underscore. You’re on a sofa right now, and you’re seventeen, and you aren’t alone. Can you feel the touch on your knee?”
Tubbo nods. When did his face get buried into his knees? The hand touching one of them, now, brushing through the ends of his hair. Hand in his, his probably sweaty, but the person holds on tightly, skin must be pale. Sofa under him. He feels sick.
“Tommy’s going to move your hand,” he is told, “and it’s going to go over his chest, so you feel him breathe. Can you breathe with him?”
The person holding his hand flounders a little, but the person- no, Tommy, Tommy, he knows Tommy, he- Tommy moves it, and he can feel something rising and falling sort of steadily, a little fast but not- not awful, nothing like when he was on the floor and thought he was dead and he was just a kid just a kid just a kid-
He takes a deep breath, and when he lets it out it makes a gross sort of whistling sound, his nose all clogged up, but nobody comments on it, just hears someone say, “Good. Keep breathing.”
Tubbo tries again. In, out, in, out- fuck, he fucked it up, the rhythm’s all off- but he’s still being reassured, so he just breathes again, in, out, in, out, in- in- out, in, out, in- hiccup- out, in, out, in, out, in, out- his head feels better, heavy but better, he feels- in, out, in, out-
As he keeps going, Wilbur states again, “You’re Tubbo. Your best friend, Tommy, is holding your hand. I’m Wilbur, and I’m talking to you. You’re on the sofa in a living room, and we’re gonna grab you some water, and you’re breathing, yeah? You’re doing good, man. You’re doing good.”
“It hurt,” he breathes out, barely audible with the thousands of layers muffling his voice, at least half of those the effort of trying to remember what he’s talking about, some trying to forget the subject entirely, brain weighed down and sinuses fucked up and face hot. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t,” a different voice says, and he remembers that it’s Tommy, sitting beside him, holding his hand and sounding really quiet. “You did nothing wrong.”
“I was a kid,” Tubbo feels another sob wrench out of his throat, but at least he can breathe. “I just- I wanted to be good.”
“You are good,” Wilbur tells him. “You’re so good. You didn’t deserve it.”
“It’s fucked up,” Tommy says. “It’s fucked up, what happened to you, but it wasn’t your fault.”
“You’re safe now,” Phil adds, having been silent the rest of this time. “It’s fucked. But none of us are going anywhere.”
“The mark,” Tubbo tries to say, feeling both painfully in control and distantly out of it. Rivulets must have soaked his skin where the scarring is, but it’ll never go away. Everyone he cares for has only known him with it. He only remembers himself with it. A birthmark, a reminder that despite his name, he’s always the culmination of the Schlatts’ mistakes. He’s scarred, marred, marked- “It won’t go. I- I hate it, I don’t- I hate it, I hate- I-”
Someone shushes him, “It’s okay, it’s okay-”
Tubbo’s vision blurs, even with his eyes shut, and he sobs into the fabric of his jeans, hand in his, hand on his knee, “I- I hate myself.”
“I know.” Tommy sounds like he’s crying, too, and Tubbo hates when he cries, feels awful for it, but he hasn’t let go of his hand and he’s tapping out the morse code for I love you on Tubbo’s palm and- and- “I- fuck, I wish you knew what- I wish you knew how I see you, Tubbs, I- I fucking- I hate the bastards that made you think that- that- that- that you’re bad. Or unlovable. Fuck, Tubbo, you’re so goddamn easy to love.”
“I’m not,” Tubbo protests, “I’m not, I- I’ve done horrible- the mark, it’s-”
“I know how difficult it is to love yourself,” Wilbur admits, voice less soft and more grounding. “Especially when there’s a scar that shows so much pain. I think you’ll find that you’re less alone than you think you are.” It sounds impossible, because Tubbo’s always been alone, it’s always just been him, just Tubbo, just Tubbo, just- “It’s okay if you don’t love yourself yet. It’s fucking hard. But people love you, man! And even if you don’t care about yourself, you gotta let other people in to care about you. Because people do.”
“We do,” Tommy emphasizes.
“You don’t have to believe that,” Phil says, “‘cause it’s fuckin’ hard. Just, let us in, yeah? Talk to us before shit starts hurting, because- because you’ve been hurting for a while, haven’t you?”
Tubbo lets out something close to a wail, and Phil asks, “Is it okay if I hug you, mate?”
The thought of being seen like this is awful, terrifying and embarrassing, but fuck, all Tubbo can think about is how much he’s always wanted this, how he never had a father and never had a brother and never had a family, and this one can’t be his, shouldn’t be his, but even if it’s for the last time, he wants to have it. He wants it so badly, more than anything,
and he nods, and Tubbo is being moved to the side as two thin arms wrap around his shoulders, and Tommy lets go of his hand to hold him by the waist and bury his face into Tubbo’s back, and Wilbur has his arm around Tommy with fingers gently brushing through Tubbo’s hair, and Tubbo’s hand flies out and gets caught by Techno, the front covered by his strong hand and the palm buried in Boreas’ fur.
It’s a little hard to breathe, but it was hard to breathe anyway, and it’s so warm but nothing like how it felt to go to hell, warm in a way that feels safe and secure. He sobs into Phil’s shirt, never the perfect father but the one Tubbo has wanted for so long anyway, and Wilbur presses kisses against his hair as he hums something, all the times he’s hurt him in the past overshadowed by the amount of love for Tubbo he’s felt like he had to hide, and Tommy cries alongside him because he’s his best friend and Tubbo wants to be his brother and fall asleep in the same room and play video games together for the rest of his life, and Techno quietly grounds him, because Techno is gone so often but Tubbo wants to be there for the day he finally stays, the day he gets his degree, the day he sorts his shit out with Wilbur and opens up to the rest of them.
He wants this so badly, wants what he can’t have,
but what’s stopping him from having this?
The story, maybe. The story he still hasn’t finished. The story that may be finished, now that he’s close to them all.
“J tried a lot,” he starts again, voice tired from crying so much, a little raspy but still able to be heard. “He started dating Big Q, and he tried, too. They both tried to raise me, but J was addicted to alcohol and we were poor and he had no idea what he was going to do. We needed money, but he wanted a future, and a future costs money, and money costs a kid, and he wanted it to stop.”
All J ever wanted was for it to stop.
“Big Q and him fought a lot. Quackity wanted him to sober up, start caring more about school, take better care of me- he wanted what J never knew how to get,” he wanted it to stop hurting, too, “because Quackity was drowning, and J was- he was still the same teenager he had been, kind of an asshole, and he never tried to better himself because it felt pointless. I don’t blame him for- for being angry, or for hating me, or for drinking, but I- I wish he asked for help,” he knows he’s a hypocrite, “I wish he tried to get better. I wish he didn’t- I wish he didn’t say and do horrible things to Big Q, and I wish he didn’t crave power and control more than anything, and I wish he got sober, even if it meant I had to go to an orphanage.”
“Did nobody try to get in contact with him?” Phil asks, voice close to his ear. “Social workers? The police? A school counselor?”
“They did, but he lied,” and so did Tubbo, “‘cause he didn’t want to feel weak. He’d call me a bitch and push Big Q around and lie to the police, ‘cause he didn’t want to feel weak. I think he always felt worse when he was drunk, ‘cause that’s when he’d apologize, I dunno.” Tubbo doesn’t know why Quackity thought Schlatt getting sober would make things better, because even if it were possible, it would have just made it a lot worse. “I shouldn’t blame him, I would have done the same in that situation-”
“There were options,” Phil interrupts. “It’s difficult, yeah, but there are a lot of things he could have done before he jumped to being an abusive dick.”
“Was he even abusive?” Tubbo asks, half rhetorically.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’d say he was pretty fuckin’ abusive to you.” Phil rubs one hand down the length of Tubbo’s arm, some kind of self-soothing gesture that still works even when on another person. “Sometimes people can do shitty things even if they’ve been through shitty things. Sometimes someone can hurt another person badly without being a bad person.”
“Then who am I supposed to trust?” Because Tubbo’s struggled with that all his life, even now. Where does he go? Who does he call? What does he even say to them?
“You trust the people who are good to you,” Phil advises. “You trust the people that you know have good intentions. You take a risk that will pay off.”
“It’s hard to know,” Wilbur adds, “but if someone has been at your side for a long time, and they make you feel happy more than sad, and you have opened up to each other, then yeah, I’d say you can trust that person.”
“But what if I’m wrong?” Because nothing that Phil and Wilbur is saying is fixing it. What if Tubbo miscalculates? It’s hard to know, but how do you know in the first place? Tubbo isn’t the type to take risks on something like this, barely knows how it feels to have something pay off, doesn’t know what happiness feels like, even, so how the fuck does he know?
There’s a period of silence following his question, one that is eventually met by Wilbur saying, quietly, “Then you’re wrong, and you try again.”
Which just affirms that there’s no clear way to trust people.
Tubbo decides it might be better to keep talking.
“I dunno what happened, but one day, it got to be a lot,” and that’s true, because when Tubbo thinks back on it, the day that he came to Tommy’s house is a blur. The details he can remember just sound like the same experience he had every day. The fact that he’s having a mental breakdown on his best friend’s couch, though, same place years later, shows that maybe it’s the repetition of the same awful every day that hurts him the worst. “I told Big Q, kinda, and he helped me get out. I think you know from there.”
“That’s when you came here, right?” Phil clarifies.
“Yeah. ‘S when I came here.”
“There’s some stuff after that, though,” Tommy points out, which yeah, Tubbo figured he’d ask, but he really doesn’t want to talk about that. Doesn’t want to focus on the parts where he fucked up– selfishly, it’s so much easier to talk about the mistakes of other people than every have to say plainly yeah, then I lied, then I stole, then I drank.
He’d have to get there eventually, though. Have to admit it at some unspecified point. If he has any sense of responsibility, then…
Tubbo takes a deep breath. Suddenly, the arms around him feel suffocating, and the room feels empty without white noise jazz playing through it.
It feels uncomfortably earth-shattering when he says, hesitancy dripping from his voice, “I’ve kind of been drinking alcohol since I was a kid.”
“Wouldn’t that affect how you grow and shit?” Tommy asks, which, Tubbo can’t fault him for curiosity, but it’s nothing Tubbo hasn’t had to hear before.
“Well, I’ve never been the tallest.” First time making a short joke about himself, and nobody even laughs. What the fuck. “Yeah, I, uh. Schlatt did it, and J did it, so I did it. I was never- like, definitely not as bad as they were. I’m not addicted. It just… it makes shit easier for me. There’s a lot of bullshit in my head all the time, and drinking makes it chill. I didn’t really think it was a big deal.” Before anyone could voice their well-meaning but predictable objections, Tubbo cuts in to add, “but it is. Clearly, it is.”
“Is that why all the alcohol in the kitchen went missing?” Phil asks.
For a second, Tubbo opens his mouth, figuring he may as well confess to the act of stealing some of the alcohol. But, Phil specifically asked about if he made the alcohol going missing entirely, and that, Tubbo didn’t do.
Wilbur doesn’t hesitate before admitting, “That was me. I noticed Tubbo drinking from it and, figuring things weren’t that bad, I thought I’d get rid of them. But me and Tubbo talked about that, yeah?”
It wasn’t a good conversation, but Tubbo guesses it qualifies as one by margin. “Sure.”
“Sure,” Phil echoes. “Alright. Has anybody talked to you about drinking? Because that’s really bad for you, mate.” Fucking obviously. “And- well, it seems like Wil knew before anybody fuckin’ told me, but have you told anybody?”
“Wilbur found out,” which domino-ed into- “then Tommy found out. I think Quackity always kind of knew. And, uh, and Ranboo.”
“When did you tell Ranboo?” Wilbur asks, masking most of his surprise, but Tubbo can still hear the tiniest bits of it. He guesses that would be kind of shocking, seeing as Tommy probably didn’t have time to relay that information to his brother in the short time since the argument at school.
Tubbo shrugs, but with the arms around him, it almost feels like him pushing against them. It has the effect of Tommy letting go of him, and then Phil, and then Techno and Boreas are retreating back to their chair and it’s just Wilbur left, hand in Tubbo’s hair, and Tubbo thinks briefly about Wilbur and the concept of staying.
He wraps his arms around himself, fingers idly tapping against his upper arms, and answers, “I think a few weeks ago? I don’t know what day, but we were at a park and it just kinda, uh, spilled out. He- I promised to quit and tell somebody, and I think that was enough for him to not tell anyone else, but I, uh, I didn’t.” A beat of silence, and then he adds, “Until now, I guess.”
“How much does Ranboo know about all of this?” Tommy must be dying, of curiosity or of some other similar disease. Maybe not jealousy, probably just anxiety. “Like, of everything you said.”
“Not a lot,” Tubbo says truthfully. “We- we haven’t had the time recently, I guess.”
“I thought you two were attached at the hip,” Techno speaks up, bluntly, for the first time in ten minutes, maybe over. He’d been content this entire time to just sit back and listen, but Tubbo knows that Techno and Ranboo had some kind of friendship, too, so news like this is probably going to shake the guy.
Tubbo’s not sure what to tell him, in this case. “I mean, we’re close, yeah. But, uh, Ranboo’s got some stuff going on. Kind of has been busy.”
Techno hums, and adds nothing else. Clearly there’s something there, and Tubbo might drill Techno about it later, but it’s going to have to wait for later because Tubbo thinks that he wants to stop worrying about Ranboo, actually.
Sometimes it feels like a gift, to be close enough to another person to have that anxiety over them. These days, it feels a lot more like a prison, and Tubbo would rather feel nothing at all.
Either way, he’s filled with a lot of feelings. Guilt, sadness, anxiety, frustration, and probably some more complicated mood terms that he can’t pick out of his brain. Should have paid more attention in English class, or maybe just in life as a whole, because feelings are the kinds of things your parents are meant to teach you, alongside morals and ethics, and yeah, Tubbo’s got none of that. He’s pieced it together pretty decently– when Tommy cries, he feels upset, and all that shit– but maybe that’s part of why it’s so hard to figure himself out. Because he doesn’t have the self introspection skills to figure himself out.
But then, if he really didn’t have those skills, would he be able to even identify that problem? How much self awareness does he have? How much is safe to have? How much until you lose your mind, or lose your world? Which is which?
All Tubbo knows is, wherever he is on that spectrum, he’s found himself on the more extreme side of it. Or out of bounds entirely.
“Okay,” Tommy finally says, bringing them back together the way he always does. Or tries to, at least, maybe more successfully than Wilbur. Or less. Fuck. Tubbo doesn’t know. “So- so- so- so- so- so we’re gonna do shit to make things better. Right, Tubbs?”
And the way Tommy says it makes it seem so, so easy.
And Tubbo wishes he didn’t know better.
“I don’t know.” He ignores Tommy’s fallen face, ignores everyone as a whole, actually, just staring at the floor. “I can stop drinking. That’s- I’ve always been able to do that, I guess, just never had a reason to. But, uh. But that’s all I’ve got. The rest is kind of up to you guys.”
“Pretty sure it’s the complete opposite, man,” Techno claims. “Like. You gotta work on things yourself, or else you’re gonna feel bad about someone else doin’ it for you.”
“It’s not about fixing myself,” Tubbo corrects, “it’s about what you all do with me. In general.”
Techno snorts. “What, like we’re gonna kick you out or somethin’?”
Everyone falls quiet, waiting for Tubbo to laugh at the punchline of the joke.
Tubbo doesn’t laugh, and everyone stays quiet.
“Oh,” Techno comments. “You actually think that.”
I’m a Schlatt, Tubbo wants to say, but what comes spilling out is, “I don’t know. I don’t- I-” He takes a deep breath, and then admits, “I can’t. Not right now.” We’ll go around and around on this forever and I can’t do this, not now, not now, not now.
“I think we’ve said enough,” Phil states, understated compassion somewhere in there. “There’s other shit we gotta figure out, but you’re worn out, mate. You should sleep.”
“Where?”
Despite the barely-concealed anxiety in Tubbo’s voice, Phil remains calm, and he carefully replies, “In your bed, mate.”
“I can’t keep sleeping here.” Tubbo feels the exhaustion wash over him, and he uses that as a scapegoat for the tear that he feels sliding down in face as he says, “I can’t keep sleeping here not knowing when you’ll kick me out.”
“Tubbo, we keep saying this,” his voice is far from unkind, closest to fatherly Tubbo’s ever really heard it. “We’re not going anywhere.”
And fuck, there’s something about that choice of words- that- he-
When he starts crying, they don’t all wrap their arms around him again. He’s grateful for it, because crying once is already embarrassing enough and doing it again feels- feels wrong. They leave him be, kind of- they all still stay, petting Boreas or checking their phone or watching him, waiting for him to say something, anything, but not pushing.
Tubbo cries and cries and cries, feeling more emotion than he’s felt in a long time, all at once and kind of overwhelming. Eventually, though, sooner than the first time he broke down, he feels himself calm down, significantly more cathartic than before. He wants to apologize for breaking down like this again , but he knows nobody is going to take it, so once he gets enough control of himself to actually speak, he just asks, “Do you mean it? When you say you’re staying?”
“Yeah,” Tommy confirms. “We’re staying, Tubbo. Even- even if you hate us, or hate yourself, or shit like that, we’re not going anywhere. You could be a dick, because- because you’ve been a dick, but so have I, and Wil’s a dick a lot,” he gets a shove on the shoulder for that, and Tubbo feels like he might laugh, “but like, we’re still gonna love you. Because we love you a lot, all the fucking time, y’know? Like. We’re your family. And- and yeah.”
“It’s okay if it doesn’t feel real,” Wilbur tells him quietly. “It’s okay if it feels kind of confusing, still. You’ve got time. You’re going to figure it out.”
“You’re gonna be okay,” Tommy concludes.
And, for the first time in Tubbo’s life, he believes it.
He doesn’t admit that, though, feels too scared to. So he just leans his head on Tommy’s shoulder, and Tommy wraps an arm around his shoulders in return, and that seems to be enough.
A comfortable silence carries on between them all for a few minutes, only broken by Tubbo’s infrequent sniffling, until Techno says, “Uh. So, in hindsight, the jazz music might’a been kinda a bad idea.”
Tubbo’s lip quirks up as Tommy loses his shit beside him, laughing over Philza’s endeared scoff of oh my God and Wilbur sarcastically quipping, “Oh, was it?”
“Look, man,” Techno says defensively, “if a guy asks me to play jazz music, I’m gonna play jazz music. It’s like, basic human decency.”
“When did you even turn it off?” Tubbo asks, because he can’t actually remember when he stopped hearing it.
Techno pauses, then says, “You, uh, started talkin’ about the uh- the scar stuff, and I was thinkin’, ‘Wow, this is a pretty bad time to be playin’ Duke Ellington.’ And then you started cryin’, and I was like, ‘wow, this is a really bad time to be playin’ Duke Ellington,’ so I stopped.”
Even with the mention of Tubbo’s facial scar, the anecdote leaves him actually letting out a laugh for the first time in hours. Tommy laughs right along beside him, and Tubbo responds, “To be fair, it would have been really funny if it kept playing.”
Phil chimes in with, “The fuck it wouldn’t? That’s so fuckin’ morbid, Jesus Christ.”
“I appreciate the commitment to the bit, Tubbo,” Wilbur adds, “but that would have been a little eerie.”
“I coulda started playin’ white noise,” Techno points out. “Coulda been worse.”
“Did you know that there are different kinds of noise?” Tommy suddenly blurts out, excitement clear in his voice.
Wilbur gives his brother a strange look and says, “Tommy, there are a lot of kinds of noise.”
“No, no, no!” Tommy quickly corrects, waving both his hands enthusiastically before realizing one of them was jostling Tubbo’s shoulders. He leaves that one still, but the other one continues to move at alarming rates. “It’s like- there’s like brown noise, and pink noise, and red noise, and black noise and shit! My fuckin’- Aimsey was talking about it at lunch today, because apparently he listens to grey noise because he’s fuckin’ weird, and I listened to it and it’s so fucked up, Wil, it’s like- it’s all staticky and shit, and it sucks.”
“I’m going to go make mac and cheese for everyone,” Phil says, completely disregarding Tommy’s anecdote out of what must be fatherly instinct. “It’s gonna be the microwave ones, so just prepare for that.”
“Thanks, Dadza,” Tommy replies, and then, a second later, says, “Wait, no, no, no, fuck you, Dadza! That’s- I just poured my heart out to you all, and that’s all you say? No that’s nice, Tommy or- or- or anything ?”
“That’s nice, Tommy,” both Phil and Techno say at the same time in unplanned synchrony.
“You two are heartless bastards,” Tommy declares, and it provokes another laugh out of Tubbo, which makes Tommy’s eyes soften. “Tubbo is the only person I like here.”
“You love me, Tommy,” Techno argues.
“I do,” Tommy decides. “I love you, Technoblade.”
Techno wrinkles his nose, seemingly realizing how much he hates verbal expressions of affection, and just replies, “Cool.”
“You love me too, Tommy,” Wilbur points out.
Tommy shakes his head. “No, I don’t.”
“You do.”
“No, Wil, I don’t. You’re all- you’re stupid, and you’re ugly, and you get no bitches-”
“I get bitches,” Wilbur argues. “I get more bitches than you do.”
“Oh, this is exactly like Crane,” Tommy insists.
“Who the fuck is Crane?” Tubbo asks.
“The fuckin’- the one that killed his brother! And he has- he has all these instincts. Or something. Techno, help me.”
“You’re thinkin’ about Cain and Abel,” Techno corrects. “And I don’t think they ever fought about this kinda topic.”
“Techno, say bitch.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“No.”
“Wil, tell Techno to say bitch,” Tommy whines.
“He’s cussed in front of me in the past,” Wilbur says mischievously. “I got to hear Technoblade say fuck once.”
Tommy gasps. “No. No, Technoblade, you wouldn’t-” his voice lowers dramatically, “you wouldn’t say fuck, right?”
“I got the food!” Phil walks in, perfectly timed to cut off anything Techno would say, if he was going to say anything. “You can mix in the cheese packets and shit if you want, I didn’t do it for you.”
Tubbo does exactly that, getting a strange sense of nostalgia as he pours the granular cheese in and stirs it into the mixture. The last time he did this, he was drunk, sitting on the roof and feeling despondent. Now, he’s here, watching Wilbur hand his cheese over to Tommy, Tommy’s turning a radioactive shade of orange while Wilbur eats his plain, and Techno and Phil share a look before eating theirs normally, like Tubbo. And honestly, as Tubbo takes the first bite, he realizes how much better it tastes when he’s sober.
Beside him, Tommy accidentally spills half the packet onto the carpet, which Boreas approaches curiously and starts licking.
“What the fuck, Boreas,” Techno says dryly, and the room erupts in noise.
–
Eventually, they all finish up their food and start to go back to their rooms. Phil leaves first, saying he had to look over something a colleague sent him, and he’s followed soon after by Techno claiming to have something similar awaiting him. Wilbur hangs out a few more minutes before he gets a call from Niki and something crosses his face, and he briskly steps outside to take the call, leaving just Tubbo and Tommy there, sitting on the couch.
“I’m tired,” Tubbo says, breaking the accidental stretch of silence the two of them had kept. Peaceful, but still there; Tubbo hadn’t really minded it, now that he thinks about it.
Tommy nods. “Yeah. Me too. C’mon, let's get up now. Innit that a song? Let’s get up now.”
Tubbo squints, standing up first since he was leaning on Tommy anyway. “Uh, we’re all in this together?”
“Not what I was thinking about, but that works.” It definitely doesn’t, but Tubbo takes Tommy’s word for it, figuring that Tommy will remember in the middle of the day tomorrow and text Tubbo in class about it. He’ll look forward to that, if nothing else.
“Y’know,” Tommy starts more seriously, “you wanna sleep over tonight?”
Tubbo thinks about when they were younger, sharing the same bed and kicking each other and complaining about the other hogging the duvet. Tubbo thinks about how truly long he’s been in this house, how distant Schlatt’s felt when he was in it compared to how, even when it’s dark and silent, this place always feels more like home than the liveliest nights anywhere else. Tubbo thinks about him and Tommy, how Tommy must like those superhero comics so much because, in some stupid and sappy way, he kind of saved Tubbo, didn’t he?
This isn’t home, not exactly, just like how Tommy isn’t his brother, not exactly. But, really, Tubbo gets the feeling that both are kind of true in all the ways that matter.
It doesn’t take Tubbo long to reply, “Yeah,” to walk up the same steps he’s tripped on every couple of months, to rearrange the pillows to his liking as Tommy hops in the shower, to finally, finally take a deep breath out.
There’s still a lot of conversations to be had. Ones that Tubbo is entirely dreading. But, he made his bed and laid in it, so to speak. He chose to live, and now, he’s going to live. And there’s nothing bad about that, really. It might be shitty sometimes, but he’s going to keep moving forward, because he wants to and he has to. And that’s all there is to it.
He’s laying in bed, Tommy’s shower-singing filling the room with the thin ass walls in this house, when Tubbo feels his phone buzz beside him. He’s pretty grateful for the excuse to stop smiling stupidly at the ceiling, because he knows Tommy would bully him if he saw it. Not like Tommy hasn’t been sappy as fuck tonight, though.
The notification brings Tubbo back down to earth, reminds him that the past few hours have been momentous and kind of felt surreal, but that there’s still a world outside of all the bullshit he just unloaded onto his kind-of family. He still has to text Quackity back, he realizes, and apologize, and he needs to figure out what school work he missed. Actually, as far as he can think, that’s all he has going on that’s really anxiety provoking, so once he resolves that, he’ll be set for a good night’s sleep.
Expecting it to be Quackity, he opens up the text message and takes a look.
And for a second, Tubbo feels the world fall out from underneath him.
Because there’s one critical piece of Tubbo’s life that he had forgotten about, just now.
Ranboo: i thitknk id bee a black dwarrf.