Chapter Text
It is another one of those nights again, with a dark room aside from the flicker of a lamp illuminating specks of dust, and the permeating scent of rose candles clashing with takeout food salt, where Ranboo knows he is not real.
Half his bed covers are on the floor, piled beside a dress he left crumpled against the manilla wall. He wants to heave the sheets up, because he’s freezing, but it takes significant effort to move his arms and even more effort to care, so he lets it fall a little more every hour. It is ridiculous of him to be cold, anyway, because he has on the same clothes he wore this morning and he fared just fine when he was outside, but he supposes it’s the sort of cold that is trapped inside him, ricocheting off the rotten bones in his body and creating blizzards in his lungs.
He is having a hard time breathing, on that note. Maybe he should be more concerned about that. Maybe he would be, if he didn’t know that he isn’t at risk of dying. You can’t die if you’re not alive- that he’s some spirit of malintent shoved into a mortal body– that no matter what happens, he won’t disappear. Because Ranboo doesn’t disappear; he’s cursed to wander, just with no memory, and there’s never any rest for him. Everyone wants him gone, but he can’t die. Just lay in bed, like this, while the first signs of frozen rain start outside his window.
One of his arms, pinned to the mattress with exhaustion, scrolls idly through his phone notifications. He has a lot of texts– from Tubbo, from Dream, from an unknown number. Fundy had asked Niki for Ranboo’s phone number… yesterday, he thinks. He had been late to school for that. He can’t find it in himself to feel ashamed.
He needs to reply to these people. Tubbo is telling him about a video game he’s never heard of, and Dream is spitballing times for the two of them to meet, and Fundy is doing similar with a tone of desperation to it. All of them need Ranboo in this second, but Ranboo can’t need himself, not when he feels so far away. So he just reads and closes his phone, fingers resting emptily on the bed as he sighs and looks at the ceiling.
Sometimes, Ranboo wonders what the point to all of this is. He already knows that the equivalent of a higher being– God, he guesses– really hates him. People in his day to day life are burdened by him, and he barely contributes to society in any other meaningful way. Really, all he has is his photographs and research, which Dream always urges him to do, but he… he hardly feels like that’s worth the oxygen he takes up. Dream would hate him for saying that, but Dream hates him anyway. That’s the way they are.
Ranboo has nothing to himself, really. Or, no, that’s not the problem, is it? It’s not about the nothingness that Ranboo has. It’s about the nothingness that Ranboo is.
He is a teen employee at the local bakery, with a polite smile on his face and shaky hands as he sorts out nickels that stick out starkly against his black gloves. He is a student at D’Essempi High School who checks out to do research and has a strained relationship with all the school counselors. He is the housemate of a wonderful person and mostly contributes by watching over her cat and adding to her financial anxiety. He is the best friend of Tubbo– but, no, he couldn’t even do that right, because Tommy hates him and Tubbo deserves better. He is the person Dream sends to take photographs, but he never finds anything. He is an empty room absent of most decorations, aside from a flickery lamp, old rose candles, takeout food, and a crumpled up dress. His identity is as ambiguous as any, and he can’t even wear a suit without wanting to run into traffic. Everyone thinks he will crash his car at 25 and die a tragedy. He can’t even remember getting his license.
Ranboo wonders if there was a little more personality in Iris. There must have been something in her that Fundy loved enough to have been looking for her so desperately. Maybe she liked music. Maybe she was excited to get CDs from Fundy, eyes sparkling as she listened to the song she’s named after for the first time. Maybe she wore dresses and had a pretty face without scars and had black hair healthily growing past her shoulders. Maybe she was kind to people, and saw the good in things, and believed in a higher power, and was scared of stars. Maybe she was a good child.
Honestly, Ranboo is more inclined to believe that she was none of that. That Iris was just as awful of a person as Ranboo, but a little more saturated. Her edges were defined, and she had a hypocritical streak, and she was indecisive, and she could never handle her emotions so she yelled at her friends. And she hated herself, and she cursed out God, and nobody wanted her. That Fundy only looked so hard to see if she had gotten any better, and as soon as he learns that Ranboo is just Iris but less, he’ll kill him.
Ranboo moves his phone to his bedside table and, with noticeable effort that nearly makes him collapse, he gets up and walks over to his dresser. He lights the rose-scented candle sitting there, even though he shouldn’t be trusted with fire, and grasps emptily in the dim light until he grabs the dress he stole from Niki, dark and creased.
On the edge of his bed, he holds the dress to his body, breathes in the rose candle, and murmurs to himself, “I’m Iris.”
It feels wrong. It feels awkward in his throat, and it feels wrong.
Try again.
His arm lowers, and he sighs. “You’re right. I know you’re right. I’m nothing,” he confesses more honestly, voice still quiet so Niki doesn’t hear him talking to himself in the middle of the night. “Iris is dead.”
One of the most common meanings for irises is hope.
Ranboo blows out the candle, drops the dress back on the floor, and falls back in bed. As he does, he laughs to himself. Being named something like hope. How ill-fitted. How awful. His parents, wherever they are, must have thought he was a joke.
He’s so, so cold, and his body feels like decay. Tomorrow is a Wednesday, and he is going to leave school again to meet with Dream. He feels sick at the thought of that, because he thinks of Tommy and still doesn’t understand, but he’ll face Dream regardless.
Because there’s no point to anything, and Ranboo is just meaninglessly wandering until someone gives him a purpose or shoots him dead.
And Dream, he knows, is one of few people with enough of a heart to do either.
-
“Are you going to leave school today, bossman?” Tubbo asks at lunch, biting into his sandwich while Ranboo delicately picks at the white exterior of the orange with bitten-down nails.
“Yeah,” Ranboo replies. “I don’t really stay at school to do research for the most part. So, you can always assume I’ll be out, yeah.”
Tubbo grins. “Care to have company?”
Ordinarily, Ranboo would agree, because having Tubbo in his car feels right. Everything feels a little less overwhelming when the other is there, and from what he can tell, Tubbo seems to not mind the long drives and menial work, so Ranboo really could bring him along.
But, today is the day that he has to meet with Dream. Not officially– to his research teacher, he’s going out to the library still, but it’s the best time for him to meet with Dream without anyone suspecting anything. Niki’s kept a closer eye on him recently than she usually does– he doesn’t want to go anywhere after work if he can help it. Unless Tubbo invited him over or something, but, well. He wouldn’t. So that doesn’t really change much at all.
So, Ranboo picks at an easy excuse, “I don’t think you should skip Chemistry this much.”
Tubbo shrugs. “Who gives a shit, dude? I would rather be with you than, like, learning stuff I already know. The teacher doesn’t really care.”
“I don’t want you to be declared truant, Tubbo,” Ranboo pushes. That would be bad, honestly– Ranboo isn’t just saying all of this because he can’t have Tubbo seeing Dream, that would- that would genuinely be bad, and Tubbo could go to court for it. “That could have, uh, long term consequences.”
“Oh, fuck off with consequences,” Tubbo argues, and Ranboo thinks he might be getting irritated. “I can handle that shit myself. I just wanna hang with you, Ranboo.”
“I…” there’s not really a good way to continue this, not if Ranboo wants to avoid upsetting Tubbo. So, he… hm. Needs to drop the excuse, probably. “I… don’t think today is a good day to hang out.”
Tubbo’s demeanor changes, and Ranboo can’t tell which is an act– his anger, or his concern. “Why not?” He tilts his head to the side a little, some brown hair falling into his face. “Are you going somewhere secret? CIA shit? I should have known you were in the CIA, it all makes sense now.” Tubbo grins, and Ranboo feels guilt pool in his stomach. “Like, your name is Ranboo, and you’re super smart ‘nd shit, so I bet this is all a ruse. Gonna take me out, big guy? With a gun? Ooh, like- like in one of those movies-”
“Tubbo,” Ranboo cuts off quietly. “I, uh. Well, I don’t think I could confirm or deny if I was part of the CIA if I, uh, was. Part of it. Which I’m not, but, uh-”
“My point stands, then!” Tubbo concludes triumphantly, and Ranboo cares for him so much and he wants to hear about the movies he was going to talk about, he wants to listen to Tubbo, but Tubbo can’t trust him and Ranboo can’t trust Tubbo and he really has no choice.
“I need to go alone today,” Ranboo insists, and Tubbo’s smile falls. “It’s- it’s important. Just, for focus and everything. Plus, I’m going, uh, pretty far. And… and you’d get home late.” That’s a complete lie, but Ranboo needs to deter him. “Promise you can come next time, okay? I promise.”
Tubbo looks at Ranboo like there’s something on his face, and Ranboo wonders if it’s obvious he’s lying. That… wouldn’t be good, not at all, but he doesn’t say anything in case he accidentally incriminates himself. Instead, he picks another piece of white stuff off of his orange, and waits until Tubbo asks, voice low, “Is something going on, Ranboo?”
Ranboo looks up and meets Tubbo’s eyes, just for a second. It’s easier to meet Tubbo’s eyes than really anybody else’s, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard when he feels guilt threaten to choke him. When Tubbo is looking at him like this is some kind of intervention, like he knows something Ranboo doesn’t.
Everyone looks at Ranboo like that. He doesn’t want Tubbo to.
It’s making him a little irritated, honestly. And it’s not like he can get defensive, not like he has a choice, but he doesn’t know why Tubbo’s so set on there being a problem with Ranboo’s isolation when Ranboo’s spent the past however-long going off on his own. It’s not like it mattered to him a few months ago– but no, that’s not Tubbo’s fault, he can’t just- he can’t just say that.
It’s not the right time to be upset.
“Nothing’s happening,” Ranboo tries to reassure, wanting this conversation to end. “Just a long work day, is all. Don’t want to drag you along, it’s all, uh, really boring stuff, honestly. Just a lot of typing and stuff.”
Tubbo raises his eyebrow. “Going far away to type stuff?”
“Photos, too,” Ranboo adds quickly. He feels sick, but he doesn’t want to waste the orange. Another white piece gets picked off. “That. But- but you get what I mean.”
“Yeah.” Tubbo says, but he doesn’t seem convinced, and Ranboo doesn’t know what it is that Tubbo’s so suspicious of. All the possibilities run through his head faster than he can think through them, and he’s just- he doesn’t know how to handle this. He doesn’t know what he’s been doing so wrong recently that’s making everyone keep their eye on him. He cries one time, and suddenly it’s as if he’s on suicide watch.
Tubbo eventually sighs, taking another bite of his sandwich before saying, “You do you, bro. Just remember you can, uh. If something’s up, you can tell me, yeah?” Tubbo gives Ranboo another serious look, and everything turns blue for him before desaturating. “I’m not good with words, but you get it.”
“I do,” Ranboo tells him, because he mostly does. “But I promise I’m fine.” Because he mostly is.
“Sick, dude,” Tubbo responds, and then he flashes Ranboo a grin, and he feels his shoulders relax again. Things are okay again. Things aren’t awkward between them. Things are okay. Tubbo’s not angry, so Ranboo shouldn’t be. “So, like, y’know the game I was telling you about?”
“Mhm mhm.” Ranboo sets the orange aside, rests his cheek on his hand, and watches Tubbo’s animatedly talk about this video game Ranboo only sort-of remembers the details of.
(It’s one pair of watchful eyes gone, at the least, even though Tubbo still glances at Ranboo when he thinks he won’t notice.)
-
“Wait outside until I come out there to meet you,” Dream tells Ranboo for the third time since this phone call started, as if these directions are ones that Ranboo is unused to.
He hums anyway, turning off his car from where it’s parked in front of an apartment complex that Dream lives in with his friends, right beside a small alleyway with clean pavement and nobody around. It would be a little more sketchy if it didn’t have direct exposure to the sun, which helps Ranboo look a little less like a drug dealer and Dream a little less like a drug user, so it’s a convenient place. Far drive, but convenient.
“Are you there yet?” Dream asks, and Ranboo snaps back to focus.
He sucks in a breath as he steps out of the car, everything a lot colder than he anticipated. Considering it’s the 26th of November, he should be a little less surprised, but he’s still clinging to the warmth that September treated them with this year. He’ll have to cope with it until spring, it seems. As usual.
“I’m here, yeah,” he replies before Dream starts to get antsy. It’s during school hours and most people around here are working families, Ranboo thinks. He would have thought Dream would live somewhere closer to the local college he attends, but Dream hasn’t mentioned college to Ranboo in a while, so maybe he’s wrong in assuming he goes there. It’s not something he’d bother asking, anyway. “Are we, uh, are we staying outside for this?”
“No, just give me a minute. It’s freezing out, isn’t it?”
Ranboo laughs. “It’s, uh, it’s pretty cold out, yeah.”
“I’ll see you in a minute, Ranboo,” Dream says, and before Ranboo can reply, he hangs up.
Ranboo’s… kind of grateful. Talking to Dream in person ranges from panic attack inducing to actually validating and nice , but over the phone, Dream sort of sounds perpetually annoyed. Which doesn’t go well with Ranboo, generally, but it’s fine. He’s sure that Dream wouldn’t invite him in if he was angry at him. They’ve done business in the snow before, Ranboo thinks. The experience is familiar, he just can’t remember when. He’s sure Dream remembers.
He doesn’t ask.
Being here is honestly kind of nerve wracking overall. Even if it’s nicer seeing Dream face to face, he hasn’t really met with Dream since he and Tommy had their whole disagreement. Part of Ranboo thinks he should just ignore it, because Tommy is dead-set on ignoring him and he’s never really going to get clarity on what he did wrong, is he, so it’s fine. The other part of him wants to ask, continually pushing until someone gives him an answer.
But, with the way that Tommy talked about Dream, he sounded… afraid of him. And even if Ranboo knows Tommy doesn’t care about him, no matter what he says or does or anything, Ranboo thinks it would still be pretty terrible to try and stir that fear back in him more than he already has. So- so he just won’t mention it to Dream, then. He can do that at the very least.
Dream is pretty quick to open the door, giving Ranboo a grin and gesturing him in. He only talks when the door shuts behind them, not giving Ranboo a second glance as he starts going up the stairs and belatedly greeting him with, “Hey, Ranboo. How’s your week been?”
“It’s been fine,” Ranboo responds politely, “how has- how has yours been?”
“Pretty good. Can’t complain, really.” Dream hums. “Have I ever taken you back to my place? Or, me and my friends’ place, but they’re out today. I swear we’ve been in here before, but. I guess you wouldn’t remember, would you?”
Dream sort of answered that question for himself. Still, Ranboo pointlessly echoes, “Yeah, I don’t remember.”
Dream shrugs. “Cool with me. We’re probably just gonna sit on the couch and stuff. I can order a pizza if you want that, I don’t know when you need to be home. I know Niki’s a bit overbearing on that, huh?”
Ranboo scrunches his nose up a little as Dream laughs, but relaxes his face in case the other looks back at him and forces a small laugh. Niki isn’t overbearing, not at all, and it’s school hours, anyway, so it’s not like she would notice anything. Ranboo doesn’t really like the way that Dream thinks that Niki is all over him or something, but Ranboo guesses it's his own fault for misconstruing it that way.
Or maybe Dream thinks you need someone watching over you like that, his brain unhelpfully supplies. You know, because you’re crazy.
Ever the contrarian, his conscience starts to fight back against itself, Or maybe it’s the opposite. Everyone is watching you like you’re crazy, including Niki. Excluding Dream. Maybe Niki is overbearing, maybe you just haven’t noticed, don’t know any better-
Ranboo takes a deep breath, pretends it washes his anxieties away even though it changes nothing. “It’s fine, it’s, uh, school is technically still going on, so it’s not- it’s not like she’s going to care much?”
“True.” Dream stops in front of a door suddenly, and Ranboo’s a little relieved that he only lives on the third flight of stairs. His legs sort of hurt, though, because Dream walks a lot faster than he does. But he’ll be sitting soon, anyway, so it doesn’t matter. “Can you always skip fourth period, or is your school going to stop you eventually?”
Ranboo watches Dream fiddle with his keys before he reminds himself of the question, tearing his eyes away from the sheen of the metal– clearly new, meaning Dream probably just moved here, or something– and focuses on staring right into the back of his shoulder, for lack of a better focal point. “I think in May they’ll want me to stop. They don’t, uh, really care much right now, though. We have a lot of time until May, I think.”
“You think?”
“I know,” Ranboo says. “Because it’s December.”
“November,” Dream corrects him, giving him a grin over his shoulder as he opens the door and flicks on the lights. “It’s November, Ranboo. You really don’t make good use of that planner of yours, do you?”
Ranboo covers up his surprise with a self-deprecating laugh. “I guess- I guess not.”
Idiot, he chastises himself, soon it’s a few days, then it’s weeks, then it’s months, then you won’t even know the year anymore. Like those characters in movies that people always poke fun of. You won’t even know your own name.
Dream’s apartment looks pretty cozy. It’s a little larger than Niki and Ranboo’s, which makes sense considering that they’re only two people and one of them is seventeen years old, while Dream lives with two other grown adults– Ranboo thinks, anyway, he doesn’t know a ton about his roommates. The couches are beige and have some small stains on them, but there are blankets thrown over and some small popcorn kernels on the floor, and the kitchen is mostly neat aside from the overflowing pile of dishes, and there’s a brightly patterned rug on the floor that’s ugly in a sort of nice way.
It’s a very normal place. It makes Ranboo kind of happy, but a little sad, too.
Expectable for a forgettable person that lives in a room with zero decorations.
“Are you down for that pizza idea?” Dream asks, closing the door behind Ranboo as he awkwardly stands there. “Didn’t get an answer from you earlier.”
“Oh, I’m okay, thank you though.”
Dream shrugs. “Suit yourself. Anyway, you can sit down.”
Ranboo nods and takes a seat on the very edge of the couch. Still, when Dream sits, he stays kind of close to Ranboo, which makes him feel a little claustrophobic for a second before he remembers that this is Dream, and it’s fine, because it’s Dream. Of course it’s fine.
He leaves his backpack on the floor in front of him, trying to take up minimal space, and pulls out both his camera and his folder. He lets his camera hang around his neck, even though he’s not going to take any pictures right now, and pulls out the few photos he has printed off in his folder. Most of the photos he has are from the church, with a few other ones from places that he doesn’t imagine will yield much. Mostly, he’s been focused both on researching the local church and looking into the abandoned one a bit farther away.
Dream accepts the photos when Ranboo hands them over, and Ranboo is quick to recite all the information that he’s learned. “This church- uh, there’s not a lot of interest surrounding it, honestly. But, but, there’s an older church, uh, farther away that’s abandoned. And- and I looked into it, and apparently the founders built it a long time ago, and it was a pretty, uh, well-run place. But then a lot of stuff started happening to the area around it– I think it had to do with a fire? And I know that there are mines in that general area, too, so I think that was involved, I- there wasn’t a lot of information about it, you know, small place and all of that. But, but the church was the only thing left standing for a while, but then eventually it got abandoned as more people moved. But a hundred years later or so, the town has started to be rebuilt and is now sort of alive again, lot of jobs and stuff, so, uh, but the church isn’t really- isn’t really any different. Still abandoned. I think a lot of people live there. Like, uh, illegally.”
Dream hums. “Do you think you can go and get some photos there at some point? I can go with, if you want.”
Ranboo bites his lip. Dream’s never actually offered to come with him, and Ranboo doesn’t want to offend him, but… he likes going out alone, honestly. The drive can be kind of calming at times.
It hasn’t been very calming recently, given, but Ranboo can’t help but catastrophize to think that it might be worse, were Dream with him. Which is a terrible thing to think, but then again, most of Ranboo’s thoughts are.
“I can go out alone,” Ranboo decides, “and, uh, yeah, I think I can do that soon? It’s far, so it wouldn’t really- it would go into after-school hours, which is fine, I’d just have to-”
“Don’t worry about doing it soon,” Dream waves off, and Ranboo stops rambling. Dream hands the photos back and pulls out some cash, which makes Ranboo nauseous but he quickly accepts and puts it into his wallet as Dream continues, “Good work with all of this. There’s not much of a rush to all of this, you know?”
Ranboo wants to protest, because really, at risk of sounding self-centered– and that’s why he’d never voice it out loud– a lot of this is centered around him. And Ranboo isn’t going to be around indefinitely. And Dream has told Ranboo that this information is really important, and Ranboo trusts him, because these places all connect to unveil this really big secret, and even if Ranboo loses sight of what he’s doing he can always count on Dream to remind him. But- but the idea that there’s no urgency sort of makes Ranboo– and he feels awful for this– get confused what he’s doing this for. What this will really accomplish and protect. Both of them know that if Ranboo’s involved in a prophecy, this can’t save him. Ranboo doesn’t know how this will save the world.
But Dream thinks it will. And it’s Ranboo’s responsibility. So he’ll do it.
But there’s no rush apparently, so he won’t.
But he will. But he won’t.
“You know, Ranboo, I didn’t really invite you over to discuss this all that much,” Dream says, and Ranboo’s head spins. Will, won’t, will, won’t. “Y’know, I’ve been hard on you, and I know you have stuff going on, so I sort of wanted to hang out. Hear about how things have been, you know? We’re friends, right?”
“Yes,” Ranboo agrees easily.
Dream smiles. “And friends talk to each other, right?”
“That’s, uh- that’s a pretty important part of it, I think.”
“But we don’t talk much.” Dream gestures to his neck, and Ranboo takes the hint and puts his camera back in his bag, zipping it up, before he can even really register what he’s doing. “We have time to kill, don’t we? School ends in about forty five minutes. Enough time to do something, you know?”
“I- I guess so?”
Ranboo isn’t prepared for this, actually. He’s just not at all prepared for this. Because usually, even if it’s someone like Tubbo, he has a second or two to get his bearings. But with Dream, he sort of doesn’t, because he can’t exactly leave nor are the two of them really comfortable with each other, so he’s kind of just- just kind of stuck here. And he doesn’t know what to say, and he’s hoping Dream can lead the conversation and everything.
After an awkward silence where Dream smiles blankly at Ranboo while he picks at a thread in his jeans, Dream sighs and asks, “Do you do anything for fun, Ranboo?”
Ranboo nods. “Yeah? I mean, I, uh, take photos-”
“That’s a job,” Dream clarifies. “I mean just for fun.”
Ranboo tries again, “I bake-”
Dream laughs. “Ranboo. That’s a job.”
“You’re right, sorry.” Ranboo feels a little scrambled from being cut off, but also, he’s glad Dream cut him off because that’s the right response when Ranboo rambles on for too long. “I, uh. I like to read sometimes. I don’t really get a ton of time to, but I think it’s cool. Uh, I listen to music, drive a lot, that sort of thing.”
“And that’s all good stuff,” Dream says, in a way that makes Ranboo feel like he’s given a wrong answer for a third time, “but none of that- I mean, I respect it, but none of that sounds fun, Ranboo. Come on, you’re, what, seventeen? When I was seventeen, me and my friends weren’t- we weren’t just reading and driving. ” Dream pauses, and Ranboo opens his mouth to reply, but then Dream keeps talking and Ranboo reminds himself not to interrupt, he had nothing important to say anyway, “I guess you don’t have a ton of friends, though, do you? And no, Niki and Techno don’t count.”
Ranboo wants to argue that he does have friends. Even if it’s just one, because, well, Tommy isn’t really his friend anymore. But still, he has Tubbo, and that’s important, isn’t it?
But… but part of him doesn’t really want to tell Dream about Tubbo. He doesn’t know why. He’s sure that Dream wouldn’t really care much, sort of brush it off. But Ranboo keeps thinking back to Tommy, and his fear, and Tubbo still lives with him, and that not only makes Ranboo himself a threat but also makes anything he says about him. Maybe. Or maybe Ranboo is just paranoid. He can’t tell.
“Aside from you, not really,” Ranboo lies. “But, uh, I am kind of an introvert, so.”
“That’s fair, that’s fair.” Dream looks at Ranboo, and Ranboo is reminded of how intense Dream’s eyes can be. Sort of like Tommy and Tubbo’s, bright blue and piercing, except Dream’s is this really clear green color. He’s one of few people Ranboo can look in the eyes of, but it makes him feel uncomfortable even still. “That’s sort of wise of you, I’ll admit. People aren’t good to have around.”
“Really?” Ranboo… Ranboo would disagree, actually. “I think-”
“I know what you probably think,” Dream says before Ranboo can get through the first two words of his thought, “but there’s a difference between the two of us, you know? I still think you should be doing more fun stuff, like speeding down the highway-” Ranboo would literally die, “-or shoplifting-” Ranboo doesn’t think that’s really a fun activity so much as a necessity, “-or vandalize some old guy’s yard-” that is just a crime, actually, “-but I did that stuff with my friends. But you don’t have friends.”
“I don’t,” Ranboo agrees, because he doesn’t know where Dream is taking this.
Dream smiles, and Ranboo feels his skin rise in goosebumps, even though nothing has happened, and this is just Dream, this is his friend Dream and this is what normal conversations look like. “Ranboo, you’re more of an important person than I am.”
Ranboo shakes his head. “That’s not-”
“Ranboo, listen to me.” And Ranboo shuts up, because he doesn’t know where he was going with that anyway. Dream’s grin widens. “You’re the center of all this. There’s- there’s a lot I don’t know about you, Ranboo, and way more you don’t know about yourself. I can help you figure that out. Other people- other people don’t know that, Ranboo. Unless you tell everyone you have all this stuff going on.”
“I don’t.” That’s true, at least.
Dream nods. “Because that wouldn’t make sense to. You- you’re sick, Ranboo, but a lot of people are sick. And it’s not your fault that you’re fucked up, just- other people might think it is, you know? Doing all this stuff with friends or whatever, that is just waiting for you to get left behind, Ranboo. Because the best people get left behind, that’s the thing. You know that, right? The loneliest people are the best ones?”
Ranboo thinks he’s heard that moral once or twice, maybe. “Yeah, I- yeah.”
“You’re gonna do big things in life, Ranboo,” Dream tells him, “if you forget all this, take that one piece away with you. You’re a good guy. One of my favorite people out there, I’ll be honest with you. Other people are going to slow you down, though. I mean, look at how much Niki and Techno hold you back.” He lets out another laugh, and Ranboo feels sick, and Dream is a lot closer to him than he thought he was, and he wants to get out but this is Dream and Dream is right, not about Niki and Techno but about the rest of it, because the longer Ranboo thinks the more he agrees that people would kill him if they knew how insane he was. “Better to be a lone wolf, right? Like those, uh, social media Sigma males.”
Ranboo pauses. He doesn’t recognize that term, exactly. “What’s a Sigma male?”
“Nevermind.” Dream sighs. “But, yeah. You get my idea.”
“I do,” Ranboo says. “Thank you, Dream, I- I do appreciate that, genuinely. Sorry if I kept cutting you off or anything, uh, during that. Just had a lot to say but- but you’re right, yeah. Sorry.”
Dream waves it off. “You’re all good.”
“Thank you again. It really means a lot that you, uh, invited me over, and…” Ranboo trails off, noticing Dream looking at his phone. He waits a little before Dream lets out a sigh and stands up, Ranboo following him and grabbing his backpack hesitantly.
“Have to kick you out, unfortunately,” Dream huffs, and they’ve only been here for- for some short length of time, not forty-five minutes, so it doesn’t make sense, but Dream starts walking towards the door anyway. “My roommates are going to come back. But, yeah, good to see you, Ranboo! I like hearing your thoughts and stuff, we should talk more.”
“Yeah, we should,” Ranboo responds, giving a hesitant smile. “Uh, thank you, Dream. I’ll keep taking photographs, and-”
“I’ll text you soon!” Dream interrupts, and Ranboo opens his mouth to say something, but then Dream closes the door on him, and Ranboo is staring at wood.
… Did he do something wrong?
He starts down the stairs, wanting to get to his car before Dream’s roommates show up, thinking over everything he said. Did I talk too much? Was I too annoying? Did I take the money too fast? Should I have talked about the photos more? Why did he kick me out so fast? What did I do? We still have so much time left, what did I do wrong?
Ranboo throws his backpack in the passenger seat and starts his car, heart pounding as he pulls out and starts driving home. What did you do? What did you do? Idiot, you messed it up and now you’re alone. You got your money, are you happy now?
Maybe Ranboo has time to get photos. But, he’s sort of dizzy, and he kind of wants to go home. And- and he could drop by the school to see if Tubbo’s free, but like Dream said, he can’t let Tubbo see him like this. It’s like the church all over again– people can’t see Ranboo like that. So he has to go home.
He can get his homework done and bake more, he thinks. He can get his homework done and bake more and that will be his night.
But in his pocket, his phone chimes one more time. And as he pulls it out to read the message at the next red light, his mind blanks as he realizes there’s one person he forgot to account for.
-
Ranboo is halfway through shrugging on his jacket when Niki walks through the doorway and asks, “Where are you going?”
“I’m meeting up with someone,” Ranboo replies.
“Who?” Niki presses.
On one hand, the best possible move here would be to lie. Niki and Fundy know each other, somehow, if that conversation during the funeral indicated anything, and the more that Ranboo flips through his memory notebook, he recollects that Niki’s mentioned him once or twice. The association of who Fundy was just… hadn’t registered by then.
Fundy had been really excited to see Ranboo. Meaning, he might have mentioned it to Niki in the past few days. And Fundy had to get Ranboo’s number somehow. But, Niki’s also been sort of low energy, only questioning Ranboo for five minutes before handing the phone back over, so maybe she and Fundy haven’t talked. Ranboo can’t tell, and he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to bring it up, anyway, because that would prompt more questions that Ranboo genuinely does not have the answers for.
… Ranboo is a really bad liar, though. And Niki doesn’t like being lied to. And Ranboo has to be at the address Fundy sent him in thirty minutes, so the two of them can’t stand in a stalemate for very long.
Eventually, in another act of her mercy, Niki lets out a sigh. Her head hits the wall lightly as she asks, “Can you come back before sundown, at least? I don’t want to be paranoid. I don’t want to be paranoid over you, but a lot of shit has been happening recently, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Ranboo can’t promise anything. He needs answers, and Niki has one piece to the puzzle but Fundy is promising half the entire thing, and Ranboo will stay there as long as he needs to in order to figure it out.
At the same time, he understands. Niki can read him well; it’s never a good idea to let Ranboo be alone at night.
“I promise.” He doesn’t want to be alone at night. But that doesn’t matter. Whatever he has to do to figure out where he was before all this, he’ll do in a heartbeat. It’s one of the only things he can control anymore. “I’ll see you later, Niki. Give, uh, give Springerle scritches for me.”
Niki nods, and for a second, Ranboo thinks she’ll actually leave, disappear into the hallway and let him go. But instead, she takes a few steps up, and he turns around to meet her in the eye as she stands on her toes to kiss his forehead.
“Be safe,” she says, and Ranboo feels his chest hurt.
There’s a special part of his brain that compartmentalizes all the sisterly affection that Niki shows him. It’s getting a little harder to slot everything in.
He looks away from her and unlocks the door, leaving with nothing but his notebook, his keys, his driver’s license, and a soft, “Goodbye.”
Then, the door closes behind him, and the three o’clock winter air leaves goosebumps along his pale skin. The wind ruffles his hair just a bit, which is unfortunate, because he actually put a little more effort than usual into his appearance today, but he just brushes it out of his eyes as he walks towards his car, clicking the keys.
He wonders how long it’s been since Fundy’s seen him prior to the funeral. Would Fundy expect him to know how to drive? Surely he knows that Ranboo got home at some point that night, but then again, Fundy had long since left by the time Ranboo wrapped up his talk with Quackity.
The earliest memories that Ranboo can readily access or have written down are from back when he was fifteen. That means that most likely, Fundy had last seen him before then. Ranboo is nowhere close to the same person he was when he was fifteen, and can hardly recognize the slight things he remembers from before as being him at all.
How did Fundy recognize him, then? Just the eyes?
Ranboo is not the same person that Fundy knows, and today is the day he realizes that.
He knows that he has to be timely, that Fundy is likely waiting anxiously for him to arrive, but he leaves his car in park after turning it on and sits in the driveway for a few seconds longer. He instinctively wants to put a CD in, but those carry a heavy weight knowing where they most likely came from, so he resists the urge. Still, he doesn’t want this pure silence.
He could call someone as he drives. And by someone, that would be Tubbo, because there’s nobody else he really would call. He’s sure Tubbo would be fine with it, but also Tubbo may be busy, and he’s not in the best of places right now. And Ranboo isn’t all that certain that he can hide the solemness from his voice in a way that would reassure Tubbo at all.
… Still. He needs some kind of tether, and he still feels bad for shutting Tubbo down earlier, so maybe it’s worth it. He can just come up with an excuse if he needs to.
So, he opens up his phone and quickly backs out of his and Fundy’s texts, going to Tubbo’s contact and typing out,
Ranboo: hi are you free to call?
[
Tubbo: YEAH
Tubbo: HOLY SHIT I AM SO BORED RN BOSSMAN
[
Ranboo: oh wow that was quick huh
Ranboo: okay :]
Tubbo immediately calls him after he sends the emoticon, and Ranboo laughs quietly as he picks up and turns his car on, starting to reverse as he says, “Hi, Tubbo.”
“I’m going to drop out of school,” Tubbo informs him.
Ranboo squints. “Uh. Why?”
“I fucking hate English.” Tubbo starts ranting, and Ranboo lets out a little sigh of relief that this was more of a joking statement than anything. Although Tubbo does seem incredibly passionate about this. “Like- like, every other subject is good, okay? Science and math are awesome, and history is really fucking cool, and like, even music classes are good and shit. And gym was fun, too– I guess health kind of sucked, but, you get me. So like. Why is English so shit?”
“What part of it is, uh, what part of it do you not like?” Ranboo asks.
“Here’s this fucking 200 page book, read it to me and tell me the thematic significance of the protagonist’s cousin’s best friend’s brother’s dog dying. You only have two minutes to do it, too, and if you misspell something we’re expelling you and killing your parents. What the fuck.”
“I, uh. I don’t think that should be the heart of English.”
“Why do you like English?” Tubbo says, almost accusatory, but then backs off, “Like, not in a bad way, just. I’m curious, ‘cause everyone I live with likes English and I don’t get it.”
Ranboo taps his fingers on the steering wheel and stops at a red light, quickly navigating through his phone and typing the address into the GPS as he talks, “I think there’s something important to the idea of preserving someone’s story. Which- which I guess that’s more of a history thing, but. I think stories and, like, uh. All the little parts of it. Are really cool.”
“Fairs,” Tubbo concedes. “Tell me more, bossman.”
He puts his phone back to his ear now that he has the address in, which he literally almost forgot to do, and accelerates the car once again. “I really like, uh. This is kind of weird, maybe, but that’s why I like mystery and horror stuff the most, I think? Everything has like, themes and stuff, but it’s cool how everything pieces together, too.” Ranboo sets his phone down on his lap and decides to leave it on speaker, because the sun is now shining into his eyes and he realizes the critical importance of using both his hands. “I don’t know if I’m, uh, a big picture person or small details kind of person. I think both are sort of important, but I get caught up in little things a lot, I guess. Maybe that’s just anxiety, haha.” That’s not funny. “Sorry. But, yeah. English is cool, I think. I think writing a book might be cool, too, someday, though I don’t know if I have the creativity for all that.”
“I think you do,” Tubbo says. “You’re really smart, Boo. And I reckon you’d be good at writing and stuff. Like photography but with words, maybe? I dunno. Not my thing. But yeah, I think you’d be good at that. Your brain is good.”
Ranboo isn’t really sure what Tubbo means by your brain is good, because it factually isn’t , but Tubbo doesn’t seem like he’s up for clarifying. It’s kind of funny, though, hearing Tubbo say that Ranboo is smart, because Tubbo is the most brilliant person Ranboo knows, and he would be a lot better of a writer if he wanted to be.
“I think I’ve always wanted to try poetry.” Ranboo remembers reading some really bad fragments of old poems he had written taped into some pages of his notebook. They aren’t dated, and he can’t remember when he found them, but he’s pretty sure they’re his. He hasn’t tried writing poetry since then, but he knows that Niki has written a lot of poems since she was in high school, so it always seemed kind of nice in concept.
“Oh, poetry is sick!” Tubbo sounds surprisingly enthusiastic about it, but Ranboo doesn’t mind at all, of course. “It’s the only writing stuff I really like. I guess aside from songwriting but, y’know, different thing.”
“Do you songwrite?” Ranboo asks.
“Nah, that’s Wilbur’s thing. I think the whole rhythm and chord progressions and stuff of it is cool, I just can never think of the right words,” Tubbo tells him. “Maybe we start a band together and you write all the stuff and I play it. I reckon you have a nice singing voice, so it would all work out.”
Ranboo furiously shakes his head, even though Tubbo can’t see him. “Oh, I have a terrible singing voice. And we don’t even know if I’m any good at writing.”
“We can be a one hit wonder band,” Tubbo suggests. “Better than nothing.”
“Nothing would be better,” Ranboo argues. “I’m really bad at singing.”
Tubbo clicks his tongue. “Surely not. You have a really nice speaking voice. Next time we hang out, we’re doing carpool karaoke.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Please?” Ranboo can envision the expression Tubbo is making. “Just for me?”
It’s easier to resist when it’s over the phone. That does not mean it’s actually easy at all, because Ranboo is a bit of a people-pleaser, but still. “You will actually throw yourself out a car window once you hear me sing.”
“I will do the opposite of that,” Tubbo argues. “I will throw myself into- into a window? No, I will throw myself into you. Wait. No. Fuck. What am I trying to say, Ranboo?”
“I have no idea, actually. I just actually have no idea.”
“If you sing, I will hug you. Just to spite you.” Tubbo settles on, which still doesn’t make any sense, really, but Ranboo is a little weak for Tubbo hugs so he can’t really argue all that much.
“I think you probably have a nice singing voice,” Ranboo flips his focus, because if he thinks too hard about what Tubbo said, he’ll get flustered. “You, uh, you have a very… pre- no, no, you have a very nice singing voice. Is what I’m trying to say.”
“Thank you for calling my voice pretty, bossman!” Tubbo cheerfully says, and Ranboo’s cheeks flush. He’s not wrong, but he would have preferred to think of a better word. Tubbo doesn’t need to know how pretty Ranboo finds him in general. That’s just entirely unnecessary, actually. Ranboo will keep that locked up in his chest until one day it gives him a heart attack- no, no, okay, not that, literally anything but that what is wrong with you- “Yeah, my voice is kind of, like. Quiet, I guess, when I sing. Wilbur says I’m a tenor, but I dunno. It’s just kinda quiet and crackly and stuff.”
“That sounds nice,” Ranboo says.
The way that Tubbo’s voice comes out tells Ranboo that he’s grinning, “You better not be flirting with me.”
Ranboo’s face flushes darker, and he quickly replies, “No! No! Literally how would that be- I’m not- that’s not- I just think you have a nice voice, man! I- you-” Tubbo’s cackling, and Ranboo wants to make a U-turn back to his house just to give him a particularly stern frown, “I hate you. You’re the worst.”
“Mhm, sure.” Tubbo responds, purposefully sounding unconvinced, and Ranboo has never been bullied this maliciously in his life. He really needs to get his blush under control so that he doesn’t look like a lovestruck twelve year old when he goes to his long-lost loved one’s apartment and talks about his childhood trauma.
The thought of that sobers him up, which is both what he wanted but also not exactly what he was hoping for.
“That’s it,” he says, voice coming out a little slower, but still trying to push through and forget about his surroundings for a second time, “You’re losing Ranboo car privileges.”
“No!” Tubbo sounds genuinely devastated, but he’s also laughing, so Ranboo thinks all is okay on that front. “What am I going to do without my Ranboo car time? I take it all back. I have made severe mistakes and I am apologizing for them now. I’m so sorry, dearly beloved, light of my life, best friend of the year, little baker boy-”
“Okay, that’s enough now.”
“-honorary catboy, paper crane creator, English nerd-”
“You can stop now, actually. You can just- you can just stop, actually.”
“-sun to my moon, freelance photographer since whenever you were born, Ranboo- wait, shit.” Tubbo suddenly stops, sparing Ranboo from further embarrassment, and asks, “Ranboo, what the fuck is your last name? Why do I not know your last name? I am the worst friend ever, holy shit.”
“Oh, no, it’s okay. I don’t usually remember my last name either,” Ranboo tries to reassure, then pauses, because he definitely should not have said that. At the very least, Tubbo doesn’t seem to have a strong response to that, so he continues, “It’s actually, uh, Beloved.”
“No fucking way.”
“Yeah, my name’s- my name is Ranboo Beloved.” It sounds strange to say in his mouth, but that’s apparently his name. Unlike his birthday, he doesn’t doubt that it is his actual name, since it’s easy to mess up a few digits on a calendar but significantly harder to somehow lose the information of his own legal name. His legal name being Ranboo Beloved. No Iris. No middle name. Nothing extra, just Ranboo Beloved.”
“You’re actually fucking with me,” Tubbo starts, “Surely not. Surely your name isn’t- isn’t just fucking Beloved. That’s- no fucking way.”
“It- it is my name,” Ranboo repeats. “I can confirm it’s, uh. That’s my last name. It’s a very, uh, interesting one, I know, but-”
“That’s… okay, I am not going to lie to you,” Tubbo’s tone sounds different, now, a lot more soft and teasing, “that is the cutest shit I’ve heard in my entire life.”
Well. There goes Ranboo’s two minute streak of having a not-flushed face. Tubbo is going to kill him one of these days.
“Your last name is literally Beloved,” Tubbo says. “Oh my God. That’s both, like, really fucking funny, and also really badass, but also like. Your name is literally Beloved. You sappy bitch.”
“I didn’t pick the name,” Ranboo weakly defends, mumbling a little in embarrassment. “I just- I don’t know why my parents didn’t have a normal last name.” It’s not really like he can call them up and ask them, wherever they are. “It’s- it’s just a last name, I don’t know-”
“The longer I think about it,” and Tubbo sounds on the verge of laughing again, which is a bad sign, “you have, like. The most cartoonish name ever. Your first name literally sounds like Rainbow and your last name is Love. Your name is fucking Rainbow Love, Ranboo.”
Ranboo is going to drive directly into traffic. “My name is not- ”
“Oh my God, if we get married, my last name could be Beloved,” Tubbo realizes.
Nevermind. Ranboo is not going to drive into traffic or have a heart attack. Those are both very risky topics. Instead, he’s just going to bury his face into the asphalt, because Tubbo literally wants him dead. Ranboo genuinely cannot tell if he’s been too transparent about his complicated feelings towards Tubbo, or if Tubbo’s just like this. He really hopes it’s the second one. He will actually die if it’s the first.
“What- isn’t your last name Underscore, Tubbo?”
“Yup.” Tubbo pauses, then says, “Tubbo Underscore Beloved. Tubbo Beloved Underscore. Holy shit. I’m part of the Beloved clan now.”
“We haven’t gotten married yet, Tubbo,” Ranboo reminds him, “You’re not- you’re still Tubbo Underscore, I’m still Ranboo Beloved.”
“But I could be part of the Beloved clan,” Tubbo says again, and despite himself, Ranboo smiles. “I’m so excited to do Beloved clan things, like making paper cranes and baking cupcakes and live laugh love stuff. Holy shit, I can’t wait to meet the fellow Beloveds.”
Ranboo lets out a small laugh, “Well, it’ll only be us two.”
Then he freezes.
“Oh,” Tubbo lets out involuntarily.
“I’m kidding,” Ranboo lies, but he’s a really bad liar, no matter how much he tells himself he isn’t. “There are- there are a lot of Beloveds. Generations even, uh, of Beloveds. It’s- it’s, yeah-”
“There aren’t a lot of Underscores, either,” Tubbo quietly interrupts, and Ranboo feels his blood run cold.
“Oh.” What does he- what does he say to that? “I- Sorry-”
“It’s fine,” Tubbo says, but his voice sounds a little strained, and Ranboo feels terrible. He knew he shouldn't have called Tubbo, for God’s sake, he just lost a family member and he was having fun talking about marrying Ranboo and Ranboo had to go in there and throw out the orphan card.
Which isn’t even true, because he and Tubbo are different. Tubbo must have lost his family to factors out of his control, like with his cousin; Ranboo’s family just didn’t want him until he turned seventeen and showed up to someone else’s funeral with flowers.
And even then, he’s not even sure if Fundy is his family. Maybe Ranboo’s family was so devastated by his birth that they just died, or disappeared, the same way that Ranboo is meant to do.
The GPS tells him he’s five minutes away, and over the voice, he hears Tubbo call out, “Ranboo?”
“Sorry,” he apologizes again. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I’m not upset,” Tubbo says, but Ranboo knows he has to be lying. “I just- I wasn’t expecting it, sorry. I shouldn’t have responded like that, I know that- I know that shit is sensitive, I wasn’t thinking. Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Ranboo insists, because it isn’t. Ranboo should know how to keep himself under control. He’s not going to go to Fundy’s place and blurt things out or stop moping, he has to get a grip on himself. Tubbo’s seen him upset more times than Ranboo has seen him upset; he can’t keep doing this to him. Not when he’s already grieving. “I- yeah. Uh. You… you can join the Beloved clan, yeah, I-”
“You’re in a car,” Tubbo points out, and Ranboo is surprised he hadn’t mentioned that earlier. “Where- where are you going?”
“The store,” he lies, and it’s getting a little easier. But he still knows he’s a bad liar, even now, that he’s just- that he’s just kidding himself. Watchful eyes, all knowing everything he’s done, everything he’s tried to hide. “I’m, uh, almost there.”
“Okay.” Tubbo goes quiet, then says, “Hey, Boo, I’ll call you back later tonight, okay? When- just let me know when you’re back from the store.”
Ranboo feels something sinking in his chest. It’s only fair– he would have to hang up anyway, and he shut Tubbo down earlier so it’s not like he shouldn’t have expected this– but he still feels awful.
Nobody cares if Ranboo doesn’t have contact with his parents, that doesn’t matter. Of course his parents would leave– any parent would leave their child if their child couldn’t bother to remember who they are, and Ranboo’s so messed up anyway that it makes sense. Ranboo would never force anybody to care for him– and that’s why it makes no sense that Tubbo makes these jokes in the first place, about marrying Ranboo, about starting a band with him, about doing carpool karaoke with him– because Tubbo doesn’t have to care about Ranboo, and if he ever wanted to leave, he would let him go in an instant. Tommy already has.
He doesn’t want Tubbo to pity him. Everything Ranboo has experienced has been brought on upon himself. And he’s practically an adult, anyway, he doesn’t need reassurance about his past or sundown curfews or anything. Once he gets his information, he’ll go back to being an adult, and nobody will have to worry about him.
He realizes a few seconds later that he hasn’t responded to Tubbo, but Tubbo hasn’t hung up yet, clearly doesn’t have any urgency to leave if he’s sat on the line for an extra minute waiting for a reply. It’s because of what Ranboo said, he knows that, and he probably won’t call him back later, will start avoiding him at school, because Ranboo remembers his argument with Tommy vaguely, just bits and pieces, and he knows that Tommy understands Tubbo better than Ranboo does. That if Tommy hates Ranboo so incredibly much, that Tubbo must hate him a little, too.
“Okay,” he says quietly, and thank God his voice isn’t teary or anything. The apartment is going to start coming into sight, shortly, and he needs to fix his hair and take some deep breaths and prepare his notebook to fill up the next page. Right now, the only thing that really matters is answers– not Tommy, not Tubbo, not Ranboo. Just the answers. “I’ll call you later.”
“Bye, beloved,” Tubbo says, and before Ranboo can reply, the call ends.
Ranboo shoves his phone into his pocket, ignoring the texts he’s gotten from Fundy out of panic that Ranboo stood him up, and he drives only a few more minutes until he’s pulling into the apartment parking area. He shuts his car off, shoves any possible valuables into the most hidden and inconvenient places in the front seat area, and looks in the rearview mirror.
He fixes his hair, making sure that it looks okay considering that it’s messy enough to definitely warrant a haircut, and allows a few strands to hide his green eye. It shines a lot brighter in the sunlight, and Ranboo is sort of hoping that it’ll get rainy again, because he blends in a lot better when it’s cloudy than when rays of light hit every mismatched and horrific part of his body.
He confirms the apartment number before putting his phone and driver’s license in his back pocket, notebook clutched tightly in his right hand as he steps outside the car. With a quick pace, he walks towards the apartment staircase and starts going up until he reaches the third floor, standing in front of the number he was sent and pausing.
All he has to do is knock on the door, and everything he’s lost to the drought of the past will flood him again.
Maybe before his call with Tubbo or conversation with Niki, he would be hesitating more. But Ranboo is nothing if not eager to escape the present and prolong the future.
And so, he gives the door three quick knocks, and takes a step back as Fundy unlocks and opens it, immediately lighting up when he sees Ranboo.
“Holy shit,” he says, taking a step aside for Ranboo to come in before hastily locking the door, “I didn’t think you were coming.”
Fundy’s apartment looks a lot more cluttered than Dream or Niki’s combined. There are countless dishes and mugs scattered across the kitchen countertop, and the living room couch is peeling apart with shirts and shiny objections shoved between the creases. He has a TV that looks damaged, and right beside it are random unopened boxes. The rug is tilted off center ever so slightly, and Fundy’s shoes are lined up beside the door, all covered in dirt.
It looks more like home than anything Ranboo has ever seen.
He goes to take off his shoes, leaving them on the very edge of the wall, closest to the door, and tells Fundy, “Sorry, I had, uh, a phone call with someone. So it took me a little longer to get here.”
“Niki?” Fundy asks.
Ranboo shakes his head. “No, just a friend of mine. Though, uh. On that note,” they’re already here and Ranboo would rather get started than have to swallow down the friendly, awkward small talk, “does Niki, uh-”
“I asked her for your phone number-” okay, Ranboo knows that, obviously- “and told her you might be Iris.” oh , okay, Ranboo did not know that. Their conversation had been clipped short by her exhaustion and Ranboo’s anxiety, suspicion lining her features but she had let it go, never saying the word Iris, never asking who Ranboo really was.
Ranboo lets out a slow exhale. “Does she believe you?”
Fundy shrugs and gives him a grin, his canines longer than most people’s. Another quirk of his that Ranboo might have remembered if he tried to pour through his brain hard enough. He’s going to get a migraine by the end of this, he already knows. “Niki generally doesn’t believe me on things just based on my own word. I told her that I wasn’t going to hurt you and that if I’m wrong, she’s free to slap me, so we’re all fine.”
“She thought you might hurt me?” Ranboo knows that Niki is overprotective, but Ranboo is significantly more paranoid than she is and he hadn’t even thought about that beyond some fleeting acknowledgements of Fundy’s inevitable disappointment. He should have brought scissors with him or something; what if Fundy tries to hurt him? What if Fundy is going to kidnap him? This is a stranger, what reason does Ranboo have to believe that he’s not going to pull anything? Just pitiful desperation?
It would be a perfect ploy to hurt Ranboo, too, because the only person who’s worried about him anymore is Niki. Techno is too preoccupied with other things and trusts Ranboo to have a hold on himself, and it’s not really like Ranboo has any other friends anymore, really. None that would care.
(Except Dream, maybe. And Tubbo- no, no. Maybe not Tubbo. Maybe not Dream. Maybe both of them, but not enough.)
Fundy lets out a sigh, biting his nail for a second before shaking his head and shoving that hand into his pocket. “She cares a lot about you, Ranboo. And for the record, I would never hurt you, man. I swear on my life.”
“I believe you.” It’s the easiest lie Ranboo has had to say.
Fundy gives him a long look before tilting his head towards his side and saying, “C’mon, we should talk in my room. I have stuff I want to show you.”
Ranboo follows him, cautiously asking, “What, uh, what kinds of stuff?”
“Those CDs,” Fundy mentions, and Ranboo tenses a little. “You’ve kept them, right?”
“Yeah, they’re in my car.”
“I’ve burned a lot more. Not just for you, but, ah. Just in general. I figure you’ll appreciate them– Wil’s big on records and shit, and this stuff doesn’t interest Niki very much. I’ve needed someone who likes CDs for a while.”
“Oh.” Ranboo guesses that makes sense. “Okay, yeah. That’s- that’s cool. I don’t, uh, know how to burn those-”
“I’ll teach you,” Fundy immediately offers. “Do you want to learn? I can teach you.”
“... I think I’m okay,” Ranboo slowly responds. Fundy’s shoulders slump, and Ranboo averts his eyes, keeps walking until Fundy is opening the bedroom door.
“I’ll at least give you a new disc,” Fundy insists, and as the door opens, Ranboo sees what the other had meant by a lot more.
Generally speaking, the bedroom is as messy as the rest of the apartment. There are old band t-shirts on the floor, the desk is completely covered in what Ranboo assumes is college coursework, and the covers are off the bed, as if someone had kicked them off while sleeping. There’s no nightstand by the bed with a lamp or anything, but there is a table that has a CD player sitting on it. And right beside the CD player, like some modern leaning tower of Pisa, are just about thirty discs.
Ranboo stands, somewhat in shock, as Fundy starts moving, motions quick and anxious compared to Ranboo’s slow and solemn ones. Fundy kicks several t-shirts underneath the bed, probably trying to make it all look a little nicer, and he splits the stack of CDs into two piles and starts filtering through them.
“What kind of vibes do you like?” Fundy asks. “There are a few for like, the summers of certain years and stuff. I think I have one I made that reminded me of you, hang on-”
“Oh, you don’t have to, uh, give me anything,” Ranboo tells him, but he can tell Fundy isn’t listening. “I really don’t mind.”
“Ah! Here it is.” Fundy shows him the disc, and along the side in blue sharpie, it reads FOR IRIS. Fundy notices a second too late, maybe by some expression on Ranboo’s face, the name is says, and he immediately retracts it. “Shit, hold on, let me fix the name.”
“You don’t have to-”
“R-A-N-B-O-O, right?” Fundy clarifies.
Ranboo lets out a sigh. “Yeah. That’s right.”
“Okay, here.” Ranboo finds himself quickly swept up in the rapid pace Fundy takes with everything. He thinks it would be comforting in a lot of ways, having something to keep him on track, but when they hardly know each other it’s a little more overwhelming. “Put in the disc. We can play it while we talk, if you want. So we’re not just sitting in silence. I hate that. Sitting in silence, I mean.”
Ranboo can understand that.
Carefully, with one eye on the CD piles, he opens up the CD playing and slots the disc in. It takes a few seconds before starting up, playing some sweet-sounding song that Ranboo has never heard before but seems a little more modern, which would make sense, if Fundy had burned it in his own time.
“Do you want to sit down on the bed?” Fundy offers, “or like, anywhere. I don’t really care, just don’t want you to sit on the floor, y’know? I know you’re a teen, but my bones are already crackling from age,” he lets out a laugh, and it occurs to Ranboo that Fundy can not be much older than he is.
“How old are you?” Ranboo asks.
“Twenty,” Fundy replies, sitting down on the bed with ease and patting a spot beside him.
Ranboo sits down, but his head starts reeling. Fundy is only twenty. That’s- he’s not sure why that surprises him, but. It hurts to know that so many people who are barely older than he is have been forced to care for him. First Niki, now Fundy. Ranboo’s a leech.
There’s a long moment of silence after that, the song on the CD still playing. Ranboo likes the song, and he kind of wants to ask what it’s called, but he doesn’t really want to speak. It would only prolong the small talk between the two, and both of them know that there’s a lot lying under the surface. For Fundy, it’s more like a second chance. For Ranboo, it’s closure.
Fundy breaks the silence first, leg bouncing rapidly as he says quietly, trying to keep his voice calm despite the way that Ranboo knows anticipation is breaking through his tone. “You’re not just here for music and hanging out.” It sounds a little like a question but is mostly just the truth. Neither of them can hide from that. “You want to know what you’ve forgotten.”
Ranboo looks up, taken off guard by the last word. “How do- how do you know I’ve forgotten anything?”
Fundy’s lip quirks up, but it’s a sad expression. “You always forgot a lot of things as a kid. I thought, y’know, that there were other reasons for it. That if you left the house, you would have gotten better.” He scoots to the side so he can turn to look at Ranboo, but Ranboo keeps his eyes focused on the bed frame behind them. “I realized a little too late that that’s not really how that all works.”
Ranboo nods. “I don’t- I don’t know how to start all of this,” he admits honestly.
“Tell me what you remember,” Fundy suggests. “Like, you haven’t- there’s no way you’ve forgotten me entirely, right? There’s- there’s something there. Surely. Right?”
The CD switches to a song that Ranboo recognizes. He can’t name it, but there’s a piano part to it, at the start, and he scrambles for piano, piano, piano, before he relocates the memory before Fundy can start to get nervous. “You taught me how to play… something, on the piano. It was… Clai-Clair de Lune? Maybe?”
Fundy lights up, and Ranboo has to swallow down any emotion he feels, because Fundy looks relieved and excited and proud of Ranboo for doing something as easy as remembering him, and it reminds Ranboo of what Fundy has been saying this whole time: he’s been waiting to re-meet Ranboo for years.
“You had long fingers as a kid,” Fundy recollects. His eyes dart down to Ranboo’s hands, and he must notice the gloves. Ranboo slowly takes them off, and Fundy continues, not paying the action anymore mind. “Good for piano. Too soft for guitar, though. You wanted me to teach you how to play the one this guy at a music store would always let us try, but I didn’t want you to get callouses.”
“Aren’t those, uh, necessary for learning guitar?”
“I was a little overprotective of you when we were kids.”
“Oh.”
“But yeah, I taught you Clair de Lune. I’ll be honest with you, man, I wasn’t- I wasn’t really expecting you to remember anything. I really wouldn’t blame you if you forgot it all, so I’m really fucking happy you remember that.”
Ranboo feels too small for the room he’s in, too small for this conversation, too small for all of this. He knows that people expect the worst of him, but it still hurts that Fundy was surprised that Ranboo remembered something. Fundy deserves so much more than that.
“I- I don’t really remember much else right now,” Ranboo says, and he thinks that’s the truth, because his brain feels a little fuzzy, but he also wouldn’t know if that’s a lie, has gotten too good at that in the half hour he spent coming here. In his entire lifetime, really, seeing as this is the first time he’s been able to crack open the blatant lie of his own history. “Can- can I ask you some things?”
“Anything.”
“We… what were we?” That’s the best place to start, Ranboo thinks. “I… I know that I was important to you, and vise-versa, uh, but I don’t… what was our relationship?”
“We were foster brothers,” Fundy explains, and that makes sense logically, that Ranboo had been in foster homes in the past, but hearing it is a different story. “We were with my blood parents. I know that it wasn’t your first foster home, but I can’t remember how many you had been in. You always said you couldn’t remember them.”
Ranboo bites his lip and nods. “Did I ever mention my parents?”
“All you said is that you didn’t know who they were. Though, you sometimes called the social worker ‘mom’,” Fundy lets out a slightly strained laugh. “She wasn’t your actual mom, though. You never said anything about them.”
So Fundy doesn’t know anything about Ranboo’s parents. Most likely, nobody out there does. Nothing comes up if you search Beloved, especially if you don’t have a first name to go with it, and Ranboo has no idea what they even look like. Presumably pale, dark hair, tall, but that’s all he has. And if Fundy knows nothing, there’s not much of a chance that anybody else would.
Ranboo can accept that. There are harder pills to swallow, this can’t be the thing that upsets him. “Okay. Uh, how old was I when I was with you?”
“You came when you were thirteen,” Fundy tells him, “and you… the last time I saw you, you were fifteen, I think.”
“So it’s safe to assume that before then, I was in some other kind of foster home?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” Ranboo opens up his notebook and quickly asks, “Can I have a pen? Sorry, I need to write this down.”
“Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it.” Fundy gets up and grabs a pen quickly from his desk, handing it to him before clearing out some of the clutter, seemingly grateful to have something to do with his hands.
Ranboo fills the notebook with everything he’s learned so far, as well as a brief description of Fundy’s apartment, since he doesn’t know how often he’ll be coming here. When he’s done, he leaves the pen in the notebook and rests it in his lap, saying, “I’m ready again.”
Fundy immediately stops cleaning the desk, dropping the papers he was holding and sitting down in the desk chair, rolling it so he’s in front of Ranboo.
Now that he’s gotten his attention again, Ranboo starts thinking of the next best question to ask. There’s a lot that he wants to know, but he’s terrified of all the possible answers he could receive. Maybe he should ask something broader, leave it to Fundy, push at the points that feel a little suspicious if there are any, though Fundy seems very earnest. Ranboo doesn’t have the best perspective on that.
“Can you, uh,” he starts, taking a deep breath. “Can you just… I don’t know what to ask.”
“Can I ask you a couple of things?” Fundy must have questions, that’s right. It’s selfish of Ranboo to assume that he’s the one most deserving of information, here. “Niki’s mentioned you, but she hasn’t told me a lot. We weren’t close until maybe a year ago, but I knew her for longer, so- so I imagine that I knew her when you started living with her, but I didn’t know back then. Does that make sense?”
“That makes sense,” Ranboo assures, though trying to piece together the chronological timeline of everything makes his head hurt a little, “I don’t, uh. I don’t remember a lot about the day I met her, anyway.”
“Can I ask you other questions, then? Just- just easy stuff, I just- I need to know some things. Small things, but- I need to know them.” Fundy sounds desperate, so Ranboo only gives him a single nod before he launches into his first question, “You- so you go by Ranboo, now. What pronouns do you go by?”
Ranboo’s been asked this question a lot of times before. By all means, it shouldn’t make him feel so uncertain. But ever since the funeral, when Ranboo had held that dress of his and learned that he used to be a girl named Iris, everything has been thrown out of proportion.
He’s not a girl, he knows that. Absolutely not. And he’s gone as a guy for years. But- but he doesn’t really feel like a guy. That’s the problem. And Fundy- and Fundy might understand that, but Ranboo doesn’t know if he should chance it. God knows that he hardly wants to entertain the thought that there might be something different in his identity, when he is sitting in front of someone he used to know and he can’t even tell him the status of his parents.
“I’m not going to be mad by the answer,” Fundy clarifies, and Ranboo realizes that Fundy might have taken the silence as fear. “I’m trans myself, I don’t know if you know. Not that I’m assuming you’re trans, but. Don’t worry about that stuff. I just- I know that Niki said you were a boy but I didn’t know how accurate that was to how you saw yourself.”
“Boy is fine,” Ranboo agrees, even though it makes him a little sick to. “I… yeah. He/him is good.”
“Are you sure?” Fundy checks again, and Ranboo appreciates it, he really does, but he doesn’t want to think about this anymore.
“I’m positive.”
“Okay. Second question,” and Fundy’s right back into it, thank God, “You’re seventeen, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Go to D’Essempi High?”
“Yeah.”
“Only live with Niki?”
“Yeah.”
“Have a job at the bakery?”
“Yeah.”
“Friends with Wilbur’s brothers?”
Ranboo hesitates. “Yeah.”
Fundy raises an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“It’s complicated,” Ranboo amends, “but, uh, yeah. Techno’s my tutor, and me, Tubbo, and Tommy were friends. Are friends. Were. It’s complicated.”
“That’s fair.” Fundy’s hyperactive nature is proving to be really comforting, actually, as the discomfort sort of fades just a little. Because Fundy seems to know that Ranboo doesn’t want to dwell on these things any longer than he has to, which makes it relieving. “Alright. That’s all I really had to ask, I think. Now, I think…” Fundy pauses, inhaling sharply and then nodding to himself, like he’s trying to reassure himself, “Now I think I tell you a little more about us when we were younger.”
“Okay.”
Ranboo wants nothing more than to know, but the thought of piecing together everything in his past feels too easy. There has to be some kind of catch– Fundy must want something out of him, there has to be something that’s missing. But he doesn’t understand what it could be, because Fundy’s been so open and kind despite all of Ranboo’s flaws, and it feels impossible that Ranboo could be receiving the truth right now.
But he’s not going to run away again. He’s not going to cry inside a chapel and ignore his problems. He has to face this, for Fundy, for Niki, for Techno, for Tommy, for Tubbo, for Dream, and for himself.
“Go ahead,” Ranboo tells Fundy, voice quiet and eyes downcast. “I’m listening.”
Fundy moves to sit back on the bed again, beside Ranboo, and his gaze against the side of Ranboo’s head is almost overwhelming. He quickly starts looking down at his hands, though, then Ranboo’s gloves, then the notebook, then back at Ranboo. His gaze cycles anxiously as he starts to talk, his story beginning with, “You were the first brother I’d ever had.”
Ranboo starts writing as Fundy continues, “You’re really tall now, and you were always sort of tall, but I think you had to have hit your growth spurt when you were fifteen, because you were tiny. I had already, y’know, I had already grown a lot more than you because I was sixteen, but you were this sort of tall, skinny kid that slouched a lot. If you were 5’5, you looked 5’2 with the way you carried yourself. You know?”
Ranboo nods, not wanting to interrupt, but making sure Fundy knows he’s still listening. It seems to be enough. “You were so goddamn polite. You loved music, and books, and animals, and flowers, and all that shit, and you were so nice to everyone.” Fundy let out a small laugh, one that sounds bitter, “I was kind of a dick as a teenager, I’ll be honest. I was not into good stuff. But having you around made things more bearable. We’d play video games together, and I taught you stuff on the piano, and we hung out. All my friends at school kind of thought I was a pussy, but the one thing they knew was to never fuck with you.”
“I protected you from everything,” Fundy summarizes, “but I couldn’t do much against our- against my parents.”
“Oh,” Ranboo says without thinking, and he tries to ignore the way that Fundy rubs at his eyes, the way that he’s already gotten emotional. Because if Ranboo thinks about that, then he’ll cry, and he can’t do that here. He has to be strong for the two of them. He has to.
“My parents were dicks,” Fundy describes. “When I turned eighteen, I went to college and cut contact. They moved out of this town after that. Never talked to them again, good fucking riddance. But back when we were kids, we didn’t, y’know, we didn’t have that choice. We had to deal with them. And- and they were dicks. ”
“I’m glad you got away from them,” Ranboo tells him.
Fundy laughs. “Yeah, you beat me to it by a few months, actually.”
“... What?”
Ranboo would have been fifteen. How did he get out of the house when he was fifteen? Was he in another house- no, that can’t be it, because he was fifteen when he met Niki . How did he get out of the foster care home and get into Niki’s care without any authorities being contacted? More importantly, why would he have ever done that?
Fundy’s bitter smile falls. “I mean this kindly, Ranboo, don’t take this- don’t take this as anything against you, okay? But- I don’t get why they opened our house to take in foster kids. Because they were already bad before they did that, but after you became my foster brother, things got worse.”
“I’m sorry.” Ranboo’s not sure how Fundy could have meant something like that kindly. Ranboo already knew he was awful, cutting the lines loose whenever he got into trouble, but he didn’t need that affirmed by Fundy, that’s not what he’s here for.
“It was nothing you did,” Fundy clarifies, voice faltering in a way that tells Ranboo he’s trying to sound forceful. “You did nothing, man, they were just- they were always just dicks. And, being the dicks they were, they saw a thirteen year old kid with some underlying shit he needed support for, and they hurt him.”
Some underlying stuff that he had needed support for, huh. “My memory?”
“That, and other things.” Fundy takes a deep breath. “When they got mad at me, I- I get it now, y’know? Because I was not a good kid, I was- I was kind of a problem child. Ran with the wrong crowds, smoked weed in the kitchen and got the whole house fucked up, set off my own asthma and added to the hospital bills, did all that stuff. I sucked, dude. The only thing- the one thing I won’t justify in how they treated me was- was the transphobia. That fucking sucked. ”
“Oh-”
“They wouldn’t let me go by another name,” he continues, clearly lost in the story, and Ranboo stays quiet to let him talk, taking notes whenever he can, “They didn’t let me start operations or anything. The only person who ever knew that I went by Fundy was you, Ranboo. You were the only person I ever told. Because no matter what shit my parents said, you never stopped being kind. I told you one day that I wanted to be your older brother, and you asked if that meant I’d finally let you play BioShock.”
“Did you?”
Fundy snorts. “Hell no. That stuff was terrifying. Scared the shit out of me, I wasn’t going to let my thirteen year old brother watch it.”
“That’s fair, I think.” Ranboo agrees. “I am a- I am a horror fan now, though, so, uh.”
“Do you want my old copy of it?” Fundy offers. “I never play it much anymore anyway.”
Ranboo shakes his head. “I don’t have any consoles or anything.”
“Ah, right. Okay. Anyway, sorry-”
“It’s okay-”
“-so they sucked, basically. They treated me like shit, but I treated them like shit, too. You did nothing to them, though. And they were awful to you.”
“What did they do?” Ranboo asks, trying to keep his voice level, because it can’t be anything that terribly undeserved. He was a bad child, he remembers that. God hated him, he hated himself, all of that. Nothing Fundy could say would surprise him.
Fundy wipes at his eyes again and takes a deep breath, a few seconds of pauses before he finally answers, “You had a lot of mental health issues as a kid. It wasn’t- it wasn’t destructive or anything, you weren’t setting things on fire in school bathrooms like I was, okay, you just- you were- fuck , sorry-”
“It’s okay,” Ranboo reassures, “I can- I can handle it, it’s fine-”
Fundy nods, eyes still watery. “When you were a kid and you got really excited over something, you used to let out these little noises. They sounded kind of like squeaks. It was the cutest goddamn thing, but my parents would yell at you every time you did it. And you stopped. You stopped making any noise when you got super happy, and I think it scared you, being excited over things. By the time you were fourteen, you stopped.”
Ranboo hesitates in his writing. “What did I stop when I was fourteen? Sorry, I lost tra-”
“Being happy.”
Ranboo’s grip on the pen tightens. “Oh.”
“I- I’d like to think I made you happy, at least a little,” Fundy says. “I’m not- I’m not the type of person to make people smile. I’ve dealt with a lot of people leaving in my life, and- and I never could make those people stay. So I don’t know why I thought, you know, doing all the stuff I did, that any of that could ever cancel out what my parents did.”
“It’s not your fault,” Ranboo tells Fundy, because Fundy had no responsibility in making him happy. “If I left because of that, then that’s not-”
“That’s not why you left,” Fundy interrupts him.
“Then why did I?”
“You- fuck, okay,” Fundy shakes his head, then stands up. “I need to- I’m gonna show you something first. Then I’ll tell you, I promise, I just- you need to see this first. Because when you find out what happened, I don’t- you might want to head back home.”
Ranboo’s whole body feels cold. “I- okay, sure, uh, that’s- that’s fine.”
Fundy starts opening drawers, rifling through them before slamming them shut. The sounds make Ranboo flinch, but Fundy has his back to him, and he opens his closet door with the same ferocity as everything else. He starts rifling through the clothes until he grabs something in the back that looks a little like a scrapbook. Fundy opens it up in his lap and starts reaching into the front pocket for something, pulling out what looks like a few photographs, before dropping the rest of the scrapbook on the floor and walking over.
Ranboo looks over at them curiously, but his heart stops as soon as he sees the first photograph.
Fundy sits beside him, shoulder brushing against his, and holds three of the photographs in one of his hands while giving Ranboo the other one. Ranboo holds it with shaking fingers, swallowing back all the emotion that threatens to come rushing up as Fundy gently points to one of the two figures in the photo and says, “That’s you.”
The photograph depicts them, a small date scribed on the side indicating that this most likely was when Ranboo was still thirteen and Fundy was sixteen. Fundy looks a lot different– he doesn’t have any scruff on his face, of course, because he was pre-operation, but his orange hair was still short around his ears. He had what looked like a candy cigarette in one of his hands, an oversized band-shirt covering him down to his knees, and he had an arm wrapped around Ranboo, who- who-
Dark hair going down to the waist, a long grey sweater on with pale hands fiddling with the sleeves. Heterochromatic eyes averted from the camera lens, face rid of any noticeable scars, a shy smile.
Ranboo is entirely unrecognizable. The only part of him that’s stayed the same is his eyes, the only reason Fundy knew it was him in the first place.
It takes him a horrifying second to realize he’s tearing up.
Fundy carefully shows him the next photograph, with the two of them looking a bit older. Here, it was clearly taken by someone inexperienced, because the exposure is painfully off, but Ranboo was sitting on Fundy’s shoulders, the two of them grinning happily. Ranboo had a little hat on, too, one of those birthday ones. It looked a little crumpled and faded.
“We had to reuse the same hat every year,” Fundy tells him, “I had grown out of birthday parties, but you always tried to get me a gift. And I would steal mom’s money to get you something, too.”
Ranboo carefully sets the two photos aside, taking the next one. The only person in this photo is himself, hair still long, but a small scar appearing right above his lip, the same one he still has. He was wearing an oversized sweatshirt and had a Wii remote in his hand, and Ranboo thinks, at that moment, that he’s never going to touch a Wii remote ever again.
“The scar was an accident in the kitchen.”
Ranboo nods silently.
The last photo is of Fundy and Ranboo again, the two of them sitting in a bedroom. Fundy held the camera himself, meaning the photo was also very messy, but Ranboo can glean the most out of it than the other ones. Fundy was grinning happily, hair messed up and the slightest appearance of a mustache on his face, faint and ginger. Beside him sat Ranboo, long hair in front of his face, obscuring his green eye. With his brown eye, he looks up into the camera, and suddenly, the only thing Ranboo can process is how tired his younger self looked.
“This was a few weeks before you left,” Fundy tells him quietly. “You- you were really proud of that long hair, huh?” The joke falls flat, and Fundy takes all the photos and gets up to put them back as Ranboo is left staring at the bedroom floor.
When he can find his voice again, he whispers, “What happened?”
Fundy starts to walk back towards the bed, but before he can, the CD lets out a static sound and he freezes. It fixes itself after a few seconds, just a record scratch, but Ranboo knows it must be a sign for something.
It takes a few seconds before Fundy says, his voice the softest it’s been since Ranboo and him first spoke, “It was an accident.”
Ranboo’s mind jumps instantly to all the times he’s driven down the highway, but he doesn’t think that’s what Fundy means.
“I was smoking weed in our room,” Fundy recounts, “and you were there, knees tucked- your knees were tucked up to your- your chest, ‘cause- ‘cause that was how you slept. You never- you never really slept well at night, and we tried everything, tried- we tried anything we could, but it didn’t work. You would get these night terrors, so I- I bought you this, this weighted blanket thing? And it- it helped.”
“Why?”
“I don’t- I don’t fucking know, man!” Fundy’s voice starts to rise as he gets defensive, as he starts to panic that Ranboo might leave, and Ranboo can’t do anything to reassure him because he knows that he wants to leave right now, wants the truth but also feels like he’s watching the accident himself-
“All I knew was that it made you stop screaming,” Fundy continues, and Ranboo feels frozen, “because- because you screamed, Ranboo, you screamed a lot. You’d start hitting things, and kicking, and- and I would have to play music to get you to calm down, just- just enough so you could sleep, but you never- it never fixed anything. Until you had that blanket, it- it made it better.”
Ranboo knows that it doesn’t stop here. That the accident hasn’t come yet, and he feels tense, almost too tense to write, because he never thought he would ever have this information.
“One day, I- yeah, I was smoking weed. And- and the- my parents, they- fuck , sorry, they- okay, yeah. My parents threw out the weighted blanket, they- they thought you didn’t need it anymore.” Fundy scowls, but the anger is softened by the tears lining his eyes. He hasn’t gone longer than a few minutes this entire time without being on the verge of crying. “I was angry, and it- it made the nightmares come back, but they didn’t care. I’d- I’d sleep with you in the bed, y’know, just- just hold you and shit. You told me all these scary things, fucked up things, how you would see tall shadows standing over you, how you’d- you’d feel things crawling in your throat, you- you saw things that weren’t there, Ranboo, because you never slept so you would see things.”
That wasn’t because he was sleep-deprived, though Ranboo wishes that was the reason. Ranboo wishes that this wasn’t always a problem with him, that he had stopped hallucinating as heavily as Fundy describes, but he still believes things that aren’t true.
“So, I- yeah, I was smoking weed, as I said, and you were laying there, and I- I didn’t want my parents to get angry at me, right? That’s- that’s a reasonable thing to want,” and Ranboo almost wants to ask why Fundy’s defending himself, but he doesn’t get a chance. “So I had left this window open. It was a tiny fucking window, like, I could have- I could have gotten out of it if I really, really tried, but I’d probably get stuck. It wasn’t super big, it was- it was tiny. So I thought I’d leave it open, so the- so the weed scent could get out, and you wouldn’t- you barely talked, at this point, so fucking tired, so I didn’t think you’d say anything.”
Fundy shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath, but it doesn’t seem to do anything for his nerves. The silence lingers, though, and Ranboo clears his throat quietly to ask, “Was- was that the accident? Did I- did I tell them?”
“No,” Fundy says. “No, that wasn’t it.”
Ranboo frowns. “I… okay?”
“I don’t know if you want to hear this, man.” Fundy lets out a nervous laugh, and he opens his mouth to add to it,
but Ranboo cuts him off, shaking his head. “No. No, I do. I’ve- I’ve been waiting for this information for my- my entire life, I should- I should have it.”
Fundy doesn’t reply.
“Please,” Ranboo pushes, “it’s- I’m sure it’s not, it couldn’t have been that bad. If it was just sleep-related, or weed-related, or-”
“I had fallen asleep,” Fundy interrupts faster than Ranboo expected, his voice deadly still. “And I had you in my arms. I was twitchy, especially when high. So I don’t fucking know how I didn’t wake up when you left .”
His voice breaks, and he turns to face Ranboo, hand reaching out to cover his hand, to stop him from writing this down, and what could have been so awful that Ranboo wouldn’t want to remember-
“The window was open,” Fundy reminds him, “It was small, but it was open,”
and Ranboo feels his heart stop
and looks up at Fundy
because he realizes what that means for a girl who used to sleepwalk who would see things that weren’t real who was scared of death never wanted to hurt herself but everyone must have thought she did when she
“Ranboo-”
when she when she when she when she
it was an accident. Fundy left the left the left the the weighted blanket lost somewhere scent of weed heavy heavy heavy and scary figures at the end of the bed but there was a window window
and it would be so easy for someone that small to get out of bed
fifteen but still small because
ranboo can’t recognize her Ranboo can’t ranboo in the photos never saw himself in abandoned churches never saw himself in HER
“Ranboo, breathe, man, please, we don’t have to-”
she never wanted to die SHE NEVER WANTED TO DIE she just NO she did no no no it was an ACCIDENT it was an accident there’s no way no no she never wanted to die he knows that now he had never wanted it but everyone must have thought it but he knows the truth knows that she didn’t do it on purpose that the memories of that cold night the cold cold night the way that it smelt like the funeral can’t remember what he remembered then knows the way the way the way she never WANTED TO
but she’s on the asphalt now because he feels something on her chest and she’s falling and he’s falling and he’s on the carpet and there’s something on his chest something on his chest he opens his eyes yellow eyes holding him down holding him down
weighted blanket the only way that he could sleep and Fundy’s holding him down because this was the only way to make it stop so another accident didn’t happen and the record’s scratching and he smells weed and the carpet hurts everything hurts pen ink in his eye he he he
Ranboo starts kicking starts kicking upwards trying to hit everything and he might be screaming but there’s nothing to scream at he’s not screaming he’s just angry angry because everyone thinks he wants to die and it’s because of this because everyone wanted him dead except himself never wanted him to live and Fundy is HOLDING HIM DOWN-
Fundy is letting go Fundy is apologizing Ranboo can see the ceiling again Ranboo can start to breathe but it doesn’t change anything doesn’t change anything because no matter what Ranboo doesn’t remember-
-Ranboo remembers nothing this fixed NOTHING Ranboo can’t remember knows he never wanted to die but can’t remember how it felt how the asphalt felt how it all felt if this is even real maybe he never fell out maybe it never happened maybe he never happened maybe Fundy is fake and this is his house but he doesn’t smoke weed and it smells like weed-
-he can’t remember he can’t remember will the memory ever come BACK will he know what it felt like will he know for sure will he ever know surely he must know he must know because he never wanted to die but he just WANTED TO ESCAPE-
Need to escape need to escape need to escape
“I should go,” Ranboo says voice shaking everything shaking and he stands up but his legs have fallen asleep and he immediately stumbles, having to stabilize himself against the wall and accidentally knocking over a tower of CDs. Down the asphalt down the asphalt why do you NOT REMEMBER AND Fundy is looking at him with his strange eyes and this place feels like home but it is not Ranboo’s home anymore. “To sleep.”
“It’s the afternoon, Noon,” Fundy argues but Ranboo can hardly hear anything but the rushing static that isn’t actually there, doesn’t know what Fundy’s responding to, if Ranboo even talked at all, just that he has to leave . “Please- please just stick stick stick stick stick man. I’m sorry ssssssssssssss, but look, we- we have some good ststststories, right? You should hear time we and the diner, the ketchup stststststststshut up shut up shut UP? That one always makes me laugh, man, you really should stay.”
Ranboo yanks his hands off his ears and starts trying to grab things, picking the notebook off the floor and flipping to the last page, finger slicing itself clean vertically and words spilling out of him the static just getting louder. The last word written down is window, and he feels like he’s going to throw up again so he shuts the notebook and makes sure he has his things. He can barely see can barely breath knows he’s probably left something but he has his keys can hear them slightly has his notebook his phone he’s okay he’s okay.
Fundy follows him as he starts walking out, still talking. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey- that’s really good, you’ll love it, hey, hey, it was when you taught me to hey hey hey hey hey. Remember that? I guess you don’t, but that’s okay, though I guess I can’t give you money. That’s what I ssssssssaid, right? It was really great.” Ranboo starts sliding on his shoes. “Oh, and probably my favorite favorite favorite Ranboo this is my favorite rainbow. Awestruck. Please listen to me.” Ranboo has his hand on the door, and Fundy’s hand covers his suddenly. “You don’t even- you don’t even know! After! What happened, you don’t know! The important part is- tell me! We might not talk! What!” Ranboo rips his hand off the door and Fundy’s grip, and shuts his eyes as Fundy, someone, whoever’s talking pleads, “ Ranboo, I’ll remember you, every bad thing-”
“There are things, Fundy,” Ranboo tries again. “Things better worth. No. Not remembering. Things you don’t remember. Not remember. Things that you. You find better. Things not to remember. Don’t remember. I understand that.”
“ Someone has to remember!” Fundy argues, and Ranboo’s tired. “And- and that can’t just be me, man, I- people forget me, I mean, you did, but I remember everything, you have- I can’t lose someone again. Not to another accident-” no, that’s in Ranboo’s head, not to another accident. How much of this is in Ranboo’s head? He can’t think. Is Fundy saying this? He must be, it’s his fault- no, no, voice, Ranboo meant voice.
“I remember- no, no, I don’t- Fundy, how am I going to bake? Talk?” Ranboo can’t- not like this, this is what happens, why he can’t come back, he can’t come back, this is it, you made a mistake and now your sister’s never coming back up- “How am I? How am I? Do nothing when I remember! Nothing!”
“You never cared about all that before,” Fundy spits out. “I-”
“You- nh- know who I… wh -was,” Ranboo says very, very slowly, forcing every word out with ten second pauses even as his brain screams. “You don’t… know who ah- I am.” Fundy’s eyes are wide, and Ranboo is so, so tired. “See you, Fundy. See… you.”
“You’re not driving like this,” and Ranboo can hear him a bit better, but only a bit, feels like he’s imploding inside himself, “You’ll crash. You need- I can drive you home, stick shift? I can drive a stick-”
“No. No, no. I can. I can.”
Fundy’s silent, but Ranboo still hears things, and there’s something really wrong. He’s never been like this, so distorted, what if he never goes back? Can’t ever hear Tubbo’s pretty voice, can’t take photos, can’t talk to Niki, can’t do anything stuck like this forever and it was an accident-
“See you.”
Fundy is a juxtaposition of a clenched fist and a soft voice, something bad bad bad. “See you, Ranboo.”
The door shuts behind him, and Ranboo hears a pained scream from inside the apartment, and suddenly, he’s running.
Through the hallway. Down the stairs. Across the parking lot.
His car turns on.
Past sundown. His phone rings. It stops too early. It rings again for the full duration five minutes later.
But Ranboo is seventeen, and he’s going down the busiest street in town, and his entire body is a self-detonating bomb. With every turn, another wire is cut, and every minute he sits in the screams of pedestrians is a new code unlocked, and his gloved hands tap his lap anxiously at every stop light as he tries to keep busy, tries to unlock every single code, so that the bomb does not go off when he’s alone in a car, so that he does not kill every person on this highway with his own explosion, so that he can let it blow when he is alone, far from any rooftops, and able to take it.
Ranboo is seventeen, and he knows how to detonate a bomb. The noise gets quieter as he continues to drive. He is not crazy. He is a functioning member of society. Nobody has to know that he is sick. Nobody has to find the cure for him. He is his own hospice, now. Nobody else will be responsible for his memories. Nobody will keep them away from him. Nobody will force them again. He is not crazy. Nobody is screaming. He is not screaming. He is okay.
He is going down the highway at straight 70 mph, and his heart is beating in his chest loud enough that he can hear it, but the bomb has been shoved in a pit and Ranboo will let it blow then, will be far enough away to never hear its sound, because he is fifteen minutes away from Niki’s apartment and fifteen minutes away Fundy’s apartment and he doesn’t have to hear the bomb blow.
He is Ranboo, a seventeen year old full-time high school student with a part time job as an 8-4 clerk and baker in a bakery and a second unscheduled job as a freelance photographer and researcher for a paying customer. He has a driver’s license and high scores in most of his classes, and while he may come off as strange, he is a perfectly normal person. There are no skeletons in his closet, so to speak, and he is perfectly fine.
He repeats this to himself a few times in his too-silent head, trying to convince himself that every line is the truth.
Because at the end of the day, the only person who will ever believe that Ranboo can function alone is Ranboo himself.
And even if he has a bomb strapped to his back, he will prove to everyone that Ranboo Beloved, formerly known as Iris Beloved, is a human being.
And human beings, as everyone knows, are prone to small accidents.
-
When Ranboo gets home, Niki immediately pops her head out of the kitchen and requests, “Help me make some shortbread.”
“I’m really sorry, Niki,” Ranboo starts, feeling mostly like himself again and less like someone shoved the vocal cords of a raptor in his mouth and requested he perform a soliloquy, “but I kind of need to lay down-”
“No.”
Ranboo pauses, looking at Niki. Niki, who usually wouldn't fight him on something like this, knows that he only ever gets lazy with chores when it comes to dusting the house, and that the only time he skips out on helping to rest is when it’s important.
Niki seems a little surprised herself, clearing her throat and repeating, “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
For a long second, Ranboo is confused as to why Niki is trying to get him to make shortbread so badly. Shortbread is literally the easiest possible thing to make, and they have plenty in stock at the bakery, plus one of their coworkers loves making bread, so there’s no point.
And then, something clicks.
“He called you, didn’t he?” It’s not a question, and Ranboo knows he should give her the same chance to lie that she’s always given him, but he starts to feel the static rise in him as the twisting feelings of shame and anger. “He called you.”
Niki breaks eye contact first. “Yes.”
Ranboo wants to know what Fundy said. He wants to know if Fundy told Niki that Ranboo had been hallucinating so heavily that he can’t even remember much of what happened five minutes ago. He wants to know if Fundy warned Niki about how Ranboo sliced his finger and it bled all over the steering wheel. He wants to know if Fundy told Niki about the accident, the one that Ranboo wrote down, the one that would make Niki think Ranboo should be locked up and medicated.
Ranboo wants to know what Fundy said to Niki in thirty minutes that Ranboo never got to hear in seventeen years.
But, Niki has been tired recently. And Niki has been worried about Ranboo recently. And Ranboo is angry at both of those things, angry that they’re happening, but that’s his innate selfishness and he knows that a normal person wouldn’t fight something as trivial as this.
And so, Ranboo rolls up his sleeves and says, “Just shortbread, or is there something else?”
Niki smiles, and Ranboo tells himself it fixes things when he just feels sedated . “I’ll be honest with you, we’re not making shortbread at all. I just knew you would say no if I said we were making cupcakes.”
Ranboo sighs exasperatedly, but walks into the kitchen anyway, his kitchen and his house and his life, “I’m getting you evicted and Springerle likes me more.”
“I’ll do the dishes after.”
“Nevermind,” Ranboo backs off, looking at the dreaded cupcake mix. His memory . “My favorite dessert. I’m so excited.”
“That’s the spirit,” Niki laughs, passing him a carton of eggs.
And Ranboo Beloved is fine.