Chapter Text
Tommy wasn’t one of those guys. You know the ones.
The “alpha males” with anime girl mousepads, who posted about how women these days “don’t appreciate nice guys” right before calling someone’s profile picture fat. Basement dwellers in both metaphor and reality, who unironically commented “the F in women stands for funny” under dank meme twitter accounts and then refreshed the page to see how many likes it got.
Tommy wasn’t like that.
He wasn’t thirty, for starters. He didn’t use the word “females” in everyday conversation. And, despite still technically living at home, he had at least considered moving out. Once. Briefly. In a sort of daydream while waiting for his pizza rolls to cool down.
Also, he respected women. Probably more than himself. Feminism was the second best thing to be invested in this world, with minecraft at the top of the list.
And yet here he was, sitting at his desk at 11:47 p.m., squinting at the pixelated icon of Kiss Kiss Fall In Blood sitting smugly on his desktop like it owned the place, just waiting for the disc to be inserted.
The heart with the bloody knife through it pulsed softly.
Mocking him.
Taunting him.
And, worst of all, it was pink.
Bright, weaponized pink. The kind that felt like it was laughing at you for thinking you were too cool to care.
Tommy sighed. Scratched his thumbnail against the game case like he could peel off the embarrassment along with the shrink wrap.
He didn’t do dating sims. Not really. Never had the patience for them. Could barely make it through dialogue trees in Skyrim without clicking “fuck off” just to get to the sword fights. He didn’t care about flirt routes or heart meters or whatever else these games used to gamify the messy, meat-grinder hellscape of human affection.
But this game—this fucking game—was everywhere.
He couldn’t scroll three seconds on any forum without tripping over some post titled “why Kiss Kiss Fall In Blood ruined me emotionally in the best way.” Every fourth YouTube video was a black-and-white essay with a moody thumbnail and titles like “Subversion and Selfhood in Digital Romance: A Deep Dive.” Even the shitpost side of Twitter had been infected—fan edits of anime boys holding knives, Wilbur’s tragic monologue audio layered over mitsiki songs and god-tier edits. Like mold. Like a virus.
He’d held out for a while. Rolled his eyes. Clicked past it. Told himself he didn’t care.
But curiosity is a slow disease. Grows in the corners when you're not looking. Boredom waters it.
And Tommy? Tommy was bored. Valorant 12 year olds had pissed him off enough to not even think about touching the game. Minecraft had betrayed him with another creeper in his horse stable. His Spotify was playing sadder and sadder songs without permission. It was Wednesday. Raining.
So.
Dating sim.
Fuck it.
He’d seen these games in passing—Romance Academy 9, Moki Moki Algebra Club, Thirst Trap Tactics 2. Bright colors. Big eyes. Plot twists designed by Tumblr refugees. Every one of them with a fanbase that could tear each other to shreds over headcanon dick sizes and still agree to collectively cancel a dev for breathing wrong.
He’d never played any of them. Never wanted to.
But this one?
This one wouldn’t die.
A whole year later and people still talked about it like it was gospel. Still topping charts. Still getting “#WilburSootFanart” trending on Twitter in the middle of the night. Still in every fandom space, every Discord argument, every late-night Reddit thread. It was a parasite with a good art team.
And the character driving this clown car?
Wilbur Soot.
Tommy rolled his eyes so hard it gave him a headache just thinking about him.
Wilbur was that character. Trench coat, soft voice, incel-coded. One of those dudes who’d quote Nietzsche in gym class and dickride moonlight in every ass poem he tried to write. You meet him in Week One. Seven lines of dialogue, background NPC vibes. Nothing special.
But that’s the trap, isn’t it?
He’s everywhere, because of his stupid locked route. Every fanfic, every edit, every 27-minute breakdown video with dramatic piano music and a thumbnail of his silhouette staring into the void. The yandere flavor of the month. The kind of character who’d commit fictional war crimes just to brush your character’s cheek and call them “angel.”
Tommy didn’t get it.
Maybe it was a girl thing. Maybe it was a trauma thing. Maybe it was just Tumblr-core brainrot finally reaching critical mass.
Either way, Wilbur Soot could choke on his own bitchiness.
Tommy jabbed at the plastic again. It still wouldn’t tear. Stupid shrink wrap clung like shame. Like the last thread of self-respect refusing to let go. He finally got the wrapping off and flipped open the case. Inside was a shiny disc, a flimsy instruction pamphlet, and—God help him—stickers. Hearts and blood splatters and the pixelated words "You're mine now."
He ignored them. Obviously.
He slotted the disc into his ancient disk drive (because yes, he had one, and no, he wasn’t made of money, despite the fact he'd brought the physical version that was 20 dollars more simply for the extra content), and watched his monitor with the vague unease of someone lighting a fuse just to see what it would do.
The fan in his tower wheezed like it was dying. The game icon flickered on his desktop.
He stared at it.
Thunder rolled in the distance.
His mouse hovered. Wobbled slightly.
He didn’t want to click it. Didn’t want to be part of this. Didn’t want to fall down the same pit as everyone else who’d ever posted “Wilbur is not the villain, actually” at 2 a.m. while crying over sprites.
But it was raining, and he had nothing else to do.
The cursor moved.
Thunder cracked.
“FUCK!” Tommy flinched, kicking back from his desk like the storm personally had beef with him.
He sighed.
Rubbed his face.
“You’re such a little bitch,” he muttered at himself. “Just play the stupid game.”
He rolled forward again. Clicked the icon.
His mouse cursor turned into a heart. It pulsed.
Tommy swallowed.
The screen faded from black with a soft chime. Like a bell at the bottom of a well.
Then—color.
A slow swirl of pinks and reds bled across the screen, blooming like bruises in water. The main menu loaded in with the kind of delicate, aesthetic flourish Tommy absolutely hated. Soft piano music played in the background, twinkling in minor chords. One of the “O”'s in Blood had been replaced with a little bleeding heart that occasionally blinked.
It blinked at him.
He blinked back.
Tommy resisted the urge to scoff. The art style was clean, high-quality, probably designed by someone who’d done commissions for horny furries and never looked back. It had that sort of polish to it—too good for what it was.
The menu gave him three options:
[START NEW GAME]
[CHARACTER OVERVIEW]
[SETTINGS]
He clicked CHARACTER OVERVIEW, just to see what kind of cursed stockpile of tropes he was in for.
The screen faded again—slow, like the game was trying to savor every transition—and then: the character select board. All ten of them.
Arranged like they were in a yearbook or some elite boyband lineup. Everyone had a little portrait that shimmered slightly if you hovered over it, which felt vaguely obscene.
Ten boys. Ten flavors of personality dysfunction.
He didn’t even know where to start, so he only looked at the ones that immediately caught his eye.
First up:
Ranboo – “The eldest son of the House of Ender, a high-ranking Duke family in the Empire. Enderman and Ghast hybrid. Shy, soft-spoken, and unnervingly tall. Empathetic and deeply loyal—unless threatened in love. Then he breaks.”
Underneath that: Only available if protagonist age is set to under 18.
Tommy stared at that line a second longer than necessary.
Weird.
Next:
Tubbo – “Ranboo’s personal servant and lover. Chaotic good, with a hint of feral. Loves bees, fire, and explosions. Probably in that order. Will tease you until you cry and then feel really bad about it. Probably.”
Only available if protagonist age is set to under 18.
Then:
Quackity – “The smiling diplomat. Keeps secrets better than anyone. Will flirt with you and then break your heart at a trade summit. Good with his hands. Especially knives.”
Tommy moved on. Not as interesting as he thought, with the bright gold wings taking up almost all of the mans portrait background and the huge sick scar.
Technoblade and Philza were next—each listed not as individuals but as The Emperors of the Antarctic Empire. There was an ornate crest behind them. Matching rings on their hands.
“Conquered the known world, and then each other,” the game offered, helpfully. “Technoblade is a war god in mortal form. Philza is the only one who can match him in both battle and patience. Unlock their true endings to unlock all content.”
All content?
That’s when he noticed the last portrait on the board.
Wilbur Soot –
Grayed out.
Instead of a bio, there was a lock icon. Beneath that, it read:
“UNLOCKED AFTER: All other character endings completed. Emperor Endings (True) achieved.”
‘Isn’t it lovely to be forgotten?’
Tommy’s face screwed up.
That was either the most pretentious thing he’d ever read in a game, or the best piece of foreshadowing he’d seen since The Wither Chronicles ended with a marriage proposal and three corpses.
“Phil and Techno’s true endings,” he thought out loud to himself. “How many endings are there? And what the hell does ‘true’ mean—like, emotionally authentic? Spiritually aligned?”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Somewhere in the back of his brain, a memory flickered—blurry forum threads, midnight doomscrolling, some half-buried spoiler. Something about Wilbur being related to the emperors? Someone joked he was their clone. Or their failed heir. Maybe he was an experiment.
Tommy didn’t know.
Didn’t matter. He’d find out eventually.
He backed out of the character overview and clicked START NEW GAME.
The music shifted. More piano. Darker now, like someone had taken the original track and dipped it in melancholy.
The screen faded in slow motion.
Then: Character Creation Panel.
He didn’t overthink it. Just enough to be recognizable.
Hair – Gold, like his in real life. Messy. A bit too long in the front and back. Game called it “bright unnatural gold,” which felt vaguely insulting.
Eyes – Blue. Just… normal blue. Not sparkly anime blue. Not "oceans of sadness" blue. Just sapphire.
Clothes – Simple. Cloak, white shirt, lots of pockets. Surprisingly grounded for a game that offered at least four capes with magical embroidery.
Then came the real choice.
Species.
A ridiculous list popped up. Dozens of fantasy-coded nonsense: Slimekin. Ghastspawn. Blaze-formed. Piglin. Enderfolk. Feytouched. Some cursed thing called “Warden-born.”
Tommy scrolled until one stood out.
Avian.
Wings. Fragile bones. Flight.
And a little skull icon.
He hovered.
A warning popped up:
“Avian players face increased challenge levels due to character interactions and faction prejudice. Recommended for players looking to unlock specific routes or character interactions only.”
Tommy clicked it anyway.
Screw it. He wasn’t here to win. He was here to understand. To figure out what had driven half the internet into emotional devastation and interpretive fan edits.
He named his character “Theseus.” No real reason. The sprite looked like him anyway—just a little more symmetrical. So a nickname felt fair.
Click.
Confirm.
The music darkened further. A low trill that crawled under his skin and settled somewhere behind his teeth.
The screen faded to black.
Then, in pale text, one word at a time:
"There once was a world of kings and killers. And somewhere in between, there was you.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “This’ll be fun.”
It was supposed to suck.
That was the first thing Tommy noticed—that it didn’t. That it actually kind of… didn’t.
No cringe, no baby-voiced nonsense, no “Notice me senpai!” dialogue that made him want to throw himself into the nearest power grid. No pastel nightmare UI that looked like someone dropped a Lisa Frank binder into a bloodstain.
Just—clean writing. Characters that talked like they had brains in their heads. Or at least like they were pretending convincingly.
Which, honestly, was more than he could say for half the people he knew in real life.
He was an hour in when it hit him. Not the game, not the plot—just how easy it was to fall into it. The way the world curved in around the screen, thick as fog, warm as tea. And yeah, okay, the little character sprite did technically look like him—gold hair, sharp mouth, more pockets than fashion sense—but it wasn’t just that. It was something under the surface. Something… velvety. Slick.
He’d chosen three backstory options from the list—orphan, thief, and Lady Death-touched—mostly because they sounded cool and vaguely illegal. The game had responded immediately, weaving them into the opening like it had been waiting for him to make exactly that choice.
He woke up in a gutter. Of course. Shivering, soaked, with black script tattooed on the inside of his forearms in curling, ghostly glyphs. Curseprint, the game called it. Echoes of Death’s touch.
The first person he met was Sam.
Imperial Guard. Stoic. Square-jawed. Wielded a glaive taller than the average horse. He’d found Tommy’s character—Theseus, because subtlety was for cowards—breaking into a locked granary, and had responded with all the warmth of a tax audit.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Sam had said. “There’s a curfew.”
“I’m hungry,” Theseus replied, in that flat, defiant tone Tommy had chosen from the dialogue wheel. “Unless the Empire’s going to feed me, I’ll take what I need.”
The pause before Sam responded was maybe two seconds too long. Just enough to feel like thought. Like hesitation.
“…Don’t get caught next time,” he’d muttered. And then handed over a single silver coin.
Tommy had felt something then. Not quite surprise. Not quite confusion. Just that little twitch in his ribs that said, Huh. Okay. I see what you’re doing.
The next character was Purpled.
A streetwise courier type, all smirks and sharp angles, lounging on a rooftop like gravity didn’t apply to him. Tommy already had four hearts with him thanks to the backstory combo—apparently they’d grown up in the same underground crime ring or whatever—but Purpled didn’t act like they were friends.
He acted like they were rivals.
“The Empire’s looking for you,” he’d said, eyes glinting. “And I’m not in the mood to babysit. So don’t drag me down, Theseus.”
“Sure,” Tommy muttered to his screen, grinning. “You’re not even one of the main routes, man. You wish I was into you.”
He almost chose the flirt option. Just to see what would happen.
But no. He was saving that for later.
When Tubbo appeared, it was out of nowhere. Literally. He dropped down from a tree with no context, covered in leaf bits and holding a crossbow half his size, smiling like he’d already forgotten why he’d loaded it in the first place.
“Hi!” he said. “Are you stealing that bread or rescuing it?”
Tommy stared at the screen. Let the silence hang for a second. Then snorted. That made no sense.
“God, you’re such a weirdo,” he muttered affectionately, clicking the “rescuing it” dialogue choice.
Tubbo laughed. The game gave him +1 affection point.
Then Ranboo showed up.
Tall. Too tall. Barely in frame tall. Shoulders hunched like he was trying to apologize for existing. Voice typed out in lowercase letters, always ending in ellipses like he was afraid of saying too much. He was half-Enderman in-game—shadow aura, teleportation tendencies, the works—and Tommy had to admit, it looked cool. Dark wisps around his boots. A jittering trail of static when he blinked out of frame.
But also: massive coward.
Tommy liked him immediately. Not because he was relatable, or because he felt sorry for him. Just because there was something there. Something twitchy and strange and very, very kind.
“Don’t flinch like that,” Theseus said, three dialogue options deep of saving the young duke from an assassination attempt. “If someone wants to kill you, flinching won’t stop them.”
Ranboo’s response box paused. Then typed out:
“…I know.”
Tommy sat back in his chair, watching as the music dipped into minor chords. Something about the way the shadows bent around Ranboo’s sprite made it feel like the game was leaning closer.
He didn’t like that.
He did like the route, though.
He’d chosen it from the start—the poly route with Tubbo and Ranboo. The only one available to under-18 characters besides obscure side NPCs like Deo or that weird guy with the single red eye and black headband in the garden. Tommy hadn’t expected to care.
But then Tubbo started making explosives in the dorm kitchen, and Ranboo started glitching when you held his hand too long, and suddenly—
Suddenly the game was good.
Like… actually good.
Like he cared what happened next.
Like he kept clicking, even though it was nearly 1 a.m. now and he told himself he was only playing an hour, max.
Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled again.
The cursor shimmered over the next dialogue option.
Theseus sat at the top of some stairs, eating stolen grapes while Tubbo ranted about class politics and Ranboo tried to dissuade him from killing some other kingdoms king he think he had seen in the character overview.
Tommy smiled at the screen. Didn't even realize he was doing it.
The next day, the house was still cold when he got back.
Not physically. Not really. Just that kind of cold that lives in the corners of a room, where sound doesn’t reach and no one ever looks.
Tommy dropped his bag by the door. No one asked about his day. Not that he expected anyone to.
His shoes stayed on.
He made it upstairs, shrugged off his jacket in a way that didn’t feel like removing anything, and stared at his desk for a beat too long. The game icon blinked at him again. Soft, steady. A heartbeat, if hearts were pixelated and knew how to guilt you.
Thirty minutes, he told himself.
That was all. Just enough to shake off the edge in his shoulders. Just enough to let the noise in his head dissolve into background music and sparkle transitions.
He clicked the icon.
The heart pulsed. It picked up exactly where he left off.
Theseus—the scrappy little death-touched Avian bastard he’d made—was crouched behind a stack of half-toppled crates in the alleyway behind the Rust Market. A tin medallion with quackitys insignia still warm in his pocket. Gifted, for once, by purpled.
He’d finished that sidequest last night—stealing a chunk of some weird alloy called Skybone for Purpled, who insisted, without irony, that it was the missing piece for his "structural anti-gravity balance chamber." Which was, in reality, just the tilted back end of a busted UFO-shaped mobile home full of beanbags and disassembled tech and glowing slime jars Tommy had stopped asking about.
It had been… nice. Kind of dumb. But nice. Tommy had failed a check and Theseus had sneezed mid-theft, nearly triggering an alarm, and Purpled had laughed so hard he choked on one of those weird freeze-dried candy cubes he always carried. The VA had done a marvelous job and Tommy had laughed at him from the other side of the screen/
They’d ended up sitting on the roof for a bit after, legs swinging over the edge like neither of them had anywhere better to be. Now his heart meter with Purpled read 6/10.
Tommy was half-tempted to see how far that route could go, if he pushed it in the romantic direction, but he wasn’t serious about it. Purpled was too much like him. Too fast, too slippery, too likely to vanish the moment you started trusting him.
Still. Not bad to look at.
The screen flashed— dialouge end. He'd been mindlessly clicking, so he went back to the history to see what he missed.
PURPLED: "You’ve stirred the nest, you know."
THESEUS: "You’re gonna have to be more specific. I stir a lot of things. Pots. Trouble. Ranboo’s anxiety."
PURPLED: "Word’s out. The Emperors caught wind of a death-touched Avian slumming it in the Lower Thirds. That ring any bells?"
Tommy sat up straighter.
A flicker of animation—Purpled’s sprite leaned forward, serious now. His scarf fluttered in the wind, digital dust motes catching light.
PURPLED: "They’re asking questions. Real ones. About wings. About marks. About a kid who smells like glowpoder."
In the upper-right corner of the screen, something new appeared:
PHILZA RELATIONSHIP ↑ INTERESTED
TECHNOBLADE RELATIONSHIP ↑ INTERESTED
Tommy blinked.
“Oh,” he muttered.
He stared at the pop-up for a second, mouth slightly open, as if expecting it to say more. It didn’t.
“...Okay.”
He didn’t know what to think about that. Didn’t want to think about that, if he was honest.
Philza was supposed to be the calm one, right? The soft-spoken killer. The man who wore green and a stupid hat and had wings like Tommys character. And Technoblade was—well, Technoblade. The Blood God. War incarnate. Smiled like a maniac in his character overview. Tommy hadn’t even met them in-game yet, not properly. They were just names and foreshadowing and the occasional painting in Ranboo and Tubbos district two manor.
He hadn’t planned on unlocking their attention.
It made his skin itch.
“Don’t care,” he said aloud, like the game could hear him. “Not my route. Don’t start weird side drama just because I’ve got cool lore.”
He clicked through the next dialogue.
THESEUS: "Tell them I’m dead. They can't verify it anyways."
PURPLED: "I’d rather not lie to people who just held an execution the other day."
THESEUS: "Then don’t. Just… don’t tell them the truth either."
Purpled’s sprite didn’t respond right away. The silence was deliberate. Long enough to imply something unspoken, but not long enough to push the issue.
CHECK: RELATIONSHIP POINTS. 6 HEARTS MINIMUM REQUIREMENT.
.....
CHECK SUCCESSFUL!
PURPLED: "...You’re making a mistake, Theseus."
THESEUS: "I make a lot of those. This one’s mine to keep."
Tommy sat back, watching his character fade into the shadows of the alley. He checked his stats in the pause screen before the game could transition to the next scene, eyes catching on two names in the relationship section.
Tubbo relationship: 7/10.
Ranboo relationship: 6/10.
That, at least, made him smile.
Ranboo had glitched earlier when he brushed his hand by "accident". Sparks of purple light. Tubbo had thrown a book at his head in the library, then apologized and offered snacks five minutes later. They were both disasters.
Tommy adored them.
The emperors could do what they wanted. If they showed up, fine. If they tried to pull him into their ancient war games and weird cryptic monologues, fine.
As long as it didn’t get in the way.
As long as Tubbo kept calling him a menace and Ranboo kept glitching when he got nervous and Purpled kept showing up with stupid blueprints and food stolen from somewhere expensive—
He’d be fine.
Tommy clicked “Continue.”
Three days.
Three whole days of school and half-silent dinners and crumb-strewn desks and half-lidded eyes watching the clock crawl toward freedom. Three days of thinking about playing the game without actually doing it except for maybe 30, 20 minutes a day, which somehow felt worse.
He told himself he was waiting for the right time.
But really—he was nervous.
It wasn’t that he cared, exactly. It was just… something was coming. He could feel it. The game had changed its rhythm. Dialogue options grew tighter. Pauses grew longer. Background music turned more... intentional. It was like the world itself had started breathing differently. Slower. Louder.
So tonight—Sunday—he booted it up without hesitation.
No thunder. No dramatic storm. Just his fingers on the keys and the soft whirr of his tower groaning awake like an old dog.
Theseus—his winged little ghost of a thief—was standing on a roof. Same as always. The sky around him was bruised pink, hint of dusk, stars barely bleeding through.
And Tubbo was there. Arms crossed. Leaning too close to the edge for comfort.
Ranboo sat beside him on the ledge, one knee drawn to his chest, tail hidden behind him. He blinked slowly, like he’d been buffering for hours and finally remembered how to exist.
Tommy clicked forward.
No dialogue wheel. Just—scene.
Tubbo turned first.
TUBBO: "We’re not subtle, are we?"
Theseus didn’t respond immediately. The wind blew his cloak. Music plucked in the background like a heartbeat trying to stay calm.
RANBOO: "We’ve been... trying not to ruin anything."
TUBBO: "We talked about it. A lot. Mostly at night. I think it started because you make terrible tea."
Tommy blinked. Sat forward. The animation was more fluid than usual. Tubbo’s expression flickered through something sharp-soft-honest all at once.
TUBBO: "You’re annoying. You’re messy. You steal my snacks and cheat at board games."
RANBOO: "...And you stand too close to the edge of things."
TUBBO: "But also? You make everything feel less like dying. So, that’s something."
Ranboo finally looked up.
Tommy watched as Theseus sprite turned to its surprised one, wings puffing up slightly. No response prompts. No choices.
RANBOO: "I don’t know what this is supposed to look like. I don’t think it matters."
TUBBO: "We want to be yours."
RANBOO: "...If you want us."
The screen paused there.
Their sprites close enough that their shadows overlapped.
A quiet shimmer appeared in the corner:
CONFESSION TRIGGERED
TUBBO: 9/10
RANBOO: 8/10
Dual Route Ending - Initiated
Tommy’s heart clicked once in his chest.
There wasn’t a prompt. There wasn’t a choice. The game didn’t need one. Because he’d already made it, a hundred choices ago—every “stay,” every “I trust you,” every thrown book and late-night snack and moment of silence between boys who didn’t quite know how to ask to be loved without a war in the middle.
Theseus stepped forward. The animation was slow. Thoughtful.
He reached out.
One hand for each.
THESEUS: "I thought I was alone in this world."
THESEUS: "Turns out I was just waiting."
Ranboo's sprite glitched softly—shoulders shaking, smile just slightly crooked. Tubbo punched his shoulder with affection barely masked by bravado.
TUBBO: "God, you’re such a loser."
RANBOO: "...But he’s ours now."
He lasted two days.
Forty-eight hours, give or take, before his resolve folded like cheap cardboard. He told himself it was curiosity. Research. Mechanical interest.
Not because he missed them.
Not because Tubbo’s sprite had this little idle animation he missed watching during dialouge—flicking rocks off when Theseus wasn’t moving—and not because Ranboo glitched slightly slower when he stood closer, like the game was learning to breathe between them.
Definitely not that.
So he started a new file.
Same name.
Same species.
Same cursed trifecta of backstories: orphan, thief, Death-touched.
Same golden hair, same sapphire eyes, same too-long cloak that Tommy definitely hadn't browsed etsy and amazon to see if anyone had made a duplicate of. (They had. His bank account was 40 dollars emptier.)
He didn’t change a thing.
Because he didn’t want to change a thing. Not really.
He was going back. Just—slantwise.
This time, he clicked differently.
Not enough to throw the route. Not enough to lose hearts. But… just enough to explore the corners. Enough to pry. Enough to see what else had been tucked under the glossy surface of cherry blossoms and rooftop confessions.
He’d skimmed a wiki, briefly. Enough to know that something darker ran beneath the bright-eyed affection meters. Yandere flags, someone had written. Obsession variables.
And apparently, if you kept Tubbo’s affection between 5–7 and chose certain dialogue paths—mostly around loyalty and abandonment—and let Ranboo glitch too long without comforting him—
Well.
Let’s just say the endings weren’t sparkles and kissing under the moon anymore.
Kidnapping had come up.
Once. Maybe twice.
Uncomfortable, yeah.
But also—strangely fitting?
He couldn’t explain it. Not well. But it was there. Ranboo had always felt like he was unraveling in slow motion. And Tubbo’s need for your attention had always teetered on a knife’s edge. Smile wide. Hands fast. A boy with a fuse always halfway gone.
So Tommy leaned in.
Not all at once. Just a toe over the line.
He picked the dialogue option where Theseus said, “I don’t need anyone,” instead of “I trust you.” Watched Tubbo's brow knit in response. +0 affection. No change that Tommy could tell besides that. But the screen dimmed a little.
He hesitated before brushing Ranboo’s hand.
Didn’t warn Purpled away when he warned him, again, that the Emperors were watching. And when Quackity—half-grin, half-ghost—pulled Theseus into a conversation about “loyalty as leverage,” Tommy actually stayed to hear him out.
Because, this time, he was going to see everything.
By day four of the new route, Theseus was walking finer lines than he ever had.
Tubbo had started pacing more in his idle animations. Ranboo lingered in doorways too long. Dialogue boxes had started phrasing things differently despite spiritually being the same conversation.
Not worse.
Just closer.
More direct.
RANBOO: "You talk to a lot of people now."
THESEUS: "I talk to who I need to."
RANBOO: "...Right. Just... don't forget were your bestfriends, ok?"
TUBBO: "You trust Quackity? That’s... brave of you."
THESEUS: "Why wouldn't it be?"
TUBBO: "...No reason. Just—tell me where you go at night. Just so I know you’re safe."
Tommy clicked through slowly. Read everything, wasn't sure about it, besides warm and wishing someone cared enough about him in his real life that they went a little insane with it.
He didn’t stop.
He let Purpled loop him into a job moving contraband through the Old Sewers—rare books, restricted tech, rumors about the Emperors keeping a soul-bound vault of crows under the castle (probably bullshit, but kind of cool). Quackity slipped into the background of more scenes now. Smiling. Watching.
Tommy let it happen.
He was playing it smart. Keeping Tubbo and Ranboo between 6–7 hearts. Not too distant. Not too close. Letting the story breathe different air.
And the game breathed back.
The screen was black.
The kind of black that meant final.
No music. No particles drifting across the background. No subtle flicker of ambient light to suggest the world was still spinning somewhere behind it.
Just the words.
GAME OVER.
And then, beneath it, like a taunt carved in marble:
“Your journey has ended. Death-touched may only die once.”
Tommy stared.
He didn’t blink.
The cursor was gone. There were only two buttons. “Try Again.” and “Load Last Save.” And that single, stupid sentence. Floating there like it knew what it had done.
He leaned back in his chair, very slowly, hands hovering limp and open like the shock hadn’t quite reached his knuckles yet.
“What.”
It came out quiet.
Then again, louder.
“What.”
He stared harder, as if the game might suddenly apologize. Or glitch. Or reveal that it was a prank, haha, got you! Psych, you’re fine!
But no.
Theseus was dead.
Dead. In a dating sim.
“I died?!” he snapped, voice pitching somewhere between disbelief and betrayal. “Are you fucking—are you kidding me?!”
He shoved his chair back, heels scraping across wood, hard enough to jolt the desk. The monitor bobbed slightly.
A dating sim. And he’d fucking died.
Who even dies in a dating sim?! They were about tea parties and festivals and ambiguous blushes under cherry trees—not dying mid-heist because some bastard forgot to give you a damn tutorial about your own cursed body.
He dragged both hands down his face. Slumped back down in his chair and forward, elbows thudding against the edge of the desk.
The last mission had seemed straightforward. Steal a ring. That was it. That’s all Quackity had said.
“One of Schlatt’s gold rings,”
“Just a test,”
“You do this, and I’ll take you to Las Nevadas.”
Tommy remembered the line verbatim. He’d reread it ten times, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. He hadn’t.
What he hadn’t known—because the game never told him, because why would it tell him, stupid fucking game—is that Schlatt was set to maximum perception stats. That you needed stealth maxed to even have a chance of success. That if you fucked it up—if you so much as brushed his cloak—he’d snap your neck like an olive garden breadstick and the screen would fade to black before you even realized it wasn’t just a cutscene.
And Theseus?
Theseus didn’t get three lives like every other character.
Because of course he didn’t.
Because Death-touched meant Hardcore Mode, and apparently that fine print only unlocked after you died the first time. Because screw Tommy, that’s why!
He’d put hours into this route. Too many hours to go back to optimize his stats for this one fucking mission. Dozens of interactions. Timing his in-game hours. Navigated delicate affection balances like he was playing emotional chess on a timer. Tubbo hovering between jealousy and concern. Ranboos interesting bordering obsessive and suffocating. Quackity threading his influence in deeper with each job.
And Las Nevadas—hell, Las Nevadas was supposed to be the big one. Entire systems unlocked. A whole city-state hidden behind locked affection gates and interwoven subplot keys. He’d been clawing toward it with scraped-together stealth checks and half-patched influence boosts. Talking to people he didn’t like. Choosing dialogue that felt wrong, just to keep Quackity’s interest.
All for this.
All for a loading screen with no load.
All for a game that let him get this far just to rip it out from under him with no warning and no alternative.
He curled his hands into fists.
Then slammed the desk once. Not hard enough to break anything. Just hard enough to feel it.
“Fucking bullshit game,” he hissed. “Fucking—stupid, broken—who the hell gives a romance game permadeath?!”
He leaned back again. Stared at the ceiling.
Breathing too fast.
“God. I hate this game,” he said to the dark. “I hate this game. I’m uninstalling it. I’m uninstalling it right now.”
He did not uninstall it.
He reached over to the drawer. Pulled out the plastic bottle. Unscrewed the cap. Dry swallow. Two pills, no water. Routine.
The screen was still black when he turned his face away. Game Over, bold as ever.
He shut off the monitor. The glow died.
The room went quiet.
Too quiet. Tommy stormed away from his desk like it had personally wronged him.
Which, to be fair, it had.
“That’s it. Fuck this. Fuck that game. Fuck Quackity.”
He was muttering, but loud. Kicking each step harder than necessary like the floor had made itself complicit.
“Steal a ring, he says. Just a little favor, he says. How about I ring your fucking neck, you glitchy capitalist duck—”
He kicked one of his stuffed animals on his way to his bed, because fuck it too! Couldn't it see he was pissed?!
“I died in a dating sim!” he snarled. “A dating sim! Who the fuck dies in a—who makes that a feature?!”
Each word came sharper. Rattled. Like if he said it enough, the sheer dumbness of it might collapse in on itself and rewind time. Like it might unkill Theseus. Unfuck everything.
“You can’t just—give me cute boys and trauma arcs and then kill me mid-sidequest like it’s a fucking roguelike! Who wrote this?! Who actually coded that in?!”
He reached the edge of the bed, fists clenched, shoulders drawn tight like a bowstring—and then it hit.
Pain.
Sudden. Fast. Deep.
Not an ache. Not a cramp. Not something he could stretch out or swear through.
This was a knife shoved under his ribs and twisted sideways.
Tommy sucked in a breath—
Or tried to.
Nothing came.
His lungs stuttered. His knees buckled like the ground dropped out beneath him. His knees folded. He caught the bed’s edge with one hand, just barely, the other gripping his chest like he could claw the pain back out.
His vision pulsed. Blackened at the corners. Dots swam across his eyes like static.
No, no, no, no—
He couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t think.
Heart hammering in his ears like it was trying to punch its way out.
“I’m—” he gasped, or tried to. “Oh my fuck, am I—am I actually dying?!”
He tried to laugh. Or scream. It came out as a wheeze.
Another stab. Hot. White. Merciless.
His knees hit the floor. Hard.
One hand still gripped the blanket. The other pressed flat over his heart, where something unnatural and wrong was screaming through his ribs.
“That bullshit ending stressed me out so bad I’m—fucking dying because of it?!”
Another stab of pain. A white-hot needle up through the center of his ribs.
“You stupid piece of shit, I swear to God—”
He sagged harder against the mattress, fingers twisting into the sheets like it was the only thing tethering him to the floor. His legs didn’t work. His arms barely did. He was sweating—cold sweat, back-of-the-neck sweat, the kind that felt wrong.
He didn’t know what was happening. Didn’t care. Not really.
And all he could think, as his chest burned and his head spun and his vision went dark around the edges, was:
This is it. This is how I die. Because I didn’t max out my stealth stats.
He woke up cold.
Not the kind of cold that came from an overworked fan or a drafty bedroom window cracked too far in spring, but the kind that crept under the skin and curled up there. A guttural, wet cold. An aching cold, like something in him had been wrung out, wrung dry, then dumped in ice water and left to sink.
He opened his eyes to a smear of grey.
Slush-glittered cobblestone. Brick and rot. The trickle of water somewhere behind his head. Everything smelled like wet stone and old smoke—like rust, like metal that’d tasted blood once and never got over it.
Tommy lay there, cheek pressed to a freezing patch of alley floor, blinking up at the draped hem of sky visible through rust-bitten gutter pipes. He didn’t remember falling asleep. He didn’t remember leaving his room.
He—
Hadn’t he died?
His chest twinged at the memory, a ghost of a knife’s edge pressing between his ribs. His fingers twitched. One scraped grit. The other curled instinctively. Still alive. But—
Where the fuck was he?
There were no sirens. No creaking floorboards. No tinny fan humming in the corner of his room. Just distant voices, muffled. A horse, maybe. Hooves on cobble. A cart wheel dragging over a rut in the road. A bell. Churchlike, but too slow, too far.
He sat up too fast.
The world tilted sideways.
He caught himself on one elbow and gasped sharply, head reeling, breath clouding the air like it was midwinter—but it wasn’t, was it? Not before. It’d been April. Still jacket weather, maybe, but this? This was soaked-through-cloak and frozen-breath and bone-deep chill.
And he was—wet.
Soaked, actually. Like he’d been dunked in a river and hung out to rot. Shirt clinging, skin raw. His boots—or no, not his boots, because these were too tight, too worn, someone else’s boots—were full of sludge, and his knees had gravel embedded in them.
He lifted a hand and stared.
His fingers were thinner than they should be. Scarred in the wrong places. And along the inside of his left forearm, starting at the crook of his elbow and spiraling down to his wrist, was ink.
No—not ink.
It shimmered.
Black script, curling. Floating just barely above his skin. Shifting like breath, like it wasn’t really there at all.
Words he couldn’t read. Words he remembered.
ʖ⚍∷リℸ ̣ ∴╎リ⊣ᓭ ʖ𝙹⚍リ↸ ʖ|| ⍑ᒷᔑ⍊ᒷリ’ᓭ ↸ᒷʖℸ ̣ ,
ℸ ̣ ⍑ᒷ ᓭ⚍リ ⎓ᒷꖎꖎ 𝙹リᓵᒷ, ᔑリ↸ ᓭℸ ̣ ╎ꖎꖎ ╎ℸ ̣ ᓭᒷℸ ̣ ᓭ.
Curseprint.
His stomach sank. Dipped past his spine, out through the cobblestones, straight to the molten center of the earth.
This—he knew this. From hours spent leaning into the screen, from walkthrough pages and wikis and one haunting piece of flavor text that had lodged itself in the back of his skull like a bullet.
“He wakes up in a gutter. Of course. Shivering, soaked, with black script tattooed on the inside of his forearms in curling, ghostly glyphs.”
He was in the game.
No, no—he wasn’t—he couldn’t be.
He staggered to his feet. Immediately regretted it. The weight hit him all at once.
His back.
Something dragged there, something heavy and sodden, clinging to his spine like a second skin. He stumbled sideways, slammed a shoulder into the alley wall, scraped skin, tried to twist around—
And saw feathers from under his cloak.
Feathers.
Long. Waterlogged. Gold and red as a sunset, streaked with oil-slick iridescence. He froze. Reached back with trembling fingers.
Touched them.
They were real.
Warm and real and attached.
They shivered under his touch, as if part of him, responding not to the world but to his pulse.
The wings.
Theseus’s wings.
He turned slowly, unsteadily. The alley stretched ahead like a tunnel to nowhere, just more stone and rust and patches of sickly green moss climbing the walls like veins. No street signs. No neon flicker. No warm lights humming from bedroom windows.
Just the sound of something distant. City noise, but…not his city. Not London. Not anything like it.
Tommy pressed a hand to his chest. His heart was racing, far too fast.
He looked down at himself—at the scuffed tunic, the ripped trousers, the laces tied all wrong. The slightly-too-large belt that looped twice. The sigil at his hip. A flask of something hooked to it.
He’d seen this outfit before.
On the loading screen.
On Theseus.
Fuck.
The world did not turn toward him.
No eyes snapped open in alarm, no voices rose in suspicion or sympathy. No one reached out.
He walked—shivering, sodden, stumbling—past shuttered stalls and open windows and streets cobbled with oil-slick stones. People passed. Eyes flicked toward him and flicked away again.
No one screamed. No one scolded.
But no one stopped, either.
Back home, if a boy was wandering like this, soaked to the ribs and visibly unraveling, would’ve had five voices calling after him within a minute. Someone would’ve pulled him aside, given him a hoodie or a phone charger or too many napkins. Asked, “Are you okay?” with that particular brand of too-casual concern.
Here?
Here, he wasn’t even worth more then a glance.
He pulled the cloak tighter around his shoulders, the fabric clinging to him with the persistence of a second skin. It smelled like damp fur and long-burning wax. He tucked it under his chin, fists balled in the folds of it, like a kid curling into his blanket during a thunderstorm.
Not because it made him warmer.
But because he didn’t know what else to do.
His boots slapped wet against the ground. Each step was wrong—off-balance. He couldn’t figure out how to walk with the wings yet, not properly. They dragged behind him, threw his weight sideways, shifted when he didn’t ask them to, like a second body living just beneath the skin.
Every so often, a gust of wind pressed too hard against them and he flinched, and they wrapped tighter against him as if to protect him—as if they were real.
They were. They were. But—
He still wasn’t… here. Not really. His head floated several inches above the rest of him. Everything was slightly out of sync.
Maybe this was a dream. The weirdest one he’d ever had. Or maybe he’d died—really died, back in his room, back where the pain started—and this was some flavor of purgatory.
And if it was, then why did the ground feel so solid?
Why did his knees ache where he’d fallen?
Why did the glyphs on his arms pulse when he breathed?
He blinked too slow. Kept moving, because stopping felt like something that might undo him entirely.
And then—
“THESEUS!”
The name cracked across the narrow street like the sharp edge of a plate breaking.
His head jerked around so fast it made the world spin.
There, just beyond the curve of the alley mouth, someone had stepped out from the shadowed stone. A boy—young, short, angular. Familiar.
His scarf was too bright. His glare was too sharp. He looked like someone carved out of smoke and alleyway shadows, standing there like he knew every corner of the world and owned half of it already.
Purpled.
He knew that face. Knew that name.
Knew the way that line of dialogue always landed: flippant, fast, just on the edge of kindness.
Tommy didn’t think. Just moved.
One foot, then the other. A little too fast, a little too unsteady—stumbling like a newborn chick whose legs hadn’t figured out gravity yet. His wings dragged behind him, caught on a splintered crate, feathers dragging wet lines across the wall. And the moment Tommy stepped fully into the alley, Purpled was on him.
Not gentle. Not soft. Not some angel of narrative kindness here to help the protagonist to his feet.
No—he grabbed Theseus by the shoulders like he was steadying a particularly stupid criminal mid-sprint, spun him, and slammed him against the nearest brick wall with a force that made Tommy’s breath punch out of him.
“The fuck are you doing?” Purpled hissed.
Tommy blinked, dazed. “Wh—?”
“In the middle of the street like that?” Purpled shoved him again, just enough to rattle. “What, trying to get arrested? Dragged? Mugged? What the hell is wrong with you?”
Tommy opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
“Are you drunk?” Purpled snapped. “Is that it? Spirits and salt? Or—no. Phantom Dust? You on Dust, Theseus? You high right now?”
The words hit fast. Too fast. Each one sharper than the last. They scraped against the inside of Tommy’s skull like he was a bell being rung too hard.
“I—no—I’m not—”
“Because you’re walking like a corpse,” Purpled snarled. “Like someone beat you senseless and dropped you off in the Lower Sevenths with your memory still bleeding out your ears. You think this is a safe place to go shambling around like that?”
Tommy winced.
“I said,” Purpled barked, shaking him once, “Are. You. On. Dust?”
“No!” Tommy snapped, voice cracking high. “No, I’m not—I’m not on your weird fantasy drug, alright?!”
Purpled stopped.
Tommy dragged in a breath. Then another. They didn’t come easy. His ribs still felt like they were locked up under something else’s weight.
“I’m not on anything,” he said again, quieter this time. “I just—I woke up. Like—just woke up. In some alley, freezing my fucking ass off. And I don’t know what’s going on, okay?”
Purpled didn’t say anything.
Tommy kept going, fast now, because once it started, it couldn’t stop: “I’m not high. I’m not drunk. I’m confused as hell and my head’s still—weird, and I don’t know what I’m doing here or what happened or why my back weighs like twenty fucking kilos, so maybe—maybe chill out?”
He ended that sentence with more teeth than he meant to. Breath steaming.
Purpled’s hands loosened on his shoulders, but didn’t fall away.
For a second, neither of them moved.
Then: “Okay,” Purpled muttered, jaw tight. “Okay. You’re not high. You're pupils are fine.”
“I told you—”
“Shut up.” He let go, turned away, dragged a hand down his face like he was trying to scrub the tension off with his palm. “You sound like a lunatic. You're lucky I found you before a guard.”
“Gee, thanks,” Tommy muttered, still half-plastered to the wall.
Purpled glanced at him again, expression unreadable. “Whatever. Come on.”
“Where?”
“Someplace drier. Before someone who doesn’t like you sees you first.”
He turned, started walking deeper into the alley. Didn’t wait.
Tommy hesitated. Wiped his sleeve under his nose. Swallowed.
Then followed.
Not because he knew where they were going, or because he had any better ideas, but because Purpled moved like someone who did, and right now that was enough.
The alley twisted tight around them, stone and brick closing in like the bones of a great animal. Purpled didn’t slow down. He ducked under hanging signs, hopped over broken crates, weaved through narrow cuts between buildings with the practiced ease of someone who’d done it blindfolded and once while bleeding. Tommy, less practiced and less coordinated, stumbled after him like a newly hatched deer still figuring out its own legs.
The wings dragged every few steps—caught on railings, brushed low awnings, knocked over a stack of crates at one point. Purpled didn’t comment.
Tommy didn’t either.
He was busy watching him.
Not like—creepily. Just… watching.
It was hard not to.
Purpled moved like he belonged to the city, and the city knew it. His hair was swept back in a gravity-defying way that shouldn’t have worked but did. The weird little alien antennae on his head glowed faintly when he passed under shadow, twitching with every turn. Purple scales lined the edges of his jaw and the backs of his hands like armor grown out of instinct. His eyes—Tommy tried not to stare too long—were bright violet with glowing rings in them, like some eldritch version of a camera lens zooming in and out without ever blinking.
His ears were long. Pointed like a knife left in fire. Faded into violet at the tips.
And he walked like all of this was normal.
Tommy didn’t know if it was.
He didn’t know what normal was anymore.
He kept his mouth shut.
They turned three more times. Slipped through a gate that looked locked until Purpled kicked the bottom corner just right. Climbed a stairwell that looked condemned. Hopped a fence. Slid under a crooked arch covered in old flyers and one very aggressive vine.
And then, like stepping through a threshold drawn in chalk—
They were there.
Tommy blinked.
“Holy shit,” he said, mostly to himself.
He’d seen it before. Once. Maybe twice. A background image in a few of Purpled’s romance scenes—artfully blurred, always lit by blue dusk and the suggestion of stars.
But the actual thing?
Was a UFO.
A genuine, honest-to-god UFO.
The kind kids used to draw on math worksheets when they were bored. Disk-shaped, shimmering at the edges like a mirage. Metal, but dented. A little uneven. Hovering about a foot off the ground on four weird mechanical legs that looked like they’d been scavenged off three different robots.
Little lights blinked across the surface. Pink. Yellow. Purple. Some blinked in patterns, others randomly, like the house was breathing.
Tommy followed Purpled up the ramp, still dazed.
Inside, it was… weird. But not in the way he expected.
It was lived-in.
Jars of glowing slime lined one shelf, next to a pile of crossbow bolts. On the wall hung a weird sword with two handles. Next to that—shelves full of books, some printed, some handwritten, one with teeth. There were bowls of what looked like cereal. Gloves. Spare parts. Coins. Mismatched socks.
On the floor of the living room, a three-eyed rabbit was lounging on a beanbag.
It blinked at Tommy.
Tommy blinked back.
“Sit,” Purpled said, already halfway into another room. “Or don’t. Just don’t touch anything glowing unless you want to explode.”
Tommy stepped in more fully, looking around. The walls curved. The lights above them were soft and pulsing. It smelled faintly like ozone and something sweet. The air was warmer here, and quieter, like the world had been folded inward and sealed off at the edges.
It was… weirdly comforting.
Purpled reappeared, tossed a dry towel at his face, and dropped into a chair shaped like a broken star.
“Lay low,” he said firmly. “Until you get your damn head back on your shoulders.”
Tommy pulled the towel off his head. Still wide-eyed.
“Right,” he muttered. “Lay low. Cool. Love that. Totally doing that.”
Purpled didn’t even blink before nearly immediately getting up to do something else.
The three-eyed bunny sneezed.
Tommy sat down on the floor. Hard.
His legs didn’t work right anyway.
The bunny blinked at him again. All three eyes.
She was sprawled on what looked like a lumpy purple beanbag now that tommy got a closer look and a half-dismantled bomber jacket, one leg in the air, chewing on nothing.
Tommy blinked back, still half-puddle on the floor, the towel now slung around his shoulders.
“You’re mad cute,” he said. The words slipped out without thinking, barely louder than the whisper of air in the room.
And then—like an afterthought rendered in gold:
+10 AFFECTION POINTS WITH PURPLED!
It shimmered right in front of him. Actual UI text. Glowing, floating, slightly transparent, hovering in the air like it was projected from nowhere.
He flinched so hard he almost fell over again.
“What—?”
But Purpled was already looking up from where he was rifling through a drawer of what appeared to be weaponized pens. He glanced at Tommy, at the bunny, and smiled like someone who was used to being correct.
“Hell yeah she’s cute. She’s the best.”
He crossed the room, scooped her up with one arm like a sack of marshmallows, and plopped down in his chair again with her sprawled across his lap. She settled immediately, one paw batting at his communicator like she was born to break tech.
Purpled had pulled the thing out of his pocket—it looked like a phone, or a DS, or maybe the sleek in-game communicator Tommy remembered from a couple rare cutscenes it was present in. Smooth black shell, cute little stickers, screen flickering with distorted map overlays and coded pings. He tapped it twice, then glanced up at Tommy like he wasn’t about to casually say something that would ruin the next five hours of his mental peace.
“Look,” Purpled said, tone clipped, “if you’re really that fucked up—like, Dust-level ‘I don’t know my own name’ fucked up—you should stay out of the main squares the next few days.”
Tommy frowned. “Main squares?”
“Yeah.” He scrolled something on the communicator. “Starting Tuesday.”
“What?” Tommy blinked. “Why Tuesday? What’s on Tuesday?”
Purpled didn’t look up. “Quackity got intel. Something official, but not published. Said the Emperors are coming down to the city for the festivities.”
There was a long, blank pause in Tommy’s brain where his soul just vacated the premises.
Then, internally: OH. SHIT.
Oh—oh my god. He remembered this. He remembered this.
The early Act II festival. The fireworks. The street events. The big cutscene. The Emperors—Philza and Techno—descending from the Citadel to walk among the people.
And also: someone dies.
Someone gets executed.
Right in the square.
The festival marked the end of one route’s calm period and the start of everything spiraling out of control. Afterward, if you were Death-touched and noticed—which Theseus always was—they started asking questions. Gaining “Interest.”
Tommy remembered the first time he played that scene. He remembered the chill.
The headsman’s axe.
The line: “Don’t blink, death's child. You’ll miss the point.”
Now it felt less like story and more like a knife hanging just above his collarbone.
“Oh,” he said quietly. “Right. Uh—thanks. That’s—thank you, Purpled.”
Purpled grunted, still focused on whatever blinking line was traveling across his screen.
Tommy hesitated, then added, softer, “You’re… honestly a really great friend, you know. Like, I don’t even know what the hell’s going on, and you’ve been the only person who—like—hasn’t completely let me get stabbed in the street or exploded yet, so. Yeah. I owe you one.”
He meant it. He didn’t say things like that often, but it slipped out before he could think to stop it.
Purpled looked up. Froze.
Tommy watched the way his expression changed—like a machine misfiring, like someone forgetting how to receive language.
A beat passed.
Then: “Stop saying stupid shit.”
His voice wasn’t as sharp this time.
“Get out of my house.”
But there was color at the edge of his cheeks now. Subtle. Flush-purple at the tips of his ears. His antennae twitched.
Tommy raised an eyebrow.
And then—
+5 AFFECTION POINTS WITH PURPLED!
RELATIONSHIP ↑ FRIENDS
💜💜💜💜💜
Five hearts. Glowing. Friendly purple.
Unlocked, just like that.
Tommy blinked at the floating UI.
The bunny rolled over and kicked Purpled’s communicator out of his hand. Again.
What the fuck.