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Three things about Tubbo Underscore that will remain hard, infallible facts, no matter how much Tubbo Underscore wishes otherwise:
Once, he was a president. Whether he was a good one or not relies quite heavily on the person you ask, but the fact is that he was one, and so therefore he’s no stranger to the art of manipulation; word-twisting, of taking what is in front of you and stuffing it into a box that fits neat between your teeth. He’d witnessed it, been subject to it – even worn the blasted fucking suit and done it himself, tie looped around his neck like a noose. It’s a skill that’s long since been dormant, but it’ll always be there in the recesses of his mind, sticky whispers of don’t trust them don’t trust you don’t trust anybody clinging to his conscience , and they never fade. Like ink stains in white polyester, or the scent of blood clinging to a worn axeblade, they most likely never will.
Once, he was a husband. Whether he was a good one or not is up to audience interpretation considering it really didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but Tubbo likes to think he did his best, or the best a nineteen-year-old child-soldier-turned-ex-president playing pretend at normalcy could manage, anyhow. He’d filled the role and played the part — fed the cats and made the bed and brought home flowers he knew were their favourite, smiled lots, laughed when he could. (And he’d loved them. Wholly and truly. What more could a husband do?)
Finally – and arguably most importantly – once, he was a father. Whether he was a good one or not is not a question he would be able to answer, but you could probably use context clues to figure out that one because he could not tell you what his son would have looked like beyond the age of five years old. The truth that remains is that his hands have held both deadly explosives and the sleeping figure of a child, and they will always, inexplicably, belong to a father — and a father’s hands never, never forget.
Tubbo’s fucking tired though, man. His hands don’t belong to him really, not anymore. He doesn’t know what to do with them anymore. What is he if not the president, the husband, the father? What is he without the noose around his neck, the weight on his shoulders?
He can feel the real owner of his hands clawing at his insides late at night in his own cottage away from everything, that iron grip of a kid in a suit too big for him digging bitten nails into his lungs, turning every inhale into a dagger strike. The kid that was supposed to die when he’d set off that nuke, cursed to live and ache and remember.
He haunts Tubbo’s every move, that boy, and Tubbo feels him like a sword through the stomach – feels him in the way he’ll still twitch at any noise just a little too loud, in the way his hands will subconsciously go to fidget with the memory of a suit tie, in the way he’ll catch himself staring at the front door like he’s still waiting for someone to come home to him. Reaching for things that aren’t there anymore, stuck in a body that will not let him move on.
Sometimes a dark part of him wants, wants so badly it hurts, wants to uproot the boy with teeth and steel and gunpowder even if it hurts him, especially if it hurts him, finish the job he’d failed, rip his past out of his chest like it’s a cancer and let himself fill out his own body fresh and bleeding and anew —
He can’t. He knows he can’t. The roots are too anchored. There is a point when tree saplings grow from soft and moldable to something ugly and gnarled and horribly stubborn, and Tubbo had passed it years ago.
(He’s envious of Tommy, sometimes: of her lightness, of her ability to just move on and keep going. And he knows there’d been more to it, but still. She’d gotten up, tamed some new sheep and started a vegetable garden, and here’s Tubbo — a widower, bereaved parent, still too small, still too old for someone so young. A weed left to grow too long.)
It all comes to a head when Tubbo catches a glimpse of a furred coat amongst the dark red expanse of the Nether during a what was supposed to be a blaze run. He doesn’t think that much of it — it’s not uncommon to see piglin or skeleton grunts wandering around in overworld clothes pillaged from the more naive travelers venturing the Nether — but then he spots the weathered blue and yellow patch of the Snowchester flag across the arm of it and whatever dismissive train of thought he’d halfway formed grinds a stuttering halt.
He’s not sure when he’d lost his coat. He certainly knows that he’d left the SMP without it, assuming he’d lost it to a laundry run gone astray or some particularly brave skeleton some time ago, the point being that it is most definitely supposed to be gone . But here it is in all its war-torn, frostbitten glory, across the shoulders of someone of whom it definitely does not belong.
It’s a piglin wearing it. A tilt of their head reveals the decaying side of their face, rot framing the exposed skull like moss on a gravestone, and their eye–
(He used to hope. Hoped that whatever cursed deity had saved him and Tommy from the explosion had saved them, too, from whatever their fates had been, but it had been a pipe dream. Puerile. A fairy tale to help himself sleep at night, he’d thought, and then he’d felt his hands pull at his own hair and tried not to think about it after that.)
Here and now, Tubbo can’t do anything but stare. His legs are made of wood, tree bark and roots, useless and unmoving as Michael turns and their eyes meet and all he can do in return is fucking stare.
The kid’s tall now, is Tubbo’s first thought – a bit below average for a piglin but still well off, all broad shoulders like Tubbo yet he holds himself the same way Ranboo does: nervously and impossibly gently, shoulders hunched and hands knotted together like he’s scared to even use them . There’s a gold pickaxe fastened to his belt and a small twisting braid in the hair behind his ear like the one Technoblade had, and his eye. Red-brown like netherite, deep-set and curious, and it reminds Tubbo of a cottage in the snow and bouts of laughter and little stuffed chickens and baby wails soothed by a parchment paper voice and small cloven hands in his own and–
(--steel and gunpowder and sulphur and smoke and exploding dust dust ash ash death nothing nothing nothing–)
The president in him steels his thoughts, stands him up straight, takes the situation and fits it into a pill that tastes bitter but real on Tubbo’s tongue. He tells him that this can’t be happening because he’d been left to a door swung open and ashen furniture, left with a desolate home and empty air and no bodies to bury. He tells him that there is no point chasing ghosts. He tells him keep your chin up, stay guarded, do not show weakness. Don’t trust him. Don’t trust anybody.
The husband in him aches , aches like old willow branches and empty beds. He tugs at the creaky pulsing thing in Tubbo’s chest and weeps salt-sour tears when it doesn’t get Tubbo to move, because if Michael is alive than where is Ranboo, where is Ranboo — oh, the thought that they could be nearby hurts bitter in his chest, disturbing an ancient pain he’d long since buried because why wouldn’t they reach out and tell him that they were safe, say something, and he’s angry but it’s only because he loves them, loves them with teeth and tears and bittersweet memories but it’s still love all the same. And what more could a husband do?
It’s the father in him that wins out in the end, raises his hand and rests it on the cheek of the face that aged without him, hits him with a pang of warm solid alive real real real that makes his insides seize with an emotion so violent he feels dizzy.
And a father’s hands never forget. Never.
He worries for a heartbeat that Michael has, though. There’s a crease of something confused in his brow that makes Tubbo’s stomach plummet, makes the hand on Michael’s face twitch to hide away forever, but then something shifts and the piglin’s breath catches in his throat as he whispers, more air than noise, “Bee.”
Bee and Boo. Michael’s nicknames for them, back when he’d just started learning to speak Common. Hearing them now feels almost alien.
“Yeah.” Too hoarse, too fragile. He tries to wrangle his voice into something calm. Emotions are just a chemical reaction, really, and Tubbo is good with chemicals. “Yeah. Hi, Mikey.”
“You’re– hello. Hi.”
Michael’s tone is soft, a little trembly, and for the most part, American. Tubbo really should’ve seen that coming — Michael had only barely begun speaking before they’d left, so he hadn’t had the time to begin mimicking any of Tubbo’s speech mannerisms — but it still hurts, hits between the ribs of a thing he thought he couldn’t feel anymore. Is there any part of him still left in this boy? Is there any proof that his love was there?
Heavy, heavy, heavy. The silence is so heavy.
“You,” the faun tries slowly. Prime, what the fuck is he supposed to say? “You’re alive.”
“Yes. Yeah. Um. I don’t— Boo thought you were–” Michael winces and pulls his own hooves close to his chest like Ranboo used to do when they didn’t know how to give someone what they needed, running cloven thumbs over his knuckles in a movement so achingly familiar it makes Tubbo nauseous. “There wasn’t any – “
“They didn’t know,” Tubbo concludes hoarsely, steadiness pulled taut like a rope trying not to snap. It comes out probably more bitterly than truly necessary — Michael had been five years old for Prime’s sake — but the taste in Tubbo’s mouth still burns something acrid.
“Yeah.”
“That’s fine.” He pats the piglin’s arm stiffly, making sure his voice is level. “You’re wearing my coat.”
“Oh! It’s— it’s from the old chests Pa keeps in the back. They weren’t using it, and I liked it, so I thought—,” Michael picks his head up suddenly, eyes like dinner plates. “Y-you can have it back if you need it.”
The offer is so awkward Tubbo would’ve laughed had it been in any other setting. “No. No, it’s good. Suits you.”
It’s baffling how the jacket fits Michael almost perfectly — he used to be barely as wide as the sleeve of it, the jacket so large around the piglin’s tiny figure as Tubbo had cradled him in his arms. The faun almost goes to fix the furred collar. Catches himself.
It dawns on him now that he doesn’t really know how to hold his son anymore.
“I-I never—,” Michael stops. Tries again. “I never thought I’d get to meet you, really. I remember– I remember feelings, but they weren’t things I could touch. And I knew you from the stories, but you weren’t- I mean, well—” He falters again but it’s just a breath too late, and Tubbo’s ears ring with the unspoken " you weren’t real ” as if it had been screamed at him.
They stare at each other. The air is thick with the things Michael doesn’t say and the things Tubbo doesn’t respond with, I grieved you and I haunt you and I’m made of you and I remember you and I love you (I loved you), the sentiments cutting like shattered glass down the faun’s throat.
Tubbo swallows. “How old are you now, then?”
Michael’s gaze flutters toward the ground, fleeting, uncertain. He used to be able to meet Tubbo’s eyes once. “Um. Twelve.”
“Ah.”
“I turn thirteen in—”
“February,” The faun finishes.
Michael’s smile is so fleeting it could’ve been just a nervous twitch. “Yeah. Yeah.”
“That’s not far.”
“I guess not.”
“You must be excited,” Tubbo tries to say, and then— listen. Tubbo Underscore is a lot of things and a crier is not one of them. He’d trained during his time in the cabinet, learned militantly to keep his face stone-still even in the face of axeblades and steel, but now the statement gets about halfway out his mouth before he chokes on it.
The president in his head hisses in disgust and tries to pull his face back into something neutral, something normal, but for once Tubbo fights him off. Can he really be blamed? His five-year old son had hit six, seven, eight, thirteen years old without him, learned how to mine and hunt and tell jokes and hold a sword and Tubbo hadn’t been there. To hold his hand and press comforts to scraped knees or tell stories to soothe nightmares or anything. Tubbo hadn’t even–
Fuck, he hadn’t even known the kid was alive.
And it feels– well, it feels exactly like how you’d expect it to feel . It feels like a giant gaping nothing, feels like empty air where there should have been warm memories, snapshots of time together. It feels like mourning, feels like a mug of warm tea gone long cold. And it hurts, mainly. It feels like it hurts.
I suppose this is all you’re good for, now, the president snarks faintly. You used to run a country and now look at you. You grieve and you grieve and you have nowhere to put it.
Tubbo Underscore curls around the hole in his chest, clutches his son’s hand so, so tight, and sobs.
“Oh,” The piglin says, soft, and there’s a bittersweetness in how the intonation is so absurdly akin to Ranboo’s. Selfishly, Tubbo wishes he could’ve heard himself as well.
He really, really wishes he’d been here. That he’d been able to see him grow up.
“I’m sorry,” The faun gasps around the knives in his throat. He doesn’t know where to go beyond that. Sorry we had to meet like this. Sorry I didn’t spend more time with you back then. Sorry for blowing everything up. Sorry I couldn’t have been better. I wish I could have been better.
At some point Michael rests his head on Tubbo’s shoulder, warm and solid, and squeezes their hands together like it’s a lifeline for him, too. Perhaps it’s forgiveness. Tubbo Underscore will let himself hope.
—
The roof is too low, is the first thing Tubbo thinks when the hut finally comes into view. It’s a modest little thing, out of place amongst its crackling, fiery surroundings, and the roof is too low. Ranboo would hit their head.
It had been quite a while of trailing behind Michael as the young piglin navigated bridges and nether portals, grunting quiet niceties to the hoglins along the way and plucking out quartz and gold out the ground if they came across any. Tubbo hadn’t questioned why their house was so far away. It sort of went without saying.
There weren't really any attempts at small talk on the way, either — Tubbo couldn’t bring himself to pry his mouth open, ask questions he should already know the answer to. The silence had been stifling but there wasn’t anything for it. That’s one thing Michael seemed to have inherited from Tubbo, at least: a complete inability to fill the quiet.
The piglin moves toward the door of the too-small hut, casting an uncertain glance over his shoulder at the faun like he doesn’t know how Tubbo will react. Tubbo can’t be too offended, really, because he doesn’t really know either. Ranboo’s behind that door. Ranboo’s behind that door.
When was the last time they’d spoken? Ages ago, surely, back when there was snow and warm fires and a baby in a cot and a king-sized bed for two. It hadn’t been anything grandiose, their final interaction — no sweeping statements of love, no, they were never the type. Tubbo remembers maybe a hand in his, a soft “I’ll see you later,” as well, whispered gently like a breeze between windchimes. Nothing more.
Empty words, now. Empty like the chasm in Tubbo’s chest, empty like the other side of Tubbo’s bed back home, even though it was only ever built to fit one person.
Prime, he hurts all over.
Michael knocks, straightening up to peer into the peephole and call “Pa! I’m home!”
The door opens almost immediately. “Michael.” Willow tree hands on the piglin’s shoulders, clad in Tubbo’s old winter coat. “Goodness , where’ve you been ? You know what we said about straying too far—”
Ranboo stops. Their eyes flare wide.
They’re not that much taller. If anything it looks like they’ve shrunk, hunched over themself, which explains why they don’t hit their head on the doorframe like Tubbo had expected. Their hair is much shorter now, haphazard around their neck like they’d hacked at it with a knife, and the glasses atop the bridge of their nose look to be a newer pair, glittering gold around red-green eyes. There’s a hauntedness about them, maybe, but mainly it’s the soft, worn, lived-in sort of tired in their face. The kind that Tubbo may have known, just for a moment in time, but is now a stranger to once more.
(Their wedding ring is, noticeably, absent from their horns. Tubbo doesn’t feel anything about that. He doesn’t wear his anymore either.)
Part of Tubbo was expecting to see the film of unfamiliarity over Ranboo’s gaze, so used to having to assure the enderman of his own identity almost every time they’d see each other – but their gaze is piercingly full. Tubbo feels too seen. Too bare. He feels the husband locked away inside his ribs shriek like a bird shot down, feels the sudden calamity of desperation and grief and white-wire rage surge through his insides, turning his blood to rumbling earth. He’d thought maybe their memory issues would justify it all, balm the injury even a little bit, but they remember, and Tubbo Underscore rarely ever gets what he wants.
“Um,” says Michael. “I’m going to. Put this gold in the back.”
Tubbo sees the piglin duck behind the enderman into the house and watches as the doorway swallows him whole. The father tries to reach between the bars of the faun’s ribcage to go after him. The husband keeps his hooves rooted where he is.
Ranboo stares when Tubbo turns his eyes to them. Beneath the ill feeling in his stomach Tubbo wonders when they’d gotten past their eye contact thing, wonders if he’ll ever know them inside out like he used to. Not that he wants to, really.
(After going through all the trouble of mourning someone you’ll find that there will be an absurdly potent sense of betrayal that may come with finding out that they’re alive. Ludicrous, maybe, but overwhelming all the same.)
“Alive, then,” Tubbo says.
Ranboo closes their eyes. Their face is porcelain, carved to remain perfectly still. “It would seem so.”
“Didn’t get in touch.”
“I couldn’t.”
“No.” Sour vitriol pools in the faun’s mouth, bubbling petroleum. His voice comes out low, strained. “Don’t pull that shit, you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to disappear off the face of the fucking earth without even a blink in my direction. ”
The enderman draws themself up, tails bristling like rattlesnakes. “It was to keep him safe .”
“Oh that’s all well and good, sure, don’t even stop to consider telling anyone at all—”
“It was this or death, Tubbo, it’s not like I had the time–”
“We were fucking married for Christ’s sake–”
“I didn’t think there was anyone left, forgive me for wanting a safe place for my son–”
“He’s not just yours, Ranboo!” Tubbo explodes, suddenly president and husband and father all at once, a wretched hybrid chimera of all the things he was and all the things he should have been. The emptiness in his insides snarls and roars dragon breath and he clings to it, holds it tight as it grows teeth and claws and venom, spilling out of him like spoiled milk. “He’s not just yours. All that time between then and now, I didn’t get to see any of it. He doesn’t know me. I wanted to watch him grow up and you stole that from me. And maybe I was shit with him, and maybe you didn’t have a choice and maybe he’s better off with you alone than he ever was with us together. But you still– stole that from me.”
Did I matter to you? He doesn't demand, but it hangs in the air all the same. Did I matter to him? Did it mean anything?
Maybe it’s not fair of him to lay it all out like that. Maybe there should have been a space of tear-soaked reunions and gentleness before there was fire – and he’s already regretting the outburst, with how much of his hand he’d just revealed— but goddammit, Tubbo is tired. Tubbo is angry. Tubbo was not there and Tubbo wanted to have been, wanted it more than he wants air to breathe.
The crease between Ranboo’s brow softens just a little. When they speak it’s quiet, as if they’ll blow the faun away if they say it any louder. “I had to get him out of there, Tubbo. I thought there was nobody else. I thought you’d died.”
“Well,” Tubbo hisses, “I didn’t.”
It’s not a particularly fatuous conclusion to draw considering what happened, but hearing it now feels like an insult. The enderman wilts.
“I’m sorry,” they say after a beat — a useless thing, fizzling like oil in the space between them. “I really am very sorry. But there wasn’t anywhere else to go , and I was scared, and she wasn’t– I-I had to choose him. I’d never mean to steal that from you, I swear– but there was nothing else I could’ve done.”
“Who’s she?”
“The– the person that revived me. She gave me a choice, but—” Ranboo looks him in the eyes. “I had to choose him. I had to. That place, it– it wasn’t good for him. It wasn’t good for me. ”
Tubbo wants to accuse them of lying, of selfishness, of something . He wants to shout more, shriek until he scorches them, sink canines into flesh until he can taste metal, but the thing about Ranboo is they could never, ever lie, not with eyes like that – they’d always been full of so much . Even if it weren’t for their genetic aversion for eye contact you’d not want to meet their gaze anyway just for the sheer amount of emotion in them, genuine and sometimes even painful to look at, like staring into the sun. Freaky, Tommy had whispered to him once, back when she’d just come back from exile and her smiles hadn’t quite fit her face anymore. They just wear everything they feel in their freaky eyes and it’s freaky.
Even after all this time, Tubbo still thinks that death would be less potent than being face to face with Ranboo Beloved.
He tries to hold their gaze, to stay firm, stay strong. His lips betray him. “It’s not fair.”
It comes out sounding so ridiculously pathetic, shaky like a deer’s first steps. Tubbo needs to stop talking but the enderman keeps looking at him and it’s too much, too familiar, makes something in him want to put it all on the table and let it burn. “It– it hurt. You left me there alone and it hurt . Someone just magicked you away from everything, you– you got to leave. I had to fight for a happy ending and it’s not really even all that happy. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s not fucking fair.”
“I know,” the enderman says. “I’m sorry. I know it's not.”
“I wish he remembered me,” Tubbo whispers.
“He– he knows about you. I’d tell him the stories… a-and even if I hadn’t he’d always known that there was something missing. Someone.”
That’s not enough, Tubbo wants to say. That’s not me. But he bites his tongue.
“You could always stay–,” Ranboo catches themself.
Tubbo tries not to smile because he knows it will come out looking miserable. Oh, how he’d missed them. He hadn’t let himself for a while, determined to bottle everything from his past into a neat little bundle in the back of his mind as he tried to start anew, but now the grief rings true through his insides like a church bell. He’d missed them a lot. He can’t stay with them.
There’s a lot of reasons why – he has his bees now, his new house, his Tommy. The one that hits the most is that whatever he feels for the enderman is not love, not anymore. He lets himself study the emotion now, lets himself see how its shape has worn over the years – it’s turned sharper, older; no longer that lovely glittering thing from when they were nineteen and stupid. It isn’t something borne from youth and sparkling eyes anymore. Now it rots. Now it hurts.
It was love when they needed it to be, but now, quite simply, now it does not fit anymore.
“How was he?” Tubbo asks instead of acknowledging it. “Michael, I mean. Growing up.”
“Oh,” Ranboo says. “He– well, he was Michael. He’s quite the talker now– muttering to himself around the house and telling stories to the cats, it’s rather nice. Oh, and he’s developed quite a penchant for crafts. He’s taken up dressmaking now, I believe. Made friends with the other piglinfolk around, as well. He’s thinking of starting a business so he can sell his handmade clothes to them.” They smile softly to themself. “I think it’s good for him, here. He likes it a lot.”
“That’s good. That’s good.”
“He reminds me of you, sometimes. He’s grown strong like you. He remembers you, even if he doesn’t.”
Oh, oh, oh. The enderman’s eyes are earnest. Tubbo bites his lip, tries not to cry by blinking very fast and then tries to not blink in order to make it less obvious.
“I still hate you a bit,” he chokes out.
Ranboo nods once, jankily.
“And I want to talk to him.”
“Okay.” The enderman raises a hand to him. “You can do that.”
It’s an offer. It’s not forgiveness, not an apology, not closure. It is not a lot of the things it should be. But it’s a step.
Tubbo Underscore, president, husband and father, takes Ranboo’s hand.