#b1rdzwriting

He remembers Tubbo’s kitchen, and its gentle heat like a beam of sun warming the apples of his cheeks and illuminating his crystalline breath on a cold January morning. Michael’s squealing, giddy laugh bouncing round the counters, slabs of  polished stone cut and placed by Tubbo’s hands. Tubbo’s hands. Dry, calloused, and one of them rougher than the other, in Ranboo’s own slender, smoother fingers. Tubbo’s grin, lopsided and teasing, and Ranboo’s timid, breathless smile in return. 

Tubbo’s kitchen is now gutted of that warmth. Frigidity creeps up the steadfast walls in thin crystal, webbed with sharp points and angles. 

It’s as though the fire crackling on the hearth isn’t there at all, Ranboo thinks sullenly, watching it devour the chopped, rough logs succumbing to the black of char. His hands are threaded together underneath the table as he sits, trembling slightly. Thin strands of hair float in front of his face, chalk-white spiderwebs drifting in the draught. 

Water boils in the kettle on the stove. 

Tubbo stands at the stove. Ranboo thinks his hands are shaking too as he pulls the tin of tea bags down from the cabinet. English Breakfast. It’s a good tea, though Ranboo prefers Earl Grey. 

He thinks perhaps this would be easier if Tubbo were pointedly avoiding his gaze and ignoring him. Presently, however, the universe does not care much at all what Ranboo thinks is easier, and Tubbo’s sea green eyes are boring into him from behind the counter as steam billows from the kettle along with hot water into mugs. The tea bags descend, and Tubbo places Ranboo’s mug on the table before sitting opposite him. He sits like he wants the table between them to protect him.

Ranboo takes the mug into his hands, and is unable to stop the tears that well in his eyes at the sudden warmth. The sand beneath his feet in Limbo was unfathomably cold. The ocean spray was even colder. He rubs away the sizzling drops of acid and takes a gulp of his tea. 

It’s more milk than water, just as Tubbo always makes his tea for fear of burning Ranboo’s throat. As a result, Ranboo’s teas tend to fall on the unpleasantly lukewarm side. He’s never told Tubbo that. 

Just as Ranboo sets his mug down, Tubbo slumps forward and presses the heel of his hand into his eye socket with a heavy breath. It’s as though the weight of the Earth itself is pulling him down, clawing at his cuffed cargo pants with fingers of soil, ready to claim him.

Ranboo waits a long time for Tubbo to say something, and finally, he murmurs, eyes closed: “I missed you.” 

“Yeah,” Ranboo croaks softly. “I missed you, too. You- it’s… been a while. It’s been a while.” 

“It has.”  Tubbo curls his own chapped hands round his mug, his gaze sinking into it. Ranboo doesn’t think he’s ever understood the phrase “deafening silence” better until now.

There’s an elephant in the room, and they both know it. It’s pushing the furniture into the walls, suffocating the fire, crushing Tubbo and Ranboo’s lungs, and neither of them want to be the first to lift their gazes from their mugs of tea. 

The fact of the matter is that it has been eleven months since Ranboo has died.

Eleven months since Sam’s netherite blade ruptured through Ranboo’s back and tore out through his chest, eleven months since he coughed up dark, muddled blood onto white sand as the world faded around him, with shouts and the shriek of blade against blade. That’s nearly a year that both Tubbo and Ranboo spent alone. And Ranboo can’t help it when his mouth opens and he blurts like an open wound spurting fresh crimson, 

“Did you forget about me?” 

It’s an earnest question, not meant as harshly as it sounds, but Tubbo takes it like a strike to the face, and his gaze immediately jerks up. His mouth opens and closes, as if fishing for the right words to say, and he lands on a quiet, “What?”

“I- I just,” Ranboo rubs his fingers over the creases and imperfections in the tabletop’s surface. “I thought, maybe, y'know- cause I was gone for, for so long, that…” 

“Ranboo,” Tubbo tries, exasperation and hopelessness falling from his mouth. 

“It’s- it’s okay if you did! I mean, I- I know you had other stuff going on, with Dream out, and then there was Michael, but I just- well, I thought that maybe, I- I dunno.” 

“I didn’t forget you,”  Tubbo says, and he says it like a fact, though his voice teeters upward in pitch like it always does when he’s correcting something. “I mean, bossman, I…” Tubbo rubs at his good eye with a tired smile, and laughs breathily, without mirth, “If I’m honest I could hardly think about anything else.”

Ranboo’s bottom lip trembles. “Then why was I there for so long? In- in limbo. It was just- one block, and- and endless sea. I couldn’t leave. I was there for almost a year, Tubbo.” His voice breaks in emotion at the end.

“I know. I don’t… I don’t know.”  Tubbo’s lips press together to form a thin line. His gaze turns towards the window. It’s been dark out for hours now. “I just felt so… alone after you died, I dunno. It was just me for a while, rotting away in Snowchester. I couldn’t bring myself to leave, or even look for Michael. I felt hopeless. Like any effort I put out would just dig my grave even deeper.” 

His voice is small, and Ranboo watches his face fall into patterns he knows well. Even with the months away, Ranboo finds himself falling back into the practice of reading Tubbo’s face as naturally as anything. The dip of his chin, the slight dimple forming between his eyebrows. His gaze drifting away from Ranboo.

“I guess I always just assumed I would be the first to die, and I didn’t know what to do with myself when you beat me there,” Tubbo says quietly. He sighs.

“Tubbo,” Ranboo breathes. 

Their hands find each other easily, midnight black against peach traced with rough webs of pink. Teas and the table forgotten, they’re meeting each other halfway, arms entangled, Tubbo’s head pressed into the curve of Ranboo’s neck. They fit against each other like smooth clockwork, the gears in one of Tubbo’s contraptions. 

“I’m sorry,” Tubbo murmurs softly into Ranboo’s dress shirt. “I- I should have brought you back sooner. Contacted Dream, or something. Found a way.” 

Tears line Ranboo’s eyes again, but he  doesn’t rub them away this time. They spill onto his cheeks, fizzing quietly, and he nestles his nose into Tubbo’s unruly nest of unbrushed hair. 

“It was so long,” he sniffles, and Tubbo tells him that he knows, he knows. When his tears began to truly flow, Tubbo wipes them away with gentle hands, those hands built for work and detail. They don’t let go of each other as they move downstairs, prepare for bed, and curl up together as if nothing had ever changed.