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The world ends, in one horrible moment, like knocking out the foundation of a tower of blocks.
It really is like that, Tubbo thinks; he imagines it vividly in his head as something cold and numb takes root in his stomach. Michael loves to build, stacking up wooden blocks high above him until he’s on the tippy-toes of his hooves to reach. Sometimes when Ranboo is over, they’ll sweep him up in their arms and help him build the tower even taller.
And sometimes, Michael misses a step, or Ranboo bounces him a little too enthusiastically, and one of the blocks will come loose. The first one falls, and the rest will come tumbling down with it in a cavalcade-rhythm of clattering wood, crashing to the floor around Michael and Ranboo’s feet. But before it all falls, there’s always one moment where it hesitates. The tower leans, and in that split-second, you know the whole thing is coming down. It reflects in Michael’s eyes, suddenly wide and distraught, or in the way Ranboo’s hands reflexively reach for a tower they’re not fast enough to catch. Everyone already knows, in that split second of teetering silence, that this is the end.
It’s that same moment right now. Technoblade hesitates for just a moment, and he’s holding that bloodstained paper in his hands, and Tubbo watches the tower lurch.
He braces his shoulders for the impact.
They hold Ranboo’s funeral in the arctic with snowflakes falling around them instead of rain, and it feels like an act. Tubbo does not cry as he recites his eulogy. He does not cry as he leaves a flower on his grave. He holds Michael, dressed in a little black suit, and he tries not to look at the ghost that watches from across the yard.
And with that, things could almost be back to normal. He could almost be okay again. When he closes his eyes in Michael’s bed — still holding his son close as if to make sure he believes he’s still here — he could just about pretend this is the way it should be.
So he pretends. He keeps up the act that started when he buried a dead man who’s still alive in all the wrong ways. And it’s damn funny that he keeps pretending, because there is the ghost of something cold and lonely hovering outside on the other side of winter-frosted glass panes, and he could just look out a window and see it. It’s funny, because he keeps waking up with his heart in his mouth and a blade on his throat, and it’s not until Michael huffs in his sleep and curls chubby baby fingers around Tubbo’s shirt that he remembers where he is. Remembers what’s real.
It’s so damn funny to keep pretending when he doesn’t even remember the things he shouldn’t have to pretend about.
Tommy comes over one morning.
He’s shaky, but he pretends he’s not. He’s loud, louder than he is scared, as if a twist of the volume dial will scrub away any of that fear turning around inside of him. Tubbo lets him pretend. He even joins in and pretends he believes it.
In the kitchen, Tommy digs through Phil’s pantry as if it’s his own. Tubbo is already at the stove with a pan.
“I’m thinking pancakes,” Tubbo says. “There are blueberries in the freezer. Or chocolate in that drawer there.”
Tommy goes for the chocolate.
“Are you okay?” Tommy asks over the table. It takes Tubbo a moment to connect it all.
“Well,” he says. “I mean, I think things are going pretty well. Mikey’s happy here, best as I can tell. And Phil and Techno have been pretty fine about us living here, so, yeah. I think it’s all going well.”
Tommy pours a cup of milk into a bowl over the dry pancake mix. “But you’re okay?”
And Tubbo’s already answered. So he says it again.
“I think so,” Tubbo says. “How about you? Are you okay?”
“Tubbo, Dream is out.” There’s the crinkle of a plastic bag in Tommy’s hands as he grips the chocolate chips tighter. “You–Okay. No, I’m not. Holy shit, Tubbo, I’m freaking out. How are you so calm?”
“Oh.” Tubbo stops. He pauses. “I don’t know. I guess I’m just too busy to freak out.”
Tommy laughs, but it sounds a little wrong. Strained. He measures out the chocolate chips. “I don’t know how you do it.”
Tubbo shrugs. He lights the stove and sets a pan on it.
The thing is, he kind of keeps forgetting that Ranboo is dead.
He forgets it until Tommy asks him again if he’s okay, and Tubbo says yes, he says why? And Tommy says, your husband is dead, Tubbo. It’s okay if you’re not.
He almost laughs, even though it isn’t funny at all. He forgot. He just kind of forgets that Ranboo is dead, even though they’re in a completely different place now, and everything’s so incredibly different – but the thing is, Ranboo wasn’t around a lot towards the end anyway. So it feels just like snow, and an empty house, and this weird gaping thing inside of Tubbo that he has to playact away.
Back after Pogtopia, when Wilbur died, Tubbo taught himself a lot about grief. It was mostly to help Tommy, because Tubbo–well. Tubbo missed Wilbur, but it wasn’t exactly the same. Wilbur had been more of Tommy’s brother than he’s been Tubbo’s for a long, long time. If Tubbo ever did grieve for Wilbur, he did it long before he died.
But Tubbo learned about grief for him anyway. He learned about denial, and anger, and depression-bargaining-acceptance. It’s a pretty straightforward concept, and Tubbo memorizes each of the words and the traits that go with them. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. A wheel that spins you ‘round until you accept the truth, in the end.
He memorizes them so well that now, a year later with spare change, he can still count his way through each step.
Ranboo dies, and Tubbo keeps forgetting about them altogether. He feels fury in his blood and rage in his voice, facing down a prison’s warden who’s never done much but get people killed. He moves into a new home, somewhere that’s supposed to be safer with men who let him and his country die, and he feels this aching thing in his chest that’s always been there. That’s never once gone away.
The wheel spins ‘round and Tubbo steps off the ride as seamlessly as he’d gotten on.
Tubbo stands face-to-face with his husband’s ghost, and he thinks, You can’t be here, because I’ve already accepted that you’re gone.
Michael is building a tower.
It isn’t his own building blocks. At home, back in Snowchester, he has his own set. Wooden and dinged up from all the times he’s built them tall just to collapse to the floor. They’ve got the alphabet on them, painted in primary colors with shapes to match. A for apple, in red. B for boat, in blue.
These blocks are different. Tubbo’s surprised Phil has them at all when he brings them out, wiping dust off each one before setting it on the floor in front of Michael. They’re all smooth, a little rough in shape but with corners well-worn and edges sanded down.
“Wilbur’s,” Phil explains, a fond smile on his face as he watches Michael immediately begin to stack them on one another. “A bit silly to hold onto, because I couldn’t just keep all of his toys, but I wanted something of his. Something to—to remember, I suppose. How small he was.”
Wilbur was a baby once, stacking up blocks on the plush carpet of a living room’s floor. Tubbo wonders if Phil ever picked him up to let him put on the highest pieces. Someday, Michael is going to grow up too and all Tubbo will have left of this baby on the carpet will be his toys.
“I don’t think you ever played with these,” Phil adds. His tone is purely conversational. “You were too old for them by the time we found you, weren’t you?”
“I’ve never seen these before in my life,” Tubbo answers truthfully. Something stings with the words, but he doesn’t know what, exactly. “Definitely did not play with them. I was a blockless child, Philza Minecraft.”
Phil laughs. Michael looks up at the sound, eyes bright and one hand wrapped firmly around a wooden cube.
“Go ahead, Mikey,” Tubbo says. He gives him a reassuring smile. “Build your tower.”
Michael, in response, does not continue to build his tower. He holds the block tightly, and then he sets it back down on the carpet. Gingerly. As if he’s afraid of it.
And he looks back up at Tubbo, and for the life of him, Tubbo can’t figure out what he’s trying to say.
“It’s okay,” Tubbo says. He kneels down on the floor, picks up the block and sets it on top of another. “I know they’re different blocks. But you can still stack them up. See?”
Michael watches without a sound, eyes riveted to Tubbo’s hands.
“Mike,” Tubbo says. “You know how to build towers. Here.”
Tubbo’s hands are shaking. He pushes the block into Michael’s grasp again anyway.
“Mate,” Phil says, quietly, and for some reason, the sound itches under Tubbo’s skin. It’s scratching at something inside of him, raw and angry, red as the scars all over his shaking hands. Instead of an answer, Tubbo does his best to ignore the sound. Ignore the presence of the man behind him.
“Here, bud. Build your tower.” Tubbo puts another block on the pile. This one goes on crooked and off balance, and even though it’s only three blocks high, the miniature tower topples to the floor. Tubbo sucks in a breath. He hands another block to Michael, who only blinks and looks at him.
Michael just keeps staring at him.
“Mike, c’mon,” Tubbo says, and his throat has gone dry. His hands are still shaking. “What’s going on?”
“Tubbo, he might not want to–” Phil starts to say, but Tubbo cuts him off. He’s insistent now, pushing at something he doesn’t understand, something flared up and wrong inside of him.
“You’ve built a hundred towers before,” Tubbo says with a hoarse voice. “You know what you’re doing.”
And Michael says, quietly, “Boo?”
Tubbo’s voice dies in his throat. He stumbles back, drops from his knees to sitting fully on the carpet. He’s–shit. His hands are still shaking. His throat feels dry and muffled, like there’s a layer of cotton stuffing filling it. In his ears, too. The whole world is as muffled as he is.
“Boo’s not here,” Tubbo says, and it’s like hearing his voice coming from someone else. A little too harsh. A little too flat. “You have to build the tower on your own.”
Phil’s got a hand on Tubbo’s shoulder. Michael’s got tears welling up in his eyes, and Tubbo wants to scream.
“–take care of Michael if you need a break,” Phil is asking him, and Tubbo–
Tubbo can’t do this.
He gets to his feet—a wooden block hits the floor with a dull thud—and all he can do is walk out of the room without another word.
When he’s back in his own head, he’s sitting outside, on the steps leading up to Phil’s house. His feet are in the snow, cold nipping at his skin and bringing feeling slowly creeping back into him. Breath hangs in white clouds in front of his face. Crisp air bites at his cheeks and his neck.
And in front of him, a ghost hesitates.
“What,” Tubbo asks, tone flat, “Do you think you want?”
“Um,” the ghost says. They shift. In one hand, they’re holding a flower–a pink tulip. They hold it out. “Just–thought you might like this.”
Something roars inside of Tubbo’s chest. Big, loud, angry. Tubbo tamps it down. He doesn’t let it reach his hands, which are taking the flower instead. “Okay.”
There’s something ugly that Tubbo almost tells this ghost. He rolls it around in his head, tastes it on his tongue with his mouth firmly shut.
I wish you were not here, he tells them silently. I wish you’d died entirely. I should be wishing you hadn’t died at all, but this, somehow, is worse.
The ghost doesn’t stay long enough for the words to find a way out of Tubbo’s head. They wander back across the snowy tundra, and Tubbo is left alone in the cold.
Philza, Tubbo has concluded, is far more of Michael’s grandfather than he is Tubbo’s father.
When Tubbo was a kid, he’d thought of Phil as a father. Wilbur’s father, certainly, but sometimes, Tubbo’s too. Tubbo wasn’t quite his son, more of the stray he found on the side of the road and decided to keep like a bird with a hurt wing, cared for just long enough to be able to fly away again. But in his head, sometimes, Phil was close enough to be his dad anyway.
That makes Michael his grandson. And watching the two of them, Tubbo believes it. Phil bounces Michael in his arms to make him screech with laughter, and he sings to him while Michael sits in a high chair in the kitchen as Phil cooks, and at night, Michael climbs onto Phil’s lap and listens to him read a storybook.
Tubbo feels uniquely jealous watching this, but he’s not sure whether the jealousy is directed at his son, or at the man he can’t quite call his father.
That night, he watches Phil tuck Michael in. He hovers in the doorway as the man tucks his grandson in, a hand-stitched quilt that’s been in Phil’s possession for at least a few decades tucked up to Michael’s sleepy chin. Tubbo knows there’s a stain in one corner from the time Wilbur had spilled juice on it, when he was fourteen and Tubbo was seven. Tubbo knows there was once a night when he and Tommy had hid under the quilt late into the night, a flashlight the only illumination as they giggled their way past midnight in hushed voices to keep Phil from overhearing.
It’s like a patchwork of Tubbo’s own childhood. Phil tucks it around Michael’s shoulders as Tubbo wordlessly looks on.
“How do you let go,” Tubbo asks, quietly, “Of something you still have in reach?”
A pause hangs between them like breath fogging up the cold. Phil turns this over wordlessly for a long moment. “How do you let go? I suppose you have to accept that it’s not good for you to keep holding on first. And then you have to make the action of opening your hand.”
Tubbo says, “I’ve accepted it already. I did my grieving, Phil. And I–I thought–Haven’t I already let go?”
Phil shifts. “This is about Ranboo?”
“No,” Tubbo says. And then, “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. Forget it.”
“Maybe you should try talking to him,” Phil suggests, and his voice is gentle, but it bristles up inside of Tubbo. A hundred sharp thorns sprout and poke the inside of his veins. “I know he isn’t the same, but if you want to move on–”
“I said forget it, Phil.”
Phil, to his credit, goes silent. Tubbo feels the condemnation of that silence like an anvil poised over his shoulders. Like a suffocating quilt of the childhood that was never his.
Tubbo leaves the tulips at Ranboo’s grave.
A ghost lingers behind him. When Tubbo turns, their eyes meet, and like a frozen breath in his chest, Tubbo waits.
“I’m just waiting for Michael,” the ghost says. “I promised we’d make a snowman.”
“Okay,” Tubbo says.
“If that’s okay,” the ghost adds.
Tubbo crosses his arms. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know,” they admit. “I just thought I should ask.”
The door slams behind them. Michael comes running outside, and Tubbo just catches a glimpse of Phil standing inside, holding the door open with a smile. Michael is bundled up round under at least four layers, with a long scarf trailing along behind him in the snow like a tail.
“Hi, Michael,” the ghost coos, fondness clear in their voice. “Ready for the snowman?”
“Build!” Michael cheers. He latches baby arms around Tubbo’s legs as a greeting, and Tubbo pats the top of his head with one mittened hand. And then his son is off, trudging through snow nearly as deep as himself, following after his father’s ghost.
The sight of it crumples up inside of him like an old receipt or a piece of notebook paper, half-written on and quickly discarded. Like smudged ink and old lines, Tubbo hurries his own way through the snow and back inside.
The ghost and their son build a snowman. Tubbo watches from the kitchen window.
He watches with a mug of hot chocolate in his hand. He watches with a man who is not his father standing at his shoulder.
Outside, snowflakes float down in quiet, gentle particles. The ghost begins to roll a ball, and Michael pushes it along with hands covered in layers of red knit. Inside, Tubbo and Phil stand in silence, and something stays entirely unsaid between them.
“I remember teaching Wil to make those,” Phil says, wistfully. “He always wanted to make them too tall and decorated the faces too much, and it’d end up knocking them over because they were so topheavy.”
“I made a snowman with him once,” Tubbo says. His throat feels tight. He can’t tear his eyes away from Michael, gathering up sticks that could look like arms. “I think I might’ve been the one who knocked them over.”
He hears Phil’s smile. “Well. You could share the job, I think.”
Tubbo blinks back sulfur-tasting tears.
“For what it’s worth,” Phil says, quietly, “I think you’ve done a good job with Michael. I’m proud of how far you’ve come.”
It still feels hollow. Tubbo whispers, “Okay.”
The final snowball is placed on top of the lumpy snowman. He’s given two stick arms, a smile of coal. Michael claps, and even from across the tundra and behind the glass pane, Tubbo can hear the sound of his laugh.
He can hear another one accompanying it.
Michael is holding a carrot for a nose. A ghost sweeps him into their arms and lifts him high enough to reach.