Happy valentines day! Have a saal!beeduo snippet from knack ch5:
“Ranboooo…” Tubbo whines plaintively, and when Ranboo’s shoulders hitch around his ears, his eyes stay caught looking down at his own hands. Tubbo huffs and tells him matter-of-fact, “You’re not helping.”
“I’m—?” Ranboo stutters, confused, but sounding more curious than bothered. “Sorry?”
“Talk to me, Ranboo.” Tubbo rolls his shoulders, tension shifting back and forth between them like a weight. “I’m all jumpy. Be distracting.”
“Oh. Oh! Uh, yeah, sure!” Ranboo is quick to agree, always relieved to be helpful. “What do you want to talk about?”
Ranboo’s eyes flick up, just once — just to graze against Tubbo’s hands. Tubbo closes his fingers into a fist, like he could catch Ranboo’s attention in the palm of his hand. But Ranboo’s gaze slips away, like water between his fingers.
Ranboo wrings his hands and watches them like the most interesting thing in the world, his voice pitching with sudden nerves. “There’s— um. We could talk about anything, really!”
From the nervous, anticipatory way Ranboo curls his spine in on himself, from the way Ranboo won’t meet Tubbo’s eyes, from the way Ranboo hasn’t said a real word to him since the night on Technoblade’s couch, Tubbo knows. Tubbo knows what Ranboo desperately wants to talk about — what Ranboo would sooner and rather die of anxiety than talk about.
Husbands.
The devil called you his husband.
“I think we’re being followed.” Tubbo tells Ranboo, because admitting to paranoid delusions seems significantly less vulnerable than the only other thing consuming his thoughts at the moment. “Stalked by a real wrongun.”
“You think so?” Ranboo tips his head, and Tubbo considers him successfully distracted.
“Yeah.” Tubbo grumbles, shoving a french fry into his mouth. “’M going a little bit nuts, I reckon.”
“Well, I mean,” Ranboo says in his low, serious tone, which means he’s about to be far more reasonable and sympathetic than Tubbo’s wallowing would appreciate. “If anyone is getting stalked, I think the guy with the sword is best equipped to handle it. So…”
Tubbo nods, absolutely certain in this confidence. Tubbo takes a bite of his greasy fast food burger, and through his mouthful he states, “Yeah, I’ll slice ‘em up.”
Ranboo laughs, muffled in the way where he finds it funny but he is worried that he shouldn’t. “Tubbo.”
Tubbo grins, and husbands rests behind his teeth, tasting like a lie.
Tubbo takes a bite of his burger, and it tastes like an echo. It tastes like a chair rolling down a hill, wood splintering itself against gravel and dirt. It tastes like envy for the freezing spring breeze sailing across an invisible border, country lines drawn in red on maps, intangible and uncrossable. It tastes like risking a theory on a 50/50 chance, and being dead wrong.
And then there’s a snap.
A moment like clarity.
A moment that rings in Tubbo’s head — echoing what am I doing here?
The silence stretches a tick — then two. The longer Tubbo looks at Ranboo, the less he recognizes him.
Ranboo’s— his nails are blunt and short and pink against the sticky table, and when he smiles he doesn’t bother to hide his teeth, and when his eyes meet Tubbo’s, Tubbo is the one to look away.
Husbands sits locked behind Tubbo’s teeth, leaking bitter across his tongue and pooling into the crevices of his mouth.
Tubbo takes a bite of his burger, but it doesn’t taste like much at all. So Tubbo gingerly sets the burger back down into the basket of wax paper. And Tubbo has to curl his fingers into his palms.
What. Is he doing.
Suddenly, the freezing spring breeze blows across the invisible border of some forgotten nation, and Tubbo realizes with an ache in his jaw that—
He is alone.
What does he think he’s going to gain from this— all this pretending? He’s been convincing himself of a lie, letting himself believe it. Because it hurts less that way.
But that’s all it is. A lie.
This is not Ranboo.
This is not his Tommy, or his Wilbur, or his world.
Tubbo is alone.
“Is the food okay?” Ranboo asks, his hands wringing in little circles of orbit around each other, clutched nervously in front of him. “I didn’t really know what you liked, so I—”
“You don’t know me at all,” The words spill out of Tubbo’s mouth, clumsy and pulled taught along his vocal cords. Then, again, like a correction, Tubbo asks, with a messy edge of desperation and hope, “You don’t know me at all?”
“Uh,” Ranboo fumbles, caught off guard. His hands slip free from their tangled knots and still, uncertain.
A wave of something burning hot and sharp goes through Tubbo, settling into his limbs and lingering there. Tubbo curls his fingers tighter into his palms, nails digging into his skin like a reminder, like reassurance, like certainty.
“You don’t know me at all,” Tubbo says one last time, firmly. It almost sounds like an accusation, but the only thing his tone is directed at is Tubbo’s own delusions.
Tubbo looks at Ranboo — his name isn't even Ranboo — with mismatched brown-blue eyes caught wide and off-kilter. His eyes are wrong. Not wrong, different. Belonging to a different person. A stranger. Fuck. Tubbo’s been sitting across the table from a stranger, hasn’t he?
What is Tubbo doing?
“I’d like to.” With a sudden burst of conviction, Ranboo leans forward across the table, across the gap, dangerously close to an invisible border that cannot be crossed. His brown-blue eyes look like earnestly, but Tubbo doesn’t know them at all. Ranboo hesitates, and longer Tubbo looks at him, second-guessing himself. “To— to know you, I mean. I’d like that. To, um, get to know you.”
“You’re insane,” Tubbo mutters, disbelievingly and just a touch helplessly fond.
Ranboo’s steady conviction breaks into the curve of a small smile, and he laughs like he’s inviting Tubbo in to the joke. “Yeah, probably. Might be! Might be.”
Tubbo shakes his head at Ranboo’s absurdity. He—
He doesn’t know what to do.
He… should probably leave.
Just get up and go.
Tubbo shouldn’t be here.
The realization laps over him like a rising tide in the freezing bay. He really shouldn’t be here, and he knows it.
Tubbo scans the food court, and his eyes linger on the exits.
He… probably needs to go. It would be easy enough to slip away through the crowd, out to the parking lot, let his feet carry him away. It would be for the best, probably, for Tubbo to walk away, out of the lives of these strangers he’s taken as his own. But—
But.
But.
“Tell me something,” Ranboo says quietly, light and hopeful and far too earnest for his own good. Tubbo’s gaze is drawn back to him. Ranboo has his eyes down on his basket of food, a french fry between his fingers dipping into a little puddle of ketchup. Ranboo’s nervous eyes are on the small french fry in his hand, but his attention is all on Tubbo. “Just— anything. And then I’ll tell you something. Or, I can go first, if you want.”
Tubbo—
Well.
He probably needs to leave, to go before he makes things worse. And that’s exactly what he’s been doing, when he pushes through his own stubborn bullshit enough to admit it. He’s disrupting the lives of strangers for his own selfish desires.
But Tubbo can’t leave. Ranboo asked him a question. Ranboo wants him here. And Tubbo will be with Ranboo for as long as Ranboo wants him.
It’s too late, now. Ranboo cares about him, in some strange way. Stupid, reckless, earnest, trusting, Ranboo has gone and gotten invested in this stranger across the table. The damage is already done. So Tubbo forces himself to sit still, and quietly picks up his burger. He takes a bite and chews slowly as he thinks.
“This is a bad idea,” Tubbo mutters, and then stuffs his mouth with greasy burger like that could stop the words from pouring out of him. “Truly awful.”
Ranboo smiles, and it’s lopsided and weak and he doesn’t bother to hide his teeth. “Trust me?”
Tubbo doesn't know how to answer that.
Instead, Tubbo opens his mouth and mutters into the silent bubble here, encased in the noise and bustle of the food court. “I used to work at a burger restaurant, you know.”
Tubbo bites back the hot rush of spikes in his blood that scream he doesn’t know. He wasn’t there. He doesn’t know. He didn’t hold your hand over an invisible border that you couldn’t cross.
The Ranboo that Tubbo loved is dead and gone.
Tubbo’s husband is dead.
The stranger says, “Oh? That’s cool. How’d you like it?” And he smiles like a stolen sunrise.
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