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The air smells like sea spray and blood.
Tubbo hasn’t really taken the time to clean himself up, since the boat left the shores of Purgatory. The dried blood has congealed under his nose, making his skin feel tight and warm whenever he scrunches up his face. He can feel it cracking when he moves, but he makes no effort to wipe it away. Occasionally, above the smell of the sea and his own sweat, he smells it. Thick and irony and tangy, in the way all blood is. There’s some spattered on his hands, underneath his fingernails– a cut on his arm has stopped actively bleeding, but every time he shifts the dried blood on top cracks and some more oozes out, sluggish.
He’s sitting on the left side of the boat, tucked up between the inside wall and the railing that leads to a short drop into the water. He’d thought about throwing himself off it, in the first hour or so. Swimming back to the island and trying to find the eggs again in the wreckage– a little radiation never hurt anyone.
The mushroom cloud had kind of killed that vibe, though. He’d chickened out before he could convince himself to jump.
Knees against his chest, Tubbo places one cheek on his leg and thinks. He stares out at the invisible horizon, the blue sea melting into the sky like there’s no line at all. He can barely tell where the clouds stop and the whitecaps begin. Occasionally, a spray of water comes up the side of the boat as it sails endlessly forward, piloted by some invisible force.
He’s alone, for the first time in a while. Thinking back on it, Tubbo actually can’t remember the last time he was truly by himself. For the past two weeks, there’s always been some member of his team with him, or on a voice call with him, even when they were physically separated. It was easier with a buddy system.
Tubbo knows there are others on the boat, sure. Phil, Fit, Bagi, Mouse, Roier– they’re all here with him, and maybe a few others who had swum out after they’d pushed away from the shore. He thinks about Tina. He thinks about Bad. He thinks about Dapper.
In the frantic first few hours, Tubbo hadn’t wanted to be alone. But Phil had collapsed the moment he felt he could, his wings ragged and limp behind him, dragging like two wet canvas sacks along the decks. Fit had stayed with him to watch over him while he slept, not by Phil’s request, but it was easy to see he didn’t need to ask. Phil found a couch inside the boat and practically fell into it, and Fit sat beside him. Within seconds, Phil had been out.
When Tubbo had tried talking to Roier, the guy had all but run away from him, unresponsive and distant. Bagi and Mouse were talking to each other in low tones, and he hadn’t wanted to interrupt.
So he’d hidden himself away, the sudden silence of everything but his own breath and the waves is a strange relief.
He thinks of it like a debrief. Sitting on the edge of the boat, he’d taken mental stock of his body– all his limbs were intact. His mechanical pinky and ring finger were still in working order, although a bit creaky. His nose is definitely broken, sore and crooked in his own line of sight, and he’s got more cuts and bruises than he can count. Around his wrists are rope burns, red and shiny and angry. But despite the pain– all his joints move, none of his bones are broken, and he’s alive.
He’s alive.
Tubbo starts crying.
He hates crying– hates when his nose and throat get clogged up, and he’s already been pretty consistently spitting out blood for the past four hours, so he tries to hold it back. But the tears come faster than he can even admit to himself, so he stops trying not to cry and just sits there, silently staring out at the water as his vision blurs and tears drop from his cheeks to his knees, leaving dark stains in the fabric of his pants.
It’s just… he tried . He tried so hard to fight and to save Chayanne and Tallulah and all the other eggs. And none of it seemed to fucking matter in the end.
Tubbo’s not upset about losing to Phil. He knew that would be the outcome the moment the observer had said it was happening. Tubbo’s ability to win hinges on his confidence, and a one-on-one with Phil is something he knows he can never win.
His insides feel like they should be on his outside. Raw, unfettered grief pours through him like water through a sieve, all his cogs and gears stuttering to a halt and skipping back over that thought like a broken record.
He tried. He tried. He tried .
For a while Tubbo just sits there, not even bothering to wipe away his tears as guilt rolls over him like one of the waves crashing against the side of the boat. He probably looks a mess, but he just doesn’t care. It’s too tiring to care.
He stops, though, when he hears footsteps. Sniffles and wipes away the wetness on his face, really only managing to smear it. Someone comes around the corner of the ship, gripping the railing as the ship pitches this way and that.
“Hey, dude,” Fit says. Tubbo turns his face away, feeling himself burn with shame as he does. He doesn’t want Fit to see him like this; doesn’t want Fit to see how much of a fucking mess he is.
“Hi,” he says, hurriedly trying to scrub the blood and tears from his skin. Fit’s footsteps come closer, then stop, and there’s a soft thud as he sits down. “Is– is Phil up?”
“Nah,” Fit says. “But Mouse and Bagi are watching over him. I wanted to come and see if you were alright.”
“I’m fine,” Tubbo says quickly– maybe a little too quickly, because when he finally looks over at Fit, the man is watching him with one brow raised. “Uh– how are you?”
“Oh, you know,” Fit says. He’s sitting criss-crossed, hands resting on his knees, back straight and expression quiet, but intense. “Mourning the loss of my son, yet again.”
“I’m so sorry,” Tubbo says, and again, guilt tears at him. “God, Fit…”
“At least he’s alive, you know?” Fit says, and he looks away from Tubbo, glancing out over the water. “That’s kind of what I’m getting from this, now. Processing everything. Realizing that hey, at least they’re alive. And that’s better than not knowing.”
“I know,” Tubbo says, and he squishes his legs closer up to his body, curls himself into a tighter ball. “I just feel like I could’ve done more.”
“Same,” Fit says, eyes narrowing. Tubbo watches him for a second, then shuts his eyes. He hears Fit inhale sharply a second before he speaks, “He called me dad.”
“What?”
“Ramon. He called me dad, before we had to run.” Tubbo doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t want to open his eyes either, not when Fit sounds like that. Choked up and uneasy, so unlike himself that Tubbo wants to cry again. “He’s never called me that before. I don’t know why I’m so broken up about it.”
“He’s your kid,” Tubbo says. “Of course you are. I’m not any of the eggs’ parents but I still feel fucking awful, dude.”
“Hey now, you did your best,” Fit says, moving the topic away from Ramon in a way that Tubbo notices, but doesn’t point out. “Tubbo, don’t feel bad. You did what you could. You were an amazing leader.”
“I choked,” Tubbo says. “Fighting Phil. I knew I was going to lose, I just felt it in my gut. I can’t win against Phil. He’s… he’s Phil. But even if I had won, I’d just be kicking myself over that damn wheel. It’s all a big fucking mess, FitMC. How were we supposed to win?”
“I think that was the point,” Fit says. Tubbo opens his eyes at some point, and he can see now Fit is watching him, the sadness in his eyes hidden by a stony face. “I think that thing was never going to let us win.”
“But it had the eggs,” Tubbo says, desperate, trying to get all his thoughts out to Fit and failing. None of his words seem right. “It had them, it wasn’t lying about that, and it just– it just took them again. And ElQ.” His voice cracks on the last word, and Fit just silently sits there with him as Tubbo starts chewing on his lip, through the dry, cracked skin and down to blood again.
“I don’t know what’s happening anymore,” Fit finally says. He glances out over the horizon, and Tubbo presses his tongue into his bleeding lip just to feel the sting. “At first I thought it had something to do with the Federation, but now I don’t know. I don’t think the eye is connected to them, not directly, at least. I don’t know. Tubbo, I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Tubbo says miserably. “Besides, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be,” Fit says. “Tubbo, you did amazing. You did what you could. That’s all I could ever ask for.”
“But I could’ve done more,” Tubbo says, and Fit shakes his head vehemently.
“No, kid,” he says. “Stop. Listen to me. You did good. Okay? You did fucking good, you worked with what you had, you made the blue team what it was. You were a leader, a real leader. There aren’t a lot of people out there like you, Tubbo. They don’t have what you have, that determination, that stubbornness, that genius. You did everything you needed to do, okay? Don’t blame yourself for what happened. It’s not your fault. We’re all in this together, and we’re going to finish it together, no matter what that eye says. It tried to tear us apart, and look at us now.”
“But everything is still different now,” Tubbo says. It scares him. Fit just nods.
“I know,” he says. “But you aren’t. You became better, Tubbo. I can guarantee that without you, a lot of us would’ve come out a lot worse for wear. Hell, we probably wouldn’t have even gotten to see the eggs. So don’t blame yourself.”
Tubbo knows what he’s trying to say, what he’s trying to do, but it still hurts. He thinks Fit is trying to reassure himself in the same breath he reassures Tubbo– and he hopes it’s working. He can see it in Fit’s eyes, that shared desperation, that fear that neither of them really want to face. And Fit has a point, too. They all tried, and even at the end when they were supposed to be at their most divided, they came together. Tubbo thinks back to them all searching for the eggs, and thinks maybe, his and Phil’s fight was the catalyst for shaky trust between them all. Purgatory had been hell– but he’d learned things there, too.
“I hate this,” Tubbo says. “I hate how all this fucking violence and betrayal and shit is supposed to make me better. I don’t want to better, because I’m not fucking good at all, Fit.”
“I get it,” Fit says. “I really, really do.”
It hits Tubbo then what Fit is referencing, and he stops. They’ve never talked about 2B2T as anything other than surface level news and small talk, but he knows Fit’s life had been there, and Tubbo thinks he had some experience, too. There’s a comradery between them that only shows up between the chaos, something intrinsic and violent down to their cores. Tubbo flexes his left hand and watches his mechanical fingers– the ones he can’t remember building– open and close. He feels like a cracked plate, but instead of gold filling in the cracks, there’s nothing but emptiness and forgotten memories.
“Everything else aside,” Tubbo says, and Fit blinks, long and slow, “did you… have fun?”
Maybe his word choice is wrong. Maybe he doesn’t mean fun. Maybe he means something more akin to did it feel like home?
Fit blinks again, then nods. “You know,” he says, “after everything, even despite it all… yeah. I think I did.” He pauses, the silence stretching between them like the gum on a grappling squack. “And I don’t know how I feel about that.”
“I don’t blame you,” Tubbo says quickly, because he doesn’t. He gets it, more than anything. Sometimes the crazy feels more familiar than the sane. “I mean, Cellbit straight up said he wanted to stay, so.”
“I would’ve stayed, I think,” Fit says. “If I had a chance to get Ramon out of there.”
“Same,” Tubbo says. “But the nuke–”
“Yeah, no,” Fit says. “We’re more useful to the eggs alive than dead in a ditch.”
They both fall silent for a moment. The wind whips through Tubbo’s hair, getting in his eyes and sticking to his still-damp skin. Neither of them want to admit it out loud, but Tubbo knows they’re both thinking it– maybe Fit’s excuse is just that. An excuse, a selfish reason to keep on living. But at the same time, it’s true. They can’t help the eggs if they’re dead.
“Dapper’s out,” Tubbo says after a second. Changes the direction of the conversation. Tries to ignore the shame yet again. “Bad’s got to have him somewhere. We’ll meet up back at the island, right?”
“Right,” Fit says. “Yeah, no, Bad wouldn’t let anything happen to Dapper now.”
“We got Dapper, so we can get the others,” Tubbo says.
“Very true.” Fit sighs. “Man, this fucking sucks.”
Tubbo laughs, dry and brittle. “You can say that again.”
He feels like he’s aged twenty years in two weeks. Based on the wrinkles gracing Fit’s forehead, he’s feeling the same. But after another long stretch of taffy-like quiet, Fit shuffles and stands with a groan, stretching his arms out over his head. In the distance, the sun is setting, casting tangerine and peach streaks across the ocean and sky.
“Come on,” Fit says. “This boat’s a beast, it’s got showers and beds.”
“Like actually?” Tubbo asks. The idea of a shower, a proper shower with hot fucking water and soap sounds like heaven right now.
“Oh yeah,” Fit says. “Feather pillows, dude.”
“Holy fuck,” Tubbo says, and he stands, knees complaining as he does so. His whole body is stiff and sore and exhausted, and he feels guilty for enjoying the luxuries for about two seconds before pushing that aside and focusing on the fact they have luxuries. “I am going to be in the shower for actual hours.”
“I think Bagi’s in there right now, but you can have it next,” Fit says, reaching out to pat Tubbo on the shoulder. He doesn’t miss how Fit gives him a once over, something warm and concerned in his eyes, and Tubbo suddenly feels… better. Not great, but better. “And then we can sleep.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Tubbo admits, even as he feels the exhaustion dragging at his limbs and eyelids. Fit laughs.
“I think you can,” he says, and they both start to make their way towards the door to the inside of the yacht. “And hey, Tubbo? I meant it when I said you did good. You’re a good kid. I’m proud.”
Something in his chest snaps, a thread so taut with nervous tension Tubbo had grown used to the pain. In its wake is a quiet, gentle warmth, and he pitches sideways– later, he can blame it on a lurching wave or a misstep, but for now he just unapologetically throws himself into Fit’s side and tightly hugging the other man’s torso.
“Thanks,” he says, just as Fit’s arms come up to hug him back.