Chapter Text
Many, many, many times, Ranboo has imagined what his life would be like if he just joined that one anarchist book club instead of End of Wars. Easier, probably. Safer, of course. And now, he gets to add 'no zombies' to that list. He’s an idiot.
They clutch their metal bat tighter from inside the bathroom, listening to the living corpse fumbling with the handle on the other side. They're so loud, breaking from their effort every few seconds to slam against the door or scream through a throat so desiccated it comes out as more of a whistle. Ranboo needs to play this carefully.
He waits for them to get the door open and charge at him, when their center of gravity isn't over their feet. Then, Ranboo grabs at their mind. It's like trying to stick his fingers through a keyhole, and he instinctively gags at how broken everything is inside. Whatever control board Ranboo accesses when he does this is melted, drowning in anger and hunger.
The zombie seizes a foot away from Ranboo's face and it ruins their momentum. Ranboo kicks the body into the sink and hits them as hard as they can in the back of the neck with their bat until they hear something crack. The body goes limp. "Phew," they say to an audience of zero.
He grabs some paper towels from the dispenser and wets them with hand sanitizer from beside the sink. Ranboo wipes the skin on his hands down, and the part of his bat that made contact with the zombie. He's still not sure how contagious this is and he doesn't want to find out.
Ranboo steps back into the diner and sighs. Coming into the city was a mistake. There's bloodstains everywhere. Some of the chairs are broken, and when they leans over the counter to see if anything good is still behind it, there's a severed ear rotting on the floor. Gingerly avoiding the body part, Ranboo opens all the little compartments and cabinets in the staff area, finds themself two bottles of water and nothing else.
The cash register is empty, because of course it is. Just what he deserves.
Ranboo closes their eyes and focuses, once more cursing the fact they didn't take any of the other people up on the training offers. Having the ability to throw cars with their mind would be really helpful right now. The most they can do is make their hair float dramatically. It takes closing their eyes to do any real sensing. Maybe if they were stronger they'd be able to reverse whatever it is they helped create.
Everybody makes noise until they die, is how Ranboo tries to explain it to people who can't do what he can. Alive humans are pretty much indistinguishable from animals to him aside from the way they move: most squirrels don't walk on two legs. Nervous systems buzz at a constant, low level, like fluorescent lights if they loved you. The zombies' are higher, louder, and the people in the End could range anywhere from a high whine to normal human frequency.
The streets are filled with shrieking minds that wander aimlessly, but none of them are close enough to Ranboo to worry about. They're about to grab their backpack and head out when they hear some they haven't heard in…one month? Ranboo hasn't been tracking the days.
Either way, there's a person nearby. A real, alive person, with a brain like the ones he's starting to forget. Ranboo needs to find them.
Now.
They follow the sound across the street, down an alleyway, up a fire escape, and find a zombie beating down a door inside an apartment building. It's a new one — Ranboo would've thought it was a human from afar if not for the sound — which means it's a strong one. They reach out and the zombie slows, fully stopping just before they can slam themself into the door again. Spine cracking with every movement, they twist to face Ranboo, expression permanently angry as every other zombie. Ranboo tells them they're sorry.
He steps aside as they stumble forwards, rendered clumsy as the zombies from TV by his influence. Ranboo leads them to the balcony and pushes them down the stairs. There are bloodstains. "I really hope you guys aren't conscious in there," he mutters, and slams the wrought iron gate shut.
Ranboo spins around, approaches the door and stops just before putting their hand on the knob. Their face is on the news, isn't it? They had done a couple press conferences with the rest of the group back before everything went wrong. The last time Ranboo checked, the videos only had a couple hundred thousand views, but that was when they were still being…diplomatic while trying to get rid of the human urge to dominate and bring about world peace and all that. End of Wars started the apocalypse. If whoever is inside realizes who Ranboo is…
He drops to his knees and swings around his overstuffed school backpack. Pretty much everything inside is food, medicine, or other things Ranboo thinks he might need, but if he checks the inside pockets and the tiny front ones there's forgotten homework, forgotten homework, unsigned field trip form, diploma, finished test— aha! He fishes out a pack of simple medical mask and puts one on, making sure that his nose and mouth are covered.
The door creaks open loudly enough that Ranboo's surprised they don't feel more zombies come running from the hallways. At first glance, the bedroom is completely empty. It's too dark to see much of anything, so Ranboo pulls their flashlight out of their backpack's side pocket and concentrates. After a moment, it flickers on. The batteries inside have been dead for months, but as long as Ranboo keeps it in their mind, the thing will work. They can't do much beyond turning electrical systems on and off, unfortunately.
Lit up, the bedroom is still unobtrusive. The covers on the bed aren't as neat as he first thought; there's wrinkles everywhere. No one is crouching anywhere on either side, but there is a very large hiking pack next to the dresser. If Ranboo didn't know for a fact that there's a human inside here, they would've thought the room was empty. They latch onto that delightful sound a little harder, pressing close enough that it turns from a sound to a feeling. Ranboo doesn't go all the way through with it because autonomy, but they do learn that the person is under the bed.
He, exercising a lot of restraint, walks around the room a little bit to sell the act before checking under the bed. When Ranboo crouches down to peek underneath, he sees a pale face looking back up at him. Broad nose, round chin, pinched expression, serious, dark eyes that — a stranger's face not zombie itchy carpet kind of hungry NO preserve the food I came in from the north and turned left in the entrance turned right in the kitchen so South is — and Ranboo stands back up. He forgot how weird it felt to make eye contact with nothing else.
Ranboo scratches absentmindedly at an itchy spot on their arm that doesn't exist and sits on the bed. "Hi," they whisper. "I got rid of the zombie."
"Thank you." The person beneath the bed pulls themself out, sliding on the backpack by the side table. "I'm Tubbo," they say, "and you are.."
"Ranboo."
"Weird name." Ranboo dodges Tubbo's gaze as it works over his face, flicks down to his…arm? No, the nonbinary flag pin on his backpack strap. "You pick it yourself?"
"Yes, actually," Ranboo bristles.
Tubbo stares at them for a little bit, and then nods. "Nice. Anyway, are you going anywhere in particular? I'm going to this one coast down south. It won't be as cold there. If you wanted to watch each other's backs?"
Traveling with Tubbo turns out to be a much needed change of pace. Ranboo's starved for any kind of company, and he turns out to be very fun once he stops acting all formal.
Turns out he didn't even know the world had started ending until a week after it started. Tubbo was raised by some kind of survivalist do-it-yourself nut who taught him to fire a hunting rifle before he knew how to drive. In the UK, somehow. He didn't have any kind of contact with the wider world until one of his friends invited him over to play video games, and then Tubbo immediately became an internet communist. He doesn't believe the (accurate) theories about End of Wars, because "if psychics are real, why hasn't anyone used them in wars yet, Ranboo? People would've figured out ways to blow cities up with their minds by now. They're LARPers, not bioterrorists."
This calms Ranboo's anxieties over waking up with a gun to his head significantly, and starts a sequence of events that will end in something worse.
There's this one time Ranboo gets injured — nothing serious, just a really big scratch across their collarbone from falling into a boat— and Tubbo cleans the wound with a paper towel doused in hand sanitizer. One hand is pressed up against Ranboo's bare arm to hold it in place and all Ranboo can feel from him is this clinical concern, spiked with adrenaline. In combination with the pain, it makes it hard to focus.
"Thanks," Ranboo hisses, "but I think we can uh, just slap a band aid on and call it a day."
Tubbo looks up at him and they make eye contact. In the second before Ranboo squeezes his eyes shut, he feels Tubbo think you're hot don't die of tetanus, and then it's over.
There's another time where they have to run across a frozen lake to escape one of the larger hordes of zombies and the ice cracks beneath Tubbo on the way over. Ranboo pulls him out of the water and half-drags him and his gear to the nearest house. In a panic, they flip on all the power and, unable to find any kind of space heater, turn on the fireplace and makes Tubbo lay down next to it. That night, they sleep together in one of the upstairs bedrooms, everything that isn't the bed pushed up against the singular door leading inside in a makeshift barricade.
It's not. It's—it's Tubbo's idea, so it's fine. Ranboo's always had trouble keeping the line between his body and someone else's straight in close contact, and he's never really wanted to, underneath it all. Everyone else is an empty vessel, and Ranboo is an overflowing cup. Leaning into someone else's static is the most beautiful thing in the world.
Tubbo's feelings are a lot more muted than the average person, but that doesn't mean they aren't soaking in his shame and gratitide through all the points of skin-on-skin contact. It's beyond tempting to reach the rest of the way in, the same way biting down on a piece of delicious food that has already entered your mouth is beyond tempting.
They know it's wrong. Ranboo probably values privacy more than the average person, and it's not their fault they're built like this. Just a problem they need to deal with. They solve it by pressing their (very cold) foot to the back of Tubbo's calf, and when that doesn't get a reaction, just pushing him out of the way. It's kind of hard, and Ranboo ends up just grabbing him by the waist.
Ranboo is like a good foot-and-change taller than Tubbo, which is very convenient for avoiding eye contact. He doesn't think they've ever stood side by side next to each other against a chart or anything, but Ranboo can't wear Tubbo's clothes and Tubbo refuses to wear Ranboo's. Also they're both not getting enough to eat. Still, it comes as a bit of a surprise when Ranboo gets a grip on his waist and his thumbs and middle fingers can comfortably touch. "Oh hey," he realizes aloud, "I can get my hands all the way around. Haha, cute."
They squeeze a little and Tubbo jerks out of their grip like he's been stuck with a needle.
Ranboo has no idea what that's about. After a minute's deliberation, he presses the back of his hand to Tubbo's neck, but whatever emotion drove him to react like that has dissipated enough that Ranboo can't feel it.
Everything bad always happens to them in cities, that's what Ranboo learns. Tubbo and them enter an aquarium on their insistence. They say it's to see if any of the fish have eaten each other yet, but it's actually because Ranboo can feel a swarm coming and couldn't think of a better excuse in time.
Tubbo splits up to go look at the insect display in the front, and Ranboo wanders deeper. He wants to see if they have a fish tunnel. On the way, he passes by a closed door, maybe a break room, stuffed to the brim with zombies. They're all muffled, so Ranboo doesn't think twice about walking into the adjacent room. Except that room has a window.
And they see him.
The zombies break through the glass even as Ranboo cinches closed around them and reduces them to clumsily climbing over the glass. There's got to be ten, maybe twelve, and two of them are in between Ranboo and the exit. They have a metal baseball bat.
He needs Tubbo, and Tubbo isn't here. Ranboo tries his best, but he swings at a bad angle at one of the zombie's shoulder and another tugs the bat out of his hands. He cracks.
They don't need to know where Tubbo is to take him. Or, take is a word other people use. Ranboo feels it as more of a 'slip your hands over his on the steering wheel'. A 'climb into his sleeping bag with him'. Being Tubbo, being anyone else, is wonderful. Ranboo splits their attention as they settle all the way into Tubbo's body, letting his organs surround them like a warm embrace. They think they might be laughing. It's so nice. Why does it have to be so nice? Tubbo wants to scream.
Still trying to reach his bat, Ranboo drives Tubbo to him, letting muscle memory dictate the act of pulling a gun out. He knows Tubbo knows it's him doing this, because everyone can always tell for some reason. So it's not like he can let go when Tubbo gets there, not when Ranboo knows how bad Tubbo wants him gone right now. Operating him from the other side of the room, Ranboo near effortlessly mows down the zombies. Tubbo has excellent aim.
When the last body has fallen, Ranboo packs themself back into their own body, and waits for Tubbo to stop trembling. To his credit, he doesn't try to shoot Ranboo. He just sprints for the door.