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Ranboo is three hours, two stacks of iron ore, and almost twenty diamonds deep into a strip mining session when the next swing of his pick causes a thin layer of stone in front of him to crumble away, and suddenly he’s broken into a space flooded with light.
He stumbles back on total autopilot, because having enchanted netherite armor is nice and all but falling into pools of lava is something he’s still generally not a big fan of doing, thank you very much, and—oh. There is no lava.
He takes a better look. Nope, no lava. The light comes instead from the flickering of torches, so bright Ranboo has to take some time to squint before his eyes, both of them more accustomed to darkness, can adjust. His head nearly brushes against the stone above as he steps fully into the cave. To the right, the ground rises in a gentle upward slope, snaking back to where an entrance must touch the surface somewhere far, far above.
Ranboo absentmindedly adjusts a torch stuck in the wall beside him that had begun to tilt sideways. The trail looks freshly placed. Cave systems like these and the mobs that lurk within them are an annoying hassle at best and a senseless risk at worst, especially when so many people these days have netherite tools that make strip mining easier than ever. Ranboo wonders who on the server even bothers actually going spelunking anymore.
And then somewhere down the passage he hears a solid, heavy thud, with a sharp screech of “Fucking hell!” echoing up after it, and he stops wondering.
“Tommy?” Ranboo peers to the left, but sees nothing but more torches and more stone disappearing into darkness. “It’s me,” he adds after a moment.
There’s no reply. A few longer, significantly more awkward moments pass before he finishes lamely, “Ranboo.”
There’s another thud. Then something else starts up in its place, a sinister and hollow drone reverberating in on itself a thousand times over. Ranboo jolts, fumbling for his sword, and it takes him a second to figure out the noise isn’t the groan of a zombie. It takes him a couple more seconds for him to realize it’s Tommy again—this time making a childish, highly obnoxious whining sound.
“Fucking hell,” he moans again, with more mournfull dramatics behind it this time. Ranboo envisions perfectly the way Tommy’s throwing his head backward, how he always does whenever he’s complaining and wants to make his displeasure known to everyone in a fifty block radius (If Tubbo were here, he would probably use the word bitching, but Ranboo tries to refrain from using language like that). “Of all the fucking people, it has to be—shit, I don’t even give a—you know what? I’m down here.”
Horror sinks into Ranboo’s stomach. It’s too late to back out now. He should’ve bypassed the cave and kept mining away into oblivion, pretended he’d never heard or seen anything and hoped that Tommy wouldn’t have noticed his dug-out tunnels when he eventually made his way back up. Maybe there is a nearby lava pool he could dive into, if he’s quick about it. It would be nice and neat and probably very warm and comforting.
Another thud. Tommy swears again—louder, if possible. Louder is always a possibility with Tommy.
Ranboo sighs, mentally curses the institution of friendship (or one upmanship, or friend-in-lawship, or whatever convoluted -ship sort of deal he has going on with Tommy), and heads deeper.
The trail of periodically placed torches lead him gradually down, and he counts eleven of them before the passage opens up into to a big, yawning cavern, illuminated with more torches and puckered with alcoves along the walls and floor that look like they’ve been forcefully hollowed out by someone with a pickaxe and a substantial well of pent-up aggression. And there, on the other side of the cavern, is Tommy, standing waist-deep in one of the alcoves with his back to Ranboo. Slowly, Ranboo crosses the cavern to stand a safe but short distance away from Tommy and his pit, and takes a better look.
There are bags under Tommy’s eyes, heavyset and purpling like bruises. Aside from his mining boots, he’s wearing no armor—just a pair of fish-print pajamas, two mussed-up pigtails, and a pretty impressive case of blond-and-white streaked bedhead. He’s managing to simultaneously look like he just rolled out of bed and like he hasn’t slept in days.
“Um,” Ranboo says. “Hi.”
“Piss off,” Tommy greets. “Do you got any more torches?”
Ranboo looks down at the single torch in his left hand. “Sorry, I just have this one.” He reaches up and sticks it into the wall, anyway. “How long have you been down here?”
“A bit.”
“Anyone else know where you are?”
“No.”
“Run into any mobs?”
“Not really.”
Ranboo hesitates. When Tommy doesn’t elaborate, he says, “I didn’t take you for someone who’s into stress-mining.”
Tommy aims a particularly vicious swing at the wall. “This is not stress-mining,” he stresses. “I just needed lapis, alright, you prick?”
“Huh.” Ranboo turns around and to get a better look at the holes scattered around the cavern. There’s not a single exposed ore in sight. “Looks like you found, um. Lots of lapis down here, then.”
Tommy makes a face. “Fuck off,” he spits, and—
And there’s no and , because… that’s it? Ranboo braces himself for a flood of insults and ranting, the kind of defensive spiel Tommy always goes on whenever anyone says something that he could even conceivably perceive as the slightest bit patronizing. But nothing comes.
He risks a glance. Tommy’s still diligently pounding away at the lapis, shoulders strained with a strange, perpetual tension. Tommy’s posture has always been wired as long as Ranboo’s known him, like he’s constantly expecting to turn around and have to trade blows with somebody, but still.
This is weird, Ranboo thinks.
He taps a pattering, hurried rhythm on the hilt of his pick. If there’s one thing he excels at, it’s self-preservation—his three intact lives and the forty totems of undying stashed away at his base can attest to that—and every logical fiber of his being is currently telling him that his safest bet right now would be to just keep his mouth shut. That would keep Tommy from getting any angrier at him than he always seems to be, and besides that, Tommy’s clearly not in a chatty mood today.
But that’s just the thing, isn’t it, because, well. Since when is Tommy so quiet?
A vague feeling, sick and jittery, worms its way into Ranboo’s core. His memory, normally so terrifying in its unreliability, picks this moment to function with perfect, ugly clarity, and flood of scenes from a darker past resurface from the recesses of his mind: the word selfish floating in the air between two best friends; Tommy, standing in the middle of the wrecked Community House, his frame dwarfed under one of Techno’s winter cloaks; Tommy, with a new ringing in his ears and a haunted look in his eyes and a bone-deep exhaustion leaking from every limb; a lonely field Ranboo hadn’t meant to stumble across, shadowed by a towering pillar of dirt and pockmarked as far as the eye could see with TNT craters—
And just to make himself stop remembering, he opens his mouth.
“Have you hung out with Tubbo lately?” He hopes he doesn’t sound too frazzled. So much for keeping his mouth shut, then. But this is the polite, innocent enough thing to do anyway, right? Make small talk? And Tubbo is as good a topic as any to start with. “I, um. Haven’t seen him today yet. Has he been with you?”
He realizes a second after asking that he actually kind of hopes Tommy has an answer. He hadn’t seen Tubbo at their house in Snowchester when he’d stopped by earlier to say good morning to Michael, or at the mansion when he’d done a quick progress check on its construction. Foolish had been hovering around the massive, nearly-finished build’s front entrance, pacing in last night’s fresh layer of snow and talking to himself about support beams or needing more spruce logs or something along those lines—whatever it was, he’d seemed busy, so Ranboo had left him alone.
Tubbo hadn’t been working at the Bee n’ Boo, either, or anywhere else along the Prime Path that Ranboo checked on his way there. Even Tommy’s little house in the hill had been dark and empty.
It had hit Ranboo around then that he doesn’t really know where Tubbo goes when he isn’t working on a project or hanging around Snowchester, which is... fine. That’s fine! Tubbo’s entitled to his privacy. It just makes finding him on an entire server filled with secret bases and hugely elaborate builds and unnavigable biomes a little difficult, especially when he has such a bad track record when it comes to checking his comm.
(A much more dreadful idea had also dawned on him at the same time—the possibility that Tubbo had told him where he’d be.
He told you, a voice in the back of his mind whispered. He told you yesterday, or two days ago, or last week, and you’ve already forgotten. You were given information that could be the difference between someone being safe with the knowledge you can reach them, or someone being left alone and in danger, and you could not remember it.
Ranboo stopped, right in the middle of the Prime Path. “I would’ve written it down,” he said.
The voice didn’t answer . It never needs to.)
Ranboo resolved to just catch him later in the evening, maybe, after he’d come up from the mines, or to ask anybody he might run into before then.
Tommy. The best-worst option. The gods of this world have a funny sense of humor.
But all at once, Tommy’s face darkens. “ No,” he snaps immediately. “Haven’t seen him since yesterday, no, sorry to disappoint.”
“Yesterday?” Ranboo prompts.
Yesterday. Tubbo was around yesterday. The knot in Ranboo’s stomach unties itself the slightest bit.
“Yeah. He tried to lecture me.” Tommy scoff-laughs. It’s an angry, stinging sound. “He tried to lecture me about love. Can you believe that? He tried to lecture me about girls, Ranboo, like I am not the biggest goddamn ladies man this server’s ever seen.” Tommy digs his pick under a chunk of lapis and yanks with his entire chest. The lapis comes loose, clumps of it clattering to the ground, and the recoil of Tommy’s pick comes within about two inches of chopping Ranboo’s head off.
Ranboo takes three healthy steps backward. “Um,” he says. “You... good?”
He wrings his tail between his fingers. Tommy keeps mining.
This is weird. Tommy is acting weird.
And Ranboo—he’s going to ask! He is truly, genuinely planning on doing it. Hey, Tommy, did something more happen yesterday, he will say, or something along those lines. He is going to ask what’s wrong and be a good, considerate friend-acquaintance-in-law, so he opens his mouth and manages something that could resemble the first syllable of a question—
And that, precisely, is when Tommy throws down his pickaxe and erupts.
“Just because,” Tommy says, “Tubbo doesn’t understand how love works doesn’t mean I don’t know what I'm talking about, alright, bitch? Listen, I’ve known him for a fucking long time, ten times longer than you have, and I know Tubbo better than anyone else knows him, you most of all. And I know crushes, and I know girls. I know everything about this shit! I’ve romanced more than you could possibly comprehend! Alright? But you two, fucking—you and Tubbo are so weird. You’re both so fucking weird. You’re a bunch of wronguns, is what you are. Fuck you. You're the weird ones, not me. You’re the ones who can’t even work out your own fucking marriage or who’s got some crush on who or whether you’re in love or not, but I know love, truly, I do. I’m—I've loved so many women you couldn't even imagine and just—just because I can't tell you right now doesn't mean I don’t remember, dickhead, just because I can’t put it into words doesn’t mean I’m broken, just ‘cause I don't know how to describe it doesn't mean I don't understand it, and fuck you, I’m not broken, I’m—I’m—”
He whips his head up, eyes glistening with fury and something desperate, something worse. “Why are you fucking staring at me like that?” he demands.
His voice cracks dangerously at the end, and Ranboo’s memory has never been great, but something he knows with absolute certainty is that he’s never seen Tommy cry—not on the day he was exiled, not at the Green Festival, not even when he’d shown up on the Prime Path after he’d emerged from Sam’s prison, with white in his hair and a third life lost. He really does not want to break that streak right now, alone with Tommy fifty blocks underground in a mine, talking about Tubbo.
“Oh,” he says faintly, finally. In the silence of the cave, combined with the sound of Tommy’s ragged breathing, it still sounds much too loud.
“What?” Tommy spits. His shoulders are up to his ears, fists balled like he can’t decide if he wants to throttle Ranboo or turn around and bolt all the way up to the surface. It’s achingly reminiscent of Enderchest whenever Ranboo tries wrangling her into the bath—bristling, cornered, more than a little bit feral.
“So that’s what—okay. That’s what this is. Alright.” Ranboo takes a deep breath and runs a hand through his hair. He flicks his tail, tamping down the urge to fiddle with it again. Now is not the time to be freaking out.
He doesn’t need to freak out, and that realization shocks Ranboo probably more than it should. For once, this is a situation he can handle. He’s growing more and more sure with each second that, for the first time in who knows how long, he knows where a conversation needs to go, and that he can guide it there.
Especially now that he knows what’s really going on here—and if he’s correct, it’s certainly not something Tommy should be making himself cry over.
One step at a time. He should start with the most important part, first.
“Tommy,” he says, as firmly as he can muster, “you aren’t broken.”
Tommy’s face contorts. “The fuck are you on about?” he asks, and Ranboo’s chest twists when he realizes the confused uptick in his voice is genuine. “Who said I was?”
“Oh, um. You did? Just now. Well, no you didn’t, technically, you actually told me you weren’t broken, so I thought—I assumed. Something else made you feel that way?” Ranboo stares at the ground, and he’s dimly aware he’s threading his tail again, that’s awesome, that’s so cool, he’s going to have nothing left on it by the end of this. “Just, if something did make you feel that way. Or something. I just want to clarify, you’re right about what you said. You aren’t. Um, broken, I mean.”
Ranboo can hear the way Tommy’s staring at him.
“I guess—I should probably explain? Okay, uh. Here goes.” Ranboo takes another breath, treading carefully. “Tommy, do you know what aro means?”
“Yes,” Tommy says brightly, drawing his bow, “and the thing is I’m about three seconds from shooting you through that big Oreo face of yours with one, actually, so start making sense or else—”
“No, no, no!” Ranboo throws his hands up, waving them frantically and backing up until his armor thunks against the cavern wall. “I didn’t mean like, with a bow, it’s—no. A-R-O. Short for aromantic?”
“Oh.” Tommy pauses midway through knocking an arrow. “Well, in that case, no, never fucking heard of it. Sounds weird. Is it some weird dating thing?” He pauses again. “I mean, because I highly doubt it’s a normal dating thing, considering I know all there is to know about dating so it must be something entirely weird and there’s absolutely nothing about dating I don’t know, so.”
“Actually, it’s literally the opposite! Of… whatever you just said.”
Tommy fully lowers his bow. Unlike some people, Ranboo is not too proud to admit to sagging in relief once he hears the weapon being stashed away.
“Well?” Tommy asks. “You said you were gonna explain.”
The challenging edge in Tommy’s voice sounds like it’s receding somewhat. Ranboo deems it safe to look up. Sure enough, Tommy’s defiant stare has thankfully shifted away from him; he’s glaring furiously at the lapis instead. His fingers fiddle around the hilt of his pick like he’s itching to swing it at the wall (or maybe Ranboo—but then again, he did put the bow away, so Ranboo’s relatively sure he’s given up on murder as a method of escaping the conversation). The cavern is dim, but in the hollow torchlight there’s a thick sheen of barely contained emotion in Tommy’s eyes. He still looks stormy and upset and more than a little lost.
But he looks like he’s listening.
“I guess I’ll start from the top.” Ranboo tries to recall the way Techno had first explained it to him, that night in his cabin after he’d made some inside joke that had left Phil cackling and Ranboo staring at them like they were the ones spontaneously speaking Ender. “So, first of all, there’s this thing called being alloromantic. It’s basically what you’d think of when you think of falling in love, feeling romantic feelings, um, desiring that sort of relationship with someone. All of that. It’s definitely the majority of people, but it’s not—the default or anything. It’s just… how a lot of people happen to go about feeling things.”
Tommy hums. “Oh,” he says, and after a short pause he turns back to the wall and starts clobbering at the lapis with his pick again.
It… sounds like he’s leaving it at that? That’s—fine. That’s more than fine, Ranboo thinks, reaching for his own pickaxe and fumbling only a little. He turns to his own end of the half-excavated vein of lapis, if only to do something with his hands. This is good. Tommy probably doesn’t want to hear the entirety of Ranboo’s whole boring explanation all at once, of course. If he’s done this right, the silence they’ll lapse into won’t be awkward and they can mine some more together in peace and Ranboo can head back to Snowchester later and Tubbo will be there and—
“And that’s what you and Tubbo are?” Tommy asks utterly out of nowhere. It startles Ranboo so badly he nearly drops his pick.
“Well—” He clears his throat. “That’s. That’s what I am, I think, yes. I can’t speak for Tubbo, though. You’d have to ask him.”
A thoughtful look passes over Tommy’s face. “Maybe,” he says under his breath. “You were saying?”
And they’re back to doing this all right now, apparently. Ranboo longs for that one time three minutes ago, back when he actually thought he had any idea the course this conversation was going to take. “Um, anyway,” he goes on. “The opposite of alloromantic is aromantic. It’s what you call someone who doesn’t feel romantic attraction at all. There’s also sort of this spectrum of who feels what, and how much—like, there’s a whole area in between allo and aro where some people might only feel romantic feelings for people they already know super well, or only occasionally and simultaneously mixed with platonic feelings, and yeah.”
When he doesn’t immediately get a response, Ranboo peers sideways. Tommy’s gone completely still, his pick hanging in limp fingers. He’s swaying on his feet a little, like a tree that might tip over. “Tommy, are you—?”
“Oh,” Tommy says, and something about it sounds incredibly, inexplicably unlike him. “Oh, there’s a— oh.”
Before Ranboo can say anything, Tommy blinks sharply, stumbling backward. He regains his footing. “I’ve got a question for you, Ranboo,” he says suddenly, words clunky and far too loud. His voice cracks again. His gaze is angled somewhere far to Ranboo’s left, like he’s the one who doesn’t do the whole eye contact thing.
“Um. Shoot.”
“And you aren’t going to be fucking—weird about it. You’re just going to give it to me straight. No bullshit, alright?”
“Mhm.”
Tommy wets his lips once. Twice. “So say someone thought they wanted that sort of… relationship, in the past. They really and truly thought so, their whole life.” He reaches up and grips the green bandanna around his neck, leaning his face into it ever so slightly, like it's giving him comfort. “And then something happens, and they find out that maybe they were... wrong, about everything. They start thinking that maybe—maybe they don’t have any romantic love feelings at all. Even though they thought they did before! And now they’re—that person’s just a little confused by this whole situation, and they think they might have definitely been wrong. Are they. Can they—is that allowed?”
“Oh!” Ranboo releases a breath and turns to the lapis again. “Yeah, totally, anyone can be questioning their orientation,” he says, starting to mine. “I don’t think it means that person was wrong, though.”
Tommy snorts, oddly faint. “Yeah? Why not?”
“Well,” Ranboo says thoughtfully, putting a supreme amount of effort into sounding casual. He gets the feeling anything less might scare Tommy away. “Someone can go years without knowing they identify with a certain label, and it doesn’t make them wrong because… there’s nothing to be wrong about? It just means they were figuring stuff out, especially if they couldn’t possibly know beforehand because they didn’t know there were words for this sort of thing. In the end, it’s just words to describe our feelings. A label can only hold as much meaning as each person that identifies with it wants it to, if that makes sense. And if a person eventually does find out that they identify super strongly with a label they’ve found, then, well, that’s just one more discovery they get to make about themself.” Ranboo gathers all the lapis in his hands and steps up out of the alcove. He crosses to the spot where the rest of Tommy’s mining tools sit, crouches beside a satchel already filled halfway with ores, and rests the lapis inside. He stands to his full height and brushes his hands on his leggings. “Or at least, that’s how I think about it.”
For a long, long moment, the cave is silent. Ranboo wasn’t previously aware any space occupied by Tommy could be silent. He listens to the sounds of dripping water and screeching bats and the distant hiss and bubble of lava somewhere below their feet.
He listens for so long he’s almost thinking that’s the end of it—and then he hears Tommy inhale.
“So a person who’s,” Tommy starts, waving a hand, “ that. A-R-O-mantic or whatever.” He’s looking away, giving great attention to all of the shadows dancing on the cave walls. At some point, he must’ve tugged his bandanna off completely; Ranboo glances down and sees he’s wringing it in his hands. “You’re sure, uh. It’s normal, like, you’re sure that it’s not, like—you’re sure that doesn’t make them wrong, or—”
“I promise, Tommy,” Ranboo says. He’s a little surprised to find more conviction in his own voice than he’s ever heard there before. “You aren’t broken.”
There’s another long silence. Tommy takes a deep, only slightly shaky breath. “That’s pog, then,” he announces, and fumbles to tie his bandanna back around his neck. He clears his throat loudly, pulls out his comm, messes with the antenna for a moment, then begins typing a message at a furious pace. “I’m just—I’m going back up now. Very busy. Big man shit to do, and all.”
“Mhm,” Ranboo agrees, rocking on his heels. He hears Tommy hit send.
“Aaaaand—I’ve just messaged Tubbo. Told him I’ll meet him at Snowchester.” Tommy shoves the communicator back in his pocket and, with only minimal swearing, hoists himself out of the alcove. He maneuvers around Ranboo towards his supplies, tucking spare picks and shovels into his inventory and hiking his satchel off the ground and over one shoulder. “He always checks his comms around now—he’s so clingy, you see, he’s probably off crying somewhere about how much he misses me.”
“Mhm,” Ranboo says again. “I’ll see you later, then?”
“Sure,” Tommy says. He does not sound very sure.
There’s another pause. Out of the corner of his eye, Tommy hasn’t moved.
“Hey. Ranboo.”
“Mmm?”
Ranboo turns, lowering his pick, just in time to get an armful of warm body lunging forward, two gangly arms interlocking behind his back and a head of blond-and-white streaked hair burrowing into his chest.
The previous hug he’d received from Tommy had been brief, with a frenetic, almost desperate edge to it, and this one is similar. It lasts all of three seconds before Tommy’s pulling away, turning around and already a few solid strides across the cavern before Ranboo realizes what happened.
“Let’s head back up,” he says, swiping an arm across his face. “Tubbo’s probably waiting.”
Ranboo takes two breaths. “Right, let’s go,” he says belatedly, replacing his pickaxe properly on his waist. He reaches for his torch on the wall, adjusts his grip with steady hands, and follows Tommy up.
(And if Ranboo happens to hear any suspicious sniffling noises coming from in front of him as he follows behind Tommy, or if he realizes halfway to the surface that a familiar, mild burning sensation was coming from the spot on his chest where Tommy’s face had been, then, well. Those are things Ranboo won’t mention when he records this everyday, unremarkable strip mining session with a friend in his memory book later.
There are some details, he thinks, that Tommy wouldn’t mind him forgetting.)