Archive of Our Own ^beta

Tubbo wakes to green grass, border walls, and a timer hanging in the sky. He stumbles to his feet, and he feels weak, he feels like he’s just been tossed down a flight of stairs and then kicked in the ribs when he reached the bottom. His mouth tastes like copper and roadkill.

When he finds a source of water to wash away the taste, he pauses as he locks eyes with his reflection.

His eyes are blue and his hair is long and shaggy and there are bags under his eyes but otherwise his skin is entirely unblemished, and that’s wrong, that’s not him. That can’t be him. His face looks wrong there’s something wrong with his face-

He can’t recognize himself and he can’t for the life of him think of why.

He’s struck by the sudden desire to run from here, run far, far away from this clearing until he can never find his way back. 

But there are borders around this place. He’s- he’s been boxed in.

As soon as that thought crosses his mind, he can’t help but hear the sound of someone’s laughter, sharp and cruel, something about Tubbox, something about traitor and his chest blooms with heat. 

Tubbo forces himself to take a deep breath, and then to take another. Panicking won’t do him any good. He has better things to do, better mysteries to solve. He reaches up to wipe the sweat off his brow, and he notices one of said mysteries.

Around his wrist is a watch, the cracked face not stopping the minute and hour hands from pointing in the right directions. At the center of the face is a digital timer, informing him that it has approximately two hours and fifty-five minutes remaining. 

The clock hanging in the sky says there are twenty-nine days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-five minutes remaining.

Okay, Tubbo thinks, and he gets to his feet. Time to get the lay of the land. 

Later, when his watch says he has an hour and a half left, he finds a gathering of other people. People he finds that he recognizes, judging by the way he knows Wilbur’s name the second he lays eyes on him, and the way his heart jumps in his chest with a mixture of joy and apprehension he can’t explain.

Wilbur must recognize him, too, because a relieved smile spreads across his face. “There you are, Tubbo!” he says. “I was wondering if you were here.”

Tubbo is accepted into the fold immediately, welcomed into a circle of faces he knows he knows but can’t quite figure out where from. At least they’re all friendly. 

He’s not sure what he would do if they weren’t. There’s nowhere for him to run, after all.

An hour and twenty five minutes later, he’s amicably chatting with Ranboo when his watch beeps. “What’s that?” Ranboo asks.

“Five minute warning,” Tubbo says, glancing down at the timer.

Ranboo’s eyebrows knit together. “What happens when it runs out?”

“I don’t know,” Tubbo shrugs. “I guess we’ll find out.”

“You’re just going to let it run out? What if it’s counting to your death or something?” Ranboo’s voice is laced with concern. Ah, Tubbo thinks. It looks like Wilbur’s pet theory about the timer in the sky counting down to the end of the world is getting to him.

“It can’t be,” Tubbo says. “I’m already dead.”

“What?” Ranboo’s eyes are wide with shock.

“What?” Tubbo blinks.

“You- you said you were already dead?” he stammers out.

Tubbo can’t help but frown. That doesn't sound right. “Why would I say something like that?”

“I don’t- I don’t know. Do you not remember saying it?”

“No?” Tubbo shakes his head. That’s odd. He’s pretty sure Ranboo is supposed to be the one with the faulty memory.

Why does he think that?

Tubbo’s watch beeps again- one minute left- and from across the base camp, Tommy’s head snaps up. “Oh shit,” he says. “You’re about to pass out.”

“I’m about to what?” Tubbo asks, but Tommy’s talking to Ranboo now.

“When that watch hits zero, you’re gonna wanna catch him so he doesn’t hit his head when he falls or some stupid shit like that.” Tommy glances back to him. “That’d be a shitty way to die, don’t you think?”

But Tubbo can’t focus on what Tommy’s saying- all he can bring himself to focus on is the light in Tommy’s eyes. They’re so bright, like the world wouldn’t dare try to stamp out his spark. He looks healthy, like he’s been sleeping well and never known a day of hunger. He looks whole. He looks exactly how he was supposed to, before Tubbo-

That’s the last thought he has before the world goes dark.

He wakes up in bed twenty-one hours later, if the great clock in the sky is to be believed. Groggily, he wonders why there’s only a month doomsda- no, that’s not the right word for it. Until the apocalypse, maybe. Until they all die. Until the walls fall down. Until nothing happens at all because the clock is just a ruse or an intimidation tactic.

A month is an awfully short time, after all. A month is a blink of an eye. Shorter than a day, in the grand scheme of things.

Quickly, they find a sort of routine in the shadow of the timer. They laugh and fight, knowing they could all be about to die. They make farms, knowing they only need to last the month. They build, knowing it could all be destroyed. 

The rest of them do, at least. Tubbo tries his best to help, and he’s good at maximizing every second of his three hours before he passes out- good enough that he knows most of these projects wouldn’t be completed nearly as quickly without his help- but there’s still only so much he can do in so little time. There’s only so much he can do with his hands tied.

Every day, he wakes up with his watch’s timer reset to three hours. Every day, when the timer reaches zero, he passes out and sleeps like the dead until he wakes exactly twenty one hours later and the whole cycle repeats itself again. He’s pushed every limit he could find and exploited every loophole he could think of, but nothing works. There’s no way of avoiding it. He’s stuck with this dumb curse that Tommy clearly recognizes but won’t explain or cure.

Tubbo hates the curse. It makes him feel idle. It makes him feel useless. It makes him feel vulnerable to attack. How can he make himself safe with a watch around his wrist counting down the moments until he’s entirely defenseless and a timer in the sky counting down to when everything he does becomes meaningless one way or another?

Ranboo is a mercy on the universe’s part, at least. He hovers a little too much for Tubbo’s liking, but he can’t entirely blame him for it. Not when more often than not it’s Ranboo’s arms he’s swooning into like some useless damsel because he’d rather use every last second awake on a project than wasting time carrying himself to bed. 

Tubbo thinks in another life, he could marry someone like Ranboo. 

But that’s wishful thinking, thinking for when he has time to kill and no threat of forced idleness on his hands.

That timer in the sky is counting down to something, and Tubbo needs to be ready when it reaches zero. He has to be. He’s boxed in, his friends might be in danger, and he’s standing on the edge of the end of the world. If he’s not ready, then there will have been no point to this past month of absolute hell.

“What do you think will happen when the timer reaches zero?” Ranboo asks when there are five days, twenty-two hours, and thirty-three left on the clock.

“I don’t know,” Tubbo says. “Maybe we’ll all die. Maybe this is all a dream, and that’s when we wake up. Maybe nothing will happen at all.”

Ranboo hums in that way that he does. “Which do you think is worse?”

“I’m not sure I know,” Tubbo admits, something ugly curling in his chest. He hates unknowns, he hates dark corners. He wants to go home, he thinks. He wants to know where home is. “I'm not sure it matters, though. The anticipation is the worst part either way.”

-

(When the world ends, Tubbo wakes up with a gasp. His lungs heave for air, but he covers his mouth with a hand for fear that he might throw up. His face where he touches it is scarred and rough and his, through and through.

He can feel Ranboo’s hand on his back, rubbing slow circles and he thinks Tommy is telling him to breathe but all he can focus on is the hand he’s using to hold himself up and the shattered watch face staring back at him.

“How long,” Tubbo wheezes out, his voice cracking and distorted. “Was I dead for?”

Because that’s the question, isn’t it. It all comes down to time, in the end, and how much he has before the inevitable happens. How much he has before everything he has goes up in flames. How much he loses. 

“A day,” Tommy tells him. He sounds apologetic. “You were dead for a day.”)