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Tubbo was good with details, always had been.
Having important people rely on you from such a young age, having to always deliver nothing short of perfection else a conflict might break out between nations, having to handle the emotions of adults who saw him more as an equal than the kid he actually was, all these things had made Tubbo very good with details.
He had learned how to deescalate stations but also when to shut his mouth. He knew when a person was about to snap and when it was best to ask them for something. He learned the different things people did to hide their true feelings and intentions and how to tell the difference between truths, lies and the things that often lied in the middle.
Tubbo had gotten good at reading people which, given his political position, was undoubtedly a good talent to have.
At least that's what Wilbur used to say to him.
It had been one of those nights were it was clear that even after the main meeting had ended that he wasn't going to go anywhere. He remember staying in the camp until the early hours of the morning, helping with paperwork, going over documents and triple checking for any spelling mistakes or any details in the fine prints of the contracts. He stayed there without a single complaint, and why would he complain?
This had become a regular part of his schedule now, one that he had gotten good at.
As a side effect of staying up late so often he had also became quite good at making coffee, a trait which Wilbur seemed to particularly like.
You're a very observant kid Tubbo, he had said after the boy brought him a drink without Wilbur even having to ask.
That's a good trait to have.
So he kept refining it. Making sure to analyze every single person he interacted with from friends and allies to the opposition. He found himself being able to tell a lot about a person just by changing a few words and for the people he knew well, he could pretty accurately tell how they were feeling simply by the way they walked up to him.
He had gotten really good at observing, something that he should had been proud of.
But every gift had its downside and Tubbo had started to question if this trait he acquired hadn't been a curse to begin with.
Turns out even though he had gotten good at understanding people, nobody wanted to take any sort of advice from "a child" saying that strategies were "grown up talk". That's what he remembered hearing when he once walked into a meeting Wilbur was having with a lot of other men that he couldn't recall the faces of, though he was certain he had never seen any of them on the battle front.
There was another thing that had made this abilities of his more unbearable to have.
And that is that he could tell when people were changing.
Sometimes you only see how someone had slowly started to change in retrospective but Tubbo could tell from the moment it was happening that something was off. And that scared him.
For some, the transformation of L'manburg had been slow, almost unnoticeable until the day the wars had started to happen one after the other but Tubbo had seen it coming since the very beginning. Every day he had been paralyzed with fear, seeing the country he had given his childhood for fall apart, one small piece after another, being unable to do anything about it until everything they had built turned into dust.
But still, he stayed by his friends side as they reconstructed, again and again, even if they now had to do their operation from inside of an extremely unpleasant ravine.
He knew that Schlatt wasn't going to last long in the office so he had patiently waited for the beast that he knew was inside of the president to start to come out bit by bit until it had all but consumed him.
He had watched carefully as both Schlatt and Quackity had started to become not something different from what they were before but simply something more pronounced. All of the cracks that had been in their carefully constructed personas had simply started to grow bigger and bigger until it inevitably shattered the people that they once were.
Just as it had done to all of the ones before it. And just as it was about to do to him.
From the moment he had been pronounced at president, he knew what was going to happen.
At first he had hope, a naive, unfaltering hope that he could catch himself if he ever started to slip, that he could keep himself on track that he wasn't going to forget himself, not after everything he had done to get here.
The first time he had to face Dream he knew that it was the end of that dream.
He had started to change but at first he had desperately , desperately hoped that it was for the better, that he was making progress. Change isn't always bad after all and maybe this is what the country really needed.
He knew that everyone else was starting to see it too. He didn't understand how now that he was in control every mistake he made seemed to catch everyone's attentions while all the other leaders before him had a "sudden and unexpected" downfall.
It was excruciating, feeling himself slip like this, knowing that he was straying further and further from the person he had started this as but not knowing how he could possibly stop or revert this process. There were choices that had no good outcome or choices that he was forced to make to meet some greater goal that would make it all worth it.
He didn't need Tommy to point out that he wasn't the same, he didn't need Fundy to yell at him that he was turning out like Schlatt and he didn't need the countless stares and remarks people threw at him, he already knew all of it.
He knew people didn't recognize him as he walked past them, because he had been the first one to notice the changes a long time ago. He had known that he was becoming something that he had spent so long trying to avoid before the suspicious gazes of his once peers pierced his skin like cold daggers.
Changed had corrupted him, like it had done with everyone before him and that it will continue do to all those that will come after him.
He had seen the change coming from the very beginning, but even as he now faced the ruin of a place he had devoted everything he had to, as he faced the always judging eyes of the people around him, he couldn't think of a single thing he could had done differently.