Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You found it.”

The gentle pad of paws- rather than feet- is one Ranboo knows well.

He knows Fundy better than he does anyone else in L’manberg, a broken code in every twitch of the fox’s nose and flick of his ears. They’ve spent long nights in the mines and early mornings bending to the governments’ will. They’ve stared at the pinprick lights of floating lanterns and contemplated leaving everything behind.

It’s that bond that makes him understand immediately what Fundy’s talking about. He just isn’t sure how to respond.

Ranboo doesn’t remember much of yesterday, his recollection already carefully extracted from their space in his mind, but his book tells him enough. What little he can remember makes him want to shut his door and hide with his cats until enough time has passed for the memories to be gone entirely.

Fear, biting fear. The kind that tears at your flesh and scratches at your bones.

It has what I did.

You didn’t put it there.

Fundy shifts and it catches Ranboo’s eye, pulling him from his internal back-and-forth. The look he’s given is so full of something, something strange and foreign and terrifying, that Ranboo feels as though he’s suddenly forgotten everything about his closest friend.

“I didn’t know where you would’ve wanted me to put it.” Fundy’s laugh sounds sour and takes up too much space between them, an intruder in the empty land that is L’manberg’s center. “I thought about your Ender chest, but I obviously can’t do that.”

Ranboo shivers slightly. “Did you read it?”

He knows the answer; he’s not stupid, despite what some of the country’s people may think of him, but he has to ask.

“Returned Technoblade’s armor to him,” Fundy recites.

“Oh okay, you did.”

“Tommy is alive and seems mostly okay.”

“That’s-”

“Phil helped you. Help him in return.”

Ranboo wants to scream. He’s never been the loud sort, nothing like Tommy, but if Tommy felt what he’s feeling, the boy would probably shout loud enough it would cross through the nether.

The words from his journal- his innermost thoughts, the parts of himself he’s determined to keep constant, the memories he’s made that he’s begged the universe to keep him from forgetting- tumble out of Fundy’s mouth like skipped stones across the river.

It feels as though the fox has reached his claws into Ranboo’s body and pulled out his soul, setting it in a display cage for everyone in the vicinity to laugh at. He knows he won’t miss this moment when it slips away from his tangible memory, nor the roll of Fundy’s eyes when he notices Ranboo’s expression.

“Why are you acting weird? You wrote it.”

“Yeah,” Ranboo’s voice comes out hoarse. “For me. That’s why it says ‘do not read.’”

Fundy sniffs. “As if that was going to stop anyone.”

If Ranboo had found it, he probably wouldn’t have opened the thing, but he’s known from his first encounter with the people who’ve made this world theirs: they are not the same as he is.

Dream’s sword.

Tommy.

You burnt a house down.

“I kept a notebook like it once, you know,” Fundy adds.

Ranboo's curiosity spikes. “Why? You don’t have bad short-term memory.”

“I had a lot I needed to remember.” Fundy’s tail twitches minutely, a silent metronome behind his still carefully neutral tone. “I wanted to impress my father.”

Slight tail movements. Distress. The motion kickstarts a part of Ranboo’s memory, the slot labelled with Fundy’s name, and Ranboo is fleetingly relieved that his friend’s mannerisms are not lost to him just because of the gap his book has created.

Not that it particularly helps. He’s heard snippets of this story, of the way Fundy had stayed under a dictator’s rule in order to fulfill some unspoken expectation Wilbur had burdened him with, only to be met with silence and the destruction of the only place he’d ever called home.

Fundy’s life is the tragedy of the very land they stand on, but it doesn’t tell Ranboo what the correct answer is to all of these unspoken questions.

“I’m not trying to impress anyone.”

“I know.”

Once, on an expedition, long before he’d made the sort of friends who could help him out of situations, Ranboo had gotten stuck under a huge plot of sand. The more he mined, the harder it poured down, clinging to the insides of his lungs and suffocating him with no sign of escape.

This feels like that again. Alone in a desert with no one to hear his pleas.

“So now what?” he asks. A wisp of a memory shouts for his attention, blood caked on Fundy’s fur and splattered across a white apron.

He can’t remember when it happened, but he distinctly feels that it hadn’t ended well.

I wonder if my blood will be the same color.

“Now, we finish decorating.”

Ranboo physically recoils in shock, bumping into the awning above his door. “What?”

“If the decorations aren’t finished, Tubbo will ask us what happened.”

“But-”

Fundy’s sigh cuts him off, equal parts exhausted and exasperated, but Ranboo can’t force out an apology when he has no idea what’s going on. He’d expected to be stuck in limbo by now, waiting for his body to regenerate itself.

“L’manberg was mine once, Ranboo. Wilbur promised it to me when the L’mantree was just another oak in the grove. He broke that promise before you got here.” Fundy’s ears dip back for a second and his lips curl into a wry smile. “I gave up on this country way before you did.”

Ranboo can’t say the questions haven’t crossed his mind, the pieces missing from the history books he diligently collected and read from Ghostbur’s sewer.

They tell the story like a textbook, a narrative from so far back in history no one can account for what really happened, even though its survivors still stake their claim on the remnants of the very land on which the great wars were fought.

What really happened to Wilbur?

Why is Tubbo president?

Ranboo’s never actually asked them, and now’s still not the right time to. Not when he’s struggling to keep up with the present, much less aid in a desperate attempt to chronicle of the past.

“Are you… helping me betray you?”

Fundy shrugs. “I’ve been a traitor before. For both sides.”

“I thought you were a spy.”

“History is written by the winners.” The fox’s fur glows like an open flame under the morning sun and his words carry weight through the eerie silence. “I called myself a spy. I could’ve said ‘notetaker.’ Or ‘person who almost stayed on the losing side.’”

Heterochromatic eyes flickering across Fundy’s face for a sign that he’s about to be killed, some indicator that this is a trap, Ranboo doesn’t move; he feels as though he can’t. Fundy sighs again.

“You might not even betray L'manberg.”

Ranboo can’t hold back the bitter laugh that escapes out of him. “I already have.”

“You gave Technoblade his armor back. He definitely would’ve killed you otherwise.”

“Yeah and-”

Fundy halts Ranboo’s protests, placing a firm paw on his shoulder and ignoring the way he tenses.

“I've said L’manberg meant nothing to me and burnt down its flag. I told everyone I did it to gain Schlatt’s trust, but a part of me felt good about it. Wilbur had left me behind and even when he was around, he never took me seriously.”

There’s a pause and Ranboo can’t help but wonder what he would’ve done in the alternate universes. One, where he’d been Fundy, a pseudo-orphan handed power for the first time by a man he’s meant to hate. The second, where he’d been in this world to see the L’manberg war.

Would he have been Wilbur’s scapegoat or Eret’s vassal? A traitor or a hero?

“I’m not ‘helping you betray’ anyone,” Fundy continues. “And I’m not telling you to side with Technoblade. I’m saying that wherever you go, I won’t stand in your way.”

Despite Ranboo’s own towering height, he feels small again; a child lost in a vast unknown, guided only by what he can desperately hold onto.

“Why?” he whispers.

“Land is temporary.”

Fundy speaks with the wisdom of someone who’s seen the world at its weakest.

Which, Ranboo supposes, he has.

He moves the paw off of Ranboo’s shoulder and reaches it out into the air, towards the wooden platform of the place where they conduct speeches and its seats. The cliffside is jagged behind it, leading up towards a tower and someone’s house, Ranboo can’t quite recall.

“Land is temporary,” Fundy repeats. “Fall in love with it and it’ll ruin you. Wilbur learned that too late.”

The statement that comes to mind is a summarized version of the first section of Ranboo's journal, the vertebrae of his moral code. It’s part of what caused this mess, that which he thought he’d have to somehow salvage, but its pieces sit collected in a metaphorical box on his doorstep and the bearer of the gift stands in front of him, still and sure.

“People are what matter,” Ranboo replies, hesitantly.

Fundy’s whiskers twitch and he recognizes the motion as a product of resolution.

“Exactly.”