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Hands, soft, fleeting like landing butterflies across his torso. It’s quiet and cozy and so nice, and Tubbo feels like he can’t breathe.
He feels that there is something far more vulnerable in light touch than firm contact, somehow — the simple mellowness of the slender fingers on his bare shoulders sends warmth down his spine with how gentle it is. The touch is timid but intentional, the softest pressure across the scarring down his collarbone, and it makes him feel naked. Like he’s being cut open and observed, handled with care like fine china.
Ranboo’s eyes are an alien light in the soft darkness of the room, mismatched red and green blown wide where their face sits just above Tubbo’s own. Perhaps the scene would look largely terrifying to anyone else — chest to chest with a creature that could tear an arm from their prey with as little as a light tug — but where Tubbo would keep any semblance of fear for his safety he finds only trust, and another thing so dauntingly all-encompassing he wouldn’t dare bring his tongue to form the name.
Hands again, on his bare chest this time, pinpricks of claws grazing the skin there ever so faintly. It’s not a pretty sight, his anterior — Tubbo is all pockmarks and scars and hair in the wrong places — but Ranboo dips their head to press a kiss to his collarbone and it’s featherlight and soft and good and there are slender fingers brushing over the burns on his shoulders like they’re something beautiful and Tubbo could almost bring himself to believe it.
Ranboo brings their lips downward, working their way toward his ribcage, their kisses gossamer-soft yet they feel heavy as boulders. Tubbo figures he should probably do something with his hands and so reaches out to anchor them on hair, horns, anything— they end up landing haphazardly over the enderman’s face before settling on their cheeks, prompting a giggle that’s almost entirely lost to the steady drone of purring, and Tubbo hisses a giddy “shut up,” to empty air.
He can feel the apples of Ranboo’s cheeks against his hands when they smile. It’s nice. Ranboo tilts their head to nuzzle a kiss into his palm and oh, that’s nice too.
“You’re so pretty,” the enderman murmurs, soft like silk, sounding so genuine it makes Tubbo’s stomach jump.
His first instinct is to scoff, to push away and insist otherwise, but the moment feels so fragile between his palms he thinks he’d rather die than break it, so instead he mumbles back a quiet “yeah, not so bad yourself, bossman,” dragging one of his hands through the enderman’s hair. Apparently some of the trepidation still leaks across his features, though, because there’s a little crease in Ranboo’s brow as they lean back down.
They don’t seem to dwell on it for long, though. Smooth palms, gentle on Tubbo’s waist as the enderman’s lips find purchase on whatever skin available — sternum, ribs, abdomen. There are a lot of important things around that part of his body: Tubbo feels lips ghost over where his heart is and he can’t help but shiver. He thinks he wouldn’t mind if they bit down. He thinks he wouldn’t mind if they ate him whole.
“‘M serious, you know,” The enderman is saying, sugar-sweet words against fire-ravaged skin. “They should put you in— in a museum.”
Tubbo almost chokes on air at that and tries valiantly to play it off with startled laughter. The bastard, all stutters and anxious words everywhere else and then a fucking poet behind closed doors. “You giant sap. You’re taking the piss.”
“They should!” Purple blush forms high on Ranboo’s cheeks as they pick their head back up, visible even in the minimal light, and it makes them look so lovely. They look so lovely all the time. “It’s where people put pretty things, is it not? They should paint something in your likeness and hang it up. Oh, but they wouldn’t be able to do you half any justice, I’m afraid.”
Oh dear Prime. The faun brings a hand up to cup the enderman’s face again, pressing a finger firm to Ranboo’s mouth. “Alright. No more of that, you fucking weirdo.”
They snicker. It sounds rough and crackly around the edges, not unlike the absent-minded noises that regular endermen make. “Silencing the truth, Mr. President?”
“You’re biased.”
The enderman’s eyes glimmer. “ Nooo . I wouldn’t dare.”
“I don’t wanna be in a museum,” Tubbo mutters, tracing the shape of the Ranboo’s lips with the pad of his thumb, trying to memorize the curve of them. If he goes over them enough, maybe the shape of them will be imprinted across his fingers forever. “Wanna be with you.”
That shuts them up — their eyes get all wide, irises almost entirely eaten by the black of their pupil and face glowing the most wonderful shade of purple, looking very much like someone’s hit them over the head. It’s stupid, how they’ll spew nonsense affections like breathing one moment and then be rendered speechless by the smallest of statements the next. A person made up of the strangest little contradictions.
The fondness in Tubbo’s chest rattles against his ribs like a caged animal, too big for his body, too big for the whole world. He wants to know all their contradictions. He wants to know them wholly, so much it hurts.
“W-well,” Ranboo says, and somewhere behind them the faun feels a whip-thin tail curl around one of his ankles. “That’s— that’s good too, I suppose.”
Tubbo smiles. “Thought it might be.”
There’s another witty retort on the tip of Tubbo’s tongue but it never gets to leave his mouth, melting like ice on warm tarmac when Ranboo dips to kiss his hand so soft, and then tugs at his wrist so they can kiss that, too, eyes fluttering shut and lips pressed to his pulse point and the faun’s breath hitches at the sight, thinking faintly that he’s far too unworthy to be having this before there’s a gentle touch at his stomach and all his thoughts scramble like puzzle pieces over the floor.
They fall back into the thick, intimate silence from before, the air heavy with the things they don’t need to say. The enderman shuffles downward to give themself more room and moors their hands on either side of Tubbo’s hips, pressing kisses like raindrops to the smooth plane of his naval, willowy and reverent, and it’s so much. It’s so much. Tubbo is going to explode.
It feels— well. It feels like love. He buries a shaking hand into cookies and cream hair and sighs when it earns him a pleased churr and another warm press of lips to his stomach.
“Sometimes I think you’re too nice to be real,” he says to the ceiling, barely a whisper above the night breeze outside the window.
The enderman’s ministrations stutter to a halt as they lift their head slowly, hair falling across their eyes, and they look at him like they’d gladly do so for the rest of their life. Tubbo doesn’t understand how anyone could look at him like that. He doesn’t understand.
“Why’s— why’s that?” They ask.
“I dunno.” Tubbo shifts beneath them. He hates this part. The articulating emotions part. “You’re so— you.”
“Well. Yes.”
“You’re too nice to me.”
“You’re worth being nice too.” They make it sound so simple.
A breath, shuddering and quick. “Okay.”
Ranboo tilts their head. “You don’t believe me.”
He doesn’t know if he does, not yet. He’s not sure if he ever will, really, but with the way the enderman looks at him he thinks it may not be all that hard.
Tubbo reaches to take their head in his hands again instead of responding, tugging them back up so that they’re face to face, breathing the same air, sharing secrets without words. Ranboo can meet his gaze, now, with an ease that they can only achieve with a very select few, and Tubbo thanks all the forces that be for it every day because their eyes are so, so lovely.
The enderman’s face is split so cleanly down its centre, a perfect half-moon of black and white struck through with the permanent tear tracks that cascade down their cheeks like rain. He leans to brush his lips against them — it’s only fair, with how gently they’d been treating his — and beneath his hold he can feel the effect it has, can feel the bob of Ranboo’s throat as they swallow.
It scares him sometimes, how much he trusts them, in a way he trusts no one else but Tommy — dangerous levels, the kind of trust that could most definitely get him hurt later down the line, but Ranboo has been around long enough that Tubbo has long grown tired of wondering why they haven’t left yet. He bumps his forehead gently to Ranboo’s and hopes they can feel how much weight there is to this, hopes the feelings he can never articulate in words are visible in how he lays himself bare for them and nobody else. I show my neck to you because I trust you will not meet me with teeth. I think you’re so good and that you’re better than everything I deserve and I love you and it’s always always always.
Ranboo is the one that closes the gap. When their lips meet, it’s pressure and it’s warm and they love each other. There’s not a lot left to be said.