I need everyone to understand that q!Tubbo, q!Bbh and q!Aypierre spent seven hours fighting a psychological war today and they lost… but it prevented both teams from dying and no one will ever know.
(All talk about character not ccs etc etc)
Tubbo wasn’t there during the egg battle so he doesn’t feel the betrayal and humiliation that the other two do. He looks at green team and sees his friends. People he cares about. He doesn’t want them to lose especially not like this! He’d made up his mind the moment he learned of the event. No one was going to die.
Aypierre looked at green team and saw the snakes who broke their promise to tie the previous challenge. Why would they agree to tie this time when they’ve already proven to be untrustworthy? They betrayed him. They humiliated him and his entire team. This was his opportunity for revenge. Why shouldn’t blue team take it?
Bbh is much more in the middle. He agreed with the premise of a tie because he wanted to give green a fighting chance. He had a gut feeling it wasn’t going to work but he was willing to try. However, he didn’t trust green either. The whole time he was paranoid about green logging in at the last minute to scrounge together the quests to beat them. He was constantly reminding the group to stay together so they couldn’t be killed in case green logged in. He did not trust green to keep to the deal but he was willing to try.
For the first five or so hours of the streams the three had too many conversations to count where Aypierre would try to convince them to just say fuck it and turn in their tasks. To break the tie and be done with it! But each time bbh and Tubbo manage to hold him back and keep to the plan. It was only when bbh and Aypierre were in green’s secret base standing in front of green’s merchant that Aypierre finally caved and turned in his missions.
This was one battle lost. The next was Aypierre and Tubbo pulling bbh in two different directions and Tubbo choosing to give Green the quest items to rebalance the score. Two different battles that culminated in the single decisive moment of bbh claiming all of his missions. But what happened leading up to that moment? Chaos.
Various members of green team were logging in and out for the next two hours which only fueled bbh’s paranoia even more. Aypierre was trying to convince him to just claim the tasks the games already over! While Tubbo was confident they could still tie the score. It all went to shit in the last fifteen minutes.
Bbh and Aypierre discovered the quest items were gonna from the chest and Tubbo was lying to them about where he was. Tubbo made an executive decision to try and balance the score knowing the other two were too on the edge and chaotic at the moment. They’d discussed potentially giving green some items to tie the score but this was never agreed to and bbh and Aypierre had no idea what Tubbo was giving them.
They arrive at the center and the score starts changing and bbh starts panicking. Aypierre calls Tubbo a traitor for going behind their back and bbh is trying to mediate and figure out what’s going on - what did Tubbo do? Tubbo doesn’t explain fully so bbh assumes he gave both ElQuackity and Roier the quest items. Then Mouse logs in and bbh’s paranoia goes into overdrive. Did green have the items stockpiled and ready for Mouse to turn them in to sweep the victory last second? It’s happened twice before so it’s not out of the question. Bbh looked at the being Coco that acted so much like his son and asked, and it told him to cash in the quests. So he did.
At this point, everything was pure adrenaline. All bbh was thinking was save Dapper. “Run over anyone you need to to win”. If it ended as a tie or if blue won, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was he could not LOSE.
All three of blue fought so incredibly hard today it’s incredible. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ccs aren’t completely emotionally exhausted. Aypierre gave into his revenge after fighting it for nearly five hours straight. Bbh gave into his paranoia after fighting it for SEVEN HOURS straight. Tubbo gave into his need to do the right thing at any costs by going behind his team’s back which lead to the miscommunication that lead to that pivotal moment.
Blue failed today. They fought an internal war for seven hours and they lost at the very last moment. But in so doing, they saved their entire team. And they’ll never know. And no one will ever know. They will continue being the villains in this story even though no one on red or green knows what they went thought mentally today. None of them understand that it took seven hours of constant stress for them to break when they could have cashed the quests and secured victory within an hour.
In the end, Aypierre said it best “Either we win a fraud or die a villain.”
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Excerpt: Eye for an Eye
Silco and Vi have a chat in Stillwater.
From 'heron blue,' an AU where Vi and Jinx reconnect under different terms. Slow, rocky relationship rebuilding, found family messiness, and political schemings.
Full story on AO3
She sees fire. She sees red. Red on his clothes, on his hands; in his mangled, inhuman iris; on the silvered edge of his poisoned tongue.
"Vander's prodigy." She hasn't heard the sickly gravel of that voice in six years. It ripples beneath her skin, and sits there. Etches the drawling cadence of every vowel into her bones. "I regret that we've yet had the ability to speak."
A tilt of his head. Through the bars, doused in shadow, his mismatched stare sharpens. "I'd have made the journey sooner," he rumbles on, "but, you see—the time would be a waste, for a dead girl." His good eye narrows, a scathing flash of blue radium. "And yet."
Vi breathes in quick, harsh. She swallows it down.
He looks like a creature the Pilt chewed off and spit back out: a sinewed blot of shadow, bones and flesh, wrapped in leather and silk-weaved linen. There's an animal under his skin—a tidewater predator watching from the shallows, silent and still. Waiting.
She scuffs the sweat from her temple. Feigns indifference. "Who the hell are you?"
His brow perks. "Don't you remember?" His hands shift behind his back, held laxly there, as though folded around a knife. "Surely the walls haven't rotted your head that easily."
"I remember," Vi snarls, baring her teeth. "Like hell I'd forget." And she'd tried. Kindreds above and below, she'd tried to wipe her mind of that night, a lifetime over. Spite coils under her tongue. "But, y'know—don't really care about the name of some rat in the street. Might have to remind me, there."
She can't tell under the dim light whether the crook of his mouth is a sneer or a smile. It passes too quickly for her to care.
"Well. You've Vander's tongue as much as his damned fists, don't you?"
Her nails carve into her palms, hard enough to draw blood. She paces across the back of the cell, glaring.
Don't you dare say his name. Don't you dare—
Silco stands still as stone, two steps from the red line that chips over the cement floor. Silver glints in his hand. He's slipped a gilded cigarette case from the breast pocket of his coat. His thin, willowed fingers pluck one roll out, snap the case shut, and flick open the hinge of its lighter. The crackling hush of the drag he takes rattles over the stones: fills the air with a dry, ambered spice.
It's not like Vander's pipe: cheap, heady, citrus and cinnamon. It reeks of expense. It's the same peppery smoke that sits on his clothes, bittersweet and earthen, laced with juniper berry and cedar. It hisses out from his lungs, a blue thread unspooled, clouding about him in a thin haze. His dead eye leers through it.
"Come here, girl," he says, and takes a step forward. Under the ripple of the light, he's taller than she took him for; taller than she remembers, cowered on those rickety grates behind a wall of other bodies. His right eye—a frigid, dirtied blue, like the underside of a glacier—cuts to her tattered boots, and climbs. "Let me look at you."
The words gut into her, vilely. She wheels on him. Her fist slams into the bars, hard enough to make an ugly, chorusing echo through the steel. "Bastard."
"Charmed."
He stands on that thin red line, puffing away on his cigarette, and stares at her, as though trying to make sense of a riddle in a paper, or picking through the nuances of an artist's strokes. Her fingers snare hard on the bars, hard enough to stain her bloodied knuckles white. She glares right back at him. Pristine coat, lithe hands; scratched up, grayed out face; swept-back hair, flecked with silver; steel-tipped boots. There's a knife handle under his belt. A knife handle nearly in arm's reach.
"You couldn't have been more than fourteen, then," he mutters. The words carry a taint of wonder, in their remembrance. It plunges, swiftly, to distaste. "Tearing through my men, like a tank through the trenches." He scoffs. Now, he is sneering: the scarred line of his lip baring crooked teeth, his cigarette pinched between his fingers. "What good are you, left to waste away under these Piltie scum?"
"I didn't ask to be here—"
"Oh, no. You asked for revolution." His eyes spear into hers, an unwavering burn. "You were denied."
Blood ticks between her fingers, scalding on the cell bars. Those words itch into her; find the festering resentment she's left abandoned, over months and years shackled within these walls, and gnaw at it.
"You sold Vander out," she says, heat broiling just beneath the words. "You stabbed him. I saw it. You killed him—"
"Vander sold himself out, girl," and he is walking, with the slow, prowling lope of a wolf; the fluid circling of a shark in the deep. "Laid his throat under the enforcers' boots, like a mutt on a leash. I paid my dues—nine years of it—while he sat back and cowered." He strides over the red line, and stops, inches from her battered fists. "He owed me a debt," he says, plainly. His cigarette skims the grayed blot of dead flesh that stretches over his cheek. "Eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth."
Her hands shake. She sees the flames, eating up the cannery with the roar of a living thing. Hears the bellows of their arguing, split apart in fritzing static and neon-blue. "What did you do with my sister?"
He ticks the ash from his cigarette. It falls to a swirl of embers at his feet. "You, however," Silco prattles on, blithely ignoring her. His fingers wave through the air, with the nonchalance of a royal: a razor-edged flit of smoke and cinder. "Now—what I wouldn't have given to see you storm this wretched city, yourself. You still could, if you only had the gall." His heels sweep over the concrete: th-thump, th-thumping: fall still at one end of the cell. His eyes flit curiously across its hinges. "These bars, girl—tell me: have they strengthened you? Or leashed you, as well?"
She doesn't have time for this. You talk too much.
"What did you do with my sister—?"
"Jinx?"
A cold pit plunges through her stomach, and twists.
Because you're a jinx! Mylo was right!
"She's alive," he says slowly, the rasp of his low, scratched-out throat worlds away. The look on his face is unreadable: deceptively blank: scathing. "Safe," he adds, with a lilt of his head. "Though—as I'd been led to believe—you're good as dead, to her."
Vi pulls in a tight, heavy breath. "Her name is Powder."
"Her name is her own. She chose it." The dagger of his teal eye thins: hunts for something under her shaking bones, something she can't see. "From what I gather," he mulls, "it was your parting gift."
Slices in.
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