cough syrup
After a minute or so of this person staring at the medicine while Tubbo stared at them, he starts to get a bit bored. So, he clears his throat, and says in a conversational voice, “They sell pretty damn good Tylenol here, don’t they?”
They jump, clearly taken aback by Tubbo’s appearance. They blink at him once before nodding slowly, clearing their throat.
“Isn’t, uh, most Tylenol the- the same everywhere?”
--
Tubbo is an accidental part of a kind-of family, worn tennis shoes firmly planted on the sidelines as a ticking time clock mocks the day his stolen life will crumble, shoved under the floorboards of his best friend's attic. In the waiting process, he meets a seventeen year old severely lacking in both memory and effective hair dye, who defines himself as the spaces between notebook pages and part-time jobs.
Like this, Tubbo meets Ranboo, who, despite everything, may be Tubbo's most worthwhile pit stop in his journey to survival yet.
(Or, a high school AU in which finding home and staying afloat are two tasks you can't shoulder at once, but there are other people who will carry the world with you, if you can muster the bitter task of giving it up first.)