Wilbur's hand hovered over the 'open project' button, wiping at his eyes to stop any more oncoming tears from leaking.

> 'SoothouseTemplate.prproj'

He dragged a video file onto the timeline, 2020-12-23.MP4 to be exact. The video wasn't anything edited at all, it was the raw take for his- no, SootHouse's future upload.

The video itself started off normally enough, the intro sounding fine, until just a few seconds in. Wilbur was surprised at how quick he broke.

"Hey guys! So, I'm assuming by now you-"

"..."

A pause, and abrupt sniffling, a very bad attempt at holding back a sob.

"-or I've heard of, well, Bulgarian Real Estate. Let's get into the video."

---

He pauses the playback, leaning back for a second, considering his options. Was going through this editing really worth it?

He finds the next part to be the hardest. The intro, their very quick intro where everyone's names and faces pop up on screen is the part that takes him the longest to do.

When he clicks into the folder, he's greeted by the faces of his friends. Faces that he's not quite sure he's ready to see once again.

He quietly grabs the one named 'wilbur.png' and drags it in, placing it dead center.

Ironic that my color is grey, huh. He thinks to himself with a hollow laugh, devoid of emotion. A greyed out figure, not standing out much from the dark grey textured background it was accompanied by.

He was one of the first, and now here he was, the last. The guitarist tries to ignore the pain that dragging the 'pop.wav' file brings. The singular pop of him disappearing from the intro screen.

The truth couldn't have hit him harder.

For the first time in the channel's history, Wilbur Soot was alone. There was nobody to help him with this video. Nobody would approve of his silly ideas. Nobody to make side comments about what he should add in the editing. It was just him.

If he imagines hard enough, he still feels a hand on his arm, gently shoving him while he's working on the video.

But the touch he longs for, hell, just a voice to his side, it never comes. He pushes back from his desk with a sob, practically wailing at this point, wrapping his arms around himself as he curls further into his chair. It's not the same.

He pushes through anyways. A 16 minute and 53 second video. A full Soothouse video. He wonders if they'd be proud of him. The video is of course a shell of what his humor once was. This wasn't a video full of just jokes, full of laughter. This was a video with raw emotion, a man who's lost it all.

Multiple times during the video, Wilbur remembers hearing himself violently sob as he tried to read one of the jokes. He keeps those parts in. There wouldn't be enough footage if he cut all of that out.

"A-and then we have- FUCK!" Interrupted by about a minute of loud crying that slowly goes into sniffling and quiet noises of someone typing out something.

"..."

"So then, haha, we have..."

It's not much, he admits. But after skimming through the video on the timeline, he exports it. No special name like the others. Just 'project.mp4'.

He hits 'upload video', and he shuts off the computer.

...

---