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1
The air ripples far above him, splattered with the stars that make up constellations Tommy has long forgotten the names of. Fireworks explode into the air, bursting with bright reds and blues that leave echoes of vibrance behind when they fade into the pitch of the sky. Tall grass cradles him as he lays there, brushing his arms and reminding him of the humanity that feels so far gone now.
Finally, Tommy sits up, eyes shimmering under the stars. It’s a nice view, and nobody else is up here— they’re all in the city, where it’s actually happening. Once upon a time, he’d long for the company of a crowd. Now, he rests easy in the swaying field, happy to call himself alone.
Alone aside from one living soul in front of him. Upon a glance further down the hill, his gaze is filled by his piglin hybrid older brother. Decked in shimmering gold jewelry and a cape that he’s tucked under himself to keep it from flying out behind him, the dark silhouette of Technoblade’s tusks and rose-gold hair are unmistakable, even in such low light. The light of the fireworks illuminates the top of his head from behind, outlining him in a brilliant, colorful glow.
Tommy hasn’t approached him yet; he’s too nervous. He has traveled for miles and miles and miles to find his brother, searching to the ends of the earth. He’s not sure how he’ll be greeted, either. It’s been a while— years, actually— since he has seen his brother. Things have not gone well in the time between. In fact, Techno was proved right even without knowing: it is always those that provide the most compassion who hit the hardest.
He’s learned that now. Tommy swipes at his face, checking for blood or anything else out of the ordinary, and stands as quietly as possible. The wind blows right through him, pinning his shirt to his chest and tossing his hair back out of his eyes. Smoking ashes float gently to the ground far ahead of them both, close to the river at the bottom of the hill. Shame, really, that they land in the water like that.
With a breath, Tommy steels himself. It’s been too long since he visited Techno, after all. Wilbur— well. Wilbur didn’t hang in there, Techno’s final advice to the two of them before they ran off, and Tommy did wander alone for a few weeks until… he was taken in.
Past that, things are hazy. He’s cold; he’s hot. He’s hungry; he’s stuffed. He’s in pain; he’s the most comfortable he’s ever been in his life. With Dream, dates and events and conversations blurred together quickly and easily— how ironic of a namesake.
He knows he’s aged, but he also knows that’s a foreign concept now. Same with hot and cold, hunger and satiation, pain and comfort. They’re all just words.
Tommy trips over thin air and then composes himself, padding down the hill until he reaches his brother.
A white and orange firework bursts into shards of light in the sky, taunting him as he works up the courage to reach forward, nearly tapping Technoblade’s shoulder.
Before he can make physical contact, his brother is on edge. Techno leaps to his feet, whirling around and setting a hand on the hilt of his sword. The wind pushes his braid over his shoulder and throws his cape out behind him, sharp eyes hooded by low eyebrows. Silence rings louder than the explosions in the village far beyond until, finally, by some miracle—
“Tommy?”
Pale as ever, Tommy skirts backwards a few steps, raising his hands in surrender and greeting at the sword that Techno is threatening to draw. “Miss me?” he greets with a lilting smile, muscles taught with anxiety even though sword is just a word. Even though sharp, pain, blood are just words.
“Miss you,” Techno spits in furious shock, and Tommy can see the gears turning in his head. Tommy can watch as he shuts down, watch as his face descends from brief surprise to stone, watch as the gates are slammed shut right in front of his face. “Miss you. Tommy, why in Prime’s holy name would I miss you?”
It’s pain. Hot, and sharp, and bloody, it is a sword to his heart, dragging itself through him with a shuddering jolt here and a twist and yank there. Tommy folds his arms over his stomach to keep his shirt from flying up in the wind and stares up into Techno’s sharp gaze, pursing his lips as the pain burns hot around his heart. To his stifling dismay, he is met with a withering gaze riddled with disappointment.
He needs to say something. He can’t just stare. “Well,” he begins, pouring all there is left of him into his tone, “we’re brothers, you and I. Bestest of friends, bestest of enemies,” he quips, feeling the flames of agony dance inside him with the colors in the sky. “Come on. You have to have missed me, the great Tommy Innit. Just a little? I missed you.”
Techno grits his teeth, and Tommy knows he has pushed too far. Tommy knows he has toed the line too much. “You and Wilbur disappeared in the middle of the night to Prime knows where, and Tommy—” Techno’s hand tightens on his sword; a yellow explosion burns bright in the sky— “I searched.”
Throat constricting, Tommy inclines his head. Again, the wind pelts through him, pushing him off balance. “You,” he begins, awkward and stilted and discordant, and Techno’s eyes narrow. “You looked? For us?” It’s a deep grey cloud, a heavy crown placed atop his head: Techno tried to find them once they disappeared.
“You’re out of your mind for thinking I wouldn’t,” he says bluntly. “You were my brothers. Both of you. Phil—” He pauses for a second, letting their father’s name hang in the air between them. It’s cutting, sure, but it doesn’t make things any worse than they already are, any tenser, any sharper, any more pressing. “Phil trusted me with your lives,” he finally finishes. “And you decided you didn’t need my help.”
Tommy shrinks in on himself. It was all Wilbur’s idea, he wants to say. He made the plans. The map was his map. We took a route he suggested. The house was his idea. The crops were his idea. The business was— But he can’t wipe out the way his own eyes shone upon the very mention of an adventure, years ago, and it’s suggested not to speak ill of the dead, or spread lies about them.
A blue explosion; Tommy’s own crystal clear eyes are magnetized to it as the knife twists in his heart. “I’m sorry,” he says, and Techno laughs in tune to the explosions, a harsh, biting sound that digs the agony further into his core.
They’re just words, he tries to remind himself, but Techno takes over anyway. “Right,” he chuckles dryly. “You’re sorry. Of course.” The man turns and leans down, pulling his bag up, and Tommy opens and closes his mouth, feeling sand slip between his brittle fingers. “Perhaps if you wanted a brother,” says Techno coldly, “you could have tried to be a brother yourself before a wanderer.”
“Techno,” Tommy murmurs in desperate reply, an ocean screaming in his head, beating at the walls and begging for a flood.
“Goodnight, Tommy,” says Techno, and with that, Tommy’s last living relative turns his back on him and disappears into the forest.
—
2
When Tommy next wakes up, the sky is still the darkest shade of night he’s ever seen it, and the wind still blows haphazardly into his frame, and his chest still aches with an engraving of rejection carved carefully into his skin.
He is not far from his brother, whose back is turned once again. Tommy’s eyes are blown wide open, watching him from behind a cluster of towering redwood trees. Techno is dipping clothes in the river, squeezing them tight to rinse them of dirt. A big white dog lays at his side, panting in the heat of summer. Tommy’s never seen him before. Maybe the dog is a better companion than he and Wilbur were— quiet, obedient, loyal.
Tommy is not quiet, obedient, loyal. Tommy is the opposite: piercing, defiant, dishonest. Tommy was the shape of something Wilbur wanted him to be mixed with something Techno wanted him to be mixed with the vision Phil had for him before he was even born. Now, though, he is misshapen, deformed, deconstructed. Now he is bent into the shape of a caretaker that quickly proved volatile once Tommy bit the hand that fed him one too many times.
The consistent companion of the wind is nice, thrumming through him rhythmically as he prepares himself. It ebbs away at the sting in his chest until a soft glimmer of hope is left there, floating around and dancing cheerfully inside him. Feeling bold, he takes one step, two steps, three steps past the edge of the forest—
And Techno sighs, sitting back on his heels.
“Tommy,” he says flatly, “you’ve never been good at hiding.”
This is true, so true that it squeezes his chest tightly, enveloping it in a familiar stinging ache (even though hurt, pain, is just a word). It becomes increasingly difficult to take more steps out from the foliage and approach his brother tentatively, feet dragging through the grass, but he does it anyway. “Why the hell are you washing your clothes in the middle of the night?” A firefly agrees with him a few feet away, lighting up as if on cue, and Tommy grins lopsidedly. “Fuckin’ weirdo.”
“Maybe I’d be washing yours, too, if you’d have done what was good for you,” says Techno snappishly, and Tommy’s face is wiped clean in an instant, a golden dagger piercing him once again. The sky's the surface, and Tommy’s at rock bottom of the ocean, grass cradling him sympathetically, because he will never reach the air above.
“Can I help?” he asks foolishly, and Techno turns around to look at him, finally, with that same scythe of a gaze that he used during the fireworks.
“You have no business here. Leave.”
“I want to help,” says Tommy hollowly. Techno can’t see him. Nobody can see him. The wind grows loud in his ears, rushing by like a river. Again, it blows straight through him, lifting his shirt at the edge, and then reaches Technoblade, gently adjusting the few misplaced hairs that hang down in his face. “Let me help. I’m good at doing chores.”
“You’re not good at many things,” Techno corrects. “Not good at hiding. Not good at doing your work. Not good at telling the truth.” He is sharp. He is bitter. He tastes like deathly poisonous berries. “I have no reason to trust you anymore.”
Tommy reaches for a response that will please him and finds nothing. “I don’t know,” he says finally, reluctantly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Wilbur’s— and Dad’s gone, and D—”
“And I’m gone,” Techno interrupts stiffly with a shake of his head. “Get out of here, Tommy.” The dog raises its sleepy head, narrowing its beady eyes at him as if to agree.
Tommy floats sideways on the wind. “Okay,” he says emptily. “Alright. Big T doesn’t wanna have a heart to heart. I get it.” The burning is back, spreading like wildfire through his chest, his limbs, his fingers, and climbing steadily up his throat, clawing its way out in a word vomit before he is lost to the wind that pulls at his edges: “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t mean for— well, Wilbur— he made it sound like it was going to be, you know, this big thing. That he wanted to— he wanted to move, wanted to explore,” Tommy rambles, and Techno glances back up, stares sharply, opens his mouth to interrupt.
Tommy cuts him off. He can’t afford the burning pain to get any worse. “And I believed him, and it was so good those first few years, and then I just— there was—” He chokes on his past, overflowing, and it spills and spins and twists into a crescendo, a gnawing agony grappling his throat and pouring into the open air. “So much happened. I didn’t know what to do. We had no money. There was a war—"
“Didn’t work out for you, then,” says Techno, and if Tommy tries, maybe, maybe there’s a slight dip in his voice, a gentle bump, just a little hitch. And then he finishes: “Leave.”
So Tommy does.
—
3
The third time. The third time it grows increasingly difficult to hide his shameful face.
The wind has died down, leaving behind stagnant humidity and smothering heat. It’s better in the evenings, though, and that is always when Tommy’s eyes open fully, when he exits the mindless task of floating along and allowing his brain to be carried by a different current than his body.
Soon, he is existing in the now. Soon, the coolness of dusk settles in his bones, and Tommy is hovering high up atop a tree branch, the texture of rough bark forcing itself into his head and reminding him of the roots that take such a strong hold on him.
Techno is far below in a clearing Tommy has not yet seen. There is a campfire, and a small table and a chair. The tent behind him is big enough to fit his bear-sized dog and probably the clothes he was washing last time. Maybe this is where he lives. Maybe it’s just a brief pause in a long journey. Tommy can’t tell.
Where is Technoblade going? he asks himself silently, guilt picking at his insides. If Techno is nomadic, then— is he still looking? Does he know?
The leaves rustle around them, and Techno pauses, pursing his lips. “Tommy,” he says, and it carries loudly and clearly, unmarred by wind or weather. With a gentle sigh, Tommy leans forward and then comes tumbling down from the branch halfway up the tree. The feeling of falling makes a pit in his stomach, and then just as soon as it began it is over, the landing thankfully leaving his legs none the wiser though a shock from the impact was expected.
“Hello!” Maybe there are leaves in his hair. Maybe if he smiles. Maybe if he makes believe. Techno will take him back sometime, right? The dark of the night won’t hide him forever, and maybe he’ll be honest then. Maybe pain really will just be a word. “What are you having for dinner?”
“Whatever it is, it’s not enough to share,” says Techno, deadpan, and Tommy crosses his arms in a falsetto that preaches of fake offense.
After all, hunger is just a word. “I didn’t want any,” he replies snobbily, nose turned up. Maybe if he puts on a character, maybe if he’s funny, maybe if he’s more honest. Quiet, obedient, loyal. Quiet, obedient, loyal.
“What are you doin’ here, Tommy,” Techno sighs heavily, and the silence, the obedience, the loyalty fade away into a cross stitch of redwood bark.
He can’t be honest, because a guess isn’t a truth. An assumption isn’t a fact. Tommy can’t tell Techno why he’s here. He can only repeat the rules that have been embedded into his brain over and over and over: pain is just a word. Obedience is required for happiness. Comfort is unnecessary in the face of threat. Tommy is a weapon with which to defeat his own iniquities
Wash your hands, they say. Wash your hands and wash out your mouth and apologize.
“I’m sorry,” he begins, wringing his hands and running the pads of his fingers over his callouses, scrapes, scratches, and the rest. “I am. I’m sorry, Techno. I don’t— I don’t know what to do to make it better.”
“You leave me alone,” Techno says finally, pushing his chair back and dropping his fork. “Must I repeat it over and over?” In the dark, dimly lit by the glow of embers and the floating ashes, Techno is framed in a flame that Tommy wishes to lie in forever.
It is a pinch, at first, until it grows into a pull, and then a yank, and then an excruciating spiral. Tommy sways on his feet, nothing but his own head making him dizzy this time, where the wind can’t extend its ruthless claws for his chest. Tommy opens and closes his mouth, and nothing comes out. Chest burning with a lack of oxygen and the harrowing leave me alone from the only brother left, Tommy descends.
Nobody sees him. Techno doesn’t see him. Phil can’t. Wilbur can’t. And his caretaker, oh, his mentor, his guide, his trainer, teacher, brother— Dream— Dream, who he left in the dust in a wild, biting attempt at autonomy.
And it worked, and he is free, except he is free in the way that the wind wraps around the trunk of a tree yet passes through a spider’s web. He is free in the way of bare footprints through thick sheets of snow and a lilypad floating on a lake. He is not free in the way of running through a field with the wind cradling his face. He is not free in hammering a stake for a tent into the ground and hitting his finger. He is not free in the way of smoked salmon over a roaring fire.
“Wilbur’s dead,” Tommy whispers, and the wind, even if it isn’t there, carries it to Techno’s ear nonetheless, pushing its way into his brain until his eyes go wide and his face loses color and his lips part.
“What?”
“Wilbur,” says Tommy, stronger, and his chest shatters, and his heart is ripped slowly to pieces where he stands as he chokes on the heavy burden of news, even though heavy is just a word. “Wilbur is dead. They drafted him. They took him. He went to war and he died and he didn’t come back and I didn’t and I didn’t have anywhere to go and this guy said I could work for him for money but then there was—” Tommy chokes trying to breathe— “less money and more work and less money and no money and more work and work and he was so— he started—”
“Tommy,” says Techno, standing abruptly. It looks like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. “Wilbur is dead,” he says bleakly, and Tommy is stabbed in the heart, impaled in the place that was already falling apart.
Techno didn’t care before. Techno only cares now that Wilbur is dead. Wilbur was always the useful one. “I’m going,” says Tommy, head filled with empty space, and Techno takes a step forward.
“Wilbur is dead. Prime, Tommy— the man taking care of you, what was his name?”
Dream, Tommy thinks. Dream. His mind fills with crimson, a pressure building behind his eyes. Pressure is just a word. Panic is just a word. Blood is just a word. His hands move haphazardly, begging to convey something that Techno will never understand, and his throat constricts. “I,” he says, pulse racing in his chest. “I.” The world spins. Techno doesn’t see him. Techno will never truly see him. Nobody will ever see him again.
“When was the last time you had a proper meal?” Techno says, something hiding behind his eyes that Tommy’s long since lost the ability to reach.
“Dream,” says Tommy. “His name was Dream.” Before Techno can say anything, Tommy is shaking his head rapidly. “Going, I’m going, I’m going,” he mumbles over and over, gripping at his freezing cold sleeves and stumbling backwards over his feet. “You said go. I am. I’m leaving. I’m sorry.”
“Tommy—”
A burst of shattering light and glass and crimson explodes in Tommy’s chest, his face twisting with the searing agony that rolls throughout his frame. He stumbles back, clutching translucent hands to his chest, and gasps for air, cradled by the deathly stillness of summer. The world tilts on his axis, darkening as Tommy wheels further and further back while his brother follows with wide eyes.
Techno leans forward, makes a final frantic swipe for him, and grabs nothing but thin air. Tommy is gone in an instant, even in the inertia of midnight.
—
+1
The sky is crystal clear.
A strong gust of wind nearly knocks Tommy to the ground when he opens his eyes. The ache in his chest has dulled but never left, not this time, and it follows him like a shadow wherever he goes. Now, he happens to sit atop a stack of crates carrying uniformly chopped logs, all layered up to the very top of each wooden box. Tommy kicks his legs, and the breeze pulls at his edges. The wind is a word. Lonely is a word. Blue is a word.
Blue. The sky is blue, bright blue instead of a midnight black blue, and Technoblade is chopping more logs methodically, just a few feet from where Tommy is seated. Just like every time, his back is turned. His draping pink hair is pulled into a tight bun and held with a pin, and the jewelry hanging from his ears dances back and forth with each swing of his axe, each loud thundering crack, each ripple of the muscles so defined across Techno’s upper back. The gold glints in the sun in a way Tommy hasn’t seen in years.
“How nice of you to join me,” Techno grunts, startling Tommy from his thoughts. It’s followed by another loud crack as Techno’s axe finally slices clean through another log, leaving behind splinters and sawdust in its wake.
Tommy exhales, and the sun shines right through him, glinting off his skin like the same gold adorning Techno’s body. “Bright and early,” he chirps, swinging his legs harder than before. He imagines the way the rough wood of the crate would rub against the backs of his shins, creating friction in an otherwise peaceful environment. “I wanted to see what you get up to in the mornings. Only a freak like you would get up so early, after all.”
Again, Techno grunts of exertion, hefting another log up onto the chopping block and setting his axe for another swing. “That’s no way to win a brother back,” he says, and it’s flinty, and walled, but still, Tommy smiles. Still, Tommy tilts his head back to the sky, and wishes for a vitality he’ll never reach.
Brother is just a word.
“Whatever. You said you didn’t want me back.”
“You ran away,” Techno accuses, not turning around, and Tommy grins wider.
“I’m good at that, huh?” He watches the way Techno’s shoulders untense, the way that his posture sets into the earth, the way that his heels dig further into the dirt beneath him. It’s familiar. It’s the missing piece that slowly floats to the unfinished puzzle in Tommy’s chest.
“Very.” Another grunt, this one harder, and the log before Techno is halfway to shreds. His older brother stops to wipe his forehead, exhaling. “It’s too bad you don’t live here anymore. I’d make you fetch me water.”
Home is just a word. “I’d say no, anyway,” Tommy bites back, sticking his tongue out at Techno’s back, and the wind threatens to unravel him. “You’re lazy. You can get your own.”
“Oh, I’m lazy,” Techno laughs incredulously, shaking his head. Tommy can tell by his posture that he’s looking up to the treetops. “You were the one I could never get to do his chores.”
“It was easy to pay off Wilbur,” Tommy exclaims easily, cracking his knuckles and thinking back to their brother’s face, scrunched in dismay upon the news that Tommy was fresh out of gold. Tommy smiles until he glances back to Techno, who has curled in slightly at the name. With a start, Tommy remembers that Techno has just learned of Wilbur’s demise. “Until I was in debt,” he says to smooth things over. “Then he got mad. And I was in debt a lot.”
Thin hands wrap around his throat, pressing until his vision goes dark and the crimson pours out of him in waves. Debt is just a word. Debt and death, both of them. They’re just words.
Again, Techno seems to breathe out an amused sigh, and it pulls Tommy back to the present. “You’re awfully persistent,” he says, and Tommy’s eyes light with the same aquamarine of the river, the same glint of the sun in the sky. “That’ll never change, then?”
Something unravels in Tommy’s chest, and a warmth joins the heat of pain that has resided there for eternities. “Of course not. I’m the great Tommy Innit. I’ve got to keep some defining characteristics about me.”
There is a silence as Techno gives in to labor, pulling his axe up again. The blade shines under the heat of summer, and Tommy averts his eyes, watching the grass dance again. With another swing and another echoing crack through the woods, Techno has split another log. With the end of the axe still stuck into the chopping block, Techno exhales. “Tell me about it,” he says, and Tommy pauses. “The war. The money. Where you’ve been."
This is good. Techno isn’t driving him away. Now all he has to do is figure out how to spin the story just how he likes it. “We lived in a nice city,” he begins, “called L’manberg.” Fireworks spin and burst in his mind, and blue paint is smeared all over his face, and his stomach is stuffed with tender chicken. His feet ache from all the walking. Things twist, then, and the fireworks are gunshots. The paint is crimson. His stomach is empty. His feet are bare and scratched to high hell. So are his arms. Hiding isn’t easy.
A breath helps him reset. “It was really nice. I used to steal from the lady with the bakery down the street. Strudels were fuckin’ amazing.” Techno makes a noise of complaint, and Tommy snickers, filled with a mischief he hasn’t been able to feel in years. “But anyway— we went broke because everyone went broke. You could pay your way out of the drafts, but it was thousands. We barely had hundreds.”
Another displeased grunt. “You didn’t think to leave for home,” Techno says stiffly, and Tommy presses his lips together.
“We were surrounded on all sides, smartass. Nobody came in and nobody left.” Nobody in, nobody out. L’manberg is reduced to a prison of its own design, Wilbur’s voice repeats in his head, and Tommy pushes the dim candlelight and the twang of a painfully sour note on the guitar out of his mind.
“Not even a letter,” Techno drawls, and Tommy’s heart clicks painfully, the desperation of a cornered proletariat returning to him.
“We tried,” he mutters carefully, quietly, gently. “I swear we did. We tried everything, Techno.” The air falls silent aside from the birdsong from the trees and the wild rustle of the brush surrounding them. Techno raises his axe, chops another log, and it’s like a lightning bolt through Tommy’s mind. Keep on. March on, soldier.
“They drafted him,” Tommy says hollowly. “And I wasn’t old enough, really. Fifteen isn’t old enough for war. And the asthma, too— they didn’t want me.” Techno doesn’t reply, and Tommy wonders if he’s always been too much of a runt for the approval of his elders. Wilbur really loved him, right? Techno really was his brother, right?
“They rounded the kids up,” Tommy says quietly. “Rehomed them and set them to work. We worked for ever, Techno, it was miserable,” he whines, swallowing with a dry throat and wincing at the prospects of scalding labor in the sweatshops. “Sewed clothes, smithed weapons, made medicine, whatever we had to do. They told us to do something, and we did it.”
“Finally did your chores then, eh?” Techno says finally, and Tommy suppresses a smile.
“Shut up.” Wilbur’s handwriting scrawls out Dear Tommy in his brain, and then the thin hands reach for it, grasp it, tear it to shreds and pitch it in the fire. “They sent us to live with anyone who could take us,” he goes on, voice finally softening. “People we didn’t know. People they said were nice.”
There’s a brief pause, where Tommy tries to collect himself, and Techno hums under his breath, a short, stilted noise that says I could have done better. Tommy wants to say something, wants to promise that he would have run if he could have, but self-doubt is just a word, and comfort is an unaffordable luxury.
“His name was Dream,” Tommy says, wavering in the wind. “He was my new brother. And they said— they said he’d love me as well as Wilbur did.”
It builds. It builds, and rises, and grasps at a crescendo beyond his comprehension. Tommy breathes, slowly sliding off of the crate of logs and to the ground. His feet barely hold him up. Breath is just a word. Lungs are just a concept. “And,” Tommy says, the world flitting in and out of existence around him, and Techno’s knuckles whiten as they tighten around the axe handle, and Tommy can’t breathe, he can’t focus, the knife digs easily through his chest and—
And Techno turns with a soft gaze that descends into horror when he realizes Tommy doesn’t need to breathe, anyway.
The light of the sun exposes Tommy for what he truly is. Quivering and cowardly, Tommy sinks to his knees in a glowing crumpled pile, staring up at Techno with the agony sitting pretty as a bird in his chest. Pressure builds throughout his entire body, rocketing through him at the speed of light, and Techno sees him, finally. Techno sees.
Tommy’s chest is soaked in blood, his shirt torn to shreds around his chest and back. It seeps down through his clothes and spatters across his skin, permanently engraved into his body. A gaping hole is carved into him, a cave where things should go and an empty hole where things should be.
“Tommy,” Techno whispers in horror, kneeling right along with him. He reaches forward in disbelief, and easily, his hand passes right through Tommy’s body, all the way through to the other side. He waves it around, and Tommy feels nothing. He reaches for his face, and Tommy tilts his head forward into Techno’s hand and feels nothing yet again.
“I’m sorry,” says Tommy quietly, pressing tears back into his body. “I couldn’t stop him, Techno.” Tommy is locked in a waltz with death, begging to let go, but his hands won’t uncurl from the grip they have in the ground. The earth pulls at him, begs him to stay, but all he wants is to reach the end.
“Theseus,” Techno says, pain and betrayal and anger and agony all flashing through his gaze in a terrifyingly fast sequence. “Theseus, what did he do to you?”
“His name is Dream,” says Tommy, reaching for Techno’s arm. His hands pass right through. “His name is Dream, and he taught me all I needed to know. Hunger and pain and exhaustion are temporary.” Techno grasps for him, and the pain heightens tenfold, Tommy crying out from the pressure. “I work, and I listen, and I don’t leave.”
Techno says nothing, lips pressed into a thin line. Tommy thinks he sees tears; he can’t be sure. He is cold, and translucent, and finally, Techno sees him for what he is. Techno knows that Tommy will never be the same.
“I called for you when I went,” Tommy whispers, edging closer and trying so desperately to lean into his brother’s chest. Techno swipes slowly through the air, and for a second, just a moment, it’s bliss. For a second, a warm hand cradles his face, the other around his back. Techno’s eyes shoot wide open, and the universe looks down on the two of them with a smile, and finally, pain is more than a word. Finally, pain is real. Tangible. Unmoving and present.
Tommy coughs, and the crimson dusts Techno’s face. “I’m going now,” he murmurs quietly, softly, gently, and slowly, his head lolls against Techno’s arm. Slowly, he is allowed the luxury of death. Gradually, the world’s grip on him leaves, and he is done. He is no longer frozen in time.
“Oh, Prime, Tommy,” Techno breathes, leaning forward and holding him tightly to his chest. “Theseus. Come on, it’s gonna be fine. You’re gonna be fine, little runt, I’ll— I have potions— you can stay. You can stay with me. Theseus, you— I’m sorry.”
Slowly, his brother’s voice fades to dust, and Tommy settles comfortably into the vast expanse of space, closing his eyes as the low rumble drags him into peace.
And he is free.