Chapter Text
In Tommy Innit’s expert opinion, sneaking out the window of your apartment has to be the most stressful aspect of being a vigilante, easily beating running around on rooftops and battling villains and heroes.
For one, you’ve got to make sure that your one-of-a-kind, totally badass, bought in a clearance store outfit doesn’t snag on any rusty nails, or that your goggles and mask don’t get knocked off by a loose brick that just decided to fall for the sole purpose of ruining your day. Plus, you have to make sure that no one going outside on their balcony or peeking through their window sees you climbing out of your apartment and decides to inform the authorities, or worse, your absolutely clueless roommates.
And that’s not even touching upon the manoeuvring you have to do to shimmy out of the window and parkour either down to the ground or up to the roof.
Luckily, Tommy is well-versed in being a vigilante, having been engaging in the somewhat illegal (very illegal, being a vigilante is very illegal) activity for more than two years now, so it was a simple matter to scramble out the window and haul himself onto the roof of their dilapidated apartment building.
It isn’t any less nerve-wracking now than the first time he’d done it, though, but he’s gotten used to it.
He stretches once he gains his footing on the roof, working out the kinks in his back from the awkward position he’s forced to take to get out the window without using his powers and making himself nauseous before the night’s even begun.
His spine pops a bit and he winces, before jumping up and down to get rid of the anxiety that still lingers even after all this time. He picks a direction at random, he’s not stupid enough to stick to a set route like a fucking amateur, and he leaps off his roof towards the next in a practiced bound.
There are only two places Tommy ever really feels truly alive and this, this is one of them, leaping from rooftop to rooftop in the Sectors of L’Manburg. Here, the wind glides past him in an effortless stream, here, the lights and shadows flicker and change and he weaves between them, here, despite his power not rendering him capable of controlled flight, Tommy can master the skies with a bit of effort and calculation.
So yeah, maybe his best friends don’t exactly know about Tommy’s abilities, or his “night job,” and maybe he should just give it up before they find out and years of friendship comes crashing down over withheld secrets, but even though one of his happiest places is with them, the other lies on the rooftops as a vigilante, and he can’t give that up.
The sun will set, and Tommy will sneak out the window, and he’ll come back after midnight and lie bruises and burns away, but he thinks he’s doing the right thing. He’s helping people, and surely that’s enough.
When he finally works up the courage to tell them, he’s sure they’ll understand.
But they won’t find out tonight.
- - -
The night’s still young when Tommy hears the a scream, and he nearly falls off the roof with a whispered cry of “fuck!” when it happens. He whips around, trying to determine where it came from, and eventually pinpoints its origin to somewhere near the building he’s currently standing on.
Some asshole’s probably trying to mug somebody in an alleyway, he grumbles internally as he’s forced to use his power to get down, landing lightly and silently on the dirty street with a wave of very unwelcomed nausea. Honestly, do criminals have no originality at all? Like seriously, try robbing someone while bungee-jumping or scuba-diving, be creative for once. Villains are all absolute bitches, but at least they make things interesting.
Tommy creeps around the corner of the building, thankful for the busted lights and the inky darkness of his costume that allows him to come up behind the asshole without them noticing. His initial suspicion was correct; the asshole had blocked someone against the bricks walling off the back of the alleyway, and is currently holding a knife to their throat. Boring. They’re probably not even powered.
Tommy makes eye contact with the muggee and makes a shushing noise, holding a finger to his masked lips. The person’s eyes widen, but other than that they don’t make a sound. They look marginally richer than the typical person in Sector Two, so they were probably used to muggings. Sucks for them, but they should try dressing less like a wrong’un from the Ring if they wanted to not get cornered in an alleyway.
He steps closer to the asshole, one step, than another, until he’s almost on top of them. He’d like to at least make it a couple hours before throwing up from the backlash of his power, so instead of dialling their gravity down to zero and drop-kicking them into the air, he just pulls back a fist and punches them in the head.
They go down immediately. Pathetic, absolutely pathetic. They would be a disgrace to criminals everywhere, if most non-villain criminals weren’t as incompetent as them.
The no-longer-muggee bids him a quick “thank you” before dashing off. Hopefully they won’t call the heroes on him like that one person a few weeks back.
Tommy pulls the duct tape out of a pocket in his jeans and sets about hog-tying the asshole, making sure to throw the knife they were using in the nearby dumpster so that they don’t cut themself free before the police can arrive and take credit for Tommy’s hard work. Yeah, it bothers him that the L’Manburg Defence Association spits on vigilantes then relies on them for bits of clout, and sure, sometimes he wishes that the name “Black Hole” was known in more places than the Sectors he patrols, but it is what it is.
Besides, if he’d wanted fame more than he’d wanted to actually help back when he was fourteen, he would’ve applied to be a hero rather than become an illegal vigilante. More people would have known him in that alternate timeline, and he’d actually get credit for what he did, but then the people in L’Manburg’s Sectors would’ve had one less person to help fight crime and the occasional monster that made its way past the walls, so. He can’t say he regrets what he chose.
He finishes tying up the criminal, and pulls out a permanent marker to write “MUGGER” in big letters on their forehead so the cops know what to arrest them for. He also doodles a crude drawing of a dick on their cheek, just for good measure, and also as payment for wasting his time with their lack of creativity.
Tommy steps back, nods, pats himself on the back, then grabs the nearest brick sticking out of the building and starts to haul himself back up onto the rooftops.
The rest of his patrol passes by in the same way; he’ll hear a commotion, jump down, knock out an asshole, tie them up, and be back on his merry way. About halfway through the night he passes by a friend of his, Wilbur, or rather, Ghost when he’s in costume, absolutely wrecking some robbers with his signature flagpole/baton. Wil waves to him, and Tommy waves back, but the brunette seems to have the robbers handled so he moves along. He circles through Sector Two, spends an hour or two in Sector Three (with perhaps a bit of extra attention directed at the area around his apartment building), makes the rounds in Sector Four, and is feeling pretty good as he heads back to his apartment, relishing in the cool air as he leaps from building to building. There weren’t any heroes or villains around, and no monsters managed to break through the walls, so his night had been pretty easy.
Of course, just as Tommy finishes that thought, he sees a flash of black and white out of the corner of his eye. He whips around, just in time to catch an enderman hybrid with glowing purple eyes by the wrists before the hybrid claws his eyes out. He lowers the gravity affecting his attacker and tosses him off the roof, where he vanishes before even beginning to fall.
Tommy turns his gaze from the dissipating purple particles to narrow his eyes at the person who sent the hybrid towards him, already knowing who it is, because of-fucking-course.
Enderwalk, a fairly new hero who works mostly with the Dream Team as a sidekick of sorts. An enderman hybrid, one of only two (known) monster hybrids to work as heroes. His power makes him super fucking annoying to fight, being able to make duplicates of himself, identical in all but the glowing purple eyes to his red and green eyes.
Tommy absolutely despises him. He’s the one hero that ever bothers coming into the Sectors, and half the time he’s here he spends it chasing down Tommy or some other vigilante, case in point, right now. It certainly doesn’t help that the asshole’s hero suit is literally a suit, complete with a crisp red tie and allium stuck in the lapel, like he’s trying to make fun of the ninety percent of the Sectors’ residents below the poverty line. Tommy isn’t a dramatic fucker like Wilbur or Techno, but he feels no shame in calling Enderwalk his nemesis, one of two people he doesn’t think he’d be too broken up about actually killing.
“Hello, Black Hole,” Enderwalk says in that stupid, artificially deepened voice of his. “Care to turn yourself in without a fight?” He actually sounds sort of tired. Bitch. If he’s so tired he can bother someone else. Tommy can’t be too late getting home; he has to get back home and through the window before Tubbo and Ranboo come home from their jobs and question why he isn’t sleeping in his room. He doesn’t feel like explaining his vigilantism to them tonight.
“In your dreams, bitch!” Tommy screams, wincing as the feedback from his less-than-adequate voice modifier screeches across the rooftop. But then he’s lunging, ignoring the feeling of nausea as he turns up Enderwalk’s gravity so he can barely lift a foot to move.
He manages to land a single punch before Enderwalk creates a couple of clones in a shower of purple particles, and these Enderwalks have no trouble ripping him away from the original and pinning him to the ground.
Tommy wrenches his control away from the gravity affecting the original Enderwalk and focuses his power on the clones attempting to cuff him with power suppressors, making them lighter than the lightest feather and easy as breathing to push off.
He barely gets enough time to appreciate the sight of two Ender-balloons before the original Enderwalk is charging at him, kicking out at his chest. Tommy manages to dodge and swing another hit at the hero, who catches it and throws him to the ground.
Tommy pops back up to his feet, and the fight continues in a flurry of jabs and kicks, some hits landing but most missing, the two enemies far too familiar with each other to really get a leg up on the other.
The vigilante growls, ducking under another attempt from Enderwalk to claw his mask off. He’d love nothing more right now than to fuck up the hero’s gravity until he can barely move and boot him off the roof, but his power is still focused on the duplicates. Enderwalk hasn’t gotten rid of them yet, and although they can’t really move from where they’re floating in midair, the second Tommy releases his hold on their gravity, they’re gonna pounce. Enderwalk lands a good kick to Tommy’s gut, and he stumbles back, wheezing through his mask.
“Fuck off, would ya?” he coughs out as he dodges yet another attempt from the hero to grab his wrists.
“If you weren’t a vigilante, I would gladly do so,” the hero says curtly, jumping over Tommy’s leg as he swings it out.
“So if I decided to retire right now, you’d get out of my face for once?” He manages to hit Enderwalk in the side of his mask, internally cheering when he hears a small crack and sees a fracture appear in the side of the half-and-half theatre mask Enderwalk wears, the black and white sides of it matching up to his hair.
Enderwalk’s hair is another perfectly logical reason to hate him. It’s exactly the same as Ranboo’s, and since Ranboo had it before Enderwalk even debuted, that means the hero copied him somehow; he probably saw the civilian somewhere on the street and stole the look. Fucking asshole. I guess it’s not just criminals that have no originality.
“Sorry, no,” Enderwalk answers, not sounding very sorry at all. In fact, he sounds rather smug. Dick. “Not committing any more crimes doesn’t make up for the crimes you’ve already committed.”
“Dammit. You wouldn’t even make an exception for little old me? And here I thought we were bonding.”
“Black Hole, your list of crimes includes, but is by no means limited to: property damage, assault, resisting arrest, tampering with evidence, vigilantism, and disobeying direct orders from a hero. Even if we were quote-unquote ‘bonding’, I would still be under legal and moral obligation to arrest you.”
Wow! Another reason to hate Enderwalk has added itself to the list! Being completely and utterly boring while bantering!
“Jeez. Hard-ass, much?”
Enderwalk scoffs, but he doesn’t falter in his side of the fight. Which is a bit of a problem, because Tommy is definitely getting tired. The nausea from using his power has only been getting worse the longer he continues to keep his hold on the duplicates’ gravity. He needs to go, now, before he’s forced to let them go or collapse.
Which would be easy, if Enderwalk was as tired as he is, but he doesn’t seem to be. While Tommy’s punches are less and less controlled, Enderwalk’s are hitting him dead-on, as he’s too tired to dodge as fast. If Enderwalk had shown up earlier in the night, Tommy would’ve been fine, probably good enough to make the hero retreat, but as of right now the vigilante isn’t doing too well, and Enderwalk knows it. Tommy might not be able to see his expression under the mask, but the self-satisfied air radiating from the hero is practically tangible.
He’s still debating what to do when something in the always-present ambient noise of the city changes. Tommy instinctively pauses to listen to it, and in front of him, so does Enderwalk.
He tunes into the background noise, trying to figure out what’s different. The cars are normal, as are the whispers of conversation and the groaning and shrieking of the monsters outside the walls.
Tommy almost turns back to continue the fight, when he hears it. A faint buzzing, like a thousand bees clustered together. His eyes widen and he dives to the left, just before a bomb appears over the rooftop and fucking demolishes where he was just standing, singeing Enderwalk just a bit.
The vigilante scrambles back, keeping his eyes on where the bomb came up, watching for—yep. A person leaps onto the rooftop, aided by the almost comical amount of bees and other flying insects surrounding him. A villain, with the mask of a honeybee and an outfit worse than Ranboo’s Hawaiian shirts.
Apitoxin. Because Tommy’s day could not possibly get any worse. Normally he’d jump at the chance to “accidentally” murder his other worst enemy, but right now he’s so nauseus the stars are spinning and Enderwalk has just beat the shit out of him, so, y’know. He feels justified in not shrieking in delight.
“Hello, boys!” Apitoxin crows, tossing a bomb up and down in one hand while holding out the other for an oversized bee to crawl onto. “Mind if I join?” And then he’s tossing the bomb at them and Tommy’s forced to scramble out of the way to not get killed.
Enderwalk ignores Tommy and lunges at Apitoxin, who summons a cloud of various bugs to fly in his face. The hero and the villain start going at each other, both apparently completely forgetting about Tommy, which, fucking rude of them. Probably think I’m unconscious or some shit.
He stands up and makes to join in the fight, until his attention is drawn to the many bruises littering his body, and changes his mind. He hates running away, but there’s no way he can stand up to Enderwalk and Apitoxin tonight.
The Enderwalk duplicates seem to be focused not on him, but on the original and the villain, so he lets go of their gravity, sighing in relief as the sickening knot in his stomach goes away somewhat. One of the duplicates turns to look at him, but Tommy jumps off the rooftop and onto another before he can give chase, and the duplicates soon join in the fight.
Tommy's already gone before he can see how Apitoxin reacts, sprinting across the rooftops towards his apartment. Normally he’d stop by Phil’s to get some healing so Tubbo and Ranboo don’t get too suspicious, but he’s already been out late enough and he wants to make it home before they do.
He clambers through the open window and drops onto the floor, swearing when his injuries are aggravated and flare up in a burst of pain. He stumbles into the living room/kitchen and collapses onto the couch, pulling some ice from the freezer as he goes.
Tommy only has to wait about half an hour before Ranboo comes in the door, looking dead on his feet and nursing a nasty burn on his arm and several cuts and bruises on his face and body.
“Prime, dude, are you okay?” Tommy asks, the dripping mess of ice hitting the floor as he stands up to catch his best friend before he falls and guides him over to the couch. “What happened?”
“I got mugged on my way home from the Association,” Ranboo says, gratefully taking the fresh ice Tommy offers and putting it on the worst bruise on his face. Thankfully, Tommy’s back is turned towards Ranboo when he winces. He doesn’t exactly like the fact that Ranboo works at the place where assholes like Enderwalk work, but it’s Ranboo’s choice, not his, so he just has to suck it up.
“Crime in the Sectors is terrible,” Tommy grumbles instead of voicing his thoughts, gently cleaning one of the cuts on Ranboo’s arm, carefully avoiding the burn. Tubbo always deals with the burns, whether incurred through Tommy’s vigilantism or Tubbo and Ranboo’s frequent muggings (Tommy has no idea what makes those two such crime magnets), having learned to treat them after the accident at his job a couple years ago that led to the scarring of half his face and neck.
“It’s getting better, though,” Ranboo says weakly, flinching when Tommy accidentally pokes something a little too hard. “The heroes are really working hard.”
Tommy doesn’t bother arguing with Ranboo on the whole ‘heroes’ thing. It never ends well, especially when Tubbo's around, and no one’s opinion ever changes. He just ices Ranboo’s bruises, protests when Ranboo sees his own and scolds him for not speaking up, and waits for Tubbo to come home and deal with the burn.
It doesn’t take too long until the goat hybrid himself is busting open the door, looking inordinately pleased with himself, at least until he sees the state of Ranboo and Tommy and rushes over.
“Are you guys okay?” he asks worriedly, his hands flitting over them like a bee over a cluster of flowers, jumping from the products of Tommy’s vigilantism and proof of the reason he needs to keep doing it littered on Ranboo. Tubbo’s eyes catch on the burn and he hisses, before going over to the kitchen and pulling out the rest of the medical supplies.
“We both got mugged,” Ranboo says sheepishly.
Tubbo looks up from where he’s applying a cool washcloth to Ranboo’s skin with a dark look in his eye. “I swear to Prime that I will kill whoever did this to you,” he growls, and something in his tone conveys dead seriousness.
Ranboo laughs it off, albeit nervously, and Tommy forces himself to laugh alongside him. Tubbo looks a bit annoyed at the reaction but he doesn’t say anything, continuing to focus on Ranboo’s burn.
Although Tommy doesn’t mean to, his mind conjures an image of Tubbo, righteously angry, terrifying-when-he-wants-to-be, powerless Tubbo facing down Apitoxin and Enderwalk, and quickly shakes the image away.
Tubbo won’t ever have to do that, because he will never find out about Tommy’s vigilantism.
Tommy will destroy Enderwalk and Apitoxin, and he will fight tooth and nail to make the Sectors of L’Manburg a safe place for Ranboo and Tubbo to live.
Because Ranboo and Tubbo deserve so, so much better than a world with Enderwalk and Apitoxin in it.