Chapter Text
There was the thrill of it at first, of course. Of disobeying, of defying, of daring to live. To give it its proper name, Shareholders of MIRA's Project Earth was one of the safest places in the galaxy that you could grow up. It was the first of its kind, but certainly not the last; a wild planet so thoroughly terraformed that it rivaled Old Earth's artwork in rural beauty. Back then it was considered an investment, not a waste of credits, to emulate ancient history.
Most people who were born there lived and died among the rolling hills. It was what the travel publications called a 'pastoral paradise', the über-rich and powerful kept at bay by the promise of hard graft and thick mud. It was also, in his opinion, terribly fucking boring.
So of course Tom signed up as soon as he could get away with it. MIRA didn't care how old you were, not really. The headhunters set eyes on his six foot three of gangle and started clamouring over him on the spot.
"You'll be running cargo for MIRA and its assets," one of the recruiters said lightly. "High-risk, high-reward work. A no-strings attached contract. Are you up for it, son?"
And the endearment rankled, but the offer did not.
He knew his parents wouldn't approve. They always said Toby was a good influence, and if he didn't think about it too hard he could pretend that by leaving SMPEarth he was only putting that to the test. Showed how much they knew, unironically calling him fuckin' Toby.
At least they had the right idea about Tubbo's morals. He wasn't a Project kid like Tom, but he was about as close to the middle of the pecking order as you could otherwise get. (Or Tom assumed from their talks, anyway. That wasn't the kind of thing you asked an internet friend.) Usually he was happy to be the sidekick in their online escapades, but sometimes....sometimes.
Sometimes Tubbo would pick up with nothing in the background but a reinforced porthole and the dark vastness of the void. Sometimes he would make jokes that Tom didn't understand, though he always laughed along. And in those sometimes was the promise of something more, which was what pushed him into signing up when he did. So really it was all Tubbo's fault, not his.
Yeah. Not his.
"You could come visit," he blurted out once on call, unwisely. The sun had been beating down across his shoulders all day, the friendly warmth of an atmosphere that was hard-pressed to actually burn him. That wasn't much of a comfort when it was still sweaty and tedious work. That afternoon he was digging up a patch of tupress that had been left to sprawl into the carrots, chewing stalks as he went. At least the monotonous rhythm of dig, strain, pull, turn was sometimes interrupted by the comm strapped to his wrist. Sure it was an older model, but he could make out his friend's tired face at his desk just fine.
For once, Tubbo was the one to let out a sound of latent derision. Their timezones usually overlapped, but Tom had a sneaking suspicion that he had been awake for at least two days of universal time. Ah well. Wasn't his business.
"No offence," Tubbo wheezed through chuckles, set off by Tom's drawn scowl, "but I think I'd get fuckin' ill! Do you even know what gravity's like on Project Earths for everyone else?" There was something he didn't like to think about.
For all their splendour, MIRA's farming planets weren't exactly normal. He knew, vaguely, that most children worked harder and worse jobs than him. Then again, he also knew that most of them weren't living in space. It was one of the very few topics neither of them ever even tried to broach.
"No," he said shortly, which he thought was a rather good argument considering his entire life had been spent on SMPEarth. The gravity was just a little less than Old Earth's, he knew from school, to encourage the crops to grow or something...
"Tommy." He said it with exasperation, but it was still nice. Everyone else called him Tom, or Thomas when things got real serious. Tommy meant he was with his best friend, and that everything was good. "How high can you jump?"
"I mean, to be real, only two or three metres-"
"Only two or three metres, my fucking skies."
"Alright, dickhead, no need to rub it in." He raised his eyebrows and spat out a stalk that had lost its flavour. Tubbo snorted.
"I'm not-"
An illuminating conversation followed. It turned out that there were more differences between SMPEarth and the rest of the known universe than he thought. Tom forgot most of it instantly, because that meant he wasn't wrong anymore. But the gravity thing stuck with him, somehow. How sad it must be, to be anchored to the ground so solidly.
"Maybe you should come visit me instead," Tubbo joked at one point, rolling his shoulders with stiff lassitude. The clock behind him glowed softly, unnervingly slow against the panelled module wall. It had only been an offhand comment. Tom's hands fell still on his shovel nonetheless. Maybe he fucking should.
After all, Tubbo was almost always working whilst they were on call. Scribbling down notes, fiddling with wires, sorting indescribable substances - adult work. Strange work.
"Tubbo, man, I mean this in the absolute least creepy way possible - where do you even live?" At that he paused mid-scrawl and wafted his hands back and forth, glancing at someone off-camera.
"Oh. Y'know, around."
Tom caught on quick after that.
"Right," he agreed, hefting another slimy bundle of tupress stems into his wheelbarrow and wiping his hands down his shorts. "And, uh, say I wanted to come visit you. Um. Around."
"Yeah!" Hands visibly trembling, Tubbo stamped a sheaf of paperwork and put down his pen. "I'm sure the MIRA people could get you a, um, a visa. My parents could probably...transfer your flight." He shrugged.
It was shitty, lame subterfuge. The deniability was hardly even plausible, considering Tubbo was still visibly under eighteen. But the message was clear. The next day he begged off collecting the eggs to barter in town, strolled down to the recruitment office and that was that.
For the next three weeks Tom worked harder than he had in his entire life. Both of his parents noticed and heaped on the praise in droves, which was hard to accept. Their appreciation felt like a sevit in his hands, feline and slippery and wholly undeserved. He much preferred dogs. On the last night he couldn't quite look them in the eye over tea. Hopefully they'd forgive him when the first pay packet came through.
The uniform was a good bonus. It wasn't combative by any means - sewn into the breast pocket was a personal call sign of choice and an ID number. He dithered briefly over Tom or Simons, or some combination thereof, and then shrugged and wheeled around to the recruiter. Now they had him signing papers, they weren't quite as interested in what he had to say. That was bureaucrats for you.
"It's fine if I just go by Tommy, innit?"
When he first saw TommyInnit embroidered onto his jumpsuit, he laughed. Hard. For a long time. Wasn't that just typical? He supposed it beat Tom. Tom would still be digging in the fields like some kind of silly baby bitch. Tommy was a brave, spacefaring man with nothing to lose.
With this comforting mantra ringing around his head, he trotted out of the changing room and towards the official. She was waiting patiently outside the recruitment office, comm set towards the spaceport. He synced with her navigation and followed with no misgivings at all. Mainly because Tommy never had misgivings. Ever.
He had even less misgivings skipping down the road beside her, thinking about gravity. When town disappeared over the horizon, he had never been less anxious in his entire life. He was delighted! It would be so great to never see this place again. Nothing could be better than leaving behind school and home and the fields and...he stopped thinking for a while.
On their arrival the hangar itself was hectic, a push and pull of bodies busied and faces pinched by the dull urgency of work. Once, as a child, he'd been dragged there to meet family friends all the way from Hypixel. Without their armour, Deo and Rudy had looked somehow smaller. But back then they had all been small, Tom - Tommy - supposed.
He felt small now. It was only exacerbated by the spacecraft they were led to, a hulking cargo ship nonetheless dwarfed by some of the commercial cruisers. Ugh. When his internal monologue got all drab and dreary like this, Tommy usually worked it out over videogames and junk food with Tubbo. Not anymore. Of course, he literally never made bad decisions. But maybe this split-second arrangement came close.
The MIRA lady patted her leg like he was a wayward dog, and the impotent rage he felt almost pushed away his worries. Fuckin' midsec snob, he bet she got a shuttle into work every day from some rich asshole pleasure planet. It then crossed his mind briefly that this was the middlemost sector of the galaxy, and that his home was owned almost exclusively by rich assholes. Oh, fucking whatever. Tommy set his jaw and followed her into the airlock.
Only two people were standing in the cargo bay. For a moment he felt almost disappointed; the prospect of new people to annoy far outweighed any nervousness over meeting them.
How exactly you were supposed to make brown coveralls look militaristic he didn't know, but the man on the left managed. His fringe was an ostentatious bubblegum pink, his bared teeth framed by two viciously enbowed fangs. Somehow, he was still the most professional person Tommy had ever seen.
Whilst he was effortlessly dominating a staring contest with the strange maybe-human man, the ship's captain stepped forward to shake his hand. Although he had to look up to meet Tommy's eyes, there was an easy authority in his grasp. There was a warm golden band around one of his fingers. Some cultural thing outside Tommy's frame of reference, which was a fancy term he'd learnt at school for 'doesn't matter at all ever'.
"You'll be on a a probationary assignment with these two," the MIRA rep interrupted, glancing at a clipboard. "Callsigns are Technoblade" - she gestured to the pink-haired man, who scrunched up his nose piggishly - "and Philza. Only three months. Most of the deliveries in the inner sectors are automatic. The point of the period is that you can become accustomed to the hardware alongside a skeleton crew of observers."
She said all of this with bored professionalism, by rote, so Tommy just shuffled and nodded importantly as if he knew it all already. At least it explained the scarcity of crewmates to piss off. But by the next sentence of her notes, the woman's eyes glittered with new interest. "Your...final position normally wouldn't be determined by now." Everybody in the bay caught the falter in her voice. Nobody pointed it out.
"Normally?" Philza echoed finally. His voice was rough and without affectation, if confused. A voice like his dad's, if younger and less tired. The MIRA official just shrugged her shoulders helplessly as Tommy drank in his gravitas.
"You've been assigned preemptively to one of next year's deepspace research modules, designation The Skeld. It-it would seem the Smith family have sent their regards."
Tommy's jaw dropped.
What the fuck, Tubbo?
His friend had some explaining to do, but it would have to wait. The woman smiled at him as one would an important politician's child, a limpid hybrid of calculation and condescension, and turned on her heel.
Neither of the contractors moved, except to smile tightly at her as she left. Tommy thought they looked cool as all shit. Both of them carried themselves with the careful wariness of people used to higher gravity, but they cut the intimidating figures of people used to running more than everyday cargo. Maybe they were terraformers, or wormhole explorers, or black hole wranglers! Looking at his new colleagues as the airlock hissed closed, Tommy couldn't hold back a blistering grin at the thought of all the adventures they were going to have.
This was going to be awesome.
"Fuck's sake, Phil," Technoblade said in a taut monotone, slumping against the wall. "Why is it always kids?"
Oh.
"Not your fault, kiddo," said Philza - Phil, Phil made more sense - before he could respond. He surged forward immediately as if to comfort Tommy and instead raised a thin eyebrow at the crimson Mira insignia on his lapel. His own was frayed and worn with age, the colour leached away to a bundle of beige fibres. "Techno's just pissed that they keep pretending they don't rope children into the most dangerous profession in the galaxy."
Kiddo. Kiddo! That was just rude. Half a foot of height between them, and Phil thought he was just a kid. At least all his teeth were the same size.
"I'm ready," Tommy scoffed. He meant it. "Do you think we don't have offworld training?"
"That's something," the captain said, heaving one of the pallets across the floor and into some kind of harness, but Techno just snorted again.
"Great. A Project native, that's just what we need. The first time he sees an asteroid he's going to be so busy ogling that we all crash into it." He stretched and adjusted the buckles on Phil's crate of cargo, and gave Tommy exactly one warning snarl when he tried to help. Ungrateful bastard.
As the men initiated the launch sequence, Tommy fumed and hovered until Phil also politely asked him to piss off. Too tired to riposte, he strapped himself into one of the seats lining the fuselage and finally let himself relax.
So this was it. No going back, not that he wanted to. Phil gave him a worried look and passed him a handheld tank of gas and air, which was the first Tommy had heard of his own hyperventilating until he was wheezing into the plastic. Fucking parental types. For a moment, he could pretend that the gentle taxi of the ship was just an expensive journey in a real life transport. It was soothing almost, the rumble of it, like how he imagined cars in foreign old movies to move.
And then it got louder. And louder. And the ship got higher. And faster. It wasn't that he was scared or anything, he just needed to slow his breathing. Right? Right? Tommy fumbled with the mask until his eyelids started drooping, and the last thing he heard was Techno laughing like a man gone mad.
The sick jolt of sudden gravity was enough to press Tommy into the leather and into wakefulness. He was just thinking how similar this was to school, just berating himself for the thought because why wouldn't it be just like school, idiot, you always do this, come on, when the floor fell out from under him.
Zero-g certainly wasn't just like school. It wasn't quite falling, wasn't quite floating, wasn't quite anything but a sense of indescribable loss. He did everything right, mind, as per fucking usual. One hand dexterous, then the other, unbuckle for extremity checks, a couple of sickening somersaults for good measure. No matter what he did, the ghostly feeling persisted in a way it never had on the simulators. Tommy struggled to keep the concern from his face, pressed his hands together until the heels went yellow, watched the blood rush pack into his palms.
"You didn't even throw up," Techno pointed out after a few minutes of watching him flounder in midair, clapping Tommy on the shoulder with a passable approximation of gentleness. It almost flung him into a bulkhead. "That's a dub in my book." And he was right.
Hurtling through the bustling thoroughfares of Sector MM-164807, pressed up against the window of a ship large enough to lose yourself in, Tommy still had a lot to comprehend.
Almost two years back home. Only three months of universal time, and then he'd get to see Toby in the flesh. Would it be worth it? He watched a tiny ship corkscrew lazily past the window, waiting for the gravity generator to kick in, and made up his mind there and then.
Anything at all would be worth it, to be up here.