Chapter Text
Technoblade was a violent being by nature. It was just some inherent part of him that had always been there.
Throughout his childhood, there had been urges here and there, though they were never anything he couldn’t handle. Any steam that couldn’t be blown off by hacking away at training dummies in the backyard with swords, would be talked out with Wilbur or Phil.
As he grew older and his shapeshifter blood became apparent, his instincts became harder to control. He had become a risk to those he loved, constantly on the edge of snapping at someone if they got a little too rough.
So, when the desire for blood became too strong, he left.
It had been difficult for his little rag-tag family. Phil, though he loved them, was often far too busy for his own good, which left mostly him and Wilbur to take on the task of keeping Tommy in check.
Wilbur had been very understanding, though Techno knew that tears had been shed when he thought he wasn’t looking. He was relieved that Wilbur had taken it so well- it had taken just a bit of the guilt off his shoulders.
Tommy had been a different story.
Tommy had cried for hours, never seeming to calm down no matter how long Wilbur and Techno sat with him. It probably hadn’t helped that he wasn’t let in on exactly why Techno was leaving. It hurt him to see Tommy like that, even more so knowing he was the cause.
Though it weighed on him, he knew it was necessary. He’d much rather deal with tears and hurt feelings then the aftermath of snapping at his brothers, the consequences of which he was certain would be dire.
So, he had bid his brothers adieu, and set off to wander the Servers, looking for a place to finally fulfill his bloodthirsty nature.
After only a few weeks time, he’d come across a Server that didn’t quite adhere to the world’s laws of death, allowing one to respawn countless times; allowing for what normally would be considered a horrible bloodbath, to turn into friendly competition.
He stayed in the Server for a number of years, encouraged as the urges were becoming easier to control once again. So long as he had an outlet, he could focus on other things in his spare time. For a while, he was content, but he soon found a catch.
Technoblade hadn’t always been subject to the cacophony of voices in his head.
They’d shown up soon after he’d regularly begun to participate in competitions on the Server. At first, there had only been a few, just quiet murmurs he could pass off as the wind.
The longer he stayed, the larger the number grew, until there were thousands of voices ringing out in his mind at the worst of times.
“Blood for the Blood God!” They’d crow as he mercilessly tore through opponent after opponent, never seeming to tire.
Even after all these years, Techno could never figure out whether he himself was the blood god, or if it was something else entirely.
Though they had been concerning at first, Techno eventually grew accustomed to them. They usually were quiet, just an unintelligible hum in the back of his mind. Sometimes it felt as though they weren’t there at all.
When they did show up, it always ended up in one of two ways for him- annoyance, accompanied by a pounding headache, or a massacre.
They’d been there during the Manberg Festival, a night Techno regretted ever happened. They had been conflicted, the many shouts desperate for blood clashing with the ones that aligned with his own hesitance to kill Tubbo. He’d been overwhelmed, and eventually the side riddled with bloodlust was appeased. He rarely could deny them when there were so, so many of them.
They’d been there during the War of the 16th too. Anguished cries for the loss of his brother and the outrage at having been used for materials, then discarded like a broken tool, was overbearing. He’d given the voices exactly what they had wanted, because at the time, he had wanted it too.
---
One day, they were there as he made his way back to his secret home in the tundra, seemingly hellbent on pissing him off as he trudged through the howling wind.
Normally he’d humor them a bit, cracking a few dry jokes to combat their relentless taunting and teasing, but with the worsening winter weather it was becoming harder to easily navigate the bleak, rolling hills of white. The constant laughter and shouts of “Technolost!”, “so-and-so is at your base!” and the quiet chanting of the letter E was grating on his nerves.
He was doing his best to ignore them when one voice suddenly cut through the others:
‘What’s that light, there in the distance?” In the second it took Techno to process what was said, most of the other voices began to chime in, the chatter ringing in his mind as they all reiterated the same thing to him at once, copying one another like lemmings.
“Huh? What light-?” He saw it, just on the horizon, flickering through the fog. With a short huff, he pulled his cloak tighter around him, and set off at a jog.
Maybe it was Phil? No that wouldn’t make sense, Phil never came from that direction.
As he came closer, breaths turning to mist in the air, he could begin to make out a form laying on the ground, the torch next to them barely enough to light up their face.
He drew in a sharp breath, dropping to his knees beside them. With a gloved hand, he gently brushed the blond hair out of their face and- yep, that was undoubtedly his poor, idiot brother, dying out in the snow.
Tommy’s face was paler than Techno had ever seen it. Even with what had to be at least a few layers on him, he looked too thin to be considered healthy; He had no gloves, no boots, nothing to even partially prepare him for the incredibly harsh tundra. The only thing that suggested even a shred of life was left in him was the shallow rise and fall of his chest.
A brief bolt of panic shocked Tehcno into action. The voices rose in volume as his muttered what the fuck was thrown to the wind. He shrugged off his cloak, side eyeing what he determined to be Tommy’s backpack on the ground next to him. He threw his coat over him and grabbed the backpack before picking Tommy up as carefully as he could manage.
Waves of panicked murmurs of 'Tommy!' overwhelmed most of Techno’s thoughts as he began to run back to his home. He heaved a sigh when the cabin came into view, warm lights rather inviting at the moment.
After clearing the stairs two at a time, he burst through the door, not even bothering to stomp the snow off his boots. As he stood in the entryway, trying to calmly decide what his next move was, the voices all tried to shout different advice to him at once. He groaned in frustration as he gently set Tommy down in the chair by the fireplace, the smoldering remains of the morning's fire not doing much to help him.
“Just shut up for a second, will ya?” He snarled through clenched teeth. To his great surprise, they obeyed, volume shrinking to quiet whispers that he could almost completely ignore.
He ran a hand through his hair with a sigh, fingers snagging on the tangles that unfortunately came with seasonally thicker hair. He spared a glance at Tommy from the corner of his eye; still pale, still wet, but still breathing.
Techno shifted to open one of his chests, pulling out an armful of spare blankets and pillows. He tossed them on the floor in front of the fireplace before grabbing a few split logs from the pile just outside the door and adding them to the smoldering pile of charcoal in the hearth. His eyebrows knit together as he unsheathed his sword to prod at the hot ashes, encouraging them to catch on the new fuel.
How the hell had Tommy managed to even come close to his base? Phil had told him that he’d been exiled, but Techno didn’t think he’d be as far out as he was.
The fire caught and slowly began to creep over the dry wood. Techno turned his attention to Tommy, still wrapped up in his cloak.
Tommy's hair was matted and dirty, his face was smudged with mud, with little scrapes littering his cheeks and dark circles under his eyes. A nasty, festering wound stood out on his jawline.
Techno had never seen Tommy so exhausted; not during his first exile, not after the festival, not even after the War of the 16th. It made his chest tighten, a spark of unbidden anger settling in his bones.
He took a deep breath, and began going through the motions of patching him up, lucky that after 4 years in the arctic, he was still well versed in treating hypothermia.
He made quick work of shucking away Tommy's wet, freezing clothes, replacing them with some of his old cold weather garments. His limbs had been checked for frostbite, and while they might blister, Techno was fairly certain nothing would be permanent. Then, he dragged a few sleeping mats out of another chest and stacked them in front of the fireplace.
He took a minute to arrange the blankets and pillows into what could only be described as a nest, before gently moving Tommy from the chair to the middle of it.
Once he was content with the positions of the blankets around his brother, Techno fell back in the chair with a huff, slouching down a bit.
With nothing else to do for the day but wait for Tommy to wake up, he grabbed one of the books he'd gotten from the nearby village, mindlessly skimming the pages as his thoughts wandered elsewhere.
When Tommy became conscious enough to hold a conversation, they would have to have an... important talk. One that most certainly would require preparing on his part.
---
The first time Tommy woke up, he didn’t truly wake up. He felt as though someone had poured honey into his brain, struggling to understand why he had woken up at all; though his eyes remained closed, he could tell he was not where he was when he passed out.
He was terribly cold, still shivering slightly, but he was dry and could hear the crackling of a fire instead of the howling wind from before. He could feel the heavy, comforting weight of blankets atop him and pillows beneath his head, a far cry from the snow he remembered. Instead of opening his eyes, he just shifted slightly, curling in on himself a bit more and relaxing his sore muscles. He took a deep breath, willing himself to stop shaking, not yet ready to deal with what had happened.
For a moment, he laid still, gently drifting between consciousness and unconsciousness, content to stay quiet. At the sound of a quiet cough, his eyes flicked open, too tired to acknowledge the mild panic he felt.
Ah, so that's where he was.