Chapter Text
You get out of bed so fast, the worn quilt knots itself around you, and you nearly get cut off at the knees, but Phil reaches out two steadying hands to stop you from falling. As soon as you’ve even sort of regained your balance, you immediately start to move again, frantically trying to extricate yourself from your bed clothing trap with shaking hands.
“We have to help him, Phil. I have to get to him. We have to go now. He told me to stay here. He would have left me here all alone. I never would have known. Phil, they’re going to kill him. They’re going to-“
He shakes you with the two strong hands that haven’t left their pinning points on your shoulders, “Y/n,” He says slowly, “I need you to take a deep breath for me.”
Your resounding breaths are shallow and anxious, but you do your best to do as Phil instructs, looking him in the eyes as you shake.
As your heart rate begins to return to a semi-normal pace, Philza nods calmly, “Why don’t you get back in that bed, y/n?”
You stare at him like he’s absolutely crazy. You aren’t sure he isn’t. There’s no way you heard him correctly, “What? No. Phil, we have to go help Techno. We have to go.”
Philza shakes his head sadly, “What else is there to do now?”
“Are you kidding? You’re just going to give up on him like that?”
Phil’s quiet, pained, a grimace carved between his lips. His eyes flash pointedly to where Ghostbur obliviously picks at the hidden stash of Techno’s surplus jewelry that he’d poked his way into. You let the silence eat at him for so long that Ghostbur looks up into the starched noiselessness of the tiny room and smiles at the two of you.
“What’s up?” He asks, cheerfully oblivious anf having found everybody looking at him.
It feels eerily like a sword through the chest, and Philza looks quickly back at you. With a serious sadness in his eyes, he nods.
“Come on then.”
“Where are we going?” Ghostbur asks excitedly. You feel contrastingly nauseous. Phil shuffles expertly down the ladder out of the attic, and you follow swiftly after. Ghostbur isn’t far behind, babbling the entire time.
“You gotta be quiet again, Ghostbur,” Phil mumbles gravely, one gloved hand wrapped around the handle to the large, wooden front door you’ve come to know so well, “Can you do that for me, buddy?”
“Huh?” Ghostbur babbles, turning away from Edward with a sweetly slacked jaw, “Oh, yeah. Mum’s the word, Phil. I can do it.”
Phil looks at you seriously before throwing the door open and trudging determinedly into the snow outside.
At the last second, you turn and grab at the heavy cerulean cloak you’d thrown at Techno’s anvil the night before through your red vision, draping the familiar thing over your shoulders like a safety blanket. Ghostbur doesn’t even notice, merely murmurs a goodbye to Techno’s Enderman friend and skips after you.
All three of you cluster on the barely-shaded front stoop, you grab at the warm cloak around your shoulders as Phil reaches out and shuts the door tightly behind you.
The sky, you can’t help but notice, is drearily gray despite the early morning. It feels like an omen, a reverse smoke screen amid the gray clouds.
“Come on then,” Phil says, and waves in the direction of the woods, “I know a short cut.”
You follow without a word, your heart in your throat.
The route is cold and hard, snow piled up nearly to your knees in some parts, but your pace is faster than it’d normally be regardless of the conditions. At dusk, you can look out between the snow-dusted trees and see L’Manburg in the distance on the other side of the ocean. On the middle ground floats the shadow of four barely moving boats. You swear you can make out the shape of Techno’s wispy hair amid the mass. You gesture at Ghostbur and pick up the pace.
The Butcher Army, as Phil calls them, just barely beats you to L’Manburg.
You dart between the houses, dodging between the shadows of the heavy oak pillars built up from the rocky crater, and you climb into your house from the back window, which requires minimum trapezerie and the most discretion. You race upstairs and throw open your balcony doors just as Techno is being lead into the execution chamber. The sight makes you nauseous enough to gag, reaching a white-knuckled hand out to steady yourself against the balcony railing.
“Do you know what you’re being charged with, Technoblade?” Tubbo asks, two and a half stories below you, with his chest puffed up theatrically and the stupid bloody apron tied savagely around his waist.
“Charged with a bunch of bullshit, I know that for sure,” Techno sneers. It makes your stomach do somersaults and triple vaults.
Tubbo inhales sharply, “Technoblade, you’re charged today with multiple counts of terrorism for the destruction of Old L’Manburg. You destroyed everything that made our country special, and you’re a dangerous threat to our independence.”
Technoblade doesn’t give any indication that he’s listening or taking Tubbo seriously at all, scowling to himself.
“I thought you were better than this, Tubbo. Whatever happened to big law, eh? No more trials? No more juries? I could’ve told you this was gonna happen. You call me a terrorist, but it’s your government that will make society burn.”
Your stomach is filled with acid and fear, roiling as you grip the railing closest to you. Your knuckles go white, and your stomach drops.
“I’m sorry,” Tubbo says, and the words ring through your ears like a cursed gong, nightmarish and echoey and so, so far away, “But I’m not who you thought I was. I’m just- I’m doing my job.”
And with that, the anvil starts to drop.
The grey, heavy thing, you think somewhere in the back of your mind as it drops, seemingly in slow motion, is the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. You’ll never look at an anvil the same way again.
It drops with a crack- the sound of a bone breaking maybe, or a strongman’s resolution snapping in two- before a glittery-gold flash bang entirely wipes Techno’s cage from your view. Somebody calls out his name, and you feel yourself drop.
For as far as you’ve come, as much as you’ve learned about yourself, grown, the distance you’ve traveled, in that instance, when you’re faced with the death of the man you’ve been rapidly falling in love with, your body fails you.
You feel your body crash to the floor of your shakey, wooden balcony. It feels like somebody else’s body, somebody else’s almost-beautiful life being torn to shreds, on another plane of existence, another universe. But on this timeline, you hear a distantly familiar voice call out your lover’s name, and everything fades to black.
When you wake up, it’s because you’re being shook back to consciousness.
It’s such a cliche, you’re almost convinced you’re still asleep, dreaming unpleasantly about the sound the anvil made when it crashed.
When the voice of a dead man accompanies the shaking, you become positive you’re still dreaming.
Technoblade continues to shake your sleeping body, desperately repeating your name in a hushed entreaty, letting the word eat him alive.
You let yourself believe, for just a moment, that it’s not a dream. It’s really him. Maybe it’d all been a bad dream, or an elaborate ruse with a couple shockingly skillful body doubles. You’re washed in a sense of calm, of relief, letting yourself believe it’s really him.
Eventually, you dare to open your eyes, blinking up into your semi-dark room. You’re as surprised as you are relieved when you discover he’s not just a figment of your imagination. Technoblade’s in your room, standing over you, your name on his tongue like a prayer and a curse and the sweetest sound you’ve ever heard. Sweet relief.
And then it hits you, like one, big, poorly-done jump cut. Technoblade is here. In your room. In L’Manburg. All the anxieties of consciousness flood back, and you sit up quickly, the breath knocked out of you as if you’d made a nasty fall. It’s like your muscles turn to bone, body tense.
“You can’t be here,” You hiss at him, “Please, Techno. They’ll find you.”
He doesn’t listen to you. Of course. When has Technoblade ever listened? Especially when it comes to your well-being.
He is, admittedly, just as concerned about your general alive-ness as you are for his- though, in your own defense, there isn’t a manic militia of teenagers calling themselves butchers and running around with a price on your head. No, you merely passed out from shock. That’s all.
“I thought I told you to stay in our room.” He says, voice raspy.
The image of the bloody anvil dropping on him comes to mind, and you’re reminded again of how absolutely unsure you are of how he’s in front of you right then in that moment. You’d watched him die, eclipsed in a golden fog and bloody spray.
Even through the blood-thumping pressure cooker that is your brain and foggy memory, and the heart that’s catapulted up between your ears, you don’t miss the way he calls it “our room”.
You reach a firm hand up to grab his wrist.
This serves to both prove to you that he exists- he’s alive and here and not pressed flat with an anvil-shaped brand marking his beautiful pink skin- but also pulls whatever was left dwindling of his attention back down to where you lay on your back in bed.
Which, now that you think about it, you aren’t at all sure how you got here. The last thing you remember was being on your balcony, just out of view, just safe enough to watch from a distance as his life was unceremoniously ended. Your grip tightens around his wrist, “You can’t be here, Techno. They’ll find you. They’ll kill you. I can’t let that happen. Please, you have to leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you.”
For the first time, you realize there’s a tear held up in his eye, glassy and tight and doing its damnedest not to reveal itself to you.
“I made it back,” He says, chokes the words out through miserable, gritted teeth, “I made it all the way back to the house. Had some allies I didn’t know I had, and a totem of undying that I definitely knew I had. I was fine, I always knew I would make it. Fought off Quackity and Fundy, and I ran all the way home to you. And you weren’t there, y/n. I thought I was safe. I thought we were safe and I- you weren’t THERE.”
His voice breaks. You can feel yourself breaking with it.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t- I couldn’t just sit back and let you die, Techno. I-I love you too much.”
He falls to his knees beside your bed, your violent grip still tight around his wrist. He falls forward with the weight of a near-death experience, and he lets his body fall forward, his forehead touching against your own, “I know,” He whispers, “Phil told me. I-I ran all the way back. I figured you were here, but I couldn’t risk not knowing for sure. I needed to know you were safe. I needed to know you’re still mine.”
You feel your throat close in. There aren’t enough deep breaths or well-timed gasps in the world to fill the air in your lungs at that moment. “Oh, Techno,” You exhale, “I’m yours. Always.”
He kisses you then, and you’re surprised when it doesn’t taste bitterly of spilt blood and death. Instead, it just tastes like him.
You go home together that night under the cover of twilight and fog that spreads like blissful wildfire in the smokey night. The two of you make it back without issue. Nobody’s expecting Technoblade to return to L’Manburg and leave again on the very same day of an attempted execution by the government. It’s risky and stupid and something only somebody in love would consider.
You’ve never felt as much unadulterated relief as when that lovely house in the snow materializes in your view, paradise in reach, snow laden and homely and everything you had come to hope to hold.
Once you’ve reached the barest outskirts of Technoblade’s homely plot of land, you reach for his hand.
He stops, lowers his head nervously, visually surveys the land around the house with caution perked throughout his nervous system, expecting it to be a word of warning. Instead, you knot your fingers with his and tug him closer. He looks at you with surprise in his eyes.
You use your intertwined fingers to tug him closer, pressing a kiss to his lips. You can feel the tension melting away under your skin, his guard falling down to pull you into his hemisphere of safety. He kisses back.
You’re smiling when he pulls away, despite the wet, cold that’s starting to permeate your boots and the dangerous darkness that’s beginning to wash over the land.
Covered in dusk, you whisper to him, “We’re home.”
He tugs you all the way to the front door with your hands intertwined, and on the front porch, he stops and picks you up. You yelp in surprise as two big arms scoop under your knees and lower back.
“What’re you doing?” You squeal, laughing, happy to know that there’s not another living person in a 500 block radius and that here, you too can just be… you.
“Coming home,” He grunts, and Technoblade carries you bridal-style into your now-home. You throw your head back in laughter. It’s ridiculous and surreal and you’re definitely capable of walking the last few snowy feet, but you don’t struggle against his warm grip. You press a sweet kiss to a reachable point of his jaw, and you feel the spot wrestle under your soft touch.
He shuts the door by nudging it closed with his back, but before setting you down on your own two feet, he bends down to press a lovely kiss to the top of your nose. Pigmen roil and take flight somewhere in your stomach like the most unlikely, beautiful butterflies you’d ever seen. You smile dreamily up at the very-alive man who trudged across thousands of blocks to get to you, back and again, “Welcome home, baby.”