Chapter Text
It’s a facecam call – as is the usual standard, now.
No more calls with only his icon – his Minecraft player, nothing too special – showing that he’s even present. Instead, it’s his face, along with Tubbo’s (and Ranboo’s), and Phil’s and Jack’s below.
They’re just talking after filming a video together, and Tommy’s still getting used to being able to talk to each person his parents add to their ‘approved list’ without double-checking that the button to turn on his camera remained unselected – despite it never having been turned on in the first place – and that the two layers of tape covering his laptop camera hadn’t fallen off whenever he’d moved it around.
In the couple of weeks since Tommy had finally, finally been allowed to resume streaming, a lot has changed.
First of all, he’d had to promise Wilbur to never surprise him that much ever again. And, on hearing that there were no more secrets left to tell, his friend had dryly replied, ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something, I’m just preparing in advance.’
Tommy had decided to take a different approach when telling Techno a few days later.
Which was, quite simply, calling him and explaining everything.
Perhaps he should have swapped the two around – while Wilbur had been in a state of shock for a good five or ten minutes, Techno just took it in his stride, barely asked any questions except for a couple about the security which Tommy had refused to answer and hoped were a joke.
And two days later it was like the whole incident with the tubes and the subsequent weeks were just a distant memory.
Tommy had soon returned to his regular streaming schedule, staying up until all hours of the morning talking, laughing, and occasionally – having resumed his lore schedule at the same time – screaming, and then regretting everything the next morning, having to focus through Latin lessons and etiquette tutoring.
And ballroom classes, although they’re progressing better now. He’s completely mastered the waltz – much to his instructor’s relief – and is moving on to other dances.
He hasn’t tried to dance to Bruno Mars again, but he’s still maintaining the belief (or utter fact, as he claims) that it’s the best track to practise traditional ballroom dances to.
And now, six weeks after the original meet-up, it almost feels like he never stopped, that the previous couple of weeks had never happened.
The screen is black. Tommy is ready.
And then clips flash across it. Clips from his previous streams. A hastily dug hole. ‘Drop them down,’ Dream says, and Tommy complies. A lit fuse, a chilling hissing sound. His own voice, rising above the mutterings of everyone gathered to watch, staring down at him from above. ‘The discs, the discs were worth more than you ever were!’ Ghostbur, handing him blue dye, so much that he might drown in it.
The screen flashes. White. Black. White. Black. White. Black. It keeps flashing, and Dream’s voice cuts across the ghost’s laughter. ‘It’s not your time to die yet, Tommy.’
The flashing stops, black lightening until it displays the scene in front of him.
His empty bedroom in Las Nevadas – except. It’s not so empty anymore.
In terms of furniture it remains the same, his single bed and ender chest and nothing more (not that anything else would even fit the small space). But the walls are a different story.
The walls are covered in messages.
Must clean up the area to the west of the restaurant, one says.
Another one simply reads burgers are better with the sauce on, but cheaper without.
A third, above his ender chest, has the words Quackity isn’t Dream on it, except it’s riddled with spelling errors, as if he’d typed it in a rush.
Tommy’s character turns to the first sign and stares at it for a couple of seconds. ‘West of the restaurant,’ he mutters.
‘West of the restaurant,’ he mutters as he retrieves his pickaxe and shovel from the ender chest – mouse once again hovering over his discs for a fraction of a second.
‘West of the restaurant,’ he mutters as he walks down the main path.
Tommy reaches the restaurant.
Tommy begins walking east.
Chat immediately spots his mistake, spamming wrong way and you went east, not west, but he ignores the flurry of messages on his left monitor as he continues walking.
On, and on, and on. Soon, as he turns backwards to check for a second, the main area of Las Nevadas is fading into the distance. Half a minute more and it’s completely out of sight.
Tommy pauses. ‘Surely it’s not this far out,’ he whispers, but continues walking. ‘Quackity asked me to sort this out, I don’t want to let him down.’
Tommy keeps walking, and then there’s a pillar in front of him. Not one of the questionably shaped ones that he makes with Wilbur – because it’s funny, or at least chat seem to find it a mixture of hilarious and stupid – but more of a marker.
Tommy’s character pauses once again, circles the pillar. Looks up to see it stretch into the sky.
‘I’ll clean this up then,’ he says, airiness clearly forced in his tone, and mines the bottom two blocks.
And a ladder is revealed.
Tommy’s character pauses for a third time. He pauses, and he looks around, and he checks his inventory.
And then he goes down the ladder.
The room – which he helped to build, offscreen – is hastily done, edges unfinished and bare except for one wall.
There are four signs on that wall.
Target list, the one above the other three says.
The sign below it to the left reads Technoblade, revenge.
The one in the middle says Wilbur Soot, answers.
And the one on the right. The one on the right has the words TommyInnit, danger to reality on it.
This time, when Tubbo and Ranboo call him after the stream, they can actually see how much he’s smiling.
‘That was amazing, Tommy!’ Tubbo cries, brandishing yet another empty popcorn bowl, which he’s currently waving around, gesturing as he talks. Ranboo ducks as it swings past his head, too close for comfort. ‘Seriously so good, you need to start telling your plans. Please?’
Tommy shakes his head, pretending to sort out his camera – although he’s already managed to find the perfect position for it, and rarely needs to change it anymore – to avoid his friend’s gaze. ‘Stop asking, I will eventually give in. And I want you to wait, especially for this one thing that me and Quackity have planned for later.
Tubbo frowns, but he soon moves onto something else, scrolling through Twitter to see the fanart already springing out from fast-working artists. He sends a couple of links on their shared group chat, and both Ranboo and Tommy retrieve their phones to see them.
The first one is a pencil drawing of his bedroom in Las Nevadas – simple, but the person has managed to capture the darkness that Tommy likes to imagine lingering in the corners, and the writing on the sign above his ender chest is scribbled, the desperation that he’d tried to convey through the spelling errors perfectly rendered in the spiky font and stray lines that remain uncorrected.
The second one is split in half. On the left is the final control room from all that time ago, TNT primed to explode, figures stood in a huddle unaware of the traitor in their ranks. And on the right is Quackity’s room, the room hidden under the cobblestone pillar that bore his death order.
An order, or a reminder, he supposes, as Quackity is supposed to be alone. A reminder to a ruler of an empty nation, a promise that remains unfulfilled.
The final piece that Tubbo sends through is of the conversation that had taken place between Quackity and Tommy, after he’d descended the ladder into the room.
He’d been there less than a minute before Quackity had joined him.
Tommy’s leader – and Tommy’s executioner-to-be, proof laid bare on the wall behind him.
‘What do you want with me?’ he’d whispered, trying to make his voice scared but also trying to hide it.
Quackity’s character, covered in rippling netherite armour and holding a sword, had moved forwards, and Tommy had moved backwards, making his character back into the wall once again.
‘What do you want with me?’ he’d repeated.
Quackity had paused. Laughed. ‘Oh, Tommy. What do you think I want from you?’
‘You want me dead.’ They had been blunt words. Simple words, of the truth dawning on a dead man walking.
‘I want you dead. Or rather, I can’t let you remain alive, Tommy. I would say it’s nothing personal, but that’s also a lie. You rather irritate me, but that’s not the reason I’m going to kill you,’ his character paced back and forth, sword switching from hand to hand. ‘No, that’s not the reason I’m going to kill you,’ he repeats in a pensive tone.
Tommy had turned his character’s head slightly, and Quackity stopped moving. ‘I can leave, I won’t bother you ever again, I promise.’
Another dry laugh. ‘You don’t even know you’re doing it, that’s the funny thing. Oh, you foolish child.’
And then Dream had appeared for a second, visible for a second before he vanished, gone as soon as he came. Only his words lingered in the air. ‘Tommy, this isn’t real.’
Tommy had ended the stream before chat could react.
‘Wow,’ he says, and Tubbo nods. ‘How do they do that so quickly? I only stopped the stream, what, an hour ago? That’s insane.’
Ranboo shrugs, and sends a link in the chat as well, which Tommy decides to leave for later, when he’ll go through Twitter and find some more stuff for himself.
He’s talked about it on various streams before, how he loves seeing the fanart of him and his friends – and how amazed he is sometimes at some of their talent. He can’t count how many times he’s sent Tubbo or Ranboo a link to someone’s Twitter profile, complete with various messages in all capitals.
He’s just looking through a person’s art – off call, while the others have gone to get food – and debating doing just that when there’s a knock at his door, and he looks up. ‘Come in,’ he calls, expecting it to just be a maid or someone come to check something.
He’s not expecting his mother to come into the room, although it’s a pleasant surprise – in the past few weeks they’ve been talking more, about their days, about his friends, about new guests at the palace.
She sits down at the edge of his bed and smiles at him. ‘Good stream.’
It’s a simple sentence, but not one he’s heard often before. It used to be – on the rare occurrences that anybody other than the occasional chef asked – a disinterested question, whereas now it’s a statement.
Tommy ducks his head slightly, still unused to knowing that she watches from time to time. ‘Thanks.’
She’s still staring at him when he looks back up, a half-smile on her face. ‘You know,’ she muses, ‘you could meet up with your friends again, if this time you promise to be sensible and not try and bend our rules.’
‘Seriously?’
She nods.
He gestures to his phone, lying discarded next to him on his bed. ‘Can I?’
Another nod, a full smile. ‘Go for it, text me the date later, alright?’
‘That’s perfect. Thanks, mum.’ He’s smiling too.
‘Seriously?’ is the first response when Tommy drags Wilbur, Phil, Ranboo and Tubbo in a call. It’s Ranboo, staring straight at the camera. ‘Your parents are letting you meet us again?’
Tommy sighs and runs a hand through his hair. ‘I just have to be sensible. But it’s a lot better now, you know that. As long as I’m sensible, so still a mask and everything, then they’ll let me.’
Phil actually claps into his microphone. ‘I knew it would get better, mate, I knew it.’
He nods. ‘Yes, Philza Minecraft. You are all wise and all knowing and –’
‘Yes, yes, alright!’
He grins. ‘But seriously, though, I was thinking –’
This time Tubbo interrupts. ‘Event of the century.’
Tommy frowns. ‘Rude. Anyway, I was thinking of asking Jack, Niki and George to come?’
He’s pretty sure the others wouldn’t mind – Tubbo and Ranboo have already met up with everyone on different occasions – but it’s always best to check.
Everyone nods, and the plans begin.
It’s nearly six weeks before everyone is free – what with Jack filming all of his vlogs, Wilbur sorting out his new songs with the band and Tubbo dropping off of all platforms to do something ‘top secret’ that even Ranboo hasn’t managed to figure out – but eventually Tommy’s once again in a car to drive to a hotel in London.
It’s a bit different this time, though. While before he’d been with his father and the atmosphere had been tense at best, this time there’s nothing on his mind but how he can meet, actually meet, face to face, some more of his friends.
Jack and Niki have rented a hotel room each, and everyone had agreed to meet there before going out together. It’s going to be a bit like the first meet-up, except with – hopefully – a better ending.
Tommy’s sure it’s going to be way better, though. Now that his parents have given him actually reasonable restrictions, he’s going to follow them. He can take his mask off in the hotel room, as he did before, and then put it back on when they go out – at which point there will still be people following them, but more laxly.
‘Just within eyesight,’ his mother had assured him. ‘And we’ll text you if we lose sight of you, not immediately come in and take you away.’
And considering that Tommy has way, way less to worry about for this meet-up, he’s spending less of his time in the car going over every single possible outcome, and more of it actually enjoying his conversations with his friends. Wilbur’s train is – once again – delayed, Tubbo and Ranboo accidentally booked a ticket for the wrong time, arrived really early and have now spent their early morning wondering round aimlessly around London, and Jack and Niki have sent all of them pictures of their breakfast to be jealous at.
Eventually the car pulls outside the address that Jack had texted him the night before, and Tommy pulls his mask over his face before resting a hand on the door handle. He doesn’t hesitate before throwing it open.
Everybody is already upstairs, Wilbur having arrived only a couple of minutes before him, and Tommy gets directions from the person at the front desk before taking the stairs to the fourth floor – while he has nothing against the people who will follow him to the door, he doesn’t really want to share a cramped lift with them – and turning right, walking along the corridor, counting door numbers until he reaches Niki’s room, where he can just barely make out loud conversation.
He knocks, twice, and the room behind goes silent, before George calls out, ‘who is it?’
Tommy feigns indignation. ‘You’d think I’d be expected,’ he replies, and Niki says his name excitedly, ‘but I guess I’m that forgettable, am I?’
The door swings open to reveal Tubbo, grinning. ‘Very funny, come in,’ he says, moving back to sit on the floor next to Wilbur.
Tommy, however, looks to the three people he hasn’t yet seen in person.
George is staring at the glasses he’d chosen to put over the top of his mask with a mixture of amusement and disappointment, Jack’s draped himself over the big armchair in the corner of the room, and Niki is just looking at him, smiling.
Tommy smiles back, and takes off his mask.