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Technoblade has been on the move for a very long time.
He barely remembers the Before, and he only truly lives in the Now. If, that is, one can consider what he does as “living”. His is a kingdom of ice and snow, after all. Nothing that grows here survives. Nothing thaws. It only makes sense that his heart would freeze over with each passing night in the darkened alleyways, too.
Technoblade has not slept somewhere soft in a very long time.
But he has picked up somewhat of a routine, in each of these dreary days. The church bells toll, and he uses it as a chime, a signal. When they ring, he picks himself up off the cobblestone, removes himself from the corners he has hidden himself in, and, despite his protesting feet, begins to walk.
There is a castle on the crest of the capital, glimmering like a crown jewel. Technoblade avoids it at all costs, but he centers his travels around it. It is the center of his compass, the source of gravity in this private orbit of his.
He has paced himself accordingly. He cannot stick anywhere for too long. No one minds a street rat staying behind their homes for just one night, but any longer and it is an infestation that requires extermination. Those who notice him watch him disappear with the rising morning sun each dawn and nod their heads with satisfaction. Begone, little mouse, lest I have to set a trap.
One complete circle around the capital takes precisely one week. It is a large city, after all, a massive urban sprawl brimming with twisting streets and buildings stacked close together like crates at docks. It is a navigator’s nightmare, an architect’s source of disdain, and absolutely no one’s dreamland.
Technoblade keeps track of his timing using the moon. She is a watchful companion. He takes great pride in knowing the name of each phase she goes through. She is the only one who will not chase him away with a broom if he comes too close.
And so he traces the streets time and time again, like their groundskeeper making his rounds. He fishes through bins for food and knows which homes will have more. He finds little loaves of bread and scarfs them down. He nibbles on crumbs and relishes them. He eats spoiled fruits and days-old vegetables greedily. The temporary satiation is more powerful a feeling than the groaning of his upset stomach afterward.
It becomes a pattern, a plan. Do not stop, never stop, keep walking, and never look back, and somehow you will survive.
And the plan works, for the most part. He never settles down, and so he never dies.
He repeats it in his head like a mantra. I never die, I never die, and if it just to keep himself sane, then there is no one around to scold him for it. I never die.
This particular night, the moon is shadowed in half silhouette, like a broken dinner plate split perfectly down the middle. Technoblade continues to travel counterclockwise around the castle, but eventually the exhaustion becomes omnipotent, and he must find somewhere to sleep.
This district of the capital is more… rough around the edges than some of the others. There really is nowhere entirely safe in the city, but these particular streets are certainly dangerous. Muggers and drunkards and lawless men prowl the shadows. Somewhere in the distance, someone wails, then stops abruptly. Technoblade keeps wary, eyes trailing the slanted roofs above for people looking down at him and between fenceposts for peering gazes. No matter how much he tries to shake it off, he retains the distinct feeling that he is being watched.
There’s a streetlight at each corner, but the blocks span on for so long that there can be up to a mile between lights. Half of the time, he travels through pitch black. The other half, he can just barely make out the scene around him. He trudges through the snowy streets, doing his best to avoid any patches of ice.
A man travels down the same road as him, though they are both going in opposite directions. The man gives Technoblade a nod; Technoblade gives one back. They pass, two ships in the night, and then they are gone from each other’s sights.
He walks another half hour.
A person approaches him, eyes wild. They demand cash. He does not have it.
They leave him with a few bruises, but they leave him alive.
He walks another twenty minutes.
He stops, the hair on the back of his neck prickling. He turns his head.
A woman stares at him from her apartment’s makeshift porch. The smoke pooling from her lips is blue and indigo, dissolving into the ebony of the night before Technoblade can even blink.
“Lookin’ for a hit?” she drawls. Her eyes are bloodshot and follow him lazily.
Technoblade shakes his head fervently, then backs away, hoping that she doesn’t come after him.
She doesn’t. She stays leaning against the door, head cocked to the side, taking another drag of her cigarette while he dashes off into the darkness. He can see the knife at her waist, though.
This is a bad district, he decides as he jogs. A really bad district that he should have learned by now to avoid at all costs. But it’s easier to go through it than cut around it.
He turns a corner and then—there it is. The beginning. (The end?) (The start of everything.)
There is a tavern on the corner of two lonely streets. It is lit in orange and copper, and in the darkness of midnight, it glows like a crucible. Technoblade watches it from the shadows, eyes flickering to and fro, quick but observant all the same.
It could be a haven or a nightmare. He has to scout it out first before he decides which one. This is his life: diverging from what prior plans he has at any given moment, jumping on any chance put in front of him. He’d be a damn fool not to seek out warmth and the possibility of food.
Tonight will be different than Before. He can feel it in the air and in the hum beneath his skin. His breaths come quicker, each inhale sharp, chest expanding. The air is crisp and stings. His eyes water. It does not matter; he will not close them. He must keep watch.
And then—yes, there—the door creaks open just a sliver. Someone steps out, fishing a pipe and a match from their coat pocket. Technoblade has always hated smoke. He darts past the man and through the gap before the door can close entirely and is met with a wall of sound.
All around him are drunks. People sleazing through the bar, people passed out in the corners, people downing their sorrows in foamy ale.
They seem, for the most part, harmless. He ducks behind a chair and observes.
No hybrids. That’s a good sign. That means that there likely won’t be any fights or riots. There is always the possibility of pickpockets, though…
“Now what is a puny thing like you doin’ here?” someone says loudly, their voice carrying above all other noise, interrupting Technoblade’s thoughts. The room’s chatter muffles, then dies completely, a candle snuffed out with a single icy breeze. Dozens of eyes lock onto him.
The boy blinks, startling, and he is the rat with the cheese in its paws but its tail in the trap.
The voice that has spoken, it seems, belongs to the person manning the bar, a large, heavy-set man with a thick mustache at his lip and scars up and down his face. He stares at the child with narrowed hazel eyes.
Technoblade swallows, standing up from where he’d been crouching. “Me, sir?”
Laughter erupts, rough and brash and vulgar. It feels dirty, like a layer of grime has freshly settled over Technoblade’s ears. He scowls, and they only laugh more. They think he’s puny.
“Who else, kid?” says the same man.
Technoblade straightens his spine, squares his shoulders, and he is only half the height of the majority of these men, but he feels taller in this moment. “I’m looking for a place to stay.”
The crowd goes into an uproar again, but the bartender’s eyes flicker curiously, and he leans over the counter, suddenly intrigued. Something like hope rises in Technoblade’s chest, but he stifles it, not willing to give it fuel only for it to be inevitably smothered.
“You,” the bartender starts slowly, as if he’s tasting the words to test them, “are how old, son?”
And it has been oh-so-long since Technoblade has had someone to call him son.
“’M twelve, sir.”
“Ah.” The man smiles, and it is kind, something so rare in a city like this. “Yer far too young to be workin’ in a place like this, then.”
There is the stench of alcohol and the stink of men, but that is nothing compared to the things Technoblade has seen before. He has seen plague and famine and things so horrifying—
His gaze drifts down to his black gloves, but he wrenches it back toward the man, not trusting his own emotions. He clenches his hands together and raises his chin even higher. “The entire capital is like this, though. It won’t be different anywhere else.”
Someone barks a laugh of agreement and another claps their hands. “Cheers to that!” There is the sound of clinking glass all around the tavern. No one who lives here is glad to live here, it seems. Except, perhaps, the king.
“True,” the bartender says slowly, “but I’d still feel mighty irresponsible lettin’ ya work in this establishment.”
“I don’t have to serve drinks, sir,” Technoblade says. “I can- I can do anything. I just need somewhere to rest. It can only be for one night, I swear.”
Something behind the man’s eyes softens. “Well then I’d feel even worse havin’ ya run off after yer done here.”
For just a moment, confidence leaps into Technoblade’s heart. “Then I could stay.”
A bark of laughter, disbelieving. “Stay?”
Technoblade’s self-assurance withers. He tries to keep it from showing. “Yes, sir.”
“Please, enough with the formalities. The name’s Mark.”
“Hullo. I’m Technoblade.”
“That’s a mouthful.” The man—Mark—levels him with a stare. “And you want to stay.”
“Yes, s—”
“Mark.”
“Yes, Mark.”
The bartender scrutinizes him. “I can’t pay ya, kid. I can only give you a bed and food and water.”
“That’s fine,” says Technoblade, and it is.
“You’ve got parents?”
Technoblade’s throat goes a little scratchy. He clears it. “Dead.”
“So are mine.” The man scratches his mustache. “Anyone who’d care ‘bout ya workin’ here?”
“No one.”
Mark does not so much as blink. There’s lots of orphans, to be fair. It’s not like Technoblade had been expecting sympathy.
“Well, Technoblade,” Mark says with a smile, “you’ve got the position.”
He extends a hand out. Technoblade takes it, shakes it, tries to smile back.
“So what will I be doing then, sir?”
“It’s Mark. And—” He crouches to retrieve something, then tosses it over the bar. Technoblade catches it. It’s a broom. “—yer sweepin’.”
He nods, swallows his pride, and begins.
The patrons—most of whom have stopped listening long ago—barely even seem to register him. They watch with glazed eyes. They live life through a bottle. He is hardly in their line of sight. (One day he will be, though.)
It’s a difficult job, the sweeping; the floor is filthy with dust and rot. He takes his sweet time, making sure to get every single speck of it into a nice, neat pile. Then, once he’s satisfied with his work, he props open the door with a stick and brushes the mess out, letting it blow away into the wind. The man who came out for a smoke is long gone. The only sounds are those coming from inside, behind Technoblade.
Just as he is about to close the door, something catches his eye out on the street. He opens the door a hairsbreadth more to see better and finds that, no, he has not imagined it.
There is a boy out there, hunkered between a homemade tent consisting of two metal sheets propped up against one another. He is shivering beneath it, skin pale as the ever-falling snow.
They make eye contact. Technoblade jumps. He’s never seen the color green so bright before.
The boy simply watches. Technoblade can just faintly make out the hollowness to his cheeks, his blue lips. His blackened nails. The resignation to him. And Technoblade knows that he is staring at a victim of the plague.
He looks away quickly, slamming the door shut. Out on the street, the child—the plague-ridden, cast-out-from-society-never-come-crawling-back child—returns to fixing his gaze on a particular spot of the tavern door.
I never die, Technoblade tries to reassure himself, leaning against that very same door. The broom is so tightly held in his grasp that his knuckles are turning white. I never die.
He loosens the muscles he’d flexed in panic and allows his breathing to return to normal. He comes up with a million different little reasons for his sudden outburst of worry: he’s tense, he’s exhausted, he’s starving. They all have a bit of truth to them, so they’re all that much easier to swallow.
He resumes cleaning, finding a rag to wipe down tables.
He clears his thoughts of any memory of the wordless interaction. He thinks of the bed he will be given to rest in tonight. In a few hours, when he realizes it’s not much more than a cot with a few tattered blankets and threadbare pillows on it, he will still be thankful. It’s more than he has had in a very long time.
As he will go to sleep, though, his mind will retreat to the memory of those empty green eyes. The moon will watch over him as he drifts restlessly into unconsciousness.
This is the first time he sees the boy on the street.
But it will not be the last.