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Technoblade said one word. “Traitor.” That was all it took.
“You bastard! You don’t care about anyone but yourself, do you?” Tommy was clawing his way closer, pushing through the narrow path between people to get closer to Techno. “Do you?” He pressed past soaked bodies, wet from the sputtering streams which poured from the ruined community house. It was cold, and they should have all been freezing, but they were all hot with conflict and battle. Where the water fell, vapor rose from the mass’s warmth.
Tommy was red, hair matted to his head and angry like nothing else. The surrounding people eventually got the idea and pushed back, giving the spotlight to the two figures gravitating towards the center of it all, like stars doomed to collide.
Techno’s voice was level as he watched Tommy hurtle towards him, but the rage boiling below was barely restrained. “I kept you safe, I gave you a plan to get your justice, and you betrayed me.” He stated it like a fact. To him, it was.
Steam poured off Technoblade’s shoulders, more than anyone else, and his breaths came in bursts of fog that obscure his face. Tommy looked frail next to something so deadly, but he didn’t hold back, pressed right into Techno’s space and spitting as he spoke. “I didn’t betray you, you were going to destroy everything! You were going to kill my friends!”
And that was the spark in the arid kindling. “You used me, Tommy! You invaded my home, stole my things, made me hide you, you had me fight for you. And then when the hard decisions came, you made the weak choice!” Technoblade towered over Tommy, a brute next to a child, hammer and nail. ‘It would be so easy to crush him’. “I didn’t have to do anything for you, I could have shut you out the day you came to me, but I didn’t! Because I thought you cared enough to be my friend. But I was wrong, because you used me.”
Tommy’s face contorted, like he couldn’t contain the expressions that pushed their way forward. It was evident that, as he paused momentarily, he was searching for something to say that would hurt. That could maybe crack Technoblade’s hard exterior. Tommy didn’t want just anger from Technoblade, he wanted pain. He found it quickly and snapped back. “You know what, big man? Maybe. I. Did. But do you really care? Or are you just mad that you didn’t get to ruin something today? That you didn’t get blood on your hands this time around?” He sounded manic as he spoke, like he knew he found some semblance of a fissure in Techno’s facade.
There were worse things he could have chosen to say, things that could have cut deeper. But in the heat of conflict, it stung enough to spur Techno further into argument. “Fuck you, Tommy,” he said, because his brain was working too fast for his mouth and he just needed to spit something out.
Tommy knew he had found an in. “No! Fuck you! All you do is break shit, you hurt people and destroy them! Everything around you is broken! Ruined! And you did it to yourself! You were literally born to do it! You are a fucking monster, Technoblade!”
And with that statement, Tommy had struck gold. A wound that had never healed despite the years, words from old friends resurfaced, actions he had sworn away from clawing back up to the forefront. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare call me that.” Technoblades’s hands were shaking, aching to reach out and inflict what his words could not. He worked to reel back, save himself from proving the boy right.
Tommy knew what he had hit, the pain he could dredge up from his discovery. He pushed: “Why, Technoblade? Because it’s not true? It is! ‘Blood God’? The voices that tell you to kill shit? For fucks sake, you’re not even human! You’re an animal, Technoblade, a literal monster!” He waited for the fuse he had lit to catch the bomb, to finally spark some real rage from the man in front of him. But it looked like the opposite. Technoblade only stilled, the fog in front of his snout seeming to freeze in place.
The steam seemed to double as the words hung in the air, thick and opaque and suffocating. It rolled off of Technoblade ten times as much as anyone around him, cascading to the ground before dissipating, a physical representation of the anger trembling beneath his skin. Tommy, in a moment of hesitance at the silence, shirked away to look at Tubbo. Techno took the broken eye contact to stare out into the group gathered around, all soaked to the bone, watching the spectacle play out in front of them. His eyes dragged to the pools of water at their feet, at his feet, and he saw himself.
He was an animal. At the end of the day, the form he stuck with was that of a beast. How angry could he be when, after all these years, he’d never proved that statement wrong. He killed things. He ruined communities. Everyone was standing around him, watching him like an animal at the zoo. Like a performance. Nothing he did went against any of what Tommy said.
‘At the end of the day, you are still a monster’.
But it wasn’t too late. He could still prove them wrong.
Something changed in Technoblade’s face, his shock and hot rage turning into a cold, calculated determination. The steam was even denser now, and Tommy wasn’t sure it was even water vapor anymore as the smell of burning hair hit his nose. He looked up in time to see Technoblade’s wiry hackles ignited with fizzing sparks. Dark grey smoke boiled over, crowding out the steam, clouding their feet, their legs, until Techno was completely engulfed and Tommy could barely breathe through the burning smog.
And then there was fire. Flames and air so hot they scorched Tommy’s clothes dry and forced everyone to step back, giving a wide berth to Technoblade’s incandescent form. Tommy couldn’t open his eyes through the jets of hot air, couldn’t hear over the roar of wind past his ears. His skin was burning in the wake of it all, but just as he turned to run, the heat left. The smoke hovered, then rose and faded.
All that was left was Technoblade, standing at the center of the charred stage he’d created. He was still steaming, still towering, still deadly, but he was human. He was human and he was still wild and he was still violent, the cold calculation gone and replaced with hate and anger again. Tommy stared, eyes wide in horror as the images blurred together in his head. A boar, covered in wiry fur with hooves he had seen crush heads, and a man with brown curls that fell over his shoulders and glasses and downturned eyebrows that look sad despite the rage rolling off of him in waves.
And Tommy was shaking, legs trembling and tears welling in his eyes, because the man before him looked just like Wilbur.
“Call me a monster now, Tommy,” Technoblade demanded. He was unbalanced in the new form, struggling to stand unwavering, but he held it together. His skin felt strange and unprotected, his hands too delicate and his legs too weak, but with whatever familiarity was left he reached into his cloak and procured an ender pearl. He hurled it as far as his frail human arms could. It was silent as everyone waited for it to land, for Technoblade to disappear.
And then he was gone, situated now at the peak of a hill a few dozen yards away. He could still see the community house, but no one seemed to be looking after him. Everyone was chattering to each other, and Dream started up his tirade again, now directed at Tubbo. Tommy was a beacon of stillness in the center of it all, his eyes focused on the spot where Technoblade had stood. ‘Good. Let him wallow..’
Technoblade turned and left, shivering from the cold for the first time in decades.