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Living with Technoblade was like Tuesday at four-thirty-seven in the morning.
His home was canned peaches and smoky kindling, the way a fire looked and smelled in the interim between the first catch of sparks and the gradual build of flame over each added log.
His blankets and furs were the twenty first of February, when Tommy might note that there were only seven days remaining until the end of the month, might think it was weird that February was so short, and then most likely would forget about the feeling because it was so unimportant and almost absurd to waste time on pondering it.
His cooking was the second try after failing to lace a shoe, the crisp press of downy powder beneath a day-old snow—the kind that melted and iced over in a thin crust at the surface and was satisfyingly easy to break.
His voice was a pot of coffee a few minutes forgotten in the kettle, warm and blossoming with steam but already cooling to lukewarm from the moment it was poured. It was the second act in an orchestral soundtrack, beyond the initial thrill and before the denouement, where the instruments sang and whittled away in the moments that felt intentionally trivial all in order to make the grand slams of percussion feel that much more important.
His presence was a favorite number—for no reason other than the fact that it stuck out in a mundane childhood memory—the way Tommy wrote a seven on top of a page and felt fleeting pride at how elegant it looked when he added the little dash in the middle like grown-ups tended to do, and thus seven became his lucky number.
Living with Technoblade was achingly ordinary.
It was the seconds in time that passed by in tranquility so blissful that it felt like nothing at all.
It was the relief of knowing that life didn’t need to be split into acts, made desperate and urgent by the weight of a plot that was entirely out of control.
It was the knowledge that things tended to turn out more dramatic than they needed to be when Tommy permeated them with wretched and agonizing filthy emotions.
It was safety, it was peace, it was the benign drudgery of daily life between the chapters of an adventure book, when the characters were sleeping or farming or doing anything but fighting for their storyline’s predetermined purpose.
Living with Technoblade was nothing and everything all at once, and it made Tommy think that this was what living truly entailed.
Nobody lived to fight, or to hurt, or to pursue their passions. They were simply meant to live. And that meant breathing, brushing your hair, folding your clothes, stacking plates to be put away in the cupboards, and merely coming in contact with the world as it spun around you. Living was tactile and secular. Living was only being alive, and that felt entirely too simple for most people to enjoy, Tommy realized.
Wilbur was caught up in purpose, denying the fact of his mundanity until it drove him to delete it. Surely, Wilbur must’ve thought, surely we haven’t been put on this mortal plane to do nothing more than exist. We must build nations and monuments and make ourselves into soldiers to eventually die for something worthwhile. When the battles are done, so will be our purpose, and so we must die alongside them.
The people Tommy surrounded himself with before were so troubled by it. They sought universal truths in the form of religions and philosophies that crumbled against their antitheses with very little resistance. They debated their throats hoarse about things that would only make sense to themselves, and thus they decided to kill and then die for these distant ideals as though that was the only conceivable way to nurture legitimacy.
Consciousness was an opinion.
If someone thought that good things happened because they prayed, then they would convince themselves that it was true by downright ignoring any proof of the opposite. Confirmation bias, one of Technoblade’s books explained, was the phenomenon that invented every God.
Tommy chose to live his life with Technoblade free from any Gods.
Where he’d clung to Prime in his days of exile, Tommy turned his back on worship in favor of admiring the way the Arctic snow petals caught on the tip of his tongue.
Sure, his days were somewhat boring—but that’s the thing about mundanity: it forces people to realize the beauty in all absence.
Because Tommy’s life didn’t just stop when everything else did. All those big and heavy emotions in his heart found places to curl and shudder elsewhere. The bounding awe that Tommy once might’ve felt swelling in his chest at the sight of his lost nation’s skyscrapers now occurred every time Technoblade’s rings caught in the light over breakfast. The penetrating loss Tommy found in grieving his comrades was made a fleeting funeral procession for a melted snowman he’d placed unfounded attachment within the morning prior.
They were smaller sensations—important to him nonetheless—and thus quite easy to overcome.
His heart was healing from its scars.
He no longer feared the pain of inflicting new ones.
And every morning, Tommy woke up downright excited.
He was overjoyed to see a warm cup of tea honeyed to his exact liking sat by his place at the table, and petulantly frustrated each time he failed to chop a wood block with one stroke of his axe whilst doing his chores. He was warm, content—perhaps even loved.
Thinking of this, Tommy's breath puffed out in a pleased little sigh.
That's when a calloused hand found its place on Tommy’s nape, nestled between the ridges of his shoulder blades, which were softened by Technoblade’s doting nourishment to make up for the starvation of exile.
Tommy turned, a humming question on the tip of his tongue, and saw the man he was finally finding courage to call ‘brother’ standing over him with bleary shadows sunken beneath the glittery garnet of his eyes.
“What’re you doing out of bed this early?” Techno mumbled. His thumb rubbed firm and absentminded circles into a knot on Tommy’s shoulder, sagging it beneath the soft cotton of an oversized sleepshirt.
Tommy focused his gaze back out at the fierce blue of an approaching dawn, sprinkling the white snow with saturation and light refracting off the torches to ward off mobs. He was sat curled up beneath the windowsill in the living room, his figure framed by throw pillows and crochet blankets made jagged and holey by Tommy’s earliest attempts with the hobby.
“I dunno—just thinking, I guess. Did I wake you?”
“Nah,” Techno murmured back. “Just felt something was off. Something on your mind?”
There it was again—the suffocating adoration of loving and being loved in return—it swept over Tommy’s sternum like hurricane winds. He remembered feeling like this on the day that L’Manburg finally announced its independence, covered in bruises and the grime of matted blood and soot and mud, he and his brothers in arms had signed beneath Wilbur’s eloquent script (and long-winded jeers at the green man who’d threatened them before) and roared into the night.
Oh, how strangely the universe shifts!
Here Tommy was, with equal emotion as the day he’d won a literal war, basking in the candlelight held up by his bookish elder brother and smiling at the faded stars outside with his fingers tangled up in frayed yarn blankets. Only that, and nothing— everything— else.
Tommy chose not to reply, instead tilting his head back to knock ever-so-slightly against the hollow of Techno’s waist, his standing hip bone level with Tommy’s shoulder where he sat cross-legged on the cushion.
Techno stiffened, his hand pausing in its gentle massaging squeeze for a fraction of a second before resuming, and Tommy felt his posture go lax once again.
And then, because Tommy knew his brother was no better with receiving verbal emotions than offering them up, Tommy squeezed his eyes shut and shifted so he could rest against Techno’s middle, just barely below his beating heart. Tommy knocked his forehead into his ribcage, pressing in and pulling back once, twice—and then twice more. A shy and shortened form of a familial piglin headbutt, just firm enough to get his message across.
(I love you.)
Technoblade made an odd noise in the back of his throat, blooming forth from roots buried deep in his sternum—a startled purr. His hand slithered up from Tommy’s shoulder to his nape, curling around to cup the back of his head and comb through the blonde curls that rested there, somewhat overgrown with no immediate plans to trim. His fingers combed through them a few times, drumming against the space behind Tommy’s left ear, and Tommy recognized it as the type of preening-petting motion that Phil often caressed into their scalps when they were all much younger and closer and kinder to each other.
That was so long ago, Tommy almost forgot how it felt—what it meant.
(I love you too.)
Living with Technoblade was a Tuesday at four-thirty-seven in the morning, and it was absolutely, perfectly, achingly ordinary.