Work Text:
He intends to go quietly. No fuss. No nagging from Tommy or bargaining from Wilbur. He thinks of a plan in between strategy meetings. At mealtimes – the three of them had taken to eating together most afternoons and every night; Tubbo would join when he could – he would laugh at their jokes and look them in the eyes all while constructing the right moment to leave them. He files his plan neatly alongside all the others in his mind. After the festival he would go, slip away before the next sunrise. They would have their country; probably wouldn’t even notice he’d gone until it was too late to chase after him. Tommy might try anyway.
But plans go awry. It’s always a possibility, a warrior learns to improvise. He’s used to going off-book on a mission. He’s not used to failing. That’s what it feels like when he watches the sunrise from the mouth of Pogtopia the morning after the festival and makes no move to leave. It had seemed like such an easy job weeks ago. An extension of his first mission, whispered by a kneeling Phil when he was only a child. Protect your brothers, everything else is details. Wilbur thinks they’ve made progress. He’d wounded Schlatt and caused irreparable anarchy in his government. Details. Tubbo is recovering slowly; he’ll carry the scars forever. Tommy won’t leave his bedside long enough to tend to his own injuries. Broken nose. Black eye. His fault. Failure.
He thinks of leaving. Knows it’s more than a return to life as usual: it’s fleeing now. In dark tunnels beneath his feet his brothers sleep, broken inside or out or both. He thinks of leaving. He thinks of leaving until it’s too late and the sun rises and the shadows aren’t big enough to hide in. Tommy passes him on the way out, a plaster stuck over the bridge of his nose. They look through each other, silent. You don’t greet ghosts. He eats alone that afternoon. Again that night. He doesn’t leave, but he still thinks he will. He makes a new plan.
He becomes familiar with failure. Recognises the taste of it in his mouth again and again until it’s no longer bitter. He chooses himself over his brothers, turns his back on them when there’s no other way to live with who they’ve become. Who he’s become because of them. It feels necessary. It feels defiant. It feels like betrayal. It’s only the echo of one. He trains his crossbow on two boys who lived in the room across the hall and left messes in the kitchen he had to clean. He doesn’t plan to shoot – but if he had to, who would it need to be? On second thought, he does plan it. For the first time in his life he's grateful Phil isn’t there. And then he is – of course. There is chaos on all sides. He doesn’t know who causes more destruction, more turmoil, him or his twin. Childish games. Let’s see who can make the bigger mess; let Dad clean it up. He sees Phil framed by the jagged hole ripped through the mountainside. It can never be fixed. In a hundred years people will look at the ruin and think of it as landscape. Maybe monument. Wilbur dies in front of him. He runs.
Nowhere is far enough. No place to go that will make him feel whole again. This isn’t failure. Protect your brothers. This is worse. Everything else is details. He runs until his lungs burn and his skin burns and he’s turned himself inside out and he can’t breathe and Wilbur, Wilbur, Wilbur.
Are you okay, Phil asks. What have you done, he hears. He stops running long enough to see Phil’s wings. Black, once like ink, now like charcoal. Torn apart like the mountain and without words he understands what has happened. The world feels futile. The world feels empty. There is nowhere to run, so he hides instead.
He knows he should go further, be safer. Leave for another land and be forever out of reach, become less memory, more myth. He feels no inclination to leave, he doesn’t understand the thought when it crosses his mind. The sunrise outside Pogtopia feels like centuries ago. He wakes up every morning to watch the dawn end and waits to feel different. He doesn’t. He begins to work. He works not to think but at first it’s all he does. A shovel feels clumsy and new to his hands and he misses his sword. Wilbur. He stabs it into the dirt and reminds himself to breathe. Tries not to think and, finding it impossible, tries to think of other things. It begins to work. The sun stays warm. The farm grows quickly. He stops needing reminders. He thinks of other things. He does not feel peace, but something that resembles it, if you only turn your head and squint your eyes. It’s not long before they find him.
It’s not the death sentence that Tubbo spits out from his podium that sickens him. Should Tubbo have wanted him dead he could hardly blame the boy. What disgusts him as he kneels before Lady Death – how he’s missed her warm hugs – is how Tubbo’s mouth moves but someone else’s voice declares the end of his life. The new president is no executioner. He speaks of vengeance and Techno can almost see the strings wrapped around his limbs and pulling at his cheeks. He only wishes he knew the puppeteer. The anvil drops. His mother smiles. His brother frowns. He’s not a man of what-ifs but it’s hard not to picture a version of himself that never watches the sunrise outside Pogtopia. That fails and leaves it at that. Leaves his brothers in a broken heap behind him and never looks back. Leaves. He indulges the thought in his last second. Only curiosity; no regret. He greets Death with gritted teeth. It doesn’t take.
He has no reason to leave once he’s free. They won’t hunt him again. They know better than that. He lives on the outskirts and misses his farm but the world feels too hot, too crowded. He likes the snow. Likes the way it swallows boots and remembers them so he can always see who’s come and go. He does not feel peace but settles for comfort. He builds fires and sharpens his weapons in their glow. He befriends animals and earns their loyalty with shelter and food. They guard his door and his sword rests on the floor beneath his bed and only then does he begin to sleep again.
There are footprints trailing out of the woods and into his home. They are hurried, the person was running, stumbling, tripping over their own feet as though they were being chased. The prints have a look of desperation to them. They are also fresh. He loads his crossbow and enters through the backdoor. The first thought that comes to him when he sees unwashed blonde hair and a tatty red and white t-shirt is that Tommy looks… young. His nose is still crooked, never set right. The bones of his cheeks poke through thin skin. When he stands his back naturally curves and he looks smaller – he’s making himself look smaller and it’s probably a recently learned habit because Techno’s never looked at him and felt such an ache because god, he’s only seventeen and he’s almost transparent. Techno lowers the crossbow.
They argue and it feels light. It sounds familiar and becomes another layer to his comfort. It occurs to him he’s become too comfortable. He spends hours every day preparing – for what, he’s not sure – but it’s been too long since he’s had a plan. Tommy goes days at a time without sleeping. He trains and eats through the entire stockroom and gets on his brother’s nerves and eventually crashes on any piece of furniture barely large enough to curl up on. Techno watches Tommy sleep and never gets any himself. Time passes. Tommy is loud again, tall again and never leaves his side. He pretends not to notice. Tommy cracks a joke and the punchline sounds like Wilbur. It feels like a warning. He ignores it.
There are too many details. He gets lost in them. History repeats itself. It stings more the second time. Tommy still looks young, like a child who needs to grow up, and the ache is gone but the burn is back. He watches another brother die in front of his eyes. It doesn’t matter that Tommy still breathes. It doesn’t matter. The world is futile. The world is empty. He is grief and rage and little more. More than a year has passed since he’d chosen to stay. And there it finally is, he’d begun to think it wasn’t gonna show: the regret.
Tommy. Tubbo. Wilbur. He strikes a match, something so small, and in doing so achieves two goals. He takes what they love from them. He destroys the cause of all this. He mourns their childhood as the bombs drop and when the earth shakes and burns it doesn’t feel like failure, it feels like justice. He does a more thorough job of it than Wilbur and smiles with spite; he wins. When he goes home the world feels cold and still. He builds a fire and lays out his weapons to clean. Something green catches his eye. A bandana, once worn as a scarf, now only an old scrap of cloth, seeing as its owner wouldn’t be back to fetch it. He considers the fabric for a moment, then tosses it in the fire.
He has no brothers. They are all dead to him. He learns to live with it. Some days he wakes up and forgets how and has to relearn it. Days feel longer than ever, though time passes quickly. He pretends to forget, lies to no one but himself. Phil doesn’t speak about them. He speaks about other things and carries on living. Techno mimics him and feels childish for it. He makes friends and – with time – even begins to trust them. He feeds the animals and inspects the snow for footprints. A favour breathes down his neck, just out of sight, though he remains aware of it. The sun rises and he wakes up early to watch it. He thinks he is home and doesn’t know how to feel about it. He understands that his brothers are gone, so he doesn’t expect them to come back to him, one by one.
Wilbur breathes again. Techno understands in some small way how that must feel. Of course, he had only tested Death’s waters, dipped in a toe and found it too cold before being pulled back to the land of the living. Wilbur had jumped in headfirst. Sank. Drowned. Yet there he stood, resuscitated by the same man who had pulled Techno back from the brink. Twins, people used to scoff, how can they possibly be? The word had never rang truer. Wilbur apologises and it sounds at least half-honest, which feels like progress.
He seeks Tubbo out. He brings no weapon, bears nothing but a photograph and the weight of his own grief. He watches Tubbo break. Go silent. Shut down. Tubbo mumbles explanations and the little things begin to make sense; he only wishes he’d understood sooner. He feels his own loss as it holds him with a horrible, heavy familiarity. He knows that what Tubbo feels must be unimaginably worse. There is too much history to seek or offer comfort. So he gives Tubbo all he has left, his word. There is no time to mourn with Michael missing. He promises that Tubbo will not lose the rest of his family. He makes good on it.
He knows that Tommy fears him. The kid – it occurs to him that the word doesn’t apply anymore and he feels the faintest ache – avoids him as well as he can. Tommy, according to Phil, avoids most people these days. He stays indoors a lot, keeps a pet for company, never walks long distances unaccompanied. Phil had failed to mention how long his hair had gotten. Tommy stands frozen in his path. Almost all his fingers are individually bandaged. To someone else that might seem like the consequence of clumsiness, wounds that could have been inflicted any number of ways. Techno recognises the handiwork and knows it means Tommy is sewing again. Phil smiles easily and bids his eldest a good morning, making no mention of how his youngest tries to subtly stand behind him. Techno holds his ground, having caught them as they were leaving the perimeter of the farm. He had been out chopping wood since dawn. His eyes stay on Tommy. Good morning, he says and then, excuse me. He strolls past them and peers at Tommy, wondering if he will flinch. He doesn’t. If anything, he seems more relaxed, finally having let out a breathe he’d been holding for longer than he could remember.
He doesn’t wake at sunrise anymore. He works long hours in the greenhouse and sleeps in most mornings. He is surprised when he wakes naturally one day just as the dark of night begins to crawl across the sky. Something in it feels significant. He scratches Steve’s ear where he dozes on the rug and makes his way outside. He wears no jacket, no shoes, but sinks into the snow and allows himself to feel the bite of the cold. The sky moves with leisure, idle as a chameleon changing before his eyes. Black. Purple. Pink. Finally, the golden rays of the sun decide the sky needs another coat of paint and this time chooses a deep orange. He feels warm.
Some hours later, when the sun sits more comfortably in the sky, he returns from his greenhouse. They – that is, his brothers – are visiting Phil. He doesn’t know how to feel about it all. And there is so much all, years and years of it. The damage would never be undone. The mountain would always be scarred. But still… Wilbur stands with Phil on the other side of the window, swinging his arms wildly about, no doubt concocting some new scheme of potentially catastrophic proportions. The door to the small house tucked away in the far corner of the farm swings open and Tubbo leads his son, both swaddled in coats and scarves and linked by their mittens, on an early walk. Tommy lingers on the porch, pulling at a loose thread on the bright blue cardigan he’d knitted himself that wasn’t nearly warm enough for these trips. When he looks up from his fidgeting his shoulders tense for only a moment, a habit he is still unlearning. They see one another. They nod. Tommy smiles. Everything else is details. At times the world still feels futile, but it is certainly not empty. For the first time in years, Techno thinks of leaving.
He constructs a plan; it is a simple one. He packs only one bag, pins a letter to Phil’s bedroom door. It bears no flourishes. No date of expected return. Only a strict feeding schedule for the animals. No one sees him saddling Carl under the cover of night. Except for Michael, awake long past his bedtime and watching from behind a frosted window. He lifts a tiny trotter as high as he can reach and excitedly wiggles it about. His uncle waves back.
Two silhouettes. One tall. The other taller. Shadows should be silent but they holler and it echoes across the field. One trips, the other doubles over. They choke on laughter, gasp for breathe. He doesn’t need to see their faces to know their smiles. The sun creeps over the horizon and he feels that he is standing too close. He pauses, doesn’t know what for. It doesn’t feel like him but he can’t bring himself to look away just yet. A breeze jostles the youngest’s hair – tangled, recently cut, probably covered in dirt – and it dawns on him that Tommy now looks more like Wilbur than he has for many years.
He remembers a night. Lying back on his bed, mock walking up the wall, leaving scuffmarks with every step. Giggles to his left, he shushes them. Too dark, too quiet. They shine flashlights into the tall mirror resting on their carpet, just to see what happens. The mirror leans against the wall like a parent in the doorway. Hushes of quiet, Wilbur and Dad will hear. In this light, or lack thereof, it’s harder to tell them apart. The flashlight points out his bandaged knee, Wilbur’s missing front tooth, but nothing more. It’s more like a carnival mirror. Tricks you into seeing double. They hate it. A door creaks. Shush. Scissors. Dye. Wood groans beneath socks. Quiet, Wilbur. When they return they find only a normal mirror. No, now it’s more like a tall window. Two boys they don’t recognise watch them through it.
In the distance, in the dawn, his brothers reflect one another. Their laughter ricochets off their chests, a light bouncing endlessly between two mirrors. It is too dark, too quiet, so they split the dawn air and amend its stillness. Wilbur yells. Tommy yells louder. Techno smiles. They will never be without each other.
He pulls the reigns and only then does Tommy spot him. No tension. There is just enough light to see Tommy’s mouth open and he might wave but… Something about the picture must look off. Wilbur turns then. Less enthused but somehow happier than he had been before. A moment, his eyes flick. The horse. The travel pack. The sun washes the field in orange. The landscape becomes a sundial; Techno knows his time is almost at an end. He feels the need to turn Carl to the west and sprint, let the light chase him.
Tommy only takes one step forward before he feels his brother gripping his shoulder. Their faces are not sad. All for the best, he would have hated a scene. The light inches closer. It covers the two of them and they stand, still linked, in the sunshine. Techno nods. And turns. And runs.
With that one nod of his head, little had been done but so much accomplished. It was more goodbye than he had ever given them before. Somehow, that made the leaving real. So long as they never truly said goodbye, Tommy and Wilbur had known he would always return in their time of need. But in this singular nod something felt final, the time they had shared in their lives had drawn to a close.
They watched him race the sun to the edge of the world. Wilbur did not chase and Tommy did not shout. No tears, no regrets, only gratitude for the insurmountable luck they were granted to have had Technoblade as their guardian, their friend, their brother, for as long as they did. And no matter how far he went or how long he would be gone – if they would see him tomorrow or never again – as they had always been long before their births and would always be long after their deaths, they were brothers. In this and every life.