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It’s at times like this that Tommy is really glad he wears red.
He stumbles through the alleyway with a hand pressed to his side, the other one supporting him against the wall. The sounds of the battle behind him are still loud, he’s still at risk, but there’s no fucking way he’ll ever just ditch Ranboo like that. If Tommy’s standing, he can still fight. He just… needs a second. Just to catch his breath, yeah, that’s all.
It’s a bad idea, every single bit of medical training he’s ever had says not to do this, but fuck the medical training. There’s a fucking feather embedded in his side and he needs it out.
The Angel of Death isn’t the type of villain that a duo like Tommy and Ranboo would usually go up against. With wings and the ability to use feathers like knives, sharp as steel and twice as deadly, he’s not usually someone the younger heroes like their duo would be sent to fight. Today, though, they’d been the only ones in the area. They were under orders to attack on sight. It was up to the two of them to hold him off until someone more experienced could take over.
Tommy doesn’t think they’re doing a great job.
This is their big chance, though. If they do good here, it could be their ticket up the ranks.
If only Tommy didn’t have this fucking feather stuck inside him.
He stops to lean against the alley wall. It’ll be easiest to brace himself here, trying to get a grip on the feather without slicing through his gloves with the sharp edges. It was a horrible idea to pull it out, yeah, but he was out of function with it still stuck. Even bleeding out he’d be better.
When he’s sure it’s good, he yanks.
It hurts like an absolute bitch, but soon it’s on the ground, coated in red. So are his gloves. And his side, actually. That was definitely not a good idea. He can’t stop, though. Ranboo’s on his own out there, and he doesn’t know what had happened with Tommy. In the fast-paced battle, with two heroes who definitely weren’t at the same level as the Angel, it had been easier to just take the hit and hope it looked like a graze than to take the time to distract Ranboo by telling him.
Just for a second, just for a moment, Tommy lets himself actually feel the pain. He got stabbed. He’ll have to fix that up later, when there’s too much blood to keep blending in with the red of his costume.
The second passes. Tommy takes a deep breath, pressing the hand back over the wound. There’s more blood on his glove than he’s comfortable with, but there’s no time to think about that. There’s only the battle outside.
Holding himself up as straight and normal as possible, Tommy walks out of the alley.
Instantly, it’s chaos. The road outside isn’t incredibly wide, just enough for a two-way road and sidewalks on either side in between three-story buildings. Trees line the edges of the sidewalk, and it’s between these that the Angel flies.
The civilians in the area had luckily had the common sense to flee before anything could happen. There are no fatalities, few injuries, just a handful of broken windows and tree limbs on the ground to show any marks so far. Ranboo stays on the ground trying to dodge the debris, teleporting around to keep up where he can. From the distance that Tommy’s ended up at, it looks more like the Angel playing with him than anything else.
Ranboo’s always needed him to even the odds. They work better as a pair, after all. It’s why the Agency had assigned them to each other.
Before he can lose sight of what he’s supposed to be doing, Tommy reaches for the light around him, reshaping it into a familiar sword, a preferred weapon of his. It almost seems to hum under his fingers, solid and faintly yellow, buzzing as he swings it through the air. (He ignores the blood on the handle.)
Lowering the hand from his side, finally, he brings it up to his mouth to amplify his voice as much as he can. “Hey! Angel!” he yells down the street, watching as heads turn towards him. “I’m still here, you know!”
Ranboo gets a moment to pause as black wings angle themselves to shoot down the empty street. It’s just Tommy and the Angel, the two of them, and all he has to do is buy some time-
(He needs to ignore how light headed he’s starting to feel as well. That’s something he very much needs to do.)
It’s too fast for him to try and be fancy, or Tommy would do something like twirl the blade in his hands. As it is, all he has time to do is brace himself.
The first feather is trackable enough, simple enough to slice out of the air when he knows it’s coming. The second follows it, but the Angel is still approaching and fast. Tommy tries to duck to the side, rolling across the street to avoid the pair of legs rapidly approaching his chest, but it jars his side and leaves a smear of red across the pavement, and it’s right then that Tommy knows he’s screwed, because he’s starting to feel it.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
He can’t go down like this, he needs to give backup enough time to arrive, he needs to not die to the Angel of Death himself-
The Angel lands on the pavement, bending his knees to absorb the shock of it, turning right towards Tommy. A mask covers his face, beaked like a plague doctor but leaving the rest of his head open, with blond hair pulled up into a short ponytail. Tommy thinks he would have looked like an average-but-strange guy if it wasn’t for the wings, easily doubling or tripling his size.
“Put the sword down,” says the Angel, voice distorted through his mask. In return, Tommy raises it further, ignoring the way the movement pulls at his side. Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it-
The Angel tilts his head, remarkably birdlike. “You want to do this the hard way, then? Alright. I can do that too.” With just a raise of his hand, there’s a new half dozen feathers floating between the two of them. “You have ten seconds.”
Fuck. Where’s Ranboo? That bitch, if he actually cared he’d be here, Tommy had come back but where is Ranboo? He’s going to die and his emergency teleportation is gone.
“Nine.”
He’s feeling a bit dizzy. That’s not normal, right? He shouldn’t be this dizzy, or tired, or clammy-
“Eight.”
Shouldn’t Ranboo be here? He was just down the road. He can literally teleport. Where the fuck is Ranboo when Tommy needs him?
“Seven.”
He thinks something’s going wrong, because the dizziness has evolved and multiplied into a bone-deep exhaustion, pulling him down to the ground. A “Six-” floats in faintly, but his last thought is just Where did Ranboo go?
He doesn’t hear any more numbers.
~-~-~
When Tommy next opens his eyes, he’s not on a street. There is no Angel of Death standing above him, aiming to kill. There’s only a blank off-white ceiling, an unfamiliar one.
He’s… in a bed? That doesn’t make sense. That hadn’t been a dream. He wasn’t asleep. (He never feels pain that vividly in dreams.)
That’s confirmed when he tries to sit up and is stopped by a stabbing pain in his side. Ah, yes, the literal stab wound he’d pulled the knife out of, how could he have forgotten that?
Bringing up a hand by reflex to cover it, he’s met by bandages that he definitely didn’t apply himself. They’re too neat to be Ranboo’s handiwork as well. Ranboo’s always ended up uneven, too loose or too tight or overlapping in all the wrong places. There was a reason he was banned from medical work. These, though… they felt almost professional, practiced.
It takes him a second to realize he’s out of uniform, unmasked, and then that’s what scares him. If he doesn’t recognize the room, doesn’t recognize the bandages…. who did this?
Months of hero training run through his mind. The last thing he remembered, he’d been bleeding out, passing out, unconscious. Now he’s somewhere strange. He should assume kidnapping, yeah? Pretend to be asleep, see what he could figure out while whoever’s got him doesn’t think he’s awake?
It’s too late for that, though. There’s a door to his right, and it opens while he’s still trying to process the fact that he’s woken up in a different place than where he passed out. Fuck. He’s too late.
There’s a pink-haired man who steps through. He’s tall, probably about Tommy’s height from what he’d judge, with a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose. His hair is long, braided behind his back. Worst of all, Tommy doesn’t recognize him.
Shit. Fuck. Shit again.
“Lightstrike, right?” says the man, turning to look at Tommy in the bed. Well, if he doesn’t know Tommy’s real name, that’s a good sign, right?
“Yeah. That’s me.” He’s not gonna give the guy a single ounce more information than he has to. Nope. Not gonna happen. He’s gonna be annoying on purpose. If he’s been kidnapped, he’s getting out as fast as possible.
“Good. Didn’t get swapped out or anythin’ while you were asleep. Ender said to say he brought you here, and also that he likes alliums the best. And that you’d know what that meant.”
Oh. Oh, thank god. They’d set up a code phrase between the two of them, just in case, and it was paying off, because nobody would know just to say that randomly. Ranboo liked alliums, and that meant this man was a friend of his. He doesn’t need to panic.
“Alright. Alliums are great, he’s right. And that means you two know each other somehow, but I have literally no clue who you are. Or where you came from. Or how you two know each other. Or why the fuck I’m here- why the fuck am I here? ”
The pink haired man sighs. “You got hurt. He panicked, he came here and brought you with him, then ran off somewhere else when I told him you’d be alright. You’ve lost a good bit of blood though, left you unconscious for a good few hours.”
Tommy’s memory of trying to hold the Angel off is blurry at best, but he remembers just thinking Where is Ranboo? That still hadn’t gone away. To some people he seemed inconsistent, but to Tommy he was always there. Him not being around… it felt strange. It felt wrong.
“Where’s my communicator?” Tommy asks, realizing that when he was taken out of his uniform it must have gone along with it all. “I need it. Like, now.”
The man reaches into a pocket, pulling out the device itself and tossing it over to Tommy, who catches it in one hand, before sitting down in a chair next to the bed. Inspecting it, it’s dented in places but not broken. Thank god, that would have been awkward to explain to the higher ups at the Agency. They were supposed to be able to withstand nearly anything. (Tommy had already broken a few, just by accident.)
Pulling up Ranboo’s contact, one of the few he has, Tommy sends a quick message. Hey. I’m alright. Where are you? Usually he’d add in a funny nickname or something, but he’s just woken up after being stabbed, the guy’s probably worried sick wherever he is.
The message comes back faster than usual. Good. Glad you’re alright. Took you to Technoblade’s, had to go back to the Agency. They can’t know about this.
There’s always something that goes unsaid in Ranboo’s messages, something only stated between the lines. It’s easier to tell when he’s actually speaking, of course, but here what Tommy’s pretty sure he’s saying is Tommy holy shit what the fuck how could you do that I thought you were dead. Maybe not in those words exactly, but it’s close enough.
Either way, he’s right. The Agency can’t know about this. They can’t know Tommy fucked up this badly. Holy shit, that was supposed to be their big break, and he doesn’t even know how the battle ended. They’d never get actual missions if the higher ups found out about this. They’d probably even pull Tommy from active duty.
It takes him a second for Tommy to process the rest of the message, though. Took you to Technoblade’s.
“Technoblade,” he says, and the pink haired man turns his head to look back at Tommy. “That’s you, yeah?”
He nods, short and quick. “Ranboo told you, then?” Tommy doesn’t question how he knows Ranboo’s real name. Names are precious in their business. They had power, and if Ranboo had trusted this Technoblade with that power, it meant he could be trusted. He was a friend.
“And you’re the one who did the bandages and all that.”
“Well, it sure wasn’t him, was it?”
Tommy goes for a laugh, but it leaves pain lancing through his side, so it turns into more of a wince. “That’s for sure. He could never.” He brings a hand back up to his side, covering the actual site of the wound. It does nothing, now, but he can still remember the feeling of a glove drenched in blood.
He pauses, just for a second. “I can’t go back to the Agency like this. I just… can’t let them know I failed this badly. It would destroy my career, everything I’ve been working for. And I’ve worked fucking hard for this.” He’s the youngest they have. He’s fought his ass off just to get to active duty. Even Ranboo had experience when he came in, Tommy had… well, not nothing, but nowhere near what the others had.
“And that’s why you’re here. I’m not gonna ask questions. You know I’m not gonna. He knows I’m not gonna. I’m just here to patch you up, and I’m not with them.”
“Well. I know you haven’t asked questions yet. I don’t think I know you well enough for anything else,” Tommy replies, but he thinks he’s gotten enough, honestly. This Technoblade guy is safe, for right now at least. That’s what matters.
He thinks he wants to get up, out of the bed he’s been in this entire time. He wasn’t stabbed in the leg, he was stabbed in the side, there’s a pretty fucking big difference there, thanks. He can get up.
The increased pain in his side when he bends to swing his legs to the side says otherwise, though. Hell. He could barely even sit up earlier. Why did he think this was a good idea? He’ll just stay here. Yeah… he’ll stay. For a bit. He can take a bit of a break now, probably gonna just push through it in a second, but for now he’s allowed to feel the pain.
Technoblade stands up, next to Tommy in the bed. “Don’t push yourself too hard right now. Bit of a nasty place to get stabbed, right there. You’re just lucky you didn’t mess it up any further by, yknow, actually fightin’ after it happened. I’ve done what I can, but I can’t do everythin’. You’ve still lost a lot of blood.”
Yeah. Yeah, that’s right, he did, didn’t he? It took, like, a lot of blood loss to pass out, and actually going up against the Angel after pulling that feather out was probably not a great idea. Still, he wished he’d have hidden it better. Then Ranboo wouldn’t be worrying about him, he wouldn’t have passed out in the middle of his big break, and he wouldn’t be sitting in a near-stranger’s house worrying about his own identity.
Technoblade shifts on his feet. “Look, if you need anythin’, I’ll be here. I’ll be able to hear you-” and he reaches up to point at his ears, which, now that Tommy looks at them, are slightly pointed, inhuman, “-so just. Say somethin’ or whatever?”
“Yeah, got it.” Tommy says. He doesn’t think he’ll need anything. Probably. Maybe.
Technoblade turns on his heel and leaves the room, shutting the door behind him.
Well. Tommy really had fucked everything up with this one, hadn’t he?