Chapter Text
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[ARCHIVIST]: [muffled, as if through fabric] Okay, Quackity should live around here somewhere, I think. If it’s– it’s 2022, yeah? Yes. Okay. My phone says it’s 2022…
[ARCHIVIST]: Uh, excuse me? Hi there. Hi! Can I ask you a question?
[UNIDENTIFIED VOICE]: Uh. Sure?
[ARCHIVIST]: Oh, thanks. Where am I?
[UNIDENTIFIED VOICE]: …California?
[ARCHIVIST]: Where… specifically, in California?
[UNIDENTIFIED VOICE]: [sighs] Just outside Fresno.
[ARCHIVIST]: Oh! Awesome-sauce! Great! Uh, another question–
[UNIDENTIFIED VOICE]: Can you make this quick?
[ARCHIVIST]: Sorry, yeah, last one– what month is it?
[UNIDENTIFIED VOICE]: …Are you high or somethin’? It’s the middle of June.
[ARCHIVIST]: [nervously] Haha, yeah, I knew that. Just… testing you! Uh, thank– thank you, Techno–
[UNIDENTIFIED VOICE]: Wait, how did you–
[ARCHIVIST]: …
[ARCHIVIST]: … I– I don’t– Technoblade? Watson?
[UNIDENTIFIED VOICE]: Who the hell are you?
[ARCHIVIST]: [staticky] Uh. I think… I think you might have… something you want to tell me.
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[ARCHIVIST]: –ank you for sitting down with me.
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: Yeah, whatever, as long as you’re buyin’ the coffee.
[ARCHIVIST]: It’s on me. Or, well, the Institute. Do you mind if I record this?
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: [dryly] Looks like you already are.
[ARCHIVIST]: …oh! Oh, it looks like I am. Okay. So. You had a statement to give, I believe?
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: Yeah, according to you. So which do you want first– my dead brother or the murder wolves?
[ARCHIVIST]: You have– you have two?
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: Yeah? Is that weird?
[ARCHIVIST]: No! No no, no, not at all. Surprising, maybe? Uh– both, would be good, if you’re… willing to give them both.
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: Don’t see why not. Maybe it’ll feel good to get it off my chest. I’ll give both.
[ARCHIVIST]: Okay! Sure! Let me just…
[ARCHIVIST]: [clears throat] Statement of Technoblade Watson, regarding first the pack of murder wolves he encountered in a national park and second, his dead brother. Recorded direct from subject June…
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: Fourteenth.
[ARCHIVIST]: Fourteenth, 2022. Statement begins.
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: Alright, sure. You want the murder wolves first? You get the murder wolves first.
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: I moved to America when I was nineteen. Two years after– after everything with Wilbur. I’ll tell you about that later, for now, just know that I applied to school over here and never really looked back. I… kind of regret that. I should’ve looked back, maybe. For Tommy at least. I left when he was eleven, and it’s only been the past couple months we’ve even started talking again. I guess you could call it healing. I think it’s more like surviving.
My school was in California. Literally the other side of the world from where I grew up and I was fine with that. More than fine, I was ecstatic to be free of that place. I started school– English, y’know, one of those real useful degrees– and worked for a while. Got an apartment and did the best to forget about everything. I could be normal here, which… maybe that was stupid. Nothin’ ever stays normal, not with us. I didn’t make friends in school so much as they kinda adopted me, a group of extroverts just kinda picked me up and swallowed me whole and then I was doin’ stuff. Not parties– those weren’t my style. But board game nights, video games. We had a Minecraft realm together, built stuff on that. Hung out and got lunch, studied together. Read a lot. Can’t tell you how many times I debated things like the Apology and Socrates. Then one summer, I think it was… 2015? The summer between my junior and senior year. Maybe 2016. One of my… friends, Kara, she was adventurous. Liked to go outside. Not really my thing, but they convinced me to come with them on a trip up to the Redwood State Park. National park? The famous one, with the really big trees. They promised it wouldn’t be too long, only a week, and that I could sleep in the car if I really didn’t like the tents. So I said sure, and everyone was excited and boom, off we went.
It was… fun. I’ll admit it, I suppose. We drove up and got our camping spot, way out in the middle of the woods. I’d never been up there, and I grew up in suburbia for a while, so the trees…
They’re big. Really freakin’ big. I cannot express enough how big some of these trees are. It’s somethin’ I don’t think you can understand unless you’ve been there and stood with them. I think sometimes it’s called an old growth forest? Just because of its size. You could stand next to one of those things and wrap your arms around it and you wouldn’t reach barely anything. Big trees. Biiiig trees.
So we set up our camp, it’s kinda isolated. Not too far away. We can still see a couple other cars and campervans, which, cringe camping if you ask me. I don’t like camping either but at least I don’t fake it with one of those giant mobile houses. Just admit you don’t like the outdoors at that point. Lame. We could see a couple of those guys and some other tents from our spot, but we’d picked a place behind a bunch of bigger trees and it kept us mostly away from the main group. The others put up the tents and I helped a bit, someone figured out a fire, not sure how legal it was but as long as no one snitched I wasn’t going to. By the time the sun was setting we were pretty much done, and I was… I wasn’t mad. It wasn’t that bad, all things considered. I’d thought camping was buggy and gross and peeing in the woods, but honestly it was… fun. My friends didn’t bother me when I wanted to go walk around the trees for a bit and stare up into the branches and someone had brought cider– the alcohol kind, and while I don’t normally drink I had one.
Like I said. I don’t normally drink. I don’t like the way it makes my teeth feel, and my head. Just so you know, so you know it wasn’t– the wolves weren’t some weird dream.
We made dinner, hot dogs on the fire. Cliche, I know. But it was… fun.
I felt normal. For the first time in a long time, I felt normal. Like the ghost of my dead brother wasn’t hanging over my shoulder, like maybe I’d grown up doing this.
Heh. Funny how that works out.
By the time we wrapped up for the night, it was dark. Out there, other than the dots of campfires and the occasional headlight and flashlight, there’s no… pollution, in that sense. When it gets dark, it gets dark. I’d chosen to sleep in the car at that point, ‘cause I wasn’t vibin’ with the tents, so they all headed across the fire and I stayed up to put it out with a bucket of wet dirt and then make my way over to the car. I’m separate from everyone else now, and I’m just about to open the door when I feel like…
Back when Wil– back then, there used to be this feeling I got. Like something was watching me. This was that, but it was worse. It felt like something was watching me, yeah, but instead of just watching to watch with that faint sense of amusement, this thing was watching me because it wanted me. It wanted to hurt me. Like it was huntin’ me.
It’s just a feeling, y’know? Gut instincts. I’d learned to trust those back home, so after a second of hesitatin’ I tried to open the car door and get inside before anything came running out of the woods and pounced on my back. And of course, because my life is a freaking horror movie, it was locked. The keys weren’t in my pocket, so they must’ve been in someone else’s pockets or maybe in a tent, and I had to go and get them in order to sleep but– but the thing was still watching me. Every move I made felt like I was takin’ a gamble, like if I took one… wrong… step…
I let go of the car handle and really, really slowly, I turned. And behind me there were– eyes.
Probably a dozen sets of them, waiting in the darkness. The tapetum lucidum, that’s the– the membrane that makes animals eyes shine like that at night. There were a dozen of them and at that moment, when I turned, the moon came out from behind a cloud and I could see them.
There are wolves in California. Just– not there. Not in that forest. They’re all up north, and there aren’t a lot of them, and they aren’t that big. And they don’t hang around fairly populated campsites.
I’ve never seen a wolf in real life before. Maybe when I was little, at a zoo or something, but these… these were huge. The tallest one had to be taller than me, and I’m six foot. Most of them probably hit my shoulder, and their fur was ragged in some places, gleamed in others. Their eyes were…
So bright. Like stars. They glittered, not just with malice, but with intelligence. And when I looked at them, I could feel my heartbeat in my chest, in my throat, in my ears. A steady thum-thump, so loud it could be a drum beating in some orchestral piece. I knew they were waiting for me to bolt like a scared rabbit, ‘cause then they could pounce and rip me to shreds. I didn’t even want to scream, because I knew they’d just take that as an invitation too. I don’t know why I thought that. I don’t know how I knew that they wanted to kill me. I just did. I could see it in their faces, the way their teeth seemed too big for their mouth and they way they drooled–
They waited. And I stood there, tryin’ to think of some way to get out of this situation. I was pinned between the car and the wolves and the longer I looked, the bloodier they got. Viscera dripping from their mouths, drool a bright red, fur matted with something dark and viscous. Blood, clearly. Had they murdered other campers? Did the park service know about them? Was there a warning out and we missed it? None of that mattered, but I was thinkin’ it, and just standing there. Waiting. Listening to my own heartbeat.
Dread is an awful feelin’. Like you’re gonna throw up, but worse. I felt pinned, like I couldn’t escape. And I don’t like feeling helpless. But there wasn’t anything I could do, and that helplessness, it just…
I guess maybe I thought if I didn’t move, they couldn’t see me. Even though they were clearly staring at me, waitin’ to take a bite. But I think the fact– I think the fact I froze is what saved me, in the end. They were waiting, and I wasn’t moving, and then to my left there was a snapping sound as someone walked across a stick and made it break.
Their eyes immediately left me. Whipped all their heads to the side and then, one of them tipped their head up and howled, long and loud. It was… haunting. It sounded like my heartbeat, kinda. But then the melody of my life slipped away, and well…
Whoever was going to the bathroom in those woods– they weren’t as lucky as me. They ran.
You can find the news articles about the rest, if you want. They called it a bear attack. It wasn’t a bear, though. It was those wolves. And the more I thought about them, the less sure I am they were regular wolves. No, I’m positive they weren’t regular wolves. I know things about the monsters that lurk in the night. And they were some of those.
Something creepy.
[ARCHIVIST]: Mmm.
[ARCHIVIST]: Oh, is that– is that it?
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: About the wolves? Yeah, that’s about it.
[ARCHIVIST]: You mean you just survived an encounter with The Hunt just by standing still?
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: Is that what they’re called? The Hunt? Uh. Yeah, guess I did.
[ARCHIVIST]: I– wow. Okay. Okay! Sure. You are a different breed, Technoblade.
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: I hope not.
[ARCHIVIST]: You’re probably wise for that. Scratch that– you are wise for that. Okay. Uh. Wow. Sure, let’s just–
[TECHNOBLADE WATSON]: Did you want to hear about my brother, now?
[ARCHIVIST]: You know what? Yes. Yes, please.
[ARCHIVIST]: Tell me about your brother.