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Technoblade has… probably been in worse situations than this before.
Sure, he can’t think of any of them right now. Sure, taking an unknown potion to the face from an unseen assailant – who’s he kidding, it’s Dream, of course it’s Dream, there’s no one else on this server crazy enough to attack him and good enough to pull it off – is a pretty bad situation. Sure, blind from an unknown potion to the face in the middle of a forest, miles from home, with the sun going down, is kind of a really pretty bad situation.
But he’s got to have been in a worse situation before, some time. The fact he can’t think of one right now is probably just some kind of temporary memory lapse.
Probably something to do with the awful, burning pain in his face and hands, too.
“So, uh, Chat,” he says, staring into darkness. “We’ve got some stuff happenin’. You might have noticed. We’ve got a bit of a situation developin’ here. What with it bein’ night and all, and me bein’– injured, and all. I mean. We’re fine, of course, everythin’ is under control, but I’d definitely all it a situation.”
He’s proud of how steady his voice is, even if it’s ragged and raw with pain. The potion burns as it works, still doing what feels like chewing into the skin of his face – and the skin of his hands, where he’d wiped at it automatically in animal panic on first contact. He’s not sure if the wet down is cheeks is blood, or something worse.
Either way, he hopes to god it’s not tears. God. How embarrassing that would be.
E
E
e
E
E
lmao
e
E
Chat is, unsurprisingly, near unanimous in their response. They do love their letters. There’s something almost comforting about it, though. Technoblade’s blind, and stuck in a forest with night falling, and has no idea where home is and no way of seeing his comm to ask anyone. But at least Chat are here, with their stupidity and their letters, a universal constant.
It’s less comforting when Technoblade thinks about what he’s going to have to ask of them next.
“So, uh,” he starts, and then has to pause to ride out a wave of violent itching that radiates out from the inside of his eye sockets. His hands flex, as he resists the urge to touch his face again. Resists the urge to claw – whatever’s left of – his eyeballs right out of his head. At least he’s not screaming any more. That’d been embarrassing.
When the worst of it passes, dulls from acute agony to steady, throbbing pain, he tries again. “So. Chat. Like I said. Situation. We– we got ourselves a bit of a situation. Which means I’m gonna have to ask you for a favour, which means you gotta try and stop with the letters for a bit. Okay?” He pauses, breathing loud and ragged in the darkness surrounding him. There is no deluge of letters forthcoming, though a handful drip drip drip their way through whatever bit of his brain Chat is hooked into. “Right. Okay. So, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna try and get our way home, and you’re gonna guide me. So. First things first. Which way’s home, Chat?”
left
E
do a flip
right
right
backwards
E
E
left
“For fuck’s sake!” roars Technoblade, to an empty forest, pain and frustration and something that’s definitely not fear getting the better of him. A fresh trickle of wet runs down one burning cheek. “Shut up! No– shut up and listen to me, Chat.”
He relishes the abrupt, shocked silence that snaps through his frontal lobe like ice water.
He doesn’t swear. Technoblade never swears – it was beaten out of him in another life, one where he was valued for his skills in a fighting pit and his obedience to his handlers and nothing more, one he doesn’t like to think about these days. But, right now, he needs Chat to pay attention, and he’s cold and hurting and– sure, he’s just a little bit scared, too.
Because Technoblade never dies but, right now, he’s not sure he’s capable of keeping that promise.
“Listen to me,” he continues, as he feels the first tentative ramblings of Chat start up again. “I… I’m gonna be honest with you, Chat. I’m gonna be honest! This is looking real bad. Real, real bad. Or, uh– not looking, actually. Heh.”
E
technoblind?!?!!?!!!!
E
E
technoblind
omg lore?
E
lmao do a flip
LORE REAL
technoblind lets goooooo
The urge to swear rises again within him, along with another wave of pain through his face and hands. He grits his teeth so hard he tastes blood, and ignores both. “You’re not listenin’ to me, Chat,” he says, and he knows he sounds desperate, but that’s because he kind of is. “I don’t– I don’t care about your dumb jokes right now, or whatever lore is, or– look. Here’s the situation. I’m gonna lay the facts out for you.”
He pauses, vaguely aware he’s breathing too hard, too loudly. His chest is heaving. His breath feels very hot against his potion-burned lips. One of his hands has, for some reason, drifted to grip the pomel of his sword, as though it were a child’s toy.
“I can’t see anythin’,” he says, and the bluntness of it shocks even him. It should be simple – a statement of fact. Instead, it feels like vulnerability. Like baring his throat for a naked blade.
He swallows, rallies. Tries again. “I’m– I’m blind, Chat,” he says, a little easier this time, “and that’s not a great thing to be when you’re in the middle of a forest at night. In case you didn’t know already, I’m tellin’ you – not a good thing. So, ideally, we gotta– we gotta get somewhere that’s not a forest. Like mine ‘n Phil’s. That’d be pretty ideal, chat, if we could get to mine ‘n Phil’s. So like– if you’ve been holdin’ out on me, if you’ve got anythin’ that might help… now’s the time, Chat. Now’s the damn time.”
He pauses. Holds his breath. His face has gone half-numb, semi-painless, especially round the eyes. His hands feel like he’s stuck them in lava. Of the two, it’s the face that scares him more.
wats the coords
COORDS GUYS
technoblind
do we even know coords??
philza’s streaming, ask him
technolore!
TECHNOLOOORE
just ask phila guys
technolooooore
do a flip lol
flip guy kys fr
He exhales, slowly, trying not to feel disappointed. Trying not to feel afraid. There’s no point to either of those emotions. They won’t keep him alive. And besides – what was he expecting? It’s Chat. The inane voices in his head might border on the mystical at times, but at the end of the day, they’re just that. Inane voices.
As usual, he’s on his own. There’s no one coming to save him, no help available. Standard operating procedure. He knows this dance with death. He’s faced worse odds before, and beaten them. Probably. He’ll survive this time too. Maybe.
And then–
-78x -2477y guys i remember it from the exile streams
pog
-70 -2400 ???
yeah phil is saying -80 -2470
lets goooo
pog
E
pog
pogchamp
youtube plays technoblade lol
“Okay,” he says, and the anger has gone, drained out of him with the cold and the pain and the bone-deep, shocky exhaustion. He’s used to working through the initial adrenaline hit of injury, the crash right after, but that doesn’t make it easier per se. Doesn’t make being alone and hurt and vulnerable in the middle of the damn woods in the middle of the damn night any more palatable. “Okay. Wait– Phil says–? You know, I don’t actually want to know. I don’t wanna know. Changed my mind. Just tell me which direction we’re supposed to go in, Chat.”
He gets several thousand demands for him to get his coordinates up on his comm.
“I can’t see my damn comm, Chat, so I dunno what– what you think this is gonna achieve,” he says, but does as they ask anyway because, what the hell. It’s not like they can make the situation worse. It’s already at rock bottom.
He pulls up the coordinates on his comm through muscle memory alone. And, amazingly, he knows the instant it’s up on the screen, because Chat responds with an overwhelming avalanche of–
left
left
right
LEFT
right lol
Left
if ur saying right kys
flip lol
MOD: people making death threats
will be permabanned
leftnoblade
“You better not be lyin’ to me, Chat,” he warns, because they’ve done that before. They seem to think it’s funny. He does not. Especially not right now, when he’s entirely dependant on the voices in his head for his survival – a concept which is so laughably ridiculous that he does in fact laugh about it. It’s a nasal sound, and not particularly nice, and it stops pretty abruptly because it makes his eye sockets feel like someone’s threading pickaxes through them. “Because if you’re lyin’, Chat, then I’m dead – and I’m takin’ you with me if I die.”
Chat splits about eighty-twenty left-to-right. The lefts yell at the rights. The rights mostly just laugh.
Technoblade turns left, and starts walking.
He discovers, pretty quickly, that walking in a forest is not particularly easy when you can’t see. He’s used to walking in the dark well enough – but he’s built for the dark, the dim light of the Nether. He’s not built for being blind.
Turns out that Chat is built for being eyes, though, because they’re pretty good at spotting mobs. He didn’t even realise they could see without him – didn’t even realise they were something more than voices, something separate, something beyond bloodlust-madness. In any other circumstance, he’d be kind of freaked out by that. In any other circumstance, he’d be asking questions about that.
Right now, though, he’s too tired for questions. Right now, he just wants to get home.
So, Chat are good at spotting mobs. Point in their favour. They’re less good at telling him about mobs, given their strong preference for uncoordinated, incoherent yelling. Point against them. Evens out to a solid zero, but they manage. Between them, they manage. Chat forewarns him about creepers and zombies off in the distance provided he swings his head back and forth every so often. He rewards them with stupid little quips, which they like, and bullies them into staying on task, which they like less. But, between them, they just about manage.
Or, rather, they manage until he takes an arrow to the thigh.
A hundred thousand voices scream skeleton inside his skull, seconds too late for it to be of any goddamn use whatsoever.
“Which direction?” he snaps, bow out and drawn and raised before he’s consciously registered the decision, before he’s really even registered the hot, wet pain of his thigh. It’s more of an afterthought, anyway, with the pain in his face and hands still like wildfire and acid rain. “Which direction, Chat?” His own heartbeat is loud in his ears, his eyesockets throbbing with residual agony. His bow feels like sandpaper in his grip. Adrenaline trickles cold down the back of his neck, coils tight around his stomach.
Chat scatters, unclear on how to answer the question. It’s a weakness of this little system they’ve set up together. Chat works well with a set of fixed commands, left right forward over duck, where they can coalesce into something almost coherent enough to be a single voice – but anything more complex and they dissolve into noise again, a wall of sound-sense-pressure in his brain that he has neither the time nor the concentration during a fight to parse apart.
“Clock directions!” he snaps, and Chat screams duck.
He ducks.
An arrow soars over his head, and he only knows because it’s close enough to hear the whistle of it, close enough to feel the disturbance of its wake in the air. His heart pounds in his chest. “Think of a damn clock, Chat, where’s the skeleton, if twelve is dead ahead–”
Half of chat starts talking about zoomers, and phones, and Technoblade has no idea what the hell those are, or what apples have to do with watches – the distractibility is another weakness. The rest, thank god, provide actionable information. One o’clock, two o’clock. He splits the difference and aims one-thirty.
He takes the shot.
Chat explodes with various iterations on F and E, and they’re back to goddamn letters, they’ve got a worse damn attention span than him–
The skeleton’s next shot clips his shoulder, tears at his cloak and shirt, draws a line of shallow fire across the muscle there. He grunts through a clenched jaw, and determinedly does not drop his bow as the muscles in his arm spasm. Chat are shrieking, hysterical, a dagger of pressure behind his left eye.
“Direction,” he snarls through gritted teeth, grabbing another arrow, nocking it, ignoring the blood running hot down his arm, turning his grip slippery as the itching pain in his fingers slowly banks into a fire. The bow is abrading the raw skin there, shredding through to the wet meat below. Chat shout three, and he turns, hyperaware of every angle his body moves through without sight as a proxy. “Left, right, up, down– I need some guidance, Chat–”
Skeleton archers are slow to reload, but they’re not terrible shots, and he doesn’t fancy trying to dodge any more arrows. Better to make this shot, his shot, count.
Chat finally gets it.
left
left
left and up a bit
left
right lol
left
left and like ten blocks ahead
left
He turns. Shifts his weight. There’s a rustle ahead – he shifts his weight again, adjusts his aim. And then, on a separate level of hearing, a different one to the one he hears the rustle of the mob with… there’s suddenly Chat. The noise of them swells, a crescendo, and– coalesces. For the first time, information coheres out of noise.
For the first time, Chat speaks as one.
Three inches up,
and four degrees right.
He raises his bow by three inches. He turns to the right by four degrees.
He takes the shot.
There’s the rattle, ten to twenty blocks ahead, of a skeleton taking an arrow to the ribs. A half-second later, there’s the faint noise of a skeleton dying – the chime of experience, the clatter of a dropped bone. Technoblade inhales. Exhales.
When he lowers his bow, he becomes aware his hands are shaking.
“Okay, Chat,” he says, quietly. There’s wet on his mostly-numb cheeks again. Might be blood. Might be plasma. Might be something else entirely, something he doesn’t want to put a name to. “Okay. Good job. Well done. Let’s– right. Let’s keep goin’.”
The wetness on his fingers, as he shoulders his bow again, is definitely blood. His hands hurt beyond reason, beyond anything he could hope to dwell on without losing his mind. So he doesn’t dwell on it. He simply starts walking again.
Chat, remarkably, does indeed keep him going. They carry on steering him through the forest, along paths, dodging trees and mobs. After a while, he starts to think they’re fucking with him – that they’re just leading him on a merry dance through the woods, not actually back to home. Back to Philza.
But then the tree roots give way to bare dirt, to grass, to frost that crunches under his boots. To snow, packed under his feet, ankle deep, creeping halfway up his calf and then further still until he’s wading through it. He’s got his snowshoes, somewhere in his inventory. He doesn’t have the eyes to look for them. He doesn’t have the energy to stop and wrestle with Chat to find them.
Now he knows he’s getting close, all he can think of is home.
He pushes his way forward through snow until he starts shivering. He keeps pushing forward. He stops shivering. Chat is shouting at him, but it’s not about mobs, and it’s not about being off course, so he keeps pushing forward. Home beats in his head like a drumbeat, louder even than Chat’s white noise. Home home home home. He needs to survive to get there, of course, which is why he isn’t shouting his head off and attracting every mob in a twenty chunk radius. But– Home. Home home home home.
When he hears the faint whinny of a horse in the distance, he throws caution to the winds.
“Phil!” he yells, hoarse and strained. His voice sounds awful, ragged with screaming, wet with tears – because there’s no denying that’s what the wetness on his cheeks is. Not any more. “Phil– Philza Minecraft! Phil! Phil!” He pauses, panting for breath, soaked up to the thigh in snowmelt and shaking with exhaustion and adrenaline, with fear and pain, with bone-deep damp cold.
“C’mon,” he gasps, and then, softly, “c’mon. Chat. If you– if you got any other miracles for me tonight. If you’ve got one more goddamn miracle for me, let it be him. C’mon.”
For a long moment, there is silence. From both Chat, and the world around him. The snow muffles everything like a blanket. Chat is silent as a prayer.
“…Techno?”
Chat explodes into noise – howling, shouting, screaming, delight, excitement, overwhelm – but Techno hears none of it. He’s too busy dropping to his knees in the snow, weak from relief, too weary to go another step.
But he doesn’t have to. Not any more. He’s home now.
“Techno!”
There are footsteps, barely audible at first, and then louder and louder until the crunch of snow beneath foot fills his ears. Phil’s ragged breathing joins it, and then the noise of snow being crushed, louder, right in front of him. Then the faint oof of Phil dropping to his knees.
For a long moment, their shared panting is the only thing that fills the space between them.
“Techno–” Phil sounds breathless, shaky. There’s the faint disturbance of air around Techno’s face that suggests hands, moving, not quite daring to touch. “Holy shit. Tech– Techno– what. What the fuck happened, mate?”
“I trained them, Phil,” says Technoblade, and if he sounds a little bit deranged, then– well, he thinks he’s allowed that. As the adrenaline of a blind journey through a forest at night fades, the pain is becoming overwhelming. Whatever was in the potion has eaten its way into the skin of his face, and it feels like a thousand burrowing ants have made their home in his flesh. His hands burn just the same. His eye sockets feel like someone’s driven daggers through them. “Chat. I trained them, with my tears.”
“Bloody hell, Tech,” says Philza, faintly, and Techno can’t blame him for the hesitancy in his voice, the raw edge of alarm beneath the nervous giggle that follows. He can only imagine what he looks like – bloody and manic and trembling, chest heaving, hands shaking, grinning.
And he has to imagine, because he can’t look at anything. Can’t see anything.
Because he’s blind.
He only gets a few seconds’ warning from Chat–
yes!!! dadza!!!!!
philza <3
aww philza
technosupport
philzaaaa
dadza!
techza uwu
emeraldduo!!!!
one of us one of us
–to flinch back from Philza’s incoming hug.
He feels Philza freeze, and it tightens something in his chest like a vise. Doesn’t matter that he can’t see the other man’s expression – he can imagine it, with a picture-perfect clarity born of long familiarity. The slight, hurt pinch of his brow, the worried twist of his lips, the way his eyes go hard and flat when he–
“Don’t,” he rasps.
He senses Philza’s flinch in the noise of fabric on fabric, in the sudden valence change of the background hum of Chat through his frontal lobe, in the tiny movements in the air between them. It might be that he’s going crazy, but he swears he can feel the heat of Philza’s knees, a bare half-inch from his in the snow. “No, Phil, it’s–” He sighs, and holds his hands up between them. He’s got no idea what they look like, but Phil’s sharp inhale speaks volumes. “I dunno if– this stuff, whatever it is– it burns, if you touch it. Not sure if it’s still active, or if it’s just nerve pain or somethin’ now. Careful.”
“Fucking hell.” There’s something wet in Philza’s voice, something cracking. Fingers close around his forearm, several inches above the point where the burning stops. He twitches, a fighter’s instinct. A thumb rubs across the underside of his arm, slow, comforting. “Fuck, Techno. It’s still hurting?”
Technoblade laughs, a low rumble entirely lacking in humour. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Like I’ve stuck ‘em straight in lava.”
The fingers trail up his arm, over his shoulder, his neck – careful, broadcasting, and god, this man makes it so horrifyingly easy to love him – to trace across his cheek. The very tip of one finger, the barest press of a nail, traces the outline of some abstract shape on his face. The point where the damage starts, maybe.
“And your eyes?”
“Not really enough left of ‘em to hurt.” A lie. Half a lie. He’s been trying not to think about it, but there’s an awful sort of hollowness to the sockets, a strangeness to how his eyelids sit. He’s realistic about what Phil’s going to find when he starts trying to clean this mess up.
The pain, though… the absence of eyeball hasn’t stopped the hurting. There’s bees filling the sockets, white hot pokers against his optical nerve. If they weren’t already gone, he might be asking Phil to take them out, just to make it stop.
But Phil doesn’t need to know that.
“Fucking hell,” says Philza, again, like that means anything. Like that will fix anything. There’s a palm against the line of his jaw, and Technoblade can’t help but lean into it, desperate for contact, for something that doesn’t fucking hurt. A thumb rubs under one eye, careful, tender – because Philza has never been good at following instructions – and though he, Technoblade, hisses in pain at the contact, Phil doesn’t so much as flinch.
The potion is inert now, then. The pain’s just from the fact he’s been eaten raw by it, from the nighttime cold against exposed flesh and nerve and muscle. And the fact that Phil hasn’t rushed him inside, hasn’t forced every regeneration and healing potion in their stores down his throat…
He sits with that, for a moment. The knowledge of what that means.
“Phil,” he rumbles eventually, hurt and grieving, the name ripped from somewhere deep in his chest. He can feel the way the hand on his cheek trembles.
He hopes to god that Phil’s not crying. How embarrassing for them both, if he was.
Chat is, for once, blessedly quiet.
They sit like that, in silent communion, for a minute. Maybe more. Time is malleable without sight, especially in the quiet, without markers of how things are moving around you. Techno’s not sure he likes it. Not sure he dislikes it, either, though. There’s something to be said for the change of pace.
“I could kill you, if you want,” offers Phil, eventually, his voice unsteady, breaking on kill. “I’m– look, I’m not gonna lie, mate, I don’t think pots are gonna do shit for this.” And it’s one thing to know that, and another thing to hear it, and Techno feels like he’s been skewered slowly through the chest. “Don’t think even a god apple is gonna– But the respawn…”
Techno knows what it must cost him, to offer that. After Wilbur. He knows, because he listened to Philza scream in his sleep every night for the weeks after the sixteenth. Had held him, until the screaming stopped.
But he also knows it’s a moonshot. The respawn’s fickle at the best of times, and doubly so on this godforsaken world. Even when the injury’s the one that killed you, it’s hit or miss as a shortcut to healing – like Quackity, and the pale and sightless shadow of an eye it gave him back, almost a taunt. With an older injury, a nonlethal injury, trying to cheat the healing process with a quick and artificial death... it's a gamble, even on servers with less vicious respawns than this one.
Like Quackity, Technoblade has never enjoyed gambling without the deck stacked in his favour.
He reaches out, blindly, and fumbles for a grip around Philza’s forearm, as tight as he dares. His hand slides up, up, and the friction is red-raw against the stripped skin of his palm, but eventually he finds it. Philza’s pulse, hot beneath one clawed thumb, a rhythm as familiar to him as his heart’s own. A beat and a half too fast, though, stress-quick with adrenaline.
“Hey, Phil,” he says, and a little of the hysterical amusement from before bleeds through, the rumbling edge of a laugh. “Don’t you know that Technoblade never dies?”
For a moment, there’s silence. Then a laugh rips itself out of Phil, choked and wheezy, his pulse jumping under Techno’s touch before settling into something slower. It’s not as good as being able to see his face. Nothing will ever be as good as that, as seeing the laugh-lines in the corner of Phil’s eyes, and the lopsided quirk of his chapped lips, and the way his nose wrinkles when he’s trying not to smile, and–
But it’s something.
Phil wraps his hands around Technoblade’s forearms, an inch above the crawling chemical burns, the grip warm and tight and half-shaking. Once again, Technoblade wishes he could see his face. Chat are no help, back to being incomprehensible as always now the danger has passed.
awww philza
…....techza
techza! techza!
it’s /p guys no shipping
best buds
techzaaaaa
TECHZA
TECZA
techza win
guys put /p!!
“...If you can hear me, Chat,” says Philza, after a moment – quiet, and as serious as Techno’s ever heard him, “then thank you.” One of the hands shifts, curls around the back of his neck, and pulls him in until their foreheads touch. “Thank you for bring him back to me safely.”
techza pog
TECHZA REAL
pog
GUYSS PLLEAS EE PUT /P
E
we win theeeeese
pog
techza pog
techza poog
“Oh, they can hear you alright,” says Technoblade, wincing against the spike of noise and pressure that Chat’s shouting drives through his brain. It’s almost a welcome distraction from the burning. “Don’t– don’t encourage them, Phil, c’mon–”
“Whoops,” says Philza, sounding entirely unapologetic, and chuckles. His hand shifts back to grip Technoblade’s, and he pulls them both to their feet. “Sorry, mate. Chat– be nice to him, okay? Maybe take a nap or something.”
“They’re never nice to me,” Techno grouches, with an indignance he doesn’t really feel. The snow crunches under his feet as he walks, and he briefly regrets not having stuck his hands in it when he was kneeling. It might have stopped the burning that’s making him want to chew them off. “Hey. Phil. What’re you even doin’ up at– what time is it?”
“Gone midnight, easily,” says Philza, absently, tightening the arm he’s secured around Techno’s waist a little more firmly, as though he might somehow drift away. “I’d say…” Techno can picture him, squinting one-eyed up at the moon, face scrunched in concentration. “Maybe three in the morning. Three thirty. I was planning on pulling an all-nighter anyways – the crows kept asking for my coordinates, so I knew something was gonna–”
“Wait.” Techno comes to a full stop. It sends Philza stumbling, nearly falling over before he manages to catch himself with the arm around Techno’s waist. “Wait, did you say the crows were askin’ for your coordinates?”
“Yeah, I–” Philza’s arm tightens around him, a brief squeeze, and then there’s a hand on his forehead. The back of one, like he’s checking Techno’s temperature. “Mate, you know the crows talk to me sometimes. You good?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Just– Chat, uh. Chat was sayin’, at one point, when I was tryin’ to work out how to get home. I didn’t know the coordinates, ‘cause I’ve never needed ‘em, but Chat didn’t know the way without ‘em. And they were sayin’ they were goin’ to go ask you.”
Philza goes very, very still. The sound of his breathing cuts off, abrupt, leaving just the pounding of his heart beneath Techno’s fingers.
“See, I just thought they were just bein’– you know. It’s Chat. They say a lot of stuff, I ignore most of it, ‘cause they’re crazy and… look, Chat, don’t yell at me for this, please, I’m beggin’ you, but they’re like ninety percent stupid most of the time. But they didn’t know your coordinates.” Technoblade pauses, swallows. “And then they– they did. All of a sudden, they did.”
He pauses again, because he’s not really sure what comes after that sentence. Sure, chat’s always had a slightly spooky ability to know stuff beyond its means. To know stuff that even Technoblade himself does not. But even assuming they’re something other, something attached to him but not of him – which he’s got little evidence on, one way or another, and is not, admittedly, something he likes thinking about – there’s no way they should have actually been able to ask.
“You’re saying that… that my crows are your chat?” says Philza, slowly. “Or that chat can talk to the crows? Or– god, that’s–”
“Kinda cool.”
“Kind of creepy, I was going to say.” Philza pauses. “Hey, ask them why they didn’t just get the crows to tell me your coordinates, then. ‘Cos I think that’d’ve been easier, right, than them having to like– puppet you through the forest at night.”
fourth wall break
noooo phil the lore
philza minecraft says
fuck your fourth wall lol
f in chat for the rp lads
E
phil pls, think of the lore
E
e
E
“They’re sayin’ letters again, Phil, you’ve got them on the damn letters again. And somethin’ about lore. And walls.” Technoblade worries at a tusk with his tongue, and tries not to think too hard about the word puppet. It hooks something into his stomach, the idea of being strung up like a marionette and made to dance by some unseen puppeteer – an edge of queasiness, an edge of coldness. The red light of a recording camera blinks, in the blindness behind his eyelids. There is the sensation of pressing up against some invisible membrane strained thin.
An animal, instinctual hind-brain kickback tells him that he should stop poking that membrane. That he doesn’t want to puncture it. That he wouldn’t like what was on the other side.
“You’re fuckin’ a wall, apparently, Phil,” he says, instead of that. He cocks his head a little to the side, as though that’s any help in parsing out individual voices from the cacophony that is Chat.
Phil chokes, and then sways into Techno’s shoulder, laughing wheezily. “I’m what.”
“Look, when I said they were crazy and half-stupid most of the time, I meant it.” Techno shrugs one shoulder, and smiles, and winces as the smile tugs at potion-scorched skin. “But I know that they can be trained, now – so you’d better watch out, Chat, because I’m comin’ for you.” He yawns, widely, still a little loopy from the adrenaline but mostly exhausted from the comedown. “Lessons start at dawn, okay, Chat, so you’d better get a good night’s sleep or whatever. If you even sleep. ‘Cause I’m not gonna go easy on you, you hear me?”
“Okay, Obi Wan Kenobi.” Philza’s voice is teasing, fond, warm. It’s not quite as good as seeing his smile, but it’s close. It’s enough. It has to be enough. “Let’s get a day’s rest and a few healing potions into you before you start bullying the voices in your head, okay?”
“The hell’s an Obi Wan Kenobi?” asks Techno, and hopes Phil doesn’t notice his neat side-stepping of agreement. Technoblade never rests. Not when there’s work to be done. And there’s a hell of a lot of work to be done, if he wants to make sure that he still lives up to the other half of that legend, even wounded, even blinded. If he wants to make sure that Technoblade never dies.
“Old immortals thing.” Phil guides him up the familiar stairs to the cottage. When the door opens, the warmth that spills out of the doorway is like a physical thing, an wave of light that he feels rather than sees. “You know. May the force be with you, yada yada.”
“Now you’re just pullin’ my leg, Phil. Makin’ stuff up.”
“What’re you going to do about it if I am, huh?”
Phil settles him down in front of what feels like the fire. The heat of it licks towards his legs, friendly and tame, nothing like the burn-pain streaked across his face. There’s a soft whuffing noise from nearby, and then a heavy polar bear head settles heavy in his lap. From somewhere slightly further away, there’s the clink of potion bottles, the rasp of bandages.
“I’ll fight you, or somethin’,” mutters Techno, semi-coherently. The last of the adrenaline has drained from him all at once in the warmth, leaving him exhausted and half-delirious with it. Even the pain feels muted, blanketed beneath a wave of sudden tiredness. “…Tomorrow, though. M’tired right now.”
“Tomorrow then,” agrees Phil, gently, and presses a potion-soaked bandage to his face. The pain eases in slow, blessed inches. The tension drops from his shoulders, tension he’d almost forgotten he was carrying. Chat, starved of violence or interesting tasks to do, quiets – as much as it ever does. “You can fight me tomorrow. That’s fine. For now… you should rest.”
And, even though Technoblade never rests when there’s work to be done, Techno can’t help but agree with him. He lets himself drift off, gradually, as Phil quietly tends to his wounds. Just this once, he lets himself rest.
Just until tomorrow.