Chapter Text
Tommy wakes up excruciatingly slowly. His consciousness is the first thing he feels, his tethered body still remaining stuck in the deep dark. His head feels like it’s floating above everything, in a way. Weightless, almost. But blind. The binds that once held him are now finally loose and malleable. Alas, it only takes a split second before the rope comes crashing down, wrapping around the boy once again, and awakening his distraught mind.
His hearing comes back next, leaving the young boy disoriented beyond belief. Well, it comes back more or less. Tommy can’t hear anything outside of the loud ringing in his ear. Its shrills are consistent and harsh, as if trying to tear a hole through his head. He doesn’t know whether that’s a good sign or not but, hey, at least he’s not deaf. Hopefully. He honestly can’t quite tell if the sound is from his head, or the ship.
Oh, that’s right. Tommy’s on a ship. He feels around the cold metallic floor as memories slowly start to trickle in, the loud beeping fading into unpleasant background noise.
He remembers being in his room- no. Cell. He remembers being in his cell. Then… Tommy thinks he heard a crash. A shout, maybe? Perhaps multiple. He thinks his kidnappers, the aliens he’s come to nickname “Demons”, were running around, panicking about something.
He remembers seeing the captain of the ship run to his cell, open it, and bark something in a language he could never hope to understand. A mix between a gurgle and the sound of snapping sticks was the best description he could give for the strange dialect. The scratchy voice mixed with the intimidating stature of the captain had sent unconscious shivers down the blond’s spine.
After all of that, Tommy remembers being grabbed and dragged by his arm. Then, he thinks he was dropped? He doesn’t know for sure, but the last thing he recalls seeing was a big bright blue planet in the distance that shined like a beacon.
It had looked stunning, but in a sickening way. So familiar, but so wrong at the same time. Uncanny. He doesn’t know if he liked that feeling or not.
Tommy’s mind finally snaps back into reality as he slowly becomes extremely aware of his body, the adrenaline from reliving his memories coming to a sluggish stop.
His arm is on fire, his head feels even worse, and he thinks his ribs might be broken, as well as his ankle. Tommy refused to look at the mess, however, for fear that it would cause him to panic. What the fuck had happened while he was asleep is something he had yet to figure out, and something he tries his best not to concern himself with. The first, and most important, thing he needs to do is get the fuck out of here before any other creepy alien fuckers take him hostage again.
Assessing his position, Tommy realizes he’s in the front of the ship. The helm, if he remembers correctly. His friend from Earth, Tubbo, loved talking his ear off when it came to space, so Tommy knows a few different facts that might come in handy. Tommy used to complain about Tubbo’s rambling when he was still on Earth. Now, sitting so utterly alone and in pain, he would give anything to hear them again.
But he shakes those thoughts to the back of his head. Tommy can’t ponder what-ifs now, it’s too late for that. So, he tries his best to refocus on the present. The door to the outside world is in his peripheral view, but too far behind Tommy for him to get a good look.
His left leg is trapped under some rubble, the remains of the large control panel from what he can tell. Lifting it up does him no good, as it’s much too heavy for him to move. Not to mention, his left ankle is the one that’s probably broken.
Deciding on a hastily put together plan, Tommy takes a few, long breaths, and, like ripping a bandaid off, jolts up as fast as he can. He almost immediately regrets it, though. The lightheadedness and pain from the quick movement makes him slump over dangerously, almost passing out. But he forces himself to stay mostly righted, blinking the black spots out of his vision as best as he can.
Inspecting his injuries a bit closer, Tommy can tell that there’s way too much blood for his liking. Half of the mess is dried, but the rest is still sluggishly running down his limbs. Cringing, he positions his arms next to the rubble keeping him trapped, and pushes as hard as he can. He tries his best to pull his leg backwards, dragging his whole body along with it.
The pain is indescribable, and Tommy feels as if he might’ve blacked out half-way through. But that couldn’t have happened because when he opens his eyes, he’s sprawled against the cold floor, his decimated leg now free from its cage.
The blood from the now visible cut is sluggishly bleeding. Slow, but enough to be at least mildly concerning. Tommy grits his teeth before climbing up unsteadily onto one foot, moving to keep his mostly uninjured hand on the wall.
He slowly limps his way towards the broken door, making sure to keep his weight heavily on his right leg. The struggle causes Tommy to see white, forcing him to clench his teeth and stall to keep the painful noise that desperately wants to crawl out at bay.
As soon as the pain dulls just enough for him to unfreeze, he continues his slow limping shuffle. It’s extremely humiliating, but worth it in Tommy’s opinion. The door, just a few steps away at this point, almost seems to move even farther away from him as time progresses. Taunting the boy. He pays it no mind, his thoughts only focused on getting as close as possible.
After one last desperate lunge, his fingers rest on the cold metal rim of the door. Tommy sees the rest of the door that was blown off of its hinges during the crash, flat and broken on the floor in front of him. It just lies there, half of it melted and burnt into the… blue ground. What.
Tommy’s eyes weren’t, in fact, playing tricks on him. The grass- was it even grass?- was blue. What the fuck?! He distantly realizes that this was the planet he saw before he had passed out.
A quick chitter brings the boy out of his mind and back to reality. Tommy quickly goes into defense mode, crouching down while leaning heavily onto the broken ship to curb the pain as much as possible. He grits his teeth and tries to breathe as quietly as he physically can, hoping that whatever made the sound will just fuck off and leave him alone.
It doesn’t.
It only gets closer, allowing Tommy to hear the- voices?- clearer. There were three distinct noises, and one in particular caught his attention.
The disembodied voice sounds similar to the birds that Tommy loved dearly back on Earth. It sprouts sounds of caws and chirps that make the boy feel homesick. However, there’s a horrifying sounding sputter or screech in between the familiar calls from the same awful voice that shakes Tommy out of that mindset. The noises become just a little off-sounding, enough where he can tell it’s not familiar. That this isn’t home. That he isn’t safe listening to that voice, no matter how much his instincts want to be.
The second voice is even weirder, in Tommy’s great opinion. It sounds rough, making deep guttural groans and cuffs but occasionally, the voice switches to a higher pitch, not unlike a pig from Earth. The sporadic change in tone makes Tommy’s head hurt, so he elects to ignore that voice completely.
The final voice is the strangest, and farthest from anything he’s known. It speaks in soft coos and whistles, its voice weaving together like a calming ocean. It reminds him of a nostalgic song, or a melody. A children’s lullaby. Swirling notes he can’t pin down, no matter how much his brain tries to. It has an extremely unworldly feel; the other two sound uncanny, but this one sounds like nothing he’s ever even imagined before. It’s almost… comforting, in a way.
Tommy’s gotten so used to dealing with things that are just a tad bit off, enough to freak him out, that it's a surprisingly nice change. Even if being on a weird planet with weird aliens is just about the scariest thing that’s ever happened to him.
But Tommy quickly shakes that dangerous thought out of his head. These are aliens that, if they see him, are probably going to hurt him. Just like the last ship. So, despite wanting to explore more, he hides behind the shabby door frame, pressing his back against the cold metal, and crouching to keep out of sight.
The three pass by without a second thought, and Tommy would tell them that they’re all dumbasses if he didn’t have any self-preservation left. Luckily, he still holds a miniscule amount close to his chest, so instead he just watches them closely while carefully sliding out the door. Now in view, the creatures are fucking humongous. Even the smallest of the bunch, the bird-like one, has a good few inches on Tommy. And that’s just fucking unfair.
But moving past the scary height difference, the aliens look almost exactly like how he pictured them from listening to their voices. Tommy obviously can’t look closely since he’s currently trying to sneak out as quietly as possible, but he can tell the gist of their frames. He doesn’t spend too much time staring at them, though, because he doesn’t want to, you know, die.
The one that sounds like a bird is, well, a fucking bird. It looks the closest to a human, sporting a face eerily similar to his own, but with added feathers on its cheek bones instead of ears. The top of its face was also completely blocked out with… well Tommy can’t really tell what it is, but it’s the same dark black as its other ear-feathers.
It also has a fucking giant pair of midnight black wings, so, there’s that. Plus, its feet end with double jointed bird legs, which is fucking awful in Tommy’s opinion. It could pass as an expert cosplayer if not for the legs.
The second fucker is even scarier ‘because why would the aliens look normal’, Tommy thinks bitterly, ‘the universe just loves tormenting me I guess.’.
It’s extremely lanky, its limbs stretching out farther than humanly possible. Tommy has to bite back the laugh that comes bubbling up to the surface at the thought of it being a fish and a ghost’s love child. He knows he can’t be too far off, however, since it looks like a weird clusterfuck of both; displaying semi-translucent blue skin, fins, and… were those gills?! Yeah, fuck that. It also has a mask firmly attached to its head with a long and thin tube traveling to its weird looking backpack of sorts. Tommy’s main theory is that it’s for breathing.
The thing that catches Tommy’s eye the most, however, is the fish-fuck’s hair. Well, he doesn’t know if it’s hair, but it looks like it, so he’s going to call it hair. Fuck it. Only, it’s not normal hair, since it fucking floats. The locks swirl around the creature’s head as if it’s underwater, seemingly defying gravity. That’s not batshit insane. Nope.
Turning away from the complete mind-fuck that was the alien he now dubbed Ghost-Fuck, his eyes land on a creature he severely wishes wasn’t there. It’s the biggest out of the group, hell its head nearly touches the fucking roof! It has to contort its body in a way that doesn’t look comfortable in the slightest to move around the ship. It’s a… well for lack of a better word, a pig. Maybe a boar? Tommy admittedly never learnt the difference. It just looked like a boar was genetically mutated, started walking around upright, and decided to wear extremely fancy, regal even, clothing. That’s totally normal, right? It was by far the least human alien out of the group. Tommy instinctively tenses when it moves.
Tommy thinks he’s seen enough of these fucking weird aliens. He steps down the broken steps, being careful to shift his weight as gently as possible. When he gets to the bottom step, his foot hesitantly dangles in the air, not yet touching the strange looking grass. Tommy’s not scared, not at all, but the grass-like strings look like they could kill him if he steps on it wrong. Plus, he doesn’t know if the atmosphere is safe for humans. But, it’s not like he has any other choice.
He places his foot back onto the safety of the last step, before turning around to look at the gang of aliens. Most of them disappeared through the rest of the ship, blissfully unaware of the feral human on board with them. One though, Ghosty-Fuck, stayed behind.
The being seems to be leafing through some documents that were too high for Tommy to reach. He had seen the assholes that kept him captive walk around the cells with those folders, taking notes in it with some type of fancy quill. Tory pricks. The folders must be on the creatures they’ve kidnapped, including him. Which means Tommy should get the fuck out of here before the suprised looking Ghosty-Fuck finds his file and starts searching for him.
Tommy gives another glance to the blue “grass”. He doesn’t want to step on it, not in a million fucking years, because that would solidify that he’s never going home. That he’s stuck here. And, it could very well be poisonous and cause him to drop dead in front of the creepy mad scientist looking fish. That would be unpleasant, who knows what the bitch would do with his corpse.
Suppressing a shiver and wiping that idea from his mind, Tommy looks back at the blue alien one last time before closing his eyes, and praying to anything that can hear while he takes a step to the ground. It takes a few seconds for it to register that he, well, isn’t fucking foaming at the mouth or dead on the floor, and when he opens his eyes, his foot is firmly on the ‘grass’. The blue tendrils snake around his sneaker carefully, so he shakes them off as best he can and places his second foot down as well.
Tommy keeps taking careful steps away from the ship’s form, making sure to look back at the entrance every few seconds in case one of them spots him.
He was never one to pray, but he finds himself whispering the unfamiliar words under his breath to anyone that might hear. He’s desperate, alright? Give him a break.
The young boy slowly starts to become increasingly careless the farther he gets, his breath coming out in harsher pants, and his legs becoming uncoordinated. Once the adrenaline he had been feeling finally wears off, he collapses into a patch of bushes for rest. This will surely cover him for a while as he takes a breather.
He can still see the bright glow of the broken spacecraft in the distance, but it’s merely a spec in the distance. Tommy takes a small comfort in that idea as his eyes slide shut.
—-------
Waking up is one hell of an affair. Everything hurts, Tommy almost forgot how hurt he had gotten during his imprisonment on the ship and in the crash. He also found his joints locked and pulsing with pain from sleeping in such a cramped position. The injuries are going to be a bitch to deal with, but he can’t find it in himself to think about that right now.
At least he didn’t die during his sleep, though Tommy can’t say he wasn’t surprised. He honestly, almost expected it. Some dumb unlucky streak he had going could explain his thought process. Maybe he’s finally on his lucky streak, considering that he somehow crash landed on what has to be one of the only planets with a mostly human-safe atmosphere. So far, at least.
The sky has darkened considerably, meaning that he’s slept for… fuck. Tommy almost forgot about how a new planet also meant a new daylight cycle. Which means he has no way to tell how long he’s been asleep. Just great.
The only thing that clues him into how much time he was knocked out for is the old ship, since it’s still radiating light in the same position it was when he last saw it. That should be a good thing, right?
But, it’s not like Tommy can heal just sitting around. Well, maybe he could, but he wouldn’t heal correctly. So, he decides to look around for a sheltered place to rest, and find some sort of first aid supplies.
With this idea in mind, Tommy carefully heaves himself up. It takes a lot longer than he would’ve wanted, since he’s so injured, but he eventually pushes himself upward and starts limping straight ahead.
Now, does he have a plan in mind? Of course not. It’s Tommy. But he does have his sheer will to, well, not fucking die, so he thinks that’s enough. For now, he just elects to go in a straight line and hope that the universe decides to finally be on his side.
—-------
Okay, Tommy’s had some stupid ideas, sure, but nothing beats this. He had been walking in his straight line when he saw it. A second ship. He should’ve steered clear, should’ve just went around the hunk of metal and continued on, but he couldn’t.
The ship looked perfect. It was big, seemingly abandoned, hidden in the forest, and best of all, it could have medical supplies. Maybe it didn’t, but the idea of supplies was enough for Tommy to sneak into the aircraft, hoping through an opening in one of the windows.
Now he’s inside, holding in a hiss from his all but stealthy crash landing. This is dumb, yes, but it could very well be his only option.
Waving that depressing thought away, Tommy immediately starts exploring. He’s surprised, and nervous, to see some significant signs of life. Fresh looking ‘food’ in what Tommy guesses is their equivalent to a kitchen, items scattered around, and no cobwebs, though he supposes that could be just an Earth thing. He suppresses a shiver at the idea of ‘space spiders’. Earth spiders were great, don’t get him wrong, but he doubts ‘space spiders’ would be as nice as most spiders he’s used to. Hopefully it was only an Earth thing.
He decides to just try and find supplies, then get the hell out. He really doesn’t want to run into any more alien poachers, no thanks.
He focuses on ruffling through the weird cabinets in the kitchen. The things are extremely advanced, seamlessly blending into the rest of the walls. That is, until your hand hovers against it. Then the cabinet’s handle lights up a nice light blue, letting Tommy open it up to look at its contents. He guesses that alien technology is just crazy fucking advanced. Maybe he can look into that in the future, but for now: food.
After peering into three different cabinets, he finally finds something that looks semi-edible. It seems like an apple, if apples were dipped in pure gold, that is. The ‘apple’, though, is close enough to human food for Tommy, so he decides to try it. It probably won’t kill him. Hopefully.
He carefully brings the shiny thing to his mouth, looking around to make sure no one is coming, before chomping down. His eyes immediately widen in utter shock. Holy shit, it's delicious. The taste is heavenly, it’s as if normal apples were blasted with tons of sugar. His injuries also feel weirdly better, which is a plus. The pain dwindled down to just background noise.
It can’t be good for him, but he hasn’t dropped dead yet, and the apple is delicious, so he finishes the first off. Then, he grabs another, and another. He stops at 3, strangely too full to continue, even though they were fairly small apples and didn’t seem like enough to fill him. Tommy shrugs it off, though, as that had been the best meal he’s had in what felt like years.
He grabs a few more pieces of the fruit he has now dubbed ‘gapples’ and puts them all in a bag he grabbed from the floor of the entrance room. It looks a little like a tote bag, rugged and with a strange logo attached to the front. Tommy doubts the aliens living here will care too much about it being missing.
Tommy leaves the kitchen and continues to wander aimlessly for a few minutes. His injuries feel significantly healed, surprisingly, but the boy still wants to find medical supplies as well, since he’s guessing that whatever the gapples gave him wasn’t a permanent thing.
Another few minutes of looking slips by without a second thought, and Tommy’s just exhausted again at this point. Just when he’s about to call it quits, deciding that the supplies aren’t worth the looming threat of aliens, he opens one last door and there, in all its glory, is a medical room.
Though Tommy is scared of it at first, going into a mini panic attack because the small hospital room looks extremely similar to the glorified torture room he had been tested in, the more he looks around, the more differences reveal themselves to him.
The walls have some color to them, a simple light blue squiggly line in the center of the walls as opposed to the pure white ones that had trapped him. ‘These aliens sure love their blue,’ Tommy thinks with an eye-roll. Little nick-nacks also scatter the room, all seemingly important, though he doesn’t know what they’re for.
After calming his racing heart down, Tommy comes to his senses and finds himself sitting in the middle of the room, with his knees up to his chest. The blond has no idea how he ended up on the ground, but he carefully stands back up again without a thought, focusing on breathing exercises instead of thinking.
He moves across the floor to the cabinets, guessing that the medical supplies must be there. Turns out, he was right, but it’s behind a password lock. Fuck.
Well, that was a bust. Tommy starts to make his way out of the ship, but he’s stopped in his tracks by a loud noise. It sounds like metal groaning, along with a huff of air. Tommy’s breath stills for a moment, but it’s a moment too long. That’s the sound of a hatch opening. The aliens that live here are back. They are going to find him. Fuck.
Tommy makes a quick dash out of the room, ignoring the dull pain that radiates off his body. He looks around for an escape route, only seeing an empty hall, and a vent sitting innocently in the bottom corner of the room.
No, he’s not going to live in the ventilation system. Fuck that. He’s not a raccoon, no matter how much he secretly loves the animal.
The worryingly fast sound of someone’s footsteps coming closer disagree. Tommy knows he won’t make it out of here alive if he doesn’t find a hiding spot quickly, so he sucks up his pride, and drops down to the floor.
The vent is small, but large enough for him to fit with a little bit of extra wiggle room. That should be good enough until he can make a real escape plan.
He jams his nails into the weird nails on the corners of the grate. The shape of the screw is different than he’s used to, but it serves the same purpose nonetheless, and that’s all that matters to the kid.
After all the nails are removed, he takes the cover off, and hops in, securing it back into place just in time.
From the holes in the vent cover, Tommy can make out a familiar shape walking into the medical room. Oh shit. Of course, just his luck. It’s Ghosty-Fuck.
Scrambling farther inside of the vent with his bag full of gapples, he searches for a spot to rest for now. After basically army crawling for some of the longest minutes of his life, Tommy finally stumbles upon an area in the vent that opens up a bit more than usual, just enough to make himself comfortable enough to sleep. It’ll do for the night.
Tommy feels the ship shake, and he grips the straps of the old tote for some form of comfort. He only realizes what just happened once the ship stops rumbling.
They have taken off.
They’re not on land anymore.
Tommy’s stuck here until they land.
Fuck.