Work Text:
Eret sighs, tracing a finger in idle swirls over the scar-rippled skin of Ponk’s remaining arm.
“We should kill him,” she says.
“Yeah,” Ponk sighs back, staring at the ceiling. They let themself sink a little deeper into the bed and try to pick out patterns in the tiles that aren’t already there.
“Wouldn’t be hard. Plenty of people don’t like him already. He kidnapped a toddler and tried to kill his dad.” What a right mess that had been. She’d had to put Foolish in charge of the Museum for the week while she and Techno and the kid’s dads went and him back. He’d gotten far, too, almost halfway to the Badlands settlement before Eret and company had managed to catch up. Foolish had managed to mess up the entire categorization system by the time she returned. Ponk had witnessed the whole thing. “And took your arm. And chased those actors out of town for zero reason.”
“They were doing Henry IV. Sam hates Henry IV.”
“Well, that’s stupid.”
They’d banished Sam after the arm incident. Incident is a fairly light word for it, in Ponk’s opinion, he’d call it torture and mutilation above anything else, but the other leaders have been calling it an incident to keep council meetings civil. It’s not often that the head of engineering and defense goes off the deep end and captures the head of medical over some misplaced weapons, resulting in an entire limb being amputated, but stranger things have happened. Like that disgraced head of engineering and defense then sneaking back in and kidnapping the settlement leader’s son a week later. That was at the tail-end of winter. It was nearing autumn, now.
In some regards, Ponk’s glad this happened in their current situation, the whole after the world’s ended one, because she can’t fucking imagine what would have happened if Sam had taken her arm in a pre- apocalypse world. Hadn’t he been a cop before? Or, like, a civil engineer or something? Government protections, either way. Christ. She’d have been out of a job for a while, covered in medical bills, probably would have had to hire a lawyer, the whole nine yards. Hell of a lot easier to just, y’know. Patch up, instruct frantic assistant nurses on how to prevent infection, take some extra-strength painkillers, not have to worry about an imaginary currency system made up by people who didn’t want to trade literal gold, and eventually become stable again. Ant had been a godsend during PT, she’ll say that much.
“I think he’s building up power in the Badlands,” Eret says, “S’what those traders who came in last week said. Said some guy called Samuel Warden was trying to convince people to leave with him.”
“Eugh.” Ponk rolls his eyes. “You tell them why he was banished?”
Eret scoffs. “Of course I did. He deserved it.”
Again. Understatement.
“Who should we get?” Ponk rolls onto their side, facing Eret. “Techno, obviously, but who else?”
“Hm…” Eret thinks for a minute. Ponk runs through their mental roster of fighters and tacticians, too. Foolish is busy with Sam’s job, Puffy and Ant will need to run medical while Ponk’s away, Tubbo loves revenge but has responsibilities, so, all of them are out. “Might be able to get McChill on our side. And Niki, if she’s free. I’m pretty sure the harvest just ended, so she’s not on call all the time for the farms.”
“Who would run the Museum?”
Eret grimaces. There’s the issue.
“Not Foolish, that’s for certain. Took me weeks to untangle the mess he left.” Not that she’d ever tell Eret, but Ponk did find it kind of funny how badly Foolish managed to fuck things up. They’d sit at Ponk’s bedside and bemoan how much of a wreck the organization system had become, how the Museum of Civilization would be unable to take new donations until things had been fixed. “For a man as intelligent as he is…!” they’d start, and then would instead describe the other goings-on around the settlement instead of ranting about their surprisingly incompetent best friend once again. “Ranboo, maybe. He should be well enough to be able to do inventory management.”
“Another reason to kill Sam.”
“Another reason to kill Sam,” Eret agrees. He sighs. “We can… we can talk about this in the morning. I’d rather not begin planning and then have someone inevitably point out a critical flaw in our reasoning.”
“I can still use a rocket launcher,” Ponk suggests, “We can always launch rockets at him.”
“Very true.”
Two weeks later, with all their intel and proper sanctions in place, a group treks out of the Snowchester settlement and heads towards the Badlands. Again, sanctions is a light word, Ponk thinks, as they set out over the cracked, overgrown asphalt of what used to be a highway. They’d pitched the idea to Tubbo, the one about killing Sam, and he’d said, in no uncertain terms, “Yes, oh my god, go kill him, I won’t even be mad, go kill him, please.”
He doesn’t think he’s gotten approval for a project that quickly in his life.
Yeah, yeah, maybe there will be some strife between factions depending on how popular Sam managed to get, maybe there’ll be some issues with donations to the Museum and Snowchester’s reputation, but…
Well. Sam’s made enemies everywhere he’s gone, by the sounds of it. Ponk can’t wait to call him honey one last time.