Chapter Text
“Again,” Dream repeated, his voice hard as stone.
Tommy swallowed back the taste of iron, heaving in a deep breath through his mask with a rattling wheeze. He ignored the scorching heat of the sand as he pressed his bare hand into it, heaving himself out of the dust so fast it made black spots dance in his vision.
Dream waited patiently for Tommy to retrieve his staff from the ground before he darted forward, slamming his own staff into Tommy’s knee as his elbow swung around at full force to catch the teen’s temple and send him crumpling to the ground once more.
“Again,” Dream snapped, his patience obviously wearing thin.
Tommy bit back a groan as he sat up and accidentally rested all his weight on his automail arm, sending a spike of pain shooting up his nerves. The metal of the prosthetic was burning hot from the entire day spent under the desert planet’s sun and he could practically feel the skin it touched sizzling as they met.
Apparently, he had taken too long to recover this time because he had hardly lifted his head before his face was reintroduced to the ground by Dream’s boot.
“Honestly, it’s like you don’t even appreciate everything I’m doing for you,” he sighed, making Tommy flinch. “I saved your life. I gave you a name, got you a new arm and eye and I promised to protect you. Yet here you are, wasting the valuable time I take out of my day to teach you to protect yourself. Do you think this is a game? Do you think your enemies will show you any mercy when they knock you down?”
When a second of silence passed Tommy knew it was his turn to answer.
“No sir, they won’t,” he wheezed, the sound coming through his mask distorted and robotic.
“That’s right, they won’t, so then why should I?”
Tommy knew he didn’t really want an answer to that question. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said instead. He wasn’t going to beg, experience had taught him it would only make things worse.
Dream sighed, closing the few paces between them and dropping into a crouch. “I know you are,” he said, his voice softer now. Tommy hated the way it made his shoulders sag in relief.
Gentle hands settled on his shoulders and helped lift him from the sand, steadying him when his knees threatened to give out and darkness kissed the edges of his vision. When his sight cleared he found Dream’s face in front of his, giving him an almost concerned look.
“Why don’t you go get some rest?” he suggested gently. “We can pick this back up at dusk when things cool off a little, okay?”
Tommy blinked wearily at him, staring for a second before the words fully registered and he nodded. “Thank you, sir,” he mumbled, trying to hide the way his words wanted to slur together.
Tommy had been through a lot in his life, he could take a beating without falling apart like this. He was fine.
He tried his best to walk normally as he returned to his tent, refusing to favour any of his injuries to avoid showing weakness. The sound of approaching speeders made it harder to focus on his breathing, but he ignored them as best he could.
Dream himself turned the other direction to head back to his own house, the homey block of sandstone hollowed out and outfitted with plenty of modern technology inside. Tommy wasn’t allowed in the house though, he was lucky enough to be allowed to live on Dream’s property, much less live at all. Instead, Tommy had a canopy of scrap cloth stretched out over metal poles and propped against a freestanding wall of a ruined structure.
It wasn’t much, but it was more than he deserved. He had already asked too much of Dream, he wouldn’t burden the man further with inconveniences like housing and feeding him. The last thing he needed was to lose his only ally over something so petty.
He had made it to the edge of the tent by the time the speeder's engines cut out. He could barely hear the sound of the riders dismounting in the soft sand.
“Dream!” a familiar voice called out, making Tommy freeze in place. “You’d better have a good reason for dragging us out to the middle of the desert to meet with you.”
“Technoblade! Philza!” Dream called back cheerily. “I can assure you the secrecy will be worth the trouble, thank you for coming.”
“It’s my eternal displeasure,” Technoblade answered easily, making Philza laugh loudly.
Tommy didn’t turn around as their conversation faded into the distance, presumably into Dream’s house.
He knew they wouldn’t recognize him anyway, but he was too scared to see how they had changed. Too afraid to see them happier now that Tommy was out of the picture.
A lot of people were probably happier now that Tommy was “dead”. He knew Tubbo must be, all things considered. The only person that might genuinely miss Tommy would be Captain Wilbur Soot, but it hardly mattered because the guy was madder than a Ryloxian Plague victim and a convicted terrorist instead of a ship's captain.
Hell, he wondered if Wilbur even knew Tommy was dead. Did they get that kind of news in prison? It had been a couple of years since then and Tommy’s part in the fall of Intergalactic Colonial Rebellion hadn’t exactly been a small one, considering that they ended up pinning it all on him posthumously.
Eventually, another wave of nausea washed over him and forced him to stumble into the safety of the shade. Tommy all but collapsed on top of his sandy bedroll and closed his eyes, finally letting his worn out muscles go limp.
He should use this downtime to try and find more water, or food probably. Those things were essential to surviving in general and Tommy wasn’t even sure if he had managed to get any water in his system before Dream kicked him awake at dawn and threw him the staff.
But he couldn’t get himself to move. Every inch of his skin felt blistered and raw, his muscles ached like the embers of a low burning fire and his nerves were so shot he could barely feel the hand he still had left. His back was burning and numb all at once, but it was like that every day.
Despite being fully aware of the fact that in the middle of an endless desert, it almost felt like he was underwater. With his eyes closed he could feel the push and pull of the waves over his body as he lay motionless in the surf. In the distance, he could hear shouting and laughing, the playful banter of close friends taking digs at one another without any real meaning behind it.
Then a hand touched his shoulder and Tommy realized that he wasn’t that far gone yet, those voices were real, and he wasn’t alone.
“--obably heat stroke,” one of the blurry figures next to him was saying. “Do you think Dream knows they’re out here?”
“Dream may be a psycho murderer, but he's no fool,” another painfully familiar voice was saying from a few feet away. “I have no doubt he knows this guy is out here. I’ll head in and ask him what's up. Keep your comm open.”
“Aye, aye Captain,” the first voice answered with a hint of sarcasm in his tone.
“I told you to quit saying that, Ranboo,” Tubbo sighed, already turning to walk away.
“I know!” the guy called after him cheerily.
Tubbo. Tubbo was here.
Why the fuck would Dream call Technoblade, Philza and Tubbo of all people to this planet? He knew . Tommy had told him everything and he promised to protect him so why?
Was Dream about to sell him out? Was he going back on his word and that’s why he went so hard with training this week? To beat Tommy so bad that he couldn’t fight back when the time came?
“Alright, let's get that mask off so you can breathe a little easier,” the guy still kneeling next to him muttered, spiking a bolt of fear into Tommy’s aching chest.
His eyes flew open-- when had he closed them?-- and his hand shot out to catch the stranger as they reached for his face.
They locked eyes and Tommy got his first decent look at the guy.
He looked like an Endarian if someone had dunked half of the endarian in milk and cut its horns off. Instead of the normal purple eyes most of the species had, his eyes were green on the normally pigmented side and red on the pale side. The young man-- probably around Tubbo’s age-- was clad in a plain white shirt with the shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the ends tucked into a dark brown pair of work pants. Tommy spotted the Lmanburg emblem and medic badge on the jacket tied around his waist and he immediately wanted to throw up.
He managed to direct a weak glare at the guy. “Don’t touch--” he wheezed, “my mask.”
Tommy had heard of Ranboo before, but never ran across the guy. He joined the rebellion close to the end and Tommy had been more than a little preoccupied at the time. Tubbo talked about him a few times though, he said it was nice to have other kids around that understood what it was like.
Tommy hated everything about this.
“S-sorry,” Ranboo stuttered, slowly retracting his hand from Tommy’s weak grip. “But that thing has to be making it harder to breathe right now. If you want to take it off yourself--”
He was cut off by the insistent beeping of a communicator.
Tommy glanced at the device on his belt then back up at the Endarian. Ranboo didn’t take his eyes off of Tommy as he retrieved it and opened the hail.
“This is Ranboo,” he said, still watching Tommy warily.
“Dream says that’s his apprentice,” Tubbo’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Called him Scourge. I asked if we could bring him in to take a look at him and Dream flat out denied it. He said Scourge can take care of himself, apparently.”
There was no small amount of disdain in Tubbo’s voice, but Tommy knew it was directed at Dream, not him. Though he also knew that if Tubbo knew it was really Tommy they were talking about, he’d leave him here to die in the heat.
Ranboo frowned down at Tommy. “Do you think he’s a slave?”
“No idea, but Dream sure seems to treat him like one. Take him back to the Lmanburg and get him cleaned up,” Tubbo ordered, sounding every inch the Captain he apparently was. “If Dream pisses me off we’ll take the guy with us and drop him somewhere with more water. If not then I doubt he’ll complain about us reviving his lackey.”
“‘Kay,” Ranboo confirmed, finally breaking eye contact with Tommy. “Anything else?”
“Keep him away from the rest of the crew. It was hard enough to convince them that trusting Dream wouldn’t be a mistake. The last thing we need is a mutiny because we brought a potential spy onboard for five damn tics.”
“That’s fair, I’ll call ahead and let Niki know though.”
“Yeah, go for it. Captain out.”
The comm beeped as the transmission ended. Ranboo turned back to Tommy and they stared at each other awkwardly.
“I’m not a slave,” Tommy wheezed after the silence stretched on for a beat too long.
“Then why aren’t you allowed in the house?” Ranboo shot back. “Are you an ill-behaved pet?”
Tommy opened his mouth to argue but no words came to him. There weren’t a lot of ways to explain what he and Dream were, much less any that someone who didn’t know them would understand.
“He’s my friend,” Tommy said lamely.
“Friends don’t let their friends die of heatstroke and dehydration,” Ranboo said very matter of factly.
Tommy couldn’t help the bitter laugh that cut through him at that. He said that as if most of Tommy’s friends hadn’t tried or almost succeeded in killing him in the past. He said it like betrayal wasn’t an integral part of interpersonal relationships in Tommy’s life.
“That wasn’t supposed to be funny,” Ranboo said, looking incredibly disturbed as Tommy tried to suppress another chuckle.
“It’s not,” Tommy replied weakly. “But friendships are only that straightforward in children's stories. Life’s more complicated than that.”
Ranboo stared down at him for a long moment, his eyes expression softening in a way that Tommy couldn’t read. “I think you might just need to find better friends, man. This is literally abuse.”
“No, it’s not,” Tommy shot back, wincing at the painful pull of muscles it took to push himself upright. “I don’t care what anyone looking in on it says, Dream’s given me more kindness than I could ever deserve. End of story.”
Ranboo watched him struggle to catch his breath for a beat before he sighed. “So then I take it, you don’t want to come back to the ship with me?”
“No, now piss off.”
Ranboo shook his head as he pushed to his feet. “At least come back to the speeders with me,” he protested, “I’ve got some extra water and food you can have to get your strength back up.”
Tommy squinted at the hand the Endarian held out, the first offer of assistance anyone aside from Dream had given Tommy after the rebellion’s end.
Part of him knew that Dream would use this against him, that taking this boy’s kindness would make him ungrateful, would spoil him into thinking other people wanted to help Tommy. They didn’t, Tubbo and Ranboo were only offering to help Scourge despite the obvious warning even the name held.
The other part of him was constantly desperate to please. He didn’t want to disappoint Ranboo by rejecting this simple gesture. He wanted to simply feel the touch of another person that wasn’t Dream. He wanted to take the hand in front of him knowing it had never hurt him and probably never would.
His head still felt like it was underwater. He knew that if he didn’t take the offer his suffering would only increase and as much as he knew he deserved it, pain still scared him.
He took the hand and tried not to flinch or shake out of his skin as his muscles struggled to hold him up, even with the Endarian’s assistance.
By the time he felt his feet planted firmly under him and his arm slung over Ranboo’s shoulder, the dark spots dancing at the edges of his vision were accompanied by the feeling of static under his skin. He tried to mutter a warning to Ranboo as the darkness kept encroaching and the static spread to every inch of his mind.
He stopped dead in his tracks, trying to hold still and wait for the feeling to pass.
When his vision finally cleared and he could feel all five of his fingers again, Tommy realized he was lying down. And he was decidedly not in the desert anymore.
The air here was cold, shockingly so to his body that had spent the last three years on Lluchiter’s blazing surface. The sheets on the medical cot under him felt impossibly soft against his sunburnt, dusty skin and the cool tone of the light was so different from the red star of the Bri-e System that it made Tommy’s eyes ache.
He took a deep breath to collect himself, panicking would never help in an unfamiliar situation. Dream had drilled that lesson home more times than Tommy cared to count.
He was obviously in a ship's med-bay, a very very familiar ship’s med-bay. Three years could never be enough to fully erase Tommy’s memories of treatments and scoldings for stupid stunts pulled when he lived on this ship. When he called it’s crew family.
Niki was at one of the lab benches across the room, her bright pink hair much longer than it had been when he last saw her. She no longer wore anything remotely like the uniforms the rebellion medics had once, instead, she wore a thick knit sweater with the same green medic band on her arm that Ranboo’s jacket sported.
If she noticed he was awake, she was unbothered by it as her attention stayed firmly on the holo-projections of charts and numbers in front of her.
He turned his head slightly, catching sight of his mask lying on the table at his bedside. He blinked, his good hand moving to feel what was actually on his face until he felt a slight pinch and turned to find he was hooked up to an IV bag.
His automail hand moved instead, meeting the plastic of the oxygen mask over the lower half of his face.
He glanced back at Niki. Considering he wasn’t dead and she wasn’t freaking out, either she hadn’t been the one to remove his mask or she just hadn’t recognized him under all the scars and bionic eye.
His movement must have finally been enough to grab her attention as she glanced over her shoulder and gave him a curious look.
“I thought you’d be out longer than that,” she said, flicking a hand to make the holo displays she was working on disappear. “Welcome back, I suppose.”
“How long,” Tommy croaked, almost flinching at the sound of his own voice. It had been years since he spoke without the mask filtering the sound into something distorted. He sounded different than his memories.
“About three hours,” she replied, making her way over to his bedside. “Considering the state you’re in and your biology, I expected you to be out for at least a few days.”
Tommy frowned at her, hoping the oxygen mask and scars hid the familiarity of his expression. “My biology?”
She hummed in agreement, moving to check something with the IV. “It’s strange, but the scans can’t lie when at least three of them are coming to the same conclusion. You’re Avian.”
“And? You’re a Merling, so what?”
She gave him a sidelong look. “Well, like Merlings, Avians originated on a very resource-abundant, temperate planet. So, like me, you shouldn’t have even considered going onto this planet's surface without the proper gear and resources. Avians aren’t built for any kind of extreme climates, much less a desert planet that averages around 45 standard degrees on a good day.”
Tommy resisted the urge to sigh. He did not miss the lectures Niki liked to give about preparedness and personal safety. This was a conversation they’d had nearly a hundred times and he wasn’t gonna let himself fall back into arguing just to be annoying.
“Well, I made it over two years without any real problems. I’m just having a bad week.”
Niki scoffed. “If by a bad week you mean your body was starting to shut down due to poor diet, chronic dehydration, an infected automail attachment and poorly treated wing amputations, then yeah, I’d say it’s been a bad week.”
Tommy shut his eyes against a wave of nausea that passed over him at the mention of his wings. His back ached with the involuntary pull of muscles that led to nothing but scar tissue.
“Yeah,” he mumbled weakly, keeping his eyes shut like it could save him from facing the past that was right in front of him. “Just a bad week.”
The silence that followed wasn’t quite suffocating but wasn’t exactly comfortable.
Tommy briefly considered trying to force himself up and flee the ship as soon as possible, but he knew Niki and he was fully aware she wasn’t going to let that happen without at least checking his vitals first. If he tried to leave without a word, she would stop him, then he’d end up arguing with her and being even more of a pest than his presence already made him.
He wasn’t allowed to be a pest anymore, that much he could agree with Dream on. The fact that he was annoying was half the reason the other rebels were so quick to turn on him in the end. That wasn’t a mistake he was eager to repeat.
But he also knew he couldn’t stay here, Dream was going to be pissed enough as it was since Tommy let his guard down enough to basically get abducted.
“Mind taking my vitals and telling me how against medical advice it would be for me to leave before I leave anyway?” He rasped without opening his eyes. He was way too tired to open his eyes right now.
“I don’t need to take your vitals to tell you how against my advice leaving right now would be,” Niki replied, an odd edge to her voice. “If you go back out there without properly rehydrating or finishing the round of antibiotics I got you started on, you’ll be dead within the week.”
Tommy hummed brokenly, still unused to the sound of his real voice hitting his ears. “And if I stay until the saline drip is sufficiently through and take the antibiotics with me?”
That question was met with a long silence that made Tommy’s skin crawl. He was certain that the medic was staring at him, but he couldn’t be sure what kind of stare it was unless he actually risked opening his eyes to see.
“Scourge, can you look at me?”
He had to take a deep breath to steady himself at the tone in her voice. He knew Niki. He practically grew up on this ship with her there to pester him and take care of him through it all, and that tone wasn’t one she ever used with him until the very last months on this ship.
She sounded genuinely, painfully worried about him.
But at the same time, his heart felt like it was trying to collapse in on itself. While it was painful and unfamiliar to hear that kind of concern aimed toward him, that was also the first time ever that anyone but Dream had called him Scourge while actually speaking to him.
Tommy was dead, after all. Niki was just a compassionate woman who was concerned about a strange, dying man left in her care.
After a beat he managed to crack his eyes open, tilting his head until he met Niki’s heavy gaze.
“Why don’t you care that you’re killing yourself?” she asked, brows furrowing as the corners of her mouth tipped down into a small frown. “What do you owe Dream that living like a dog in his yard on one of the most hostile planets in this system is all you want to get back to?”
Finally, a question he knew the answer to without having to think about it.
“I owe Dream everything,” he answered easily, the word spilling past his lips like a truth instead of a script beat into his very bones. “If it weren’t for him, I’d be dead anyway. So if he wants me to live like a dog till I die, that’s already more than I deserve.”
At least, that’s what Dream had told him so many times he couldn’t bring himself to consider it anything other than true. It made more sense the longer he let it sink in, Tommy didn’t deserve anything. Whatever Dream gave him was already more than enough and he should be grateful for it, even if others said it wasn’t enough.
They wouldn’t understand because they didn’t know who was really under the mask. If they knew it was Tommy, they wouldn’t even think he deserved that much.
Obviously, because she didn’t know who he was, Niki didn’t seem to agree with his reasoning. Her lips pressed into a thin line as she broke eye contact with him, turning away with a soft sigh.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you leave with just the antibiotics,” she said, voice oddly hard. “You’re going to need bed rest for at least a week to even recover enough strength to move around on your own. And the antibiotics need to be kept in a cool environment, so sadly I don’t think they’ll last very long in your pocket.”
“Then I’ll give them to Dream,” Tommy argued, already knowing it was a weak defence.
“And then he’ll hold them over your head and probably not give them to you on time,” she muttered just loud enough for Tommy to hear.
He didn’t bother debating that, opting to lay his head back, eyes slipping closed once more.
Even if she was right and Dream did end up holding them against Tommy in some way, he would probably have done something wrong to deserve it. Dream was just trying to train him to be better, to be strong.
“Dream’s my… friend,” Tommy said eventually, breaking the tentative silence.
“Really?” Niki asked, the sounds of her shuffling around paused. “How long do you think it’ll take your friend to realize you’re gone?”
This time Tommy scoffed. “I’m sure he already knows.”
“Then why are you still here while we’re preparing for take off?”
Tommy blinked his eyes open again, head raising dizzyingly to catch sight of the merling across the medbay. “You’re-- you’re not actually gonna take off with me still on board are you?”
“Course we are,” Niki said. “As it just so happens, Dream is decidedly not our captain's friend and their negotiations didn’t go very well. Plus, we like to consider ourselves good samaritans who rescue people from their abusers, not return them to them.”
Tommy’s stomach lurched as he suddenly sat up, automail hand already scabbing at the iv in his other arm. “No you can’t keep me here--”
Between one blink and the next, Niki had crossed the room to his side, her own hands wrestling Tommy’s mechanical hand away. “Listen I know it doesn’t make sense right now--”
“No you don’t understand--” Tommy cut himself off with a somewhat hysterical laugh.
“Hey it’s okay!” Niki tried to assure him, hands gripping his shoulders tight enough that his weak muscles struggled to move. “Just look at me and breathe for--”
“No! You don’t understand I can’t be here--”
“It’s okay just look at me--”
“You don’t want me here--”
“Tommy, breathe!”
And Tommy stopped.
He stopped struggling, stopped breathing, stopped thinking because-- Niki knew.
Niki knew.