Chapter Text
Technoblade had always prided himself on being concise, collected, and confident. He never went into a contract without knowing what he would be up again, and on the rare occasion in which whoever was contracting him did manage to lie about what it was they were hiring him to fight, he could always count on himself to be overly prepared.
He’d always been a good, reliable Witcher. Serves him right that the first time he really gets cocky, he loses his eyes.
It’s not entirely his fault. The woman in the village told him they had a nekker problem; she’d told him merchants were being attacked on the road into the village, and when he’d asked for a nest, she’d pointed him deeper into the forest. He’d come armed with several Northern Wind bombs and his swords, and that was supposed to be that.
Someday, humans will learn that if they want their monster problem dealt with, they need to describe it as what it is. Lying to a Witcher about there being a Leshen in your woods doesn’t get you a cheaper price—it only gets you a dead Witcher. The buzzing of his medallion felt like it exploded against his chest, and then the antlers had risen over the hillside, and Techno had known he was thoroughly fucked.
He’d put up a good fight. The first wave of wolves the Leshen had summoned were easy enough to deal with, but he’d missed the roots sprouting out of the ground to grab him in favor of keeping a nekker away from his throat, and it’d just gone to shit from there.
He doesn’t remember what actually took his eyes, but he knows whatever took them should have killed him, and he’s decidedly not dead.
Something is jingling in whatever room he’s in. And it is a room. A room that has been in a state of decay for quite some time, but underneath the rotting wood smell is something that most lived in places contain. The jingling is attached to something that’s moving around the room, stopping beside whatever it is Techno’s resting on and then moving back over to where a fire is going in the corner. The jingling creature is cooking something over there.
A test of his mobility reveals that—while he’s armorless—he still has all his limbs, but there’s the tightness of bandages around his stomach that has him wondering if whatever is jingling took one of his organs to cook over its fire. He can smell something cooking; he hopes he can’t smell himself cooking.
No weapons on his person. Fine. He can do that. His vision is gone. Also fine. He can smell, and he can hear, and there’s a decent chance he can move. Whatever is jingling doesn’t sound very big, its steps are soft as though it weighs very little. Technoblade is a man made of several decades worth of muscle and experience; he can fight something small.
But then he tries to sit up and pain spreads like wildfire from his torso outward, and he’s crumbling back onto whatever he’s lying on with a tight gasp.
The jingling stops abruptly, and the hair on the back of his neck raises the same way it always does when there are eyes on him he can’t see.
Through ragged breath and clenched teeth, Techno attempts to sound intimidating. “Who’s there?” he snarls into the room.
The jingling comes closer, accompanied by the patter of quiet feet, and Techno forces himself to focus on the creature’s heartbeat. It’s much faster than any monster could be, faster than a human’s, faster than most things.
“I’m Tommy,” the jingling replies. “You’re really fucking heavy, you know that?”
The heartbeat is not, however, faster than that of a child.
Tommy, whoever he is, is a child. Techno relaxes minutely when his senses adjust to account for the sound of the smaller boy’s breathing and heartbeat, the scent of wildflowers mixing with freshly turned topsoil. The kid smells like he spends all of his time outside.
“Did you drag me in here?” Techno asks next, and this time, he pushes himself into a sitting position slowly. The jingling moves behind him and he freezes. “What are you doing?”
“Of course I dragged you inside, bitch. You’re in my house. And I’m moving your pillow so you don’t fucking fall over.”
Techno feels behind him for the pillow, and after finding it and making sure there’s nothing hidden behind it, he slowly leans back against it. The jingling moves further into the room again, and when it returns to his side, something bumps his arm.
He reacts without thinking, really. He flings his arm out to push whatever it is away, and Tommy shrieks. From the sound of the jingling, the boy jumps away from him to the other side of the room. How he made it so far, Techno doesn’t know, but he doesn’t say sorry, either.
“I’m just trying to give you water, you piece of shit! Gods, some people are such ungrateful bastards…” Tommy trails off into petulant grumbling, but he’s persistent, Techno will give him credit for that. He approaches once again with more jingles alongside each step, and then a small ceramic mug is pressed into his hand. Techno raises it to his nose to smell it, but it’s exactly as Tommy said. Water. He grunts his thanks.
“You really don’t talk a lot, huh.” Tommy’s prattling on to himself, jingling around the room and, from the sounds of it, climbing on pieces of furniture. “I think you should talk more, Mr. Witcher, it’s very important to keep a conversation going when your host is being so nice to you.”
“Where are your parents?” Techno asks instead, and he hears Tommy scoff.
There’s a lot of grumbling where Tommy’s retreated, but the jingling really makes it difficult for the kid to sound mad. Tommy’s feet hit the ground softly and he huffs. “Well they’re not here, are they? You’re so nosy. What’s your name? I gave you mine.”
He gives the kid his name, and Tommy has the audacity to laugh. Techno almost feels offended, and then Tommy is jingling his way back over while he drags something made of cloth behind him. There’s the distinct sound of glass clinking underneath all the sounds of the bells.
“What’re you doin', kid?” He grumbles. The only answer he gets is what sounds like Tommy tripping, and then the kid starts swearing at the bag he’d been dragging.
“I’m trying to bring you your stupid potions, you bitch.” There’s more shuffling and clinking of glass, and then with a cacophony of jingles, rustles, and clinks, Techno’s saddlebags are dropped into his lap. The saddlebags that he left on Carl. Carl, his horse, who is not in this tiny room with himself and this child.
“Why do you have these?” Techno snarls, turning his head in the direction the jingling had come from, but he doesn’t know if he achieves the full effect of his usual glare with his eyes bandaged. It must not work—at all—because Tommy heaves a tremendous, dramatic sigh, and then he jingles away.
“You have so many questions,” Tommy whines from over by the fire again. “I got them off the horse! He was waiting at my house when I brought you back here. When is it my turn to ask you questions?”
Techno offers only a grunt of annoyance and focuses on sifting through his bad. He has to be meticulous now that he can’t see the colors, but their smells are enough to go off of. He pops the cork on three potions before he finds what he’s looking for, and he downs it in two gulps. By the fire, Tommy’s jingling comes to a stop.
“What did you take?” The boy asks him, sounding both curious and uncertain. “Which one was that?”
“It’ll fix my eyes,” Techno answers. Tommy clearly knows his eyes are fucked up, the kid’s the one who bandaged them to begin with, and considering the pain in and around his eyes had been minimal, he’d done a good job. But Techno has always kept a White Raffard in his bag or on his person for this reason.
He unwraps the bandages from around his eyes against Tommy’s hurried protests, and he blinks his eyes open.
There’s nothing. Techno can’t even call it darkness; he knows that intimately. This is the absence of darkness, of light, of everything. It’s like trying to see out of the back of his head.
Underneath Techno’s internal panic, he can hear Tommy from somewhere behind him, though the boy sounds muffled. “Did it work?” He asks, and it’s only then that Techno catches the scent of fear. He doesn’t know which one of them it belongs to. “Can you see again?”
He can’t. He blinks again, he knows he does because he can feel his eyelids moving, but he can’t see. He can feel whatever wound was on his stomach stitching itself back together, can feel the toxicity of the potion sinking into his bloodstream, but he can’t see.
“Technoblade?” Tommy presses, quiet and clearly afraid, and Techno finds himself swinging dangerously between rage and a tired kind of acceptance.
“No, Tommy.” Even to his own ears, he sounds like the kind of calm that precedes danger. The sour stench of fear spikes. “I can’t see again.”
Tommy comes closer anyway, the soft tapping of feet on what Techno assumes is a dirt floor, and the boy stops a short way from the bed. “Do you want me to rewrap your eyes? I can… I’ve got herbs and stuff that I can make a paste with. Maybe you need fuckin’ magic or something.”
“Is there a healer in the village?” Techno asks him, and Tommy scuffs his feet on the ground with a huff. “Tommy.”
“Yes,” he snaps back. “I don’t know why you’d want to go to the village. They’re all a bunch of liars.”
Now that he mentions it, the village had lied to him about the Leshen. It’s not an unusual thing to be lied to about, but Tommy isn’t someone who should have a problem with that. Techno can’t say with confidence that most villages are kind to their children—his definitely wasn’t kind to him—but this boy, for all his faults, would be endearing.
Techno hums instead of answering, and he weighs the bandages in his hands. “How bad?”
“Oh, those guys are the fucking worst—”
“Not the villagers, boy. How bad are my eyes? How bad is my face?”
This time, Tommy falls quiet. His clothes rustle as he shuffles closer still to the bed, and the foot of the bed shifts as he climbs on it. “It’s not… good,” he answers tentatively. But he’s not answering fast enough, not enough detail, and Techno doesn’t have the time to waste.
When he brings his hands up to trace the scars that mar his face, it’s both shocking yet not to find them jagged and deep. Three long scars carve the width of his face, two of which pass through his eyes while the third splits the bridge of his nose. Judging by the tightness of one scar to the next, it’d been a nekker.
“You killed the asshole that took your eyes, if that helps,” Tommy tells him quietly, still sitting at the foot of the bed. The balls of the bells he wears roll in their casings with soft, short noises. He’s fidgeting.
“And the Leshen?”
Tommy’s fidgeting worsens. “He went away.”
Leshens don’t just go away. He tells Tommy as much, and the boy jingles rapidly toward the other side of the room. Techno’s already miserable paranoia is even worse.
“He did. He likes the bells, so when he hears them he stops being a dick.”
Techno goes to wrap the old bandage back around his eyes, but Tommy returns and drops a new one into his hands. He tries not to startle too noticeably before he traces the bandage, and he finds he can feel the difference in the bloodied versus the clean one. “Is that why you wear the bells?”
“No,” Tommy answers, but he huffs like he doesn’t want to do so and scurries back toward the fire. “I wear the bells because I like them. Niki wears bells because they keep the Leshen happy. Oh! She ties them in the trees, too. The trees like the bells, Techno, did you hear them when you came into the forest?”
“Who is Niki?”
Tommy returns to his side as quickly as he’d left, and he sets down the bowl of stew he carried over. He takes the bandages Techno still hasn’t done anything with from his hands, and after a moment, the Witcher leans forward off the bed to let Tommy wrap them around his eyes. It’s only the constant jingling and the subtle smell of topsoil that keeps Techno’s muscles locked and prevents him from lashing out. Tommy steps back when he’s done, and then he places the stew in Techno’s open palms and scurries back across the room.
“Niki is the witch who lives in the woods!” The jingling returns close to him again, and when Techno doesn’t move, Tommy huffs and jingles excessively. A moment after Techno uncurls his fingers from their fist, Tommy’s dropping a poorly carved spoon into his palm. “I put a bunch of the good stuff in the stew to help you heal, but you’re an asshole who doesn’t appreciate all my hard work and took one of your weird potions, so now it’s just stew. You should apologize to me.”
Technoblade is not, in fact, going to apologize to this obnoxious little kid. The stew he’s made smells like venison and celandine, but underneath it is just enough magic to make his nose itch.
“Is Niki nice to you?” Were he dealing with an adult, or even a teenager for that matter, he’d have asked for more details. As it is, witches in the woods have a habit of taking on the abandoned children of nearby villages, but the purpose for which they keep them always varies. He’s killed witches who eat kids, who beat kids, and then he’s met some that simply enjoy having little apprentices. Whatever magic is in this stew probably came from her, and she may be able to find some way to heal his eyes.
Through a mouthful of food, Tommy answers. “Niki’s great! She helps me put up new windchimes when the storms knock them down, and she likes it when I sing to her flowers because they grow really fuckin’ good, and she keeps the big tree safe from those assholes in the village! Don’t tell her I said that stuff though; she’ll get a big ‘ead.”
Techno takes a bite of his bowl of stew, and the magic settles across his tongue gently. It’s healing magic for sure, likely meant to fight infection were he suffering from anything. It’s at that moment he remembers the gashes along his stomach, and though the potion he took would have healed them, there’s always the chance they were infected.
“Kid,” he calls, and Tommy hums his affirmation. “Was I sick? Your witch put healing magic in this.”
“Oh, you were gonna die on the first day for sure,” he answers, and the only thing that keeps Techno from choking on his next bite of stew is an entire century to practice his composure.
“The first day?”
“Yeah, the first day. Don’t interrupt me while I’m talking, bitch, that’s rude.” Tommy slurps another spoonful of what Techno presumes is his own bowl of stew rather obnoxiously before he continues. “So on the first day, you were really sick. Like, I could’ve used you to cook an egg. Not one of the eggs with a baby in it, though, Tubbo would get right pissed with me. And the second day you were still sick and the same with the third day, but then on the fourth day you stopped being really warm and now it’s the fifth day and you’re awake.”
Five days. He’s been unconscious for five days—sick for the vast majority of them.
“And Carl—my horse—you’ve been taking care of him?” He has other questions, ones that are probably far more important, but Carl is important, too.
“Your horse is a bitch, Technoblade. I hate him and he hates me, not that anyone could ever hate me, but he smells terrible and he ate all of my nice hay and he shat in Niki’s garden. You’re a terrible horse father, did you know that? Why haven’t you taught your son how to behave properly?”
Outside, a horse that Techno hopes is Carl neighs in what could very well be contempt. Tommy gasps, there’s the sound of his bowl thudding onto a table, and then he jingles angrily until a window is flung open.
“Fuck you, horse!” Tommy cries. “You’re an ungrateful piece of shit, and I won’t give you any more sugar cubes if you keep talking to me like that!”
“Is Carl out there?” Techno’s fumbling for a surface to set his bowl of stew on without even thinking about it, and he tries to stand once he’s found it. Standing proves to be a mistake when he slams his forehead into… something that clangs loudly and then clatters to the floor. With one hand on his forehead, he attempts to stand up straight again and slams the back of his head against the ceiling.
Over by the window, Tommy is laughing so hard he starts to cough. His laughter is a pleasant sound, all things considered, boiling over with the epitome of childhood innocence. But he’s laughing at Techno, and he growls in warning.
Tommy stops laughing instantly. Fear curls around the small room, stark and cold, and then Tommy’s laughing a little hesitantly; the way someone would to break the silence. It has guilt festering in Techno’s gut before he even has time to think about it.
“Right, um,” Tommy clears his throat and shuffles around the edge of the room—as far from Techno as he can be—and then a door creaks open and Techno can feel the warmth of the sunshine on his face. “The horse is outside. The sun’s going down but you can, uh, you can go out and see him. He misses you.”
Technoblade is not a kind man. He is not an emotional person, he cares only to keep himself and his horse fed long enough to find someplace to winter with Phil, and then he begins again the next year. The feelings of others mean little to him, and he cares not for children.
Phil likes to call him a liar, most often to himself.
“Can you… help. me.” It’s stilted, barely even a question at all, but the nervous jingling by the door pauses. The fear that’d been circling the small room like a predator cloaked in shadows subsides. Techno nudges whatever he’d knocked from the ceiling with the toe of his boot.
“Oh,” Tommy realizes quietly, a soft gasp before he’s hurrying over. “You can’t see. And you’re very tall, so you have to hunch over.”
Techno bites back the retort on his tongue about how he knows that already. The kid’s hovering around him again, pushing whatever it is that was hanging from the ceiling out of the way with clangs and crashes that grate on Techno’s sensitive ears. Hesitantly, the jingling comes to halt, and then two fingertips brush the back of Techno’s hand.
He doesn’t lash out this time, as much as he would like to. Tommy is still a kid, and he’s trying his best to help. Techno doesn’t need to scare him.
Tommy takes one of Techno’s hands in both of his, and then he slowly begins to pull him outside. It’s a slow-going process, Tommy hesitant and softer than he'd been earlier, Technoblade awkward and unused to being led by his hand. He hadn’t realized just how much he took his sight for granted until now. The bells Tommy wears are a decent indication of where he’s going, and the boy is good about giving him directions.
“You have to step up here, Tech- oh shit. Careful, bend down a little more. Okay, you can stand up all the way now.” Tommy lets go of his fingers as Techno stands to his full height and pops his back, and then the little boy hurries across the grass. “Horse! Your father is awake.”
All things considered, when the thump of hooves in thick grass stomps over to him and Carl shoves his nose directly into Techno’s chest, he can’t help but be a little grateful that the kid who found him actually knows how to take care of an animal. Carl’s clearly been well taken care of, and Techno has been cared for decently, too.
“Hey, Carl,” Techno murmurs to the horse, smiling slightly to himself when Carl stomps the ground. He brushes his fingers through to Carl’s mane, but his smile drops when his fingers snag on… braids. The braids are interwoven with flowers, neither of which were there the last time Techno saw Carl. “Tommy?”
There’s rapid jingling until Tommy comes to a stop by his left side, and Techno can almost picture the boy looking up at him. He tilts his head down to where he thinks Tommy would be, cracking a small smile at Tommy’s disgusted noise. “How’d you know I was looking at you?” The little boy asks. “That’s freaky as fuck. Don’t do that.”
“Did you braid Carl’s mane?”
Tommy is quiet for a while, and then he huffs dramatically. “He asked me to. I put hate flowers in though because I hate him and he hates me.”
“Mhm. Sure he did.” Techno has never been well versed in flower language, but if Tommy’s going to call the buttercups he can smell ‘hate flowers,’ he’s going to take the boy’s word for it. “Your witch, Niki, where does she live?”
“That way.”
“...Tommy.”
He’s quiet for a second before muttering a soft ‘oh,’ and then there are small fingers reaching up to grab the side of Techno’s pant leg and tug. Techno lets himself be turned until the supposedly setting sun directly warms his face. Distantly, he can hear windchimes in that direction.
“Niki lives that way. I don’t know what way that is, but it’s that way.”
“Thanks,” Techno mutters at last, and he can practically feel the joy radiating off of the boy who still hasn’t let go of his pant leg.
“You should probably wait until the morning,” Tommy tells him. “The path is really wiggly and sometimes the monsters come out even though the forest tries to be nice and make them leave me alone.”
“Is that so?”
Tommy jingles sagely and the fingers disappear from Techno’s pant leg. “Yeah. And it’ll be hard for you to not trip on the roots and the rocks because your eyes are broken. So I can bring you in the morning but not tonight because of the—”
“Because of the monsters, yes,” Techno finishes for him, only a little bit frustrated at his apparent dependence on a child. He’s a Witcher, for fuck’s sake. A little bit of darkness shouldn’t be a problem for him.
But he’s a blind Witcher, and there’s a reason he’s never heard any tales of one who’s gone blind. Having someone who knows the forest so well may be good for him.
“The Leshen,” Techno realizes, turning to face where Tommy last was and startling when the jingling happens behind him.
“What about him?”
“How did you get me away from it?”
Tommy hums before he answers. “I told you, he likes the bells. They make him nice. And I got in front of you when he clawed at your stomach and I said—” There’s aggressive jingling as Tommy likely reenacts what he’d done, though he’s forgotten Techno can’t see him. “— Hey! You get away from him! Don’t be a fucking dickhead! And I wiggled my arms like this—” From the sound of the bells, Tommy wiggles his arms a lot. “—and then he stopped trying to pick you apart with his roots. And then I had to drag you back to my house. You’re so fuckin’ heavy, Technoblade.”
Never in his near-century of life has he heard of a Leshen being placated by bells. He’s never read it anywhere in any book, and he’s read a lot of books. Phil has had no stories about anything like this; none of the other Witchers he’s met on the path have had anything like this to say. It’s an anomaly. You’d think that would be something you’d tell someone.
“The Leshen likes the bells?” He tries to clarify, and Tommy hums again.
“And the windchimes. Don’t forget those.” He jingles back over and reaches up for Techno’s hand, grabbing hold of two fingers and tugging. “Come on, Techno, it’s getting dark soon. The monsters will leave Carl alone, but they’ll be mean to us. We have to go inside.”
He’s never known monsters to leave a horse alone, but if Tommy’s to be believed, he’s been unconscious for five days. Carl’s been out here for five days. The horse doesn’t smell like fear or any kind of distress.
“Who taught you how to take care of a horse?” Techno asks him, hunching over so the little boy can lead him better. “Why are you by yourself?”
“Nobody taught me how to take care of a horse,” Tommy answers easily. He tugs down on Techno’s arm, and the Witcher ducks in accordance. “And I’m by myself because I didn’t want to stay with Niki. I’m a big man. I can take care—duck a little more, there’s this big ugly pot that I can’t get down—I can take care of myself. Okay.”
Tommy lets go of his fingers and jingles behind him where he shuts the door with a thud, and then there are small hands pushing at the back of Techno’s legs. “Go finish the rest of your stew! I made that and I don’t want you wasting it.”
For a moment, Techno considers what Phil would do in this situation. And then he remembers that Phil has been scammed by children at least seven different times, and he stops considering what his friend would do in this situation.
“Am I going to hit my head on anything else?”
“No. But you’re gonna trip on your armor if you’re not—” Techno trips on his own armor. “—careful.”