Chapter Text
"You ready for this?" Xisuma asks gently. Tommy kicks a stray pebble into the end portal and watches it disappear into the void.
"You're sure it's going to work right?" And- if Xisuma ever had the opportunity to sit down and have a chat with Dream, he was certainly going to have some things to say to the admin of Tommy's old server.
Tommy had come up to his base a little while ago, twisting his bandana between his hands. It had taken several starts and stops and backtracks before Xisuma could put together the shape of what Tommy was asking, of what exactly he was afraid of.
Plenty of servers didn't allow people to go to the End, for one reason or another. That was fine. Some people didn't play the way they did. Few, though, few felt the need to threaten their members to enforce that rule.
Fewer still tried to enforce it within the code itself.
Xisuma had done some digging. It was something that was possible, theoretically, but it wasn't something he had ever seen in practice. With Tommy's permission, he had picked through the mess that was Tommy's player data back when he first appeared on the server. There was nothing there to indicate that Dream had modified Tommy's data, even if he had left his fingerprints all over Tommy in other ways.
"Here." Xisuma pulled out a screen and opened up a couple of tabs. "Here's your data, and here's mine. They're going to look a little different, obviously, but if there were any restrictions on your data, they'd be here." Tommy squinted at the glowing lines of code. Xisuma waits patiently as Tommy works through the lines of text. When he finally looks back at X, X folds the screen away.
"There's nothing in your data that's going to hurt you. And if something happens in the End, your spawn is set right here." Tommy reaches out to touch the bed, as if to remind himself, and then he nods. He sets his jaw, turning back to the portal like he's squaring up for a fight. For a moment, X thinks, he looks like a soldier.
"Let's show this bitch how it's done, then." Tommy climbs the steps, takes a last look at Xisuma, and then turns and practically throws himself through the portal. Xisuma bites back a smile and follows through a little more carefully.
He catches up to Tommy in the middle of the main island, head tilted up far enough to avoid the Endermen and taking in the obsidian pillars that stretch up into the void. "Cool, huh?"
"It's alright," Tommy says in a daze. Xisuma consults his map.
"Right, so, the portal at our eight o'clock is more or less untouched, so let's try that one first. Mumbo said last time he was out that he thought he saw a city before he turned back, so if we're lucky we won't have to spend too much time bridging to find a ship." Tommy nods, head still craned backwards.
"The dragon perches there?" he asks, pointing.
"Yep. Gets low enough that you can hit it if you jump."
"Brilliant," Tommy says. Xisuma tilts his head to study the teen, for a moment.
"We can respawn it sometime, if you want. You can fight it on your own, or we can pull together a team." Tommy's face crinkles thoughtfully.
"Maybe," he says, and Xisuma doesn't push. "Alright! Let's do this!" He barrels off in the direction Xisuma had pointed and immediately aggros an Enderman. Xisuma drops a jack-o-lantern on his head as he catches up a moment later. Tommy straightens it and gives Xisuma a hesitant grin behind the pumpkin's toothy smile.
They bridge across the void like they're a week into the server. For whatever reason, Tommy had been insistent on not buying, borrowing, or stealing an elytra. Xisuma's got a shulker of material for bridging, and Tommy can speed-bridge better than almost anyone on the server. Xisuma keeps an eye on him, ready to swoop in with his elytra and rockets if Tommy slips, but he's more sure of his step than Xisuma's ever seen him.
"You're good at that," Xisuma says idly, chopping down a chorus fruit tree in their way.
"Didn't have elytra or fancy nether tunnels, back- y'know. There. We did a lot of bridging." Tommy doesn't elaborate on 'y'know'. Xisuma doesn't need him to. Tommy scowls at the cobblestone in his hand. "Had a couple of fancy roads, though- we had the Prime path, that was cool."
"Oh, yeah, I know about Primes," Xisuma says blandly. Tommy's face wrinkles suspiciously, like he thinks Xisuma might be bullshitting him, or maybe that Xisuma is too old to know about Prime. Xisuma ignores him. "Hey, look up to the right. I think that's a city." Tommy's head swings around, and then he's running off again.
They clear the first tower together, Tommy dodging shulker shots and climbing the stairs quickly. Xisuma snags the End rods- somebody will want them, if he can't find a use for them in the next build. There's no ship at the top, but there is another city off in the distance, and they set off in that direction once the last shulker is down.
Somewhere in the second tower, Tommy gets hit by three shulker shots in a row. Xisuma can hear him yelling as he floats higher and higher. "Bucket!" Xisuma yells, but either Tommy can't hear him or he hasn't got one on him, because when the effect wears off, he comes hurtling back to the ground.
Tommyinnit hit the ground too hard.
Xisuma: you ok?
Tommyinnit: yeah
Tommyinnit: omw back
Grian: oof
Xisuma: got your stuff.
GoodTimeswithScar: Shulkers?
Xisuma: shulkers.
Xisuma packs Tommy's things in a shulker and takes to the air, heading back toward where they had first spawned. Tommy would respawn at the portal, but he'd probably need a pearl to get to where they had exploring, and-
-and there he was, climbing down the stairs and picking his way gingerly through the Endermen. Xisuma drops to the ground. "You alright?" he asks again. Tommy makes a face.
"I had a bucket on me," he says irritably. Xisuma shrugs.
"Happens to everyone. Wanna try again?"
"Yeah," Tommy says. Xisuma drops the shulker so Tommy can reclaim his things, and they set off again.
"Do respawns ever really matter?" Tommy asks a few minutes later, a hundred blocks into a bridge across the void. Xisuma very carefully doesn't look at him, focuses on placing block after block after block.
"How do you mean?"
"I mean- that's my first death in the End. So maybe it should matter. I know- I know I have unlimited respawn and all. I, you, I know that. But it's weird, isn't it? It's weird that it doesn't matter here."
For one thing, the fact that Tommy has finally accepted that he has all the lives he'll ever need is- it's something. It's something that took a lot of reassurances and promises and a few looks through the code. It's important. For another- "I think it can matter as much as you want it to matter," Xisuma says slowly. Tommy makes a noise that might be a scoff. "No, really," Xisuma says. "Like- like we play 'first death' games at the beginning of seasons, and those deaths matter. But we also play minigames where they don't, not at all. So I think you can choose. It can matter to you in that it's a funny story, or it can matter because of what you learn from it, but it's not going to change the fact that you have a place here." He risks a glance back at Tommy, who is looking very intensely at a spot on Xisuma's shin. "You're always going to have a place here," he repeats.
"Yeah," Tommy says. "That's- yeah." They're both quiet as they finish the bridge, and then Tommy claps his hands; clearly the conversation is over. "Right! Let's get back to that ship!" He barrels off in a direction that's just slightly off, and Xisuma races to catch up.
The chat explodes with congratulations when Tommy shrugs into his first pair of elytra, and they enchant the wings with Mending and Unbreaking right then and there. "Probably want to test them out back in the Overworld," Xisuma tells him. "Less void to fall into." Tommy nods, and after a few more confrontations with shulkers, they're retracing their steps back to the portal.
When they make it out of the stronghold, Xisuma hands Tommy half a stack of rockets and steps back. "Alright, so- give it a go, and don't worry about messing it up. We've all flown into way too many buildings to give you any grief about it."
"Iskall's told me some stories," Tommy agrees. "So I just-" the rocket goes off, and Tommy shoots forward with a yell. He fumbles, crashes into a tree, and then he's soaring up and up and up.
"Holy shit!" Xisuma hears faintly, followed by a whoop, and he can't keep the smile off his face.
When Xisuma invites Technoblade to visit Tommy, he figures the other player is expecting a trap. He makes sure they meet in the shopping district, well away from anybody's base, and he makes the nosier Hermits find something else to keep themselves occupied. What he doesn't anticipate is Tommy expecting it to be a trap.
Tommy sidles up to Technoblade like he's suspicious, like he's expecting the pigman to lunge at him. Technoblade keeps himself very still. His hands are empty. "What are you doing here?" Tommy asks, and hell, maybe Xisuma has messed up here, because he sounds afraid. "How did you find me? Did- did he send you?"
"Dream couldn't make me sell you out," Technoblade says bluntly. "I'm here because Dream's server has gotten weird and I wanted to make sure you were out of it."
"I'm definitely out of it," Tommy says. "I'm not going back." He glances behind Technoblade.
"He's not here," Technoblade says. "I made sure he didn't know I was coming, and your admin has some pretty impressive security."
"He's not my-" Tommy starts before cutting himself off. "Yeah. Xisuma's pretty cool, for an old guy." Technoblade snorts. Xisuma bites back a smile.
"If you're here, do you want to see my base?" Tommy asks. "Or, oh, I- what are you, are you staying long?"
"I suppose I can stick around for the tour," Technoblade drawls. Tommy grins.
"Oh, you're going to be so jealous, I swear-" and then he's racing off. Techno stares after him for a moment, but then he's hot on Tommy's heels. Xisuma leaves them to it.
He hears about their adventures secondhand via the chat and shouts that seem to ring across the whole server. Tommy, False, and Techno all spar, which luckily seems to have resulted in only a handful of respawns. Techno and Grian seem to immediately hit it off, which is unexpected but more than a little charming. There seem to be a few minor shenanigans, but all things considered, it's far from the most stressful time they've ever had a guest on the server.
In the end, though, Technoblade leaves before nightfall- "I'm expected back for a meeting," he says, and refuses to elaborate. Tommy needles him about it, but gives up quickly. Instead, he digs in his ender chest and emerges with a rumpled piece of paper.
"Hey, look, can you get this to Tubbo?"
"Tubbo and I aren't exactly on what you'd call 'speaking terms'" Technoblade says dryly. Tommy pushes the letter against Technoblade's chest insistently.
"You said he has a house now, just stick it there. I'll give you a totem," he bargains. "I've got- here, yeah, I've got one in here." He places a shulker on the ground and starts rummaging through it. "I'd give you the shulker, if it weren't for-" Technoblade waves him off.
"Yeah, that's asking for Dream to come pick a fight," he agrees. He takes the letter and totem and tucks both in his bag. "Pleasure doing business." Tommy rocks on his heels.
"Thanks for coming," he says gruffly. "I- it was alright. Seeing you, I mean."
"It was okay seeing you, too, I guess," Technoblade says. Neither of them quite manage to look directly at each other. "You're good here, right?" Technoblade asks after a long moment.
"Yeah," Tommy says slowly. "Yeah, I'm good here. I like it. Are you... you know. You're not any crazier than usual?"
"Chat threw a fit when you disappeared," Technoblade says, and that doesn't quite make sense to Xisuma, but it must mean something to Tommy. "They like you, they like Phil, they like Ghostbur. Committing some light terrorism keeps them happy enough."
"What constitutes 'light'?" Tommy asks. Technoblade grins.
"Oh, you know," he says casually. Tommy shakes his head.
"I don't think I miss that," he says. Technoblade's grin fades.
"Don't come back," he says, and for all that his voice barely changes, there's some urgency in it that hadn't been there before. "Not until me or Phil tells you different."
"I'm not," Tommy says. "Fuck that."
"Cool," Technoblade says. "Good. Well. I'm just going to go back to my long-term plans to dismantle Dream's reign of terror, now."
"Give him a good punch in the nose for me," Tommy suggests. Technoblade laughs, loud and boisterous. After a minute, Tommy joins him. He's still smiling as Technoblade strolls through the portal without a backwards glance.
There's a wither spawned somewhere around Zedaph's base.
The health bar nags at the edge of Zedaph's awareness, a little ringing in his ears going 'danger! danger!'. He ignore it for a while; whoever spawned a wither has their reasons for it, and every Hermit can take down a wither in three minutes flat.
Twenty minutes later, though, there's still that nagging sense of danger, and Zedaph gives up his latest contraption as a loss and goes investigating. The wither has lost some health- or maybe it's a different wither, Zedaph can't tell. Either way, it's strange for there to be a wither roaming around for more than a handful of minute at a time, especially without any head's up.
He navigates by the ringing in his ears until battered chunks start loading in, and then he can follow the trail of destruction to the field where someone has spawned the blasted thing and not taken care of it. When he reaches the crest of the hill, still out of range of the wither, he pauses to take in the scene.
Tommy's got full enchanted netherite on, taking potshots at the wither from behind an awkward cobblestone barrier. He ducks whenever the wither shoots, scrambles backwards as his cobble gets exploded, rebuilds, takes a couple more shots.
When he dies- because of course he does, that's not at all an efficient way to take out a wither, especially when you don't have the thing trapped- Tommy respawns in a smaller camp he's set up at the edge of a forest. Zed watches him take a deep breath, rummage through a chest, and then go barreling right back out to try and collect his things, dodging blasts and clambering through pits.
Zed watches for a few minutes, and Tommy's a wily kid and stubborn. He gets the wither down eventually.
And then he spawns another one.
He's quicker this time around- manages to get in close and kill it clean, without taking a respawn. Zed figures that's the end of it. A wither's a challenge, and you always want to be able to do it right. An hour or so messing around in a quiet corner of the server to prove something to yourself is understandable.
Zedaph gets ready to launch himself down from the hill to congratulate Tommy and say hello, but something about the set of Tommy's shoulders makes him pause. Tommy walls in his bed, digs in the chest again.
This time he spawns two withers.
It looks like a grueling fight. Zedaph watches from far enough that he won't get aggroed, but it's a struggle. His hands are itching for his bow. Tommy keeps dodging straight into shots, and he can't get into a good enough rhythm to eat. Zed winces as the kid respawns again, peeking out from behind his wall in the direction of his items.
Once he gets those two withers down, he spawns two more. It's only then that he ends up in a death spiral. Zedaph can't blame him- he's been watching for at least forty minutes, and the kid had been spawning withers for at least half an hour before he'd gotten curious enough to come looking. It's not even a stupid mistake- one of the withers flanks him and blows up his ender chest. That's all of his good stuff gone, and the blast catches the regular chest, too, so his things are all over the ground. Tommy doesn't rebreak his bed and regroup, though- he keeps trying to grab his things, and the wither keeps taking him down, and after the fourth death in as many minutes, Zed can't watch anymore.
He shoots a handful of arrows and takes off, catching the first wither's attention and pulling it away from Tommy. The second one is whirling around angrily, but it doesn't seem to have spotted him yet. Good- Zed can take these both down independently, but even he has trouble with two withers.
Tommy's hyperventilating behind a tree, knees tucked up against his chest. Zed boxes him in as quick as he can and turns back to the fight. The withers are low, and he's got his sword. He can do this. Tommy got them down most of the way, it's just a matter of finishing the fight.
He's down a few hearts when the second wither finally goes down, but he's still in one piece. The field is too quiet without the anxiety-inducing hum. "Tommy?" Zed asks. There's a wheezing noise coming from where Tommy's camp had been, and Zed breaks his barrier to find Tommy exactly where he had left him, pale and shaking and on the verge of passing out from lack of air.
"Hey, uh. You've gotta breathe, dude." Zedaph breaks down all the blocks besides the one at Tommy's back, and then he sits down in front of Tommy. "You, um. Okay. Hey, Tommy, hey." Tommy looks at him with wide, wide eyes. Zed's not completely sure Tommy's actually seeing him.
"Okay, so. We're gonna breathe together. Can you take a deep breath? Just like this." Zed inhales, gestures with his hands, lets his ribcage expand. Tommy sucks in air and gasps it back out three times before Zed exhales. "Okay, it's okay. Come on, try again." Zed breathes in. Zed breathes out. Tommy breathes in and out and in and out and in and out and in, and finally holds a breath for three seconds before it bursts back out. "Yeah, that's good. Keep doing that."
"Can you. Can you talk," Tommy wheezes.
"Can I- oh. Yeah. Yeah! Um." Zedaph blinks. "So, I built this thing for Grian a little while back, except it seemed to work for me but not for him, and I can't figure out what the problem was, if I was standing in a slightly different spot when I woke up- oh! Right! It was a cool little contraption that-"
He talks aimlessly for a few minutes as Tommy heaves in these huge gulps of air. "This was a bad idea," he says loudly, interrupting whatever nonsense had been spilling out of Zed's mouth. "Holy shit, that was a terrible idea."
"Hey, it's alright, we all have those sometimes," Zedaph says reassuringly. "You maybe aren't listening real close right now, and that's alright, but believe me, I've had plenty of ideas worse than this."
"Holy shit," Tommy says again, and leans forward to put his head between his knees. "Those fuckers hit hard."
"Yep!" Zedaph agrees cheerily. "Especially when you've already gone a couple of rounds," he adds, although he tries to keep most of the scold out of it.
"I used to be able to do it," Tommy says. He lets out a little yell of frustration. Zedaph pats him on the shoulder.
"It's totally fine to need help taking down two withers in hard mode, dude. That's a lot for anyone." Tommy looks up at him slowly.
"Hard mode," he says slowly. Zedaph frowns.
"Yeah? We run on hard mode here. Always have, least as long as I've been around."
"So everything hits harder," Tommy says carefully, as if he's feeling it out.
"Yeah," Zedaph says. "Yeah, man. You haven't noticed?"
"I thought-" Tommy squints at the ground. "I thought maybe I was out of practice." He doesn't have to say anything so obvious as 'I thought I was weak'. Zedaph carefully puts an arm around him.
"I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but we can look them up, if you want?"
"Yeah," Tommy says. He takes another deep breath. "Yeah, that'd be good."
They regroup in Zedaph's base. Zedaph pulls up a screen with the stats, and Tommy examines them carefully. "Huh," he says. "So I'm pretty pogchamp, actually, is what you're saying."
"Sure," Zedaph agrees. He's not quite sure what that means, but it sounds good. Tommy brightens.
"I can't wait to tell- sorry, Zedaph, I've got to go, I've got to go tell Techno how I'm a Big Man now. Ooh, he better watch out, I-" he goes barrelling out the door before pausing and sticking his head back through the frame. "Thanks," he says, offering Zedaph a small smile. "I- thanks."
"Anytime," Zedaph says, and then Tommy's gone, charging off toward home.
Tommy's looking at her, in the sidelong way he has that False used to think was him looking for a weakness, looking out for traps, but has started to mean that he has a question he doesn't know how to ask.
"Break time," she says, putting her sword away. "Carrot or steak?"
"Steak," he says, and she passes one over as she drops to the ground alongside him. They've graduated to fighting with only chestplates each, and she unbuckles hers as she catches her breath.
"Alright, what's on your mind?" she asks, and Tommy startles, a little guiltily.
"It's maybe personal," he says. "I just- how did you get so good at fighting?" he asks, and- False doesn't flinch. She doesn't. There's a rapid-fire flicker of images through her mind, a half-forgotten scream ringing in her ears for a split second, but she's always been too well-trained to flinch.
She sighs, though, and loosens her chestplate further so she can pull it entirely off. "Y'know how we've been talking about how violence is a cycle?"
"Kids who grow up fighting only know how to solve problems by fighting," Tommy says, and even if it sounds a little practiced False feels a surge of pride in her chest at the idea that Tommy's been listening, is trying to internalize the things they've all been trying to convince him of. "Did you- wait." He shakes his head. "You didn't-"
False shrugs off the jacket she always (always) wears, exposing the long lines of criss-crossed scars that have stuck with her through countless respawns. "You don't have to show me yours, but these are mine," she says. She glances over at Tommy, whose throat has been torn open by her blade, whose blood coats her hands, he's got betrayal in his eyes- no. His eyes are wide, but with shock, not fear or pain or betrayal or rage. She looks away. "It was a long time ago. I started building, but I didn't stop fighting."
"Did you want to?" Tommy asks quietly. False shrugs, looking out over her base. There's a scar on her left shoulder that always pulls when she brings up her shoulders; she notices it more without her jacket.
"Do you?" Panic crawls up her throat, as sharp and metallic as her sword. "We can stop, if you want. Nobody's gonna make you fight, Tommy, I-"
"False." She looks at him, blinks away the afterimage of blood. He's smiling, just a little. "I like it. It's fun."
"Yeah," she agrees, looking away again. "Yeah, it is."
"You wanna go another round?" Tommy asks.
"I need a minute," she says. "Sorry."
"It's cool, it's cool," he says. "Um. Mumbo usually tells me some bullshit about redstone when I need to not think about stuff. Do you- you already know about redstone, I guess, but. Um." False laughs, just a little.
"Tell me what Mumbo's been teaching you, I bet it's cool." Tommy immediately launches into an explanation about flip-flops that False is about 60% sure has some fundamental misunderstanding behind it, but Tommy is animated and gesturing wildly and laughing at his own jokes. It's gonna be a minute before she can raise a sword to him, but they have time.
Shit, but she loves this brilliant, brave kid. She's so glad he survived long enough to find his way to them.
The next time they have a visitor to the server, the notification makes Tommy go utterly, completely still for a moment before bursting into frantic motion. He scrambles out of the shop they'd been in and lurches to a halt when he catches sight of the figure down the road.
The man is tall, brown curls falling in his face. His smile is a little hesitant. Tommy wheezes at the sight of him like he did in the early days.
"Wilbur?" he says, and it's hope and heartbreak all at once.
"Hey, Tommy," the man says. "Been a while."
Tommy takes one, two steps, and then he's dropping his things and bursting into a run, barrelling into the other man hard enough to throw him off balance. "You were dead!" he yells, holding him at arm's length before immediately changing his mind and pulling him into another hug. "What the fuck, man, you were dead! What happened? Where's Ghostbur?"
"It's a really long story," the man- Wilbur- says. "Do you have somewhere we can talk?"
Tommy and Wilbur disappear for hours. long enough that Xisuma starts to worry, but there are no strange chatlogs and nothing unexpected in the code, so he bides his time until it's nearly dark. Finally, just before he's about to send off a message checking in, he sees two tall figures entering the shopping district, shoulders bumping against each other.
"Things go okay, you think?" Grian asks, coming up beside him.
"Seems like it," Xisuma says. Wilbur laughs at something Tommy says, loud and boisterous, and from the corner of his eye, Xisuma sees Grian's spine stiffen in surprise. After a moment, he relaxes, but Xisuma notices that his eyes rarely stray from the pair of Tommy and Wilbur after that.
Tommy is beaming the whole night, hardly ever more than an arm's length from Wilbur. As the night winds down, they're still talking quietly in their spot by the campfire.
"Are you going to come back?" Wilbur asks Tommy. "I think you could now, if you wanted. Everything is so different than it was before- there's no more L'Manberg, no more Pogtopia. There's something weird happening with an egg, but I'm pretty sure we can avoid that." His voice gets a little softer. "People miss you, Tommy."
"It's still Dream's server," Tommy says reluctantly. "I don't- he was a real shithead to me, Wilbur."
"I know," Wilbur says. "I remember. But there's a bunch of us living up in the arctic- me and Phil and Techno and Ranboo, remember him? We can fuck around, it'll be just like old times."
"But without the wars and death and stuff?"
"But without the wars and death and stuff," Wilbur agrees. Tommy sighs and looks down at his hands.
"I don't know, Will. You're like my brother, you know that-"
"Don't, I'll cry," Wilbur says, with the particular rhythm of a well-trodden joke, and it gets a halfhearted chuckle out of Tommy before he sighs again.
"I don't know if I want to go back. I like the Hermits. I like building and not worrying that it's going to get blown up. I like pranks that are just pranks. I like flying. I get why Phil's so bitchy about not being able to fly there." He's quiet for another moment. "Grian and Mumbo and False and all the boys, they're like family. I don't want to leave them. I don't want to go back to being afraid all the time."
They're both quiet for a long moment, for long enough that Xisuma starts to think he should maybe sneak off before he gives himself away.
"I'm proud of you, Tommy," Wilbur says at last. "No matter what. And I kind of want to kill Dream for everything he did to you."
"I'm tired of killing," Tommy says. "That's the whole point. I just-" he laughs, and it sounds a little choked. "I just want to live, man."
"Yeah," Wilbur says. "Yeah, Tommy, of course."
"I miss you all, too," Tommy says. "I miss Tubbo and I miss Techno and I miss Jack and- fuck, sometimes I even miss Dream. That's kind of fucked up, though, maybe." Wilbur hums noncommittally. "I think seeing Dream again would be a bad idea, is the thing," Tommy continues, his voice trailing off into something upset and miserable.
"I think... I think you should do whatever your heart tells you to do," Wilbur says, "and if that's staying here, so be it. We'll send you comms and we can visit on public servers and someday when this is all over, we can build something together again."
"That'd be good," Tommy says. There's a noise that sounds like someone shifting; Xisuma can imagine Wilbur wrapping an arm around the younger man.
"You're my best friend," Wilbur tells him, and Tommy takes a shaky breath, and Xisuma slips back toward the portal, leaving them alone with their memories and the night sky.