Welcome Home (Dream SMP Rapunzel AU)

Signal Searchlight Strike Me

tw: implied minor violence

—————— 6 ——————

A mask sat limply by a wooden hook at a stall is undisturbed until mid-afternoon that day—an ivory boar skull, abrasions and nicks vaguely depressed into its surface, and a leather strap whose threads have begun to fray. It's an old thing, charming and just slightly macabre.

That afternoon, the mask is bought, and the stall owner is given a single golden coin. The mask is no longer left undisturbed.

Wilbur's gaze flickers back and forth between the stage and Technoblade. The boar skull sits gently in his hands, strap draped over his fingers. A guitar, a rental, rests on Wilbur's crossed legs where he sits on the rim of the fountain at the core of the clearing.

"If I get arrested today," he says with an irritation in his tone, "I will escape, then hogtie you by the ankles, from a tree, in the woods. And then I hope the crows find you."

Despite the threat, Techno grins, swiping Wilbur's glasses off the bridge of his nose. "Consider this. I've been pulled back and forth out of my comfort zones multiple times in the last few days-"

"That is not my fault."

"-so this is like, repayment. Also because that mask is cool and this gives me an excuse to buy it without making me feel like I'm gonna become a hoarder."

Wilbur raises a brow as Techno playfully puts the glasses on his own face, and squints, muttering a couple of incoherent words. Something about being unable to see through them. A series of clapping from the moderate number of people around rises up, and the current performer on stage bows to signal their leave.

"Would you look at that," Techno gestures with a hand to a group of teens. "If you go now, you won't have to wait for however long those kids are going to take. I think it's a skit. Could take three minutes, could take fifteen."

"Or I could just not go at all, spare the both of us the risk of getting caught. I also do not have a lot of songs that are particularly family appropriate," he clicks. Techno stares, as some odd kind of way to show disapproval. And Wilbur stares back into the very matter of his being, a vacancy ten times more soulless than anything Techno can forge.

"Okay," he raises his hands. "You don't have to do this. Spare us the risk, also never look at me like that again that is—never do that. But, you can just sit here then, like a pigeon, because you're too scared to go up on stage."

"Technoblade, this is peer pressure."

"Exactly."

A curve forms at Wilbur's mouth, twisting downward, before wrenching up the opposite way. His hands find the mask's leather strap and ties it around his head. It sits on his face, an intimidating image of golden eyes peering through from the depths of two sockets, and Techno takes off Wilbur's glasses because he can't see anything through them. He blows a clump of hair out of his face that comes loose with the motion. The image is a tad less menacing, now that his vision is clearer, but it works to conceal Wilbur's face.

Wilbur stands, saluting with one hand and the other at the guitar. Challenge accepted, his stance seems to say, as he marches towards the stage before breaking into a run to cut off the poor group of children who'd taken too much time to climb the stairs.

Techno watches him greet the host, the mask's muzzle nodding along with the movements of his head. He snorts, then finds a seat away from the cold spray of the fountain. There's a niche in the furthest wall which holds an enormous mosaic. It's built from slices of porcelain that hold various colors—a few of them defaced by scratches or marks of ink, chalk; paints that spell out some unpleasant things, and some which he thinks were carved by couples or close friends.