Till Death Do Us Part

Stories

Me arriving however many months ltr w the most lacklustre update: 😎

~~~

Technoblade leads Tommy to their campfire, Michael and Phil trailing behind them. Tommy watches them wearily, doubtful that they could provide an explanation that would ease his hurt. He spent so long resenting them, trying to forget their names and live a good life without them, that he doesn't know if he'll ever see a day when he's not cursing their names. But maybe this can change. Maybe they have changed.

"It took a while for anyone to notify us of your disappearance," Technoblade starts, glancing at Phil. "We'd cut ourselves off from most of the world by that point, living far from civilisation and in the middle of icy tundra. We barely saw each other, even."

"Then Dream comes to me one day," Phil continues, eyes clouded, somewhere in the past. "I still don't know how he found me, but he appears in my path and tells me that you've gone missing. No one could find you. He told me he'd searched for days already, and there was no trace of you anywhere."

"So of course he came to me," Techno says. "I was worried. You'd never pulled an act like this before and everyone we tried to question was acting vague and evasive about the circumstances around your disappearance."

"But everyone knew what happened," Tommy says quietly. "The exile was very public."

"Yet we didn't know," Phil says heavily. Tommy sits confused in the silence until it clicks. Oh.

"You... you didn't know?" Tommy says. "How could you not know!?"

"No one told us, we hadn't been around for months and Dream kept it away from us," Phil says. "He knew that we'd probably retaliate so he kept the whole thing under wraps so we wouldn't tear down his puppet government."

"And his plan worked," Techno says, sounding bitter. "By the time we'd unravelled most of his schemes we were too frantic looking for you to care about anything else."

"I'd already lost a son," Phil adds. "I wasn't about to lose another one."

Tommy could only sit and stare, trying to take it all in. His anger still simmered, but didn't feel dangerous anymore, less consuming and more there so he didn't break down from any of the other emotions swirling beneath the surface. They'd cared. They'd looked. Even though they hadn't stayed or known, in the end they'd still worried about him. It's more than he'd had before, at least.

"But you didn't find me," Tommy settles on saying. No need to bring anymore conflict in today than he already had, and Michael already looks so uncomfortable being here.

"No," Techno sighs. "We didn't. We actually found Michael instead."

"We took him on our search, going from village after village before we found one that talked of the wild boy," Phil says. "They described him as untameable, with eyes holding a sadness beyond his years but a face that held the boyish mischief that we knew you were famous for."

"We followed the stories from village to village," Phil continues. "They got wilder and wilder, the descriptions sounding more and more like you everyday until they just... stopped."

"We bounced to every surrounding village but the stories never picked up again," Techno says. "So we went back to the last village and never left."

"But you... what?" Tommy says. "You gave up?"

"You have to understand Tommy," Phil said gently. "It had been two years by then, and the chances of finding you were falling with every lead we lost."

"You hid yourself well," Techno says. And Tommy is reminded that he never wanted to be found, did he? So how can he sit here and criticise his only family for never finding him?

Maybe because you wanted to be found, a voice in the back of his mind says, and he scowls. The sudden new perspective ties a knot in his gut. He fights with his old reality and the new truth, his mind struggling to settle on what it thinks is right.

"Yes, I did," Tommy murmurs. No one speaks, sitting in silence as the story settles over them. This is not what Niki meant when she said refresh his mind. "I need to- to process. I'm going."

Techno and Phil's heads dart up to watch him as he stands, moving towards the edge of the clearing.

"Will you come back?" Phil asks. His tone is so soft Tommy almost misses it. He turns his head slightly, just enough to see the restrained longing in his fathers eyes. The words 'I'd already lost a son' echo in his head.

"I don't know," Tommy whispers.

And with that, he slips into the trees.

~~~

I would say something now like 'the plot thickens' except idk what the plot is so I have no idea what I've just done by uploading this with a very made up story that I hope vaguely resembles the dsmp plotline (also for everyone trying to criticise me on the timeline IDK AND IDC OKAY im trying 😭)

thanks to all those ppl who left a comment asking me to update. a few would come in every couple of weeks and remind me to write a paragraph lol.

THANK YOU FOR UR PATIENCE BLESS EVERYONE OF YOU