Chapter Text
Tommy knows the general direction to Snowchester. It's not far, by any means: it wouldn't take even a half an hour for a human to stomp from the spawn to the snowy commune on their own two legs.
The problem is, Tommy is not a human.
Not since a few hours ago, when he woke up, sprawled under a spruce tree that seemed ridiculously big for such a giant as himself.
There was no mistaking the ugly stone and wood walls for anything but the spawn trap - or rather, failure of it - that the old members of the server had set up ages ago.
Last thing he remembers was the world going blank as the back of his head slammed into the obsidian wall. And before that - Dream's punches, his fists barreling into Tommy's face, stomach, ribs. Bones cracked and his body screamed, and he begged and pleaded, and he didn't want to die -
Yeah. Maybe don't think of that.
The point is, Tommy probably died and respawned. He was not supposed to - given that he was in his last life - but he was not going to complain about it either.
That is until he tries to stand up and finds out he doesn't have fucking legs.
He doesn't have a lot of things, actually. Like a normal mouth, face, fingers or elbows or arms whatsoever.
Scientifically, birds probably possess all of the above, but Tommy never bothered to learn their anatomy. Was he supposed to? I die and respawn as a bird is something everybody definitely encounters at least once in their lives.
Tommy can think of it with irony now, but his first reaction had not been pretty. He freaked out a big time and probably had a panic attack or two as he did so.
It's all blurry, now, and Tommy suspects slamming repeatedly into trees and stones and roots have something to do with it. Whatever force that had forced him into a bird's body did not include movement skills to the package. That is, with zero experience of controlling it Tommy's coordination is on the level of a toddler, if not a newborn baby.
Tommy keeps trying to straighten normally, like humans do, on instinct, and topples over immediately. Apparently, he is supposed to stay leaned forward and fuck that feels weird. Everything feels weird. Tommy tries to stand up again, but falls forward and slams into the ground with his beak.
Fuck.
Tommy misses his legs, his arms and his whole lanky stupid body.
Couldn't he respawn as a something more human-like?
Even a zombie would be fine. Sure, he would be stuck under a tree for the rest of the day, and his flesh rotting on him doesn't sound fun either, but Tommy would've preferred anything to trying balance himself with a fucking beak.
At this point Tommy wants nothing more but to curl up on himself and just. Wait for something or someone to pick him up.
Tommy cannot afford that, however. He suspects nobody even knows he died in the first place, let alone that respawn had glitched so much he had ended up in a wrong body. That is, he needs to find someone who will be able to recognize him even like this.
Someone he knows for ages.
Someone really close to him.
And no, Tommy doesn't think about his numerous wives, but about Tubbo.
Tubbo is his best bet right now - If he won't help him, then nobody would.
***
It takes a painful hour for him to finally figure out how to keep himself upright. Two more are spent on developing his walking from stumbling over with each mere shift of balance to clumsy jump-steps.
Tommy doesn't have the time to celebrate his achievements, though; he will proceed with that once he is in Snowchester. Tommy walks past familiar buildings, and with most of them, he has to throw his head back to see the top of. Even the dirt shack people used to make fun of him for seems gigantic in comparison with the size of his new body.
Tommy continues stomping down the Prime path, but he can't help but freeze when movement flashes in the corner of his vision. It's another bird and –
Oh. That's not just another bird, that's Tommy.
Or to be exact, his reflection on a dabbling surface of a water puddle. Tommy rotates his head, snaps his wings open and folds them back, and the black bird copies every single of his motions.
It's a crow, there is no mistaking it. A very hot one at that, Tommy convinces himself, but somehow the joke does little to fight the sudden frustration clawing at his chest.
It downs on him at that moment that he is actually stuck in a fucking crow's body, of all things. Tommy wishes so bad he is dreaming or hallucinating that he almost jumps into the water to check it, but there is a certain disgust that arises on the perspective of getting his feathers wet that makes him dismiss the idea.
As much as the exhaustion in his limbs can tell, this isvery much real. And if he wants to get out of the situation any soon, he should be moving to Snowchester. Tommy doesn’t actually know what he is going to do once he finds Tubbo, since his best friend is not an admin and hence can’t fix his respawn glitch problem, but he knows they’re going to figure out something together, like they always do.
The shortest path to Snowchester lays past Tommy’s hotel, and immediately on sight, he notices a major issue.
There is a building next to the Big Innit hotel that certainly wasn’t there a week ago. Tommy couldn’t care less – things are build and destroyed on this server practically every day – if it wasn’t for the bright sign flaunting the name, ‘Bee n’ Boo hotel.’
Now, there is an only one person on the entire server who could put a bee in a name of a business, and that fucker is also Tommy’s best friend. A fucker because apparently Tubbo had decided to compete with his hotel while he was in the fucking prison. Which isn’t only frankly unfair but a shit ton insensitive of him.
Sometimes, Tommy doesn’t understand what’s going inside of Tubbo’s head. It isn’t what attract his attention the most, however, but the ‘Boo’ part in the hotel’s name. Is it somehow related to the dumb peekaboo game people play with babies? Because if not, Tommy has no other idea what it could stand for –
Wait a fucking minute.
Don’t tell him it’s what Tommy thinks it is, because if he’s right, then Tubbo had opened a hotel business together with Ranboo. Ranboob. The tall half-enderman fucker Tommy haven’t talked to since, like, exile, and whose he had seen hang out with Tubbo suspiciously often in the past few weeks.
Tommy’s not jealous. He is just confused and angry, and he wants a reasonable explanation from Tubbo, right now.
But his friend isn’t here, and before he can snap out of his thoughts and rush to Snowchester again, the front doors of the Big Innit hotel fly open, and Jack Manifold bursts through them.
“Jack!” Tommy screams. It comes out as a caw, because of course it does, but he still yells again, “Over here!”
Jack doesn’t see Tommy, doesn’t even acknowledge him tearing his throat raw trying to call for him. He trots to the giant ‘Big Innit hotel’ billboard, humming something upbeat under his nose. A smile blooms on his face, absent of his usual expression of grim discontent, and it looks from all hints like Jack is celebrating something.
Tommy stumbles closer and closer until he is just a few feet away from Jack, and is about to scream again when he sees Jack unwrap a roll of paper and suddenly dump it on top of the billboard. Did Jack decide to update the design?
Tommy tilts his head and watches confusedly as the man completely covers up the old sign with a new one, but it all clicks in place when Jack steps away to view the results of his work.
‘Big Jack Manifold hotel,’ the billboard says in possibly the ugliest handwriting ever.
Tommy gasps from the sheer audacity of the act.
He was absent for one fucking week, and Jack is already taking over his hotel.
The man was acting suspiciously from the very beginning; Tommy should have listened to his own intuition and never employed Manifold in the first place.
Jack clicks his tongue, satisfied, and says to himself, “Looks better now, doesn't it?”
Not it fucking doesn’t.
Tommy caws angrily, startling Jack and making him jump a foot into the air.
That's right, bitch. He should be afraid. Tommy is going to fucking show him why seeing a crow is a bad omen.
Tommy lunges, aiming at Jack’s leg. He would’ve preferred to tear the man’s face to paper shreds, actually, but he can’t fly so he will get what he is offered. Tommy’s beak snaps shut around the fabric of his pants, and he tweaks and pulls at it fiercely.
Instead of screaming and begging for mercy, Jack suddenly laughs.
“Seriously?” he grins. “What are you even trying to do, stupid bird?”
“That’s it,” Tommy growls, blood boiling in his veins, “Your free trial of life has ended.”
Jack yells when Tommy’s sharp beak pierces through the fabric and into his ankle, kicking his leg out on reflex. The crow doesn’t have the time to dodge as the heavy boot slams into his stomach, knocking all the air out of him and sending him flying backwards.
The world spins before his eyes, flashing between hotel and grass and dirt and shit he is falling off a cliff.
The moment of weightlessness is long enough for Tommy to feel his entire body going icy cold. He tries to spread his wings to slow down the fall, but it’s already too late.
Crack.
Tommy screams.
It hurts, and it hurts so fucking much that the first few seconds Tommy can’t see through the veil of white-hot pain. His right wing surges with burning agony that shudders his entire body and breaks through his throat in a form of an abrupt cry.
Jack kicked him off a cliff.
Jack fucking threw him off a cliff.
Tommy was hurt badly before: he had a sword pulled through his stomach, blood flowing out in crimson fountain, and felt his own skull shatter, pierced by a steel-tipped arrow. He experienced far worse wounds and injuries before, but that fact doesn’t make the pain any more bearable.
Crows can't cry, Tommy finds out. If they could, he would’ve already sobbed into his feathers.
Tommy hears a caw, then another. He pays them no mind, still curled up into himself in a pathetic puddle of feathers. But when the separate caws turn into steady rumble, he snaps at the sounds and gulps involuntarily.
All around him, crows gathered.
On the ground, their feet sinking into the grass, on the branches of nearby trees, on the ledges of the steep cliff he has fallen off from. Dozens of birds, all staring at him intensely with their tiny black eyes. They caw, and the sounds don’t seem necessarily angry or threatening, but Tommy doesn't speak bird and all he knows they were cornering him, preparing to launch.
Tommy doesn't know whether crows are cannibals, and he doesn't fucking want to learn.
"Go away!" he yells.
It comes out as a hiss, and even if it draws some crows away, retreating with their wings half-hung in the air, the majority stands still or moves a few jumps closer. Tommy presses himself into the ground until his entire body shivers - from the cold, of course, because he isn't fucking afraid of a bunch of birds.
Very unhelpfully, it comes to his mind that a gather of crows is called a murder. A friendly bird group wouldn't be called a murder , of all things.
The crows continue to surround him. Maybe they somehow know he wasn't a real crow, sensed the impostor. Tommy would have laughed if it wasn't for the hundred fucking crows watching him like a walking bag of food.
He is about to get ejected. He is about to fucking die.
Tommy hates this body, he hates this situation, but he doesn't want to get eaten alive by a bunch of creepy birds.
When one particularly bold crow flies over and lands right in front of him, Tommy snaps.
He pecks the crow's neck.
The bird lets out a pained cry, but Tommy couldn't care less. He doesn’t want to move, but the crows don’t give him another choice. A shadow flashes over him, and with it comes a rush of adrenaline strong enough to muffle out the pain as Tommy scrambles himself up and drags his injured appendage towards a spruce tree growing twenty feet away.
Immediately, the whole murder explodes with series of caws and wings flapping.
Wings.
They can fly, and Tommy cannot.
Fuck fuck fuck.
Tommy runs like he had never run before in his life.
Meaning that he runs with a speed of a legless pensioner.
Anything is better than just standing and accepting his death, however, so Tommy sprints as best as he can on his tiny feet, miraculously not faceplanting into the ground with every step.
Tommy dives under the low branches of the spruce tree and clings to the trunk as if it could save him from hundreds of crows that immediately start gathering outside the curtains of pine needles.
None of the birds duck after him, however. Maybe they are afraid to get attacked. Tommy really hopes that is the case because the other option is that they are just waiting for him to get out. Hunting him. Preparing a trap.
Every small movement resonates with excruciating pain in his right wing. Tommy’s sure it’s broken, and the fact that he doesn’t see any blood doesn’t mean that the sharded bone didn’t do any serious internal damage. Besides, if the injury doesn’t kill him, thirst or hunger can; the latter immediately reminds of itself in persistent throb in his stomach.
Tommy can’t stay here forever, and as if the situation couldn’t get any worse, he hears steps.
Ground crunches under the weight of an unknown person. The steps are fast at the beginning but start slowing down as they get closer, and they are too loud to belong to any of the wild animals who are always too careful to be heard so clearly.
It has to be a person, then.
Somehow, that knowledge only makes Tommy’s fear worse. His memory snaps back to the Pandora's Vault. The thin shadow of the tree is not that different from the dimly lit prison cell. In both places, he is trapped. In both places, he is injured and afraid.
Who knows if the person will look at the pathetic tiny crow shaking with dread and decide to put it out its misery. Or kick him like Jack did, Tommy wouldn’t put it past majority people on the server. Sapnap haven’t killed any pets in a while, but maybe it’s just because he switched to torturing wild birds instead.
Tommy freezes as the cawing of the crows outside surges in a deafening choir. He flinches and stumbles into the trunk with his wing, and the injured appendage explodes with pain.
Tommy cries out - and as if on purpose, it's that exact moment when the crows decide to fall silent. Tommy snaps his beak shut, but it's too late - a pair of boots stops right in front of the tree; they are so close he can see individual scratches on the shabby leather material.
Clothes shuffle as the person kneels in front of him.
Tommy tries to bolt before he gets trapped again - but the crows are still surrounding the tree and fuck he has nowhere to run.
He tries to squeeze on himself, begging not to be seen. The person moves slowly but so do the predators sneaking up on their preys. Tommy can feel his heart slamming into his ribs with such a force he is afraid it might break them.
As the person slowly lowers himself to the ground, his eyelids fall shut. He doesn’t even care what happens next. Or, the opposite, he is afraid of it so much he can’t even bring himself to look.
Tommy waits for the inevitable: for a hand to crush his skull or to suffocate him to death. A second passes. Nothing happens. Tommy counts to five but only gathers courage to open his eyes again after a solid minute and is immediately met with a familiar face staring straight at him.
"Hey," Phil says. "What are you doing here, little one?"
Tommy's blood runs cold.
Of course, it’s fucking Phil.
Now it makes sense where all the crows were coming from. Phil has an entire army of them, a flock of birds he calls Chat, following him around like loyal dogs.
Phil continues to stare at him with a soft frown. He almost looks concerned like that, but Tommy sees threat in every little twitch of his lips and brows. Phil’s angry, isn’t he? Did he accidentally trespass the flock’s hunting territory or something? Did Phil send Chat to hunt him down? Did the avian somehow recognize Tommy and saw it as a chance to get a revenge on him for betraying Techno?
Tommy doesn’t know and that what makes the situation terrifying. The annoying urge to vocalize his fear is overwhelming, but at the same his throat tightens so much that even air flows through it in abrupt whistles.
Phil opens his mouth and makes strange purring sounds at him. If it’s meant to be soothing then there must be something broken within Tommy because all he feels is second-hand embarrassment – Phil looks ridiculous like this, crouched on the ground and cawing like a bird.
Tommy answers with a hiss. The sound comes out easily. He wonders if it could be count as a swear in crow language or whatever they use to communicate. Phil clicks his tongue in the way that sounds thoughtful and sad at the same time.
"What did scare you so badly, mate?"
You. Just leave me alone and I'll be fine.
Phil doesn’t understand him, of course. Or he does and pushes through anyway. Tommy is glued to the ground as open palms start slowly moving towards him, and only snaps when he feels fingers touching his feathers.
He tries to bolt, but it's too late. Tommy is wrapped around tightly in Phil's hands and all his thrashing is useless against the hold as he is being slowly pulled from under the tree.
Rationally, he knows Phil is too strong for him to fight against, any human is, really, but it doesn't stop him from maneuvering to try and peck at his fingers.
A particularly desperate lunge startles his wing again. Tommy cries out, and Phil makes another of his weird sounds at him. It vibrates in the avian’s throat and comes out as a soft rumble. Tommy swears it doesn’t affect him at all, but there is something in the monotony of the sound that soothes the ache in his body and the frantic pounding of his heart.
The struggle is fruitless, anyway, and Tommy falls limp in Phil’s hands.
Whatever happens to him next, he cannot do anything about it.