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It’s freezing cold in Logstedshire. Not that the place is ever warm. Tnret isn’t much better, though. Tommy’s worn shoes sink into the snow and his socks get soaked through the holes, shivers wracking his bones with every extra step. His arms are locked together against his chest, shaking blue fingers tucked neatly into the ripped fabric of his t-shirt. Wilbur’s coat is flush to his skin, but it’s thin, worn, the fabric rotten just like its previous owner.
But even though Logstedshire is not enough to shroud him from the cold, Tommy is thankful for the place in some twisted way. Sure, Ghostbur made it, and he’s not particularly fond of the ghost, but at least it serves its use.
Near collapse, Tommy grips one of the wooden slats keeping the place together and slowly lowers himself into the hay that surrounds Mooshroom Henry, chewing the pile of greens in front of her that he’d replenished earlier. She seems warm enough, covered in a thin blanket and in front of the slowly dying fire he’d put together earlier from twigs and ash. She greets him with a soft moo as he slides into the warmth beside her, groaning lightly when his bones creak, sore and worn.
“Hullo,” he says, his voice soft and subdued. Tommy slides one of his shaking hands across her thin layer of fur, smiling a bleak smile when her head tips backward, greeting the petting with another little moo. “You’re just like a big puppy, huh?”
Mooshroom Henry seems to have no opinions about whether she’s a puppy or not. Her green-stained nose comes up and shoves its point into his hand, beckoning it to come closer and continue its ministrations. Tommy leans up against her entirely, laughing quietly when her broad tongue comes out and licks a hot stripe up his arm. The goosebumps on his arm rise as the warm feeling of her snout on his skin contrasts the freezing cold that has run up his entire arm and gnarled its way through his fingers like ivy of snow and ice.
“I think it’s Christmas,” Tommy muses to himself as Henry continues to snuffle into his arm, mooing softly whenever he pauses to rub his hands together. He’s smiling consistently now, a rare sight, the weight of the cold between his ribs lifting if only for a moment as he lets Henry inside his arms. “They set me up a tree an’ everything, but it’s not like anyone has come to visit, so I think they’re all still— still dick’eads.”
Henry seems to have no official opinion on the people who betrayed him, because she just huffs and puffs and sleeves, disturbing the front of Tommy’s jagged, overgrown bangs. He doesn’t mind, though. “I wish I was a cow too.” Her round eyes center on his own, eyelashes long and fluffy. “Maybe then I wouldn’t be so bad. I’d have more friends, that’s for sure.”
Maybe he wouldn’t have been abandoned by the ones he’d thought he already had, thinks Tommy, as he runs his hand over the only being alive for miles around. His teeth are chattering, he realizes suddenly, as he looks up into the empty night sky and realizes that his jaw’s rapid clicking is making it hard to see. He can still watch the stars, though.
There are no clouds outside tonight. Only empty blackness and a completely full moon, drinking up all the darkness and billowing into it like milk in a hot drink. That thought makes him bristle — a bit of pain shooting through his frozen feet as they start to warm, curled up beside Henry.
The snow beneath them has begun to melt. It creeps away from their shared body heat, Henry far warmer than him even though he’s sat in front of the fire. Tommy hasn’t been able to get warm in a long time now. Not even when the days were still blistering, the morning sun making his skin red and raw and pained as Dream worked him to the bone for materials he was only going to blow up. There’s a different sort of warmth from sun and burns and explosions. A different one from the type that has made him scarred and deaf in one ear and absolutely fucking traumatized — but you know, Tommy doesn’t have to think about that right now. It’s Christmas.
After a while of petting Henry, she goes back to chewing her greens, and Tommy leans in closer, head pillowed by her fuzzy mass. The mushrooms on her back part and bend as his head sits against them, his cheek burning with the insane warmth of her skin. She’s practically a furnace, muscles working as she chews, mooing softly every once in a while when she gets a mouthful of carrot or potato.
“I like you…” It comes out as more of a mumble than anything. “That’s— that’s what Christmas is for, innit? For like— bein’ thankful, and— and bein’ kind and all of that… pussy shit.” He rolls his head upward, staring down at the back of Henry’s head. “Well. Well— I… I like you. I’m thankful for you, Henry, you— you don’t abandon me, you don’t hurt me. You’re just… Mmm. Mushroomy, and shit.” He pats one of the little stems on her back, smiling as it bounces against his frozen fingers.
He sits there like that and feels warmth leech back into his skin. Henry doesn’t seem to mind Tommy’s using her as a pillow, so he continues to do so, tossing little bundles of sticks and leaves into the fire every time it starts to die.
This isn’t the worst Christmas he could’ve had, he muses, while sitting in exile and knowing he’s utterly unloved. A smile twitches across his lips at the thought. Henry doesn’t have the capacity to hate him. Not when all he’s done is fed and pet her and kept her warm. He curls up a little closer.
Tommy isn’t sure when he dozes off. He comes to, to the feeling of a heavy weight being slammed into his side, hitting right where at least a dozen bruises already lie. Tommy gasps, rolling away on impulse, snow crunching beneath him — only to feel that weight drop down onto his chest, keeping him pinned to the dirt.
His eyes, fogged with sleep, blink several times as he lifts a hand and wraps it around an ankle. “Whh— wh—”
Dream. His mask an impassive smile, his cloak whipping out behind him in the dark midnight air. There’s one hand on the hilt of his sword, slick with unknown blood and viscera. His other hand, braced against Tommy’s chest, moving to yank his hand off of Dream’s ankle.
“Why’d I know I’d find you in here, Tommy?” Dream mumbles, in that same, raspy tone he’s always used. His hand presses down further, and Tommy shrinks backward in a futile attempt to avoid it. All the warmth from earlier is gone. “Instead of the perfectly fine tent I let you keep.”
Let him keep. Like he lets Tommy keep everything else, doesn’t he? But at that brittle, sarcastic thought, Tommy’s breath hitches and his expression falls apart and all the fight within him fails. Because Dream is the one who lets him keep things, like his life and his new home and like Henry, hey— where is Henry?
“I’m— ‘M sorry, man, I didn’t—”
“No, you’re not, Tommy,” Dream says, and he wants to argue, he wants to explain himself, but Dream is already shouting, his voice high and sharp and angry, and Tommy flinches back, that awful gut-gnawing nausea of listening to Dream scream filling him. The boot on his chest moves. He’s yanked up by his shirt, brought face to face with Dream, legs kicking off the ground. His nose brushes against the mask and he gasps, trying to struggle away yet only being drawn closer. “Because you’re never sorry, are you? That’s why you’re here.”
He’s dropped. Tommy hits the ground with a strangled cry as it jostles wounds he hadn’t even remembered that he had. The fire behind him is gone. The pile of food for Henry is scattered and messy. Mooshroom Henry is—
Henry isn’t there.
Quickly, he looks about, trying to coach his breathing into something steady even as it rises and shakes with fear and pain. Henry is— Henry is * gone,* a pile of snow where she’d once laid, and Tommy feels the cold on his back where he’d once laid against her. In her place is a warm, small splotch of crimson, and Tommy’s eyes widen as they follow a small trail of blood leading out of Logstedshire.
“Y— you— you didn’t,” he gasps, nothing but fear in his voice, none of the anger he should have as he is simply too exhausted to procure that fire, to muster up that rage. All he feels, deep between his broken ribs, is a grief that seems to have sprouted long before anything even died. “No, no no no— You— You didn’t!” He shrieks, legs kicking outward, hands scrambling against Dream’s wrists, cutting gouges into his skin with his overgrown nails. “Stop!”
He’s thrown to the dirt and snow with no hesitation, curling in on himself as a sharp kick is landed to his gut. His air disappears, and he gasps, eyes blown wide and bloodshot and tearful, freezing the moment any liquid dares to trail down his sunken face. Dream advances, grabbing his hair, tilting Tommy’s head up until he lets out a pathetic whine of pain, staring right into the manic eyes behind the mask.
“You should have done as you were told,” says the Admin, a growl rather than a sentence, his curled fist tightening on Tommy’s hair. He’s dropped a moment later, though, cowering pathetically, hands digging into his scalp and the burning pain against it. “This is what happens, Tommy! This is what always happens, and for some reason, you can’t get it through your stupid, thick head!”
The world goes silent as Tommy’s throat crumbles to dust and his tongue turns to ashes. Dream’s words scald and splash across his skin, burning what frostbitten flesh is left upon his bones. Tommy lies there in the snow, pathetic and small and bleeding, and tears start to freeze as they stream down his face. Snot sews his nose shut as it dribbles out of his nose, bits of spit stuck to his lips as he finds himself unable to hold back absolute sobs.
His stomach burns, his head pounding. He can’t breath, something stuck in his lungs and his nose and his hands far too frozen to rip it out. Every part of his body is burning, and his lips beg for him to spin apologies, to word what he must, but Dream only sneers down at him from behind his mask.
“Oh, don’t give me that. Fake tears? Really? I always knew you were the manipulative one,” he hisses, and it only serves to shove Tommy tumbling off his cliff and into another volley of aching sobs. “Trying to make me feel bad when this is literally all your fault, Tommy! You can’t just blame everyone else!”
He cries. He can’t help it, and everything feels so heavy, feels so broken and awful and he can’t fucking handle it. Why doesn’t Dream just kill him already? Just get it over with?
But instead of a hand on his neck or those beady black eyes piercing his own, he feels a palm, warm and comforting, pressing into his face. Dream crouches down, all vitriol and hate gone from his stiff movements and the twitching of the jaw beneath his mask.
“It’s alright, Tommy. You can make mistakes. I just have to help you pay for them.” Dream gently slips his arms around Tommy, pulling him off the snow even as he jerks and shakes and twitches and sobs, unable to form words around the absolute anguish in his chest. The touch is terrible, the worst part by far, and it only gets even more awful. Dream hugs him, pulling Tommy’s chest to his own, tucking his head under his chin, and Tommy doesn’t even have the energy to push away.
“Here. You know I love you, so, so much, right?” Dream murmurs into his ear, his voice so utterly soft it feels like a knife through his skin. “I’m so proud of you, kid. You’re so smart. So special. You’re so good. All because of me. All because I’m here to love you, ok?”
And Tommy, weak and pathetic as he is, sobbing, unable to breathe, nods. What else could he possibly do?
—-
Hands, cold as ice.
Sleep, warm and comfortable.
Frozen water all across his bones, brittle as the blue and black skin he claims as his own.
A voice, a clicking tongue, a confused noise, something birdlike.
Something tugging him upward.
Something hugging him to their chest.
Something like Dream, comforting him in ways he doesn’t deserve.
Something like exhaustion, for he cannot fight, for his matchstick limbs and tinder hair and flint and steel tongue are all still, far too cold to kickstart the wildfire that once burnt his heart.
“What happened to you, kid?” A voice like feathers and a voice like the Death of a brother. Tommy tries to escape, but he crumbles into snow, and there’s nothing left to keep his body from falling apart.
—-
Phil had returned a few days after Technoblade’s execution. Limping on a dislocated ankle, a massive burn wound surrounding an arrow’s gaping gash in his shoulder, tired and flightless and half-frozen, he’d stumbled into the cabin and right into bed.
It’s been a long few days. Techno’s head never quite quiets itself. Chat roars for a trillion different things, though none of their chants seem to care about ending his persistent migraines, or assisting him in relearning some of the words that a fatal brain injury had knocked out of him. Phil carries his cane with him at all time, refusing to wear socks and shoes, the compression feeling far too much like an anklet forced to keep him grounded, captured. His burns are nasty and painful, weeping gruesome viscera for the better part of his first two days back at home.
The most important part, though, is what Phil has to say about the weather.
“It’s getting colder,” he muses softly one night as he sits by the window, breath so warm against the frosty glass pane that is turns immediately to ice.
“S’s always cold down here,” Techno responds absently, fixing his glasses to his snout as he glances down at the book in his hands, repeating each line several times. “What’s on your mind, man?”
Phil is silent for a long time, fingers twitching against the worn velvet seat below them. Finally, his wings shuffle, rearranging so he can turn around, facing Technoblade with a creased brow and pinched, discomforted expression.
“It’s gettin’ colder down by where Tommy’s serving out his exile, mate. I…” He swallows, glancing away. “I passed by it when I came home. He just has a flimsy little tent, Techno. It doesn’t… look right. It looks…”
“Off?” He suggests, looking up and cocking his head, curiously scanning the expression on Phil’s face. It’s easy to decipher as worried. It isn’t in Phil’s nature to worry. Techno folds the book in his hands shut, his glasses pressed up with a single knuckle as he considers the silent stretching out between them. “I don’t think it would hurt to check in.”
It starts with a corpse.
With a half-submerged Mooshroom, body rotten, mushrooms soured. There’s a leash around her neck, a large gash gone right through her stomach, entrails spilled in a small, abandoned puddle of water, half-frozen where a slushy of her guts and snow has lain, seemingly for days. It’s hard to differentiate between gore and mud. On her neck is a tag reading her name. Henry.
After that, it isn’t hard to realize that something in exile has gone deeply awry.
It’s the day before Christmas eve when they go out in search of Tommy. Exile is a long, sprawling land, with a beach and a tent and a shack and a tree and a dozen million trillion disjointed buildings, like someone has vomited up all the imagined places in the world right into this space but they’ve come out half-digested.
They start looking in the tent. The dirt is torn up and frozen, all earth covered in thick frost and snow, leaching in from the holes in the top. Then the beach — with scattered party equipment and a jagged hole through one of the tables, as if someone had punched through it with frustration. They look into the Nether and into all the buildings and all the places a boy might go to shelter himself from the bitter, cruel cold.
In the end, though, Phil’s dread and his conviction are what brings him into the wooden, rickety, open thing at the edge of exile. It whistles with the song of a ghost, the wind going in and out of the slats of wood, the badly constructed walls. He thinks, for a moment as he approaches, he can almost hear someone crying.
When he enters, though, one talon gripping the doorway as he limps, it’s utterly silent. It’s as if the wind and the world itself will not touch this dead place, with no light nor fire to keep it alive. Drifts of snow roll about and are trapped there, the only sign of life at all. Phil takes a single cautionary step inside, praying to Death that whatever he finds in here, it is not a child.
Then—
Long blond hair. A completely ripped red shirt, bits of the fabric flapping out from beneath the coat his son had given another. Skin, blue and white as ice and snow, blood and water frozen to its glassy surface. Eyes half-lidded, mouth ajar, face sunken, dark, dead.
It’s only when Phil staggers forward and presses his shaking hand to Tommy’s is he able to confirm that the boy is still alive. A low whine emanates from the boy at the contact, and he shivers at the contact, and Phil recoils as he feels just how ice-cold his skin is.
“What happened to you, kid?”
“Techno!” he roars out, head snapping back to watch as his friend comes running, tugging his horse along. “I found him!”
“Where?” He demands as he enters the tiny broken building. He searches around, only stilling when his eyes land on the prone figure of the boy beneath Phil, huddled so tightly as to be nearly invisible. “Oh— oh man—”
A struggle, as Phil yanks his cloak from his back, quick to pull Tommy off the ice, ignoring the spluttering, dying thing in the kid’s chest, the absolute terror in his eyes, eyelashes coated in ice, seemingly holding his eyes open. Phil tucks the cloak around him and holds him in his lap, rubbing his hands up and down Tommy’s arms, trying desperately to get some warmth back into them.
“Kid’s gonna die. I just found him like this— fuckin’ hell, Tommy.” Phil shifts to the side and lets Techno take him, shouldering the boy’s weight and hitching him up into his arms. He’s so malnourished and small that he’s able to hold him like a baby, an arm under his thighs and one supporting his head, held against his chest. “Fuck.”
“I’m gonna kill Dream,” Techno says dryly. On his chest, Tommy lets out a weak gurgling noise, bloody spittle flecking its way onto the piglin’s neck, wetting his fur a shade darker than normal. “Hey. Hey— you’re not dying on me, idiot. Not on Phil, either.”
A noise like a gag. A moan. “Hh— hf— Ph—il?” says Tommy’s voice, muffled, cracked, wet, awful. There’s a death rattle to the way he speaks, and Techno helps Phil off the ground with more urgency now, leading his friend and the boy in his arms to Carl, waiting patiently by the shoddy excuse for a door nearby.
“Phil’s here, kid. And me. Technoblade. May not be the most heartwarming reunion— but I promise we’ve got you.”
“We’re not gonna hurt you,” Phil chimes in, a strangled chirp yanked from his lips as he hops onto Carl, a burn in his ankle and in his wings as he flaps them, regaining his balance on the horse’s back. He takes the reigns, gesturing for Techno to follow behind him.
“Don’... hhfg… F..fff— fuck—”
Techno gets on next, gently readjusting Tommy so that the boy is curled up in his lap, head just beneath the piglin’s chin, arms and knees huddled to his chest. Tommy cries out at the movement, a weak and broken thing, barely mustered from between cracked and bloody lips.
Carl’s movements are urgent. He breaks into a gallop without prompting. The air stinks of blood and death and rot. It sings with a rattle that to Phil, sounds like home. To the Angel of Death, that noise is anything but comforting. He spurs the horse on a little faster.
“You’re safe, Tommy,” says Technoblade in a voice far more soft, far more kind, than he thinks it has any right to be. It’s firm, too. It’s a promise. “You’re gonna be ok.”
That, though Technoblade doesn’t know it yet, is a promise in turn.