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The cold metal of the anvil was enough to cause his mind to go blank. He had thought that the moment it crushed his skull, everything would go cutthroat white before darkness bled in. A few heavy footsteps ago, he was glaring at his enemies from inside the cage they put him in, and in the next, he was looking at a field full of daisies.
Techno doesn't understand. He was being executed. He swears he heard the anvil drop, he could swear that he felt it crashing.
Perhaps he is already dead…?
No. He had the totem, it should've worked. He can't be dead. This is a place far too beautiful for a ruthless man like him to consider an afterlife.
It's either he'll stay inside his hutch in New L’Manburg or he’ll burn in hell for all the faults he's committed. He can imagine no scenarios wherein he ends up on someone's farm, (unconsciously destroying) laying on a bed of blossoms.
"Hey!" someone yells. Techno whirls around only to find a blond child wearing a farmer's hat and holding a shepherd's crook.
The pinkette points at himself. "Me?"
"Yes, you!" the boy marches up to him, puffing his chest in efforts to make himself seem intimidating. Well currently, he is as petrifying as a ladybug.
“Excuse me,” the boy frowns. “You're sitting on my flowers! That's not very polite of you."
The younger lifts up his hat to stare daggers into the soul of this oddly-dressed stranger on his field carrying a sword that can probably cut him into fragments when he gets irritating enough, but that's okay, because his precious flowers are wilting and that's all that matters!
Techno could recognise the boy. He would know those eyes anywhere, even though they're much more sunken now.
“Tommy?”
“How do you know my name? What a weirdo.”
The question is, why wouldn’t he? Techno would always remember the bright boy of sunshine who would follow him around, from his old base near Pogtopia, to the potato farm he managed to plant underground.
“You look like one,” Techno shrugs. Wherever he is, whatever this place he got unwillingly teleported to is, he isn’t going to ask Tommy if he remembers the past they built upon brotherhood and betrayal, in a ravine with maps and outlines spread across a rotting oak table, or in a pit where both their blood still stain the stone like cantillations on an immortal’s skin.
If Tommy-from-this-place couldn’t recall any of that, then Techno would gladly let him live the rest of his life without those memories, without him. And if this turns out to be a fraternity between his consciousness and death, he can wake up and pretend, but he cannot deny how different these two Tommy’s are.
“I look like one?” the younger raises an eyebrow.
“Yes. ‘Tommy’ is a very fitting name for a child.”
“I’d have you know that ‘dickhead’ is a very fitting name for you,” Tommy frowns exaggeratedly.
“That’s a very childlike thing to say,” Techno smirks. Children like Tommy hate being called children the way adults like him hate being adults.
“You know what else is childlike? Trespassing! You’re a trespasser and a destroyer of property! Do you not feel sorry for my flowers that are suffocating underneath your ugly cape?” It's blue now, he's not used to that, even if it is stained with the red he assumes to be blood.
Techno rolls his eyes, finally rising from the ground. Only now had he noticed that the field extends in every direction forever, uncomfortably endless. No mountain ranges or valleys up ahead, not one house standing on a hillock.
Tommy’s expression shifts into an enigmatic gaze. “I'll have you know, I liked your cape better when it was red.”
“..What?”
“I said,” Tommy drawls with a groan. “I’d like your cape better if it was red.”
“Oh.”
“Now, get moving, prick! It's gonna be night soon and Papa is going to be looking for me. If he sees you here, he'd think you're a thief and beat you to a complete fucking pulp,” Tommy puffs his chest proudly, although it isn't his brawn that he's flaunting.
Techno prays that Tommy’s ‘Papa’ doesn't come here, he really doesn't want to brandish a weapon in front of a kid.
“Where am I supposed to go?” the older asks. He has no idea what he's doing here. He just wants to wake up in his dimly-lit cabin. He can't stand being oblivious, even if he gets this in return, even if he gets his brother back in return. At least for a moment.
“Dunno,” Tommy shrugs. “Dig a burrow somewhere and start living in it. Or become a nomad, that usually works, yeah. Sometimes I'd want to live nomadically. The fields are the itchiest during my shifts.”
Techno doesn't know what the hell that means, neither will he ask. “Why do you even tend to, like, a whole myriad of flowers? Everything's gonna wither during winter anyway.”
“Winter? Pfft,” Tommy chuckles. “We don't have that here. It's always sunny on this side of the world.”
His face flickers, and Techno feels clueless. Like the boy is keeping secret he hasn't got the faintest idea about.
Something's wrong when everything is already so right.
‘This side of the world’. Hm. Curious things.
“Tommy?” Techno exhales shakily. “Where are we?”
“At my paddock, dumbass! C’mon, do you seriously not believe that I grew all these flowers by mysel-”
”Tommy.”
“No,” Tommy holds a palm up. “Don't say another word.”
Techno grimaces. “Why am I here, Tommy?”
“I said not another wo-”
“Why am I in your limbo?”
Tommy stares at him sadly. His eyes, they began to whisper. ’Why am I in yours?’, he'd wanted to say. ‘I missed you’, he'd wanted to scream.
“Look, I have to go back. I'm sorry, Theseus, but I can't stay here.”
“You don't just get to leave, there's no way out. You wait.”
What felt like hours walking on the eternal meadow of daisies and sunflowers is a mere few seconds in the enclosure where they all watched him get ridiculed like a circus animal for showcasing. In that transient moment when metal dented his skull and muddied his matted hair with blood, he could've sworn they all smirked while he held his breath.
He won't let them have their contentment.
But he can't leave Tommy here.
He doesn't even know why Tommy is here.
“You're fading,” the boy smiles—it wasn't a melancholic one, nor was it a bitter one. He was happy. Relieved. “That’s what happens when you're about to go back to the real world.”
“I can take you with me. I can do that, right?”
Tommy shakes his head. “You can't, because Technoblade never dies, but Tommyinnit always dies. I'm staying here because I'll be dead before I get revived again, and you're getting sent back because you're meant to live.”
Techno could discern the gold of the Totem of Undying wrapping around his very veins. It's pulling him back. It's tugging him awake. He floats away, dust particles of a centenarian scripture.
And right before he awoke where he originally was, where he was supposed to be, Techno perceived two arms of a certain golden-haired child around his waist.
Later, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror he'd been trying to avoid. And there, Techno saw in between the cracks of his skin, covering all the scars he got from his execution, was a single daisy tucked behind his ear.