Chapter Text
The battlefield is very nearly dead silent.
The only things that can be heard is the breeze rushing through along the bodies thrown across the grass, and the ragged, pained breaths of a single, dying warrior.
There is no one left, except for him. He made sure of it.
Not a single person is alive except for him, and he fought hard to have it be that way. He has a reputation to upkeep, a fight to win. This one is no different than all the others. It was supposed to be like all the others.
He wasn’t supposed to fall.
What was this one for, again? Was it a winning favor Techno was trying to grab? An offer with some sort of reward at the end? Maybe it was just another plea, a desperate townsperson asking to end the fighting at any cost. Technoblade doesn’t usually fight without some sort of steep price, but on the rare occasions, he will take a single gold coin, and deem it enough.
And he will fight.
You’d think that getting orders and requests would feel like shackles, in a way. Being told when and where to go, who and who to kill.
Technoblade finds freedom in it.
He chooses to accept those offers, he chooses to accept those wars. And he chooses to take his sword and let loose, staining his hands red and feeling the rush of victory course right through his veins. It’s something he could never give up. How could he?
In another life, he might’ve tried to stifle it. Tried to distract his mind, focused on safer, more peaceful alternatives. He’s tried it before, but he always comes back to the swing of a weapon and the heat of a fight. For him, it just feels right. It feels like where he belongs, stealing lives with the edge of his blade, coming home with the reek of death on his shoulders.
The support helps.
“It runs in the family.” Phil said to him once, and he laughed with those words, even with the honest weight they held. “Death is a common thing, somehow, with us. I mean, look at Tommy.”
Techno knows that outside of their home, Tommy’s case is a horrifying one. But it’s also something they’ve gotten used to, and somehow, it’s become comforting, in a way.
Tommy doesn’t stay dead.
Always, no matter what, he comes through, comes back from the very brink of death. He always revives, always with a healed wound, a healed body, and a plentiful amount of swear words on how much that had hurt. Wilbur will never stop worrying each time Tommy’s heart stops, but Phil has a strange faith in Tommy always coming back. It rubs off on Techno, and so, he doesn’t worry.
But Wilbur does. Although, that could just be a Wilbur thing. He always smothers Tommy, and Tommy kicks and yells every time with the proper teenage disgust towards affection.
“Look at you.” Technoblade had responded, and Phil just gave a small smile. “No, actually, I’m not sure that’s a good example.” Phil never comes near death at all, never injured to that extent, but with the way he throws himself into the jaws of danger, you would think he would be seeing the afterlife at least once by this point. The man must have a death wish, but he is never granted it. Technoblade personally thinks Phil is just too good in life for death to steal him away.
“Nah.” Phil huffed. “You take after me.”
“...I don’t throw myself off cliffs.”
Phil snorts, and his wings shift from behind him, pitch black feathers that have carried him often through the sky. “No, but you are sturdy. You fight well. One day it’ll catch up to you, but that’s not today.”
“That day won’t ever come.” Technoblade says, and he says it with a bit of fire burning in his voice. “I’m not going to die.” He said, and it felt like a promise coming from his lips. He refuses to die. He doesn’t want to know what awaits him, he doesn’t want to meet that fate, even if Tommy has seen it so many times, even if Techno himself has sent so many people there, even if Wilbur and Phil hold no fear for it at all. “Ever.”
“Now, don’t say that.” Phil tells him, and his tone is almost scolding. “You’re not invincible, Techno. You’re strong, sure, but with your habit of fighting, you can’t avoid the fact you might lose one day.”
“I just won’t ever lose.” Technoblade shrugs, as if there isn’t fear gripping his heart right at that moment, making him feel like a child lost in the woods, like when he was small. “Easy.” He says breezily.
Phil rolls his eyes with a fond smile, and he says “Oh-kay”, long and dragged out, like he doesn’t quite want to believe it, but still recognizes the capabilities of Technoblade being persistent on something. He is familiar with death looking him in the face, and he knows that if Techno wants to try running from it, he will do so, with no small amount of effort.
Death runs in the family.
Technoblade runs from death.
This was just a day where his luck ran dry, where he had made the wrong decisions. He didn’t move quick enough, didn’t strike hard enough, didn’t realize that he had truly, for once, had gotten surrounded and had gotten outnumbered. And now, look where that’s got him.
Dying, bleeding out on the dirt floor.
The adrenaline from the battle just moments before is slowly draining away from his limbs, and it leaves nothing but a heavy weight of exhaustion behind. He feels like he’s embedded into this spot on the ground, fated to never move again. The world keeps blurring in and out, his head spinning, and he doesn’t even bother trying to pick up his sword beside him. He knows it would feel similar to trying to pick up a mountain.
Trying to breathe in deep, Technoblade coughs, then chokes a bit as he struggles to not drown in his own blood that’s rising up through his throat. The sun is warm on his skin, but he feels cold, and only gets colder with each passing moment. He tilts his head to spit out the blood pooling in his mouth, and then looks back up towards the sky, because he refuses to give his gaze to the very men he killed a few minutes prior.
His shirt is sticking to his skin, soaked in red, not all of it being his own. Because while Techno had gotten unlucky, and someone had gotten a once-in-a-lifetime hit, Technoblade had struck back with everything he had.
With everything he had, he stabbed right through still-beating hearts and tore away the life from their very eyes. He remembers his blade digging right into someone’s stomach, he remembers pulling away and watching them fall and bleed and die, right on the ground before his feet. He remembers swinging with such fury and such fear that he wasn’t thinking, he wasn’t planning, he just moved, and-
Chopped someone’s head clean off.
That’s not the first time that’s happened, but Techno isn’t fond of being so terribly brutal with his kills. His goal is to be efficient, quick. Not-
That.
That, is something Technoblade refuses to look towards, because that makes him too careless, too rough around the edges. It’s the bloodlust that’s settled into his bones, it’s the guidance of Death over his hands, encouraging him to go on and take as many lives as he can. Gather as many souls as he can carry with this bloody, bloody sword of his.
He likes to pretend that if he simply doesn’t lean too far into that, he won’t have to look into its eyes. He won’t need to visit that place that Tommy visits so often, that place that Phil speaks of fondly, the place that Wilbur likes to whisper about to him.
All that he’s ever heard about Lady Death is that she is kind, and while his family only rarely sees Her in between near death experiences and miracles, Technoblade has always been told the same thing, from what little that can be said.
They don’t talk too much about Her. Phil says it’s because of the way the overworld works, how technically, no one is supposed to even see her face, let alone remember what she looks like.
But death runs in the family. Sometimes, details stick, and from what little they have, they’re able to put together bits and pieces about Her, the Goddess of Death.
Phil says she is kind. Tommy says she’s ‘pretty cool, actually, for a dead woman.’ Wilbur just says she is rather pleasant, and that’s all he ever holds on to.
Technoblade can’t help but doubt the spoken words, though. Because if someone is kind, then there must also be a cruel side to them as well, a real reason why Death is so feared by everyone, save for his family. There’s more to be seen in the words that aren’t said, and Technoblade decided a long time ago that he’s not interested in meeting Lady Death at all. He’s not even sure if she would be there, in the afterlife.
People die, and then that’s it. Technoblade doesn’t care to know where they go, because he will not follow after them. He will stay alive, out of sheer stubbornness, and maybe, just maybe, a slightest bit of fear, for the unknown.
He will not die.
He does not die.
And yet, here he lays. Blood pooling underneath him onto the fresh grass, his ragged breaths coming out in short, pained bursts. It’s getting harder to see. It’s harder to live.
Technoblade knows he has to move, he has to get up and drag himself through this silent battlefield. He needs to get on his feet, ignore the way he sways when he walks and ignore the sharp, burning pain in his side, in his leg, in his shoulder. He needs to go back home, ask for Phil to get a healing potion, sleep in bed and ignore the fact he’s staining his bedsheets with his own injuries-
Techno gives one attempt, and never did he think such an attempt could be that pathetic. He hardly moves. He thinks maybe one of his arms lifted for a moment, but it’s hard to tell through the rising panic and the freezing cold that sinks in through his skin.
The sun is warm. It comes down on him, covers him in the light summer heat, but he can’t stay warm. He only gets colder and colder and it’s getting harder to breathe, now. He coughs again, and it wracks his entire chest with pain.
There’s a desperate, frantic urge in his chest that begs him to do anything, to not just stay here and accept defeat when he could so easily walk away with victory. The fighting is done. The enemies are dead. All he has to do is walk away.
All he has to do is get up.
But everything feels like it's getting washed out with pure exhaustion, and with each passing moment Technoblade reconsiders on trying to get up at all. Maybe he can just lay here, underneath the sun, and rest until he’s able to go home. Maybe he can just lay in his victory here, stay laying down as if there isn’t blood soaking into the dirt, as if he isn’t losing with death looming right over his head.
Technoblade opens his eyes, and keeps them wide, because he doesn’t know when he closed them. He doesn’t want to close them again, and he tries to focus on anything at all to keep himself awake.
But the battlefield is eerily silent, a result made by his own hands, and he hears nothing but his own struggling breaths that are getting slower and slower with each second.
Techno listens, straining his ears for something to hold onto, maybe just a stray bird singing to the sky, or maybe the wind itself passing a breeze.
He hears only one thing, and he tries to ignore it, closing his eyes and opening them again, wanting to block it out but not wanting to fall asleep. Either way, whichever way he struggles they both go to the same place. His chances don’t matter much, by now, and the thought makes him frustrated beyond thought.
Techno swears with all his heart that if he turns his head and presses his ear to the soft grass, he can truly hear Her voice. A sweet, gentle lullaby. An open hand coaxing him to the other side.
Technoblade feels nothing but fear.
Because he knows what that voice means, and he knows where she will lead him.
And he cannot go there, because how can someone who’s spilled so much blood be granted anything kind in the afterlife? How can she ever be kind to him, when he himself has never granted any sort of mercy to his enemies?
He knows for a fact nothing good waits for him on the other side, so he refuses and fights.
Heaving himself up with everything he has left, Technoblade rolls onto his side, feeling a familiar surge of spite fuel him. He pushes himself up onto his elbow, holding a hand to his wound as he lifts his head and looks up across the field.
The sun is blinking out. It fades, returns, disappears once more, switching back and forth between a night sky and a summer day. Technoblade shakes his head, and the movement makes his head spin.
He looks up again, gritting his teeth and pushing himself across the grass, dragging himself to somewhere, anywhere but here. Anywhere but his grave.
He does not die.
Technoblade does not die, dammit, and he does not believe in Death, so she can’t take him. And if she tries, then Techno will go kicking and screaming the whole way.
There’s a bird that flies over his head, through the shifting sky that keeps flickering on and off. Technoblade looks towards it, and it’s the worst mistake he’s ever made.
It’s a crow.
A single crow, landing on the corpse of some fallen enemy, and Technoblade stares. He watches, and listens, as the crow’s beak opens wide to let out a laugh.
An echoing, amused laugh, and it goes on and on and it’s so familiar yet so strange and Technoblade knows exactly who’s laugh it is. He wants to throw a rock or something at the crow, shoo it off so he doesn’t have to listen to her laugh through that bird, but he’s given everything he’s had, and he’s run out of time.
She’s done with giving him time.
Technoblade collapses fully onto the grass, and he can’t see, he can’t breathe, he can hardly think. He tries to grab at the grass underneath him, but he can’t even feel that too, and his fingers barely twitch anyway. The freezing cold sticks to his skin, crawls right into his bleeding lungs, and Technoblade keeps his eyes open, trying his best to stay awake. With the way his heart pounds too quickly in his chest and how he’s struggling to take in any bit of air, it should be easy.
Then he falls.
And even with his eyes wide open, he falls right into the dark, right through the ground, into the void’s open arms.
His heart stops, and it seems like that Technoblade can indeed die.