Chapter Text
Tommy took stock of his meagre belongings. The scraps of his life, patchworked together in the tiny escape shuttle leaving his solar system as fast as it could go.
Away from the tiny moon of a tiny half-planet, away from him. Tommy didn’t want to think about Dream, or Logstedshire, or what would happen if he was caught . He wanted to think about Tubbo.
The compass strapped to his wrist pointed unerringly away from his sun, the only other constant in Tommy’s life. No matter what planet he was on, the sun was always there. The sun and Tubbo.
Your Tubbo. The engraving was slightly chipped and dented, but still legible.
But Tubbo was gone. And Tommy had only the sun. The sun he was leaving behind.
Tommy sighed, his breath fogging up the glass paneling above the dash. Space was fucking cold , and his ship had very little insulation. The nanobots in his synthetic blood always kept him at a perfect 37 degrees Celsius, but did nothing to combat the chill biting just at his skin.
The S.S. Clementine was small, barely larger than a van. The roof was almost a foot shorter than his standing height, and if he sat facing the windshield and dashboard, he could easily touch the walls to either side of him. She (because Clementine was a lady ) didn’t have synthetic gravity either, which was useful to Tommy and Tommy alone. His biomech upgrades were made for exactly this.
It started with the horns and tail. On Mars, after his parents were drafted and killed in the revolution, he responded to an advertisement calling for young, healthy humans. All he had to do was let them put a bit of metal in his head and tailbone. Experimental surgery for the military, and they needed lab rats, paying 30 whole credits!
(Of course, after the war, 30 credits was barely enough for a week’s rations, but it was more than he could make in a month. And at the ripe age of twelve, he and Tubbo needed all the help they could get.)
Antenna, to help his inner ear balance, he’d been told. They poked out of his hair like red devil horns. A tail, the same shade of red and whip-thin, a pointy spade at the end. He heard that the newer versions had rockets in the stingers, but all he’d got was the lousy prototype. Figures. The tail was meant to help soldiers maneuvering in zero-grav, and Tommy could attest to its success.
Putting Clementine on auto-pilot, Tommy used his tail to push himself from the dash, floating to the back of the ship. Looking out the rear port, he could just make out the outline of Pluto. No other ships in sight. Nobody following him. It did nothing to soothe the fear in his metal heart.
The moon he had spent so many unhappy months on was on the opposite side of Pluto, her four sisters orbiting slowly, not a care in the world. He’d put Clementine together himself from the scraps littering the moon, named Logstedshire. Ironic, really. Now it was nothing but a landfill.
Once, it had been covered in lovely blue and purple plants that reached out to the stars, their lovely red and purple flowers were said to be revered throughout the Copernican system. There was only one tree left on Logstedshire by the time Tommy arrived. Tommy named it Henry. Sickly and drooping, Henry had produced only one flower in the whole seven months of Tommys stay. The tiny thing brought life to the S.S. Clementine, purple and vibrant against the unpainted and rough metal. It would grow into a tree, one day. If Tommy was careful.
He held the little plant close, the metal of its pot cold against his palms.
“It’s okay, Henry Two. You don’t have to be scared. I’m not.” He was. “I’ll get us to Tubbo, he’ll love you.” It was barely a whisper, raspy. He still wasn’t used to his trachea implant.
Tommy rested his forehead against the port, his horns clink ing against the glass. He wouldn’t cry. He wouldn’t. NOt over that awful place. Henry II said nothing, predictably, but Tommy took comfort in the flower nonetheless.
The sixteen-ish year old boy turned from the port, emotions swirling in his chest like a shook-up bottle of cola. Tommy held Henry II closer, running his fingers over the imperfections on the metal pot in a self-soothing gesture. They would be fine. They would be alright.
He’d never been in space alone before. He’d been alone before, sure. He’d been left alone for weeks at a time on Logstedshire. The moment he was once again able to manage on his own, his tormentor would fuck off to god-knows-where, and Tommy would be left to put his little life back together. Until he wasn’t alone again. And another bit of his body would be taken away and replaced with metal and wires and synthetic flesh.
Rinse and repeat.
But not anymore. Never again. He was on his way to Tubbo.
Tommy couldn’t go straight to his friend, though his very soul ached to find his missing half. The rations he was able to stash away would only last him a month, just enough to get him to Alpha Centauri, and he would have to stop at a trading station on the way there. He didn’t have any money, though, and had little in the way of tradable belongings.
He could sell his fuel, perhaps, the only thing he actually has surplus of. The trees of Logstedshire were valued for their explosive bark, hundreds of times more potent than gunpowder, but more stable. It was used as fuel throughout the Copernican solar system, and the species was quickly propagated to other planets and moons. Over the months of his isolation, he carefully collected Henry’s sheddings, hiding his stash across the landfill. Though it worked wonders as fuel, the powder had also been used as explosives in the war.
(Dream found his explosives, once. Found the stash of dried and grounded bark carefully tucked away under Tommy’s cot. He wasn't punished at the time, but the next time Dream came, he took Tommy’s heart.)
He surveyed the bundle of scrap metal and rubbish he had thought to bring with him, and an idea began to form. People would pay more for an artisanal trade rather than raw material.
Hmm. He could definitely find someone to buy a bomb.
With his plan set, Tommy set to work. He pulled up his holo-screen, the same one he’d had his whole life, and set to work designing best fucking bomb anyone had ever seen. Logstedshire was a dump for destroyed and dysfunctional ships and army equipment, and he'd had plenty of time to take them apart and put them back together. He's built plenty of bombs before.
Tommy worked on the schematics for a long while, having to tweak and improvise the designs a bit to accommodate for his limited supplies. Working on stuff was weird in zero gravity. Sometimes his shit would just float off, and he couldn't really brace himself against anything without being strapped down to it.
He didn't start building the bombs immediately, regardless of how his fingers itched to begin construction. He wasn't the smartest guy around, but he wasn't stupid enough to just have bombs hanging out in his tiny ship with him. Instead, his attention turned to his leg.
Or, rather, lack of one.
It was an accident, really. On Mercury, an infected cut in the sole of his foot, barely larger than a scratch. He got it in the mines, if he remembered correctly, and by the end of his shift, black and yellow splotches had set in up to the calf. Visibly rotting his skin and muscle. His supervisor had taken one look and amputated it herself, right in the break room. It wasn't her first time.
Dream was the one who made his prosthetic. On the house, no less! Tommy demanded to work off the debt, to earn it in some way, and Dream took him up on the offer. Tommy never could have guessed how much Dream would take from him from that offer.
He even took the leg back, the dickhead.
Now, all Tommy had was an empty metal socket just under his knee, with incredibly sensitive wires hanging out.
His crutch was strapped down right under the dash, it would have to do for now. Tommy’s mechanical fingers itched to do something, though.
He calculated his course. He ran the calculations again. He played some music. He turned off the music. He took Clementine off of autopilot and sat at the controls for a while, though there was nothing to do but hold the wheel straight. He didn't want to sleep. Didn't want to stop moving, to let his thoughts wander. When he couldn't sit still for a second longer, he set the A.P. back on and floated back to take stock of the rations.
Opening them, his heart plummeted as pure dread washed over him.
“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me .”
In his rush to get off Logstedshire as fast as possible, he hadn't thought to check. The rations were military-grade, he'd been told. Surplus, now that the interplanetary war was over. They could last years without expiring. They were supposed to, anyways.
They were rotten. Inedible. The nutritional paste was usually cardboard brown in colour and the texture a mix of peanut butter and applesauce. Now, it was dry, black, and moulded. Tommy gagged, feeling more nauseous the longer he examined it. In the centre, buried halfway out of the ruined paste, was a bug. Tommy used his metal fingers, long spindly, and unfeeling, to fish it out. Unassuming, it looked like some type of beetle, a simple black in colour, but the glint of metal was impossible to deny.
Tubbo told him about this, once. In the war, Jupiter had wanted to do as much damage as possible to Venus and Mars's troops. They'd come up with a genetically engineered bug, designed to crawl in nutritional paste and secrete some sort of rot-juice that fucks up the rations and makes it inedible. Tubbo had thought it was cool, while they were far, far away from the war, in a little mining colony on Mercury. Tommy agreed with him at the time. Pretty fucking cool.
Tommy didn't think it was cool, now.
He closed the plastic tub with shaking hands and examined the next one. The same. He frantically searched through all of his rations, pure terror coursing through his veins, salvaging what he could. He ended up scrounging a quarter of his assumed rations, barely enough to keep him alive to make it to the trading station. Fuck. Fuck.
He didn't cry. He wouldn't. It would fuck up his stupid robot eye. His stupid robot heart never faltered, never missed a beat, yet it felt like it was being torn to shreds. His stupid robot fingers brushed against his normal human ones as he clutched the plastic bin tight. He curled around it protectively, tail wrapping around his knees for good measure, being careful not to brush the wires meant to connect to his stupid robot leg.
He just had to make it to the trading station. If he made it there, he could make it to Centauri. If he made it to Centauri, he could make it to… the next place. Manburg, wherever that was. Wherever Tubbo was. He curled tighter around his lifeline, alone, floating in the middle of his tiny ship rocketing away from his solar system. He felt impossibly small and weak. Dream was right. Tommy couldn’t do anything on his own. He’d always be just some stupid kid, always relying on others, incapable of doing anything right.
The uncertainty, the what-ifs, the daunting and insurmountable impossibility of his task swarmed Tommy's mind. He didn't know if he could do it. He wasn’t smart enough, not strong enough. Reliant and unreliable. The only thing he was good at was being a good little test subject.
And yet…
He’d built Clementine by himself.
He’d made a home for himself on Logstedshire.
He’d gotten away from Dream, and stolen as much shit as possible from the bastard.
He was done falling for Dreams' lies. Dream wasn’t his friend. Dream had only brought pain and hardship to Tommy’s life.
Tommy’s eyes, one real, one metal, rested on the lovely form of Henry the Second. He wasn’t alone. Tubbo’s compass would lead him home. He could make it to the trading station. From there, he could figure something out.
Steeling himself, Tommy floated to the rear port once again. Pluto was barely visible now, a speck in the immeasurable backdrop of the universe. The rest of the planets were lost to the void. None of them were ever his home. Not really. Not if Tubbo wasn’t there.
Dream was wrong, Tommy realized then. Tommy was capable. He was clever enough to build a whole fucking ship right under Dream’s nose. He was strong enough to heft crates of explosive powder halfway across a fucking moon while missing his goddamned leg.
He was Tommy Fucking Innit, the biggest man ever. He was going to find Tubbo. He was going to find his home. Dream and anyone else in his way could get fucked.
He could do this. Probably.