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arts-and-drafts · 6 months ago

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Wherever You May Go (Hermit!Tommy AU)

Summary; Continuation of ‘Minecraft Championships’, in which TFC discovers a stowaway in his strip mine.

(Title from ‘Follow You’ by Imagine Dragons! I highly recommend reading ‘Minecraft Championships’ first to understand what’s going on! This one has been in the drafts for a WHILE and I had just recently finished it. This won’t be the last iteration of this little storyline! Enjoy!)

((And don’t worry, Come Morning Light is still in progress!))

CWs; Mentions of death, mentions of violence, slight body horror

Tubbo didn’t know what he was thinking when he ran through that portal.

He considered himself to be a smart man. He always tried to think rationally, to let logic decide his best move, and let it back up his choices when he did rarely make an emotional decision. Very seldom was he moved by his heart and his heart alone.

That all flew out the window when he heard Tommy scream.

His best friend, who he thought dead, cried out for help. And like the gods themselves puppeted him, Tubbo ran to his aid.

He didn’t bother squashing down the terrible hope rising in his throat, that he was actually hearing his dead best friend’s voice instead of him finally having lost it from stress. Tubbo ran, hope and fear blindingly bright in his chest, shoving any Player in his way aside with little care.

Please. Please. Please.

Tubbo pushed through the last people in his way, and froze.

Tommy.

Tommy was wrapped in the arms of three other players, all comforting him with words Tubbo couldn’t hear. All he could do was stare as his dead best friend smiled, shakily, tears streaming down his face as he answered back.

He barely took into account that the portal back to the Dream SMP was gone. His attention was all on the boy that made up Tubbo’s other half, alive, alive, alive.

The Players surrounding Tommy helped him off the floor, the avian among them draping his great gray wings over the backs of the entire party, shielding their faces from view.

Tubbo made an aborted cry in the back of his throat, jerking forward like his bones and muscles had been replaced with decrepit redstone machines, barely clinging to function.

The group containing Tommy didn’t notice, and seamlessly passed through the portal back to the place Tommy must have been since he die—went missing, the place Tubbo had no idea how to reach to try talk to Tommy again and beg for his forgiveness.

But now the gateway to his best friend was right in front of him.

Tubbo broke into a desperate sprint, throwing himself at the pure-white portal with the desperation of a dying man.

His vision went white, all encompassed by the void between worlds, where he simultaneously existed and didn’t all at once.

And then Tubbo tripped, landing hard on the ground that materialized right under him.

He groaned, his head spinning from the transition of being and not-being and back again.

Tubbo tried to raise a hand to his head, and his entire body lanced through with wrongness that he swiftly recognized to be the work of whitelist magic.

Panic reared its head in Tubbo’s mind, but he shoved it down, his meticulously logical side rising to his aid. With eyes that were becoming increasingly hard to keep open, Tubbo scanned through the lines of code in his communicator screen.

A Player with limited knowledge of how the world operated would not see the code behind the comms, but Tubbo had delved into the magic that made up the fabric of existence since he was small.

Tubbo knew he was on a time crunch. Even the worst-maintained whitelist could discorporate a Player in time, and based on the fact that Tubbo could already feel his atoms destabilizing, this whitelist was very maintained.

Still, he willed himself not to panic, drowning out the instinct roaring in his ears to fight for his life. It would not help him here; there was nothing tangible to fight against.

Tubbo located the string of magic in the code that was tearing him apart, a very powerful enchantment that attacked his being like a white blood cell destroying a virus. It was too powerful to cancel out, so Tubbo didn’t even try; instead, he attempted something he had never done before.

Tubbo mentally reached out to the magic, and embraced it, tangling the data in his veins with the enchantment that was attacking him, knotting them together so tightly that they were indistinguishable.

It was messy, and imprecise, but Tubbo kept a calm mind through the entire process, even as he felt his consciousness beginning to slip into nothingness. He continued to wind himself into the code of this server’s existence, knitting himself into the fabric of reality stitch by excruciating stitch.

Then, all of the sudden, with a SNAP that echoed through Tubbo’s very being, the magic of the whitelist pulled taut, unknotting itself, and Tubbo felt the data in his soul smooth out with it.

Tubbo let out a ragged gasp, his eyes flying open as feeling returned into his limbs. He coughed roughly, scrabbling at the earth underneath him to pull himself off the ground onto his shaking hands and knees. He choked and gasped for breath, willing himself to recover faster from being nearly disintegrated.

He took a minute to just exist, shivering and shaking as he tried to calm his body into functioning again.

Eventually his senses returned to him, and Tubbo raised his eyes.

He looked out to a great ocean, surrounding him on all sides. He was laid upon a cheerfully sunny sandy beach, with a chest to his left and a simple farm of carrots beside it.

There was a handwritten sign beside the chest, displaying the words ‘Take what you need!’ in curly handwriting that made Tubbo’s dyslexia flare up.

Tubbo shakily rose to his feet, and made his way to the chest, opening it to see loaves of bread and a few oak-wood boats inside.

He took a breath, raising his head to glance around at the empty ocean.

This must be the server’s spawn. Tommy nor the other Players he was with were here—which made sense, though it set a deep itch of urgency in Tubbo’s bones. They probably spawned back in their beds after coming through the portal.

Leaving Tubbo stranded alone, with no idea where to go from here.

He inhaled sharply, willing his despair to ebb away into the back of his mind. He summoned his compass from his inventory, glancing down at it before he psyched himself out too much to look.

The needle was still. After spinning uselessly in the SMP for an entire year, it was finally pointing straight and true, towards the boy Tubbo thought dead by cause of his own actions.

Tommy was alive.

Tubbo let out a breath that was between a laugh and a cry.

It wasn’t a dream, a hallucination or a snap of the psyche. Tommy was alive.

Tubbo pushed the bangs out of his eyes, looking up at the direction the needle pointed.

Tommy was just beyond the horizon. He was here all along, wherever ‘here’ was, and now Tubbo was too.

Tubbo grabbed a boat from the chest, and as much bread as he could carry, throwing the wooden item against the water and jumping in as soon as it expanded to size.

I’m coming, Tom.

TFC knew his mines like the back of his hand.

They were just as rough and aged as his hand too, but still, he had memorized each one of them. Strip mines that had long been given up on, once the dwarf had run out of torches or ran out of durability on his pickaxes. He had no reason to venture down once he was comfortable with resources, but still, he walked the lengths of his underground tunnels often.

He felt most at home with rock over his head, and he traveled his handmade mines so much that he could recount the route of them all with his eyes closed.

It was how he knew someone had disturbed them, and done so recently.

Now, he was no stranger to the other hermits accidentally breaking into his mines during digging out room for their own projects. The matter was always dealt with amicably, with the offending hermit patching up the tunnels like they were never disturbed and redirecting their dig site out of the way.

However, they never failed to mention it to TFC, even if he wasn’t around at the time of the incident.

So when the dwarf noticed perfectly smooth stone innocuously laid among the walls of one of his strip mines, he knew he was dealing with someone else entirely.

To even the most careful eye, there was no hint of disruption along the mine wall. But that was precisely why TFC noticed it.

Being one arm short, he wasn’t the most graceful with his pickaxe. He carved the rock rough and uneven, making sure there was enough room for him and the torches, but leaving the edges of the tunnel untidy, because it was work to make it look all pretty and he didn’t mind it how it was.

Whoever had squirreled away in his mine, though, thought otherwise. Or perhaps they didn’t even notice the rougher stone, too focused on covering their tracks to care.

TFC hummed to himself as he hobbled down the tunnels, his rough tune echoing off the stone and carrying his voice far into the mine.

He leisurely came to a stop where the stone smoothed out, where he’d been hearing quiet footsteps up until he halted. The owner of said footsteps didn’t make another noise as soon as they registered TFC wasn’t either, a smart move to ensuring they stayed hidden.

Unfortunately, they didn’t account for the sharp hearing of a dwarf, nor said dwarf’s attention to detail.

TFC let the quiet linger for a moment, only sighing when there was no movement to be heard for several minutes.

“Alright,” TFC finally said, keeping his tone light of any accusation. “Who’s down here?”

The someone in the walls, predictably, didn’t reply. TFC cleared his throat.

“C’mon, now. I’m not gonna be mad. Just wanna know who I’m dealing with.” TFC tried again.

The silence continued on. TFC was debating fully sitting against the wall and waiting out the Player, infinitely patient as he was, but then a quiet voice spoke up through the rock.

“You first.” A young voice demanded in clearly false bravado, and TFC chuckled.

“Sure, if that’ll help.” He agreed, making sure his tone wasn’t too rough. “I’m Tinfoil Chef. Everyone calls me TFC.”

The young voice was quiet for a beat.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” They spoke again, that same brave streak hiding their trepidation. TFC raised an eyebrow.

“Tellin’ the truth about my name, or that I ain’t gonna hurt ya?” He countered. The kid in the walls made an aborted noise.

“Cuz the answer is the same for both.” TFC continued, sparing the confusion for the kid. “It’s the truth. I just wanna know who’s in my mines.”

The voice was quiet for a few moments. TFC wondered if he’d have to speak again to keep the conversation going, to assure the kid further that he wasn’t going to do anything to them, but then they finally replied.

“Tubbo.” The kid said quietly, almost incoherent. “I’m Tubbo.”

TFC nodded. “Well, Tubbo, nice to meet ya.” He said. “What’re you doing down here in the walls?”

Tubbo was quiet.

TFC waited.

“I’m hiding.” Tubbo finally answered, sounding a bit sheepish. TFC hummed thoughtfully.

“I see.” He said slowly, thinking through his options. He truthfully wasn’t one to get into other people’s business; he tended to stay out of the server-wide shenanigans, and interacted with the other hermits very rarely. He would be perfectly content to leave his and Tubbo’s conversation there, after he’d gotten the answers he needed.

He had a feeling, though, that this kid shouldn’t be by themself.

“Well,” TFC spoke again, shifting his weight to his good leg. “You don’t have to hide all the way down here.”

“People rarely come around my place.” He continued. “You can hide and be comfortable too, at least.”

Tubbo was quiet, though TFC could practically hear the gears turning in their head.

“Why would you help me?” They asked, a bit abrasively, and TFC was reminded starkly of Tommy.

Huh. If he had a diamond for every kid that unexplainably showed up one day on Hermitcraft, he’d now be two diamonds richer.

“Just…seems like the right thing to do.” TFC answered honestly, shrugging. “I know it ain’t comfortable down here for most other than me.”

There was silence from the kid again.

Then, the stone wall broke, and the tip of an iron sword pointed warningly into the hall, held by a small goat hybrid with lapis-blue eyes.

TFC blinked.

“What are ya planning to do with that, exactly?” TFC asked neutrally, keeping his hands at his sides. The kid’s brows furrowed.

“It’s just insurance,” They said, their young voice firm. “I wouldn’t try anything if I were you.”

TFC blinked again, and then let out a laugh.

The kid’s face twisted to shock and uncertainty, obviously caught off guard by the dwarf’s reaction.

“You can point that thing at me if it’ll make you feel better, kid.” TFC amended. “But I’m not gonna hurt you. You can believe me if you want to.”

And with that, he turned and started walking back down the mine the way he came, his gate just as unhurried. He heard the kid behind him pause and then climb out of the hole in the wall, keeping a steady pace a few blocks behind.

Tubbo paused entirely when they made it to the ladder leading back up to TFC’s house. The dwarf turned back to them and gestured to the ladder.

“It takes me a good year or two to get up there.” TFC joked. “You first.”

Tubbo narrowed his eyes. “Not a chance.” He replied firmly. TFC shrugged.

“Suit yourself.” He answered, and promptly turned his back to the kid again to begin the process of arduously climbing the ladder with only one functioning arm and leg.

After he climbed a few blocks up, he finally heard the ladder creak behind him as the kid started his ascent, and he smiled to himself. Maybe Tubbo would be more inclined to trust him after the agonizing few minutes he’d be stuck behind TFC’s slow-moving butt.

TFC finally pulled himself through the hatch in his house floor, slowly rising to his feet and moving away from the hatch to his chests. He heard Tubbo emerge from the trapdoor soon after, the kid getting to his feet much quicker than the old dwarf and notably keeping his distance.

TFC grabbed some wool and wood from his chests, meandering to his crafting table. Tubbo shifted behind him.

“Where…are we, exactly?” The kid asked, his brave act lowering slightly.

“My very humble abode.” TFC answered, arranging the wool and wood methodically on his crafting table. Tubbo made a noise in his throat.

“No, I mean—what server?” He tried again. TFC collected the bed he constructed and turned back to the kid, holding it out to them with a slight smile.

“Hermitcraft.”

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