Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tommy dusts the dirt off his elbows with a grunt as he drags himself up onto his knees. There’s sand in his hair, and cobbled bricks against his back. He hasn’t broken anything through some sheer dumb luck, and by the looks of it the worst injury he’s suffered is a graze on his side and a shallow cut in his cheek. He grins.

“Sticked the landing,” Tommy grunts, rolling off the cobble path till he’s lying flat on the beach. He’s crushing whatever remains of his glider, but he realises he doesn’t care as he laughs it off nearly hysterically.

He’s alive. He shouldn’t be, with the stunt he pulled mere moments before his crash, but he is.

Tommy sits up and throws his arms into the air lazily with a resounding ‘woop!’ into the bay. “I’m alive!” he cheers. “I fucking did it! I fucking–” he cuts himself off as the thunder roars off the coast, in the direction Tommy came from. Tommy greets it with a roar of his own, a raucous cheer that scratches against his eardrums horridly as it echoes off the rocks.

“I fucking lived,” he finishes finally, and then laughs again. “I fucking lived! Suck my fucking dick, Prime–” he screams to the ocean, flipping the entire expanse of water the bird.

“I’m alive– I beat your stupid fucking weather, I…”

He trails off just as the rain begins to hit his face, streaking lines through the sand coating his skin and sombers at the realization that his glider is now wrecked and he doesn’t have a way home.

There are no gulls to crow or heckle him for his mistake, no crabs to nip at his ankles to get him up on his feet, and nowhere for him to go now.

“Fuck,” Tommy whispers. “Fuck,” he says.

All there is for him on this beach is a rapidly approaching tide shaken by the wind, the impending threat of being washed out to sea with it, and the storm.

Tommy almost died out there, he realises. He very well would have if he was even the slightest moment late in steering himself away from the rock pools below. High on quickly depleting adrenaline, Tommy doesn’t know what to think of that.  So to put it simply– he doesn’t. He doesn’t think about the possibility, because what does a near death experience even matter if he came out of it victorious?

He has bigger fish to fry anyways, he decides as he redirects his focus to scanning the land for a place to rest that won’t get him swept away in the waves. The cliff is out of the sea, but Tommy’s legs ache too much to fathom climbing all the way up. Tommy lowers his gaze, and finds a hollow cavity in the cliff face, enough metres up off the beach that Tommy feels assured enough that he won’t drown if he sleeps there.

His mind is made up, and he tiredly picks up the remaining scraps of his glider and begrudgingly hauls himself off of the sand, exhaustively hobbling his way across the beach, and into the cave.

The thunderous sound of the storm raps against the walls and reverberates around Tommy as he lies against the rockface, and the last thought that occurs as white crack of lightning erupts against its entrance and as Tommy falls asleep is that he couldn’t be more pleased to be out of its reach.

//

When Tommy wakes up it’s dark outside, seemingly late enough at night where the only thing illuminating the cave is the occasional strike of light in the nearby entrance. There’s a crick in his back when he stretches, and he bumps against a stalactite as he stands up, nursing his shoulder where it hits him.

Sleep still drags him down as he dazedly adjusts to the light but Tommy forces himself up regardless, nearly silently muttering to himself about the fact that he doesn’t have much time now if he wants to make full use of the daylight tomorrow.

He takes a hammer from his belt and makes quick work of it as he picks away at the stilts holding up his glider, scraping out the sand that cements itself in between the supports and letting it fall into his lap as he continues working.

‘ There’s so much work to be done,’ Tommy thinks as he shuffles further into the light, dragging down a pair of goggles that rest on top of his head as the wind hits his face hard, threatening to knock him over with the force of it. Belatedly Tommy realises his goggles are shattered too, and he tosses everything aside with a groan as he stomps out of the rain and back into darkness.

“This isn’t going to work,” he huffs defeatedly. “Everything’s wrecked– I can’t fucking fix this,” he says, allowing his head to fall back against the rocks.

He needs his glider. Its wings were the only thing he could rely on to get him across the ocean,  and now he doesn’t have them at his behest he doesn’t know what to do.

“I need to go home,” Tommy says. “I need to–”

Tubbo is at home, Ranboo is  at home. Tommy knows they won’t come for him – how could they? He knew what he was doing by flying into the storm, and he knows damn well that neither is going to let the other chase after him if that’s the risk. It’s almost comforting knowing that there’s hardly a chance for them to crash with him.

Water drips down the opposite wall to him, and for a moment, in a flicker of lightning Tommy can see his face in it, bruised and dirty and lost.

He sighs. “Icarus,” he says to his reflection, “You are a fool.”

//

Tommy waits out the storm.

It’s morning when it subsides, and Tommy can finally go outside again without having to stabilise himself against the cliff face to prevent being blown away. There’s a thin layer of water pooling over the floor of the cave, and Tommy wastes no time in getting out of there, welcoming the sunlight with open arms as he treks down the beach.

The beach is a mess when Tommy leaves it, racked thoroughly with kelp, rocks and rubble that the water is yet to wash out. The marks in the sand from when Tommy had skidded through it in his crash are long gone, filled in by the soggy sand around it and closed with almost nothing suggesting it was a crash site in the first place, save for the torn pieces of his glider thrown over the cobble pipe beside it.

He needs to find a town – there’s obviously been people here, the lighthouse makes that very apparent – and he needs to mend his glider. Tommy hopes that if he walks straight forward he should come across one eventually.

Tommy is going to get home.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do if he doesn’t.

Chapter Text

Someone’s covering his mouth.

Tommy freezes at the feeling of an arm over his shoulders, and attempts to push against it as it moves towards his glider, tightening his own grip on the pieces as the person tries to take it.

“I’m not here to cause any trouble,” they say, trying again to tug it out of Tommys arms. “We’re not going to hurt you, man. Just give us the materials and we’ll let you go.”

He tries to respond, to refuse them, to do something but the hand muffles any words he manages, until all he can do is shake his head slowly and hope the message gets across. Vaguely he processes the ‘we’re’ in the sentence, and the prospect of the mugger having friends only serves to terrify him further.

The person– man, stiffens against his back. “Here’s what’s going to happen, mate,” he articulates slowly. “I’m going to let you talk, and–”

Tommy yells, struggling against him. He’s going to take his wings – Tommy can’t lose them, not again – and Tommy can’t let them.

“–and you’re not going to scream,” the man says, and there’s a tone of humour in there that Tommy barely catches over his wild struggling, which is enough to have Tommy freezing up all over again. “If you do scream, well then we’ll be right back where we started,” he threatens, before sighing. “Please don’t make this any harder than it has to be, mate– this is already a low, even for me–”

With what little self preservation Tommy has, he nods. He’s not that much of a fool as to not cooperate here, and surprisingly, the mugger removes his hand.

Self preservation be damned, Tommy takes his chances, and screams bloody murder into the town, praying it’s enough for somebody to find him by. The man tries to muffle him again, but this time Tommy sinks his teeth into the man's glove, and bites down.

“Fuck!” He hisses, and Tommy is promptly released as the man loosens his grip just enough for him to slip out.

Tommy practically bolts into the square, tearing through the villagers and the market as he runs, but not before he hears the mugger behind him plead for him to come back.

“Shit! Kid– kid? Wait, please–” Tommy ignores it, easily shaking the desperation that seeps from the man's tone from his consciousness because Tommy had been like that. Tommy had been desperate to get his glider fixed, and that man almost robbed him of that.

He’s been stuck in this dreary seaside village for weeks now, only yesterday did he finally manage to pay off the blacksmith who let him use his tools, the fisherman who let Tommy use his fishing wire, and the farmer who had allowed him work in exchange for money that allowed him to pay off the other two.

Chancing a glance at the streetlamps, Tommy knows exactly who the assailant was too. He was the one to notify the fishermen of the shipwreck by his cave after all, and news happened to travel fast as gossip only blossomed about the black and white flag plastered on torn sails.

Pirates, Tommy had known. Nobody wants to deal with pirates, though in this particular case, the pirates– or pirate had been quite pitiful.

The man doesn’t have a crew to back him, or at least not one Tommy nor the villagers have seen. It’s none of Tommy’s business why and he knows it but–

–What has to occur to get a man treated as near royalty on the water to get so down on his luck? The rumours are there and Tommy can’t help but listen, but…

He can’t help but feel curious as to what really happened to the lonely pirate.

//

This afternoon is Tommy’s first test flight with his repaired glider. Of course, this was also apparently the perfect occasion to cross paths with the pirate yet again.

“Fuck off, man,” Tommy says from the cliffs ledge. “You’re not getting my wings so you can fucking shove it– I don’t care about your fucking pity party because frankly, I’ve got my own fucking problems and yours don’t concern me.”

The pirate – Captain Philza, as the townsfolk call him – pauses, raising his hands up placatingly. “Listen, mate– I feel really bad about this,” and Tommy knows that he does, he can hear it in Philza’s voice, “but I need those parts to repair my ship,” he says. “Surely you can sympathise, mate, I just need to go home.”

Somehow Tommy falters at that, because he can sympathise. But he needs to go home too. “I wish I could help you, Phil,” he sighs. “I really fucking do, but–”

Tommy turns around to face the ocean, and the mainland has never looked so far away. The giant mass of land and mountains is reduced to a speck on the horizon, and Tommy swallows down the regret as he realises his friends are still waiting there.

“These wings are my only way home too, man. I can’t just fucking… give them up, y’know?”

It’s flimsy solidarity, and Tommy can see the moment Phil begins to mull over what he said. “We’re in the same boat here, then,” Phil says before coughing, “Erm, pun not intended.”

Tommy barks out a surprised laugh at it, and then really laughs at it, because there’s something more to those words than Phil knows, and Tommy sees gold as he tries the words again in his head.

“Taking that very fucking literally, I think you may be onto something, big man,” Tommy says, pausing to take a final glance down at his glider. “I’ll… I’ll give you my glider–”

Phils eyes light up at that. “You will?”

“–in exchange for a ride to the mainland,” Tommy offers. “I don’t care what happens after, where you go after that or whatever the fuck you do. If I’m giving you my wings–”

The sky is cloudless behind him, it’s the perfect day for a flight. Though somehow, Tommy believes he can wait a little longer for another chance to fly.

“I’ll get you home,” Phil promises, and Tommy finally hands the parts over. Phil grins. “Well, welcome aboard then–?”

“Tommy,” Tommy answers.

“Welcome aboard, Tommy,” Phil says. “Now, do you get seasick?”