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Tommy falls from his tower. He’s expecting nothing else but the crash and the release and relief.
But instead of crashing against the ground, static rises up to meet him, and he finds himself falling through the boundaries between servers– With no idea where he’ll end up.
And he opens his eyes to a fucking mess of cobblestone and obsidian and there’s netherrack over there and there’s lava everywhere and there are people lying motionless on the ground, blank eyes staring listlessly forward– He walks forward, and something blows him up. He dies.
He wakes up.
He shouldn’t have woken up.
Everyone, in every server, has three lives so why the fuck is he still alive?!?
It shouldn’t be possible! Unless–
His breath catches in his throat.
Unless he's in the deathless land. Unless he is in the closest place the known universe has to hell. Unless he is in 2B2T.
Tommy freaks the fuck out. He starts running, makes the mistake of jumping into the first nether portal he finds. There’s a trap at the other side, he dies.
He wakes up.
This can’t be real. He can’t be in the middle of the infamous anarchy server.
He wants to scream for help, but he knows it won’t come. The server's admins would probably just laugh at him and kill him again; they don’t do anything unless someone’s trying to break the server. Anything goes otherwise; stealing, griefing, killing, hacking–
Tommy gets up fighting to get out of the pile of unresponsive bodies and runs, runs for a while until he chances another portal. This one spits him out into the nether on a shaky netherrack path– and holy shit. This makes the nether paths back home look like the shit you’d find in Hermitcraft in comparison.
He runs over the paths wildly, stumbling and the dizzying heat is making his vision spin. There’s a hole he doesn’t see in time, his foot steps on air, he throws his arms around the other side of the path but all he manages is to get netherrack cuts dug deep into his forearms and he falls, falls, falls. Dies.
He wakes up again.
Tommy forces himself to stand. He’s crying. This is bullshit. He just wanted to die, and he’s transported to the one fucking place where he can’t die .
So he runs. He runs, keeps running until he’s forced to slow into a walk. He passes by messes of lava-casted ruins, pitfalls, a fucking spinning crystal that explodes when he throws something at it and it fucking hurts.
He keeps walking even though there are burns all over his arms, his throat is desert-dry and the ghost pains of his previous deaths are raging under his skin–
He trips. He skids on the ground, dirt under his face, cobblestone chips digging into his stomach. He’s so tired. He can’t move.
“Hello?”
Tommy uses the last of his energy to turn his head. He tries to lift it too, but it’s too much and it thunks back onto the ground.
“Oh! There’s someone here!” the guy says. Tommy’s vision is a little blurry with tears, so he can barely make out the features: tan skin, covered in scars, wearing iron armor over a tattered black hoodie, and snow-white hair.
“You’re an eyesore, aren’t you? You still have color in your hair, look at that!” says the guy, a grin clear in his voice. There’s a click as the guy loads a firework into his crossbow. “Let me give you the 2B2T welcome!”
He fires. Tommy screams as the bright colors burn.
God, he wishes he’d punched Technoblade more, back at the Pit. Dying to a firework is agonizing, and Techno forced Tubbo to go through that–
A second firework hits Tommy, burns away at the rest of his health.
He wakes up again.
This time he doesn’t stand up again. His head is stuffed with cotton. He can’t feel his limbs.
Someone spawns, and punches him off the spawn platform until he splats against the ground far below.
He wakes up again.
There is silence in his head.
He can tell he’s pulling away from his own body, and he wants to sink into the blankness, but there is a whispering in the back of his mind that tells him that if he does, he’ll end up like the dozens of still-living bodies around him. Empty, breathing sacks of flesh.
It does sound nice.
He can barely tell that there’s someone that just spawned trying to walk through the piles of unresponsive people.
Blankness sounds very nice.
But there is something that compels him to look up, to see who’s trying to get out of spawn.
Tattered black hoodie, covered in scars, white hair.
It’s the asshole that shot him with a firework.
Rage rises in Tommy’s chest, and like a drowning man he clutches it, lets it fill him, and consume him. The blankness evaporates like water in the Nether. His anger runs just as hot.
His hand shoots out to grab the asshole’s ankle and yanks him to the ground. Asshole screams, trying to kick Tommy in the face, but he barely registers the pain through the fury running through his veins like lava.
Dragging the asshole closer, Tommy wraps his hands around his throat and squeezes , until the kicks stop, until the breathing stops, and until the body dissolves into a shower of white particles a few minutes later.
Now that the target of his anger is gone, Tommy struggles to pull himself through and not just collapse into blankness. So he holds the rage closer, fans the flames, and when the asshole respawns Tommy lunges again.
The asshole was waiting for it though, trying to push Tommy off the platform and to his death, but only succeeds in shoving him away just enough to give him the opportunity to run .
So Tommy gives chase. He runs, and jumps when he jumps, and turns when he turns. Tommy’s still fucking emaciated from exile and dealing with the pains of his recent deaths but he forces his body to move forward. No matter what.
Turns out Tommy’s more stubborn than the other guy: he starts slowing down and Tommy lunges forward, knocking both of them onto the ground.
Asshole struggles and manages to put Tommy in a chokehold, air getting harder and harder to get. Tommy freaks the fuck out and forces his head to turn just enough so he can clamp his teeth onto the asshole’s throat and bite.
They struggle for what feels like an hour, but the asshole’s struggling dies down, slowly, surely, blood coating Tommy’s teeth. He’s hungry enough that the taste of blood registers as delicious.
The asshole stops moving. Disappears in a shower of white particles.
Tommy takes a gasping breath, laying on the ground. His body aches like a motherfucker.
But he’s alive.
He’s alive.
The anger in his chest is still burning brightly.
He gets up and keeps walking.
A year and a half later
Tommy sits on the private seats of his arena, drinking from a glass of enchanted apple cider as two fighters duke it out in the middle. The roar of the crowd is deafening, and Tommy yells with it, living for the thrill of a fight and the spilling of blood down below.
“Thought I’d find you here,” says a rumbling deep voice, his friend stepping into the seat beside Tommy. Most of his face is hidden by a dark mask stuck to his face with surgical staples, but his one visible eye is scrunched up in a smile.
“Corpse! Long time no see, eh?” Tommy greets, slinging an arm around the cat hybrid with wide, theatrical movements. “What brings you to my humble VIP area?”
“Just catching up a little,” he answers, his ears swiveling as the crowd roars again, the two appendages peeking out from his white hair that ombre into black at the tips. “I got some updates you might wanna hear, but first, you still on for the body mods and tats next Friday?”
“Hell fucking yeah!” says Tommy, almost spilling his cider with the force of his movements. “I’ve been wanting those horns for fucking months .”
Extreme-as-fuck body mods are part of 2B2T culture, one that Tommy absolutely loves to be a part of. When you’ve got a couple of hundred people used to the pain dying over and over again, ripping out all your fingernails to replace them with netherite claws becomes a popular pastime.
Tommy already has the netherite claws (a staple in veterans of 2B2T), but he’s also got a sweet set of netherite fangs that he’s very proud of. Aside from those, he’s got a few tamer things, like a set of piercings (one under his eyebrow, the other above), ear gauges in both ears, and a nose ring in memory of Henry. He used to have three piercings in his ears, but the two on his left ear were ripped out long ago, and the one on his right was slashed off along with a chunk of his ear pretty early on.
The horns he wants are simple netherite stubs, painted red, that would come out of his head in between his hair. It should be a splash of color to balance out the fact he’s kept his hair in its now-natural white, and it would look cool coupled with his long undercut.
“I’m thinking of getting something tattooed on my knuckles,” comments Corpse, gratefully nodding at Tommy as he takes an offered glass of cider. “Haven’t decided what yet.”
“I wanna get something ink over this stupid smiley face,” says Tommy, gesturing towards the branding scar on his neck in a familiar smiling symbol. “I want to give it horns and a tail. Make it true to my brand! A Devil original!”
Corpse nods, though there is understanding in his eyes. He was part of the SMP briefly, only staying long enough to build a log cabin, but it was enough for Tommy to recognize him on 2B2T and decide to stick around. Now he can confidently say Corpse is one of his best friends and his biggest ally, one of the few people he’s told about his past.
And Corpse told him about his too. How after losing his first life, whatever sickness he had (the doctors still couldn’t find everything that was wrong) got exponentially worse. He made the difficult decision to go into 2B2T, where no matter how bad the sickness got it wouldn’t permanently kill him, and there was a surplus of regen potions to keep him healthy in the meantime.
“But uh, there’s some news I think you’d want to hear,” Corpse says, his mischievous grin clear as day through his voice.
Tommy’s comm pings (his hacked one, at least), and he pulls up the most recent message, a screenshot from one of Corpse’s conversations.
Dream: Hello Corpse.
Sorry for contacting you without warning, but I need your help.
There’s a parasitic thing that popped up in the server a while ago, a big Egg-looking plant. It wasn’t much more than a hassle at first, but then it started infecting players and corrupting the server’s data.
It’s a fucking virus, one that I can’t delete with code. The only way to deal with it is to beat it physically.
I’m calling everyone I’ve ever whitelisted onto the server to help. I’d appreciate it if you could come.
Tommy reads the message one more time and barks out a laugh.
“ Dream is asking for help?” he cackles. “Either he’s fucking desperate or trying to rope you into some shady shit.”
“That’s what I thought too,” Corpse says, pierced sphinx cat tail lashing behind him. “I wanted to ask though… if Dream agrees to it, would you like to come with me?”
Tommy frowns, looking contemplatively at the arena as the body of the loser is dragged out before it can despawn completely.
He doesn’t feel the need to go back to that place. He’s worked hard to rise in the ranks of this place, carving himself a home with blood and violence. He’s the richest fucking person in this entire server, a master hacker in his own right, feared far and wide for his skills in battle, and owner of the Coliseum. There’s nothing Dream’s server can offer him.
Except… wouldn’t it be funny, for the server to be saved by the one fucking person that everyone blamed all the problems of the server on?
“Sure,” Tommy says, grinning with the same darkly mischievous grin that gave him the moniker of ‘the Devil of 2B2T’. “I’m going to go as my undercover persona, though.”
That’s something Tommy worked really hard on. Escaping the deathless land isn’t as hard as people assume, it’s just that people outside the server are really fucking scared of them once they’re out. So Tommy set up a system of fake identities that stand up to any kind of admin scrutiny, alongside a few skin-illusion hacks, that allows anyone to get out of 2B2T in peace, be it temporarily or permanently.
“I’ll message Dream tonight, get this shit going,” Corpse says, engaging his own identity hacks so his scarred-to-hell-and-back skin shimmers under illusion into an approximation to how it was before he stepped foot into the most infamous anarchy server. “See you around, Devil.”
“See you around, Poltergeist,” Tommy replies. He downs the rest of his cider, stretching as he stands up from his seat. He could go for a few rounds in the arena. He’s craving a little bloodshed.
Corpse_Cattt: Sup Dream
I’ll help you with your Egg problem, but can I bring a friend along? His name’s Theo and he’s a raccoon hybrid. He’s an experienced fighter and has been on Hypixel leaderboards a few times.
Dream: Go ahead. We’ll need all the help we can get.
Further Notes and Ideas
Thank you to Mushroom-Moo in my discord server!!! I wasn’t actually going to write this, but then they made fanart based on my ramblings about this and the brainrot got too strong. Tommy’s design was 100% inspired by them, with just a few changes once I decided to change Tommy’s moniker from Phoenix to Devil.
Newbies to 2B2T are called “eyesores” because their hair still has color in it.
In my version of the story, Dream found the Egg and got the idea of trying to use it to control the server and eventually take over all other servers. He’s inviting more people so he can feed them to the Egg.
Tommy’s not actually a raccoon hybrid. He’s pretending to be one because that way the illusion hacks can more easily cover his netherite claws and fangs. His “Theo” persona also has black hair and eyes, to further distance himself from Tommy.
Tommy collects eyeballs and has a few eye tattoos to reference the fact. He also has a tattoo of a red hoofprint, with white cow-fur spots in it, in honor of mushroom Henry. He also has a cobblestone-ish design wrapping around his throat.
Speaking of Tommy’s moniker, I just thought it would be a fun parallel with the winged-Tommy statues that people built in his honor after he died. He’d get a kick out of it, given devils are just fallen angels and he sure did fall in exile.
By 2B2T standards, Tommy is kind. He has no problem with killing and stealing and burning everything down, but he doesn’t go after newbies unless they go out of their way to attack him. He’s made it his mission to make it so only people that want to be in 2B2T end up there, dismantling trafficking rings with prejudice.
He gives home and support to any kid that ends up there, no questions asked, helping those that want to leave and training those that want to stay. More than a few call him dad, despite his blustering protests.
He’s also implemented a “spawn-clean up”, which is basically taking all the flesh-bags (people that died so much and so brutally that their minds just shattered) and bringing them to a protected place. Rumors are wild around that. Some speculate he makes human leather out of them, others that he eats them, there are even a few that think he keeps them as decoration. In truth, he just keeps them in a hospital-like room as if they were coma patients, in the hopes that maybe they will wake up. Most don’t, but those that do usually become his most loyal followers.
Tommy doesn’t notice, but people follow him. There are a few other players in 2B2T better at fighting than him, but he’s more powerful because people are loyal to him. He’s the closest thing the server has to a leader, but he doesn’t notice it or care about being one.