this is for @naraki, thanks for inspiring me to write the longest thing i’ve ever written
Technoblade doesn’t remember the first time the voices spoke to him. He doesn’t remember what they said. He does, however, remember how he smashed a glass onto his hand just to sit there and watch it bleed until he passed out. He remembers how when Phil, sitting at the side of his hospital bed, gently asked him why he had done it, he couldn’t think of an answer.
“They want blood,” He had responded.
“Who?” Phil had asked, but Techno didn’t know.
He remembers how Phil started locking the kitchen cabinets after that, and how when Tommy was born, Phil let Techno see him only at arms length. Techno remembers how he watched Wilbur pick the baby up in his small, five-year-old hands, and gently rocked him.
“Can I hold Tommy?” Techno had asked as he stared inquisitively into the scared blue eyes of his little brother.
Phil didn’t know how to answer.
When Tubbo was found on the side of the road, he too was afraid of Technoblade. By that time, his tusks had grown in, and he was covered in scars, some self inflicted, others from fighting the kids at school. Techno doesn’t remember why those fights started, but he does remember the looks of fear in the eyes of both students and teachers. He remembers the hush that fell over the playground when he stepped outside, he remembers how people would scramble to be his friend, but those friendships never lasted. They weren’t real in the first place, born only out of fear and greed. They always dropped Techno once his purpose had been fulfilled, once they remembered who he was.
When Techno was eleven, he stopped sleeping. He would go to bed with the rest of his brothers, then sneak out to the kitchen once he was sure they all fell asleep. He would make potatoes, the only food he knew how to cook, and read books all night long. One night, Phil found him there, sitting with a book of Greek myths in his lap, curled up on the couch with a bowl of poorly mashed potatoes.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” Phil asked. “Is it the voices again?” Techno nodded.
“They’re too loud,” he said quietly. His small voice shook. “The only way to drown them out is to read.” Phil heard how scared he sounded, so he scooped his son into his arms and began to carry him to bed.
“Wait here,” He said, placing Techno into his bed. “I’ll get some potions so you can fall asleep quickly.”
When Phil returned to the room, Techno wasn’t there. Rushing to check on the other kids, he found Techno in Tommy’s room, scratching at the six-year-old’s arms. Phil grabbed Techno and pulled him away, allowing Tommy to jump back. Techno was shaking, crying. He was unable to form words. Phil simply hugged him and gently stroked his back. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know if his family was safe.
“They want blood.” Techno choked out, before falling into a deep sleep for several days.
Phil got him a therapist after that.
Techno doesn’t remember his first fight. They all blend together now. All he can remember is the taste of blood, and the feeling of not knowing if it was his own or not. He remembers how it felt to get cut and hit, and how it felt to do that to someone else. By fifteen, he was the best warrior in the world, but he hated it. He knew he was only a vessel, a body to be controlled by the voices in his head. Even with his mastery of violence, the language of power; the feeling of control was foreign to him. The titles, the medals, they didn’t belong to him. The only results of his military prowess that were truly his were the scars, the fear, the pain.
Techno hated the fear in everybody’s eyes when they looked at him. He noticed how his three siblings were closer to each other than to him, how they called on him to overcome problems they couldn’t solve on their own. Being a good brother, he always went to help them, but he didn’t trust himself to stay for long. He never wanted to hurt them again, never wanted their fears to be realized. Wilbur hung out with him, sang him his songs, but at the end of the day, he always left. They all did.
The only ones who didn’t leave were the voices.
When Techno was eighteen, he ran away from home for the last time. He lived off of potatoes, and monetary rewards for winning tournaments. He knew his family was too kind to leave him, so he had to leave them. It was for their own protection, he told them.
“They want blood,” he’d said to Wilbur, the only one who knew of his plan, “And I have to make sure it’s not yours.”
Some part of Techno had hoped that winning more fights, killing more people would placate the voices, but it never did. The better he became, the more prowess he showed, the more rewards he earned, the louder the voices got, feeding off of his loneliness and his inability to fight for himself. Techno started to wonder what he was fighting for.
Did he want to win? Or was success a curse that doomed him to a life controlled by imaginary people that only seemed to want the worst? Techno wished he could lose a fight. He wished he could just lay down on the battlefield, wished he could beg for his opponent to kill him. But it wasn’t his choice. It wasn’t him controlling his axe in those moments, it wasn’t his arm that dealt the final blow. He was simply a prisoner in his own head, forced to watch through clouded eyes as they yelled at him and all he could hear was the voices, drowning out the screams of his opponents, drowning out his own cries of pain, until he blacked out and awoke an hour later with blood on his clothes and a new medal on his chest.
By the time Techno was twenty one, people shook at the sound of his name. But that power wasn’t his. To others, he was a bargaining chip, a threat to bring up when things didn’t go their way. He was cursed to be nothing more than a soldier, fighting for people he hated, causes he didn’t believe in. To himself, he was nothing. A mindless flesh puppet, controlled by thousands of disembodied hands, hands that only he could see, and they only want one thing. They only have one motivation. They want blood.