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L’Manburg was on fire.
Withers, flying everywhere, destroying everything. The bakeshop the dead president had taxed to hell and back was on fire. Niki’s heart hurt. Screams filled the air. The screech of death rattled through her ears and the smell of gasoline filled the air. War. More war. Technoblade standing at the top of the hill laughing. Wilbur blowing their home up.
A few weeks ago, Niki caught him staring at the button. He asked him what he was doing. He promised not to press it. Niki pulled him out of his cave and straight to her bakery. They went in through the back door and Will sat on the counter as Niki made cookies. She threw flour at him and he laughed. It was nice, even though they could be caught at any moment. Niki knew he was good. He wasn’t going to blow it all up. He may be damaged, but this was his home.
Niki was naive.
She saw the TNT and she told no one because Willbur was better on that. She thought their moment in the Bakery would be enough to stop the destruction that lived in the hearts of men like Wilbur. It didn’t. The only thing that stopped Wilbur was a heart through his chest. Niki watched. Ran her fingers through her hair as a broken nation wailed. No one paid her any attention. She could run. Take what was left of herself and leave. No one would notice. Did anyone ever notice her?
Niki didn’t run. She just watched. She watched as Phil drove his sword straight through her best friend’s chest. She watched the light drain out of Wilbur’s eyes. She watched how relieved he was to die. She watched how the young man she met years ago had become eerily old.
Withers destroyed everything. The bad and the good and everything in between. Niki pulled out a sword and fought. She fought. Her foot hurt. Her friends were dying. Technoblade was slaying people with that stupid sword of his. He laughed as Niki’s life was razed before her eyes.
She watched as the corners she sold pasties at fell. She watched as the buildings she screamed behind collapsed. She watched the leader who ruined her life die. She witnessed the power Technoblade had. She marveled at the way he made all of them fall to their knees, Even the ones who thought they were invincible. Violence, the universal language. All the people who ignored her were down straight to her level, fight to be heard and a twisted part of her was excited. She fought. Out of duty. Out of spite.
“ I don’t even want to be here!” She yelled at Schlatt after he sent her best friend away. She stayed and never stopped wondering why.
She watched. As another Child was sent up to a podium. Another one sent to be slaughtered. To lead and rule and grow horns just like the last one. She cheered, even though her President was a boy who should be studying art and music, not death and war.
Too late for that, she supposed.
Tubbo declares a new age of peace and prosperity. Just like a young man in a bright uniform with a pen and a drug van. Soon, he would be old and cruel just like the men before him. Niki wondered if there could be peace in a world with L’Manburg. If cruelty could be destroyed by more cruelty. She saluted Tubbo. She watched as her friends cheered and she smiled. Maybe this time would be different. Tubbo smiled. He looked happy. Tommy hugged him, fierce and tight. The two of them were incredible. Maybe they could hold this hellhole together.
The sun set and Niki placed her bed in the crater. Block by Block, maybe they could build this hole into a place worth living. The sun was almost behind the trees and Niki climbed a tree to watch it. The wind rustled through the trees. NIki breathed. For the first time in weeks.
“Hey Niki,”
She looked down, “Oh. Hi Eret.”
“Mind if I climb up?”
“No Problem,” She said.
Eret smiled up at her and started climbing. His golden crown glittered in the sunlight. Niki could see the dirt on it.
“So,” They said, “Some war, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Eret settles himself next to her, facing towards the setting sun.
“Is it just me or did this one feel different?”
“No,” Niki said, sitting with Eret in that tree, “It is different. The first time it was glorious, now it’s just bloodshed.”
“Hmm,” Eret said, picking at the bark, “Do you think there will be another one?”
Niki laughed, “There’s always another one.”
She rebuilt her bakery. There was no back door this time.
L’manburg rebuilt. A new white house rose in the ashes of the old one. A new kingdom was build on stilts. Niki had to make sure Tommy didn’t fall more than a few times. She’d walk the wooden paths, and deliver pastries to cabinet meets. She pratcived shooting with Tommy. She started a Bee Farm with Tubbo. She did little things with Eret. Most nights, she stared at the wall. On bad nights, she would punch it.
But it was good. The citizens of L’Manburg marched on. Some of them had their cabinet meetings, others had their hobbies. Niki had baking nights with her friends.
New L’Manburg felt kinder. Tubbo didn’t want greatness, he wanted peace. He and Niki are similar, both trying to keep the peace, and both talked over when they express what they want. Maybe Tubbo would be different, she thought. Maybe the last war would become an old memory, with no new wars to replace it. Maybe cabinet meetings would always end in soft laughter. Maybe things would have stayed that way if Dream had never built his wall.
-----
Tommy sets George’s house on fire and with it the serenity of the nation. Niki wants to yell and scream, wants to beg him to put down his sword and live a different life. She doesn’t say any of them that. She doesn’t get the chance. She just shares a look with Tommy and she sees a terrified child and can’t bring herself to be mad. Tommy walks away. Niki remembers the enemy. It is not a person, not anymore. It is an idea.
Niki walks to the edges of the country, the edges where dream’s terrifying obsidian wall hasn’t touched and she screams. She yells and yells, at the edges of the wall, where no one can hear her. Her voice hurts. She keeps screaming, and screams some more after that. It feels good. Her throat stings and tears rolls down her cheeks but it feels good.
She walks home. She pulls out her sword for the first time in weeks and stays up sharpening it.
She spends weeks practicing it. She stops attending the cabinet meetings she never gets to speak at. Instead, she trains. She’s no Technoblade but she does it anyway. When she feels like it, Eret will join Niki. Most of the time she’s alone. Just her, a sword, and her cave.
She used to stare down at her blade in disgust. The shiny blue blade is meant only for destruction. Willbur would spend all day pestering her to train with him. She would shake her head and tell him she would help the war effort her way. Flighting was the last resport. She didn’t want to know how to use a blade like Wilbur or Dream did.
But now that it’s in her hands because she wanted it to be, she understands. Niki loves the way her sword moves through the air, the way it glimmers in the midday sunlight. She loves the power it gives her when she moves. She is tiny when she speaks, too quiet, too peaceful. With this blade, people have to listen to her. She is tired of being talked over, and now she’s finally doing something about it.
She takes her anger to a cave. Nothing but her, a torch and her blade. She practices on zombies first, figuring out the basics of what works, what kind of blows deal more damage, and which she needs to stop using. She stays in the caves until sweat drops down her neck and she can’t breathe. She wakes at dawn and walks right back in. Once she’s done with zombies she moves onto spiders and then she takes on skeletons. She kills her first enderman and takes zero hit damage. It feels good. To be the one holding the sword instead of watching everyone around her point them. It’s distracting from the boring meetings, from the obsidian wall, from the feeling that Niki is going to see her bakery on fire again.
The wall gets higher. Tubbo is running out of time. Niki goes to the Nether. The hot fire leaves hers gasping. She stumbles. Her skin burns. Her lungs burn. She feels alive. She’s surrounded by things that could kill her at any moment and she is having fun. She walks, and then she runs. She is on fire, and she can no longer be held down.
She stands at the top of a hill and looks out at a fortress. She makes her way down. She clutches her sword as she walks past brick windows. She freezes as a wither skeleton with a black blade walks towards her, far more deadly than the skeltons in Niki’s cave. She kills it before its poison can kill her. She whoops and cheers, no one stops her from Cheering in hell.
She finds a Blaze generator. She throws snowballs like she did with Will when they were kids and she puts the blaze rod in her bag. She climbs out of the fortress to make tunnels. She uses beds as her bombs and watches as the land opens. She crawls in, grabs her pickaxe, and collects enough nerthite to upgrade her sword. By the time she’s done, she can barely hold a pickaxe.
Niki walks through the portal and crafts her first Nerthertie sword the day Dream gives them an ultimatum: exile Tommy or never see the sky again.
She saw the exhaustion and fear in Tommy’s eyes. She saw the naive fire in Quackity and Fundy’s eyes. She saw the same look Wilbur had when Schlatt won the election in Tubbo’s.
She saw the age in the eyes of a 16-year-old forced onto the front lines, and she knew what his decision would be before he did.
War. It was always fucking war with men. They killed and they burned all in the name of ideas that were only means to an end. Peace was a word none of them knew. War would always be chosen over peace. It took children, it tore them away from their friends and it made them sacrifice everything for governments that would never be worth it.
She watches as Tommy and Tubbo argued. Maybe Technoblade had the right idea. She hates him, hates how even the best anarchist in the world couldn’t stop the war from coming back. She hates that he might be smarter than all of them.
---
L’manburg isn’t her home, not anymore.
Dream walks away with a stupid smirk on his face. Niki knows he will destory Tommy, no matter what the boy says.
The second he’s gone people start screaming. Quackity and Fundy think Tubbo’s crazy for even considering sending Tommy away. They shout and scream and Tubbo takes it all. Tommy watches, just as helpless as Niki. She smiles at him. He doesn’t smile back, she doesn’t blame him.
Tubbo tells them he’ll decide at the end of the week and pulls Niki aside at the end of it.
“What do you think?” He asks.
“Honestly?” She asks, and he nods.
“I think you should grab Tommy and run far, far away.”
Something like wishfulness twinkles in Tubbo’s eyes, but he shakes his head, “You know I can’t do that Niki.”
“It would be nice though wouldn’t it?” She says, Tubbo nods.
She wants to tell him it will all be okay. She doesn’t. It won’t be, not when there are gods like Dream controlling the story.
---
Dream waits by the wall and Quackity comes up with a war plan Niki knows Tubbo won’t use. They meet Dream at the wall. Niki doesn’t come, she sits at the top of the white house. She tangles her legs and watches as Dream comes closer. She hopes that Tommy and Tubbo have one last trick up their sleeves that will end this.
She hears Fundy yell. She hears Hears Tommy’s voice crack. She watches Dream draw his blade and walk Tommy towards her. Niki wants to take her sword and stab it into his chest. Dream is destroying everything. Tommy shouldn’t look defeated. The world owed Tommyinnit more. She wanted to stab at Dream, again and again, and again until he could never respawn again. She wants to crush Tommy in a hug and tell him one day he will smile for no damn reason. She wants to set the white house on fire and declare L’Manburg no more.
Niki jumps down the building, she ignores the fall damage takes and she sprints. She has to get to Tommy and tell him something, anything. Dream looks at her with inference and Tommy looks at her with too many emotions.
“You can’t take him Dream,” She snarls, “You can’t.”
The bastard laughs, “I’m pretty sure I can Niki,”
She pulls out her sword. Dream presses his to Tommy’s neck. This is not a fight she can win.
She puts her sword away. Dream smiles at her and lowers his. Tommy looks scared.
“Tommy,” She says. He meets her eyes, and for a second Dream isn’t there, “Don’t let the bastards see you cry.”
Tommy nods. Dream gives her a look and leads Tommy outside of the walls. She watches until she can no longer see them.
One day she is going to make Dream bleed .
---
Everything is fucked. Tubbo won’t accept her help, war has taken him too, with Tommy gone he is now no longer a child.
Tubbo throws himself into L’Manburg. Niki wants to shake his shoulders and tell him that this country will never have a happy ending. She wants to hug him, stand there with him and let him have a moment filled with nothing but love. She wants to scream at him until he realizes what’s happening to him, what Dream is doing to all of them. She just wants to sit with her friend and let him know that not everyone is out to get him. She does none of those things because Tubbo won’t let her into his office.
She stops trying after a while. She goes home to the Bakery. It doesn’t feel like home anymore. It feels like a shell, a place where happy people once laughed. They will never laugh again, because of war. Because everyone in Niki’s life gets addicted to the feeling of fighting and doesn’t come back the same way.
She is tired of government. Of discs, of losing, of treaties and rules. All this greatness and no one ever took the time to see if anyone was happy anymore. They’re not. The only you can be in this world is angry, any other emotion will lead to your destruction.
No one thinks of Niki as an angry person. She isn’t angry like Tommy. Niki’s anger rests under her skin, never visible, but always Present. Sometimes she thinks her rage will pop out of her skin and kill her. Sometimes she will shake from the force of it. It can only be satisfying when Niki goes out with her sword.
She is tired. They’re all tired. But Niki is Technoblade’s kind of tired, she is tired of everyone letting government destroy them. She wishes they would just fucking listen for once.
Nike scrunches the sheet of her bed. She looks up at the pictures of her and Wilbur on the wall. Her skin feels like it’s about to burst. Niki stands up and she takes her sword.
She swings it through every picture of Wilbur, every single smile and laugh, every piece of evidence that things were once good. Niki swings her sword, again and again, and again until she is standing in a hurricane of broken memories
She is so sick of being tired.
---
A few mornings later a big wanted poster is placed outside of her door.
Wanted: Technoblade, the dangerous anarchist has been spotted once again in L’Manburg. Do not underestimate him
Niki grabs the poster, and if she does a happy dance, no one has to know.
It starts slowly. A few sightings of people running around invisible. A few wanted posters are taken down. A few more people start whispering the name “Technoblade”
It gets bigger. One morning they wake up and L’Manburg is covered in anarchy propaganda, everywhere they turn there’s a new poster. Tubbo orders the posters to be torn down but it’s all any can think about.
Technoblade .
Niki hopes he comes back with a thousand withers. A month ago, she would have been ashamed to think that. Today she wants to scream it. She wants to knock down Technoblade’s door and tell him to hurry up already. She wants to get her own wither skulls and do it herself.
Tubbo schedules them for more patrols. He looks exhausted. Niki hunts the streets with the hopes she can find Techno and demand that he take her with him.
This isn’t her home. This is hell at a lower temperature.
The streets of L’Manburg are dangerous. Niki smiles, because so is she.
---
“Are you loyal to L’Manburg?”
“What?” Niki says turning around.
Quackity is standing in her bakery. He’s smiling, but it looks tainted. Niki keeps one hand on her sword.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed Niki, but L’Manburg has changed. Technoblade is back on the streets. There are people out to stop us everywhere.”
Good.
“Why are you talking to me about this?”
“Oh, y’know,” Quackity says, leaning against the counter, “Just wanted to remind you that enemies of L’Manburg won’t be getting off easy. Not this time. I have a hit list, and I don’t want you on it.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No.”
“Good,” Niki says, “You don’t want to try threatening me,”
“Why not?”
Niki smiles at him, “You know what they say about ladies with nothing to lose.”
---
Niki stands on the borders of L’Manburg and steps out of it’s walls for the first time in a long time. She breathes in the air of land not yet corrupted. She enjoys the silence of a world without rules.
She was unsure about leaving, but now that she’s out she doesn’t think she could go either. She had to get out before Quackity started during his “Hitlist” into reality.
Niki walks away, towards the woods, and she doesn’t look back. She whistles as she goes and twirls her sword in Rhythm. Her diamond boots get her across the terrain with ease. Niki doesn’t know where she’s going and that feels good. No one is telling her what to do. No one will stop her from screaming in the solitude of the woods. She sleeps under trees and cooks random chickens she finds wandering around.
Maybe she could stay out here forever, with the trees. She could be free out here, no one to tell her what to do or what to think. No government, no pain. Just weird berries that may or may not be edible.
But as the weeks go by, it grows more and more obvious that something is missing. This is nice, but Niki isn’t used to peace. She gets restless. Killing skeletons is only entertaining for so long. Even the wither skeletons get old. She needs more. Soon, all she can think about is how L’Manburg is still standing. How much that pisses her off. How no one cares that she’s gone. It doesn’t matter to anyone if she’s gone.
They hurt her, and she wants to hurt them twice as hard.
She wants revenge, and there’s only one man who can help her with that.
----
Niki doesn’t understand why Technoblade was so hard to track down. Sure, the guy was a war genius but this shouldn’t be hard.
She searched everywhere that wasn’t marked territory, she looked all the way from the edges of the Badlands to the edges of L’Manburg. Technoblade was nowhere to be found.
Niki groaned. She was stupid for thinking this would be easy. If Technoblade was this easy to find more people would be dead already. It was the whole point of going into hiding
A snowflake landed on her nose and Niki blinked. Snow. Snow! She hadn’t searched in the tundra yet! She jumped to her feet and took off running. Snow flew in her eyes, but she kept going. Her enchanted boots stopped her from slipping on the ice. The wind roared.
Niki ran through the snow. When she couldn’t do that anymore, she walked. Her hands were freezing, her face was probably bright red. Niki wasn’t sure how long she could keep walking. She kept going anyway.
Finally, Finally, she saw the smoke of a chimney, that had to be him. And if it wasn’t, Niki was getting out of the cold either way.
She walked over to the house. It was made of spruce and cobblestone, covered in a sheet of thick snow. It looked remarkably cozy for a man of his accomplishments.
She knocked on the door, hitting it with her first twice.
“Tommy I swear to god if you don’t stop that right now-Shit someone’s at the door.”
The wooden door unlocked, and within milliseconds, a diamond ax was pointed at her neck. She glared back up at Technoblade, his brown eyes filling with confusion and irritation.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Why the hell are you pointing an axe at my neck?”
“I asked first,”
“Put the weapon down and I’ll tell you.”
Technoblade dropped the ax but made no move to let her inside.
She looked over at the door, “Can I come in?”
“Ugh,” He said, “Fine.”
The house was cozy, almost ridiculously domestic. It was small, but Niki liked it. It felt lived in. There was a brewing stand, a bunch of chests, and a very poorly hidden Tommy.
Tommy glares at her and jumps when she makes eye contact. He looked better than he did when Niki last saw him. More damaged, but angry about it. Angry Tommy was always better than depressed Tommy.
Techno raises an eyebrow at her and moves to stand in front of Tommy. Weird.
Niki gets straight to the point, “You’re planning on destroying L’Manburg, correct?”
Tommy makes a shocked noise. Techno just nods.
“I want in.”
“You want in?”
“Yeah,” Niki says, “I want to see it burn. And I know you have a plan that will stop it from ever being rebuilt.”
“How exactly do you know that?”
“Because you’re Technoblade” She says bluntly, and Tommy laughs.
“That is true,” Techno says.
“I know the cabinet better than anyone,” She says, “I know how to take it down, I know every inch of the place, and most importantly, I’m the one who wants it gone more than anyone else.”
She sticks out her hand. Techno hesitates and then shakes her hand.
“You have a...really strong grip.”
“Thanks.”
At the edge of the world, in a cabin with a child still smiling after years of war and an anarchist pig with a crown, Niki feels at home. Someday she will stand and watch as L’Manburg burns. The three of them will look at the kingdom and raise hell. But Today, listening to Tommy and Techno bicker, with a mug of hot chocolate warming her hands, this is good enough.