Chapter Text
The first time it happened Tom didn’t think anything of it. Dreams usually were what you had been thinking about right before you fell asleep, or so Tom had been told.
Tom never had been able to remember his dreams; maybe some here or there but never anything like a first-person experience of what he was expecting his first-ever stream to be like (and he followed his dream to a tee when he streamed). He had been inside his Minecraft character, not his body yet it was at the same time, while he was on Hypixel. But maybe that was normal so Tom didn’t say anything.
But it kept happening.
As he streamed more and more the dreams kept happening before every single one. Tom would take the place of his Minecraft character and would reenact the dream exactly as he streamed.
He brought it up to his parents who just tutted at him and called him obsessed.
He brought it up to his friends who just laughed it off saying that streaming must be his real-life job now if it was affecting his dreams. (He tried bringing it up again thinking himself crazy but they just laughed and called him a freak. So maybe he was. Or maybe they just weren’t very good friends. He was fine though. He was fine.)
So he learned to not talk about it. To keep it a hidden and personal secret locked away inside his brain.
He tried to ignore the dreams and just stream and go to school and hang out with his friends? but the dreams then started to change.
No more play-by-play reenactments of the streams, his dreams started to treat Hypixel as if it wasn’t just a videogame. It was its own world. And Tom was just a player amidst players, the body he was put into foreign yet had a familial comfort.
It started small. First with the feeling of wind through his? hair as he ran along his Skyblock island, but it soon grew stranger. The lobbies which were once silent with typed messages that Tom could see in the bottom left of his peripheral view were gone, transformed into screaming players.
For the first few times this happened whilst dreaming, Tom couldn’t even hear his thoughts over the sound of the screaming but over time he was able to understand what everyone was saying as if he was reading the now non-existent chat. He didn’t question it just thanked whatever higher power who was doing this to him for these small mercies.
(Tom wasn’t religious but when things like a videogame become a changing, adapting world that Tom was forced to be a part of basically every night? A man’s gotta believe something was doing this.)
The more he streamed and the more he dreamt the more he realized that in this world that he had been calling a dream in his mind was another universe. One where there were players were hybrids of different mobs. One where the body that he took over, that of TommyInnit, the character he played had a backstory. Had a whole life before and in between the times Tom dreamt and subsequently streamed.
Tommy Innit had been raised on Hypixel, the server that he predominately streamed on. Tommy Innit had been taught different made-up languages, survival, money management- something Tom took his dream’s interpretation as truth and used in his day to day life- and how to kill before Tom had even finished primary school. The universe hadn’t shown much of Tommy Innit’s life but Tom wasn’t sure he wanted to know more.
Tom didn’t understand why he was being forced into this body of someone who looked exactly like him yet had already lived more. (A bad life but more of a life than a lonely streamer with 9s in all his classes and an empty contact list in his phone).
Tom didn’t know how to react to that so he just pushed the information to the back of his mind and went on with his day as he ignored the feeling of recognition he felt in the world when he ran into someone who had known him Tommy Innit.
As the dreams got more and more real Tom realized that the skills he gained in the world of Minecraft had somehow affected his living, waking world.
Now, catching a falling item in midair is easy on Skyblock both awake and asleep (especially when both Tom Simons and Tommy Innit practice for hours over and over again just to get it right) but it’s not that easy in the waking world. Unless you were Tom it would seem.
Running late for school had a normal occurrence for Tom since he started dreaming as the added parts of the world - the actual people, the actual feeling in his fingers and toes, the everything of this dream world/universe - took up so much more time in the dreaming world than it did when he was streaming. If he streamed for more than two hours it was because he had slept and dreamt for eight.
(It may have been some sick way of forcing him to get a good night’s rest, but it always ended up with Tom oversleeping if he went to bed even 5 minutes later than normal)
Running late for school was a normal occurrence for Tom but catching his bagged lunch as it was thrown at him from the door was not.
When he was running late he would usually get thrown his lunch by his mother if she was home or be forced to buy some at his school if not. If the lunch was thrown he would usually miss the container and have to pick it up off the pavement.
This specific time, however, this time Tom felt like the world slowed down, just like it did whenever Tommy Innit would throw an item and then himself off the side of the floating island. A slow-motion shot as he rushes to grab at the sword or piece of armour. His hand moving as if not affected by the slowing down of time that the world around him seemed to be.
As the bag of food arched towards the ground, his hand reaches out and catches it before it hits and bursts on the pavement. Muscle memory taking over. Muscle memory that belonged to someone that wasn’t him.
Shock and disbelief overtook his mind before he heard the rev of his father’s engine as he waited to drive a soon-to-be-late Tom Simons to school.
Throughout that day Tom hadn’t been able to focus as his mind drifted back to catch. The skill that belonged to Tommy Innit had somehow been used by Tom Simons.
While this didn’t fully convince him that Tommy Innit and Tom Simons were both him (though he’d had a suspicion for a couple of weeks now) not being able to change his stream from what he had dreamed definitely changed that mentality.
Tommy had made a habit of following whatever he had just dreamed about in his stream. If he played on his island in his dream, yeah sure why not. If he was in Bedwars in his dream, well Tommy had no plans.
He slept the same amount (and still woke up late) but when he streamed later that day he tried to change his plans. Instead of Skyblock, he was going to play on Bedwars but he somehow couldn’t. His body and mouth continued on with the original plan even as his mind was screaming for it to change.
Tom had originally thought that this dreamland was just an unconscious showing of his stream plan but if this world had changed and taken control of Tom while he was awake, which universe was the real one?
It was very obvious which one he had to listen to but why wasn’t Tom’s universe the right one? Why was Tommy Innit the one that both universes favoured?
And if the fact that a skill that he had only ever done as Tommy Innit had somehow affected his waking life then what was the difference between the two if the waking and the dreaming worlds were bleeding through into each other?
As he nodded off the sleep he finally accepted that his ‘dreams’ may not only be just that.
(The fact that he could feel the metal of the sword whenever he was killed, the swish of it forever ingrained into his memory, the killing blow leaving an ever so slight line of silver scar tissue that would be even less visible when awake but the ache remained helped to cement the fact. )
And so Tommy Innit and Tom Simons were finally accepted as one. It wasn’t a quick change but he couldn’t tell you when the shift started. He was just Tommy
He accepted it and moved on with his life. Then he met Tubbo.
Tubbo, or Toby as he had given Tommy permission to call him, was someone that he had raided on a whim after his own stream had ended and they had started talking. Staying quiet so that they wouldn’t get caught by their parents that talked for hours and after Tubbo’s parents finally realized and they had to get off (Tommy’s had always let him stay up as long as he wanted. Some sort of an apology for being away from home so often) Tommy realized that he had made a friend.
Then Tommy met Hypixel’s Tubbo. A sheep hybrid that had dyed his hair and changed his name from Toby to Tubbo to get away from someone. Tommy didn’t question anything more than that (or about the circular scars of the back of his neck) and Tubbo didn’t question Tommy’s instinctive aversion to questions about him, though the moments the questions came up were few and far between.
(He did ask Toby if he dreamt, for lack of a better explanation, but that only left the older boy confused and concerned. With a simple reassurance it was forgotten. Tommy figured that he was cursed.)
As Tommy and Toby hung out more and became something of best friends, Tommy Innit and Tubbo became brothers.
As Tommy and Toby streamed more, Tommy Innit and Tubbo became more known amidst Hypixel and beyond.
Then Tommy Innit was told to an about-to-be-released server called SMPEarth. A server that would have very known streamers including Wilbur Soot, Technoblade, and Philza. Tommy Innit was invited after getting a vouch from LukeOrSomething but Tom Simons wasn’t having such luck.
So he may have gotten to know the people he knew were helping make the server while streaming and planned to ask them to ask Wilbur Soot if he could join the server once it was finally announced.
It took a very long time for the actual server to be announced but when it was Tommy was ready. His befriending of those on the server had paid off when he had gotten Wilbur Soot’s discord info and had messaged him asking if he could join said server. Wilbur Soot had said that he would if Tommy could get a decent amount of viewers. And after a bit of a loophole use (streaming on his Youtube which had more of a following than his prefered site: Twitch), Wilbur Soot had allowed him on the day of! And man, the news was BIG!
The server when awake wasn’t that bad. Tommy was ignored, sure, and was barely tolerated when not but he and chat, both when Tommy was awake and dreaming, had loads of fun! Tommy got to ‘meet’ a lot of streamers that he looked up to and a lot of streamers that he’d never heard of but seemed to be really really cool! The problem was when he was there as Tommy Innit.
When he was streaming and he messed around and made jokes and mistakes, it could be laughed off. Maybe they would fight and maybe the other people would steal something from Tommy but it was always something that was easily fixable or replaceable.
When he was there it was different. The fights always ended with blood and another scar. Even a couple of days into the server Tommy had suffered the most deaths at the hands of other people.
It also didn’t help that Tommy had taken the role as the server ‘Gremlin’ as Wilbur Soot called him both awake and there- or streaming and as a player as Tommy had taken to calling them- as he was the one to cause the most drama and quote-unquote ‘plot’. What Wilbur Soot really meant was that Tommy was annoying but that added to the story of the server.
When a player in the game Tommy did fight a lot. The swords and arrows aren't that bad. Their cuts and wounds don’t hurt once you regain health- another skill Tommy had noticed: he could tell how hungry or hurt he was in the world even as a player, something that no one else could do to his knowledge- and the wounds didn’t even scar. The worst part was that the server had added GUNS and NUKES! The guns are slightly hard to get used to but still deal a lot of damage and wounds and the nukes which just destroyed everything in their path!
The first time Tommy died of a bullet wound as a player he went to Wisp, his older brother, who had recently joined Tommy’s faction. The suit that Tommy had sewed for him having proudly replaced his earlier outfit.
He went to Wisp and as Wisp helped him with his wounds Tommy told him how he hated dying, how the pain of it still got to him even after he’d died again and again on Hypixel. He talked about how the bullets hurt so much worse than Tommy had thought.
And Wisp? Wisp looked Tommy in the eyes and told him that he would kill anyone who touches him, that he would destroy the planet and take everyone down with him if anyone were to touch him.
Tommy totally didn’t cry, nope. Tommy was a Big Man and no declaration of undying loyalty was going to make a Big Man cry. And with that Tommy knew he could take on the world.
Then LukeOrSomething, one of the people Tommy had befriended to get on the server, joined his faction and it became a faction of three. Though Luke was American. Tommy who had barely had anyone on his side now had two people who he would die for (and had).
(Wisp had gotten upset when it happened replaying the conversion in his head but Tommy just smiled with bullet holes littering his suit and said that he would do it again.)
Business Bay took the world by storm as they caused chaos and destruction everywhere they went. They talked through war plans and Tommy unconsciously became the leader. He would talk and the other two would go quiet. Tommy thought it was hilarious, the fact that the youngest was the one in charge. Tommy wanted to stay like this forever but the universe had a different thought in mind.
During the raid of Bean New York Wisp suddenly turned against Business Bay. Sure Tommy hadn’t listened when both Luke and Wisp told him that he was overexaggerating but to think that Wisp, the one who had helped Tommy bind his wounds and had joined Tommy whenever he wanted to cause chaos on the server would just leave. Would join the Antarctic Empire and leave Tommy them in the dust?
Tommy felt his heart break and Wisp looked him in the eyes and he had once done when proclaiming his loyalty and called him a child. With tears in both their eyes, they went their separate ways. Wisp to his new home and Luke and Tommy to treat their wounds and new scars in their now quieter home base. Wisp, now haunted by the fact that no one else would trust him and Tommy now with an overly strong aversion to being called a child.
Philza, one of the members of the Antarctic Empire, visited the two after the battle. Luke had said that he was probably there to talk but before a word of greeting could come out of his mouth an army of nukes at Phil’s command rained over Luke and Tommy. Neither had died to nukes yet and after their deaths, neither of them wanted to again. The feeling of something sliding down his throat into his lungs and getting under his skin in the only place not protected, his hands, made Tommy gag at the thought even after the feeling had long dissipated.
Philza laughed and disappeared back to a faction that had gained a new member.
(After Tommy streamed the betrayal Wisp called him the second he ended his stream. After Tommy answered, preparing to hear the older man call him a child and other insults he was surprised to hear the man rush out an apology before Tommy could even open his mouth. He said that he was sorry, that he regretted the decision but couldn’t come back. Not after what Wisp had done to them. Tommy accepted the apology with a laugh and called Wisp a boomer before leaving the call. If Wisp the streamer felt remorse about a roleplay decision that had no consequences then the Wisp in-game must be heartbroken, right?)
Tommy healed and invited Time Deo and Bitzel to Business Bay. And the group grew. Tommy was still the leader, something neither Deo nor Bitzel said anything about. Luke had taken over as the builder of the group- something nobody argued about as none of them were really that into building other than Luke-, Deo was a PVP God and Bitzel was the parkour master.
(The members shared and taught their skills. Tommy taught about scamming and ‘slight manipulation’ and was taught PVP, parkour and building. Though he was only proficient in two of them. Cobblestone is just too good of a block no to use!)
With ‘TommyScammy’ as their leader, they were one of the strongest groups there.
So strong in fact that they killed a GOD! Chat called it either ‘The God War’ or ‘The Fight Against God’. It started when Tommy killed JoshA20 who had not been in his god/admin form at that time. JoshA20 used his admin powers against the Bay and so they fought back. The Bay died again and again as they fought against the man that was cheating in Tommy’s opinion.
They fought long and hard against the admin getting him close to death multiple times before he would vanish or use a gapple. Tommy hated the feeling of death and hated to inflict it on others but after this ‘god’ had killed his faction unfairly Tommy thought maybe he deserved it and Tommy struck the finishing blow. (Tommy hated killing more than he hated dying but Tommy would protect his Bay) The name of the slayer was hidden from the chat. Replaced with the flag of the server.
(The rest of the server would gain a small amount of fear after this fact. A name of a person so powerful they had killed a god was hidden from view. The players would call him the God Slayer.)
As Josh’s body disappeared Tommy looked at his boys. Deo and Bitzel had gotten their first deaths and looked the worse for wear. Their land and armour had been destroyed and ruined. The cheering going on around him lifted his spirits and Tommy messaged (read: threatened) Josh as soon as he could asking for compensation.
Josh just left the server.
They got him back on and trapped him once again. All four of the Bay members took turns killing the admin as they asked for compensation for their land. Tommy laughed as he saw 41 diamonds enter his inventory.
(The names of the slayers in the death chat did not show up and so would only cement the fact of a powerful being with the ability to kill a god. Nobody would know that it was all of the boys of Business Bay that had managed it.)
The players knew nothing of the identities of these slayers but the streamers didn’t have their messages hidden.
The Bay won their first war and had gotten rich because of it. With the faction name now known as one of the more powerful ones and a game given to them by Josh that used command-blocks? The literal building blocks of the gods? The Business Bay was on the up and up again.
They got nuked again. And again. Always by different people but the result was the same: the suits that Tommy painstakingly sewed for his friends and their armour protecting most of their bodies. Deo had lines around his already white eyes passed down from his Herobrine heritage- Tommy knew of Deo’s heritage only because of another family member named Eret who had greeted Deo with a wink and a smirk- lines that Deo hid behind his glasses. Tommy never saw the eyes of his friend again.
Tommy and Deo had the worst out of the four. Deo, along with the marks around his eyes, had a spot on his shoulder where his suit had ripped. Tommy had scars on his hands that went down his arms as the radiation seeped under his sleeves and the other two had started to wear gloves after the first raid so they were safe.
Along with Tommy’s scars, he had started to have a heavy cough whenever he was around a radiated area so Deo always made sure Tommy got out of the area quickly along with the other two while he would check on the area until the radiation went away. Deo also started making Tommy and himself wear gloves like the other two. He had been hesitant after seeing Tommy’s blueish-green fingertips, a trait that only shows up after overuse of ender pearls. The only way to negate the effect of the pearl dust was to let it air out.
(Tommy had to decide between having blueish-green hands or scars and he decided neither. When away from the Bay he would let his hands air out and at the bay would wear the iron protective gloves that he had made for all the boys.)
Tommy started to infuse the suits with iron for extra protection after that happened. The other boys just took the new suits with smiles and didn’t ask where the iron had gone.
After a raid, Tommy went on a walk along his railway and noticed some spots that needed a bit of a repair. He didn’t have any rails on him so he would just have to remember later. Tommy was looking along the rail and his eyes rested on what looked like a little girl maybe, a fox hybrid with golden piercings in the fox ear atop their head and a braid with gold mixing with the red. Maybe 10 if Tommy would guess. The kid was a fox-hybrid and was sitting on the side of the bridge kicking her? their? feet. Tommy had thought that the youngest player on the server was Grunk who was only a bit younger than Tommy, not a literal 10-year-old.
He went up to the kid who introduced himself as Fundy. Tommy didn’t say anything about his insistence about his gender, not needing to, not and never would be able to understand and so just accepted and moved on. Fundy was lost and needed help getting back to his dad. Tommy, who felt way out of his comfort zone, just asked the kid where he needed to go and gave him a cart to get there.
Before he left the kid shook his hand only to frown and look close to tears at the sight of the scars. Tommy then had to calm the kid down, who then promised to get his dad who was in Newfoundland to help, and sent him off forgetting about the kid whose dad was at Newfoundland because the only man at Newfoundland was WilburSoot, a Piglin hybrid and he didn’t have a kid. Tommy just shrugged off the interaction and went along with his day.
(When he streamed nobody of the sort showed up that even looked like Fundy so Tommy just sent the memory to the back of his mind.)
After another particularly bad raid that left the Bay a danger zone for many days, Tommy was making his way down the tracks to repair the rails he had noticed before he had met Fundy.
When he had gotten to the main area of breakage he went to work pulling up the rails and replacing them with new rails that didn’t have cracks anywhere along the metal or wood.
He was so focused on his work that he missed the figure that was stood in front of him. So much so that he nearly ran into him. Looking up to yell at the man that was in the way of his Big Man work he recognized Fundy who seemed happy to see him. Looking at the next figure he recognized WilburSoot. The Fallen God and the God Slayer were meeting and all because of a kid.
The brat smiled and said that he had brought his dad to help Tommy with his hands. Wilbur was a father of a red-headed brat. Good to know. Tommy just waved him off with a ‘thanks, no thanks’ and tried to go back to his work.
What he hadn’t been expecting was for WilburSoot to make a noise of alarm and grab one of Tommy’s hands. A childhood of fighting and now living a life of war had left Tommy with an aversion to being grabbed and so he pulled his hands back and away from the fallen god as he made eye contact with him. Alarmed Tommy started swearing at WilburSoot even before he had said anything.
Fundy smirked triumphantly at his father with a ‘told you so’ look, that could have only been managed by a child, in his eyes and also pointed out the pearl dust on his hands that left them looking like he had dipped them in ink. The fallen god just looked even more worried and asked Tommy how the scars had happened.
Tommy just snorted and stared at the man that he had once been in alliance with. He explained the nukes and the raids with a dry laugh because WilburSoot was obviously just making fun of him, right?
WilburSoot had looked angry, downright terrifying, at hearing this news and Tommy had thought that maybe he had messed up. WilburSoot had said that he would talk to him in a few days and ran off with Fundy to somewhere else. Tommy, confused and worried, just went back to the bunker that the Bay used for evac.
After the later stream (and nothing with Fundy or Wilbur happening), Tommy was complaining about the nukes to Deo when Wilbur Soot joined the call. Tommy thought it was one of the Bay Boys and had just kept on complaining to a now amused Deo and confused Wilbur Soot. Tommy shut up once he realized who had joined that call and Wilbur Soot had just said that he needed to talk to someone left the VC leaving an anxious Tommy and a laughing-so-hard-he-was-crying Deo.
And as quickly as the raids and nukes had started they had stopped. As a player and when streaming, Tommy had gotten a server-wide message stating that the nukes were lagging the server and so they had to be retired. This angered many people, especially an anarchy-filled Technoblade and Philza but all the players later accepted the reasoning and moved on.
Tommy, whilst a player, however, was met by WilburSoot at the Bay and was led away to talk as the other boys looked on warily. Tommy was led to Newfoundland where JoshA20 and Fundy, whose tail was wagging, were waiting. Josh gave Tommy a high five, on good terms even though Tommy and the Boys had basically tortured him into giving them diamonds, and Wil explained that he needed Josh to look at Tommy’s hands.
Josh’s face (it didn’t seem like a face, too jittery and warped) fell as he looked at the puffed tissue and pulled Tommy’s sleeve down to show more as it disappeared into his skin. Josh just handed Tommy some potions he had spawned in-game and told him to give them to the other boys. A confused Tommy left but saw that WilburSoot had a very guarded expression and figured he knew who had gotten the nukes removed. He just didn’t understand why.
(Why did WilburSoot care? Why the nuke removal at all? Why help Tommy? Tommy wasn’t sure what Why he was asking)
The potions helped to lessen the scars on all 4 of the boys and WilburSoot, though he hardly was a part of the server anymore, stopped by to visit the boys more often.
Tommy still had coughing fits but they passed quickly and painfully in a matter of a few seconds.
Tubbo had also joined the server though had his own nation. The brothers were close and so they started many ‘wars’, no deaths, between the two factions. It soon became one of the funnest parts of the server: just hanging around with Tubbo and the Bay boys.
Wilbur also had started to invite him around Newfoundland more. He also found out that Philza was Wilbur’s father from Fundy. Fundy said they weren’t that close which was a far cry from the streamers themselves.
The next time Tommy had gone to Newfoundland Wilbur had just kicked him out with a warning and an invitation to come back the next day and get his ears pierced by the piglin hybrid.
Tommy went back the next day and left having got golden studs in what Wilbur called the lobe and helix in both ears and a promise of learning Piglish (Tommy already knew Enderian from his time on different Skyblock islands but the Piglin language was a well-kept secret between packs and families). Wilbur also gave Tommy a chain to connect two earrings.
When he had gotten back Deo had pulled him aside and explained what they meant once he found out that Wilbur, the only piglin hybrid on the server, had given them to him.
Piglins and Piglin Hybrids had a sort of family calling card to show others that this person was their family and what they were in the family/pack. Studs for if the title was acted on/for them and rings if they acted the title for another.
The lobe and helix studs meant that Tommy was cared for by Wilbur. Both as a secondary carer, usually a father, and a primary, usually a mother. (Family was biological, the pack was whatever you wanted to make it).
And the chain was to show that he was a part of a piglin pack. That he was under the protection and if he got hurt they would have to answer to him.
And so Tommy had gained another family. With an older ‘brother’ and Fundy who called Tommy his uncle.
Deo had said that it was good that Tommy had moved on from Wisp’s betrayal and was trusting again, but gaining family is different from giving someone his trust. Tommy wasn’t sure how easily he could trust a new friend again after an ally betrayed his whole team.
Tommy didn’t realize that the piercings would pass over between worlds and so had to take them out whenever he streamed. He wore them when on a call with Wil but only when they had their cameras off. He still wore them whenever he could outside of that, however.
His parents didn’t notice or care but he didn’t mind. They didn’t notice a lot of things.
What was strange was that when Tommy was streaming he was getting closer to Technoblade and Philza as well as Wilbur but as a player, he was only close to Wilbur and Fundy, who as it turned out was a streamer who also did code. Streamer Fundy was also a grown adult so Tommy wasn’t sure what was going on there.
(He wasn’t until he found out that since Fundy was a fox hybrid he grew to be around 20 in two years. His ‘nephew’ who was already nearing his age would be older than Big Man Tommy.)