Technoblade's fever had broken by the next morning.

Ranboo hadn't slept at all, kept awake by some acrid combination of worry and anticipation. It had taken him longer than he liked, but some vague plan had started to take form in his mind. It was only the start of one, the first step in something that would probably need a whole mile of work to make him feel at all confident in its chance of success. He desperately wanted to think on it longer, be more certain of all possible outcomes and how to deal with whatever could go wrong.

They didn't have the time to wait though. Techno didn't have the time. Ranboo had felt a growing sense of urgency at half-awake mumbles and clouded red eyes with not a smidge of recognition in them. He had to go ahead with his plan, unprepared.

Mel's entire face scrunched up in disgust when he entered the room. Ranboo couldn't tell why until he remembered the vomit, hastily scrubbed off with a rag and left in a corner of the room. He stopped smelling it a few hours ago – Endermen didn't have the best sense of smell to begin with and after a while of sitting next to the source it had blended into the general stench of this place.

(Ranboo missed the fresh pine scent of Snowchester that made it feel homely. The ever-present firewood smoke of the Arctic commune that promised a warm fire behind every door.)

Ranboo had asked Mel yesterday to be allowed to fill in for matches. Technoblade was in no condition to protest. It was an easy assignment, young-faced teens with not a blemish on their cheeks and dirt beneath their fingernails hoping to become volunteer fighters, recruits for the arena's future. Ranboo was fine, he was great. He just had to remember not to look them in the eye, not to think about what would become of them.

What had become of Mel's brother.

And when nobody was looking he took an arrow that had missed its target, broke off the sharp metal arrowhead with a snap. It dug into his flesh until dark trickles of blood were flowing down his hand and Ranboo shoved it down somewhere secret, wiped the blood off so it became yet another stain on his already ruined shirt. Nobody would be any the wiser.

His heart beat faster, his guilt felt as if it had been branded on his face. Surely they would notice, there wasn't any reason for them not to. Even the faintest sound of the metal, every brush of it against his side was magnified by his senses into all-encompassing proportions and any moment somebody would grab his shoulder and shove him in the dirt and kill him for trying to sneak this past them.

Except none of that happened and Ranboo left the pitch with an arrowhead in his pocket, the wooden shaft buried in a corner beneath the sand. All weapons were accounted for and nobody would bother to count projectiles used.

Against all expectations, he had managed to pull off step one without suffering a heart attack.

"Did they not say you're allowed to skip out on kitchen duty since you're enrolled as a fighter now?" Clarissa shook her head, like seeing Ranboo all hunched up on his stool peeling potatoes was the most impossible thing she had ever seen. "I love to have you here, but you only really have to come down when you've got no matches."

"No, I asked. I wanted to. It's..." Ranboo left the pause there, hoped it would sell the lie as more convincing. "It's better down here than in the cell, I guess?"

He got an empathic nod in response and maybe it helped that it wasn't entirely untrue either. Where the cell was small and claustrophobic and currently smelling of puke, the kitchen was loud and crowded and gave Ranboo a headache. He probably hated both equally, when it came down to it.

But it was all part of the master plan.

Because before long Clarissa asked him to fetch something again. And before long Ranboo was standing in the pantry – standing in front of that cupboard – with nobody around and an arrowhead in his pocket.

A while ago Tommy had shown him how to pick locks with those. Tubbo had lamented on how much easier it was with hairpins but Ranboo didn't have any pins. And he hadn't practiced with either, so he had little confidence in it working either way. But it was a possibility. Slippery, already coated in blood, it was hard to get the metal to sit firmly in his hand. He wanted to try and do it without scratching the lock up, that'd be easily noticed. But at the same time, he had to work fast since somebody could enter the room at any second.

He inhaled, kept the air there for a tad too long just to feel it burn in his chest. Then he attempted to force the lock open.

The pointed part wouldn't smooth into the gap. Ranboo tried to remember Tommy's exact words, filtered through the laughter and sunlight that coated everything in his already hectic memories of that afternoon. "Wiggle it," Ranboo told himself, trying to do just that. "You have to wiggle it in place and angle it up."

It slipped and almost fell to the floor. Ranboo caught it and tried again, putting some more pressure into it. After what felt like an eternity though it probably wasn't more than a minute the padlock gave and clicked open. Barely suppressing a few little chirps of joy, Ranboo hastily removed it to get inside the cupboard.

"Not a lot of time." He said it out loud as a reminder. Getting in had been the easy part. Now he had to decide what to take and how to hide that he had taken it. What could he smuggle back to the cell unnoticed? What would they discover was gone right away? What would they not care about going missing?

There was only one item he actually needed. If he could not take a communicator the entire point of risking this break-in had been in vain. There were several – some looking older than any Ranboo had ever seen, with big buttons and grayscale screens. Others more modern than what they had used back on their home server, the flashy type a Hypixel admin might have carried around. More functionalities, but if Ranboo couldn't figure out how to use it that'd be pointless.

The lowest row of communicators was partly obscured by the bags on the bottom of the cupboard, so Ranboo took one of them before pushing the bag against the back panel. Unless somebody were to need it – which wasn't likely, hopefully – it could take them a while to notice anything had gone missing.

He grabbed a few more golden carrots for his other pocket but didn't want to risk anything else. This was enough. Not a lot, but enough. Better than nothing. Much better than nothing. "A start," he said. "It's a start."

He closed the cupboard and replaced the lock, good as new.

Step two was all taken care of and he hadn't died yet. Which meant that overall, things were still going better than he could have hoped.

Mel was kind enough to take away the puke rag and bring Techno a fresh shirt since he had vomited all over his current one. Even better, this generosity was offered to them with an additional gift of luxury Ranboo hadn't expected to see again so soon: warm water.

An entire pail full of it.

Finally, Ranboo could get the blood off himself – and the grime that had become stuck to his skin such that the difference between filth and freckle had become indistinct. If he asked Techno to soak a cloth in it, then squeeze it until all droplets were gone and it was only slightly damp it didn't hurt. Then he could wash up a little. Techno had recovered enough to do the same, splashing handfuls of water on himself with a delighted noise that sounded halfway to purring. Ranboo tried and failed not to stare at some old faded burn scars that ran along his arms.

Vaguely, they reminded him of Tubbo. He couldn't say why.

Ranboo's own blisters from the water had healed as much as they would ever do, a tapestry of flecks and dots not unlike the stars speckled across a night sky. He didn't hate them, he had many more like them all across his body. Some faint, others standing out ugly and jagged. His hands had become numb to water's effects a long time ago, but other parts were still sensitive to it. Ranboo had never found it in himself to hate his scars.

He didn't think Techno did either, from the way he displayed them – or wasn't going through any measures to hide them, anyway. Ranboo had seen a lot of them already. Techno didn't wear his cloak inside his house, bunched his sleeves up all the way to his elbows when he worked at his brewing stand.

But when he took off his shirt to change it, Ranboo still was caught off-guard at there somehow being more than he expected. Covering almost every inch of Techno's chest. He traced one that ran all the way from Techno's collarbone down his sternum, wider around the middle and curved off to the side.

"Had a run-in with a boar spear," he said upon noticing what Ranboo was doing. "Real funny lot, those guys."

Ranboo pulled his eyes up again. "I can imagine."

Techno laughed. When he tried to reach up, that quickly changed into a pained chuckle. "Uh, this is a bit cringe of me to ask but, maybe you could help me? With my hair. I'd do it myself but-"

"Oh, yeah! No, I'll help." Ranboo practically jumped over to the other bed. He wanted to be helpful.

"Yeah, just-" Technoblade flinched when Ranboo yanked a little too hard. "Ouch, be careful with it, will ya? If the worst knots are out, that'd already be more than enough."

"Hm, I can do that." Ranboo nodded as he got to work, scooping water over the mess that Techno's hair had become and combing his fingers through it to detangle what he could. It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be better than it currently was. For every chunk of strands he washed out, Techno pulled them forward over his shoulder to braid them.

Then a glint of gold caught Ranboo's interest.

"These are..." His fingers stopped their work to hover over the intricate web of thin golden lines spread out between Techno's shoulder blades. They seemed to originate from somewhere higher up, disappearing under pink hair when they reached the nape of his neck. The rest spread downward, becoming thinner and more faint at the curve of his spine.

"Totem scars," Techno said. "From being crushed by the anvil. They're pretty cool. Look better than regular scars, at least."

"They're uh, interesting." Ranboo got to work again, hoping his hesitancy would play off as intrigue rather than remorse. "I didn't know totems left scars."

"Heh, yeah." Techno tugged, braided another section of hair. "You just don't get rid of death that easily, Ranboo."

He couldn't know if it was a warning or a joke. All Ranboo knew was that more than anything else, he couldn't bear the thought of being responsible for Techno dying twice.