Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Tommy opens his eyes for the first time that morning, it’s to a dim light on his face, and a musty smell that he can only associate with a damp basement.

He squints, lifting his head from his pillow and blinking at the square of light sitting in front of him, shining right into his eyes. A television screen—odd, he thinks through the cobwebs of sleep, considering he doesn’t even own a television. The screen shows only buzzing static, cut across by glitching lines of colour, and Tommy cocks his head curiously at it.

Beneath his hands is the rough texture of worn fabric, and he plucks at it, lifting it into the light and frowning. It’s a blanket, and one he doesn’t recognise, something brown and ratty and wholly unfamiliar. As he pulls it up, though, cool air floods beneath it and Tommy shivers, pressing it tight against his lap to contain the warmth.

…Where is he? Why does it smell like concrete and mould?

Carefully, he levers himself to his feet, wincing at the cold that bites at him even through his clothes. He shuffles around the light provided by the television until he can hardly see anymore, outstretching one hand to make sure he doesn’t bump into anything. Five steps, and his hand hits the chilly, rough wall, six until he’s standing right in front of it. Tommy slowly walks along the wall, careful of anything that might be sitting in the dark, and once he hits the corner, he turns right back around and counts his steps as he follows the wall again. It takes ten steps for him to find the other corner of the room.

In less than a minute he has a good idea of how large the room is, and he finds then that it’s distressingly small.

“Where the fuck am I?” Tommy asks aloud, continuing to strain his eyes in search of features in the room to find.

A click sounds from above his head, and then with a buzz, fluorescent lights come on, illuminating the room and blinding him instantly.

“Jesus Christ,” he swears, stumbling back into the centre of the room and yelping when his heel catches on the edge of the television. Plastic scrapes against the ground and he only barely manages to catch himself on the top of the box. He blinks the spots out of his eyes and finally, finally gets a good look around.

Tommy’s eyes go wide as his heart starts to kick faster, his breath catching in his throat. He doesn’t recognise a single inch of the concrete walls. They’re not his apartment, with its stained and water-damaged wallpaper, and the tiled floor is nothing like the creaky floorboards that he treads on every day. Frantically, he casts his gaze over his surroundings, spotting a thin mat on the floor, laid with the frayed brown blanket and a pillow that doesn’t even have a case on it.

And finally, the last detail that makes his chest constrict, he is well and truly boxed in.

There are no windows, nothing to provide light but the overhead lights and the boxy, still-lit television he half-leans against. There’s a door, set into the wall behind the television, but there is no knob, no latch, and certainly nothing to catch his fingers on to haul it open. Aside from Tommy, there is nothing else in the room.

He’s alone, and it makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Tommy pulls in a frantic breath, fighting the way he can feel his features starting to pull and sharpen, and years of practice are probably the only thing making it possible to rein the change in.

“No,” Tommy breathes, casting about for the last thing he can remember, but nothing stands out. He’d finished his shift at the bakery, waited for Niki to finish closing so he could walk her to her bus stop, and then he walked home. There was nothing he’d noticed amiss on his path, no cars behind him, no people following him. But– Does he remember getting into his apartment? Even making it into the lobby of the building? He knows what it would look like, knows how it is every other night when he leaves work, but are his memories truly fresh, or are they just imprinted on his brain?

From beside him, there is a soft crackle, and his eyes are drawn to the television as the screen flickers, the screen fading from static to white to a blurry image, which gradually comes into focus.

The blond man shown on the screen is sitting, legs crossed, in a plush, overstuffed armchair, and the room behind him looks like some kind of sitting room, with a fireplace lit behind him, shelves of books covering the walls to either side of the hearth, and a small, round side table next to him, set only with a slender vase holding a single, spindly red flower.

Something about the gentle smile that spreads across the man’s face is wrong and unnerving, and Tommy’s shoulders pull up as he leans away from the screen. Still, he cannot look away as the man’s head tilts to the side, almost as if he’s studying Tommy.

“Hello,” the man says, voice echoing out of the television. It’s almost too quiet, and Tommy finds his ears straining to hear properly. “As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, you’re not at home.”

There’s something familiar about him, something about his voice that picks at the back of Tommy’s brain, but it doesn’t come to mind immediately, and the video continues on without giving him time to think longer.

“Don’t worry, for now you’re perfectly safe,” comes the serene voice. “Currently, you’ve been placed in a secure bunker on my estate, and in a few minutes, you will be released to participate in a little game I like to call Hunter, Hunted."

What?

The man uncrosses his legs then, leaning just so slightly forward as something lights in his eyes, fever bright. “Fear not, I’ll gladly explain the game. First, as I have said, you are in a bunker on my estate. You have been specially selected to play this game with me and my sons, chosen from amongst many others. I hope you appreciate the gesture. Now, as the name implies, this is a game of predator and prey, and you, of course, are the prey.”

Tommy swallows hard past the lump growing in his throat, and he fists his hands against his jeans to keep his hands from shaking. There’s no way—this is insane, it has to be some kind of joke. There’s no way he’s been kidnapped for some– some game.

“When you are released, the door in front of you will open, and you will make your way outside. I advise you to not refuse to leave, since I doubt you’ll enjoy the consequences that come with that particular refusal. So, you will make your way outside, and there you will find yourself on our hunting grounds. This hunting ground covers a few dozen acres of land, and it is fully enclosed. What you do in the enclosure is up to you entirely, but we do recommend that you try to survive for as long as possible.” The man smiles wider, and there are too many teeth, something manic twisting his expression. “Once you are free, you will have exactly one hour before your opponents arrive—namely, my sons and I. From the moment your time is up, we will be tracking you down. Trust me, we will have no more advantages than you do. There are no trackers on your person, nor any cameras throughout the hunting grounds. We like to do our hunting rather… traditionally, if you will.”

“What the fuck,” Tommy whispers, although he knows there is no one to hear him. What the fuck. There’s no way this is happening. There’s no way some rich fuck has kidnapped him and plans to hunt him like an animal with his sons.

The smile falls from the man’s face, and his expression grows sober then. “There will be traps laid by us, and we will be bearing weapons. When you are caught, and you will be caught, you will be killed. What happens to you after you are killed is none of your concern, of course. But in the time between your release and your death, I do ask you to be kind enough to be entertaining. It always is so disappointing when those we select give up early in our game. It’s terribly boring.”

Terribly boring.

This man is abducting people to hunt them down and murder them on his own property and he calls them ‘terribly boring’. And still the video keeps playing, leaving Tommy biting his tongue so hard that it draws blood, although only then does he realise his teeth have grown sharper, leaving metallic tang on his taste buds.

“Now, with all that said, your hour starts now,” the man says, lifting one hand and gesturing backwards with his thumb, just as a hydraulic hiss sounds, and the door in the wall slides slowly open. Through the opening is so much green, trees and grass stretching on further than his eye can see. The smile returns to the man’s face, except this time it’s much, much more pleasant. “Thank you for indulging my explanation, although you certainly had no other option. Go ahead and leave the bunker now, and do your best to last as long as you can.”

The video cuts out, the screen going dark, leaving Tommy alone in the room with an open door waiting for him to walk through it.

For a moment, he considers staying, waiting to see what happens if he just doesn’t leave, but clearly this man is batshit insane, and he has no doubt in his mind that someone would come in with a crowbar to bust his knees before they’d let him go. A part of him still wonders if this is a joke, if someone is going to walk through the door and laugh at him, but there are few people he knows who are cruel enough to play a prank so sinister on him.

Tommy pushes himself upright and navigates his way around the television, stumbling on legs weak with nerves through the doorway. The grass is almost a blinding shade of green, but Tommy has a single hour to use to his advantage, and so he gets his feet properly under him and takes off running.

Here’s the thing, and the only real upper hand Tommy has if this game is to continue the way that he thinks it is: what these psychopaths don’t know about him is that he doesn’t have to stay human, unlike what their other victims had to do. Tommy doesn’t hesitate to let the change come this time, his face elongating, his body shortening, fur sprouting over his skin. He hits the ground running on all four paws, ducking low beneath the underbrush with his ears pinned back against his skull.

No one will think anything of a fox in a forest, and so he slips into the woods, ready to play the rich man’s game.

Chapter Text

Tommy is both unsurprised and pissed off to find that the video was right—the forest is enclosed, although he couldn’t really say for certain that the whole thing is surrounded by the same tall stone wall.

It takes much more walking than he’d have liked to find where the hunting ground ends, and to be honest, it’s difficult to judge how far from the bunker it is. By the time he has found it, he’s not completely sure how much time he has left before his opponents arrive, but he knows it’s less time than he would like to have.

The first thing he does once he finds the wall is to slip past the treeline and over the thirty or so feet of open space between the trees and the wall. He shifts back, just for a moment, just to really gauge how tall the wall is. Once he’s on two legs before the thing, it becomes pretty clear that the wall can’t be less than fifteen feet tall, though it can’t be more than twenty. How tall it is exactly doesn’t matter, though, because it’s pretty obviously too big for an easy escape. His first thought, now that it’s clear it’s not some chain link fence he could scale, is that maybe he could climb it.

This plan falls through when he starts looking it over properly and realises that not only is the wall stone, but it’s also concrete, which means that the entire surface of the wall is smooth and flat, with nothing to make a proper handhold.

“Rich assholes,” Tommy mutters, skimming his palm over the concrete once more. “Probably cost a goddamn fortune to pour a wall this big.”

He can’t say he wouldn’t have expected it, since there’s got to be some level of off-the-rocker for any of this to be happening, and he’d think being insanely irresponsible with money is probably less insane than anything else they’ve done so far.

There are better things to do than dwell on that, though. He’s already long since established that they need psychiatric help.

Tommy takes back to being a fox then, using his claws to dig at the juncture of concrete and dirt, just to make sure there’s no way for him to dig under. As he had expected, he only finds more concrete, so he turns away then and inspects the trees, which seem well kept. There are no dead limbs broken off and hanging loose from the canopies, and throughout the foliage, there are no dead leaves, nothing to signify decay or drought.

The kicker, of course, is that none of the branches reach anywhere near the wall. Each bough ends no fewer than ten feet from the top edge of the wall, rendering them useless for escape. Tommy eyes the fresh cuts at the end of some of the branches, which have clearly been trimmed short. Figures they’d have thought of that too.

Silently, he wonders if they fixed that after one of their victims tried to escape that way.

And god, how many people have been dragged into this? How many people have died? The man in the video had all but said that they’d taken multiple people for this, does that mean he’s the third? The fourth? The dozenth, even the hundredth?

It almost doesn’t matter, because there’s one huge difference between Tommy and anyone else who’s come before him—all of the others are dead, but Tommy is still so very alive.

There is the faintest sound then, a crackle that rides the air and makes Tommy’s ear twitch. He stills, lifting his head high and searching out the source of the noise by swivelling his ears until he pinpoints the direction the noise comes from, somewhere off in the trees to his left. He pauses to consider his options.

So far, the forest has been disquieting, but overall largely normal. There are some animals, squirrels and birds mostly, surprising if this whole enclosure has been manufactured. This means that the sound could be one of these animals, or it could be one or more of the hunters. Has it been an hour yet?

In either case, his options are these: Investigate, and find out what he’s up against if the sound is from a hunter, or run, and hope that he can avoid any trouble until he has a more solid plan worked out. One, of course, is the clearly more safe option. The other, although it could end poorly for him, might not be as dangerous as it sounds, considering he has the shield that comes with being an animal and not the human they expect of him.

The pros of investigating, then, are that he’ll know a little bit more about his situation if the sound is from who he thinks it’s from, and he might even have a chance to get a look at every person he might come up against later. The con—and he’s fairly certain it is only one singular con—is that he dies if the hunter he might meet is trigger happy.

Tommy, despite the burning will to survive in the back of his mind, has never really been one to try to take safety over risk. High risk, after all, equals high reward.

He takes to silent black paws and trots off in the direction the sound had come from. The forest around him is still green on green on green, and he knows that his red coat is hardly hidden even in the dappled sunlight that makes up the forest floor. He’ll be visible to anyone who cares to glance in his direction, but he hopes that his own heightened senses will allow him to remain one step ahead of anyone he might encounter.

Tommy steps quickly over a patch of rocky ground, eyes darting over the fungi and plants sprouting at the bases of the trees he passes. Some of them he recognises but couldn’t name if asked, mostly from primary school, when Tubbo always seemed to like showing him the cool new things that grew in the woods behind his house. Others, he couldn’t even begin to give a name to, shapes unfamiliar to his eyes, the fork of leaves and the blooms of colourful petals lost on him.

The first thing he sees that doesn’t belong to the flora and the fauna of the forest is the flash of reflection, light bouncing off of something shiny and metallic.

Tommy squints against it and ducks down, lowering his body closer to the ground as his pace slows, giving him a chance to take in what he approaches at his own speed. Through a gap in the trees, he finds pink, unnatural and too high up to be a plant, and when he comes to a standstill, craning his neck, he’s able to get a better view of what he’s looking at.

There’s a man in the woods, pacing leisurely in the space between one tree and the next. His hair is long, just past his broad shoulders, and dyed an obnoxious shade of bubblegum pink. Tommy probably would have been inclined to laugh if not for the fact that the man is armed to the teeth with fucking knives .

They’re strapped across his chest, smaller daggers and what looks like throwing knives—again, only recognisable because Tubbo had always loved dangerous hobbies, knife throwing one of them—and even at his waist there’s an even bigger knife, something that looks like it’s made for hand to hand combat, or maybe taking apart and breaking down a freshly hunted animal.

He’s wearing a plain grey shirt and olive green cargo pants, with boots laced up past his ankle and flashing golden earrings in his ears, and when he turns to start walking again, Tommy’s breath catches in his throat, because the man has a handgun attached to his hip too, something dark and sleek that Tommy doesn’t want to have aimed at him at all.

The man looks annoyed, almost, brows pulled down, gaze continuously turning anxiously in one direction, as if he’s waiting for something to come from there, as if he’s urging it to come faster. As Tommy watches him draw one of his knives and fiddle with it, turning it smoothly and expertly over in his hands, he decides he doesn’t want to know what the man is waiting for, and starts to back away.

It has to be the worst luck in the world that his eyes fall on Tommy then, fixing on him and his vibrant red pelt, all too easy to find against the grass.

Tommy turns tail and darts off into the woods before the man can move, let alone bring a hand to his gun and blow Tommy’s brains out.

He runs until he finds cover in the shape of a cluster of bushes tucked along the edge of a meadow, and he slips low beneath them, curling his slender frame around the base of one of the stems of a bush and tucking low. The bushes are full and hang low, leaving only narrow gaps that he can see out of, but for his own purposes, they work wonderfully well.

Tommy catches his breath there, taking five minutes to allow his rabbiting heart to settle, and then he lays there for ten minutes longer, waiting to find out if he’s being followed, if the pink-haired man has deemed him worth a chase.

Tommy stills at the barest hint of a noise, eyes darting off towards it, although his vision is blocked entirely by the leaves before him.

There is the soft padding of shoes on grass, and Tommy’s ear flickers, as he shuffles down deeper into the bushes, claws digging into the soil and detritus beneath the span of the leaves. There is silence for a moment, and then Tommy watches a brown leather boot come down just feet in front of his hiding spot. Dread curls and pulls through his stomach, leaving his breath shaky in his lungs.

But he is well-hidden, and all it takes is for Tommy to stay still for the person to move on, their steps near-silent over the plush grass of the meadow.

Tommy drags at the air, nose twitching as he tries to track the hunter. They smell of leather and turpentine, so pungent that it makes Tommy’s snout wrinkle sharply. But as the scent drifts away on the air, he starts to slink carefully in the opposite direction, the same way that his hunter has come from. The bushes end ahead of him, but it’s getting harder to catch the scent, so as he reaches the border of verdant leaves, he slips his nose out, breathing carefully, and when the taste of chemicals on his tongue hardly registers, he pushes out from under his shelter.

Tommy sprints, feet pattering silently against the grass, preparing to slip off into the woods again. The air rings with the twang of a string snapping, tension being released, and an arrow buries itself into the grass in front of him, right where his head would have been in the next half second. Tommy skids back, eyes darting up to stare in the direction it had come from.

There are brown eyes fixed on Tommy, and Tommy freezes.

He knows those eyes, has seen them from his place behind the bakery counter, crinkling up in a soft smile as Tommy passes him a latte and a warm croissant, and Tommy knows the mirth that lights them when Tommy calls him an ass.

Wilbur Soot.

Tommy’s favourite regular.

For a moment they are still, Tommy left in silent horror at the realisation that he’s being hunted by someone he once might have called a tentative friend. Wilbur just examines him silently, calculating and cold, compound bow still held tight in one fist. His arm raises, reaching back for the quiver slung over his shoulder.

Tommy watches as Wilbur nocks another arrow, but he doesn’t stick around for long enough to watch Wilbur let it fly.