In this Letter, to the best of our knowledge, we present the first thulium (Tm) single-crystal fiber (SCF) laser with free-space propagation of the laser beam only. The SCF is equipped with diffusion-bonded end caps of undoped YAG for better thermal management and enhancement of pump guiding. By utilizing mode matching and pump guiding in different SCF parts, an output power of 9.1 W is achieved at ∼2.02µm with a slope efficiency of 49.4%. This straightforward approach, which is also simple to realize and is based on combining the advantages of fiber-geometry structure and crystalline properties of Tm:YAG, is expected to be useful for 2 µm amplification stages in different time formats as well.