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Schlatt's funeral was a community affair.
Gold-veined blackstone pulse down the walkway, outshined by hastily-crafted lanterns. The unfriendly monument, made of cool greys and murky red, entrenched on the mending grounds of New L’Manberg had been swallowed by the merriment of its spectators. Metal railing boxes in the coffin, they’ve made an exhibition of the body. It seems fitting to have it in open air- ah but no one would have attended cramped in a room so soon after the wreckage, there is time needed to let the bad blood breathe.
Truce had been drawn in the silver lines between clouds, by the hawk-eyed subjects of the Dream SMP, who shot flame arrows into the painted face above the grave.
Techno stands at the dirt entryway, in the middle of enemy territory, counting the steps down an empty aisle.
Jschlatt hadn’t looked at him when he died, not even in accusation – and why would he have?
His face had been starkly gaunt, fatigue making him look older than his years. His teeth were the same stained yellow of his eyes, and he had been sweating heavily. The grooves running spirals down his horns seemed shallow, dangerously unkempt. It was far from the polished shine Techno knows, expects, is instead coarsened, dimmed, even in the light of the compact trailer van.
Techno doesn’t complain.
He thinks about the game between the two of them, the old running bet. The might have and would have, and the when, Technoblade?
Techno enjoys winning games, and he’s lived in brutish desperation long enough that he knows it doesn’t matter how you win.
Jschlatt wouldn’t have looked at him in accusation.
Techno knows his own ambition in the reflection of Schlatt’s golden buttons, his teeth flat and white, conversation charmed by the way his smile fills the apples of his cheeks. He remembers the warm assurance clasped around his shoulder, and Jschlatt had never spoken to him before he’d won, one, before he’d won two- but the hand on his shoulder, familiar, pressed in his space, smiling like they had spoken a million times before.
Friendship is a sticky concept for those born in the abyss. Techno ploughed through a million bodies to reach the ring, and the very clean, very sharp sword he’d cut between the gap of Jschlatt’s ribs on their first meeting created something stickier.
“Hey, what the fuck?”
Techno hears the sound of unsteady footsteps on thin railways before he hears the shriek, body turning to lean against the podium.
Alex Quackity is a man moving out of boyhood at a turtle’s pace. His hair peeks from the neat fold of his blue beanie in listless strands, he seems not different at all from one administration to the next. The suit draws his eye first, familiarly pressed, carefully chosen; the same expensive design lying in the coffin. If Quackity had meant it to be retribution, it's only a poor one, it hangs off his sloping shoulders, the wide cuffs roll over his peaky knuckles. He fumbles on his feet like unused to them, stands like he’s never stood across both Technoblade and Jschlatt in the ring. He bends his wrist when he thrusts his sword, grip clumsy and distracted, like he's never swung so hard his palms bled on the handle, like his guileless laugh is his only weapon.
“Hey, asshole! Whaddaya you think you’re doing here, huh?”
Techno flexes the length of his palm against his sword, pricked by the urge to slide the sharp edge under Quackity's jaw, to see if his skin is, in truth, just as thin. He bore down on the Ex-President’s bodyguard not because it’d been funny – well, a little because of the funny – but because Quackity had been there with them too.
Is this the one that did it? Techno considers the righteous rearing of Quackity's head, the deliberate click of his dress shoes. Schlatt's never stopped himself from business and pleasure.
“He’s the prettiest motherfucker I’ve ever seen,” he had said once, sounding so triumphant over the crackling line, “It’s a great view where I am, you oughta come by.”
“I’m not gonna- I'm not gonna show up just to look at your assistant.” Vice president, but Techno hadn’t known, and Schlatt had never corrected him.
“Your loss.”
Techno breathes out, lets old memories dissipate into the evening chill. “You talkin’ to me, Quackity?” He asks.
The coloured parchment in Quackity's arms are so tightly wound together that a few are crumpled against his chest, flicking over his chin, tension lines tight around the weary curve of his eyes. Techno watches him step neck to neck, how thin, nervous laughter trickles out of his cracked, dry lips as he stares at Techno's chest, eyes flicking upwards before he physically struggles to impassivity.
“Yeah yeah I am. You- traitor man. You… pig. I don’t even want to look at your face," Quackity cranes his neck abnormally to the side, straining not to blink, "Of course you're here- no, why are you here, why don't you tell me that,”
The metal railing presses into his back.
This is new.
Technoblade considers himself slow to social cues, others would consider him deliberately so. Quackity isn't subtle, and the screaming is self-explanatory. What Techno knows how to do is to spot a pressure point; a splinter in the home, the peeling away of their wallpaper, the signs of the battered. Press A to break. Breaking things are unpredictable. The worn brown coat, blackened by fire, cradled in Phil's arms- Technoblade is born sky high, molded with a golden chisel to be acutely aware of the things that might make someone unpredictable, and Quackity stews in a constant state of high-strung anxiety, chews on his nails with the force of a man addicted.
He moves to the side, his fingers curled on the podium, eyes falling to the stumble-back of Quackity's dress shoes. "... well, which one is it, Quackity," he says slowly, mouth curled. "Do you know or do you not?"
“Okay, yeah," Quackity mutters; he tips his head higher, tugs on his left index finger like soothing himself. "Yeah, I know, cause you’re a piece of shit, and he was a piece of shit,” he makes a show of spitting on the ground, and there's almost an attempt at poking Techno on the chest, but his nails scrape at the grooves of his armour before he dances back. “And,” Quackity lets out a low, rasping laugh, going thin and rambling, “You don’t even know, oh, you don’t even know what I have planned for you,”
Techno breathes a low hum of amusement, lets a little bit go when he says, “He was the worst.”
Giggling bursts from Quackity, all at once brightened by his meandering agreement. “Oh yeah," he says, "You would know, right Technoblade.”
Technoblade doesn't often hear of their shared past in so good a light, something only for the both of them that Quackity is offering. Techno remembers the scream across a fenced in community, you’ve killed me so many times, too many times in the ring and I wake up screaming from it when I see you. Techno doesn’t remember. Quackity almost sounds nostalgic.
He’d carved the long edge of his sword into a glowing, roaring arena, but Jschlatt hadn’t been Jschlatt long before he gave up the ghost.
It wasn’t friendship. Techno mourns the hand that would have poured him whiskey, mourns the creaking of leather gloves on hard cash. He mourns the sound of Schlatt’s victorious scream when he draws his sword.
We’re gonna be just fine, Techno.
Maybe it was sportsmanship.
Schlatt liked sportsmanship.
“I mean," Quackity muses, shuffling his papers, "This is a funeral parlour, I would’ve let you come yesterday, y’know. For the funeral.”
“Thank you.” he replies placidly.
Quackity lets his body thump against the pew shaded by a dirt ledge, and the shadows camouflage the bags under his reddened eyes. “You knew him better than I did,” he says, something like hope and twisted resignation, offering a breathless conversation to Techno, of all people, when Techno can clearly see the bloody pictures in his hands. He speaks like he wants to convince, and Techno isn’t sure who he’s convincing. “Rest of us couldn’t team with the great Technoblade . You- he- was he always like that? I mean Jesus Christ,”
Quackity wouldn’t have lasted long with Jschlatt, and that’s the truth of it.
He tastes the dry sand of the arena whenever he gets too close to Quackity. At the cusp of adulthood, Technoblade knew to count every single body in the examination room. Jschlatt isn’t for a man like Quackity, but he’s charming. Techno imagines Jschlatt showed him the trick with his voice, how it could curl around someone like smoke, a thunderstorm. Technoblade’s seen Quackity. Soft-faced, screamy. His unnerving ability to mold his face into abominations aside, Quackity wouldn’tve lasted long with Schlatt at all.
“I haven’t seen him in a long time, Quackity.” he replies, folding his arms across his chest as he settles against the stone pillar. “He was your husband.”
The smile drops off Quackity’s face.
“H-hey, don’t say that.”
Techno rolls his shoulder listlessly in a shrug. He doesn’t know the man Quackity married, the Jschlatt he knew would never have let Quackity... get quite so close, would never have let himself turn into the living corpse in the once-White House, cold and yearning for someone else.
What a loser.
“Do you know what useless traits are?” he asks instead.
Quackity’s mouth twists; the shadows that hug his face make him seem less gaunt when he's annoyed. “Jesus Christ.”
“It’s in the name.” he gestures, “You know how humans are, me and you included for the sake of uh... simplicity." Quackity lets out a bark of laughter, his shoulders, wound tight, loosening. ”We evolve... designed to be the best of our species. Fear is an evolutionary trait.” his eyes drop to the nervous working of Quackity’s throat, “It’s to keep us from dyin’, Quackity.”
Ah, but Quackity knows death, burned into the elasticity of his human coat. Something about him throws the voices feral, roiling waters in a thunderstorm, a million worm-like fingers rising to bang against the walls, snarling, crying, begging. He's yet to figure out if this is something that just happens around Quackity, or if it's Techno who's picking it up. Wilbur had patted Quackity on the back when he arrived in Pogtopia's caverns, roughly, smile saccharine, and Techno had watched, privately bewildered. Is it on purpose? The clamorous laugh, how familiarly Quackity moves with even strangers, and how quickly, how confidently, he projects his frailty, body made smaller.
The President's bodyguard.
The spy.
“We’ve evolved beyond that.” he hums, listening to the scraping cry above the clouds, old, invisible birds that have gone extinct long ago. “You die, you come back. The fear- it’s just window dressin’. You train yourself out of it.”
The button pin of Quackity’s void eyes narrow into slivers; Techno can’t look at him head-on or he gets buzzing in his head, and he gets enough of that already. There are wisps, writhing things that prod at Quackity’s skin, the places where his veins are visible.
“How do you know if you’ll come back?” Quackity asks.
He taps the end of his trident against the ground absently. “You’ll come back.”
“Schlatt didn’t come back,”
His mouth twitches, and it’s almost as if the grave behind him shudders with cold spots. “That’s his fault.”
Techno watches Quackity’s hands shake, how his unbuttoned cuffs fall over his bird wrists. He’s caught on the way his hands twist, that he doesn’t notice the breakdown when it comes. It’s the thing with Quackity. When he gets emotional, he messes his face up, unintentional, only that he couldn’t help himself. His face flickers erratically, water smeared over an oil painting- and he can’t get it into something properly human, which is uncomfortable to watch because Techno hates emotional breakdowns.
Quackity would put his sunglasses on sometimes, which helps a little.
“I did it to him.” Quackity whispers, his voice lyrical on the brink of mania. His hands are patting down his pockets, looking, Techno suspects, for the glasses. “When I left him. I killed him.”
The skin around his thin, lipless mouth is crinkled in a perpetual smile, what are they feeding L'Manberg kids? “He said we would make decisions together,” he says, his voice morphing, the sound of a stream tripping over rocks, “He said we were building together. He was so nice.”
Techno tips his head to the side.
“He could be.” he replies, without inflection.
He hopes it was the right thing to say, but it probably wasn’t.
Quackity turns his hands over in his lap; he hadn't been able to find his sunglasses, probably regrets that he'd put on a dead man's clothes. The first sound is innocuous, and it makes the voices scatter.
Quackity cries a lot over a man he hates, Techno notices uncomfortably, turning his head away. No tears come out of his black hole eyes, but there is the hollow noise of quivering, heaving sobs, and out of the corner of his eyes, the scrunching of a featureless, melting face. Purple light crawls across the blackstone, threatening the arrival of the new dawn, when Quackity flinches away, but Techno has already seen the devastation scrawled across his wilting posture.
“I ate him so I wouldn’t miss him.” Quackity says. “At the funeral, I took him and I swallowed him whole.”
Uh-oh.
“That seems... like a reasonable and appropriate response to grief.”
Quackity’s voice breaks in rhythms of laughter, stacked over one another. “I’m glad you think so, Technoblade. I- I'm so glad he’s dead.” his body swivels towards Techno, “I’m over that ass, done. I’m finished, and I should've been finished a long time ago.”
“... That’s good to hear.”
Quackity pinches at his fingers so hard his knuckles turn white with pressure.
He bears a parting gift that had Techno left him, a long, angry line from his left shoulder to his right kidney, the skin puckered where poison had melded in. For a man with as many scars as there are stars in the sky, Quackity is remarkably comfortable without his clothes. He's clumsy, Quackity is, has built that reputation for himself, but Techno only remembers the killing blow. He has the mark that Quackity put on him still, the explosion that seared him to the bone. He wonders if Jschlatt has ever picked at the raised skin, made his voice boom the sound of a canon, just to shake Quackity into hysterics. The Jschlatt he knew would.
“I think you changed him.” he says, unprompted, which was a strange decision.
He’s never been good with emotions. “He got... attached to you, and that was, his mistake.”
Quackity’s face quivers.
His mouth tears open, “Then what the fuck was he doing?" the sound of nails on a chalkboard, recoiling from the parlour , and out in the open air. Techno's eyes flick to New L'Manberg, the empty spruce platforms are haunting in the early morning, the watery base of the crater sits still by the light of its lanterns. Quackity takes the form of a raging storm when he lurches to his feet, his hands tight on the arm of the pew. Papers scatter. "Why was he just fucking around? I tried so hard, he knew how much it meant to me, to be safe here, to build-"
Techno considers the crying portrait at his feet, tugging a stray document towards him with the butt of his trident.
Quackity staggers out of his seat.
“H-hey, no, no,”
He lets it go peaceably, and Quackity lets out a watery laugh, crouching to gather them.
“That was on him,” he says, “You had the upper hand, you left him... you killed him.”
“Yeah- yeah,” Quackity leaves crinkIed lines in the paper, crushes them together tightly until they’re nigh unusable. There’s a dark red blotch on the side of the pile, where Quackity, in his haste, thumbed across a sharp edge. “I outlived that bastard.” he breathes, his movements erratic – he doesn’t notice.
“Yeah.”
Quackity’s face crumples, looks up at Techno snarling, “Then why am I fucking crying, asshole?!”
Techno thinks on how Jschlatt’s voice shook when he laughed, all those years ago. He hasn’t stopped thinking on it since he heard the drunken slur.
“Grief is a strange process.”
“Christ,” says an echo, sharp and low, out of Quackity’s mouth. “Shut up, it’s, it’s the allergies... it’s- I’m not- I'm so angry, Technoblade, I’m fucking pissed. At you, at- at Wilbur, at him,”
Techno wasn’t Jschlatt’s friend.
He knew Jschlatt well enough to say it.
He isn’t Quackity’s friend.
Not by a long run. It seems comical at all that he’s standing here, his sword snug in its sheath, at a boy he only remembers sparking the match of a wretched explosion. Children are not allowed in the arena, but Technoblade had gone, hadn’t he? Quackity had gone, spent the time running, and hiding – it was his decision to make, the man on the other side of the revolution. Quackity had said, “He’s right.”, standing beside his newly-elected president and the irresponsible, offending vice.
Quackity, dragged from the abyss inch by bloody inch, knows.
Technoblade deals in absolute reciprocity. It is good sportsmanship to take his cloak, drape it awkwardly around the sloping shoulders of a crumbling creature. Quackity’s scream is shrill, rumbling from his chest to come out thick and venomous. Technoblade is relieved to have the sound caught between the dirt-flecked fabric and the grave.
There are new lights in the windows of New L’Manberg’s half-built houses. Slow-moving silhouettes of early-morning risers.
“That’s a lie.” Quackity’s voice seeps into the fur, inaudible, exhausted, “I’m not mad at you.”
Techno looks North, “That’s a pleasant surprise.”
“But I can’t keep going like this.” Quackity says, and that one isn’t for Techno to hear. It is buried into the thin slips of paper in his hands, hidden away in Techno's red cloak. He pretends he doesn't hear it, for politeness sake, his eyes drifting to the side, that it was the warm gust of wind curling behind his ears, bringing sunlight to the nape of his neck. Quackity balls up at the drawings in his hands. “I can’t.”
L’Manberg is run on the blood of children, and Quackity the oldest of them all.
Nothing that comes out of the Monday arena is all the way sane.