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I. The Election
When Tommy - a kid Quackity met mostly through coincidence and immediately took to, one of few who’ve ever tried to match his energy instead of asking him to quiet down - invites him to a distant land, he doesn’t know what to expect.
“We’re not in charge,” Tommy says, voice crackling through the comm, “yet. But we will be. Wilbur’s got - you’ll like Wilbur, Big Q - Wilbur’s got plans.”
Fresh from the shackles of crime and a flutter of anticipation in his heart, Quackity is not wide-eyed or naive, not a fawn in a field, but he does consider himself an optimist.
The glass is completely full, depending on of what. The future is waiting for him and he doesn’t intend to loiter.
War - the kind fought with teeth and claws and little mercy - still comes as a bone-rattling shock.
Tommy’s become a soldier, somehow. That’s what those plans were.
When he sees Tommy down the walkway, the boy’s hair is messy and there’s a scar on the bridge of his nose, blue uniform too-small around the shoulders.
If Quackity hugs him a little tighter than he would’ve otherwise, well, that’s no one’s business but his.
To be fair, Tommy was right. He does like Wilbur.
Decently, at least; Wilbur is a native creature in any space, delicate and self-assured in one.
It’s impressive. His army has a sort of awe-struck air about them that Quackity’s never seen and doesn’t really want to replicate. Wilbur stands in the center of danger like he expects someone to dive in front of every bullet for him.
They do. Without fail.
That’s why, when Wilbur announces that he’s running to be elected president of the country he created, Quackity doesn’t hesitate to declare his own counter-campaign.
It’s not personal. Really, it’s not. He just wants to pose a challenge, wants to stand in the way of complete control, wonders what power tastes like over war rations.
Quackity doesn’t know who Wilbur is as a person. They met a clatter of buttons and a pass of powder and they meet again as adversaries, political rivals, enemies of a kind.
A two pair, the trees sway in the wind and Quackity asks if they’re allowed to speak as men, not megaphones.
“Forget the election. Forget the politics, forget we are politicians. Right now, I want to talk to you up close.”
There’s a beat, a crotchet rest, where Quackity thinks Wilbur will strip away the armor he’s forbidden his people from wearing; they’ll discuss something other than the walls that trap everyone inside and what they’re meant to mean.
(Quackity is boulder-chained and L’manberg eats at him. If they will not offer a seat at the table he will torch their food and make his own welcome sign.)
But Presidential Candidate Wilbur Soot’s slight gape shuts just as soon as it opens and he shakes his head with the same dismissal he used to bar Quackity from his land.
“I mean, I appreciate it.” He wavers, resolve fragile, but he rebuilds it in moments; his are the hands that constructed the walls to begin with. “No. The election’s in twelve days.”
Politicians they will be, then.
Wilbur is many things. Fiercely protective and doubly burdened; he takes power like a shot to the veins and shrivels back down just as fast.
Schlatt, who arrives with an invitation not unlike Quackity’s but continues to exist on a broken promise, is even more.
The weakest link in a chain that starts with Schlatt’s rough grip on his pre-written speech loosening; Quackity finds himself on the debate floor only to lose himself in Schlatt’s low drawl.
The papers flutter down to their feet like snowfall.
And then there were three.
Four, if you count Fundy. Who is in fact wide-eyed and everything Quackity considers behind him until Schlatt points the cracks in his story out with a smirk.
(Fundy’s own father doesn’t, though, so Quackity assumes that he’s not supposed to.)
Come election day, standing on the stage, Quackity has a jarring moment of clarity, a split second where the color drains from the decorations and the woodstain runs red.
Paranoia rolls off of Wilbur, a steady pulse. Schlatt flicks a coin up in the air with his thumb and catches it on a flat palm. They watch each others’ every movement with practiced smiles.
Not an eye is on Quackity, not even when his votes turn over and paint the ground black and white, the starting line for everything else that’s to come.
Interlude I
Forty-seven beer bottles in, Quackity quits his job.
That’s the short of it. The two-inch long fish bone lodged in his throat, a swallowed piece of a broken engagement.
The long is, well, long. Starting with the first time Quackity saw fear reflected in Wilbur’s blank eyes, ending with Schlatt’s persistent hands.
Always persistent, always demanding, always destroying.
Forty-seven beer bottles and countless pounds of weight protein; overpriced whiskey extracted from the budget and bruises pressed into his deltoid.
Glass clinks in celebration as Schlatt tears down what Quackity built and the sound roars in Quackity’s ears as he tries to tear into him.
Quackity quits his job, finds himself lumped in with the people who’ve been his enemies, and ends up kicked out of the place that never wanted him to begin with, all within the same few moments.
He runs until he can’t feel his legs, arriving in the new home Tommy has claimed - albeit temporarily - just as the sun dips its toes into the horizon.
Wilbur is in charge; the ravine’s walls stretch high.
Addiction is inescapable, it seems.
The air in Pogtopia is unbreathable. A living thing on its own, it wants everyone in the vicinity dead.
Reclamation of natural space, the potatoes take hours of cultivation to grow and Niki ducks out with her sleeve over her nose. The burnt-umber of Wilbur’s trench coat matches the cloud around his head and the inevitable tar-smear across his lungs.
Cigarettes are in no short supply. More smoke drifts out of Wilbur’s mouth than reason these days.
Quackity wants to warn Wilbur that smoking will kill him, but he’s pretty sure Wilbur already knows.
He wants to warn Schlatt; tell him to send out his last wishes early. He wants to save Wilbur from his TNT-ridden fervor. He wants Wilbur gone. He wants Schlatt gone.
He wants to kill Schlatt himself, to stare down the barrel of a gun and have it fire in the opposite direction.
Quackity wants plenty of things. Few of them are productive, even less are realistic. He’s pretty sure every person involved already knows.
Quackity is sober. It’s a miserable way to be.
II. The Butcher Army
Ash sweeps over L’manberg - Manberg now, Quackity reminds himself, glee churning ill in his gut - steadily flooding out of the burning flag. A hundred shades of red, a scream from Niki; Fundy’s paw is gripping a torch and something delicate and unspoken shatters in everyone who watches.
Except, of course, Schlatt, who grins, a wolf in curled horns, and offers the fox a position of power, one Wilbur’s denied him all this time. Fundy’s eyes gleam.
The Manberg Cabinet is made up of the last president’s son, the last vice’s best friend, and Quackity.
They get along fine.
Better than fine, honestly. They find family. Sort of. In a fucked up way that’d only be possible for them, their collective past tucked tightly under an umbrella with acid-rain holes.
People tend to give pitying looks in response to talk about picking glass out of palms or dodging bottles; not them, they know where the peroxide is in each of their houses.
It leads to an eternity later - months at best, really, but the fatigue in his limbs feels like an age has passed - when Quackity stands on top of a blackstone pillar with Tubbo.
He didn’t know Tubbo before they both became members of a governing body with a blackened heart, but Quackity’s gotten to know him well. Bees and intricate machinery; aversion to substances and the web of firework-burns splashed across his left side.
Tubbo is a mosaic of their shared experience and most of the time it’s nice to have someone who gets it, but sometimes, apathy heavy in Tubbo’s voice as he talks about what surely awaits them, Quackity wonders if he got off easy.
Tubbo’s a slowly-burning fuse, is the thing, and he’s the one to suggest they make their own place, a sudden burst of adrenaline flooding the boy everyone’s trampled over to get where they are now.
Quackity is the one to suggest the method.
To the left, L’manberg. For the country. To the right, forest. For freedom.
Tubbo counts. Quackity steps sure. They lock eyes.
They agree, in that moment, to fight for L’manberg. Whatever it may mean, however it might end.
Later, though not by much, Quackity wonders if it was ever a question in Tubbo’s mind. L’manberg has a hold on Tubbo, thick-clawed and sharp-edged.
Would you really have left with me?
He wonders it as Tubbo grips Tommy’s hand, across the way from Technoblade. He wonders it as Tubbo reconstructs the site of a dying man’s final act. He wonders it as Tubbo’s fists clench and he gestures with an steel-bar arm.
When Tubbo yells, it’s with no mic, just the illusion of reverb. Broken deals on elevated land, L’manberg always at its center; the most important thing in Tubbo’s world is traded for Tommy.
“Remember,” he says when Quackity protests, Schlatt’s shadow under his cold eyes, “we both walked left.”
Fundy, of all people, is the one to pull out a leather-bound journal, a glorified hit list on thick paper. They’ve all had the same train of thought; Tubbo with his abrupt shift to exile, Fundy with his blue and scarlet paws, Quackity with his prepared room, buried underneath the country’s shaky foundation.
“Hopefully,” Quackity says, staring each of them down in turn, his plan itching at the back of his mind, “this shows you how much I care about this fucking country.”
And then there were three.
An axe-wielding army, the last remains of a hundred and a half legacies.
Four, if you count Ranboo, awkward and unsure. Betrayal, the crowning jewel in his cardboard crown.
(No one does. Least of all, Ranboo himself.)
When Technoblade erupts in green and gold, escaping his execution cage with barely a gash across his arm, Quackity is the only one who chases after him.
The straw that broke the camels’ back was failure and it’s all-of-a-sudden clear, if not to them then to him, that they don’t actually care at all.
Fundy is angry at abstract things, ghosts who don’t give him the answers he wants. Tubbo is regretful over decisions he made in confidence, a further-reaching shell of a president in a too-big suit.
The L’manberg Cabinet is made up of a dictator’s sole heir, an echo of the past, and Quackity.
They do not get along fine.
Interlude II
Technoblade talks about heroes like they are the ones in the wrong. Like if he talks loud enough and for long enough, he can change the meaning of the word, change history to where he was a paragon of virtue and L’manberg was a parasite burrowing into scarred skin.
There’s irony in the fact that he gives several variations of the same speech; the one where words mean nothing.
He challenges George in that way, in some way, but he’s actually the least-relevant part of the conflict, because George has only ever cared about what he chooses.
Power doesn’t make the list. Techno doesn’t even come close.
Eret’s gold throne, meanwhile - a symbol of humanity from a pseudo-god - sits on the very bottom line.
“Just say you hate me.”
George levels a flat stare at Dream, as though he can see through the mask - maybe he can; if anyone could, it would be him - and makes a demand only he would ever dare make.
Quackity used to think that Dream would do anything for George. Overthrow a king, uproot the world, alter time and space.
Dream still would do all those things, but not anything.
He will not speak.
Violence is the only universal language and Dream isn’t going to fight them - because he loves George or because he doesn’t care at all, who’s really to say - so the silence that tugs at their titanium bond is painfully obvious.
Expected, but not welcome. Not to George.
Not to anyone with sense.
It sets a precedent that’s always been there, lying dormant. Techno said it to Tommy after killing Tubbo. Dream doesn’t say it at all, because that’s what makes it actually work.
Quackity speaks two languages and neither of them are violent.
Everyone else seems to understand, but fluency comes at a cost.
(On a grassy hill, twelve days before the election, Wilbur Soot breaks the yet-to-be-proclaimed rule and monologues with all the certainty of someone who’s gone all-in on a machine that only might pay out.
“Power isn’t gained from diplomacy and bureaucracy and giant courthouses suspended in the sky,” he paces and says Quackity’s name in a way that slices through the air between them. “It’s gained from swords. It’s gained from blades. It’s gained from steel.”)
In the end, Quackity stands alone on the floating dirt pile that is El Rapids. Power lies in capable hands and his shake as he levels the place he used to call home.
III. The Aftermath
Just as the leaves are beginning to die, a candy-pink flower blooms.
Quackity knows what he’s like. His habits, his idiosyncrasies, the things about him that make people ignore his comms. When Dream tells him he’s always sticking himself in places he doesn’t belong, Quackity takes it in stride, pushes harder, digs deeper.
He never imagined he’d hit diamond.
They are together without him, a complete picture, but for some reason they decide he fits. Two becomes three; their love is sugar-spun.
Quackity is the accent, the edge of a fluffy cloud or the thin beam of sun peeking through a canopy. Karl leans his head on his shoulder and Sapnap mocks the way he breaks into song at random times.
He whispers them everything he can offer in low Spanish and they give him soundless warmth in return; Karl’s sleepy sweetness and Sapnap’s patient inferno.
Sapnap’s voice is all gravel - concealing flint, just on the edge of fire - as he yells Quackity’s name on the battlefield and his sword clashes against Techno’s. Techno stumbles and blood seeps out of the wound as he runs; Quackity’s good eye goes blurry and he leans against a surviving pillar, huffing when Sapnap gives a tiny wave.
Backed into a tunnel’s corner, Bad’s sword dangling from fingertips he never thought would see red, Karl’s the one who drops down, weapon in hand, stance guarded. He shields Quackity with himself and Quackity’s heart gets stuck in his teeth as it tries to get out and take its rightful place in black-nail-polished hands.
They are everything.
Until they aren’t.
Sugar is hygroscopic and love is a desert and together, in the rain, in front of the curious stare of his ex-running-mate and a prison housing either hope or the lack thereof, Quackity loses everything.
(“You, Karl, and Sapnap made a country?”
“Yes!” George’s hair is plastered against his forehead, his expression small and confused. “Karl said he told you.”)
It’s not a surprise.
Quackity wasn’t surprised when Schlatt died to his own vices, nor when Wilbur failed to follow suit and had to have someone else finish the job. He wasn’t surprised when Dream came to tear down his newly-built country, a revenge fantasy based on a shared best friend.
He wasn’t surprised when Technoblade left him with his first set of real scars - it was about time, and it was never going to be anyone else - so he’s not - sure as fucking hell not - surprised that Karl and Sapnap decided to leave him behind.
It still hurts.
Because Quackity has been in love before, or he’s at least thought it. He’s met Schlatt’s dark gaze across a dinner table, raised a wineglass to his lips. He’s gone on dates with pretty much anyone who’d say yes. He’s attached himself to ideologies and movements and empty vows, sometimes all three.
Karl and Sapnap had felt different.
He’s used to being the third wheel, but this feels like being split in half; Quackity’s the one left standing, a polished gem discarded in his own dirt.
That’s how it goes, isn’t it? This is on him. His mistake for doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Offer him an insanity plea and he’ll keep it next to the box containing his stupid naive hopes.
The want for someone to love. For someone to love him.
For escape, a crumbling of layered borders, the boundary line he always stays within. Trying to become leader of a place that rejected him, trying to seek camaraderie in people who’ve moved past him.
Trying to hold onto the ephemeral. Always trying, always failing.
“I’ll definitely pay a visit sometime,” he tells George, who looks like he wants to ask a question, but isn’t going to.
Quackity knows him well enough for that. He knows himself too; he won’t be going where he’s not wanted.
He should’ve known what to expect.
Skeletal hooves click against the ground as he turns away from the past. George waves goodbye with a tentative hand.
And then there was one.