Chapter Text
For the second time since Schlatt’s death, the first time since his funeral, Quackity is having a cigarette. He stands in the center of an empty street, the tar so fresh it’s still black. The casino is fucking silent: the only sound is the bugzapper crackle of neon coils. The tip of the paper flares blue and his mouth tastes like burning wood. Las Nevadas is pristine and finished and perfect and empty. He has everything he’s dreamt of but he’s all alone. His white shirt is rumpled, discolored with blood stains he hasn’t bothered to clean. What the fuck’s the point, if he just adds more every twenty-four hours?
Footsteps startle him out of his skin. A second silhouette under the gas lamp, and a soft tap on his shoulder. “Hey, old friend,” says Wilbur Soot, fond smile audible in his voice. “Got a light?”
It’s not the ghost. His skin is almost as sallow, like he’s gone years without sun, but his hair is a warm, rich, brown. Except for one colorless lock that hangs over his forehead. There’s an unexplained bandage on his arm, soaked through with red.
“What in the fuck,” he grins as he shakes his head, “are you doing here?”
“Sorry, am I intruding? Is this private?” One corner of his mouth tilts up in a sneer. “I can leave.”
“Stay, man. Stay.” Quackity reaches out to touch him, to see if he’s solid, but Wilbur pulls back, flighty.
“--too much. Everything’s too much at first.”
He looks at the buzzing light-up signs, swirling whirlpools and bars with amber-colored bottles circulating through the windows. Too much is exactly the point. “Welcome to the Nevadas Project.”
Wilbur’s head snaps over his shoulder as he takes in the hotels and clubs and casinos. “I respect this. I like your style.”
“Suck-up.”
“Exactly, I knew you’d get it.” He bounces from heel to toe, animated. “I’m going around telling people what they want to hear. So they’ll like me.”
“Why on earth would you admit that?”
“I’m tired of lying. It’s how it got so bad before. I’ve decided not to tell lies this time.” He scratches at his chest through trench coat and sweater. “D’you still lie, Quackity?”
“Did I ever?”
Wilbur’s face twists, as if he’s considering. “Tell me, then. What’re you doing all the way out here? Did you build all this for yourself?”
“I built it for my friends,” he admits, crumpling, “for my fiances, for us, for our fucking honeymoon - Sap and Karl and I were gonna elope in Vegas. But, um. The wedding’s postponed. Indefinitely.”
“Sucks.” He sounds sympathetic, even as he laughs. “But look at this, right? Perfectly good city of sin - are you just gonna let it go to waste?” His dark eyes gleam argon-teal. “Come on!” Wilbur leaps up onto a fire hydrant, coat billowing in the night breeze like a cape behind him. “I spent thirteen fucking years in a train station, in near-darkness, over a decade of damp cold sensory deprivation and now I’m back! I’m ready to live, I want to see it all, I wanna take every bright loud thing in the world and cram it in my mouth. That’s what life is supposed to be about, I’ve just decided.” He leaps into the air and lands hard on the pavement, knees crunching.
Quackity helps him up. “You alright?”
“I’m fucking fantastic,” he says, sincere, glowing. “Pain is real again. I have knees.” He sprints at the nearest building, almost colliding with a wall. He pokes a light yellow brick with his nose. “Sick shit. What are these made of?”
“London clay,” Q says confidently (he's built it all, by hand, with love), “and lime mortar, but leave it alone, you freak. You haven’t seen anything yet. The real party’s inside.” And Wilbur reluctantly follows him through a revolving door and into a long, sleek, lobby. He drops to a low crouch and inspects the carpet with his eyes and fingers. “Looks like a bowling alley. But clean.”
“Clean for now.” There’s a bar with mirrors at each end to make it look infinite, recursive. Wilbur stares at his thousands of reflections as if to catch them blinking. Quackity opens a fresh bag of casino tokens, the seal stretching before it breaks. The chips are brand new and they smell like plastic. He pours them into a slot machine, testing. It flickers to life, clicks and whirs, and the resurrected man trembles at the loud noise, a shiver passing all the way down his spine. The wheels stop on cherry-apple-cherry and Wilbur vaults over the taps and fills a shiny glass with maraschinos. “Keep your dirty hands out of the serving tray.”
Ice. Vodka. Lemon juice. Rock salt. Green olives. Sugar. Cinnamon fireball. Espresso shot.
“What the fuck? Are you going to drink that?”
“You - you know what I had to drink in the train station?” Wilbur’s hand spasms as he adds a frilly umbrella. “Nothing. I licked condensation off the walls. It tasted like smoke and old gum and sidewalk chalk.” He peels the papery skin from a white onion and shoves it on top, the vegetable splitting open as he forces the bulb through the narrow neck of his cup.
“Are you crying?”
“Onion.”
“I thought you said you wouldn’t lie anymore--”
Wilbur cuts him off with a massive gulp of the cocktail that almost unhinges his jaw. He gives a full-body shudder as he swallows. “That is so fucking disgusting.” He pours the rest of the liquid down his throat, tipping the solid sludge back into the bottom of the glass. “Can I have a fork?”
Quackity rolls his eyes and confiscates the glass. “Please find something less gross to do.” Wilbur freezes in place, pauses for a long moment. “There’s a pool, you know? A lazy river. And a waterslide!”
***
Quackity peels off his shirt and dives in immediately, but Wilbur hangs back, slowly unlacing one boot. The water’s lukewarm, but steam rises from the surface into the cold desert-night, turning the air blurry. He dives down toward the warm underwater lights and his face is cast in turquoise.
Wilbur lies down poolside and sticks his face in, eyes open. He blows out bubbles that drift across the contours of his cheeks and catch in his eyebrows. After a long, airless minute he involuntarily sucks in water and pulls back, coughing and gasping. “Oh sonofabitch I forgot I need to breathe now.”
“Careful,” says Quackity, as his friend chokes chlorinated foam onto the pool deck, “or you’re gonna end up right back at that train station.”
“Fuck off. No.” He rubs his wet forehead and curls up tighter into his coat. “I-I’m gonna take care of myself this time.”
“Mhm?”
“...I was trying to die, y’know? For a long time before it really happened. Off and on, for a couple months. I’m sorry I-shouldn’t -say -that.” He recoils in shame from his own words.
“But no lying, right?”
“That doesn’t mean I have to tell the truth, either.”
His silent, distant stare is acutely uncomfortable. Q changes the subject. “It’s a casino, right? Wanna play some cards?”
***
Wilbur shuffles the deck with nimble, adept, flair. He’s had a lot of practice. Quackity suggests poker, a classic.
“Fuck are we gonna bet?” Wilbur points around the glittering, gilded, casino, and at his own caved-in form. “You have everything, and I have nothing.”
“There’re more valuable things,” Q shrugs, “than money. Than property. But we’re just playing for fun, right?” He has half a flush, and the cards stick to his wet hands like paper. He has an idea. “Strip poker.”
“Any excuse to -- hold on, you’re already shirtless. What, are you gonna peel off your skin?”
“You can’t beat me at poker, Wil. I’m that confident.” And Wilbur loses five consecutive rounds, but under his jacket there’s a yellow sweater (“you steal that from the ghost?”), under the sweater a white shirt with a tear in the chest (Quackity lets out a low whistle: “morbid”), beneath that the blue of a L’Manberg uniform (“shut up, doesn’t symbolize anything”), and then another long-sleeved undershirt-- “What the fuck.” He’s laughing so hard he can’t breathe.
“It was cold,” says Wilbur quietly, “in the train station.”
Quackity throws down his cards: just this once, he’s willing to fold. “Why’d you come all the way out here? To Las Nevadas?”
“Got your note,” his expression is unreadable, “You said I was right the whole time. I like being told I’m right.”
“And L’Manberg’s gone forever.”
“Of course it is,” his smile is grim but easy and it doesn’t spread to his eyes, “I’m the one who killed it.”
And that’s not true, but at the same time, Wilbur isn’t really lying.
“I never cared about L’Manberg,” he insists, “I never cared that it was L’Manberg. It coulda been anything. It could’ve been called Bim-Bom, or Mantopia, or Las Nevadas, you know? It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t about freedom, it was about sticking it to the MAN.”
Quackity, who’s spent his whole life challenging authority, frowns in confusion. “Isn’t that exactly the same idea?”
Wilbur lets out a little groan. “...I feel sick.”
“Yeah, you drank a fifth of vodka on an empty stomach. Wait right here, I’m gonna get you some peanuts.” He slides over a salted snack in a paper dish and Wilbur sucks on them like tic tacs. “God I missed food I missed tastes I missed eating. I missed being hungry. I missed the feeling of weight in my stomach.”
“So being dead, it’s just pure shit, then?”
“...yeah.”
He gives an open-mouthed smile. “I could’ve told you that a long time ago.”
“But I don’t think I would have believed you.” He whips a handful of peanuts at Quackity’s face and they sting like shrapnel. “Sorry. Drunk.” Q narrows his eyes. “High on life, I mean.”
“You wanna play slots?”
Wilbur turns up his empty palms. “No money. No chips.”
“Yeah well, it’s my casino.” He tosses his friend a sleeve of orange fifties. “My rules.”
Wilbur feeds a token into the meter and pauses before pressing the button. “Is it rigged?” the absolute nerve to ask.
“It’s a fucking slot machine, isn’t it? The odds aren’t even. I have to make money somehow.” He flips a black chip through his fingers like he’s doing a coin trick. “But if you didn’t have a chance, nobody would play.”
“I wonder why people still like tragedies. You see the gun hanging on the wall in the first act and you already know it’ll end with a bullet in the brain. You’d think that would ruin the story.”
“Chekhov doesn’t have to kill anyone, right? Just pull his trigger.” He rolls the slots and they come up smiling. Wilbur blinks several times at the familiar, identical, symbols. “Not him. Me. I’m reclaiming it.”
“We’ve won, I guess,” he mumbles, as the machine spits out a shower of multicolored chips, “not that these are worth anything.”
“Sure they are. Go trade ‘em in for a glowstick.” He gestures to a wall of teddy-bears and rubber balls on slap-strings, and Wilbur sneers.
“These are kinda pathetic.”
“I know. But wait until you see the grand prize.” He rubs his palms together but refuses to elaborate.
***
There’s a jukebox sitting on a circular table, a crate of music disks tucked away under the cloth. New and unscratched, still in their original covers and protective sleeves. “Don’t steal ‘em,” Quackity jokes, “Or do, it doesn’t matter. I have a lot more where those came from.”
Wilbur laughs much too loudly and yodels along to an instrumental, out of tune. “This is so much fucking fun," he whoops as the beat drops, gripping Quackity’s shoulders, “I never want it to end!” His hold becomes painfully tight, his voice breaks. “...I never want it to end. I can’t go back I can’t FUCKING GO BACK, MAN--”
“Hey,” he soothes, trying to dislodge sharp fingernails from his neck, “We’re having a good time; you’re safe, yeah?”
“I can’t go back I can’t EVER go back.” His face is sweaty and drained of color, and then his expression darkens. “We need that fucking book.”
“I know,” says Quackity, “I know, I’m already on that shit, I’m -- torturing Dream daily for information.” Wilbur’s nose wrinkles. “What, do you have a problem with that? You’re literally the one who told me to--”
Wilbur drops his hands and rolls his eyes. “I’m not scandalized. It’s just that you’ve been fucking stupid, Q. Torture doesn’t work - not like that, not for this.”
“Then how do we --”
He gives a smirk that turns Quackity’s bones to liquid nitrogen. “Have you tried being
nice?”