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There is a theme that runs through every chapter of Quackity’s short and unlucky life. It’s a saying, the flip of a one-sided coin or the toss of a pair of unfairly weighted dice. He recalls being a child and being told, once, that if you look on the bright side of things, you’ll never run dry of good luck. He recalls as well being told another form of this - that good luck only exists so much as you make it.
He remembers he used to believe it, too. Once upon a time, he was seventeen and starry-eyed and still thought if he just worked hard enough, he’d be able to achieve everything he wanted. He would set his lofty goals and he’d climb and climb for them, and someday he’d reach the peak and dust off his knees and know that the luck he worked for was his.
Once upon a time, he was a young and starry-eyed fool. Once upon a time, he had yet to learn that luck is a cruel and fickle force, and it is power that brings about success.
He works for L’Manberg, he creates his own luck and he wins - the odds are in his favor because he sets them up to be. He shakes Schlatt’s hand, he stands beside him onstage and beside the podium, and he laughs. He wins. He climbs a rung up the ladder of his success and one closer to the top.
This is a step closer to where he wants to be.
He tells it to Tubbo, later. “You know, we can do really good things with this. This isn’t as bad as it looks.”
Tubbo’s friends are gone. He is left with Quackity instead.
“I can do everything I want to now,” Quackity says. “I can make change.”
“You aren’t even president,” Tubbo says. “Schlatt is. You didn’t win.”
“But I did,” Quackity says. “Maybe not the election, but in the end? I’m where I want to be, Tubbo. I’m here at the top of everything.”
Tubbo regards him with the skepticism of young and naive eyes, and Quackity meets them with a naivety of his own that he doesn’t know yet. These are the last moments either of them will carry that sort of childishness.
“This is the way it works, Tubbo,” he teaches him. “In order to win, sometimes you have to let yourself lose.”
There is a strategy to success, a strategy to creating your own luck and working for it. A give-and-take; knowing when to cut your losses and when to play another round, when to risk it all and maybe when to slip out the card up your sleeve. It takes an eye for the wider picture. Quackity learns to watch the details without losing sight of the end goal.
Here at the top of everything, at the peak of his success, he is almost within reach of what he wants. Change is his, the world is his, finally finally he is holding a hand out for all he wants to grasp. All he wants to be.
Quackity stands on the next rung of his success. He’s laid his cards out and he’s cashed in, he’s won. Vice President, co-leader of Manberg, man of power, man of change. It’s not the way he’d wanted it, exactly, but to win some, you have to be willing to lose others. Quackity can be smart. He knows how to play the long game, and it’s worked for him, because now here he is. Now here, he’s done it.
He’s done it, until he hasn’t at all.
Schlatt lays his cards down after Quackity does.
“This is the way it works,” Schlatt teaches him, not so much in words but in a lesson he’ll remember all the same. An ace up his sleeve and sudden dread in Quackity’s gut. “The house wins, Quackity. Not you. Never you.”
Schlatt plays his cards. Quackity, Vice President, yes-man, a trophy on Schlatt’s arm and not much else, is out of moves to make. The rung of an unfair ladder beneath his feet is broken, and the one above him is so much farther away than it had been before.
“You have to lose in order to win,” Tubbo says, with a face that is more bandage than visible and an arm he can barely move for scarring. The marks of death are deep and irreversible, even for a death as impermanent as this. “Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you told me?”
And what have you won? Quackity wants to ask. Nothing has changed. They are both standing here with their scars and the cards in their hands have been played, and they have lost and lost.
“You have to lose in order to win, huh?” Tubbo says again, standing on the edge of a crater and staring into rubble. There are still bandages over the scars on his face. He’s wearing a suit now. There is no naivety in his eyes anymore.
“We can rebuild,” Quackity says. They have lost - and lost and lost and lost - but there are still cards to build a new hand with. Schlatt is dead, and maybe Wilbur is too but all it means is that the slate is wiped clean - the ground itself is wiped clean - and they can rebuild. “We’ll rebuild.”
They rebuild.
Quackity, Secretary of State, beloved and trusted, holds his cards close to his chest because he knows better now. He stands on a shaky ladder, clings to it and watches his feet so he does not fall.
Quackity, Vice President again, lays his cards down again, plays a bold move again. Nothing risked, nothing gained. Luck is something to work for, not something to be freely given. Luck has not been on his side for so long. It has to rear its beautiful, hateful head for him someday.
They are vulnerable, and he is vulnerable, so he bets high on a success he needs to accomplish. A card to add to his hand.
“We find Technoblade,” he says, he leads, and they all follow behind him, “And we kill him.”
It’s a simple plan, except for the fact that like so many other things in the unlucky existence that Quackity has led so far, it ends up as anything but. There are potions and chaos and botched executions and then Quackity is standing here face to face with L’Manberg’s most wanted, and no one to back him up. Not a single person stands beside him.
Technoblade draws himself up, all height that Quackity doesn’t have and broad shoulders and curved tusks and a wild light in his eyes. A smile that doesn’t fade, no matter the blood on him, the broken chains still on his wrists. He turns a pickaxe over in his hands, diamond reflecting torchlight.
“Tell me, Quackity,” he says. “Do you think you’re enough to kill me?”
“I’m enough to fucking try,” Quackity spits back. Technoblade has a pickaxe and a smooth gait as he sidesteps the first swing, dancing to the side as though this is the easiest thing he’s ever done. Quackity has an axe and fury and desperation, a fire lit in his chest that leaps and burns angry and bright.
This is nothing personal, he tells Techno with a swing of his axe, glancing off the handle of his pickaxe without so much as a scratch.
This isn’t even about you, he tells him when he dodges Techno’s next attack - when he misses the dodge, when the pickaxe tears a chunk out of his arm and he hisses as blood runs hot down his wrist.
If there is one fight I aim to win, he tells Techno, it is this.
You have to lose some to win some, and Quackity has lost and lost. It is his turn to win. Isn’t it finally his turn to win?
Quackity’s skull splits and fractures, two teeth shattered in his mouth. Technoblade’s pickaxe kills him on the upward swing. He’s lucky it’s so quick that he barely feels the moment it tears through his face. He’s lucky he respawns with fragments of tooth and the bone of his own skull in his mouth and blood pouring down his face and his eye - miraculously - still in its socket. He’s lucky. He spits out his own teeth and blood here on the ground and Tubbo stands over him—
Tubbo is talking. He can’t hear him. He can’t hear any of them.
“You have to lose in order to win,” he says, and he’s almost laughing. He’s stacking up his losses. They’re piling up and up, until they’re more than he can count, and someday - someday he’ll be bound to win. Isn’t that how it works? Isn’t that how the game is played?
Quackity is not the house. Luck is a scam and a fraud, he realizes then and there, with blood thick and metallic still running from his chin to the ground. Luck is a game and there are no winners among those who play it. Luck is an election won by a dictator, luck is a country blown to pieces, luck is a pickaxe torn through his skull.
Luck is a sham. Luck is not what you make of it; luck is what the man at the top makes of it.
The house wins. Not Quackity. Never Quackity.
He stands with Tubbo over a still-smoking crater. The sound of explosions echo in his ears until it’s all he can hear, all he’s going to hear for a week. The smoke stings his eyes. He can’t see Tubbo’s.
It’s been a matter of months, from then to now. From Quackity standing on the election stage, Tubbo covered in bandages after a festival, destruction and rebuilding and destruction again. A series of months, a series of losses, a series of bad luck.
TNT falls like a nail in a coffin. Another funeral, held here over something dying, held by two people who died for it and in it. The slide from one life, to two, to three. Quackity, Tubbo, L’Manberg.
They stand over a crater again.
(Luck does not live here. Nothing does anymore.)
Neither of them say it this time.
Quackity soaks his hands in blood and pretends this counts as a win.
The blood is not his; for once, it is not his own injury, his own loss. Crimson over obsidian, and he spilled it. Cries in his ears and broken screams from the only inhabited cell, and he is the one dragging them out.
He is the one in control. This power is his.
There is blood on his shirt.
When he remembers to wash it, so much later, stained with dirt and dust - the blood of something else - it’s too late to get it all out. Faded brown patches still litter the white button-up, and strangely, he can’t bring himself to care.
In a mirror, he doesn’t recognize himself. It’s an odd feeling, looking at himself and seeing someone who isn’t him, someone who wears a bad disguise of his own skin standing right where he is and moving like a puppet as Quackity pulls the strings behind him. He is his own puppet, he thinks. He raises a hand and the hand in the mirror moves with him.
A scar tears through the skin of his face, still pink on the edges. His shirt is stained with spots of red and brown. He hasn’t bothered to change it. It’ll just stain again if he does.
There is something numb settling into his chest where a fire once burned. There is an empty sort of ache, and he buries it so far down that he’ll never feel it - except on the nights where it’s all he can feel, when the emptiness is so strong he thinks he could fall through it forever - and he believes that he doesn’t care.
(There isn’t room to care. Not when the climb to the top is as vicious as this.)
He builds a country, brick by fucking brick. He tears another down the same way.
This is his goddamn place. If he cannot find power anywhere else, then - well, fuck it! He’ll make it himself. The ladder cannot break under him if he never sets it up here. Nobody can stand above him if he starts at the top.
The house always wins, and Quackity has decided it is his turn to win.
This is where he wants to be, isn’t it?
He doesn’t see Tubbo again until they nearly declare war on one another.
Tubbo wears the flag of a nation Quackity doesn’t recognize. He wears his hair long and nearly covering the scars on his face. He stands straight and guarded and careful. There is no underestimating him anymore. Danger lives coiled and waiting under this boy’s skin.
Tubbo wears self-defense—threats and the power to back them up—like an easy shield. Quackity wears a blood-splattered shirt and he feels unprepared.
“Let’s talk this through,” Quackity suggests. This land he’s built is the last one he’ll ever risk it all on. This is his final win. His final loss. He is careful and calculated too now.
“What’s there to talk through?”
Tubbo looks him up and down, and Quackity knows he sees him. Every flaw is on full display, and Quackity has given up hiding it. He’s shoring himself up, he’s blocking in the weaknesses with shoddy work. He’s not sure what he’s more conscious of; the weakness, or the way he’s chosen to hide it.
He won’t win this, Quackity thinks. He wouldn’t win against Tubbo, but he doesn’t need to be against him. This is a loss he can avoid. There are papers that can be signed and truces that can be called and alliances to be made.
“Is this really what you want to be?” Tubbo asks.
“This is the only thing to be,” Quackity says.
Sirens sound loud enough to be heard across half the server. Everyone knows what has happened, and only he knows what is going to happen.
No one stands beside him.
He is never going to win.
He stands in the middle of a fake desert where real snow falls on his shoulders and the weight is cold and damp and crawling in his chest and in his gut. It curls up there and makes itself a heavy crawling home.
As hard as he works, he is never going to win, and he laughs. He laughs, it hitches in his throat and it’s a sob, he’s never going to win! He’s never going to win! Luck is a sham and Quackity stands at the top of a lonely peak and the fall is such a long way down.
He’ll go down with this country. He’ll take it down with him, he’ll take himself down with it.
Build up a bunker. Stock up armor and weapons. Quackity is not a man of arms; he is not a man built to fight with swords and pickaxes. He surrounds himself with those who are, with mercenaries and gods and a kid with enough power to make Quackity nervous and he prays that it’ll be enough. They stand near him but they do not stand with him, because he is not enough of a fool to believe that they would.
All that’s left is to wait.
Quackity is no longer a fool. He knows better now than he did when he was young and bright and stupid. You can work as long and as hard as you want, and the people above you will always be above you. The climb is cruel and vicious; it is no place for someone who cares.
(Leave behind the things you love. You will not have them tomorrow, and it is better to lose on your own terms.)
He has learned his lesson. He has grown up and he is no longer a fool. The only way to success is through power, and the only way to power is through luck that does not exist.
(Quackity is not the house. He will never win.)