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The chest is empty.
Somewhere in history, a boy asks about a button. There is laughter still bright and endless in the night sky, starlight falling around them and naming itself hope.
The moon cannot see them. They are underground. It is raining. The moon cannot watch what is about to happen and what did happen.
“There’s nothing in the chests.”
“Purpled, there’s not- Oh.”
Somewhere in history, this part happened already.
Every tale gets told differently when a new mouth tries to make sense of it. Every hero gets two endings: the real one and the happy one.
Somewhere in history, you were told this would happen again.
The land remembers even if the landscape changes.
Remnants of explosives make for fertilizer in the ground that was cursed to be L’manburg. A once dead president had said the land would be ruined for the rest of time once he was done with it.
He must not be done quite yet.
The trees reach upwards to heavens obscured by obsidian, the vines cloak the layers of debris. The land refuses to stay scar tissue. The land remembers it was once a forest even if the last of its untouched growth was burned so many months ago.
It snows in the desert made by desperate hands, because no amount of hiding from the truth will ever change it. A country built for love will never be anything but a letter to someone who might never understand it.
It snows in the desert, great heaving white flakes crashing to the sand, and Quackity thinks about ash drifting in a storm as the world crashes and burns and crashes and burns.
His dreams are shattered stained glass. He sits in the pews of a church he watched the birth of while the church burns. He dances with the heart of a lover turned monster still lodged in his throat. He watches the people he loves leave him because they have to, because this part was written in their bones long before he ever met them.
Time passes him by wrongly and cruelly. He wants it to shut up and leave him alone.
History is not written by the victors. History is written by the fools who thought they might stand a chance against the unchanging tides of a landscape made of their blood.
He leaves the desert, and walks into the night with only one place left to go.
History calls. You pick up the phone.
A shapeshifter stands on the edge of a nation that never wanted him, and there is new growth beneath his feet.
“Awful late to be out, innit, Big Q?” Someone calls, and Quackity has so much anger inside of him he thinks he could mistake himself for the detonation that ruined them all.
They were ruined long before anyone ever pressed a button or pulled a lever.
“Tommy.” Quackity greets, a touch too cold, eyes never straying from the darkness that lingers over the pit that was a home once. “It’s past your bedtime.”
“I don’t got a bedtime, man. I’m not a kid.” Tommy comes to stand beside him, and he inhales sharply as he takes in the crater.
“Hate this place.” Tommy grumbles, kicking at the new grass that has the audacity to grow.
Quackity knows he doesn’t.
“You shouldn’t be out alone, Tommy.” He warns, because Dream is free, and Technoblade is free, and despite everything Tommy will say, he is a kid.
“I’m not scared of nothing.” Tommy lies.
Quackity drags his eyes away from what was and will always be L’manburg and looks at him finally, and it hurts to do so. He remembers a kid who was loud and dangerously careless and bright. He can’t forget that boy who was always laughing, always caught up in some scheme to rule the world.
Quackity looks at him and in the moonlight that falls over them, Tommy’s eyes are grey and his face is made of shadows.
History is laughing.
“It’s not safe, man.” He stresses, and Tommy blinks. His eyes, those terribly desaturated eyes, seem to catch on Quackity’s latest collection of scars and he opens his mouth and closes it and opens it again.
“You go swimming in the Nether?” Tommy asks.
Here is the point where honesty would be a good policy. Here is where Quackity should tell him that the Devil made a deal to win back his freedom. Here is where Quackity should be the bearer of bad news.
No one learns from history. They just pretend to.
He laughs, quiet and bitter. “Something like that.”
“No, like, really? Are you okay? You look like shit.” Tommy’s eyes roam over him, and Quackity can imagine what he sees and what he doesn’t. The lack of golden rings around his neck, the way his flesh is freshly burned.
The house always wins, someone said that once or twice or enough times to tell you they thought it was true. No one expected the house to burn and burn and burn.
“It’s been a long week.” Quackity says in lieu of explanation.
“It wasn’t- Wilbur didn’t do this, did he?” Tommy sounds like he has already resigned himself to the answer.
Quackity thinks of standing in a room carved out of stone where the words of hope were turned into the ramblings of chaos. Quackity thinks about screaming for a kid to return to that room as an ally turned threat told that kid to die. Quackity thinks about the way the explosion threw him up and up and up, almost like flying.
Quackity thinks about a lot of things.
“It wasn’t Wilbur.” He replies, and something in Tommy, some terror born in a stone made Hell or maybe long before that, deflates.
“Oh, that’s good. Well, obviously, it’s not good that- I mean it’s good that he isn’t- Yeah.”
Above them, the stars blink in and out of existence. They have been dead for so very long, but still they dance in the darkness of the sky.
“Charlie is gone.” Quackity tells him, even if it isn’t fair to ask anyone else to hold his grief. “Slime is- he’s gone.”
“I’m sorry.” Tommy barely knew him, but there is a tightness in his words, a sorrow that no seventeen year old should have to bear. “He was really cool.”
“Yeah.” Quackity is embarrassed by the way his voice cracks. “He was the best.”
“You know, he thought Ranboo was a slime too?” Tommy asks, and Quackity laughs again, but this time it’s lighter. It devolves rapidly into a sob, and he shoves his fist over his mouth.
“What?” He croaks, and Tommy rocks on his heels, his hands shoved into his pockets.
“I don’t know. He mentioned it when I was at dinner in Snowchester. They were friends, I think.” Tommy trails off, and he suddenly collapses fluidly onto the ground, sitting so his legs dangle over the edge of the crater.
There is an unspoken question here. Quackity doesn’t know the answer.
He sits down, and their knees clatter together for a moment before they shift apart, and it is as close to saying what he should say to Tommy as he can allow.
I am sorry and I wish someone had protected you better and I wish it had been you instead and I wish it had been me and It’s all my fault and Why can’t we go back to before? If we did it all over, would we still be friends?
“It’s not fair.” And it isn’t fair. None of this is fair. Quackity knows odds and chances better than any man on this server. He understands how rolling dice can be the same as wielding a blade.
He scrubs at his face and wills himself not to cry.
It isn’t fair. The universe never is.
“It’s not. I’m sorry.” Tommy whispers. “I should have never taken him hostage either. That was fucked up.”
“You didn’t mean it.” Quackity tells him, because he had been mad at one point, but he knows Tommy well enough to know his actions and his intentions are rarely malicious.
They have both been punished enough for what others think they know of their intent.
“It was still a bit of a dick move. He didn’t deserve it.”
“No. He deserved a lot better.” Quackity agrees, and they are not talking about the same thing anymore.
“Can I ask- Is it rude to ask how?” Tommy kicks his legs back and forth, and rocks tremble and slip down and down and down.
The chest was empty. The moon couldn’t watch.
“Purpled.” Quackity spits, but the anger in him is a tired flame now. Tomorrow, he will take up his pen and his knife and he will figure out how to make things feel a little better. Tomorrow, he will be the man that ate the heart and the man that learned how to climb to the top from the very bottom of the world.
(Someone asks, “Is it ever worth it?”
And this is the type of joke the universe will play on you. This is the conversation that plays on repeat every night when you toss and turn in a bed that was made for more than you. This is the moment you realize how tired you are of the violence you will never be able to leave behind.
“No. No, It’s not.”)
“Oh, fuck that guy.” Tommy says, but his words are wrecked by a yawn that slips from his mouth. “He’s a wrong’un.”
“Yeah.” Quackity mumbles. “You should go home, Tommy.”
“What?” Tommy blinks. “I’m not going to- You just told me your friend died.”
“Yes?” The word is drawn out, confused.
“I wouldn’t want to be alone.” Tommy tells him, and Quackity’s broken heart shatters.
You were alone, he thinks of saying. I’m sorry for that. I don’t think I will ever not be sorry for that.
“Thank you.” He says instead. He tries not to let the tears fall, but they slip down his face a little too easily. Tommy doesn’t comment on his terrible display of weakness.
Instead, the blond flops backwards so he is lying in the grass, and he opens his mouth and starts to tell a story.
It’s some long winded no real objective adventure that has to do with a spider that slowly becomes Tommy talking about the past, about long dead countries and friendships that no longer hurt to miss. Some of it is memories the two of them share, reflections of a history that neither of them will ever escape or ever get back. Some parts of it sound bitter, but most of it is just Tommy talking until Quackity laughs.
When he does, loudly at a joke he has already heard, a joke he’s pretty sure he wrote, it startles him. He isn’t sure he deserves to laugh.
He falls backwards into the grass, and a very small smile changes the landscape of his scarred face.
Above them, the stars dance until the sky grows too light to watch the last pirouettes of dead gas far far away.
The sun comes up slowly and quietly, and Tommy waves his hands as he speaks until Quackity feels ready to start to tell a new story.
It is a story that needs to be heard.
“I named him Charlie because he just kind of looked like a Charlie, y’know?”
History watches. History lives inside of them, curls around their bruised and battered hearts and forces them to beat.
Tomorrow, the universe will beg for bloodshed and horror and terrible things. Tomorrow, history will play the same old story again, and no one will be treated fairly.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
The sun rises again.
“He is my best friend.”
A shapeshifter and a boy lay on the ground they helped inadvertently ruin once, and it is as close to kindness that the universe will ever offer.