Chapter Text
Everything around Wilbur feels suffocating. No, this is the wrong word, probably, it’s not suffocating: it’s just… weird. Abnormal. Maybe it’s the result of spending a decade elsewhere, maybe it’s the way Las Nevadas looks when it’s empty, maybe it’s the combination of both. Wilbur didn’t feel comfortable in the last 15 years or so. It’s not like he expected it to change anytime soon. But it’s still disappointing that it didn’t.
It’s disappointing that getting brought back from the dead just cheered him up for a month. It’s disappointing that he will have to work from the ground up again. It’s disappointing that he will have to carve out a place for himself again. It’s disappointing that seemingly everyone around him tried to forget him. Wilbur can almost feel the scalpel in his hand as he opens up old wounds. “Oh, did you try to move forward? To heal? To forget, or to only remember the good parts? Let me cut that scar open again. Come on, I know you hated how that scar tissue looked.”
It’s not even that he tries to be hurtful. Then it would at least be fun. No, he doesn’t have to do anything. He doesn’t have to say anything. His presence alone is hurtful.
Wilbur time and time again finds himself in Las Nevadas. Wandering. Looking around. It’s a new area, so it’s not crowded with memories that have a tendency to be unpleasant. It’s beautiful, well-built, and, most of the time, completely empty. Perfect for his purposes.
It feels uncanny, honestly. A place built to accommodate thousands, but only ever visited by a few. A desert where it fucking snows. It feels like this place shouldn’t exist. Wilbur chooses not to examine why he likes that.
Wilbur always ends up in the Tubburger. He could lie and say that it’s because he always wants to know what the competition is doing, but the truth is that he doesn’t give a fuck about burgers. He cares about giving Quackity the middle finger. He doesn’t care about burgers.
And yet he always finds himself here. Staring at the goddamn aquarium.
This is crude. Even cruel, maybe. Just in Quackity’s style. So crude, so vulgar, it circles back to subtle. The fish move in enchanting, hypnotizing patterns. Wilbur can imagine himself spending hours here, watching the fish scales glisten in the neon lights.
The aquarium is probably way too small for them. Salmon is a large, wild fish, it’s not exactly adapted for living in a two by two container in a fucking diner.
They are out of place, too.
They are mostly placid, just spiraling the container, seemingly lulling each other and Wilbur to sleep, but sometimes something riles them up, and they chaotically twirl around each other, bumping into the glass, getting more and more confused. Usually Wilbur just waits it out, gives them time to calm down by themselves, but this time curiosity gets the best of him, and he moves closer, leans in, so that his face is inches away from the thick glass, and knocks on the fish tank wall. The fish pick up the pace, the whirlpool of scales and fins raises higher. Wilbur knocks again. And again. And again. He hears an anxious fish slam it’s head into the cheap plastic roof, and he hears it slide to the side. A large wet body slams itself on the ground by his feet. As he watches it struggle, he can’t help but think that he has definitely felt like this before. Out of his element, scared, confused, agonized. Eager to die.
The body twitches for the very last time and finally goes still. Wilbur picks it up by its tail. It’s slimy and cold. Wilbur slowly puts the body back in the fish tank, to the still anxious fish, watches, as the body slowly sinks to the very bottom, and closes the lid. Here. Now it’s back in the water. Although it doesn’t fucking matter at this point.
They’ve both been out of water for way too long.