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Quackity isn't a good person. At one point, he thinks, he was, back when all he worried about was making his friends laugh and joking around and having to fix up scraped knees.
How naive he was, believing he was the type of person who was able to be happy. He couldn't even manage to have a face. He barely knew who or what he was.
He was prone to change, subtle sometimes, like his freckles and moles would rearrange themselves, or his eyebrows would change shape. Sometimes it would be his legs were different, or his eyes were different colors, or his teeth were fanged. All these little things that make you wonder if you were ever really you to begin with, or just a shambling excuse of a person with a smile plastered to his face. He didn't know, so he just used the change he could control for very physical physically impossible comedic effect and tried to pretend he didn't think about it late at night.
He was a good person then, but he wasn't a happy person. Not really. Things were simple, though. Then everything changed, subtly but enough to be inherently different, until it didn't matter what it was before because it would never be enough to make it go back. It almost blindsided him, how so many small things had changed until everything was different, if not for the inherent familiarity of it all. He knew a lot about that kind of change.
He had a lot more to worry about suddenly. Learning how to be taken seriously(it didn't work), learning how to appease the people(it didn't work), learning how to protect his friends(it didn't work), learning how to protect himself(don't think about that right now).
Gone were the days of golden sun rays and golden memories and golden feathers. He was drowning in the tides of political upheaval that he was trying so desperately to navigate while his ankle was held down by an anchor with ram horns and rum stained clothes and sharp nails digging into his skin, bruising his eyes, clipping his feathers-(don't think about that right now).
He learned how to set broken bones, how to disinfect wounds, how to lie with golden honey coating his lips. He learned how to kill. Oh, it wasn't fun, but what is? It's not like he was happy before.
He changed, he adapted, and he was a bit less of a good person. He did some things, some that were good, some that were bad, some that were necessary. He didn't care what he had to do. He was cradling a broken heart with bloodstained hands and bloodstained teeth and he was used to the cloying ache of being different in ways you wish you could change. He ignored it. He moved on.
Things changed along with him. Some of it was for the better, some was wildly for the worst. He woke up, with adrenaline filled veins and a blood-dripping face and a missing tooth. He learned how to take care of a golden fang. He learned to take care of healing scar. He learned how to adjust to a partially blind eye.
And the world blew up, and he was at least together with someone he cared about, who smelled of ashes that blended with the acrid smoke curling around them and the hissing of TNT and the screams that surrounded them.
And in the aftermath of calamity, in the bosom of chaos, he found the eye of the storm. He found peace. He found love. And he began to feel like he might be happy. Oh, it seems naivete lingered in his bones all along, for as a dandelion destroyed for a wish, these tender things never last. So he worked.
He worked, and he longed, and he maimed, and the light within him was subsumed by darkness and a burning ache that went to the bone. He rose from the ashes of misery with an iron will, pressed to the whetstone until all that was good and pure and holy was worn away.
He was a bad person, yeah, and he wasn't happy, sure, but he had something he had never had before. He had power. He had leverage. He had golden rings, and gold gilded machines, and golden sand on land he owned and controlled. He had strength.
He would never have all his teeth again, or unscarred skin, or scraped knees, or dirt to scrub off his cheeks, or people he could trust, but he had the ability to protect others so they could have that.
Who cares if he has to scrub blood off his stained clothes and from under his sharp nails, who cares if he has to cover the bags under his eyes with cruel grins and weapons, who cares if he can't recognize himself in the mirror sometimes?
He's become someone new, and it's his last shot at something that might resemble a happy ending. If this fails, it will be the end.
At least then he won't have to worry about who he'll be next.