Work Text:
Quackity’s hiding behind a rock.
He’s been doing that a lot lately, since he joined Pogtopia. His eyes snag onto Wilbur’s outline, grime amongst grime, or Wilbur’s hand reaching down around a corner to grab his glasses, or even Wilbur’s heavy, scraping footsteps, announcing his presence, and Quackity turns on his heel, drawing a pickaxe, and ducks into the nearest mining strip. When he’s forced to sit down and strategize in the kitchen area, he speaks to Techno and Tommy almost exclusively, both grim and focused, not entranced, not staring at Quackity and counting heartbeats. And on the rare occasion he has to talk to Wilbur (on the rare occasion Techno bothers to bring it up, or Tommy’s paying enough attention to notice, or Tubbo is around and also not running around looking for his best friend, for something to anchor him while he relives horrors he’ll never elaborate on), he keeps it curt. Keeps his eyes on Wilbur’s hands, on Wilbur’s eyes, catching onto any movement, any tell. Not only on Wilbur, of course, but not as religiously on anyone else.
It’s something Quackity has always done — glancing, assessing, reading between the lines and into things and digging and digging and digging for something to say in a debate. But now, it is abortive and hasty, ice-smooth and snapping-clean. It’s a quick spark in the eye, a brick wall built upon it as quickly as it strikes.
It is fear, raw and hot and doused before his opponent can pick up on it. And Wilbur is, of course, naturally, suspicious. He keeps a keen eye on Quackity, keen as he can, even as dirt splashes onto his glasses and things keep rising higher and higher, above his field of vision, and the days begin passing faster and faster. He finds himself slouching and only remembers to look up from his scuffed boots when he catches, in his peripheral, Quackity’s eyes snapping onto the curve of his spine, down, down, down.
Wilbur doesn’t know the why. Doesn’t really care. Just knows the what and wants to know the what will it take to get you to stop, to talk to me, to look at me for longer than one second, please, please.
Then he finds Quackity with a cigarette pack, dirty and logo illegible, and a flint and steel. He fumbles a thin, cylindrical piece of cut plastic out of the pack (Wilbur quirks an eyebrow, but slinks even further behind the wall by the stairs, peering past to watch Quackity, stood in plain view even though his head swings and his eyes dart all around). He then lights it on fire, throws his arms up in surrender, expression stretched and eyes no longer darting, stock-still. Dropping everything in his arms, he stomps out the flames. He retrieves it all, placing the plastic back into the packet, shoving them all into his pockets with much steadier hands than those he retrieved them with. Takes a deep, deep, gulping breath, then blows a slow, steady one back out, face uncreased and sharpened once more, smoothing his jacket down. He glances around, then scurries away to the mines.
Wilbur blinks, conjures up any possible explanation for what he might’ve been doing and could only think that Quackity had planned to burn down Pogtopia, then had come to his senses at the last second. Wilbur slouches, down, down, down, the sands of time and memory piling up on his back. He can’t trust Quackity.
But Quackity can’t trust him, either, or at least can’t trust him not to blow up L’Manberg at the slightest inconvenience. So maybe they’re equals in that regard. Have something in common, even. They don’t trust each other, and they never can, especially not until one of them snaps and proves the other right. Wilbur instinctively bristles at the concept.
And Quackity hides from him, to top it all off.
So Quackity hiding from him right now isn’t really surprising, and nor is the fact that, when he walks past Quackity, head turned and cocked, he can see Quackity was fumbling rocks out of a cigarette packet. Before he saw Wilbur, that is.
“Quackity?” he asks, voice light and thin and airy, anxiety carried out on a huff of wind. Quackity’s eyes, fixed on him from the first shuffled footstep out from the cover of the rock, flick down to the packet, to the rock, to the flint, to his grime-covered hands. He takes a deep breath in, looking back up at Wilbur. Breathes out, lips pursed, and Wilbur imagines smoke whisping out of it, imagines Quackity doing the same, thinks back to all those times he did the same. “Would you… like a smoke?”
Quackity looks at the rock again. Back at him. “I shouldn’t,” he says, mouth pursing around the words, smoothing down his jacket and stuffing the items back into his pockets. Smoothing them down again and breathing again, he looks at his pockets, at the rock, indirectly, again, and looks back at Wilbur.
“That’s fine,” Wilbur says, suffocating in something much worse than nicotine. “You just looked like you might need one.” He glances at the Nether portal a few metres away, back at Quackity, to Quackity’s pockets, to the hand he slips out of his own, gripping a grimy, well-worn cigarette pack that Quackity’s eyes briefly snapped to, to Quackity, to the portal. Leans in, and says, quiet and conspiratory but also soft and cosy and kind as he can, “I was heading down for one myself, so it’s no bother if you want to join me.”
“Fffffffine,” he says, rocking back on his heels for a moment, lips pursed. He then sets off ahead of Wilbur, wringing his hands and hunching his shoulders. “I do really need a cig, anyway. Turns out being part of a rebellion’s pretty stressful.”
“Who’da thunk it,” Wilbur says agreeably, mouth quirking up into something that feels distantly like a smile but more obviously like adoration. He steps into the portal, easily tugged through and comfortably waiting on the other side. Quackity appears a second after, looking nauseous and even more in need of a smoke break.
He groans and mumbles something about portals and (spittingly) old people and (with a snarl) the youth of today, disjointed and expressive, eyes snapping to Wilbur’s smile. Gentle and gone as Quackity’s eyes pass over it, dispersed into his eyes and his shoulders and sweaty palms and his hands shuffling through his bag.
He hands Quackity the first cigarette, steps in close and brings his own up to his mouth. Stares at Quackity, curled-mouthed and wide-eyed and taking a late step back, cigarette-wielding hand held up in front of him. A sneer, almost, but Wilbur simply grips the cig in-between his teeth and brings Quackity’s hand up to his mouth, lighting a fire underneath the two cigarettes. Face warm and fitting and lovely, Quackity’s eyes trail after the fire, instinctively bringing himself back another pace and bringing the cig up to his own mouth.
Wilbur’s heartstrings jump up and down, tug his arteries open and closed, in time with the dancing fire, in time with Quackity’s eyes snapping back and forth. He steps back, leaning against the right pillar of the Nether portal as Quackity retreats to its left.
Wilbur takes a drag. Breathes, in, in, in, down, down, down, imagines it swirling around his insides and stoking his heart and sticking to his lungs, to his throat, coating the inside of him black and charred. Pictures his gut tearing at the strain, letting the wisps prod at his skeleton and wrapping around his spine and squeezing, imagines it short-circuiting the part of him that rages at everything he does these days. Imagines it being the death of him. Pulls out the cigarette, rests his back against the portal, purring as he breathes out. Imagines it lingering, hesitant and heavy-footed in its exit, coating the corners of his mouth black and charred, dissipating all that stuck to it as it leaves. All his worries and fears, plans and past, all the joy from watching Quackity and all the sadness from seeing him crush himself into small, hidden gaps, out of sight.
Rinse and repeat. Simple and steady. Again and again and again until he’s coughing and sputtering and thinking this is it and dropping back down to the coarse and unkind Earth, dirt climbing up his heels, an anchor, and taking another drag.
Wilbur is five drags in before he notices Quackity’s lingering stare, and the cigarette burning up in his hands, presumably untouched.
“You ever even had one?” Wilbur asks, smiling toothily, noxiously. Quackity scowls, a cute little pout Wilbur almost laughs at, but instead he leaves it to bubble up and coat his eyes, ensnare his grin, shave off the sharp edges.
“‘Course I have,” he responds, angry and funny and so, so gruff, tapping the cig against the humid air, “Just not in the Nether, or stood by someone like you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Wilbur says, letting the sting spill out, eyes half-closed to smile properly, all knife-sharp edges and sting and fumes, but also to watch Quackity glaring, utterly miffed. In spite, or maybe in apology, of this, he sits down with his boney ankles crossed over one another and tugs on Quackity’s sleeve until he hits the floor, legs splayed in front of him and eyes open and smokey with confusion. Wilbur, horror of horrors, winks at him, and, even worse, doesn’t entirely regret it. Noxious, purring, spitting out the fumes and the joy and the sadness, untethered, “Just relax. That’s what you do this for, anyway, right?”
Quackity nods hesitantly and takes a drag. Lets it settle and watches it go. “You don’t?”
“It’s complicated,” Wilbur lies smoothly. More honestly, “It’s a habit, I guess. And it helps me think.” Not about anything useful, of course, but Quackity needn’t know that. “You only do it for the stress?”
“And because it’s a habit,” Quackity admits, shrinking visibly. “One I almost managed to kick, but… Schlatt’s not relaxing to work under. And not relaxing to work against, either, it seems.”
“That why you’re here? With us?”
Quackity takes a drag, stubbornly looking forward, and Wilbur sinks back. They can’t trust each other, after all. Why would Quackity tell him that freely?
Wilbur looks at Quackity and feels a fire in his gut, spitting and festering, burning him from the inside-out. A familiar fire. One that bites him whenever he tries to pull it out, that leaves tendrils that scar and thrash and grow again.
It feels more like fireworks, this time. He can feel the explosive pain, concentrated and beautiful, already. And then Quackity opens his mouth, and Wilbur is reminded, with a violent, passionate burst of a lung or two, that he is not to be trusted.
Does that really matter? something worryingly loud says. It sounds like Tommy and Tubbo and Techno and— and Quackity. Prime, it sounds like Quackity.
Oh. Oh.
“Wilbur?” it says, high and confused. “Wilbur, are you even listening to me? WILBUR!”
Quackity kicks his thigh. The real Quackity, the one who doesn’t trust Wilbur at all, the one who cares about that kind of thing. Wilbur sets his jaw, and looks away, bringing the cig up to his lips, pursed. A knife’s edge.
“Of course he isn’t.” Yeah, Wilbur doesn’t respond. ‘Course he wouldn’t listen to Quackity, or anyone who sounds like him, or— “I was saying,” real Quackity says then, says now, says again, “that the weather’s nice. Isn’t it?” He’s gazing, intent and heat-flushed, at the cigarette he rolls between his fingers.
Wilbur takes his own out of his mouth, breathing out too quickly and coughing for it. As should’ve been expected. What is he, a rookie?
“Yeah,” he responds in-between curses. He takes a sobering breath. “Um, yeah… yes. It is.”
“I like it. Warm.”
“Mhm. That’s why I come here,” Wilbur says, banging on his chest and clearing his throat, gesturing to his cigarette. Quackity doesn’t trust you. Another breath that cuts up his mouth and lets something heart-born slip out in drip, drip, drips, held high as a shield. “Y’know, Manberg’s a coastal country. About two-thirds of its boundaries are marked by water. So it’s usually warm, but not this kind of warm. This is hot, but it’s also humid. Manberg is rainy and windy, at least, oh, half-a-dozen storms blow over from the sea north-east every summer. There were more than a dozen during the War for Independance.”
“So it was nice?” Quackity mumbles (barely mist, even as it lingers, wet and skin-stripping in Wilbur’s chest). Shakily, he brings the cigarette up to his face. He looks concentrated as he sips it, drinking it down quickly and sealing his lips tight. His brows scrunch tighter still, eyes trained on his hand. Finally, he sighs the remnants out, eyes closed, working his tongue to taste it. Wilbur doesn’t say anything; maybe he’s entranced, maybe he’s stifled in the strange vulnerability, maybe he doesn’t want to dick around and make a joke he’ll regret (ha, as if that’d stop him). Quackity cracks an eye open, taking another, shorter drag. “L’Manbergian weather?”
“It was mine,” Wilbur says. He expects it fierce. He tries to ignore how defeated he sounds. “Of course it was nice, Quackity.”
Wilbur thinks the silence after that might’ve bored him, if he were with anyone else. But the pain, constant and rhythmic, a th-thump, th-thump of explosions, unbalances him. Wilbur wants to say so many things, if only they weren’t shattering in his stomach, lodging themselves in there and growing stems that pierce comfort. Winding a thorny vine about his vocal chords.
He isn’t dying, and he feels like this was worse, because he’s sat at least two metres away from Quackity. All he wants is to burn up in his arms instead of suffocating two metres away, cigarette smoke painting his lungs ashy and his heart black and blue and his stomach blinding, cloudy white and the in-between of his organs crispy black and blistered red.
“Y’know, Wilbur,” Quackity hums, out of the blue, thumbing the end of his cigarette. “L’Manberg could’a been ours, by now.”
“Don’t remind me,” Wilbur grumbles.
“And it’d be cooler for it,” Quackity continues, heedless and smiling cheekily, a glint in his eyes like he knows where he’s taking Wilbur, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t know, surely, that it makes Wilbur want to strangle and kiss him all at once. And if he does, Wilbur would kiss him harder for it. Before Wilbur can lose himself, separated into jagged little millionths by another explosion, Quackity says, “Did you know Schlatt’s been cutting down trees?”
“The redwoods?” Wilbur questions. The topic of Schlatt darkens his tone and douses his thoughts. Typical.
“Yep,” Quackity laughs sardonically, popping the ‘p’, but the glint’s still there and Wilbur has long since learnt not to trust any spark (doesitmatterdoesitmatterdoesitmatterdoesitdoesitdoe—). Especially when it looks ready to grow like Quackity’s. “L’Manberg’s a lot warmer, and I’ve heard there’s been a few more storms than usual, too. Should’a listened to Niki and Jack when they told us about building shelters. But you know Schlatt.”
Wilbur doesn’t mention Tubbo, doesn’t mention how he and Tommy hollowed out the perfect spot under Tommy’s home, how Tubbo took notes of what worked and what didn’t and how the book is surely somewhere, still.
He also refrains from mentioning Fundy, how the rain got stuck in his fur and he’d be fluffy the next day, how he hated the humiliation of it and built his own shelter under L’Manberg, how Wilbur snuck in and slept there a few nights, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, how Fundy quietly accepted his presence and began stocking up on enough emergency food and supplies for four people, how he and Niki whispered negotiations for the bread, glancing away from Wilbur conspicuously. How Wilbur snuck in one night, after his exile, but could only stay for an hour for fear of how Fundy would react now, after all that had happened. How Wilbur would react.
Instead, the poet in him rolls the idea of Quackity being a storm around like it’s a tongue. It’s not explosions, it’s lightning — like a eureka. But then Quackity turns his bitter, bared-tooth, bared-soul look unto Wilbur, and — well, the things coiled around and within his stomach are definitely hot and bright and beautiful, dirty and colourful and scattered into dust-like bits, and they’re definitely breaking him.
Nothing like a lightning bolt. Silly him.
“Aren’t you engaged to the bastard?” Wilbur asks, unfocused, or rather focused elsewhere.
The facts are as follows: Quackity could’ve sat still and stayed in L’Manberg, stayed by Schlatt’s side, and maybe he would’ve been killed by Wilbur and the Ts, but he wouldn’t have known. Not like Wilbur does. He wouldn’t have felt the sands of time falling onto his shoulders, building up, sliding off, sticking to him. He wouldn’t have done anything wrong.
He wouldn’t have been the one pressing the button.
And Wilbur is happy for him, making the right choice. He’s happy to have… met him, in times like these, before shucking off the sand and breaking out of the hourglass. To have met him amongst times like these.
But the fact remains that Quackity made that choice, when, according to the grapevine, it meant leaving his fiancée. And the question becomes why and did he, really and does it matter.
Wilbur can’t tell if the ensuing sigh is his or Quackity’s. Moreover, he doesn’t know why he cares, or why his stomach knots, and then burns again, even more intense, walls closing in on the unmoving flame and hurting, plain and simple and delectable hurting, for it.
“Yeah,” Quackity says, voice taut, taking another drag. He must smell of smoke and misery and sweat. That’s one, or three, things they have in common. Wilbur hides a goofy grin around his cigarette. “I… I kinda miss him, too.”
“You miss Schlatt?” Wilbur asks, eyebrows raised. Noxious, billowing out, twisting and turning inside out — tripping up over how flimsy he feels, how visible, how people can step inside the fog and spin around and see every inch of him, blurred but there, something they can swat away. He builds something solid in his eyes and locks all the smoke in his lungs, placing a wall — not real, not literal, not enough — between him and the doesitmatterdoesitmatterdoesitreallyareyousureyousureyourenotcrazydoesit falling on his shoulders and slipping from his fingers and perusing his lungs. “Are we even talking about the same person?”
It matters, it matters, it’ll all mean something, it matters, it’s the button, the button matters, the button will fix all this (areyousureareyousureareyousureareyousureareyousureyourenotcrazy) sputters through him. (areyousureyouretalkingabouttherightpersonareyousureyoucanttrust) I’m sure, I’m sure, I’m sure, I’m not crazy, I’m not.
Quackity laughs bitterly. The string of words he’d just caught and watched dissipate in his hands — scattered into the wind, scattered in the sky — trips over itself, burning bright streaks as it wanders his fragile, ephemeral interior. Smoke against smoke.
He chokes out the fumes — real and literal and enough, for now — from another drag of his cigarette. Smiling ruefully, Quackity switches which hand carries his own cig, and uses his freed right hand to pat Wilbur overly hard on the knee, like he’s only doing it because Wilbur’s back isn’t free, is pressed up against the wall like Wilbur’s a cornered animal.
He doesn’t like thinking of it like that, doesn’t like thinking of the days when he was still learning how to be more animal than man, doesn’t like thinking of stumbling back away from a traitor and a button and scattered harbingers closing in on all sides; Wilbur’s festering a grudge for truth, lately.
“I know, right?” Quackity says, like an off-key violin, too high, too thin, but still scratchy and coarse and complimenting Wilbur’s own string-plucked, unoiled voice. Wilbur stares, plants a red stick at the base of the solid thing in his eyes and watches Quackity’s bared-soul, bared-teeth expression unfurl from the new opening. He’s a little too exposed and thin, himself, but he’s seeing Quackity, a sad little smile on his face and something molten in his eyes. “I mean, I still hate him. I always have, maybe. But he was—”Fiddling with his cigarette with one hand, the other still resting on Wilbur’s knee, he grins, pained and grimacing, and oh, everything hurts and Wilbur can’t decide where he stands on it“—He was mine, y’know? Of course it was nice. Of course I miss him.”
“Yeah,” something that sounds like Wilbur and occupies Wilbur says, filling in the space left behind as Wilbur snags onto the was and watches it crumble into sporadic dust. Something clicks, like a lever, and Wilbur’s joining it, chasing it, heart thumping a was mine, was mine, was mine, pattern into his crispy, torn-up ribcage. “What was he like?”
Quackity raises an eyebrow. Wilbur flushes, but returns the gesture, tossing Quackity another cigarette — the one he was messing with has gone out by now, as has Wilbur’s. It lands between Quackity’s legs. He takes a lighter out of his left back pocket, and retrieves the cigarette with his right, leaving Wilbur’s knee without- well, with a bare Quackity’s-hand-shaped space right on the cap, maybe a pinky-shaped space on the lowest part of his thigh. Everything hurts, and Wilbur despises it.
“Well, he was… drunken,” Quackity started, sputtering, a firecracker setting off and then shrinking back into itself, mouthing the end of his cig.
Wilbur stares, noticing the curve of Quackity’s spine, not pressed up against the obsidian. He abruptly remembers that Quackity does not know war. He does not know what it’s like to break one’s hands into the shape of claws, to live as an animal, maimed but still kicking and biting and scratching. He does not think to press his back against a wall. Wilbur thinks it impossible and beautiful. He shuffles, small of his back flush to the portal, but hunches forward to rest his elbow on his Quackity’s-hand-shaped knee, resting his chin on his palm. He bounces his cigarette in his other hand. The kind of way a man would sit. Relaxed (which Wilbur doesn’t laugh at the thought of, just keeps his face blank, and he thinks he deserves an award for it).
“He was a little mean,” Quackity continues, and this time Wilbur does laugh, a little gasping snort that Quackity’s eyes widen at. But then Quackity’s smiling, eyes molten, and huffing, still smiling. Grinning, even. “Yeah, okay, a lot mean. Cruel and rude and selfish, but…”
Quackity’s eyes, molten, melt and melt and melt until they go misty, fragile and lingering; they’re made up by stubborn, fluid shadows and whispers, all around him, in his lungs, rushing by his ears, passing by his back. Wilbur’s heart jumps, a hair’s breadth from another explosion (implosion, ka-boom, whatever). It doesn’t really matter because Quackity looks like that and this time his lungs collapse, leaving him to fumble his cigarette alight and then breathe in desperately.
“It was, like, a chase. He’d always come back and apologise, and he’d always cave to my demands when he wasn’t being cruel and rude and selfish.” Quackity side-eyes Wilbur, eyes still misty and penetrable, something Wilbur could slice through with a snide comment, and he thinks that’s what Quackity’s staring at him for. “And sometimes when he was, too. It felt like… a game. A push-and-pull, a give-and-take. Sometimes I’d win, sometimes he would. And it was fun, ‘cause it was a game. Cheap, I guess. But that was us.”
A game. Tubbo and Tommy had described the War of Independance like that, one time. A tug of war, a little back-and-forth, push-and-pull, mostly hopeless pulling, but still. Maybe Quackity’s not an animal, but maybe he’s not quite man anymore, either.
“And it was yours,” Wilbur says, breathing through the smoke and the falling trachea and the inside-out feeling of his stomach. He’s Quackity, and you’re Wilbur, and maybe that’s not so different. A spark held up to his gut.
“Guess I’m just a cheapskate,” Quackity jokes, elbowing thin air. His smile, toothy and lopsided, freezes, then fades. His brow furrows and he scoots away from Wilbur, taking a drag, short and sweet, eyes freezing and freezing and freezing past molten.
does it even matter? Wilbur wants to ask. you hating me. you being his fiancee. why would this matter? even if you’re on his side, why? why do i have to trust you?
“What about you?” Quackity ventures, solid and insurmountable. Something Wilbur kind of doesn’t want to place a red stick at the base of. “What was up with you and Schlatt?”
“Nothing much,” Wilbur responds breezily, pressing his back to the obsidian and hiding his stiffness in carefully taking up space, pointed elbows and head leaned back, sticking one leg out. Doesn’t look at the portal, letting his head loll and tracing the outlines of everything in his vision, of how dangerous they probably are. Doesn’t think about how he’s unarmed and he doesn’t know about Quackity and, in the Nether, nobody can hear you scream. Tries to will his stomach into flip-flopping instead of twisting into a pea-sized crease, pushing the acid up, “He’s big with Chat FM, which is how we spread news of our election. We thought that— that he’d help us.”
He doesn’t mention the first meeting with Schlatt, because that would be about Tommy, and, like it or not, care about it or not, he can’t trust Quackity. Tommy doesn’t seem to care about that (whydoyoucareyoushouldntitdoesntmatterwhydoesitmatterareyousureyourenotcrazy). But he can’t. He can’t trust Quackity with the people he’s meant to be protecting. With the things he’s meant to be keeping locked-up and well-polished, untouched. Unexploded, if all goes well.
“Schlatt doesn’t really help anyone except— well, not even himself, really.”
“I guessed that.” A pause, trickling down his back, into his palms, through the nooks between his fingers. “Why’d you snap?”
Quackity quirks up the whole left side of his face, puffing out rings of smoke onto Wilbur, who waits unflinchingly. A game? “I’m not a twig, Soot, I can’t snap.”
“Really?” he says, scratched and rough, breathing in smoke briefing and puffing it onto Quackity’s face, still lent against the obsidian. “What made you leave Schlatt, is what I meant.”
Something solid, unwrinkling Quackity’s face and leaving itself there, immobile and sunken into his skin. “A lot of reasons,” he settles on, angling himself away and breathing in, slow and deep and desperate.
“What made you snap, though?”
“Why do you care, Soot?” Quackity settles on again, ragged.
Silence, Wilbur settles on, taking a drag. Everything goes silent. Wilbur kind of wants to die because Quackity’s angry at him but also just like him and a couple other reasons, too. Who won?
Silence, silence, silence. It stretches out from a wall to a river to lingering rings of smoke. Silence, silence, silence, again and again, looping ‘round and ‘round into an ouroboros.
“He took down the white house,” Quackity says, almost conversationally, like they’re back to talking about the weather. Like they’ve moved on. But no one’s won, and Quackity never mentioned a draw. He laughs bitterly, molten, “Funny, isn’t it? I marched into L’Manberg because I was angry at the President back then, and I marched out of there because I was angry at the President now.”
“Oh,” Wilbur says, crackly. His stomach hurts because that’s Quackity’s voice, all fucked up like mine but also that bastard took down the fucking white house and also was angry.
“Yeah, oh,” Quackity scoffs, audibly rolling his eyes, Wilbur’s stomach rolling around the firecracker like burning is something to be mildly interested in, and not something to be completely enamoured with.
Paper crackles, and Wilbur looks to see Quackity twisting his cigarette with his left hand again. Wilbur leans over and rests his hand, sinking in softly, on Quackity’s knee. Quackity’s flushed raw-meat pink, skin turned inside out and showing all his insides. He shuffles a bit to the left, shaking Wilbur off. Wilbur wants to imagine that maybe he’s sick and cares about him and doesn’t want him catching anything but doesn’t want to be impolite (ha), but, realistically, it’s hot and sticky and Quackity doesn’t trust him, and, my, doesn’t that just stick in all the wrong ways, all the wrong places, all the wrong times, too?
Quackity’s trousers are expensive, he observes. Soft and comfortable, loose but professional.
“He said some shit to me,” Quackity admits, small and broken, dissipated and all around. Eyes snapping to Wilbur. He sneers, “Some fuckin’— some real shit. I told him I’d leave, I told him, and he just continued, so I— I showed him I wasn’t bluffing. Plus, y’know— he destroyed the whitehouse.”
Wilbur knows Quackity knows where he and Tommy and Techno sleep, and he kind of wants to ask will you regret this later, and align with him? will he say sorry and rebuild it bigger and better and will you move in and realise, geez that pogtopia was such a dump compared to this place and i wish i’d never left? will you? But Wilbur doesn’t want to sound crazy, because he’s not, and this doesn’t matter anyway. Instead, he says, “How could he do something like that to someone like you?”
Quackity shrugs and turns his head into it fractionally. He tsks, taking a short drag, then pauses, stiff and crumpled. “Wait,” he says, smiling impossibly wide, making Wilbur’s lungs impossibly hot until they reach a boiling point and pop. “Someone like me? Aw, chucks, Wilbur, you warming up to me already?”
His insides are on the outside and his outside is still out drying, leaving his dusty little heart speckled all over with blisters and bruises, and if Quackity just looked around, looked at it all a bit different, he’d see. Wilbur chases that hope, scattering the dust.
“What can I say, you’re a charmer,” Wilbur says, grinning, because they’ve done this. If Quackity just looks around and sees everything’s different, then… Then he’ll see. Wilbur feels giddy.
Quackity’s eyes light up, fiery and open and burrowing into his lungs, consuming him. Wilbur’s all around him as he leans in minutely. A spark in his eyes, smile sharpened. “Would you say I’m also intensely intelligent?”
“Why, of course,” Wilbur agrees, bobbing his head and laughing. He swallows it down so he can smoke. The hope melts a little, pours itself into his ears and his veins, settling into the system. He peels himself away from the portal and shifts towards Quackity, putting his weight on his left hand, leaning ever-further towards Quackity, taking a drag and then smacking his lips obnoxiously as he removes his cigarette. “And debilitatingly… debonair.”
“And hot as hell, right?” Quackity says, leaning in quickly and bumping their noses. He situates himself properly into an exaggerated pin-up pose, a little closer to Wilbur than before. He grins, razor-like.
“Positively ravishing, darling,” Wilbur drawls, pushing his hand further, dropping his weight. Eyes half-lidded and not looking at the portal, because Quackity’s here and talking to him and no one is going to pop up behind him. You don’t know that, he ignores (doesitmatteritsinevitabledoesitevenreallymatter). Hunching his shoulders and lifting his head, raking his eyes along Quackity, “And eloquent, too. Tactful.” Breathing in fumes.
“Truthful,” Quackity shoots back, rolling onto his stomach, inching closer. He looks lazy. Or, more politely, relaxed. He douses his cigarette and tosses it away, holding his hand out for Wilbur’s and doing the same.
“First and foremost,” he replies, nodding again, flopping to lay down on his side and exhaling in Quackity’s face.
“I’ve got nothing to hide,” Quackity says, voice dropping onto Wilbur’s back in the form of heaps of sand, solid but not feeling like it, present but all too far gone, present but not far from gone. His voice sounds like sand, coarse and rough, and it spills out like fumes, a sandstorm, from under Wilbur’s kicking heel or under Quackity’s eyes — his sparky, untrustworthy eyes.
“Nor do I,” Wilbur says, measured, precisely only a few grams of sand because he was expecting it. He feels solid. Solid, as he leans his cheek into his knuckle, hand curled under his head. Molten, against Quackity’s searching, glinting, untrustworthy gaze. A solid against smoke, toppling under smoke, towering above a red stick or perhaps a bleeding heart and then crumbled amongst. “And you, practically Mister Observant, would realise anyway.”
And Quackity’s eyes are really sparky now, not glinty. Grin razor-sharp as it used to be before, but not solid. Not a wall (he tore it down, after all). He hums, focused on Wilbur entirely. He pulls himself up with his crossed arms to be closer to Wilbur, faces inches apart. “I’d intimidate it out of you, wouldn’t I?”
He hums. A knife’s edge. “Or seduce it out of me.”
Quackity blows on the bridge of Wilbur’s nose, onto his half-lidded eyes, smiling around it.
”Or seduce it out of you.” Low, scratchy, tinted with a smoker’s voice, awkward. Like that old, familiar tone was only newly stitched into Quackity’s voice. Like it’s not a habit.
Wilbur almost pulls away to think, to roll over what this means, to adjust to this new.
An explosion. A shard’s edge, maybe, specifically a shard-of-rib-bone’s edge.
“Yeah,” Wilbur murmurs, breathless. Staring at Quackity’s eyes, sparky, pieces of flint grinding against steel. Molten, still.
Maybe not a spark or a glint. Maybe a dabble of sunlight on murky water’s surface. A reflection.
Quackity shuffles closer again, nose against nose, solid against solid. Real against real. His wheezy breaths sound scratchy, too. “Or maybe just seduce you.”
“Creating a false sense of security is most of the point of seduction,” Wilbur points out, smiling smiling smiling. Swimming in it and looking around, through the fog, and sinking into it. Everything’s the same.
“I promise I won’t seduce you, Wilbur,” Quackity tells him, index and middle finger overlapping under his crossed arms, which he rests his head on, smile molten. Thin yellow marks near their tips, overlapping circles around their knuckles. Dirt under their shortened fingernails, splattered all over them. Probably roughened, chalkish.
His eyes are still molten, vaporous, hardened. Still with that little reflection, cloud, smudge in the corner. Match-shaped lines spiralling out of the pupil, a window to the soul, bared already, skin inside-out and burning. Thin hairs curved around the edges, some growing from higher places than others — a particular one a good millimetre higher than the others above his left eye. Uneven. Humans have 90 to 150 lashes per eye, 180 to 300 lashes in total, and Wilbur jerks his hand from under his cheek to the space between him and Quackity, unfurling before he flattens it on the Netherrack — he guesses Quackity has… somewhere in between the two figures, and more on his left lids than his right. He guesses Quackity’s would be nipping, not soft. But Wilbur may very well be totally wrong.
It doesn’t really matter. Quackity’s smiling. His lips are chapped, fixed into a lazy grin, wrapped around his sharp teeth.
Maybe this is a staring contest. Maybe Quackity’s lashes are soft. A game?
He imprints the image of Quackity, laying there peaceful and surveying, not quite man, not quite animal, into his mind. Closes his eyes and revels. So, so close. To Quackity, and maybe to something else, too.
A knife’s edge. The second before the spark reaches the end of the fuse.
Wilbur lets the second roll down his back, and then leans in.
It’s awkward, angled not quite and placed just-too. Wilbur hefts himself up, head tilted and barely touching Quackity, who pulls himself along. He ends up with his legs splayed out ahead of him, tangling together, while he twists his upper body to his right. Wilbur crosses his legs, huddled closely to his body, and leans forward.
Still clunky. Hesitant and only just hovering, chapped lips against chapped lips, smoke against smoke, solid against solid. It’s not enough. It doesn’t set the gunpowder ablaze, just crackles above it, just stands out of reach.
Under layers of skin and flesh and bone, there is Quackity; Wilbur presses his lips to his, harder, desperate to dig up the dirt and roots and little rocks and find Quackity, part-animal, laughing and smiling and finally free, finally his L’Manberg, his unfinished symphony humming in his ears and under his skin. Or hissing and spitting and finally free, finally his Pogtopia, his unburnt fuse crackling in his ears and under his skin. He just wants Quackity, maybe. Just wants to hold his hand and hug him close and think This is loving, and this is loved. Just wants to look into Quackity’s eyes and know his own eyes are being stared at, too, just as intensely, to know that they’re both seeing the same things.
Wilbur pulls away, breathing in the smoke and rock, filling his lungs and feeling it swirl. Quackity’s eyes, the bit of Quackity that he holds to his chest and doesn’t have to claw anything up to find, snaps to his mouth, and Wilbur wonders idly what he sees — a heart, choked up and bloody, or just a tongue and teeth, unsnapping. He likes Quackity looking at him. Wants him to do it more, wants to see that flash of familiarity in his eyes, wants Quackity’s eyes to snap to him and linger, gliding across his skin and pricking his elbows and knees and ribs and keeping him addicted. Wants Quackity to kiss him again. Just one last time.
Quackity slides his hands up Wilbur’s arms and tangles them in the hairs at his nape, crosses them behind his neck and locks them there (a bursting hint of panic slips through is veins, where do i put my hands, where do i put my hands, and he settles on something like a hug, one arm on Quackity’s back, hand resting on his flank, arm straight, and the other arm on Quackity’s back, hand resting on his shoulder, arm diagonal). Quackity smiles, sharp and sparking. Breathing, breathing, breathing, he is the one to kiss Wilbur.
It’s open-mouthed from the start, sloppy and harsh instead of soft and clunky, something primal and warm. Constantly moving, skin gliding against skin and teeth sinking into lips. Consumption, again and again and again, soft by that metric, slow and savouring and Wilbur smiles around Quackity’s own. They taste like grime and smoke and fire and sleep deprivation. Like something messy and something Wilbur never wants to let go of.
They pull back, drowning and suffering from hot water shock, maybe.
Quackity laughs, shaking against Wilbur, and oh, he can feel the rumbles under his skin, scratching occasionally at a tendon. Wilbur laughs too, resting his forehead against Quackity’s. Soft and tightened in a coarse sort of way, Quackity says, tongue flicking over his teeth, “Feeling seduced, Mister—” Then he cuts himself off, eyes wide and hands motionless on Wilbur’s hair. Stilted, and eyes melted in the worst way, he finishes, “Soot.”
Wilbur pulls a face, sure Quackity can feel the movement, can translate it. “Thought you promised you wouldn’t seduce me?”
“I lied,” Quackity says, sinking back into joy, a flicker of his eyes the only sign he’d ever pulled himself out of it.
Wilbur revels in the aftermath of another implosion of his lungs, letting the smoke and debris billow out in the form of laughter. Revels in the sick burst of hate in his heart, for Quackity and his stupid mouth and everything that comes out of it and the way Quackity won because of him, what a useless piece of shit, how could he do that to him? He lets it hover in his lungs, stick to the edges, and breathes it out. More importantly, Quackity is in his arms, right now.
And he hopes this is how he dies, laughing and bleeding into Quackity’s mouth, pain bursting from his back, his own teeth sinking into his cheek, killing himself. Hopes Quackity’s tongue pokes and prods and swirls around the blood. Hopes Quackity’s kisses and smiles and breaths are noxious, hopes he never really took the cigarette out of his mouth. Hopes it’s glamorous and larger-than-life and like fireworks, finally. A sick part of him wants it seared into the backs of Quackity’s eyelids, wants him to either skip his funeral entirely or spend it all choked-up, trussed-up in nightmares. Wants Quackity to carry it forever, this feeling of dying, bright and inevitable, intended, foregone, made for this, in the crevices between his ribs.
He kisses him again. It’s not glamorous. It’s harsh, and sloppy, and slow and savouring, and Quackity loosens his grip on his hair, heels sinking into the Earth, ripping through his still-beating heart, and Wilbur leans forward again. It’s push-and-pull, smoke sliding against smoke, solids melting and melding into one another.
His body rips itself apart and assembles itself back together, a poor imitation, and Wilbur pulls away, to take a fume-filled breath.
“Ah, shit,” Quackity mumbles. Wilbur can’t look away from his mouth, thin and chapped and moving, lips moving so close to each other Wilbur thinks he could feel all the words, if only they were kissing. “Shit, um. Listen, Wil, I really should go back to Manberg, Schlatt’s probably — not missing me, ha, but he’s probably noticed I’m gone and, when I get back, he— I don’t know what he’s gonna do, Wil, but, point is, I really, really should go.”
And you really, really shouldn’t have kissed me, Wilbur wants to say, mouth lilting up around the words (wants to add And I really shouldn’t have liked it, to add And you will be the death of me, but he bats those away quicker than he can the rest), And yet here we are.
Because Quackity’s engaged, still, still, stupidly engaged, and Wilbur wants to scream and wants the fireworks to take him out this time, scar the left side of his face, and his right. He wants to end up worse than Tubbo and Prime knows Tubbo’s struggling. He’s been sleeping in the cave more often, and, speaking of sleeping, Wilbur wants to start and never stop.
Wilbur moves the hand from Quackity’s shoulder, rests it on Quackity’s knee. Quackity moves both his hands from Wilbur’s nape, drops them by his own sides lamely. Wilbur takes his chance, grabbing onto Quackity’s calloused and roughened and beautiful hands, interweaving their fingers. Pressing his lips, letting them drag, to the corner of Quackity’s mouth.
“Do you love him? Schlatt, that is,” Wilbur asks, kiss-drunk, before reality snaps into him with Quackity’s eyes. “Sorry,” he adds, sounding a little less repentant than he meant to. Then, without trying to add anything this time, simply smoke-roughened, “That was shitty. Unfair. Et cetera.”
“Shouldn’t expect any different, should I?” says Quackity, bitter, eyes fluttering down to their hands and ripping his away, dropping them back down to his sides and turning his torso to face away from Wilbur. Then, after a pause, “Sorry. That’s fucked.”
“You shouldn’t,” Wilbur responds, imagining a glint like Quackity’s in his eyes, knowing he’s being shitty, but, well. Quackity shouldn’t expect any different. “Now, to even things out, how about an answer to my question?”
Quackity groans, wrestling Wilbur’s weight off him and standing. Wilbur follows. He towers over Quackity, shrinks in the nocturnal light of the portal, and ends up an average-sized wall in between them.
“You’re in my way.” That’s another way of putting it.
“Not an answer.”
Quackity pouts. Wilbur tries not to stare at it, and fails. Another groan, sharp and coarse. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I do. I did, and I will, in the worst fucking way. I do.” A sour, bitter, cruel laugh around the words, “That’s what I’ll say when — or if — we get married.” Harder, molten but only a tad, “And this wasn’t anything, Wilbur. It can’t hold a candle to Schlatt. It didn’t, it doesn’t, and it won’t. Ever.”
Wilbur doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t startle, doesn’t scream, doesn’t rage, doesn’t ask why, then? Just, “Can I give you a kiss goodbye?”
“If we’re quick,” Quackity says, nodding, stepping into Wilbur’s arms and resting his hands into the nooks of his elbows.
It is short, Quackity pushing in hard suddenly and then slowly inching away. Wilbur chases the feeling and, too, chases Quackity at first, but soon settles for flicking his tongue over his fangs, then front teeth, then the inside of his lips. He opens his eyes to find Quackity never closed them, not physically. But his eyes are solid and his smile isn’t sharp and this is worse than anything Schlatt himself could ever do. Let him tear up L’Manberg and threaten the fragile peace with the Dream Essempy — the only kind legacy he’d been allowed.
Wilbur just — Wilbur’s heart pangs, aching, a subtle and unfair and self-inflicted tension in his shoulders, his own thoughts acting both as the knife that cuts neatly down his back and the wings that grow from them — wants to keep Quackity. But he can’t (that, Wilbur’s chipping-old, boiled heart concurs, is true).
Quackity steps back, pats Wilbur on the shoulder on his way past, and says, “Don’t mind the vomit you might find when you go back through.” Wilbur musters a smile, even one with a slither of teeth.
The sinew that holds Wilbur together unties itself, each bit swapping places with another, leaving him lopsided, stuck in the feeling of hollowness from between his bones. Of wrongness. Of jealousy and yearning and panic. Of being inanimate.
Of being destined to fracture, or grow and change into something so different it feels like a betrayal. Or rot. He holds the feeling like hope in its chest, and closes his mouth, with his hands over his ears, when it inevitably catches light, praying it scatters across his body and sticks there like a promise, or a noose, or a button sealed to a stone wall.
Quackity comes back the next day. They lean against different faces of the same pillar, and talk about something else. Quackity leaves, citing Schlatt, and returns the day after. Again and again and again, walking along a fuse fashioned into a tightrope.