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When you're about to torture somebody, the first and most important thing you’ve got to consider is how you’re going to break them.
Think of it like glass, or like ice. If you go in with a sledgehammer, you get this pulverized mess in the middle, and that’s no good to anybody. Likely as not you’ll bury shards in your own hands as you try to get at what’s underneath. But a good clean break - as with a pickaxe - that’ll get you exactly where you need to be, no mess no fuss, and with much less effort. So what's your pick? What can you leverage to strike at the core of them - fear? Anger? Loathing? Will unexpected kindness break them where violence would not? Will deprivation? Should you bring in a third party - are you truly confident that you can control for that extra variable? The options are manifold and the doing, once begun, is not so easy to undo. Like breaking glass, it's best to get it right with your first attempt.
That was, perhaps, where Quackity had failed in his torture of Dream. Try as he might, he’d never truly understood the man - never picked the lock, so to speak, only tried to force it. Perhaps, even with his enemy completely at his mercy, he’d still fallen victim to his own overconfidence. Or perhaps he wasn’t suited to be a torturer in the way that Dream had been; Quackity was always, after all, struggling to catch up to the naturally gifted.
It had been approximately three hours since Quackity had discovered Wilbur Soot bleeding out on a dirty stone floor in Paradise. It had been two since Quackity returned, flimsily patched-up Wilbur Soot in tow, and sat him down on the couch in his office to go find - anything. Anything at all that might help. It had been an hour and forty-five minutes since Quackity returned and nearly succumbed to a panic attack at seeing Wilbur, limp and nonresponsive where he remained on said couch. It had been an hour and - some fucking time, he didn’t know, since he’d verified the man was still alive and unconscious and proceeded with his meltdown, but quietly and on the other side of the room.
And then he’d poured himself a drink.
In Quackity’s darker moments, he quite agreed with Wilbur’s previous assessment of him, what seemed like ages ago. He was a quintessential vice president - an ordinary man set against a world of extraordinary people. Ghosts and gods and demons, yes, but even just the humanly gifted. He thought of Schlatt’s charisma, Technoblade’s strength, Dream’s cunning - Philza’s dedication, Tommy’s bravery, Wilbur’s…
Well. Wilbur.
And he thought that, perhaps, with all the supernatural shit flying around, those humble human abilities tended to get undersold. The ability to summon lightning was all well and good, but the ability to read people, to get at their core with just a glancing assessment - that was magic too, wasn’t it? These people, they excelled. Everywhere Quackity looked, he was surrounded by people who had been gifted at birth, who turned those gifts as weapons against each other, against even themselves.
And Quackty was still, amidst and in the wake of it all, just an ordinary man trying to catch up.
The sun had long set. Through the window, the lights of the plaza burned bright - he prided himself on mob-proofing the place. There were no creeper holes here. There was no movement at all. His empire stretched before him gleaming and perfect, nothing like that rotting little shack, nothing like Wilbur’s so called “Paradise” -
God, he still couldn’t even skirt around the thought of Paradise without wanting to throw up. He was so desperately avoiding thinking about it. He’d scrubbed the blood off his hands, but couldn’t quite get the scent of it out of his nose. It remained in the cracks of his cuticles, in a stubborn stripe beneath his nails. It stained the cuffs of his white sleeves, where it had soaked in as he'd pulled the sword from Wilbur's chest, and the tops of his thighs, where he'd rested his one-time enemy.
He took a pull of whiskey, the best stuff he had, and tasted nothing but metal and acid.
He took another, and another.
See, he was at least decent at planning. He loved plans. He loved setting his pieces up, the satisfaction of them all falling into place. He still thought fondly of the day the Butcher Army had come to fruition, that perfect moment before it all went wrong - the feeling of holding Technoblade in the palm of his hand, forcing a man like that to bend. It was a moment that had rendered moot the humiliation and resentment that had come before it - glorious, halcyon, his crowning achievement. Quackity had been so proud. That sentiment, of course, had made the subsequent failure, the loss of his eye, sting all the more.
But still - he'd learned from his mistakes.
So despite how many times his plans failed, he held firm in his belief that one day he would make the perfect plan, and it would succeed, and in doing so he would thwart his own fallibility. He would successfully plan around the liability of his own being. That day had yet to come, of course, and he’d lost everything in the process, but someday -
He was rapidly reaching the conclusion that he didn’t know Wilbur Soot at all.
One one hand, this was patently ridiculous - he’d known the man for years. On the other hand, it was the only possible - the only logical explanation - for why Wilbur was currently tiptoeing backwards from the brink of death whilst passed out on Quackity’s couch.
It was a situation completely outside his control. He had no answer for it, no framework to fall back on. Quackity could have never planned to be dealing with something like this, because the Wilbur he’d so often planned around would never do something like this, which meant that Quackity didn’t know Wilbur despite everything they’d gone through, which meant - well, what did it mean?
What did it mean for him, that this supposed rival of his, the first person to get any emotion out of him since Slime, was in truth a stranger? What did he have left if he didn’t even have Wilbur fucking Soot? What was Wilbur Soot to him, then and now? What was this feeling, like his heart was being ripped out of his chest, like he wanted to tear it out his damn self - why did he save Wilbur? Why did he care ?
His glass was empty. His breathing was ragged, catching on the inhale and painful on the exhale. His hands shook. He poured himself more whiskey, and poured until the glass was full, until it dripped over the sides and cooled his hands and splattered onto the desk, onto his muddy pants, onto the stainless, spotless carpet beneath.
It had been four hours and four minutes since Quackity had brought Wilbur Soot back to Las Nevadas. In that time, Quackity had drained the bottle of whiskey, and not moved from where he leaned against his desk to get more. He hadn’t moved to get water, either, or check Wilbur’s wound, or fucking get Foolish, or anything remotely useful. Once the whiskey had run out, he hadn’t done anything at all, just looked outside at his neat, elegant grid of lights.
And so it was at four hours and five minutes, when Wilbur announced his consciousness with a pained grunt, that Quackity turned to him - for once, with no plan at all.