Work Text:
Karl feels like a stranger in Kinoko Kingdom. The vibrant colors, from the red roofs to the pink cherry trees, hurt to look at. He’s grown so used to seeing blank white-on-white that the vibrancy of it muddles into a dizzying mess.
He touches the ground for good measure. It’s soil, grainy between his fingertips. It’s real.
He’d forgotten how much the world smelled. The Inbetween was pristine to the point of being sterile, but back in Kinoko Kingdom? There’s perfume, some fresh, some musky, from flowers in various stages of bloom and decay. A hint of something foul coming from the horse stables. Someone bakes in a cottage nearby, ripening the air with the scent of fresh bread.
Karl wants to curl in a ball and shut his eyes until it all goes away.
Better yet, he wants to feel grounded in the arms of his fiancés.
He hides the wince on his face and shakes his head. The new warmth of the sun tells him he’s been away for months. He bites his lip—how is he going to explain himself? He wants to feel happy, share in the revelry that he’d finally conquered his memory problems and bid farewell to the Overseer. But if he knows his fiancés, then he knows the first thing they’ll demand of him is a warm hug. It’s their simple form of love, something unconditional and forgiving.
He skips his shared house with George and makes a beeline for Sapnap (hopefully Quackity had found the time to move in with him while he was away… he can’t quite recall if Quackity had joined Kinoko yet; the days immediately before his departure are still a haze).
Sapnap’s home is empty and covered in dust. That… can’t be right. Karl must be misremembering. Maybe he moved in with George too, in Karl’s absence.
He finds someone in the heart of Kinoko, near the pond. She tends to one of the garden beds, nails and palms darkened by dirt. With sleek black hair and a pair of snow-colored cat’s ears, Karl thinks he recognizes her and calls her name.
Tina perks up when she hears him, ears twitching. “Karl!”
“Tina, when did you here?” he asks. She’s an old friend, from before his days on the Dream SMP, but he’s not confident that he can recall their past correctly. He remembers inviting her to Kinoko by letter when it needed more citizens to thrive. He can hardly believe that she actually came.
“Yes? Karl, you look pale,” she says, ears twitching.
“Do you know where Sapnap and Quackity are?”
Suddenly she looks down at her earth-stained hands. “Oh… why don’t we take a walk together? We need to catch up.”
He hesitates, wanting a straight answer, but… Kinoko looks unfamiliar to what he remembers. More lived in. He’d like to hear how Tina’s settled, too.
They stroll side by side, around the lake. Tina walks with a purpose that tells Karl she knows where she wants to go, and that he should follow.
“Do you like it here?” he asks.
“It’s beautiful, but it’s a bit lonely. I try to do my part to maintain it though. I even got myself a pet,” she says with a wry smile. “He visits sometimes.”
Karl nods along as if that made sense. “How’s George?”
“He sleeps a lot. Sometimes we hang out, but he’s been more distant lately. I can’t really blame him,” she says. Her shoulders slump. “Sorry, you’ll see.”
A pit forms in Karl’s stomach, and he wants to snap at her for being so cryptic. The longer he’s unaware of his fiancés’ whereabouts, the antsier he grows. Why isn’t it simple? He’s already survived the hard part, the remembering.
Their love is supposed to be simple.
Tina stops in front of a grave. “George is the one who found him.”
It has to be a prank.
He looks to Tina, waiting for her to crack a smile and rib him for being so gullible, but her expression is grim and set.
“I try to keep it in good condition. I saw he had those flowers in his home, so I assumed he liked them,” she says.
It’s decorated with marigolds and forget-me-nots. Yellow and violet, complimentary colors. Sapnap never had much of an eye for that kind of stuff, but they do look lovely together.
“It looks nice. You did a good job.” Karl just stares numbly. “Thank you.”
Sapnap’s name is etched in it, along with the years of his birth and supposed death.
“How did it happen?”
“We don’t know. He wasn’t killed or anything like that, and George said that he seemed fine the last time they’d seen each other. It just happened.”
“It’s real?”
“I wish it wasn’t.”
Karl inhales.
“Should I stay?” Tina asks.
“I think I need to be alone for a bit,” Karl mumbles.
She nods and leaves him be.
Karl sits at the foot of the grave, eye-level with the etchings that declare his fiancé damned to the dirt. He hugs his knees close to his chest.
Part of him still doesn’t believe it, without a body to witness. His mind can’t comprehend what his reality’s supposed to look like, in this strange, old-but-new world he’s been thrust into without Sapnap by his side.
It’s like trying to piece together his reflection in a shattered mirror. His sense of self is a rag, ripped to shreds and painstakingly stitched back together over the course of months of instruction from the Overseer. If an old coat’s been patched up so many times that there’s not a scrap of original fabric left, is it still the same being?
He doesn’t know what he is without them. They’re at the core of every good memory that he can still revisit.
He needs Quackity. Quackity will know the truth.
Karl can’t be bothered to seek her out in person again, so he uses his communicator to ask Tina where his fiancé is.
He’s surprised that she actually has a pair of coordinates to give him. He rises and goes to the stables to find a mount that’ll take him to a place called ‘Las Nevadas’.
Las Nevadas is wrong.
It’s a facade. All glitz and glamour, with none of the warmth of a proper home. It’s built like it was designed to impress the world’s worst kind of person.
Karl grimaces at it and wonders how the hell he’s supposed to find his fiancé in this metal jungle.
He asks around aimlessly and gets turned in all kinds of directions by cold, uncaring strangers. The more time he spends here, the more he’s soured to it. He’s going to whisk Quackity away from this hell and they’ll figure out how survive this together, as they should’ve been from the start.
Eventually he finds himself near a glistening fountain at the heart of the country.
And there’s Quackity, his fiancé, looking radiant as ever, holding the hand of another man. An odd-looking slime hybrid, who raises their joined hands to his lips and kisses Quackity on the knuckles.
It’s tender, and it’s certainly not platonic.
And Karl feels like there’s something lodged in his throat.
Quackity catches him out of the corner of his eye and startles, then regains his composure as quickly as he’d lost it.
“Charlie, can you give us a minute?”
The slime hybrid frowns, seeming concerned as he looks at Karl. There’s a knowing glint in his eyes that’s unsettling. But he nods and walks off anyways, not without giving Quackity a small squeeze on the hand that makes Karl’s stomach churn again.
Hands clasped behind his back, Quackity approaches Karl more like a businessman than a lover. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, prancing through my country like you belong here,” he says.
Karl doesn’t recognize this man.
He tries to reach out and touch him, to discern what’s in front of him. Who’s underneath, wearing a face that looks just like his fiancé’s?
Quackity pushes his hand away and takes a step back.
Karl feels his throat constrict more. “Quackity? What was that?”
He waits for the explanation that would make sense of all he’s seen, but Quackity only frowns and says, “That was none of your business.”
Karl tries to say something back, but he can’t; something’s blocking his airway. He turns away and coughs raggedly into his fist.
Then he looks at his hand and to his horror sees yellow petals. They’re bunched together tightly and crimped on the edges.
Marigolds.
And suddenly, it clicks. How could have Sapnap, young and healthy, been claimed by a mysterious illness?
The evidence of Quackity’s betrayal is already laid bare. And it’s back in Kinoko too, decorating his fucking grave.
Throat clear enough to speak now, Karl says, “You… You killed him.”
Quackity’s eyes narrow. “Excuse you?”
“Sapnap is dead and you killed him!”
Quackity’s expression is collected yet dark, like an oncoming storm. Finally, after a silence so empty that Karl could only hear the beating of his heart, Quackity says, “Is that so? I’m sorry for your loss.”
Such empty platitudes. All their history, and that’s what Sapnap is worth? Karl trembles with anger. “You’re a murderer,” he says with as much venom he can muster.
And finally, the placid mask Quackity had worn breaks. His eyes flash dangerously, and he grits his teeth. “Get the fuck out of my country.”
“No!”
“You think you can just come here and accuse me of murder to my face? After what you almost did to me?”
“What I did to you? You killed him!”
“I didn’t fucking kill anyone!”
“I just saw you—you’re a liar,” Karl chokes, then he turns away again to cough up more petals. He keeps them crushed in his fist and out of sight; their existence is humiliating.
“You should pick the next words that come out of your mouth real fucking carefully. Whatever we had means nothing to me anymore, and you’ll be treated like any other trespasser.”
Karl sees white.
In the end, Karl has to be dragged away, spitting and screaming, by a teenager in a purple hoodie. It’s humiliating, but he digs his heels in the sand and gives all the fight he has. There’s blood caked under his nails and he grins spitefully knowing that Quackity will have fresh wounds on his face to lick.
He can’t remember the point where his screams gave way to sobbing.
Karl wonders if he came back to the wrong timeline. If this was some twisted version of his home, made to teach him a sick lesson.
He hates how he’s grown used to solitude. After months away from home, he’d already mourned his cold bed and the absence of a hand to hold. Laying alone in bed, without Sapnap (or Quackity), doesn’t hurt the way it should. His heart won’t ache with the grief he’s supposed to feel. It’s just empty.
He can’t find comfort in his precious memories anymore. Memories that he’d earned back one by one and treasured. They’re poisoned by the presence of a traitor. A murderer, he reminds himself.
He coughs again into his hand.
The petals are too bright, too happy a shade of gold. The color of sunshine and smiles.
He already rooted out the marigold bushes at Sapnap’s grave; he made sure there wasn’t a petal nor stem left to taint it, all while Tina watched but didn’t stop him.
He doesn’t understand why it’s still there, why the bloom grows in his chest when he can only feel hatred. He should rip it out before it takes him too. But Karl decides to leave it in there, for the time being, so it can decompose on its own. It’ll be proof of his willpower.
Of course, Sapnap never tried to cure himself. He was always too stubborn and loved without demanding it be returned. He probably looked at the petals in his hand with a sentimental smile, deciding that it would be unthinkable to take away a piece of himself.
Karl wants to hold him again.
His absence festers.
But it doesn’t have to be permanent. On a server like the Dream SMP, the lines between life and death are as movable as sand in the tides.
Karl’s accomplished the impossible once before, when he saved his mind from ruin. He’s spoken to god himself and made friends of his Overseers.
The tale’s not over yet.
You message Awesamdude: Still taking visitors?
Karl stands outside the entrance of Pandora’s Vault grasping cold metal shears in frozen fingers. He can see his breath in the air as he exhales in an uneasy shudder. It’s the easiest breath he’s had in ages. He’d begun hacking up root rot when he fully dedicated himself to his mission. Very little of the decomposition remained.
It’s not good work; it’s certainly not something that he’s proud of. He pushes the judgments that Sapnap may have from the grave far from his mind.
There’s a book in there that he must obtain. No matter the cost.