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“The bastard. After everything he’s done… he up and leaves.”
Quackity uttered the words and took a deep breath, keeping his back turned. This wasn’t supposed to be about him. That wasn’t happening again. He had to be sympathetic. It wouldn’t be hard; after all, he did fucking sympathize. Maybe for far different reasons—reasons laced over with resentment like gasoline waiting to be lit aflame—but he did.
He wanted to open his mouth and tell Tommy about how angry he was that Wilbur did not come to talk to him before he left, but he deemed it better to leave it shut. Tommy wasn’t usually this quiet. Quackity knew him as loud and bold and boisterous and everything in-between, but this time, he stared into the fireplace as it flickered left and right.
“I’m glad you came here, Tommy,” Quackity started again hesitantly and amicably, moving to sit on the couch opposite from the one Tommy sat on. They were separated by a coffee table covered with nicks and scratches that was only decorated by a weird succulent Foolish had gotten him that had, somewhat infuriatingly, survived the attack on the city. The separation felt oddly formal—they were friends, after all—but the circumstances had been so tense and they hadn’t spoken this intimately in what felt like ages. Maybe Quackity himself was to blame for that. He was distracted about building his city. Distracted about fighting. Bickering. Distracted about climbing and climbing his way to the top, falling, and trying to rebuild.
Tommy was all but curled into a ball in the cheap blanket Quackity gave him a few minutes ago. “What happened here?” he finally croaked.
“I don’t wanna say anything that’ll make this worse,” Quackity told him.
Tommy turned his body, his gaze drifting to the view from the nearby window. “It’s like the L’Manberg capitol.” Slowly, his head turned. “Who did this?” It took him a second to make eye contact. “Was it Dream?”
Quackity interlaced his fingers in front of his face. He leaned forward at the inquiry, struggling to bear the quiet abandonment that could be seen on Tommy’s face. “It was.”
Tommy’s posture shifted again. He already had both of his legs tucked close, but he looked smaller, his chin on his knees and tension drawing him inwards. “I can’t believe it. I mean, I can. He…” He drew in a breath and exhaled in shivering pieces. “He destroys everything. Everything there is, he eventually…” Tommy trailed off, tilting his chin down to hide his face. “I’m sorry. I’m gonna get worse if I talk or even think about him—this.”
Quackity sat up and opened and closed his fists a few times. “That’s fine. I would, too.”
Silently, he waited for Tommy to say more. Tommy’s voice eventually came out, broken up and uncertain. “Everyone… keeps leavin’ me.”
Everyone eventually does. I know what it feels like. It’s not just you.
“I’m sorry about that,” Quackity said, suppressing the slew of thoughts. “Is there anything I can do to help right now?”
Tommy’s head rose back up, the corners of his eyes wet with escaping tears. He quickly lifted an arm to wipe them aside. “Can you come sit with me? You’re so far away over there.”
“… Of course.” Quackity crossed the uncomfortable distance and joined Tommy on the other couch. He didn’t really know what to do about the remaining couple of feet. The more he thought about it, the more it made him more self-conscious. Should he have been physically consoling Tommy? It’d been like a thousand years since Quackity had done something like that and it was still a very scuffed attempt at comforting Tubbo way back when Schlatt was still president of L’Manberg. Quackity tentatively gave Tommy’s shoulder a squeeze. It was difficult to maintain a peaceful expression when he was livid about Wilbur disappearing. “If it’s any consolation, I’d go after Wilbur and fucking kick his ass if I could.”
Tommy let out a halfhearted hum. He reached to his shoulder and laid his own hand on Quackity’s knuckles. “God, what do I do? It’s like… It’s almost worse than him just dying. He disappeared. He wouldn’t even promise that he’d come back.” He turned his body, tightening his grip on Quackity’s hand and holding it between them. “I don’t like this, Big Q. I need something to do. I hate feelin' all this stuff. I don’t wanna figure anything out on my own again. Give me something to do, like—like, let me help rebuild something, or let me organize something, or fuckin’ mop some floors, anything!”
He could’ve simply agreed, but an inkling in the back of Quackity’s mind told him doing so would have brought the selfish survivor in him back to the surface. “Tommy, you’re shaking,” Quackity said. He reached his other hand out and adjusted the blanket on Tommy’s shoulders. “As much as I’d appreciate the help, I don’t think you should do that right now.”
“Being useful will help,” Tommy protested, his voice cracking.
“Don’t worry about being useful right now. Let’s just hang out for a while. Okay?” Quackity tried to assure him. “We haven’t really talked in a while. I don’t want you to feel like you just have to be useful to Las Nevadas or something.”
Tommy gave in with surprising ease. “… Okay.”
“Are you hungry? How about I get you something to eat?”
Tommy quietly nodded. He was like a different person when he was this subdued. Quackity stood up, crossing to the kitchen cupboards in his temporary apartment and looking for something he could give Tommy to eat without shame. Tommy wasn’t exactly picky, but Quackity kind of wanted it to count.
While he was looking, Tommy opened his mouth again. “I feel like… Wilbur… he doesn’t realize that I needed him to feel safe,” he said.
The best Quackity could find was meat and sandwich bread. He was preparing something and glanced up, a skeptical look on his face. “Really?” he asked.
Tommy’s posture slacked. He had his legs crossed on the couch and leaned into his palm. “I know, it sounds dumb—I’m basically an adult now and I’m still terrible at taking care of myself.”
Quackity looked back down. “No, I just mean—” he started, easing in a deep breath. “How does a guy like that make you feel safe? He was basically causing trouble everywhere he went.”
“I know. When you say it like that, I know.” Tommy looked back out the window. “It was like he came back and… everything that happened went away. All the stuff I did. It was undone. Everything he wasn’t there for wasn’t real to him, so… so I was younger and dumber again.”
Quackity pursed his lips. There were things he wanted to say and he did not say them. “That can happen. Going back and acting like nothing’s changed.” He came closer, presenting Tommy with his vaguely sorry excuse for a meal. Tommy accepted it without hesitation.
“Thanks.” Tommy took a needlessly large bite out of it. Quackity sat down with him again as he chewed in silence. “Wish I could’ve gone back further, if you ask me,” Tommy mused. “Maybe.”
“What do you mean?” Quackity asked him.
Tommy backtracked. “Not literally. But… man, if we’re going to go back, I wish it’d just been easy. Like, sometimes I wonder if it was L’Manberg. Wilbur changed so much. Even before he left, he…” Tommy sighed, glancing around the room and fishing for words. “I can still see it. It’s like there’s something different with him. L’Manberg changed him. Being dead—that changed him. Obviously, I mean. I tried to go back, but he’s just—he wasn’t all there. He wasn’t.” Tommy withheld a shaky breath. “He hasn’t been for so long.”
Quackity didn’t look at him. “I’m sorry, man.”
Tommy wiped at his eyes with his arm, sniffling. “Fuck,” he cursed. Quackity cautiously placed a hand on his back. It took Tommy a few tries to get his voice to come back out. “E…Even when he was right there, he—every day, I missed him. He was right in front of me and I missed him. I almost wanted to go back to before L’Manberg. It meant so much to so many people, especially us, but… could I have prevented it if I’d known what would happen?”
“I don’t think anyone could stop Wilbur from doing anything if they tried,” Quackity told him.
Tommy’s response was hoarse. “… Right.” He took another bite of his sandwich. Another unsettling silence stretched on as he ate. Tommy’s attempts to quickly shove food in his face and be done with it to stave off his pain didn’t seem to be working. He suppressed another sob with a small, frustrated groan. “I’m so tired of—so tired of people leaving! Everyone does this! What did I do wrong? Why does everyone have to go off and… change?”
Quackity steadied himself and started to rub into the knots between Tommy’s shoulders. “I wish I knew.” Tommy’s rigid position eased somewhat, but he didn’t move a muscle beyond that. Maybe he appreciated what Quackity was doing and he didn’t want to chance it stopping. His expression remained sunken.
“… He didn’t wanna talk to me, Big Q. Not for real,” Tommy said. “But… I guess I didn’t really wanna talk to him either.” He fumbled around with his now-empty hands. “Y’know, I just… I’m just thinking.”
Quackity awkwardly chewed on his lip. “Yeah?”
“I just wanted Wilbur to do something like this. It’s stupid,” Tommy continued. “Just want him to be there. Act like he’s there. Act like I… I’m worth talkin’ to. I don’t want him to just look after me. I want him to be my friend. I wanted him to tell me he…” He trailed off. “No, never mind.”
“Something wrong?” Quackity asked him.
Tommy’s next sigh was morose. “He might’ve been. Up in the head, if you get what I mean.” He did a hand motion of sorts and barely succeeded at lightening his own mood. He wasn’t wrong, but Quackity had already committed to leaving Tommy in charge of this conversation and Tommy had a different, deeply complicated relationship with Wilbur that was threaded to his core. “God, I don’t want to be mad at him or I’ll be mad at him forever.”
“Maybe right now you should be mad at him,” Quackity told him, grasping for ideas. “It probably won’t last forever. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing has to last forever, I mean.”
“But I can’t be mad at him. He’s not here,” Tommy claimed. “It’ll just… go everywhere for a really long time, and trust me, you don’t want to see that.”
Quackity let out a huff of air. “Tommy, I’m gonna be mad at him a long time for not even speaking to me before fucking off to god knows where. That makes two of us.”
“Utah.”
“What.”
“He… he went to… forget about it.”
“He went to fucking Utah? How the fuck did he go to Utah?”
“I don’t know, he just—he teleported! It was weird and it didn’t make any sense! It was like he sailed off into the sunset and got fucking raptured!”
Quackity pinched his brow. “Okay, never mind. I digress. Tommy, I think you should go ahead and be mad about it. I know this is probably super personal to you, and your whole experience with the guy is very… personalized, but he’s gotten into trouble with so many people. It’s not just you.”
“That doesn’t do… anything, man.” Tommy deflated again. “There’s so much shit I never got to talk to him about. I… I just don’t get it. I couldn’t convince him to stay. I couldn’t fucking—convince him that I mattered enough for him to stay.” He tried to laugh his way out of the tears he was starting to choke on again. “What if–what if I–how did he do it? Did he go home?”
Home.
“Wasn’t he home here?” Tommy continued. “If I went home like him, would I…”
Quackity didn’t say a word.
“Do you think I’d have a family there?”
Quackity was looking a different direction. “I think you’d remember.”
“Maybe I just… haven’t remembered yet. Maybe he…” Tommy cleared his throat, bouncing and clearly trying to shake the tension from his body. “I’m not asking this for real, obviously. I don’t fucking know what happened to Wilbur or where he went, the rascal.”
“… Right,” Quackity muttered. He quickly thought through his options to center the conversation on something. “Were you still living with him?”
Tommy blinked. “Huh? Uh, I guess. We were just going from place to place…” He trailed off. “To be honest with you, I… haven’t gone to my old house in a while. I haven’t been able to, knowing Dream could find me there. I’m not supposed to be scared of him anymore, but…” He looked outside again at the shambles at the center of Las Nevadas. “That doesn’t look like the work of a nice guy. For all I know, I’m next on his fucked up little to-do list.”
Quackity’s response wasn’t entirely premeditated. “I mean, you could stay here if it makes you feel better.” He didn’t really know where it came from. There were probably a few other people Tommy could turn to instead that would be way better at dealing with his emotional baggage, but there it was. Maybe Quackity missed Charlie, maybe he missed a whole slew of people, maybe he didn’t want to fuck things up this time, or maybe he simply… wanted revenge on Wilbur. “I promise I won’t try to give you a boring job this time.” He tried to be normal about it. He was pretty sure he was succeeding, but the image of revenge started stewing in his mind.
Yes, Wilbur was fucking gone without even batting an eye in Quackity’s direction—maybe it was a battle Wilbur knew he’d lose if he even tried—but the one person who truly knew Wilbur’s legacy was still here, alone and abandoned. The thoughts it incurred made Quackity feel off balance. Tommy was a person that Quackity had tried to snatch from beneath Wilbur’s nose not too long ago. Quackity had wanted Wilbur to feel like he had lost something for real. It was a simple game of both chance and wits back then, one which Quackity easily lost for his poor choice of words and blind vision for his land. It was still absurd that anyone would pick the stoned wanderer with a taste for politics that was Wilbur, but Tommy always saw something in the bastard that nobody else did. Tommy could see that past he had mentioned, perhaps. That time that Wilbur was at least somewhat normal; if not, at least less of a coot.
Quackity had a chance to do this over after he fucked it up last time. He had a chance to try to mend something that Wilbur colossally fucked up. He had a chance to show Wilbur that he took the whole fucking world for granted, even if he’d never see it. At least Quackity stuck around long enough to learn that lesson.
It was confusing, it was bizarre, even a little twisted.
Couldn’t he have just wanted to do something nice for someone?
Quackity attempted to continue his suggestion after a thousand thoughts buzzed through his brain at lightning speed. “There’s still a lot of space in the city, and…” he tried to say. “Even this building we’re in has tons of empty apartments. I’ve been staying here since the incident. I’d be… really close by, y’know…”
It wasn’t a great time to remember being pushed out of a skyscraper by his former apprentice. Yet, he was dragged out of the memory by Tommy, almost like a halt to his fall, who suddenly squished him into a fervent hug. “That’s great,” Tommy’s voice slipped through. “That’d be… that’d be great. Just for a while.” For a moment, Quackity was averse to the contact, guilt creeping up on him with the memory of the last person who embraced him, but he rejected the thought. Returning the hug felt better than he thought it would.
It seemed like a gesture of gratitude, but Tommy didn’t want to let go. Quackity figured he couldn’t blame Tommy, not after all of admissions of soul-crushing loneliness and all the Wilbur subtext. Quackity relented. He sat still for as long as Tommy did.
“… Sorry…” Tommy finally mumbled. He seemed reluctant to free Quackity from the embrace. “I just really needed this. Thank you. You’re a good man, Big Q.”
“You don’t have to say sorry,” Quackity told him, ruminating in being called good or anything of the sort. “We’ll figure all this out, all right?” Being called good by the guy who believed in Wilbur isn’t much of a compliment. He tried not to sink too far into another inner debate. Just take it, just take it, he continued to persuade himself.
“… Right,” Tommy agreed, withdrawing his hold. He let out a huff of air and fought to not stare into another corner of the room. “There! I’ve felt things.” His declaration was unconvincing, but spirited nonetheless. “Ready for menial tasks. You name the task, I’ll be on the job.”
Quackity, to some degree, wanted to leave this specific emotional tension behind as well. It certainly wouldn’t have made his boiling disdain towards the whole thing vanish, but it sounded like a better idea than exploding into a slew of curses to Wilbur’s name. As much as he hated considering it, he would get over it sooner or later. Tommy, on the other hand, was dealing with honest-to-goodness grief. Nobody did the kind of shit for a person Tommy did unless they really loved them.
Hey. Why did you have to lose everything? Why were you punished like this? Did Wilbur ever even suffer for what he did? Did he care? Why did he leave behind a person who loved him like it wasn’t the most precious thing in the world?
Did anyone ever even love you?
Did Charlie?
“If you say so,” Quackity conceded. “You can follow me to the repair site if you want.”