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The table is made of wood. It must be; it’s brown and grainy underneath the red varnish. It’s made of planks instead of the cool slabs of marble that line the Las Nevadas dining halls. Cedar, Quackity thinks, but the thought doesn’t have any reason behind it.
Quackity is staring down a bowl of sand. The sand looks back.
It doesn’t. Sand doesn’t look. He’s crazy, but not insane. The sand is silent and unshaking in the bowl. It lies as still as the grave.
“Quackity from Las Nevadas, why are we doing this?”
Quackity looks up. Or, he doesn’t. He doesn’t remember looking up, but one moment he’s staring at the sand and the next he’s locking eyes with Charlie. Slime. Whichever.
“What?” he asks, and presses down the thought that this is a familiar conversation. He’s probably sat at a million different tables answering his stupid questions.
Charlie’s eyes are wide and unassuming. Like a deer in the headlights of a train if what the deer felt was confused curiosity instead of fear. They’re wide and unblinking, settled into the rest of his face awkwardly, like they don’t really know how they got there.
He tilts his head, all dumb dog and no deer. “Why do you keep repeating this? Do you think you’re in control of the universe? Does it make you feel better?”
Quackity looks back down at the table. The grain is smooth. He can tell without his fingers ever leaving the outside of the bowl. He sighs.
“I—Listen, Slime. Can you just be normal for like, two seconds?”
Quackity just needs a minute. He just needs another minute.
Charlie grins. “Sure! I’m always normal.” He melts a little when he talks, skin and muscle and unidentifiable goop dripping towards the floor. His hands pull the pieces back up, but for a second Quackity can see the bone underneath his lower eyelid.
Huh. He’d never been sure Charlie had bones at all. Guess that answers that.
Charlie smiles proudly when he’s done fixing himself, and Quackity can’t help but smile too.
“Do you think being normal will save us from the rot? Will pretending save us?”
Quackity rolls his eyes and his smile dips. “God, you’re so fucking crazy,” he says almost fondly, and it’s probably supposed to be uttered under his breath or at least quieter than it is but it comes out loud.
Too loud. The sound rings in the silence, and the quiet overtakes it slowly. A thrum turns to a hum turns to a whisper of a noise. Quackity can feel when the silence settles. It’s a light and monotonous feeling. There’s nothing heavy about it at all.
He still feels like he’s holding his breath for something. The bowl doesn’t move. The sand inside doesn’t so much as twitch.
“Does it get easier, Quackity from Las Nevadas?” Charlie asks, blinking, and right. Right. His eyes are on Charlie. Not the sand. He’d have to crane his neck down to look at the sand. He’s looking at Charlie.
Charlie moves. The sand does not.
“Does what?” Quackity asks, and déjà vu hits him for the second time. He’s had this conversation before, in a different room or a different time. His fingers grip the bowl. It feels like porcelain.
Does what? he asks, and anxiety sidles up with the imagined nostalgia. A creeping feeling paces itself behind them both.
The grains are small but not microscopic. Fuck whoever told him you can’t see individual grains. Quackity can see all of them. They writhe in the bowl like maggots.
Except no. That’s the segments in Charlie’s eyes. He smiles and his eyes roil, melt and unmelt, goop and ungoop.
“Living without the people you care about. Does the feeling ever go away?” he asks.
Quackity flinches. “What the fuck are you talking about, man?”
Charlie talks like he hasn’t heard him. “I’ve been doing well, I think. You left me plenty of instructions. ‘Rule #1: Don’t goop in the machines. Rule #2: Hide. Hide. Hide. Hide.’ That’s a lot of hiding, Quackity from Las Nevadas. What are we hiding from?”
We’re not hiding, Quackity wants to say, but while he’s a liar and a cheat and an idiot he isn’t usually dumb enough to call out the rabid wolf in the room. They’re hiding. He doesn’t know what they’re hiding from. The memories have settled somewhere vacant and out of reach, but he knows they’re hiding.
“I…I don’t know,” Quackity admits, and it feels like the world starts closing in around him at the admission. The sand at the table quivers, except no, that’s his own hand. He’s brought it up to look at it. It shakes, all animal — deer legs, no dog tail. The train’s about to hit.
Charlie settles, unmoving in the peripheral until Quackity puts his hand down. He smiles like everything is fine. Because he’s Charlie, and to him everything is probably fine. The sand doesn’t move.
Charlie does. He leans forward at the table.
“That’s okay, Quackity from Las Nevadas.” he says, “You have time. In the great cosmic universe, you are the sands!” Slime opens his hands to show two fistfuls of sand, slightly green and damp. “Just these ones, though.”
The sand in the bowl isn’t the same as the sand in his hands. Quackity recognizes this before anything else, before he takes in the serious look on Charlie’s face or the sound of his fingernails scraping against the outside of the bowl. The sand in Charlie’s hands, that’s his. That’s Quackity’s.
Charlie looks at him. Quackity hasn’t stopped looking back.
“What are you going to do with them, Quackity from Las Nevadas?” he asks.
Quackity breathes. He breathes and the sand doesn’t move. His hands grip the bowl and his forearms press into the table. Charlie’s eyes melt and Quackity’s burn.
There’s a decision here, somewhere, hiding more than Quackity. It’s got its tail between its legs because it doesn’t want to choose or be chosen.
The memory of it doesn’t surface so much as it presses against the edge of Quackity’s mind. A silhouette of a feeling of a time and a place. Quackity doesn’t know what it’s of.
The sand waits and does not move for anything. Charlie waits and moves, eyes flickering back and forth, melting and remelting, watching and unseeing.
Quackity knows, or at least he knew, what that meant. He knew what the sand was for, and that the table was made from cedar and the bowl from painted porcelain. He knew what happened before.
He doesn’t now.
“…I want to remember everything.” It’s the only smart choice, figuring out the rules of the game before the game figures out how to rule you, but it still feels like the wrong one. Fuck that. Fuck that. Knowing is the only thing that’s going to save him.
Charlie’s head tilts, the opposite side from before. He blinks, once, twice. “Oh,” he says, surprised, “Are you sure, Quackity from Las Nevadas? Everything is a lot. I’m not sure your human brain can comprehend the endless colors of the universe. They are very color-y.”
Quackity snorts and ignores the dread. “Yeah, man. Just show me already.”
Charlie leans even closer over the table. He reaches forward and grabs Quackity’s hands in his own. They’re sticky and gross and far too green to be human, but they’re warm in a way Quackity didn’t expect them to be. They feel alive underneath the goop.
Charlie grins. Hesitantly, Quackity smiles back.
His hands tremble and Charlie’s don’t. The sand lies still.
Their hands dip into the bowl together.
It happens like this: the earth is made of stardust. There is rock and there is water and there are plants and animals and monsters, and underneath the everything that is everything, there is dust. Ash slips through every world. It settles as every unmoving body and it thrums as every beating heart.
The dust is in the air, and in the sky, and the sand is on the ground. It sticks to your boots and trails into your buildings. The casino games are loud and bright and the sand that settles in their cracks is unobtrusive, but it is everywhere. It is just as alive as you are, and it is just as dead as you are going to be. And one day, you know that it will bury you.
It already has, and you can feel it. It’s warm. It feels alive.
Yellow for the sun and the grass and time. Orange for flowers and dirt and red for sunburns and lava and disdain. Purple for the morning and blue for the night. The shade of your own eyes for the dust, and one for the feeling of your hands in sand that Quackity doesn’t know the name of.
The colors of the universe are color-y. They’re everywhere, in everything, a million little grains of colorful sand for every microscopic spec of stardust. An uncountable number of them inside him.
The colors of the universe are endless. There are more colors than there will ever be names for them, and more names than Quackity can ever hope to learn.
They ebb, and flow. Red and yellow and blue and purple and black and white. But mostly…?
Mostly, Quackity finds, the colors of the universe are green.
Quackity’s hands leave the bowl on their own. Charlie’s are still holding his sand across the table.
Something sits between them, heavy and light all at once.
“Does it feel better, Quackity of Las Nevadas?”
“Does what?” he asks, and he knows. He already knows. He knew it even when he thought he didn’t.
“Dying,” Charlie says, like the knowing is something forgivable, “I’ve always wondered if unbecoming feels better than becoming. I was the ground for so long time forgot to keep track, and now I’m slime—I mean meat. And bones. So many bones.
“But you? You get to become the ground again, Quackity of Las Nevadas. Your meat and bones became dust in an instant. A sun exploded on the ground far, far away from you and turned you to ash.
“We couldn’t hide from the Sun, Quackity of Las Nevadas. Nothing could.”
Quackity forgets to breathe. The sand in the bowl brushes his fingertips and the world is technicolor and monochrome all at once. It’s black and white and grey and it is purple and red and orange and yellow and vermillion and ebony and crimson and violet and somehow, despite that, it is green.
He settles his hands around the side of the bowl.
Charlie looks at him like he wonders. He starts, then he stops. His mouth melts off his face and starts again.
He asks, “Does it feel better to burn? Lava only burned me into chunks, but your pieces are so small their atoms couldn’t stay together anymore.”
“I…” Quackity doesn’t answer. Can’t, beyond the weight that has settled and crushed and lifted, beyond the burning eyes that drip the clear water from a river in a green forest. The grief is deep and quiet. The sting and the ache is gone. Night in the desert night has come, and all that’s left is the flood.
Charlie smiles. “It’s okay, Quackity of Las Nevadas. The end is over.”
Quackity can’t breathe through the tears. He does it anyway.
“Is this it, then? The afterlife?” he chokes out, but he knows. He knows. The sand stays still and dead in the bowl and he knows. He isn’t there yet. Not with Charlie here. Not together.
“Quackity of Las Nevadas, you can’t go anywhere if you’re running in circles,” Charlie says instead of answering.
Quackity wipes his face. “What if I stay?” With you, he doesn’t say, but the universe hears him anyway.
Charlie leans back in his chair and ponders, “What if? My slime will take millions of years to crawl up out of the ground again. Maybe there will be plants when I get there. Maybe it will just be sand. What if the sands pour just right and I see you there, Quackity of Las Nevadas? No one can know until it happens.”
The sand is Charlie’s open palm sits. It waits.
He smiles and asks, “What do you want to happen?”
Sometimes, when Quackity’s half-dead from paperwork and logistical meetings and everything fucking else, he’ll lay down on the floor underneath his desk. He’ll lock the door and close the curtains and kick the chair away and he’ll lie there.
He probably knows the bottom of his desk better than the top of it. The wood is shiny and smooth and solid, the varnish shiner there where it remains untouched.
In the relative dark, Quackity exists. He doesn’t meditate or think through problems or address the growing hole inside of his chest. He just lays there, and breathes.
Something about the desk and the dark and the lock on the door feels — if not safe, then familiar.
The desk had been one of the only things Quackity had been able to take with him from L’manburg. He’d lugged the thing from the white house to El Rapids to his office in Las Nevadas. The wood was supposed to be a reminder of strength. If his stupid desk could survive bombs and a fucking wither, then he could make it through the day.
If you look at it from the top, you notice the varnish and the grain filler and the filled-in parts where chunks had been taken out in the blasts. Where it isn’t perfect it’s reinforced, and where it isn’t strong it’s something else.
From the underside, Quackity can see the nails. He can feel the splintering edge where a piece near the floor chipped on the way out of El Rapids and never got fixed.
He can see the part where Tubbo carved his name into the wood, back when the office in the White House was the only good place to be. He can feel the little ridges where Fundy scratched a ‘Fuck You’ into the leg with his claws after an argument in the casinos. From sometime much farther back than that, back when the desk belonged to a polling booth and Wilbur Soot was scheming or maybe just bored, there’s a middle finger drawn in permanent marker on the same leg.
And in the middle of it all, there’s a bright green stain. Quackity had been so, so unbelievably angry when Charlie dripped on the desk, freshly-applied varnish staining and settling into the wood before he’d been able to scrape it all off. He’d screamed for what felt like forever before getting a rag and scraping as much of it off as he could before resetting the varnish.
You can’t see it from the top anymore, but it dripped down the sides. There’s a smudge on one leg, and a solid smear on the underside.
Except there isn’t anymore.
Because Charlie is dead, or alive, or whatever happens when he does the equivalent of burning to death. Quackity’s dead, and from the sounds of it there isn’t going to be a desk left to look at or a world to look at it from.
It’s shitty. The green makes the whole thing look ugly– all the marks make it look bad and reduce its worth to firewood. It was a stupid piece of furniture he stole from a voting office. There shouldn’t be anything to miss.
And yet.
In an office with a lock on the door, with wide glass windows that overlooked the entire world — all shimmering sand and bright technicolor lights — there was a desk. More tangentially, there were people who tied themselves to a scrapwood piece of furniture. Memories that stuck themselves to history, a tangible reminder of what was. Sands of time stuck themselves together, threaded together by people who weren’t even trying to do it.
There were people. A person, if you could call him that.
That’s it, really.
That’s kind of all it takes.
Quackity breathes hard and lets go of the bowl one gripping finger at a time. “Give me the sand,” he says, and he stands up.
Charlie hands it over without a thought. It pours through Quackity’s fingers into the open air before it lands back in his palm. It’s soft, like the fine beach sand of a shore. There’s no desert grit in it.
“Where are you going?” Charlie asks, following behind as he moves. You, like it isn’t supposed to be we.
“Back.” Quackity ignores the hallway, the stairs that go up and the ones that go down. He ignores the familiar photos on the wall and the ladder that leads to an attic. It’s home, this little space with a kitchen table with two chairs and a bowl of sand.
It’s also not. The photos on the wall are encased in picture frames Quackity has never seen. The walls are painted a shade of color Quackity can’t name.
He ignores it.
“To the beginning?” Charlie asks.
Quackity huffs and shakes his head. “To you.”
Charlie stops. The sound of his feet against the ground is loud and mildly wet.
Quackity turns around.
“Oh. Oh. I’m leaking,” Charlie says, and green-tinted tears roll down his cheeks.
Quackity laughs. “You’re so fucking—Bye, Slime,” he says, and pulls Charlie into a hug.
He’s warm. He’s also sticky, which is always a little gross, but despite that, it’s still good. Quackity has an ear against his neck, and even if it isn’t blood that pumps through his body, Quackity can hear his heartbeat thudding. He grips tightly.
There is a universe where neither ever let go of each other, where Slime keeps the sands forever and Quackity lives his Limbo in a house with him. There is no hunger or thirst or hardship, and neither of them ever hurt each other again.
He knows. He already knows. They aren’t that kind of people, and they don’t live in that kind of world.
Quackity squeezes Charlie tight and lets him go. They let each other go.
“I’m gonna bend the rules a bit, Quackity from Las Nevadas, and give you a bone,” Charlie says. He reaches a hand behind his back and pulls out a femur.
Quackity laughs. “What the fuck do I do with this?” he asks, but he takes it anyway.
Slime just smiles. “You can always use more bones,” he says with a knowing wink, and turns and pushes Quackity out the door.
Quackity stumbles, landing in a room that very quickly stops being a room and starts being a vast expanse of white. There is no ceiling or walls. Even though his feet are on solid ground, there is no floor. This world goes on forever.
Quackity looks back at the house. It’s small and made of stone and wood. There are little potted flowers on the windowsills. Above the roof, a chimney puffs out smoke that disappears into the white.
The door is made of wood. Cedar, Quackity thinks. The grain is painted an old white that’s peeling at the bottom. It’s closed.
Okay.
He breathes. The noise echoes, an endless mirror of stuttering breaths and choked inhalations.
He’s going. He will. He just has to turn around.
The house will wait. It isn’t running on a time limit. It doesn’t need Quackity back before noon. It’s waited this long, patiently passing time until he’s ready.
The end of the world will wait.
He just has to leave.
The door creaks and Quackity jolts as Charlie peaks his head out of the house. “Good luck, Quackity from Las Nevadas! Don’t forget to be alive when you’re there!” he shouts, before slamming the door shut behind him.
Quackity takes in a breath and holds it.
He doesn’t think much about where ‘back’ is. He thinks of a place, of tall buildings and spiraling towers with bright lights. He thinks of an office room with a shitty old desk he’s never throwing away.
But mostly, Quackity’s thinking of people.
And that’s it.
He spins on his heel and throws the sand. It scatters in the air, directionless. Some goes up. Some spins around him in spirals. Some falls straight down.
Quackity clutches the bone, and the abyss beckons. The white lights up, blue and red and purple and green.
He exhales, and falls. The sand falls with him.
-
The sand is coarse and rough. It grates against his palms, and stings when he holds it tightly.
Quackity drops it to the desert. He breathes, or forgets to, and breathes again. Picks up a bone, already half-buried in the sand.
Las Nevadas glimmers while he walks through it. In the dead of night, in a city that will one day never sleep, it’s quiet. There is no wind whipping up the sand into a storm, no rain that floods and feeds and pelts the earth.
He passes the half-finished hotel, the glimmering shine of the casino’s underbelly, the fountains and the roads and the mostly-paved buildings. The small, secluded section of homes where people live.
Quackity takes the elevator up the tower. He breathes with his face in one hand, a femur in the other.
The elevator dings, and the noise echoes.
The door opens, and he steps into a wide and open room. The ceilings are tall and arching. The floor is wood, half-covered with rugs. Most of them started out white, but have since turned light green.
Quackity walks by the sitting areas and the hallway that leads to the bedrooms. He listens for the sound of anything, finds nothing, and decides to start somewhere.
He walks into the kitchen. Pauses, then laughs.
At the table, Charlie picks up and pours sand into a wooden bowl. The sand is clumpy, wet and growing greener with every pass through his hands. Up, drop, down, green.
Charlie looks up from the table and sand pours out of his hands. “You were gone for a long time, Quackity from Las Nevadas,” he says, and Quackity has no idea if that’s true but nods anyway.
“Yeah,” he says. Then, feeling a little stupid, “…I got you a bone.” Quackity holds out the femur.
Charlie tilts his head. Goop falls off it and lands on his shoulder, reabsorbed immediately. He reaches for it gently. He looks down at it, inspecting every inch for a long moment before he looks up.
“What lesson is this, Quackity from Las Nevadas?” Charlie’s wide and unblinking eyes are a solid green. His skin is pale with a faint undertone of the same color. He’s dressed in a Las Nevadas uniform.
The table is made of marble.
Quackity remembers the end. It was red and hot and crushing. There was sand that turned to glass that was crushed so small it went back to being sand. The sun killed the world.
That’s it. That’s all he knows. There was the sun that was not a sun at all and the world and an endless desert of sand, and now there is the here and the now and the Charlie.
“I don’t know yet,” Quackity admits, “Probably a stupid one.”
Charlie hums and goes back to gooping up the sand.
He closes his eyes and sits down heavily into a chair. He has things to do, definitely. The city of Las Nevadas will not stop for one man’s crisis. The desert won’t keep the rain away forever. Eventually, the world will end. Dust will always go back to being dust.
But for a moment, the wind blows through an open window at the top of a tower and the sand stands still.
Outside the window, the entire world sleeps. It waits, the entire universe, for the sun. Every person and animal and piece of dust, waiting for the morning.
There are no mountains that surround Las Nevadas. Nothing to hide the morning for hours and hours and hours. The sun crests over the sand in a brilliant golden scattering, light shining up and up and up.
Color bursts. White and yellow and orange and purple and brown and blue. In the corner of Quackity’s eye, he swears he sees a color he knows but can’t name.
And the universe, in all its purple void and red hot lava, in the deep blue ocean and inky black sky, is surprisingly green.
