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Slime isn't sure why he feels that wretched ache that tugs at his chest when he sees his corpse. Dying is inevitable for all organisms, even him. He had seen it happen to himself before. Whether death arrives before you're even truly born or a thousand years from now, it'll still come. Slowly, like cancer manifesting in your cells one by one, or as abrupt as an unfortunate accident, it doesn't matter. Death waits for no one.
Death doesn't take anyone away, either.
Not exactly.
It doesn't ask you to die just so it can take you away, it doesn't even drag you there. Death is always something you caused in a way even if that cause is miniscule, like dominos toppling down. If anything, something out there makes one beg for death to take them, but Death doesn't ask you itself.
Quackity caused his own death. Slime knows this well. It's planned and executed well to the point where Quackity could have known the exact moment the lever (now unrecognizably destroyed) would ignite the redstone attached to the explosives. He might've even counted down in his head if only the impact didn’t take his life immediately.
It's sickening to think about it, still. Quackity from Las Nevadas, dead. His corpse is unrecognizable, if it wasn't the fact that he was the only person that still resided in Las Nevadas. If it wasn't the fact that Slime watched it all happen too far, too late. His clothes are tattered to ash, and his tie is messy around his neck like a noose. His skin and face is terribly molted into shades of red and black. His scar isn't even noticeable any more, but so are all the other features Slime knew so well back then. It's all too gory for Slime to want to look at him, but he's far too deep in to turn away. This isn't the Quackity he knew. Slime can't even look at his lifeless eyes like he can from other corpses—it's gone to begin with. He can't even tell where the skin becomes tissue from all the blood.
Slime can't help but feel a sinking feeling of anger looking at him. He could've waited until he left before doing… this. He shouldn't have made him watch. Slime can't remember the last time he felt this sick.
Outside, the sun has already set, and only the moon and the slow fire burning around the casino light up the place. Slime sighs shakily before he carefully carries the body, cradling the head near his neck. He wearily walks to the entrance/exit, watching his step.
As he leaves, he notices how nothing lights up the streets now. The city that never sleeps, Quackity from Las Nevadas used to tell him. He walks right in the middle, nothing passes by, anymore. In the back of his mind, he can envision his partner walking with him, hand-in-hand. Quackity always walked quickly, like he was running out of time.
He was.
Slime follows the trail they always took, until Las Nevadas ends and grass begins. Only the stars lit up the way now. There is a naturally paved indent from the repeated walking. Something about Quackity's behavior had always been repeated, maybe even scheduled.
Quackity's head starts to droop down his shoulder before Slime secures it by keeping his hand there. If he tries hard enough, he can pretend that Quackity is simply unconscious. Asleep, even. He remembers carrying him back to his bed after passing out from too many drinks.
Quackity was fully sober when he died. In the right mind, yet he still pushed the lever. Not many people have that courage.
Before he knows it, he's on top of a hill overlooking the now-quiet city. It's hard to see, but the moon does its job well. Flowers and grass had overgrown this area thanks to the lack of visiting.
Their spot.
Slime finally looks up from the ground, and there he sees it. There is his own tomb, ironic really. People usually don't get to see their own grave, but there he is. He's a special case.
Quackity always made him feel special. Slime gulps thinking about it.
He finally puts his body down, gently of course. His back leans against the pillar he built next to the tomb, with his head right below the dusty photo frame Quackity placed at some point in time. Their faces are almost unrecognizable from water staining the picture, and the colors are dull.
Slime steps away from the pillar and closer to the grave, an obsidian cross embedded with slime. His or not, it most likely didn't matter at that time. It never mattered. Slime wonders how Quackity must've felt, while he was “dead”. If he digs deep enough into his brain (or what he wants to label as a brain), he can remember bits and pieces of memories of Quackity when Slime was in that state. That state of unconsciousness, unknowing. He can recall books and pages scattered on the floor, and there are hiccups and tears falling down, flowing down his cheeks like molten lava. Slime wonders how blinded Quackity truly was because of grief, because of him. He must've been blinded so intensely to have been able to build so many clones of Slime, as if desperate to have some part of him back. (Slime remembers the chase to Quackity filled with fury, on that day. He remembers realizing that the clones never attacked him. He remembers feeling sick. A sick feeling, tainted with love, or what Quackity saw as love. Slime realizes how blind Quackity was.)
Suddenly, his hands claw deep into the ground, pulling the grass off as he starts to dig almost animalistically, like a dog searching for something. Slime isn't sure what he is searching for. He isn't sure if he can ever find it, if it has been burnt and destroyed by bombs already.
As he scoops the dirt away, Slime realizes how metaphorical the motion feels. In another timeline, Slime excavated the meat of Quackity's chest instead of the soil of his own grave, burrowing against the muscle and bones and blood seeping out until he found his heart hiding behind his ribs. He could've watched it beat, deciphered the morse code it said as the rhythm started to flutter, as if that would be enough to know what Quackity hid under his words of legacy and lessons. In another timeline, Slime could've found some honesty in him.
The hole he creates isn't even close to six feet, but it can bury the body. A few days from now, when Slime has already left, animals and fungi will be attracted by the scent of it rotting, and they'll dig the hole once again, as if Slime's attempt to give Quackity a proper funeral was futile. It's not futile, Slime tells himself, it's not. His hands are sore from the repeated friction. Pain and ache as a feeling is still new to him.
He finally stands up, his limbs shaking from exhaustion. He wants to throw up, if that's even possible in his anatomy. Slowly, he carries Quackity again before gently placing him into the hole, careful enough not to hurt him (as if that's even possible). He tries to think of an outcome where Quackity's legacy was remembered, where his country prospered for centuries. He fails. All he left behind was himself, the corpse, and the rubble.
Anger tries to take hold of Slime's heart thinking about this, but all that lingers is despair.
It's sickening, thinking about it, how everything he was taught was broken by his mentor himself. Was none of it worth it? Is leaving an impact even important? Did any of the lessons— the words that Quackity said to him even matter? Surely, it mattered to Quackity himself at some point in his life, it was all he lived for. Quackity fought and struggled his entire life for a slice of power, and this was proof of it. Quackity from Las Nevadas struggled until nothing of himself was left behind. Its rather funny. Slime wonders how legacy can be left behind if there is nothing left of yourself.
The moments mattered, Slime tells himself. Quackity himself mattered. Quackity from Las Nevadas still matters to him to this day. Slime has lived for millenniums, but Quackity is the highlight of all those moments. A part of him is scared that he'll be the highlight for the rest of his days, but a bigger part wants to be entangled with his memory for infinity.
Reduced to nothing but a corpse, Quackity's form makes Slime wonder if this is the most peace the man will get ever again. His face isn't close to recognizable, but his stance is finally relaxed for once. In another timeline, Slime never showed up in Las Nevadas and Quackity would've never thought about going back to the bomb site. Slime could've saved him, or made him change his mind, or atleast postponed it, but the world isn't in his favor. As he thinks about it further, he realizes that Quackity from Las Nevadas was too deep in that spiral to ever be saved. Quackity was as dead as he is now when he found out he wanted to give up. There was nothing any one can do, he tells himself, as if the idea of hopelessness could give him solace.
Or perhaps he could've done something. He could've ventured deeper into Quackity's soul, could've stayed a little longer, could've stopped him. His eyes widen as he tries to tell himself that didn't cause this, that Quackity from Las Nevadas already wanted to be dead and this is his happy ending, but Slime can't lie to himself anymore.
He killed Quackity.
He took one of his chances of life in that balcony, and he did the final blow by leaving. By making Quackity push the lever. The first time he killed him, he was blinded by so much anger, he was just like him. Slime wonders if anger is a better feeling than regret.
The dirt on his hands is starting to feel like blood, blooming with guilt. He tries to rub it off but the mess spreads and Slime is sure his body isn't shaking from just exhaustion.
He killed his best friend.
All those people he met after Las Nevadas was nothing compared to Quackity from Las Nevadas, as messed up as he was when they were together. At the end of it all, Quackity was his everything.
The realization of it makes stranded drops of goo fall down his cheeks—he hasn't felt like this before. Before everything, all that consumed him was numbness and now all emotion just seem to crash down. His knees buckle until he’s kneeling on the grass as if this motion would bring him closer to his friend. As if he doesn't need to cross the border of life and death to be with him again. Suddenly, sobs start wrack throughout his entire body, and it hurts. If being in pain with no physical injury is being human, he hates every part of it. He wants to crawl back to the earth along with his partner and forget every bit of it. It's too late now, he knows, it's over. It's over now, and so is Quackity and his voice and the intimacy of it all, and Slime wonders if he'll ever experience anything like Quackity again.
He has never felt more lost in his life. He thought he had move on, it shouldn't have mattered if Quackity was alive or not because he wouldn't be coming back.
Slime looks up at the grave again and he realizes the joke of it all—he’s burying Quackity in his own grave, as if they share a tomb now. He can almost imagine it, if they were both human: ’Here lies Slimecicle from Las Nevadas, the world died with you’, says the inscription. ‘Here lies Quackity from Las Nevadas’, the grave connected to it reads, we share the same dirt together. In this reality, Slime stays dead and Quackity doesn't spiral and it doesn't end like this.
The idea of it makes him laugh, because they really were supposed to share the same dirt they lay in. Only Quackity is lying in the dirt now. There is no shared tomb. Slime isn't, and never will be, human. He'll never know what it's like to be buried under soil, to be with Quackity forever. It'll stay that way forever, and Slime curses his immortality.
But that's all there is to it. He can't help but feel empty, thinking about it.
Slime gulps as he wipes his tears, before going back to digging.