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The air grew thick and heavy as Gumball pushed through the mysterious door, its wood groaning as if it hadn’t been opened in centuries. Beyond, the room was shrouded in unnatural darkness that swallowed what little light seeped in from the hallway. His ears, once perked with cautious curiosity, now flattened against his head as his eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom.
There, motionless at the center of the chamber, stood a figure that made Gumball’s blood run cold. It was draped entirely in black—a jacket that seemed to swallow the light, pants that clung like living shadows, and shoes that made no sound despite their solid form. Where claws should have been, long, fingered gloves stretched outward like skeletal extensions. But it was the mask that truly froze him in place: the bleached skull of a cat, etched with thin crimson lines that mimicked whiskers. From its hollow eye sockets burned an unnatural red glow, each pupil ringed by a sickly yellow aura that pulsed faintly, like the last flicker of a dying star.
Gumball tried to speak, but the words caught in his throat, scraping out as a dry whisper.
"I should have known you would be here, waiting for me.”
The figure stood rigid, eyes locked on Gumball. When Zachery spoke, his voice grated. “Can you believe everything we did meant absolutely nothing? All our hard work—revenge, clearing our name, making money, surviving—only to be cast aside like garbage! And this is what we are left with: emptiness, loneliness, grief, blood on our hands, loss?!
Gumball’s gaze fell to the floor, his shoulders slumped under the weight of memory. “It was a tough ride. I guess… at least the fire has gone out. We are not burning with it anymore.”
"AS IF THAT MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER," Zachery roared, his voice echoing off the walls with enough force to make the room seem to tremble. “Nothing has changed! You are still the same person who endured so much pain, so much torment, just to claw your way back to civilization—killing irrelevant figures along the way. And now we are nothing more than a fucking hollow stump! All this for what: recognition, making others feel our pain, or to satisfy a rich man and a certain one-eyed freak? Only for the latter to use us like a lab rat and throw us away, while the cyclops plotted behind the scenes the entire time. All because he held a grudge over how we lived, and now look where we are!”
Gumball’s breath hitched as tears welled in his eyes. “I was tired of being a puppet. I never should have joined them.”
“And if that is not ludicrous, here you are, crying now over the fact that you are the reason so many we knew are dead,” Zachery said, his voice dripping with mockery as he took a step forward.
“The goblin may have held the strings, and the cyclops may have set the stage, but guess what?” His eyes narrowed to slits. “We are the puppet!”
A choked sob escaped Gumball’s lips. “I cannot stand it anymore. It was all too much.”
Zachery threw his head back and cackled, the sound hollow and humorless. “Ha-Ha-Ha! Boo-hoo! ‘It was all too much.’ Fine—but how does that excuse us from witnessing the deaths of Billy, Gary Hughes, Sussie, Wilson Bilson, or our elders? Even some cops and soldiers never made it home after our crashouts. And what about the fallout from the false accusations, the way they ruined our reputations?”
Gumball sniffled, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
“And speaking of ‘impact,’” Zachery continued, raising a skeptical eyebrow, “how do you explain Mom and Dad, Darwin, Anais, or—dare I say—even Penny? The same people we’ve stood by countless times, only for them to betray us in every way possible. Like Pop, leaving us behind and screwing things up; Mom, taking an ‘eye for an eye’ stance; our little sister, using us as a test subject; the goldfish we refused to call ‘brother,’ only for him to break a leg twice; and the two-faced bitch who used us to clean up her messes while letting drugs control her?” He shrugged with exaggerated nonchalance.
“Druggies, am I right?!” His expression darkened again. “Or the fact that she tore our heart out in front of everyone at prom while dancing with another guy—the same one-eyed freak who was hiding once again—and even got help from that horny, rich idiot we refused to name. One humiliation after another! Everyone was in our hands, and we were ready to pop them like balloons. We even gave the cyclops a piece of our minds! Giving him head! Consider us screaming at our folks in our cell afterward, well fucking deserved!”
Gumball remained silent, staring at the dusty floorboards before meeting Zachery’s burning eyes. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone… I just wanted it to stop.”
“Aww…” Zachery cooed, his voice thick with mockery. “‘Didn’t want to hurt anyone… just wanted it to stop…’”
He tilted his head. “Yeah… that’s adorable. As if that stopped us. ‘Innocent’ is the last word that applies. We were doing terrible shit long before this, and don’t give me that ‘it had a purpose’ crap. ‘Stroking our ego’ or ‘sheer boredom’ is more like it! Just look where our so-called ‘help’ landed us—402 life sentences, right?! We were bound to become criminals eventually, and it took a couple of dumbasses and a gang of convicts to push us there. And everything we did? The Detention Gang couldn’t even come close. As if we’re going to do anything to make Grandpa Frankie proud!”
Gumball fell silent. Zachery shrugged and began pacing like a caged animal.
“And what happens next?” He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Hmm… let’s see.”
His finger shot up like a lightning bolt. “Oh, that’s right! We turned into a massive lava-like kaiju and tore through the town! As if blowing up the school wasn’t enough! All because ‘it was all too much.’ We’re the reason Elmore is now a goddamn smelting pit that society has to piece back together like a giant jigsaw puzzle! Everyone’s terrified of us—and how could they not be?”
His hands clenched into fists. “After all, we played right into the false mayor’s schemes! We even managed to enjoy ourselves despite everything the world threw at us. We aligned with the same guy who screwed us over in the first place! And his regret? Where was that from the very beginning? And that’s not even the reason so many lives were ruined afterward. We even brought the original Mayor to his knees! And what about all those we claimed 'we didn’t want to hurt'—Felicity, Sal, Margaret, Butterknife, Spray Paint Can, Dolphin Man, our classmates, neighbors, impostors, Tobias, Jamie, Julius, Mr. Small, Mr. Yoshida, Clare, Rachel, Vladus, Mrs. Yoshida, the Fitzgeralds, Mrs. Jotunheim, Masami, Carrie… even our own family and ex?!”
His voice rose to a fever pitch. “Bodies, bodies, bodies, bodies!”
He panted, chest heaving. “We are still the ‘annoyance’ they cannot stand, and we cooked up the meanest barbecue in town as payback for what they did to us. Nothing will change that.”
“No,” Gumball whispered, shaking his head. “We were the ‘annoyance’… we were everything they hated.”
“And all that’s left is your lament. Tears won’t bring anything back.”
Gumball sobbed harder, tears streaking his face.
“And now… what do we do?” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“But there’s one thing I do know.”
His gaze hardened as he glared at Zachery. “I’m not you anymore. That rage has consumed me for too long—the anger, the loss, the bloodshed, the hatred. And what has it accomplished? The life I once had is gone, and I can’t change it. I was so focused on my fury that I didn’t see the aftermath until it was too late.”
He sighed, shoulders slumping, eyes on the floor. Then he looked up, burning with determination.
“But that doesn’t change the fact—you’re not me anymore!”
His eyes narrowed as they locked on Zachery’s. “Even when we were brainwashed and discarded by others, the deaths of all those criminals—and anyone else we once cared about, even those indirectly—are on your head, no one else! You’re the reason everything is in flames. You’re selfish, murderous, and chaotic. You chose to align with the one who used us from the start and even teamed up with the person we despised most.”
His gaze dropped to the floor, the weight of his words pressing down. Gumball’s tears kept flowing, but his frantic sobs softened into deep, sorrowful grief.
“But you’re also so much more.”
A low hiss of venom escaped Zachery’s lips, fading as quickly as it came. The rage that had held him rigid drained away, his shoulders slumping. His claws loosened, and his masked face tilted downward, finally confronting the weight of his actions reflected in the dust at his feet.
After a long silence, he met Gumball’s gaze, the red glow in his eyes flickering like dying embers.
Gumball wiped his tears with a trembling hand, his voice barely a whisper but heavy with truth.
“We… are so much more than this.”
The words hung in the air, a fragile truth in a room built on lies.
As if summoned by the revelation, Zachery’s form began to waver, to flicker like a faulty projection. The dark fabric of his jacket seemed to thin, the solid form dissolving into smoke and shadow. In seconds, he was gone, leaving behind only the cat skull mask lying face up on the wooden floorboards.
It was no longer menacing—just an empty, hollow thing, the red marks looking like nothing more than dried paint in the dim light.
Gumball walked toward it, each step heavy with the gravity of the moment. He stood over the mask, glaring down at it as if it were the face of every demon he’d ever faced.
He bent down, his fingers closing around the bone-white surface. It was cold to the touch, unnervingly smooth. He lifted it with both hands, holding it before him like a sacred relic—or a damning piece of evidence.
He looked downward into the empty eye sockets, and the silence of the room pressed in on him, a physical presence filled with the ghosts of his past. Grief etched itself onto his face, every line and curve telling a story of loss and regret.
But then—
From the far corner of the chamber, a soft light began to bloom.
It started as a pinprick, a single point of warmth in the oppressive darkness, and grew steadily brighter, casting long, dancing shadows that writhed like living things. Drawn by an instinct he didn’t understand, Gumball began to walk toward it, the mask still clutched in his hands.
With each step he took toward the burgeoning light, the shadow he cast behind him grew, stretching and twisting until it was no longer his own.
It was a massive, monstrous silhouette—a terrifying fusion of Zachery’s sharp, predatory form and the hulking, chaotic shape of a great beast.
A constant reminder…
That even in the light, the darkness would always be at his heels.