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Being a villain sucked shit.
“Foolish.”
“Yes, boss?”
“Why the fuck do I do this?”
“To give us all jobs?”
Quackity scowled, lips twisting in displeasure as Foolish finished off the potion soaked bandages that apparently had to stay around his ankle for at least a week. No loopholes.
Quackity reckoned he could bargain it down to two days, perhaps if he offered a pay rise in with the deal.
“Great. Great shit for a mid-life crisis.”
“Boss, you’re, like-“
“I am aware. Do you know the life expectancy of the average villain?”
“Lower with Blade around. You know I know someone who remembers when he wasn’t?”
“Shit, that’d be great, wouldn’t it?” Rolling his eyes, Quackity bent down, rolling his trouser leg back down over his Schrödinger of a broken ankle. It neither was, nor wasn’t, until the potion ran its course, and he wasn’t allowed to even look to check. “I remember when I still had a fucking eye.”
“And I remember when you didn’t go running into things that’ll get you the same.”
Foolish shot him a disapproving look, as he got to his feet, and Quackity wouldn’t have bothered to restrain his derisive snort even if had been someone he respected more than his most trusted colleague. It was pathetic, how they tried to make him care. There was nothing much to care about.
“Yeah, and I remember when I was the scary villain Charlie didn’t dare speak to. I should go back to that.”
“You were never scary, boss. Trust me.”
Flaring his wings, Quackity let out a short hiss that would have a field mouse trembling in its grasses, but had next to no effect not he gold-skinned healer standing before him. In fact, it was hardly doing his position as someone who should be intimidating any good.
“I need new staff.” Quackity got to his feet. He deigned to give Foolish an appraising glance, and narrow his eyes. “Find me a new medic. Then fire yourself.”
“On it, boss. Want me to organise your funeral while I’m at it?”
“If you would.”
——————
Purpose. That must be what he was lacking.
Quackity was hardly a new villain, but it had all been grind work, until now. Stay alive. Stay functional. Stay relevant enough to get gear. Stay hidden, stay in control of both of his identities. Stay the owner of his casinos. Get staff. Keep staff. Keep them alive, too, and now he had businesses other than keep functional. Keep himself relevant enough to stay in the charts, because his pride happened to be a fundamental necessity for a bird like him.
It had been long, gruelling, cyclical work, but now Quackity was through the woods, and life was…
Easy.
Dull.
Quacktiy envied his more pitiful patrons. Gambling was an easy high. And he got one, too, but he knew he’d get more of one from impaling a man through the chest until his guts bubbled out of his eye sockets than watching the same man lose all will to live before his eyes as Quackity laid his hand.
Gambling was easy. Winning was easy. He was the one who rigged the machines, and it left him little more to do besides.
Everything was easy. It was easy to stay alive, a little harder to find a decent reason to, but even idle suicidality had abandoned him, as of late. Quackity had a great life. Everything he could ever want.
And yet, his inner shrike railed against him, every time he flew the same circuits, came limping back to Foolish with the same injuries.
Quackity had never considered himself a terrorist, before now. And still wouldn’t. He was a political figure, as valid as any of the corrupt geezers who presided over this hellbent city, and he wrote his messages in the blood of as many innocents as they did.
Still. A little destruction of public infrastructure would get anyone’s blood flowing.
It was always random. That was what made it fun. It was a far cry from justified, a far cry from slick, a far cry from the morality his vigilante-self had clung to like a ratty stuffed animal.
His days of stuffed toys were long behind him. Quackity dealt in dice, in coin flips, in the decaying nucleuses of micro-radium clocks that would detonate at complete, total random.
Chance, it seemed, was just the thing to make him feel like his existence was on a set path. They called him the TNT villain, and Quackity liked it. It was something to his name. A spark in his blood, in the heart of an explosive in the heart of a building, in the hearts of the heroes who got so field up at just a little fun.
Roll the dice. See what was going down, where, and when. The why didn’t matter. Quackity was a hellbent bird, dealing whatever he wished to whomever he wished. They would all suffer to appease his wrath, only for the roulette wheel to come crashing through their roof next.
He’d bet against anyone, just to watch their eyes fall as his claw tipped the scales, and sent the next chip straight into his pot. There was no good reason to play fair, in Quackity’s book.
——————
Odds, as they said, exponentiated.
Fine. Perhaps they didn’t say that. Quackity wasn’t going to admit it.
“I don’t think anyone says that.”
“Shut up.” Quackity flicked one wing in irritation, running a poker chip over his knuckles and flicking it back into the palm of his hand. “Just shut up, okay? Novel conversation is the only thing keeping you alive, and I’ve heard enough people tell me I’m wrong.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just- unique.”
“Great. This supposed to appeal to my humanity? Because humanity’s a pretty shitty species, and all it did was get lucky, to excuse me for not feeling much connection to the fu-“
“I’m saying I’ve never seen anyone like you.”
Big talk, from an idiot currently sitting under a fallen girder like it was a picnic in the park. Quackity was deriving no little satisfaction from it, from knowing that the stupid hero was probably doomed, and here he was, taking his last words like so many shots in the witching hours.
“Well, that’s my point! I’ve seen you three times. Including this one. One fuck of a coincidence, don’t you think, mi héroe?”
“Three fucks of coincidences.”
“Shut.” Quackity dropped other his knees, dangerously close to the hero’s not-pinned hands, and held the tip of his knife to the bird’s throat. Before he continued, he tipped his head, smiling politely to really drive the point home. “The fuck ok. Okay?”
“Okay. You can kill me now.”
Pale flesh flashed before his eyes, as the hero bared their neck, and Quackity felt some ounce of wind leave his sails. It was a shitty surrender. Really shitty. Deeply unsatisfactory, and he almost wanted to let the hero go right now, and chase them down, just to inject some thrill of the hunt back into this thing.
“Is that what you want out of this?” Quackity jabbed a little, just with the very tip of his knife, his ankles aching from the awkward, crouched position. “Do the heroes not even let you guys kill yourselves while on the clock anymore?”
To his surprise, that got him a laugh. And a flash of the hero’s eyes, which he hadn’t been paying much attention to, before now. Preferring to rant, like always.
But- blue. Startlingly blue, one of them, at least. The other… less so. Still.
Still.
“Guess not. What’s a villain doing, giving a fuck?”
“Same as always. Something the heroes aren’t.”
The hero blinked at him, those beautiful, exhausted, sparkling blue eyes framed by a domino mask Quackity was strangely interested in removing. So serious, so polished, the very image of the perfect hero. Beaten but not down, holding out against the trying forces of darkness.
Quackity’s own tailcoat brushed against his ankles, the tips of his hair dyed scarlet, this season, by selection of the roulette wheel from which he got his name, and if he’d had an ounce of poetry to his names he’d have called himself a prince of darkness, bent down in front of this radiant, azure outpost of radical rationality.
But, alas, he’d always been a fighter, not a lover. Never tested, but he’d never claim to be a scientist either. He was under no obligation to make himself intelligible.
“Yes.”
“Yes what, pretty bird?”
Oh, because the hero was a bird, too, of course. Quackity had no escape, these days. The price of madness, it seemed, was the universe being just as illogical in return. He had no need for such a beautiful bird to be throw at his feet on a random Wednesday.
He’d certainly done nothing to earn this. Quackity had shaken off any ideas of karma like a bad coat of storm water off a dog’s back, and had been enjoying his shelter from the tornado of moral righteousness ever since.
“I’d like you to kill me. Roulette, right?”
“Si. You seem to think I give anyone what they want.”
“I don’t want anything.” Those eyes were going to be the death of him, beaming defiant apathy into Quackity’s waning insanity. Common sense seemed so appealing, when this hero must be objectively attractive, by any standard. Quackity couldn’t be losing his mind in a different direction for no reason at all. “But I might die here anyway. So I’d like you to kill me, because I didn’t lie, Roulette.”
“Nor did I…” Quackity’s ear feathers flicked back and forth, as he thought, his pensiveness trailing into an airy laugh. “Oh, I’ll bite. Tell me, TRANSLATE my bird. Run your little script, see if I spare you.”
“I’ve never seen anyone like you. And- my life is really fucking boring, so this seems the best middle ground as a way to go out. Do you believe in justice?”
Quackity did not.
“Not particularly.”
“Good. There’s no good reason for me to die.” The hero leaned his head back, and sighed, a curl of chestnut hair falling over one half of the domino mask, and obscuring the less vibrant eye. “That’s the shitty part of life, isn’t it? Things happen for no reason.”
“I’d call it the best part…”
Quackity couldn’t stop looking. He hadn’t wanted anything, either, hadn’t in a long while, and now… he did. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. He was a force of nature, not a being with desires.
“You wouldn’t, wouldn’t you?” The hero eyed him, then sighed again, and his wings flared out and forwards. “Okay. No luck. Let’s see if your odds exponentiate again, as they say.”
Before Quackity could protest, the hero managed to force the solid metal girder off himself, and stood up, and he was wearing an costume, just a default hero costume, nothing special about it, the kind of costume you’d see in a comic book and not even think about it, but his wings were blue and black and the ocean at night and the sky reflected out of his eyes, fractured by the space between them, and Quackity felt fractured.
He was flying away, before Quackity pulled himself together, and the odds clicked back into place, resettled precisely as they’d been meant to.
The universe won every bet, in the end. Quackity had lived on borrowed fortune, stealing from other people’s pots of luck, and now, he had none of his own left to fall back on.
But still, he needed to see that hero again.
——————
Preferably before he killed himself.
It seemed a simple sentiment to communicate, yet, Purpled seemed to be being deliberately obtuse about the necessity of timescales.
“He wanted me to kill him. What part of that makes you think this can go at the bottom of your priority list?”
“Uh- the fact that if you’re involved, you’re probably gonna do it yourself when I don’t do it well enough, and then I’ll have wasted my own time?”
“I will pay you.”
“Sure. I’ll take the money. Anything to go motivate you to do what you’ll do anyway.”
Quackity hated being known. Being predictable. His life was a careful balance of complete spontaneity and intricate routines, and it was the latter that grated far more than the former.
Particularly when he had to deal with uppity teenagers, who dint know how to respect a force of nature when they saw one.
Quackity would have threatened Purpled, if Purpled didn’t have some special kind of lasers to detect any sharp objects inside his office and have Quackity full of more bullets before he could so much as sword-swallow.
“Fine.”
“You do seem very fine. Good complexion.”
“Go fuck yourself, kid.”
“Can’t tell me to do that. I might not be of age yet.”
“You don’t need to be legal to jerk off.” Quackity flipped Purpled off, turning around with his wings spread in a fierce display of intimidation as he headed for the door. “And thanks for fucking nothing, anyway, which is how much I hope you c-“
“Nice seein’ you too, Roulette!”
——————
Quackity was beginning to suspect he was losing his mind.
What he hadn’t realised, about making the world his casino, was that he set the odds. There was no RNG, no universal luck stat. He was karma. He was Fortune. He was Tyche, Lakshmi, Hermes, and he was god if he willed himself to be.
To sit down, and hope the hero that had so thoroughly wrecked his carefully balanced system of odds to reappear like a rare bird sighted just once a season might well kill him.
Quackity hated to be bored. To be anything. To be nothing, moreover, because he was meant to be everything, and anything he wasn’t was beneath his notice.
Right now, he was apparently beneath the notice of the only thing he’d wanted in years.
And it was boring. Quackity hated to be bored. Had he mentioned that? He’d play god, except to narrate his own story was just as crushingly dull as to end it himself, and he wasn’t going to do that.
So, he narrated other people’s. Dealt their hands, because he’d had it proven that the general public was stupid, and he’d had one interesting conversation in his life after the first one ended, and now he couldn’t even find the bastard he’d had it with.
Sidetrack. Derailed. Quackity couldn’t remember where he was going, except from around the casino. Again, do a loop, loop around the roulette table, and he was bored.
“Roulette!”
Charlie, at least, was a blissful relief, wilful ignorance in a sea of ineptitude. Quackity would always have time for someone who chose to be stupid.
“What’s up, Slime?”
Hands in the pockets of his tailcoat, Quackity tried for a smile. It was a pleasant game, to play human. He had a tendency to get distracted. Charlie made him feel like a person again, a person who was a villain who lived in a city and owned casinos. No Tyche-complex, he was no god. Just a young man with a scarred eye and red-dyed hair tips. He hadn’t changed it, since he’d first met the hero.
“There’s a hero I don’t think you want us to kill in the lobby. He- he told us that. Those words.”
Heartbeat, skipped. Roulette, skipping across the wheel. Bet it all on black, and Quackity saw blue reflected back out of it.
“What… does he look like, Slime?”
“Uh- boring? Oh! He has wings. Big ones, kind of like…”
“A magpie?”
“Yes! I take it we were right not to kill him?”
“Very right.” Quackity was grinning. How and why were questions for later. Right now, the odds were in his favour. “Great work, Slime-“
“He might be dead by now, though. He was bleeding a lot.”
“What.”
——————
“I don’t want to put that in my body.”
Wilbur needed to be very clear about that. He wanted to be fundamentally, entirely, unrestrainedly clear, that he was not going to ingest a mystery substance from an unknown coworker of a villain he also hardly knew, while a lot of his blood soaked through a wad of bandages.
The unknown not-villain nodded, and Wilbur relaxed a little, sinking into the plush waiting-room chair he’d been shown to. Apparently, mentioning Roulette’s name didn’t get him killed on sight. He’d wondered, idly, but he’d also been quite worried about dying, and it was a known fact that Roulette ran the nightlife distract.
“Fair enough. Oh- he’s here.”
The gold-skinned man sat back, setting his suspiciously colourful concoctions elsewhere, and lightheadedness hit Wilbur like a mallet to the forehead as he once more took in the force of nature that was the TNT villain, Roulette.
Fuck, he was so pretty. Wilbur didn’t want to pass out in his casino.
“Roulette!” Too cheerful. It made blood go to the wrong places, but Wilbur didn’t want to underwhelm his desperation. “Is your healer going to kill me?”
Roulette was everything Wilbur had ever seen him as. Standing in boots that must give him half a footer t least, arms crossed and half a grin visible, underneath that mask. His hair looked bloodstained.
“Not in the slightest. He does require your name as payment, though, and so do I.”
Wilbur turned red.
“Oh. Um- sorry. Wilbur. M- Magpie, but… that’s for hero business, so…”
In real time, Wilbur watched Roulette’s cheeks also begin to glow, and the gold-skinned healer shoot him a half-wary, half-mocking glance. It was strange, to see the villain lose his composure so quickly, and Wilbur wondered when he’d been meant to say his name.
“…Your codename is Magpie. Foolish- his name’s fucking Magpie, and I nearly paid Purpled to-“
“I hear you, boss. Shout any day you want me to arrange your funeral.”
Roulette buried his face in his hands, and screamed shortly, with an alarming lack of decorum. For that instant, he looked like a child having a tantrum, and then had was composed again, cheekbones glowing slightly red.
“Sorry. Sorry- Wilbur? Wilbur. I… may have made my life more complicated than it needed to be. Fuck.”
Wilbur laughed. His vision spun, and nausea made a fresh reminder of itself as it crested the unsteady waves inside him.
“You’re so… special. Sorry. I- I might… pass out?”
Lots of blood. A lot of it was in his feathers, that was going to be a bitch. Maybe Roulette would preen them for him, he looked like the sort of bird that knew what to do with feathers. Wilbur maybe liked that idea too much.
He shouldn’t expect anything from Roulette. It was pure luck of the dice that he was still alive at all, and his odds would become astronomical, quicker than Wilbur cared to calculate, of even making it out of this in the same state.
“Wait-“
Wilbur tried to get to his feet, out of some strange idea that he should be standing up, to make a good final impression on the villain, and everything rotated. Spinning was too nice a verb for the unpleasant, painful sensations filling him like a half-full, half-empty glass.
“Passing out. Sorry. Don’t- don’t kill me yet.”
For some reason, Wilbur liked his odds.