Work Text:
Wilbur shows up from the dead, with a white streak in his hair and a shit-eating grin and Quackity thinks to himself, “Shit, this fuckin’ guy.”
He didn’t even know Wilbur was back. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to know but it’s happening and Wilbur is up in his face smelling like the void—mud and tobacco and tears. Tommy hops around them, babbling all the while about how amazing everything is here.
The conversation is tense, all requests for citizenship promptly rejected. It fries Quackity’s nerves having this exchange with Wilbur of all people but he tries to play it cool. His resolve almost goes up in flames, however, when Tommy remarks on the romantic nature of their spoken jabs and Quackity has to end it right there, says there is nowhere else for this to go.
By the end of it, Wilbur has had a proper tantrum and declared himself and Tommy the founders of a new country to-be just outside of Las Nevadas’ indeterminate border. It is just one more thing for Quackity to worry about on top of Wilbur somehow being alive.
It’s a shock, sure, and the heartache wakes anew within him. Quackity has nightmares that night in his presidential suite just above the casino in which the ground opens up and glows red with hellfire and out crawls Wilbur, and he is either smiling or crying, it’s so hard to tell.
Wilbur is so close by, they have no other choice than to see each other more than a few times again. He may be alive but Wilbur is the ghost haunting the periphery of Las Nevadas. He’s always there at the fringes of their vision when the Las Nevada crew is chopping down trees in the nearby forest or when they’re finishing their day by sitting at the river bank.
“Don’t engage,” is Quackity’s order to his country’s citizens.
So none of them engage when Wilbur shows up in Las Nevadas late one night during a rainstorm and stands in the main fountain.
“What a weirdo,” Purpled says from around the pinkie nail he’s been chewing on. The game of chess between him and Fundy has been put on hold as they peer out of the Space Needle’s windows and down on their country below.
Fundy doesn’t want to look; he has great reasons to not look. Instead, he rubs his paws together anxiously and takes the opportunity to survey the board. He’s lost six times so far.
Quackity goes down to the street to talk to him. Perhaps he should have grabbed something to shield him from the rain but the night is warm in a strange way, like the air might combust at some moment and the rainfall is the only thing keeping it from catching.
“What are you doing?” Quackity yells over the roar of the falling rain.
Wilbur stands knee deep in the fountain with his face turned toward the sky. Quackity has to chance a glance because it really looks like he’s waiting for something. Memories of L’Manberg flood back and Quackity shouts once more.
“Hey!”
Wilbur turns his face from the sky and looks over at Quackity. Quackity’s shirt is see-through now; it’s plastered to his torso just as tendrils of his black hair are stuck flat to his face. He kind of feels exposed and vulnerable, and Quackity fully intends to blame any traces of red rising to his cheeks on the night’s temperature.
“You can bathe in the river if you need somewhere to take a bath, but you can’t do it here.”
Wilbur blinks. Then he smiles.
“You’ve changed, Big Q.”
“Yeah,” Quackity says, quieter this time, “I’d hope so.”
Quackity is just so tired of taking offense to the word ‘changed.’ It’s a compliment to him now because he’s thoroughly convinced that if he hadn’t changed when everything fell to ruin, he’d be dead like Wilbur had been.
And who knows if Quackity would have been able to make it back.
Quackity drips all over the carpet as he enters into the lounge at the top of the Needle. Slimecicle trails after him in excitement, mistaking Quackity’s sopping wet form as some kind proof that Quackity is like him. Sam extinguishes all hope of the fact, however, when he arrives with a towel and drapes it over his boss’s narrow shoulders.
Foolish floats up after a minute or two next to Quackity who is standing at the large window of the lounge overlooking Las Nevadas.
“What did he want?”
Down below, they watch as Wilbur moves through the fountain. He runs his hand through the falling water of the fountain as he passes. He climbs over the side and back onto the street and begins walking back to his makeshift home—aspiring country, he had said.
“Hell if I know,” Quackity murmurs.
He watches Wilbur disappear in darkness and moves his eyes to the faint torchlight flickering in the rain on the wall of that tiny stone block outside of Las Nevadas.
Quackity eventually makes his way over to that stone seedling that Wilbur promises will be his demise, if only eventually.
He leaves in the middle of the night when the country is asleep and bribes DogChamp with a steak for his silence. Quackity isn’t sure what compels him to leave his own neon purgatory and travel into Wilbur’s tiny Hell. He tries not to think about his secret suspicion as he continues forward over the hills and down to the water.
The building is more like a shack than anything intimating, small and square and all stone. Quackity knocks on the rugged door and picks splinters out of his knuckles as he waits. He notes that there is not even a window in any of the walls.
It might be a tomb.
Quackity hasn’t seen Wilbur in some time and part of him is afraid that if he opens the door, he’ll find Wilbur dead and rotting inside or even worse—making explosives.
But Wilbur is very much alive when he answers the door. He smiles that devilish smile once more but it’s heavy on his face. His eyes are tired. He does not inquire as to why Quackity has brought himself here but steps aside to let him in.
It strikes Quackity poetically upon entering that he might actually be inside of Wilbur’s mind for as long as he is inside this shack. It’s cold and dark, unnervingly silent. A bed is tucked in the darkest corner. An unused oven sits nearby like some sleeping monster. A single torch glows on the western wall and over the only small table with two matching wooden chairs.
This is no place to live, Quackity thinks; it’s a place to suffer.
But maybe that was Wilbur’s intention all along.
“Shit place, Wil,” Quackity says as he looks around, willing his voice to not reflect the ache in his belly that the potent loneliness of such a place elicits within him.
Wilbur shrugs. “I’ve found people who live in astounding excess to be some of the most vacant and unhappy people to ever live.”
“Sounds like something someone living in a stone hovel would say.”
Wilbur smiles again and this time his eyes twinkle with fondness in the torchlight.
Wilbur opens a nearby chest. Quackity pushes himself up on his toes ever so slightly for as long as Wilbur’s back is turned so can peek inside but he doesn’t see gunpowder or sticks of dynamite yet to be strapped together.
Wilbur pulls out a bottle of clear liquor and cocks his head at Quackity.
“Want a drink?”
Wilbur doesn’t have much but he thankfully has more than one shot glass. Quackity lifts his half-heartedly.
“Salud.”
They drink the shot back and sit awkwardly in silence after.
When Quackity drinks, he’s prone to a song. Vague traces of lyrics come to him even now at the barely-there beginnings of his drunkenness, some like, ‘And now, the end is near,’ and ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few,’ and ‘I bit off more than I could chew.’
Wilbur offers another drink without a word and Quackity takes it like he hates himself.
“Where’s Tommy?” Quackity asks.
“Who knows.” Wilbur drags a hand down his face. “With Phil probably.”
Quackity leaves it at that. He doesn’t want to know what happened. The last time he and Tommy spoke had been rather contentious and he’d felt regretful for ever having involved him. He wonders if Wilbur had felt the same and sent the kid home, or if Tommy had actually stood up for himself and walked out.
Quackity hopes it’s the latter.
Wilbur scratches his stubbly jaw, brow furrowing in genuine wonder as he asks suddenly, “Do you hate me?”
Quackity’s mouth falls open, promptly closes it when he realizes. His reaction initially suggests that such a question is idiotic and obvious in its answer but in the silence between them, any clear answer disappears and it is the complicated uncertainty that they are left to sift through for any semblance of truth.
Quackity breathes a small sigh and trains his eyes on the few drops of vodka at the bottom edge of his glass. He tilts the glass to the side. The droplets converge.
“I didn’t hate you back then.”
It’s clear to them that Quackity means the time back when they were younger and sweeter and stupid. Those were the times when Wilbur would trail his knuckles down the quivering skin of Quackity’s stomach just barely, when they’d share the breath in their lungs, when words, hot and lovely, were whispered in the narrow space between them before being sealed with a kiss.
All of that is a distant memory now.
“I didn’t hate you back then,” Quackity reiterates, and his voice is shaking subtly. He snatches the bottle from Wilbur’s side of the table and pours more into his glass. He throws it back, wincing in the aftermath. “I hate what you’ve become, Wilbur.”
Shadows settle in the hollows of Wilbur’s eyes and cheeks in the dimness of the room. Wilbur appears like a skeleton sitting across from him, some Grim Reaper, Harbinger of Death. Quackity could be afraid and someone else might be, but it’s Wilbur and he knows Wilbur too well to really fear him.
Wilbur could have ripped Quackity’s throat out back in those days when Quackity had given him everything. It would have been easy for him to do. But Wilbur hadn’t. He had loved Quackity instead, and promised in soft whispers that he would do nothing else but love him for all eternity.
“And I hate what you’ve become,” Wilbur says, matter of factly. “From what I’ve seen anyway. It won’t end well, but you know that. You’re counting on it. Why drag it out? Why get everyone involved?”
“What the fuck are you talking about,” Quackity spits.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
Quackity scoffs. He shakes his head and tips what little bit of liquor remains in his glass to his lips.
“You want someone to end this,” Wilbur says. “You want to say you tried so you never have to think about doing this quest for power and influence ever again. You want to fail, and you want someone to blame because you can’t bear knowing it’s your own fault that you failed. It’ll make you feel better, won’t it? Being angry because then you won’t be so alone.”
Quackity’s jaw tightens. “You don’t know me.”
“I wish I didn’t.”
That hits Quackity like a pickaxe to the mouth. He flinches slightly and breaks eye contact because he doesn’t want to risk seeing resentment there in the same eyes that have, up until now, peered upon him with something akin to adoration.
“I thought I could be that for you—an end,” Wilbur says solemnly. “ The end.” He looks up at the ceiling of that attempted ‘end’ but it’s not much to look at. Cobwebs gather at the shadowy corners. A deep crack down the center promises an eventual collapse.
“But look,” Wilbur says, “I can barely destroy my own life at the moment, so. You’ll have to wait or whatever.”
It’s quiet for no more than a second between them and then they’re sharing a laugh and it fucking hurts. It’s the discomfort of the headache-inducing intoxication settling behind their faces, and the unshed tears over lost love and lost life, and the ache of their stomachs trying fruitlessly to digest the immense guilt and shame they’ve feasted on.
They both lean forward and over the table and when they kiss, the pain is even worse.
Their mouths taste the same but they’re speaking something different. Wilbur speaks silently of his fear of death and the lingering memories of his time in a train station that no one will truly understand the perils of. Quackity’s lips move to paint the picture of the deepest fissure that has been gouged in his heart by one boy or a pair of them, to tell of the terror of having fallen short at every opportunity, of being truly alone.
They part but not too far. It’s like they can’t stand it. They need the other near because they’re both so very scared and hurt.
Quackity swallows with a click and when he gives a small shake of his head, his nose brushes Wilbur’s.
“I didn’t want it to be like this.”
“No,” Wilbur murmurs, and Quackity can practically feel his words on his own tongue, “but you don’t hate it.”
Quackity’s fingers curl in the hollow of Wilbur’s throat. Wilbur’s skin is cold. He feels like a memory, unreal at some capacity. A stranger.
Quackity squeezes his eyes shut.
“Pienso en ti, todas las noches, ” he whispers like a secret. “ Cuando el mundo está quieto. Cuando no oigo nada excepto mi latido. ¿Por qué…?”
There’s no way Wilbur understands what Quackity has just said, but it doesn’t really matter. The hurt is pouring off of him and Wilbur answers by taking Quackity’s face in his huge hands and sighing into his mouth. “Alex…”
They kiss and it is the same but different. They are the same people somewhere deep, so deep, within themselves but they are different—traumatized and risen from the dead. They are safe but in danger for as long as they are with each other, both starving for the other but absolutely repulsed by the memories they drudge up within each other.
And it really is a paradox, Quackity thinks as he presses his fingers to the inside of Wilbur’s wrist and waits for a heartbeat that will never come, the way he loves Wilbur but also absolutely hates him.