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Quackity dreams of dark rooms and empty space.
In his dreams, he’s caught in a moment outside of time. Outside of the world as a whole. He’s falling into nothing but inky void. It’s endless and hollow; it’s half a blanket wrapping around him, half a coldness that haunts him and aches in every joint and bone.
His chest tightens with the panic of it. He’s got enough control of himself still to crawl backwards as far as he can - he can’t see where he’s going, can’t see even a hand in front of his face before he smacks himself in the nose - until his back hits something solid. One wall. He slides down it until he finds another, and in the corner he presses himself back as far as he can. Both shoulders press against each wall, the last bit of something real he can hold on to.
He’s back here. He’s back in empty dark rooms and locked doors and vacant space that crawls around in his chest and tightens his lungs.
There is no light. There is no sound. Everything is black and dark and silent, suffocating and full in its emptiness. He opens his mouth, and all that comes out is more silence - he can’t scream, can’t cry, can’t make any sound at all - so he bites down on one hand instead. He lets the pain that blossoms under his own teeth be grounding; the last thing he can feel, the last thing that lets him know this is real, this is true.
Nothing is real anymore. He feels like he’s falling and floating, and there’s no ground to go back down to. There’s just the darkness, and there’s him, hallucinating somewhere in it.
He spends weeks, years, decades in the dark. He waits, and he waits, and he waits for someone to let him out, and no one ever does.
It seeps inside of him. Presses against his skin until it seeps through, down his mouth and into his joints and his bones. It’s eating away at him until there’s nothing of him left. It’s all the dark.
It’s going to be dark forever.
When Quackity wakes up, it’s with silent tears drying on his face and a ring of bruises gone purple on one hand.
It’s going to be a bad day, then.
He shoves nightmares like memories to the furthest part of his mind, and he gets dressed. He has work to do today.
When the window slides open behind him, Quackity does not bother with the time it takes to look back. There’s a first aid kit kept in the top drawer of his dresser, where it’s easy to reach and to find in a hurry. He wraps his fingers around the white tin and keeps looking.
“How bad is it?” he asks, still digging through the drawer in front of him. He has a bottle of antiseptic in here somewhere. There is a tv playing low in the corner of the room. He’s had it tuned out to background noise, a faint buzz in the back of his mind just a little louder than the one that seems to live there no matter what. Above it, a familiar voice comes out quiet. Nothing louder than the reporter’s words.
“I’m fine.”
Quackity hand closes on the bottle he’s looking for. He turns now.
His brother’s helmet is off, in his hand instead. There’s a bruise on his forehead and a cut on his lip, and it’s not bleeding anymore but it is still dark and angry. He’s holding one arm against his side, carefully guarded and ginger. Quackity has to wonder how he got up to the window. He lives on the third story. Either Tubbo is getting frighteningly good at working through his pain, or he’s borrowed someone’s powers. He’s not sure he wants to know which is more likely.
The world is dark outside the window, and Tubbo’s reflection silhouettes harshly in the glass. Quackity hands him the box of bandages and a bottle of antiseptic and he moves to it. Peers outside, squints down at an empty street and dark windows, and then yanks down the open window and pulls the blinds down with it. When he turns back, Tubbo is watching his every move.
“I came here alone,” Tubbo says. He sounds tired. He sounds defeated. “I’m not dumb.”
“You can’t be too careful.” He turns back to the thin ghost of a figure in the middle of his cramped one-room apartment. Tubbo’s picking open the first aid kit with gloved fingers, wobbling his split lip between his teeth in concentration. “Rough day?”
Tubbo shrugs. “Same as always.”
If it’s the same as always, Quackity wants to say, then why are you here and not at Sam’s? But he doesn’t say that. Instead, he takes the box of bandages back from Tubbo and opens them himself. “Sit. I’ll get you ice for that bruise.”
“It’s not bad,” Tubbo says. An echo of earlier. “I’m fine.”
Quackity ignores him. He raids the freezer for the ice pack - can’t find it, swears under his breath, finds it thawed in the kitchen sink and swears again - and comes back with a bag of frozen vegetables instead.
“You eating healthy?” Tubbo asks, pressing it to his forehead. He’s shed the jacket on over his suit, a nondescript thing even with all the gold on it. With one sleeve rolled up, Quackity notices the gash across his bicep now and reaches for the antiseptic.
“You know me,” Quackity says. “Healthiest person you ever saw. Home cooked meals, every day.”
As if he hasn’t been living off of microwave meals and whatever food he steals after shifts at the diner down the street. His stove has been broken for two weeks. He hasn’t had the chance - or the money - to get it fixed. And like, yeah, he could probably ask Sam. The guy would come over and fix it himself or pay for a brand new one delivered the next fucking morning if Quackity so much as let his guard down for a second. It’s tempting, sometimes. To let him. To sit back on his heels and have someone else fix everything at his every whim.
But something sits a little wrong when Sam gives him things. There’s a sting in his chest, and something crawls under his skin and lives there like a bad memory. Makes him wonder the price tag behind every gesture.
He doesn’t know how Tubbo manages it.
“So who got this one in?” he asks, dabbing at the cut with a cloth. Tubbo barely flinches. “New villain? Did you kick their ass?”
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t even a villain. T–uh, Circuit got freaked out in the fight. Shorted out a whole city block, something blew, and I got hit by shrapnel. Nobody’s fault, really.”
Quackity barely bites back a harsher comment. Instead, what slips out from carefully cutting teeth is, “Can’t even keep a handle on their heroes, can they?”
“It’s not Circuit’s fault,” Tubbo says, defense creeping into his voice. “He got backed into a corner and lost control. It happens.”
“Yeah, to kids,” Quackity says. “To people who don’t have perfected powers. To people who don’t have lives that rely on them not fucking up.”
“Circuit is a kid.” His tone tells Quackity to watch his next words.
“So are you.” Quackity tears open a bandage, paper packaging crinkling in his hands. “Don’t see you taking down buildings by accident.”
Tubbo’s quiet. He barely flinches as Quackity applies the bandage. Finally, he says, quietly, “It’s different.”
“Why?” He knows he should take a step back, but he doesn’t want to. He presses, pushes, looks for a faultline. “Because you think you’re tougher than he is? You can handle the pressure better? You think you don’t count as a kid?”
“Yeah,” Tubbo snaps. “You know what, yeah, I do think that. And I’m right, Quackity, I’m fucking right and you know it. I am better at this than everyone else. And you know exactly why, don’t you? Why we’re both better at this than everyone, and why nobody’s ever gonna be able to do the shit that we can–that I can do. You don’t fucking grow up the way we did and then get to be a normal kid after. You don’t even get to be a normal hero.”
There’s silence loud enough to be heard for miles. Tubbo’s chest heaves. The flash in his eyes fades within seconds of the outburst ending, and Quackity watches it happen. Watches the fury burn bright and fast, and then fade into tired charcoal.
“You don’t have to be the one to do this.”
“I do.” Tubbo lays ginger hands in his lap. Still gloved. “You know as well as I do that it has to be us. Has to be me.”
“Bullshit.” Quackity crinkles the paper garbage in his hand again. Crumples it into a ball. “You’re a kid.”
“Not anymore,” Tubbo says. Like a death sentence. Like an anvil dropping. Like a gavel loud and clear.
Quackity doesn’t say, Let the heroes solve their own damn problems. Doesn’t say, They’ve put us through enough hell, me and you both. You’ve earned a break, do you know that? You shouldn’t have had to earn it, but you have. Can’t quite get out the words, If you stop, I can keep you safe this time. I can keep you safe now like I couldn’t before.
He can’t say any of that, bitter as it is on his tongue. So instead he says, “There are other heroes in the world. It isn’t just us.”
“And yet you’re out there anyway,” Tubbo says, and he says it quietly like it’s not a jab. Like it’s not a retort; a simple fact. Plain and simple. Brings up something else. Debunks Quackity’s argument and leaves it disassembled in the dust he hasn’t swept up yet. “You are, aren’t you? Somebody took out a whole human trafficking ring, right after the hero force paused looking into it. Somebody left the leader’s head on the chief of police’s back doorstep.”
He doesn’t know how to answer that. “Huh. Imagine that.”
“You’re out there digging into it too,” Tubbo says again. “As if nobody else is gonna do it.”
“Because they aren’t,” Quackity says, and then realizes that’s as good as an admission. He charges ahead. “They don’t do shit where it matters and you know that as well as I do.” And then, “How’d you even know about that?”
“How would I not know about that?” He raises one eyebrow, a pointed look. “Some new vigilante poking into shit, starting to get in the way and get caught underfoot. Makes it into a message with how they turn shit over to the heroes or to the police. You’ve got a whole file just to yourself now. They call you Blindfire, but more often than that, they call you a fucking pain in the ass.”
Quackity shrugs. “Least I get a cool name.”
“You’re a hypocrite, Big Q.” Tubbo points at him with his bag of mixed peas and carrots. The bruise under it has gone a dark, ugly shade of purple. Quackity reaches out to press the makeshift ice back against Tubbo’s forehead.
There’s a memory still fresh in his mind of a close call, a narrow scrape two weeks old that he’d just barely got out of with his identity still intact. Not that it’s much of an identity, in either direction. With a mask on, he’s just an extra shadow. Without it, he’s a washed up twenty-something who barely exists on paper. He’s unremarkable, no matter where he stands.
And Tubbo sits here in front of him with his gold-trimmed hero suit, working with four of the most famed heroes this city has to offer.
“No,” he says, finally, “I’m not. Because I’m not working with the goddamn hero force.”
Tubbo deflates ever so slightly.
“Just be careful, okay?” Tubbo scrubs one eye with the heel of his palm. “I don’t want to be assigned to hunt you down.”
“You’d never bring me in,” Quackity says, voice light and teasing. Or he hopes it is, anyway. “Would you, Turbo?”
“It’d be a big annoyance,” Tubbo says. Not a no, but not a yes either. “So much to explain, reports to write, lies to make up–”
Quackity grins. “Lies? And from the city’s newest golden child, too. Knew you weren’t actually heading down the straight and narrow.”
“Yeah, well.” Tubbo shrugs. “We’ve all got our secrets, don’t we?”
It strikes him, sometimes, how different things are. Tubbo is sitting on a kitchen chair - Quackity’s kitchen chair, the one he owns himself - under a flickering lightbulb he keeps forgetting to change, and there’s a bag of frozen vegetables over his face and a bandage around his arm. It’s all a bit shit, but it’s their shit, so it’s a welcome fucking change from what it used to be.
Tubbo still looks tired. There is something dark in his eyes and in the skin under them, something heavy in the turn of his mouth and the set of his shoulders. Even in this difference, something still weighs on him.
It weighs on Quackity too. Even in his own apartment, even this far from everything they’ve left behind, even though they’re supposed to be safe now, something hangs in the air over him. Something makes him check over his shoulder on an empty street, and something rests in a heavy weight on his chest.
Years have gone by. They’ve both grown up. They’re not the fucked up kids they used to be. Now they’re just in some kind of fucked up middle ground between that and moving on.
“You staying the night?” Quackity blurts out, finally. His bed isn’t much more than a mattress on the floor, and the couch is in worse condition, but it’s at least his. It’s his enough to share with Tubbo. “If you want. You should rest that arm.”
Tubbo hesitates for a moment. “Sam will wonder where I went.”
“So tell him,” Quackity says. “What’s he gonna do, ground you?”
Tubbo makes a noise that’s almost a laugh. “I was thinking more like he might stop by tomorrow morning. He’ll take any excuse to check in on you, you know.”
Quackity winces. “Ah. Right.”
“It’s kind of sweet,” Tubbo says. “He worries about you. He’s not a bad guy.”
Quackity brushes it off. He doesn’t let it stick. Doesn’t let his mind latch onto that and spin it through the spiraling circles his head likes to grab onto, tearing into well-worn paths. If Sam is so good, he wants to challenge, why’d he wait so long to save them? If he is so good, why work with heroes at all?
But Tubbo knows distrust as well as Quackity does. So he doesn’t say it.
“Tomorrow’s problem, then,” Quackity says. He tosses a blanket at Tubbo, and Tubbo catches it with his good arm. “I’ll take the couch tonight.”
Tubbo accepts it without argument. He puts vegetables back in the freezer. “Night, Q.”
“Night, Tubs.”
Quackity’s phone buzzes in his pocket.
He pauses as he reaches his own floor, stepping off of the stairs. With one hand, he fishes his phone out of his pocket, and he fiddles with his keys in the other. Every part of him is worn out after his shift, and he’s so ready to just get into his apartment and crash. But when he looks down at the screen of his phone, exhaustion is gone and replaced with a rush of adrenaline.
(6:42) turbo: ina dvance im soryry
(6:42) q: what???
He sends the reply back in an instant, but there’s no reply that comes up right away. In an instant, he thinks he hears a hundred other things that set him on edge. Something whirs on the other side of his apartment door - has his fridge always been that loud? A quiet clunk. Is that in his apartment, or the one next door?
His heart pounds in his ears as he turns the key, silent, balanced on the edge of his feet –
A crack of the door. His apartment is empty, but it’s off. It’s strong enough to make the hair on the back of his next stand up on edge, the sheer force of wrongness combining with the adrenaline from Tubbo’s vague text message.
And then he notices.
Every single thing in his apartment is different.
First of all, there are all three lightbulbs in the light above his table. None of them flicker when he flips the switch to turn them on. His stove is gone, and there’s a new one in its place. His–His couch is gone too, what the fuck, and so is his bed. There’s a bedframe and a new mattress and blankets in the same color as the brand new rug on the kitchen floor. That clunking sound he’d heard from outside the door happens again, and his attention snaps to the corner, where a little vacuum robot trundles along the side of a wall.
It takes one, two, three seconds for it to register. And it takes his phone buzzing again.
(6:44) turbo: i tired to stop him for what its worth
There’s a note on the table. Even without it, Quackity has figured out what’s going on. He swears as he picks up the note.
Q,
If you need anything else, you can give me a call anytime.
- Sam
Goddammit.
(6:52) turbo: ur bed sucekd this on eis better a nyway
(6:53) q: he got me a fucking roomba, tubbo. you’re never allowed at my apartment ever again
(6:54) turbo: :D