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My good friend,
Though my letter might come as a surprise, possibly a mere power play of some sort, or you may interpret this as an upcoming attack, I’ve only the genuine intention in my heart to assure you that I leave our past feuds behind.
I have only this one thing to say: no man learns from his constant accomplishments, for the road to wisdom is a rugged path. In life, we tend to shun and hold grievances towards those who teach us our toughest lessons. Some leave emotional scars, whereas others leave physical ones.
All I know is that retribution doesn’t supply me with more wisdom, but it damages my soul, filling it with devastation and darkness. It would be silly to clarify the specifics of our feuds; I simply want you to know that, wherever you may be, I send my personal gratitude for your mere participation in my life’s path to wisdom. And I encourage you to be apart of it once more, leaving all our differences behind.
Sincerely,
Quackity from Las Nevadas.
The sun is going down when Quackity sets his second-to-last letter to rest. An apology, though far from his last, he’s sure. He’s going to spend the rest of his life apologizing, he thinks. Regret is an unending burden to carry. And someday, maybe he will set it down, but for now, he cherishes its weight.
His shadow stretches out ahead of him. He follows it with careful footsteps.
There’s been an ache in each of his bones for days. It takes a long time for everything to heal fully, and sometimes, it doesn’t ever get that far. There are no scars this time, at least not visible ones. Nothing but the purple of bruises on his arms and back, and some snapped-and-splinted wing bones that Foolish assures him will heal in time. And it’s fine, even if they don’t. Quackity’s never been able to fly anyway.
With the golden glow of setting sun alight on ever-flightless feathers, Quackity follows his shadow back inland. Back home.
Quackity joined the server with his wings free.
They couldn’t fly back then, but he’d been able to glide, at least a little. He was proud, once upon a time, and he left them in the open. Let them fluff up when he laughed, when he was startled; let them droop in disappointment and stiffen in anger.
He was proud of a lot of things back then. His wings, his smile, and the world, all at once. And if he had known any better, he might’ve curbed a little of that pride. At least savor it and remember the taste a little better. Hold on to it tighter than he’s ever been able to hold on to anything.
But he was an idiot back then, and he let his wings out and laughed and raged and threw his arms out to the sky and thought he was proud of it for just existing above him.
(He was an idiot, or maybe he was just nineteen. Years later, the difference seems indistinguishable. He misses it nonetheless.)
He sits above an empty crater, the grave of the one place he was never really going to be part of, and the grave of somewhere he killed with his own hands. Someone he killed himself.
There’s a lot of blood on his hands, he thinks.
The moon is out now, and stars blink down at him. He looks up at constellations he doesn’t know the names of. In his pocket, there is one more letter. One last apology, tucked in his shirt pocket close to his heart.
He isn’t wholly sure why he brought it along. He’s already read it, after all; he wrote it, one after the other, writing through waves of pain in bruised limbs and cramping fingers, because the pain made it a little easier to brush back the tears that crept around the corners of his eyes.
Now, he unfolds the letter. He takes his gaze away from the sky, and his wings are bound against his back, and he tries to read.
“My–” He falters immediately. The words go dry on his throat. He’s seen these words a hundred times; it should be easier to say them now than ever. He opens his mouth again, but this time the words freeze entirely on his tongue, and nothing crosses over it. After a moment longer, he crumples the paper between his hands, and he gives up. “Shit. Um. Okay. This is gonna go badly, I think, but uh, I wrote you a letter too. Which is probably a little silly, because it’s not like–well, you can’t hear me. But I wanted you to know, uh, that I’m sorry for you, too.”
A quiet breeze ruffles the grass around him. Plays with the hair at the back of his neck. September’s final breaths whisper over him, and he takes in one of his own in tandem.
“I’m sorry,” he says, softly, “for what happened to you. And I’m sorry that in the end, I’m the one who killed you.”
There’s this one memory he keeps shielded against his heart.
It was in Manberg, as most of his carefully-guarded memories tend to be. He hates that he still holds on to them, but he holds anyway. He has yet to truly dig out that core, tear it away under slicing fingernails and sharp-cutting teeth. It beats in him anyway, bloody and broken and real.
This is what he remembers: the first time Schlatt ever hit him, he hadn’t seen it coming.
And he thinks he should’ve seen it coming, because everything had always been leading up to that moment. It’s this one point in his life where time itself rearranges into two pieces—the before, and the after. Once upon a time, he was nineteen. And then he was older than he has ever had any right being.
And in between the two, there was Schlatt’s palm stinging across his face.
In between the dumb fucking kid who kept his wings out and looked up at the sky expecting it to love him, and the Quackity who finds himself sitting over a crater where more than one dead things lie buried, there was the first moment he ever felt fear so strong he learned the taste of it. Sharp and bitter on his tongue, curling in his mouth and down into his stomach and flooding every last nerve with that same awful acidic taste.
Quackity has seen a lot since he was a kid. He’s been terrified. He’s never felt fear so bitter with betrayal like that ever again.
And here’s the thing about that memory, the part that stays heavy in his chest while he pens letter after letter: No one’s ever apologized to him for it.
Quackity is fully aware of the wrong he’s done.
He always has been, he thinks, but he’s good at compartmentalization, which is a long word that just means he doesn’t think about how much things hurt if he can help it. If he thinks, yes, yes this is awful, this is wrong, but there’s nothing else to be done about it, well–then he can just move on. It doesn’t haunt him anymore after that.
(Because he was nineteen, and it was awful, and it was wrong, but he’s dead now. So there’s nothing else to be done about it.)
Regret is heavier than the sky ever was. Quackity feels it crushing on shoulders bruised from the fall, and he feels his own knees buckle under its weight. He writes, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and he does it without those words at all, because–because they feel hollow. Because I’m sorry doesn’t say, I barely know who I am anymore, even though you’re the one who shaped it. And I’m the one who bent it further. For good or for bad, here we both are. And I miss you, and I miss me, and I wish we could, both of us, stand under the same sky again.
Quackity writes each letter, and something grows in his chest with each one. Regret does not ease; it grows stronger with acknowledgement. It looms over his shoulders like the vengeful ghost of something that Quackity killed.
It’s only on the last letter that Quackity finally pens the words he wants to be heard. I’m sorry, he writes. And I wish someone had told you that sooner.
This is the other memory he keeps tucked against his chest like a winning hand of cards: Schlatt had danced with him that night, too.
Hand in hand, with the radio playing in the corner and a window open to let in the last warm breeze of the end of September. Summer’s memorial, one last dying celebration, and Schlatt held Quackity’s hand in his own and twirled him in a full circle. He’d laughed. They both had.
His wings had been out. He’d left a few tiny golden down feathers on the carpet, and one on Schlatt’s shirt. Quackity had picked it off, and he’d laughed more, and he’d–
He’d been a dumb happy kid.
Quackity knows that now. He knows it plainly, and it aches in him like nothing else.
It aches, and he sits above a trifold grave that goes to the bottom of the world, and he tries to apologize to someone who has never before heard the words.
“I’m sorry.” Quackity reads it this time. The letter in his lap goes blurry from tears in his eyes, but he’s long memorized what this one says. Memorized the paragraph in the center that says only the same thing over and over, as if he could make up for lost time. Could make up for years of the fear that twisted into anger and something uglier. “I’m sorry nobody ever told you that. And I’m–I’m angry no one ever did, too. I think that’s what I’ve been angry at this whole time.”
And that part isn’t in the letter. Ink runs under a wet spot, dripping from his chin, and he takes a slow breath, and this part isn’t in the letter, but something in his chest is going to explode. “I’ve been so, so angry for you. For me. And I wanted–I wanted everyone to feel that anger. I wanted someone to see it. And then–”
He falters. He takes a breath. “I think I just lost myself in it. Lost you. I think I’m the one that killed you in the end.”
Part of him died under Schlatt’s hand. He thinks more of him died there than died in the upswing of Technoblade’s pickaxe or on the pavement in Las Nevadas. But he thinks the rest of him has died slower, something agonizing and suffocating, and it’s been him who slowly cut off the air.
“I want you to know,” Quackity whispers–and this part is easier, this part he knows every word of, even if he can’t see the letter at all anymore– “I want you to know that I am so grateful for the fact that you existed. And I’m sorry nobody saved you. And I’m sorry I finished the job.”
And there’s more he wants to say—that he wants to do better, that it wasn’t his fault, that he still wants the same thing, deep down, as he ever has. He wants to do good. He wants to be loved. It’s been twisted and bent out of shape, burnt and bruised and broken, and it’s barely recognizable anymore, just like he is himself, but it’s there. He wants to do good. He wants to be loved.
He wants to start over.
But these aren’t words he can say aloud.
Instead, he curls forward, and he grieves.
He hasn’t cried like this in a long, long time. It’s hard to start, but now that he has, it pours out like a flood. It hurts, sobs that drag a knife through his lungs, aching through every bone and bruise. It’s an agonizing sort of grief, and an ugly one–he is nothing proud in this moment, a pile of flightless wings and scars and bruises and tears and snot and shaking limbs–but it is grief like he’s never let himself feel before.
Because there was a kid who used to live here, and he wanted to do good and be loved. And there’s two memories, written on the back of the paper in his hands, held tight against his chest, and all Quackity can do is mourn for the person he used to be who lived through them both.
Quackity lets go of the letter. He drags in one breath after another, closer to a gasp than anything else, and he watches the paper fall. He watches it until it’s out of sight, falling invisibly into the water that pools at the bottom of the world.
And it’s gone.
He raises one hand and swipes tears from his face, wet across the back of his palm. A few more breaths, and it’s a little easier to get the air in and out. As the sobs calm down, and his vision grows clearer, he feels a little more in control of himself. He feels worn out, like someone’s scraped out his inside and left him hollowed out, but in a good way, somehow. He feels tired in a way that begs only for rest.
“Q?”
The sound of someone else’s voice startles him. He jumps, wings trying to flare out but caught by the bandages and splints firmly holding them in place.
Behind him, Tommy stands with his arms crossed over his chest. He tugs his cardigan tightly around him, warding off the chill that Quackity’s hardly noticed until now. He shivers, as if Tommy’s acknowledgement of the cold has given his own body permission to recognize it too.
“Hey, Tommy.” He scrubs at his face again, quickly trying to rub away the last of the tears. He’s glad he’s already thrown the letter. “Uh, you’re out late.”
“You’re out here too,” Tommy points out. “Honestly, man, I just thought I heard someone over here and thought—Well, I just thought I’d better come check it out, make sure nobody was in some sort of trouble that I could save them from. You know me, just always out there being heroic.”
“Of course, of course.” Quackity smiles as best as he can manage. “It’s just me. No danger.”
“You sure?” Tommy shifts his weight slightly. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Quackity says. “Yeah. I think it is.”
“I can call someone,” Tommy offers. “You sort of look–to be honest with you, Big Q–I can be honest with you, can’t I?–you kind of look like how I feel after having a full, like, panic attack and shit. Maybe somebody should come get you. I can call, uh…”
He trails off. Quackity waits for half a second, and then it becomes clear that Tommy can’t think of any names to fill in the dots with. Quackity could almost laugh, if it weren’t for the sad ache that still lingers in him.
“Well,” Tommy tries again. “You could just come back to my house, then. It’s right over the hill.”
He reaches down with one hand, and Quackity accepts it. Tommy’s hand clasps around Quackity’s wrist, and he pulls him up to his feet. Once he’s up, he nearly lets go, but Tommy hesitates. And then he hesitates.
“Do you, uh,” Tommy starts. His voice dips into something soft, genuine sympathy. “Man, do you want a hug? You really look like you could use one.”
And that–that’s what starts Quackity off again. He laughs first, and then Tommy’s arms are around him, and he leans his head against the kid’s shoulder and his eyes burn all over again. It’s gentler this time, quiet, and he hopes he doesn’t shake too hard that Tommy really notices.
But Tommy doesn’t pull away. He squeezes, a tight hug that nearly feels like he’s trying to strangle Quackity into feeling better, and that image alone makes him laugh again, through the tears still dripping down his nose and leaving a wet spot on Tommy’s shirt.
“God,” he whispers. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Tommy says. “Dude, seriously, it’s all right. It would be very hypocritical of me to judge you for coming out here to cry. Trust me, I get it.”
Something aches in Quackity’s chest. “I didn’t mean for that. I’m sorry for everything else. Spent a lot of time tonight thinking about, uh, everything. Dream and stuff. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. Make sure you’ve heard someone say that.”
Tommy, very quietly, says, “Oh.”
And there’s the wordless things in his chest again–gentler now, sadder. The ghost that weighs on his shoulders leans over him, heavy and heartbreaking. The fear and fury that he still tastes like acid under his tongue seems easier to bear, but he can’t form the words around it.
He squeezes Tommy a little tighter before letting him go, and he hopes he understands.