Work Text:
“Sapnap is dead,” Karl growls at you.
You don’t know how he got in here, to be honest, but this has to be the last thing you need right now. You’re elbows-deep into paperwork, three nights deep into a whiskey and coffee bender from which you refuse to stop; not even Foolish is stupid enough to set foot inside your office at the moment, not that there’s anyone else left who would care enough about you to even bother. You take another swig straight from the bottle and place it back down next to you on the floor with a thud.
“You shouldn’t be here,” you tell him quietly.
Karl storms into your office and slams the door shut. “He’s fucking dead, Quackity!” He shouts. He’s always exuded warmth and energy wherever he’s gone, inhuman as he is, other and alien; right now, though, the air feels cold and awful. It has felt this way for about three days now. Honestly, maybe even longer—you have long since stopped keeping track of the bad days. You still won’t look at him.
“I’m well aware, Karl.” You continue shuffling papers.
“Are you?” You say nothing. Karl steps forward again, trampling your research. “You’re the person I trust the least on this server. I know you had to be involved in it. You hurt him, didn’t you? You murderer; wasn’t it enough with me? He trusted you!”
Imbécil.
You exhale, reeling back your rising anger. “Do you actually need anything or did you just want to yell at me? I’m busy trying to fix this mess.”
“I want to strangle you,” Karl says, and that, finally, gives you pause, because it sounds just so earnest, like his words against your ear as he told you he wanted to marry you. “I have never wanted to kill you more, and believe me, I’ve wanted to.”
You laugh. Oh, this is rich. “I can’t believe I ever loved you,” you lie, because your heart still breaks over this stupid moron of a boy. “You are the worst fucking person I’ve ever fucking met, Karl, okay?”
“You loved me?” Karl says. “You didn’t even love Sapnap enough to care that he died!”
You don’t respond. Tears have blocked off your throat. You continue to look at paperwork.
“I honestly don’t think you know how to love,” Karl continues.
You’ve loved before. You’d loved Schlatt like boys do, naively and bright-eyed, and then it all had fallen apart at the seams, just like him and the country you doomed together. You’d loved Eret, for a brief spark of time: quick, bright, warm.
“You— Are you even listening!” He grabs you by the shoulder, makes you turn around forcefully. You’d loved Sapnap even after cradling his still-warm body in your arms and sobbing into his still chest. You’d loved Charlie in his childishness, in his strangeness, and even in his betrayal you’d loved him, and still, even now, you love him. You love Tommy, of course you do; you love him, and you love Tubbo, like brothers, almost. Not quite. Perhaps you even love Wilbur, or at least parts of him; his passions as they threaten to consume you whole, the scared core hidden underneath all his layers.
You still love Karl, despite everything. He’s got you all wrong, though. You love too much, that’s your fucking problem.
“Shut the fuck up,” you manage to bark out.
He throws the first punch. You can’t say you’re even surprised, but you hate him all the same; his fist, adorned with so many rings (yours and Sapnap’s included, and you wonder if he even remembers what those mean), connects with your cheekbone and sends you toppling to the floor. He doesn’t stop and throws another one, and this one collides with your nose and probably bends it. You put your arms up and grit your teeth.
“He loved you,” Karl sobs. You try to push him off of you, but he pushes you down against the floor and there are fat, glistening tears rolling down his cheeks, and oh, when did Karl get so famished? And you’re not supposed to care, but your heart has never not betrayed you. “He loved you, why did you hurt him? What did you do?”
You giggle. You can’t help it, man. This is so ridiculous. “You’re such an idiot,” you tell him. Anger flashes in his eyes, and then his hands lock around your neck.
The next few minutes are a blur. There’s the gold of his eyes, the feeling of his freezing fingers against his skin, your own trying to pry him off. The world darkens around you and his hateful expression burns through you. He looks like shit, dark bags under his glowing eyes and the other underneath his skin threatening to break out as he suffocates you, bruises your throat and cuts off the air from your lungs. He’s got Sapnap’s high school jacket over his shoulders, torn from the wars but still his. His nail polish is chipped and his nails bit down to the finger, his hair a bird’s nest. Honestly, he looks like he’s been living in the goddamn woods. You love him. You still love him. Fuck—you love him, despite it all. That’s why you’ve always been doomed to fail. You love him, and that’s your curse. You love him like you loved Eret the traitor and Schlatt the dictator and Sapnap the knight. You love him blindly, truthfully, and you hate him in equal amounts, and that’s your curse. That’s the knife buried into your heart; that’s the guillotine coming for your neck.
You don’t recall who pried him off of you. You wake up in bed, hours later, and Foolish sits next to you, reading a book. Karl is nowhere to be seen.
You look at him without saying a word. You don’t have to. Perhaps you overestimated his self-preservation skills. Perhaps you under estimated how much of a shit he would give about you. Regardless, you appreciate his presence, feel comforted by it, and he understands the silent question burning in your eyes.
“I kicked him out,” Foolish tells you. “I don’t think you would’ve wanted to kill him or anything, y’know?”
Your life is such a fucking joke, man.
You clear your throat, but your voice is still wrecked. You dread the mirror, later, dread the bruises and whatever horrors they will remind you of. Karl’s hateful, grieving eyes are branded into your brain, gold melting your soul down.
“I’m leaving,” you tell him, and you cry, and you laugh. You think of your little childhood home in some backwater, nameless, definitely illegal server which probably no longer exists, and you think of starting over and maybe finding it again—Las Nevadas, no matter how hard you try, can never be it, anyway. Maybe you’ll move closer to your homeland. Maybe you’ll go so far away no one will ever find you. But you say it nonetheless, settle it in stone: “I can’t fucking do this anymore. I’m leaving this shithole of a server.”
Foolish simply nods. He’s the only one left. He’s the only one you can tell. “Okay.”
And there’s that.