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All things considered, in Tubbo’s opinion, working for Quackity in Las Nevadas isn’t that bad. It’s a curious reversal of roles—once they were president and vice, now they are burger flipper and casino owner.
It’s more complicated than that, of course. Tubbo has nukes and plans, and Quackity disappears daily to some unknown location, returning with bloodstains on his shirt and a kind of hardened exhaustion in his eyes. They both have secrets they refuse to tell each other, hidden agendas and hands kept close to their chests.
But it feels, just a little, like the early days of Schlatt’s administration, when Tubbo was Schlatt’s right hand man and Quackity was vice president, ruffling his hair reassuringly and grinning at him like all was right in the world, like they hadn’t just lost everything, like Tubbo’s best friend hadn’t been exiled, like he hadn’t stood on the presidential podium and watched Wilbur’s blood bloom in the water, shot down mercilessly as he and Tommy tried to run from the land they had built from the ground up.
Really, Tubbo thinks, Las Nevadas feels a little bit like what Quackity thought L’Manberg should be, and a little bit like what Wilbur feared Manberg was.
All in all, it seems one Tubbo Underscore fits right in. Most of Manberg’s cabinet is here (but then again, George was hardly around, even back then) and most of Tubbo’s own cabinet as well. It’s only missing Tommy. (Tubbo is always missing Tommy, these days.)
He might have signed on for Quackity’s burger joint just to have something to do, to feel alive again, but some part of him still basks in Quackity’s approval, wants an excuse to be around him again, to laugh and joke and reassure himself that Quackity is still…well, Quackity, underneath the scars and the exhaustion and the cold calculation in his eyes when he looks at someone, like he’s seeing an opportunity instead of a person.
In a way, Tommy had Wilbur, and Tubbo has Quackity. (Or maybe it’s the other way ‘round, Tommy has Wilbur because Wilbur is back, now, and Tubbo had Quackity, but he lost him somewhere between broken whiskey bottles and netherite pickaxes and poker chips.)
Tubbo’s not sure which is worse, anymore.
*
It is sunset, and the streets of Las Nevadas are empty and abandoned, glimmering and gold-limned and utterly desolate.
(L’Manberg’s crater, rotting ruins and bedrock alike strung with creeping vines and rustling leaves, filled with winking fireflies and the sound of rushing water, feels impossibly more alive than Las Nevadas most days.
It’s a ghost town, a city of dust and false fronts and fool’s gold. It’s a home without a heart.)
Tubbo exhales, breath a bright cloud in the icy air, and tucks his hands deeper into his pockets.
If I were Quackity, he thinks, where would I be?
*
Wasted, apparently.
Tubbo finds him in the depths of the main casino floor, slumped miserably over the bar with a suspender hanging off his shoulder and face buried in the crook of his arm. He has a death grip on a half-empty glass and a near-empty bottle of scotch keeps him company.
In the sea of blinking lights and quietly whirring slot machines that makes up the empty casino, Quackity is a lonely island. A very drunk island.
Tubbo regards him for a moment, unable to put a name to all the emotions warring for attention in his chest. Disappointment, maybe, or pity, or worry. Or simple exhaustion, perhaps.
(He imagines his ribs are a cage and his emotions the beast within them, slavering and snarling and opening up its jaws to devour his heart.
His ribs are a cage and he throws away the key.)
Tubbo sighs and climbs onto the stool beside Quackity, reaching towards the bottle of scotch and dragging it away from him. Quackity startles, jerking upright, scarred lip pulled back in an almost-snarl before his eyes land on Tubbo and he freezes, blinking rapidly.
Slowly, recognition dawns. Slowly, his eyes clear. Slowly, the tension drains from them both.
“Evening,” Tubbo says, trying for pleasant, but mostly, he just feels tired.
“Tubbo,” Quackity replies, like it’s an answer. His speech is just slightly slurred, pupils dilated. “What’re you doin’ here?”
The thing is, Tubbo doesn’t rightly know. He told himself he was just trying to find Quackity to tell him he was headed home for the day, back to Snowchester and Michael and the home he’s built for himself, but maybe he just didn’t want to be alone. (It is the day after the sixteenth of November. It has been over a year since everything ended, and then didn’t, and Tubbo does not want to be alone.)
But Quackity doesn’t wait for an answer. Maybe he wasn’t looking for one.
“’M the king of fools, Tubbo,” he mutters, dragging the pads of his fingers through the condensation on his glass, staring at the melting ice cubes within like they contain the secrets of the universe, the solution to all their problems. “Th’ king of nothin'.”
Actually, Tubbo wants to say snarkily, Eret’s king.
But he doesn’t, because Quackity keeps talking. In a way, this is how it has always been. Everyone talks, and Tubbo thinks but does not say. Tubbo listens. Quite often, people forget he might ever have something to say himself.
“I built this whole fuckin' city, and for what,” Quackity is saying. He drains the rest of his glass and looks around for the bottle, grasping at the empty air where it used to be. Tubbo pushes the offending bottle even further down the smooth marble of the bar, ignoring the scowl he receives in response.
“I think you’ve had enough to drink, bossman,” he says simply.
“Why are you here, Tubbo?” Quackity asks, slumping miserably back down. And then, more to himself: “Everything I touch dies. Everyone I care about fuckin' leaves.”
In the dim yellow lighting, there is a glimmer of golden rings at Quackity’s neck, the chain they’re strung on hanging out of his shirt collar and clicking faintly against the countertop. One is duller than the other, as though he’s afraid to touch it, but can’t bear to let it go nonetheless.
Tubbo thinks, but I already died, Quackity, don’t you know? He doesn’t say it. Like so many other things, he tucks it up into his ribcage and leaves it to rot.
He says, “Well, not me. You’re stuck with me, Big Q.”
Even if it means I have to keep you from drinking yourself into an early grave, Tubbo thinks. I’m not losing anyone else.
He hops off the bar stool and picks up the bottle, pries the glass out of Quackity’s clumsy fingers and trots around to deposit them behind the bar.
“Come on, big man,” Tubbo says, rounding the counter and shooing Quackity off the stool. He ends up shouldering most of Quackity’s weight when he sways drunkenly, suspender falling down to his elbow and rings clacking against each other on their chain. “Let’s get you to bed.”
Quackity groans, flapping a hand towards the back of the casino. “Usually sleep in m' office.”
Tubbo doesn’t even want to begin to process that one. A part of him wants to look at Quackity, really look at him, and ask are you okay? But a larger part of him isn’t ready to deal with the answer. Tubbo imagines he already knows it, anyway, because no one on this server has ever been okay, or even if they were, they certainly never will be again.
He sighs. “No sleeping in the office. You’re coming with me.”
Slowly they make their stumbling way towards the grand doors of the casino, emerging out into the golden light of the evening, the reds and pinks of sunset bleeding into the sky as the sun sinks closer and closer to the horizon. The shadows on the streets are long and cold and empty.
They’re halfway out of the city when Quackity seems to register what’s going on, coming back to himself, and tries to tug out of Tubbo’s grasp, nearly tripping his way to a halt.
“Why,” he asks, eyes wide and wild, “do you care, Tubbo? Why do you fucking care?”
Something in Tubbo curls tight.
“Because I just do,” he snaps. “And I’m allowed to. I care about you, and you can take your self-pity and stuff it because I’m not going to let you chase me off so you can drink yourself into oblivion and cry about how I abandoned you.”
He breathes out harshly, too angry to be a sigh and too sad to be a snort, and peers up furiously at Quackity through his fringe.
“I don’t want to see you turn into Schlatt.”
Quackity reels back as though struck, face twisting in the realm somewhere between grief and fury.
“Don’t,” he hisses, stumbling two steps to the side and steadying himself on a lamppost. “Don’t you dare compare me to him.”
“Oh,” Tubbo says sarcastically, marching right up to Quackity and poking a finger into his chest, “yeah, like you and everyone else did when I was president?”
Quackity falters. Tubbo does not.
“Do you know,” he asks, “what it was like, Quackity? Do you know what it was fucking like, to hear from you, the person who understood most how much it would hurt, that I was acting like one of the worst things that ever happened to me? Do you know how miserable it was to try to do the right thing and have that slapped in my face, day after day?”
“Tubbo,” says Quackity, and then he says nothing at all.
He does not say I didn’t know. He does not say I’m sorry.
Neither does Tubbo.
Not yet.
Tubbo draws himself up, squaring his shoulders and lifting his chin, feet apart in the way he learned to hold himself as president, as spy, as right-hand man, exuding confidence he did not have, once upon a time.
“I care about you,” he says, quieter, but no less heated. “And I’m not going to let you stop me from doing it. I’m not going to let you become something you’re not. We look out for each other, Big Q.”
Silence.
There are no insects in Las Nevadas, no mobs prowling the well-lit streets, so there is no sound but the quiet rasping of their breathing, the soft whistling of wind through the alleyways, before Tubbo speaks again.
“I’ll keep us safe,” he says. “I’ll keep us all safe.”
Something in Quackity’s face crumples, then, caving in on itself to reveal the empty loneliness below.
“You shouldn’t have to,” he says, tipping forwards to press his forehead against the lamppost. “I’m…Tubbo, I’m supposed to be the one keeping people safe, giving them purpose. I’m supposed to be winning. I’m supposed to—to belong. Why does it always fall apart?”
A choked-off sound that might be a sob fills the stillness. Then:
“Why can’t I win?”
There is a saying (in Las Nevadas, it’s a little like a prayer): the house always wins. It doesn’t matter who sits down to a game, how the cards are dealt, who has the winning hand; in the end, the house comes out of it on top. The house always wins, but it was never Quackity’s, not in L’Manberg or Manberg or L’Manberg again, so he built his own damn country, his own house, a shining white city welcoming members and victims alike with outstretched arms.
But what is the house, really? An idea, Las Nevadas, the server itself? And whose is it really? Dream’s, like everything seems to be?
Frankly, Tubbo thinks no one even knows what game they’re supposed to be playing anymore. Maybe they never needed a house. Maybe all Quackity needed was a home. Maybe that’s all they ever needed.
(Maybe it’s all they’ll never have.)
“I don’t know,” says Tubbo. Quackity’s questions are not ones he has answers to. Quackity’s problems are not his to solve.
But he can be here, still.
Gently, he takes Quackity’s arm and shoulders his weight again, and the two of them make their staggering, swaying way onwards.
*
They make a pit stop at Paradise, where Tubbo goes up to the van to order a burger for Quackity, knowing he’s going to need something in him or he’ll be beyond miserable tomorrow.
He’s hoping Ranboo will be at the window, but it’s Wilbur who peers out in surprise at him instead, looking over Tubbo’s shoulder at Quackity slumped drunkenly at a picnic table, definitely not looking hazily across the waters towards the winking torches of Kinoko Kingdom in the distance.
“One burger, please,” Tubbo says tiredly, and manages to shoot Ranboo a meaningful look under Wilbur’s elbow, jerking his head towards Quackity.
Wilbur looks between the three of them, brow furrowed, but says nothing. Oddly enough, Tubbo wishes he would. He’d know how to handle a question or a casual jab from Wilbur far better than this new silence, this old softness in Wilbur’s eyes behind familiar glasses, the quiet worry evident in the way his mouth pinches as he leans out the window to hand Tubbo the burger in a grease-spotted bag.
(Wilbur was never his brother, but sometimes he would laugh and ruffle Tubbo’s hair and gift him with glowing words of praise and his brow would knot in worry when Tubbo did something particularly stupid, and Tubbo always wondered if perhaps he could have been.
Wilbur is not his brother, but he might have been.
Tubbo thinks about that often.)
*
Tubbo takes him home to Snowchester, practically dragging him when he complains about the cold and his feet hurting, but he refuses to leave Quackity behind. He would have taken him to Walltown, but there aren’t any beds there and Tubbo is too tired for crafting. So they go to Snowchester, and Tubbo leads a slightly more sober Quackity to one of the houses.
“You can stay here,” he says, gesturing at the door from the bottom of the porch steps. “It’s Jack’s house, or, it was, I guess. He probably won’t care. It’s not like he’s ever here, anyway.”
There is bitterness, there.
(Quackity wonders, standing exhaustedly on the porch and looking down at Tubbo, if perhaps he is not the only one always left behind.)
“Thanks, man,” Quackity rasps, voice thick and scratchy in a way Tubbo refuses to acknowledge is from anything but the cold. “I, uh, appreciate it.”
“Good night, Quackity,” Tubbo says, and offers a tired smile and half-salute before he turns and treks towards the mansion and Michael, a comfort in a too-big house and a too-empty settlement.
They will not talk about this tomorrow, Tubbo knows. Quackity might not even remember most of their conversation. But that’s okay. He’ll do it again, if necessary, again and again and again until Quackity realizes that he’s not alone.
“Night, Tubbo,” Quackity slurs from behind him, and there is the rattling of a doorknob, the clumsy slamming of a door.
Tubbo smiles.
They look out for each other. It’s what they do.