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Quackity is pulled from sleep by the sound of sniffling.
He can’t recall where he’d been while asleep. The moment consciousness hits him, all remnants of the dream he’d been having melt away into a mottled memory—or lack of such—that he remembers only in vague non sequential essence.
It’s still dark out, he notes. Across the room, through the crack between the curtains pulled mostly shut over the glass balcony door is nothing but a sunless sky behind window reflection. Quackity’s alarm isn’t going off. It shouldn't be, anyway, because it’s set to do so right when the sun rises.
Notably, the sun is not rising at the minute.
He forgets what woke him and clocks this as nothing more than an odd break in his sleep, and lays his head back onto the pillow he raised it from to right the issue.
Until there’s another sniffle behind him.
Ah.
“Wilbur?” Quackity asks into the dim of the room, rolling back to look over his shoulder. He looks just in time to see Wilbur tense up where he lays with his back to Quackity’s on the other side of the bed. A couple beats of silence pass before he realizes Wilbur’s trying to pretend not to be awake.
“Wilbur,” Quackity says again. Nothing, still.
With a long inhale and a longer sigh, Quackity rolls over until his chest is flush against Wilbur’s back. He shifts a bit to get comfortable, slipping his arms comfortably around Wilbur’s waist and adjusting the blanket. “I know you’re up. Cut the shit.” The words would seem biting if it weren’t for the softness with which they were spoken.
“Sorry,” Wilbur apologizes anyway, despite not having done anything wrong. He’s not usually quick to apologize, it’s just not something that comes to him naturally. This only adds to the short but growing list of Something Is Wrong evidence that Quackity is beginning to notice. He doesn’t like it.
“Don’t be.” Quackity pauses to move Wilbur’s hair aside and press a short kiss to the back of his neck. “What’s wrong?” For a third time, there is no response. Only the sound of sniffling and breathing and the quiet tick of a clock.
Absent-mindedly, Quackity rubs a hand up and down Wilbur’s arm. The urge to pry squirms at the back of Quackity’s throat, so he purses his lips to the point of pain and forces himself to keep it reeled back.
Some days, Quackity is still astonished by how much he’s come to really know Wilbur. It used to be so… finicky , teetering between rivalry and fragile acquaintanceship. The first felt an odd combination of chess and tug o’ war. The second? More like navigating a minefield, tiptoeing and guessing around certain topics and certain names and certain memories. He used to have to triple think each step he made, what words he spoke and in what order. But enough times traversing the same path, it starts to etch itself into you. Quackity knows where the mines are and what leads him where, for the most part. Isn’t that wild?
“Do that again?” Wilbur requests into the still. His voice croaks in the way that someone who’d been crying’s voice would croak. A strained, shaky thing.
Quackity takes only a short moment to register, then obeys, and plants a dozen more little kisses to the back of Wilbur’s neck. He thinks he hears a “thank you” even quieter than a whisper.
He feels the deep breath Wilbur takes, and when he releases it. With the hand against Wilbur’s chest, feels the vibrations as Wilbur speaks.
“It’s dumb.”
Quackity blinks once, twice, and somehow, completely understands. “It’s not dumb.”
“How would you know? I haven’t told you what it is.” Wilbur tucks his arms close to his chest and his knees fold up to follow. Six and a half feet and he manages to look so small.
“Tell me, then.”
He does not. Instead, he wiggles and turns until he faces Quackity, fitting right under his chin. Quackity loosens his hold to let Wilbur get comfortable, then pulls him back in just as tight as before.
“I’ll let you know if it’s really dumb or not.” Quackity adds.
Wilbur seems to consider it, fidgeting with the buttons of Quackity’s silk pajama shirt. With a defeated grumble, he admits: “I can’t sleep. It’s stupid. I just want to sleep and I’ve been trying for hours but for some reason I can’t and I-“ he cuts himself off, breathes heavily for a moment, self-regulating. “I told you, alright? Dumb.”
He sniffles some more, gripping Quackity’s shirtfront in fists. The gentle drag of Quackity’s nails across his scalp doesn’t seem to soothe him like it normally does.
“Well, I don’t think it’s dumb,” Quackity remarks.
“It is.”
“It’s not.”
“It really is.”
“I’m the president and I say it’s not dumb.”
Wilbur snorts at that, and it strikes Quackity with the smallest relief. He’ll be alright.
They bask in the warmth of each other's touch for a while longer, until all sniffling subsides. Quackity decides to get up, kissing Wilbur’s head and promising to be back as Wilbur whines. He heads to the kitchen.
It’s possibly the quickest Quackity has ever made a cup of tea in his life when he’s done. At least four almost-spills and a chipped cup are the cost, and the cupboards definitely faced some rather violent slamming, but it means Wilbur won’t be waiting alone for too horribly long. Worthy sacrifices.
With a hand held over the top of the cup like a lid, Quackity bumps the bedroom door back open with his hip and and has a seat on the side of the bed next to Wilbur, who sits up and takes the cup gently. The way his fingers curl around it looks fragile, lithe and scarred and a bit too bony to be healthy, just like the rest of him. And so, so pretty. From hands to legs to arms to—to everything , Wilbur is gorgeous. Soft jaw and light stubble and big pretty doe eyes that he tragically hides behind those stupid red glasses half the time. His skin is a patchwork of scars and stitches and areas of rotted skin that haven’t quite recovered yet. The parts unscathed are bumpy with acne. Wilbur used to seem ashamed of the state of his skin, as if Quackity cared, as if he expected anything about Wilbur Soot to resemble conventional perfection. He felt real to the touch, beautiful because there are a million patterns across him to memorize.
And there’s his hair, softer than Quackity could’ve imagined possible once he got Wilbur to start washing properly . It falls just to his shoulders, long enough for him to keep in a ponytail—which he does, near daily. Right now though, it’s down and hanging messily in front of his face. One of his hands comes up to delicately tuck some hair behind his ears and oh, Quackity’s heart nearly stops.
He’s the furthest thing from a poet, but if he was he still wouldn’t have the right metaphors to describe the way Wilbur’s lips look parted around the rim of the cup as he drinks.
“You make surprisingly good tea,” he remarks, lips quirked up in that goofy, smug grin of his.
“Excuse you,” Quackity shoots back in faux offense.
“It was a compliment!”
“A backhanded one .”
“I’d never. You think so lowly of me.” Wilbur’s voice attains a teasing pout, feigning upset. His bottom lip juts out exaggeratedly and he tilts his chin down to look through his lashes at Quackity, who is about one more second of looking into Wilbur’s puppy eyes away from snapping and kissing the dumb fucker senseless. Wilbur relents and focuses back on his tea before he can face such a fate, though. Lucky bastard.
Wilbur hums, then yawns, tossing the now empty cup onto the floor carelessly. “How much did you put in that?”
“How much what?”
“Weakness potion. I could taste it mixed in.” No matter how many times he’s reminded, Quackity keeps managing to forget Wilbur’s potion knowledge. Before answering, Quackity reaches down and picks the cup off the carpet and sets it on the nightstand beside the bed.
“I don’t know potion dosages, but it wasn’t a lot. Just whatever looked like enough to knock you out and not cause problems in the morning,” he explains with a shrug, in hope that his nervousness doesn’t come across as prominently as he feels it. He always gets jittery talking about a thing with someone who’s better at said thing, some traitorous longing for approval scratching at the back of his brain.
“I’d say you got it spot on, Q. Good work.”
Quackity scoffs.
“Can a man not compliment you?” Wilbur shoves playfully at Quackity’s ribs with a bare heel. “You’re very bashful!”
“Ew! Get your fucking feet off me!” Quackity shives at Wilbur’s shin, but giggles too much to put any force behind it, so suffers more kicks to the rib.
He manages to seize Wilbur’s leg, shutting up any protest by surging forward and stealing a kiss, then another and another. Wilbur’s hands find the sides of Quackity’s face, thumbs pressing into his cheekbones. Quackity opens his eyes for a short second, just wanting to see the pretty flutter of Wilbur’s eyelashes, but catches a glimpse of the clock on the nightstand. He pulls back and presses his forehead to Wilbur’s.
“Go to sleep before I make you.”
“And how would you plan on doing that?” Wilbur teases.
Quackity thinks on it for a moment. “I’ll smother you. With a pillow”
“Kinky.”
“Murderous.”
“One can be both.”
Quackity would entertain the banter any other time, but he wants Wilbur to get some sleep. He climbs over Wilbur’s lap to his own side of the bed and lays down, opening his arms for Wilbur to settle into.
With a yawn and a long stretch, Wilbur does just that.
His head fits just as perfectly under Quackity’s chin as any other night, one arm winding around Quackity’s waist and the other sandwiching between them.
They both end up sleeping through Quackity’s alarm.