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Grief was a funny thing. Except that it really wasn’t funny at all. It ached and it ached. Burned and burned, razing the ground till nothing was left but bitter regrets and reminiscent lingering. Like a flame it consumed until there was nothing left to fuel it, and when it burnt out, it left a cold void in its wake.
They say there are stages of grief. Quackity knows its bullshit. Stages had a structured order; one that made sense and could be followed. Grief wasn’t a stage. It was a river, twisting and churning, still and calm, meandering and swerving. Some days it was so strong it surged around Quackity’s knees, threatening to sweep him off his feet and down into the sharp, algae covered, riverbed rocks below. Other days it was almost stagnant, thick as mud, forcing Quackity to trudge on when he’d rather lie down and succumb to the muck.
Today was a muddy day. Everything felt like moving through molasses. Quackity couldn’t lift the covers that were tangled uncomfortably around his sweaty, cold limbs. The bed was empty. The house was cold. The sun was shining through a perfect crack in the blinds and into Quackity’s eyes.
Today was a muddy day, but it was the one day Quackity actually had to get up for.
The ring on his finger felt frostbitten and foreign. A promise of good things and a bright future united- things that never got to come to fruition because the universe decided that happy-ever-afters weren’t for Quackity. When it had decided that the ring on his finger from the best day of his life would become a trap of pain and fear so contrasting to all the sweetness and beauty it once brought. Now it sat on his hand like a bitter reminder of what was robbed from him.
Today was muddy, and Quackity had to bury his husband.
At the time, Quackity had been livid about the destruction of the White House. Now, however, it was a blessing it was gone. Quackity didn’t think he could bear to sleep in the same place his husband had been. Where they had loved and lived and laughed until something went wrong, and the love turned soured and life no longer lived. The honeysuckle sweet man who turned as bitter as the liquor that polished him off was not the man Quackity had married. That man had loved, soft and secretly, but endearingly nonetheless. The man Quackity would bury was the corpse of those dreams. The man who would never have thought to lay a hand on Quackity when his words failed him.
Mourning wasn’t new for Quackity. He’d been mourning that man since the first day he struck him.
A knock yanks Quackity into full awareness from his swampy wasteland of thoughts. Actually moving hurt a thousand times worse than just thinking about moving. Stumbling on numb legs, Quackity dragged his malnourished corpse to the front door of his pity apartment he’d been housed in since the war that took Schlatt from him and Wilbur from them. When he opens the door just a crack, a tall, darkly robed demon stood rather sheepishly outside. He gives Quackity a sad smile. One that made the duck hybrid wish for nothing more than to sink his fingers into it and tear flesh from bone till it stopped looking at him like that.
“Hello Quackity,” Bad said softly, nothing short of gentle.
“Fuck off,” Quackity growled back, ever pleasant as always.
“Language,” the demon chastised, tired from the repeated song and dance.
Quackity threw him the middle finger and slammed the door in his face. He didn’t need pity. He didn’t need someone to stand there and coax him into a shower or food down his throat or help him step into his pants and tie his shoes. He wasn’t fucking five. He could take care of himself just fine.
But the evidence in front of him said otherwise. His house was cold and empty. The groceries Sapnap and Karl had brought him were spoiled in the fridge, and he hadn’t changed or bathed since they sweet talked him into it weeks ago. Sludge claws at Quackity’s ankles as he lumbers to the little bathroom with the shitty mint colored tiles. It reminded him of the mints Schlatt always had. A chilly sharp scent stung his nose, and he could feel it on his lips, freshening an already sweet kiss. The phantom feeling of lips on his own was so intense, Quackity almost believed he was being kissed awake from this horrible nightmare.
When he opened his eyes, he saw only his lone, gaunt reflection in the mirror.
Preparation for a funeral took far too much time and energy from Quackity’s already empty reserves, and he hadn’t even planned the actual event. All he had to do was show up and look presentable. An impossible task really if Quackity had any say in it. He didn’t. It’d been a long time since he had a say in anything really. His own son couldn’t look him in the eye anymore. The kid was there too, stuffed into a suit just a bit too big for him with his collar flipped up. Quackity wanted nothing more than to smooth it out and hold him like a mother should. He was the goddamn adult, and even if things were strained between his and Schlatt’s son, the kid still deserved someone to be there for him. Even if Quackity was a horrible mama, Tubbo deserved the chance of having someone to lean on.
Quackity didn’t move from his place. He couldn’t face the son he’d let die on a stage decorated in the kid’s own mind’s eye. It was better to stay away and not hurt his hijo further.
So he stayed away.
Funerals were really such a funny thing. They were funny in the way that grief wasn’t. Everyone was in ugly fucking suits with no personality, blank faced and hollow. The ones that showed up anyway. Barely a handful of people who mostly pretended to care. None of them knew Schlatt like he had. The world saw a dictator and an abuser. Quackity saw a lover and a father who’d been corrupted by something out of his control. Maybe it was denial. Maybe he was only in the first stage in this fucked up grieving “process”, but Quackity was adamant that something had come over Schlatt like an illness maddens an animal. Quackity had known and loved the man before. The man no one really knew like he had. That man was not the man the world knew.
So when Bad tried to get through a hollow ceremony of respect, Quackity felt his empty voided chest swell with laughter at the sheer, unfair ridiculousness of it all. His laugh rang out, high pitched and wavering as he threw himself up to give a few of his own words. This funeral was a goddamn party. No one was going to pretend to grieve the goddamn bitch they thought he was. So Quackity celebrated the death of a dictator. He sang in a broken voice and cackled so hard and loud no one could see his tears. No one stopped him when he grabbed and tore pieces from the autopsied remains in the coffin. No one stopped him when he gorged himself on a cold heart filled with fatty tissues that broke across his teeth like rubber tubes. No one stopped him when he gagged and choked with goopy blood on his chin. No one stopped him when he pissed on the coffin as a final fuck you to everything that everyone ever thought.
He hadn’t stopped vomiting since he got home over two hours ago. Hunched over the toilet, hair gathered in sweaty clumps over his brow, Quackity remained unmoving. His suit was rumbled and bloodstained from consuming his husband’s heart like a feral dog. In his breakdown the logic in doing so had seemed pretty straight forward. Eat the heart that loved him so that Schlatt would always be with him. The man he loved would never be gone and a part of him would always remain with Quackity. However, reality had finally crashed back onto him, and his hysteric sobs echoed in the bathroom for only the shitty mint green tiles to bear witness to. More bile tumbled from his lips as he wailed into the porcelain. It echoed back at him like some sort of sick song. Maybe it was. Maybe all this was going to be the next awful jarring tune he plucked out of his battered guitar.
Maybe if he cried hard enough Sam would figure out how to bring his husband back.
The process- the stages of something meant that it came to an end, yet another reason Quackity said the stages of grief was utter bullshit. It never went away. Not truly. Not even with the amount of distractions and work he piled onto himself so his son could be just a little less burdened of a president. Over time it lessened maybe sure. He’d hope for that. It got easier to manage. To shove down and suppress until it was nothing but an ever growing numbness.
However, it still popped up in bursts that prickled across his skin like the lingering edges of the explosion that executed his son, or the one that Wilbur used to tear his home apart. Just like an explosive, the smallest triggers could set it off. Someone wore a cologne too similar to Schlatt’s, and Quackity found himself in the staff bathroom of the new presidential office with his hand in his mouth so his sobs were silent. Someone had a hairstyle too similar or a gait too familiar, and he’d curse the hope that swelled in his chest. He’d seen Schlatt die. Watched him choke and spit and crumple to the ground and twitch until he stopped like an electrocuted moth that flew too close to the light.
Schlatt wasn’t coming back, and he knew Sam probably never really tried to find a way to bring him back. It was said to soothe and placate him when he was delusional from a public breakdown. Shame still tinged his cheeks crimson when he remembered his behavior at the funeral.
Schlatt would be ashamed of him.
He cried into his morning cup of bitter black coffee that he hated.
It was the same brew that Schlatt loved.
He threw it back up later.
Sadness and anger went hand in hand. They were twins, two sides of the same coin. Parallels. Oh so quickly could grief become anger, and anger turn to tears.
Every bitter, festering piece of emotion Quackity had let boil and rot in the corners of his heart bubbled into diseased fruition one day when wind of Technoblade stoked the embers in his brain. The brute that had murdered his son. The brute that had murdered his home. The brute that had turned against them after they had been winning Lmanberg back. The pig that would hurt them again. That pig who could and would take his home away again the second he decided he was bored or whatever it was that truly motivated him. Quackity didn’t care. He raised an army. An army that wasn’t an army but a group of passionate and fiery souls. Though, Quackity thought that it maybe was only really him who craved blood, and his son was simply going along with it to satiate his own grief and confusion after Tommy’s exile was ordered.
Simply a duckling following his mama.
Quackity couldn’t think about it like that.
Tubbo was his equal.
Tubbo was his president.
Quackity would kill the man who killed his son, and he would make their home safe again. Maybe when this was all over, Tubbo would ask him to sing that Spanish lullaby he sang every night to put the boy to sleep. Thoughts like those didn’t belong in the cutthroat environment of politics.
Tubbo was his president.
Nothing more than that much was clear as the boy never sought him out for anything other than vice presidency.
Recovery was a slow and painful process. Whether it be from grief or physical ailments. It was long, hard, and very unrewarding during the process. Quackity found this to be true with two things in his life. One would be the nasty scar carved uncleanly through his face. The second would be the pair of hands that held him through that process. The hands that were warm and soft and gentle. All the ways Schlatt had once been. The hands that brought with them soft bodies and warm voices and bright laughter. The hands that carried so much love and tenderness in them. The hands that held him together when he broke, and the hands that changed his bandages and helped him navigate his new environment with only partial vision. The hands that promised to love him forever.
Quackity had always loved tragically. His love bled and watered the flowers of his passion until he had none left, and they withered and died. He cut his heart open and gave all he had till there was no more to offer. He fell hard and fast and loved even harder. He gave his all to whomever had caught his affections.
But who was left to give to anymore?
Finally he had it, clutched in his bloody fists. Quackity held the paper that could bring back the one thing he had left. The one thing who’d never been unloyal. The one thing he’d been able to rely on to always be there even when something went wrong. Quackity wasn’t a holy man, but he prayed that who he brought back was the one he married.
When he claws his way out of his grave, gasping and coughing, Quackity doesn’t want to believe it's real. He doesn’t believe it when dirt-stained, suit-covered arms wrap around him. He only believes it when he tastes those stupid mints on his lips. Tears mingle and mix on cheeks, soft broken words exchanged between the pair.
“You’re here,” Quackity murmurs, voice wavering and afraid.
“All thanks to you, sugar pumpkin,” the sweet gentle voice he remembered so dearly met his ears again.
A dreamon had caused the damage.
An evil entity of raw malice that came deep from within legends and myths. How it got there and how it got his husband remained a mystery, but Quackity didn’t care because the man he loved was back and holding him just as tenderly as he did on their wedding day.
Nothing else mattered anymore. Not the casinos, not his estranged fiances, not his distanced son, not Wilbur and his stupid van, or Dream in his cell. Nothing mattered now that he was in Schlatt’s arms. He wished he could show those stupid mint green tiles that cradled him through his breakdowns that he didn’t need them anymore, but they were long dead and gone just like the love anyone ever claimed to have for him.
Schlatt was the only mint he needed anyway.
The only love that stayed true and pure to the end. That, even when tainted, had remained. They renewed their vows in the wedding venue in Las Nevadas, and together they strolled the magnificent streets until their legs ached, and they tumbled into bed together sharing sweet laughter and tender kisses.
Maybe grief wasn’t in stages. Maybe it wasn’t a process, or maybe it was. Maybe it was hard to track and messy just like life and love. Whatever grief was didn’t matter. All that Quackity knew was that it took and it took and it took until it could take no more and then some. It continued to leak even after it was bandaged, and the scars that remained after it healed never left it the same. Quackity was scarred, but he found himself able to smile honest and true once again when his husband held him, and his son came home toting his own partner and adopted child.
Maybe grief wasn’t a process.
Maybe grief was a wound that bled a little too long and stung a bit too much and left a scar when it healed.
But whatever it was, at least his grief had finally healed.