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The route to Manberg is an underground railroad that runs from the ravine, which branches out into the offshooting shafts they're squatting in. The most stable of them are natural caverns, although they're the minority. The rest were manually excavated and then reinforced with improvised fortifications. More than once, Quackity has watched someone pick up a rock and violently wedge it between loose spaces in the beams.
The cave-in isn’t a surprise, is all. Quackity always imagined Tommy nailing the archways into place with the same level of structural integrity of anything else he’s ever built. More surprising is that it hasn't happened sooner.
After hours of trying and failing at sleep, Quackity was on a mission to get some extra cushions that led him deeper into the tunnel system. It was on his way back, with a blanket rolled under his arm, that he met the wall of rubble blocking his exit.
There’s this unofficial protocol for cave-ins in Pogtopia: Don’t panic. Dig yourself out if you can, or wait for help.
Faced with the horrible realization that he's not carrying the tools on him to clear it on his end, Quackity turns around and goes back where he came. His feet carry him somewhere he can have the privacy to close his eyes and pretend he’s above ground level, breathing fresh air, someplace open. Or else have the privacy to ride through the other thing until the open side digs him out.
Quackity comes across Wilbur leaning against one of the dividers, his taller face staring at him, taking a drag off his joint. It feels unreal. It feels precisely out of a bad dream.
“Fucking caved in after me,” Quackity feels himself attempt to explain. "Man– you have a pick on you?”
“No, but it happens,” Wilbur says after a long pause. The strong smell, and the size of the joint, and the sunken way he holds himself, tells Quackity he’s been at this for a while. “It shouldn’t be long. Unless you’ve pissed Techno off somehow.”
Quackity walks over and joins him against the wall, feeling numb.
He has exactly enough space to press flat against it. Wilbur does not. Beginning at his shoulders, his body tapers inward with the ceiling, and Quackity copies him, hunching, trying to trick himself into seeing bigger tunnels and more space for them.
He wonders how long it would take for them to run out of oxygen, as Wilbur breathes smoke into it. He thinks, Wilbur would be more concerned if they were in danger, before he catches himself and thinks, hilariously, What a stupid fucking thing to think.
Quackity drags another breath and forces himself to look up into Wilbur’s curious bloodshot gaze, and then hides his face before Wilbur can see his eyes helplessly flood.
Wilbur doesn’t react, but to pull another joint from his back pocket. Finally, when Quackity’s stifled crying subsides and he is just beginning to catch his breath, Wilbur lights it and extends it to him. Quackity inhales gratefully. The effect is instant and powerful.
“It just makes you feel like you're fucking entombed down here,” he groans, shuddering on his drag. “Sorry. Fuck. Thanks.”
“It happens,” Wilbur says again, only sounding moderately uncomfortable. “Your tear ducts were probably cramped.”
“They were probably–” Quackity’s choppy breathing breaks on a squeaky nervous giggle. “What? That– can that happen?”
“Yes. If you don’t use them for a while, they get stiff, like any other muscle.”
It occurs to Quackity that he hasn’t cried once since defecting. Until now. He mutters, “That makes sense.”
“I try to make myself cry every once in a while, so my tear ducts stay in shape,” says Wilbur, and it feels conciliatory. Like he’s trying to make Quackity feel better, that is. Not like it's supposed to be a joke. Quackity shudders.
“...You can make yourself cry?”
“Yeah. Yeah, watch.” Wilbur squeezes his eyes shut and opens his mouth like he's going to yawn, contracting his throat, and when he opens eyes again they’re full of water. One fat tear runs down his left cheek, and another down the right.
Quackity doesn’t know what to say. His mind is tipping toward the brink of annihilation. He almost wants to laugh, but he feels like if he opens his mouth he’ll scream his fucking lungs out.
Wilbur wipes his eyes with his index and middle fingers together, before he slides down the wall.
“Now's the right time,” he says as Quackity sits down next to him on the floor. “Gets it out of the way.”
Quackity waits for Wilbur to say more, but he only takes another long drag. Quackity takes another off his own joint. It’s fucking delicious. He feels every pore of his body relaxing and loosening.
He closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them, Wilbur is staring at him intensely.
He almost freezes. Wilbur’s stare is not only interested, but startlingly open. Transparently possessive and simple.
No one has stared at Quackity like that in a long time. It’s surprising, after a complicated year, to see that look again. A part of him is embarrassed for Wilbur. The rest, less cruel (and more importantly, desperate for alleviation), knows how to react.
He leans over and kisses Wilbur hard, like he really means it. Wilbur responds without any hesitation, pulling Quackity’s face into his with one hand and wrapping the other around his back with a series of movements that seem too fluid to be real.
Quackity crawls over Wilbur and eases him to the floor, securing the warm body under him as the cave warps and transforms around them. Quackity's skin tingles like it's made of foil, but it just makes him want to be touched more (a state of overwhelm that he can reach where he factory-resets and his stress is hardwired into initiative, electrifying the nerves that make him talk and move into action like a type of reanimation).
After they’ve made out for a while, Wilbur’s hands ranging around inside his clothes but not removing any, he asks if Quackity will sleep with him.
Quackity thinks for a moment. Of course this is where Wilbur is situated, in the deepest possible crevice. Quackity holds deliberate eye contact with him.
“Yeah,” he says, going carefully down a mental list. “But under three conditions. I need a condom. I have to be on top and– and you have to cry the whole time.”
Wilbur's expression wobbles like he's going to chuckle, but ends up frowning instead. “I think my tear ducts could be connected in some way to the ducts in my penis,” he warns, although apparently it's not a disqualifying factor. He brings Quackity to his mattress.
At first, Wilbur has a hard time getting started. He chokes a little until some tears start to come out, and then it’s like he can’t even control himself. He sobs wholeheartedly, worse than Quackity had prior to being offered the joint. Quackity finds it stunning, how incredibly cathartic it feels to be fucking someone who’s more emotional than he is.
After it’s over Quackity pulls his pants back on, forehead pounding like someone took a fucking hammer to his skull. He bitches about it quietly as Wilbur's arm blindly fishes for the joint he’d tossed on the ground. He's smoking it seconds later. Doesn’t even need to take out his lighter. He says, "I have something that can take the edge off of that.”
When Quackity gives him a thoroughly questioning look, Wilbur goes on to clarify, “Tylenol. It’s in the chest.”
The chest he’s referring to is past the foot of the mattress and against the wall. Quackity crouches down and opens it.
There are empty journals and scrap paper and an emergency first aid kit inside. The Tylenol is burrowed into the folds of a ratty scarf, and laying on top of everything innocently rests an iron pickaxe.
Wilbur barely even gives it a glance when Quackity holds it out to him.
“Mm,” he says bleakly. “Forgot that one was in there.”
Quackity sets the pickaxe down on his lap. Like a switch, it seems he's unlocked the ability to be confrontational again. He tries not to sneer and is partially successful. “You didn’t forget.”
“If you don’t believe me, that’s your right,” Wilbur says. “I am not going to plead it to you.”
At least this cordial type of loathing is familiar. Quackity repeats, “You didn’t fucking forget.”
Wilbur finally looks at him, down his nose. “What are you trying to say, Big Q?”
He looks like he honestly expects a response– at least like he’s bothering to pretend to expect one. A monarch flashing its colors. It doesn’t quite put the fire out, but it gives it a good fucking kick. The heat is pushed from Quackity’s chest up to his face.
Wilbur doesn’t do this often; acknowledge how the people here tread carefully with him, tiptoeing through a minefield. Enabling him, really.
(It's not as if Quackity is really above those people. It took him less than a handful of weeks to become one of them. It’s a damn easy thing to fall back into.)
Wilbur sighs out smoke, resigned to a state of self-indulgent dejection, and Quackity starts to leave. He takes the pick with him.
“Wait. Don’t forget your cushions,” Wilbur tacks on, with the same lack of any tonal emotion he’s had all night. “Our mattresses wouldn't be easy on your wings.”
Quackity has to hand it to Wilbur, it does nearly take the breath from him, the audacity. He briefly visualizes taking the pickaxe to Wilbur’s lazily concealed dick, but it’s brief. Residual. He’ll get over it. He always does.