His fingertips brush against the scar. He doesn't comment on the wavering. "...do you still think that's true?" 

His voice hitches in his throat. "Yes." He can't tell if he believes it.

He trails his fingers across Wilbur's ribs, pauses at his heartbeat, then back to the scar again; he watches Wilbur's face the whole time. "Why?" 

"You can--you can say whatever you like, whatever noble ideals, about--getting power through your words, and at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. All that matters is who has a sword, or an axe, or a bow, and the willingness to use it. After killing Tubbo, Techno said the only universal language is violence, did you know that? You can ignore someone's words. You can walk away. If someone kills you, really kills you, you can't just ignore it. We tried to have a country where violence wasn't the only thing that mattered, and where is it now? It's a crater. Because of violence. Because that's how you get people to listen. Not through asking. 

It's--look at Punz. Punz isn't well-spoken. He's not an orator. He's never led anyone." He takes Quackity's hand, puts it on the puckered circular scar on the side of his stomach. "He gave me this one, too. He has two scars on me, and I don't have any scars on him. To the best of my knowledge, he's never died. Why? Because he's a better fighter than I am."

His hand rests over Wilbur's stomach, fingertips catching on the ridge of scar tissue. 

"...I guess my answer to that is... if you were right, if the ability and willingness to fight and kill were all it came down to, and words didn't matter at all— then we wouldn't be having this conversation." 

"Why do you say that?"

Are they really going here? 

Yeah, okay, he really is going here. 

"So the way that the Hunger Games works is, there's twenty-four teenagers. Two from each district, allegedly randomly selected unless someone volunteers. You put them in an arena, and the last survivor wins. Districts One, Two, and Four are the career districts, which means that every year they send in two volunteers each who have trained their whole lives for this. They've all killed before, it's part of the testing, and they can all use a dozen different weapons, and they're the oldest eligible, and unlike the rest of us they didn't grow up half-starved."

Deep, shaky breath.

"But I'm from Ten, and I was sixteen. The only thing I had any training in was accounting, and the closest thing I'd ever held to a weapon before was a kitchen knife. If it came down to swords or axes or, or poison or maces or knives or even fucking guns— if that were all that mattered, every time, always, and it doesn't matter what you say because nobody listens— then we would not be having this conversation. Because I would be dead." 

"How did you live?"

"My knowledge of accounting and my sunny personality. 

That's flippant but it's not that flippant. The real answer is that I was good at playing to the sponsors and the audience loved me. Admittedly I have not seen a high success rate for noble ideals, but— sometimes, if you talk, people listen. Sometimes, if you talk to enough people," if you're hot and charming and funny and endearing and quick to learn and they want you, and they can't have you unless they keep you alive, "they help."

"And sometimes the people who help die for their trouble. I'm--look, I appreciate it, I really do. I know I can--convince people to follow me. You're here, aren't you? But sometimes it feels like--it feels like I'm leading you off a cliff."

Someone's gotta talk you down from cliffs, he doesn't say. He's tracing over the edges of Wilbur's scars. 

"Maybe," he does say. "I don't-- I don't know that there's much I could say, one way or the other." 

"Yeah." He pauses, collects his thoughts. "I guess it's--less that words don't ever matter, and more that--they're not where true power comes from, not if you can't back them up. They're just talk. People don't have to listen, not the way that you have to listen to a sword at your throat. I don't know how the hunger games work, maybe it's different where you come from. Here, you can talk to people, get them to help, all you want, if Dream wasn't in prison and wanted you dead--I mean, I'm alive because he wanted me alive. And I'm grateful for that, I--I owe him, for that, for wanting me alive when everyone else wanted me dead. But when I had tried to fight him, when I thought words could fight him, we lost five canon lives in one day, because people listened to me when I talked, because they tried to help."

"Yeah. I mean— I'm not trying to get into fights, I don't want to start a fight with Coriolanus Snow, using words or weapons or anything else. I'm not trying to say there aren't things you can only get if you have an army, just— that they aren't the only things?"

“Well.” Grin. “Let it not be said that I only want things I can have.”

Ha. Yeah. Imagine being the sort of person who only lets themself want things they can have. "Let it not be said, indeed." 

He is thinking something very dangerous and he needs to fucking stop.

"...your scars are a nice texture. Is that a weird thing to say?" 

“It’s cute. You’re cute.”

"I'm right." Around the edges of the one at Wilbur's ribs.

(Quackity, Wilbur might have noticed, has no scars at all, anywhere, not even from childhood wounds or cooking burns. He also doesn't have any body hair or stubble to speak of.) 

This hasn’t actually occurred to Wilbur as strange; childhood injuries and cooking burns usually aren’t canon enough to stick after respawning. The absence of body hair’s a little unusual, but it’s still significantly less unusual than, say, Ranboo.

“I’d say something flirtatious about how you can give me more if you like but I think Tommy might actually kill me. Or—not kill me, I suppose, that being the whole point. Besides, I like being alive, and I don’t know how many canon lives I have going spare.”

"If you did I would have assumed you were joking, I'm not doing anything that would actually for real hurt you. I'd say 'until I've known you longer than a week' but I wouldn't do that with my actual boyfriends either. Sorry."

“Awwww, Q, you’re no fun. Best jokes always have an element of truth.”

"Sorry, man, I'm still not going to stab you." 

“It’s cute that you care.” He pets Quackity’s hair absently.

At first he's definitely not even a little bit thinking about last time someone reached for his hair, and then the touch lands and it's gentle and he's actually not thinking about it, and then he just feels incredibly stupid about how much he Wasn't Thinking About It. None of those shows on his face; he just leans into Wilbur's hand.

"Thank you, I think." 

"You're welcome."

"But I actually was going to say a different thing, which is that-- my Wilbur's only got the one? It doesn't match up to any of yours. 'S cool how many you have."