“See you around.”

Wow. That interaction could have gone much worse. He leaves the restaurant. 

Outside the restaurant he clears the note and writes note to self do the thing instead, which is nice and meaningless and proof of nothing in case he later has to lie through his teeth about whether or not that ever happened. And then he goes back home and says hi to Sapnap, and has a perfectly nice afternoon learning about axe crits and no panic attacks at all. 

Sapnap will gladly explain axe crits! There are two reasons to axe crit, and one is that a fully charged axe crit will do more damage than literally anything else, but the other is that axes disable shields for up to five seconds. Also, one neat thing you can do is that if someone hits you, this puts you up in the air, and you can use that to crit them while you fall!

A lot of the lesson is spent reminding Q not to go for as many hits as possible; he tends to lash out a bunch, especially when he's got someone in his space, but one well-timed hit does as much damage as five poorly-timed ones. It's all timing.

See the thing is that he is blind in one eye and his aim is terrible and if he tries to go for as many hits as possible then probably at least one will hit—

(Also, sometimes he panics and forgets what he's doing and starts hitting blindly. Today, at least, he manages to avoid getting it that particular kind of wrong.) 

He sleeps, not well but he does in fact sleep, and then the next morning can he find Ranboo? 

Yeah, Ranboo's around! He's at the burger van, making it look slightly nicer. Adding flowers and such. He waves to Q when he sees him.

"--Oh, hey! What's up?"

"Not much. Spent yesterday morning with Wilbur and the afternoon with Sapnap. Yourself?" 

"...Did Wilbur...do...anything? Yesterday morning?"

"No, nothing other than making out with me."

He'll help with the flowers? 

Flowers! He's also making a little picnic table with an umbrella. "That's... probably for the best."

"Yeah. 

He, uh, spends a lot of nights with me in Kinoko. Not, like, every night, but a lot of them." 

"Oh. Um. Okay." Ranboo is not entirely sure why Q is telling him this but he appreciates the information!

"...which means that we know where he is and whether he's doing things more often than one might expect," he says, since the subtext doesn't look like it landed. 

"O-oh! Oh, okay, that's, that's good! That's a good thing.

--I live with, um, with Techno and Phil. In the arctic. So I can--keep an eye on him, too? On the nights he's not with you, I mean."

"Yeah." He feels like a traitor, saying it. More of one than he felt fixing up the restaurant in Las Nevadas, actually; that was business, which doesn't matter because neither of these restaurants are going to turn a profit anyway and the whole enterprise is kind of fake, and this is personal and real. "That's— probably a good idea." 

Ranboo is mostly just relieved to have an ally, honestly. "Yeah, sure, no--no problem, man. Thank you for--yeah."

...yeah. That's also a mood. He smiles in Ranboo's general direction. "You're welcome." 

"...Do you want a cookie? I still have a bunch from the--uh--yeah."

"I'd take one, they were good." 

“One chocolate chip cookie, coming right up.” Cookie!

Cookie! 

"I never did find out what was up with the, uh, yeah? --you can tell me to fuck off if that's personal, I won't be weird about it." 

"It was--I mean, it was a lot of--a lot of conflict. Tubbo said it was--I mean, Tubbo said it was a cookie shop. Wilbur called it a, uh, a palisade, if I'm remembering correctly? It was definitely a little--uh, fortified. I still think--I still think Quackity overreacted a little to it? We didn't actually, like, do anything, he didn't need to--make it a big thing. But I guess in retrospect I can kind of get where he was coming from. At the time it was just like--dude, why are you so mad, it's a cookie shop. Looking back--I dunno, man, we didn't sell many cookies. And it was, uh, pretty big. So."

Oh he's so fond of Tubbo. Fuck. Genuinely fuck his stupid idiot easily-attached heart. 

"It did seem a little big to be a cookie shop," he agrees. 

"I left Quackity--uh, other Quackity, not you-Quackity--a, like, apology chest? With, um, cookies and Yeezys? But it, um--he hasn't--he said that he liked it, I think? I don't know if it actually--helped. I hope it did, but who knows."

"Who fucking knows. I don't, I don't really get him at all." 

"He's--yeah, I don't know. I don't--I mean, he's probably a good person? I think most people are good people, just in--bad situations, sometimes. Tubbo's--I get why Tubbo's wary of him. But I try not to--hold stuff from his past against him, you know? A lot of people did things they regret during the--L'Manberg era. I mean, I'm working with Wilbur."