Las Nevadas is as quiet at night as it is during the day. (If he's been checking his phone, he'll know there are two new people on the server, Eryn and Tina.)

He has been. It's kinda nice not being the only new guy? It'd be nicer if they were names he knew; it'd be even nicer than that if they were people he knew.

It's only been a month. He hasn't given up hope yet. 

He heads back to Kinoko for the night but the next day he's up in the space needle again; Las Nevadas is just as quiet but in a way that makes him want to scream less, maybe because he hasn't spent as much time here and maybe because he knows there are people here other than himself and Sapnap.

It really is beautiful. He doesn't want to live here especially and if he were designing a city from scratch it wouldn't look like this but he can definitely see the appeal. It's going for austere and imposing much more than Kinoko is; he wonders, vaguely, what Quackity's design specs were like. 

Quackity was up all night getting rid of the TNT, double-checking that there wasn't more, removing the item frame art and then putting it back piece by piece, and then he stayed up even later than that, drinking about Wilbur fucking Soot, trying to decide what to do about him. The problem, Quackity figures, is twofold. The first half of it is that letting Wilbur know he got to you is a surefire way to have him do it again and again and again, to escalate it and giggle the whole way there. The second half of it is that he is, in fact, really fucking pissed about the TNT. Everything before-- that was just a game, taunting each other. He's not going to let Wilbur fucking Soot waltz in and actually destroy his country.

He goes up to the needle with the plan of chain smoking and thinking off-and-on (not in any real way, he's not Wilbur, just a sort of abstract pondering) about throwing himself off it. All that goes out the window when he sees Q.

"What are you doing here?"

He jumps a little but only a little, turns so Quackity is to his right. 

"Questioning my life choices," he says, and sounds about as tired as he feels, which is not as much as Quackity sounds but still pretty damn tired. 

It's probably not worth playing the game with Q the way it was with Wilbur. (This is what he tells himself, anyway, to avoid the fact that he's too damn tired to play right now.)

"Did you help Wilbur with the TNT?"

So they're not doing the semi-sarcastic saying things that are obviously false just to establish which story they're all sticking to, this time. That's nice. 

The chances that Wilbur won't hear about this, after last time, are fucking nil; Q specifically asked Fundy to leave his name out of it for a reason. But he's too relieved to be able to pretend not to be. And, well— they're already being sincere.

"Oh thank fucking god Fundy came through.

—which is to say, yes, and then I went back and removed a third of it so it wouldn't chain and broke the redstone and told Fundy where it was." 

This surprises Quackity enough that he laughs. Not a short laugh, either; it goes on for about ten seconds.

"That's interesting. What kind of game are you playing, Q?"

...huh. 

"It's— I don't care about the rivalry thing. The restaurants are both fake, neither of them will turn a profit and it doesn't matter if they do or not, at the end of the day the whole thing is an excuse for you two to posture at each other. Which is fine, but Wilbur's going to keep escalating— you know he is, I know he is, he can say 'it's easy to replace why are you acting like it's a big deal' and 'the TNT is just a plan B, it'll never see the light of day' all he wants and I think he might even believe it but everyone else can see perfectly well it's not true, and if he keeps doing this shit someone is going to get hurt for real. 

If I thought it would just be him, whatever, he made his bed, he can fucking lie in it. If I thought it'd just be me, I could just spend my time somewhere else. But it's not just going to be him. It's going to be Ranboo, or it's going to be Fundy, or it's going to be Tommy, or it's going to be Tubbo, and I would really rather it not be. 

And the leverage I have, the best fucking tool I've got here, is that he trusts me. That's the game I'm playing." 

"It's not worth trying to deescalate for him. It is never--it is never going to be worth it. And he's not going to trust you forever, especially not if you keep going behind his back like this."

Well. That sounds like it comes from experience. 

"And that would be why I am questioning my life choices."

The disgust isn't fully gone, but it significantly lessens, at that.

"Well, congratulations." Pause. He's still holding his cigarette. He brings it to his mouth, lights it. "Do you want one? I'd offer to pour you a drink too but I don't have one with me."

Don't congratulate me yet, I haven't actually decided, he wants to say. He kind of has, though, is the thing. 

"I don't really smoke. Thank you, though." 

"Good for you, man," he says, and he almost means it.

(He picked up smoking from Schlatt, in the days where he and Tubbo and Fundy all passed cigarettes around when they needed a reason to go outside for a break, kept the habit in the caves of Pogtopia with Wilbur, stealing back and forth from each others' pockets from clothes discarded at the end of the bed. It wasn't good for Wilbur, made his asthma act up until Tommy yelled at him, but that never stopped him, and it wasn't a fight Quackity thought was worth picking. Anything that got Wilbur through the day was a win in his book, back then, and if he saw the suspiciously circular burns dotting Wilbur's wrists, he never said anything.)

He leans over the railing to blow smoke into the night wind. Tommy was right, as much as he hates to admit it, hates to think about it like that. He's a good kid, he doesn't deserve to be thinking about this shit. Still. It's a pretty good place to die, if you wanted to. Which Quackity doesn't. "So, what, are you here to talk to me or just here to think?"

(Q probably would have picked up smoking from Schlatt, if he hadn't had a stylist who didn't want him wrecking his voice. As it stands he's just vaguely nostalgic about the smoke. Being seventeen was awful and he wouldn't go back for the whole fucking world, but like, in a way where he still wraps himself in a jacket that smells like that year and buries his face in the lining.) 

"To think, mostly, I didn't know you'd be here. ...Also a little bit because if I spend one more hour in Kinoko I will start screaming just to prove there's someone there who'll make noise." 

Quackity's face twists at the mention of Kinoko. "I'm going to tell Wilbur about the TNT even if you don't, you realize that, right?"

"I kinda figured. He'll try something else but like, presumably you know that."

"Fucking-- obviously, it's Wilbur."

"Yeah." Tiny almost-but-not-quite laugh. "I'm, uh, currently debating whether I want to ask you to leave my name out of it." 

Snort. The disgust is creeping back. "Sure, sure. Give me the sales pitch for why I should do that."

He opens his mouth to give his sales pitch—

He closes his mouth.

"You shouldn't, you should force me to face the consequences of my actions and also make better choices, but that doesn't mean I want you to." 

"And what are you going to do about that? Beg? Cry about it?" He takes another drag of his cigarette, flicks the ash off the end of it. The words come automatically. "Some advice, if that's the best you can do, don't bother asking."

...man. Even Q doesn't miss Schlatt that much. 

"Oh, that wasn't asking. That was realizing my sales pitch was terrible, making up my mind, and asking you not to. I hope you tell him I went to you on purpose because he treats me like a vending machine and I'm sick of putting up with it, and I hope you do it where I can see the face he makes about it." 

"Now that I can do." The disgust completely melts off, replaced by an easy grin.

It is absolutely definitely extremely pathetic how much part of him glows at being something-vaguely-like-approved-of. "Glad to hear it." 

"How long are you good with waiting? I was going to make him wait at least a couple days, it's good for him."