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Neon lights, artificial flavors - the casino never sleeps.
Concrete and dirt, back alleys and smiles sharper than knives, there’s a distinct feeling to this place. Covered up with bright colors and eye-catching advertisements, it’s easy to ignore. Easy to pretend, to be drawn in by the lights, the towering structures and humming music, but there’s a wariness that doesn't fade. A hiss at the back of his head, a hand flexing for a weapon; it’s a feeling won through battle after battle, with blood-crusted hands and buzzing paranoia.
The paint is a bit too red, the signs a bit too cheerful. The air smells like iron, a tang of whiskey, of promises that everyone knows won’t be kept. Murmurs follow him, and they are not any sort of friendly.
“Come in, come in. It’s all fun and games.”
An invitation. Poker chips litter the ground, and he kicks a broken bottle lying near his foot. It shatters against the wall, shatters and tears through a poster of a laughing face, until it's just a smile. A smile, red wine soaking through the teeth, forming a puddle that he doesn’t bother to step over.
Trailing red footsteps in the streets. Monochrome grays, a watchful darkness, but he was invited. And he won’t be hurt. He won’t.
“Oh there you are,” a voice purrs. Quackity steps out from around a corner, all languid confidence and shaded eyes. The light casts his profile in red - there’s so much red here.
He wonders if it’s intentional, as Quackity grins at him with a crooked, painfully crooked, smile. All his words, all his explanations, promises, apologies, dry up in his mouth. They turn bitter, bitter as the resentment that glints in his fiance’s eyes.
“Quackity,” Karl murmurs. “It’s-”
“So good to see you, man, yeah! Let’s just move right along. I have so much I want to show you.”
He sweeps away, fading into the darkness like a second friend. Like an embrace, and it strikes Karl all at once how distant they are. Kinoko Kingdom, painted in pastel colors, soft grass, and a breeze with the promise of change. Where he’s turned to nature, to parchment and books, Quackity has turned to concrete and crimson and dark. Distance stretches between them, and it’s not only because Karl’s feet stay rooted in place, rooted in half-forgotten memories.
“Hurry it up, Karl,” Quackity says over his shoulder. He doesn’t wait. He doesn’t stop, doesn’t look behind him, and he wonders what that means. “It’s time to play a game.”
…
“What’s this, now?”
“It’s a game,” Quackity laughs, lit by the glow of the sun. “No one plays poker with me - stupid fucks,” he gives Sapnap a lighthearted shove. “So I invented something easy enough for you idiots to understand. Deal ‘em up, Karlos.”
He does. With summer sweetening the air, warming the world, it all feels infinite. He smiles among carefree laughter, the swaying flowers, as Q bounces.
“Here, I’ll show you. Kind of like chess - the queen is the most important. So whenever someone draws a queen, they get to ask for a promise.”
Pollen is thick, cloying in Karl’s lungs, but it’s not smoke. There’s no smoke, no sulfur or blood, just grass that stretches for what feels like miles and a checkerboard blanket, cards spread out between the three of them. He closes his eyes, lets them have this. Lets Quackity have this - this sunlit afternoon.
“Promises, huh?” Karl laughs. “Go on.”
…
The cards are dealt. The sky is dark outside a grimy window, the two of them sitting opposite each other over a cracked, mahogany table. There’s a checkerboard blanket thrown over it, and Karl wonders if the other remembers. He knows he barely does, clinging desperately to memories where they didn’t feel like two strangers, where sitting together in a smoky room didn’t feel final. Another battle, another war.
“Do you need help remembering how to play?” Quackity asks, and it feels pointed, a barb spoken in honeyed words. Karl opens his mouth to respond, to say something, anything, but he chokes on the taste of cigarette smoke. Chokes under a swinging light, red like the rest of this goddamn place. It sends shadows dancing, judgement spinning, and he notices there isn’t anything else in the room. Just a bottle of wine and a singular glass, standing tall over their decks.
Quackity reaches out, takes a swig. He grins with red teeth and places down a card. A jack.
“Your move,” he murmurs, and it feels like a threat, a loss, a failure.
…
“Your move, dude!”
“Ah, fuck-”
“-It’s all in the skill-”
Laughter rings through the field as Sapnap groans, looking like he’s seriously considering lighting the cards on fire. Quackity is a smug figure besides him, and Karl watches them with all the fondness in the world.
“Rules are rules,” Quackity sings. “I get a promise - a deal.”
“It better not be something dumb-”
“It’s not; it’s not. Just promise...hm. A promise to leave me alone next morning. You get so fucking annoying-”
“Hey!”
Summer turns to spring, turns to joy, and it feels like they will never end.
…
Quackity draws a queen. Karl exhales a shaky breath, as a slow grin creeps over the other’s face, danger lurking in his eyes. He wonders, idly, if Sapnap and him left their other side, their third, alone too long. Because there’s nothing kind in his fiance’s gaze as he looks at Karl with a slow tilt of his head.
The light swings.
Red spirals.
“Will you look at that,” Quackity says, slowly, eyes dark with something other than sympathy. “Well...rules are rules, I suppose.”
“Q-”
“I’ll even give you a choice.” Quackity stands abruptly, sending his chair clattering behind him. The light flickers above them, and outside he swears he hears the distant sound of rain beginning to cry downwards. Quackity reaches out, seizes the wine bottle by the neck, and holds it loosely. His cards are in disarray.
“A deal,” he murmurs, pouring wine into the singular glass. It splatters, staining the checkerboard cloth a deep crimson, running in rivlets towards Karl’s shaking hands. When did his hands start shaking? “A deal for my victory.”
The wine reaches his fingers. They feel too slick, too warm, and it stains him to his soul. Quackity stops pouring, the cup filled nearly to the brim. “Your rings,” he says quietly.
They’re covered in red. A desperate hope, a sinking dread, as he whispers. “What?”
“You can give me one of your rings, for losing,” Quackity watches him with hollow eyes, as Karl clutches his hands, rubbing his knuckles. “You get to pick which one.”
…
A proposal.
The day of the proposal was one of the happiest of Karl’s life.
For hours afterwards, long past when Sapnap and Quackity went to sleep, he stared at them, tracing the patterns with gentle fingers. A black band, shimmering, igniting to reds and oranges in the light, for Sapnap. A deep blue, silver engravings, for Quackity. They’re everything to him.
His fiances are everything to him.
And even when he leaves, is pulled away to different times, the rings stay. A reminder that he’s not alone, as the world crumbles around him. Even as his mind fails him, his reality betrays him, he can still trace the word he knows by heart, carved into both bands. Carved into his soul.
“Promise.”
…
“I can’t,” Karl sputters, shaky and explosive and loud in the silence. All his words, all the thoughts remaining locked in his throat, tumble out in a haze of panic. He finds himself standing too, cards fluttering to the floor. “I can’t, oh God, Q, you know - you can’t make me do that-”
“But I can, Karl.” There’s nothing in that gaze. No joy, no kindness, none of the man he promised he would marry. Karl’s world crumbles to ash, distorts into smoke, as the other dips fingers into the puddle of wine. He looks at it blankly, darkly, before turning his eyes back to Karl. Red reflects. “I can. It was a promise.”
“We were a promise,” Karl chokes out and gets nothing but a mirthless laugh in response.
“You think I want this?” Quackity's voice finally cracks, a fissure in the mask of indifference. Underneath is an explosive rage, a tide of grief and hate. Blood colored fingers and a barren, lonely complex. “This - all - this was for us.” He spits the word like a curse. “It was for you, but you went and fucked up, didn’t you?”
“Quackity,” Karl whispers. He wants to reach out, wants to close the distance, but there’s a chasm between them. Parchment and pavement, mushrooms and hazy smoke. “Q- it doesn’t have to be over-”
“No,” he murmurs. “It doesn’t, Karl. Pick.”
Karl stares.
He looks at his hand, a blue ring stained red, and at the stranger standing before him. Looking so at home in the darkness, surrounded by crimson, but also with that grief. A grief he caused, a grief he forced from a kind man, trust withering into a game, a balance of power and lonely roads.
He squeezes his eyes shut, tears silently falling.
A ring hits the table with a clink.
…
“What’s with you and promises, anyways?” Karl mutters, on a night it’s just him and Quackity, Sapnap off doing God knows what. They’re sitting close to each other on the couch, and he admires their new rings with awe he doesn’t think will ever fade away.
“Words are important,” Quackity says, after a beat. “Schlatt, hell, Wilbur too, always told me I fucking trusted too easily. That I was too soft, that my words aren’t enough. I think-” he hesitates.
Karl lets their rings clink together. “You think?”
“I think this - us - is proof they’re both wrong. Not everything has to be paved in bloodshed, war.” He grins at Karl. “We aren’t, and as long as we turn out fine...well. Guess I can have faith.”
…
The blue ring sits starkly on the table, as Quackity laughs, hollow. Karl tries to talk, tries to say something - anything - beyond the sobs heaving his body, but he can’t. He can’t. And Quackity throws the bottle of wine with a resounding crash.
It feels final.
He knows it is final, as Quackity picks up the ring with scarlet fingers.
“I should’ve known,” he laughs, and it sounds teary, betrayal shaking his hands. “I should’ve fucking known, Karl.”
“Q-”
“No. No, this is it, Karl; this is fucking it - he was right! God, he’s fucking right.” Quackity paces, and he can do nothing but watch, watch and shake like a coward , rubbing hands that feels wrong. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even move as Quackity turns towards him. “He’s fucking right,” his - his ex-fiance whispers, and there’s something worse than anything he’s heard lurking there.
Quackity grabs the still-filled wine glass, dropping the ring into it with a splash. It fades into the murky darkness, sinks to the depths, gone, and Karl can’t do anything. Can’t do anything as it all goes wrong, what was supposed to be an apology souring into another betrayal.
Any hope sinks with that ring, in an ocean of red, as Quackity tosses it carelessly to the side with a crash that rattles his bones. “Wilbur,” he laughs, Karl going rigid. “Guess you were right, damn. Suppose I owe you a drink.”
“Fuck yes you do,” a voice drawls, and Karl spins around, limbs locking in place.
Wilbur Soot stands at the open door, an imposing figure, at home in the greys of the casino. A cigarette hangs loosely from his lips, and he grabs it, exhales, filling the room with more poison smog. Quackity rolls his eyes at him good-naturedly, as his eyes lock outside. The smell of gunpowder hits Karl full-force, ash heavy on his tongue.
“Well,” Quackity says. “You know what to do. You know our deal.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Wilbur grins, before disappearing the way he came. A shadow flitting away and back again, disappearing in a swoop of red light. Quackity still doesn’t look at him. His eyes staring blankly through the window, any hint of goodwill - fake or otherwise - vanishing with the smoke.
“Q-” Karl tries. His voice is odd, out of place, and the words already taste like regret. “Please - this - it doesn’t have to end this way-”
“Oh, Karl,” Quackity turns to him, and for a second, for a second, Karl lets himself hope. Lets himself believe that Quackity will forgive them, for forgetting about him, for making Kinoko Kingdom without telling him at all. It’s a short-lived fantasy, but one he clings to desperately, as he searches those blank eyes, one greyer with a jagged slash running through.
“Oh, Karl," Quackity tsks, and his hope sputters out, stomped by a cruel boot. “When will you learn? We were doomed from the fucking start.”
Explosions go off in the background. A finale, a final goodbye, as colors blossom in the sky. Laughter echoes from the hall - Wilbur, presumably - but Karl can’t focus, can’t think beyond a sudden, visceral terror, and the realization that that’s the direction where his home is.
A hand lingers on his shoulder, Quackity looking at him, broken glass beneath his feet, a smile on his lips. “It was always rigged to blow, babe,” he hums, exhaustion and pride and something sad. “It - we - were never meant to be.”
And Quackity disappears, rounding the corner with a deep sigh. Karl stays frozen. He doesn’t move; he doesn’t know what he’ll find, and it terrifies him. Terrifies him almost as much as the red staining his hands, the missing ring on his finger, the guilt clawing his throat and making him want to go and try to fix things.
Broken glass, spilt red wine - Karl realizes that maybe, maybe this is beyond repair. Maybe he’s finally beyond repair, missing a piece of himself and standing alone in an empty room.
Karl turns slowly and-
Wakes.
The landscape flickers around him, glitches, spiraling away.
He wakes with a gasp, limbs tangled in sheets, dawn a barely-there glow on the horizon, in Kinoko Kingdom, safe and whole and not blown-up. He wakes with the memory of red and glass and mistakes turned into revenge, and he falls.
Karl falls, hits the ground with a painful wheeze, but he’s already scrabbling up. Racing through the house, he scrambles for a pen, for one of his books, for anything so he won’t forget. He doesn’t think he would survives that future, and so needs to remember- he needs to remember-
His fingers find paper. With a choked-off noise, he looks at it and…
Stills.
“An invitation,” Quackity’s handwriting reads and, oh. Oh, this would be a perfect chance to apologize. Memories slip away, leaving only lingering fear, a distinct feeling that the casino is dangerous, as his mind latches onto the new thing. He tries to remember what he was doing, he tries, and he comes up blank.
(He needs to remember-)
Oh well. It’s probably nothing, and Karl uses his pen to write a letter telling Quackity he wouldn’t miss it for the world.
A promise, he thinks, the phantom taste of wine bitter in his mouth. It’s time to fulfill a promise.