Archive of Our Own ^beta

The apartment stunk.

It was to be expected, of course. It wasn’t like Charlie had been bothering to clean it, after all. He could barely get out of bed most mornings; how was he supposed to work up the energy to pick up the small mountains of take-out containers and discarded microwaveable meal boxes that filled the small apartment?

He did half-heartedly try once to spray some probably-expired Febreze that he had found hidden in the bathroom closet at the mounds of garbage, but the fake flowery scent of the spray mixed with the garbage in a horrific blend of rotting trash and chemicals and just generally made things smell even worse, so he had simply tossed the spray bottle aside and headed back to bed, calling it a day.

He had gone nose blind to it all anyway, and it wasn’t like there was anybody coming to visit the shitty apartment he called home, so he didn’t really see a reason to clean up.

That is, nobody was supposed to come visit.

That had changed recently, but the person visiting wasn’t exactly the most bothered by Charlie’s recent slovenly habits.

Charlie peered out from behind his cracked-open front door at his guest, only his face and a small portion of his torso visible. His light brown hair was plastered to his head with weeks worth of sweat and grease, his skin shiny with oil under the fluorescent lights of the apartment complex hallway, and his sweat and food-stained shirt clung to his unwashed body. His once-bright green eyes were dulled with dark bruise-like bags under them, giving him the unfortunate appearance of a raccoon, and his lips were cracked and dry.

Charlie knew he looked horrible, a vast change from the once bright and bubbly man he had been just a few months ago, and the Old Him probably would’ve felt ashamed of looking like such a disgusting mess in front of another human being and of the stench that seemed to permeate his very being now, but he just couldn’t find it within himself to care as he glared halfheartedly at the man standing on the cheap yellowish beige carpet in the apartment building’s hallway.

The man in front of him had once possessed a reputation around the island for being someone people were unable to ignore. He had always seemed larger than life, his voice loud as he sowed chaos across the island with a smile on his face and a scheme sparkling in his eyes.

Charlie could barely connect that man to the one standing before him in the cigarette stench of his apartment complex hallway, depleted and empty of energy.

He supposed they were similar in that way.

(They were similar in other ways too.)

(Charlie didn’t like to think about those other ways.)

“Quackity, ” he croaked out in greeting, his voice creaky and hoarse from months of disuse, He coughed slightly, attempting to clear his throat.

Quackity stood there, a plastic container filled with some strange brown liquid in his hands, his eyes hidden with dark sunglasses as rainwater dripped from his black hair and down his skin. “ Mierda , man, you look like a mess,” the man drawled as if he didn’t also look almost as bad as Charlie.

“Really.” Charlie scowled. “Thanks a lot, Quackity, it was so nice to see you. Now fuck off, will you?”


He attempted to close the door.

He wasn’t quick enough.

The shorter male grabbed the door, not letting Charlie close it any more than he already had. Charlie grimaced but stopped tugging on the door handle, knowing he was beaten. Old Him would’ve been able to easily slam the door shut on the small man in front of him, but half a year of doing hardly anything else but lay in bed and cry had caused his once-considerable muscles to atrophy to the point where he wasn’t even sure if he was strong enough to lift a milk carton anymore, and it was obvious that Quackity had been working out in what Charlie assumed to be some futile attempt to work through his rage.

In Charlie’s current pitiful state, there was absolutely no possibility of him being able to beat Quackity in a tug-of-war with the door.

“Come on, man,” Quackity complained. “Don’t be like that. I have soup.” He held up the container with the mysterious brown liquid.


Charlie blinked slowly as he studied Quackity. “Soup?”

Quackity nodded. “Soup. Beef soup. With meat. From a cow.”

Charlie’s eyes narrowed. The way Quackity described the soup didn’t exactly fill him with confidence in Quackity’s most recent culinary venture. “Did you make it?”

Quackity sighed like he had been expecting Charlie to ask that particular question. “I poured it out of a can and microwaved it.”


He hesitated. Despite Quackity’s rather… dubious ability to make food (there had been an Incident with an attempted offering of what was supposed to be pasta that made Charlie shudder just thinking about it), there wasn’t much the man could do to mess up microwaved soup, was there? Besides, Charlie was hungry. He hadn’t eaten in… since yesterday? Maybe? Charlie gave up trying to remember when he had last eaten exactly and just decided on yesterday. “Fine.” 

Charlie and Quackity had never really been friends, even back in high school when Quackity had first moved to the island. Despite both being considered the “class clowns” of their school and their graduating class being made up of just a handful of students, the two hadn’t exactly hit it off. In fact, Charlie and Quackity had begun nurturing a seed of dislike for each other ever since they had first met, and it had only grown in the years since, no matter how much their mutual friends tried to reduce the animosity. Quackity had been the only person on the island Charlie hadn’t invited to his wedding- much to his bitch wife’s disapproval- and Charlie had been explicitly banned from attending Quackity’s baby shower for his daughter.

Not that either one of them wanted to attend those events, but still. The meaning had been clear- they had both been slyly telling each other that they disliked the other, in a sneaky socially-accepted way.

Old Charlie would’ve laughed at how pitiful Quackity looked in the hallway’s harsh lighting, drenched to the bone from the rain and shivering while holding that plastic container of lukewarm microwaved soup.

Old Charlie would’ve scoffed in Quackity’s face and told him that in no way was Charlie going to eat his suspicious-looking soup.

Old Charlie would’ve slammed the door in Quackity’s face with a loud “Fuck off!” and a half-serious threat of getting a restraining order put on the man.

Charlie wasn’t Old Charlie anymore.

He wasn’t entirely sure what he was now, but he was very certain that the Old Him had been killed and buried alongside her .

So Current Charlie simply sighed and opened the door to the smelly dump his apartment had become, and let Quackity walk into the eye-watering gag-worthy confines of his home like he had done a concerning amount of times in the past few weeks considering the way they had felt about each other half a year ago.

“Alright,” Charlie said tiredly, pushing his blue-framed glasses back up his nose as he closed the door behind Quackity. “Soup me.” He held out his hands, his fingers opening and closing in a gimme gimme motion.

Quackity sighed again. “Do you have any clean dishes? I’d rather not eat out of the same container as you.”

Charlie thought about the last time he had tried to do the dishes.

He had been feeling somewhat better the morning he had tried, so he had thought himself capable of washing the months-old dirty dishes.

He had gotten two dishes in when he found her favourite plate, still crusty with the remains of her last meal.

The dishes never were finished, abandoned in favour of yet another mental breakdown.

“Umm…” Charlie rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. “Not really?”

“Not even spoons?” Quackity looked like he was regretting the trip to the shithole Charlie called home.

Charlie waved a hand lazily. “Spoons shmoons. Who needs them?”

“People who want to eat .”

“Well, that’s just wrong, clearly. I want to eat your probably-not-poisoned soup, and I don’t have a spoon, so your argument’s clearly flawed.”

Quackity looked a few seconds away from tackling Charlie. He rubbed his temples with one hand as he placed the container on one of the few available spots on the coffee table. “Why do I even try,” Quackity grumbled. “What is the point.”

“You’re the one invading my sanctuary,” Charlie pointed out, rummaging through his cupboards for the clean cups he was kind of sure he had. “Aha.” He pulled out two slightly dusty-coloured plastic cups. “Green or orange?”

Quackity sighed again.

He did that a lot around Charlie.

Charlie didn’t really have the energy to analyze exactly why.

“You like green, don’t you?” Quackity said finally. “I’ll take orange then.”


Charlie smiled, a halfhearted thing that seemed out of place and wrong on him. “Sorry, they’re a bit dusty.”


“Eh.” Quackity grabbed the cups from Charlie and began pouring the soup into them. “You’ve been living here for six months and you’re still alive, so I doubt dust will be what finally ends me.”

The two sat on the stained couch silently, drinking the lukewarm soup.

It was lumpy, the promised cow meat hard and chewy, and the soup itself was a tad bit too salty, like it hadn’t been watered down enough before being made.

“It’s kind of shit,” Charlie mumbled after a few moments, his hands wrapped tightly around the green plastic as he sipped.

“Shut up.”

“No, seriously, how’d you mess up canned soup? Are you cursed?”

“I walked across the island to bring you that ‘shitty’ soup. Shut up.”

He took another sip.


It was still shit.

It was also the first (kind of) hot food he had consumed since Quackity last visited.

Charlie hesitated. “... thank you.”

Quackity glanced over at him, his expression inscrutable. “... you’re welcome.”

The two of them sat there, surrounded by piles of trash, sipping their soup.

It was kind of funny, Charlie thought, that he was sitting here all friendly-like with the person who perhaps disliked him the most.

It was funny, the things grief did.

He hadn’t really been sure why Quackity had begun showing up in the beginning- maybe as some sort of revenge, some sort of way to get back at Charlie for what he had done had happened to Tilin? It certainly seemed like that at first, with the grieving man screaming in Charlie’s face nearly weekly, his words filled with vitriol and hate. Then Quackity attempted a fistfight, his fist slamming into Charlie’s right cheek, causing it to swell and leaving a bruise that lingered for weeks afterwards and was dragged kicking and screaming out by one of Charlie’s neighbors, a bald and super buff man Charlie didn’t really know the name of.

Quackity disappeared for a bit after that, and Charlie’s neighbour attempted to talk to him, even giving him a coupon for a local gym that Charlie immediately lost. Charlie retreated back into his apartment, exhausted and assuming that that was it. Quackity was through spewing hatred at Charlie, his neighbours had begun ignoring him again, the chatty bald one had moved out, and he was alone. Again.

Even if Quackity showed up again, Charlie had the distinct belief that it would be to finally murder him- something that Charlie had been reluctantly accepting of.

He deserved it, he was a monster and he deserved it-

Then out of nowhere, the black-haired man had just begun appearing in front of his apartment’s front door again, not with a hatchet or a gun but with containers of soup or takeout or some other offering in the tentative form of food in hand as he forced his way into Charlie’s life with a few cuss words and slaps to Charlie’s head. The best Charlie could come up with was that Quackity was lonely, slowly going mad from grief and an empty house, and had decided to bother the only other person on the island who knew what it was like to lose something so precious as Charlie and Quackity had.

Not that he was complaining, of course.

Throughout the few months since Quackity had invaded his home, Charlie had learned that Quackity needed Charlie’s company and Charlie needed Quackity’s company- no matter how strange it might seem to yearn for the presence of the person you’ve hated for years.

Charlie was the only person who could understand Quackity’s particular brand of grief- he had been in that stage himself, after all.

And Quackity was probably the only reason why Charlie was still alive.

“The school year starts in a week,” Quackity said suddenly. “My leave is up. I’ll be going back to teaching then.”

Charlie winced.

He couldn’t imagine being forced to be around all those children.

Just the idea made his chest ache.

“That sounds shitty.”


Quackity let out a harsh laugh. “Yeah.” His voice went quiet. “Yeah, it is.”

“I’ll be here,” Charlie said after a bit, a fake smile on his lips. “Like always.”

“Of course.” Quackity looked disapproving at this. “You’ll be here.” He hesitated. “You could always come work for the school, you know. Not even as a teacher. Just a… janitor or something. I can talk to the principal, I’m sure Jaiden would agree.”

Charlie frowned. “I haven’t left the house in months. I can barely stand the presence of you , let alone… the rest of the island. Besides, I really don’t think I could stand to… you know. Be around all of those kids.” Let alone him.

Quackity was quiet for a moment. “I know. It was a long shot. Just…” He looked up at the cracked white stucco of Charlie’s ceiling. “Think about it, okay? Please?”

Charlie stared at the dredges of his soup in the bottom of the green plastic cup. “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll think about it.”

The words felt wrong on his tongue. He had no intentions of “thinking about it”, and any potential thought about it would immediately be shot down with a loud mental “NO!”

He was pretty sure Quackity knew that too.

But Quackity accepted the lie with a sad smile, and they went back to sitting there in silence. Grief still outlined their every feature, but they were content in the knowledge that they weren’t alone in their pain- no matter how messed up that seemed.