Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Quackity had come to terms with the fact that Slime didn’t understand the difference between romantic and platonic relations, and probably never would just a few days after he had tried to teach him. He had told him that handholding, kissing, hugging, and most other ways of touching someone were romantic. Then Slime had thrown him a curveball by asking, “what does ‘romantic’ mean?” How was Quackity, a person who was only ever forsaken by love and romance, supposed to explain the concept of love to someone who wasn’t even a human?

Quackity had tried to oversimplify it. He wasn’t ready to go into philosophy at 2:26 in the night. He had just said, “it’s a way of loving that’s more intimate than platonic. Like, loving intimately. With touching and stuff.” That had seemed like it had worked… for two seconds. Slime had almost instantly asked more questions (‘what is love?’ and ‘What is the difference between platonic and romantic relations? I’ve seen friends hold hands!’) and they had ended up talking until dawn. Quackity hadn’t gotten much sleep that night. (Not that he usually did anyway, but-)

Slime did not seem to have gotten the memo, however. He continued to try holding hands with, hugging, and even kissing Quackity. The kisses were never big, usually just little pecks on the cheek, but still, it bothered Quackity to no end. Whenever Slime tried to hold hands or hug him, Quackity would just respond with a scolding remark. There wouldn’t be any warnings before Slime would kiss him, though, so Quackity would scold him after, usually more than he scolded him for other stuff.

Quackity hated Slime’s touchiness because it was unprofessional. Quackity was the owner of the city of Las Nevadas, the biggest (and only) gambling empire on the SMP, and Slime was his assistant/apprentice. Their relationship was purely professional, no matter what Slime said, insisting that they were ‘best friends.’ They weren’t, and Quackity was (not) completely fine with that.

Chapter Text

After a couple weeks of Slime seemingly not getting the whole ‘touching is weird in most human societies’ thing, Quackity started to notice things. Quackity always noticed things, you had to have been observant and on your feet if you lived in the White House during Manburg and Schlatt’s presidency , but recently he had been noticing two things that stuck out to him and bothered him. One was about Slime, the guy was full of interesting intricacies and secrets, and the other, very disturbingly, was about himself.

The first and most obvious one was that Slime was selective with who he hugged, held hands with, and kissed. In this context, “selective” translates to “only Quackity.” That’s right, Quackity had only ever seen him attempt to do any of the typically intimate stuff with anyone other than him before he had (quite shodilly) explained the concepts of intimacy and love to him.

Slime had never tried to kiss, hug, or hold hands with anyone else in Nevadas. Fundy? No. Foolish? No. Tubbo (even though he didn’t live in Nevadas, he worked there, and neither did Foolish so…)? No. Purpled? Well, for some reason, Slime avoided Purpled. No one really knew why, but Slime always got infinitely more focused on the topic of indomitable death and impending doom when he was around Purpled, and that just meant that he was definitely not hanging out with him or being intimate with him.

Who was the one and only person to receive hugs and cuddles from Slime? You guessed it, give it up for Quackity from Las Nevadas!

On the topic of name suffixes, Slime had let go of adding the suffix to nearly everyone’s name at this point. It had started with Fundy insisting that he couldn’t go by “Fundy from L’Manburg” and asking him to drop it. Slime did, shortening it down to just “Fundy,” pretty quickly, and soon everybody in Nevadas was requesting the name shortening. And Slime complied… mostly. 

You see, Slime just loved singling out Quackity, for reasons Quackity didn’t know, and it bothered him to his wit’s end. Quackity had asked so many times to just be called “Quackity” rather than “Quackity from Las Nevadas,” but Slime never listened. He continued to add the suffix, saying it as if he’d never been asked to stop.

As for Quackity’s feelings toward this whole shabbang? Well, that was the second thing Quackity had noticed. Quackity found himself embarrassed when Slime ever so slightly touched him out in public, and he didn’t know why. It wasn’t like he was going to look into it too deeply though, it was probably just the fact that his apprentice (Quackity would use the word “intern,” but Slime hated it for unknown reasons) was hinting that they were together to the public.

The fact that they were together was a lie, by the way. They weren’t even friends. (Even though Quackity sometimes finds himself wishing they were.) That was just Slime being Slime, he was ‘friends’ with everyone. Quackity wasn’t different. (Somewhere, deep in his subconscious, Quackity knows that isn’t true.)