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Quackity never knew hunger, before Schlatt. Oh, he had known a need for food. He had known going to bed with his stomach still growling. But he didn’t know hunger. Didn’t know just how deep, and how expansive of an ache he was capable of feeling in his gut.
There is no other word for it. Hunger.
Their first date— the first real one, finally, after weeks of trading kisses over campaign materials and paperwork— was at a restaurant. Schlatt had picked it, of course, and then proceeded to make Quackity wait alone at a table for twenty minutes before finally showing up. But he’d looked so pretty with his hair pushed back that Quackity had just decided not to care.
It was a nice restaurant. Upscale, although Quackity can’t remember now how the food actually tasted. He remembers soft candlelight and a white tablecloth, and an overly ornate script on a seasonal wine menu. He remembers learning then that he didn’t like wine, but that he liked when Schlatt reached across the table to chidingly wipe the excess from the corner of his mouth. He remembers, he liked when he paused there. Hand on his cheek, thumb hovering over his lower lip. Pressing down, ever so gently. Just to tease him.
Quackity remembers biting down, just to tease back. Lightly nipping with his teeth.
And he remembers that was the first time he really felt hungry.
It was something Schlatt grew in him. Perfected in him, over the course of the relationship. Feeding it with kisses, guiding it with a firm hand on his waist. Training it, by holding what it wanted just barely out of reach.
Quackity remembers begging for a wedding. He remembers the butterflies he felt when Schlatt finally agreed, all nauseating, lepidopteran ecstasy. He remembers the weeks he spent fully unable to sleep from the ache in his stomach. The need to see it finalized. The intense, desperate hunger.
But he quickly learned the only way he would be fed.
A missed service. A cheap ring. A quick kiss and a slap on the ass. Their wedding was little more than a signing of papers, barely spent in the chapel that Quackity let Schlatt pick, in front of no audience, no friends or family. No holy union to be observed.
But Quackity would take it, wouldn’t he? He would take what he could get, even if what he could get was a store-bought cake that he couldn’t even eat. He had felt too sick, that day. Too much anxiety burrowed into his gut. And Schlatt didn’t want to waste his figure.
It is striking, how shame and love burn in the exact same places. How much they strike the very same ache in his core, a low, molten pain. How much they both feel like starving.
And Quackity starved in Manberg. Oh, there was food. Rich and needlessly expensive food, though he cannot remember any taste, fed to him with comments about keeping up his shape. But it was the comments that fed the ache. The small, endless degradations that created the ever-growing hole in the pit of his stomach, that taught him just how many ways it could turn. He ate, in Manberg. He was full, in Manberg. But he starved.
He starved, sitting quietly at Schlatt’s side during meetings. Sitting pretty, because that’s what Schlatt told him he was good for, pretty. He starved in his tight suits, the ones that Schlatt picked out, that “emphasized his only good qualities”. He starved, letting himself be touched and admired like meat because at least to meant he was being touched, at least he was being looked at.
And he starved, lying alone in their bed so many nights, clutching a pillow that still smelled faintly of faded cologne and sweat and wishing the scent could fill him whole. He starved when Schlatt finally joined him some late hour past midnight, with no acknowledgement and no arm slung heavily over his side, only a grunt and his back turned towards him. At least sparing him the sour scent on his breath.
He remembers, trying to make him breakfast afterwards. He remembers starving for a thank-you.
But Schlatt wouldn’t touch it.
He remembers an argument. He remembers a smashed plate. He remembers, cleaning the mess later, sweeping up shards of porcelain and eggs and crying when he thought no one would catch him. And still feeling so deeply hungry.
By the time he arrived in Pogtopia he thinks he barely noticed the lack of food. He doubts he could have eaten, anyways. So accustomed to his own persistent nausea, that an empty stomach was an afterthought, could barely even be felt over his personal gnawing. Nothing could have filled him, he thinks. Nothing could have helped.
He thought it might eat him alive in that ravine. The thing constantly gnawing at his guts. He burned with a caustic humiliation, knowing that every night he spent in Pogtopia plotting that bastard’s death he also spent desperate to curl up at his side again. Every night he lay awake he spent aching, swallowing hot mouthfuls of his own stifled tears as his stomach churned on nothing. Still picking at those loose what-ifs. Still picking at the not-in-months and never-again and maybe-not-at-all-to-begin-with feeling that he would do anything, anything, to cut open and crawl back into.
He thought it was love.
He was a kid when it started. But Schlatt left behind something else. Something ravenous. He tore open a pit in his gut that Quackity knows will never reform. And as he stands here, at the podium ready to give his eulogy, he still only feels one thing.
Hungry.
Schlatt’s funeral is a small service, in front of a small audience. There is no formality and no fanfare. There was no one willing to arrange it. No one even to bless the body, before it goes into the ground. Quackity knows he would have wanted that. He would have wanted a mass, a proper chapel, but when Badboyhalo asked he simply didn’t feel the need to speak up.
In lieu of a priest, Badboyhalo has said a few words. Tubbo has given a short, stilted speech. And now, it is Quackity’s turn.
His lips twitch, as he tries to keep them straight. As he tries to keep his expression as level as possible, his words calm, digestible. “Realistically,” he says, “serving next to Schlatt, it taught me a lot of important things.”
He tries to keep his head up. His voice steady. He tries to keep his eyes on his audience, who he can see are twitching in the same way he is. Eyes watchful, waiting for something to crack.
“More importantly,” he continues, “I think, a side of him not many of you knew.” The mic crackles softly as he reaches out to take it, carefully removing it from its stand. “I'd like to say something, though. Before we put him in the ground.”
Schlatt’s casket is an open one. Quackity approaches it, slowly, each step down the polished wooden steps seeming to echo through the rushing in his ears. There are no flowers laid around it. There is nothing in the coffin save for the body itself, lying there, motionless and pale.
Quackity pushes his hair back.
Schlatt does not look pretty, now.
Little was done to preserve the body, after it was recovered from the van. There was little that could be done. After three days, there is no color left in it save for the bruised, purple mottling barely visible on its underside, the skin lying strangely across its form, as if it no longer fits quite right. His suit no longer seems to fit quite right either, Quackity passively observes, and he reaches down to smooth a creased lapel.
“If there’s, just one thing," he murmurs, "that I can say about Schlatt…”
The man’s chest is cold, and stiff, beneath his hand. He pauses there, almost waiting, palm flat above the breastbone. There is no movement. There is no beat.
It is all still.
And somehow, that is the thing that breaks Quackity. That, somehow, after all of this, after everything he’s been through, he is the one left here writhing, left here hungry, and Schlatt is only still.
He stares at his own hand, alive and trembling. And then his eyes slip lower. Lower, following along the edge of Schlatt’s jacket to where the first button rests, undone, just below his sternum. Below his ribs. Absently, he notices that his hand has followed. That it has latched itself to a button. Sliding it open. Absently, he notices that it is still shaking, that all of him is shaking, his teeth clenched furiously behind snarling lips as he tears button after button away.
“It’s that the motherfucker’s dead!”
Quackity doesn’t think before he moves. Before his hand draws back, and then plunges straight back down into Schlatt’s torso. Rotten flesh splits under his fingers, something thick and black spurting up around them as he forces his way through. He gasps as he sinks up to his wrist, enveloped suddenly in a deep, wet cold. He thinks he hears someone scream. He thinks he hears someone cheer. The microphone clatters from his other hand with a yowl of feedback as he adjusts his angle, and pushes further, pushes up.
His audience doesn’t matter. His audience barely exists. There’s only the blood rushing in his ears, the blood pooling up around his arm, the blood pounding through his heart.
He feels it more in his stomach.
It is a tight, tight squeeze around his hand, but Quackity drives his way through packed viscera in a desperate fight to get deeper. His free hand goes to Schlatt’s ribcage for leverage, and he shoves, grunting as he slides between what he only assumes might be stomach and liver.
He has to do this. With his bare hands, he has to do this. Schlatt never needed anything more to take him apart. And now, here is his returning of the favor. Forcing his way up, up, under the ribs of his husband, the thing that made him, that biblically tore him from its side and left him a starved and rabid thing.
Everything is cold and fibrous and slick around him as Quackity reaches, further and further, watching his forearm slowly disappear into Schlatt’s corpse with horrified fascination. As if it’s the body itself that is consuming him, dragging him into its narrow space. Surrounding him entirely. Wrapping around and begging him to stay.
Holding him again. Finally, one last time.
It’s with another gasp that he sinks fully up to his elbow, with one last push through shredding connective tissues until his fingers find their prize. Something just the size of his own clawing hand, as if it was made to fit there perfectly.
With all of his weight, Quackity pulls. And like the rest of Schlatt’s rotten body, it tears away too easily.
Quackity rips himself free with a horrid squelching sound, a horrid feeling of the cavity he made attempting to suck him back in. His arm swings high above his head, holding Schlatt’s cold, unbeating heart for everyone to see.
He has Schlatt’s heart. It’s his. His. His.
And he tips his head to look at it, still aloft and dripping in his hand, ink-like gore streaked down his entire arm. His conquest. His relic, held to the heavens for a blessing.
Quackity pants, open mouthed and grinning.
Schlatt will get a holy burial, still. And here, his holy Eucharist. Transubstantiated.
He takes it like Schlatt taught him to, in both cupped hands with his head tilted back in reverence. He sinks his teeth down, feeling cold, congealed blood spurt and burst across his tongue like wine, letting the excess spill from the corners of his mouth. It’s tough. Thick, almost leathery between his teeth, and yet all the force it takes to tear out a chunk the right size to swallow feels like catharsis. The press of smooth, blood-drenched meat against his lips almost feels like a kiss. As he clutches it to his open, working mouth, it begins to feel something like that again.
Finally, after months of starving, Quackity is able to eat. Finally, Schlatt is able to feed him properly. Finally the thing that has been growing under his skin all these months, the empty, aching thing is able to open its maw and take it.
Going down, it’s all just meat. It feels good, to treat him like nothing but meat.
Sweeter than kissing is the taste of iron on his tongue, is digging his teeth through ribbons of muscle, ripping his head back like a wild animal to take yet another piece and choke it down. This is closeness. This is love. Maybe this is what he felt all along, maybe this is what all his desperation was for. Not to kiss. But to consume.
Schlatt goes down cold and heavy in his throat, and as Quackity gasps for air between bites, he finds his mouth curled in an open grin.
“His heart is within me now.” The words are little more than wind in his mouth. He’s breathless, he realizes, only now, his chest heaving with effort as he tries to regain himself. He pants, hoarse and ragged, desperately sucking in air until the breaths are cracking, bursting into sharp, static sounds. He’s laughing. Shrieking at a joke he’s forgotten if anyone knows. “His heart is fucking within me now!”
In his stomach, it feels warm. The rapid pulse slamming at his ribs almost feels like someone else’s.
This is love.