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you do it because you love him.
you were intrigued by him from the moment you saw him across the bar. he was surrounded by people while you were alone. he tipped his head back and laughed, loud and bright, and you glanced down at your white rum and coke and felt your cheeks flush. something gold glinted around his horns. he swapped jokes with his friends. you ordered another drink. you knew he would never notice you. he was a different kind of unachievable than anyone else in the city.
and then he talks to you.
“you thirsty?” he asks you, and you’re too stupid to realize that this is his way of asking to buy you a drink. you gesture to your rum and coke.
“nah. just a little hungry.”
“this is a bar, sugar.” he deadpans. it’s funny. he’s funny, really. there’s a bone-deep, aching hunger inside you that’s been there ever since you set off on your own in this city.
“doesn’t really matter.” you respond, for you hunger for something that isn’t food. you don’t know why you even brought it up.
he asks what you want, and you eye him up cautiously. “surprise me,” you say, boldly. he laughs and orders you cognac.
that’s when you fall in love.
you love him, you think, maybe. you love him if loving him is the same as wanting to be him. you love him if loving him is like wanting what is his as your own. if love and desire—possessiveness—greed—jealousy are one and the same.
you move to the dream smp and he follows you. you’re all alone on that election podium when you see him and you feel hungry all over again. you make an agreement, an exchange, a business deal, and then suddenly he’s proposing. you say yes, because you love him, if loving him is the same as wanting to be the vice president.
you are never hungry as long as he is with you. it’s a cruel sort of irony because the citizens of manberg are starving, but he would never let you starve, at the very least. he feeds you something new and exciting every night, by the whitehouse personal chefs: full roast hams and imported sweet berries and bread pudding. once he feeds you roast duck, and you giggle and ask him is this cannibalism, then? and he smirks at you across the table and says you are what you eat, hun.
you love him until the moment he is dead in the ground. in sickness and in health, in life and in death, said the wedding vows that you will now never say. you used to ask all the time, until it slowly weaned to nothingness. now you stand on a podium in front of his body.
what’s a rite, anyway?
--
you do it because you hate him.
he gets you drunk off cognac. he’s funny and charming and you can’t afford a taxi but you think he’s going to take you home so you don’t really mind.
“these are pretty.” he says, words slightly slurred, gesturing to your wings. you’re pretty confident in his ability to hold his liquor but he’s had a lot, but once again you don’t really mind because you’ll be going home soon enough.
“so i’ve been told.” you smile softly. “you wanna touch?”
you fluff out the feathers for him. he’s gentle when he touches. he knows where and how to touch you. you’re not the first avian he’s been with, you realize. you feel a strong twinge of jealousy. it’s not quite hatred. not yet.
it does become hatred, though. not initially. it’s a slow thing, like the hunger that fills you after a large meal. but eventually you hate him, if hating him is the same thing as wanting to shed him like you would take off your suit jacket after a long day. you hate him if hating him is the same thing as the hunger to be rid of him. you hate him if hating him and loving him are the same.
he signs papers and you watch him sign papers. when he holds official meetings, you sit on his leg. he calls you his lovely piece of eye candy but you feel like literal candy, ready to be devoured alive by every hungry eye and mouth in the room. you shrivel under his touch, a delicate, caramelized treasure buried under the sands of pretense.
he makes you tear down the whitehouse by swinging the handle of a pickaxe at your shoulder. he calls you a pussy. he calls you a coward but you’re not cowardly, you’re just hungry. you’re hungry for the satisfaction of holding something you’ve made with your own two hands and you’re hungry for a nice meal of roast duck and you’re hungry for revenge so you leave with broken bones in your shoulder and hatred and hunger like a particularly gross cocktail in your gut. you get all…”hangry”, he used to say when you told him you were particularly in the mood to tear something apart with your teeth. you are carnivorous prey and you leave your predator for Pogtopia.
you stand in front of his body and you have never hated him more. he makes you feel like you aren’t yourself, so you say something that is very unlike you. “realistically and jokes aside”, you begin. your hands curl around the podium. he looks up at you, taunting you. “i think serving next to schlatt as vice president taught me a lot of things.”
you’re hungry.
--
you need to have him. to treasure, to hold, to own. that’s why you do it.
he does indeed take you home at the end of the night. he treats you like a conquest and you’re not sure how you feel about it but it doesn’t matter, does it? you already love him and you’re used to being treated like that, anyway so you let him. maybe you don’t mind being owned if it’s by him. maybe it tastes like being cared for when the hateful words are hot in your mouth.
you stand on a stage and watch technoblade fire off at tubbo and you do absolutely nothing. obviously, the right thing to do would be to stand in the way, to break tubbo out of the concrete, to try and…you don’t know, tackle the guy with the rocket launcher? the problem isn’t exactly cowardice, or fear, or anxiousness that fills you with hesitation. the thing is, you feel an equal pull in two directions. part of you wants to spit curses at your fiance--part of you wants to take his hand and lift it triumphantly in the air and shout FOR MANBERG!
hunger turns into disgust. your feet are frozen. you do nothing.
you break into the camaravan with the full intention of killing him. you have a sword and everything. but it looks like you don’t have to do any work; the fucker drops dead before you or tommy or wilbur or anyone else can stick a weapon in him, and then that is that.
and then you are standing on a podium in front of his body.
“um, more importantly, a side of him that you didn’t really know.” that same hunger rises in your stomach and into your throat. you think about the taste of roast duck on your lips, soft and pliable. you think of sitting on his lap, soft and pliable. you love him and you hate him, and both of those emotions are wanting what he has. wanting to be him. you want to be him but that doesn’t mean you want to be dead, it just means you want…
you want…
you stalk over to his body. you love him and you hate him and you want to be him. you can feel eyes on you, that is for sure. tommy, tubbo, sam--you can clock them all as you stalk around him like a predator eyeing up his prey. you suppose this’d make you a decomposer, actually. it’s all a rather morbid train of thought, but as soon as you dismiss it from your mind it ends up in your stomach and your tongue runs over your bottom lip, your shoe tapping aimlessly against the floor.
you wonder if the blade he always kept in his suit jacket pocket is still there.
--
you miss him. you really, really miss him. you miss the way he would show you off to everyone. you were a prize to be won but he was proud he won you and isn’t that what love was in the end? you miss the way you would share sheets and hearts and hell, you even miss the late night political discussions over scotch, the ones that ended in broken glasses. more than anything, you miss the way he would never let you go hungry. now that he’s gone, there is a broken sort of hunger inside you. you feel like you will never be full until you once again love him--hate him--want to be him.
“but if there’s one thing I could say about schlatt…”
a conversation sitting on his knee. a conversation over roast duck.
the blade is still there.
--
quick as a flash you pull it from his pocket and twirl it between your fingers. you were never allowed to touch this thing. it was one of the things that set the two of you apart and will no longer. you hear screams from the crowd, which you suppose is kinda to-be-expected, as people don’t usually go brandishing weapons at a funeral. schlatt wouldn’t have cared, though, stubborn crass bastard, and neither do you.
so, because you love him and hate him and need to have him, you plunge the blade into his sternum.
there’s no blood. of course there’s no blood; dead bodies don’t bleed. you know how to stab for the heart--schlatt taught you well. you stab just deep enough but not too deep, not enough to pierce the organ. you do the rest with your hands. the give of the chest cavity is easy enough; this is a dead body, after all.
your breath catches in your throat. you have literally just eviscerated your fiance.
you have never felt more hungry.
you never go for his heart--the place where the love and, more importantly, hatred is stored--with the intention to hold it. with the intention to cherish and keep it. with the intention to have the last piece of him with you, to hold his love and his hatred.
to hold his love and his hatred is not enough. it has never been enough for you, never satiated, never full. you have always hungered for more, and now you are hungry for him. the moment you get your hand on his heart, rip it from his arteries and hold it like a laurel, you have one intention and one intention only.
schlatt would never let you go hungry, after all.
you are crowned like a king, your hands dripping gold like a monstrance as you bite down. sinew and flesh and muscle tear beneath your teeth. the first bite is the worst one--you feel like you could vomit. you keep going. the taste dulls over and you focus on the sensation of swallowing--hard with all the blood but manageable. the blood is viscous and tangible and real and it coats the hunger in your gut like the world’s most sickening antacid. by the third bite, you taste familiarity. it’s meat, is all it is. tastes like chicken, if you squint. tender, very fatty. tastes like duck.
“AYYY, THAT MOTHERFUCKER’S DEAD!” you shout to a crowd of horrified onlookers. you’ve repelled everyone like some sort of equally-charged magnet. you don’t care, though. schlatt had always repelled everyone, and now he will always be with you. “LET’S GO! HE’S DEAD”!
it’s a fitting ending for someone you loved, someone you hated, someone you became.
--
“you want breakfast?” schlatt asks you the next morning as you’re pulling on your jacket. you’re still feeling a little hungover. it was a lot of cognac, after all.
you look at him quizzically. he would cook for you. it’s a feeling you haven’t felt a while in this city--the feeling of being cared for. that’s sweet. you love that. you could love him, you think, as long as you don’t take too much. as long as you don’t step out of line.
you’re nothing like schlatt, and don’t think you ever will be.
“nah.” you respond. “i’m not really hungry anymore.”