Strawberryhallows - Sprout !!

A comic (?) about my love of weird little bats for this halloween

who up delaying the inevitable

So here’s the thing about Quackity: 

Once upon a time, he played guitar. He still does, sometimes, but it’s more muscle memory than anything. He tried teaching Sapnap once. Karl had just gotten a recorder and was going fucking ham on it, okay, and Quackity had his guitar, and Sapnap had a stick he would beat against a tree and endless enthusiasm, even if he didn’t actually know what the fuck he was doing. 

Sapnap snapped a string, and Quackity kissed the crease between his eyebrows and told him it was alright. Karl laughed and slumped over Quackity’s shoulders from behind, nuzzled his face behind Quackity’s ear and told him that he’s hot when he’s caring. Sapnap said that he was hot all of the time. Quackity pushed Karl off of him and told him to shove his recorder up his ass, a smile on his face.

Okay, but here’s the thing about Quackity: 

Once upon a time, he played guitar. He doesn’t anymore, not usually, because some idiot filled it up with slime when he wasn’t looking, and he can’t bring himself to clean it out even though he knows that the guitar is basically ruined at this point. It was a wedding gift. Maybe it’s better that it is destroyed. He tried teaching Charlie, but it’s kinda hard to pluck at a string when the string cuts through your finger like, well, slime. 

Charlie reattached his finger with a small pout, and Quackity just rolled his eyes and told him that he should just wear gloves next time. Or he should try something that wouldn’t injure him. Has he considered the drums? Or, better, the harmonica?

Yeah, but here’s the thing about Quackity:

Once upon a time, he played guitar. He would sit next to his husband and serenade him under the stars. This was back before he took up drinking, so the arm around his shoulders wasn’t too heavy, and the horns digging into his cheek did so accidentally. Schlatt didn’t really get music theory or anything when Quackity tried explaining it to him, but he told him that he had the sweetest voice on the server, baby, why don’t you come closer? 

Schlatt later slammed that guitar against the ground so hard it snapped in half, and Quackity just took the pieces and taped them together. It still isn’t fixed, and it never will be. 

No, but here’s the thing about Quackity:

Tubbo can play the piano. He does so in the lounge of the hotel late at night when no one else is awake, even in the city that never sleeps, and his hands shake. Quackity sits on the bench next to him, sometimes, and plays the notes that he can’t reach. He knows these songs. He used to play them himself. One of them is one that Tubbo made up one day during his presidency, some stupid little thing that made Ranboo laugh so hard that the milk he was drinking came out of his nose. 

Tubbo never says a word, but Quackity sees the glint of his wedding ring. It’s the same shine as the ones hanging around his own neck, just a bit too dull to be anything real fancy, worn down not by years but of hands never letting go for fear of it disappearing on them. 

Right, but here’s the goddamn thing about Quackity: 

Tommy is trying to learn the guitar again, and Wilbur is too busy moping in the woods to actually bother teaching him like he promised. Quackity just steals Wilbur’s from his shitty van and sits next to Tommy on a log and shows him how to curl his fingers just right, because anything Wilbur Soot does is, in fact, factually incorrect. Tommy’s quiet about it, but when he gets a chord right for the first time, he smiles, and he’s missing a tooth that he wasn’t missing when Dream was still in prison, and Quackity’s grip on the stolen guitar’s neck tightens like how it tightened around Dream’s shitty neck once. 

Wilbur joins them, eventually, sits on Tommy’s other side and tells him that he sounds good for a beginner. Quackity stays silent. He does not give Wilbur’s guitar back, not even when Wilbur holds his hand out for it. Wilbur raises an eyebrow, calculating, and Quackity wonders how hard it would be to bludgeon someone to death with a guitar. Not that hard, right? Not that hard?

Here is the thing about Quackity:

Nobody sells instruments anymore. So Quackity asks Foolish, who is a little confused but who makes one, anyway, and who insists on sitting there while Quackity strings it and tunes it. He leaves, and Quackity is left alone in the desert looking into his own face, reflected on the shiny wooden casing and warped just enough so that it looks like he’s got a forehead the size of goddamn New Jersey. On the inside of the casing, Quackity knows, is an engraved S & Q & K, out of sight and out of mind. He knows this because he carved the letters there himself when Foolish wasn’t looking. 

The thing about Quackity is such: 

He looks up at the stars from the roof of the chapel he was going to get married in, and he hums to himself, and he can almost smile when he is able to translate the notes onto the guitar. 

Your Daily Batty Dose

(posable bumble bee bat figurine)