Work Text:
The earth clings cruelly to its children.
It makes desperate grabs at their lives, snakes its way through mountains and rivers, topples trees, withers flowers. It blisters in the sun and molds in the dark. It hovers, just out of sight, a constant reminder that all will, one day, return to it.
There are few who escape its embrace, and fewer still who do so unscathed.
Wilbur is not one of those lucky few. Decay follows him, steady and aching, and sits nestled in his chest, where a sword took his final life, where a beating heart should reside. It is spreading, he knows, but as each day passes, he goes longer and longer without addressing the deadened skin.
He falls back on that often, his tendency to neglect to acknowledge his problems. It’s served him well for most of his life and death, it’s only natural for the same to be said of his undeath. If he waits long enough, the troublesome things that plague him might just go away on their own. It worked with L’Manburg, with Limbo, so why shouldn't it work now?
(It’s got nothing to do with the fact that the thought of rot eating its way through his skin, putrefying his muscles, corroding his bones, makes his vision swim and his ears ring and—)
He closes his eyes and breathes through the nausea.
Wilbur doesn’t know what god decided to drag him to Las Nevadas, but he imagines that They are laughing at him. Cruelly, loudly. With all Their god friends gathered and laughing right along with Them. Really, this is just adding to the constant stream of entertainment he’s provided the higher beings that govern the server’s natural world. A crowd-favorite, he must be, if Tommy’s insistence that things happen according to their whims. Otherwise, he’s a tragedy, a blight, and he feels it with every panging ache of his failing body.
(His fingers went numb a long time ago. He pretends, desperately, that the sensation was brought about by the cold that settles into his bones, by the snow that drifts softly down around him.)
He doesn’t think it’s supposed to snow in the desert, but he doesn’t mind it. L’manburg never got cold enough for snow, and neither Limbo nor Pogtopia ever had the exposure to the sky necessary for it. Instead, the glistening snow drifts remind him of the cozy little cabin that Phil lives in, the one place he can manage to rest without fearing what he’ll see when he closes his eyes or who will be there when he opens them.
Wilbur watches as the desert turns to tundra, and it almost draws a laugh from him. The weather, like the earth, is steadfast in its quest to swallow up the pitiful attempts players make to defy it. And players, in turn, only struggle harder, building elaborate structures and signs and fountains to line the roads leading to their homes, their workplaces. He takes in the extravagance of Quackity’s country, and finds no life, no soul, in the place. It’s a ghost town, consisting only of facades and lacking any real substance. A city with no denizens, a country with no history. A desert with snow; a tundra with sand.
Quackity’s scarred features twist into a wolfish grin as he explains the nature of Las Nevadas’ casino. If Wilbur wins, he gets what he came for, but if Quackity wins, he takes something of equal value. Wilbur entertains the thought of giving up a life. It doesn’t concern him as much as it likely should. It’s worth it, even without the guarantee of his success. He’d bet anything for a body that doesn’t reek of death.
The cards are dealt, evenly, methodically, slipping from Quackity’s hands with practiced perfection. Wilbur tracks both their movements and those of Quackity’s eyes, which stay intently focused on Wilbur. He spares one quick glance to Wilbur’s hands, before once again coming to study his expression.
(Wilbur has to consciously assure himself that he’s looking for twitching, for hidden decks, for any number of things that he should be focused on, and not pondering the gloves that conceal the decaying state of Wilbur’s fingers.)
Wilbur assesses the cards Quackity deals him: the Hanged Man, the Tower, the Wheel of Fortune, the Hermit, Death, and a number of minor arcana. No aces, nothing higher than a ten. His chances of walking out of here pain-free are laughable.
(Slime, who is laughing, says, in that terrible, cheerful tone of his, Wilbur’s name, and something about Limbo, and there is the rattling of a train echoing in Wilbur’s mind, and the cool, solid sensation of grimy tiles against his forearms, and the crushing understanding that he will be on this platform until the world ceases to be.)
He brushes off the question, something about how he’s “tense,” with a shrug that strains far too many parts of his body, and lays his first card down.
The desert is all but snowed over by the time Wilbur limps from the casino, two lives down and no better off than he was when he arrived. The area is blanketed in white, and it’s beautiful, pristine, unmarred by the imperfect footsteps of players. The air carries with it the sort of cold that flushes your cheeks and freezes your breath, the sort of cold that reminds one of the steady rise and fall of their lungs, the beating of their heart. Wilbur experiences only the former, but it’s a revitalizing chill. Not nostalgic, as it was before, but the outline of something akin to life. If he had accomplished what he came to Las Nevadas to do, he might have even called it “hope.”
Despite his deaths, despite the decay, despite the gods’ mockery, he is still standing. Like the snow, falling despite Quackity’s desert, Wilbur is alive.
He takes a step into the frosty expanse, and watches as the tiny crystalline structures buckle under his weight, swallowing up his foot and half of his leg. He takes another step, and another, and lets those tiny defiances carry him out of the snowfall.