Chapter Text
Quackity tightened his bolo tie and stared back into his own eyes in the mirror.
He looked sexy as hell.
He grimaced, and his reflection looked like it’d eaten something sour.
He relished in it, because this was the only time for the whole wedding ceremony he was going to be able to express how much he thought this was a crock of horseshit.
Because, clearly, everyone else had clearly lost their goddamn minds.
It hadn’t been his call, he wanted to make that clear – he was more than happy chasing tail and remaining a perpetual bachelor to the end of his days (having two failed engagements by the tender age of twenty five would do that to a man – he considered it life’s funny little way of teaching him where his priorities should be), and was more than happy with his ‘work hard/play hard’ lifestyle.
Sure, some might call him a workaholic. Some might say ‘Quackity, you really shouldn’t sleep at your desk, it’s bad for you.’ Or something like ‘you can’t get hammered at a work function and try to network at the tavern, what is wrong with you.’
Or! Or! Something completely stupid and unreasonable, like ‘Quackity, please, we’re begging you, please stop pulling sixty hour work weeks and then going on a bender, your liver has to be killing you, you will die by age thirty.’
Hah! Fools!
They didn’t understand him because he was too brilliant for them to understand. He was an efficiency machine. They would have never have gotten that trade agreement with Kinoko if he hadn’t slept with two out of the three parliamentary chairs!
Yes, they may have had a dramatic and messy breakup, but still! He got their foot in the door! It would be super unprofessional to break off a trade agreement because they had an affair with a Nevadan councilmember, so suck on that, Karl!
But.
Well.
He was a councilmember. Not chairman. He doesn’t get to make the big decisions – he just facilitates them.
Which is why today, Quackity is finally getting his ass married.
To a fucking snake.
(Naga, technically, but whatever. Same difference.)
“Sam,” he said primly, adjusting his lapels and pointedly not looking at the man in his periphery, “I hope you know that when you die, I’m pissing on your grave.”
“Hm,” Sam said, not looking up from his leather-bound journal. “That’s nice.”
“You’re gonna think it’s raining, and because you’re in Hell, you’re going to bask in it, but just know, it’s my piss.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I’ll dehydrate myself. For days. It’s gonna suck,” he insisted, flicking his fingers through his hair yet again to straighten out the non-existent tangles. “And you may think ‘oh, it’s fine, I’m going to live at least ten more years because while I’m old and feeble I’m not THAT old and feeble, I have a long time until I get to Hell’ and you would be wrong. It’s coming. You won’t see it coming but it is.”
“Did you get your corsage?” Sam asked, writing something in his journal. “Premier Craft specifically picked that one out for you, make sure you’re wearing it.”
“I fed it to your dog. She’s dead now. Her blood is on your hands.”
Sam tilted his head, looking briefly at the dog laid sprawled out in the sunlight in the window, casting multicolored light through its colored glass. Her tail wagged. “Fran looks pretty happy for being dead.”
“I would be happier being dead. She’s not special.”
Sam finally sighed, putting down his journal. “Quackity – “
“Chairman,” he said pleasantly, turning on his heel to look the man straight on, so he could see the Shark Grin he was wearing just for him.
Because fuck him, that’s why.
“I know you’re not happy about this – “
“What gave it away?” he said, smile unwavering.
“—But you have to know, from a political standpoint, it makes sense,” he pleaded, holding out his arms.
And, hatefully, Quackity would never admit to knowing that yes, it was in fact the best move.
Specifically, that a match was pretty clever, he had to hand that to them.
Marriages were just a part of the game, and while they were old fashioned, so was Premier Philza Craft, the old scaly fuck.
And it was either this, or letting Premier Craft slither his way up to the chairman’s seat and turning it into a throne, letting their corpses be the new décor for the next however-long until they fully rotted.
And not even to rule there, either.
He just wanted a vacation home.
“It gets cold by us, you know,” he’d explained pleasantly, coils wound underneath him like a little cushion, only it was made of solid muscle and nearly impenetrable scales instead of fluff and cloth. “Sure, we’ve got our shit sorted, but it’d be nice to get some proper heat, and you’ve really got a handle on the terraforming business. A desert! In the tundra! What a clever concept!”
They had, of course, immediately offered to just, y’know, do the damn terraforming construction for him, but he had been generally unimpressed, eyeing up their interior decorating with keen, slitted eyes.
(It wasn't a surprise he had refused.
Word had it that his side passion was in architecture.
Quackity had no doubt the man was already reading their weaknesses in their very walls.)
He had, however, reacted when Sam had offered a different kind of trade.
A marriage.
“To seal the deal,” he’d explained, in his typical even tone that had made him so famously popular as a leader. Nice and steadfast, Sam A’Dud. “A way of aligning ourselves that doesn’t signal weakness or having to have the upper hand. Very neutral, popular with the conservative folks and easy to spin to the romantics.”
Premier Craft had straightened – a threatening move in his own culture, but one decidedly of interest in his and theirs. “You understand I am, as they say, ‘off the market’, yes?”
“We do,” Sam had agreed, which Quackity at the time had definitely not agreed with, because no, he really didn’t understand.
The snake supposedly was ‘married’ to their goddess – a carryover tradition from their monarchy, apparently - but had had a rotating group of male ‘consorts’ over the years that may or may not have actually been sexual, or something else entirely.
Captain Snag he was pretty sure was not a concubine, but he was still on the fence about Lord Sinfonia. He was pretty sure that one had a bastard son involved, but he wasn’t sure.
But whatever, apparently he wasn’t taking any more boy-toys. Whatever. No skin off Quackity’s nose, that was for sure.
So then who –
“What about your son?” Sam had asked, like an absolute fool.
The whole room went stiff.
Quackity knew he wasn’t the only one giving Sam a look of ‘what the fuck are you doing’.
For context: Premier Craft had three sons.
His youngest, Thessssseus – or ‘Tommy’, as Quackity’s intern Tubbo was permitted to call him, being the only one deemed ‘pog’ enough to be worthy – was still a teenager, or the equivalence in the Naga’s culture.
Lanky, cranky, and with half as much sense as the length of his tail, the youngling had been banned a long time ago from entering any official talks, and would definitely never be married off, even if to a young person his own age in a sort of ‘when they’re grown they’ll be wed’ kind of marriage.
If they tried, any and all attempts would fail with how dramatically and publicly he would throw a huge bitch fit, and none of them needed the headache caused by his expletive-laden shrieking.
So it wasn’t Thessssseus.
The second eldest, Technoblade (believe it or not, that was the pronounceable way to say his name) was actually known to be off the market, unlike his much more ambiguously spoken-for father.
He’d done some stunt years ago marrying himself to his own battle axe and swore on their Goddess to never marry another, yada yada yada, fancy PR move that meant basically that he was permanently taking himself off the market, see ya never, succession battles.
Which was fine – Quackity would have bid a tearful goodbye to his worst enemy if they’d been shipped off to marry him, because while the pink-haired cobra was indeed deadly as hell without his fangs, he was also – more importantly – a massive fucking troll.
The constant mockery was almost worse than getting potentially strangled to death, and Quackity says that as someone who was actually on the business end of his claws once.
(Big Diplomatic Incident, Premier Craft had paid through the nose in that particular fuckup. Things were pretty tense for a while. He still got this pinched look on his face whenever he made eye contact with the councilman.
Quackity always made sure to smile big and wide so he could get a good look at the gold tooth his hush-money had paid for.)
So the ‘son’ in question was not, in fact, Technoblade.
Which left the eldest.
Wilderborne-Sss’t.
Better known amongst the common plebs as Wilbur Soot, aka a Fucking Political Nightmare.
When university professors explained what could go wrong with teaching someone statecraft from a very young age, they showed his face on the first fucking slide on the slideshow.
Wilbur Soot was a bastard.
He had the philosophy of a nihilist, the politics of Machiavelli if he was very under the influence of hard drugs, and the personality of an anglerfish – one shiny sparkly end that was very good at making itself look appealing and normal, and the sharp toothed bottom-dweller that was actually calling the shots.
The last time he’d been allowed on a trip with his father, he had tried to marry himself off to three different people, declared himself a god, and tried to blow up that country’s Representative Hall.
In a week.
Premier Craft had actually rescinded his diplomatic immunity that extended to his son and left him to rot in that prison for a month following that stunt.
He then regretted that decision when Soot had rallied his fellow prisoners into an attempted jailbreak, which didn’t succeed but did cause a massive amount of property damage.
He hadn’t been allowed out of the Artic Taiga’s thermals since.
Premier Craft seemed just as taken aback as everyone else in the room was at the proposal.
“You – what?” he asked, looking baffled. “Wilbur?”
“We’d be doing you a favor,” Sam had said confidently, the gears of a professional spin-doctor already whirring behind his eyes. “You must admit, he has a rather terrible reputation, and I imagine he hasn’t been taking house arrest for the past few years very well.”
Craft’s eye twitched, ever so slightly. A confirmation – Soot must have spent the years being an absolute, professional-grade pain in the ass. “And what, precisely, are you trying to indicate here?”
Sam’s hands raised in respectful placation. “I mean no disrespect – only that you are dealing with an issue, and we have a potential solution. Marry him to one of ours under the banner of your goddess, and not only will you no longer be solely responsible for his care, you would also have a reason to encourage tourism and economic development between our countries that wouldn’t cause you to lose face in front of your own people.”
‘And you wouldn’t have to conquer us to get your summer home’ went unsaid but not unrecognized, based on the considering look that crossed Craft’s eyes.
“Are you offering him diplomatic immunity?” he asked.
Sam did not hesitate. “No. No more than any his spouse would have, and all of our ambassadors are married.”
“Good. Don’t let him get away with it,” Craft said easily, and wow, okay, apparently that was even more of a sore spot than they thought. “But you’d need someone willing to put up with all of…him.”
“Of course.”
And then the meeting had gone into recess, Quackity had gone to take a shit and a smoke, and when he came back he was handed a series of scrolls and a cheerful congrats by the other councilmembers for his upcoming nuptials as Craft and his entourage left with as much of a spring in their step as creatures without legs could have.
They fucking plotted against him.
He was going to remember this.
“Oh, make no mistake, Sammy-boy,” he said pleasantly, opening a case that had very expensive looking emerald cufflinks – shipped over from the Arctic as a wedding present, first class mail. “I understand the why. What I don’t understand here is the who, namely, me.”
“You weren’t getting married anytime soon.”
“Yeah, by choice. I don’t remember sending you a request for a matchmaking service, fucker.”
Sam actually scowled at him, the motion a little difficult to see behind the copper scaffolding of his air-breather, but visible nonetheless.
Quackity refused to budge.
They lived in the modern age – an age of technology and science and equality and shit. They had flushable toilets and an excellent train system. Their letter messaging system was top notch, mail tubes criss-crossing the city like the lifeblood of their people. The steam pipes pumped energy from the core of the earth to the surface, and they maintained their own weather beneath their greenhouse sky shield, sun refracted across it in a perfect prismatic display across the bronze and steel of the city.
It wasn’t perfect, of course. Sure they still had homelessness and crime, but who didn’t?
They had so much. In Quackity’s opinion, they were the most advanced society in the world.
What they were not supposed to have was marriages without consent of both parties. The nagas of New L’manberg might run like that, but Nevadans did not.
“You fuckers locked me into a marriage,” he hissed, baring his teeth at the other man in the barest resemblance of a smile. “Never even asked my opinion or anything.”
“We were just – “
“You were just nothing,” he spat, straightening as he adjusted his lapels, not a thread out of place. “It was politics as usual, and I just happened to be the casualty. Whether it was because you’re afraid of what I’m capable of, or you just think I’m a loose cannon, I don’t know and I don’t fucking care.”
Sam pursed his lips, but didn’t interrupt.
Good.
“I want you to know that I am not going through with this because I agree with it, nor because i’m afraid of what happens if I don’t.”
He strolled forwards, an easy stroll, and slammed his hands on either side of Sam’s wheelchair, getting well into the older man’s space.
Sam, predictably, didn’t flinch.
“I am going through with this,” he seethed, “because I love my goddamn country.”
He let those words hang between them.
A reminder of where his loyalties lay – not with Sam, not with the council, but to Las Nevadas.
His home.
He straightened, pulling his cuffs back into place. “And if that means marrying a lunatic and a snake, then so be it.”
He turned on his heel, and marched out of the room.
Sam didn’t bother to follow.
Thankfully.
000
The church was kind of creepy, if he was honest.
He wasn’t gonna say that, of course, he was a politician after all, but still.
His husband-to-be’s ‘mother’ was apparently the goddess of Death – which apparently meant that she was to be honored with emblems of death.
Which meant a lot of skeletons.
To their credit, they were immaculately kept – gilded with gold and wrapped with jewelry, hung from the walls by their shoulders, tails stretching down to the floor and curling in on themselves like overturned dead centipedes.
Like sentinels keeping watch.
Quackity kept way away from them. He was at least glad that there didn’t seem to be any indication that he would need to touch them or anything for the ceremony.
He didn’t get a very long time to contemplate the bones – were those bones embedded into the walls? – before he heard a loud, annoying voice.
“You cannot be serious! This is a violation of my rights!”
Quackity could not believe that he and his husband apparently had something in common.
An enemy.
“Wilbur – “ an attempt to speak in Nagai was made, but Wilbur scoffed at it, more of a cracking hiss than anything.
“Oh by all means, if I’m meant to marry one of these bloodthirsty industrials, let us speak their language! What, we sell my body to them but not allow them our secrets?”
“No one is selling your body – you know as well as I do the clauses in a political marriage – “
“I read every single clause on the goddamn scroll, Philza, and I will not be told that I am not being sold for your personal gain. Am I worth less to you than a pair of Mother’s jewels?”
“You are getting married, because for once, you are going to act like a goddamn member of the Craft family and do what’s best for New L’manberg,” Craft hissed, voice so low Quackity wouldn’t be able to pick it up if he weren’t on the other side of the altar dais. “And no, for fuck’s sake, I’m not selling you or your body off. Believe it or not, I am trying to help you.”
“Help me - ?!”
“Premier,” the priest said quietly. “We must begin the ceremony soon. The sun is almost at its zenith.”
“Thank you, Beholder. Wilbur, stand at the altar and behave.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Quackity snorted.
Wilbur whirled around.
Copper, Quackity noticed.
Every inch of him was like the copper pipes than ran across his beautiful city – reddish brown and sparkling, even the diamond shapes along his tail reminding him of the paneling that echoed and repeated along each pipe.
His eyes were amber, like the way the sun looked when it hit a certain part of the sky dome.
And his hair –
Hm.
Curly. Soft. Very tuggable.
Long enough to hold while he –
He blinked hard.
No. No.
No hoeing about his husband-to-be, he was getting married under duress.
The naga blinked, staring hard at him, before clearing his throat.
“And what exactly do you think is so funny?” he demanded, voice less cutting and more distracted by something.
Quackity rolled his eyes.
“What, you think you were the only one getting volun-told for their marriage?” he said dryly, waving his hands out wide sarcastically. “Get in fucking line, buddy.”
His eyes went wider.
His eyes scanned up and down Quackity, and he fought the urge to cover himself from a stare so intense, it felt like a physical caress.
His pupils blew wider, face slack. “Wait, you’re - ?”
“Under the light of the life-giving sun, we gather,” the priest boomed, authority in every inch of his body, and both grooms straightened.
They shared one last look with each other – to say what, neither knew – but they went silent under the weight of ceremony and ritual.
The sun hit its zenith, and the altar was awash with light.
The marriage had begun.
There was no turning back now.
000
(At some point in the ritual, Philza noticed the way his son’s coils started to curl in on themselves, some of the loops suspiciously close to Councilman Pato’s legs as he shifted, and a scent hit his tongue.
Potent, a strong release of certain pheromones.
His face scrunched up slightly, but he forced himself to ignore it.
Ah well. A good sign, he supposed.
Gross, for sure.
But at least Wilbur would be happy.
He hoped.)
(Sam noticed how Quackity tucked his hair behind his ear, eyes flicking toward the naga with furtive looks.
He prayed it worked.
He prayed to his god and to the goddess of the nagas that this worked out.
If not, he was out of options.
This was Quackity's last chance.
If nothing else, he hoped they'd at least find someone to lean on.)