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Sam shifted in his seat, looking up at the standing Quackity the best he could given his…current situation.
“So that’s where you’d been all this time, huh?” Quackity mused, pulling over the first aid chest. “Playing prisoner for Dream?”
Sam didn’t respond.
“You know, I doubt this would’ve happened if you’d told me where he went.” A pause. “Or better yet, killed him when you had the chance. There were plenty of opportunities.”
Quackity crouched in front of him. His gaze was cold, but something close to his old compassion crossed his eye as he took Sam’s face gently in his hands, moving his head to assess the damage.
“I’m a piss-poor doctor, Sam,” he said quietly, staring at what Sam can only assume is the remains of his eye. “Why didn’t you go off and ask Ponk for help?”
“...Ponk hates me,” Sam reminded, voice quiet and broken from the force of his previous screaming sobs. The words fought to form properly around the mangled mess that he knows his tongue to be. A bit of blood escapes his mouth, part of the lasting damage from a Canon wound.
Even if Ponk were willing to help him, he couldn’t bear to see the terror in her eyes or hear the poison she would spit at him. Quackity’s vitriol was painful, yes, but it was something familiar. Two sides of the same coin, he and Quackity were. A boiling pot of self-hatred and forced aggression that melted into…something else.
Quackity sighed. “Open your mouth,” he ordered, lifting up a potion of some sort. Sam did as he was told, and the avian began pouring it into his mouth.
He tasted the sickeningly sweet burn of Regen. He felt the warped and calloused hand gripping his jaw. The hold was sharp and tight, yet clearly mindful of the angry wound tearing apart Sam’s face. The type of biting care that only Quackity would give him.
Slowly but surely, the potion began kicking in. Sam could feel his tongue morph into a state of… semi normalcy, at the very least, and his gums and lower jaw were starting to feel marginally better, if a bit sticky from the potion dripping out of his mouth. The potion wasn’t a perfect cure, but at least he’d stopped bleeding so badly.
Quackity rambled softly, seemingly more to himself than to Sam. Perhaps it was more at Sam. “Well, if there’s one thing I’m experienced in, it’s facial injuries.”
Sam said nothing once more, instead choosing to look back up at the man through his singular watery eye.
Quackity’s scar was, of course, no secret. It would be impossible to hide such a massive tear through one’s face. It seemed to have carved his very skull in two. The scar began somewhere in his hair and tore right through not only his eye but a decent chunk of his lip, too. Oftentimes, his false golden teeth were visible even with his mouth closed, sharper than the rest, and certainly a show of power.
“You know Sam, we’re not so different, you and I.”
Quackity had set the potion down by this point, letting go of Sam’s jaw and picking up a rag that he had dipped in the remains of the Regen. His other hand moved to run through Sam’s hair. Sam wasn’t sure why–perhaps to see if there was any more hidden damage up there?
It was the gentlest touch he’d felt since Ponk. His eye grew wet again.
“We’ve even got the scars to match now,” Quackity laughed, a tinge of bitterness clear in his tone.
“Lonely lovers. Failure fathers. We tried to protect everyone and ended up fucking alone.” He pressed harshly at Sam’s scar, to which he grunted exhaustedly in pain. The pressure eased near immediately.
“At times, you know, I can’t tell which of us is worse.”
Most times, Sam can’t, either.
“Both, maybe,” he slurred quietly, mouth still numb from the Regen.
Quackity gently rested his head on Sam’s own. If he focused, Sam could feel the awkward cracks and disfigurement of Quackity’s lower jaw brushing against the top of his skull. He was quiet for a long while.
“Yeah. Maybe both.”