#I forgot what spelling of grandpa quark uses in vlr

[kayzero]

For the ideas wanted post, I always find people's different interpretations of how Quark functions after different endings in VLR so so interesting, since they're a character i've analyzed so so much. so a Quark-centric writing of them after one of the endings in which they're alive and get out?

This takes place during/after Luna END.

Weeks and months and years ago, when Quark was little, littler than he is now, he would sometimes wake up without Grandpa. He would panic, he would cry, he would be convinced that this was it, Grandpa finally got tired of having a little kid around, he’s gone and never coming back. And always, without fail, Grandpa would come back, see his sorry state, and calm him down, explaining that he just had to get an early start on work, and Quark looked too comfortable to disturb.

He grew out of that phase when he started helping Grandpa out with scavenging in earnest. He started to understand why it was so important that he get up early, get to the good stuff before anyone else. The memories fell to the back of his mind, like baby teeth from his mouth.

When Quark wakes up after being sedated in Rhizome-9, he knows for a fact that Grandpa is dead.

The surety comes from the same place that screams for freedom, howls at being chained up in this flesh prison where he could die at any moment. The visions he’d been having in the first round of the AB Game with Dio and Grandpa crop back up. He could be sliced with a scalpel, buried under trash, killed by a cultist — and even if he could avoid all the ugly, violent deaths, he couldn’t avoid death by sickness or old age.

But the sedative still floating around in his system combined with the shock of his Grandpa’s death make him numb, and let him see the tantrum he threw objectively — and it was a tantrum, albeit one over his very life instead of some toy he wanted — but more than that, it reminded him of something he had seen on the streets with Grandpa.

The people who got infected with Radical-6. The Cultists and the Damned. They ranted about the state of the world being divine judgement, that humanity would shrivel up and die out eventually, that there was no point in struggling because they would do it to themselves.

The Cultists grew in fervor, shifted to talking about the world that would rise from the rubble that the world was covered in. The Damned all ended up dead by their own hands.

Quark had almost joined them.

Might still. Grandpa’s dead, what’s the point?

Quark put his hands on the ground and pushed himself so that he was sitting against the wall instead of laying on the hard metal floor.

“Oh good, you’re awake. I didn’t wanna have to struggle to get you into this suit.”

He tilts his head up and sees Miss Phi, dressed in a spacesuit but missing the helmet. Looks at her with dead eyes that were still too alive because his body is still moving while his soul is screaming that Grandpa is dead—

He tries to tune out the howling. “Why do you want me to get in the suit, Miss Phi?”

“There’s some sort of pressure difference between this room and the outside world, and the suit’s what we need to survive it.”

“But what about the AB Game?”

The flinty, cool look Miss Phi usually wears gives way to something close to what the people Grandpa used to talk to wear when they look at him. Kinda sad, kinda frustrated.

“You’ve been asleep for a while. The AB Game’s over. We won.”

He doesn’t feel like a winner. He doesn’t say that out loud.

Instead he goes, “So you want to leave?”

“Yeah, and I have to bring you with me because you’re too young to be on your—“ She stops herself with wide eyes and a hand that stops halfway up to cover her mouth, because—

Because Miss Phi knows. She knows Grandpa is dead, she thinks that Quark doesn’t know, she doesn’t want to tell him (right now? ever?). The howling starts snarling at her now, his mind starts whirling with mean things and bad words to say to her, things he said when the adults wouldn’t let him—

Well. He doesn’t feel like being mean, but he doesn’t feel like being nice either. He settles for polite and factual.

“You know there’s nothing out there, right?”

“What? What do you mean by that?”

He doesn’t have a bracelet on, and Grandpa’s already dead, so nothing stops him from saying, “We’re on the moon.”

“…What?”

“We’re in a research base on the moon. Grandpa told me before we got on the ship. But the pilot knocked us out, so it was probably a one-way trip.”

As he talks, Miss Phi backs up until her back hits the wall, slowly sliding down until she’s sitting on the floor like he is. She doesn’t move, except to wrap her arms around her shins and bury her face into the collar of the space suit.

They stay like that for a while.