DeepBlue- TntDuo!

Chapter 3.

Heavy Rain.

—

It had passed a couple weeks, everytime Quackity had put a foot on the precinct he almost immediately found himself talking to Wilbur— Part of him knows that he's just distracting himself.

Quackity's head was spinning by the time he got home. The echo of Wilbur's words reverberated through his mind, making it impossible to think straight. "You'll figure it out soon enough." The way Wilbur had said it—calm, certain, like he was holding all the cards—made Quackity's skin crawl.

He slammed the front door behind him and tossed his jacket onto the nearest chair, running a hand through his wet hair. His apartment was small and cluttered, but it was his. Normally, the sight of it would relax him, the mess serving as a reminder that he was in control of his own space, his own life. But not tonight.

Tonight, it felt suffocating.

He sank onto the couch, rubbing his temples. Everything about the case was starting to blur together—Wilbur's cryptic comments, the eerie resemblance between the victims and himself, the way his father had been so quick to shut him out. Quackity wasn't a detective, but he wasn't stupid. He knew when something didn't add up, and this entire situation reeked of something far worse than coincidence.

Reaching for his phone, he hesitated for a moment. He could call his dad, demand answers. But he already knew how that conversation would go. Alejandro would brush him off, tell him to stay out of it, that it was too dangerous. Maybe he was right. Maybe this was too dangerous for Quackity to be involved in.

But Wilbur had said the victims looked like him. That wasn't something he could just ignore.

He opened his browser and typed in the name of the first victim, hoping to find some information that hadn't been covered in the briefings he overheard at the precinct. Most of the articles were just rehashes of the same details—male, early thirties, found in a park with deep lacerations to the throat. No witnesses, no suspects. Just another unfortunate casualty in a city full of violence.

But then there was a grainy photo attached to one of the articles. A picture of the man. It was blurry, taken from a distance, but the resemblance was uncanny. Sure his hair was way shorter than his and his skin was a couple tone's lighter but there was no doubt.

His stomach churned.

Quackity scrolled down further, searching for any connection between the victims. The second man, mid-twenties, was found in an alleyway not far from where they had just been tonight. Her picture, too, looked hauntingly familiar. The similarities were undeniable, and Quackity could no longer dismiss it as paranoia.

His mind raced, flipping through the details like pieces of a puzzle, but every time he tried to fit them together, the image that formed was too terrifying to fully accept.

"Why me?" he whispered aloud, his voice barely audible in the empty apartment.

Was it really possible? Could someone—Wilbur—be orchestrating these murders because of him? It sounded insane, like something out of a bad movie. But the more Quackity thought about it, the less far-fetched it seemed. Wilbur's strange behavior, the obsessive way he looked at him, the way the victims looked like they could be his sisters... or worse, stand-ins for him.