the littlest edgelord (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
inconsequence) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thisavrou_log2017-11-25 08:52 pm
inconsequence) wrote in thisavrou_log2017-11-25 08:52 pm
points to spinal chord on brain diagram [open]
Who: Chara and YOU
When: 11/23 - 11/24
Where: Literally all around Avagi this child is wandering in a disoriented post-fight daze
What: Chara fought in a trial. Chara got a prize. No one is happy with this.
Warnings: Emotional distress probable, in addition to the usual Chara warnings.
The temples began to sing.
They emerged bloodied and ragged along the edges, one hand clasped around the rust-brown stains fringing every tear in their clothing. One side of their hair has become uneven where a hank of it was roughly and sloppily cut away mid-combat. They limp. Their eyes are glazed with hunger, with emptiness, with exhaustion. Their motions are stiff and automatic. Whenever someone draws near to them, they flinch and hold ready, a blade of red steel gleaming in their hand. A smile tears over their features in a blaze of forced and painted-on glee.
They emerged from the Trial of Life victorious, in a manner of speaking - in a very loose manner of speaking. They emerged from the Trial of Life, having not died or fled, and thus are eligible for something of a prize.
That is when the temples began to sing.
They ignite with a soft blue glow, ethereal, illuminating their surroundings in a cool sweep of runic light. The light takes root inside them, nestling like a seed in the center of their chest; not patience-blue, not integrity-blue, and certainly not determination-red, but something else entirely. It aches in solemn acknowledgment of itself. The child's eyes squeeze shut. The blood has begun to hammer in their ears anew, as if rejuvenated enough to feel like it ought to redouble its efforts to spill out from their torn veins.
The hum pressing across their ears has begun to vibrate in their bones.
As they cross through the portal's bridge of light back to Avagi, the whispers and fragments of other people's thoughts begin to trail after them, silver-tinted specters of other people's thoughts.
When: 11/23 - 11/24
Where: Literally all around Avagi this child is wandering in a disoriented post-fight daze
What: Chara fought in a trial. Chara got a prize. No one is happy with this.
Warnings: Emotional distress probable, in addition to the usual Chara warnings.
The temples began to sing.
They emerged bloodied and ragged along the edges, one hand clasped around the rust-brown stains fringing every tear in their clothing. One side of their hair has become uneven where a hank of it was roughly and sloppily cut away mid-combat. They limp. Their eyes are glazed with hunger, with emptiness, with exhaustion. Their motions are stiff and automatic. Whenever someone draws near to them, they flinch and hold ready, a blade of red steel gleaming in their hand. A smile tears over their features in a blaze of forced and painted-on glee.
They emerged from the Trial of Life victorious, in a manner of speaking - in a very loose manner of speaking. They emerged from the Trial of Life, having not died or fled, and thus are eligible for something of a prize.
That is when the temples began to sing.
They ignite with a soft blue glow, ethereal, illuminating their surroundings in a cool sweep of runic light. The light takes root inside them, nestling like a seed in the center of their chest; not patience-blue, not integrity-blue, and certainly not determination-red, but something else entirely. It aches in solemn acknowledgment of itself. The child's eyes squeeze shut. The blood has begun to hammer in their ears anew, as if rejuvenated enough to feel like it ought to redouble its efforts to spill out from their torn veins.
The hum pressing across their ears has begun to vibrate in their bones.
As they cross through the portal's bridge of light back to Avagi, the whispers and fragments of other people's thoughts begin to trail after them, silver-tinted specters of other people's thoughts.
[Chara scored the empathy reward for their participation in the Trial of Life, meaning that, to quote the info post: others stay inside their body, but gain a sense of those around them. This manifests not as telepathic knowledge of their thoughts, but an empathic resonance—ghost-vision showing their emotions in stark clarity.]
[This more or less gives them the ability to know and feel anything your character is experiencing emotionally so that's you know fantastic. Feel free to tag in with prose or brackets; I'll match you! Let me know here or over atarrpee if you want a closed starter or something more specific!]
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[He almost laughs when they say it isn't fair. A depreciating, tired sound that isn't anything like humorous. No amusement. Nothing. Just something dry and tired.]
[Always in control]
[The smile he gives them is just as tired. Just as frayed at the edges.]
I might not even be all that human anymore. So... maybe they're not.
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[Human enough.]
[Human enough, the way Shepard is. The way Lucio is. The way these people are, these people who are all so far removed from what they have ever known humans to be that they cannot help but regret - ]
[Cannot help but envy, cannot help but hate, that these are the humans they met before everything was set so irrevocably in fate, in stone.]
You cannot control everyone else's pain, Shiro. [Does he know that?]
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[More to Pidge, who's lost her family. To Allura, who lost her whole world. Hunk and Lance who lost any chance at being normal. Keith who lost his future. Himself... well. He'd lost everything already that day on the ice. That day it became clear he had to do anything he could to make sure Matt made it back alive again.]
[He can absolutely keep himself from putting more hurt into the world.]
You're included in that, Chara.
[He can't fix whatever's happened to them. He can just make it so he's not part of the problem.]
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[He can't control what it is that hurts and helps others. Someone with the best of intentions can tear it all apart without meaning to, without wanting to, because they just wanted to help and be the future of humans and monsters and set them all free and they could do that because they had a SOUL and they had the resolve to change fate, and even the best of intentions can be so, so - ]
[Why. Why them.]
...why?
Why are so adamant in this? [In me?]
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[But.]
[Maybe he can't save everyone. Can't make it so no one he loves, no one he cares for, ever hurts again. But he can try. He can try and isn't that what matters? Aren't moments like a first sunrise for the Balmerans important? That little scrap of footage proving Pidge's family wasn't totally broken important?]
[Isn't pulling kids out of a spider-filled jungle, so they didn't have to keep suffering, so they could survive, important?]
[Why are things like what he wants, those little desires, in comparison to all that?]
... I don't know why, except what I've already told you. Except...
[Anyone is capable of doing nothing. I just hate it.]
I can't not try.
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[Does that make him better or worse, in the end? Does that paint him in the same false, unveiled optimism that inflicts a child braving a hostile land for the very first time, shouldering every responsibility, solving every problem, until the notion that there were certain problems they could not solve turned into a personal failing on their part.]
...absurd, is it not?
[A cracked smile, feeble and flickering and pained.]
Even with a direct line into your thoughts, it seems evil cannot comprehend good.
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[It comes out as steel. As something almost an order. Echoed in his thoughts, his feelings. They're not evil. Evil is... he's seen it. He's fought against it. It's the thing crawling around in his head, the dreams and nightmares. The monsters who ripped Allura and Pidge's families apart. Who literally tore him apart.]
[This child... isn't that.]
[They can call themselves evil, they can call themselves monsters. But he remembers the forest. How much Asriel had cared. How Frisk worried. How they had fought for their sibling.]
[He can't call that evil.]
I don't think you are.
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[They ought to FIGHT back. Grind against that expectation until the wall bursts and they cross some line and they generate the Level Of ViolencE they have come to expect, watch the world fragment as every good thing anyone can claim them to be ceases to be relevant. They ought to force it to happen, because it will happen, one way or another, and it is simply a means of controlling the when.]
[But they]
[Big Kids D̪ǒn᷈'̈tͯ C̱͔᷇ͥ́̽̇r̠͓̼̓̂̓͟y̛̖᷊ͮͤ̇̀]
[They can't.]
Then what am I?
[What does that make them?]
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[He wants, very much, to try and comfort them. To do something. More than just sit here, passing words back and forth. But he can't do what he would for the others. Can't even put a hand to their shoulder. He'd promised he wouldn't forget.]
[Instead, he'll hold himself quiet, restrained, as steady as he can be.]
I want to tell you "anything you want to be". But... I know how little that can help.
[Because he wouldn't know. If someone handed him a choice like that.]
I will say... you're Asriel's sibling. You're Frisk's friend. Is that enough to go on, for now?
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[They don't feel very much like that, really. Asriel has a better sibling, one he wishes he always had. Frisk has friends who do not make them feel confused and unwanted, who do not drag them through the dirt and call it LOVE.]
[A giggle bubbles up and out from their throat, a silly puff of sound that they can't seem to suppress.]
I have no idea. I don't feel very much like either of those things, at present.
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[He can't speak for Frisk. Or Asriel. But he knew Frisk cared. Frisk cared enough to be shocked Chara remembered them, to not strike out when whatever happened to Chara made them attack. He knew Asriel cared too. Enough to look out for their well-being, even when he was suffering.]
[And. He knows himself.]
[Knows he cares. Even after all their conversations, all that shadow crap. He still cares.]
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[But they already know that he means it. They already know that he means it, and they cannot take it back now. There's a wealth of retorts they ought to dredge from the sludge of their thoughts, the admixture of everyone's emotional soup slurried together with theirs.]
I can't understand.
[They just can't understand.]
I have done nothing but continue to hurt you, and those you hold dear. Have I not?
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[It wouldn't be fair to try. If they say they can't, then... he accepts that. He accepts their words. Their admission.]
[As for the rest...?]
I'm not really hurt, Chara. I haven't been. None of us were.
[He means it as a reassurance. That they might not be as "evil" as they seem to think they are. With the exception of their shadow, all that's happened between them were words. And maybe their words have stung, but in the greater picture... when they're lined up with the words he's never failed to hear, ringing in his thoughts --]
[a monster like you]
[-- it's not that painful.]
You also asked me to look after someone important to you. That meant a lot to know -- that you trusted me to keep an eye on them.
no subject
[They cannot help but flinch when the words wick across their consciousness, unwanted and unasked for. "Monster" carries its own set of grisly connotations, heavy with hypocrisy and leaden with dread. Reminders of what it feels like, to witness a small child impaled through with bones or vines or spears, scalded with the flames of someone who claims to want them safe.]
"Monster" is too kind a word for what I am.
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[They can hear him. That's right. If he had the power to not remember those words -- to forget what he chose instead of everything taken from him --]
Chara -- that wasn't about you.
[Because they aren't. They can think it all they want. He doesn't believe it. He can't. They can always be something else, can't they?]
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[Feel? The terminology for this manner of exchange eludes them. It grows ever more difficult to plumb the impressive, expansive parts of their vocabulary when their head is full of so much additional mess.]
no subject
[Calm.]
Because it's something someone told me. [His voice doesn't waver, now. Steadier than it would have been before, talking about this.] They told me I was nothing.
I was a monster someone else made.
[Not them. It wasn't about them.] It gets to me.
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[Someone in this world, no doubt, would really love to see a human. So it would really help us all out, if you were to keep pretending to be one.]
[Most creatures are crafted. They are forged, not sprung fully-formed from the ether. They are a product of something or another, unless they happened to merely be cursed from the cradle, rotten to the CORE.]
You do not look very fabricated to me.
no subject
[Still calm. Composed. He has to be -- for their sake. He holds up his right arm. Bare and metallic in the hallway light. In stark contrast to the rest of him.]
[They've spoken about it before, the two of them. There's little hesitation in drawing attention to it for understanding's sake.]
You don't think so?
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[They spread their arms, briefly, and let their eyes gape open like black holes. Let the thick dribbles of rot gum their open mouth and flow freely from their pitch-dark irises. They allow their true visage to creep out from beneath that unkempt hair, stinking of long-dead things, of compost, of mold, of dirt.]
[Disgusting, like them.]
I'm a memory of something long dead. I'm an echo of child that was never meant to live this long. I'm a collection of numbers in someone else's life.
[Do they look like a monster someone else made?]
no subject
[He makes himself stay calm. Makes himself focus on that memory of triumph, that place secure and braced against everything else. The fortress of the Lion's making. This is ... a point they're trying to make. Isn't it?]
[Why do you care?]
[They don't want him to. Do they?]
... you're supposed to be a memory. My teammates are supposed to be bad pilots, cowards, or attitude problems. One of them is supposed to be an apocalypse.
But they're not.
I'm supposed to be a weapon. Supposed to be part of the enemy. And I'm not.
You don't have to be, either.
no subject
[You wake and remember. Don't forget; you're an atrocity to god! Don't forget; you ruined everything by eating a flower! Don't forget; you consistently make life harder and more difficult for everyone around you, and nothing you say or do now will alleviate the pain of what you once forced them all to endure!]
[Don't forget.]
[Their eyes return to their typical rosy hue. Streaks of that oily black remain, dribbling off the edges of their cheeks. Like some other kind of moisture that would cling there, after an excess of emotion.]
It still haunts you.
no subject
[Maybe later, it will be. Somewhere down the line, he'll figure out how to master the nightmares. Set them aside, and stop dreaming of that day in the depths of the castle. Or the hundreds of other moments surfacing while he was unconscious -- bright lights overhead, dust in your lungs, held down and examined and prodded and cut and broken and reformed and]
[Calm.]
And yes. It does. Every day.
[Let them see it, how raw everything feels, reserved and held back, like a photograph shown, instead of a wide-screen movie.]
no subject
[How does he do it? Much in the same way they do, they imagine. Only instead of smiles and barbed words, he converts every waking moment of that nightmare into a tired tranquility that has less to do with an internal sense of peace and more to do with the fact that there are so many other people out there he feels are owed his time and his attention.]
[He himself hardly registers as one of them.]
[It is too blisteringly, bitingly familiar in too many ways.]
How do you do it? [It's less of a challenge; not a gauntlet thrown or words spat cruelly out.]
[It's a request, quiet and uneven.]
[A plea.]
no subject
[Honest as always. Even with the other thoughts running through his mind. The memories and the hurt and the flashbacks threatening the edges of his vision. Even as he fights, still, fighting it all down for their sake. To try and keep them from being overwhelmed by his problems.]
[Forcing down calm.]
[His head hurts. He does it anyway.]
People are counting on me to get through it. They want me to lean on them, when I have to. They... keep offering me a hand.
When I need it.
[The way he will keep offering to Chara. If they need it.] I guess I just keep trying. For their sake. Because they're important to me.
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