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 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.
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[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.]
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[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.
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[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?]
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.]
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[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.]
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[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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[That twists their expression in such a way that implies those words weren't meant to be uttered aloud. Not to him, not like this, and certainly not in this instant. To witness behavior in parallel with a different set of circumstances, a different structure, a different point of origin, is a little like seeing the back of your head in the mirror.]
[It feels wrong.]
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... it's easier for me to start with them. With my friends, family.
If I do that long enough. I'm hoping I can work my way up to me.
[A shake of his head, a hollow, exhausted laugh.]
That probably doesn't make any sense, does it?
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[It's quieter.]
[It's the gentle acceptance that no one should or would ask you so much as your name. The quiet knowledge that if you have nothing to give, you bear nothing of value, and you are, yourself, worthless. The solemn abandonment of everything that defines you for the sake of what others wish instead, because if no one wants it, why hold onto it?]
[The similarities, upon recollection, are glowering.]
[They should have noted it sooner.]
Perhaps it makes too much sense.
[They do, after all, know others possessed of the same Achilles' Heel.]
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[And there it is. There's the question he has to ask. All this soul-bearing has to be useful, right? Has to make things a little better for someone else. For Chara. After all, why else would you do it?]
[Not to help yourself.]
[He doesn't know how to do that. Maybe he'd started, once, but when Angela left, when she disappeared, so did that knowledge. So did that outlet. There's no other reason now, but to help someone else.]
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[They need...time. Time to be alone in the center of their own thoughts without someone else’s fears or regrets or angers trespassing upon their own. Nothing about this is easily clarified, and it does not clarify itself either. Mostly it burns cold, like a dying star.]
[They cannot say.]
Has it helped you?
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[It is. It truly is. It's all right and it's understandable and accepted. Even if they aren't helped by what he's said, even if they come out of their time unchanged, it's all right.]
[All you can do is try. And keep trying.]
Helping other people usually takes my mind off things, at least. [He shifts a shoulder in a shrug.] In a way, it does.
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[He's very determined, isn't he? He's determined to help, no matter the personal cost. He's always - tried. He's terrible with names, and he's terrible with jokes, and he cannot help but gather children to him like moth to a flame, and he pours himself out to cover for the fact that he does not know how else to help.]
[None of it is all right. None of it is all right, even if the tranquility running beneath his thoughts says that it is.]
...I interrupted you. You were going somewhere.
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[That goal sort of faded out while they'd been speaking. Along with the headache, the feeling of general disorientation. He shakes his head, pressing his palm to it for a moment.]
... bed. If you can believe that.
[He'd been asleep for days, according to the others. But it doesn't feel like it.]
But it's all right. I'll get there.
Are you going to be okay? For now?
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