lifeaftr | I Think I Got Too Many Memories Getting In The Way Of Me

Entry tags:

I Think I Got Too Many Memories Getting In The Way Of Me

Who: Anyone willing to deal with an armed, violent-prone child having a tantrum
What: Chara's horrible, no good, very bad day. Someone's getting stabbed! Potentially multiple people! Someone's getting punched in the face! Potentially multiple people!
When: 11th to the 13th of April
Where: everywhere
Warnings: violence, stabbings, generally please don't tag into this if you're not into your character being physically or verbally attacked f-ff

11th - Even At The Best Of Times I'm Out Of My Mind | Islet One

They aren't the type of child who seeks out others, when something happens. Something awful, something utterly out of their control. They do not want to talk about it. They will not cry, nor sulk. There will be very few, if history has proven anything, who will even realize they have been slighted in some way at all.

And then there are those who are on island one when Chara walks up to that now empty abode. And perhaps, they will also not realize that anything is out of the norm-- but they'll certainly take stock of the suddenly flaming knife in their hand, the very same one that embeds itself in the cottage with four, additional rooms added to it, the one with no owner.

The knife, still on fire, remains embedded in now smoking wood. Calmly, Chara takes out a second knife.

And up in flames that one goes, as well.

11-13th - You Only Get What You Grieve | E4

According to some, setting houses on fire is not a healthy outlet for stress.

Which, realistically, is probably fair. The solution to this problem is not to stab inanimate objects, no sir. So how about some animate ones, instead?

The fact that the centipuppies are kind of cute doesn't mitigate the issues they cause- a pack of the creatures could go after a singular target with ease. A cute nuisance. A potentially dangerous nuisance. There would likely be one or two people not too keen on the burning carcasses they've left strewn about the place, but centipuppies aren't docile. They're not a rare creature upon Enso, either; ridding the beach of a single pack isn't problematic at all.

Not even slightly.

If anything, the ordeal becomings something of a mind numbing task, child walking up and down the stretch of the beach, watching out for stragglers. For the next two days, it's all they're going to do. Walk. Wait. And when the situation calls for it

Lash out.

13th, closed to Frisk, Lup, and Tim - Are You Smelling That Shit? | Islet 3
[Their flowers are wilted.

Three days without attention, and Chara should have expected this, really. It's not as if the plants themselves are going to die; they're sturdy enough to take a bit of thirst, a slight amount of burn at the edges of their petals from a harsh sun. The majority of them will love; there are even more shoots to grow, ready to take the place of those that won't.

But there are those that won't.

Frowning critically, Chara considers- the various things they could and should be doing, at this point. Carefully pruning the leaves and picking off the wilted buds, mixing the earth with some more most soil. Watering them all. It's a sizeable enough patch now that it should take a few hours for just the one person- plenty enough to keep them moving until they're tired, ready to find... perhaps ready to collapse into their hammock, after a few days of sleeping outside.

And yet, they don't move just yet. There's so much to do here- and moreso, if they would pay attention to anything else. They haven't been looking for food, the past few days. Haven't been collecting resources to trade with Lup and Taako. Haven't been to the new island past a brief, cursory look; the familiar, tell-tale itch of curiosity absent. Haven't spoken to Frisk or Tim since he-- since this started. There is a great deal to do.

They don't move just yet.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Screw-up. Always doing the wrong thing. They did mean it, but have they ever been in a fight they didn't intend to end? Have they ever just...lashed out, and not expected the other party to die because of it? What's he doing, cutting in the way he does? Too much strangeness in his head, seeing the point in intercepting. Loose bolt in a complete machine.]

I'm pretty bad at doing what I'm supposed to.

[Should just lay low, and keep your head down, and not get involved. Should let this all be someone else's problem. Should just run. Should fucking cut and run, and leave it all behind. Should follow someone else's lead blindly, and without question.]

[Should just put the gun to your head, Tim, and do what Alex said you lacked the courage to.]

I think just 'cause you're both hurt, you don't need to hurt each other.

S-... stop.

[Little cracks in their voice that are always there, in a way - the soft-sandpaper sound of vocal chords hovering at an eternal cusp of pubescence, one they'll probably never see, but now they're frozen and brittle and painful in Frisk's throat, and breaking. Gouging holes in their voice, their throat. Them.]

[Everything's broken. Everything's breaking. Frisk's and Chara's fault, but mostly Frisk's.]

[And Tim's trying to fix it. Why does he get to try and fix it? Why doesn't Sans, or their mom, or their dad, or Toriel? Why does he care and they don't? Why --]

[Frisk sinks down, burying their eye into their palm, and hug their elbow meekly. Their knife feels like an anchor.]

Stop telling me how not to hurt!

I'm not -

[Close his eyes. Breathe. You are. Yes, you are. Stop inserting yourself into the goddamned narrative, Tim. You have to take everything, like you took their words and their determination and shaped it into something you could use. You used them. You're using them now.]

[You're making another goddamned mistake.]

I just - Frisk, when was the last time you fought anyone and the stakes weren't...everything? When was the last time you fought anyone and it wasn't to the death?

...

[Their hand lowers from their eye and goes to their other elbow, and that's the silent answer that he receives at first: Frisk hugging their elbows, staring at him quietly with now-unchecked tears down their face. Their eyes are a sharp red against the dark flush of their face, but the confusion in their brows is unmistakable, as calm and fragile as the kid in the back of the class who doesn't understand the question they've just been called on to answer.]

[When? Has that ever even happened? As long as they can remember, before the grooves of the knife hilt became familiar, when it was a stick, a glove, a frying pan. Fire - spears - bones - dust - wait. Wait, wait. Bones. Not ones washed in golden light, but - they do. They do know, and they respond with a shallow croak, like they're not sure the answer is the right one.]

... Papyrus.

[Papyrus. He doesn't know their timeline - he doesn't know how many times over the same points have been repeated and tripped over and wiped away. But Papyrus is an early point. And how long has it been since then?]

[Give or take a few years to accommodate a Castle in the Mist, a war between shadows and light where the stakes were absolute because they had to be, they always had to be, and where does that put them in terms of what should have amounted to a schoolyard brawl?]

How long ago was that?

The first time, [they say mechanically, their gaze moving past him] And the last.

[In-between - it wasn't a matter of their life and death. But that still counts. Frisk swallows again, realizing a few beats later that it doesn't answer his question, not fully - that was far, far back, in the Underground. Before castles, with Queens, and shadows, and portals, and islands with caves and crystals --]

Before everything else.

[Most people don't get used to that kind of thing. Or - they shouldn't. But it's not like Frisk needs to hear what most people are like; they spend enough time hearing about how they're so unforgivably different from everyone else that there's no salvaging it.]

[How do you phrase something so that a kid knows it's not their fault, when they're so used to the onus being on their shoulders?]

You've almost never been allowed to be anything else. It's always...all or nothing. Right? You or them?

[The faraway look they'd had snaps away from them; they're focused on Tim again, and their face goes dark and still. They squeeze one of their elbows and say tonelessly:]

Yes. Kill or be killed.

...

That's what some people used to say to me.

[But they never really believed that. Not the first time, anyway. Maybe not even the other times. Maybe not even now. It was never kill or be killed; not so much as it was SAVE or be killed.]

[They hate it either way.]

That's not how it has to be. Not anymore.

[They've probably heard this before, too. Is there anything he can offer, anything he can say, that isn't exactly what they've heard a million times over? The same fucking words, the same fucking life lessons? You don't have to be this. You don't have to do this. You don't have to give everything away, open-palmed and empty-eyed, until there's nothing of you left. Right?]

But learning not to be that is...hard. You can spend so much of your life just surviving that you can forget how to do anything else.

I don't care.

[Tim doesn't deserve to be talked to like that. They know, they know with that same alarm bell that shrills in the back of their mind, that they're being too rude and it's not okay; the closer, more cognizant understanding that he's just trying to help. Tim is always trying to help. Always trying to be someone that it's too late for them to have - someone they don't need anymore.]

[But he cares enough to try. And that's good. And they care, too.]

[But not right now.]

...

I didn't forget. We talked about this before. You said - you were always going to hurt.

I'm not talking about me right now, Frisk.

[His hurts are things he's lived with his entire life. Sometimes he can ride them out, like a wave broken up against a cliffside. Cut the taste of his meds with the smell of salt, the spray of ocean water on his lips, the scent of flowers. Borrowed memory from sparking neurons, tuning-fork souls.]

[It's one of the reasons he can shrug that away. Anger is a strange color on them. He won't begrudge their capacity to use it a little more than they historically choose to.]

[They licked the pad of their thumb and rubbed it at the slate to clean it all off, chalk dust and ink. Rubbed it all out, except you could still kinda see what still written on it before.]

[But try as you might, ]

What about you?

[Try as they might ,]
[their choices don't matter.]
[they can't stop the tears that carve quiet paths down the dust on their face.]

... that's what I mean.

I told you what someone always said. That I should FIGHT back. He thought it would make me hurt less, but it doesn't. It just makes me hurt like him. I don't want that. I don't want to hurt people when I'm hurt.

...

It's harder than just killing.

[All or nothing. Kill or be killed. Is that meant to be a mercy?]

Can you forgive yourself if you do?

[You can't thumb this away, Tim. You haven't earned that right. Not when you barreled into the two of them, cut them apart with an act that was a violence in and of itself. He can't - but that doesn't mean they have to be alone in it, right?]

...do you think you can walk right now?

[They stare up at him steadily, with an expressionless, tear-marked gaze.]

I've forgiven everyone.

[Frisk glances away from him, scrubs their sleeve up over their eyes, thumbs away some of the blood gummed up in their nostril. Then they nod without turning their gaze. Yes. They can walk. Forward, relentlessly.]

[Privately, he thinks they could stand to forgive a little less. But they already do, in a sense. Selectively. He holds their gaze for only a fraction of a second longer than he has to, then glances in the direction of the house.]

Probably best to get inside, you know? Warmer in there.

[And there's a tigerlily that could probably do with the company. Of course.]

... OK.

[For a few breaths they stay like that, looking at the ground. Their thumb rubbing circles into their wrist through fabric, where Chara grabbed them. Then their eyes skate back up to Tim, and they let go of their arm and reach their hand up towards him, almost imploringly. It halts, and it hovers, for a heartbeat.]

[Just for a heartbeat.]

[And then they start to lower it, and turn towards the shack, and begin walking.]

[He catches it too late - the motion that flickers and drops their hand back to their side. It feels awkward to call attention to it, but to be fair, it's hard for things to get much more awkward than literally pulling someone apart from the person they helped erased from existence in a double suicide.]

[It's a good thing self-consciousness went out the window a while ago.]

You can...I mean, if you want, you - [His inability to be a relatively normal person, however, endures.]

[In the end, he settles for holding out his hand, in case they, uh...change their mind.]

[It just didn't occur to him that they would want him touching them again.]

[They stop walking and look at the ground. Swallowing, Frisk picks at their sleeve nervously.]

[They don't, actually. They don't want anyone touching them. They hurt and they're gross and they're bad, they're so bad that even Chara hates them now. They don't want anyone to have anything to do with them. That split second was selfish, and stupid, and just because they know what it feels like to be wanted sometimes now doesn't mean]

[they should ask to be.]

[but they turn around and reach up again, grabbing Tim's fingers and keeping their eyes down, looking away. His hand is warm and soft and naked and human; smells like - like - no hand they know. Not cinnamon, or bones, or dust, or blood. Something in that is wrong, but they don't mind. It's something. It's anything. It's Tim.]

[They won't move again, until he does.]

[For a second, he thinks they're just - not going to bother. They'll deny it, and he won't have any idea how to handle it, because he's not any good at this. He doesn't know how to press up against boundaries and skirt them without bulling directly through them, and when his entire life has been made up of boundaries being violated and rules being broken and lies being told, it's of pretty critical goddamn importance that he not be the same as those that did that to him.]

[What do you do when someone needs it but doesn't want it - or wants it, but not from you, only there's no one else around?]

[The question splinters and breaks upon contact with the slipping of a smaller hand around his. They don't look at him, but they hold onto him, and - he offers a vague little squeeze, like that might be consolation.]

Come on. Let's get you inside.

OK.

[Just... ok.]

[...]

[... no. Not just OK. Not at all, maybe never before. A bit of that hot, thready anger flickers back to life inside of them, pulling through their insides like scorched wire, but it's self-contained and silent. They can do that, at least, after acting the way they did. It won't fix anything. But they don't have to tell Tim that the soft squeeze of his fingers is out of a tight, quiet fury more than anything else.]

[It's not OK. What they did was never OK. It's never been more obvious than it has today, in the last few minutes, in the last few seconds of boiling anger. Frisk is tired of pretending like they're protecting some kind of valuable secret, when they've done nothing but build up this house of burning cards. They haven't been protecting anything, all this time. Not even themselves. Not even when they thought themselves was all they were protecting. It's all... dumb and stupid. And a waste of everything. And they don't want to do it anymore.]

[It's time to Quit.]

[They look away from the ground, but not quite at Tim; away from him, into the gray horizon.]

I'll show you something.

[He's better at veiling his reactions to things - shock, dismay. He's done it time and time again. He doesn't expect them to say what they do, mild as it is, and glances at them without bothering to hide it. The urge to tamp it down comes naturally, but given the state of things, the nature of the exhaustion that's already seeping up into his bones, that he's sure is gripping them both, there's only so much he can do.]

[A protest worms its way up to the back of his throat naturally. He swallows it down.]

Sure. Sure, if you want.

[Drawing close to the house means that he can touch his tongue to the back of his mouth an make a soft clucking noise, just enough to draw out the orange-striped, felid head of the tigerlily that lives there. The poor thing with far too many names, but probably makes a better comfort than Tim himself.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I Think I Got Too Many Memories Getting In The Way Of Me

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject