Tim W█████ (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
postictal) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
entranceway2017-08-27 02:43 pm
postictal) wrote in entranceway2017-08-27 02:43 pm
Entry #90
action;
[Everything goes white.]
[It's slow, and it's immediate. It's an eruption of snowy white fur across his forearms, along his back, to contrast the black-brown of the hair on his head. It's not painful, but it blazes in a way nothing else can. The weight of stubby horns on his head, the white-hot torquing of the barbed wire of his nervous system as it rearranges itself, as his organs howl in accommodation of something a human body was never meant to endure. His shoulder blades prickle with an eruption of thorny growths, stark and black as the skeletal branches that always rake the sky in his dreams. A startled, agonized noise wrenches out from the back of his throat, sputtering into an abortive gagging when he discovers that his canines have abruptly sharpened into fangs.]
[That's when the memories begin.]
[He doubles over, hands snapping around his middle. He's taller than he was, larger than he was, and there's a bright sizzle of something in the palms of his hands.]
[Can't think. Can't do anything but - ]
[* ACT.]
[An eruption of white-hot flame bursts from his hands - his paws? It coils up and around, wreathing the Frost Giants in a fiery nimbus. They begin to shriek as the heat starts to melt their blueish skin into slurries of clear, watery runoff. It curls his lips upward into a snarl. His eyes are wet, blinding him with the heated prickle of his own inability to fucking cope. His nostrils are thick with dust. He's breathing in, sitting in, FIGHTing in Asgore's own fucking remains.]
[The interleaving of dualed memory digs into the posterior of his skull like a fingernail prizing away a scabbed over wound. Warm scents of butterscotch and cinnamon, of a crackling fire in a hearth, soft white fur smoothed beneath a large, heavy paw, the twining of horns in with tree branches and the musical chatter of a child's laughter at the sheer silliness of it. The bitterness that clenched in a Boss Monster's gut that left him bedridden for days, and the deep-voiced plea that begged the bedraggled, bleeding, sweating shape on the bed to * Stay determined.]
[Watching one child crumble to dust, so soon after the other stopped breathing.]
[He can no longer tell whose tears are burning in wet runnels down his cheeks.]
[...]
[He no longer cares.]
video;
[If Tim could have his way, he'd be issuing this announcement over text. But he can't - having learned, very far after the fact, that the new, clawlike shape of his hands makes inputting text commands rather impossible. It seems Asgardian technology doesn't account for impromptu goat-human hybrids. So instead, people get something different.]
[Something...very different.]
[On day four, a watery scarlet iris stares hollowly at the screen for several moments before Tim pulls back. If the presence of thick white fur and rounded horns and branchlike protrusions doesn't cement that something has gone really, horribly, terribly wrong, then the tremor in his voice and the glisten of tears down his cheeks certainly should.]
I, uh...
[Maybe it's the eyes - the eyes that, though they've changed in color, undeniably belong to one Timothy Wright.]
Asgore told me - he said that I had to, I had to take it before anyone else did. I didn't know this would - god - I didn't know.
[He's trying not to break down. He's trying not to. He can no longer tell whose guilt is swelling like a tumor in his chest, whose grief is eating at his heart. At the soul he allegedly, apparently possesses.]
I'm sorry.
private audio
Do you...want to know where I am?
private audio
But he doesn't say what that is. Doesn't say how a person lives with it. How does a person live with it?
They stare bleakly at their screen.]
...Please, sir. If nothing else, someone should gather his dust. It should be sprinkled on the things that he loved.
private audio
[Why? God, why did he waste this on Tim, of all people? Couldn't his kids have been...they should've...]
[Can't worry about that now. He has a request, and he can fulfill that. There's still some - he knows. He can gather it. For them, and for Asriel. His kids deserve to have that - that remnant of him.]
I can do that. In an urn, or... [Or something. He doesn't know. Fuck. He'll - he'll find something.]
So you can spread it where you need to.
private audio
[How can anyone feel happy or grateful about something so sad? So... no, not sad. This doesn't feel like anything at all. How could it possibly be sad when they've already watched him die again and again and never once tried to stop it?
They wonder if this feels sad for him. Maybe those tears are all fake. Maybe some part of Asgore is aware how - how routine this is, ha ha!]
Just... tell me where I must go.
private audio
[It's quiet, and it's - maybe a first for him - devoid of that kind of hollow pity that's so easy, so goddamn easy. With Asgore's memories soaked in his own dust, his soul humming like a tuning fork alongside Tim's own, it's inevitable that the tide will break, and that he'll drown in it.]
[But maybe they both, in times when they can recognize someone else's profound and genuine distress, have grown accustomed to putting everything else aside, simply because it doesn't occur to them not to.]
I'll... [Not outside. God, no. Not a safe place for a child to be, by any means.] There's some rooms inside. I'll take...I can meet you there. I'll - I can light a lantern, something, just to - hang it outside. So you know which one.
private audio
Life doesn't work out like stories, though, does it? If they could all have the ringing incompleteness of Kitchen, maybe, the timid but realistic whisper of hope instead of the ringing tidy wrap-up, then real life might not feel like such a cruel mockery.]
...You'll be hard to miss, sir.
[The kind of face that sticks out, that. The kind of face that makes humans recoil in horror, grab their baseball bats, throw rocks. The kind of face that people say never should have existed.
Not that Tim would ever know about feeling like that, though, am I right? Ha ha.]
I'll see you soon.
[Their voice is soft, dead, flat. Like this is all just an errand. Like they don't feel anything at all, because they don't, and they never have. They end the call, rise heavily. Long way to go until they find the lantern calling them home, after all. Got to get started right away.]
private audio
[The feed cuts out. He kneels, dragging clawed fingers through the dirt. Swirls of soft gray dust puff out upon contact with the ground. He scoops up palmfuls of the stuff, carefully, as carefully as if he were handling someone's ashes.]
[In a way, he is.]
[He'll find somewhere to put them. And somewhere they can...say goodbye.]
[Both of them.]