Entry #90

[postictal]

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.

Comments

[Voice]

[postictal]

I'm not handling anything.

[His voice sharpens abruptly, that rifting edge of his panic polishing to an edge sharp enough to cut. Diplomacy with humans is always doomed to failure. He should know! He should know after the War, that this kind of thing was inevitable - ]

[Fuck.]

[Fuck, no, come on.]

[There's an undeniable strain to the words when he speaks again, but at least that's familiar.]

You can't...make this better, Max.

[Voice]

[mypartnerintime]

[And there it is.

Should've just shut up when I had the chance.

Tim can't see her eyeroll and exaggerated (but silent) sigh on the other end of the phone. But if it was possible to ever feel that sort of thing over radio waves, then hell he can probably feel it.]

Yeah, I- I know. That's not what you and I do. [There's a small pause, like giving him space. And her next sentence is clipped, a promise that she'll leave him alone if he answers correctly.] Just get to safety, okay?

[Voice]

[postictal]

[That's not what you and I do.]

[What do they do? Fumble and flounder over one another, incapable of separating themselves from the shadow of a man who was here for a year, maybe less than that - still trying to reconcile their memories of him with the fate that inevitably claimed him.]

[Just get to safety, Tim. Stop wasting everyone's time.]

...fine.

[If there's nothing else to add, he'll cut the feed there.]