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

video

[pleasereset]

[Asriel recognizes Tim's voice, but that's - that's not...]

What happened to dad?

[There's only way Tim can look like that, and Asriel knows it. But he can't accept that, he can't-]

video

[burntvideocassette]

[Jay switches the phone--or whatever it's turned into, ornate and advanced beyond Jay's comprehension--to broadcast video before he's ready, and he ends up taking up the first several seconds just staring in mute horror.]

[He's seen Tim as a nonhuman before, a bipedal thing with feathers and a beak, but this? This is much worse. He's still very visibly Tim. He's got the same face. But he's got branches erupting from his back and horns curling over his head and he looks like he's in physical pain.]

Tim, what--

[He can't decide which question to ask first, so of course the worst possible one slips out.]

What are you?

[video]

[punful]

[It's Tim's voice, but it's all wrong.]

[There were always stories. Legends. Humans were so worried about a monster taking a human soul, but a human taking a monster soul was always a possibility, given very unique circumstances. The history books say that neither thing ever happened, but there were stories. Humans kidnapping Boss Monsters to steal their souls, gaining incredible powers and terrorizing the countryside, to be stopped only when monsters and humans worked together to defeat the foe. The kind of story you'd tell to spook your little brother at night.]

[This is the first time it's happened in over a thousand years, if it ever happened at all. Unless Frisk really did absorb Asgore's soul when they took it in certain timelines.]

[Asgore's dead. And Tim...]

[God, he hopes Papyrus doesn't see this.]

tim.

[What does he even say? It's not like he can really do anything. Maybe teleport the poor guy (guys?) somewhere, but he hasn't left the dining hall since the fighting started.]

that is you, tim, right?

[Doesn't even realize he made a pun, for once.]

is he still--is he conscious? in...there.

audio

[fulllifeconsequences]

[A human has never taken a monster's SOUL.

It's a law of the world. Literally carved in stone. For all the atrocities humankind was capable of, not once did they sink that low. Not once did the whisper in the back of Frisk's head permit them to snatch up Toriel's SOUL, try to keep a trace of her with them instead of going through a journey with a phone nobody answers. Not once did the flower and his schemes let that human take Asgore's SOUL, gain the power to slip past the Barrier.

No human ever crossed that final boundary. No human took the last thing monsters had to themselves.

And yet. And yet!

What greets them, when they finally reawaken in a familiar world?

Not Mr. Dad Guy, ha ha. That's for sure! When they speak, there is no face attached to it. There is no question mark on the end of what should be a question - no rise in inflection at all. Nothing but a deadened, sharpened tone, dripping with redness.]

What have you done.

[Voice]

[mypartnerintime]

[She answers in voice only, because the sight of him sends her goosebumps up her arms and makes it hard to speak.]

T-Tim? Wh-, what- god- what happened?