entrancelogs | It may very well be the worst thing that's ever happened to you!

Entry tags:

It may very well be the worst thing that's ever happened to you! | OPEN MINGLE

Who: EVERYONE!
Where: EVERYWHERE!
When: Friday October 27th - Tuesday October 31st
Rating: PG-13, warn if you're gonna go higher!
Summary: A catch all for the Horrible Memory Truth Event!
The Story:

For the duration of this event, everyone's entire room will be replaced with a memory playing on loop. They will likely recognize the moment as soon as they see it – it is a moment they remember as the worst moment of their entire lives. It could be a memory from home or something that happened in Wonderland. Lengths of the memories will vary, but they will find that these are not memories they can merely watch – they can step into these memories and attempt to make changes to them, and the memories will be long enough that they have time to make changes (though no more than 24 hours). However, anyone who tries will find that it is futile. No matter what you do or how hard you try, the outcome is always exactly the same somehow. No changes you make will prevent that horrible outcome. It just happens over and over and over again no matter what you do.

On top of that, perhaps complicating any attempts to make changes, everyone will be forced to be honest for the duration of the event. No lies or half-truths are allowed, and filters will be gone for the entire five days. If something bothers someone then they will blurt it out, regardless of whether or not it hurts someone's feelings, and no one will be able to simply keep quiet when they have something to say. They must be truthful and honest with every word they say.

This is a catch-all log for all of your Worst Memory needs! Please mark your threads clearly in the subject line with your character's name and Room Number + Floor for character rooms, or just location if you're making a top level for a public place in the mansion (like the tea rooms or the kitchen) so people can see if there's already a thread available. And here's the plot post if you need it!

Have fun!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"...You're right." They can't lie. Can't equivocate or dodge or manipulate past that fundamental truth. They can't protect Frisk from everything. Wanting a timeline where there are no mistakes or accidents... that's just a fantasy, of course. It just isn't possible to keep absolutely everything bad from happening unless you've got infinite tries and a friend in the wings arranging things with advice, flattery, predictions. Even so, there's frustration in admitting it. What good are you, if you can't protect Frisk? If you're not useful, you're a burden. If you're not helping, then you're sliding back into being that toxic, hideous leech.

But there's a bitter, dull anger in admitting it: they can't.

"Even so, I... wish that I could. I wish I could wear your pain for you. At least... at least until you're ready to stop saying that you deserve to hurt. Looking at dusty hands and saying "it's me" is... I take some small comfort in imagining maybe that, too, could be a form of protecting." From what? From whom? Why do they insist that?

They don't know. They don't understand. Frisk has long since ceased drawing that line in the sand. Frisk, perhaps, was never fooled. It had seemed important that someone know that it was I and not you that was used, but there hadn't been anyone else listening.

"I can make it make sense. I can be your scapegoat even if I stop being something comforting for you. Even if - if that LV19 demon is what you truly think of me, deep down. Even if you believe that I'm not exactly the greatest person, too. At least if it ever comes down to... if I'm the last remaining threat to everyone's happiness, then there's still something I can do to make sure you can be happy. Or, if nothing else... I can play that role, for a little while. Just until you're ready. Until you know that pain won't rip you into smiling little pieces."

Is this what they taught them?

Or is this...no. They can't take that much credit. They know it's not just them. It's not just the person who tried to press away the blame onto a voice in their head, confessing sins that were not theirs to a skeleton they barely knew, whom they trusted compulsively as they trusted everyone they met. Walking and wandering, open-palmed, into every sword in the vicinity and trusting that it would be enough.

It's something they learned a long time ago. It's the thing they learned that meant they...they would look at a fistful of flowers and think that this would repay a family's kindness. A world where everything's exactly the same, except this sacrifice would mean something for monsters. For them all to go free.

It's something they learned before they hit the ground in a rush of wind and leaves.

But it isn't something Frisk exactly helped them contest, either, is it? It doesn't matter how many pretty words, how many formless adages, how many quiet declarations they layer over everything; those balms are window dressing compared to whatever their actions say. Someone who leaps forward to tackle a child away from a skeleton with 1 HP, because they didn't trust them to make the choice. Someone who doesn't ask for someone else to stop. Someone who gets up and leaves the room, when they hear something they don't like, instead of asking after it. Someone who shuts up and doesn't say anything at all, when it suits them, and lets the conclusions pool in the desolation that follows.

Maybe they didn't teach them that. But they didn't help, either.

They can't lie. And the pressing of words against their throat, the soft compression of phantom fingertips around their airways, forces everything out.

"I don't see you like that. I don't see you as some...demon. I don't know what that meant, but I don't care, and I never...I never thought to care. Because it wasn't you."

Can they say anything other than - than stupid not-apologies, words that Chara hates?

"I don't want you to be a scapegoat, or some...something tragic that happened to someone a really long time ago." A sad and mournful footnote in the story of Prince Asriel Dreemurr, like it was inevitable, like there was no escaping their fate. "You don't own every bad thing I've ever done. You don't. Just like...how I can't own anything good that you've done. And I know you don't think it, but you have. You have done good things."

"God, but it was me. It's - there's nothing about it that wasn't me." They had once been LV19, after all. They cannot pretend otherwise. They'd been the sort of dusty, unemotive creature that Flowey had fled from in quivering terror. What solace is there in the reassurance they aren't as bad as the Chara that showed up on Halloween if they are exactly that bad?

"It wasn't like Trash Chara." Variations on a theme. A rounder face, a taller frame, a spray of freckles over their nose. "Wasn't a knockoff. It had my body."

"It wasn't like a mirror." A distortion. A version missing something uniquely quintessential to their identity. "It had my determination. It had my heart." Or lack thereof, ha ha.

"It wasn't like you had a nightmare." A snapshot in time. A figment of Frisk's imagination. "It knew about words I never told you. I can't even trust my memories are proof I'm me, because it had those, too. It remembered things you weren't there for. Wonderland things! Stuff that happened even here, where things are different, where I'm supposed to be more than a whisper rattling in your head! It had my mind!"

Chara stares down at their hands blankly, flexing and unflexing the scarred fingers. The same scars that Chara had, too.

"What makes someone a person, Frisk...? Memories, personality, a physical existence? A SOUL...? Everyone seems so sure that wasn't me. Everyone acts like it's stupid to question it. But - but how do they know? What if I am that Chara, and my SPELL just switched us around? What if Wonderland summoned a Chara like that because that reflects what my true nature is, deep down? What if I'm just another trick Wonderland is pulling, fooling everyone into thinking Chara Dreemurr is here? What proves someone's real?"

They sit up straighter, spine growing rigid. They never...

They never knew. They never thought to know. Thought it was all just as inconsequential as anything else Wonderland trotted out to play. How do they know? Have they been caught in this - this tumbling aftermath for the entire year that followed?

They never noticed. They never questioned.

They never cared.

There's a tremor in their voice, a look of undeniable shock, of unadorned horror.

"...I didn't know."

They didn't know this tormented them for days, weeks, months - a year after the fact. They never thought to ask. They'd been so, so centered on what this meant for themself, what this meant for how they couldn't feel like they could survive without Chara, that they hadn't thought to consider what had been done to Chara themself. Feeling like they knew best for them. And they hadn't known anything at all.

They hadn't even asked.

"I didn't know you'd...this whole year?" It's whispered, barely audible. Wishing they could try for contrite, but that doesn't even begin to cover just how much they'd missed by virtue of never wanting to think about it.

"Nothing I have is truly mine," they murmur, laughing that quiet, weird laugh they do sometimes. The kind that's maybe more creepy than funny. The locket and knife that prove they existed, they mattered, they were once more than a demon? They didn't come here holding them. Frisk brought them, not Chara. This shell they're piloting, the thin pale lines that litter its surface? The things that rattle around their head? The things they did and the EXP they carried? What do you hold onto when everything is replicable, meaningless, when everyone around you can point to all of it and effortlessly declare it fake?

"I have known that for much longer than a year, Frisk." You didn't teach me that.

They reached it on their own, when they found the word demon. When they decided that Chara was an avatar, a metaphor, just the insubstantial feeling of numbers climbing higher. They'd grappled with it when the red voice came out of Frisk's lips and they'd reeled with horror as they wondered who was piloting this shell if - if that marker of identity was coming from another shell entirely. They'd tripped over it when gravity had flickered away and the unreal sensation of drifting insubstantially away had lead them to assume that the other half could take over talking to Sans. Where's Frisk, Chara? Why are you acting so weird?

"I'd just... forgotten I'm not supposed to talk about it. It's like - it's one of those Surface things, is it not?" You're the only one with a problem. Trying to talk to people about it just makes them uncomfortable, makes them like you less. There's never any winning with you, after all. Do you want them to prove you right? Is that what you want?

"You don't have to talk about this, you know." Why are they circling back to it when they already know what happens? Why are they back to just trying to make Frisk suffer? "It's..." Not a big deal. They have to say it's not a big deal. Why can't they just say it's not a big deal?

They're good with words. They're manipulative. They can connive their way around it. Just... reach for a truth that you can say. "I don't want to argue. I'm sick of making you feel bad."

"I don't want you to have to feel like this."

How could they have not known? How could they have not known? Were they not looking for it? They knew that Chara...that they'd wanted to hold to the pieces of themself that remained. A Knife and a Locket that were the sole remnants of the child that once existed, proof that they were anything beside some malevolent shade frequenting the dark and empty of a howling void. They knew that, but then they - they never thought they ought to talk about it, did they?

Never thought to bring it up. And after Halloween, after that manifestation of something that was and was not them, was distorted and strange and unique and wrong, what were they meant to walk away from that?

"You should be able to." They...what can they say? What can they say to that, floundering? "You should be able to talk about it. I'm - I am sorry. That I never really talked about it either. I don't...I don't always remember that other people have problems too."

Getting so wrapped up in themself that they forget other people matter. The kind of selflessness that stops being selfless, stopped being selfless a long time ago, and instead just becomes the raw black hole energy of something desperate to make the entire world revolve around them, them, them.

"I'm not sure if I've ever known anyone as worried about other people's problems as you, Frisk," they point out with a faint little huff of air that's almost a laugh. They say nothing about sorry. They never say much about "sorry." That's... ha, they don't know, actually, if it's something that makes this Chara Frisk's Chara, or if it's just one of those meaningless markers repeated a thousand times over in that avatar of LOVE, that cautionary tale, that plot device in someone else's story. With everything that Halloween showed them, what can they possibly begin to say makes them Frisk's Chara at all?

"It's... a stupid thing to have a problem with, anyway, isn't it?" They ask, smiling. "Everyone else understands it instinctively. You shouldn't have to explain something that's supposed to be basic common sense." If you're the one who can't grasp something simple, then the problem isn't everyone else, right? You're the dumb one. What happened to being smart enough to keep up with adults, huh? This is that great, cunning manipulator? No wonder they keep getting the reactions they got whenever they tried to bring it up. Nobody can believe they can't actually keep up with something this obvious, can they? Of course they're only bringing it up to make people mad, nobody's actually stupid enough to have trouble with this. Are they?

"What good is talking about it, anyway? It just makes people frustrated, and... what if there isn't an answer for me? What if the reason that Wonderland can make and destroy me on a whim like that really is because I'm... I'm not really anyone at all?"

Are they? Are they worried about other people's problems, or are they worried about how they can solve other people's problems, and how can they apply themself to those problems? So wrapped up in wondering how they're meant to push forward their will to fix something that they don't want to acknowledge that some things simply aren't fixable?

Is it selfish to be like this? It feels like it must be, but...

"It's not stupid," says Frisk. And they mean it. "I wish I had an answer. I wish I could say that you are someone, but I don't know how...I don't know what makes someone real. I don't know what makes myself real, or you real. Not when there are thousands of us out there."

Not when there are Frisks that fell last and Frisks who look like Boss Monsters and Frisks who can do magic and Frisks who are far more willing to FIGHT. Not when there are Charas that fell first and Charas who have knives that set themselves aflame and Charas that learned to pull their SOULs from their bodies and suspend that slice of scarlet in the thin air and coax something answering out of Frisk.

Who are they, really?

"But I don't...I don't want you to feel like you're no one. I don't want you to feel like you're something that can just be destroyed. I never want anyone else to feel like that."

They never want anyone else to feel like the world would be better off without them in it.

They do not miss, for even a second, the use of the phrase "anyone else."

"Why's it just us, anyway? It's always just us," they point out, with a dead little attempt at a chuckle. "Everyone else is so... consistent. Defined. Grounded. Us? We don't even look the same across versions. We're way taller or way younger or your eyes are all wrong. The whole way you talk changes. Our entire personalities are just... do we even have personalities if they're swapped out so effortlessly?"

Frisks who Chara can't believe are determined at all, they're so passive and dewy-eyed. Charas who aren't even that plastic smile, because all they do is scowl and glower. Beings completely devoid of the gregarious impulsivity and charm they might have, vainly, hoped the whisper in Frisk's ear sometimes had - so surely that part of them, too, must be fake, just an act put on to trick people into not noticing they aren't the greatest person!

Leaning on the bookshelf is getting uncomfortable. They shift. Just... lie down on the dirty library floor. Is that a Chara thing to do? Is this Chara's element, or are they giving away how insubstantial their character really is by being so improper and filthy?

"I'm three miniscule chunks of faded red - just a few faint traces of whatever Chara Dreemurr used to be. I'm a locket and a knife that someone else brought and just lets me wear. I'm magic someone else gave to me because they thought I should have it - and even that's just a whole bunch of broken, abnormal nothing. I'm the resonance of souls that a better me taught someone else how to do."

It's absurd, isn't it? "You're bandaged fingers and a hat someone else handed you that looks like some other species entirely. You're purple notebooks and ukuleles and a movie someone else showed you. What even ARE we, Frisk? Just - just function? Just fragments sort of clumping together in a vaguely useful shape? Echoes of the real Frisk and Chara, pale and inferior and artificial, trying to convince ourselves we're not just amalgamates parroting what better selves might think or do? What's the point of even... what's the point of existing, if Wonderland could wipe me out completely and put a new me here and nobody would even be able to tell the difference at all? Why are we even here if all that really defines us are the bits of other, better selves that we just tacked onto ourselves after the fact?"

How to Generate an Existential Crisis in Ten Steps Or Less.

What are they? They never put thoughts like these to light. They never want to consider that something of them might just be...transient, liminal, a fluttering afterimage of someone else's thoughts and someone else's life. However bad this might feel now, this constant game of doubting and second-guessing, it only means they can't imagine how it must be for Chara - Chara, who has struggled with this feeling for over a year, because no matter how much they might have thought it could be over, it could finally be resolved, they'd never thought to ask if it really was. Never thought to ask what really bothered them about that horrible night where everything went irrevocably wrong.

Chara lies on the floor. Frisk hugs their arms around their knees and wonders at the tint of their skin. Wonders at the scattered collection of before-falling memories that they never talk about, and wonder if those align too. If those, too, can be replaced and lifted away like scabs.

It feels wrong.

"Who are the real ones?" Is there a...a prime version of one or both of them from which all pieces are derived? Are they all interchangeable, across every plane? Is there even an original buried anywhere, or were they always something roused from a story that needed someone to carry the narrative to a close?

...

If that's the case, then -

"...so what?"

Frisk sits up a little straighter, and their knees drop from around their chest.

"So...what? So what if we're just - if we're maybe not real, or just some kind of imitation? So what? Aren't we still here? Haven't we still...would you give this up? Any of what's happened?"

"Is that the answer?" They ask softly, lying on a public library floor like some kind of filthy animal.

"Just... accept it? You're nothing and no one, not even yourself, but at least you can have fun with it while it lasts?" That's how it is on this bitch of an earth! Existence is meaningless, so may as well embrace it! Laugh in the face of the sheer absurdity of futility! There's freedom in that, isn't there? They can see the liberation behind the concept. If nothing matters, might as well do anything. Strength through...

Ha ha. Strength through negation of self?

They do, for what it's worth, giggle a bit.

"How funny that we should come so far on this back-and-forth. First I am a demon, then I'm not. Now, I suppose, I am again. We're not our own people, we're not individuals, we're just... a feeling. A fleeting experience of progression." Flopped onto their side in an ungainly little pile, they look up at Frisk, giggle once more. But that way of thinking... it'd been wrong, hadn't it? All the insistence things were different, they were a person, they weren't a demon, they were something more substantial than mere experience... was that all fake, too? Is this where the world is, ultimately, guiding them? They just can't understand!

"Which is worse, Frisk...? If the reason you're alive is... if your purpose is necessary, but ultimately a damning one... or for your existence to not have any basis whatsoever?"

♥ Here for a (bad) reason A superfluous accident

"I don't know. I don't...know if it's something anyone can prove. I don't know how to."

That's for people with big books who actually understand what they're reading; people who know what deterministic means and understand the intrinsic nature of words like wavelength and spatiotemporal and can conceptualize what it means to exist for a reason. Do people think about this kind of thing a lot? Are they all stuck in microcosms of existential wonderings?

They have no idea. They don't have a basis for normal. Not really. They think that maybe they never did.

"I don't think..." Start. Stop. Begin Again. "I mean, I don't know if it...matters. Why we're here. If we're some kind of - copies, or if we aren't really real. We feel real. You feel real. There's pieces of you in the Underground, even if they're just...pieces."

A Locket with words engraved across the shape of a heart, twined with a chain of gold. A Knife with a blade dangerous as it is beautiful, glinting with an unearthly scarlet sheen. A handful of tapes where only one voice was loud enough to truly be captured and held, like a firefly in a bottle. A coffin with a name on it, and something like...mummy wrappings at the bottom of it.

Even if the name changes, the Game stays the same. Always, it stays the same.

"I mean, do any of us...exist on purpose?" The words are stumbling, uncertain, spoken with the halting inflection of a child becoming aware that they're coming up against a boundary that even adults have difficulty grasping. "Does anyone? We're not the only ones with other versions of us out there. We're not the only ones like this."

Are they?

"We live in a world with prophecies, Frisk. Some of us surely do exist on purpose." Hard to argue fate doesn't exist when your power is built entirely on the resolve to defy it. Hard to claim there's no such thing as preordained roles when there are only a finite number of outcomes you can have. Only two choices at this junction: FIGHT or MERCY? Yes or no? Befriend or don't?

"Asriel did." The angel who has seen the surface. The one destined to make the Underground go empty. The true prince of this world's future. Even in a world where Frisk falls first, the role he plays in the universe's machinations doesn't change. He can certainly say that nobody ever told him he was an accident, ha ha!

Well, except maybe Alphys.

"I just... want something that I can believe in," they admit. "I want just one thing that can be... secure. Absolute. Real. I'm so sick of the rug always being yanked out from under our feet. Maybe it's unreasonable, but I don't want to be a series of blanks strung together by hints. I don't want to be pieces."

Is it unreasonable? They've gotten this far without stability or security or anchors. They endured a surface life that was senseless and chaotic, fraught with shifting goalposts and fluctuating rules and tempers that exploded with terrifying randomness. They got through the underground as a faceless, unwelcome whisper, as a self-proclaimed avatar of progression. They cracked open the bones of the world and saw for themselves just how constrained and finite their choices truly were, but they kept going regardless.

"I know we're both terribly desperate to have one thing, at least - just one! - that we can hold onto. It's not fair to keep asking you who Chara is, who I am, because I know the only answer you can give is 'I don't know." Even so, despite that..."

They still... don't want to be an unknowable nothing, ha ha. Don't want for none of it to mean anything at all. They aren't bandaged fingers or a talent for the ukulele or a room that's halfway plastered with notes and drawings. They aren't a tendency to go for the hands first, or eyes that have lost their precious brown warmth. They're... what? Magic that still, after more than a year, is nothing but absence? A tiny white scar on the shell of one ear? A third of a room that still, two years later, looks as blank and uninhabited as it always did. A template that has not deviated from that blank slate at all. No wonder this is the conclusion the world provides. No wonder the answer to "what am I" is "nothing, so don't think about it too much." The monkey paw curls one of its fingers in, and you get what you've been wishing for!

"Well... so be it. It's childish petulance to try and argue the fundamental reality, is it not? We just have to find strength in our hollowness. Surely there can be comfort in chaos, if you try hard enough. We can shape just about anything to appeal to us."

It's not unreasonable. And this isn't...it isn't fair, really, that they can't do more. That they can't give them more. They're supposed to be Partners, Soulmates, hands clasped as they stand at the edge of the cauldron of Hell, and they're supposed to always be together in all of this. They're supposed to be...

...they're supposed to be getting better at this "supposed to be" stuff.

Where one of them pulls desperately at every interest they can to fill the blankness they know must be there, the other works so very hard to sustain that blankness and smooth it over everything that might define them. A chocolate bar pinned between the corners of a mattress. A rocket launcher hidden away where no one can see it. A chemistry set that they're...what? Too ashamed to let anyone see?

"There are a lot of people that care," they say at last. "Shepard. Mettaton. Dipper. Mabel. People who do love you, and care about you, and didn't know the person you were before you died. Do you really think they're just in love with nothing?"

Their smile is weak and fluttering like a candle's stilling flame.

"I don't know how to give you an answer. I'm still learning it myself, and even if I did know...I'm twelve. Fourteen, I guess, but even that feels like a lie sometimes."

What else do they say that won't be something simpering and saccharine, the kind of thing Chara said they'd hate? Liking chocolate. Liking puzzles. Liking to learn about things like stars and chemicals and the way the world works. Liking to learn big words that Frisk stumbles over. Isn't that the kind of answer they'd hate?

"If I'd never put on that sweater," says Frisk, quietly, "and if I'd never...if none of what happened on Halloween even happened...would you be asking this now?"

Would this be plaguing them the way it is now? Would this be ringing in their skull? Would this be some kind of inconsolable nightmare?

Is this all your fault?

Are they in love with nothing? Did Shepard love the LV19 Chara that tried to kill her? What does anyone even see in... whatever they are? They've never been that great at recognizing any redeeming qualities within themself whatsoever, even at the best of times. Look at all the trouble they've been pouring out onto Frisk's shoulders! They're not that great at recognizing any qualities within themself. Everything's still mired in a white haze, obscuring the true shape of things, muddling things with its endless static.

It's time to sit up again. Lying on the ground in a public space, too, is childish petulance. They have no excuse to not act appropriately, not when Frisk is...

They ask Chara a question.

A cruel question to ask when neither of them is capable of anything but the raw truth, that one.

They bite the inside of their cheek. They can feel an answer in the pit of their stomach. Can't be sure whether it's the objectively right answer, or the objectively wrong one - the one that will just hurt Frisk, will just feed back into that poisonous idea that they had to vanish so a better Frisk could come take their place. Can't assume they'd have the luxury of an "I don't know what I think," given how rarely they land on that particular answer. Can't dodge a straight answer like Frisk can, but then... they were never the one that was best at dodging, right?

Silence is starting to burn. They'd rather burn than risk a truth that might hurt Frisk, but for all their determination, can they just ignore the iron band branding itself into their throat forever? Chara bites their lip. Chara ducks their head, hides behind the veil of their bangs. Just... they just have to reach for a truth that they can say. Try to move laterally.

"I," they begin, delicate, careful, deliberate, "was beginning to buy into the idea that things were different here." True. Toeing a line, but still not dangerous. They respond to the guidance that the world places before them. They always have. External forces are what define Chara - literally, ha ha! Name the fallen human!

"I... wanted to get better." Also true. What makes the idea of being doomed so scary? Hope. Lack of resignation. Even if they hadn't always known how to go about it or really always tried their utmost or completely believed it possible, they'd wanted it. A Chara who's allowed to admit they can taste chocolate. A clock that begins to move again. A Frisk and Asriel who can grow up happy, can move beyond this aching, unknit wound. A Chara who, greedily, starts wanting to be more than a cautionary tale, a sword of Damocles, a Jacob Marley. Someone who's certain that being caught yearning for things outside their role is weakness, but then actually lets themself start pining for stability, identity, the luxury of being certain they belong somewhere.

Always were a rank hypocrite at their core, huh?

"I think I still want to," they add, trying to keep pushing their answer along this tangent, away from the question. Their voice wavers, and that invisible band of iron clamps harder. Wonderland, perhaps, knows what they're trying to do.

Try again.

"You were never the problem. The truth would have made itself known eventually, one way or another. Not like I can - we can't really be positive what I would be doing right now, anyway! Any answer I give will just be baseless speculation." There! Found it! Took longer than they should have, blabbered out an utterly unnecessary number of words reaching for it, but it's a safe, solid truth. "We can't reset, so we don't know what we'd be doing if we'd tried things differently!"

They're trying. They know they are. They're trying not to lever the words so they hurt, trying not to press them in too sharply and too harshly and too painfully. But the underpinnings of the way they speak, slow and deliberate, too deliberate, too careful, have made themselves clear regardless.

Look at what you've done.

It was an error. They know it was. It was an error, and it was one they never should have committed in the first place. It was something they never meant to have happen. It was something that made blame difficult - that made it hard to sort a guilty party upon which everyone could happily pin the blame, and be done with it. A dark voice humming in someone's skull, a fallen child, a demonic presence extolling the virtues of LOVE and EXP. Mark the divide, and mark it well. Separate the fire and brimstone from the waxen wings, and surely that will make it all better. The sins will come home to roost and someone will come away with the consequences and everyone can walk away happy, pleased that there is justice in the world, that a set of scales exists and that the wicked were punished for their misdeeds.

Who's the wicked there? Frisk, for putting on the sweater? Chara, for hating what they saw? Sans, for trying to interfere? Alphys, for building the machine that sucked them dry? Wonderland, as a collective entity, as a sentient loci, for facilitating the event in the first place?

It doesn't matter, in the end. It doesn't matter who is truly guilty. What matters is that they were starting to believe that things could change, that they were not merely a set of blank dashes upon which someone could input a name pulled from the depths of the world's marrow, that things could truly get better.

They were starting to think it, and that night - that threw everything out of balance. It affirmed what Chara had finally begun to believe wasn't wholly true. It bled corruption into the one thing they could hold to themself, and of course, of course they would take that as a sign they felt they never should have ignored.

The tip of one fingernail digs into the rusted red of a scab at their kneecap - some bash or scrape another that healed clumsily, improperly, one whose etiology they can't recall, and they pick at it slowly, absent, unthinking.

"You can tell me that I made a mistake," says Frisk. "I'm supposed to be okay with making mistakes now."

They're supposed to see a mistake, an error that they've made, and account for it and learn from it instead of deciding it makes them - irredeemable.

It doesn't make anything better. None of it does. But - "If I'd known that it would do this to you...I never would have done it."

But that's the hardest part of being what they are now, right?

The not knowing. The not being able to predict the best course of action. The not being able to mitigate the damage they themself inflict on others.

The not knowing.

"I know," they answer quietly. "You've never enjoyed hurting people. You never wanted to. You just... you keep being put into situations that push you into it." And isn't that a fun, delightful quirk of fate too? Isn't it just so zany, the way the world takes the most good kids they know and railroads them toward pushing back, then uses that exact reaction to tell them that they're not good anymore? Don't think of it as really me, or I'll never be deserving of love! If you can't be an angel, then why even exist at all?

"Please don't pick," they mumble, knowing full well that, too, is rank hypocrisy.

"I don't want this to be something you flagellate yourself over. I don't want you thinking that this is because of you. It was Chara, not Frisk, who was LV19 and hungry for more. It was Chara, not Frisk, who used a SPELL. It was Chara, not Frisk, who made you think we wanted you to disappear. All you did was put a shirt. You said it yourself: your only crime was wearing a costume." They don't blame Asriel for the plan, after all. His only crime was picking flowers. He's not guilty of anything else - it was another party entirely who had control when he stepped across the barrier. Frisk, surely, can understand. You're not a bad person because a bad person took you over for a little bit, right?

"If you're already over this... if you've moved past it... then it's important to me that you remain over this, Frisk. I don't want to drag you down again. I don't want my inability to move past where I started to hurt you or sabotage the growing up that you've done."

"That isn't fair to say that. It's not fair to me and it's not fair to you." They sit up a little straighter. Obligingly, they let their knees drop so the temptation to paw at the scabs there falls away somewhat, and their hands drop to their sides to brace against the roughness of the rug underfoot.

They hate that they can be like this, now. Gaze sharper, more astute. Direct in a way they never were before. It's pointed, and it's pointed in a way that always hurts people.

"We've both done bad things. It wasn't just you or just me. It can't have been. Not knowing what we know."

No chocolate. (You took the key and put it on your phone's key-chain.) (I unlocked the chain.) You felt your sins crawling on your back.

Together, we eradicated the enemy and became strong.

A little bit of carelessness? Or something more?

"If we're both doomed," says Frisk, the words dropping in pitch, in volume, until they're almost whispered, paired with thin crimson slits peeking out over the ridges of their cheeks, "then we're both doomed."

Ha. Red eyes, open and resolute. A voice with the spreading sharpness of an asterisk, like its words have the power to make things reality. Directness that borders on defiance. Would the Frisk who woke up in Wonderland two years ago look on this and recognize it? Would they see Frisk, or would this rattle them like a red voice Chara pretends they can't use? Somehow, in the span of just one day, that bed felt entirely too small for them now. Maybe growth sneaks up on you. (Asterisk-you.)

"Golly, I hope this doesn't turn out to be unhealthy," they answer, with that wry little self-deprecating smile that lets the world know they're in on the joke. "I suppose if Halloween made one thing clear, then it was that you're never truly going to be separate from the vengeful ghost rattling around in your head." It, apparently, can still peel their fragile identity away at any moment. It can still scribble their name out. It can take the brown from their eyes and leave a vile stain behind in its place. "Best friends forever, with emphasis on the forever part, no?" Inseparable in the sort of sense you wouldn't really expect people to be.

"...You really were over it, though, weren't you? You were getting better." The hard lesson they'd taken from this obstacle had already been figured out. They'd come to terms with the idea they didn't need to be perfect, that mistakes just sort of happen sometimes and it's nobody's fault. It hadn't splintered their identity. But then... not being there must be easier than being in two places at once? Hm, no, that's not a very funny observation at all. Can't get a punchline from that. Doesn't really lend itself to jokes the way a doomed friendship does.

"I don't know if I'm getting better." That's the sad truth of it. They're not sure if there's a beter for them. It doesn't feel like it, most days. The kind of desperate haze of optimism they once clung to has faded to shreds, to torn-through tatters, like a dusty curtain letting in too many fingers of sun.

"I don't know if I ever was. I've learned to stop thinking about things sometimes, but that doesn't really make them go away. It just means they come back later."

Like now. It doesn't fix them. It doesn't make them better.

It just separates them, isolates them. Becomes another bad, dirty thing that they shouldn't be turning over and over in their head, so they sequester it, pile it under the proverbial bed, and stop thinking about it. Just stop thinking about it.

"I think..." No. They have to say this right, this time. Stop being so stupid that they can't string the words together in the right way. "I think it...it really could have been anyone. If I'd dressed up as anyone else, it would be...some fake person. Something that had all those pieces pulled out and stretched and, and - 's like the, it's the funhouse mirror. I'm not good at..."

They don't have the words for it. They're not making any sense. Just shut up, Frisk.

That's... not what getting better is, huh. Please don't think about this anymore. Let them go. Chara's been gone for a long time. That's... hm. That's just turning it into one of those Surface things. You're not supposed to talk about them, or you'll make people mad at you. Have they been making that worse, they wonder? Using "is this a Surface kind of don't talk about it" as an excuse? Letting things stay bottled up instead of giving Frisk someone to share them with?

"You are getting better," they say, and because they can say it, that proves it's true, right? "You hold your head higher than you used to. You say no more often. You're getting better at telling people it's not okay when things aren't, well, okay." They... Chara isn't sure, in truth, if they can see that. It's hard to notice things about yourself sometimes, ha ha. Growth sneaks up on asterisk-you.

They're... focusing on the first half of what Frisk said. Kind of glossing over the second part, the part they're really struggling to get across. Frisk is probably aware of that. But then, they're probably aware, too, that Chara takes action into account far more than words. Anyone can just say things, right? Anyone could be lying. Anyone could be totally convinced the contradictory, fake thing they're saying is true, because you tricked them into believing it. They can claim that any costume worn would have been an untrue, exaggerated form of what it was really meant to be, but... Chara didn't turn into a hellish, violent version of their stupid embarrassing fursona, right? Frisk didn't turn into a wrathful, blood-hungry parody of a ghost when they donned their first costume. Should they assume that for some reason, because it was Chara instead of a generic ghost, it's suddenly an exception? It's just that one time was mysteriously fated to be inaccurate, no matter what costume it was, for no reason?

It's just words, with no real evidence at all.

But they don't... they don't want to keep hurting Frisk with this.

"I think you don't have to worry about this so much," they answer. "I think what's important to me - to both of us - is that you don't have to resign yourself to being doomed, Frisk. You don't have to linger on regrets. You've come so far already. You have it in you to keep moving forward. You've overcome everything that's tried to drag you down so far. Despite the world's best efforts and despite the occasional setbacks and relapses, you survive. You progress. You have learned from this, and because of it, you have more faith in your ability to be loved despite your imperfections. Is that not the most important part of this? Maybe... it's the only part of this that really matters?"

It sounds unspeakably after-school-special to phrase that as a question, good god. Nonetheless, they phrase it as a question, because they don't really want to test if someone as stuck in the past as them believes that's really true or not.

They're doing better. Chara thinks they're doing better. They're...they really believe it.

That in and of itself is enough to lift the corners of their lips slightly, a warmth like another SOUL cupped around theirs blossoming in their chest with an unfurling scarlet light. Their eyes hood, crinkling at the edges, and their hand clenches at the material of sweater at their chest in a scrunched-up moment of something almost like pride.

They're changing the subject. But they don't have any reason to keep clawing open the old wound like this, do they?

"It's not enough that I'm just...supposed to be untouched from this." Their hands drift to their kneecaps. The motion stops, abortive, and creeps over to the threads of their sweater instead, picking at the fraying edges of their sleeves. That's better. Less destructive.

"I want you to be too. I want you to know that you can be loved, too, despite your imperfections. That you are."

"I might have to work on nailing down 'you' before I'm ready to establish the rest," they joke. What's even "their" imperfection, and what's just a narrative function that avatar had to fulfill? If they can be replicated down to the last memory and mannerism, then those imperfections... what's even yours at all?

"You've got a bit of a head start on me, Frisk, but that isn't something to feel bad about. It's the opposite, in fact." It's the warm moment of a sincere smile, it's the switch to toying with the hems of your sleeves instead of picking scabs open. It's a SOUL that's still whole and radiant and unblemished, despite everything. "You shouldn't have to feel like you can't be secure in something until everyone else is. You should be able to celebrate your successes without feeling guilty that you're celebrating yourself."

Why, after all, wouldn't Frisk be worth celebrating? The crowded red wagon that had been brought to a padded room months and months ago had been full of those wonderful, beloved things, hadn't it? Gifts from people who taught them that it was a mistake to hate humanity. A copy of a beloved DVD. A package of twizzlers. Soda (which isn't sickly liquid at all, it turns out) poured into a glass and garnished with a curly straw, because cans can have jagged metal edges. The supplies needed to draw and write, to produce more of the creative works that had been painted on the walls with dear friends, to bring home more things to make their side of the room uniquely theirs.

Bandages. The Rainbow Connection plucked out on ukulele strings. Rolling a human character for DD&MD. (Putting up with the least creative member of this wretched trio of determined kids drawing a stupid immature furry fancharacter for them, because it's no fun if they aren't represented too, and look, one of their ears has a heart-shaped mark.)

"I can't... necessarily promise that I know that, Frisk. I have a lot of catching up to do before I reach where you are." They were never quite the example who shows how it's supposed to be done. Not too surprising that the Shittier Knockoff of Frisk would be a bit behind them on the stairway to self-actualization, right? Maybe that's inescapable narrative function, too. Maybe they're just being bitter. They kind of do that a lot. "I haven't grasped any of these ideas about - that maybe loving can be a bad thing. I haven't made sense of what happened like everyone did. I'm starting at a bit of a lower bar, but... if you start at the bottom, at least it isn't hard to figure out which direction you need to go."

Can't stand still forever. A strange voice starts insisting you're the future of... the future of something if you try to lie in bed and ignore that box of assorted shoes.

Maybe they can't be better, but they can be... less worse. Maybe they can't understand themself, let alone accept themself, but... "No matter where I stand, I know, at least, that my life is less hollow with you in it."

Is this another painful jag of someone else's expectations, foisted across their neck, a throat just parallel enough to be their own? Is this wanting them to be something they don't want to be? The future of humans and monsters, the demon that comes when people call its name, his best friend, the increase of a number, something that isn't really human and therefore just pretending to be one, someone who won't EVER be happy...a long, long list of things people keep telling Chara they are, and not enough asking who Chara wants to be.

Is wanting them to be okay, an acceptable version of okay that isn't just moldering in the dirt, another hurtful expectation they won't ever be able to separate themself from?

"Do you think someday you can get there?" To...wherever there is? To a point where they can be a little more okay with being here, and a little less guilty over the way the world has spun its tale around them?

Do things really get better?

"I've never been very good at visualizing the long-term." Is that being morbid, considering their life story? Even with no choice but to tell the truth, they can't seem to just deliver an answer that isn't dark or sharpened into that self-deprecating, jaded edge. "I don't know what I'll end up being at all."

It'd been daunting enough to think time might start moving again. It's daunting enough to try and find a definite answer for who Chara is now, let alone someday.

"But I don't think anyone can say where I'll end up, can they? You can't define that for certain. I tried to force you to supply an answer for me, and that was... it was pretty unfair of me, actually. I'm not surprised that "I don't know" was the only answer you could give, too." It's a pretty elusive concept, existence and the role you're meant to play in the universe, so it's not exactly a light burden to just drop on a person's shoulders. Can't expect folks to just be carrying the meaning of life up their sleeve or something!

"I... went this long without gaining more LOVE, though." The EXP they've gathered won't be going away. There's no easy out from those consequences. You wear the lives you've taken for the rest of your days. But they're not... they're not LV19 yet. "I think I care about you, so I know that I do care about something other than... you know. Senseless mass murder. Sans told me the lesson I was supposed to take from it. How I was so busy only thinking of myself, that I didn't care that I was hurting everyone else. I let that be more important than caring about you, and it just... I... I don't want any of that to ever happen again. So, I know that I've learned from this."

Those are good things. Right? That's some evidence of somewhere to start. There's a foundation to build from, right there. This isn't all self-pity and tragedy and flagellation.

"I won't get worse. I have not forgotten I promised you that I would try."

It may very well be the worst thing that's ever happened to you! | OPEN MINGLE

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