entrancelogs | merry christmas; i could care less [ open ]

If you can do something right, it will really stick with someone. One good deed, one kind word, one refusal to FIGHT. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

“I think it makes sense,” says Frisk, with a short little hum of acknowledgement and a nod. “It doesn’t cost anything to be kind, but for someone who’s had a bad day, it can mean everything.”

Considerably more simplistic than they’d like to imply, but now isn’t a time to talk about things like how bad memories can stick just as badly, if not more so, as good ones. Sometimes they eat away at you. Sometimes they can be the one thing you need, when all is at its lowest point, and all you have is a Bad Memory and the realization that, without any determination at all, even something cruel can behave like a Last Dream instead.

"Of course." Underneath, she is thinking the same- the significance of one action, the gesture of one moment, the feeling of letting one thing fall and disappearing, her disappearing, from everyone she had ever loved. Seconds. Moments. And then nothing.

But that isn't what she says, either.

Lucretia pauses in her movements to look over at them, gesturing with her pen. "So once you have the main shape, you add other dimensions, and then you move on to details. When you're doing work like this, you want to be sure to draw what would be on the bottom first, since you can't erase lines. Since the strings go over the middle, we'll want to detail that first."

"Dimensions," says Frisk, a casual repetition out of curiosity rather than lack of understanding. People have called Wonderland that, before. Dimension. Its own little isolated pocket of world. Apparently it means something in drawing too.

You can't ERASE your mistakes. It's like the way the world ought to work. It's like the way the world usually works.

Usually. But not always.

"What if you could erase it?" It hardly takes anything. A little fraction of determination spilled into a SOUL overfull with it, these days, pinning the moment in crystalline suspension for a handful of a moment.

"Yes, like a plane of existence." She replies idly, starting to add depth to the hole inside, anything she'll be going over later. Lucretia almost misses the second question when it's said, tilting her head just a bit their way.

"Well, if you were using pencil, or an erasable material... but ink simply smudges, I'm afraid." She's also incredibly literal, most of the time. "So you couldn't."

It would be good for her to know, just in case. And...maybe it'd be good for them to know, too, for posterity. Just how Determined is she? How likely is she to remember? They suspect that, given their conversations before, she might be very Determined; enough to feel a ripple in the water-bucket when the pebble drops.

"It's not about if it's erasable," says Frisk. All things are, they know, to an extent. Entropy. Decay.

A tincture of unidirectional force and SOUL, poured into the butterfly-pin stuck in the inching creep of linear time.

"It's about going back and fixing it."

That's what it's about.

Going back.

And time leaps back, a skip and nestling back into the ordinary way of things. A dark, rusted red iris peeps out from underneath heavy lids, peering at Lucretia for a reaction.

"Ink smudges," says Frisk softly. "But you can still erase it."

She almost misses it, truthfully. If somehow Frisk found their way into her SOUL, it would undoubtedly shine purple, the odds to keep going whatever the cost, to live, to survive. But there's no denying that bit of red, the way she has learned to shape the world, the way she has taken her brush strokes and written herself from the narrative. But what tells her isn't any of that. It's the muscle memory of being remade. Of, at the top of each year, she and her companions would break into a thousand pieces, knit back together, and the transfer of action in that leap.

What happens, is she almost misses a line where she was drawing. And Frisk takes the next line right out of her mouth.

"... And how exactly did you pick those words?" Lucretia can't be sure, but curiosity has found her as she readjusts her hand properly. "I hadn't quite mentioned ink smudges."

"You told me," says Frisk. Their eyes have pinched half-shut, but there's still a glimmer of dark scarlet, eyeing her carefully. Can she remember? Can she see past the skips and leaps across time?

Is she as Determined as people like Dipper, like Shepard, like Chara?

"But I went back to before you told me."

It would be easy enough to dismiss it, if they hadn't said anything. Just a little misstep. Time magic is incredibly complex in her world, even among other planes they visited and techniques she learned across worlds. Causing any kind of temporal disturbance to move yourself is hard enough, but to bring another person? They're just a child. But how could they have pulled that wording, the movement of her so precisely?

Lucretia idly wonders if this, combined with the ukulele, means she's simply found an incredibly good bard. Not a bad thing. But unexpected.

"How did you do that?" She's keenly aware this time, wonders how there wasn't even an uttered word. "That sort of magic is very advanced. Getting through time isn't at all simple, especially with a passenger in tow."

People call it that all the time. Magic. Some kind of superpower. Even if they should know that ordinary humans don’t have magic - not from their world. Not normally. Then again, what about an anomaly counts as normal?

There’s really only one answer to her question, and it’s the simplest one.

“Determination,” says Frisk, simply. “It’s what makes humans different from monsters. The resolve to change fate. I just have a little more than normal.”

Abnormal. Ha ha.

She's finding herself twisting the pen in her hand instead of sketching further, her mind moving with the fidgeting in her hands. There are versions of something like this in her magic, of forcing the universe to do your bidding, but they'd be much too complex for any child to learn- some scholars don't make it there their whole lives. This has to be something different, and she wants to know about it immediately.

"Is it a... spell? From the way you're talking, it sounds more like an innate ability." Maybe less like a power, more like a racial trait, if they mention humans and monsters. "Can all humans in your world do this? Can it be learned? Did someone teach you?"

“I don’t think so. “ it’s easier to talk about like this - looking down at their hands and speaking all matter-of-fact like it’s not something that puts people off. Like it’s not something dangerous, that others can and should fear. “I’m an anomaly.”

There it is - the word that explains it all. Anomaly. Different. Wrong. Don’t belong.

Something that was never supposed to exist.

She notices. Lucretia is good at this, the subtle changes in behavior, from years of dangerous cycles, from picking up cultural cues and needing to do it fast. It's hard to say what of this is the source though, but she knows to tread lightly.

"You're unique." She picks, after a moment's deliberation. "It sounds like you have put in a lot of work into cultivating and practicing this power, even without proper instruction. That's quite admirable. And incredibly difficult."

Lucretia isn't properly sure how to finish this thought, but chews on the thought a few seconds before speaking again. "Thank you for trusting me with this."

"I let everybody know." Is that...does that discredit what they just said? Clipping it away, defusing any potential for some sort of secret, for any manner of trust? It seems discourteous to lie to her, to claim that this is something they trust people with, when it's more of a failsafe instead.

It's something everyone should know, in case someone needs to stop them. Someone with the power to know what they are.

"They deserve to. So I don't mess things up for them."

So they won't be tempted.

"That's a lot of pressure to put on yourself." She can't imagine living a life without any kind of secrets; even now, trying to explain all of the things she could do with magic would take much, much too long. "I can't imagine constantly being on display like that. It is... honest. But straining."

She twists her pen in her fingers, the drawing forgotten in favor of conversation. "Though, that is often the weight of responsibility, you needn't be so harsh."

"It's okay." They already know they have to be. That's...what they've always done. For something approaching two years, now, that's been their policy. It's nice of her to pretend otherwise.

It really is nice of her.

They curl both arms up, fists balled up, flexing what poor excuses they have for muscles with an expression of mock intimidation.

"I'm tough."

She can't help the pull of a smile at her lips, the small bit of laughter as she raises her hand to cover it. It's not funny because of their diminutive stature, but there's always a certain humor in such conviction, such drive. It reminds her of her family. It reminds her of a lot of love.

"You remind me a lot of someone I used to know." Lucretia remembers him now, jacket over a shirtless chest, starting a barfight just to stop someone from getting hurt. "He was young, but confident, too. Strong. Willing to be there for others at any cost."

It's charming- even if he needed to be stopped and helped sometimes. "As long as you have friends to help you when you need it, I have no doubt in your abilities."

"I've been here a long time. I have a lot of friends." That's not, strictly speaking, a lie. There's a lot of people here that they've come to want to...to remember, if they could. If they could hold onto those memories forever, they would, even if, realistically, it'll all slip away should they ever disappear.

Should they ever go back to the Underground, and learn to be the anomaly all over again.

"Do you?"

Lucretia hasn't been in Wonderland long enough to peg a number of people as her friends- nice acquaintances, sure. Many good for conversation. But there's really only one person here that knows everything about her, has the caring to reach out and reassure her through anything.

"A few, in this place." Is what she answers, because it's not technically a lie. "More at home, though they are luckily not present. While I miss them, I'm not sure this world is necessarily safer for them. I can ensure their protection back home. Here... it's a bit more complicated."

It makes sense. Considering the nature of the Core and the way it draws souls to it, it’d be safer to be somewhere else. Safer, but not really anything but stagnant. You can’t learn about people at home the way you can here.

What would someone like Frisk be, without the hearts they’ve met, the souls that have touched them?

“It is,” Frisk agrees at last. “You have to decide if it’s worth it.”

“I think it is always worth it.” It’s honest, probably one of the more honest things she’s said the entire discussion. She moves her hands a bit to touch each other, running her thumb over old scars, nicks and scratches. Ways her skin has wrinkled over the slow crawl of time. There’s been a lot of choices she’s made in her life, but that one will always stand at the forefront.

“If there is something I can do for the people who mean the most to me, I’ll do it. And I— I know that may seem foolish, sometimes, but I owe it to them. They have given me so much.” She shifts her pen, wishing for a moment to grab for her staff just to ground herself. “I have to help them. I could never throw that away.”

They sit a little straighter, at that, the corners of their eyes pinching, the edges of their mouth creasing upward by increments. It doesn't sound foolish at all. Not to them.

Not when the long, ponderous walk from the gray-patterned stone of New Home to the clusters of golden flowers underfoot, at the base of the hole at the mountain's summit, would never be enough to coax the two last and most unsalvageable Lost Souls into the sun. Not when no amount of crying or pleading or cajoling or bleeding would bring them back to the lives they never got to live.

It seems terribly cruel, sometimes. That some people simply cannot be SAVED.

"I get it," they say simply. "If you have some sort of special power, isn't it your responsibility to do the right thing?"

Now it’s her turn to let her smile widen, increments of letting herself shine through the person she’s made herself to be. “If you have created a problem… I think you owe it then to make it right. I could not feel right making space for myself in a world that required me to get rid of others’ to do so.”

She doesn’t know if she has some sort of special power, in a way she can quantify. She supposes she used to, when they travelled between worlds, when death was no longer permanent. Lucretia knows how Magnus felt about it as he threw himself to the wolves time after time to save people without a promise of their survival. Knows how Merle felt, heading to his end with the enemy cycle after cycle. But it’s hard. Facing that, especially removed but not quite, is hard.

“I simply look to protect my family and amend the wrongs I have done. For the good of the world and those I love.”

“...you can’t fix everything.”

Stupid. She’d know that, wouldn’t she? She’s older. Wiser. Probably seen more than some kid ever has. What are they doing, acting like they have any authority on a thing like that? Isn’t it admirable that she’s trying to make amends at all, regardless of how successful that might be?

They sink, slightly. Head bowing. Ashamed.

“Sorry.”

She lowers her eyes a bit in turn. Of course, it would be foolish for her to assume she could. But she can try, can’t she?

“No, it’s… it’s alright.” She puts a hand near them, gives them a small smile. “It is important to keep those limitations in mind, but… well, I am aware no plan can come out perfectly.”

Lucretia swallows, a little harder than she wanted to. “But I feel it is better to act than to have done nothing at all. I have been… both people, before. One who has done too little, and one who has done too much. In the end, I think I am happier to have been the person who took the initiative. Who started something, instead of letting it lie in the tension of what it was before.”

merry christmas; i could care less [ open ]

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