i've made up my mind over and over; keep pressing rewind [open]

[determinedest]

Who: Frisk and YOU
Where: All over the mansion
When: 2/04 - 2/08
Rating: PG-13 for Bad Thoughts and implied suicide attempt
Summary: * If you DO end up erasing everything...you have to erase my memories, too. I’m sorry.
The Story:

[* There is one last thing.]

                          [* One last threat.]

                                                      [* One being with the power to erase EVERYTHING…]

                                                                                                                       [* Everything everyone’s worked so hard for.]

[* You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?]

[* That’s right.]
[* Despite everything...]



[* It's still YOU.]

Comments

[determinedest]

[Time continues to move. It continues to move until it - RESETs. Leaps back to its origin point. Ha ha...that's their fault, isn't it? It always has been. The special power, the power everyone was fighting to stop - no one's that cruel. Only the anomaly is that cruel.

The shape of a man draws closer. They've not been convincing enough, or perhaps he's simply the sort of person they can recognize best; the sort that holds sacrifice as the sole action one can take with the hope of meaning, and of success.

The only kind of love that isn't LOVE is sacrifice, and however well-meaning, there will always be someone who will take issue with it.

Like now.

Now, a larger hand brushes at them, and they react immediately, explosively, adrenaline-fueled and desperate, attempting to press away from him even as he reaches to steer them to safety.

"Safety" is relative, and creatures like them do not deserve it.]

[directed]

[Perhaps if Rip could know what the child attempts to do, he could see the logic behind it. He is that sort of man; not a good person, but one who counts the cost and weighs them each, and picks the path of greater good. It's why when he watched one comrade knock out another to take his place, to commit heroic suicide in place of the man the future dictated would die, Rip had listened to Mick's wish to go.

He'd hesitated, to be sure, but in the end? If he'd forced that stubborn man away, all three of them would've ended up dead. What would've been the point in that case?

He cannot save everyone. This lesson Rip knows. But now, perhaps, he can save someone.

He draws near enough to almost reach, but the child moves away before his fingers find purchase. There are so many reasons why that might be: Wonderland is full of dangers, and the water dark, cold. There's every chance this child has no idea someone is attempting a rescue rather than something far more cruel and nefarious.

(Is does not occur to Rip that the child wants to die. No child should want to die.)

He tries again, ignoring the screams of his lungs, the tinges of color edging their way into his vision. He's running out of time, and so is this child. If he is to do anything it must be now.

I never got to teach him how to swim. There just never seemed to be--the time.

He is not gentle when he reaches out again, grasps an arm or a leg, wherever he can find purchase. He does not yield even when the child begins to struggle, instead pulling them firmly against his body.]

cw for allusions to child abuse

[determinedest]

[Perhaps, with what little power he has -

He can SAVE someone who does not deserve it.

He is not gentle when he reaches out again; adults are never gentle. A hand to their arm, and then to their leg, and the panic had been distant up until this point, rifting and tepid, a dulled-away acceptance of death as it would come to them, because it always does. They've never drowned before. Some fragment of their mind is morbidly curious as to how it would feel. Impalement, burning, stabbing, crushing - they've lived the spectrum of all of them, and yet the closest they've come to drowning is the cascade of their body as it tumbled into the inky dark of the garbage dump, landing with a dull thump upon a mat of golden flowers.

Memory may as well be rooted into those flowers as completely and intricately as pollen. The flooded mansion halls are nothing like the smell of sea grass and the soft squish of mud underfoot as they tread through Waterfall.

Adults are never gentle.

They're pulled to him, and the grip of someone else's hands, ironclad over their wrists, is what prefaces the bruises in the shape of fingerprints on their neck and on the small of their back and on their shoulders. Hold still hold still if you won't hold still I will have to make you hold still - and yet they thrash, persistently, their struggles nauseatingly weak despite the adrenaline bubbling in their bloodstream, because a darkness has already begun to wreathe their vision.

Sans was right, you see.

They never did learn how to QUIT.

So give them, please -
Give them what they deserve.
The chance to repent. To set things right. If the timeline withers with them, then they'll know, they'll know for certain, that it's their fault. They'll fix it. Please, just let them fix it. They'll be good. They'll be good.

Show some MERCY, human.]

cw for dying

[directed]

[The fleeting though is there, almost an instinct trained into him, that with the right tool and a flash of light Rip could make those struggles cease. Yet he does not have his stunner, nor would he count on it to work properly in this prison. There is not even time to try, for as the child struggles they force precious air from Rip's lungs, bubbles float free and time ticks on and ever on.

He has a seconds; a minute at most (this is being generous).

The child is too weak, and Rip, stronger than most might expect given his slender frame. He kicks his legs, heads back towards the room only a few doors away (only a few, he tells himself; only a few, so keep going, keep--)

It's so much harder to see; the water grows darker, and Rip knows better, but he tells himself that anyway.

The child doesn't struggle nearly so much now. It's fortunate and not; the room is close, the door closed, and he has to open it, pull it, and God how much effort does it take for that much? He's already aware of the strength required to pull himself from the heavy flood into the air. Safety is right there, yet beyond him.

He can't resist the urge, the desperate need of his body. It doesn't matter that he's surrounded by fluid rather than air; he sucks it in anyway, and pushes the child forward, past that final barrier with a prayer that please, please whatever powers that be, let the child take in a breath.

Let them breathe.

Let no one find them, as he had once. Let no one feel the pain of cradling their dead child as he had his son.

Angels--

Ministers of grace--

Have mercy, indeed.]

[determinedest]

[It strikes them, occurs to them far too late, what it is that he's doing. It's not holding them still to box their wrists, it's not wrestling them into submission like the filthy thing they are. They jerk in his grip; once, twice, feebly, but it's not nearly enough.

He's doing this for them. He's doing this to watch over them, and protect them.

That opens to their SOUL a new bridging, sickening scream of panic, a formless, wordless burst of sound that tears from their throat, that would have been a quiet cry of dismay, because if anyone should have gone this way it should be them, it should be them, they're the one that did this they're the one that deserves it.

The last pocket of air is Ripped from their lungs as they're thrust at the door and go spilling through the portal with a sputtering cough, water sticking to the inside of their throat.

A glance over their shoulder, and the door swings shut.

Palms and forehead press to the door as they sag against it for support, the cut edge of their teeth and the slump of their shoulders marking defeat in every line. Their hair clings wetly to their forehead, the nape of their neck as they crouch there - trembling with exhaustion and goosebumps shivering down their flesh, wholly drenched but alive.

Alive.

They did this.



Once again. They did this.

Twisted MERCY into something sick and horrifying, and someone else paid the price for it. Someone always does. It should have been them. It should have been.




Look at what you've done.]