*Smells familiar.

[dustless]

[warning for child death, gore, general trauma]

Chara's dead. Chara-and-Frisk.

Slice across the throat. Just the one. Still bad. It makes their own hurt like their scar's peeling open.

But they've got a job to do now, because--Frisk just can't leave them there. To rot. For other people to find.

So they don't.

Takes a lot of work, figuring out how to move their body. Dragging's horrible, even when they thought about using a blanket or something. Carrying them fails, because they're literal dead weight, even if they're pretty scrawny.

In the end, they manage to shift them around until they've got the corpse on their back. The most disgusting and macabre piggyback ride, and Frisk needs to keep being hunched over uncomfortably for it to work, but. It does.

It also leaves them completely covered in blood, especially the half where Chara's head ends up lolling, sending rivulets of red down that side and makes a trail all the way from the bottom of the stairs to the garden. Frisk's not really aware of that. Frisk's not really aware of anything except the steps they need to take.

Bring the body outside, to the garden. Not far from where their body and the first Chara's were buried, actually, though a little more concealed behind a stand of trees. Go get a shovel. Dig.

They won't be able to dig as deep as six feet alone, and they can't build a coffin. Doesn't matter. Frisk just needs to make it big enough for them to fit under the dirt.

Chara-and-Frisk will be back soon enough.






Addendum: one more body, one more burial.

Comments

[havesomefun]

All he wants is fear. Jack knows what that's like, and he hates that he knows. He knows now how easy it is to just leave everything else behind and focus on that hunger. He hates thta that knowledge is in him now, and Pitch is the easiest person to blame for that.

So Frisk charging through them both is perhaps the only thing that would stop him attacking in that moment. It does, and suddenly Jack is...nowhere, and nothing, and he pulls himself away from both child and enemy with a startled cry of shock and pain. He stumbles and staggers back, holding his staff up defensively in front of himself, before his vision clears and he focuses on Frisk and for a moment Jack looks betrayed.

...only for a moment, though. Then he comes to his senses.

"Get out of here, Pitch."

[boogerman]

Feet. Little child feet are stomping through him, sucking all the warmth and goodness and self out of the world. He hadn't managed to sit up in time. They're walking all through him, his legs his stomach and chest his face--

He's not real. Real things are solid. You can't walk through beds, tables, and walls. Pain he can handle. Slammed into walls, pulled apart by evil vines, burned and crushed by light, bones shattering? Not a big deal. This feeling of being hollow, turned inside out... nope. He's making a wheezy whining sound which is probably meant to be a shriek.

Then he's scrambling up, clumsy as a drunk, and collapsing into the shadows like a dying black hole. Time to go submerge himself at the bottom of the underground lake. He doesn't breathe and no one will ever find him there. Pitch is out.

:'I

[dustless]

Frisk twists and circles around them both, not watching Pitch disappear, even if the sound he made makes their chest tight despite everything.

(It's still you.)

They stop and stoop by Chara-and-Frisk's body, picking the shovel up. "Sorry," Frisk tells them, because the shovel landed on their arm. They can't feel it, probably can't hear it, but they don't care. Feels better than not.

Jack's still here, and they don't want that. They step around again, too late, standing protectively in front of the corpse. Blocking it. "You too," they demand roughly, holding the shovel the same way he does his staff.

[havesomefun]

Jack doesn't notice Pitch leave, at first - he remains huddled on the ground, shaking the way any other being would in a gust of freezing wind. But even when that shock fades, it only leads to him being free to feel the equally icy force of Frisk's glare.

He looks up at them, and has just enough time to register that Pitch is gone before he hastily has to look away again. Jack opens his mouth, closes it, gulps, then tries again.

"...can I stay? Please? I...I want to help. Look," he adds hastily, and holds up a hand. Ice crystallizes above it, taking shape, spreading out, until it forms a shovel as well. "I can help you dig."

[dustless]

"No!" they snap viciously, chest constricting. He wasn't supposed to be here! He wasn't supposed to see this. He...

...he looks so scared. Of them. Of what they did.

And still, he wants to help them.

"No," they repeat, quietly. "You...you shouldn't--" their voice breaks off into a horrible sound, a rusting doorhinge and a wounded dog.


"Please. Please go 'way, Jack."

[havesomefun]

He should. He should just go, they've made themselves clear. But...they also look to be in so much pain. He can't turn his back on that so easily.

Jack ran away too, once. He thought he wanted to be alone, but...he was still so grateful later that Baby Tooth came to look for him.

His expression flickers like he's just been slapped, when they make that noise. But then Jack gets slowly, carefully back to his feet, and creeps a few paces closer.

"...you shouldn't have to do this alone, either." He bends down a little, to better look them in the eye. "It's okay, to need help. I want to help. That's supposed to be what I'm for. I'm not...I'm not mad at you, Frisk. I know you just wanted us to stop." He wants to offer a hand, but...both of them are occupied. So after a moment's wavering hesitation, he jams his staff down into the dead grass to wait on him for a little while.

[dustless]

He's a blur blue and white in front of their eyes. They can't tell exactly how close he is that way. They lean back, though, because they don't...actually want to do it again. Go through him. There's no reason to. Yet. Not trying to touch Chara-and-Frisk. And--even if he did, he wouldn't...throw them away.

It'd be easier if he was mad. It'd be easier to yell at him to leave some more.

Frisk moves the shovel so the scoop's hiding their face, and hiding Jack from them too. "J-Jack you--you--you--d-d-don't--" but they can't get anything else out.

[havesomefun]

He would never throw them away. He would never condemn them to sinking through emptiness, discarded and left behind...like he was. Even if it wouldn't be forever. It wasn't for him, either.

Funerals are important.

Jack reaches out when Frisk hides their face, but stops himself. He looks between them and the bloody, motionless body left on the grass. Then he takes a deep breath, and makes a decision.

The dirt makes a very satisfying sound when he drives his shovel down into it, just next to Chara-and-Frisk.

"This spot okay?" He looks over to Frisk for confirmation, before he lifts any soil free.

luv the irony of jack's username showing up for this thread's alert

[dustless]

They flinch, head bowing to hide even further.

Why won't you go away, Jack?

The wait will be uncomfortably long. They can feel the blood cooling through this shirt, 'cause he's so close.

But they do look. Eventually. After they stop shaking as much, when they can get breathing right again. "...yeah. It's. Fine." They're tired.

They turn and move and flip the shovel, pressing it into the ground. It doesn't go as deep, even though it should, being metal instead of ice. Maybe it's better they've got some help after all...

...they get distracted by staring at them again. The body. They pulled the collar of Chara's shirt up over their throat, but it's still obvious what's under there.

[havesomefun]

Jack, meanwhile, has to focus a lot on keeping his shovel as a shovel. Splintered pieces and small chunks of it break off every time he drives it down into the soil, stress cracks appear like new spiderwebs every time he lifts up a load to toss it aside. It's easy enough to renew and regenerate, but it still requires enough focus that he doesn't look up until Frisk moves away from the newly forming grave, back to the body. Jack glances up, and then finds he can't look away right away. Instead, he rests himself against the shovel the way he would his staff, staring sadly at...them.

"Do you know what happened?"

[dustless]

So he doesn't think it's them who did it. Another strike against Pitch, they guess.

"Yeah. And. 'M not gonna talk about it." They don't want the news to be spread today--about the other one. They don't want to need to bury another Chara. Or...even have one locked up, really. Felt wrong for the first one. They can admit, at least to themselves, that they were relieved when they heard they were out.

Enough. Enough thinking, they've got this to do, it's important.

Frisk squares their shoulders and get to digging.

[havesomefun]

Jack hesitates, wavering over whether or not to ask any further. One look at their expression is almost enough to make him back down entirely. There's just something very...definite about the way they're wielding a shovel much too big for them.

But the weight of the doll in the pocket of his hoodie is just that bit too much to ignore, now that he's getting involved in things again. So even as Jack digs beside them, he tries again.

"I know it's hard to think about. But...I should know who did this. So I can make sure they don't hurt anybody else."

Like you, he can't quite bring himself to say.

[dustless]

"It's not." Really, it's not hard to think about, logically (Frisk thinks). They don't want revenge; they want to trust the Chara they'd talked with, to give them a chance. They don't know what happened. They're going to try to figure it out in three days.

"It's...it's not...you don't need to do that. Punish."

[havesomefun]

Jack grits his teeth, feeling a hopeless, helpless ache in his heart at Frisk's continued stubborn refusal. "Yes, I do." There's no holding back the bitterness in his voice, the pent-up anguish that he's taking out in the dirt beneath their feet now that he can't take it out on Pitch. "That's what I am. It's what I'm for. I'm supposed to protect kids! That's why I exist!" He digs the shovel into the dirt hard enough that an edge cracks off of it, and makes a frustrated sort of noise that sounds a little close to a sob. The shovel doesn't heal itself right away.

"And this place already tried to take that from me! It turned me into something like...him." He says the word with enough vehement disgust that Frisk can probably guess who is meant. The dirt starts to freeze up around him. He doesn't seem to have noticed right away.

[dustless]

Mechanically, Frisk keeps digging.

"Jack...it's...no. No, you don't...you don't want to know." They should be reassuring him. They can't.

That frost is getting a little too close. "'F you're gonna freeze where they're gonna get put, you need to go."