[It's a burden of relief to know that throughout all of it - there can still be a softness. There's the interlocking of fingers with the nicks in the nails and thin white lines that could almost be an abstruse pattern, linking up across two different canvases. It feels wrong to think that it could almost be pretty. You're not supposed to think those sorts of things are pretty, those pitted craters and remnants of your body's war with itself, the digging and scraping up of skin. And the sores are riper than ever, the skin of their arms pocked and knobbed with ugly, clinging scabby bits, flakes of dried things crusted around the edges of old, old scars they picked open with the absence of anything else to do with their hands. And their knees - their knees are no better.
There's no part of them they haven't dug into at some time or another, it feels like. That, or someone else picked up Frisk's slack. Hair a mess, even after showering, because there's pieces of hair that have been torn out and smoothing strands over the pale bald spots makes it look like you just woke up.
Chara has a - a bluntness to them. Or perhaps that's the wrong word, too callous and harsh. Not blunt, but perhaps - direct. Frisk sidesteps, evasive, dodging the question, dodging the answers, dodging the issues at hand. But Chara has a solidity to them that they've ached to hear again; the willingness to say and do what needs saying and doing, no matter how unpleasant, no matter how poorly it may be accepted.
And they call to attention the obvious. The strangeness of touch, and the way that something so familiar can feel so foreign after so long.]
I'm afraid to hurt you.
[That prompts a laugh, one of their hiccuping, quiet little chokes that could almost be a sob. Ridiculous, right? Only not so much, not anymore, not when they did such a great job of it before then.
In every way it was possible.]
I'm afraid that I forgot how. How to...hold onto something nicely, without hurting it. It's not like I've ever, um, practiced very well with myself.
[A rueful edge, then, the first to enter their tone since the conversation's beginning. Something approaching humor, even if it's of a dark cast.]
no subject
There's no part of them they haven't dug into at some time or another, it feels like. That, or someone else picked up Frisk's slack. Hair a mess, even after showering, because there's pieces of hair that have been torn out and smoothing strands over the pale bald spots makes it look like you just woke up.
Chara has a - a bluntness to them. Or perhaps that's the wrong word, too callous and harsh. Not blunt, but perhaps - direct. Frisk sidesteps, evasive, dodging the question, dodging the answers, dodging the issues at hand. But Chara has a solidity to them that they've ached to hear again; the willingness to say and do what needs saying and doing, no matter how unpleasant, no matter how poorly it may be accepted.
And they call to attention the obvious. The strangeness of touch, and the way that something so familiar can feel so foreign after so long.]
I'm afraid to hurt you.
[That prompts a laugh, one of their hiccuping, quiet little chokes that could almost be a sob. Ridiculous, right? Only not so much, not anymore, not when they did such a great job of it before then.
In every way it was possible.]
I'm afraid that I forgot how. How to...hold onto something nicely, without hurting it. It's not like I've ever, um, practiced very well with myself.
[A rueful edge, then, the first to enter their tone since the conversation's beginning. Something approaching humor, even if it's of a dark cast.]