hadriel | video/action (forward-dated to 4/20); while collecting the stars, i connected the dots

[The video wobbles a minute before it steadies, locking onto a grinning skull. It's your friendly neighborhood skeleton, Sans, looking undeniably pleased with himself as he comments to someone just off screen:]

'S lookin' great so far.

[There's a fumbling tapping as the feed gets jostled, and Sans is forced to set the thing onto the ground, face-down. At least the audio filters through, unimpeded if a bit muffled.]

All right. We ready?

[There's a distant sound of affirmation - two, actually, though one sounds a mite more stammered than the first. Kate, it seems, hadn't much wanted to take part in the announcement itself. So when the feed swings up again, there's two distinctively non-human shapes in the periphery - a yellow, lizardlike creature and a small black hedgehog that sharp-eyed cave-dwellers might recognize as Alphys and Shadow, respectively. The video jerks again, blurring the twin blazes of color into smeared linear streaks, and the cave gets a lovely shot of Sans's pink fuzzy slippers in preparation for the finale.

There's a click of fleshless fingers snapping; hundreds of tiny, glowing objects being displaced and then replaced, buried into the rock of the ceiling. Takes a lot out of a skeleton and leaves him a bit stooped from the effort, but it's worth it.

The camera swings up again to pan across the ceiling, now lit with a vast array of blue sparkling stones.]

It ain't Tranquility's illusions, but... [One last whip-pan back to Sans's face, and he winks at the camera, lookin' just a tiny bit more on the edge of exhaustion than usual. Just a hair.] You can consider it a good constellation prize.

[Enjoy the night sky, Hadriel. It'll last for quite a while. Sans, for his part, plans to be stargazing all night. Feel free to find him at the lake, if you're real interested.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

No. But I can hear what hurts. And I can help it not to.

Yeah, well, that ain't what anyone here is askin' you to do.

You can't know what'd be most helpful for everybody, no matter how much you might think it.

It's what I am. I can't do anything else.

Sounds like a personal problem.

[And also a profound failure of imagination.]

Spirits are different than people. They're only one thing.

[So he's a spirit. That was an extremely roundabout conversation to have to finally establish that one basic fact.]

You ever tried bein' anything else? 'Cause I hate to break it to ya, but you got all the time in the world down here to figure that out.

I was almost a person, once. I slipped in, solid and stuck. I don't remember why. But it's why I was Cole. It's better being not a person. I can hear more, heal more, help more.

Maybe consider, for a sec here, that your version of "helping" ain't the same as everyone else's.

[Simplistic, for one. Overly reductive for another. He could go on.]

It isn't always forgetting. It's different. The hurts need different things.

And sometimes it just needs to be.

[Having a permanence to pain ain't a pleasant experience. But he'll take it over having every shade of it scrubbed away, leaving only a vague echo, an impression of something that must have hurt or stung, blocking his capacity for hurt into a numbed, desensitized shade of its former self.

He'll take that, every time.]

Maybe. But it shouldn't keep people stuck.

Maybe you got no clue what it is that gets people stuck, pal.

Unless you ever thought of asking. But that's outta the question, right? No point in that sorta thing.