Of a Better World

Slow Becomings

Horror was well aware that he was far from an interesting person. It was a fact of life he'd come to terms with a long, long time ago. Back when food was still in stock and Undyne wasn't mad with hunger. Before the blood on his hands, the hole in his head, and the gaps in his memory.

He didn't mind being unmemorable for the most part, he saved him trouble in the long run. Aside from his fearsome appearance— jagged teeth and stained clothes and blood red eyes, there was a certain pride he had in being just your average joe. Horror read what little there was to read, he sat in his thoughts the few times of day they brightened into something more palatable, and he slept whenever the night terrors relented; crawling back into the hole in his head from which they came, resting to torment him another day. His life was little, always focused around the epicenter that was his next meal. It was shallow. But it was fine. He didn't mind much anymore.

Lust was something a bit more interesting, he supposed; a colorful personality with the delivery to make it work. Although that was something that went without saying; a truth realized when you stepped into a room and didn't even have to turn a light on because there he was, in all his sunlit glory, illuminating the room with that million watt smile.

So it's only right that the story went like this: Horror's world becomes very lively, and then very dull. There's a series of steps you can trace to follow the progression of the story, each one falling into the next like the downward slope of a hill once the top has been reached.
Act one turned into act two and it all happened just like a sequence of natural consequences— what goes up must come down. 

Horror meets Lust, and his world explodes.

Not in a literal sense, and not even in a particularly spectacular way to be honest. But it explodes in the way that there's another pair of shoes beside the door alongside his and his brother's. How when he comes home from another useless patrol there's chatter abound as Crooks and Lust manage to drag  out a conversation about absolutely nothing for yet another day. It's in how they sit him down and manage to get him involved in a debate over something so obscure that he'd be more interested in talking about what led them to stumble upon the subject in the first place.

(No, he doesn't think artificial intelligences need citizenships. No, Mettaton does not count.)

It explodes with the sound of a bell jingling and a dog barking on the other side of his door at the crack of dawn every morning as Lust rises to head down to the living room. This tiny terror Lust has made a pet of paws at Horror's door like the irreverent little shit it, yelping it's demands that he follow as well. So two obedient mutts follow Lust downstairs.

It explodes in a way that made Horror wince everytime he sat on a paper star he hadn't quite seen, or how he had to be careful not to accidentally step on little paws now, or how a electric shiver shot down his spine every time Lust touched his shoulder to make sure he hadn't drifted off in the middle of his story about how he'd gotten black out drunk in a bar and somehow ended up working there as a bartender for the rest of the night.

What goes up must come down, but they don't really tell you how dreadful the ground seems after touching the stars. He knew whatever this was couldn't last forever, but it's no less of a shock to him when it ends.

Lust stops talking to him. Stops sitting with him. Stops living with him for all intents and purposes.

Lust all but cutting him off feels like the loss of a well loved limb, it sends him reeling as he was suddenly spat out of what felt like it could have only been a daydream, stumbling and unbalanced, still used to trying to account for Lust's weight. 

Horror's life returns back to its own bland normalcy, hyperactive time slows to a sluggish snail's pace— technicolor vision turns monochrome.

He remembers quite a bit about life before Lust came, but he doesn't remember even more. The house has a stifling sort of chill he had never really noticed; a true kind of cold that filled you up from the inside and spilled out. The eerie silence had gone overlooked most of the time too— the groans and creaking of the house's aged bones being the only voice to keep him up at night. Quiet sprawled out like ivy vines and straddled the walls in his absence.