@megalobonia [x]
Nausea twisted in his gut at the sight. There was something upsettingly surreal in the child’s motionlessness, the soul having departed from its vessel and rendering it dead weight as it was dragged carelessly through the water. He didn’t manage to suppress a flinch as the corpse dropped into the river, tossed aside with all the ease of someone skipping stones. It wasn’t--that he necessarily felt pity for them. If anyone knew what humans were capable of, had seen first hand what they were capable of, it was him.
There was the smallest part of him that saw the bloodied creature drift away in the current, and remembered the sight of a village and a culture washed away just as easily. Shattered fragments of men, women, and children drifting among the stones at the bottom of the river, pulled along by the river’s flow. And a very cruel, very cold part of him thought look at that; the water washes you away just as easy--and it serves you right.
If it were them or Sans, them or any monster in the Underground, Grillby wouldn’t have hesitated to make his choice.
(But it had still been... only a child, hadn’t it? A child who had to have been lost. Confused. Probably frightened. How much of a fight had they put up? What had they done, aside from simply having the misfortune of falling down here? He--didn’t know. And he didn’t want to think about it.)
He shook it off, and lifted his gaze to Sans.
The monster he saw in front of him... wasn’t someone he recognized.
And under the weight of that icy blue stare, he felt--purely by instinct--heat of his own gathering at his fists. They shone white in the dark, as if preparing to fight, to defend himself (against Sans?) if he should need to. He looked down at his own fists briefly, an expression flashing across his face somewhere between horror and guilt.
Was he... afraid of him, like this?
Grillby forced himself to look away, only for a few beats. One slow breath, and then another, and the heat slowly began to dissipate. The flames that constituted his hands darkened as they cooled.
‘Finished with your work?’ His tone was terse as he lifted his head again, a thousand emotions straining beneath the words. ‘If so, I’ll ask again. What happened? Are you hurt?’
