* The wind is still.

|| [Guard] has every reason to be harsh and cold; the people he could have once called brothers (both as a scholar and as a warrior) BETRAYED him and MURDERED his best friend and near-sister, started a WAR with his OWN PLANS, nearly DUSTED him without remorse, and blamed everything on HIM. ||

        Before the war had began, Gaster had been quite the known scholar throughout most of the known world at that point. (Recall: Gaster’s been alive since ~1200.) Due to his soul being as it was, he had more of a leverage in every day life. However, he was still more or less hard to get along with, considering that he would ofttimes focus more on work than social gatherings, beneficial or not. (He wouldn’t learn this skill much later.)

        He had been approached by a high-tiered general of a close army to make plans, but he was never told what they were for. He simply saw the paycheck and got to work, even though he said he didn’t need the additional bribery, earning him a bit more pocket change for being a “good samaritan” despite being a skeleton monster. 

        However, when he had turned the plans over to the general, he was fired on the spot and “escorted” rather harshly back to his university and watched extremely closely. It’s only at this point did he realize that he may have done something wrong. Though, it doesn’t quite settle in until he hears that a city of monsters--fire elementals, to be exact--had been attacked with catapults infused with magic to hold “boulders” of water, covering the streets with ash and dust. 

                       Gaster hasn’t been the same since.

        Attempting to keep that knowledge to himself as long as possible, he began helping out his close friends, and the king’s family, in the monster cities and encampments (from being run out of mixed cities) as best as he can to counter his own plans, even working himself physically and mentally sick time and time again. Despite everything he had tried to do, when a human that worked alongside the general saw him, the tables turned against him, saying that it’s nice to see another friend among enemies. In that state of mind, three days sleep deprived and mentally unstable from magic over-usage, he couldn’t control himself.

                                 His first kill came that night.

                                         ( but that didn’t save him. )

...and his own kind accepted that, even when they should have KNOWN that he was just a teenager. He had NO IDEA what people could do, until it was far too late. 

        Encampment after encampment blamed him for the war, telling him that he’s not human or monster, just a harbinger of death and destruction. Old friends, new faces, familiar places, worn out words. He’d hear them time and time again, no matter how many lives he saved, no matter how many times he gave them small victories in the war. Eventually, he came to believe it was his fault.

        Though, he took it in stride, saying that he’ll fix this, he’ll fix EVERYTHING, and, only after The Late King’s interference, the harsh shouts and screams ceased to be. (They would always ring in his head, though, whether he realized it at the time or not.) Battle after battle, the hope of the monsters began to return, and he began to hear mumbled apologies, justifications he’d long since told himself making him begin to build up his confidence again. Of course, his confidence made him work even harder, telling the squadrons where to go, where to hit, who to take out to make everyone else run, when to take out everyone, and if you couldn’t control yourself not to fight in certain rushes. He was held on a high pedestal now, and all the children absolutely adored him... everyone came to LOVE him. Until they l o s t.

        The one thing Gaster had forgotten in the time between the beginning and the near-end was that he had told the general to pull out the sneak attacks at the end, and when he remembered, all he could see was FIRE. Fire, for miles and miles, to the point that it seemed that the sky had turned to a sea of fire itself, the clouds plumes of ash and smoke, darkened dust falling from the heavens to taunt him, telling him that these are his fault. All of this is his fault. Body after body fell around him, his own frozen as if caught in time until he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a human trying to sneak up on him.

                          ------    HE SNAPPED.    ------

        Again, and again, and again, his magic pulled the multicolored souls out of the chests of his enemies, the roar of war rumbling in his ears, blocking out the screams of the soon-to-be-dead humans that RUINED him, that tore him apart, from the inside out. Suddenly, an thought rose in his head and his smile became crazed, all sense of rationality slipping from him as he continued to rack up the EXP from the murderers around him. His mental voice became ragged, chiming over and over again, loud and clear as day, howling maniacally over the war drums that pounded in his skull.

                                 ( Eradicate, eradicate! Eradicate the ENEMY! )

        As his LOVE climbed the ranks, he began to feel his soul lose its color, not even remembering what he had felt like with the color. It felt as if his soul was completely black, and only when he was restrained by The Late King’s son, tears streaming down his face, telling him that he can’t lose his best friend, too, did he realize what had truly happened to his soul. The blood of his enemies, the dust of his friends and family ( of his best friend ( his SISTER ) covering his body )... it had turned his soul gray, and there was a crack right down the middle of it. Strangely, though he knew he should have felt something -- pain, intrigue, anger, disgust, nothing came. He was...

                                        E    M    P    T    Y

...and the fact that he’s hardly ever nice to anyone, including himself (in private tho, he’s pretty “conceited” in public), makes me so, so goddamn sad, because after 400+ years of bearing that guilt and lame that was never his, he’s a completely different person, because both humankind and monsterkind were too busy looking for a scapegoat to realize the truth, and when they did realize it, that scholarly child who only wanted to help bring the two races together was shattered--broken and torn apart, with barely a shred to save and those remains were burning to ashes right before their eyes, and it’s their fault.