#e!jimmy

Jimmy pouts - bottom lip out, eyes wide and watery and everything. Sausage almost melts on the spot. Scott and Lizzie both told him he'd need some reserve, though. He clears his throat and straightens a bit further.

"We have business to attend to in the morning, I can't stay over-"

"It gets so cold at night though."

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Some people love the toy gag, others are tired of it, I just find it a fascinating plot hook whether he is a toy or not. The head canon that Joel calling Jimmy a toy repeatedly actually turns him into one is everywhere and I love the concept. While brainrotting over this, I had an idea.

Imagine with me, for a moment.

Jimmy is a completely normal human, has been for as long as he can remember. He wholeheartedly knows it, and so does everyone around him. It’s just Jimmy, the completely normal human. Sure, he struggles with his self image a bit, but confidence is key! Fake it til you make it!

The life series happen. He dies first once. Twice. He’s not quite sure when or how it started, but people start calling him a canary. The canary in the coal mine, simply an omen of the death to come. A shock of yellow in the dark and grim, extinguished too soon. He thought nothing of it. It was just a phrase, a nickname. Nothing of any real importance, not definitive about him in particular.

Then he met his soulmate.

It only made sense it was through death, an explosion, the first death on the server. Tango being the coal mine to his canary, they said. The parallels grew, the amount of people mentioning it grew, the amount of times he heard the word canary as synonymous for him grew. 

It wasn’t even always bad. Tango called him Songbird as a term of endearment, and it was rarely ever said with truly malicious intent. 

But just because it wasn’t bad didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.

It hurt when he bolted upright in the middle of the night, back feeling like it was on fire. It hurt as he barely choked back a scream, the skin on his back ripping open. It hurt when hollow bones and bloody golden feathers tore through the gaps. It hurt when fully grown wings developed in a matter of minutes, while Grian had described the process of his own wings growing as a weekslong process, from the forming to the baby wings bursting out to the wings being large enough to fly. It hurt when he cried, even as Tango held his hands, fretting and confused.

But he pushed through it, because that’s what Jimmy did. When things went wrong, when the universe had determined he was the perfect punching bag, he kept going, to show just how poor of a decision it had been.

So he got used to the wings. Eventually learned to navigate with the new weight on his back, stopped bumping into every door frame and tree and chest. He even started building up his wing strength and resolved to talk to Grian when this mess was over to see about flying lessons.

Then he died, a third and final time, and he was thrown to a new world. When he came to, he was human again, no evidence he had ever been any different besides the dandelion yellow flowers scattered around his spawn point. Not even scars on his back where the wings had pushed through in their golden, scarlet glory.

It was just an effect of the life server, the code had gone wrong, he was back to the way he was supposed to be. All of these explanations he heard when he asked the others, most just waving it off. After all, servers changed how they looked all the time. Nothing was wrong.

Jimmy tried to believe them, he really did. But when nightmares come of blood and hollow splintered bones tearing his back to ribbons, phantom pain still making him wince, it was difficult. None of the other changes had ever been that… painful. Real. 

Still, he kept going. Found a desert, built up a town, established a law. He was a sheriff now, dedicated to his Empire and making sure things were right. So what if a stuck-up god decided to make fun of him? So what if he was called pathetic, a toy? Those things didn’t define him. He was human, through and through, no matter what he had been just a single world ago.

Even if he was shrunk by a potion. Even if the comparisons to a plaything became more and more frequent. Even as all respect for him was lost, nothing but a mockery of a sheriff.

It was after the second time getting splashed with the lore potion that it happened. He was small, they weren’t turning him back, and he was just so, so sick of all of this. The Hermits had been brought in on the joke, and now almost everyone he talked to brought it up in some way. Tango was kind enough, he didn’t, and Scott… well, Scott said other things. 

Toy.

It was almost like the word was echoing around in his head as he sat in his sheriff’s office, despite the rage it filled Jimmy with. He wasn't a toy! He was a living, breathing human being! He didn’t have plastic skin, or stuffed intestines, or a pullstring, or soulless glass eyes that couldn’t see anything, not really, not truly. 

Every time someone called him a toy seemed to flood his mind, and tears pricked his eyes. Is that really all he was to these people? To his friends?

The air suddenly grew thick and heavy, and a lightning hot pain shot through every nerve in his body. Unprepared, he fell to his knees, barely keeping a pained screech from escaping his lips. He swayed, barely keeping himself from falling over entirely. 

Jimmy didn’t know what it looked like as his insides scrambled and dissolved and hardened and numbed and hurt. All he knew was the feeling of his bones dissipating, of the phantom sensation of something stabbing his arms and legs and torso, of his back aching as something pushed its way through, so similar yet so different to the wings he had once grown to treasure.

He didn’t see the way the tears in his eyes blended in with their growing glassiness, or know how his torso looked as the organs unspooled themselves inside of him to make way for stuffing. He doesn’t realize until later that the thing protruding from his back is a pullstring, one that doesn’t give him the option of silence if used. He had to look in the mirror to notice the stitches that had woven their way into the seams of his toosofttooplushnotrealenough body. 

He avoids reflections after that, because he is not a toy, no matter what his image says. He can’t be.

He doesn’t know why this happens. Why he seems to be forced to bend to the wills of those around him, to their perceptions of him. He knows he’s human. He has a real, beating heart, even if his chest just feels full and still from the stuffing inside of it, a complete and utter lack of organs. He breathes, filling non-existent lungs with air. He thinks, he feels, even though his head is full of cotton and his face seems empty and lifeless. 

He’s- he’s human. He is, always has been, so why does he keep changing?

Maybe one day, someone will see the signs. One day, someone will tell the shapeshifter what he is, about the powers he can’t control, about how he’s not the universe’s punching bag, not on purpose. They’ll teach him to control his powers, so that he was the one who determined his form, not the whims of others.

But today is not that day. 

Today is the day a plush sheriff squares off against a god, hides from his soulmates of past lives, and longs for the ability to cry all the unshed tears in his unbeating paper heart.

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look, writing body horror is fun. plus i thought of the concept of jimmy being a shapeshifter without control of his powers was a cool solution because as far as he knows, he is human. and he is, most of the time. his power is just very, very easily influenced by repetition.

and even if the words were changed, north always looks at south. beyond limits, beyond systems and beyond time

i love you.

i love.

©️maybe anny