Right after being turned back from a stone statue, he'd said something about being "dark and tortured for realz now."
What had he been thinking?
Robbie knew he'd never exactly been what some people called cheerful. Heck, how was he supposed to be happy in a god-damn funeral home, where the rooms regularly smelled like corpses and a graveyard was his front lawn? But this was beyond his usual absence of cheer. At least then he could still be happy sometimes, instead of being a swirling mass of macabre, Lovecraftian despair.
He couldn't smile anymore, or laugh. Every time he tried, any time any of his weird rotting mouths so much as twitched in a sign of joviality, it was accompanied by a sharp bolt of pain, easily ten times as unpleasant as when he'd been turned into a statue. He couldn't offer comfort, either – when his parents, his bright and disgustingly cheerful parents, broke down crying because as much as we love our job, you just weren't ready to become a zombie yet, he tried to reach out, to say something nonchalant and self-suffering, just like before, only for the rotting limb he reached out with to sizzle and crackle, and he would suddenly find himself retreating into a corner, hissing with too many mouths at the agony crackling through him.
So yeah. Dark and tortured, for realz?
Just the thought made him want to go back in time and laugh at his younger self. Or flip himself the bird, assuming that he could with these weird tentacle arms.
It only got worse from there.
Days passed, and soon not only was he flinching in pain at every smile, every giggle, every symptom of exuberance on the streets, but some part of him wanted to go so far as to squash it like a bug.
He only noticed it when Tambry came to visit him – oh, he hadn't realized how much he missed her, being the weird thing he was now, until he saw her at the door – and upon seeing her smile, had this disturbing little thought.
I wonder what she'd look like crying.
Probably lots of mascara dripping down her face. Maybe a little bit of lipstick on her teeth, if she bit her lip. Smears of black on her hands from her rubbing her eyes to wipe away tears –
He stopped himself right there, because his thoughts had been wandering down some dark path that was way too dark, even by his standards. The rest of the time was somewhat normal – see her smile, twitch in pain, try to smile back, twitch in pain – until she left later that afternoon looking a little nervous and worried, because she'd recognized the nervousness was actually his newly contagious emotions and was now concerned.
But he didn't really give a damn, because what the BLEEP was wrong with him?
Had he really wanted to make her cry?! The urge had come back, even stronger, and had begun trying to creep spiteful words into their conversation, words that could so easily tear her emotions into the abstract equivalent of bloody pieces -
Words that he had never once thought of saying to her, in the brief month since they'd started dating.
Hell, some of those words he'd been thinking of saying he hadn't known would be hurtful, at least not until that dark little whisper had assured him that oh yes, this is totally real, and did you know Tambry's adopted and she never knew?
And that her old family gave her away because they were addicts and didn't want to waste their precious beer money on a baby?
Tambry may have been his goth girl, through and through, and usually focused more on her phone than anything else, but he knew something like that could hurt her, hurt her somewhere down deep, and do irreversible damage.
After that, the little whispers only got stronger. He'd look at a random somebody walking down the street, and think huh, her husband's cheating on her, I better tell her or hey kid your mom thinks you're stupid and a waste of space or, once, hey mayor, did you know that your great-great aunt was a cyclops, big and ugly?
He'd never felt so horribly, wretchedly evil before, and yet somehow, at the same time, some little lizard-brain part of him was reveling in it.
A week later, when those same dark whispers finally escaped from his stinking mouth and his parents' expressions turned shocked and hurt and furious, he fled to the graveyard and sunk into the first open grave he could find, praying once more that someone would come along and bury whatever he was becoming for good.
Because even now, when he knew he should be feeling shame for what he had spat at the man and woman who had taken care of him for years, he didn't feel a single god-damn spark of it.