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You felt like maybe you could justify calling yourself a good person. Then you met Chara.
Maybe “met” was the wrong word. It was more like Chara seamlessly weaved themself into your life, or even into your own self. Everything you did, Chara was there with a comment, before your own inner monologue even kicked in. Chara was the guiding force in your life, a voice always whispering hints and tricks…and telling you to stab things.
When you first fell, it was just the occasional word, the odd faded echo of another kid’s voice that could easily just have been the wind. But as you kept on going, the words turned into sentences turned into little monologues turned into flat-out narration.
And at first, you had ignored that. Thought that this voice in your head was just like the ones you already had, the ones with scary, otherworldly ideas, the ones that everyone had been very eager to assure you weren’t real. The new voice never interacted with the old ones, though. That was your first clue.
Your first trip through the Underground, you kept smiling and spared everyone. God knows, you even spared that freaking terrifying spider. But that taught you something in itself; you learned that even the scary looking ones aren’t necessarily evil. Which is something you had, quite frankly, picked up from an old Aesop fable when you were about four. You didn’t need to learn that lesson again.
No, what you really needed to learn was what the voice was telling you.
Being kind is good, but sometimes it just doesn’t cut it.
After all you’d been through, you were determined not to hurt others like you’d been hurt yourself so many times. So you kept on sparing, saving, giving mercy. This voice wasn’t like the others. It (no, they) respected your decision, and continued with a harmless commentary of your every move.
This figment of your imagination didn’t seem hell-bent on your self-destruction, which was your second clue.
And once you’d won? Once you’d saved everyone and freed the monsters? You were overjoyed for the first few months, before you realised you missed the adventure. You found yourself, one day, wishing and wishing everything could go back to how it was in the beginning…
And it did. Your entire body hurt once again from the fall. Everything was untouched, nobody knew you anymore. Except the voice.
Determination, the voice said, and you could imagine it being said with a playful grin.
After discovering it was possible, resetting became a way of life for you. You’d save everyone, then reset the timeline so you could save everyone all again. You could play the hero over and over, make old friends in new ways. It was bliss. One of the skeletons, though, sometimes gave you a knowing look and it haunted your dreams.
It was reset #12 when things changed. Call it gradual corrosion, the voice had made a dent. Come on. Come on, Frisk. Kill them. If you don’t like it, you can just reset, right?
And you tried so hard to be a good person and say no, but the voice seemed sad every time you did, they would try not to show it but you know they wanted nothing more than for you to get your hands dusty, for reasons unbeknownst to you.
So one day, having just reset, with the agony still coursing through your bloodstream, you decided it was awfully selfish of you not to give them what they wanted. After all, they were kind of your best friend, even if they weren’t necessarily real.
The voice was kind when your first victim fell. It was a Froggit and you cried and cried for hours. The voice told you it was alright to stop, but with a note of regret that you didn’t like to hear so you soldiered on, massacred the inhabitants of the ruins, turned Toriel into nothing but a pile of dust, looking like the contents of your Grandpa’s urn but actually a lot more sad.
The other voices in your head, the ones that had been there for ages? They sneered at you, told you that you were a worthless, heartless, soulless murderer. But the newer voice? Your narrator? They did nothing but gently egg you on until you picked yourself up off the floor and kept going, and by God, you did not stop until the entire Underground was nothing but a dusty mess making your shoes look dirty.
“Greetings. I am Chara.”
You were staring at a kid, your age or probably a little older, with brown hair almost to their shoulders and a green and yellow striped jumper. They had a big smile on their face and when they spoke, sure enough, it was the voice. The very same one that had been in your head. So the voice had a name—Chara.
“Thank you,” they said with a laugh and a courteous nod. “Your power…well, it awakened me from death!”
You nodded, suddenly without words, as happened rather a lot.
They told you everything about the plan, about how they were reincarnated because they were destined for power. “Together,” they said, “we eradicated the enemy and became strong! Isn’t that wonderful?”
You found yourself nodding your agreement in a bit of a daze because…yeah. It was pretty damn wonderful.
“You’re a great partner” and “we’ll be together forever” rang in your ears. It was a pleasant feeling, so much so that you felt nothing else as you erased the Underground.
*
But that wasn’t the last time.
Chara was kind enough to let you start over again, right back at the start, when you fell, and for nothing more than your soul. But this time something was different—instead of a disembodied voice, you could now see Chara’s ghostly form floating along beside you. This was an infinite source of strength: their smile protected you from falling head-first into your self-loathing thoughts and just giving up. When you were scared and shaking, they were there, patting you on the shoulder even though their ethereal hand phased right through you.
You didn’t just kill everyone, not every time. Sometimes you’d stay at Toriel’s house for months, just after resetting. Of course, nobody else could see Chara, so Toriel had no idea why you were in your room all the time, playing board games with yourself.
You started to develop a language of signs, not like the ones up on the surface because there was no-one there to teach it to you, but you made up your own signs and established them with Chara and Toriel so you could communicate a little better whenever your powers of speech decided to take a break.
One notable occasion was when Chara was demanding that you get some chocolate so they could eat it together with shared control of your body, and you were unable to ask Toriel for any because you hadn’t worked out a sign word for chocolate yet. You felt useless and cried, and when they saw you getting upset Chara cried too.
You and Chara had a lot of hobbies. Board games, playing pretend, mass murder, killing Sans. Oh, killing Sans was fun. A challenge to say the least. He wasn’t strong, not by any means, but he was fast and clever and most importantly pissed off. He was so damn hard to get a hit on, because he was mad and he was determined. Determined wasn’t enough up against pure Determination, though.
But sometimes you just wanted to play board games and eat pie. Murder was fun (only because Chara made it fun) but it’s not something you could do every day, or your fragile heart might just have given out. Sometimes you needed the domesticity, with Toriel telling you to go to bed at a reasonable time, and you and Chara ignoring her and staying up all night for a chess and checkers tournament.
Chara always won at chess, but you were the undefeated master of checkers.
Playing with Chara, weirdly enough, is what restored your faith in humanity. Maybe they were the driving force behind the literal ocean of corpses you left behind, but they cared about you, and that really wasn’t something you were used to. Your whole life above the surface had been comprised of being yelled at and hit and called the wrong name. Up there, every day was torture, so bad you threw yourself down Mount Ebott and hoped to die. Here with Chara, you had fun.
And if you had to kill hundreds, thousands of monsters to get to where you were? You were happy with that.
Screw being a good person. Dust on your hands was a small price to pay for the best thing that ever happened to you.