Chapter Text
Toriel’s pen hovered over the paper of her well worn journal. The monster was perched on the edge of her chair waiting, listening for the faintest of sounds from the next room.
The motherly goat monster might never truly know what had happened to Frisk on the surface.
Not knowing was hard to accept.
Not knowing why she wasn’t merely taking care of a child, but rehabilitating one.
The former queen of monsters had lived many years, and in those years she’d seen death, war, and unimaginable cruelty between both monster and human.
So Frisk’s haunted look could only tell The worried monster that something terrible had happened.
The child had seen war, or something close to it.
Toriel recalled the first few days with Frisk. The child was so terrified, it took the monster hours before the monster could even approach. The human was emaciated, and bore scars from blatant abuse all over her body. The fall had injured the poor child further, and the first monster she had wandered into damaged her even more. Toriel was sure the small child’s soul would shatter at any moment.
But the little human girl seemed determined to pull through.
Frisk had been with Toriel a few months. There were improvements, mostly physical, but there were also setbacks.
The goat monster would often find Frisk gripped in a traumatic event that only she could see; the nightmares were constant. It both amazed and frightened Toriel to realize just how much punishment a human soul could endure without breaking. But it pained the monster to see the human struggle.
The other humans who had fallen previously would speak endlessly about the surface and their lives. Both young and old who found themselves here would mention their friends, family, or children that they needed to return to. There was always something up there waiting for them.
They always, always would be upset when they found they couldn’t get home, that they were trapped down here like the rest of monsterkind. And despite Toriel’s warnings of Asgore, the murderous king of the underground, hell-bent on collecting human souls, they would still take their chances and leave and try to make their way to the barrier.
But Frisk was different. She never spoke of her time on the surface; she never spoke of family, or home, or wanting to return to it.
All of the previous humans had wanted to return. All save for one. the first fallen human child, Chara. Like Frisk something had happened to Chara. But that’s where the similarities ended; where Frisk would cower, Chara would lash out.
The first human had been quite the handful, but they had taken to Asriel so well-
Toriel sighed, as she tried to ground herself to keep the painful memories of her past life from flooding in.
While it was decades ago, the death of her own two children felt as fresh as the day it happened.
But she needed to stay strong, for Frisk. Toriel needed to keep the child safe. Above all else the monster needed to keep Frisk safe from the rest of the underground.
The mother monster finished writing her thoughts of the day’s events into her journal. Tucking it safely away in a drawer, she turned to the other open book on her desk.
Toriel had to make sure that an arsenal of jokes were ready for the evening when her friend at the door came to visit after Frisk went to sleep. The former queen looked forward to the company.
Toriel grinned as she jotted down another skeleton pun.