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When I was a kid, I fell through a hole in a mountain.
I fell into a land of magical monsters: skeletons and ghosts and talking animal-people. I lived with them. I adventured through their kingdom. I fought them and made friends with them. I trapped them and I freed them. I did it over, and over, and over, and over.
But I didn't. Of course I didn't. Because things like that don't happen. There's no such thing as monsters. There's no such thing as magic. Flowers don't talk. And time doesn't... Well. It just doesn't. Time goes on and on, one moment after another. The way it does now. The way it always has.
None of that ever happened. I was a mixed-up kid, at an extra-rough time in my already rough life. Probably I was ill. Enough people have told me I was. I had dreams, fantasies, hallucinations. That's all they ever were. I believed that. I had to believe it.
Until my fantasies showed up on the news.
One day, between my usual Monday-night dinner of microwave pizza and what was supposed to be my weekly trip out to buy milk and bread and far too much beer, there they were on the TV. Wave after wave of strange, familiar creatures, caught on drone-mounted cameras as they emerged from the side of the mountain to stand blinking in the sunlight. Well, the ones that had eyes were blinking, anyway.
There was news commentary, of course, rapid and breathless, and speeches from politicians and scientists -- human ones, I mean. But I don't remember any of it very well. It was hard to focus on. All I really remember, all I really saw, was the tall, furry woman in the purple robe, telling us all in her calm, warm, reassuring voice that it was time for humans and monsters to live in peace.
I was holding the TV remote. I think I dropped it. I don't really know; all I know is I found it later, halfway across the floor.
"Mom?" I whispered, uncertain, for a moment where that word had come from. My mother had been dead for years, had had as little as possible to do with me for a long, long time before that. But she wasn't even in my mind. The only thing that existed for me was the monster on the television. I was lost in her face, lost in remembered smells: butterscotch and cinnamon, and dust.
"Oh god. Oh god. Mom. Toriel... It's me. It's still me!"
She couldn't hear me. She was only on the TV. But she was real. She was real, and so was everything I'd seen. Everything I'd done.
I threw up on the living room floor. And then I started to cry.
**
After that I called in sick to work, and for the next three days I did nothing except watch the news and go through the same endless loop in my brain:
I need to talk to her. I need to explain. I owe it to them to explain.
And then, No, I don't. I can't help them. I can't explain anything. I owe it to them to stay away.
And then, I owe to to myself to see them. To remember. To know that they're real.
I didn't want to know that they were real, though. And I did. And I didn't.
In the end, I couldn't stand having all of that spinning around on the inside of my head anymore. So I searched online until I found a phone number, a contact line for the press. I called it. It's a simple enough thing, dialing a phone. I could do that without thinking about it. Fortunately.
It was a monster on the other end of the line. I could tell. They always sounded... different, somehow. As if their voices didn't really come from human lungs. Which, of course, they didn't. I'd forgotten that, until now.
"I..." Stay determined, I told myself, and nearly laughed hysterically into the phone. "Hello. I need to speak to T-- To Queen Toriel." Queen. That had confused me at first, why she was wearing the crown. What happened to Asgore?, I wondered. Then I remembered. I'd happened to him. Or maybe Flowey had. I honestly couldn't remember which it was, that last time. Knowing that made my stomach knot with shame. I swallowed and carried on. "It's Frisk," I said. "It's the human. The one who fell. The one who--"
There was a gasp on the other end, and silence. I couldn't finish that sentence, so I started a different one. "If she doesn't want to talk to me, I understand. But please tell her. Please, just tell her. Please." I couldn't seem to stop repeating myself. "Please."
"Um..." came the voice from the other end. "Um... Hold on, okay? Just... hold on."
I held on.
There was hold music. Hold music. Somehow that amused me, actually made me smile. Or maybe it was the music itself that did that. There was something familiar about it, upbeat and boppy. I remembered it, didn't I? I did. Posing with the robot. Mettaton. Oh, god, how could I have forgotten Mettaton? I'd been so terrified of him at first, so humiliated at what he'd done to me for the entertainment of his audience. But I'd come back and done it again, and again. I'd grown to love it, the attention. The drama. The glitter. I could still taste the sequins.
I was on hold for a very long time, long enough to wonder if they'd forgotten me. Which might be only fitting. Finally, though, the monster voice was back. "Are you still there?" it asked.
"Yes."
"She says to come. Come to the monster embassy, tomorrow morning. Can you do that?"
"Yes," I said. "Thank you. Yes."
That evening, I went out and bought a striped shirt. I hadn't worn one since I was a kid, but something in the back of my mind was convinced they wouldn't recognize me without it. When the morning came, though, I couldn't bring myself to put it on. It didn't feel like me anymore.
**
And now... Now here I am again. Mt. Ebott. The mountain that children never come back from.
The "monster embassy" is an uninteresting-looking prefab structure set up at the base of the mountain. Outside, there are humans in uniforms and monsters in armor. They're expecting me, and come forward to help clear a path for me through the crowds of reporters. The humans look at me curiously. The monsters look at me like I'm a monster. The other kind of monster. I guess they must know who I am.
Someone big and green and scaly leads me through a door, all but shoves me through it, then closes it behind us. He stands between the door and me, glaring silently with his arms crossed in front of him. He's trying to scare me, I think, and he's succeeding. I'm staring at him, staring at the door and wondering if I'm ever going to be allowed back through it, and that's why I don't look around until I hear the voice.
"Hello, my child," it says.
Mom.
She's sitting on a chair -- an ordinary chair, not a throne, although she is wearing the crown. She looks the same as I remember her. A little older maybe. Or maybe not, except perhaps around the eyes.
I wanted to talk to her so badly, and now I can't even say hello. I can't make words come out of my mouth. How could I? How could I dare? This woman took me in, loved me, helped me. There were times -- timelines -- where she was my mother, where we'd lived together on the surface and she'd packed my lunch every day before school.
I'd taken that from her, over and over. I'd killed her, over and over. I'd ruined her world. I'd abandoned her. I'd refused to believe she was real. Even before it ended, I'd stopped believing she was real.
I make a sound, a pathetic, childish noise I barely recognize as me.
She stands and comes towards me, a few steps across the small, mostly bare room. Behind me, I hear the guard tense, his armor clanking. I can't look away. I can't look at her, either. I close my eyes.
And then her arms are around me. Her hug is tentative, but I can feel the solidity of her. Fur and robes and magic and everything I'd refused to remember. "My child," she says, "I missed you."
I remember the feeling of Undyne's spears in my gut, killing me over and over until I finally learned how to run away. This feels like that, only worse.
My tears are wetting her fur, and hers are wetting my non-striped shirt, and all I can manage is, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
She pulls back from me and wipes gently at my face with her big, furry hand. It just makes me want to cry harder, but I try to stop. I have to stop.
She gestures past me, in the direction of the guard. "Please go," she says. He shuffles uncomfortably from foot to foot, still clanking. "They will not hurt me," she says. "Go." There's command in that last syllable. A mom voice. A queen voice. The guard bites his scaly lip, shakes his head, and goes. The door shuts behind him. I'm not sure if his absence, and the trust it implies, makes me feel better or worse.
"I can explain," I say.
"You do not need to," she says. "I do not blame you, Frisk. I sent you out of the ruins hoping you would defend yourself, did I not? I cannot fault you for doing so."
"Mom," I say. "You don't know what I did."
I didn't meant to call her that, and the look of tender surprise on her face when she hears it makes me desperately wish I hadn't.
She takes my hand, leads me to a chair, and sits down across from me. She looks so big in the human-sized chair, but she's still smaller than I remember.
"I need to explain," I say.
She inclines her head, quietly listening.
I have to start now. I have to start somewhere. "On the TV," I say, "I saw you with... with Sans." She'd introduced him as her husband. The newscasters had mentioned their kids. It probably shouldn't have surprised me so much. Some of those times when I'd let us reach the surface, things had seemed to be going in that direction. I'd half loved the idea, half feared it, the way I both loved and feared Sans. I may have reset once or twice because of it, because it's so much easier to relive the fun, familiar parts of the story than to stick around for the uncertain life that comes after the happy ending. Easier than trying to be a family with someone who might almost remember the awful things you're capable of doing.
"Yes," she says. "We have been together for a long time." Her voice gets quieter, sadder. "I asked if he would come here today, but he refused. He said he did not wish to see you again. I am sorry. I hope you can understand--"
I can't help the sharp, bitter laugh that comes out of me at this. "Understand? Him not wanting to come and watch you hug the person who killed his brother? Yeah, I think I can understand that. I'd understand a lot worse. I deserve a lot worse."
She's gone silent, and utterly, utterly still. The look on her face... "Oh, shit. Oh, shit. You didn't know. Of course you didn't. He told me that, didn't he? He told me, on the phone. He said if he told you, it'd break your... break your..." I can't continue. There's something in my throat. Something in my heart.
For a moment, she still doesn't move. Then, very quietly, she says, "No, he did not tell me. But I knew. In my soul, I knew."
I lick my lips. My mouth is so dry. I can't help thinking of Undyne, in Hotland. How sometimes I helped her, and sometimes I didn't. I killed her that last time, too, didn't I? "Did he, uh... Did he tell you about the timelines?"
"Yes," she says, and thank god, that's one thing, at least, I don't have to explain. "He told me something was controlling them. Resetting them. Making the same times happen, again and again. He did not say what it was." She looks at me sadly, expectantly. I broke a vase once, in one of the happily-ever-afters that wasn't, and hoped to get away with blaming it on the dog. She'd looked at me with that same expression.
(And, oh god, how had I ever, ever allowed myself to think that might not be real? It was realer than anything. No one in my life was ever this real.)
"It was me," I said. "Well, first it was Flowey, then it was me." Oh, shit, Flowey. Did Sans tell her about that, too? Did he even know? Or Alphys, Alphys might have told her, if she didn't... But, no, her expression doesn't change. There's no pain there, at least no more than was already on her face. So at least I can spare her that.
I draw a deep breath, fold my hands in my lap. "I want to explain," I say. "What it was like for me." This is what I've come here for. I can do this. I can. "When I climbed that mountain, I just wanted to... to get away. My life was not happy. I... don't really want to get into the details." I've ripped enough old wounds open today already. "Probably you could guess a lot of it. And I just so desperately wanted to get away. I didn't care where to. Even if I died, I was okay with that. But then I fell through that hole, and I found you, and you were so nice to me. So much better than my own family ever was. But you scared me, too."
She lets out a small, dismayed groan, and I hold up my hand.
"No, please, don't. You made me afraid of the world outside your door, is what I mean, and you weren't wrong. People out there wanted to kill me. People out there did kill me."
"Oh, my child..."
"Please, stop calling me that. Please. I'm not sure I can get through this if you don't."
She looks sad, but she nods silently, shifting slightly in her chair.
"Right. Like I said, I was afraid to leave you. But I couldn't stay, no matter how much I wanted to. There was this... this voice, in my mind. Something inside me that kept telling me I had to keep going, that my story couldn't end there." I have thoughts, now, about what that voice was. It wasn't all me, I'm pretty sure. But she doesn't need to know about that, either. "So I did. And I was so scared. When people attacked me, I fought back. I killed some of them. And then I met Asgore."
She tenses. I wonder how she feels about Asgore now.
"I felt so terrible for him. He did awful things, but he did them because he believed he had to. I'd... I'd done awful things for the same reason, you know? He wasn't any more evil than I was. Nobody in the Underground was. They were all just trying to live. Like me. They all just wanted their happy ending. So I figured, maybe I could give it to them. I reset time, back to the moment when I'd fallen. That was as far as I could ever go."
"The first time I saw you," she says, "I felt as if it was not the first time. Sans told me that's because it was not."
"It wasn't. It was... I don't know. I lost count. It might have been the hundredth." She tries to stifle the hiss of surprise she makes at that, but I can hear it, anyway. "I'm sorry."
"I am certain you had a reason," she says, but it comes out sounding more like a question.
I press my hands to my forehead for a moment. "Just let me finish telling it, all right?"
"All right, my-- All right."
"So, yeah. I went back, and I fixed things. I wasn't afraid anymore. I was determined. I was the savior of the Underground. I made friends with everyone. It was.... It was the best. Not just because I was the hero, or because everyone loved me. It was so much more fun the second time through. I knew not to be so scared, you know? When I saw Sans for the first time again, he wasn't a scary shape in the forest. He was already just funny little Sans. Papyrus wasn't a weird, shouty, human-hunting enemy, he was sweet, harmless Papyrus. Undyne wasn't a scary monster who wanted to steal my soul-- Well, OK, she was, but she was also a noble warrior trying to save her people. And by that point, I knew I could always get out. I knew I couldn't die for real. So in a bizarre way, it felt... safe. I felt like I belonged there. And by the end, well, there were more monsters who loved me than there were humans who ever did."
Toriel is moving, making to rise from her chair. "Don't hug me again, Mom. Toriel. I don't... I don't deserve it, I don't..."
She wants to, anyway, I can see it. "Please," I say. "Please, don't."
She doesn't. I love her a little more for that, and that hurts, too, on top of everything else.
"Do you get it?" I say, when I feel able to speak again. "I saved you all. I broke the barrier. We all lived together, on the surface. But I just couldn't let it go. There was... There was one person I couldn't save, you know? Never mind who. There just... was. And I felt like I had to go back and try. So I... I undid it. I felt awful, but I told myself, was it really so bad? You monsters wouldn't ever know it happened. Mostly. And I'd just make it all happen again, only better. That's what I told myself. I think it was mostly an excuse, though, now. I just... I just wanted to do it all again. So I did. But I still couldn't.... Well, I still couldn't save the person I wanted to save. So I kept trying. I stayed determined! Over and over and over and over... But it never worked. And... Okay, see, this is it, this is the thing I need to explain, and I don't know if I can, I don't know if it'll make any sense..." I'm talking too fast now. I stop myself abruptly, and feeling terrified I'm never going to be able to start again.
"I am listening," Toriel says. I look at her face, look directly into her eyes, for the first time since I entered this room. She is listening. She's absorbing all of this into herself, isn't she? Adding it all to her own deep well of pain. Maybe she figures she's carved out more than enough room inside her for hers and everyone else's.
I have to finish this. "The thing is," I say, "Flowey warned me. He knew what happens when you start treating time that way, but I didn't believe him. Or didn't believe it applied to me. But it did. When you live the same days over and over again, even the best days of your life, eventually you start to get bored. And when you see the same people doing the same things over and over, saying the same things like they're just reading a script, responding to everything you do in perfectly predictable ways, like puppets, like a movie scene you've rewound a hundred times... They don't feel real to you anymore. They can't. And it becomes easy to..."
I steel myself. I force my voice to be calm. "It becomes easy to not treat them like they're real. You find yourself poking at them, sometimes nastily, just to make something different happen. And it's fine, right? Because you can always just not have done it. You can even... If you start to wonder, maybe, what it would be like to beat them in a fight, a real one, you can, and does it matter if you kill them, when you can just jump back in time and be their friend again and they'll never know the difference?
"But that sort of thing is... It's just like LV, isn't it? There's a concept I haven't thought about in a long time. LOVE. But it is like that. The more you do it, the easier it is. The less you feel bad about it. The less it seems to matter. So... That's what I did. For a long, long time. It was... It was a game to me. I could kill this person, or that person, or everyone, and see what happened. What they'd say, how the timeline would progress after that. I was..." I laugh. It's an ugly laugh. "I was getting to know them better, right? But they all became -- you all became -- less like people to me. You were all just mindless characters in my game, and nothing I did in that game mattered. And the less it mattered, the more boring it got, and the less real it felt. Which just made sense, right? Monsters don't exist! Magic doesn't exist! I only just wanted it to. I wanted somewhere better than my real life, but I messed even that up. And then, finally, I-- I killed Papyrus. Papyrus..." A realization hits me. "Oh, god, you didn't even know him, did you? This version of you didn't, I mean?"
Toriel shakes her head. She looks too stunned to speak.
"He was... He was the best, the sweetest. He was so nice to me. And I killed him, not even for the first time, but this time I didn't feel anything. Which proved it, didn't it? That's what I decided, anyway. I'd proved it couldn't be real. I couldn't be the person who did that, not if it was real. And then I just didn't... I didn't want to live in that fantasy anymore. It wasn't better than real life anymore. So I left. I went through the barrier and back to my own shitty family, and I stopped believing in monsters. And now here you are. Realer than me, and living with everything I did. And..." I draw one last, shuddering deep breath. Almost done. "Well, that's everything I wanted to explain, I guess. I don't even know why. I just... I just wanted you to know. I wanted you to know how sorry I am."
And that's it. I don't have to keep it together anymore. I can stop.
I crumple over in my chair, my head on my knees. I feel empty now, almost calm. I feel ready for judgment.
A minute goes by. Another. At last, Toriel, her voice shaking a little, says, "May I hug you now, my child?"
I don't look up. "Why? You never forgave Asgore, did you?" My voice comes out small and choked. "If you couldn't forgive him, you really can't forgive me."
I feel a hand come to rest on my shoulder. "I did forgive him," she says. "It took a long time. But I have learned to let go of what is in the past."
I look up at her, at her earnest, sad, furry face. And then I close my eyes and reach out with my soul. I can feel it there, still. Distant. Maybe not reachable. But there. The past.
I open my eyes. "I could reset again, I think," I say. "I'm not positive. After all this time--" All this time refusing to look at it, refusing to believe in it. "--I don't have much of a connection with the save point left. There's no way it's going to work automatically when I die again, so you don't need to worry about that. But if I put in enough effort, maybe..." I tilt my head up at her, and I realize suddenly what it is I'm doing. I'm pleading. "I could fix it one last time. For real this time. I could free you to the surface twenty-six years earlier. I could give you the life you were meant to have, and then I could leave you to it, leave you alone, I could--"
I stop. Toriel is shaking. The expression on her face is pure horror. She grabs my arm, gripping so hard I can feel blood welling up under her claws. "Do not!" she says. "Do not dare!" Her voice is shaking, too. I've never heard her sound this angry. Not with Asgore, not with anyone. "You were my child once, but I will kill you myself, before you make me lose the ones I have now!"
Her words wash through me, and leave me feeling strangely clean. Her anger feels more right to me than her forgiveness. And if she feels that way, then that means... Maybe that means...
"Did..." My voice sounds childlike in my own ears, the voice of that unhappy youngster who once tumbled through a mountain and into a bed of flowers. "Did I not screw everything up, then? Did you end up with a life you actually want, even after everything I did? Are you happy? Can I... Can I let it go now?"
I'm not sure what the look is that she's giving me. Pity maybe. Maybe she's thinking that "happy" is far too simple a word to describe anyone's life, let alone hers. But there is no trace of doubt when she gives me her answer. "Yes," she says, as her bruising grip becomes a soothing touch on my arm, then my cheek. "Yes, Frisk. You can let it go."
I close my eyes again. Again, I can feel that glimmering, shimmering, tempting moment in time, the one something deep inside me has held onto for all these years. The promise of a second chance, a do-over, an escape. I focus on that moment, focus on it with all my longing, all my being... and I let it go.
My childhood is over. The dream is over. Now, only the future is real.
"It's done," I say, and open my eyes. And the woman who was once my mother takes me in her arms.