Work Text:
Toriel does not know how old they were when they fell… or after.
(She has never been able to learn that, no matter how many records she has searched for. It seems no one up here cared to preserve them.)
It seems like such a simple thing to ask, and yet she did not. Age for her own kind was largely irrelevant, marked in the passing of milestones and important moments. The numbers had very little meaning to her.
They never provided a number. And she never asked.
Now, she has met other human children and grown close to them, and each one smiles brags upon introduction. “My name is…. And I’m… years old!”
It is a near-constant.
The passing of years means so much to those children. It is a core of their very identity.
And they did not provide one.
It’s another thing she never knew was wrong. Another thing amongst many. So, so many things her child never told her, and so so many things she did not understand. And she should have. It’s only through context, years and years and years own the line, that she understands things about them that they didn’t want her to understand, (that they needed her to understand.)
But they are gone, and so she tries to remember.
There are videos here and there. Photographs. Many have been lost to time, or to misplacement. Cassettes not made to last and polaroids dimmed with age, and yet… none of them captured the things she wants to remember. Their eyes and how they lit up at the paperwork or the trowel or the set of chairs, four, for the table. The way their hands, seemingly so small and fragile, could hold tools they didn’t need with a strength she should have never found surprising, but still gently tend to the flowers. She remembers their hands on her face, smaller than Asriel’s, completely different to his.
She remembers their hope and their compassion and their unending love for their family. She remembers their soul and determination.
And there are things she should remember that she does not. Darker things she should have noticed. Quiet things they hid that she should have found. There are things she once tried to forget, in her grief, out of self-preservation, and only now that she’s away does the loss of these things sting. The unhappy memories that were just as much a part of them. Pieces that she ignored.
And if she had not ignored the things that scared her, scarred her, maybe she would no longer be here, and in her place, old worn hands, both strong and gentle, and wrinkled eyes that knew both hope and love and far too many things, or a plaque with a name and an age and so many more flowers than she alone was able to manage, so much more than what they had in the end. There should be parks and gardens and bowls full of chocolate candies that never go untouched, that must be replenished every day. They should be everywhere, and they are not.
She should have known. She should have seen. She should have understood the things they could not tell her.
She has helped and taught so many children, but she wishes she could have helped at least that one more.
Some days their face is just a worn photograph in her mind. It's not like Asriel, who she sees in the mirror in the corner of her eye, or hears on the wind from another room when all else is quiet, only to realize he isn't there. The world is worse for the utter lack of them she finds. There are no haunting reminders.
She must make her own.
She tries to remember how they used to hug her, and that, at least, is easy, for Frisk hugs her the same way.