Chapter Text
Asriel Dreemur woke to the sound of a ringing phone.
He’d been dreaming until his phone went off. Dreaming of… what had it been, again? It had been a happy dream. Kris and him had been children, running through a field of flowers. That was it, he thought. A field of golden flowers.
Lying under his sheets, he groaned, and kept his eyes stubbornly shut. The phone kept ringing - it was an actual call, not his alarm for class. They’d hang up soon enough.
His phone kept ringing for a while longer, before falling silent. He was almost dreaming again when it started to ring again.
At this point, he forced his eyes open, staring up at the ceiling of his dorm room. He sat up, propping himself up with an arm, and pushed his blanket off of his form and onto the floor. The morning sun shone in the sky outside of his dorm window. It was a bright spring day. Stumbling out of bed, he walked across the room, half awake. Picking up his phone, he checked the caller id. If it was Burgerpants calling drunk again… he didn’t want to think about that. It had better not be.
The caller ID read “Dad”. Asriel picked up the phone.
“What is it?”, he asked, as exasperated as he was exhausted. Why on earth was dad calling so early?
“I’m sorry,” he heard his father say. “I… I need to tell you something. I think you should come home.”
“What? Dad, I’ll be home in less than a week.”
“Asriel…” his father said. “I think we may need you home sooner.” His father sounded distraught, Asriel realized. Not just melancholy, like he got sometimes.
It sounded like Asgore was trying to hold back tears.
“Um. Dad. What’s wrong? Are you ok?”
“Ah, no, not really, not at all… Asriel, Kris is in the hospital. We’re not sure… um, that is, the doctors are confused. They don’t know why they’re not waking up. Asriel, I’m - no, I shouldn’t burden you with my, ah, emotions. The doctors are calling it a, um, coma. They don’t have any idea why. No more than I do.”
Asriel stood there, frozen still as a statue processing what he’d heard. The worry he’d had about Burgerpants drunkenly pestering him suddenly felt very far away.
He took a seat on his bed, slowly, his fuzzy hands gripping his phone tight. He didn’t say anything, didn’t trust himself to not to start sobbing like a child if he began to speak. His father eventually continued, as Asriel numbly stared at his plaster dorm room wall, trying not to panic.
“Are - are you able to drive down here? Kris is, um, in the hospital in Hometown. Toriel is - she’s praying, she’s been praying for hours. I don’t dare interrupt her. I wouldn’t dare even if we were, ah, still married. She’s scared.”
It would be quite a long drive. Exams were coming up, and he knew the importance of his grades. But his family needed him, and that took priority.
“I’ll head over as soon as I can manage. Today. Stay strong, okay, dad? I’ll be there in a couple hours.”
After he hung up, alone in his dorm, he stood up. Getting his things together for a long drive home, he began to cry - soft, quiet sobs.
Everything would be okay. Kris would be okay. They had to. Please.
——
Driving home was difficult. It was hard to drive with the fear digging into him, sharp as a knife. Memories of his family that had once been happy felt more painful now, even more so than when his parents had divorced. At least his parents were in good health. They had decades left in them, he hoped. But Kris had fallen down.
Fallen Down - Asriel knew it didn’t work like that for humans, for people like Kris. They were far too young, besides. When monsters grow weak, old, sick, they invariably grew sluggish, and often the magic in them fades, and slowly dissipates, until they are truly gone. Then they were with the Angel, as Father Alvin said. He remembered exactly where he’d been when he heard old Mr. Gerson, who had inspired him to study history, had fallen down. It had been a tuesday, in the school cafeteria. The old teacher was dead in under a week.
But humans were complicated. They were sturdier than monsters, made of bone and sinew and muscle and blood, instead of magic. They had magic in their souls, of course, but that was bound deep in their hearts. Humans didn’t die from their magic fading, they died from their bodies giving out on them. Human doctors had all these long names for all sorts of conditions humans could get, from neuroses in the brain to failure of the liver. Humans were stronger, and could recover from many sorts of injuries with time, and more with healing magic. But while Asriel wasn’t a human doctor, and barely proficient in healing magic, he knew what a coma was. It wasn’t something people always woke up from.
As Asriel drove out of the city, into the countryside, he remembered when he’d first gone off to college. The long drive down from their little town to the big city had been… fun. Asriel had done the driving there himself though he’d only had his driver's license for a year or so. Still, he’d not gone alone. Toriel and even Kris had come along, helped him get everything unpacked and in his dorm. Kris didn’t have school until the week after his college started, so they’d insisted on coming along and seeing his big brother off to college. Asriel remembered putting music on the car speakers, Kris and him singing along to a CD of Shyren’s Greatest Hits. He recalled the late fall night when they reached the city, and Kris gasping at how impossibly tall the buildings were.
He remembered Kris had been sad that he was going off to college - they’d asked him to stay home, which Asriel declined as politely as he could manage. He’d already paid the first semester’s tuition, after all. There were teary-eyed farewells, waving goodbye in the cool autumn air. They’d kept in touch by text, of course, but that was the last time he’d seen his brother.
Asriel wondered what he’d missed, these last two and a half years. He’d had his reasons for not coming home sooner - double majoring in history and sociology was not exactly easy, and it kept him quite frantically busy. There had been the internship with his professor last summer, and the job he’d had in the city the summer before that. Spring breaks were spent studying. And besides, he didn’t want to witness any more arguments between his parents. They both loved him and Kris, but they couldn’t stand each other, not anymore.
As Asriel drove home, his tears came in stops and starts. Right now they were flowing steadily, with thoughts of that night years ago where he’d waved goodbye to Kris. He could barely see through the tears.
Pulling over to the side of the long road home, he tried to take deep breaths, tried to calm himself. Kris was a tough kid, he told himself. They’ll be okay, he thought, and they’d laugh together about the old times, the bright days of their childhood. A long future was ahead of them. No need to cry, not now. He had to keep driving, if he wanted to see his sibling soon.
Asriel wiped his tears away, and started the car up again. He’d be home soon.