Work Text:
There is an old box of toys. A shut wardrobe. A lamp with a dead bulb. A peeling sheet of paper taped on the wall. A fraying carpet. A picture frame, glass cloudy. Two neatly made beds. It smells a lot like dust and a little like pollen. The room almost looks like it's graying with age.
Roots peak from the floorboards, spindling up like a weed growing through gaps in a brick path, meeting to form a stem and a flower. The flower has an uncharacteristic blank look on it's generally more uncharacteristic face.
The flower pictures a blurry figure, walking down a blurry hallway. It’s a hazy vision, an unclear outcome, an uncertainty. A discomfort, an excitement, a little bit of hope. The figure has an obscured face. It could be anybody.
But the flower knows who it is. Which is why it grows here. It’s a malformed weed sprouting from a decomposing corpse, splitting through splinters of a rotting coffin under damp ground. But that corpse is again walking, like a zombie from one of those dumb movies that fall down in the dump sometimes, going from person to person and smashing their skulls open easily, scooping brain into their sore-filled mouth with their hands like a piece of pie with a too-gooey filling and a too-thin crust.
The flower moves forward, vines reaching up to lift the covers of one of the beds. The sheets are a soft cream with rusty-red, long-dried spots of blood. There is a pristine golden locket tucked in like a sleeping child, and an old dagger hidden between the mattress and the boxspring. The flower doesn’t see the second one, but it knows it’s there. It takes pride in knowing something secret about them still, after all this time, after the millions of other less-important secrets about less-important people. It doesn’t look at the other bed.
Earlier, the flower sits loyal in the graveyard, at the head of an invisible tombstone, and watches the dead rise with its own eyes. A limping, bloody body walking right toward it, face down.
“Did you miss me?” They say, maybe.
“This is all your fault.” They say, probably.
They don’t say either. They don’t say anything. They just stare at him through hazy, tired eyes. There is no recognition.
What a sick joke, a horribly cruel prank. How completely typical. Only they could think of it. No one else.
Except the flower. Which is why the flower turns to face its sun, moves to match their rhythm, like always. Like it was made to do.
The figure trails a few feet after Toriel, at a pace signaling that they don’t want to get too close or be left behind. They look around like they’re taking in the sights for the first time. A good act. They search the fridge for chocolate, eat their slice of pie without grabbing a fork. Not good enough to fool it.
The flower is frustrated. How long can they keep this up? They’d always had more patience than it. They’d never acted exactly how it expected them to. The flower liked that about them, especially these days. That thought didn’t actually do anything to make it less annoying.
The figure continues to amble about aimlessly, this time behind Papyrus and his stupid brother. They stupidly do stupid puzzles and take a stupid amount of time to progress. Stupid stupid stupid.
The flower is bored. But mostly still frustrated. They’re really committed to pissing it off. It shouldn’t have expected anything else. It was the stupid hesitant naive idiot first. They’re just showing it a taste of its own medicine. It tastes like pollen and blood and burnt pie-crust. A tough pill to swallow.
The figure follows person after person, willing to chase after and listen to everyone who calls like a dog. Except the flower. The brown-shoe striped-shirt clad zombie runs in pointless circles, occupying themself with pointless nothings, somehow managing to eat the flower’s brain from long-distance.
It feels like it’s going crazy. It barely has the willpower not to run up and squeeze their neck until their decapitated head pops off. To tear off their fingers one-by-one and finally figure out whether they love-me or love-me-not. To throw them both into a pool of lava or pit of spikes and let them both go back where they belong.
The flower is antsy. It still knows the game well enough to know that the other shoe is going to drop soon. It won’t let itself be crushed by it.
The hoard closes in, sick and stumbling, trying to protect their new leader. They’re all slow and predictable. Stupid. Something he expected, finally. It drops the act. They don’t.
A boy stands with shaking shoulders and misty eyes, trembling like a broken wind-up toy. He lifts his arm and scrubs madly at his eyes as if trying to scratch a horrible itch inside his head. When he lowers it, he sees a figure. They have curly hair, tan skin with chubby pallid cheeks, footie pajamas covered by a pair of tightly laced too-big work boots. They wear a locket and loosely clutch a dagger that clearly aren’t theirs. They aren’t even smiling. He’s such an idiot.
A flower boy sits with his roots tangling into the long-rotting limbs of a decomposing memory. It holds skeleton hands, kisses dirty wounds, mumbles into worm filled ears. It sits perfectly still stuck in his own head. It mourns the loss of innocence and the loss of wisdom, the loss of childhood and the loss of eternity, the loss of kindness and the loss of cruelty. It mourns for both of them.
The person behind him, wearing not-a sweater, tries to take his hand. He ignores it. ‘You weren’t buried here.’ It thinks. ‘You didn’t grow here.’ It thinks. “You don’t have to stay.’ They try to gently pull him away. He shrugs them off.
They don’t leave. They sit next to it, scooping water and fertilizer and sunshine into their hands and pockets and the heel of their oversized boots. It’s a nice gesture. But he really isn’t hungry anymore. He overfed himself on kindness and happy thoughts long ago. Look where that got him.
They have the same eyes, now that he really looks at their face. But they aren’t quite the same colour.
Finally, they touch enough of its thorns and he gets them to leave. He doesn’t move.
He plants the flower at their grave, a miserable wilting bouquet with blood stained petals and spiky severed roots. It’s the best he could find on such short notice. He hopes they like it. Golden flowers were their favourite.