Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When he first awakened in this body- a stunted, fragile thing, always seconds from shattering- he knew right away that things had gone terribly wrong.

He still struggles to justify his conception, a premeditated death and birth all at once.  While he can’t remember dying, can’t remember the feeling of his body turning to dust, he can most certainly remember being born.  He imagines it hurt just as much, if not more than the alternative.

Sharp pain had torn through his left eye socket, like he’d impaled himself upon his own magic.  It buzzed beneath his skull, entering his head and refusing to leave, overwhelming him with a sensation far worse than any migraine he’d ever experienced.

His vision was black for a long while as he thrashed on the ground, elbows painfully knocking into the metal floor below.  He wanted to throw up but he found himself unable; he had no stomach, merely a surplus of magic struggling to force itself out of a body too meager to contain it.  It drew away from his socket in peals, bulging out of his skull like a real eyeball might have.

He didn’t know how long he laid there, rib cage heaving, curled up in the fetal position and attempting to remember what he’d done.

He remembered looking into the CORE, feet dangling over the edge, turning his hands to and fro and watching the bright light of his creation pass through them like sunshine through treetops.  He didn’t remember anything after.  He especially didn’t remember why he was in this body.  When his vision returned to him, still blurry and overwhelming, he searched for his hands.  They were a scant source of comfort he wished to indulge in; a reminder of Who and What he was.  He did not find what he was looking for.

The fingers now before him were slimmer, more delicate than they should have been- perhaps better suited to playing piano than spending long hours jotting down notes.  One of his hands had an hole through its middle, as it had for many long years, but the other was untouched.  All of the bones that made up his right palm were intact, slotting together gracefully.

He got the feeling such a sight shouldn’t send such a resounding spike of dread through his chest.  He couldn’t understand what he was looking at, nor why the body which his SOUL filled felt so incongruous.  His body was bare against the ever-shifting platforms of the CORE- his creation, but not created with these hands.  He didn’t think he’d ever been so terrified in his life, trembling hard enough that his bones clicked against one another despite his best efforts to calm himself enough to evaluate his situation.

When a flicker of movement drew his attention to another skeleton, equally bare, his SOUL dropped.  There was some flicker of recognition in the other monster’s eyes, an emotion echoed within himself, though he can’t comprehend why.

The other skeleton looked down at him- he towered over his current form, though he imagined they’d be around the same height if he was in his real body.  Actually, apart from a few differences in his facial structure and his visible confusion, it feels almost like he’s looking in a mirror.

“Who are you?” the skeleton asked, high and raspy.  There were much more pressing questions occupying his own thoughts- why they were here, whether his experiment worked, how Asgore would react to the mishap which had clearly taken place- but he finds himself stumped by the simplicity of it.  Most people recognized him before he had to introduce himself, but he is now unrecognizable to even himself.  Magic buzzes behind his teeth as he replies, not even aware of what he’s doing until he’s done it.

“i’m doctor w-” he cut himself off, reaching up to grab at his jaw.  That wasn’t how he spoke.  That had never been how he spoke, not in all his years of life.  His hands did the speaking where his mouth did not, and it had been that far too long for him to recall whether he couldn’t or merely didn’t .  With the sick feeling of magic rising in his trachea, he attempted to sign, hands trembling nearly too hard to form words.

He was able to recall his previous way of speaking, but his movements were clunky in contrast to how fluid they’d been when his hands were puppeted by magic, and he could hear none of the musical intonation that typically accompanied his chatter.  When he spoke in his previous manner, his words were…  flat.  Ill-fitting.  Wrong , unlike how they’d been for Gaster.

If he wasn’t Gaster, who was he?  Was there even an answer?

The one across from him looked down at his hands, scrunching up his face in concentration.  “You’re not making any sense.  What is interesting?”

He hesitated, looking the taller skeleton up and down.  His eyes landed on his hands- again, an imperfect mimicry of… the scientist’s.  One was whole, every bone slotting together like a perfectly completed puzzle, while the other shared the characteristic gouge through it.  That skeleton noticed the direction of his gaze before long, lifting his hand from his side to stare through the hole.  “We have the same hand on opposite sides,” he muttered, something he hadn’t yet processed himself.  “Does it bother you?”

“bother..?”  He found his voice naturally coming from behind his teeth, a rhythmic sound that reverberated within his SOUL.  He preferred speaking this way now, he realized with an unavoidable wince of shame.  He quickly brushed past it, hoping the other one didn’t notice.  “nah, it doesn’t bother me… i just thought it was curious.”

“A hand cannot be curious, do not be silly!   Although it is strange that we both have a scar like that…”  The taller skeleton frowned down at his hand, looking for all the world like he was trying to initiate a staring contest with it.  He only looked away when he- seemingly, from an entirely non-biased perspective- lost.  “Perhaps it means we are brothers,” he suggests suddenly, a startling non-sequitur to him.

“uh.”  He wasn’t sure what he was meant to say in response.  He had his own hypothesis as to what they were- shattered pieces of a lost SOUL, somehow distilled by the energy of the CORE into beings with consciousness and will- but he got the feeling they hadn’t come to the same conclusion.  Would it be cruel to destroy someone’s sense of identity just because he didn’t want to be alone with the knowledge?

He’d long since become acclimated to the feeling of lying to protect people when he was Gaster, but it made him acutely uncomfortable in this new body.  Oh, well.  He’d just have to become reacquainted with it sooner rather than later.

“i think we must be,” he finally answered, flashing a grin up at his so-called brother.  “i mean, we’re both skeletons.  that’s pretty uncommon.”

“It is?  Wowie… we must be very special,” the skeleton pondered seriously, nodding to himself at the thought.  

“very spe-skull, even,” he mumbled to himself, the sort of idle joking he’d have tamped down in embarrassment a few hours before.  He figured it was too quiet to hear over the thrumming and whooshing of the CORE until a strained voice responded.

“Bless you???” the taller skeleton said, seemingly perplexed.

“uh… no, it was a joke.  forget about it, heheh…”  He glanced down at his singular holistic hand, then over the side of the railings preventing them from plummeting into the catacombs of his creation.  It was hard not to think of it as his , even now that he was pretty sure he was little more than a piece of the Royal Scientist he once was, a splinter in the side of the world.

He seemed to have retained most of his memories, if little else.  He remembered long, sleepless nights mapping out a source of energy that would never deplete, for the good of all monsterkind.  He remembered mornings holed up in his lab searching for a way to fracture and duplicate human SOULs.  He remembered his first breakthrough, and his last, and the rush of euphoria that overwhelmed him in those moments of epiphany.

So, he thought- the CORE was at least a little bit his, if only due to shared experience.  And his CORE was currently giving him an atypical sensation of vertigo, something he’d never felt before, even when gazing into its heart.  He remembered- he had to take a breath, had to steady himself in place despite being firmly rooted to the bridge- falling, plummeting into its mass.  It was the last thing he could remember from the time before he wasn’t himself.

“Hello?  Earth to sans???” the other skeleton interrupted his spiraling thoughts, snapping phalanges in front of his face impatiently.  “Did you fall asleep mid-conversation?  How do you even do that?”

“sans?” was the first thing he thought to ask, and so he did.  He got the feeling he was going to have to work on his brain-to-mouth filter, now that he spoke with words.

“Uh… yes.  Your font.  Unless you go by something else..?” Papyrus, he supposed- based on his own font and the assumption he’d made- said hesitantly.  He wrung his hands out before himself, a motion which made a series of cracking noises that rang uncomfortably in his skull.

“i’m just messing with ya.  i’m sans, yeah.  and, uh… as sans-ational as this place is, i get the feeling we shouldn’t stay out here in the open for too long.”  He was itching to check their stats, but not out in the open- he didn’t want to risk initiating battle, with each other or anyone else.  There was a faint pulsing worry behind the eye which had exploded in pain earlier, warning him away from any sort of conflict.  He guessed he was the sort to follow gut instinct, now.

“That was… I don’t even… fine!  Let us go.”  Papyrus shot to his feet, wobbling in place a bit before he was able to steady himself on the railing.  Sans grabbed it before he stood, pulling himself up with it as leverage.  His ‘brother’ eyed the movement suspiciously, but didn’t comment.  “Do not fear.  I will protect you should the need arise!”

Sans wondered if he really looked that breakable before swiftly concluding that he did.  He chuckled awkwardly, trying to ignore the lump in his SOUL at the thought of needing ‘protection’.  “thanks, uh… bro.”

The genuine smile he received in return for his halfhearted gratitude dispelled most of his worry.  Most being the key word.  He thought it might never leave him, for how wholly it filled his SOUL in his last and first moments of life.

~

Sans halfheartedly twists a dial on the (less than) half-functional machine, currently free of the sheet he covers it with preceding his absence.  All it can do currently is regulate the state of their universe; it has no hope of truly affecting it, not without SOUL power.  And- he’s fairly sure- not without Determination.

If he could only decipher his frenzied scribbling, notes jotted down in shorthand wingdings.  They shouldn’t be so hard to understand when he was part of the man who wrote it.  Frustration builds in his sockets and obscures his vision as his pupils fizzle out.  He ends up having to sit back and wait for his nerves to ease, knowing the only other way to reignite his eyesight is with a burning pain and invading his left socket from within.

Instead he shoves his hands into his heavy jacket and lays flat on his back, trying to ignore the way his ribs tremble with every inhale.

He tried wearing a lab coat in here for the first few months, recalling something or other about ‘safety’ and ‘sanitary procedures’.  This seemed perfectly reasonable until he actually put it on and it settled strange against his form.  He had to roll up his sleeves and trim the bottom to be able to wear it without its fabric dragging along the floor.

Even after he made adequate adjustments, something was off about his body in that sort of clothing.  It was all wrong, and maybe he wouldn’t have noticed if he didn’t know what it was like when it was right.  He eventually gave up on safety and just stuck to the coat he chose for the specific purpose of obscuring his form.

The ceiling greets him amicably enough when he gets a hold of himself.  He’s become intimately familiar with that ceiling over the past year.  He doesn’t think it feels the same way about him, sadly.

He watches the monitor attached to the tall capsule before him, conveniently positioned near the floor so he doesn’t have to stand while working through the night.  The readings are just as abnormal as they were yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.  It doesn’t tell him anything new , though- time and space are fluctuating wildly, sure, but they’ve been doing that for nearly a week straight.  It’s redundant and unhelpful.

He leans against the tall, glass tube of the machine made from disparate parts taken from Alphys’s lab before she noticed them and started wondering what purpose they served, or who left them in her lab.  His skull hits it with a quiet thunk, soaking up the cold on its surface as soon as it makes contact.

Alphys.  He’s thought about telling her everything on more than one occasion, but something prevented from humoring the thought for more than a moment.  Considering what happened to those he did tell about his predicament… he stops himself, forcing the thought to disperse like dust.  He’s just glad he didn’t tell her, in the end.

She ended up inheriting more of the formal Royal Scientist’s than sans or Papyrus ever would.  He doesn’t envy her so much as he finds it… inconvenient.  He may be able to recall far more than his brother, but his memory is far from perfect.  More than half of his notes ending up in her claws makes it difficult to make any progress.

She doesn’t have to know everything, he reasons with himself, pulling the monitor around to face him and watching the intersecting lines dance across its screen like a legion of heartbeats.  If he can just convince her to let him use her lab, he can copy everything he needs into a notebook and reverse engineer the rest.  Carrying on like this clearly isn’t going to help anyone, especially when his frustration has grown so regular and severe it can temporarily incapacitate him.

It’s half a plan, half an excuse to get out of the room within which he’s spent more time than he can count solving the same equations in the hopes something might suddenly change.  Either half is enough to get him on his feet, lifting the sheet bunched around the faulty machine and throwing it back in place with a flicker of magic.  He makes sure to toe at the sheet to fully cover the wildly fluctuating patterns on the monitor, unsettled by the thought of anyone seeing them, even if they wouldn’t be able to discern their meaning.

When he leaves, he slips out without fully opening the door, wary of allowing anyone a single glimpse of his secret work- though it’s hard to call it such when he still can’t get it to work.  Either way, he doesn’t want Papyrus to know anything about their origins until they’re back in their original body.  If they ever get back to their original body.

He thinks he would prefer to live in ignorance, unknowing of his incompleteness, unaware of every little way he’s changed for the worse.  He can’t ever forget himself, but he can at least spare his brother the guilt and shame of trying and failing to return to a better time.

Papyrus might not even feel such things when faced with the truth, though.  Perhaps sans inherited the worst of Gaster’s traits, those which might have prevented him from accomplishing all he did if it weren’t for his… well, determination, insofar as a monster can have such a thing.  He grits his teeth at the thought that he might’ve been doomed to failure from the start…

“Brother!  What are you doing awake at this hour?  You’d usually still be sleeping the day away!” Papyrus’s voice breaks through the quiet ambience of a Snowdin morning, the crunching of snow under his boots an unsubtle signal of his approach that sans somehow still managed to miss.

He turns, smoothly retrieving the key from the door and depositing it into his jacket.  “it’s a tempting idea.  actually, i think i might go do that now.”

“Really??   Sans, if you don’t stop being a weird hermit , we’re never going to be accepted as bonafide Snowdin-ians,” Papyrus insists.  Sans isn’t sure where he got the idea that they’re not accepted, or that it would even matter if they weren’t, or that what sans does affects his image at all.  Besides, he’s fairly sure most people are more worried about the racket Papyrus makes than whether he’s from the town or not.

“oh, i’m a bone-afide snowdin-ian, alright.  i’ve got half the place eating out of my hand.”  Literally, seeing as more than half the residents are dogs.

“But… well.”  His brother hesitated mid-sentence, an occurrence unusual enough to give him pause.  “You don’t have friends like you used to, not really.  I was trying to figure out… maybe… why that is.  And I think you just haven’t put yourself out there here like you did in Hotland!”

Sans shifts uncomfortably, looking down at the sprinkling of snow spilling onto the tops of his feet so as to avoid having to look Papyrus in the eyes.  Sure, he had friends before, of a sort.  The reason he doesn’t anymore is because he got them killed, simple as.  That which caused their demise and that which brought them close in the first place were the two hands of a singular body.

“i have friends here.  just not best friends .  my best friend is still in hotland.  i was going to go visit her today, actually…”  And nag her to help him do something she couldn’t possibly understand.  Maybe that’s just what he does to his friends, considering how many times he talked Asgore into giving his experiments leeway in the months preceding the incident.

“Wow, you don’t even seem to be lying!  Who is your best friend?  Why have I never met her?  And why isn’t she me??”

“she’s, uh.  doctor alphys.  remember her?  and we’re best bros; her and i are best friends, it’s very different.  you’re higher up on the bro-cial ladder.”

“I see,” Papyrus said, eye twitching as he made a visible effort to stay supportive despite his irritation.  “I remember the Great Alphys… vaguely.   Regardless!  I’m glad you’re making an effort to connect!  I say you should head there right this instant, and I’ll cover for you with the bunny sisters!”

“the bunny… what?  why would you have to cover me with them?”

“I may have volunteered my efforts in assisting them to repair the upper floor of the Snowed Inn, since it was damaged in the blizzard last week.  I may have also volunteered your efforts on your behalf, but speak no more of it!  I will resolve the conflict of scheduling swiftly and succinctly!” he explained, waving his pointer finger confidently about himself.

“oh, uh.  thanks?” sans says, which seems to be the right answer given the way Papyrus nods cheerfully and turns to leave.  He only gets a few meters away before he turns and shouts an addendum to his brother.

“Also!  Don’t forget!  To change out of that jacket!  It’s HOT there, as is clear from the name!”  He doesn’t wait for sans’s response before he whirls around and marches off once again.  That’s good, because sans is not changing out of his jacket, Hotland be damned.

~

Sans doesn’t take a shortcut directly into her lab like he might’ve if he intended to sneak in, steal his notes, and be done with it.  That’s not off the table if this doesn’t work out, but he prefers not to preemptively burn any bridges, especially when she’s one of his last remaining connections to him .

He lifts a mittened hand to knock upon the doors, which is more effective than it really should be.  Either Alphys has freak hearing or he’s stronger than he looks (hah).  In a surprisingly short amount of time (that being: a bit less than a minute), the entrance whirs to life before him, doors parting to reveal a disheveled scientist.

“Oh,” she says upon seeing him, about as disappointed as a monster can get.  He wonders if she was hoping for someone else.

“not quite.  it’s ‘sans’, actually,” he says, rocking on his heels.  “mind if i come in anyway?”

“U-uh… I wasn’t, uh, expecting visitors!  That’s fine t-though… haha.”  Alphys’s anxiety clearly outweighs her annoyance, but only barely.  She steps aside, wringing her claws together, and nods in the direction of the disarray of her laboratory.  “Make yourself… at home?”

Sans accepts the reluctant invitation, stepping over the threshold and hearing the doors shut behind him as soon as he does.  He leans back against them, bunching the fur of his hood up against the back of his neck.  Alphys fidgets in place, a long moment of silent discomfort passing before either of them speaks.

“A-why are you here?” Alphys finally asks.  “N-not that I don’t… not that y-you’re not… um.”

He’d usually poke fun at her about not being able to enjoy a friend’s company, but he gets the feeling she wouldn’t react well.  Also, she doesn’t remember most of their friendship, which makes it a bit hard to justify to her.  “right… i’ll get to the point.  i’ve been doing some, uh, personal research.  on the passage of time.  and i thought, maybe… we could compare notes.”  He twirls a strand of fur on his hood around his pointer finger as if it were his hair.  “maybe… i could take a look at the blueprints for the dt extraction machine, if you’re feeling generous.”

“T-t-the..?  Why on e-earth do you know about that?  H- how on earth?”  Alphys grabs at her head, digging her claws under her scales in her worry, nerves visibly fraying with every word from her mouth.

“i worked with the last royal scientist, remember?” he says as casually as he can, glancing at the monitor currently displaying an image of a cartoony human woman hoisting a spear over her head.

“Take good care of them,” he signed on his final day, then took the blueprints from the bag strapped to his hip and passed them to his protege.  Her stubby claws gingerly took hold of them, like they were the most valuable thing in the world, and she smiled up at him gratefully.  Her anxiety was clear upon her face, but so was her enthusiasm, and he couldn’t help but shoot a crooked smile back.

“I-i will, Dr Gaster.  T-thank you… I don’t know how I’ll ever r-repay you for everything you’ve d-done for me…”  He cut off a self-deprecating ramble at the source, interrupting her spiraling train of thought with a hand on her shoulder and a shake of his head.

Now, Alphys merely says she ‘found them’ if asked, an empty space filling her mentor’s place in her mind.  He has to stop himself from trying to stoke the flames of her memory, sometimes, feeling a discomfiting pang in his SOUL at the way she forgot their friendship so easily.  He has to remind himself it isn’t her fault; if anyone is to blame, it’s him.

“i can sanse your trepida-shin, heh.  don’t worry, i won’t do anything you wouldn’t”

“That’s not f-funny.”  She sighs, suddenly very interested in a nearby crack in the lab’s otherwise pristine tile.  “Sans… I know you think I can’t do this job.  B-but… I can handle it myself.  A-and even if I couldn’t!  It wouldn’t be your j-job to help me.”

Wouldn’t it?  He scratches the back of his spine uncomfortably, mittens catching on the small dips between his vertebrae.  Truth being told, he wasn’t thinking of Alphys at all when he came here.  He’d been thinking of the big picture, a danger less personal if all-encompassing.  While someone had to put such things, he gets the feeling that the previous royal scientist would’ve been more concerned with her well-being.  He wonders if that means he’s worse, or if it just means he’s incomplete.

“i don’t think that, alphys, really.  i’m…”  He sucks in a breath through clenched teeth, staring up into the overly bright lights above.  “i’m asking you for help, here.”

“Y…”  Her shoulders fall where they’d hiked up, a lost expression gracing her face.  “You’re serious.  W-why are you serious?  What did you find?”  Her nervous energy returns, although it’s directed toward a different target this time, which sans can appreciate.

“it’s probably nothing,” he lies as easy as breathing.  “but i can’t be sure until i take a look at mmm… your findings.  and anything the previous royal scientist might have, iunno, left behind. we could… figure it out together?”

She considers his request for a few long moments, in which he starts to believe they might be able to work together again, even after everything.  Then she furrows her brow and shoots him an apologetic smile and his SOUL sinks in his chest.  “Sorry, s-sans.  I already have important work to do, a-as the royal scientist… unless you can t-tell me exactly what’s happening and why, I can’t dedicate my time to it.  And even t-then, hah… I don’t have any left to spare…”

He nods overly quickly, burying clenched knuckles in the fabric of his jacket.  “that’s no prob.  i’m not expecting you to be in two places at once, hah.  could i at least see..?”

“O-oh, yeah!  I can get the blueprints for you, at least!  I d-don’t think I have any other n-notes that would be of use to you, though…”  She shuffles up to the elevator, seemingly unaware that he’s following her until the doors are swinging open and he takes a step too far.  She whirls around and throws her claws out, like she’s about to push him, only to freeze in place with her arms hovering in midair.  “Uh..!  You can’t come in here, s-sorry.  Top-secret, you know!  Just wait here.”

He nods mutely, jarred by the sudden outburst.  If anyone should be allowed to venture below the laboratory, it’s him.  He made this place what it is.  That doesn’t count for anything now that he’s not himself, though, so he steps back.

She retreats into the elevator, the same place Gaster stood alongside her many times before the incident, usually (but not always) too occupied by his thoughts to notice her scrolling on UnderNet.  The door slides shut between them, a tangible barrier between the present and past.

The elevator whirs to life before him, carrying her down into the depths of her True Lab.  Sans glances around himself, eyes skating over the scattered papers and empty bowls arranged artfully around her workspace.  How long has she been trying to do everything herself, he wonders?  Perhaps he might’ve been able to help her if he wasn’t consumed by failed attempts to go back.

Well, she hadn’t helped him either.  Not that she has any reason to.

It isn’t long before she returns, but the chilly air of the lab still feels heavy against his bones.  When she steps back out, holding a roll of blueprints and a small handful of loose papers, he takes them with an encouraging grin.  “thanks, al,” he says, not missing the way her jaw tenses at the nickname.

“Oh, um, of- of course!  Good luck with…”  She pushes her glasses up, lips curling up with a nervous tilt.  “Whatever it is you’re doing.”

“i don’t believe in luck… but thanks anyway.”  He shifts in place, worrying his teeth together consideringly.  “good luck to you, too.  with your ‘top secret royal science’.”

“I d-don’t need luck,” she says, affecting more confidence than she’s ever truly had.  “B-but thank you.”

There’s nothing more to say, so neither of them speak another word.  He leaves the lab, and she waves him goodbye, and he returns the gesture.  As soon as the door shut he clutches the map to his forgotten creation to his chest and steps into a shortcut.

Chapter Text

Sans strapped Papyrus into the chair he had sequestered away in a private portion of his lab, a device made for the express purpose of safe stat checking.  It was an older creation- it must have been a few decades old at this point, judging by its wear and tear.  Try as he might, he couldn’t remember making it, even though he knew it was of Gaster’s devising.

At least he figured out how to work it without many hiccups.  Papyrus patiently waited for him, interjecting with decidedly unhelpful ‘tips’.  “Try putting some elbow grease in!  Maybe it isn’t working because it doesn’t respect you,” he told sans, at which point he smirked and agreed readily.

The machine finally whirred to life after sans rearranged several cords, unplugging and replugging them repeatedly until they ended up in what looked like the same order despite the power now flowing freely through them.  Maybe he just needed to turn it off and back on again.  “I knew I was onto something,” Papyrus remarked, nodding to himself.

“thanks, bro.  and hey, stay still, or it won’t work,” sans instructed him, standing up to hook a wire onto the conductive sticker he stuck to the center of his sternum.  It coaxed the glow of his brother’s SOUL forth, drawing it closer to the surface of his body without fully exposing the essence of his being.

“I will.  But, uh… what exactly does ‘working’ look like?” Papyrus asked, glancing down at the solid light that shone from within his bones.  It squirmed in his chest nervously, like a heart skipping a beat, casting rippling shadows upon sans’s face.

“it, uh… simulates a battle with yourself.  that way we can see how strong you are without fighting,” he explained absentmindedly, far less detailed than he would have been before.  His thoughts were wandering, already drifting to imagine what his own stats might look like, though he knew he was getting ahead of himself.  He shook his head and pulled the lever at the chair’s side.  Papyrus’s eye sockets widened as soon as he did so, as his vision was thrust into black and white.

“you good?” he asked, caught off guard by the look of alarm upon his face.

“Yes, of course.  I just got a funny feeling, but it’s gone now,” Papyrus muttered, starting to gesticulate and having to fold his hands firmly in his lap to stop himself from slapping the wire so hard it flew off his chest.  “What do I do to see..?”

“oh yeah.  s’right here,” sans said, picking up the small, handheld device attached to the back of the chair by a wire.  He eyed the numbers for a moment- his base stats were fairly typical, although his HP was impressive.  His current stats, on the other hand, were a stark contrast- his attack and defense each hovered around three.  He shifted nervously, trying unsuccessfully to parse out why Papyrus felt so safe when he’d been constantly on edge from the moment he started existing.  He shook his head and deposited the chunky monitor into his bony hands, giving him a minute to take them in.

“Those numbers are quite high, aren’t they?” he said after a long pause, glancing up at sans.  His expression shifted as they made eye contact, the corners of his mouth twitching down just enough to be noticable.  “Or are they..?”

“they are, don’t worry.”  Honestly, they were good.  The thing was: they were identical to Gaster’s base stats.  Not just that; sans had a feeling, twitching in his marrow like a restless parasite, that his were going to look very, very different.  That wasn’t Papyrus’s fault, he had to remind himself.  He forced his teeth to form a grin.  “they’re spec-stat-cular.”

“I… see.”  Papyrus hesitated, and for a moment sans worried he might call him out on the lie of omission.  “Must you do that?”

“do… what, exactly?”  sans took the device from his hands, gently prying each finger open to get him to release it.

“Make those… ‘jokes’.  They’re not even funny.”  Papyrus approximated a disapproving frown, brow bone furrowing as he fixed his sockets on sans.  It startled a laugh out of him, the seriousness with which he said it, like he was staging an intervention.  His hand shot up to cover his mouth, though it did nothing to stop his snickering.

“are you saying you don’t find them humerus?” he asked around his fingers, using his other hand to tug the lever down and end the faux battle.

“Yes I am… oh my god.”  Papyrus’s head fell into his hands, a look of defeat as though he’d truly lost a fight.  “How is it possible that you’ve made one even worse than the others…”

“ok, ok, i’ll spare you any more.  get up and let me have a go,” sans said, pulling the wire from his chest and dispersing his gathered magic.  Papyrus narrowed his eyes at him, let out a loud and pointed huff, and stood.  He stepped to the side to make way for sans, who practically fell into the chair the second it was unoccupied.

Sans opened up the compartment in the chair’s arm to retrieve the last remaining conductive sticker, slapping it onto his sternum carelessly.  He fished around for the wire meant to connect to it with little success, having dropped it onto the ground where his arms couldn’t reach, until Papyrus knelt down and handed it up to him.  He accepted it silently, hoping the heat rushing to his face wasn’t visible.

He affixed it to his chest and pulled the lever as soon as he was certain of its security, refusing to waste more time agonizing than was strictly necessary.  The light that rose from within his rib cage was significantly more subdued than his brother’s.  It barely looked like a living SOUL, most closely resembling that of a monster on the verge of falling down.  He just stared at it for a long second- at that which came together to form the distilled thought that was himself , whoever that was supposed to be.  He almost forgot to hide his disappointment.

“Is something wrong?” Papyrus asked, leaning close to get a better look at him.

He twitched in place, then forced himself to take a slow breath, then another.  “i’m good,” he managed to get out.  Then he took hold of the small monitor and turned his attention to his results.

Whatever it was he’d been expecting- no, dreading; what he saw, staring impartially up at him, was worse.

One, across the board- there was no variation between his base stats and his current stats, because there couldn’t be.  Not without him turning to dust.  His jaw clenched and unclenched as he stared blankly down at the numbers- no, at the number , the singular quantification of all that he was.  If he didn’t have an audience, he got the feeling he would’ve thrown up all the magic in his body.

As it was, his spine felt like it was trying to tie knots around itself.  Not long after, his vision started to abandon him, pupils blotted out by an all-consuming darkness rising in his skull.

“Let me see that,” Papyrus said after he spent a second too long staring blankly into the nothing behind his eyes, finger bones brushing up against his own as he grabbed at the plastic shell of the device in his hands.  Sans reflexively clutched it to his chest, screen clicking painfully against his ribs as he hunched over it protectively.

“hey, it’s rude to check without asking, y’know,” he mumbled through clenched teeth, hastily scrambling to tug the lever off and free his SOUL from scrutiny.

“You checked mine without asking,” Papyrus muttered, prying the device from his hands only to huff in disappointment when he inevitably found it blank.  Sans’s pupils returned just enough to see the suspicious look he was fixing upon him, cutting through the cloudy haze of the world and settling in his chest uncomfortably.

“that was different,” he mumbled, then shook his head.  “uh… i guess it wasn’t, sorry.  do as i say, not as i do, bro.”

“Is that so.”  Papyrus didn’t seem amused, but his characteristic demeanor returned quicker than sans was expecting it to.  “Well, do not fret.  You should not be embarrassed of your seemingly pitiful stats, but you do not need to share the exact details at this moment!”

“thanks.”  Sans practically went limp in the chair, feeling as if all the energy had been drained from his body.  He supposed there wasn’t very much to spare, now.  “you’re… pretty cool, huh.”

“I have been told this on many occasions!  Now, I may not remember the exact details of these occasions, but I’m certain that it has occurred,” his brother assured him.  It was the last thing he heard before his eyelids fell shut and he forgot what it felt like to be alive.

~

Sans didn’t know how long he slept for, nor did he remember any of his dreams, if he had any at all.  All he could recall from that time was a vast, endless darkness, subsuming everything in existence.  He was no exception.

The rest did him little good.  Perhaps if he slept in a nice bed, or a bed at all, his HP would’ve risen a bit further.  As it was, he ended up four points over his max, for a whopping five hit points.  He shrugged his shoulders and slid out of the chair, figuring it was better than nothing.

“i need to go talk to someone about what happened to us.  will you be alright here on your own for a while?” he asked his brother, who had been visibly debating whether he should be relieved that sans woke up or annoyed that he passed out unprompted in the first place.  Annoyance seemed to be winning.

“Of course I will be alright.  Will you be alright to talk to ‘someone’, or are you going to fall asleep mid-conversation again?” Papyrus asked- mostly rhetorically, but sans could detect a genuinity in the way he looked him up and down, as if he might suddenly fall down.

“can’t make any promises.  but the worst that’ll happen is i embarrass myself in front of king fluffybuns.”  Or he could pass out in an inopportune place and take another- no, not another, not him- swan dive into the CORE.  Or he could get drowsy mid-conversation with a dangerous monster who’d promptly dust him.  Or he could stay wide awake and end up dusted anyway.  From a papercut, or something.

Not a big deal.  He could figure it out.

His brother’s eyes were bugging out of his skull for some reason he couldn’t pin down.  “Maybe I should come with you.  To protect you, of course!  Not just because you’re going to see the king …”  Ah, that explained it.

“it’s gonna be a pretty private conversation.  personal biz, y’know?  but i could… put in a good word for you?” he tried, shrugging his shoulders.

“Hm… while I struggle to imagine what sort of ‘personal biz’ you have to discuss with the king of the underground, I will concede this time, as I do not want to give him a bad first impression.  But let it be known that I do not like it!”

“noted.  anyway, you’ve got to… hold down the fort here.  make sure nobody breaks in and… steals anything.”  sans nodded to himself, glancing around the barren room.  Other parts of the lab held more valuable information and machinery, but practically all of it was useless to anyone without the proper education to comprehend it.  Which was… most monsters.

“I will do my best, do not worry.  No thieving scoundrel will get past my watchful eyes…” Papyrus announced, seemingly pleased at the idea.  Sans’s smile widened a bit at the sight of him scanning the empty room.

“you’ve got this, bro.  i’ll try not to be too long.”  Though he should probably find something to wear before he walked up to the king, seemingly a stranger, and initiated a conversation bare naked.  He couldn’t imagine that would be a good start to a difficult conversation in any possible universe.

“That would be nigh-impossible for you, considering your… stature.”  Papyrus’s hand dropped down to hover around the top of his skull, then his other rose up to the top of his own, comparing their heights.  He was more than twice as tall, but sans hardly registered the fact in the moment.

“did you just-”  He tried to cover his mouth, but it truly did nothing when his voice was wholly magical, and even if it wasn’t it was too late to contain the slew of laughter bubbling up in his chest.  “after all your complaining!”

“That wasn’t.  That was a simple observation!” Papyrus insisted.

“nah, you can’t get that past me.  i see right through you,” sans said between snickers, shooting a pointed look down at the space between his brother’s ribs.  Papyrus let out what he thought was the longest sigh he’s ever heard a monster make, one that quickly transformed to a groan.

“I refuse to engage with this tomfoolery!  Go speak to the King or I will forcibly eject you from this ‘Lab’!”

“ok, ok, alright,” sans said, wiping a non-existent tear from his eye.  “i’m just so proud…”

“Sans!”

He held his hands up placatingly, returning to his task of finding something suitable to wear.  Or anything to wear.  He waved goodbye to his brother, who returned the gesture despite his irritation, and slid out of the small room into the greater lab’s halls.

The lab was dark, and it had been since they arrived.  He vaguely remembered walking through every room and turning off all the lights the day before, as if leaving them on would somehow disturb his plans.  He couldn’t recall what those plans were , aside from leaping into his creation with reckless abandon, but he supposed it could have been true.

He wandered around for a while, searching for something he might’ve discarded in his haste before the incident.  He managed to find a single lab coat in a heap on the ground, looking disconcertingly like a pile of ivory dust from a distance.  He pushed the thought to the back of his mind and peeled it from the floor, dusting it off before draping it over himself.  It engulfed his form, tailored specifically to fit an irregularly tall monster.  It fell around his feet in great pools of cloth, preventing any sort of consistent ambulation.

He rolled up his sleeves and tied them off, the easiest problem to solve.  Then he pulled the coat as taut as he could around his form, buttoning it up halfway- which meant, nearly down to his ankles.  He held out a hand, left socket twitching, wondering if the gambit would even work.  Would he even be able to manage any sort of precision with such a low ATK?  He ignored his trepidation and formed a fist, willing sharp spectral hands into existence with every bit of his being.

A pair of bones sliced through the fabric, effectively trimming the coat, though it turns out looking like it’d endured a harsh battle.  He blinked at the attack, dangerously close to skimming his shins, and released his hold on his magic.  They vanished into thin air, leaving him alone in the dark.

“Guess that was wishful thinking,” he said, words slow and languid like molasses, devoid of the new voice that might’ve given them weight.  He blinked, dropping his hand to his side, and turned to leave the lab.  If someone saw him leaving, he’d tell them he was an escaped experiment-gone-wrong of the Royal Scientist’s.  He had been sufficiently reclusive to make it believable, and the thought tickles him with how morbidly close to the truth it is.

~

The golden flowers were soft under his bare feet, a stark contrast to the sweltering heat of Hotland and the discomfiting cold of the rest of New Home.  They parted easily whenever he took a step, shifting just enough to cushion his heels without being crushed beneath his weight.  He couldn’t help but wonder why the King surrounded himself with a constant reminder of all he’d lost.  It seemed counterintuitive.

The King’s throne was unoccupied, and the Queen’s was tucked in a corner and hidden with a sheet, as it had been for as long as he could remember.  Had he known the King before they were forced underground?  He tried to concentrate on his first memory with Asgore, but his thoughts went as blurry as his eyes tended to.  He tried to remember the surface, to draw to mind the sight of grass beneath his feet or stars above his skull, but it was no use.

“Hello?” a deep soundfont interrupted his contemplation, and his eyes flickered up to the monster who’d just stepped through the far door.  The King ventured closer, his heavy cloak dragging behind him, and as he drew near it became clear just how far he towered over sans.  He swallowed, veiled in the older monster’s shadow, and shoved his hands in his pockets.  “What are you doing here?”

Sans found himself at a loss for words.  What was he supposed to say?  ‘hey, it’s me, your formal royal scientist.  i split myself in two for reasons which aren’t even clear to myself, sorry about that.  do i still have a job?’

Asgore’s soft, heavy paw fell upon his shoulder, and the king knelt to face him shortly after.  Looking him in the eye like that, he came to realize what a failure he would look like the second he tried to explain.  He’d been counting on him for so long, and then he’d gone and gotten himself torm apart.  What could he say to justify his current state?

“Are you okay?” Asgore inquired, and he was reminded of how little that mattered.  He had been his friend, and perhaps he would remain his friend.  Even if he didn’t, he would surely show mercy.  It was in his nature.

“i’m really not, haha… that’s sort of why i’m here.”  He stared at the blinding yellow field below then, a warm feeling building in his left eye socket.  “so… this is gonna sound crazy, but i need you to stick with me, okay?  um… basically, i’m dr. gaster.  part of him, at least.  i have a lot of his memories, but not all.  s’um… really weird… and i don’t know exactly what- or, uh, why…”  His voice grew more strangled with every word, the relaxed hum of his letters becoming a jumbled mess.  He could feel them rattling around in his mouth, hitting up against his jaw and getting stuck there, lodged in place where his tongue might have been if he had one.  He grabbed at his neck, fingers twitching against the ridged bone of his spine as if he could squeeze his voice free.

Another hand gripped his shoulder, a steadying weight pressing into his shoulders.  He shook in place, staring up at Asgore, waiting for him to judge him.  When he searched his eyes, he found only concern.  “Excuse me if this is rude,” Asgore said, soft-spoken and cautious, a soothing balm for the few moments before he finished speaking.  “But who is Dr. Gaster?  Does he go by another name that I might know him by?”

Sans stiffened in his grasp, SOUL plummeting as surely as Gaster had less than a day before.  “you’re kidding, right?  this is a joke.  heheh… good one, fluffybuns!  but i’m gonna need you to stop now.  this is serious.”

“I’m… not joking,” he said slowly, brows drawn together.  “I apologize if I offended you.  Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for someone else?”

Sans chuckled at the idea that he could have mistaken the king of the underground for someone else.  His wife was the only contender he could think of, if it weren’t for the fact that she disappeared centuries ago.  He pulled away from the boss monster’s gentle touch, unable to endure it any longer.

“you’re serious.  you don’t know me… him.  your royal scientist?  the royal scientist?”  He was waving his hands wildly at this point, but there was no meaning behind his gesticulation, only an explosion of nervous energy with nowhere else to go.

“Our Royal Scientist went missing.  We haven’t had one for…”  His eyes glazed over almost imperceptibly, tearing up and clearing between blinks.  “I don’t even know how long.  But if you knew him… I believe we have much to discuss.  Over a cup of tea, perhaps?l

Sans lowered his hands, wondering how many times he’d heard that before.  Every instance blurred together in his skull, a jumble of kind words and reassurances between sleepless nights, more like a dream than a memory.  His arms fell to his sides, dangling uselessly against his half-shredded lab coat.  “alright.  sounds good to me.”

He didn’t utter another word to Asgore about the former Royal Scientist, and Asgore seemingly forgot he’d been brought up at all.

~

“sans the skeleton, reporting for duty,” sans says, sprawling out across the great throne he’d never once seen the kind occupy.  He’d taken a shortcut directly into the room, seeing no point in hiding that ability from Asgore.  He’s seen him at his worst (and his best, though he doesn’t remember it), which he figures warrants letting a few secrets slip for once.

The boss monster turns to face him, expression pinched at first but quickly smoothing into a wan smile.  “Oh, hello, Judge.  It’s been too long.”

“don’t call me that,” he says lightheartedly, despite the prickling discomfort running up and down his limbs.  “and i don’t see the point of meeting as much as we do in the first place.  not like there’s anyone going around gaining LV on the regular…”

“It’s an important job, and it’s important that I know it’s being done.  Not that I don’t trust you to do it, of course,” Asgore says kindly, a sentiment sans doesn’t think a singular other inhabitant of the underground shares.  “And I enjoy our meetings.  Do you not?”

“course i do.  it’s grim work, is all.  thankfully i don’t have to actually do it more than once a year…”  Sans see the king’s attention drift in real time as he kneels down upon the carefully curated flowerbed, cupping a handful of petals with a paw.  He doesn’t seem to notice when sans stands up on the throne, looking down on the boss monster for the first time since before he was sans.  “something on your mind?”

“No, no… you’re right about it being grim work.  I am sorry I’ve burdened you with such a thing,” Asgore apologizes, lifting his head to smile weakly up at the small skeleton.  The light from the barrier that shines through the stained glass windows illuminates his fur, revealing a glossy sheen of sweat he’s only seen him with immediately after he took human SOULs.  Sans should probably be more worried for his well-being, but his foremost concern is why he’s hiding something from him.

“nah, it’s not like i can’t handle it.  your burden is greater, after all…”  He glances subtly past Asgore, into the hall they both know leads to a basement filled to the brim with child-sized coffins.  The king stiffens, his pinky claw puncturing a petal against his wishes.  He frowns down at the torn flower, carefully removing his hand from its vicinity.

“That is irrelevant.  If my burden is greater, it is only because I have chosen it for myself.  Meanwhile, I chose your burden on your behalf.  It is not a fair world I have created, but… I want to believe it will be worth it in the end.”

Sans chose a far greater burden for himself before he even came to be, but Asgore doesn’t know, won’t ever know unless it’s somehow lifted from his shoulders.  Every day that passes Gaster’s memories become more distant, like a series of bad dreams echoing in his head, and he worries he’ll end up not knowing what he’s doing it all for either.  “it will be worth it.  and hey, even if isn’t, you can’t say you didn’t try.  that’s probably the important part.”

“Yes… I suppose you are right,” Asgore murmurs, rising to his feet once more.  “I apologize for wasting your time with my worries.  I should be used to this by now.  If you have met nobody worthy of judgement, you may leave, for I can say much the same.  Return to you and your brother’s normal life and forget about all of this, until next time.”

If only he had anything of the sort.  He remembers Asgore’s hand on his cheek, eyes boring into his own, daring him to open up the slightest bit.  “You need to slow down.  I worry, sometimes, that you might crumble under the weight of your own expectations.  Friend… I need you to know; I would rather have you here and a failure than dead and a success.”

He didn’t say anything in response, unable to bring himself to lie to Asgore’s face.  He just left, and sooner rather than later, he ended up both dead and a failure.

“alright.  nice talking to ya, bud.”  He hops down from the throne, strolling past the other monster without looking back.  He feels the king’s gaze on the back of his neck, following his every move until he vacates the throne room.  As soon as he’s out of shouting distance, his shoulders slump and he leans against the nearest solid object, which happens to be a marble pillar.  A golden glow outlines his silhouette, long strips of false sunlight filling the empty hall.

He slides down its length, ridges in the structure digging uncomfortably into his spine, ending up sitting propped up against its base.  He could easily return to his laboratory in Snowdin, or even go back and see what Papyrus was up to like Asgore suggested.  He decides he’ll do something of the sort eventually, but he can’t stand the thought of returning at the moment.

Even the notes Alphys salvaged from the true lab haven’t been enough to spark any significant progress.  While Determination might be able to power the machine, it won’t do him any good unless he can somehow channel it through a Monster SOUL.  And even if he could figure out how to do that, he didn’t have anything to extract it from.  If he borrowed one of the SOULs from Asgore, maybe… but that was a bit too far.  He’d prefer not to betray his oldest friend if he could help it.

If he carries on like this for much longer, though…

“I’ve never seen someone so smiley look so depressed,” an unfamiliar voice comments, echoing through the hallowed hall of the last corridor.  He looks up, blinking a few times to clear his vision, and finds himself face-to-face with a Buttercup.  It’s the same type of flower abundant in Asgore’s throne room, the graveyard disguised as a garden.  This one, however, has a small but expressive face, which is currently eyeing him in the manner a dog might eye a particularly tasty-looking bone.  (Sans would know, it happens to him nearly every time he goes outside in Snowdin.)

“guess you haven’t met a lot of monsters, then,” he shoots back, unbothered.  He doesn’t know why he naturally classifies this flower as something other than a monster, but it feels like it would be incorrect to call him one.  He’s missing something, something he feels should be obvious, though what that might be is a mystery.

“I have, trust me.  Waaaaay more than you,” the flower says, rolling its head in a complete circle in some distorted display of pride.  “But that’s besides the point.  What’re you doing here, weirdo?  Are you planning on taking a nap in the Hall of Judgement?”

“the… whuh?  that’s not what it’s called.”  sans pauses, taking note of the perpetual dramatic lighting surrounding him.  “that’s actually a better name though…”

“I know.  That’s why I call it that.”  The flower ducks its head and before sans can reach, it’s vanishing into a crack between the tiles.  A second later it pops out a few tiles closer, barely an arm’s length away from sans’s slippered feet.  He pulls his legs closer to himself on instinct, unsettled by the flower’s unchanging cheerful expression.  So close to him, he casts a shadow over the flower’s entirety, dwarfing someone for the first time since he changed.  “You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.  Aren’t you going to answer?”

“right…” sans mutters, folding his arms over his ribs.  “i was just saying hi to the king.  catching up.  shooting the breeze.”

“Really?”  The flower’s expression finally changes, the corners of its mouth tugging down and its eyebrow quirking up to fix him with an appropriate look of doubt.  “ You and him are friends.”

“besties, even.  what, d’you got a problem with that?”

“I don’t have a problem .  I just don’t believe you.”

“it’s not like you’re any less out of place.  i mean,” he pauses for emphasis, holding out a mittened hand to gesture at the entirety of the creature before him.  “you’re a flower.”

“That’s rude.  You’re a skeleton .  Last I checked, skeletons weren’t particularly common around here,” the flower huffs, folding a pair of leaves like stubby, useless arms.

“sure, but… you’re exactly the type of flower my good pal mr. dreemurr has all over his throne room.  care to explain?”  Sans glances toward the exit leading to said throne room, a bit worried the king might walk in and see him having a conversation with a flower.  Or, potentially, thin air.  He’s not ruling out the possibility of sleep-deprived hallucinations.

“No, I don’t.  Are you always this nosy?  And… irritating?” the flower adds under its breath, as if sans is the one being unreasonable.

“i’ve been told.”  He narrows his eye sockets at the flower, trying to pinpoint what exactly feels so wrong about it.  He can only find the faintest hint of the quiet discomfort that accompanies his every waking moment.  The flower is puppeting its body like it isn’t its own, like its every movement is preceded by a press of a button, like its every word is deliberately scrawled out in its mind before it can truly form.

He doesn’t like how familiar it is.

“Stop looking at me like that,” the flower hisses, beads of sweat forming around its face.  “What is your deal?  I can’t figure you out!”

“my deal..?”  He hesitates for a moment before lifting his hand, holding it out to the strange entity.  “my brother says i should make more friends, and i doubt you’d be talking to someone so irritating if you weren’t lonely.”  Or bored, which seems the more likely answer, but he doesn’t say so aloud.  “howsaboutit?”

“How’s about… what?”  The flower’s eyes widened, seemingly realizing what he was saying.  “Wait.  You want to be friends with me?”

“yup,” he says, somehow managing to pop his p without lips.  It’s all about intention.  “got the feeling we have a lot in common.  think we could learn a lot from each other, y’know?”  He winks with his right eye socket, keeping his left pupil fixed on the flower, magic buzzing just low enough in his skull to leave its colorless appearance undisturbed.

The flower hesitates for a long moment.  Then it says, “Sounds good to me,” and peels a vine from below another tile.  It wraps the length around his mitten, gripping the hand beneath just a bit too tight for comfort.  He doesn’t have a whoopee cushion or buzzer on hand, but he can’t bring himself to be disappointed.  He gets the feeling they’re going to have a very different kind of ‘friendship’ than what he’s used to.

“I’m Flowey.  Flowey the flower,” the creature tells him with a smile and a wink.

“sans the skeleton,” he says with the same, and an unspoken deal is struck.

Chapter Text

The first time sans saw Papyrus ignore the laws of physics, a bone-deep sense of dread rose within him and refused to leave, pushing past his teeth and breaking into reality.

Papyrus had decided that their house looked bland without any decorations and swiftly purchased several long strands of red and green lights.  Before sans could ask how Papyrus was going to string them up on the higher part of the roof as he intended to, he took a step up off the ground, then another, and then he was hovering several meters above the snow.

“how’d you do that?” sans asked in a low voice, grabbing at his wrist as soon as he returned to solid ground.  “where did you even learn to..?”

“I am quite skilled in many ways, some of which elude even me!”  He shrugged, an apologetic smile gracing his face.  “Basically… I forgot.”

“you forgot how you did it?  but you literally just did it.”  Sans shoved his hands into his pockets before his brother noticed they were trembling.  He tried to play that off as the cold getting to him the other day, but Papyrus pointed out that he had no flesh to warm up by shivering, and they lapsed into awkward silence for a few minutes before moving on as if it never happened.

“No, no!  I know how I did it, I just don’t know how I know how I did it.  Get it?”  Papyrus eyed his handiwork, scrutinizing the way the lights hung with his hands held out to frame them.  “A bit too far left, I think…”

“wait!” he said suddenly, startling himself along with his brother.  “can you tell me how?  i… want to try.”  He was sure he’d been able to do something of the sort before, hadn’t he?  Or had Gaster merely been attempting to produce such results in himself?  He scrunched his face up at the feeling echoing through him with no readily apparent source.

“Oh!  Of course I can.  Wow… I get to teach you something… this is exciting!”  Papyrus looked around himself, tugging on his jacket- lighter than sans’s, and unbuttoned over a shirt a few sizes too small to cover his spine- before striding off in a seemingly random direction.

Sans watched for a few moments, thinking he might stop, only to realize he’d been left behind when Papyrus continued marching forth.  He stumbled over the thick snow, struggling to pull his shoes free from the indent he’d been sinking into over the past few minutes.  It’s hard to keep up with his brother at the best of times, but since they came to Snowdin he’s found it exceptionally difficult.

“hey, slow down,” he called after him, managing to raise his voice enough for his brother to hear, at least.

“Sorry,” Papyrus said from a distance, halting in place until sans caught up to him.

“where’re we going in the first place?  i just said ‘tell me how you did that’ and you ran off.”  Sans fell into pace beside Papyrus, who was deliberately walking much slower now.  He was practically shuffling forward, which looked rather ridiculous with his long legs, but he appreciated the gesture too much to poke fun at him for it.

“It’s important to train in the proper environment!  We can’t very well train in Snowdin , that would be dangerous!  For passerby and also perhaps you.”  He added the last bit in his equivalent to a whisper, which was about the same volume as sans’s regular speaking voice.

“training?  who said we were training?”  The flakes of snow falling around them grew thicker with each step they took.  They stuck to his bones, formed clumps of crystals on his hood, and invaded his eye sockets with the white light that reflected off their imperceptibly unique shards.  He wished they could have stayed in Hotland.

Maybe if he hadn’t killed all of his friends, they would have.

He actually shivered for once, though it was more of a full-body shudder.  Papyrus hummed consideringly, then gripped both sides of his hood and tugged it firmly over his skull.  “You have that thing for a reason, sans.  It keeps you warm when you’re cold , see?”

“oh… right.  thanks, paps,” he mumbled into the plush fur surrounding him, even though the chill in his marrow had nothing to do with their surroundings.  He can’t pretend it doesn’t make him feel a bit better, though.  “so… training?”

“Eh, yes.  I can’t really teach you how to do something without… teaching you how to do it, can I?  I’d have thought it was simple,” Papyrus said uncharitably, resting his hands on his hips.

“heh, guess i didn’t think of it.”  He honestly hadn’t considered the idea that he might need more than a brief explanation of the process to figure out how to replicate Papyrus’s reality-bending magic, but that might not be the case.  He felt appropriately chastised despite his brother not knowing the reason for his confusion was overconfidence rather than incompetence, as they were close enough in execution.

“Of course you wouldn’t think of training.  But, here I am, ready to train you!”  Papyrus paused, shifting in place as though he was waiting for something to happen.  “So… basically, you just, uh.  Think really hard about walking into the air?”

“uh-huh.”  He said nothing more, waiting for any crumb of elaboration he might cling to.  Papyrus closed his eyes in thought for a few beats before launching into what he presumed would be an actual explanation.

“Okay, it’s like this: there are a bunch of invisible walls and floors, but they only exist when I’m thinking about them.  So if I need to walk somewhere and not crash into an inappropriately placed invisible stable, I simply don’t think about it.  But if I need to reach something high up, or I just want to walk on nothing, I remember that solid nothing exists and I step on it!”  His brother’s eye sockets blinked open, looking down at him expectantly.  “Now you try!”

“okay.  i think i got that, yeah.”  Sans closed his own sockets to try and concentrate- though he’d never seen Papyrus do the same when he defied gravity, it felt like the right thing to do.  He pictured the space around him, a tangible darkness which closed in on his SOUL.  As he focused more intently, and the sensations of cold on his face and ice crystallizing within his sockets faded into the background, they seemed to stop existing altogether, as if his awareness of them was what caused them to exist at all.

He tried to imagine a wall that he couldn’t see, but could touch.  What he found before him instead, springing into his mind as if guided into his thoughts by an invisible hand, was a pale gray door.  It loomed over him, and he turned his head this way and that to get a better look at it, as if it were actually occupying the same space as him.  Something drummed against his chest, a five-beat of anxious anticipation, and he lifted a hand to grasp the doorknob.

As he touched it, he was greeted by an absence of sensation.  When his metacarpals made contact with the smooth-looking knob, they went suddenly numb wherever they made contact with it.  He didn’t hesitate to twist his hand and push the door open.  The door clicked, loud and grating in his head, and he delved into the space between space.

He only thought to worry about the disparity between Papyrus’s description and his reality when he was several steps too far in to stop.

He stepped out onto a platform, connected to the door with a thin strip of visible nothing, the same gray as the door.  Surrounding it on all sides was a sight blacker than black, a nothing which reached into his sockets and snuffed out any light left within him.  His toes curled uncomfortably at the emptiness that overwhelmed him, an absence with a presence, and he instinctively glanced down at his chest.

Sans quickly discovered what was wrong with him- where he had ventured, his SOUL had not followed.  It did not float between his ribs, cautiously tucked beneath his sternum, which would easily shatter if he was hit with even the slightest ill intent.  He choked on nothing, no excess magic swelling in his chest as it might’ve some other time, no way to subdue the feeling of claws raking down the insides of his bones.  He whirled around, searching for the door, only to find more void.

It surrounded him, overwhelming his senses with no input at all, a sensory deprivation chamber created entirely by his own mind.  His phalanges twitched and clutched at his ribs like he was desperately gripping the rungs of a ladder.  He wanted to reassure himself that this wasn’t real, but it was no less tangible than the rest of his world.  If that was the case, was anything..?

His sockets snapped open, stinging with a buildup of magic previously trapped behind his skull, now pouring out of him in a violent explosion of sparks.  He stumbled forward, grabbing at the nearest object as a sudden influx of light overwhelmed him.  It took far too long for him to realize that it was the couch Papyrus dragged all the way from Hotland to furnish their otherwise barren new home.

He collapsed into it facefirst, feeling the scratchy material catch against his teeth, digging his elbow into the uncomfortable lump on one side.  He curled up there, breathing deceivingly steady, and tried to remind himself that he existed.  His SOUL came to the forefront of his mind, and he pressed both his hands up against his chest through the generous padding of his jacket, peeling it away from the negative space it usually inhabited.  He didn’t dare look down, he merely held it in his hands, feeling it as it was crushed between finger and rib bones.

It was warm, just barely, a dying ember of a flame he’d never felt.  Gaster’s SOUL had never felt anything less than frigid.  He can’t help but feel guilty for feeling comforted by the difference.

~

“I’m not impressed,” Flowey says immediately upon seeing sans’s life’s work, eyes narrowed.  He tries not to feel too offended, as he’s never seen the flower impressed before, and he’s done a lot of work over the past few days to try and produce that result.  It’s currently watching the wildly vacillating lines upon the monitor, which was already conveniently positioned around its height.  “Is it supposed to do something cool, or is this it?”

“i guess you could say it’s ‘supposed’ to do something cool.  it’s not fully working.”  Sans crosses his ankles where he’s sitting atop his laboratory’s built-in counter, swinging them just enough to barely brush the backs of his heels against the cabinets below.  “but this is already pretty cool, if you understand it.”

Flowey glares up at him, practically vibrating with annoyance.  “I know you’re just trying to bait me into asking for an explanation.  You love feeling smarter than everyone else, don’t you?”

Sans flushes, glancing conspicuously at the blueprints laid out across the other half of the counter he’d made into an impromptu chair.  “if i say no, how likely are you to believe me?” he mutters, thrown off-kilter.  He isn’t used to showing any sign of what he used to be, especially not since his first attempts to go back failed so utterly.  It’s strange to be scrutinized by someone who can see more than half of him, even if it’s only a small fraction more.

“Not at all.”  Flowey presses its mouth into a thin line, glancing at the machine beside it, then back up at sans.  “Fine!  Tell me what all this is about.”  It uses a vine to gesture at the monitor, then the tall glass tube, then the tangled mess of wires connecting the two and mingling amongst each other in the process.

“alright, if you insist,” he says jovially, hopping down off the counter with a loud clicking sound as he makes impact with the floor.  Flowey scoffs, which he promptly ignores, crouching down beside it and tapping a finger against the side of the tube.  “this thingy here checks the state of the universe.  every second.  well, every millisecond.  semantics.”

“It… whuh?  How can you check the universe ?” Flowey asks, making sure to sound appropriately personally offended by the concept.

“i’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt here… so, you know how all matter is made from atoms, and what those atoms… uh, do… changes the matter’s state?”  sans folds his hands as he awaits the flower’s response, unable to help the twitching of the corners of his mouth at the sight of its furrowed brow.

“Um, yeah.  That makes sense,” Flowey mutters.  “But what does that have to do with your stupid tube?”

“ah-ah-ah.  i’m getting there.”  His legs are getting uncomfortable propping him up like this, so he slides down to sit fully against the tile.  “i made this thing to check states of matter.  simple, right?”  He waits for the flower to nod along before continuing, well aware of how much it pains the creature.  “well, the thing is, it doesn’t actually work like that.  the theory makes sense, and our reality couldn’t function if it weren’t the case.  but there are no atoms.  there are no states of matter, not really.  all this thing picks up is numbers.  and those numbers have meanings, but who knows what they are.  just know they’re what we have in place of… anything else.”

Flowey squirms uncomfortably through the entire explanation, its perturbed expression growing more pained as time goes on.  When he finishes, it shouts its response, unable to hold itself back any longer.  “That doesn’t make any sense!  Why are there numbers?  And what’s the point of checking them?!”

“uh… i dunno,” he says with a shrug and a grin, at which point the flower lets out a reedy whine of frustration.  “but.  if everything in our world is made up of numbers, then if i find the right string of numbers, i can change the world.  however i want.  i could turn back time.  i could even,” he pauses, magic catching in his chest, “bring back the dead.”

Flowey falls very silent, quieter than he’s ever seen it.  At first sans thinks it’s just impressed by his ‘stupid tube’ and unwilling to admit it, but with every second that drags by he becomes less sure.  He’s about to say something, maybe snap a few times in its face or dump a bucket of ice water over its petals, when it finally speaks.  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” it mumbles, barely audible.  Before he can respond, it ducks down and vanishes into the space between tiles, successfully running away.

He wonders why it was so bothered by the thought.  He supposes it’s no use searching for answers now when he’s apparently going to see it tomorrow.  With a sigh, he shoves himself to his feet and trudges out of the lab.

~

“If I become a sentry, then perhaps time will pass and, seeing my prowess in combat and how dutiful I am, Undyne will make me a Royal Guard!  People will look at me in the street and go..!  Wow!  That’s that one Royal Guard!” Papyrus said from his side, a background chatter which had accompanied the entire walk to Waterfall.

Sans had asked his brother earlier why she didn’t come to Snowdin when she was testing potential sentries for Snowdin, to which he replied: “I don’t know.  Maybe it’s yet another part of the test!” with increasingly shifty eyes.  He shrugged it off and followed in his footsteps, not really bothered about it considering his plans for the day were already kaput.

The fact that they’re hiring more sentries in the first place strikes him as odd.  Why is Asgore suddenly agonizing over the possibility of a human falling down again when it’s been decades since the last?  Sans’s thoughts drift to the flower with whom he’s been consorting.  He’s trying his best to puzzle out his motivations, but every piece he finds seems to belong to a different jigsaw.

“that sounds cool,” he says in response to Papyrus’s fantasizing, which is enough to get him yapping again.  He doesn’t mind- really, he likes hearing about his brother’s dreams, no matter how nonsensical they might be.  No matter how little he wants him to join the Royal Guard.  He’ll find a way to convince Asgore to keep him from doing anything actually dangerous if it comes down to that.

“Oh!  Looks like we’re here!” Papyrus says, stopping at the start of a rocky corridor packed with tall, rustling grass.  Sans looks around, searching for any indication that they’re supposed to be here.  He finds none.

“uh… bro?  are you sure this is right?  it’s just… i’m sorta noticing… there’s nobody here.”

Without warning, a monster bursts from within the grass, leaving it swaying only the normal amount for a place with no wind- that being, not at all.  Sans may not know her personally, but he knows enough about her to recognize Undyne, the Captain of the Royal Guard, the ill-fitting anime tee currently taking the place of her supposed ‘badass armor’ notwithstanding.

She flashes a crooked smile down at him, hands planted firmly on her hips, and sans has to wonder what sort of influence she’s been exerting on Papyrus without him noticing.  “So this is your brother?  Doesn’t look like much, but hey, I’ll put that to the test.”

“I assure you, he is very capable!” Papyrus chirps from his side.  He turns his deadpan expression onto his brother, bones audibly cracking as his head shifts atop his spine.  Papyrus shuffles his feet awkwardly under the weight of his transgressions.

“i was under the impression,” sans says slowly, “that i was taking you to try out.  but it seems like you’ve already met miss capt-fin over here.”

“Yes, that does seem to be the case,” Papyrus says helpfully.  Undyne eyes the two of them, hands sliding down to hang awkwardly at her sides.

“care to explain?”

“There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.  That is!”  Papyrus folds his hands in front of him.  “Tryouts were actually yesterday, and this was actually a clever ruse to convince you to join, as well!  I thought you could stand to get out of the house more, but you don’t like battling in front of people… and thus, my scheme was devised!  Nyeh-heh-heh!”

Sans’s pupils flit to the fish girl currently spinning a spear idly in one hand, eyeing him with all the doubt of someone promised a michelin-star meal that ended up with a bowl of lukewarm ramen in front of them.  He sighs, making sure to sound as begrudged as he is able to (which is very), and gives in.  “fine.  but if she’s not impressed, i’m not doing it.  i don’t want her to hire me just cause you’re my brother.”

“Like I would ever..!”  Undyne seems personally affronted by the idea that she would engage in any sort of nepotism.  “No wimps allowed in my Royal Guard, even if they’re related to Papyrus.”  Or at the idea that she would hire someone weak.  Well, he’s confident in his ability to disappoint her thoroughly.

“Get ready, punk.  I won’t be holding back just because you and Papyrus are blood,” she says, hoisting her spear threateningly at him.  “Or… well… you get the point!”

“oh, i get the point , alright,” he said with a wink, shoving his hands in his pockets.  Her face scrunched up like she just took a swig of spoiled milk.

“New rule!  No puns while we’re sparring!  That one’s going in the official sentry tryout rulebook!”  Before sans can comment on how a book like that definitely doesn’t exist- and he would know, he’s read every book in the ‘Librarby’- she launches a spear directly at his skull.  He can’t help but be a bit surprised, as she hadn’t initiated battle until that very moment, but he still sidesteps the attack with relative ease.

“Hey,” she says, her smile spasming in place, “what?”

“Oh yes, he does that!” Papyrus says from the sidelines, pressed up against the wall so as to stay out of range of any potential stray magical attacks.  “I’ve been told it’s called ‘tactics’.  Unnecessary, in my opinion, but to each their own!”

“just don’t feel like getting a spear through the eye.  what would i do if you cracked my money maker open?” sans remarks, practically baring his teeth at Undyne.  Her eye twitches along with her mouth, but she can do little else until he takes his turn.

He throws a few bones her way, making sure to make them impossible to run on accident while her SOUL is red, which it very much is.  She glances between him and Papyrus, a look somewhere between despair and disbelief dawning upon her face.  “Are you serious?  Come on, give me your best shot!”

“that was my best shot.”  He shrugs.  “what, didya not like it?  that’s kinda rude to say when we’ve just met.”

“Ngahhh!  No, no, no.  Your ‘best shot’ should be like this !”  An array of spears materialize around her person, every single one turning to face him and launching themselves forward in quick succession.  With every attack she flings, he steps artfully to the side, dodging and weaving around the spears.  He doesn’t even need to use a mini-shortcut like he taught himself to do in the case of particularly difficult battles.

When her attack concludes, he presses a finger to one of the last lingering spears, wobbling it where it sticks out of the soft ground.  “i don’t know if you know this, but i’m a skeleton.  i make bones , not spears.”

“The point isn’t that they’re spears- oh my god, just go already!  It’s time for fighting, not talking!” she exclaims, practically buzzing with restless energy.  He wonders if she’s always this aggressive or if this is a one-off thing.  He gets the feeling it’s the former.

“alright, don’t say i didn’t warn ya,” he says in the most threatening voice he can manage without dropping his font altogether.  A bone rises up from the ground, sliding toward her slowly.  She watches it inch sluggishly nearer with a blank expression, long seconds dragging by without a word spoken.  When it finally reaches her, she slashes through it with a spear, breaking it into tiny ivory pieces.  He shakes his head in mock disappointment.  “darn.  i really thought i might get you that time.”

“I see how it is,” she growls, a twinkle in her eyes that he doesn’t like the look of.  “I’m being too easy on you.  You won’t fight unless you have to, will you?  Don’t answer, I already know it’s true.”

“actually, i’d like to answer, if you don’t mi-”  His sentence comes to an abrupt halt as he feels an alien pressure upon his SOUL, far different to the feeling of blue magic manipulating the gravity of his being.  He looks down in response to the leaden pit at the crux of his spine.  There is his SOUL, radiating a sickly green glow, locked firmly in place.

He attempts to struggle in place, but it’s no use.  All he can do is turn, and even that mobility is limited.  His teeth feel gummy where they connect to his jaw, which is clenched so tight he’s sure it’ll be sore for days after this.  He tries to run before she launches another attack- even if it means using a shortcut in front of her, it’ll be worth it not to dust in front of Papyrus.  It’s no use, though- he can’t picture the empty space, too overwhelmed by the sensation of his SOUL being plied by someone else’s magic.  It’s a disgustingly helpless feeling.

Before he knows it, spears are flying at him from every direction.  He barely registers the speed at which they’re moving- they’re relatively slow, all things considered, but he can’t help but give into the magic-churning head rush that comes with his inability to dodge.  He throws out his hands, intending only to summon simple barriers of bone to block the spears, but finds himself surrounded by a circle of spectral skulls.  They part their jaws and, in one fell swoop, they eradicate Undyne’s every attack with a flare of blinding white light.

For a moment there’s nothing but the whistle of the grass, a gust seemingly having been kicked up by the sudden burst of magical energy.  As soon as the strands still and his blasters dissipate into pure magic, Undyne disengages, dropping her hold on his SOUL and setting him free.

“Damn.  You weren’t kidding when you said he could hold his own,” Undyne says to Papyrus, apparently unbothered by the sudden panic that overtook him due to something as simple as a SOUL shift.  He guesses she was distracted by the ring of skulls shooting lasers from their maws, which he can’t blame her for.  He does his best to affect his usual cool, calm demeanor, hoping his slouched shoulders look more relaxed than relieved.

“I did!  I would not lie to you, so you should not have doubted me!” Papyrus responds, though sans doesn’t miss the way he unsubtly beams down at his brother every time they make eye contact.

“ah… that was nothing.  definitely not strong enough to capture a human,” sans says, waving a hand through the air dismissively.  “so, uh… what’s the verdict?l

“You’ve got the job, obviously!  Man, with moves like that, I’d post you at every station this side of the underground if I could.”  Undyne flashes a genuine toothy grin in his direction, and he does his best not to wilt under the force of her admiration.  It feels wrong to get this sort of praise for something he only did because he’d have died otherwise, but he hardly wants to share that little tidbit with her or his brother.  So… becoming a sentry it is.

“You really wouldn’t,” Papyrus mutters to himself, no doubt remembering every time he’s found sans passed out in the middle of a seemingly trivial task.  “But I am glad you think so!  He is definitely as strong as me when he ‘tries’ and ‘isn’t napping’.”

“I’ll never doubt you again, man,” Undyne says, placing one hand on his shoulder and the other over her SOUL.  Somehow, sans doubts that’s going to last long.  He listens to them talk for a few minutes until their words start to sound like white noise and the pauses between them seem to fill his head with cotton.  He holds a hand up and interjects after Undyne finishes saying something or other about human history.

“i’m gonna head home, paps.  call me if you need me,” he says, diving into the sea of tall grass leading deeper into Waterfall.

“I will.  Oh, yeah, he does that too,” he hears Papyrus remark behind him.

“Hey, punk!” Undyne calls after him, practically shaking the ground beneath him with her voice alone. “You’re on duty as of tomorrow morning!  So you better show up!”

“yeah, yeah,” he mutters, then steps through a pale gray door.

Chapter Text

Sans did a double-take when he first met the Riverperson.

There was nothing off about them within a cursory glance, but as he approached their boat, gently swaying atop the river’s current, he got an implacable feeling of deja vu.  Their face was obscured by shadow, hood pulled too far up for him to have a chance of seeing past it from a distance.

He strolled up to them and held a hand up in a half-wave, because that was what he did.  He made sure to exchange at least cursory greetings with every monster he came across, with a smile and a nod and a few lines of dialogue to confirm he wasn’t going to have to judge anyone that day.

“hey, pal.  i haven’t seen you around here before,” sans said casually, leaning sideways up against a nearby pine.  The hooded figure raised their head, hood lifting up an inch only to reveal yet more shadows below.  It was such a deep darkness that he was sure it could have swallowed up the light of his SOUL if it so wished.

“Tra la la.  That is because you weren’t here until recently…” the Riverperson replied carelessly, head tilting minutely.  He may not have been able to see their eyes, but he could feel their gaze on him, accusing.  Did they mean to say that he wasn’t in Snowdin, or that he didn’t exist?  He dismissed the thought quickly; obviously, they had meant the former.  Even if it felt like they were the one judging him .

“sure, but i’ve met most everyone in town.  and i’d like to meet you, too.”  He extended a hand for the Riverperson to shake, assuming they had something capable of doing such tucked beneath the ambiguous waves of fabric falling over their entirety.  “name’s sans.  sans the skeleton.  and you are..?”

“Tra la la.  I am the riverman.  Or am I the riverwoman..?  It doesn’t really matter.”  They shifted in place with their singsong introduction, making sans think they might be about to take his hand and find themself thoroughly pranked, but they fall still as soon as they’re finished speaking.  He waits several beats with his hand awkwardly extended before awkwardly lowering it, shuffling his feet in the crunchy, fresh snow below.

“not really.  hey, are you from around here or..?”  He pondered on how to phrase his question without drawing undue suspicion to himself.  The person before him felt distinctly otherworldly, an unnatural magic which resonated within his malformed SOUL.  “are you an outsider, like me?”

“Tra la la.  Beware of the man who speaks in hands.”

“Excuse me?” he asks in a low tone.  His entire body has gone rigid, vision falling dark for a brief second before he regains control over his magic and focuses it in his left socket.  He pushes away from the tree trunk he was feigning lounging against and walks up to face the Riverperson, having to crane his neck to meet their presumed gaze.  Even looking straight up into their hood from mere inches away, he can’t see a thing.

“Tra la la.  Beware of the man who came from the other world,” the Riverperson says, unbothered by his approach.  Sans chuckles low in his throat, reaching out, phalanges twitching in anticipation.  In a single, swift movement, he divests the Riverperson of their hood.  The fabric spills over their shoulders, dripping down their sternum.

He sees his own face looking back at him.  A long, ivory face, cracks splintering its surface like spider veins, venturing in different directions and oozing some inky black liquid.  It dribbles from its sockets, one wide open and the other sagging so far it looks like it might fall from its skull.  The sludge from the sagging socket leaks upward, dripping into the false sky above.  Without warning, a pair of familiar hands, bored through with twin holes, shoot out to greet his SOUL.  They encircle him, crowding the essence of the self sans had become in his absence, and the ever-present guilt weighing upon him grows so acute he feels he could crumble into dust right then and there.

“You have not honored thy father.”   The figure doesn’t sign, but speaks directly to his SOUL, breaching the inner sanctum of his thoughts.  Sans spasms at the invasive touch, but he cannot bring himself to dodge, nor fight back.  He falls limp in his grasp, a marionette waiting for strings to encircle its joints like old friends.  “Do not simply regret.  Make it right.”

“i’m sorry,” he grits out, unable to meet his better self’s sockets.  “i’m trying, i am.  it’s just… i don’t even know if it’s possible.  if this is all i am…”

“It doesn’t matter if you try if all you do is fail,” the former Royal Scientist says, squeezing his soul a bit tighter.  Sans lifts his weaker, smaller hands and encircles those he wishes were still his own, finding himself unable to fully cover them with his trembling fingers.  He presses down, encouraging Gaster to dig deeper, drenching his soul in well-deserved Karma.

“i know it doesn’t.  it doesn’t matter… so i should just give up, right?”  He hooks his fingers through the holes in the larger hands below, pressing their sharp tips to the thin surface of his SOUL.  He can feel his HP slipping away, decimal point by decimal point, a slow drain accompanied by a painful itching sensation crawling up and down his spine.

Before the final sliver of his health disappears, Gaster wrenches his hands apart, releasing his SOUL.  Sans’s hands come with them, still clinging to them, threading through them in an ugly display of need.  He chokes, finally looking up at the figure who held his SOUL in his hands.  His face is falling away from itself, dropping onto the ground and disappearing, yet more pale clumps in a sea of pale snow.  Sans tries to grab at his eyes, to keep them from spilling dark goo like molasses over his cheeks and into his mouth, but the older skeleton’s fingers dig into his own and hold them in place.

“Failure,” he says with his own hands as well as sans’s, slow and languid as he forces them to form the signs that no longer come naturally to him.  “is not an option.”

Inky fluid trickles lazily from the holes in his hands, entering every crack and divot between sans’s bones.  It’s warmer than he thought it would be, like fresh human blood against his fingers.  He feels ill, but he can’t run away from himself.

He almost wishes he could.

When sans’s sockets shoot open, stinging with unshed tears, he’s greeted by the sight of a half-opened ketchup bottle teetering on its side, leaking small globs of crimson onto the bunched fabric of his comforter.  A cool glow illuminates the otherwise dark room, casting long shadows up the length of the walls.  It takes him a moment to realize the source of the light, but when his eyes land on his paperthin SOUL, floating free of his chest and clutched between shaking fingers, his entire body spasms in fear.

It’s like he’s still in stripes- hah, as if he ever had been- losing control of his magic in his sleep like this.  He clumsily tucks the culmination of his being back into his body, knocking the bottle over fully in the process.  A large red patch forms on his covers, halfway soaking into the fabric, halfway settling atop it.  He closes his eyes against the sight.

His short legs are sprawled out underneath, but he pulls them up to his chest, curling into himself.  He doesn’t know how long he lies there like that, desperately trying to empty his head of the slightest thought, but sooner or later morning light starts to creep in through the window and force its way into his sockets.  He shoves his face into his pillow, trying to ignore the reminder of his obligations.

“Wow, this place is even worse than your other place,” a familiar voice chirps, and the slight twinge in his head starts to feel more like a violent throbbing.  He lifts his skull from the pillow, tugging a hand free from the sea of covers he pulled snugly around himself to prop his head up.  Flowey blinks up at him from the floor beside his mattress, wearing a smirk that makes him wonder how he resists the urge to punt it on a daily basis.

“how’d you even get in here?” sans mumbles, shooting a glance at the locked door on the other end of the room.

“Um… forgetting something?  I’m a flower , stupid.  I go where I want.”  When he looks back down at Flowey, it looks about as annoyed as he feels, which is somewhat comforting.  The reminder that it might as well have free reign of the entire Underground, on the other hand, is not.

“fine.  why are you here, then?  i’m kind of busy.”  Sans tries not to look at the puddle of ketchup on his blanket as he lifts the bottle up to prop it upright again.  Flowey looks at it, then keeps looking, to the point where ‘looking’ turns into ‘judgemental staring’.  He ignores it pointedly.

“I can see that,” the flower says, sarcasm dripping from every word.  “But I did say that I’d see you tomorrow.  And I’m ready to talk, so you’d better be ready to listen.”

Sans can’t say his curiosity isn’t peaked, but before he can get a word out in reply, a deafening pounding besieges his door.  He sits up hastily, spine painfully straight, and hoists all of his bed’s covers over the side of his mattress and onto Flowey’s unsuspecting head.

“come in bro,” he says, kicking the lump of blankets when Flowey starts to curse him from underneath it.  He crosses his legs atop the soft mound, making sure to look as relaxed as possible when his mind is being torn ten different ways at once.

The door swings open to reveal his brother, who is currently wearing the jacket he made from several different jackets cut up and sewn together.  He remembers this one- Papyrus came to sans with the scraps, saying he couldn’t pick one to wear and so decided to put them all together, only to stumble at the final step when he remembered he didn’t exactly know how to sew.  Sans took a day off from his efforts to repair the machine to help him, which consisted of sewing half of it and teaching him how to sew the rest when he told sans he didn’t just want him to do it all for him.

“looking cool,” he comments, which may be a bit self-serving to say when he helped make the outfit he’s wearing, but Papyrus seems to appreciate it nonetheless.  Also, he’s wearing a crop top with ‘cool dude’ written in permanent marker across its front, so it feels like an appropriate compliment.

“I know!  I must look cool on my first day as a sentry, so I selected my clothes accordingly!”  He glances around sans’s room, which is in a mild but not unfathomable state of disarray, excluding the crumpled ball of blankets on the floor.  “Did you… um, redecorate?” he asks, looking pointedly at the covers hiding Flowey.

“yeah.  i’ve decided i’m really into making balls out of things that aren’t meant to be balls.  it’s, uh.”  He hesitates, but bravely forges on.  “it’s modern art.”

“I… can’t say I get it, but good for you!” Papyrus says, brows furrowed in visible confusion.  He finally pries his eyes from the shuddering covers to focus on sans, which is equally relieving as it is exposing.  It’s not even like he’s actually exposed- he’s fully dressed, having collapsed into bed as soon as he took a shortcut home yesterday and slept for longer than he thinks he ever has before- but Papyrus’s scrutiny pierces his SOUL regardless of his state of dress.  “I can’t say you’re ‘looking cool’ so much as ‘looking normal’, but that is okay!  This way you will not steal my spotlight, which is perfectly fine with me.”

“uh-huh.  i didn’t want anyone to pay attention to me instead of my cool brother, so i also selected my clothes accordingly.”

“How thoughtful,” Papyrus says, placing a hand over his SOUL and nodding to himself.  Then he points high into the sky (or the ceiling, in this case), and declares, “Now, let us embark on our first day as sentries!  I have many puzzles and japes in mind, all of which I will swiftly prepare in case of any trespassers!”

“oh.  right.”  Sans blinks dumbly. glancing around himself as if he might somehow find a way out of this situation without straight-up shortcutting away.  Sadly, nothing presents itself to him.  “give me a minute to… prepare myself, and i’ll come down.  it’s a lot of excitement at once, y’know.”

“I understand… I, too, can hardly contain my joy.  Very well!  I will wait at the door!”  He pauses, seemingly remembering sans’s tendency to arrive well-past fashionably late.  “Until we have to go, that is, at which point I will return and you will have no choice but to follow me.”

He nods in agreement, attempting to conceal his embarrassment at his brother’s lack of faith in him.  “good idea.”

Papyrus nods as well, then turns and walked out, leaving the door hanging open behind him.  After a few long seconds, he returns and carefully shuts it, submerging sans in partial darkness once again.

“alright,” sans mutters, grabbing the blankets and hoisting them up off of Flowey.  Or what he presumed to be Flowey, because when he threw the crumpled sheets and comforter aside, he found only empty space.  “uh…”

Flowey’s bright yellow petals peek out from behind his dresser.  A second later, they retreat, then emerge once more from the carpet directly in front of him.  “Nice going, trashbag.  What’re you trying to suffocate me, or something?”

“i was hiding you.  or did you want my brother to find out about you?  and then have a long, awkward conversation with us?”  He feels a bit bad throwing his brother under the bus like this, but he’s pretty sure putting it like that will convince Flowey.  In actuality, he doesn’t want Papyrus to know anything about his experiments, and he doesn’t trust the passive-aggressive flower to keep its mouth shut around him.

“Ugh… you’re right.  You could’ve warned me, though.  Jerk…”  The flower pouts for a while before looking up at him, a sudden spark of interest in its eyes.  “Hey, if you two are brothers, where’re your parents?  I’ve never seen another skeleton down here, so…”

Sans holds up a hand to stop it, sliding his feet into the slippers conveniently positioned at the end of his mattress.  “we’ll talk later.  while i ‘work’.  go out into the forest, i’ll meet you there.”  He pauses, eyeing Flowey with what he hopes is an intimidating- or at least unsettling- expression.  “and only when my brother’s gone, alright?”

“Fine,” Flowey spits, petals practically wilting.  “I don’t know why I put up with you…”

“i could say the same for you.  now go on, run along.  or… eh, heheh… make like… heh… make like a flower and leave,” he somehow manages to get out in his amusement.  Flowey doesn’t dignify him with a response other than a death glare and a swift exit.

He trods out of his room with his hands in his pockets right on time, much to Papyrus’s surprise.  They walk out of their house side by side, preparing to look for a human sans is sure won’t arrive in either of their lifetimes.

~

It’s a long time before Papyrus leaves his side, but he eventually grows tired of dragging sans around and says he should find his own route, one which he can do without getting his stubby legs stuck in the ‘really-quite-insignificant snow’.  He lets out a sigh of relief and walks as far into the woods as he can, eventually forced to stop as he reaches the end of the metaphorical road.  Past the sea of pines rests a huge, purple door, austere aside from the Delta Rune displayed upon its arch.

He walks up to it, eyeing it with inevitable curiosity.  He presses a hand to one of the doors, testing its give, and is unsurprised when it doesn’t budge.  He looks around himself for a moment before lifting a hand and knocking twice on the door.

“knock knock.”  He waits for a few moments before answering himself, dropping his intonation.

“Who’s there?”

“nobel.”

“Nobel who?”

“no bell.  that’s why i knocked.”  He snickers to himself, well aware that it isn’t funny if you’ve heard it more than once.  Alphys tried telling him that joke in the first week they worked together, her anxiety practically visible as she desperately sought some way to break the ice.  He stared at her blankly after that one, feigning a lack of understanding.  After all this time he allows himself to laugh with a different voice, trying to ignore the phantom prickling on his spine.

“Laughing at your own joke, really?  And I thought you were pathetic before…” Flowey mutters, emerging from a particularly thick patch of snow.  His laughter dies in his chest, fading away to nothing.

“you should really try being nicer.  we’re friends , remember?” sans says, letting his legs go limp below him and falling back into the snow.  It surrounds him with its chill, filling up the crevices between his tibia and fibula.  Flowey peers down at him with narrowed eyes as his own droop until they’re nearly shut.

“Uh… yeah,” it says hesitantly, as if it actually forgot they were supposed to be friends.  “I’m just teasing you, obviously.  Friends tease each other.”

“you do know there’s a difference between teasing and insulting, right?  cause it doesn’t seem like you do.”  Sans folds his hands over his lower ribs, smiling up at the backfooted flower.  Or… backstemmed, he supposes.

“Uh.  Is there?”  Flowey actually seems to consider this for a few moments before shaking itself.  “That’s not the point!  We’re meant to be talking about important things, not… whatever this is!”

“banter.  friends banter, too.  man, you have a lot to learn… see, you’re a friendship amateur, but i’m kind of a pro.  lucky you, huh?”  He smiles bitterly.  Him, a friendship pro… that’s the real joke, not that the flower would know.

Flowey flounders for longer than it’s comfortable with, evident from the way its face scrunches up in frustration.  “Not at all!  Seriously, I want to talk about your machine.  And how stupid it is.”

Sans’s eyes open a bit wider, though not fully.  The corners of his grin have taken on a cruel twist, he’s sure, and he makes no attempt to tamp it down.  “is that so?  well, inform me of its stupidity, i’d just love to hear.”

Flowey twines a pair of vines together before itself, long, organic tendrils coiling around one another in a dance.  “You can’t bring people back from the dead.  It doesn’t happen.”  There’s a strange turn to its expression, a small frown fixed on its face.

“yeah?  but turning back time, that’s fair game?” he asks, mirroring the flower by twirling one of his hood’s strings around his thumb.  Flowey doesn’t answer, but its vines fall still, then retreat back into the snow whilst still entwined.  “alright.  good to know.”

“Look… I don’t think any of this will work.  Especially when you’re trying to do something as futile as that .  Trust me, you’re going to be disappointed.”  It pauses, stem growing long enough for it to lean over sans, petals framing its face.  “But I’ll help you.  With your… numbers.  And trying to change them.  I want to see if you can actually do it.”

Sans sighs, gazing up into the false sky far above.  Magic snow wafts lazily down from the blurry haze of perpetual winter.  Maybe it’s something in the air, or his exhaustion is finally getting the better of him, eroding the little hope he has left to fix everything he broke.  Maybe there isn’t a reason why, and it’s just a whim.  Whatever the case, he finds himself telling the strange sentient flower the truth.  “well, to actually change the numbers i’d have to have, uh… determination,” he admits, sockets falling shut.  “the ‘indomitable human spirit’. and, well, i’m about the furthest thing from determined… so, i’ve been a bit stuck. or, completely stuck.”

“Oh.”  A gust ruffles his hood, its soft fur brushing up against his face.  Even with his eyes shut, he feels the silent argument the flower is having with itself.  It must be his lucky day for once in his life, because a leaf brushes up against his shoulder in a useless attempt to shake him alert.  He opens his eyes anyway and sees Flowey’s mouth pressed into a thin line.  “So, about that…”

~

It turns out sans was right to follow his instincts when it came to making a ‘deal’ with Flowey.  He knew, deep in his bones, that the strange creature was no normal sort of monster. It was different, clearly, but he hadn’t known just how different it was.

Determination.   Not just a monster with Determination, something less than a monster given it by chance or circumstance.  He can’t help but worry at the carelessness that must have led to this being’s conception, but he has little room to judge given the circumstances of his existence.  He smiled and reassured Flowey that he wouldn’t tell anyone.  Then he told it he’d try to set up a makeshift Determination Extraction Machine over the next few days, at which point it blanched, but reluctantly agreed.

He could try asking Alphys again, but he gets the feeling he pushed her as far as she could bend without breaking last time.  He isn’t too keen on the idea of breaking any more of his friends, so he’ll try this first.  If it doesn’t work… he’ll figure it out from there.

When he finishes with his ‘patrol’- which consists mostly of shooting the shit with an insentient door- he meets back with Papyrus and tells him he’s going to Grillby’s.  He does take a quick detour there before heading to the dump- he jumps in, grabs a bottle of ketchup, and shortcuts out to Waterfall immediately after.  This way, there’s no chance he’ll get caught out in a lie.  At least, not a direct lie.

His slippers splash into the ankle-deep water before he can realize his mistake, quickly soaking the soft fabric of the footwear.  He huffs, braving a few steps with the heavy shoes clinging to his toes before he gives up and takes them off, wringing them out as well as he can before shoving them into his insulated pockets.  They only seep into the fabric of his jacket somewhat, which is good enough for him.

Sans sloshes through the dump barefooted, somewhere he hasn’t actually been before.  Well, he had when he was much taller than he is now- he remembers informing Alphys that it was the best (and only) place to find abandoned human technology.  The next day she was beaming down at a DVD she salvaged from the piled trash, in mostly pristine condition.  He was going to tell her that it wasn’t particularly useful for their work and that she should try looking for other things, but she was so pleased that he bit his nonexistent tongue.

He picks through the piles of garbage scattered around the place, grabbing onto anything that looks like it might make for good connective tissue and tucking it into his jacket alongside his soaked slippers.  He quickly finds the article of clothing full to the brim and has to take a shortcut to the lab to drop the assortment of metal bits in a pile.  He lays out his slippers as well, putting them next to the door so he can slide them back on as soon as they’re dry.

He steps back through the door in his mind, ignoring the discomfiting sensation that always seems to linger afterward.  Now that he’s here, in forward motion, actually making progress in his efforts to accomplish something he’s been uselessly chipping away at for years, he can’t help but feel a bit giddy.  He gets the same euphoric rush that he hasn’t gotten since he became sans, the feeling of a breakthrough when he was on the verge of giving up.

He strides further into the dump with his head held high, kicking up water in the stretches between piles, splashing about like a child jumping into puddles after a storm.  His SOUL feels lighter than it ever has, always seeming to weigh him down despite its paltry presence.

At some point he realizes he’s passed a few piles by, distracted by the sound of water crashing into itself mingling with his uncharacteristic excitement.  “whoops,” he mumbles, stumbling to a stop.  He has to take a second to catch his balance, not particularly keen on the idea of falling face first into the huge shallow pool.

As soon as he steadies himself and the water stills with him, he becomes aware of a faint noise past the steady flow of water that envelops his senses.  If he concentrates he can make out a stuttering, breathy sound, like someone trying not to cry.  How bad can his luck be, what with someone else showing up the one day he didn’t want anyone to see him here?  He sighs, about to call it a day and shortcut back home, when a characteristic sob rings out.

It’s snotty and wavering, as if the monster making the sound is embarrassed to cry.  They compose themself for a few seconds before another forces its way out of them, clearly unwillingly judging by the way their voice breaks and falls away halfway through.

Only one monster he knows cries like that, and it’s the very monster he came here to avoid.  His shoulders sag at the realization, wondering if he should just leave after all.  Alphys barely knows him, now.  She’ll probably be even more upset if she knows he heard her crying.  He drags a hand down his face, fingers catching on the dip of his eye socket.

“nobody else is gonna help her,” he whispers in an attempt to persuade himself to continue toward the sound.  It works, just barely, and he strides forward as quietly as he can when every step is punctuated by a splash.

He approaches the new Royal Scientist, finding her hunched over herself near the far end of the dump, shoulders shaking terribly.  He shuffles slower as he grows near, not wanting to startle her, but she seems entirely too absorbed in her own world to notice him.  He nearly stumbles over his feet when he sees the bed of golden flowers her form had been partially obscuring until he got close.  A few of them have been clawed free from the dirt, clenched in Alphys’s loose fists.  Her other hand is digging into the scales on her face, deeper and deeper, enough to draw magic to the surface of her skin painfully.

“hey, al,” sans said cautiously, hovering over her.  He dodges back as she shoots to her feet, flailing wildly in an attempt to compose herself.  She very conspicuously scrubs her lab coat sleeves over her  eyes several times, trying to mop up her tears before he can see.  When she’s satisfied, she spins around, mouth contorting into a twitchy, pained smile.

“S-sans?  Why are you here?  I… you…”  Her face falls mid-sentence, crumpling in mere seconds.  “Oh god…”

“got bored working for once, so i went for a walk.  now i’m lost,” sans answers with a shrug, as if her eyes aren’t red from crying tears that blot her lab coat alongside several other half-dried stains.  For once, her lost memories are to his benefit, as that lie would only sound believable coming from him.  “you wouldn’t happen to know the way back to snowdin, would ya?”

She sniffs, folding her claws so tightly around each other that her nails threaten to puncture her scales.  He wishes he could tell her he thought her joke was funny, or that he appreciated the useless trinkets she used to find here and leave on his desk.  He clenches his jaw and waits for her to speak instead.  “Um.  I… p-probably do.  If I think about it.”

“help a pal out?  i was feeling bonely out here all on my own…” he says, ducking his head a bit to look up at her.  She’s one of the few adult monsters around his height, though she’s still barely taller than him.  Her glasses are a bit fogged up, but he can tell she’s about to start crying again, unable to stop the tears welling in her eyes.  His grin wavers a bit at the sight.

“I… I’ll help, I swear.  Just- ugh… I-I’m sorry.”  She buries her face in her hands, shaking her head back and forth in aimless desperation.  Sans’s smile falls from his face, mask dropping and leaving him defenseless.  He extends a bony hand, hesitant but unknowing of what else he’s meant to do, and places it on her shoulder.  Almost instantly she’s flinging herself at him, wrapping her arms tightly around his frail body and digging claws into his hood.  He stiffens in her grip, but carefully brings his own arms up to surround her, patting her back in some feeble attempt at comfort.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers into his shoulder.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I-I’m…”

“do you, uh… wanna talk about what… happened?” he asks, stumbling words betraying his unease.  It almost feels like she’s apologizing to him , though she needn’t do anything of the sort.  If anything, he should apologize to her.  Before they met, she had a good life set out before her- now he’s never sure if she’ll fall apart or fall down first.

“I c-can’t.  I just…”  She gasps in a breath, clutching him tighter to her chest then letting go.  She steps back, hugging her arms tightly around herself in sans’s absence.  “… can’t.”

“that’s okay.  hey, i understand.”  More than she knows, ironically.  He can’t find the humor in this situation, for once.  “you wanna just sit here for a while?  take a break from… whatever it is bothering you.”

“I… I’m supposed to be…” she starts, before huffing out a sigh and hanging her head.  A stray tear dribbles down her cheek and over her lip, vanishing when she clamps her mouth briefly shut.  “O-okay.”

Sans plops down, golden flowers breaking his fall.  Alphys seems hesitant to do the same, but settles by his side regardless, albeit more careful in the way she lowers herself to the ground.  Her tail sways from side to side with a restless energy she can’t contain and she draws her legs up to her chest, resting her chin on her knees.

He lets his sockets fall shut, dimly aware of the faint thrum of her SOUL, reaching out in desperation for the slightest contact.  He funnels his magic into the socket it seems to gravitate to, his ‘good eye’, the only one which he can guarantee he’ll be able to see out of.  He keeps the stray strands of magic hidden under his skull in case she glances at him, but tries his best to channel all the good feelings he’s ever had into that single unseen pupil.

He thinks of the chance he has, now that he has Flowey’s begrudging assistance.  He thinks of Papyrus bringing him spaghetti after he went days without eating, and forcing it down because he knew it would make his face light up.  He thinks of Papyrus writing on half of his shirts and making fabric amalgamations from the rest.  He thinks of Papyrus, and how if he gets what he wants- what he’s wanted for so long, what he’s wanted from the moment he was created- he’s going to cease to exist.

He opens his eyes with a shock, magic dissipating in an instant.  He grits his teeth to force himself from making a strangled noise that might resemble Alphys’s earlier sobs too closely for comfort.  He glances to his side and finds the Royal Scientist dozing, eyes shut and shoulders relaxed, looking more peaceful than he’s ever seen her.

“tired yourself out?  first time it’s not me doing that, heh…”  Sans clenches and unclenches his bare hands against the soft, golden flowers surrounding them, crumpling delicate petals and stray roots Alphys previously ripped up in her meltdown.  He knows now, or at least suspects, that he can bring Gaster back.  What he doesn't know is if he should .  If he was the one who ruined everything in the first place… who’s to say he won’t just repeat the same mistakes?

He sighs, nonsensical breath whistling through his teeth, and carefully steeps Alphys’s SOUL in blue magic.  He wraps an arm around her shoulders, the other around the base of her tail, and eases her gravity, making her light enough for him to carry.  He hoists her up with a cracking sound from his knees which blessedly doesn’t wake her.  Then he steps through a shortcut, striding easily into the surface level of their- of her lab.

He gives the easy-to-draw box a light kick, watching it unfold itself before lowering his friend onto its surface.  He tugs the blanket out from under her before he releases his blue magic, draping it over her as she sinks into the mattress.

“sorry this is all i can do,” sans apologizes to her resting form, rocking on his heels with a faint clicking of bone against tile.  He buries his hands in his pockets, extending his arms fully once they’re inside his jacket, pulling the fabric halfway taut.  “when everything is back how it should be…”  He pauses, color draining from the world with the rest of his eyesight.  “i guess i won’t be here to help.  but, uh… maybe he’ll help you.”

Or maybe he won’t.

Sans leaves before she wakes up.

Chapter Text

“Listen to me, Asgore,” he started, as delicately as he was able to, slumped against the side of his king’s throne.  Said king was not sitting upon it, instead opting to drizzle water over his buttercups with a slight tilt of the hand holding his watering can.  Its trickling stuttered before coming to an abrupt halt as the last of the can’s reserves were depleted.  “We need to do something about this.  I’m well aware of the importance of breaking the barrier, but it will mean nothing if we don’t do something about this anomaly.”

“I trust your word; believe me, I do.  But how can I help you when even you don’t know what it is we’re up against?  What use are my words when faced with oblivion?” Asgore asked, still waving the watering can about as if it served any purpose.  He had been feeling similar lately- a tool that had outlived its use, still humored by his king because of their ‘friendship’.  He ducked his head shamefully.

“If I can pinpoint the anomaly, it’s possible your power would be great enough to eradicate it.  You… after all, you have…”  He paused mid-sentence.  He kept his head low, though it was out of apology more than shame in this instance.  “more LOVE than any other single monster in the underground.”

The long sigh that escaped Asgore’s parted lips was expected.  What wasn’t was the way he walked up to him, taking a mere handful of strides to make it to the scientist.  He placed the can on his empty throne, where it sat uselessly where a great ruler was meant to sit.  “W.D.” Asgore began, gently resting a paw upon his shoulder.  It engulfed most of his clavicle, a hand larger than any singular part of him.  “I can see this has shaken you.  I know this is bad, but you must take care of yourself.  Know that I will be there every step of the way.  Anything you need to protect monsterkind, I will give you.”

Gaster finally looked up.  Asgore’s warm eyes were fixed on his face, open and honest even when turned upon him.  His crown caught the light, forming a reflective halo around his head.  Nobody else would give him so much, expecting nothing in return but his honest effort.  He had to find some way to fix this.

“I mean it.  Anything .”

~

Sans opens his eyes to find himself slumped against a half-built Determination Extraction Machine, likely only avoiding crushing it due to his insignificant weight.  He shoves himself off of it as quickly as he can manage, resulting in the conglomerate parts falling to the side.  He huffs, propping it up against the wall and giving his work a once-over.

He’d gutted one of his blasters, sure that it was the only way to replicate the body of the machine on such short notice.  He tore its jaw free while it was still thrashing around, thankfully able to subdue it before it did any damage.  Now an array of tubes and wires feed into its sides like veins into a heart, soon-to-be connected to the computer he uses to control the machine he hopes he might one day harness to edit reality.  He’s pretty sure he could throw together a hodgepodge motherboard specifically for it, but he’s never been one for expending unnecessary effort.

He hooks a wire he made from two shorter wires soldered together into the unresponsive blaster’s nasal cavity.  He fumbles blindly for a moment before he finds the port he shoved through the back of the skull and clicks it into place.

“you’re gonna work for me, alright?  and you’re not gonna lead to another dead end…” sans murmurs, gripping the repurposed attack’s skull and staring into its sockets as seriously as he can muster.  Unsurprisingly, it says nothing in response.  That doesn’t mean he gets no response, unfortunately.

“You’re talking to your attacks now?  Aren’t we… err, ‘making friends’ to stop this kind of behavior?  It doesn’t seem to be working,” Flowey remarks from his side, squinting at the useless assemblage of parts, turning its head this way and that as it does.

“actually, we’re ‘making friends’ to ‘have friends’.  geez, you really don’t know how this works, do you?”  Sans resists the urge to hunch protectively over his handiwork, embarrassed by the flower’s doubtful staring despite himself.  If someone with the knowledge to truly appreciate it were here, they’d be impressed at what he managed in the span of a day.

The theoretical monsters with the knowledge to appreciate were basically just Alphys, but that is irrelevant.  So is the uncomfortable twist of concern for her that crawls up the ladder of his ribs.

“Stop acting like I’m stupid or this really isn’t gonna work,” Flowey deadpans, eye twitching unsubtly.  A stray vine brushes up against his lower leg, then slowly slides up its length in some strange caress.  He has to force himself not to form another blaster, one far less friendly than the one lying inanimate before them.  “You think I don’t notice, don’tcha?  That you think you’re soooo much better than me.  Well, you’re not.  So stop .”

“you caught me,” he says drily, holding his hands up in mock surrender.  “i’m actually an egotistical mastermind trying to manipulate you to my purposes.  sorry, won’t do it again.”  He has a sneaking suspicion that the description isn’t too far off the mark for Flowey itself, but he gets the feeling saying so wouldn’t be a great social lubricant.

“Ugh… you sicken me.  I’ve had friends before, you know. I’m so good at it I even had a best friend!”  It seems to be genuinely hung up on the idea of him thinking it doesn’t know how to have friends.  He’s taken aback by the small quiver to its lip, the way it glances to the side to avoid looking him in the eye.  “Whatever.”

“hey, it’s just my charming personality,” he insists with a crooked smile.  Then he softens his voice as much as he can when it’s practically made of nothing but mumbles.  “nothing personal.”

“Okay… fine, I’ll let it go.  But only because I’m nice .  Now, are you planning on explaining that skull full of junk or is it another piece of ‘modern art’?”  Flowey’s vine finally releases his leg, vanishing into the tile as if it were never there.  Sans can still feel it against his bones, wrapped around his legs, threading through bones it could easily break with the slightest clench and twist.  He curls into his jacket subtly, rubbing his hands together as if he’s cold in hopes Flowey doesn’t know that doesn’t do a thing to warm skeletons.

“would you say it’s skull of junk, even?” sans says, not even waiting for Flowey’s groaning about how bad it was to fade away before continuing.  “this is the determination extraction machine i told you about.  a.k.a. your new best friend.  like it?”

“I… um.”  Flowey scrunches up its face, then forces it to smooth out, then scrunches it up again.  “I have neutral feelings about it.”

“really?  cause, uh… honestly, you look like you only have strong feelings about it.”  Sans pauses, rubbing the blaster’s skull as if it’s a living creature in need of comfort rather than a barely-animate skull he tore apart and reduced to a function.  “conflicting ones, actually.”

“No,” the flower retorts bluntly, not even bothering to come up with a convincing argument.  He can respect its lack of respect, theoretically.  “Do I have to get inside of that thing?”

Sans narrows his eyes, turning to face Flowey with his whole body rather than just his head.  “i didn’t say you had to, buddy.”

“But I do, don’t I?  The… um, the things are going in and out of it.”  Flowey gestured to the tubes with its whole head, petals rustling with the movement.  It pops back up with a saccharine smile that sets him on edge no matter how friendly it appears to be.

“you do.  i can’t make it any other way with such little time.”  He shrugs weakly, unsure of the source of the creature’s apprehension.  “sorry?  it’s safe, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Uh-huh,” Flowey mutters, void of inflection, and lets out a long-suffering sigh.  “Alright.  Whatever.  I’ll see you tomorrow.”  Apparently it’s set on showing up every day until he finishes the thing.  Does it think he won’t finish the machine if it isn’t there to babysit him?  It’s almost funny how misguided it is, if so.

“one more thing, before you go.”  Sans takes a loose wire between his fingers and twirls it idly, avoiding Flowey’s piercing gaze.  “d’you know alphys?”

“The Royal Scientist?  What about her?  She’ll be no use to you, if that’s what you’re wondering…”

“oh, no, no.  just figured you might, since she kept talking about golden flowers,” sans fibs, rolling his shoulders in their sockets with a faint scraping sound.  Besides, ‘talking about’ and ‘crying over a bed of’ isn’t all that different, at the end of the day.  “how did a sneaky little flower and a scientist that never leaves her lab meet, anyway?”

Flowey narrows its eyes, slowly leaning back to appraise the skeleton beside it from a distance.  “…you’re plotting.  I can see it in your creepy round eyes.  What does it matter how we met?”

“just curious, is all.”  The rolling of sans’s shoulders smoothly transitions into a shrug.  “you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“Well, I don’t.”  Flowey ducks its head, prepared to abandon him in his bare-bones (heh) lab, but hesitates before it goes.  “And… just cause I said that, doesn’t mean you should go asking her about me.  She’ll ruin our experiment with her whining.”

“ our experiment?” sans asks, eyes widening disproportionately.  “didn’t know you felt that way, buddy.  i’m touched.”

“Psh… if I’m doing this much work, I should get credit, that’s all.  Otherwise you’d just be using me as a means to an end.”  Flowey stares sweetly up at sans, batting its eyelashes.  “But you’d never do that, would you?”

Sans stiffens, feeling strangely accused by the vague statement, and by the time he collects himself he knows it’s already too late to avoid the flower’s notice.  It says nothing as he sits in discomfort, his teeth feeling like they’re made of foam, the wire he was playing with forgotten in his lap.  At some point Flowey disappears, but he doesn’t see it go; his vision has already turned darker than black.

Alphys must know something about the flower, but she’ll refuse to tell him, even if he asks directly.  Especially if he asks directly.  He knows she’s closed herself off completely already, he’s known since the moment she started to spiral.

Is it important enough to break the little trust for him that lingers in the recesses of her mind, amputated from its source?  Flowey carries itself like something capable of inflicting harm, despite few signs of a high level of violence presenting themselves.  He doesn’t trust it, and if they’ve worked together in the past?  He should really be more suspicious of her.  Treat her more like the enemy she very well could be.

… he thinks of the photos of him with Gaster’s lab partners, tucked into a half-empty photo album in the nearby cabinet.  The second he’s not looking at them, their faces turn to a fuzzy blur in his memories, indistinguishable from each other or the world around them.

No, he won’t dig a deeper hole than the one she’s already dug for herself.  This is his cross to bear.

~

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Papyrus asks him the next day, startling him out of drowsy inattention.  He lifts his head, which was previously resting face down upon a sentry station, craning his neck to see his brother’s worried glare.  He blinks slowly, trying to understand what he’s being asked for longer than he really should.

“uh… yeah?” he slurs, running his mittens across the wooden table they rest upon, fraying fabric scratching against the grain.  Then his voice comes out all at once, a jumbled mess attempting to get across a singular thought.  “hold on, you haven’t asked that before- not recently- why’re you saying it like… like you have?”

“Well!”  Papyrus places his hands upon his hips, and he’d probably paint a heroic figure if it wasn’t for the bedazzled poncho he dons.  “You’re obviously not okay, but when I ask you stuff like that, you just say ‘yeah, i’m okay’ five times until I ask you in a stern tone due to your avoidance!  So I figured I’d just skip the preamble and just get straight to the ‘telling me what’s wrong’ part.”

“oh.  uh, do i do that?”  Sans is well aware that he does, but until this very moment he had no idea Papyrus was as well.  It’s more than a bit embarrassing, when laid out plainly like that, and he can’t help the sheepish chuckle that escapes him.  “yeah, sorry.  wasn’t trying to worry you, i just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

“No!” Papyrus interjects sharply, slamming his hands down on the sentry station’s table and startling sans into jumping in his flimsy chair.  “I told you , we’re skipping that part!”

“ah, whoops.”  Sans schools his spine into slumping in his seat, relaxing against his hands where they rest upon the table.  Papyrus’s brow furrows at the sight, for whatever reason.  “why exactly do you think i’m not okay, though?”

“You’re tired all the time.  You can barely go five minutes before I have to shake you out of a stupor!  And lately, you keep just… staring into space.  Like you can see something I can’t.”  His brother shifts in place, shuffling his boots against the thick layer of snow below.  His hands slide from his hips and suddenly he’s kneeling before the sentry station, eye-to-eye with sans even after his excessive height is cut in half.  He places his hands on the table and his head atop them, in some bizarre mirror of sans’s current position.  “Something is bothering you, I’m sure.  But what..?”

Sans squirms in place as Papyrus gazes into his sockets, as if seeking answers within his skull.  Unfortunately for his brother, there’s nothing to see in him but a yawning void.  He doesn’t shut his eyes against his efforts to see, however; silent and still, he bares his insides.  “nah, m’just being lazy.  all this ‘looking for humans’ leaves me bone-tired, y’know.”

“As if you pay enough attention to notice if a human’s right in front of you…”  Papyrus sighs dejectedly, breaking eye contact and lifting himself up out of the snow when sans continues to stare with no sign of stopping.  He turns his head to survey the empty woods for signs of movement.  Sans glances around in turn, watching tiny white particles stick to Papyrus’s shirt.  “At least your HP will stay a bit higher like this…”

“huh?”  Sans’s head jerks reflexively at the reminder, scanning their surroundings with a sudden surge of nervousness.  Papyrus might not know exactly how low his HP is, but he clearly has a good enough idea to worry over it.  He feels a pang of guilt at the idea of concerning him with his very existence, wishing he’d hidden it better in the past.  “bro, not so loud… what if a, uh, human heard?”  Or a monster, he doesn’t say- the idea of any of his not-quite-friends knowing how fragile he is isn’t particularly tempting.

“Nonsense!  No human would dare attack the brother of The Great Papyrus!”  He looks over his shoulder with an apologetic smile.  “But, ah, I will employ discretion in the future if it bothers you so much.”

“thanks…” he murmurs, sockets drooping in the aftermath of his anxiety.  They don’t fall entirely shut, creeping exhaustion interrupted by a brief flash of yellow between a distant cluster of pines.  His steady breathing comes to an abrupt halt, caught between his ribs like a mouse in a trap.  The feeling that accompanies the sight is enough to know beyond a shadow of a doubt exactly what creature was eavesdropping on their conversation.  It was neither a monster nor a human he should’ve concerned himself with.

“Sans?  Are you listening to me?” Papyrus asks, voice strained enough that he can assume he’s said his name a few times already.

“hm?”

“You at least need to recalibrate your puzzles before you sleep all day!  It’s the bare minimum!” he repeats, to which sans nods and agrees without making a move to do so.

“I mean it!  And no, thinking about doing it doesn’t count!”

“okay.”

“Nor does saying you’ll do it and then doing something else entirely!  Which should be obvious!  But!  Clearly isn’t!”

They talk back and forth like this for a long time, until sans’s world eventually falls under a blanket of thoughtlessness and the comfort of sleep subsumes everything else.

~

Sans shuffles back to Snowdin on foot for once, dreading the task that awaits him when he finds himself back home.  It doesn’t do him much good, considering the familiar face he finds as soon as he steps past the entrance and into the town proper.  Flowey is hunched over outside of the shop, twitching in place where it hovers a few paces away from an interdimensional box.

He hangs his head, running a hand down his face and catching a stray thread from his mitten on the lip of his socket.  He only approaches after sufficiently preparing himself, strolling up to the flower with his hands in his pockets, affecting nonchalance.  “hey, bud.  whatcha doing out here?”

Flowey startles, spasming in place before spinning around to face him with a smile too wide to look right on its face.  “Ahah, howdy!  I didn’t know you’d be back so soon, so I was looking around.  It’s a nice town you’ve got here!”

“uh huh.  is the side of that building way more interesting than it looks, or..?”

“Actually, yes.  Not that you’d understand,” Flowey adds under its breath, quiet enough that he has to strain to hear it.  Either it’s something else the flower is too full of itself to think him able to comprehend, or something else it’s deliberately hiding from him.  It’s not very reassuring to notice when they’re about to do what they are.

“alright,” he mumbles anyway, turning his face away from his small ‘friend’ and toward him and Papyrus’s distant home.  If sans brings their old self back, will he stay here?  Would anyone in Snowdin recognize him, even feel the barest hint of deja vu upon meeting him, or would he become a stranger to everybody once more?

“Hey, why the long face?  You’re almost done with your… ehm, project , aren’t you?” Flowey asks, stem growing until his eyes are mere inches away from sans’s sockets.  He leaps back on instinct, as if the thing’s approach might spell the end of his life.  Well, that’s basically what it’s helping him to do in the first place, isn’t it?

“i’m done, actually,” he tells it, letting his right socket fall shut in a wink.

“Already?  How… why?”  Flowey’s face contorts before him, features twitching into several different conflicting expressions before finally settling on one of naked bewilderment.  “That doesn’t make sense…”

“um.  what’s the big deal?  i finished a bit earlier than i said i would, sure…”  Sans rubbed his neck, hand dipping below the fur outlining his skull before rising up again.  “but it’s almost like you…”  Like it thinks he wasn’t supposed to.  Like it thought it knew when he was going to finish, but it was wrong.  No… like it’s already been proven right, but something changed, and it isn’t anymore.

“It’s not a big deal!  C’mon, let’s go there right now.  Might as well get started, haha!“  It turns to look at the building again, but it doesn’t linger this time.  It beams up at him eagerly, the strange energy it had moments before seemingly vanishing.  How easily its face becomes a mask all its own, despite its clear lack of control over itself.  If it weren’t so important to his work, he might be tempted to judge the trickster flower before him.

Instead, he crouches down before it, places a hand around its stem as if he’s about to rip it from the earth and reveal the tangled roots beneath, and falls rather than stepping through a shortcut.  The familiar door eagerly accepts them, swallowing them both whole and spitting them out on the floor of sans’s lab.  Flowey’s eyes are wide and unblinking when they return to the living world.  He wonders how familiar it is with being unable to control its movements… if it’s ever experienced such a thing.

“we’ll do what i said we would.  but first, i need you to tell me something, and i need you to tell the truth,” he says, releasing Flowey’s stem but not pulling away just yet.  His hand hovers around it, caging it in, reminding it that it cannot flee unless he allows it to.  “you weren’t surprised when i said i might be able to turn back time, were you?  bringing back the dead, that you had something to say about, but…”

Flowey’s mouth opens and closes uselessly, a silent plea for something it can’t even articulate.  Sans’s thumb brushes up against the nearest petal, a slight touch that makes its entire body shudder.  “tell me… why was that?” he asks, smiling at it, just like every other blatantly fake smile they’ve traded one another since the day they met.

“No reason..!  I swear, I really do!  I just… I thought one might be possible, but…”

“if you turn back time, anyone who died in that time would come back to life, wouldn’t they?  so why do you think one is possible if not the other?”

“It’s… they wouldn’t come back to life .  They’d just…”  Flowey blinks profusely, and he thinks it might be holding back tears until it looks up at him with a sly smirk of a sort he’s never seen on its face before.  It’s bitter and cruel and he thinks it must be what hides under every one of its sweet smiles, just below the surface.  “Reset.”

Sans lets go, drawing his hand to his chest in some instinctual reach for his SOUL.  This thing… this unnatural, alien thing… in that moment, he’s sure it has more control than he ever will.  All those branching timelines, disparate threads drawn apart and back together… he knows in an instant: this thing could ruin his life on a whim.  The way it looked at him, the way it’s still looking at him… has it already?

“Listen close, buddy .  I’m not gonna ask you this twice.”  Without the slightest twitch of its leaves or shudder of its petals, its expression melts back into the one it shows frequently, of feigned friendship that curdles in his SOUL.  “Do you still want to do the experiment, or am I going to have to try again?  I’m giving you a choice, here.”

Sans would laugh out loud if it wasn’t so terrible.  A choice between eradication and existence?  It’s no choice at all.

It shouldn’t be so hard to decide.

He hesitates, hand flush against his chest, pressing through the thick fabric of his coat to dig uncomfortably into his ribs.  It would be easier if he didn’t know.  He could keep searching for his better self as if nothing else mattered.  And it wouldn’t, not to him.  Does it really still..?

“Tick tock, trashbag.  C’mon, you know what to do.  You can’t just give up on him,” Flowey keens, reveling in his indecision.  Sans doesn’t think it even realizes how easy it would be for him to give up.  How much of a relief it would be.

“let’s keep going,” he murmurs with a barren voice, all the hopes and dreams meant to accompany a monster’s magic stripped away.  “what else is there to do?”

He could kill it, he’s sure.  If it’s done half of what he thinks it must have, it would wither and die the second he reached out to attack.  But then… what would happen?  If it has as much control as it seems to think, it’d just end up right back here, again and again, until it survived.

“Good!  I know we can figure this out together, friend .”

~

Flowey blinks up at him from within the confines of the gutted blaster, eye twitching.  Every time he adjusts a wire or flips a switch it jumps away, as if anything he could do to it would even matter.  He scoffs and rolls his eyes each time, feeling even less sympathy for it than he would have before.  “stop squirming,” he demands, poking at the creature with a bare phalange, having pulled off the mitten concealing his unblemished hand to work.  “if this goes wrong, it’s on you.”

“If you say so.”  Flowey squeezes its eyes shut as he hooks a clamp onto its stem, teeth practically chattering at the sensation.  “But you really should be careful how… how much you take at a time.  That stuff”s all that’s keeping me alive, y’know.  Which is more than you’ve got, but…”

Sans stiffens, and the next clamp he closes around the flower’s petals is more than a bit rougher.  It yelps aloud, which makes him feel a bit better, especially considering what it just said.  “you heard?  or… have we fought?” he asks, the world blurring around him in a rush of lightheadedness.

“ We haven’t fought, silly.  I’ve never done anything bad enough to fight you…”  The flower winks, clearly mimicking his own, and it looks ugly on its face.  “I wouldn’t worry about the other you-s.  They have nothing to do with us.”

“uh-huh,” he grumbles, extrapolating everything the flower might have told him from its careless words.  He flips another switch and chuckles as the flower starts, then turns to activate the much larger machine directing it.  The monitor activates with the slightest touch, seeming almost eager.  He ignores the lines fracturing into a million pieces, pulling a keyboard from within its shell to send inputs to the patchwork machine slaved to it.  He’s already coded the necessary sequence, so the only thing he has to do now is pull it up and activate it.  When it’s ready, his hand hovers over the enter key, pupils fixed on Flowey.

“you ready?”

“Ugh… maybe give me a second, actually,” the flower starts, folding its leaves around itself.

He presses down.

The electricity rushing into Flowey stimulates its magic mercilessly.  It surges out of its little body, feeding through the cords and back into it, a feedback loop that seems to set it alight.  Sans can see bright coils of magic lifting away from it, blinding white that turns red for a brief moment before dissolving back into its petals.  With every cycle the red stays a bit longer, grows a bit more vibrant.  Some of it trickles into the blaster’s sockets and pools there, a pair of glowing pupils in stark contrast to his sole functional eye.

Flowey’s eyes are wide and fearful, like it truly believes he’s going to let it die.  He’s tempted, even if everything he is will be overwritten the second he dares to do so.

(Its petals wilt and then disintegrate into dust that vanishes the second it hits the air.  It tilts its head up to stare into him, like a sunflower turning to face the sunlight, accusing him with eyes that melt and dribble down the length of its face.  Vines pry themselves free from the floor, cloying tendrils seeking comfort in its despair, but he doesn’t grant it.  It doesn’t deserve it .)

He turns the machine off.  The bright crimson flooding the blaster’s insides settles into a darker color, like harvested human blood.  It’s barely visible within the shadows flooding the skull’s sockets.

Flowey pants loudly, a crumpled pile within the machine, petals trembling as they struggle not to fall from its face.  Every once in a while its magic will visibly surge before fizzling out.  It curls further into itself each time, never sparing a glance at sans.

He peels himself off the ground, legs protesting the motion with a spike of pain through their marrow.  He opens a cabinet under the blueprints and retrieves a thermos with ‘Dan’ printed across its side in comic sans.  He originally picked it up at the dump because he thought it was funny, but in the absence of an alternative, it’ll do as a container.  “thanks, dan, whoever you are,” he says under his breath, unscrewing the cup’s top and returning to his spot amongst his machinery.

Flowey has pulled itself upright, looking paler and sicker than before, but still very much alive.  He quirks his brow at the sight, but makes no other acknowledgement, instead directing his attention to the coagulated sludge filling his attack’s sockets.  He tugs the tube he attached to drain the Determination and funnels it into the open top of the thermos.  Leaning over and tapping the enter key a second time, the dark red liquid starts to pool at its bottom.  More leaks out than could possibly fit within the pitiful form of the flower it was extracted from.  Of course, the same is true for his own magic… their universe doesn’t seem to care about following its own rules.

“You idiot ,” Flowey rasps, still facedown in the miniature Determination Extraction Machine, petals pulled taut by the clamps barely clinging to them.  “Don’t you realize what happens if I die?”

“nothing at all happens.  at least, for me,” he replies easily, watching the final remnants of Determination dribble down to meet the rest.  “i’m not too worried about it.  you were surprised i finished so early… must’ve done something different, huh?”

“That doesn’t mean anything.  You were just as likely to do it worse as you were to do it better.”

“oh, sure.  but that doesn’t matter.”  He clutches the thermos, full up with precious ichor, the likes of which he’s only ever imagined holding in his hands.  “as long as one of me finds him… well, it’s all the same.  besides, the original sans is far gone by now, right?  as far gone as he is…”

The flower’s lack of response tells him all he needs to know.

Chapter Text

Sans siphons the Determination into a syringe, watching its sluggish flow with bated breath.  He won’t use all or even half of it this time; that would be too risky to attempt before he knows the effect it will have on him.  Even this much poses a danger to him, with the frailty of his SOUL and body, but if he dilutes it and injects in small doses he should be able to regulate its effects.

Flowey watches from the corner, a petulant frown permanently affixed to its face.  It’s silent as he works, jotting down notes with generous empty spaces left to add footnotes in case things don’t go to plan.  Perhaps it’s exhausted from having a fraction of its life essence severed from it, or perhaps it just wants him to feel judged.  He shrugs it off; it’s hard to care about its opinion when he’s holding the distillation of its terrible power in the palm of his hand.

He disconnects the tube he redirected into the syringe, allowing the handheld pump he used to draw the crimson out to fall to the side.  “is this how you did it all?  with stolen power…”  He turns the syringe over in his hand, watching the glass cylinder and the vibrant red within catch the light.  “i bet you don’t even have your own SOUL.”

The flower moves for the first time in a long time, crinkled petals shuddering as it turns its back to him.  “How do you know so much..?  I just don’t get it.  Who could have possibly told you all this?”

“i’m just making educated guesses, and you’re helpfully confirming my suspicions.  thanks, by the way,” he remarks with a smile and a wink.  He pushes the mess of loose tubes and machines around him up against the wall, sufficiently clearing the floor.

“I don’t accept that!  It doesn’t make sense for there to be no answer… if I help you enough, I’m sure I’ll figure it out.  If I save whoever it is you’re trying to save… maybe he’ll tell me,” Flowey supposes listlessly, watching him from out of the corner of its eye.  He doesn’t tell it that even a complete Gaster will likely know little more than it does, at least on a metaphysical level.  He doesn’t tell it that he’s not doing it for the sake of love or knowledge, but to satisfy the emptiness in his chest that never seems to go away.

Sans leans back with an arm behind his skull, propping himself up precariously with his free hand clutching the syringe partly full of Determination.  He lifts the syringe to his left eye socket, positioning the tip directly over his glowing pupil.  He’s not ready to inject yet, just to pull from himself to dilute the solution.

The needle slides into his socket easily, piercing the thin layer of concentrated magic without issue.  He eases the plunger the rest of the way open, flooding the syringe with swirls of blue and yellow.  (“Patience and Justice,” Asgore told him one night, soon after he’d been appointed as Judge.  “Yes, of course it would be… oh, don’t fret.  I’m only glad to have chosen correctly.”)

He gently tugs the needle free once the syringe is filled to the brim, leaking a slightly paler red from its tip.  His eye stings a bit, but not terribly, and after a cursory check he discovers he’s thankfully taken no damage.  His HP hovers at eleven points, exactly where it always is as of late, thanks to his endless drifting off.

“That’s disgusting.  You could have gotten that from anywhere.  Why did it have to be your eye ?” Flowey remarks, repulsion creeping in around the edges of its otherwise vacant voice.

“there’s more magic there, simple as,” he replies, tapping the syringe until the combination of monster and human magic dribbling down the side of the needle slows.  Sans gets the feeling Flowey really isn’t going to like what happens next, if that alone upset it.  He’s already had a silent debate with himself over the best place to inject the Determination, and quickly settled on his right eye socket.

He considered sticking it directly into his SOUL, but that would give him exactly zero wiggle room if it affected him poorly.  He decided he should focus it into some part of his body.  His right eye socket already doesn’t work half the time, so he thinks it’s the best option.  If something goes wrong, there won’t be very much at stake.

“guess i’ll get straight to the point,” he mumbles to himself, lifting the needle to the opposite eye socket.  The pupil within has already died out and left that side of his face obscured by darkness, which he supposes makes this a bit easier to psyche himself up for.  He shoves it in blindly, ignoring Flowey’s atypically moderate protests, and winces at the hot buzz of magic he feels from contact with the overflowing concoction coating the sides of the needle alone.  He counts down in his head, supposing he ought to find some way to prepare himself.  Five, four, three-

His thumb squeezes the grip, pushing all of the crimson solution from the syringe and into his socket at once.  It hits him with all the subtlety of a heart attack, clutching his SOUL in a viselike grip.  The pain is indescribable- it floods every inch of his body, filling his marrow like he’s never been filled before.

For a second he thinks his body is rejecting it and it’s come spurting out of his eye, but then he realizes that the slimy texture running down his cheekbones is the bone tissue lining the inside of his socket melting.  He grabs at it helplessly, soaking his mitten with mealy sludge, as he twists this way and that against the frigid tile.

He can’t see a thing, can only feel the fire he’s lit across every inch of his body.  There is an aching desperation within him to live that he’s never felt before, one he didn’t think himself capable of feeling.  It eats him from the inside out, cannibalizing his magic to sustain itself.  He yearns to survive, even as his HP ticks down point by point, even when he can’t formulate a thought that isn’t it hurts, it hurts, god, why does it hurt so much?

Sans thought being entirely unable to see was the worst his eyesight could get, but he is swiftly proven wrong.  The first thing he sees as he lies on the floor, every bone in his body tense and shaking, is a flash of random color.  It’s bright and painful and he can only see it in his right eye socket.  It hurts, but it only stays for a few seconds before leaving him be.

He curls into himself, drawing his legs up to his chest and clutching at the thin, rattling bones.  Then another flash fills the right side of his head, still blurry but clearer than the last, nauseating in its contradiction to the feeling of cool tile pressed up against his side.  He sees bright white, blinding white, all-encompassing white.  A streak of red cuts through its emptiness, like a wound torn through the world.  More white spills from it, a dusty powder that dissipates into the everything, reduced to meaninglessness as it is devoured by a cascade of pale, twinkling flecks.

It’s back to black, after that.  Sans feels like clutching at his throat, like choking himself, like crushing his spine until he makes a matching pair with the powder he saw.  He tries, but his hands are shaking too hard to close around it.

It’s gold, next, the yellows and oranges of false sunlight blending together to make a sight more beautiful than they are allowed.  Still, they took it, like they take all the scraps the humans leave behind, animals hungry for the sky they’ve been starved of.

Green vines thread through the tiles as they approach him, reaching out to grab him.  He can see himself lurch back, can hear his voice echoing through the last corridor.  No, no; it’s the Hall of Judgement.  It always has been, even when he called it by a different name.  “so, i’ve got a question for ya,” he says- the other him, the one with stinging eyes and a humorless grin- and the beady blank eyes he’d become familiar with in the past few days wait patiently for him to finish.  “do you think even the worst person can change..?  that everybody can be a good person, if they just try?”

He’s plunged back into the all-encompassing nothing.  It feels more tangible, now, like it’s crowding him from every direction, crumpling him into a tighter and tighter ball.  He curls up in a fetal position, a futile attempt at comfort for something that was never born.

Determination slides down his chin like spit, a trail of vibrant dribble that pools around his jaw.  The pain has become a background ache, as if the unending disquiet he’s learned to ignore has been made tangible, thrumming through his marrow and threatening to break him into pieces.  He lifts a hand to wipe the liquid human spirit from his face and force what he can back between his teeth, choking it down like a bitter pill.

He sees the barest hint of something else, just beyond his reach.  He shuts his left eye, struggling to make out anything in the swirling colors laid out before him.  A faint glow shines through, then another, and suddenly he’s surrounded by stars.  A million, billion stars, and maybe he could’ve picked out individual constellations if he wasn’t stunned into thoughtlessness.  They’re so present and tangible, like he really is peering into the sky; seeing the universe he’s been kept from, so vast in its infinity.

It’s almost worth the feeling of his SOUL boiling in his chest.

~

How long has it been?  Days?  Weeks..?

Minutes?

Sans tosses and turns in his bed, the thin sheen of sweat upon his bones sticking uncomfortably to the sheets.  Something continuously buzzes behind his right socket, always threatening to puncture his SOUL and show him everything he doesn’t have, for better or worse.  He tries to keep it shut, tries to focus his magic in his left socket- all to no avail.

It doesn’t matter what he tries, the disparate timelines still tug at him from every which way.  Even if he is unable to see them, he can hear them, so loud that his head starts to pound.  He imagines that if he found some way to block the sound he’d get caught up in the sensations of the quasi-memories, and if that failed he’d wind up full of emotions that shouldn’t be his to feel.

At some point he gets so desperate he shoves a hand into his SOUL to try and force it to reject the trace Determination from itself like vomit.  All he gets for his efforts is a dizzy feeling that doesn’t go away for several hours and several hit points evaporating into thin air with a mere touch.  He collapses against his mattress and attempts to sleep as well as he can with dozens of overlapping voices overflowing from within his skull.  He barely manages to accrue a single hit point from the restless half-slumber.

He’s sure he hears Papyrus shouting through his door at multiple points through the… day?  Night?  He can’t tell if linear time even applies at this point, but his brother is calling for him and he can’t bring himself to reply.  He doesn’t even know if it’s his brother, strictly speaking, or if it’s some other sans’s brother.  Whatever the case, sans can only hope he doesn’t end up forcing his way through the door only to find a pile of dust waiting for him.

Flowey stays by his side as he suffers, mumbling to itself all the while.  Does it find this funny?  It must, or else it wouldn’t stay and watch.  He can’t find it in himself to be angry, though he wishes he could.  It’s pathetic how often he reaches out to the flower to ground him in the present; how much comfort he takes in its shrill, disingenuous reassurances.

“Don’t worry, pal.  Your best friend Flowey’s here to keep you company!” it says.  Or: “Boy, I sure hope you don’t fall down after all this.  But you wouldn’t dare ruin all our progress like that, would you?  That’s what I thought!”  Or once, when sans is hunched over the side of the mattress, magic gushing from his left socket and staining the carpet below: “Don’t cry, sans.  You’re doing better than I did!”

He lifts his quivering pupils as soon as the magic pouring out of him slows to sluggishly ooze down his cheekbones.  “am i reeeally?” he slurs, wobbling in place where his thin arms prop him up.

Flowey blinks, apparently surprised that he’s lucid enough to not only understand its words but respond to them.  It quickly composes itself, though not without directing a repulsed sneer at the clumps of magic sinking into his carpet.  “Yes… when I got my Determination, I didn’t feel anything .  You’re lucky!  You get to feel everything !”

“is that so.”  Sans’s arms shudder and collapse under him, dropping him back onto the unkempt nest he’s transformed his mattress into in the wake of his… experiment.  He gulps down every breath like it might be his last, eye sockets fluttering shut as soon as he catches a glimpse of something that isn’t his dim room.

Still, he can hear the words echoing in the darkness that really ought to be impassible.  “Excuse me… Yes, you, with the blue jacket.  Can you do something about your friend..?”

He hears a mumbled reply from himself, words that form behind his teeth independent of his will.  “my friend..?” he asks in some other time and place.

“Yes, your friend… The one behind you, with the creepy smile.”

His eye sockets shoot open, met with dual visions of the mess strewn about his room and the tall grass characteristic of Waterfall.  A bug looks up at him, around the same size as Flowey and sitting in around the same place relative to him.  He can’t see its face, can only see the twitching of its antennae and the shuffling of its stick-like legs.  His other self spins around, searching the grass for some sign of someone else, desperately pushing aside foliage in an attempt to find something that isn’t there.

“Hmmm?  Where’d your friend go?” the bug asks, and he could swear its mocking smirk is audible.  As soon as its sentence concludes, he’s abandoned in his room, shivering in a dark corner under Flowey’s watchful gaze.  His SOUL turns in his chest, shuddering harder than his whole body, threatening to tear itself apart if he doesn’t focus all his energy on keeping it whole.

“Wow, you look scared.  You’ll have to tell me what all you saw when you can talk in full sentences without eye-vomiting all over the place.  I always wondered how a monster with surplus magic would react to Determination…”  Flowey ogles the sickly glow of his SOUL in a way that makes his skin crawl, and he tugs the sheets over his rib cage completely to obscure the sight.

“nn… you, say… uh…”  It says it like it knows how monsters without magic to spare react to Determination, he’s trying to say, but he’s suddenly too nauseous to get the words out.  He presses a hand to his chest under the sheets, trying to soothe his disturbed SOUL as well as he can.

“Aw, not feeling well?  Hey, you should drink some water, maybe it’ll help with that.  I’d get you some, but, y’know.”  Flowey waves its leaves around itself with a shit-eating grin.  “No hands.”

“m’fine, thanks for nothin’…” he rasps, struggling to keep the light in his eyes from dying out.  If he’s left seeing nothing but patchwork glimpses of his other lives, he worries he might forget that he exists at all.  The thought fills him with more fear than the thought of dusting here in his bed.  He forces his sockets to widen, even if all he’s permitted to see with them at the moment are the ugly golden petals of his worst, closest friend.

Sans doesn’t know how much longer he carries on like that.  He can only recall the snippets of other times funneled into him, slight and severe detours from his path that make him grimace when he realizes they changed nothing in the end.  If he manages to turn Gaster back into a living, breathing man… will all of those sanses be erased, or only him?  Or have they already been erased, falsely perpetuated in his memories alone, just the same as their previous self?

“you remember the timelines… all of them?” sans asks from the ambiguous state he hovers in, somewhere between awake and asleep.

“Sure I do.  They only exist because of me, after all!”  A vine crawls up the side of his mattress ,playfully  tugging at the sheet he’s hiding himself under.  “Why?  Do you..?”

“no… no, i don’t,” he lies- quickly, but not so quickly as to sound desperate.  His SOUL thrums hot against the remnants of his palm, encroaching slightly on the hole interrupting the intricate arrangement of bones, even through the single mitten he keeps on in Flowey’s presence.   “i was just thinking.  why do you do it?  does it feel good , controlling people like they’re toys to play with?”

“I don’t know.  I wouldn’t say it feels ‘good’ so much as it feels ‘satisfying’.  The sort of feeling I used to get from solving your brother’s puzzles… but someday I realized I knew all the answers, and the only puzzle left to solve was you .  All of you, at first, but now you specifically.  So here we are.”  The flower’s vines twitch in a motion approximating a shrug.

Sans doesn’t ask if it’s killed before.  He doesn’t ask if it was out of curiosity or malice, or how many it killed if it had, or how long it took for him to do something about it.  “do you think even the worst person can change?” is all he asks, his voice low, sockets staring straight through the flower.  It stiffens, narrowing its eyes and curling its lip.

“You’re a dirty liar.  Don’t think I don’t know that,” it hisses indignantly.  “And to answer your question: obviously they can’t.  Not even if they change before they do anything bad!  From the second anyone is born or made or whatever, they’re doomed to fill the role set out for them.  They can’t change that, no matter how hard they try.”

“and you..?”

“I’m the only real person left down here,” Flowey says, ironically.  It hasn’t escaped his notice that the characteristic hum of a SOUL has never once reached out to his own when they speak, as it might with other monsters, or even humans.  It is an hollow being claiming to be more tangible than him.  The worst part is, he believes it.  “I’m the only one with a real choice.”

“but you won’t choose to change, will you?  there’s no reason to.”

“Of course I’ll change.  Again and again until I see something new.  That’s life!”

“you don’t get it.”  Sans grimaces, hoisting himself up on shaking hands and turning over to flop down facing the wall.  He wants to hurt this thing, to impale it upon every evil act it’s ever committed, but he can’t inflict that kind of pain when everyone it’s killed still lives and breathes.  “of course you don’t…”

“I don’t get what?!  Hey, trashbag!  Tell me what I ‘don’t get’.  Because right now it sounds like the one that doesn’t get anything is you, even though you know more than I’ve ever let you before.  Come on!”  Flowey harangues him like this for a long while, whining at his back like a petulant child.  It nearly manages to drown out the flashes that burn themselves into his head.  They’ve started coming slower, making him think for a bit that they might finally let him be before returning with a vengeance.

A knock interrupts the haze that blankets his thoughts, cutting through the silence of anticipation with its unexpected arrival.  “Sans, are you in there?” Papyrus yells through the door, likely hovering a mere inch away from it.  “It’s been a full twenty-four hours since I last saw you, which is far longer than anyone should be locked up in their room!  If you don’t come out, I may have to enact an ‘invasion of privacy’, which I don’t think either of us want!  So!  If you could come out now!  I would appreciate it.”

“one second,” sans says, hopefully loud enough for his brother to hear despite its low volume.  He rolls over to face the edge of the mattress, surprised at the ease with which he achieves the feat.  That is to say, his limbs burn with the movement, but he doesn’t look like he’s in terrible pain, which is effectively the same as not being in pain to begin with.

He pulls himself to his feet with a hand on the wall, leaning heavily into it as his legs threaten to give out.  He decides to just keep a steadying hand against it the whole way and walk around the perimeter of his room, shuffling carefully around the dresser that comes all the way up to his eyes.

“Sans..?” Papyrus is asking by the time sans reaches the door, fingers curling around the knob.

“yeah, i’m here,” he says, swinging the door open and stepping through without thinking.  To his confusion, however, he does not step into his hall, nor does he see his brother’s face as he cranes his neck expectantly.  He stumbles onto a tiny gray platform surrounded by darkness.  His pupils gutter out before he can stop them, engulfing him in that unending black, invading the space between his bones.

His SOUL is separated from him, leaving him empty apart from his fear, his dread, his repulsion toward his very state of being.  “papyrus?” he calls into the nothing, reaching out in desperation to feel something, anything .  “asgore?” he asks- and then, quieter, after a long moment of hesitation, “…alphys?”

But nobody came.

When he gets a tight enough hold on his magic to pry open the sockets he didn’t even remember closing, he finds himself face-to-face with… himself.  He jumps back, spine slamming into a hard counter and elbows knocking into several pots that shatter as they fall across the table and floor.  He glances at his feet and finds the tile below littered with limp yellow flowers- buttercups, to be precise.  He’d laugh at the coincidence if he didn’t know it was anything but.

He looks up at the mirror across from him, his trembling body surrounded by lovingly potted plants.  They seem to mock him in their reflection, but when he turns to face the true flowers, they are as still and silent as the dead.  (He walked down this hall, hand in hand with Papyrus, soon after they’d both been brought into existence.  There were no flowers, then, and the air hadn’t been thick with a scent like too much perfume layered over the chalky smell of dust.)

“al…” he breathes, turning his pupils back to the buttercups and stroking the petals of one he’d knocked over.  It’s been partially crushed under the weight of scattered dirt and clay shards, stem bent in such a way that he knows it won’t ever recover.  He doesn’t look much better, having caught sight of himslf in the mirror- his face is smeared with half-dried Determination and a thick sludge made from his own body breaking down and spilling from his eye.  His SOUL doesn’t feel like it’s about to cleave itself in two anymore, but the sweat still clinging to his surface has a pinkish tint to it.

A wheezing noise cuts through the otherwise silent hall, a sort of strangled panting.  He lifts his gaze to search for the source of the sound, only to find a small white sphere at the end of the hall.  It shudders in place, threatening to roll closer but instead simply spinning in a tight circle.

It whirls around and around, hypnotizing in its aimless movement.  Sans holds up a hand in anticipation, ready to take hold of its SOUL if need be.  If it’s even a monster, that is.  It could easily be yet another outlier like Flowey, especially considering everything points to this being the place of its conception.  He shifts to lean against the table, feeling suddenly unsteady on his feet.

Another shape peels itself from the blob of solid magic before him, spilling little bits of itself on the floor as it does.  A second later, a hole opens in what now seems to be a vaguely canine head, a gaping hole in place of its face.  A body forms shortly after, and it lifts itself up on far too many legs, individually unfolding from within itself.  It stumbles forward, the orifice with which it draws in labored breaths shrinking and expanding wildly.

It approaches him, and he thinks he sees some collection of matter in the shape of a tail wagging in the mirror.  He reaches out to grip its SOUL as it lumbers forward, tendrils of blue magic encircling the culmination of the beast’s being.  What he feels sparks instinctive disgust within him; there are several SOULs overlapping within it, melting into one another to the point that it’s hard to tell where one ends and another begins.

This freak is not of nature, but a manufactured accident, one with the opposite problem to him and his brother.  There are too many monsters within it, rather than too few.  It seems to hold itself together by sheer force of will, its conjoined SOULs constantly quivering in terror, like that of a monster who’s already fallen down.  And yet.  Still, it attempts to stumble forward, scrabbling amorphous feet across the floor in its desperation to reach him.

He loosens his grip on the gravity holding its body in place and it drags itself across the floor, a bit more hesitant than before.  The gaping cavity stares down at him when it reaches him, dripping pinkish froth onto the top of his skull.  He looks up, staring into the hole of its face, hand still raised as his magic gently cups its SOULs.  It takes this as its cue to engulf his forearm in its peculiar maw.

“hey, that’s not- let go,” he hisses, attempting fruitlessly to pry his arm free with his other hand pulling on his elbow.  A thick layer of slime soaks into his sleeve, not to mention the mitten covering his hand, which sticks uncomfortably to the inside of the hole.  He falls limp in its grip after a sufficient amount of useless struggling, sighing and letting his head fall against its side.  Its approximation of a tail wags faster.

He wonders how many monsters were forcefully melded together to create this being.  Is it happy?  It barely seems sentient, not how a monster really ought to be, loving and hoping and dreaming.  He runs his free hand along its side, the bones of his fingers catching on damp, matted fur.

“End-d-dogeny?” a familiar voice calls from the end of the hall, just loud enough for sans to hear.  “I h-have… f-food.  If you…y-you…”  It trails off, giving up on even trying to articulate itself.  A crinkling sound replaces its words, and the amalgamation drops his arm, freeing his hand from its seemingly endless maw.

It glances between him and the door, apparently unable to make up its minds.  Sans, on the other hand, made up his mind as soon as he saw this place.

He could stay, of course.  He could console Alphys, insist that he understands what she’s going through and try to help her right her wrongs.

(Her clothes are half-shredded and covered in stains.  She looks like she hasn’t slept in days.  “God… oh, g-god…” she whispers to herself, over and over like a chant.  He reaches out but she flinches away, eyes wide with horror, and he knows it’s already too late.  She fell headfirst into her creation long ago.  All that’s left is to watch as she’s consumed by it.)

It’s not his place.  And… well.  He doesn’t exactly want to stick around trying to help someone who’s doomed to repeat his mistakes.  Maybe it’s hypocritical, but some small part of him hates her for doing this.

Some small part of him hates Gaster for what he did, too.

“H-h-hello?”

Before Endogeny can make up its minds, he ducks through a shortcut, deliberately this time.  In the few seconds before he wrenches the door open, he catches sight of a vivid red color seeping from underneath it, beckoning him like an old friend.  He steps through without hesitation, ignoring the faint sobbing he hears from the depths of the Lab.

(“I’m sorry I d-didn’t tell you sooner, sans.  I was… scared.  But… I-I’m kind of glad you f-found out anyway?”  Alphys laughs a mirthless laugh, rubbing at the corner of her eye.  She’s smiling, bittersweet but genuine, exhaustion weighing her down but no longer crushing her under its weight.  “You’re a good friend.”)

Chapter Text

Gaster cupped his SOUL in his hands, its pleasant warmth turning to an uncomfortable pulsing in his gaping palms the longer he held it.  He curled into it, perched upon one of many beds from a time when the lab was more of a hospital, surrounded by harsh light that stung his sockets.

The theory of SOUL mitosis was not one he was unfamiliar with.  In fact, it was he who initially proposed the idea, when he was still searching for ways to break the barrier.  If they could propagate more human SOULs from that which they already had, Asgore would have no need to continue killing, and they could still go free.  Now, though… now he was considering enacting the theory upon himself.  It was for a different reason, but nonetheless to prevent death.

Still, the thought of putting it into practice made his chest tighten painfully.  He could have used someone else as a test subject, sure.  But could he trust anyone but himself to do what needed to be done?

No, he couldn’t.  So it would have to be him.  A piece of him, at least, would remain, and he hoped that would be enough to carry out his newest work.

He’d long since modified his magic with the express purpose of eliminating duplicitous creatures; things that existed outside of the normal flow of time would stand no chance against it.  He’d crafted great skulls capable of turning anything of that nature to dust, even if they weren’t part of monsterkind.  His… offspring?  Counterparts?  His… fragments should be able to sense the innate wrongness of such beings.

His LOVE was higher than it had ever been before.  He needed the power of a Judge, after all- it was the only way to guarantee his success.  It didn’t matter how profoundly it gnawed away at him; he could not regret something that would save his world.  If a sacrifice was needed, he would make it.  At least they would live on as a part of a hero, just the same as Gaster.

(They shook their head ‘no’ over and over, tears streaking down their face and matting their dark fur.  Gaster wrestled them into the chair nevertheless, holding them down with a legion of spectral hands.  As soon as he turned the machine on, their SOUL was wrenched forward, hovering just underneath the fur covering their heaving chest.  They’d given up on begging him to stop at this point, merely weeping incomprehensibly.  How could they know exactly what he was about to do before he even started to do it?

Oh, right.  Their power.  That was why he was doing this in the first place.

His true hands invaded its chest and forced the brightly glowing SOUL free.  Its unique yellow light stung when it hit his sockets, and he squinted against it.  A monster could not absorb a monster SOUL, of course, which had been a point of contention for a while.  How would he take their unique abilities if he could not subsume them into himself?

He hoisted the container within which the cyan human SOUL hovered nervously, uncapping it all too eagerly.  He requested its use from Asgore- this one specifically, the one with the strongest hue of Patience.  Its ability would balance out that which gave the Judge power, so that his pieces may have the will to enact the same Justice again and again.  This SOUL would absorb the Judge’s own, and then he could pry free their power using his Determination Extraction Machine with a few slight modifications.  It was so simple he kicked himself for not thinking of it sooner.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” he signed rapidly, and though he was sure the Judge could understand, it did little to assuage their fear.  A great skull emerged from the dark behind them, excess magic leaking from within its maw.  He could have sworn he caught a glimpse of someone behind it- a silhouette in the shadows- but as soon as he caught sight of it, it was gone.  He shook his head and waved a hand, letting loose a shock of brilliant light from behind the blaster’s teeth.  “You’re the last one I need.”)

Gaster sighed, rubbing his pounding head with a summoned hand.  He couldn’t stop now, not after all he’d done for the sake of peace.  Even if somewhere deep in his marrow, he wished he could.

He had time- it wasn’t happening now, or even soon.  He was able to say goodbye to Alphys- though she didn’t know it was his final goodbye, nor would she ever.  He didn’t pay a similar visit to the King.  Asgore would see through him, and then the Royal Scientist would end up spilling his nonexistent guts, and then he would ask him to stay and he wouldn’t be able to refuse.

He said goodbye from afar, watching the boss monster shamble through the last corridor from behind a pillar.  He slipped away before he noticed his presence, hiding his face behind his hands all the while.

Now he only had one thing left to do.  He had to rend his SOUL from itself and scatter the pieces throughout all time and space, so that they might eliminate every instance of the anomaly simultaneously.  It wouldn’t be pleasant, not by any means.  It would be exactly what he deserved.

Gaster lifted himself up off of the tattered mattress, hand trailing behind him to tug the covers over it.  He stumbled forward, feeling uncharacteristically unsteady on his feet, like his sins were tangibly weighing upon him.  A flicker of movement caught his attention before he could get to the door, another dark silhouette, just the same as he’d seen before.  It was much shorter than him, but still clearly monster-shaped, and he could make out a flicker of blue and yellow magic sparking from one side of its face.

“Excuse me?” he signed, too exhausted to feel fear at the sight of an intruder.  “You cannot be here.  You need to leave before I lock up.”  Because it would be the last time he did so, and then his home would become something else.  Or maybe it would be lost to time just the same as him…

“i don’t remember this,” the figure muttered to itself, taking a wary step forward.  “this must be… some other reality.”

It took another step toward him, and he instinctively stepped back.  The other monster kept stumbling forward, close enough for him to catch a glimpse of its wide, unblinking eye sockets.  One was empty, the other inhabited by magic forcefully crammed into it.  Its mouth was pulled into a disconcerting grin, though it seemed more and more like a grimace the longer it looked upon Gaster.

A mittened hand twitched in place before rising up between them, a feeble attempt at a barrier composed of bones flickering into existence.

“You don’t remember?”  Gaster felt a sinking feeling in his SOUL, weighing heavily upon him as the cogs turned in his mind.  Why would someone other than him have reason to remember the darker parts of his Lab?  He grit his teeth, sockets falling half shut as he watched this unfamiliar creature recoil in fear at his visage.  “Do you know something I don’t..?” he signed, taking a cautious step forward despite the other skeleton’s visible distress.  “Tell me, if you do… is it worth it?  Everything I’ve done… does it even change anything?”

A flicker of recognition shone in the small monster’s singular pupil before even that went out and he was left staring into two dark holes.  His hand fell to his side, and the sight of such defeat at Gaster’s simple question transforms the sinking feeling in his SOUL to something more like drowning.  “ is it worth it? ”

He looked down, shuffling his feet in place, and Gaster wondered if he could see anything through his empty eyes.  “i don’t know,” he whispered, seemingly to himself.  He interrupted as soon as Gaster lifted his hands to insist, as if he knew exactly what he’d have to say to that.  “really, i don’t.  i’m just a piece of you, after all.  i can’t see the big picture…”

Gaster shoulders slumped in disappointment, but really, he should have known.  He couldn’t help but shudder at the sight before him, an incomplete fragment without guidance… part of him would soon become this pitiful creature.  He took another step forward, then lowered himself down onto his knees, kneeling before his fraction.

His hand reached out to grab his shoulder, but stopped just before they made contact, the barest distance from him.  He pulled back, worried about what might happen if they touched.  “Don’t worry about what comes next.  All you have to do is trust in me.  Everything that needs to be done will be,” he signed, attempting to reassure this piece of him despite his own doubt toward his plans.  If he could not forgive his own actions, perhaps the future self he’d never fully become could.

“is that so..?” he asked tremulously, grin wavering in place alongside his words.  “and what needs to be done?”

Gaster paused, taken aback.  Surely he would be imbued with that knowledge from his conception… but, no, there was no guarantee.  When one was to throw themself into a tear in the fabric of time, there were infinite ways their carefully laid plans could go wrong.  All he could hope to do now was to course correct.

“To erase the anomaly from our world, and every world besides.  That is why I created you,” he signed, though he has yet to do so.  Created, will create, is creating… it was all relative.  The important part was that this thing remembered his words, and went on to help the other shattered pieces of himself to do so as well.  If they worked together, as the well-oiled machine he intended them to be, the anomaly wouldn’t stand a chance.

“you did this on purpose,” his fragment breathed, barely even a whisper this time.  He pulled away from Gaster’s hovering hand, stricken with some conflicting amalgamation of betrayal and yearning.  “you made me like this… on purpose.”

“I had to!” Gaster signs fervently, unable to hide his frustration at the lack of gratitude for his sacrifice.  “Otherwise our world… every tangled timeline will cease to exist!  At first they’ll merely jump left and right, stop and start.  Surely you’ve seen that much, at least.  But if you don’t get rid of it, everything will end.  Everything .

“There was never any other option.”

“oh.”  His successor turned his head to the side, face scrunching up.  He looked pained.

Gaster watched him, clearly losing himself to thought, just as he’d always been prone to.  This piece so resembled him in many aspects, but ventured apart in many others.  It was worrisome, to say the least.  He wouldn’t show such worry, though- that would only sow doubt, which would lead to hesitation, which would lead to failure.  He couldn’t confide in anyone, especially not himself.

“Thank you,” he said simply, forcing a smile, and hoped it was enough.

~

Sans sits under a relentless cascade of water let loose by the shower head above, a hollow sound bouncing off the bathroom walls as it crashes into his skull.

The downpour slowly washes away the thick, half-dried clumps of melted bone still clinging to his face, the sludge that remains sloughing off and leaking down the drain in ivory and red chunks.  He watches it trickle down the drain from his perch upon the chair wedged haphazardly into the tub, knees pulled against his chest and toes curling over its edge.

The second he thought it was getting easier to tell what was real and what was not, he was thrust into a memory that never belonged to him, not even as a hand-me-down.  He’d come face-to-face with that which he’d been seeking relentlessly, and that angel told him he cleaved itself apart deliberately.  His arms tighten where they wrap around his legs.  Even before it started instructing him on his purpose, he’d wanted nothing more than to run away.

The worst part is, now that it’s over and he finds himself back in ‘his’ body, he can recall seeing exactly what Gaster saw, feeling exactly what he felt.  He can see fear on a face that shouldn’t be able to look up at him, an empty puppet without a SOUL.  He remembers offering hollow words of comfort to himself, and he remembers believing each and every one as if they were gospel.  He chokes on his own magic and wishes he was able to throw up.

“Sans?  Are you in there?” his brother’s voice calls out, slightly muffled by the door between them.  He glances at the curtain, flecked with tiny droplets, some of which are slightly pink.

“uh-huh.  i tripped and fell into a whole mountain of banana peels.  really just covered me in slime.  soo… i’m fixing that.”  He’s fully aware that Papyrus won’t believe his nonsense excuse to shower, but he doesn’t tend to contend him on little things like this.  As long as he yes-ands long enough to forget any concerning non-sequiturs in sans’s behavior, he’s done his job.

“How on earth did you not see them?  You could have just… not done that, you know.”

“oh, no, it was truly unavoidable.  see: i was standing there thinking how funny it would be, so i did it.  there was nothing i could do.”  Sans feels something slick and hot fall from his eye, an unsettling feeling that sends a shiver up his spine.  He swipes a hand across his cheek and when he pulls it away a thin film clings to his phalanges, like an amniotic sac coddling some terrible fetus in his eye.

“Sigh… I should have known.  Well, either way… I must come in to prepare for sentry duty!  As I actually prepare for such things, unlike some skeletons.  So… you know.”  Papyrus doesn’t elaborate as to what he apparently knows, but soon after the telltale creaking of the door swinging open announces his entry.

Sans stiffens in place, eyes fixed upon the drain, where the steady flow of water mixes disparate bits of his already feeble body with the diluted Determination coursing through his marrow.  It would be so easy for Papyrus to see this; he’s standing mere feet away, all he’d have to do is push the curtain aside and he’d know exactly what sans had done to himself-

But he won’t, he reminds himself.  Sans hears him humming his ‘special battle theme’ to himself as he gets ready, and he can’t bring himself to move an inch.  He stays still as a statue, joints locked in place and pupils blurring and dissipating like snow against warm flesh.  He barely breathes, the only sensation he registers being a few final chunks of himself trailing down his face and into the tub, where they vanish forever.

“Sans?“ Papyrus asks after some intolerable amount of time, speaking unusually quietly.

“yeah?” he responds on instinct, no deliberacy behind the singular word.

“So, I was thinking.  There’s going to be a sort of… get-together this weekend.  By which I mean a party!  At Undyne’s, but it’s not Undyne’s party, but she invited me anyway.  Which makes this the first time I’ve been invited to a party, which is kind of a big deal!”

“yeah..?” he mumbles, trying not to let his growing dread creep into his voice.

“And, well, that’s quite a big occasion!  But, see, as I’ve never been to a party (on account of no party being cool enough for me to attend and also me not being invited to any) I thought perhaps you could come with me.  To assist in my quest to become popular, of course!”

“i… uh.”  Sans lets his legs slide off the edge of the shower chair, swinging them idly where they hang just above the ceramic floor.  “you do know i’ve never been to a party either, right?”  He’s been invited to quite a few, but he doesn’t tend to show up, even if he says he will.  Not counting showing up for a moment to grab a snack, tell a bad joke, then immediately take a shortcut through some conveniently placed bushes when nobody’s looking.  He does that plenty.

“Yes, well.  Perhaps you have not attended a party, but monsters do seem to be… drawn to you.  I am thinking you could act as bait, reeling them in, at which point I will impale them upon the hook of my friendship!” he explains enthusiastically, seemingly unaware of how violent his friendship scheme sounds.  Or perhaps he is aware, considering one of his best friends these days is Undyne.

“oh.  well, that sounds a bit violent, but it also sounds like i won’t have to do much.”  He swipes his hand across his face once more, and finds it blessedly bare save for water trickling into the cracks and divots in his bones.  Oh, well.  He’s going to have to start acting normal sooner or later, or else someone will notice what he’s been doing.  So… a party.  He can do that.  “i’m in.”

“Great!  I’ll inform Undyne of your attendance, and then she can inform… um, whoever it is that is arranging it!”  They lapse into silence for a minute, Papyrus audibly shuffling around and opening and closing drawers, Sans fidgeting under the shower head and feeling the water pouring over him steadily grow colder.

Papyrus’s footfalls start toward the door, and Sans prepares himself to drag himself onto his feet preemptively.  Before his brother can slam the door behind him, however, he pauses at the threshold.  “Oh, I almost forgot!  It is a costume party!  So, there’s that to think about!”

Cool.  One more thing to do with all that time he has.  Time that seems to be draining away with every second he stays breathing…

The door slams shut, as expected- his brother employs enthusiasm in all things, even closing doors.  He reaches out and twists the handle before him until the downpour turns to a trickle, then turns to nothing at all.  He shivers under the wave of cold air that hits him, droplets beading on his surface and dribbling down his limbs.  It takes at least a few minutes to lift himself up and climb over the side of the tub.

~

Sans hasn’t seen Flowey since it kept him company through the self-induced torture that trapped him in his room for who knows how long.  Days have passed, but he hasn’t caught the slightest glimpse of it, no flashes of golden petals ducking into the ground as he’d grown accustomed to.  Not in his timeline, at least.

He  can’t bring himself to be disappointed by its absence, but he also can’t help but feel frustrated at its sudden disappearance.  Irksome or not, they’re meant to be working together.  Plus, he can’t exactly keep an eye socket on it if it’s nowhere to be seen.

Nor can he kill something that refuses to show itself.

Gaster told him he existed to destroy the anomaly, but how can he hope to destroy something that can rewrite his entire world?  Had he really failed to consider that the being might have control over that power?

Currently, he sits across from Papyrus, small fingers threading a needle.  His brother once informed him- in a roundabout way- that the precision required made it difficult for him, so whenever he brings him a needle and thread and stares expectantly, sans does it for him without a word.  He hands it over, hands dropping onto his criss-crossed legs.

“Very good!” Papyrus says, which sans thinks is a bit excessive for how little he did, but his grin widens at his method of thanks regardless.  He turns its point upon the fabric sans laid out and pinned together before them, in a hastily constructed pattern based upon the drawing his brother showed him earlier.  That which will become the main portion of the costume is thick and sturdy, frustratingly too much so for sans to pierce, but Papyrus seems to have no issue doing so.  He just hopes he doesn’t break the needle in his fervor.

He scoots a pair of bright red boots they found at the dump in front of him and starts methodically popping the pale buttons off and replacing them with darker, more ‘dramatic’ buttons.  Papyrus is nodding approvingly when he glances up at him.

For a while, they work on the costume in silence, save for the sounds of Papyrus’s intense sewing.  He’s still methodical, but sans gets the feeling Undyne has been rubbing off on him for a while without him realizing.  He ignores how inadequate that makes him feel and moves on to making a pair of mittens from the red fabric he won off of Greater Dog in a drinking game a few months ago.  He tactically refrains from telling Papyrus the origins of the material.

“Hey,” Papyrus says out of nowhere, breaking the silence as tactlessly as he tends to.  Sans glances up at him expectantly, the hand holding his own needle and thread pausing in its ministrations.  “Thank you for doing this.  I know things have been… difficult, for you.”

“what?” he asks, suddenly very aware of every one of his individual bones, the surface of which prickle uncomfortably.  “what does that mean?”

“Well, I mean, you haven’t been feeling well.  You’ve been…”  His brother shifts in place, visibly deliberating his next words.  Sans can’t help but hunch into himself, staring at the red blanketing his hands.

(He sees bright red pouring from blue fabric, spilling out of him and splattering across a golden floor.  He aches, but he knew this would happen someday, and now that it’s over and done with he’s just grateful that the stolen power flooding his SOUL finally gave up on trying to keep him alive.)

“Sick,” Papyrus finally settles on, though sans can tell from his tense expression that it isn’t quite what he wants to say.  “But you’re still doing this with me.  It’s good to know you still…”  He trails off, uncertain in a way unlike him.

“i still what?” sans presses, twirling his thin needle between two fingers.

“Nothing.  I’m just glad,” Papyrus says after a long pause, his smile pulling at his face unnaturally.  He resumes his work on the costume without elaborating, leaving sans to worry at how much he’s noticed in the past weeks.  How long has his laboring in an attempt to bring them back to their original state been obvious to his brother?  Has he known even before the past weeks, preceding this recent breakthrough?

Sans isn’t even sure his original goal is an option, now.  What was the point of all of this?

(“I just wanted to see what would happen,” Flowey tells him, flecked with a white powder that could be snow just as easily as it could be dust.  Sans isn’t prone to knee-jerk reactions, but he can barely contain the revulsion bubbling up between his ribs.  Still, the flower carries on, either oblivious to or uncaring for his disgust.  “If you had this power, wouldn’t you try everything?  There’s so much to know..!  And… don’t you love knowing more than everyone else?  That’s why you keep secrets, isn’t it?”

“…”

“Ha!  Look at your face… I knew I was right!”  Sans tries to argue, but his throat burns like he’s swallowed broken glass and filled himself with lacerations he’d never hope to survive.  Flowey cuts him off before he makes a sound, the corners of its mouth curling perversely.  “Don’t bother lying to me.  We’ve had this conversation before.”)

“sorry i made you worry,” he mumbles, carrying on weaving threads through soft fabric he can barely feel against his hand.  He sees Papyrus’s brow furrow out of the corner of his eye, but his brother says nothing in response.  All the better; sans doesn’t want the empty reassurances he knows would follow if he attempted to comfort him.

They both know it’s his fault.  He should be better at lying by now.

~

Sans shuffles after his brother, donning his usual outfit with the miniscule difference of his hood being pulled up for once.

“i’m not gonna look as cool as you no matter what, so i might as well not distract from the main event,” he’d explained as he looped Papyrus’s new scarf around his neck after his brother demanded he explain why he hadn’t bothered making even half a costume for the party.  Papyrus rolled his eyes at the explanation, clearly not buying it.

“You could stand to do something different, at least!”

“alright,” he’d said, then pulled his hood over his skull with a flourish.  Papyrus’s eye twitched irritably at the display.

“Wearing your clothes slightly different doesn’t count as a costume!”

“no, no, watch this.”  Sans paused for dramatic effect before zipping up his jacket, pulling the zipper all the way up to his chin.  Papyrus groaned indignantly, but begrudgingly accepted the lack of effort due to their time having nearly run out.

The walk to Waterfall isn’t exactly peaceful, but it’s as close as he’s gotten to it in recent memory.  He listens to the trickling water and the thumping of their twin footsteps falling on planks and soft grass, his own twice as prevalent as he struggles to keep up, and lets his mind wander.

Despite everything he knows, he doesn’t want to kill Flowey.  He hasn’t killed before.  That is, unless he counts what Gaster did to the previous Judge.  He grits his teeth until they ache and decides he isn’t going to count it, especially considering he didn’t even remember doing it until today.  And… well.  He doesn’t have any of the Execution Points that would naturally come from such an act, so maybe he didn’t inherit its repercussions.

That doesn’t change the fact that he can remember how their face contorted in fear when they realized they were going to die.

He wonders if he might still be able to reason with Flowey, despite everything it’s done.  If he can start over from scratch, perhaps it can as well?  He doesn’t think it deserves such a chance, but neither does he want its dust on his hands.

The strong musical thrum of chords played on a piano echoes through the hall and he realizes they’re approaching Undyne’s house.  He glances up at Papyrus, expecting him to be vibrating with excitement, only to find him wringing his mittened hands anxiously.

“hey, everything alright?” sans asks, a hand lightly grazing his arm.  His brother blankly stares at the door for a few long seconds before looking down at him.

“Oh?  Yes, I’m fine.  Good!”  He’s clearly trying to seem more confident than he actually is, but before sans can bring it up, he thrusts the Captain’s door open and marches through.  Sans lingers behind for a moment, peering around the door frame at the gathered monsters within.  Warm light floods their cooler surroundings from within the house, casting him in shadow where he hovers halfway behind his brother.

Undyne launches herself from the piano to greet Papyrus enthusiastically, barely refraining from suplexing him in her excitement.  Her hair is down and she’s wearing an unusual outfit with numerous bandages.  She loosely grips an impractical attack, one which previously rested up against the side of the piano, practically hugging it to her side.  He imagines she must be dressed as someone from one of the anime Alphys always used to try and get him to watch, or something of the sort.

He used to wish he had taken her up on her offer, sometimes.  Once, he did, but on his own, too much distance between him and who he once was to even consider doing so by her side.  He sat curled into himself in front of the television for hours and let it play automatically.  When she brought it up next, he pretended he didn’t know anything about it and let her explain it to him.

He sees a pair of monsters he doesn’t recognize- a rabbit and some sort of reptile, standing with a painfully deliberate distance between them despite their matching costumes.  Greater dog stands nearby, a tuxedo somehow pulled over his armor, barking at the two of them.  More monsters he’d only ever seen in passing shuffle around, some sticking near the walls and others going out of their way to socialize.  His brother follows in the latter’s footsteps, loudly announcing his presence to the gathered people.

Sans slips through the door before someone notices it hanging open, shuffling around the perimeter of the room.  He stops at the piano, leaning against the instrument with his back turned to everyone.  Undyne’s footsteps unsubtly announce her return, and though he doesn’t turn to look, he can feel her gaze burning into the back of his neck.

“Your brother drag you here or what?” she asks, dropping into the stool before the row of ivory keys with a thud.

“is it that obvious?” he asks, tilting his head a bit to flash the corner of an awkward grin at her.

“Judging from the fact that you didn’t even bother to follow the dress code… yeah, duh?”  Her hands fell down upon the piano, playing strings of chords on what must have been muscle memory considering the way she carried on speaking.  “I wasn’t jazzed about the idea either, but I can hardly deny my favorite sentry.  Besides, I’ve realized parties are pretty fun, when you get down to it!  And nobody’s even noticed I spiked the tea yet!”

He makes a note of that for later, if this whole thing drags on longer than he’s expecting.  Then he backtracks a few sentences, sockets widening.  “… are you saying this all was paps’s idea?”

“Um.”  He tilts his head a bit more to see her starting to shrug a bit before realizing the motion would disrupt her playing and just tilting her head side-to-side in a so-so gesture.  “It was Alphys’s idea, but he convinced me.  She, uh… hasn’t shown up yet.”

She won’t show up, he doesn’t say.  She’s too busy drowning in half-melted bodies and a lab whose true owner she’ll never know again.  “figures,” he mutters to himself, staring out the window.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Undyne questions, suddenly defensive.  He blinks a few times before giving a halfhearted chuckle.

“nothing.  don’t worry about it.”

(Suddenly, he can see two Undynes.  One perches on a piano stool, practically attacking the keys with her fingers.  Her smile is slightly tense but eases up as her eyes wander to Papyrus, who’s currently explaining the key features of a good puzzle to a baffled Shyren.  The other…

Undyne’s face melts, just as sans’s had mere days before, only in its entirety.  Clumps of blue flesh half-turned to dust slough off of her like wet sand, held together only by some desperate will to survive.  She’s dissolving anyways, turning to a puddle on the ground, eyes lingering atop a mess of monster sludge for a few seconds more before it all turns to dust.)

He stiffens, suddenly grateful his hood is up, hoping it might obscure his grim expression when he turns to face the mirror.  The edge of the piano digs uncomfortably into his spine, and his body feels itchy all over, like he’s the one melting.  He very well could be, considering what he’s done to himself.  It wouldn’t surprise him if he looked down only to find the magic that forms his ribs soaking his jacket.  He pointedly avoids looking at any part of himself, strangely terrified the thought might become real if he does.

“Uh, dude?  What the hell is up with you?” Undyne asks his back.

“sorry.  the party atmosphere gets me chilled to the bone.”  It’s not strictly true, but if she’s friends with Alphys, he figures she’ll accept the excuse.  Her unusually thoughtful hum confirms it to him, and he relaxes as much as he can when her dying face is burned into his eye sockets.  He rocks on his heels with a faint clicking sound, vision having fallen away from him without permission.

“That… oh my god.  I’d hit you for that if you weren’t Papyrus’s brother,” she hisses under her breath.  He wonders if it’s a straightforward comment or if Papyrus mentioned how breakable he is at some point.  The thought of him pulling her aside and explaining how easily he could be dusted makes his SOUL feel heavy.

It takes a while for his eyesight to return, but when it does, he finds himself face-to-face with a reflection on the surface of the window before him.  He swears he catches a glimpse of a pair of dark pits for eyes, one drooping halfway down a pallid face, and a toothless smile.  He startles despite himself, then curses his malfunctioning head, because Undyne’s stopped playing entirely now.

“Hey, um.  I don’t really know you, but something’s up, and I’m thinking… maybe you should go outside and cool off?” she tries, clearly out of her depth when it comes to comforting people.  He gives a one-shouldered shrug before realizing it’s the perfect excuse to get out of there.  Still, his feet feel rooted in place, and he shoots a hesitant glance at Papyrus.

He seems to be doing fine, even if the monster he’s talking at is shuffling restlessly in place.  Undyne cuts his thoughts off before they turn tangled, apparently seeing straight through him.  “I’ll make sure he doesn’t get into trouble.  But really, he can handle himself at a party, you’re doing worse than him .”

Sans sighs, a whistle of air that rushes through the slight gaps in his teeth.  He hates that she’s right, that he’s not even needed to take care of his brother.  He never was, not really, but he liked to think he was good for that if nothing else.  “alright,” he finally concedes, pushing himself fully upright and strolling past her.  He taps her lightly on the shoulder as he passes, looking to the door rather than her expression.  “… thanks.”

“Sure?” she says, off-put by something or other that he can’t discern.  He doesn’t bother trying, heading out the door without looking back.

He doesn’t realize how cool it is outside in Waterfall until he leaves Undyne’s generously heated house and the chill hits his face.  It’s not as cold as Snowdin, but it’s closer than one would expect, and he’s always been sensitive to slight changes in temperature.  He curls into himself and leaves the muffled sounds of conversation and music behind, staring down at his feet as he stumbles forward.  He only stops when he finds himself unable to walk any further, having made his way to the edge of an outcropping of land surrounded by brightly glowing water.

He sinks down to the ground, feet sliding from the edge and grazing the surface.  His slippers skim the vast pool below, carving patterns through it with the ripples they stir up.  A golden duck stands on a similar incomplete land bridge across from him, seemingly unaware of his presence.  He sits there for some time, maybe minutes or maybe hours, trying to see something reflected in the water that isn’t there.  Eventually he sighs and flops onto his back, staring up at the artificial stars too close to feign realism.  He could reach out and touch them if he wanted to, but the only constellations down here are ones of his own devising.

The confident march of footsteps rapidly approaching him doesn’t register until Papyrus pops into view directly above him.  Sans startles, pushing himself up on his hands and intending to get up the rest of the way before a wave of lightheadedness hits him.  He grabs at his skull, squeezing his sockets shut with an irritated mutter.

“I see you didn’t even last five minutes… I had hoped it might take longer than that for you to vacate the premises,” Papyrus says.  Sans can feel the air stirring beside him and hear the grass parting as his brother settles down next to him.  He’s only able to get his left socket to open all the way, but that’s more than enough to see the fretful expression turned upon him.

“well, i did say i didn’t want to steal the spotlight.  it’d be a shame…” he answers weakly, shoulders hiking up a bit as he leans back.

“Yes, yes, and it wasn’t a very good excuse the first time.”  Papyrus watches the duck bouncing on its feet across the gap.  Up close like this, his sockets look hollow, like all the magic has drained out of them.  Why is he looking like that when he’s halfway to becoming a Royal Guard, when he befriended the Captain when sans wasn’t even looking?  Is he missing something?

“alright, you caught me.  tibia honest, i didn’t wanna bring the mood down.  water you afraid of, that i’ll fall down out here?” he jokes, but Papyrus’s mouth twists like he just bit into something sour.

“That’s not funny,” he says flatly.

“what, are you… are you seriously worried about me dying cause i left a party for a few minutes?  how weak do you think i am, heh…”  He shouldn’t ask questions he doesn’t want answers to, but that seems to be all he knows how to do.

“That’s not the point.  I don’t like it when you talk about… that so candidly.  How would you feel if I started talking about dusting?  Would you think it’s funny?” Papyrus continues, tapping a hand against the surface of his leg bones.

“no… guess not,” sans admits in a low voice, watching his brother’s red boots dunk fully into the bright pool with a splash.

(Papyrus sits in one of the darker parts of Waterfall, crouched before a flower.  He looks up at sans with a bright smile and gestures to the plant beside him, one with petals too warm and bright to even slightly resemble an echo flower.   His heart sinks for some reason unknown even to him at the time, deja-vu like a blade carving and recarving patterns on the inside of his skull.

“I made a friend on my own, see?  He said he wanted to know all about you, so I of course said I’d introduce you two!  Now we can all be friends, as is the logical course of action,” Papyrus explains, but his words barely register past the ringing in his head.  Sans nods automatically, dragging his weary bones forward and holding out a hand with so little thought it feels like something is pulling his strings.

“go on, then, put ‘em there.  or don’t you know how to greet a new pal?)

“And for your information, it’s been two hours.  The party is over,” Papyrus is explaining, waving his hands through the air as he speaks.  “I don’t know how you could possibly think that’s ‘a few minutes’.  Unless you fell asleep…”  His brother side-eyes him, clearly considering the likelihood of the explanation, and he’s not about to dissuade him of the notion.

“looks like you caught me red-handed.  you’ll have to put me under a-rest, now,” he says with a shrug and a wince that he does his very best to turn into a wink.

“Ugh…”  Papyrus shakes his head, but makes no other comment, not even cracking a begrudging smile.  Shame throbs in the gaps between sans’s ribs, filling up the empty space left by his incomplete body.

“hey, are you… are you okay, paps?” he asks, straightening up to the best of his ability.  He reaches out to take his brother’s hand before pulling back at the last moment, worried his touch might just make things worse.

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that.”

“uh.  why?”

“If you’ve forgotten, which I’m sure you have, you callously dismissed the same question from me.  And since then you’ve just… sort of… I don’t know!  I just know something’s wrong.”  Papyrus’s hands reach up to grip his scarf like a lifeline, pulling it taut where it previously fell loose around his neck.  He opens his mouth to offer something, some hollow explanation, but he can’t get a word in as his brother forges on.

“You keep disappearing for hours, and you didn’t even explain after you went missing for a full day!  I thought something terrible happened, but then you just came back and acted like everything was normal!  You haven’t noticed I’ve started cooking, and I have to wonder if you’ve even opened the fridge since then.  You haven't opened your mail in weeks, even when I keep setting out the important letters on the table.  Did you know Asgore sent you a letter asking why you didn’t come to see him?  Asgore!  King of all monsters!  I didn’t even know you knew him!”

“oh… ah.  i, uh.  that’s a work thing,” he mumbles when Papyrus finally finishes his ranting, wishing his hood would swallow him whole.  “and the… the rest… i guess i’ve just been…. busy?”

“Busy,” Papyrus repeats, deadpan.  Sans gives a sheepish nod.  “Busy with what ?!”  His hands jerk in sans’s direction and nearly hit him in the face as he shouts.

“would you believe me if i said it was a work thing..?” he asks halfheartedly, dipping a finger into his right socket and pulling as hard as he can.  When Papyrus doesn’t answer except to fold his arms expectantly, sans lets out a long sigh, turning his head so that the fur of his hood hides him from his searching gaze.  “that’s not a complete lie, but i guess that’s not the real point of it all, so.

“hey, paps.  what if you spent your whole life trying to help someone, but when you finally figured out how to do that, you realized they didn’t even want your help?  that it was- that you were supposed to be doing something else the whole time, according to them?”

“I… can’t say I fully understand, but.  I often feel like you only refuse my help because you’d rather not be helped,” Papyrus remarks thoughtfully, and sans’s chest tightens.  It feels like all he inherited from his past self are his faults.  Even his memories feel rotten when he revisits them, like he’s seeing and knowing something that never should have been seen or known by him of all monsters.

“yeah, uh… yeah.  anyways, that… thing you were supposed to be doing.  you can do it, or you’re pretty sure you can.  but you don’t know what will happen, or how long it’ll take, or… why.  it’s all just…”  The finger in his eye starts to feel more like a long needle where it digs into his magic, an unpleasant squelching coming when he forces it even deeper, piercing his pupil.  “but you should, right?  they asked you to… and you owe them, so you should.”

Papyrus’s hand wraps around sans’s arm, roughly jerking it back and pulling his hand out of his socket along with it.  His other hand comes up to rest on his shoulder, steadying him where he didn’t even notice he’d been swaying in place.  “Sans, just because someone doesn’t want help doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help them.  It just means you have to try twice as hard, to help them know they need help in the first place!”  He hesitates before continuing, smile dropping further than sans ever wanted to see.  “If you’re feeling… inadequate, or perhaps like you’re a failure, that’s perfectly natural, I imagine.  It’s just motivation to keep trying to help them.”

Has he been making his brother feel that way?

Who is he kidding, of course he has.  He’s made it clear he didn’t want to rely on him from the start.  But he can’t stop after everything he’s done to ensure Papyrus will never have to know.  If he ever finds out how carelessly sans intended to overwrite their lives and SOULs alike, sans will never be able to bring himself to do it.  And if he can’t bring himself to do it…

There will be nothing left for him, will there?  No reason to continue keeping up the charade of his existence.

“i’m sorry,” he rasps, slumping into Papyrus’s pauldron.  His brother twitches against him, resting an uncertain hand against the curve of his spine in an incomplete hug.  “m’sorry… i don’t…”

“You… you’re sorry for what, exactly?” Papyrus asks quietly, stock-still against him.

“everything.  i’m sorry i can’t tell you more.  oh, god, i’m…”

Papyrus huffs, rubbing hesitant circles into his back.  “You can, I know you can.  You just… won’t.”  Sans pulls him closer, holds him tighter, hides his face in the familiar vibrant red of his scarf.  “That’s… ‘ okay ’, though.  I’m going to help you anyway.”

He can’t help sans, not at this point, not without becoming a man that chose to shatter himself years ago.  But sans… well, sans can help him.  It might erase his existence, or their timeline’s existence, or it might not work at all, but he can protect his brother.

Gaster saw something sans can’t, not through his flawed sockets.  A world coming to an end, leaving them with nothing.  He might not be able to see it, but he can do what needs to be done.

All he needs to do is trust in his better self.

Chapter Text

The first time sans kills Flowey, it’s like ripping a band-aid off.

It takes him longer than he would’ve liked to find the dreadful creature to begin with.  He begrudgingly returns to his typical routine, sans stepping into his lab under any circumstances.  He smiles and jokes and lies as easily as he wakes up in the morning- that is to say: with difficulty, but not so much that he can’t force himself to do it.

He ends up spending more time at Grillby’s than usual.  He may have acted like a regular since they arrived, but he’s actually started playing the role as of late.

Sans slumps over the counter, nursing his… third drink?  He thinks it’s probably his third, but his right eye thought it’d be funny to show him a look through the sockets of another sans drinking himself stupid, so it’s hard to tell at this point.  He closed that eye immediately after the vision came to him, now holding it shut in a perpetual wink.

His head feels fuzzier and his vision blurrier than it really ought to with this many drinks, lightweight or not.  He gulps down a bit more of his… he thinks it’s a gin and tonic, but he honestly can’t tell past the burning in his throat.  He can’t remember the last time he ate, so maybe that’s why it’s making him feel so odd.  He pulls the lime wedge off the side of his glass and chews on it idly, convinced it will solve his problem.

It takes him more than a few seconds to realize Grillby has approached him.  He only really notices because as he stares down at his cup, he sees the characteristic fiery glow reflected on the surface of the drink.  When he lifts his pupils to the flame elemental, he looks a bit hotter than usual, spitting a few sparks into the air around him before settling.  He squints curiously at the barkeeper, skull pleasantly empty enough for him to flash a genuine grin.

“……… how is your brother?”

Sans blinks a few times, taken off guard by the crackles and hisses forming some of the few words he’s ever heard the man speak.  Grillby’s only met Papyrus a few times, and every time sans convinced him to come they tended to spend the whole time in a booth in a corner loudly talking to one another and no one else.  Has sans done something to make him think he should be concerned about him, or is it just a general question?

Maybe he noticed how often sans has been coming here compared to usual.  It isn’t because he doesn’t want to see Papyrus, not really- it would just look strange if he suddenly stopped disappearing for hours every night.  It’s been such an important part of his routine since he was made, to the point where he’s sure it would spark even more worry in his brother than he already had.

Also, it’s a little hard to face someone he’d recently come to realize he was fully willing to destroy for the sake of a futile dream.  The buzzing in his limbs starts to feel more like needles piercing his marrow at the reminder.

“er,” he mumbles when he realizes he hasn’t said anything and Grillby is staring down at him expectantly.  “he’s fine.  bit down but… who isn’, we… we live underground, hah.”  A huff like a quarter of a laugh escapes him, catching on his ribs before coming out.  A few more breathy chuckles escape him, at first because his joke seems like the funniest thing ever, but soon enough he can’t even remember what he said and all he knows is that it’d hurt to stop.

“…………… maybe you should go see him.”

“uh.”  Sans shifts uncomfortably atop the stool, tucking his slippers into the metal rung halfway up it.  He takes a swig of his drink, fighting the darkness building in the backs of his sockets.  “mayb’ you should… mind y’r business.”

Grillby stares at him- or at least sams assumes he does, whatever part of him that serves as eyes being indistinguishable from the rest of him.  He feels his face flush hotter than it already is from his inebriation, a sharp prickling onhis surface disquietingly reminiscent of Determination melting his body from the inside out.  Before he can remind himself of what’s really happening, he retches on reflex, some knee-jerk reaction leftover from a time when he was able to throw up.

(Hunched over a trash can in the corner of the lab, Gaster heaved up every bit of magic in his body still separate from it, coming out as inky black sludge.  He winced and rubbed his head when a sharp pain pierced his eye socket like a trepan.  This was supposed to be the easy part, incorporating fully tested tech into his body.  And yet one of his eye sockets hurt so badly he could barely open it, and the other wouldn’t shut no matter how hard he tried.

Someone rubbed circles into his back- someone who shouldn’t be there, no one should be there, not while he was doing this.  He didn’t push them away for some absurd reason, one he couldn’t explain if he tried.  He caught a glimpse of pink slippers, barely visible through his spasming socket.)

Sans gulps down the rest of his drink, trying to wash away the phantom taste of impossible vomit.  He sets his glass down on the counter with a trembling hand and looks up at Grillby, shooting an apologetic smile up at him.  “hey, no hard feelings… ‘nother, please?”

“…… that’s enough for today,” Grillby responds, taking the cup in hand and wiping it down stoically.  He cringes at the uncharacteristically quick refusal, leaning far enough into the counter that the curve of his spine grazes the edge.

“sorry.  ugh, keep sayin’ that…” he murmurs into the table, dropping his head to it.  “don’t tell m’ brother.  i just need to… need to sleep it off.”  It’s not entirely untrue.  He’s felt his HP slowly ticking down since his brother dragged him to the costume party, and none of his naps have lasted long enough to raise it all the way to eleven.  Exhaustion pulls him down nearly too far to look for the anomalous flower he’s supposed to have killed already, every day he spends genuinely scouring the woods seeming longer and longer.

Sans cracks an eye socket open after a long silence, peering up at Grillby over the puffy blue fabric of his sleeves.  As soon as his gaze lands on the fire elemental, he gestures pointedly to the nearby booth.  The spot where Mouth usually sits is vacant; he must have gone home already.

He accepts the offer gratefully, feeling a bit embarrassed to be acting like such an invalid, but not enough to go home.  He misses when sequestering himself away in his room was comforting, but nowadays every time he lays within it all he can think about is (days, minutes, years) sweating and shivering as Determination devours him from within.

He slides off of the stool and stumbles over to the booth, dragging his feet on the floor and nearly tripping over them more than once.  As soon as he stands before his destination, he collapses into the seat facefirst, curling into himself on instinct.  He falls into a dreamless sleep, enveloped in darkness like an old friend embracing him.

~

Sans wakes to an empty bar, a pounding head, and the unnaturally pristine underside of a table.

It’s dark save from the faint blue glow from outside, simulated moonlight put in place to keep monsters from stumbling off the nearby cliffside and accidentally dusting themselves.  Or maybe it’s just to make them feel like they aren’t imprisoned under the earth, but it definitely helps with that.

His skull is throbbing, but he’s kind of grown used to it in the past days.  That doesn’t mean he likes it, but it does mean he can push himself upright without his pupils guttering out, even if he sways in place more than a little.  The numerous bones that make up his palms dig into the sleek fabric of the booth, propping him up and grounding him in the present simultaneously.

It’s around then that he realizes the bar is utterly vacant.  It isn’t just closed, either- even Grillby is nowhere to be seen, and sans would’ve already caught sight of his glow from under the door to the back of the bar if he was inside.  He sucks in a sharp breath, a feeling someplace between confusion and fear settling against his sternum.

“hello?” he asks, scooting up to the edge of the seat.  He feels out of place here without any of the other regulars, a fish out of water.  Or… water without any fish in it, he guesses.  There’s an absence he can’t quantify in words, an emptiness that reminds him of the space between space he passes through regularly, filled only by a pale gray door.

“I told your brother not to worry.”  The voice grates on him, alerting him to the presence of a small, animate flower.  He looks around, scouring the bar for Flowey to no avail until the creature rises up from behind the bar, miming rubbing down a glass with its vines.  It fumbles and drops the cup, which shatters on impact, but it continues rubbing circles into the empty air without batting an eye.

“like hell you did,” sans hisses, shoving himself to his feet.  He lurches forward and has to steady himself on the back of the chair he’d previously passed out in, gripping it tight as he can to keep himself upright on wobbling legs.  “did you forget everything we talked about?  you’re not supposed to talk to him.”

“He’s an adult.  More of an adult than you, all things considered.  He can make his own decisions about who he wants to talk to,” Flowey says in a strangely defensive tone, as if that’s even remotely close to being the problem.  “What’s wrong?  Not used to being the one people keep secrets from?”

Sans grits his teeth, pushing himself forward and stumbling up to the bar, each footstep punctuated by a heavy thump as he fails to lift his feet all the way.  He climbs onto a stool to look Flowey in the eye, trying to ignore the rush of dizziness that overwhelms him as he lifts himself up.  “you’re going to tell me why you disappeared, why you were talking to my brother, and how you got in here, now .  or else we’re gonna have a hard time getting along from here on out.”

They’re not going to ‘get along’ no matter what either of them says, but sans can’t help but try to garner as much information as he can before their relationship is irrevocably changed.  Flowey was almost right when it said he loved knowing more than everyone else- it isn’t that he loves it, but rather, he needs it.  He needs to make sense of the nonsense that floods their reality, otherwise he’ll drown.

He hates how alike he and Flowey are in that way.

“And what if I don’t want to?  What’re you gonna do?”  Flowey looks him up and down, as if it’s sizing him up, teasing a check as well as it can without initiating battle.  “I’m gonna ask you something.  Why haven’t you used your timey-wimey machine yet?  Cause I doubt you were waiting on little old me…”

“there was a…” sans’s words catch in his throat shamefully.  “change of plans.”  That’s all the little freak of nature is going to get from him on the matter, he decides.  He doesn’t even want to think about what he’s giving up for the sake of killing it.  “now tell me what you did.”

“I didn’t dust anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about.  It’s not like it would do me any good this time around…”  The concession of mercy born from simple convenience is both repulsive and painfully familiar to him.  Hadn’t he considered sparing this creature only to avoid the mark it’d leave on his SOUL?

He wishes he was still drunk.

“alright.  so you just talked grillby into leaving while i was still in here?”

“I told him I’d take you home when you woke up.  He was worried about you, y’know.  What with how pathetic you were being and all.”  Flowey presses its lips together thoughtfully, glancing down at the scattered shards surrounding it.

“and why would you do that?”

“I’m not actually going to take you home, silly.  How would I even do that?  ‘C’mere, lean on my vines…’ hah.”  Flowey’s eyes crinkle at its own joke, and for once sans doesn’t crack a smile.  His teeth may curve in the same arc as always, but there is no humor to his hollow grin, and apparently Flowey can tell.  “God, you’re difficult.  I just wanted to talk to you.”

“you didn’t want to talk to me for the last week and so many days.  what changed?”  Sans almost doesn’t want to ask, worried at the answer he might receive.  He thinks the worst thing Flowey could say is that nothing changed, that this had been within its scope all along.  That he’d been dancing on strings from the start…

“I think we both know what changed.  I mean, come on .”  Flowey rolls its eyes, vines slithering over the surface of the counter like snakes.  Sans shifts as far back on his stool as he can without tipping it over.  “I didn’t want to die before I got anything done.”

“didn’t want to… you…”  Sans’s jaw feels locked in place.  It can’t know; they haven’t seen each other since he accidentally fled his room, and he hasn’t told anyone what he plans to do.

It can’t know; not unless some other sans did the deed already.

In a flash of green, Flowey’s tendrils shoot forward, desperately reaching out for him.  He finally leans back far enough to flip over, sending the stool toppling to the ground alongside the whole of him.  He lands on his elbows, sending a sharp pain up through his arms and eating through a considerable chunk of his HP.  He doesn’t waste any time springing up on his feet, ignoring the sharp cracking of his joints as they overextend.

“You look surprised!” Flowey remarks with a pleased smile, and he can’t help but think he could say the same for it.  Its vines skirt around him, teasing him, ducking in close then retreating as soon as he starts to sidestep.  It takes all his concentration not to stumble over his own feet and fall right into the flower’s grasp.  “Did I getcha?  I think I did, oh, man.  And you’re so hard to catch off guard…”

Sans is so focused on the vines before him he nearly doesn’t notice those encroaching upon him from behind.  By the time he sees them he only has a split second to throw himself through the cracks between the tendrils, one of the thorns upon which nicks his calf as he flees.  Another bit of his meager health ticks away and he chokes on his breath, trying to force his SOUL to steady.

“so you’re gonna kill me instead, since some other me did it to you.  is that it?” sans asks, barely audible judging by the way the flower scrunches up its face as it attempts to parse his words.

“This time… for sure.  Next time… well, we’ll see what happens next time.  But it’s kill or be killed, right?”  Flowey smiles sweetly, and if sans didn’t know better he’d say it looks almost like there’s a sliver of trepidation underneath its overwhelming spite.  “I know that now, thanks to you,” it spits out, quivering.

(Sans stares coolly down at the flower, pinning it half-buried in the thick snow in a prison of bone.  It shudders, and he doesn’t miss the excitement mingling with its anxiety, like it’s getting some sick thrill from his actions.  He’s starting to think it won’t matter if he kills it, after all, but he can hardly bring himself to care at this point.

“W-wow..!  This sure is new,” it chirps, letting out a yelp as he grips one of the bones and pushes it further into its stem.  It doesn’t feel like his hand holding the attack, nor does it feel like his foot that comes out to stomp on the withering vine that tries fruitlessly to crawl from the snow.  It’s so cold he thinks his SOUL might go numb from it all.  “But we’re friends, remember?  You wouldn’t hurt your pal, right?”

If he doesn’t hurt his ‘pal’, it will destroy everything.  Maybe he’d throw his hands up and let it happen if it was just him getting erased, but he can’t exactly stand by and do nothing when everyone he’s ever known is at stake.  Even if he really wishes he could.

“i don’t think we are.  pals , that is.  do pals kill one another to satisfy their curiosity?”  He digs the bone a bit deeper, and he thinks he hears something tear.  He tries to focus on the snowflakes landing on the top of his skull rather than the fraying threads struggling to keep Flowey in one piece.  “if i don’t do this, you’ll be the end of everything.”

“Aw, come on… I haven’t hurt a single monster this time!  I’m really not going to hurt you,” Flowey insists, though it’s starting to sound a bit more like pleading.  He wishes it wouldn’t.

“this time… heh.”  He shakes his head, loosening his grip on the bone and letting the attack dissipate.  Flowey looks relieved for a few seconds, but this is quickly remedied as a great skull materializes between the two of them.  “well then, since we’re such great buds , i’ll give you some advice.  if we’re really friends,” he starts, and the flower almost seems to be paying attention, like it actually finds value in his words past idle entertainment.

“you won’t come back,” he finishes.)

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, bud .  Something eating you?”  Flowey’s vines twine around his legs, just barely loose enough not to break his limbs, but certainly tight enough to hurt.  Had it attacked as his head assaulted him with the past-present-future memory?  All he knows is that its tendrils are wrapping around him, encroaching upon the gaps between his bones, entering the spaces between his ribs.  The second he realizes what the flower is trying to do he shuts his eyes and tries to think of in-betweens, but it takes hold of his SOUL before he can catch sight of the door, trapping him in the here and now.

“bet you feel real clever right now,” he mumbles into the fabric of his turtleneck, chin pressed to his chest as the creature hoists him up off the ground.  “turning it around on me and all.”

“So you do remember!  I knew you did, you’re an awful liar… you’d think you’d be better at something you do so often.”  The vines don’t just hold his SOUL in place once it has hold of it.  They reach into him and grab at the wafer-thin sheet of magic, pulsing faintly in protest.   Flowey hums at the feeling, ignoring the way Sans reflexively spasms at the feeling of someone else touching his being so carelessly.  “Wow, you really are weak.  I’m kind of embarrassed now… how are you even alive?”

He wishes he could still say he was never supposed to be alive and believe it.  That would easily explain how difficult it is for him to live, to keep on working toward the unachievable goals set out before him, time and time again.  Flowey digs a bit deeper into his SOUL and he feels something crack deeper than his marrow.  It feels like he’s shattering across all of reality, like it’s breaking him before he even existed.

Is this how Gaster felt when he fell?

“what’re you even hoping to achieve?” he asks, ignoring his dangerously scarce hit points.  If he can get the flower to start talking, he can catch it off guard.  If there’s one thing Flowey likes, it’s talking.  “can you even win the game you’re playing?”

“I’ve already won.  It’s not about ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ any more.  I just want to know you.”  Its grip tightens on his SOUL, and he thinks it’s got to know him pretty well now, if it didn’t before.

“and when you know me well enough, you’ll quit?”  Sans feels something cold in his chest, like a shard of ice in the place of Flowey’s strangely warm tendrils.

“Of course not.  I’ll just… find someone new to play with.”  Flowey seems a bit troubled at the suggestion, brows pinching together.  “I’m sure there’s someone else.”

“and when there’s…” sans struggles to force the words out past the pressure that erratically intensifies and lessens, no rhyme or reason to the flower’s violent touch.  “nothing left to find?”

“Well, I’ll…”  Flowey stumbles over its words, mouth working helplessly.  “I’ll just…”

Erase this pointless world, and move onto the next?

A legion of bones cut through the flower’s vines at the source, shooting at it from every angle.  It yelps in surprise and jerks in some useless attempt at dodging, but he gives it no time to react as a spiral of skulls come to life around it.  They set the air alight as he uses every ounce of magic in his body, clutching his chest where dead vines slough off of his SOUL, giving him a start every time he feels them shift.  He doesn’t see Flowey as he pours all of his strength into his magic, but he knows there’s no way it could have reacted to his onslaught.

When sans can’t summon anything else, the blasters fall into nothingness, and he’s left alone.  In their place a pile of ash remains, a charred black too dark to belong to any living monster, a scar in reality.

His hand falls to his side uselessly.  He stands there for a long time, and at some point he must fall too because the next thing he knows he’s flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

Is that it, then?  He had wondered if he’d remain here… but he hoped he wouldn’t.  The only thing worse than reaching for an unachievable goal is finally grasping it, then having to carry on after.  What is left to do after that?  Is there even a point to life after one’s sole purpose has been fulfilled?

He doesn’t have to wonder for long.  He feels his body start to tremble and lose its shape.  For a second he wonders if he’s falling down, but soon enough he notices the rest of the world around him is similarly distorting.  He might be going somewhere new… or perhaps he’s going to be erased.

His eyes fall shut, blanketing him in comfortable darkness.  He doesn’t care either way.  He just wants to sleep.

~

It’s quiet and dark wherever sans is.  If this is the afterlife, he thinks he won’t mind it all that much.  It seems like a good place to rest, eternally or otherwise.

Though, it’s not so much quiet as it is completely silent, and not so much dark as it is lacking even the slightest sliver of light.  He blinks a few times to orient himself and realizes he’s somewhere all-too-familiar.  He pushes himself up on his elbows and looks around the space between space, the void through which he passes regularly.

He hadn’t come here on purpose, but maybe… there was nowhere else for him to go.  He suppresses a shudder at the realization that it’s only him here.  If Papyrus isn’t here, and there’s nothing left in their world…. has he been erased or met an even worse fate?

He hopes he was given the mercy of non-existence.  (He wishes that wasn’t the only thing he could strive to give his brother.)

Some time passes… maybe.  Time is relative, and he supposes he’s the sole anchor point for it at this point, so he’ll go ahead and say it does.  He lays there for a while longer- he thinks he falls asleep for a bit, but it’s hard to tell when the darkness only has more darkness to interrupt.  At some point he pushes himself to his feet, swaying unsteadily before he gets his footing, and starts walking.

He doesn’t know what possesses him to do it.  Only that he has to do something , and he doesn’t see an end to this void, unlike the one he tends to pass through.  There, there was a clearly defined separation between ‘in bounds’ and ‘out of bounds’.  He never stepped out of bounds before now.  He worried he’d get lost and wouldn’t be able to find his way back.

There clearly is no way back- no matter how hard he tries to open his eyes, he remains here- he might as well ‘explore’.  He mutters to himself as he trudges forward.  “oh, would you look at that, nothing!” he says, feigning surprise.  “and here we have a special monument… to nothing.”  He eyes a spot to his left for a while, squinting in a fascimile of interest.  “i think i see… hold on, let me just get a bit closer… right, yeah, it’s nothing.”

He gets tired all-too-quickly, and takes another journey to the theoretical floor.  His ribs shudder under his jacket, and some squirming sensation beneath them reminds him of what just transpired.  And of what usually isn’t there when he comes here.

He lifts his shirt and looks down, trying with all his might to draw his SOUL out.  Nothing happens, not even the faintest twinkle of light graces his sockets.  After a minute and a half of fruitless efforts, he concludes he still doesn’t carry it with him in this place.  Though, where it is now… he couldn’t guess.

If it still exists.  Maybe that’s his only reward for killing that twisted flower- to become like it.

Something brushes up against sans’s exposed rib cage and his entire body jerks in place.  His mind returns to the feeling of vines crawling through him, prying him open like his body isn’t his own- but no, this isn’t the same.  The cool digits sliding up and down his side are fingers, and not just that, he recognizes the hard, ridged surfaces of them.

He pulls his shirt up further to see the skeletal, spectral hand caressing him.  Though ‘caress’ is, perhaps, wishful thinking- it explores his body in a distinctly clinical manner, climbing up his ribs one by one as if cataloguing them.  He recognizes the affectation of his former self even separate from his vessel, and his pupils dart around, seeking him out.

There is nothing there, of course.  But then, emerging from the nothing- or perhaps made from the nothing, in the same way most monsters are made from magic- there is a man.  He has two gaping black sockets, dripping black fluid down and up the length of his skull.  His body struggles to take shape, and eventually he gives up trying to coax it into doing so, merely folding a pair of disembodied hands over the vacancy of his form.  He stands just out of reach, the barest distance feeling like miles.

“you’re…” sans breathes, unsure of what he can even say.  ‘Real’ is clearly inappropriate, not to mention incorrect.  ‘Here’ might not be right, either, and ‘alive’ is most certainly not.  “… you’re me,” he finally says, and that’s wrong as well, but he knows the man will understand what he means.

“If you thought it was over, it is not,” the man signs without preamble.  One of his hands comes up to rest against sans’s sternum, thumb wedging itself under his clavicle.  “Kill it again.”

“the…” sans glances down at the spectral hand before a new hand presses up against his chin, tugging his head up to face the man.  “the anomaly?”

“Yes,” he signs simply.  And then, with a twitching smile, “There are infinite timelines.  It must be destroyed in every one.”

“by me?” he croaks, dread filling up his SOULless body.  “ this me?  i thought, maybe…”

“I made you for this.  You and him…”  sans looks away, smile subtly shifting into a grimace.  He feels cold all over, except for the spot where the man’s hand encircles his bones, a grip that tightens at the sight of his uncertainty.  “You will succeed,” he signs, as if it is a fact of the universe.  “Don’t worry.”

Sans wants to apologize, wants to collapse against this familiar stranger who stands too far for him to do so.  Most of all, he wants to give up.  He wishes it were an option.

“Thank you,” the man says preemptively, and as soon as he says it he is no longer there.  Sans feels no different; he can still feel cold fingers digging into his bones, a twin sensation to the ghost of Flowey’s encroaching vines.

When he wakes up, he’s curled up on his mattress, buried under too many sheets and blankets.  When Papyrus ‘reminds’ him they have a party to attend that night, he isn’t even surprised.

He kills the anomaly.  Again, again, again.

His LOVE never increases, not like Gaster’s.  Every time he destroys the anomaly, he ends up right back where he started, and that man tells him he has to do it all over again.  Every time he touches sans appraisingly he thinks he might actually embrace him this time around, and every time he is disappointed. 

The tenth twentieth first time sans kills Flowey, he just wants to get it over with.  How long will he have to do this?  Will he be stuck here forever, killing infinite versions of this anomaly, trapped in a loop of the same few weeks played over and over again?

He thinks he’d rather die.  No wonder Gaster did what he did, in the end, if it meant being free of this.

The first time Flowey kills sans, he doesn’t even fight back.  He calls it a peace offering when the flower asks what he’s doing, but he thinks they both know that’s not the real reason he’s doing it.

The man doesn’t speak to him in the time between timelines after that one.  He stares through sans from that impossible distance, silent and still, until the world reconstructs itself.  Sans thinks it takes much longer, and he guesses it’s because the world went on without him.  When he finally blinks his eyes open, he feels hollowed out, like another piece of him has been chipped away and forgotten.

That’s all, then.  He’s officially useless.

What a relief.