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You are standing in the judgment hall. For the amount of time you’ve spent in it over the course of your life, you’ve never truly gained an affinity for it. King Asgore wasted what little magic he could spare on this chamber — it is the only place in the entire Underground where sunlight peaks through the windows. The long, everlasting corridor is flooded in a glowing orange hue entirely unlike the burning red embers of Hotland, and the way it shines in segments illuminates particles of dust floating in the air.
It is cold in the judgment hall. Colder than your cozy home with Papryus in Snowdin, colder than the coffins holding the mutilated corpses of the past six fallen humans, colder than the seventh human’s determined SOUL as they cut foe, friend, and family into dust.
Asgore, with all his power and magic, could not replicate the loving, natural heat of the Surface’s sun. Your accumulated hours in this hall have only served as a reminder to you of all that you cannot and will never have as long as the human is alive. You think, maybe, that you have reached the Surface, but you cannot remember how the sun’s warmth felt on your bones.
The Judge is rushing and silent in your head, curled around your shoulders and through your femurs, ischium, and finger joints. It watches the human shamble across the orange, cold tiles through your sockets and tibias. You know how many they have killed. Microexpressions aside, the Judge whispers secrets into your ears of the places they have been and each individual monster they have scattered to the rushing winds of the Underground.
What you do glean from the human’s face and tiny body is this: they have not reset your fight. They have not met you at your worst; they have not died to your power; and they have not taken a single breath in combat with you.
They have reset before, you realize. They’ve taken you to where the sun, for the first and only time, has pleasantly warmed your bones.
This, from the way they tilt their head up at you, grip their knife, and extend their leg forward, you are sure. The barrier has been broken. They gave you the sun and the moon and the stars and life on the Surface with your brother, and they have ripped it all away from you without your knowledge.
The Judge disappears through your sternum, leaving behind a cold, empty rage to fill the gaps in your SOUL.
You’ve never liked the judgment hall. It is cold. It echoes endlessly, making the human’s footsteps sound like stomps on a ship’s wooden deck. It is the only place where your mind is the most clear, where the Judge can encase you and inform you of the deeds of those standing before you. You understand the resets more plainly, and you recall what little of past timelines are permitted for you and your weak SOUL.
You don’t remember the heat of the sun, but you remember experiencing, once, the feeling of happiness.
“do you think even the worst person can change? that everybody can be a good person, if they just try?” You don’t care for the answer, but you ask anyway. You ask to see if they remember the last monster who tried to show them mercy, who stood with open arms and begged them to give up the road they were traveling, lay down their weapon, and try to be a good person.
You want them to remember how, despite ample opportunity, they did not spare your brother.
You want them to have a bad time.
The fight doesn’t take long. You defeat them quicker than it took for them to reach up and slice Papyrus’ head off. Your magic bones toss them around, poisoning them with the residues of the Judge and the debt of their actions. And your blasters, oh, your blasters. They rip the human to absolute shreds.
When all is said and done, you stand over the human’s tattered, unrecognizable body and watch in fascination as their SOUL pulses like a heartbeat in their chest despite them being positively dead. You know they are dead because they aren’t breathing, their body is eerily still, and their expression completely and utterly faded. Their sins have been washed away by the pale, clammy, and dehydrated state their body has undertaken. Lack of blood flow, you assume. Brain damage. Broken bones in their toes, arms, legs, shoulders, knees, back, neck, feet, hands—
Tentatively, morbidly curious, you slowly move your hand to their bleeding chest. Your fingers phase through them completely, as though their body isn’t made of protective skin and thick, slimy flesh. Your palm fits through next, and you grasp their red SOUL.
You don’t really care about going to the Surface anymore. Your brother and the woman behind the door are dead; everyone else who has fled town to hidden corners for protection is too scared of humans to even think about setting foot on the Surface. The SOUL, you decide, is not worthy enough to bring to Asgore.
And besides, you’ll be seeing them again. You are sure of it.
Your hand squeezes the red SOUL until it makes a sickening squelching noise and pops . While the core of it remains in your hand, the rest of the SOUL has exploded all over the human, the floor at your feet, and on your clothes. A bit of it has flown up your nose. Mostly, it blends in with the rest of the human blood in the hall.
You gain one LOVE, the first you ever have in your short, miserable existence as the carrier of the Judge, as a scientist, as a brother, as a killer.
Gosh, you have so many titles. If only Papyrus could see you now! Ha ha! Not such a lazybones after all.
You are standing in the judgment hall. It’s a quiet and cold place meant only to balance the scales upon those whose SOULs have come into question. You, in all the time you have spent here shrouded by the Judge’s gravity, have never judged someone who has committed genocide before.
The Judge curls through your ears and wiggles over your feet. The human child lumbers unsteadily, their gait thrown off by the karma rooted in their heart. You can almost see their blood pulsing through their veins, their adrenaline and anxiety spiking and redirecting as wildly as their swiveling head.
You’ve killed them once. You don’t need the Judge to tell you; all it does is whisper to you of their executions, their LOVE, their merciless trail of dust and fear. Their sins drag on them, weighing them down as they shuffle, shuffle, shuffle across the tile towards you.
You see their panic.
They’ve RESET, like they have time and time again for the other monsters they’ve slaughtered. Undyne had given them a run for their money, though they succeeded in the end. But you are not Undyne. You are going to give them more than just suffering, more than another LOVE point to gain, more than another monster to turn to dust.
Their grip on their little knife changes. You laugh in their face, making a joke over phantom lines of their once-dead body. They tremble. Their expression twists and the joint of their arms twinges.
One step forward. You throw out your strongest attack that requires as little energy as possible. They don’t die; they are resilient, determined, but karmic poison rushes through those tiny little veins. It pulses into their heart and kills their sugars and hope. You watch, grinning, as they gasp for air and launch at you with their dusty knife.
Oh, come on. That was a little pathetic.
“what? you think i’m just gonna stand there and take it?” you call to them, five feet away from where they are lunged. Their head jerks as they struggle to follow your voice.
They’re going to have to be faster than that.
With the manifestation of their sins ripping through their system, you reach out with your magic and tug down on their SOUL. Your power outlines the child in a brilliant shade of blue. The blue of the abyssal Surface sky that you’ve never been allowed to see; the endless ocean Surface blue you’ll never swim in.
Maybe you have. You know you have experienced happiness, once.
It doesn’t really matter. A bone slices their neck, the large, pulsing jugular, and they bleed out on the ground of the judgment hall. Their blood spills to your feet, and you step in it, fascinated by the way it doesn’t quite splash like water would. It squelches, oddly, like ketchup.
Huh.
Human blood, you find, clots and sticks. It clings to the pink fuzz of your slippers quite unlike a ketchup stain would. On the human’s skin, where little drops have landed on isolated parts of their exposed body, it hardens into an odd brown color. You run your hand over their body to flip them over. Their red SOUL, faded now from the blue horizon they stole from you, beats in replacement of their still heart.
You reach in, gently pull it out, and examine it. It is strong, filled with DETERMINATION even in the face of all it has seen, all it has done to weaker souls of the Underground.
You close your fist and it squelches and bursts into a brilliant scene of red pelting rain. A chunk lands on the top of your head, and you find that it has a hard time sticking to your round skull. The blood runs down, down, down your spine and into your ears and over your nose.
Deep in your own SOUL, which pulses in a shade of white like the bones of a skeleton or freshly fallen snow, you feel a twinge. A pull. You’ve done this before, you think.
The Judge wisps through you, piercing your weak SOUL and the dips in your gore-filled hand. Yes, you have done this before. You don’t remember the exact scene, the exact way the child collapsed on the floor after you tore them apart, but you do remember that you, once, felt the like this. Your rage isn’t tided at all.
Unhappy. Unfulfilled. Undeserving of repeating the experience until they give up. But you’ll do it anyway. It’s not like you have a choice. And besides, that’s kind of the point. Keep going, and going, and going, until they can’t handle it anymore, and they RESET your life back to where you aren’t happy, exactly, but you are content.
You are content with making jokes with the woman behind the door. You are content with your jobs you spend most of your time sleeping on. You are content with irritating your brother and silently encouraging him in his efforts to cook an edible spaghetti dish.
You want it back. Even though it isn’t the Surface or the ocean or the sky or the stars or the sun, it is your life. It is yours, and your friends’ and family’s lives. Nobody has the right to take that away.
You just have to keep going until they RESET, or, at the very least, never RESET again.
You are standing in the judgment hall. The human is perched a little ways off, not yet approaching you like you unduly thought they might. They rub their sleeve against every inch of their blade, cleaning any dust off the glinting toy metal. They lick one of their fingers and use their slobber to wipe away the scuff marks.
Ten attempts, you read off of their body language. It feels like the first and only time to you. The Judge filters in through your teeth, reminding you of the exact number of lives they have taken. Nineteen LOVE points mar their red SOUL. It is strong, filled to the brim with DETERMINATION.
Your SOUL is weak. You’ve seen what DETERMINATION does to monsters like you. You’ve seen it injected into willing and unwilling participants; seen it create an amalgamation of a once beautiful creature; seen it explode and dismantle someone’s entire existence across a thousand timelines; and seen it melt a friend until she was nothing but dust.
It is better that your SOUL is weak. It only takes one hit to kill you, and with any luck, you will not suffer.
The judgment hall is quiet and loud at the same time. You’ve never enjoyed standing in it before. The way it crunches and kills sound, to the point where the human’s uneven breaths and the rubbing of the fabric of their clothes echo down to where you stand, is almost unbearable. The clarity of your mind is painful — you hate the memories that do resurface, the ones of a man who speaks in hands, the ones with a woman as queen, and the one where you felt happiness, just once.
The faux sun filtering through the windows mocks you. It burns your bones with how cold and frightening the black hole this corridor is. Compared to what it’s imitating, the glowing hall fills you with a chilling, sorrowful wrath.
Finally, after a considerable amount of time of methodical cleaning and sharpening of their knife, they amble towards you. Shfff, shfff. Their feet drag on the orange-cast tiles.
You tell a joke. They don’t laugh, but their lips pull into this sick, twisted sort of smile. It isn’t really a smile at all, you think, but neither is yours. You wonder, briefly, just how similar you two must look.
They take a step forward. The words that fall from your mouth feel oddly familiar, like you’ve said them ten, now eleven times already. You can’t really confirm that, nor do you care enough to think of new things to say.
You kill them all the same.
Eleven times. Their red SOUL remains determined. You pull it gently, carefully, from its sticky, blood-soaked human body, and it squelches and explodes in your fist. A splatter reaches the ceiling. You watch, amazed, as the warm, thick liquid drips into your eye socket.
Papyrus would tell you it’s disgusting. Even you can’t pretend it is ketchup.
You are standing in the judgment hall. It’s hard to tell how many times they have fought you by just their expression and body language. You could make a guess, but you don’t think it’d be very accurate. Mostly, they seem bored and frustrated by their repeated attempts and repeated failures.
The chill of the judgment hall matches evenly with the Judge coiling around your vertebrae and into the sliver of space between your humerus and ulna. It whispers to you the number of the Underground’s deaths, their unrelenting motivation for — for what, you aren’t exactly sure. The Judge does not care; it only tells you what you need to know. It shows you dust littering the haunts of the old lady, a white skull blending in with the snowy landscape, the tears of an orphaned child, and a scientist without her creations.
Your objective ruling is this: the judgment hall is no place to thrive. It cuts deep with its reminders of a sun you can’t reach and a sky that will never exist in any meaningful capacity for you. The orange hue of the corridor offsets the clawing, creeping motions the human makes as they shudder and drag their feet down the chamber.
They approach you, one step too far, and the Judge exits from your coccyx and temporal bones. You say words they’ve heard before, and they don’t react. Bored. They are bored of this constant back and forth, of your attacks and their missed hits. They seem weary of karma, failure, and your repeated spiels about the misery their sins have caused.
Bored is good. You know firsthand that getting bored is an easy excuse to stop trying to push that boulder to the top of the hill. If they think it impossible, they will quit, and you can finally say you’ve won.
And it is all good and swell, and you are smiling at the thought of getting to move forward or backward or somewhere with your life.
Then you start to feel it — this drag on your bones. It is the barest beginning of exhaustion. Your attacks currently don’t use much magic, but your more intense attacks do. The human is learning, growing, and you will be damned if you let them become well-adjusted to your onslaught.
You need to expend more energy. You know you could never fight for forever, anyway. Might as well use everything you have to make them regret ever falling down that mountain.
You just need a second. One minute to calm down, catch your breath, and prepare yourself for the fight of your life. This is something new, you think, an act you have not done in all of the times you’ve stood in this hall facing this demon. The human shuffles and stands taller at the way you exert yourself in exaggerated pants. You raise your hands in a placating, near-begging manner.
Perhaps it's a little embarrassing, but you have no shame for letting your words be as cunning as your physical power. You tell the bleeding, dying, physically drained human that you think there is some glimmer of a good person deep inside them. You ask them to lay down their weapon — you and them could be friends. You pretend as if you are reaching for a hidden part of their SOUL and ask them to listen, to let their drive to do good outweigh their need to ceaselessly murder.
And maybe they did have that virtuous drive at one point in time. You remember the feeling of happiness, once, and that could only have been brought by the sun heating your bones, the ocean cooling your feet, and the sky glistening above with its endless blue horizon, glimmering constellations, and a crescent moon to illuminate the dark of night. It could only have been brought by the human breaking the barrier.
But you don’t really think that same human resides in them anymore. The human that stands before you killed your brother in this timeline, in this RESET. That is what matters.
To your honest, gobsmacked surprise, the human’s shoulders start to shake, and a sound erupts from their parted lips. It starts deep in their stomach. Their large organ clenches and releases in a full-body motion as they choke breathlessly on something horrible. They shake out the sleeve of their sweater and bring it to their eyes and, oh.
They are crying.
Water leaks from their eyelashes and down their cheeks, leaving clear marks in the wake of blood, dust, and dirt. It’s clear that in their massacre of the Underground, they haven’t thought to bathe at all. Their crimes stick to their body like sins to the heart.
They toss their weapon on the ground, their sobs growing louder and louder, and you extend out your arms for a hug. Your chest twinges and a painful feeling expands, grows, and pushes against the hardened layers surrounding the weakest parts of your SOUL.
It is a child, just a child, that springs and collapses into your arms, whispering between harrowing, gasping tears that they are sorry. “I am so sorry! I didn’t mean it, I don’t know why I did it! I’m sorry, Sans!”
Their humanness feels weird against your bones. When you touched them first with that handshake, most of their hand was blocked by the whoopie cushion in your palm. Now, their entire body is flushed completely against yours. With one hand pressing kindly against the back of their neck, you can feel the thin layer of skin that hides their flesh. They have several scrapes that bleed between the small gaps of your finger bones. You don’t like this feeling, of warm, life fluid against you, a monster who needs neither blood nor the flesh that holds the blood.
When you clench your hand ever so slightly, you can map out the pulsing, gushing veins in their neck. You presume where their nerves are. You remember when your bones were once as small and stout as theirs must be now, hidden as they are behind a strong, wet, flesh prison. There are organs yet still inside and around their bones. You adjust your hand and feel — this is where they must allow food and liquid to pass through their body.
There is a soft point at the junction between their jaw and their neck, so soft that you can feel the beating of their real heart. You have seen it, of course, their heart. You are unsure of when or where, only that you have most certainly torn them apart in a manner where their real heart, not their SOUL, has had its protective layers of bone, flesh, and skin removed and exposed to the dangers of the outside world.
You don’t remember it exactly, only with the firm impression that it had happened.
Their heartbeat is erratic and unnatural, and their body shakes and stirs with uncontrollable sobs. You move your hand up further to card through their hair. It is thin, unkempt, and bloody, causing it to stick together in some areas and knot in others. It reminds you, oddly, of your pink fuzzy slippers.
This is but a child in your arms. Short and weak to other humans, crying in the arms of an adult offering mercy in a world they fell into.
Your SOUL is weak, so incredibly weak. It takes only one hit to kill you.
That is why you have spent years shrouding your emotions. When that sorrow, pain, and God-forgive sympathy dig in roots to weed out your grudges to make you do something outrageous like forgive, you rear your head the other way.
It is a massacre; that is all there really is to say. You have a strong, gut-twisting feeling that this is the first and worst of their deaths. Bones stick out of every place in the tiny body. Most have impaled them completely, going through that large organ in their torso, puncturing both of their ugly pink lungs, and tearing through that red heart of theirs. You step back, and they drop unceremoniously to the ground.
Plunk. The sound echoes like a gunshot when dead weight smacks tile.
You pick up their heart first, not the SOUL that still beats with life. You see where it would have, at one point, churned blood to every little limb in their body. It amazes you that, even though it fits in the palm of your hand, it was the human’s entire source of life. Except for, maybe, their brain.
Only one bone made it through their little skull. You don’t think it would be worth it to attempt holding the brain — too much of it has been scattered in several gooey pieces across the floor. The brain, in general, has always been a little too complex for you to delve all the way into. You were never a doctor. A scientist doesn’t need to know the ins and outs of any animal’s brain to conduct proper research on machinery and SOULs.
Gently, you lay the heart on the ground next to the human’s hand. Their arm is bent all out of shape, but that is to be expected. Even before their harsh landing crumpled and unaligned their limbs, your summoned bones had twisted and reshaped all of their bones.
Their SOUL comes next. You take it from their chest, and you examine it. Its DETERMINATION has weakened a minuscule, almost imperceptible amount.
You begin to hope.
“if we’re really friends, you won’t come back,” you whisper, your teeth pressed against the pulse of their SOUL. You make sure they hear and comprehend it, wherever they are, before you close your fist and let the blood spray.
You get the feeling Papyrus would be disappointed in you.
You are standing in the judgment hall. When you see the human, they are paused, caught in a state of perpetual agony and betrayal even though the fight has not yet begun. You wonder what may have caused such a small thing to feel so strongly that it makes their entire body tremor in stasis.
After all, you are the only one who should feel betrayed.
You are standing in the judgment hall. Eternity is a long time to spend in this mocking, miserable orange-cast place.
You start to think eternity — forever, ever, ever, and ever — is how long you will remain fighting. Never moving forward, never falling back. Always caught in a battle that ends in their death and your triumph. You don’t quite remember any of the repeated RESETs, but you know the human does.
Maybe they will give up.
Their SOUL, red and beating and alive in your palm, remains determined.
You won’t give up.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall. The magic, fake Underground sun shines through the windows, lighting the human’s face into an angelic sort of glow. The sight almost makes you bark out a heinous laugh.
They move quickly towards you, their dragged feet quiet and near silent in the chamber. Their eyes open for a small moment to peer at you, and their mouth spreads into a vicious grin. The Judge glides into your pelvis and traverses up your mandible, and you see with vivid clarity their kills — but it invites something else along for a change. It does not just show the human’s crimes. It shows their misery.
One hundred.
The number should be discouraging. One hundred times they have been slain and defeated at your feet. Their attempts are all unsuccessful. They must be bored of your face, of your smile, of your attacks, of your words. It has to be exhausting to relive and remember the days they’ve ended by being brutally impaled, dismembered, tattered, and shredded. For you, this is your first and only time fighting. For them, it’s been a consecutive one hundred.
Their SOUL pulses brightly, outlining their body in a faint shimmer of red that you presume only you can perceive. You see it more clearly, looming in the gaps of their teeth, the length of their stride, and the determined twinkle in their forest green eyes, the message they convey without wasting a single breath: you cannot dodge forever.
No, no you cannot.
But you can certainly trap you both in this judgment hall for as long as forever may take.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You are standing in the judgment hall, and the human child shambles towards you. Their feet drag on the tile, barely echoing in the sound-crunching abyss of the chamber. Your small, quiet, soundless breaths are louder than their jerky movements.
They tilt their head up to you, their eyes closed and mouth quirked into an unreadable, indecipherable expression.
You are unsure of how long you’ve been doing this.
You know it’s been a while.
Then, their body twists this slight amount — a muscle in the jaw pulses upward, their pointer finger presses gently against the flat edge of their knife, and their foot pigeons half a degree. The exact number of their deaths is still lost on you, but the Judge sees it. For a split second, the entire hall is painted in blood. Every single inch of the room has been splattered, at one point or another, in fresh red, old crimson, and brown clotted blood from a small child.
The jacket you wear loosely around your bones becomes too tight, restricting your movements as judgment weighs heavy on your shoulders. Individual strands from your fluffy pink slippers stick uncomfortably to your feet. Warm, thick liquid coats your shirt and dribbles into your mouth, your eye sockets, and the spaces between your ribcage that your SOUL can’t quite patch. Your hand especially is hot — hot with the piles and piles of exploded heart-shaped SOULs.
The core of the SOUL remains in your fist. The rest of it drips down your arm and onto the ocean of blood on the floor. The human SOUL has gained exactly nineteen LOVE. You gain one hundred nineteen LOVE.
It ends as the Judge slithers out from your clavicles. The chamber shines in a cold, orange hue, but even King Asgore cannot replicate the loving, natural heat of the Surface’s burning sun. The human who has murdered most of your friends and your only family — your brother, Papyrus, who endearingly called you a lazybones while you slept on the job, who knew of the human’s wrongdoings yet showed mercy all the same, who died because monsters like you did nothing — takes one step too far.
You are standing in the judgment hall.
You start to feel your sins crawling on your back.