Work Text:
Day 82
The ritual didn't work again.
I've tried everything from dandelions and myrrh to different candle numbers, types of candles, orientations of candles in circles squares triangles lines, pentacle sigils, weird shapes, all of it drawn in all kinds of blood like deer, rabbit and bear, and even this time I used
“Hold still.”
A large bony hand carefully tends to your hand, applying pressure with cotton swabs and wrapping it with gauze. You shift in your skeletal seat, the journal slipping insecurely around your thigh as you feel giant bones supporting you from behind.
“I'm trying to write down what I did before I forget.”
“You never forget.”
“There are a lot of permutations here.” You sigh as you allow Horror to confidently secure the wrappings. “I could accidentally rerun a setup or miss a step.”
“You won't.” You hear the frown in his voice as he forces you to rest against his chest. “Why blood?”
“Because over half the books I've managed to pore through on ritual circles agree that blood is the way to draw the sigils.”
“Why your blood,” Horror clarifies, and you can feel the concern in his voice as his thumb brushes over the spot where you slashed open your palm. You frown at his dedication.
“Well the ritual calls for a sacrifice…”
“shit dollface, you cut yerself again?” Red makes his appearance known in the doorway to the open living space, the curve of his horns threatening to turn the wooden framework into splinters. You roll your eyes, brushing off the severity of your own actions.
“It's fine. I didn't use nearly enough.” You consider saving some sort of supply over time to get higher volumes. Red must read the thought going through your head as he pops in front of you and Horror on the couch.
“i told ya we can jus’ use animals or some other human meat blob, not yer fuckin’ life force.”
“It has to be someone's life force. Might as well be mine. Sure can't be yours.” Red huffs, arms crossed, displeased but relenting.
“still don't gotta be you doing it,” he mumbles.
“I know what performing this ritual means to you all.” You look at your wrapped hand and sigh with a smile. “I just want to make sure I’ve tried all the options.”
“sucks that we don’t even know what goes into it.” Sans shuffles into the living room with a cup of what you can only presume to be coffee. You watch his bony tail swish out and curl around his leg as he continues mid-yawn. “can’t even give you any pointers.”
“I remember lights.” Horror adds, stroking your hair behind your ear soothingly. “Tiny lights. Lots of them.”
“I know.” You nod appreciatively. “That’s why I’ve been using candles.”
“look, i don’t care what ya use sweetcheeks. just let us know next time when yer gonna take a knife to yer hand.”
“they did what?” Sans is instantly more awake, sockets wide. “again?”
“..I think we need breakfast.” Horror lifts you from his lap–effortlessly, like a thin piece of paper–and settles you onto the couch.
“what’s fer breakfast?” Red asks curiously, his temper distracted by the promise of food.
“Steak and eggs. And juice. Good for blood loss.” He eyes you softly and you sink into the cushions with just a smidge of guilt.
Sans has popped over to examine your hand more closely, frowning. “i thought we talked about this.”
“I said I’d think about it, not that I wouldn’t do it.” Sans frowns, but keeps his thoughts to himself. “Besides, I have to rule out all the options.” You see his worried expression and it tugs on your heart. “I won’t try it again for a while though, okay?”
“a month at least,” Red grumps, then plops onto the couch next to you and puts his feet in your lap, your journal finding a new resting spot on the floor. You instinctively begin massaging his tarsals and metatarsals with your good hand and Red relaxes into the seat. “there’s plenty of other stuff we can work with before we even gotta think about trying that again.”
You nod and process through some other options as Sans sits on your other side, his radius and ulna on the armrest. He takes the remote and flips on the TV, which of course starts broadcasting a news channel commenting on the large increase of demon summonings in the past few weeks. With a tired look, he switches to a dumb sitcom that can take your minds off all the demon nonsense until the thick smell of cooked protein comes wafting from the kitchen. Red stands up to set the table, obviously invested in food, leaving you and Sans on the couch by yourselves.
“you don’t have to do any of this, y’know.”
You keep your eyes on the TV, but you know he can tell that you’re listening as you cross your legs, readjusting yourself.
“this was always our problem to figure out. our burden. why stick your neck out like this?”
You smile a little, fondly, and turn his way. “I happen to like my haunted half-price house, thank you very much. And it isn’t haunted without all of you here.”
“pft, c’mon, you’ve already got–”
“All of you.” Your smile turns into a determined frown as your heart remembers flutters of turbulent memories, what it was like to lose the family you had and seek out this place of your own, how these skeletons have been looking for their own lost family. In what universe would you insist on their separation, their family forcibly halved?
The coatrack by the door still holds three scarves of various crimson hues, hanging there like ghosts of the past.
“I won’t let your brothers be lost. We’ll get them back. I promise.” It’s the least you can do for them–Sans, Red, and Horror–who not only gave you a house (by proxy), but a family. Not one that could ever replace the one you lost, but one that could stand with you, weather through the rough times, and turn this house into a home. It was a shaky start at first, having to figure out why no one had already bought this cabin in the middle of nowhere, slowly discovering bright eyes that stared at you in the dark, voices that whispered in your ear but disappeared into nothing when you turned your head to find the source. They had done everything monsterly possible to chase you out, but slowly you broke down their defenses, cradled their fears, and offered them peace and warmth.
Sans slumps and rests his head on your shoulder, an unexpected show of affection from the one skeleton who has always been the most skeptical of your intentions, his walls the hardest of all to break down.
“just stop hurtin’ yourself. we’ll get ‘em back. somehow.”
“We will,” you affirm. “I really think if we keep trying different rituals, eventually one is going to work. You saw the news, it’s already been working for other people.” Crazy as they may be.
“yeah but those other people are lookin’ for demons.” Sans looks up at you, eye lights meeting yours. “we’re not demons.”
“As far as the ritual’s concerned, you are.”
“it’s a mix-up from our side. we’re not supposed to have all these horns and tails and–” He realizes his hand is trailing down the crook of your jeans and he immediately moves it chastely over to his femur. “–weird impulses and shit, it’s all messed up over there.”
“Our best chance to get your brothers back is to do whatever… whoever brought you guys here did. And chances are, where you are now, it was a demon ritual.” You gently poke one of his pointy horns and he grunts, not disapprovingly.
“i know. i know it all makes sense. just feel like there’s gotta be something different, something that we haven’t tried yet.” Sans looks down at your hand again with a frown. “maybe if we actually caught a demon we could get some more information.”
“Absolutely not.” Your brow turns downward in hard, judgmental fashion, and Sans lifts off your shoulder. “No one is going demon hunting around here, okay?”
“we can take ‘em.”
“I don’t care if you can take them, demons are vicious and exceptionally cunning.”
“we’re smarter than them. we could do it.”
“I said NO!”
You realize that the words come out harsher than you really mean, the surprise in Sans’ eyes reminding you that he is not the same as the family you had.
He’s not dead.
“Breakfast is ready.” A hand cups your whole shoulder in a sturdy, comforting grip. Horror stands behind the couch, bringing you out of your past and back to the present. After a moment of hesitation, Sans grumbles and switches the TV off.
“nothing good on anyway.” He stands up and heads over to the kitchen. You look up at Horror like a child caught throwing rocks in a glass house, but he only looks at you with gentleness and understanding.
“You’ll feel better with food.” You nod, knowing that he’s right–you need a proper breakfast after starting out with such a busy and early morning.
“Okay.” You look up at him with a grateful smile. “Thanks Horror.”
“Eat first, thank me later.”
With gentle support, you both make your way over to the table where Red is scarfing down his practically raw steak and burnt eggs. Sans cuts his own medium-rare meat and scrambled bits, clearly avoiding eye contact with you. You sigh quietly, knowing you'll have to fix things with him later.
When you sit down at your spot at the table, you’re served your own steak and eggs, just the way you like them. You stare admiringly over at Horror as he's putting his own plate together. He's always so detail-oriented, particularly with food, and so quiet about the attention he puts into each meal, how he makes it special for each person. You can't help but feel the guilt with Sans taking a backseat to the warmth of your breakfast as it slides down your gullet and into your stomach. When Horror turns about to join in, you give him an appreciative smile, a silent gratitude for his silent gesture of care, and he receives it with a faint blush and a self-conscious grin. He was the only one of the trio that didn't focus on the fact that you had hurt yourself for them–just saw your wound and simply asked what he could do to help. You hope that later you'll be able to enjoy sitting in his lap again, snuggled up against him, and you remind yourself that you are very lucky to have him and Red be so affectionate with you.
—+++—
By nightfall you still haven't been able to make amends with Sans. While you did manage to obtain Red- and Horror-flavored cuddles throughout the day, Sans stayed clear of you, taking space for himself. You suppose you should tell him, open up about your experiences, why you reacted the way you did, why you're so desperate to bring their brothers out of whatever strange void they came from…
…But since you're bad at all that stuff, you decide instead to focus on something he'd be happy about–a new sigil attempt, bloodless in all forms. What Sans said earlier got you thinking: if demon summonings are so common–relatively, anyway, five or so on the news being ‘a lot’–they must not be so complicated to carry out.
So what if you just tried the simplest iteration?
Candles, a sigil, and a sacrifice. With the boys in bed, you grab a paint can and trace a red circle on the designated trial space in the living room, painting as straightforward a pentagram as you can. You kindle a number of tea lights, placing them around the sigil with enough room for you to kneel as needed.
The sacrifice is the trickiest part and the biggest gamble–a switch from an organic loss to a sentimental one. There's no rule about the size that the sacrifice needs to be, so you err on the small end because your skeleton family has already suffered enough. Any greater sacrifice and they'll lose everything they have left.
You approach the coatrack and carefully pull a thread from each of the three scarves of differing red hues, then promise yourself to patch them up later when this inevitably doesn't work.
You place a concrete bowl in the middle of the sigil with dry twigs, kneel behind it and set it alight. While many rituals call for some sort of incantation, you decide that in the light of simplicity, the quality that matters isn’t what it is said, but the vibrations of the sound, the intonations that are produced, and so you hum your favorite tune as you wait for the flames to burn steady. Then, with a steady hand, you drop the threads in so that they ignite altogether.
“Dumpling?”
Oh shit. Horror must have had a nightmare again.
You hum your acknowledgement of his greeting, not wanting to mess up this shot on the off-chance that for some reason it does wor–
A burst of light shoots to the ceiling like a powerful fountain, sparking a pearlescence of color as it flows. It bathes the cabin in a stark, white glow, bright enough to fill the room. You screech with surprise and this thankfully doesn’t upset anything–
“dollface? what the–”
“what’s going o– what the hell?!”
–except the other two skeletons in the house who were also probably awake being plagued by nightmares, of course.
You look over to them, their expressions a mixture of awe and concern. This is it–it’s working and they can see that it’s working! Everything you worked for, everything you wanted for them is finally happening.
They’re going to get their brothers back.
You smile triumphantly, with love and hope that their stories can finally end happily.
“No…”
The light falls from the source, pooling around your knees and legs, filling the simple pentagram you painted with bright, blinding radiance.
“Wrong… It’s wrong! Dumpling!”
He realizes just before you, too little too late.
The pentagram is the portal.
And you’re sitting on it.
You commit them to memory–Horror’s raging panic, Red as he comes to the same horrifying realization, and Sans who simply knows, who feels it in his gut, struck by the sorrow and guilt of all the things he never talked to you about, the things he never got to say.
That he never will.
You are already sinking into the circle as you see Horror above you, reaching out with a desperate hand.
And then you fall through, swallowed by the white void.