Permanent Solutions to Temporary Problems, And Other Nice Ways for People Who Don't Understand You To Say They Never Will

You get sick.

You feel fine when you go to bed, sore and exhausted but not feverish and even though she doesn’t say so you know Mom’s going to let you stay home tomorrow. You wake up sweating and wheezing, throat scratchy like a sunburn on the inside and limbs heavy like water sausages you’re controlling with puppet strings. The first thing Frisk does is whine, unaccustomed to this, and try to bury themselves back in the blankets. You gently ease them out of bed, wobbly and tired and overly warm and into the bathroom to grab a washcloth from under the sink and run it under some cold water before putting it on your head.

You wash your face and use the bathroom and Frisk makes these miserable little noises you don’t bother chastising them for, even though your first instinct is to puff up and say “What? This? This is nothing, tough it out!” But that’s mean. So you don’t.

“Hey,” Asriel asks, looking genuinely concerned when you shut the bathroom door, “You okay?” You grimace. “Don’t get me sick,” he says, warily. You roll your eyes.

“You’re a flower,” you say, and your mouth feels like cotton, “Can you get sick?”

“I don’t wanna find out,” he says.

You pad down the stairs and into the kitchen and check the stove clock- it’s 10am, and the general silence in the house makes it clear Mom isn’t around. Thoughtful of her to let you sleep in, unfortunate you didn’t wake up in a great condition. You get a cup of cold tap water from the sink and chug the entire thing, which kind of makes your head hurt, but makes your throat feel better for a few minutes.

You have good pain tolerance and great sick tolerance and could stay on your feet a little longer, and even though Frisk won’t admit it, they’re exhausted and miserable already, pain threshold far lower than your own. You go back to your room and crawl in bed, grabbing your cell off the nightstand.

You consider your options. You really don’t want to interrupt Mom at work (and Mom would freak if Dad came over without her knowing), Sans is probably…. Not in a great mood today, and Undyne works at the same school as your Mom, so if Alphys found out, Undyne would find out, and then Mom would find out-

Leaving Papyrus. Frisk seems happy with the decision, though, so you sigh and text him.

Hey. Sick. Will you pick me up some Nyquil?

The response is nearly immediate.

OH NO! HUMAN, I WILL HAVE THE NYQUIL AS SOON AS MONSTEROUSLY POSSIBLE! DO YOU REQUIRE ANYTHING ELSE??

You give Frisk a little mental nudge and after a moment of thought, they take your hands and type.

yeah, can you bring me some apple juice and a chocolate bar?

You smile before you can help yourself, because Frisk doesn’t even like chocolate. You don’t mention it, though.

OF COURSE, FRISK! I WILL BE THERE VERY SOON, TRY TO HANG ON!!!!

You click the screen off and slide it onto the nightstand, melting into your duvet with a groan. You roll over and look at Asriel.

“Hey,” you say. He looks up at you from his gameboy.

“What.”

“Do you mind if I watch tv?” He frowns, and shrugs. “Thanks,” you say, and pap around the nightstand for the remote. It’s on the floor, knocked over at some point, and by the time you’ve gotten it you don’t even know if you actually want to watch tv anymore so you just toss it in the sheets somewhere and pass out again until Papyrus shows up.

And he does show up, throwing the front door open and clomping up the stairs in his boots, before bursting into your room dramatically with a booming NYEH-HEH-HEH. You take a backseat and let Frisk deal with him.

“Hey, Papy,” Frisk says, smiling weakly and reaching their arms up in little grabby hands. He drops the grocery bag on the bed and scoops them up like a sack of potatoes, rocking them back and forth a little jarringly. They seem comforted, though, so it’s fine.

“Did you bring me anything??” Asriel asks immediately, and you roll your eyes, but Papyrus brightens and puffs up his chest.

“OF COURSE, MY FLOWERY FRIEND!” He digs into the plastic Walgreens bag and pulls out a pack of foil wrapped Pokemon cards, “THESE ARE THE ONES YOU WANTED, RIGHT?”

Asriel perks up, petals jittering and nods, reaching for it with his tiny leaf arms. Papyrus beams as he hands it to him. He goes back to rocking you and Frisk while Asriel tears the pack open.

“OH, HUMAN!” He laments, “A GREAT MISFORTUNE HAS BEFALLEN YOU! TRULY, I AM SORRY! BUT WORRY NOT, FOR THE GREAT PAPYRUS IS NOW HERE TO MAKE EVERYTHING BETTER!” Frisk giggles and wraps their arms around his skinny neck, comforted. He cradles them in one arm and rummages around in the bag, “I ASKED THE WONDERFUL HUMAN PHARMACIST WHAT HUMANS NEED WHEN THEY ARE ILL, AND THEN BOUGHT ALL OF IT.” He pulls some things out and sets them next to the bag and you watch carefully, cataloging the bottle of Tums, box of Hello Kitty bandaids, a packet of NyQuil, some Tylenol, a heating pad, and a bottle of apple juice and a chocolate bar.

You pat him to let you down and he does, gently, onto the mattress. You scoop up the nyquil and the tylenol and wonder if taking both is a bad idea, but you shrug and take them anyway, before unwrapping the heating pad. You don’t need it right now, but you probably will. Frisk wants the bandaids and you don’t know why.

“WORRY NOT, HUMAN, I WILL READ YOU A STORY WHICH WILL SERENADE YOU TO SLEEP AND ALLOW YOU TO PASS THROUGH THESE DARK TIMES WITH THE EASE OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS!”

Frisk curls back up under the bed and sneezes, hard, into the pillow. When you look up again Papyrus has produced a picture book from somewhere and has seated himself on the side of your bed, clearing his throat. Does he have a throat?

“ONCE UPON A TIME,” he begins and you roll your eyes, because you hate storybooks, but Frisk is utterly delighted so you begrudgingly refrain from saying so, “THERE WAS A FLUFFY BUNNY…”

Your body is curled in on itself, sneakers parked in a puddle and huddled in the shadows, sobbing into its sleeves. You’re getting wet.

“Get up,” you snarl at it, weak and pathetic and whiny, all the things you’ve learned the hard way you can’t ever be, “Get the fuck up!”

It won’t, though. It tears its cell phone, the one your mother gave it from its pocket and presses it to its moist, blubbering face, “Mom,” it sobs into the dial tone, “Please.”

The wind is howling. You can hear that fish bitch laughing in the distance, screaming some bullshit monologue while she hunts you down like a dog. You won’t fucking die again. She’s put a spear through your bloated heaving chest too many times now and if this stupid brat you’re sharing your head with would fucking listen to you and defend itself you wouldn’t have to ever let her kill you again.

It’s still sobbing into the phone, calling her over and over again. She’s not picking up though. You’re dead to her, long fucking dead- and now you are all over again, like you didn’t get reincarnated at her fucking feet, defying space and time to see your mother who you’d died for, sacrificed everything for, to be burned and tossed out on your ass into the cold like yesterday’s newspaper.

“Get up!” You scream and grab at this stolen suit of skin you’ve found yourself living in, and it jerks to its feet. Its sobbing hiccups to a surprised halt, and you pause, before laughing. You flex your fingers, thoughtfully, and they struggle weakly against you, but they’re so grief ridden it’s pathetic and useless. You ignore them and stretch your muscles, before cracking your neck and cocking your head to hear which direction fish-bitch’s clanging armour is echoing from.

“Please, don’t,” your host whispers and you laugh, bitterly, a hollow sound that comes from your ribs.

“Never,” you say, “Never again.”

You wake up in a cold sweat, hands grabbing at the air and panting, wheezing, blearily.

“Hey!” A voice says, and you look frantically around for it, confused, delirious, warm, “Don’t worry, darling, you’re fine.”

Oh god. Oh god, no.

Mettaton is sitting on your desk chair, rolled over by your bedside, primly, legs crossed, reading a tabloid magazine that he sets down immediately.

You groan, “Where’s Papyrus?” Your mouth feels like cotton. Your eyes are swimming. You kick off the blankets.

“Papy had to run to work, darling, so he called me to come and wait with you!” He clasps his hands together, smiling, “He was so worried, Frisky, you should have seen him, absolutely adorable. Oh, what am I on about, how are you feeling, dear?”

You’ve stopped listening to him, trying to struggle onto your elbows, but your body is hot and heavy and you can’t. You collapse back into the sweat soaked sheets panting. Your nose is running really badly and your throat burns. Frisk is practically wailing in your head, but you don’t want to back off and put them back at the front because you know you can handle this better- Mettaton looks concerned.

“It’s-” you say, “There are… No have… Did you… Toilet paper?” You say and he stares at you, confused. You sneeze, hard, and you can feel it all over your face, and it makes your toes curl at how gross it is. You’ve startled your guardian though, because he scrambles to the bathroom to grab you a roll of toilet paper that you wipe snot from your face with.

“Oh, dear, sweetie,” he says, while you finish wadding up your snot rag and dropping it on the nightstand, “You really are sick!”

“I told you,” Asriel says from his pot, without looking up from his gameboy.

“Azzy,” you whine, voice breaking, and you pant hot air. That makes him look up and his previous unconcerned demeanor is gone.

“Hey,” he says, “Are you okay?”

You frown and the world is so warm it hurts and you're falling falling falling like a paper airplane from a mountain cliff, scribbled on and spinning out of control, “I’m… A… Azzy…?” You say, wobbling, and shove a knife into his face, again, and again, and again, and again, in the old throne room you used to play in, overgrown by wildflowers from a home you hate, standing in your father’s dust. You keep stabbing until he’s nothing but plant paste and scattered dirt and the voice your share your brain with has gone silent. You wonder if they’re dead. You hope they’re dead.

You turn around and smile, the knees of your shorts grass-stained green and hands powdery white-grey and clenched like teeth, and you grab a bone from the air like it’s easy, swinging over a volley that would have hurt more than the one. You keep a careful eye on your HP, landing on the yellow tiled floor of the Judgement Hall with a thump. He’s panting in a way that seems like bullshit for anything without lungs and his hand clenches into a fist at his side.

“Oh, come on,” you say, twirling Mom’s kitchen knife in one hand absently, “Are we really gonna do this again? What do you even care, you know eventually I’m going to beat you.”

“i don’t know that,” he hisses, “there is always the chance this is the timeline where you get bored and give up.”

You snort, “Unlikely. How about this, I go back, and do this whole thing again, but this time I leave you and your brother alive and you just let me go on my way, huh?”

He pauses, actually pauses, hands stilling, eye sockets widening and you snicker again, “Haha, no way. You think I would give up the opportunity to kick your bony ass?” He hardens instantly in a beautifully broken way that reminds you of yourself and your own dead brother, “This is too much fun, Sans!”

He screams at you and gravity grabs you by the back of the neck and throws you like a ragdoll past a whirlpool of yellow pillars onto a rickety wooden bridge surrounded by blue cave walls and falling water. There’s a kid in your way, teeth grit, eyes watery, like they matter, like this matters, like they can stop you, like they SHOULD- and before you can run them through like wet paper the fish bitch is there, monologuing and whining with her dramatic anime horseshit like she matters either and your tagalong is weeping and begging you to stop and you want to smother them with a pillow until they shut the fuck up-

She looks different when you look back up at her- pointier, or something, you don’t know, but you tighten your grip around the knot tying the two ballet shoes together and swing them into her stupid smug face even while she keeps going on and on about fucking honour or whatever it is fish bitches care about like any of this even matters, like she matters or you matter or anything matters and an arrow lodges itself in your gut so you rip it out and scream and run at her again, banshee shrieking your hatred and his bony arms fall to his sides like they weigh nothing at all. You turn in the snow, leaving deep footprints in it and he smiles at you, even though he’s already starting to destabilize like a dry sand castle in the wind.

“I believe in you,” he says, like an idiot. Doesn’t he know that humans are evil? You crush his skull underneath your boot and grab at the blankets, screaming through your hot tears and sweat, face moist and red and puffy, grabbing at your face and curling into the mattress like you can vanish there, wailing like you’re dying again. Maybe you are. Maybe you are.

“Hey!” A voice says, a different voice and you can’t even uncover your eyes to see its owner because they’re probably a ghost like you, “It’s okay, you’re home, it was just a bad dream, kiddo. Auntie Undyne is here to fight the nightmares off for you.” Frisk immediately scrambles toward her voice like a beacon but you yank them away, terrified, because surely she remembers, surely she cannot forgive you, she’s going to kill you again and again and again and again and again and you don’t want to die again again again again there’s blood in your mouth and buttercup petals on your lips and the world is like water you could drown in but you won’t, you’re almost there, almost dead but not quite and you can’t die but can’t get better and-

“Chara,” Asriel says, whimpering, “I don’t like this plan anymore.” You look down at your hands. There’s a bouquet of dust and blood covered buttercups clenched between your blistered fists, a golden flower with his face in the center, staring at you with wide tear-brimmed eyes.

You throw the whole fistful into the darkness and fall backwards, falling, falling, into silence itself, into a hole in the dirt six feet under the flowers from your village too far from home and too dark to leave-

You struggle but can’t move your body, you reach for the save and fail, your determination is wavering like the lights and just when you think you’re ready to give up someone grabs your hand from the murky darkness, the last fragile remnant of their soul clasped between their shaking fingers, screaming at you not to give up, that you and only you can still save something, someone else, with this little bit you have been given.

Asriel is wailing wailing wailing, giant spiky claws hovering over you in a dark and ending world, a rainbow blast of grief and hate and mercy erupting from his fingertips like it’s easy, hot and burning and painful and you stand your ground, filled with determination, but he’s stronger than you are and it burns through your soul like fire, like LOVE, like hate, chipping you away into the darkness, 10HP, 5HP, 1HP- and then keeps going, .1HP, .001HP, .0001HP- you look down at your own soul and you can see it there- a tiny red fragment of someone else’s in front of it like the smallest imaginable shield, protecting that last fragile sliver of everything you are, and you look up at Asriel, tears in your eyes and the faded fingers of someone you hope is a friend clenched in your fist like a memory and scream his name like a battle cry-

You run your hands over the yellowed paper tacked to the wall and curling gently at the edges against the scotch tape, faded crayon drawing standing out in bright reds and greens even still.

“Was it yours?” You ask. The tiny voice in your head says that it is, wordless, somber. You look at the bed. They laugh, sadly.

“A comfy looking bed,” they sigh, “If you fell asleep there, you might never wake up.” You think they might have died there. You think they’re probably dead, they seem like a ghost, but they won’t tell you what happened. You think it was bad. There’s two beds in this room.

You step through the doorway and into the rain, sidestepping puddles that cradle someone else’s reflection like an infant in their murky depths, the pitter patter of falling cave water over the distant sound of a melancholy music box, a scaly new friend at your side singing praises of a woman who wants to kill you, has killed you, will kill you again.

The rain stops in front of a massive, arched doorway, a white and purple crested thing that Toriel stands in front of, white and gentle, dress billowing in the cavern wind.

“Would it make you happy?” She asks, turning to face you, deadpan, “To call me ‘mother?’” flames burst from her hands but her face remains expressionless and the air catches in your throat and you step back, knees shaking.

“Please,” You say, as the flames lick violence around her filed-down clawed fingertips.

“Don’t die,” she says, and bursts into dust that burns your skin.

Gravity tips forward and you fall through the door and into golden flowers, shirt dust-stained, wrists red with rope burn and shoes filled with pine needles. You sit up and crawl through the snow the flowers are growing from, the darkness a chasm overhead, and you spin when you hear shuffling. Sans is smiling at you, patiently, blue goo dripping from his dark eyes and the corners of his mouth, thick like paste and glowing cyan.

“You can’t know how this feels,” he whispers, and you stumble to your feet and take a step back, and turn, and run, kicking up snow and flower petals under your sneakers. You trip over a vine and hit the ground face first, and when you sit up, he’s leaning over you, still oozing, still giving you that melancholy smile. His shirt is torn open, his hands in his pockets. You smell ketchup. “It’s funny,” he says, and a blob of blue lands on your cheek and eats through your skin like acid, “before all this, I had hoped we could be friends.”

You fall through the flower bed on your back into darkness, encroaching, suffocating. “If you’re really my friend,” the darkness whispers like a lullaby no one ever sang you, “You won’t come back.”

There’s ropes on your wrist and sunlight in your hair, buttercups in your shoes and pine needles in the back of your collar. You’ve been sleeping in the soil on the mountain, lost and afraid and refusing to go home. You don’t have one. People like you don’t deserve homes, not really.

You’re human. You’re evil.

You take a Stouffer’s meal out of the freezer and wipe off the ice burn with a washcloth before placing it gently on the microwave tray. The box is a little soggy, so it’s hard to tell how long it’s supposed to stay in there, but you’re pretty sure it says two minutes, and it’s usually two minutes, so you put it in for two minutes, and dig around the sink for a fork to wash off under the faucet. The dishes haven’t been washed in a while so the sink is starting to get a little gross, but it’s fine, you know how to clean things when you need them.

The microwave dings. The tv dinner is slightly undercooked, but it’s fine. You sit down at the table and eat it anyway, and you clean up what you can when you’re done. You go back to your room to watch tv. Today was a school day, but your mother was at work, you think, and hasn’t been home since the day before yesterday, so you stayed home and watched reruns of Cryptkeeper and Baby Looney Tunes instead. The school will probably call and leave a message, tomorrow, and you’ll probably get the belt, but that’s tomorrow, so.

Alphys holds your hand in Macey’s and helps you pick out a new school outfit when Summer starts to wane, leggings and hoodies and shorts and t shirts with characters you like on them and a brand new backpack. You help her pick a new dress, too. Lipstick red and glittery. She says it looks like something an anime character she likes wears so she buys it with a coupon and you take photos for facebook on Undyne’s cell like a fashion runway. The voice in your head laughs and isn’t as angry as usual and it’s nice.

You keep your head ducked, quiet, and wait behind your mother in line while she talks to her friend in front of her. You hold the basket in two hands at your chest and try not to be noticed.

“It really is so hard,” your mother says, “Daryl’s back in prison, so, I’m done with that asshole,” she sighs, and leans back on the counter. It’s been awhile since you’ve seen Dad come around. You wondered where he went. She picks up a box of macaroni from the shelf to your left and hands it to you. You put it in the basket.

“I’m in the same boat,” the other lady says, rolling her eyes, “Found out Chuckie has another girl who lives out by the Piggly Wiggly on fifth. Her name is "Debbie.” Have you ever heard a more trailer trash name in your life? What an idgit, I dunno what I ever saw in him.“ Your mother hands you a plastic bag of rice and you put it in the basket.

Your mother laughs, "Wow, really? You can do so much better, Sissy. I bet you can squeeze hella child support out of that fucker, now.”

“Swear jar,” you say, quietly. Your mother stops and looks down at you, unhappy. You look at your feet.

“Hush now, that’s just for you,” she says, “Grown ups can say grown up words if they want, you hear?” You nod. She hands you a little bottle of dish soap and you put it in the basket.

“You coulda left her at home with my oldest,” Sissy says, taking a few cans of baked beans off the shelf and putting it in the basket under her arm, “He’s been babysittin’ Carol for years now.”

“Oh, I dunno, she really ain’t that much trouble when she keeps her mouth shu-”

“They,” you say, gently, and your mother’s eyes snap down to you.

“The hell you just say?”

“They,” you repeat, following the contours of your sneakers with your eyes.

“Now what did I tell you about that damn nonsense?” She says, and grabs you by the arm. You stumble and shift the basket into your other elbow, still looking down, “I don’t want none of that liberal shit in my house, you hear? You think child services ain’t gonna come and take you away if they think I’m lettin’ you turn into a goddamn poof?”

You shake your head, hard.

“No?” She says, harshly, yanking your elbow again, “You don’t think so? They’ll pick your ass up in a goddamn heartbeat knowin’ what your daddy did and stick you with a family that’ll beat the hell outta you for fun, or one of them funny homes.”

You stare at your sneakers and try to disappear.

“So what do you say, Francesca? What do you say?”

“Sorry, Mama,” you whisper. She lets go of your arm. It’s going to bruise. You readjust your hands on the basket and tip the dishsoap back up to standing from where it had fallen.

“I tell ya, Karen,” Sissy remarks, “If my kids talked to me the way that one talks to you I’d dump ‘em down by the river.” She laughs like she’s made a joke, “You’re a goddamn Saint with what you put up with.”

“She takes after her daddy,” your mother sighs, “Gotta keep her ass straight 'fore she ends up in the same way, you know.”

The woman at the foodbank counter tries to give you a bag of gummy bears from a box behind her when you check out, but your mother won’t let you have them.

Your mother leaves you at Sissy’s with Kevin and Carol when dad gets out of jail and goes to get him. It’s really far away so she’s not supposed to be back for a few days. Kevin pulls your hair and Carol cries and takes all your pencils. You try to stay out of the way as much as you can, but there’s not much to do at Sissy’s house since they only have one TV and Kevin won’t let you use it.

A week later Sissy tells you your mother isn’t coming back, and you aren’t her kid or her problem, so she drives you out to the fire station and drops you off on the sidewalk. She says the firemen are real nice and they’ll get you sorted away since your mother is gone, but not to mention her. You tell her you won’t and she leaves. You walk to the end of the street and keep going until it’s night time and sleep in a playground tube slide. You wake up damp and shivering and you don’t like it. You miss your mother, but she clearly doesn’t want you anymore.

The next morning you climb down the slide and walk into the forest no one ever comes out of. Your mother left you here for a reason, and mother is always right, mother is so stressed and tired and all you do is make things worse, make life harder and more expensive, and she works so much already, and if even mother cannot handle the burden of You, surely no one can.

You know that it will be better if no one finds you. You’ve seen on movies mothers get in trouble when kids get lost, but you aren’t lost, and you don’t want mother to get in trouble. You think maybe you can eat berries and live in the woods like a wild animal, maybe be raised by wolves or bears or feral cats or something really cool like that. The sun sets between the mountain ridges and the earth smells like pine needles and it’s raining and you aren’t paying attention when you trip and fall down the gaping chasm in the side of the mountain that no one ever comes down from and it swallows you up like a giant spider while you clamber up sticky purple webs, screaming and desperate and refusing to give up and refusing to give in and Muffet turns to you in her perfectly kempt little petticoat and frowns around her fangs, “Wake up, little one, please.”

You sit straight up out of bed like a spring board, panting.

You lean forward onto your legs, coughing, and someone brushes your soaked hair from your face and wipes your forehead dry. You lean into the touch gratefully, chest heaving. You're so tired.

"hey, hey now, you're fine, yeah?" You look over at him and he's grinning, but you're not sure if it's real or not.

"I'm dying," you say, pathetically, and the lights of his eyes roll.

"don't be so melodramatic. not anymore. between your mom and a real human doctor they got ya patched up." He picks up the packages of Nyquil and Tylenol from the counter and waves them at you, "you can't take these together, kiddo."

"Oh," you say, feeling dumb, "they're both over the counter, I thought it was fine. Frisk and Papyrus didn't say anything about it."

"well, frisk is thirteen and pap doesn't have any organs," he says, and taps them against your forehead, making you blink, "both of these have got acetaminophen in 'em. you took way too much of both, honestly, you downed like, half of each of these packages. did you even read 'em?"

You frown, "No? That's... That's how much my old parents used to give me when I was sick. Before I fell."

He pauses, and you aren't sure why, but he tenses up immediately, like he's mad. You know he's upset at you for putting Frisk in danger. Rightly so. You're mad at yourself, too.

"your human parents..." He says, slowly, "gave you eight nyquil?"

"Yeah?" You say, confused, "I was really, really sick, though. Even after I took them I slept for like two days. I threw up a lot."

He looks conflicted and you wonder if he thinks you're lying, and finally he sighs through his teeth, but he doesn't look happy. You really are sorry, though, you didn't mean to make yourself sick- you'd hate to make a pattern of that. You tell Frisk you're sorry and they say it's okay.

"...from now on," he says, strained, and puts the packages on the nightstand, "don't take anything without getting me or your mom to read the package, okay?"

"Okay," you say, because you don't know what else to say, "Where is... Mom?"

He nods toward the door, "she's out in the kitchen with asgore and the others. this house is gettin kinda crowded."

"Dad's here?"

"couldn't keep him out. was pap really your first choice for discretion? he told everyone," Sans chuckles, and hands you a new box of tissues to blow your nose with, "everyone gets real worried real easy."

"Not you, though," you say, and sneeze. He shrugs.

"never said that."

You snort and tug on Frisk's tired subconscious, but they shrug you off, tired. They really must be. You don't blame them.

You look at Sans, and look down.

"Do..." You start, and he perks up, ever so, "Do you think I'm a bad person?"

"who's askin'?" He says, leaning back in his chair. You pick up your right hand a bit and wave. He nods and closes his eyes. "you remember what i used to say? Right after you'd killed everyone i ever cared about, and before you killed me?" You flinch.

"That kids like me should be burning in Hell," you whisper, and he grunts.

"what? no, before that. i asked if you thought even the worst person could change, if they just tried."

"I am, then. The worst person."

"what did i just say about being melodramatic?" He sighs and scratches his head, "maybe i'm being too damn esoteric for a fever blitzed teenager. look, kid, i'm trying to say i think that everybody can be a good person, if they want it badly enough. and i think you want it pretty damn badly. and i dunno what kinda shit happened to you to make you so violent in the first place, but if the shit you were just screaming about has any basis in reality, i'm willing to bet it was more than i can really blame you all that much for."

You stare blankly at him for a moment, "Screaming?"

"oh," he says, "yeah. you had a fever dream, you were talking in your sleep."

The blood drains from your face.

"They know," you say, because you can see it on his face, "I said something bad."

He shrugs, but you can tell you're right, "i wanted to let you do your own explaining, but i did have to... give a brief overview of the situation when you grabbed undyne and begged her not to kill ya again."

You bury your face in your knees.

"So you mentioned the resets," you say, slowly.

"yeah."

"Did you... Mention me?"

"...yeah. i didn't get to into it, though. monsters tend to be pretty accepting of weird situations, and all- magic, right? but the whole murder spree thing... yeah, that's your dig, kid."

You stare at your lap and swallow dryly.

"I can't," you say, softly, and you start to feel Frisk waking up, gently papping at you with pity, "I don't... I don't want everyone to know."

You look up at him and it's sympathetic. He leans forward to pat you on the shoulder, "it's gonna be alright, kid. the truth is, there's not a single person in this house you haven't killed in one timeline or another." You wince, hard, flinching from his touch and he pulls his hand back to lean on his knees, "but to the same end, and all. there's not a single person in this house who hasn't killed you a dozen and half times back."

That stops you. You mull it over, softly, face twitching. He's right. Maybe there is a way to get through this discussion without wanting to kill yourself again. "Can I get some more sleep, first?" You ask, and he laughs.

"god, please do. i'll let tori know you're doin' better, she's out of her mind about this. roll on over, kiddo, rest that sick sense of humour of yours."

You roll your eyes at him and flop back into the pillows sleepily, but you are feeling better than you were. "Thanks for the pep-talk, buddy," you say, shutting your eyes, "It was real chara-table of you." You peek one eye open to see his reaction, and it's somewhere north of "delighted." You close your eyes and listen to the chair scrape back against the carpet and the door open.

Is that where you came from? You think, softly. Frisk doesn't respond. Was that really your mother? Is that why we've never looked for her?

I don't want to talk about it.

I genuinely believed you were an orphan.

You never looked?

It never occurred to me. I just assumed. You have the general demeanor of an orphan.

You've never even met an orphan, how would you know?

How do you know I've never met an orphan?

They seem uncomfortable and pause, before relenting, Because I did look. I wanted to know. It's hard not to think about it. Everything from before gets so.... Muddled up.

It's okay, you think, I don't really have any secrets. From you, anyway.

They seem somewhat flattered and embarrassed. You bury your face in the pillowcase and breathe through the cotton fabric heavily.

I love you, you know, you think hesitantly, because you do, really- you love Mom, and Dad, and even though you hated Azzy for a hot second there, you love him, too. Frisk is your family, for better or for worse, and you don't know if you've ever said so.

I know, Frisk thinks, and you're glad. I love you, too.

We don't have to talk about her.

Thank you.

You tighten your grip around the down pillow and hear shuffling outside. You wonder if Sans is coming back, or Mom, or someone else, but you don’t get to find out, because unconsciousness takes you back softly into dreamless sleep.

You were in love, once.

Or at least, you thought you were. Now you aren't sure if you had been in love, or he'd just made you think you were. You aren't sure he ever existed- the man you'd been in love with was not the man who'd whispered your death over your shoulders while you struggled. You aren't even sure love exists at all, the way you understand it. Maybe all love is is liking someone enough to file taxes with them- which is nice, and all, but not love the way you'd yearned for, the way you'd thought you'd felt about him. You're not sure that exists. If it doesn't, or if you never get it, or if you lost your one chance, you don't know how to handle that. Love is scary. Love is bad.

The way you know love is bad, really know it, is the way she's hunched over her hands in her armchair, sobbing like a dying animal, wailing wet tears into her paws (white, like his, but soft, not like his). Love made her like this. Loving the kid made her like this, puffy eyed and miserable beyond belief, bearing her grief to the world before they'd even kicked it. You lean against the bar between the living room and the kitchen, eyes dimmed, and watch Pap try to comfort her with his boisterous attitude and endless optimism.

"THE HUMAN DOCTOR SAID FRISK WILL RECOVER!" He says, "YOU MUST BE STRONG FOR THEM!" He says.

"Again," she sobs, "every single one-"

You look at their door when it opens, quietly, and the room goes silent. Alphys shakes her head.

"They're not up y-yet..." She stammers, rubbing at her eyes beneath her glasses, "but it's b-been two hours, it's your turn, Undyne..." Undyne stands up with a nod and stops by Alphys at the door. Tori buries her head in her hands again and keeps sobbing, and Alphys buries her face in Undyne's neck and breathes shakily. You can feel their worry palpable in the room, as thick as butter. Undyne vanishes into the kid's room and Alphys goes to collapse on the couch with Mettaton, who lets her sit in his lap and strokes her head crest while she tries to gather herself back up.

Yeah. This is probably what love looks like.

You're very good at standing still and fading into the furniture so you loiter in the background while people take turns comforting Tori and something tells you should, and something else tells you you shouldn't, and that's the one you listen to. You don't think anything is going to break the tense monotony until the screaming starts.

You could be the first one at the door, easily, but you don’t need to be, so you’re not. You can hear their desperate, hoarse little voice shrieking “Please don't kill me again, oh god, please, I can’t die again please please please Mom” from here and you do your best to ignore it. It’s becoming difficult to remember this kid slaughtered your family with a smile once, the way they’re begging and whimpering and fever-blitzed into oblivion. You pull a bottle of ketchup from the fridge while the kid screams in the other room and Alphys comforts Undyne, who looks completely unsettled, just outside the door. You stick the nozzle between your teeth and squeeze and think you’re probably going to have to tell them something, but you really really don’t want to.

You wipe your mouth on your sleeve and straighten your spine when Toriel reemerges from the bedroom, looking angry rather than sad.

“You killed them,” she says, and she’s looking at Undyne. You know what’s going on here and you really really wish literally anything else would be happening, but it’s not, “You killed my children-”

“What-?” Undyne sputters. She looks confused, and you don’t blame her.

Toriel whips around to look at you, and you dim your eyes, “How many times?! How many times has she put a spear through my baby’s heart?!” You can see heat warping the light around her fingertips, barely restrained.

“No more than you,” you say, hoarsely, and that does it. The heat is gone with the anger, and she looks betrayed, but someone had to say it, and no one else could. She covers her face. She collapses back in her chair.

“What… What are you talking about?” Undyne asks. She sounds like she’s about to cry. You’ve never seen her cry. You wish she would threaten you instead, you wish she would be angy instead. That would be easier.

You shrink back into the counter, looking down. You can feel their eyes on you and you want to drop through reality and take a shortcut home, but you won’t leave her here to deal with this. Like always, the heaviest and the hardest falls to you, the only one beaten down enough to be used to it. Figures.

“time,” you say, softly, and their gazes don’t waver, “is really weird.” Tori looks up at you. You look down. “and sometimes it goes backwards, or forwards to fast, or it stops, its- reality is really weird.”

“What the… Hell are you talking about?” Undyne says. Now she’s mad. You thought you would feel a little better, but you feel worse.

“and it turns out humans do have their own kind of magic- i guess that’s what it is, it’s hard to tell, because it’s not like ours- like, sure, i can do this-” you pick your hand up off the counter and reindex F values 46.3/11(7x7.000091), raising the Y axis of the coffee table. You hold it, jittering, about four feet in the air before you let it drop back into the carpet with a thunk, “but the kids? yeah. their magic is more along the lines of… time distortion? i suppose?”

She stares blankly at you, but you can see the fins on the sides of her face ruffling, agitated. Tori is looking at you. You pretend not to notice. Time to rip the bandaid off.

“to make a long story short, they can go back, but not forward. so, if, hypothetically speaking, they got killed-”

You can see it dawning on her face, slow, like that first sunset in reverse, but Alphys is the one who speaks, “So if someone put a spear through their heart, they could go back, and we wouldn’t know.”

It probably makes sense she would grasp it first. This isn’t her area of study, but it’s close enough she has to know a little about it- it’s a result of DT, after all, which is her area of expertise.

“Wait-” Undyne says, and yeah, she’s mad, “you mean to say- you mean to say that I actually- I actually killed the little goober and I don’t- and I forgo-” you nod, sharply. Her mouth snaps shut and the silence is so heavy it feels like you can’t breathe. “How many times?” She sounds strained. You’re not used to her sounding like this. You don’t like this. You don’t answer. “Twice?” You don’t answer. “Five times?” You don’t answer. “Ten? Twenty?” Her voice breaks. You don’t answer.

The kids start wailing again in the other room, obviously sort of awake, now, and you wonder if the screaming will stop before their fever breaks at all now, but they’re begging for Azzy, which means they must really not be doing well, since you can hear Flowey too, desperately shushing them from the other room and saying that he’s there. No one stands up at first, and then Alphys puts her hand on Mettaton’s knee and he stands, briskly, and disappears up the stairs.

You look at your hands, crossed on the counter, holding your weight on your elbows.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Alphys says. She’s logiccing it out. She can tell there’s a missing variable here. “There’s no way a single human soul can produce enough DT to overwhelm the naturally occurring levels of DT in their surroundings, it’s completely-”

“yeah,” you say, softly, and she falls very, very quiet, “there’s… yeah. they have two souls. sort of, combined into one.”

“What?!” She bursts, jumping to her feet, “Who- who did- there’s no other Boss Monsters, who’s soul did they-”

“not a monster’s soul,” you say. The colour drains from her scales, “it’s human.”

She covers her mouth with her claws, “That’s not possible.”

“it clearly is,” you say. She shakes her head.

“N- n- no! I’ve- my notes- none of my r-research indi-dicates that a human should eb- be able to- to-”

“your hypothesis was wrong,” you sigh, “make a new one.”

The kids scream out again, begging for Tori. “Please,” they sob, and you can hear Mettaton trying to comfort them, nervously, poorly, “Mama, no, please, I’m sorry-” Toriel stands up and leaves the room. No one says anything until Mettaton comes back into the room and sits down next to Alphys.

“it was her first human kid,” you say, looking at the doorway she left through, “they’re still in there, with them. they like chocolate, and getting on my nerves.”

Their screaming is somewhat more muffled now, and you know their face is buried in her chest, sobbing out apologies that she won’t accept. This isn’t your story to tell and you don’t want to. They can do this when they feel better. and they will feel better.

They can always reset, if they don’t. You don’t think you can go through this again, though. Everyone’s eyes are still on you, so you bury your face in your arms, making it clear you’re finished talking. They’re going to be fine.

You’d played off your exit as a joke, but you’d lingered at the edge of the barrier’s exit for a reason: the kid had saved you, saved everyone, sure- but you remembered. You knew what they had done. You have your suspicions there’s something going on- their personality seems entirely different this time around, not like someone who had changed their mind, not even like someone who’s acting, but like they were an entirely different person. You wonder if they’re some kind of human amalgamate, maybe- you read something about a human thing called “schizophrenia” once and it’s not exactly right, but maybe humans have other things along those lines? You aren’t sure, but you can tell there’s something going on your don’t understand.

The kid is still sitting on the edge of the clifface. The sun is a red pinprick on the horizon, casting shadows on the clouds against the sky. Toriel left a while ago, and they haven’t moved since then.

“Thank you,” the kid says, and it nearly startles you into stepping out from the shadows, thinking they’re talking to you, but they’re not.

“It’s beautiful,” they continue, softly. There’s a pause, and they lean forward into their hands, “I guess this is it, then, huh?” They nod at themselves and you aren’t sure why. “We can still go,” they say, barely a whisper. You have to strain to listen, “We don’t have to do this.”

They draw their legs up onto the ground and rest their arms on their knees, “It would be nice, I think. To see it, again, but with everyone this time. We can’t, though.” You narrow your eyes. It sounds like they’re planning something. “I know. We could…. We could go. We can always do this later- we can live with them, a little bit.”

They stand up, their hair blowing gently in the mountain wind, hands at their sides, overlooking the range.

“No. I haven’t done a lot of things right, Frisk, not in my life or… Otherwise. But… if we don’t- if we don’t do it now, we never will. You know we’ll never be able to leave them if we actually get to see what we’ll be missing.”

Something is wrong.

“I know.”

Something is very wrong.

“We won. We freed everyone. We were good. As long as we’re here, we’re a threat, but we- we were good. We won. We saved everyone. We won.”

You stumble out of the shadows toward them.

“I know. It’s okay. It’s not that bad; I promise. It hurts, and then- it’s just nothing. Like sleeping. You just don’t wake up.”

“hey-” you say, but they either don’t hear you or pretend not to.

“Goodbye, voice. Goodbye, Frisk.” They step forward and over the side.

There’s still the faintest pink-red twinge of fever burn on the high points of their cheeks, but they’re up and about and clearly ready to do this. They’ve got Flowey’s pot in their lap and he’s got his petals folded around his face, looking down. The kid’s eyes are in the same direction and you almost wonder if you shouldn’t say something first, crack a joke to break the tension. Before you can, they raise their right hand.

“Right for Chara,” they say, and put it down, raising their left, “left for Frisk.”

“Ch-chara?” Asgore drops his teacup. You reindex F values 5.4443(x/34.7811111101) and catch it in the air so it won’t stain the carpet. You put it back in his hands without looking. Undyne shouldn’t have called him hear. He should have done this one on one, not like this. Too late now.

They don’t look up, but put their right hand back up, “You don’t have to like me. I don’t expect you to like me. You shouldn’t.”

“Chara?” He says again, and they wince, but ignore him.

“Once upon a time, I was a kid like Frisk. I fell into the Underground and I met Mom and D- Toriel and Asgore. And Asriel.” They tighten their grip on the pot, “And… I did… Bad stuff. I thought… I had to. I promise, I- at the time I thought-” they’re getting choked up. Asgore’s teacup is shaking, “I thought I was doing the right thing. And me and Azzy died.” You take Asgore’s cup when he drops it again, “And that would have been the end of it, but it- it wasn’t. Nothing is ever that easy. There was- some things, happened, and Azzy came back first.”

“It was her,” the flower says, without looking up, “the lizard girl. She made me.”

Everyone turns to look at Alphys. She’s frozen solid.

“And then Frisk fell, and I woke up there. Just like when I fell the first time…” Everyone’s looking at them again, but you’re looking at Alphys, who looks like she can’t breathe, “And I was so angry- I didn’t…” There’s a long pause before their hand goes back into their lap and they raise their left just so, “They were angry, and I was scared, and together, we made… Bad decisions. We hurt people. We hurt a lot of people. Shut up, Frisk, it wasn’t like that, and you know it, you don’t have to- I’m not doing it for you, that’s how it- no it wasn’t! You kept saying stop, I was the one that- Not at first! Not at Chara and you know it-”

“oooookay,” you say, because their arguing amongst themselves and they’ve forgotten their hand-gesture system and everyone looks confused and alarmed. They look up at you, face flushed, and back down.

“Sorry,” at least one of them says, and the left hand goes back up, “In any case. The first timeline wasn’t so bad. We didn’t- we didn’t know how to make Mom leave, and I thought- I thought she was going to kill me, I did, and Chara kept yelling that they knew it, they knew love was fake and everyone just wanted to hurt us, and-” they pause and raise their right hand, lowering the left hesitantly, “and I killed her.”

You aren’t sure who gasps. It’s probably Tori. Her hands are clasped around her mouth, eyes like dinner plates.

“We sat in front of the door, in her dust, for a whole day. I wouldn’t get up. They didn’t want to. We didn’t… I didn’t think we could kill her. I thought she would give up, and let us go. She didn’t.” The look up and over at her, and their face is pulled into one of those tense, painful looking smiles, but their eyes are watering, a weird dichotomy, “I- I didn’t mean to, that time, I s- I swear, I didn’t-”

Tori doesn’t say anything but the kid picks up both hands and puts them on their sides of their face, turning it forward. They close their eyes and take a deep breath, but raise their left hand and don’t open them, “so we left. And then Undyne tried to kill us and at first I was scared of dying but then I was just angry at her for killing me- and then we got to the end and Dad was there- and- there was- there was no mercy. We had to make a decision. We made a decision. We left the underground.”

Asgore’s making the same face Tori is. You feel like you should hate her ex, because she does, and if you had to pick a side you’d pick hers, but you can’t.

“And then we went back. Like just- I can’t explain the resets, I don’t know how the work. Just- if I want it badly enough, it happens. So we went back. And we still couldn’t figure out how to save Mom, but we thought- if no one cared about us, if we didn’t make any friends, it would be okay. So we didn’t. We just ran and didn’t look back. We tried to get through without hurting anyone and without making friends but it didn’t- it didn’t work. Dad died. We went back. And again, and again, and again, and again, and then- And then one time, we- I-”

Their right hand grabs their left and snaps it into their lap. They stare downward in a tense silence before their voice rises again, hoarse, “This time, I was mad. I died once, fighting humans and I- truly, and genuinely believed humans were evil. I knew, at the time, that I was evil, because everyone… Had always told me so. And I thought we all were. I thought Frisk was evil. And I wanted to prove it to them, that we were evil. That we didn’t deserve a happy ending.”

They look up at you. They’re looking for something but you don’t know what. You aren’t sure if they find it, but their brows knit together, determined, “and I killed… Everyone. Everyone. Because I could. Because I wanted to.”

They look back down, “Frisk didn’t do anything. I was the bad one. So don’t blame them. But you should still know- about the times I hurt you- and the times I killed you- and the times I didn’t save you- and that Frisk did, and that it was- me. Doing the bad stuff. And you can hate me, and probably should, but you can’t hate them. You can’t hold it against them.”

Their hand goes down. No one says anything for a moment, until Undyne’s chair scrapes back and she stands, trembling.

“I thought I knew you-” she says, her voice wavering, fists clenched, “the first time I saw you I thought I knew you. Like deja vu, but something was telling me you were bad. I ignored my instincts. I ignored my instincts.”

She steps forward and you tense, and the kid’s shoulders knits together and their head dips further down, coiling into themselves.

“Undyne, I don’t think-” Alphys starts, but Undyne strides forward four quick steps and grabs them by the front of their shitt, hefting them out of their chair. The pot tumbles off it to the floor and the flower yelps first in surprise and then what you assume is pain when it lands face first on the ground. Toriel hops out of her seat with a startled cry and the kid’s eyes flash with an old hatred you find uncomfortably familiar, their hands curl into tiny fists; intervention is now inevitable.

You set F value 68 at to 68/3.3333333334((4/8999.999)x45.11/32.7(n)) and you yank them both apart, sending them each four squares backward. The kid digs their fingers into the ground and trembles and Undyne scoots backward along the floor, kicking her legs, startled. You think you’ll have to hold the kid down but they stop their jerky snarling on a dime, sitting up and crawling forward to scoop the flower back into its pot and Undyne struggles back to her feet. You put your hand back in your pocket.

“Sans-” she snarls, her eye darting back to you. You let your eyes dim.

“don’t fight in tori’s living room,” you say, and you fold your arms across your chest and lean back against the wall, making it clear that’s all you have to say. She seems to consider it for a moment, before slamming her fist into the carpet and snapping her head back to the kids. They’re leaned over the pot, whispering something to the flower with a worried expression on their face, hands covered in soil and picking its face up to look at them. They don’t even look at Undyne, whose seething. The flower rolls it face into their hand and nods. The kids pick it up and hand its pot to Tori, who’s kneeled down next to them now. It curls into her shoulder and she wraps her whole arms around its pot like it might slip away.

The kids stand up. They look at you first, some kind of quiet thank you, you think, maybe, and then they turn to Undyne, “Do you know how many times you’ve killed me?” Undyne’s jaw locks, silently. The kid’s stance doesn’t waver. You know it’s Frisk. “Two hundred and thirty seven. Two hundred and thirty seven times, and I still love you.”

There’s dead silence. You can see Undyne fighting with herself, and finally she grits her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut, before shaking her head, grabbing her coat from the back of the chair and stomping to the door and out of it. She slams it behind her.

“Undyne-!” Alphys cries, scrambling from her chair. She casts a look back at Frisk and then, bafflingly, at you, before following her out. It’s for the best. They probably need some time. Asgore hasn’t moved an inch, a stone gargoyle in the corner of the room, but the flower picks it face out of Tori’s shoulder to look at him, eyes moist and he takes it in his quivering paws like it’s going to vanish at any moment. The kid’s eyes twitch, only for a second, in this really broken way when he does. You wonder why.

“hey,” you say to them, because they’re shaking, “kid. we’re out of ketchup, you wanna come to the store with me real quick?” It’s a stupid excuse, you know, but the tension is like ice and you need to leave the room, and you get the feeling they do, too. They don't even nod but rush into you, burying their face in your chest. You scoop them up like you did when they were ten and look back at Tori. She looks a little sad, but she nods. Whats best for her kids always came before whats best for her.

You think you probably love her, but she definitely loves her kids, and it looks like that’s breaking her, so you hope not. Undyne’s gone when you step outside and they take a deep shuddering breath of outside air and sob moist patches into your jacket shoulder while you walk to the gas station on the corner.

You’re really not big enough for this. Papyrus is tall enough, Tori is meaty enough- you’re like, four feet tall and no matter how many jackets you pad over your bones you’re still just a bunch of sticks cobbled together. You probably weigh less than the kid. You wish you could keep carrying them but you can’t, and they sense it before you say it and shimmy back down to the ground. They hold your hand. Though, with their left, sticking close to your side.

“Thank you,” they say, sniffling. There’s a clutching in your chest where your heart would be and you squeeze their hand, trying to be reassuring. “Do you think she’ll be okay?”

“honest answer?” You ask. They nod. “dunno. either way, she’s gonna need a minute. alphy will pro’lly calm her down some.” They look at their feet while they walk.

“Should we not have told them? It feels like… It feels like everyone would be happier if they just didn’t know.”

“you remember when you jumped off mt. ebott?” You ask. It’s a bit abrupt, you know, but they’ve always come to you for abruptness and honesty. Everyone else is so careful with them, guarding their words and their feelings. People are careful with you, too- pretending things are okay when they’re not to avoid upsetting your delicate feelings. You smile a lot. You don’t trust people.

“I- yeah,” they say, still looking down, “You caught me.”

“yeah,” you say, softly, “i caught you. you don’t… why the hell do you keep trying to kill yourself?” They flinch, hard, “why is that always the damn answer with you?”

“What does- what does that have to do with anything?”

“you think i don’t know how you got here?” You say. Their feet are dragging, “i never asked you about that, because you didn’t want me to but i didn’t forget. and the buttercup shit, now? how come you always assume things are broken beyond fixing? it’s starting to become a nasty habit, kid.”

They’ve stopped walking. Their hand slips from yours and winds around their arms.

“You can’t break something that’s already broken,” they whisper, harshly, clenching their fingers white knuckled around their upper arms.

“why are you so damn dramatic?” You snort, and fold your arms. It’s cold out, still. They don’t say anything. You kneel down in front of them and lean against your knees. “yo. kiddo. i’m talkin at you.”

They look up at you, lip quivering, “I’m sorry.”

You think about saying something but you don’t know what to say, so instead you just pull them into a hug. They don’t cry, but their face rests against your collarbone and they sigh into your jacket.

“yeah,” you say, “i know.”

“I want a Mountain Dew,” they sniffle and you frown.

“you’re not supposed to drink those,” you say, and pull back, “they’re full of sugar.” They pout at you and you roll your eyes. “fine. playin’ on my pity, though, jerk.” They smile at you, a little, eyes still moist. They take your hand again in their right and you feel like you should comment on that, but you don’t. By the time you get to the gas station they’ve calmed down considerably and manage to convince you to buy them a Mountain Dew and a Snickers bar. You get a bottle of Heinz and they sip it on the way back in silence.

Undyne’s waiting by the front door, hands in her pants pockets, shoulders hiked and staring at the ground. She looks up, startled, when you round the bend at the corner past the yield sign and in front of Toriel’s front flower garden. She leans off the floor and scuffs her feet.

“Hey,” she says.

“sup,” you say. The kid is silent.

“I overreacted a bit,” she says, studying her boots, “I mean, I don’t forgive you or nothin, I still wanna- talk about that but I- I shouldn’t have gotten violent.”

The kid looks at their feet. You put a hand on their shoulder and squeeze, “That’s fair,” they say, quietly. Undyne’s lip twitch toward a relieved smile for just a second, then return to carefully neutral. She opens the door and you let the kid go first, you behind, and Undyne steps in last, shutting the door behind her.

Toriel looks up at you when you step in and her first expression is relief, and the second is disgruntlement when she notices you bought them sugary snacks. You expect at least a cursory glance of disappointment from your brother when he sees the bottle, but he’s still staring into the distance. You stick the ketchup nozzle of the in your mouth and squeeze, giving her an apologetic shrug. She seems a little placated, at least. Asgore, surprisingly enough, looks overjoyed, paws wrapped around the pot. He’s saying something you don’t catch and even the flower looks reluctantly happy, if it can be happy. You aren’t sure. You don’t want to think about it.

Frisk pads over to Asgore for a wordless burly hug and you take back your shadowy spot by the doorframe and Undyne returns to the couch with Alphys and Mettaton. Alphys pats her thigh when she sits down and she softens a little bit. You look away, but definitely just because you’re bored. Definitely.

“So was it- if it was- if he was my fault-” Alphys says, adjusting her glasses, and the kids hands fall from Asgore’s and they go back to the chair they’d pulled into the center of the room. “Were you?”

They shake their head, “I don’t think so. I think whatever was left of my soul got stuck to my body and latched onto Frisk’s when they got close enough. I don’t know why it never happened before.”

Frisk sips their Mountain Dew and folds their legs beneath themselves, raising their left hand, “I think I probably died, actually.”

There’s a weird silence, and you break it, “what?”

“Yeah,” Frisk says, shrugging nonchalantly, “like, I blacked out a bit when I fell, and I think I might have maybe… died? Or gotten close. And just sort of. Filled in the holes with the closest unvesseled soul, if that makes sense. It sounds like a bad movie plot, though, so it's probably not right.”

You waver between “That sounds possible” and “I hope not” and say nothing. They rub at their arms absently.

“So,” Undyne says, “you. You’ve killed me. Me? Like, you hit me with that lame baby tap that one one time, you’re saying you whaled on me enough to-?”

They flinch, look down, and take a swig like its a flask, “Hatred,” Chara says, right hand up, “makes hurting monsters easy. It’s your weakness.”

“not inaccurate,” you say, and Undyne gives you a passing glance, then looks down.

“You hate me that much?”

The kids flinch again and their head snaps up, “N-no, I don’t- that’s not what I m-” they stop, eyes softening, and they look down, back up again, and chew the inside of their mouth, hiking up their shoulders, “Two hundred and thirty seven times. At the time, we did.”

You sort of expect her to get mad, but she looks mostly sobered and picks at the webbing of her fingers absently, in thought, you think.

Alphys looks like she wants to say something, nibbling on her claws and clenching her toes against the carpet anxiously, but your more focused on your brother, who’s spent the majority of this exchange silent. You half expected him to chastise you for magic use, because he knows it’s draining for you, if that’s all he knows, but he’s been very quiet, leaning on one hand and staring quite studiously at the carpet. It's only when you meet his eyes now that he nods, stands up, and claps his hands together.

“WELL,” he says, and everyone looks up at him, startled, because things had been relatively quiet thus far and Papyrus’s booming volume was jarring, “THAT SETTLES THAT, THEN!”

“It- it does?” The kids say, leaning a bit away from him, looking nervous. You could almost laugh at their expression, it was pricelessly off guard.

“YES. WE ARE FRIENDS, HUMAN, AND I APPRECIATE YOUR HONESTY AND FORGIVE YOU!!” He picks them up sharply, hands under their shoulders and they hang limply, staring at him totally baffled.

“Wh- seriously?? That’s it??”

“Pap-” Undyne starts, but Papyrus is too busy monologuing.

“TIMELINES, SHMINELINES. FRIENDSHIP TRUMPS EVERYTHING!!! I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, DO NOT HOLD IT AGAINST YOU LITTLE FRIEND. S. FRIENDS. IT IS SO WONDERFUL THERE IS TWO OF YOU, THAT IS DOUBLE THE FRIENDSHIP!!” You bury your mouth in your hand and laugh, because your brother really is great.

You shouldn’t laugh, though, the kids look like they’re going to cry, lip trembling and eyes watery. Papyrus either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, because he lifts them up a little higher, flashing his trademarked smile.

“TELL ME, HUMANS, DID I FIGHT WITH HONOUR AND VALIANCE?? DID I GO DOWN IN A BLAZE OF GLORY?! THE GREAT PAPYRUS SURELY FOUGHT BRAVELY TO THE END!” Aaaaand that does it. The kids are crying. “OH. OH DEAR. THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANTED. SANS WHAT DO I DO.”

You’re smiling when you push yourself off the wall, despite yourself, and you gesture to him to hand you the humans. He does, nervously, before tapping his hands together uncertainly. You throw them over your shoulder and they sniffle but don’t protest. Tori looks like she wants to frown at you, but she’s got a reserved little smile anyway.

“alllllright, buddy, its time for bed, you’ve been awake to long, dunkle sans will take over storytime for now.” You pad back up towards your room and they go slack against your back.

“He’s not- he’s not supposed to be so nice to me,” they sniffle, wiping snot on their sleeve when you plop them down on their bed, which is gross, and something you’re glad skeletons don’t have. You tussle their hair and they pout.

“yeah, well, that’s just what makes him so great, huh? guess you just gotta get used to the idea that some people are just innately good.”

They look down at their la, hands on their ankles, “Some aren’t.”

“nope, some of us gotta work a little harder at it.” That earns you a little smile. Just a little one. “alright, buddy, i know you’ve had a hard day, but i got a question for you.” They cock their head at you, “for both of you, separately.” They nod. “do we need to find your folks?”

The reaction is immediate. They lock up, grip tightening around their legs. “N-no, we don’t- I don’t want to-”

“hey, hey, shush, you don’t gotta go back to ‘em, whoever they are. you don’t gotta do shit you don’t wanna. you can rest assured anybody who tries to take tori’s kids away is gonna meet exactly the kind of monster you humans like to make movies about.” They soften, ever so slightly, and scratch around the back of their head, burying their face in their elbow to hide it from you, “but if your suicide complex is their fault, buddy, i got a bone to pick with them.”

“They’re probably dead,” they say, muffled.

“yeah, little mx. “its only been thirty years since i died,” maybe not.”

They flinch at that, “I hope they are. I don’t want to see them.”

“says which?”

They raise both hands, which creates a pain in your chest, sharp and cold, and you grab both hands gently, “we ain’t gonna send you back, buckaroo. tori figured already they weren’t great, which is why she didn’t ask. but i ain’t tori, and i don’t buy into ‘tell me when you’re ready.’ that ain’t my shtick. me?” They look up at you, hesitant, “i’m more into righteous judgement.”

They snort at you, like you’ve made a joke, which sort of offends you, “What ever happened to everyone can be a good person if they just try?”

You frown, “did they?”

They shrug, and wave their right hand just so, “Probably. You’ve seen what I’m like, I don’t think they ever did anything I didn’t deserve.” You narrow your eyes, because that sounds incredibly dubious, not to mention you have your suspicions about how “accidental” Chara’s story about taking a lethal dose of over the counter fever medication under their parent’s supervision truly was.

“look, you don’t gotta talk to me. talking? also not my dig. will you talk to tori about it, though? your mom won’t ask you to do anything you don’t wanna, i promise. she learns from her mistakes fast.” They consider it, slowly, and it looks almost like they’re having a conversation without you, the way their face is changing, and then they look up at you and clap their hands together, which startles you.

“Yeah, okay,” they say, “we can do that.”

“good.” You grab their phone from the nightstand and toss it in their lap, “now watch some youtube videos and nap or somethin’, me and the other grown ups are gonna talk amongst ourselves, a’ight?” They look a little conflicted for a moment and shrug, before waving with their left hand.

“Kay. Bring me a poptart if you come back up.”

“no. you already had a soda and a candy bar, you don’t need anymore sugar.”

“You carried me like a sack of potatoes,” they pout.

“you stabbed me in the chest!” You burst without thinking and you expect them to get all morose and upset again, but their lips twitch toward a smile.

“I’ll just ask Papyrus,” they say, opening the screen on the phone and typing. You groan.

“ugh, fine. you’re terrible. you mom’s gonna kill me,” you sigh and stand up with a creak from the mattress. The roll over into their comforter like a burrito, nose buried in their phone already, so you head downstairs to go try and add some more context to the kid’s story. Papyrus passes you on the stairs with a poptart and you actively don’t comment on this.

You wake up like you’ve been hit by a truck, filled with white hot pain and ice cold confusion. You’re face down on cold stone earth and you push yourself up on your elbows, choking on short, breathy gasps, surprised at the pain. You’re sure you broke something, but you can’t focus in on any one center of the pain, there’s several and it’s distracting. Not your arms, though, you think, your elbows are supporting your weight, but maybe your wrists. It feels like maybe something is wrong with your ribs, top, but it might be your lungs instead, you don’t know how to tell.

The room is dark, and filled with sad little pillars. You look up, craning your neck and see the shimmering opening you fell from, far overhead, and your first thought is that you can’t believe you survived the fall. The second is disappointment that you had- you’d tripped, sure, but now everything hurt, and you don’t know where you are or where you’d be going if you did- you collapse back forward and groan, sore and cold and tired.

There’s a shuffling, distantly, down the far corridor. You pick your head up again, sharply, towards the noise, “Hey!” You say. There’s blood in your mouth- you bit your tongue. The shuffling pauses. “H- help!” You stammer, spitting into the dirt. A moment of silence, and then, from behind a pillar, a face.

It’s a monster. A weird, bipedal goat with fangs and claws and red eyes.

You cry out in surprise and scamper backwards- and realize quite suddenly that you managed to save your left leg from injury, but definitely broke your right. You grit your teeth anyway and scrabble at the ground for some kind of weapon- a stick, or a sharp rock, anything.

“Hey! Hey, calm down-” it says, raising its clawed hands in front of it, palms out. They’re pink, you notice, with pads like a cat. It looks worried. “You’re gonna hurt yourself! Um, worse than you already did!”

“Please don’t hurt me-” you say, scooting back against the wall, the rocks biting into your spine. He stops walking toward you.

“Why would I hurt you?” He says. You open your mouth to answer and can’t think of anything polite, and usually that wouldn’t stop you, but this thing has teeth and claws like a monster and while you’re not afraid to die, you certainly don’t want to be in MORE pain if you can help it.

“Don’t,” you say, pathetically, straining against the wall.

“I won’t,” it says, “You look really hurt, I’m- my mom knows a little healing magic, um, and I know we have s doctor back at the cas- home, can I- can I please take you there?” You look at him and then down at the ground and stammer something that makes no sense, and wince when you bite your tongue again. You nibble your lip hard and then nod, sharply, and he softens really dramatically. He's probably going to eat you, but if so, there’s nothing you can do about it now, so.

You let him help you up, his clawed hand gently holding your arm over his shoulders while you limp in step with him through the darkness.

“Do you have a name?” He asks. He has little nubby horns on top of his head. You hadn't noticed them at first, because they’re really small. You think he’s probably a kid because they’re really small. That makes you laugh, because baby goats are called kids, and he’s a-

Yeah, he's looking at you really worried because you’re laughing for no reason and it’s just coming out as this weird sad, wet wheezing. You stop and flatten your nose self consciously. Your face is heating up.

“Chara,” you say. Maybe he wants to know what he’s supposed to name the stew he’s going to make you into. You don’t think you'd make a good stew. There’s not a lot of meat on you. Maybe they’ll lock you in a warm cage and give you a bunch of food until you’re really fat and then make you into a stew. That sounds pretty bad, but there’s worse ways to go. Ans you are really hungry. Maybe you’ll suggest they bake you into a pie or something instead, you love pie, and you think you’d probably make a great pie.

“I’m Asriel,” he says, smiling at you. You smile back before you can stop yourself.

You can hear them whispering downstairs. They always think you can’t, but they’re wrong. Whispers about danger, and you being so, which is pulling up particularly unfond memories that you suspect you’re going to have to deal with soon. Frisk watches minecraft let’s plays on youtube while you dwell in your thoughts and consider your options.

You could always lie; google some fuddy duddy old couple from your old town that died already, maybe- but no. Surely your disappearance was in some kind of news article somewhere, and if it was, Sans would find it. He might be starting to like you, but you’d think he was an idiot if he started to trust you. It strikes you as odd that you take a weird sort of comfort in his distrust- your mother terrifies you, sometimes, with how much she loves you and trusts you and how much you don’t want to disappoint her but know you will. That problem doesn’t exist with the smiley bastard. Frisk pinches you.

It’s funny, actually- you and Frisk and Mom and most people stayed relatively close to the barrier. You only live a few hours away, even now, but you lived within a few miles that first year; walking distance, and you’d passed the church your parents ran more than once driving around town with Mom or Papyrus. You’d always tensed up in your seat, hyperventilating, and Frisk never asked why, but you guess you always figured they’d looked. You never dared do the same.

For all the times they’d called you a demon, some curse sent from Satan to plague and punish them, for all the times you’d sought vengeance for your battered childhood against every innocent person you could you’d never wanted to find them. You’d never wanted to make them suffer and not because you didn’t think they deserved it, because they definitely did, but because you were terrified that if you saw them again, and if they saw you? You’d turn back into a frightened little kid in their basement, tied to the bed and screaming and you’d never be able to get out and you wouldn’t be able to handle it and-

Frisk clicks the screen off and runs their hand through your hair consolingly. Seven, they start, taking your lungs from you and slowing your breath.

Six, you think, five. Four. Three. Two.

One, Frisk finishes, and you feel better. “Thanks,” you say, softly.

“You okay?” Frisk asks and you think about it for a moment.

“Not really,” you say, “but he’s probably right, anyway.” Frisk nibbles their lip in thought and sighs.

“I guess,” they say, softly. You squeeze their arms and try to be reassuring, but it probably doesn’t come across right. “I just wanna go to sleep right now.” You nod into the pillow- you’ve not been awake long, but the fever exhaustion and emotional exhaustion both are starting to catch up with you and you’re both ready to sleep.

You try not to listen to their little strangled outbursts downstairs and close your eyes.

“A left at the light,” Frisk says, leaning against the window to look out. There’s mountains in the distance. The sky is blue. There’s some kids on bikes outside.

“RIGHT-O!” Papyrus says, and turns, gently, around the corner. It’s weird how good a driver is. You’d expected driving with him to be a nightmare, sharp turns and breaking speed limits, but he’s so careful, even in this ridiculous hot rod. You whisper to Frisk that after that it’s straight for two blocks, and it’s on the right. They lean forward between the front seats and tell the skeletons.

You can see it cresting past the other buildings and the tree line, a dim red-grey brick with a pointed steeple roof and a handpainted sign. There’s yellow flowers out front and an empty gravel parking lot, and the mountain rises up behind it like some great behemoth, ready to swallow the whole place up.

Papyrus stops the car, but leaves it running. Sans turns around to look at you, cocking an eye socket ridge silently. You look at him, then back at church your parents run and the little house behind it, brown, wood, cottage like, almost, with a white and concrete porch covered in bird feeders and wind charms. You swallow, thickly. You wish you'd brought mom or dad, but you're sure these people would think they were demons or something and it wouldn't end well. You don't even want Sans to come in with you. You just need to see.

He was definitely right. It was time to deal with this. You don't have the fever an excuse to lay around in bed anymore putting it off. You take a deep breath of Ebott mountain range air.

 Kill her! You shout, and try to clench your fists, but Frisk won’t let you. Their hands stay slack at your sides and they refuse to let your panic and anger overwhelm them. You push at them and they ignore you.

“I’m an orphan,” they say, “I don’t have a family to go back to.”

The woman’s face softens and her shoulders sag ever so slightly, wrists shifting against her knees. You know she’s kneeling down in front of you to meet your eye level, but it feels like she’s mocking you. You hate her. You and Frisk saved the entire underground and less than a month later she has the audacity to treat you like a child. This is your family, you found them yourself and you aren't ever going back. You'd rather reset than go back to either you or Frisk's nasty human families.

“I’m sorry,” she says, gently, taking your hand, “I still need to take you with me, though. I understand that you want to stay with these- people, but, you are a little human girl, and they may not know how to take care of a little human girl.”

Frisk yanks their hand back and clenches their own fist, “I’m not a girl.”

“...Right,” she says, folding her hands back together, “Of course. I need to take you with me, and we’ll find a nice human family to take care of you instead, okay? They’ll be just as nice, I promise.”

Frisk is starting to panic. They don’t know anything about adoption or foster homes, but you went to the library once and read about it in the reference section. It sounded bad. It sounded really bad.

“You can’t promise that,” you say, when they fail to speak, “You’re gonna take me away from a family that wants to take care of me and give me to one that gets paid to.”

She pauses, taken aback, “No, sweetheart, it’s not like that at all-”

“I’ll kill myself,” you say, and her mouth snaps shut like a clamp. You’re breathing hard. She doesn’t seem to know what to say, “I don’t care if you hate monsters, or what. If you take me away I’ll kill myself.”

“You don’t get a choice, honey, it’s already decided, this is what’s best for you,” she says, standing up. She takes your hand again, a bit harder. You clench your fingers hard enough around her hand you know it has to hurt.

“If I kill myself because you take me away my parents will start a war, even if I tell them not to. A lot of people will die, and it will be your fault.”

She stops, turns, looks down at you. You know you’re panting.

“That’s very melodramatic,” she says, but she’s frowning.

“Compromise,” you say, and you don’t even know where Frisk is anymore, everything feels like a tunnel with one exit: win, “I stay with my Mom and you can come check on me and stuff. You can even make rules.”

You let her hand go. She rubs at it absently, watching you, before she turns her face toward the door.

“That’s not how this works,” she says, mostly to herself, “Wait here.” She steps away, opens the door, and then disappears through it. 

Violence isn’t the answer, Frisk thinks at you. You snort, staring at the door.

Whatever, you say, particularly unwittily. You aren’t in the mood.

You click the car door lock off and push the door open. Papyrus turns the car off and your sneakers hit the pavement. You rub your hands together in front of you, kneading your thumb hard into the muscle between your other thumb and forefinger, digging into the skin. It hurts. You stare at the church and past it, to the little house you grew up in.

You hear Sans get out behind you but don’t turn to look. The mailbox is on your right. It’s lavender coloured, with little swirly white patterns on it shaped like flowers. You walk down the gravel drive and onto the cracked sidewalk and the steps up to the big wood doors that open inward. You run your hand over the wood handrail and notice the notch you took out of it throwing rocks at a bird when you were seven is still there, albeit somewhat more weathered than you remember.

You step inside.

You adjust your hood over your face and knock on the door again, harder. Finally you hear footsteps on the other side, and it swings open. Sans’s face goes from blank to confused to kneejerk horrified before he grabs you by the strap of your backpack and yanks you inside, slamming the door shut. Your tiny legs stumble against the tile in front of the apartment door.

“jesus christ, what are you doing here?!” Sans hisses at you, harshly, as if someone could hear him.

“There was a cop parked outside Mom’s house,” you say, shrugging your coat and backpack off.

“no, i mean, why the hell aren’t you with the baldinos?!” He says. He’s still whispering.

“I hate them,” you say, simply, and shuck your shoes off.

“Is everything alright, Sans?” You jerk your head towards the voice and the light source, leaning in from the far corridor. You recognize him- Grillby, his collar rumpled. He looks worried.

“What’s- wait, what is he doing here?” You say, narrowing your eyes. Frisk is confused. You’re not.

“shit, okay- grillbz, come on i- i got this, okay, give me a minute.”

The light disappears.

“What about my mom?” You hiss, harshly, and he rubs the back of his neck.

“it’s complicated, buddy. don’t- look, don’t- you have to go back.”

“Yeah,” you say, “I see.”

“no!” He hisses, rubbing the space between his eye sockets where his nose would be, “not because of that. i-”

He sighs. You think about putting your shoes back on but don’t do anything. Frisk doesn’t understand and they’re pushing at you to tell them what you’re made about.

“did they hurt you?” He asks. You shake your head, “they treating you bad?” You shrug. “seriously, buddy, are they treating you badly?”

“No,” Frisk says. Traitor, you think. They flinch.

“look,” he says, gently, and takes both of Frisk’s hands in his, “this is grown up stuff, okay? and we’re gonna take care of it. we will, i promise. everything is going to work out. right now, though, you just have to stay with the foster folks. if they find you here, it’ll make a lot of trouble. you have to trust us to take care of you this time, okay? can you do that for me?”

You stare at your socks. The wall clock in his apartment ticks, and you can smell leftover spaghetti in the trash bin by the fridge.

“I do,” Frisk says, and he softens, hugs you. Frisk melts and you hate it and can’t wait for them to pull away, skin shivering.

“put your coat back on, let me drive you back, okay?” He says, standing. You nod and pick your coat back up from the floor. “gimme a sec,” he says, and disappears around the corner.

“Don’t trust him,” you whisper, when he’s out of sight, and Frisk frowns.

“Why not?” They whisper back and you grit your teeth, but don’t reply. Sans and Grillby step out in normal clothes a minute later, and all four of you leave, Sans locking the door behind him. Grillby’s car is in the other parking lot and you still don’t tell Frisk why when they ask why Sans didn’t say goodbye to him, but you let them play the Frozen CD from Sans’s glovebox they like on the way back as an apology.

The sun filters in from the big stained glass windows and over the pews in such a pretty way you forget about the time your mother dragged you down the aisle screaming by your wrists and held your face down in the water until you were baptized. You’d wanted to kill her, but your hands were too small then.

There’s a woman in the front pew, humming something tuneless but loud. Her hair’s grey.

You step around the pew and look down at her. It’s your mother- wrinkled, sunspotted, with thin grey-white hair pulled back into a bun and wearing a cream sweater that looks soft, and straight out of the eighties where you left her.

“Chara,” she says, smiling, and you freeze. “Oh, I missed you,” she sighs, and reaches for your face. You can’t move- frozen solid like stone, rooted to the ground-

“Mom!” A voice calls, and her hand stops. She turns toward the sound, smiling gently, and your eyes betray you, doing the same.

“Ah? Look, Terry, it’s your brother,” she says, “He came home!” Your eyes move to the adult in front of you who looks annoyed and apologetic and tired all at once. He jogs up to you and shakes his head.

“Sorry,” he says, “She calls every kid she meets Chara. Mom,” he says, turning toward her, “It’s almost lunch time, do you want to go set the table?” She brightens and nods and stands with a wistful little smile, and then ruffles your hair. You think for a moment you’re going to burst like a water balloon, but you don’t. She picks up her cane from where it’s leaning against the side of the pew and begins to limp away. She looks old, and small.

“Sorry about that,” Terry sighs, “she had a kid go missing like thirty years ago. She’s never really been the same. Are you here for bible study? It’s not really till this evening, but-”

“How old are you?” You say, suddenly, interrupting him. He pauses.

“Twenty-six,” he says, then looks around, “Are your parents here?”

“In the car,” you say, “what do you mean she never really got over it?” He frowns and pauses like he doesn’t want to answer, then points at the left wall. There’s a little memorial with one of your old school photos in front of a worn old wooden cross, with a little collection basket. There’s newspaper clippings papered over the wall behind it and you find yourself walking toward it, mesmerized.

AMBER ALERT ISSUED FOR LOCAL TEN YEAR OLD, reads one, COUNTY CALLS IN STATE ASSISTANCE FOR SEARCH FOR CHILD LOST IN MOUNTAINS, reads another, SEARCH CALLED OFF, BOY PRESUMED DEAD, reads another.

There’s a little obituary, some polaroids. Your Han Solo toy your parents didn’t want you to have that you stole from a kid at school is on the table.

“Mom!” Frisk yells when the car door opens. You can’t shuffle off the sad, suburban upholstery fast enough, and she looks like she’s going to cry by the time you get to her and wrap your arms around her like you never need to let go.

Jenn (your maternal foster parent, whom you refuse to call a mother in any sense of the word) gets out a little slower, heavy and old. Your real mother picks you up like your weightless and crushes you against her chest, burying her furry face in your hair.

“Oh, Frisk,” she sniffles, and you’re too happy to see her again to let it sting that she doesn’t know, “I have missed you so. You were so brave and patient, I am so proud of you.”

You bury your face in her neck, arms clasped around her back, breathing in the scent of pie crust and fire magic, like home, grounding you. Dad pets your hair and gives you that big dopey smile and Mom doesn’t even look mad about it.

“thanks for driving them here,” Sans says, distantly, “i know it’s pretty far.”

“It was no problem,” Jenn says, “I’m just glad to see this all resolved with a happy ending. I was always rooting for you.”

“thanks,” he says, “i really appreciate that.”

“I’ll be off then,” she says, “Let you have your reunion in peace.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Dad says, looking up at her, “You must come in for tea, it’s the least we can do. At least sit down for a bit before you drive all the way back.”

You lean away from Mom to look back at her and she hesitates, before nodding, “That sounds lovely, actually, I would love a spot of tea.”

“I never met him,” Terry says, behind you, stepping forward a bit, “Mom talked about him a lot, growing up, though. Says she saw the light when God saw her sins and took him from her and whisked him straight off to heaven.” Terry chuckles, a little awkwardly, “I think he probably just ran away.”

He looks like you, a bit. Maybe what you would have been if you’d grown up. Tall, thin, bony, with wiry muscles, a square jaw and an upturned nose. His hair is the same soft brown as yours had once been, a dull amber mop he has combed back gently but casually. You’d never wear your hair like that. You like it longer, a bit longer than Frisk prefers it, so you can fiddle with it and tie it into lazy little braids with your fingers, distracting them from picking at drying scabs or scratching absently above your wrists at bubbled old white-pink scars.

“Anyway,” Terry says, straightening, “Family tragedy, and all that. I’m sure that’s not what you’re here for. Can I help you? Or would you like some privacy to pray?” He smiles so gently at you that you’re momentarily taken aback.

“A moment,” you say, and he nods, understandingly, and steps out toward the back door, the quickest way to the house out back, you know. You look back at the little shrine.

“See?” Dad says, holding your new social security card up, “This little paper makes it official!”

“Actually,” you say, pointing at the adoption papers on the table, scanned copies with faded ink, “those make it official. That just makes me a person.”

Dad frowns and turns it around, mouthing the numbers as he reads it, “Oh. Dear, I must admit, I don’t excel at paperwork.”

“People all get numbers,” you say, “in this country when we’re born. It’s because there’s so many of us. Everybody only gets one, and they’re all different.”

“Oh!” He says, brightening, “That’s so interesting! It is my hope that one day, there are enough monsters out there again that we will also need tiny cards with numbers on them.”

You smile, a little sadly, “Yeah, me too.”

Frisk offers Dad their palm and he hands over the card. They sit back on the couch in Mom’s lap and read the numbers slowly, like they want to memorize them. You hate numbers, you’ll leave that to them.

You have your suspicions that Frisk is lying about something, but they do give you an orphan-y feel, so, you figure they’re probably an orphan. You could check, but you won’t. It doesn’t really matter, now, you’re a brand-new person all around with a new number and a new family, even if Dad is away on business a lot and they were less than completely honest about their marital status, which, you guess, is still technically a thing. You love your mom and dad but you hope they don’t get back together; you think it would only make them sad, and you’d rather have two happy parents that love you but don’t talk to eachother than two angry parents again. Frisk agrees, but it makes them really sad to do so. You really like having them both in the room right now, though.

You’d actually kind of forgotten what your old face looked like. You’d always hated it, hates being in it, wanted to rip your flesh from your bones and you’d hidden your face in the few photos you let others take of you, but there you are. Fifth grade, maybe? It looks like a reprint; it’s not really yellowed and it’s blown up a bit.

You take a few photos of the articles and pictures with your phone in case you want to read them when you feel a little less overwhelmed, and Frisk says that you were pretty, which makes you laugh. You’d never liked that body, never felt at home in it. You’d torn it to ragged little pieces left it behind, and while you regret a lot of things, not having to live in that walking corpse anymore is not one of them.

Frisk still thinks you were pretty, and you let them know you appreciate the sentiment.

You shove your hands in your pockets and let Frisk poke around and explore a bit, curiously, and find you’re more bored than you are anxious, which is kind of weird and surprising, but you aren’t complaining. You wander out back through the wooden door. There’s a little plastic playground out here for the kids after sunday school, and your folks told you to stay off it, not to talk to the other kids, that you were different, a bad influence. It looks really run down now.

Behind that is the little home-town cemetery, maybe a few dozen headstones, tops, and beyond that, the treeline, framing the upward scale of the mountain. You used to hide in the woods sometimes- for hours, or days, until you got bored and went home and took the belting. You made a fire, once, way out in the woods, and had intended to skewer a toad on a sharp stick and cook it to see if you could become a wild kid, without a name, or a gender or parents or a language, killing and eating in the woods and totally self sufficient, and maybe get raised by wolves? But the toad gave you big sad toad eyes when you caught it and it made your stomach flip and you couldn’t kill it, so you’d stomped out the fire with your bare feet instead. It had hurt, but you figured you’d deserved it for trying to kill a poor innocent frog.

Your mother is sitting in front of one and speaking in a low, excited whisper. You walk over, but you don’t rush, and you recognize the name, Charles Driver, as your Dad’s. Also yours, sort of, but you left that with your body, and you aren’t going to dig either up now. The headstone looks pretty new. There’s flowers, but not fresh ones.

“Little Chara came back again!” She whispers, “He’s looking so much healthier this time- darker, too, but I’m not picky.” She turns, sees you, smiles, and waves. You wave back a little.

“It’s so good to see you, baby!” She says, and you aren’t really sure what to say. You look back at the house, and you can see Terry in the kitchen behind the half closed blinds and lacey curtains. You step forward, a bit hesitantly, and ring your hands together.

“Hey, Mom,” you say, keeping your voice soft, “Good to see you.”

She’s kneeling forward on her knees, and pats the ground beside her. You sit down.

“I was just telling your father you came by again! Last week when you were here he didn’t believe me,” she laughs, and you chew the inside of your mouth. This is probably cruel of you, but you’ve also probably earned it.

“Yeah,” you say, “Did you ever feel bad about how you treated me?”

She cocks her head at you, “Oh, Char-char, baby, when you vanished…” She sighs, and rest her cheek on her hand, “God came to me in a dream, and He said to me Laura! I gave you an angel, and you called it a demon! I am taking him back.”

“Them,” you say, unconsciously, but she doesn’t even seem to notice your interruption.

“You’re going to have a new child, and treat it right!” She pauses, “Oh, if only you’d met Terry. He’s such a good boy. He’s making cheese grits for lunch.” Your stomach rumbles. You love cheese grits.

“I kind of thought this was going to go differently,” you say, and she nods, but you’re not sure at what, “You’re making it really hard to hate you, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, which doesn’t feel helpful either.

“I wanted to burn this place down,” you say, and scowl at your father’s name. She just nods again. “Whatever. I can’t stay.” You stand up. She looks confused.

“You never do,” she says, sadly, and you almost feel bad.

“I’m not coming back,” you say, looking down at her.

“Oh,” she says, and then goes quiet. You can’t think of anything better to say, so you don’t say anything, and instead turn and head back inside, past the play structure and through the pews until you push back out the front door. Sans is still leaning against the door with his hood pulled up. He looks up from his phone when you push the door open and gives you a look that feels like a question. You shake your head, but you aren’t sure what you’re answering. In any case, he opens the back door for you and you scoot back in and let Frisk go back to watching youtube videos while Papyrus drives home and convinces Sans to sing Disney songs with him.

Frisk is kneeling on the barstool in front of the counter, sleeves rolled up past your elbows, a network of brown skin and criss-crossed white-pink spiderweb scars you both think are pretty, but Frisk likes to pretend they don’t think that, so you pretend that's all you. They grab another handful of grated cheese from the tupperware container on your right and sprinkle it into the pizza dough. You can’t help but watch it sink into the sauce with fascination- red. Frisk grabs another handful of cheese and pats it down evenly.

“Don’t use too much cheese,” Mom says, pulling a ziplock bag of pepperonis out of the fridge, “That’s way too much dairy.” Frisk pouts, but grabs another handful when she turns her back. You think she notices, but you aren’t going to stop them. The way you see it, you’re getting pepperoni on half either way.

There’s a knock at the door and Mom puts the bag on the counter and pats her hands on her apron, stepping out of the kitchen to answer it. She’s out of sight, but you can hear Sans’s voice, low, and then he’s in the kitchen, smiling warily. You ignore whatever he’s hiding and push the barstool on your left toward him with your foot, reaching over the dip in the counter for the bag of pepperonis.

“hey,” he says, sitting down, “what’s up, guys?” You flash him two thumbs up and grab the bag, plopping it between the two of you.

“Wanna help?” You ask, “I gotta spread them evenly.”

“sure,” he says, and grabs a handful from the bag. You start from the left and work inward. Mom steps in the kitchen, looking perturbed, and leans against the sink, distracted. Frisk wants to ask if she’s okay, but you urge them not to. They don’t understand, but trust your hesitation anyway, which you appreciate.

You wash your hands off in the sink and Mom pets your hair while you dry them, which is kind of weird.

“Are you okay?” Frisk asks, and you bite your tongue on a swear.

“Ah- yes,” she says, smiling, “We’ll talk about it after lunch, alright?” You eye her carefully and nod and she moves the pan away from the counter to cook it with fire magic. It always tastes better like that. Sans grabs some plates from the cabinet and you smooth the folds of your white and lilac pleated skirt, a perfect replica of your favourite anime character- a gift from Alphys and Undyne, and scoot off the stool and onto the tile floor, pink-and-white-with puppydog socks padding to the kitchen table to wait patiently while Mom finishes cooking lunch.

Sans sets a plate in front of you and you smile at him. He smiles back, but looks distracted. You adjust your legs under yourself and wait for mom to drop a slice of cheese and a slice of pepperoni pizza on your plate, pouring off warm steam and the scent of melted cheese. Frisk pushes you back and grabs the cheese and you resist a snort at them.

Mom puts a slice of cheese on her plate and stares at it. You watch her while Frisk eats, and while you’re both aware something is wrong, you can’t let it go like they can. You wipe your mouth on your sleeve and tap one hand anxiously on the table.

“Hey,” you say, and her eyes snap up to you gently, “what is it?” She smiles gently and rings her hands together, and looks briefly at Sans and then back at you. Frisk chews their lip anxiously.

“Well… It is only that, Frisk,” she says it pointedly, intentionally, and you pull away a bit and let Frisk look up at her, “we did… Actually find your real mother.”

Your breath catches in your throat, but Frisk is caught less off guard, “You’re my real mother,” they say, without missing a beat, “And I don’t want to see her.”

“No, no,” Mom says, but you can see the way Frisk made her smile, eyes glistening in their corners, “That is not what I meant, only that… We wanted to make sure there’s no complications, with the adoption, of course.”

Frisk frowns, looks down, “There won’t be.”

“we’re just coverin’ our bases, kiddo,” Sans says, leaning back against the wall in a way you suspect he thinks is cool, “you ain’t gotta do nothin’. just don’t worry about it, ok?”

Frisk looks down at their plate again, “Okay,” they say, but they’re lying. You don’t call them out on it though.

There’s blood in your mouth, an apology you bit in half that’s seeping through your teeth and pooling against the inside of your left cheek, warm and coppery. Or maybe it was just your tongue, you’re not sure, but either way it hurts like hell.

Man.

You really fucked up this time.

“Mom?” You say, quietly. She’s hugging you, maybe too tight, the filed down dubs of her claws digging into your back, quivering. Is she crying? “What’s wrong?”

She buries her snout in your shirt collar and makes a weird, sad little noise. You don’t understand. Neither does Frisk.

Something’s wrong.

Her face reminds you of spoiled fruit, withered by the sun, skin cracked and ugly, rippled by wrinkles and discoloured in ways that make your stomach flip. Frisk says you’re being overdramatic, she’s pretty average looking, but no. She’s ugly. All the way down to her rotten soul, and you want to stomp it under your foot like a jack o lantern in december until it’s nothing but orange paste on the sidewalk.

Please don’t kill my mother, Frisk thinks, quietly, but you ignore them. You want to tear her dry, spoiled hair out of her bloated skull one at a time until the holes start to bleed out whatever black ichorous taint is poisoning her soul. You want to break all her fingers one by one and feed them to her like carrots through her black and brittle teeth and then maybe those, too. You want to tear out her eyes and make her look at what she’s done.

You want to kill her so badly.

Frisk wraps your hands taut around your arms, fingers white knuckled against lilac fabric (one last gift from someone who gives a shit, not that giving a shit about people ever does anyone any good), clamping them down and disallowing you to follow through on what you want. They’re a coward, today, and you kind of hate them too. You probably won’t in a few hours, but in this moment, you hate everything and can’t see any reason not to.

“Franceska!” She says, smiling, her mouth spilling black oozing bile, eyes like slick, shimmering slugs, “I’ve missed you so bad, baby. Come to mama, babygirl, did those monsters hurt you?”

There are ten circles in Hell, probably, one just for her.

She’s in the living room with her friends and a bottle of wine, chatting loudly about a tv show you don’t care about. Her laugh is loud and grating and you want to reach down her throat and find whatever part of her makes that noise and tear it out.

Frisk thumbs through the trash until they find the bank statement addressed to you, crumpled up and discarded beneath an empty carton of eggs and a dirty coffee filter.

It’s empty.

“Mom,” you say into the phone, voice shaking. You hear her breath catch in her throat on the other side and you squeeze your knees against your chest. “Mom, please come get me.” You say.

“I can’t-” she says. Her voice is hoarse. Frisk’s fingers are white around the receiver, “We are working on it, my children, I promise, if you are only patient, if you only- only trust in the people who love you, I- I promise, I promise we will fix this, please, you must be brave-”

You throw the phone against the wall so hard that it shatters. The plastic front scatters across the floor, mechanical innards skittering across the kitchen tile. Frisk jumps to their feet and scrambles toward it, but it’s broken. Your head snaps up to the hall door as the light flicks on. Her gnarled-tree trunk feet pad to quickly in the room and you think about putting needles into her toes while she grabs Frisk by the arm and yanks them harshly to their feet.

What’s left of the phone is in pieces at your feet with your faith in humanity, once again.

You run your thumb gently over the kitchen knife under your pillow, feeling the hard plastic grip under the pads of your fingers. It’s warm.

“‘Ceska, get up.”

Frisk buries their face in the pillow, hunching their shoulders against the blanket. You run your thumb over the flat of the blade. The metal is cold, smooth.

“‘Ceska! I ain’t got time for this, our flight leaves in three hours and I wanna make sure we’re at the airport early, security is a bitch on saturdays.”

Frisk pulls their legs up against their chest. You test the muscles of your palm against the knife grip and feel it against your skin.

“Franceska!” The Woman says, ripping the bedspread off your body. Frisk whimpers and covers your face reflexively. “If you don’t get the hell outta bed, I swear you’re gonna get the whoopin’ of a lifetime after we’re done seein’ Oprah. I ain’t gonna miss the plane ‘cuz you’re feelin’ lazy!”

You think about your mother's gentle paws and patient smile, and the warm plastic grip of the very real kitchen knife in your fist. The Woman reaches for you. You shove frisk out of the way and jerk your hand out from under the pillow toward Her.

Your socks are wet, chaffing mud against your ankles, stained pink-brown with clay and blood already. You don’t know where you are. You don’t know where you're going other than “hopefully home.”

You’re pretty sure it’s raining, but you’re also worried you’re having some kind of panic induced hallucination of grandeur, cold rain and thunder while you run through the night. Wasn’t it morning? Seems like a continuity error.

Frisk isn’t even fighting you. Your legs are moving in tandem, powered by your desperate need and their sense of composed direction. You trip over a ditch and they catch you with your arms and cry out when the wrist of the left twists badly against a rock. You take it from them and let them have the other one, you don’t care, you just can’t stop. There’s plastic lightning in your hand and shallow shuddering earthquakes in your lungs. The world is spinning without you.

“Mom,” you whine, voice cracking like thunder. You don’t know where you are. You don’t know what you’ve done. You’re sorry. You’re sorry.

You trip over a displaced root and fall forward like the spring of a mousetrap, thumping facefirst with a thump against the packed earth, laced with stones and gnarled roots. You see stars, a dozen constellation blossoming like fireworks over your vision. Libra and gemini look down on you with pity, offering undeserved forgiveness and you reach out for cancer like a lifeline, something you can grab onto and lift yourself up with, but the stars spin like a bad mobile and you heave onto the grass before collapsing on your side, the earth a moist comfort.

There’s blood in your mouth, an apology you bit in half that’s seeping through your teeth and pooling against the inside of your left cheek, warm and coppery. Or maybe it was just your tongue, you’re not sure, but either way it hurts like hell.

Man.

You really fucked up this time.

The world goes black.

You wake like from the dead, your head pounding and teeth sore. There's a coppery taste in your mouth and dirt under your nails. Frisk shifts you to your knees and wobbles ever so slightly.

“What happened?” They ask, wiping your eyes.

You stare at your hands, and Frisk pauses. Frisk remembers.

Frisk intakes sharply and you squeeze your hands around your arms, “I think I killed her, Frisk.”

“I think you just stabbed her,” Frisk says, slowly, leaning back and kicking your legs out in front of you, examining the scrapes on your knees. “We don’t have enough upper body strength to kill a full grown human in a single stab, I think.”

“But we don’t know.”

Frisk pauses, “Yeah. We don’t. It’s fine. Let’s focus, okay? We gotta find mom, or Sans.”

“I… You aren’t upset.” You say. It’s not a question. Frisk is quiet, then stands up.
“We gotta find mom.”

You wipe the blood from your mouth onto your sleeve and rub the stickiness from your eyes. You don’t push it.

“We can’t go back-” you say, looking the way you think you came- you can still see your footprints in the loose soil.

“We go forward, I guess,” Frisk says, and starts walking. Your stomach hurts. The sun is out. Its warm. Midday?

It’s not look before you pad out of the treeline and onto a sidewalk. There’s an old video store to your left, so you know this probably isn’t a particularly busy area, but it's still sort of eerie how no one is there. Your stomach is rumbling. Your throat hurts. There’s a 7/11 across the street and you cross the empty lanes hesitantly.

The door’s unlocked. No one is inside. You eye the rack of chips by the counter and your stomach rumbles, but Frisk pulls a crumpled dollar from your pants pocket and puts it on the counter before taking a bag of doritos from the shelf and walking back outside.

You sit on the sidewalk curb and wait for someone to come by. Anyone.

No one does.

“Something’s wrong,” you say.

“Yeah,” Frisk says. They finish their chips. You’re still hungry. You stand up. You go back inside.

“There’s gotta be a phone here somewhere,” you say, when Frisk pushes your wordlessly for clarification. You dip behind the counter and see a phone hanging up on the wall. It has a dial tone when you press it to the side of your head, so you type in mom’s phone number- then change your mind, reset the dial, and call Sans.

You get his voicemail. You’re uncomfortable leaving a message- you don’t know how much trouble you’re in- so you hang up and call mom. No answer. You’re typing in Undyne’s cell number when you see something run by the outside window. You hang up the phone.
“Hey!” You call, stumbling back around the counter and through the door, looking down the street where they ran to. You don’t see anything.

“Is someone there?!” Frisk yells.

“Frisk?” Says a voice you recognize, “Is that you?”

“Kid?” Frisk asks, hesitant. A trashcan falls over and MK steps over it and out of where they’d been hiding.

“You’re okay, yo!!” They yell and rush into you, bumping the top of their head into your neck in an armless hug. Frisk can’t help themselves and squeeze back before MK steps away.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” You ask.

“Well, your mom…”

“My mom?” Frisk asks. You can feel the cold dread in their chest.

“The Queen your mom.”

“What happened to my mom?” Frisk blurts.

MK turns to look down the empty street and then back at you, chewing their lip, “The lady you were staying with said some real bad stuff and, and, I mean, she went to the hospital and all? And no one could find you… The Queen said she was hiding you somewhere, that she’d hurt you. There’s been…”

They look back down the road.

“Where is everyone?” You ask, shakily.
“There was… Fighting,” Kid says, hesitantly, “I stayed out of it. I think the humans were just waiting for an excuse,” they say softly, then frown and look up, “not like you, of course- the bad ones.”
You heart skips a beat, squeezing itself like a sponge.

“Mom,” Frisk says softly. MK looks down, then dips a bit, a half shrug. You shake your head.

“My mom wouldn’t do that,” you assert. MK won’t look at you.

“Most folk are on the other side of town,” MK says, “By Mercer Street. I think the humans left.” They look around and shrug, flicking their tail for emphasis.

“All of them??” You say, and MK just looks down.

“I guess.”

“Okay,” you say, slowly, “okay. We can fix this. We can still fix this. It’s only been a night, how did this happen?”

“It’s… Been two, actually,” MK says, slowly, “Where have you been?”

Frisk’s hands are shaking. Before you can speak, they do.

“Take me to my mom.”

Frisk thinks it's a waste of time, but you pop back into the 7/11 to cover you scraped up legs and arms in spider-man bandages from the back aisle, and you refuse to let them leave until you’ve ripped open another bag of chips and taken a bottle of water from the fridge. You’re practically starving.

MK packs up the satchel slung around their neck with peroxide, bandages, ibuprofen, a pile of things you think they're grabbing randomly from the shelf. He looks at you guiltily, but you don’t comment on it.

The silence on the street is still unnerving when you step back outside. Frisk wishes MK had a hand they could hold, but that would be rude to say, so they don’t. You fold your hands together in front of you instead. Frisk seems touched by the gesture, at least.

“I need to- I need to make a stop,” MK says, giving you a look, papping their feet against the sidewalk anxiously, just um… You can wait here, if you want, dude, or you can- whatever you want, yo.” They duck inside, of all things, a bar.

Should we go in there? Frisk asks. You don’t really want to, but you don’t want to look like a coward either, so you snort and follow them.

The bar is dark, the chairs scattered haphazardly. There’s some broken glass on the floor, but a path from the door to the bar has been cleared of debris. MK scuttles behind it with their usual speed. You dip behind them at a more cautious pace and peek your head around the corner.

There’s a girl there, a human girl. She’s propped up by the back of a chair, turned upside down, clutching a blanket. Her face is burn-red and her eyes are closed. She doesn't react when you arrive. She’s panting.

“Kid?” You ask, furrowing your eyebrows together. They wince, drop their bag, and dig around with their mouth, pulling things out.

“She’s my friend. From school. Her name is Theresa,” they say, not looking at you, “She, um. Her parents were our of town and she called me and I wanted to help her but then she- there was-” they frown, then nudge the blanket away from her leg. It's red with crusty dried blood, “we were just trying to get away from the fighting, and she… She fell.”

MK is silent for a moment. Then they sniffle, and sit down, curling their tail around their legs, “and then she got sick! Why do humans always get sick when they’re hurt? I don’t know what to do, and I can’t ask any monsters for help because if they find out a humans here who knows what they’ll do! And- I tried to ask the humans for help but they chased me and I was scared they were- they might-” MK is holding back tears. You scoot forward and open the pack of bandages and the put the peroxide near her leg.

“Go find a towel and get it wet, okay?” Frisk says while you rummage behind the bar for a pair of scissors, “we gotta cool her down.” You find the scissors and work at cutting away the pantsleg near the wound.

Do you know what you’re doing? They ask, hesitantly.

Do you? You respond, with a titter of nervous laughter, We saw it on the movie once, remember?

You can feel their dubiousness, but you probably know better what to do than MK. Whole they’re gone, you twist the top off the bottle of peroxide and pour it over the wound. It fizzes and bubbles, pink-white-red and she jerks her leg away from you and cries out.

You scuffle back and away, but she still doesn't seem really lucid or conscious, because she’s mostly just panting. You crawl back over and dig into the bag for a pack of baby wipes and wipe away the blood and dirt from the area. Its not as bad as it had looked before- a relatively small puncture wound, if dirty. You aren't sure what to do at this point.

MK comes scrambling out of the kitchen with a wet rag in their mouth and you tell them to wipe her face and keep it cool while you wrap the hole in gauze. You pull a box of Tylenol out of the bag and your stomach does flips. You put it back down. She needs help.

You stand up.

“You’re going to have to stay here,” you say. MK looks up at you from the floor, pathetically. “I’m going to go get help.”

“What about your mom?”

“Mom will-” your stomach is still doing flips. Frisk finishes for you. “Mom will have to wait. Which way are the humans?”

“City limits, I guess,” says MK, “your mom told them to stay out.”

You don’t move for a moment, feeling like you should say something else, but you don’t know what else to say, so you turn and leave.

You tug the hood of your lilac sweater over your head and shove your hands into your pockets. Your elbows as scuffed red-brown-grey with dirt and there’s blood spatter on the front of your shirt. You hunch your shoulders forward and quicken your pace self consciously, but Frisk shakes their head and knocks the hood back off, straightening your spine.

“We don’t want them to think we’re a monster,” Frisk whispers. You tug it back up indignantly.

“You want them to know we’re- you?” You hiss, stumbling over the words awkwardly. Frisk pauses, then stops.

“There’s no way they won’t recognize me,” Frisk says, “the hood isn’t going to help.”

You chew on your lip for a moment before pulling your knife from your waistband and holding it against the base of your hair, fisted tightly in your other hand. You pause to give Frisk the opportunity to stop you, but they finish the motion and cut off a sizeable chunk of it. You spend a few minutes getting it as short as you can with just a knife and the inability to see yourself, before you look around and notice a soot-black mark on a wall a few yards away, and you trot over and smear your hands in it.

There’s not much you can do beyond asymmetrically sooting up your face- and your arms a bit for good measure, but there's not a lot to work with, anyway. It’ll have to do. You turn back towards the road.

You start to hear the dull thrum of engines and chatter in the distance and it’s only when you see the barricades on the road that you and Frisk step out off the shadowed edges of the streets and into the open, arms up, hesitantly. You don’t see any humans yet- until you do. Big cement road blockers with big military green cars and men with guns. You’re starting to think this was a bad idea, you don’t know that girl, she’s not your problem this is not your problem, but- but Frisk keeps walking and refuses to let you turn around.

Frisk breaks into a jog and the men turn to look at you, weapons raised and it strikes you quite suddenly how much you hate guns. They put too much distance between you and the person you’re hurting. They make it less real. Sometimes, you think, you have to hurt people, but you should have to feel yourself hurt them, you should have to know exactly what you’re taking away. It has to be real for you. You decide you hate these men and their guns watching you.

“Hey!” Frisk yells, “I need help!”

“Stop!” Yells one of them, and Frisk does, panting, “What’s wrong?”

“There’s a girl- a human girl- her leg is bleeding, back in town, um, she’s really sick, and I don’t know what to-”

“Is it Theresa?!” A woman yells, pushing away from the group you hadn’t noticed milling around cars, unarmed, in regular clothing, “is her name Theresa? What does she look like, is she-”

“Her name’s Theresa,” you supply, suddenly uncomfortable for reasons you don’t understand. The woman covers her mouth with her hand and looks like she wants to come near you, but a woman with a gun has stepped in front of her.

“Okay-” says the first man, lowering his gun, and the others follow suit, “Roberts, Scott, Barber, grab a stretcher and go get the kid.”

Two men and a woman run off to, presumably, grab a stretcher.

“Those monsters,” the woman you assume is Theresa’s mother chokes, “my baby-”

“It- there’s actually a-”

You snap Frisk’s mouth shut before they can finish the thought. We absolutely can NOT tell them MK is there. They’re not gonna care they took care of her. They’re humans, they already made up their minds about monsters!

Frisk bites your lip, hard, and you flinch, “A monster is taking care of her right now, a kid from her class. They’re the only reason she’s still alive, I only just found them.”

“A monster…?” She says, and then something dawns on her, “the little yellow lizard boy with no arms?”

“Not a- boy,” you say, and Frisk nudges you that its not the time. You grit your teeth.

“You have to promise me you won’t hurt him! I’ll only take you if you promise!” Frisk says. You expect tension, an argument, a threat, but his shoulders just sag.

“We’re not in the business of killing children,” he sighs, and nods at the three who have reemerged with a stretcher carried by the largest under one arm, “Don’t be afraid.”

Frisk seems satisfied but you’re still bristling, “Okay,” they say.

“What’s your name, kid?” Says the woman as the three step past the barrier to meet you. Caught off guard, frisk opens their mouth to answer, their name on their tongue and you rip control from them at the last second.

“Chara,” you say. She smiles at you, in a way you think is meant to be reassuring.

“Chara,” she repeats, “that’s a nice name. Okay, let’s go get that girl, alright?”

You nod.

You find yourself walking ahead, eyes peeled for MK. They annoy the shit out of you, but you’ll be damned if you want them to end up the victim of this situation. Frisk is oddly calm, though, the stoic determination opposite your frantic stubbornness.

You can see the bar door ajar the street over, and after a quick glance around, you cross toward it silently. No sign of MK yet, so things are okay. You look around before you lead them behind the bar, and they start doing all kinds of medical looking stuff that makes you relieved, your shoulder sagging away their tension.

“Frisk? Did you find help-?” you snap your head up as MK leans in the door, and a few things happen.

One. Your heart skips a beat at the name.

Two. You hear Frisk’s name again, behind you.

Three. After the name, you hear motion, people standing, boot stomps.

Four. You try to bolt forward, toward the door, and Frisk tries to whip around. Neither happen and you stumble, overwhelmed by vertigo suddenly.

Five. There’s a hand on your arm and it pulls you backward, large hands with a tight grip that makes your blood race screaming through your veins.

“Let me go!” You scream, clawing at the hand on your arm.

“That’s the name of the kid they were looking for, isn’t it?” Someone says, “she- um, they, said their name was chara, though?”

“Did you lie to us?”

You yank your arm backward desperately, trying to pull out of the grip, kicking your legs against the ground and Frisk turns their head to look at MK. They try to yell “run,” and you try to yell “help me!” And together you just make an awful angry noise and MK flinches, eyes like dinner plates, looking like they want to cry. They curl their toes against the pavement and scrunch their eyes shut, willing little white pinpricks of light into existence. They're not much more than shaky blobs, but they shoot at the man holding your arm and burst like water balloons. You don’t think it’s actually hurt him, but he’s so startled by it he flinches and you wrench out of his grasp, trip, land hard enough on your chin that you see stars and bite your tongue, before scrambling back to your feet and running for the door.

“Jesus christ, it fucking- it shot me-”

“Roberts, you’re not even bleeding-”

“It shot me-”

“Lower your weapon, Roberts, don’t-!”

Six. By the time you reach the door you’re running through dust still floating in the air, and you don’t stop.

You don’t want to get up. You want to stay here. Maybe forever. You don’t want to see them. Any of them. Not mom. Not anyone.

Frisk ignores you and kicks the cabinet door open. They stand up. They wipe the blood off their chin. It tears the scab open and it hurts. You don’t say so.

“This has gone too far,” Frisk says, softly. You don’t respond. “Should we reset?”

“Of course we should reset,” you hiss. Frisk frowns. Frisk doesn’t reset.

“It seems like cheating,” they say, “it isn't fair.”

“MK is dead,” you say. Frisk flinches, “They probably don’t give a damn about what’s fair.” Frisk is silent, but you’re mad, “What? Aren’t you going to tell me about the fucking swear jar?!”

“Chara,” Frisk whispers, hugging your arms and leaning back against the kitchen counter. There’s an old half folded burrito a few feet away. Someone left in a hurry. You’re still mad.

“Mk is dead! Dead, dead, dead, dead dead and they’re going to stay dead until you reset!”

“I can’t,” they say, hands clenching against the fabric, “I can’t-”

“Yes you can!” You yell, yanking your hands away to ball them into fists, “all you have to do is do it! Just go back!”

“The last save was-”

“The last save was what?!”

“It was… Still with her,” Frisk whispers, “I’d have to go back all the way. We’d have to do everything again. Everything!”

You’re silent for what feels like a full hour but is probably just a second, “are you serious?! That’s the problem?! You’d rather let this shit happen than go back to your old fucking mommy?!”

“She’s not my mom!” Frisk snarls, and both of you are angry, now. Your voice echoes off the metal cabinets in the restaurant kitchen and it almost feels like the two of you have different presences here for a moment.

“MK is dead!! They're dead dead dead dead dead dead DEAD DEAD!!!” you stomp your feet, yelling, and you feel a surge of uncharacteristic anger that doesn’t belong to you somewhere in your belly, before your own fist punches you in the gut.

You double over with a groan.

“Shut up,” Frisk hiccups, both of you trying not to puke as you curl up on your side, hugging your stomach, “shut the fuck up.”

“You’re so selfish,” you wheeze, and those are definitely not your tears in the corners of your eyes, “I hate you.”

“Good,” Frisk says, bafflingly, nonsensically. You wish you’d grabbed a knife from the countertop and stabbed yourself when you had the chance, made them reset, but now that the thoughts in your head, it's in theirs, too, and they’re going to be watching your hands.

You stay curled up on the floor and tell yourself it's definitely not you that’s crying. Frisk is telling themself the same thing, though.

Eventually, you do actually throw up.

You push yourself back to your feet, even though they try to buckle under you. Your body is fighting every motion you make, screaming fury and fear and determination, but you step forward anyway. The door is two yards away and it takes you four minutes to get to it.

Your fingers twitch and jerk as you reach for the handle but you fight them, teeth grit on dried blood and dirt and you palm at it anyway, and it opens outward. You clench your fists against the shaking insides of your elbows and you keep walking.

You pass a bookshop you once brought Papyrus to to pick out bedtime stories and you see faces inside, watching you, scaly noses pressed against the glass. You keep walking. Frisk bites the inside of your cheek and your eyes prickle with tears, but they’re not as determined to stop as you are to keep going.

“You don’t even know where you’re going,” Frisk says. Petulant. Childish.

“MK said Mercer Street,” you spit, “she’s probably at the school.”

“We don’t have to go there,” Frisk says, “We don’t have to see her.”

“No,” you snarl, “we don’t. Just reset.”

“No!”

“If you won’t,” you say, thumbing the handle of the knife in your hand, “then let me-”

“No!” Frisk yells, and tries to throw it. You focus entirely on keeping your white knuckled fingers clenched around it, which stops your feet. You stand, panting, on the sidewalk for a moment.

“Frisk?” You whip around together, the motion you haven’t fought for since you climbed out of the cabinet and your heart skips. It’s Azzy.

He’s pushing up through the packed in dirt next to a sidewalk tree, petals gently moving in the breeze.

“Asriel-” Frisk says, and you hit panic mode. The whole world tunnels into focus, and you can hear your heart beat pounding in your ears like war drums.

“Kill me!” You yell, and Frisk clamps your mouth shut. Asriel looks startled and his eyes dart around like he’s looking for hidden cameras. Frisk claps one hand over your mouth and tries to throw the knife away again. Your whole body jerks as it tries to do a hundred conflicting actions at once.

“What?!” Asriel says.

You bite Frisk’s hand- and you really bite it, harder than you realize before you hear the metacarpals of your hand snap like carrots, and you do hear it before you feel it. Frisk shrieks and snaps your hand away. There’s blood in your mouth.

“Frisk won’t reset!” You cry, and frisk doubles forward, clutching your broken hand with a sob.

“Chara…” Asriel says, softly, his voice trembling.

“Shut up!” Frisk yells, “don’t come near me!”

“Azzy!” You yell, and jerk your head up. Asriel swallows (does he have a throat?).

“Chara, I- I can’t-”

“No one’s killing anyone.”

You’re sweating when you look behind you at Undyne, in her royal guard armor. She looks very official.

“Two hundred and thirty seven is enough. We’re not going for two hundred and thirty eight. Not today. Not ever.”

You’re shaking. Asriel’s on one side of you, Undyne’s on the other.

“Don’t-” Frisk starts, and Undyne takes a step back, raising her palms.

“It’s okay,” she says, “You’re alive, which means we can still fix this-”

“MK is dead,” you blurt, and she tenses, sucking in her breath.

“That’s- we need to- you didn’t-” she stumbles over the words, whatever script she brought with her thrown out the window.

“My mom-” you say. She solidifies a little at that.

“Your mom! We need to get you to your mom!”

You’ve been trying to get your arms to cooperate in stabbing something since you left the restaurant, and the same amount of time has seen Frisk trying to throw the knife away. They’re startled, angry, only for a second, but both of you think FIGHT for a single simultaneous second, and in the next, your hand is empty.

“Oh,” Says Undyne, looking down. She blinks, frowns, and pulls it out of her gut, between the plating of her armour, dust pouring out of the hole like flour from a sieve. Your breath is coming in wheezes, unable to get enough. You’re feeling light headed.

“Look-” she says, shakily, “I’m okay-”

Frisk bolts and you don’t stop them.

You’re so used to the tap tap tap of rubber soles against hard stone when running that there’s something unsettling about the dull thwak of blood stained socks against the pavement. It’s too quiet. You don’t know how many steps you take or how long you run, but you don’t stop until you buckle forward and dry heave until you start crying again.

“She’s dead,” Frisk says, “we killed her.”

“She’s not dead,” you spit, though she might be, “get up.”

Frisk wobbles, leaning on their elbows, ignoring you.

“Get up,” you say again.

“Shut up, Chara,” they whimper.

“Get up. Get up! Get up get up get up get up get up!” You scream, and Frisk recoils, frightened.

You stand up. Nothing stops you.

“Frisk?” You ask. Silence. Your knees wobble a little. You hate silence.

You look up. A green sign looms a few meters away telling you you’ve arrived at Mercer street; and just past you, through the spotty treeline you can see the school. The ground is littered with debris. There’s a few overturned vehicles functioning as makeshift barricades, but there’s no one here now.

You limp toward it.

“Mom!” You call. The wind answers you by scattering some loose papers around your ankles. “Mom!”

The front doors open. It’s RG01 and RG02- a little worse for wear, but alive. Together. RG02 ushers you to come in and you do. RG01 scoops you up like an infant and you’re a little disgusted, but you’re limping, trailing blood, probably covered in puke and dirt with your head poorly shaved and wearing unrecognizable clothes. You can feel swelling in your face. People are talking to you.

“Momma,” you say, fuzzily.

Things go in and out for a bit, but very soon, you realize you’re not in RG01’s arms anymore. You’re in Mom’s.

She cradles you like you’re dying (debatable) and keeps running healing fingers gingerly over your swollen bruises and your feet, whose pulpy flesh is now indistinguishable from the torn fabric woven into the cuts from your socks.

“Mom,” you say, softly, reverantly.

“My babies,” she says, a half sob, half cry of delight and buries her fuzzy nose in your chest. You rest your face against her neck and feel the warm muscles under her fur.

“What’s going on?” You ask. She leans back and looks at you, tearing up a bit.

“I lied to you,” she says, voice breaking, “I told you everything would be okay.”

“What happened?” You ask again.

“That awful woman- she said you tried to kill her and ran away. I know- you would never, my sweet, gentle babies,” she says, and runs a clawed paw over your hand, erasing the split skin over your knuckles and the bloody pulp of your fingertips. It looks new, but still dirty, “she lied to me, and they all believed it, and I knew she had done something to you, I told you it would be okay if you just stayed with her, and I lied to you, it wasn’t okay, you did what you were supposed to and she hurt you like you knew she would, I didn’t trust you- I am- I am so sorry-”

She’s trembling, rough, calloused fingerpads shaking against your skin a she pulls bruises from your face like petals falling upward in reversed footage.

“Momma…” You whisper. Frisk is listening.

“She’d killed you and I told her- I told her she had to tell me what she’d done to you and she just kept sayong she’d done nothing and that awful- that human from their government, he just kept saying they would do nothing, that nothing- that he wouldn’t- and I told them, I told him, I told them I am the Queen- I will not allow this treatment to my people, to me, to the saviour of our kind-”

She’s got her face buried in your shirt. Frisk’s hands are shaking.

“I went to war,” she whispered, “I went to war.”

“You went to war,” Frisk whispers, “You went to war.”

“But you’re okay!” She says, leaning up quickly to wipe some dirt from your cheek, giving you a wobbly smile. “My babies, you’re okay…”

Frisk, you think, please go back.

Frisk’s hands shake, I can’t. I don’t know why. I can’t.

This world is rotten, you think, it’s evil, and it’s a lie. Things were never supposed to be like this. It’s okay to fix mistakes like these.

“Would you take back your own death?” Frisk asks, shakily, out loud.

You frown, “No. It took years, but my death still freed my family.”

Toriel looks confused.

“What if this… Somehow this still all needs to happen? What if it still leads to some good future?”

“You never would have freed everyone had you not reset every time you’d died!” You shout, and wrench yourself away from your mother.

“Chara!” She says, filled with heartache. Your insides wrench. You wish there was anything inside you left to puke up.

“Had you not reset every failure, every friend you didn’t make, every time you died or-” you wrench your knife from your waistband and jam it into your mother, “I killed someone you care about.”

“I don’t… Understand…” She says, looking ar you. She doesn’t even look angry.

“You will,” you say, heart pounding, eyes cried out. Frisk backs up against the wall and covers their eyes with their hands until you hear The Sound.

“Why did you do that,” Frisk whispers.

“I had to,” you say back, but you’re done. You’ve got nothing left. You’re done.

You hear footsteps and don’t respond.

“I can’t,” Frisk says gently, “I can’t.”

“yeah, you can,” Sans says, kneeling down and leaning on his knees to meet your eyes. “this ain’t our story, and you know it. if you’re waiting for permission, you got it. got it?”

Frisk stares up at him, emptied out for a moment, before he sighs, and sits back on the ground. He lays down. He doesn’t get back up. He’s waiting.

Silence.

The world drops away into darkness, and you come gently back into yourself in your room at your not-mother’s house.

You let your fingers drift gently up the knife’s handle, under your pillow. The woman is yelling at you, Frisk is covering your face, and a moment ago, a lifetime ago, you were burning, on fire with determination. You are still, to a different end. You let just the pads of your fingers gently brush the cool steel of the blade before you uncurl them and pull your arm out smoothly and follow through the motion she’s pulling you into to sit up.

“That’s more like it. Now, I wanna see you in that nice dress I bought you in five minutes, or else! Understand?”

“I understand,” you say. You stand up. You put on the dress. You put on a jacket. You get in the car. You go to the airport. You go to the airport bathroom alone.

You stare at yourself in the mirror. Or, Frisk’s face stares at you in the mirror. Or your face stares at you in the mirror. You can never be sure now. You take off your jacket and wrap it around your waist. You lock the door. The toilet behind you has a metal pipe going up along the wall, jutted out a few inches and you hold the base of your forearm up against it to judge the size, and then, you tell Frisk to go somewhere else for a moment.

You sit patiently through all the preproduction, the coaching and the makeup. Frisk waits until the cameras are rolling and That Woman is oozing lies about how much she missed you to quietly take off your lilac jacket and there’s a moment before the collective gasp, a moment before the crowd notices the lacework of purple bruises along your arms like an uneven quilt.

You’ve come to realize humans have a sick obsession with tragedy, and that your heroisms are quickly forgotten when a scandal appears. Human mother beats child, new evidence shows history of abuse. Has it all be an anti-monster coverup? More at eleven.

You spend another month in s group home while they bicker and banter over whether you should get to live with your mother but you’re tired and you barely register the time pass until the moment she scoops you up like she never intends to put you down again and you bury your face in her fur and breath in the scent of pie and pinesol. She takes you home and makes you snail pie (she wants to make you butterscotch cinnamon but you like snail pie, you love snail pie, snail pie is home and life and good and normal) and lets you wear basketball shorts again.

You’re on your second slice, savouring it now instead of jamming it into your face like an animal when the door opens and the first of your friends come in. It’s Undyne and Alphys first, of course, and then it’s Mettaton and Muffet and then Dad is here and he brought you a new hat for some reason and then it’s Papyrus and Monster Kid and then you lose track. Everyone is happy to see you. You ache looking at their faces and you hug MK the tightest.

When Sans shows up on the stairs, like he never even came through the door he just gives you a look and you slip away and crawl out on the roof with him, looking out at the woods. He pulls a bottle of ketchup out of his pocket, takes a swig, and hands it to you. You take a sip.

“on one hand, it’s nice to see you found a solution to your problems that wasn’t self destruction for once. on the other hand, it was less nice to see it was more killing.”

Frisk hugs their knees to their chest and you pick at the bottle’s paper label idly.

“and then on a third hand, it was unfortunate to see you go back to self destruction again.”

You snort. Frisk winces.

“No,” Frisk says, a terrible liar, “she hit me.”

“i’m sure she did,” he says, and takes the bottle from your hands, “but not this time.” He takes a swig.

“Maybe,” Frisk says, looking down.

Sans puts an arm around you, pulls you closer a bit and ruffles your hair. “it’s alright. we’ll work on it.”

You wipe your nose on his jacket and he ignores this, and you stand up and go back inside. You’ll talk about it later. A lot of things you’ll deal with later. But you’ll deal with them.

Today you have snail pie and your mother in the kitchen, and friends in your living room and Azzy on the kitchen table finishing your plate while you’re gone, and those seem like higher priorities in the moment.

But you’ll get there.

Someday.