The Only Thing Necessary for Evil to Triumph is For the Good to Get Bored

Frisk is peeking over the counter, eyes just barely open and glittery. You can feel their tummy rumble at the sight of the birthday cake. It's beautiful, of course- Mom spared no expense or effort. It was three tiered, towering over your head on the high counter and a bright, shiny cherry-red, Frisk's favourite. Snow white frosting and lilac fondant polka dots. The inside was funfetti, not chocolate, so you weren't all that interested, but Frisk looked like they were going to explode, hands folded on the counter under their chin.

"You should just, like, jab your finger in the frosting," you suggest, "No one would know."

They roll your eyes and snort.

"Okay, well, sure, they'd notice, yeah, but I mean, it's your birthday, right? It's not like anyone's going to get mad at you."

Frisk huffs and gives the cake one last longing stare before pushing off the counter. You pout. The frosting looked good, at least.

"heya, kiddo, who ya talkin' to?"

You both freeze, hands clenching. Oh no, not him.

"Nobody!" Frisk says hastily, "only me." Sans snorts. He doesn't believe you, but he's too lazy to push the subject. He sidles over to look at Toriel's cake with you.

"sure is pretty, huh?" He says, folding his hands in his front pockets. Frisk nods excitedly. "you weren't thinking of sneaking a taste, were you...?"

"No!" You burst, flushing red. You can feel Frisk's frustration at you and back off again.

"Hungry," Frisk says, and Sans smiles. Or, he was already smiling, but it reaches his eyes. You've never liked him, even if Frisk does.

"well, eat somethin' a little more substantial then, huh? whaddaya want?" He opens the fridge and Frisk bounces to his side to look in with him. You resist the urge to groan.

Frisk hums thoughtfully, then points at the pizza box in the back.

"alrighty," Sans says, tugging it free and popping open the microwave. Frisk does a twirl on the linoleum floor while Sans reheats them a slice of pizza, watching the frills of their creamsicle-orange party dress flounce with the motion. You want to gag.

Frisk stops and pouts. You can pick our outfit tomorrow, they think at you. That seems fair, but you still want to complain about it. All this birthday stuff is kid's stuff and you don't like it. The microwave dings and Sans grabs a plate from the cabinet.

"excited for the party?" He asks, setting it on the counter and going to retrieve your stool. Frisk nods enthusiastically.

"Dad," they say, succinctly, between bites. Sans frowns, with his eyes.

"yeah, he is coming, isn't he? we'll see how that goes, i guess."

Frisk shrugs.

"Think he and Mom'll get in a fight?" You ask, Frisk frowns.

"not on your birthday," Sans laughs, then pauses, "not in front of you on your birthday."

Frisk nibbles thoughtfully on the pizza slice, and you kind of wish it had been pepperoni instead of just cheese, but they let you kick your legs under the counter back and forth against the stool as a consolation. You're grateful.

There's a knock at the door.

"yeah, that'll be alphy'n undyne, then," Sans says, leaning away from the counter. You and Frisk continue to work on the pizza slice while Sans answers the door to let your first guests in. Frisk let's you finish the pizza slice with a big chomp, because you were always a more decisive eater, and then hops off the stool to go bury Alphys in a hug. You pretty much take a backseat from here on out. These are their friends, not yours, and you're not invested enough in this party to participate OR ruin it.

Until Mom cuts the cake and you see that the second tier is made out of chocolate. You're nearly unable to stop yourself from grabbing it with your bare hands, and when you jerk like a marionette people stare. You're embarrassed, for once, and go back to being quiet, letting Frisk have their stupid day. Undyne gets them a huge sword and Alphys gets them a chemistry set, which you begrudgingly admit is actually kind of cool. Another pet rock from Sans and another cookbook from Papyrus. Dad even comes and brings you a teacup, and Mom doesn't yell at him once that you see. It's all in all, a very run of the mill birthday. You're a little jealous.

It's only that night, after everyone's left, that Frisk turns their thoughts inward and asks if you're tired. You of course spent most of the day napping or lazing about so, no, you're not, and this seems to weirdly delight them, because they open your phone and call Sans.

"'sup, kiddo," he says from the other side. You can hear video game noises in the background.

"Sans," Frisk says, "Need favour. Gotta go somewhere. Cover for me?"

You listen curiously, and tug at their thoughts, but they're carefully quiet and mentally distant.

"where ya', uh, goin'?" He's trying to sound casual, but you'd have to be stupid to miss the tension in his voice.

"Can't say."

"ss it important?"

"Yeah."

There's a moment of silence on the other end while he considers it, before sighing, "okay."

Frisk grins, "Thanks. See you soon."

"Where are we going?" You ask, but they ignore you and put their phone away, going to your room and grabbing your backpack. You're getting a little annoyed.

"Mom! I'm going to Sans's!" Frisk says and steps outside, unceremoniously.

"Where are we going?!" You press, and they relent.

"Well, it's your birthday, too, so-"

"No, it's not."

"Do you remember when your real birthday is?"

"...No."

"Then it's your birthday, too. We've hung out with my friends all day, I thought maybe we could go hang out with yours."

"I don't have any friends."

You're walking along the sidewalk in the dim twilight. You know this is the way to the bus stop. Frisk pouts, "Not even me?"

You make a vague, noncommittal noise that seems to delight them.

"We're clearly not going to see you, though," you grumble, frustrated, "Where are we going?"

"We're going to see Asriel."

"What!" You yell, and immediately grab at the inside of your legs, stopping you both short. Frisk fights you, pushing one leg forward, while you focus on the other one, going back, and you both hit the ground with a shared "Oomph."

"Come on! It'll be fun! I bet he's lonely!" Frisk chides, but fuck that.

"No! I don't wanna see that crybaby!" You snarl and try to roll over. Frisk holds you still and you just sort of wave your arms wildly from the sidewalk.

"Yes you do! We literally share a soul, Chara, you totally do!"

"No!" You're whining now, petulant, but you can't help yourself.

"I bet he wants to see you, at least."

"I bet he doesn't. I got him killed. The only reason I'm dead is cuz he lied to me."

"He didn't lie to you."

"He said he's never doubt me!" You pound your fists against the ground and Frisk lets you have your tantrum. The prickling pain in your fists is familiar and grounds you.

"Chara, come on, you wanted to go on like, a rampage."

"Yeah, but, but. He said..."

You trail off, because there's guilt in you now. You really hate guilt. You never used to be guilty, and now this dumb kid made you feel it all the time, with their gentle reassurance you weren't a monster, that even you deserved mercy... It makes you sick.

"I bet he'd appreciate an apology."

You're quiet for a bit, and Frisk stands, "Do I have to on my birthday?" You say, hopefully.

"It's not your birthday," Frisk chuckles, "Oh, yeah, also, you can say one swear word and I won't get mad. Happy sort-of-birthday."

Frisk leans down, brushing you off and shouldering your backpack. You pause together, and take a deep breath, before going to the bus stop together.

It's not a long trip, maybe an hour or so and night has fully set by the time you step out into it. It's a brisk walk up the parkway and through the treeline to where you know the entrance to Mt. Ebott is- the part you can walk through, without jumping. You've both had enough of falling down holes for awhile.

It's another long walk through the empty, quiet, echoing chasm to the ruins.

"Are you ready?" Frisk asks you, kindly, patiently, as always. You want to sneer, but that seems mean, and you'd promised to try being nicer, so instead, you sigh like it's a stupid question.

"Yeah, let's just get it over with," you mumble, and together you step into the room you both once fell in.

There's golden flowers peppering the room like spots, the light from the outside dim moonlight on the center pile. You both survey the flowers for a moment- not sure where to start looking.

"Asriel?" Frisk asks before you can. Their words echo off the walls. There's only silence, otherwise.

"Maybe he's dead," you suggest.

"Hush," says Frisk. You hear the tinkle of laughter in the distance.

"What," Asriel's taut, hateful voice says, "Didn't I tell you not to ever come back here? God, you're so stupid!"

Something slams into the back of your calves and knocks your legs out from under you. Your head smashes into the ground and you see stars, static rainbows that block out your vision.

"Lost your edge, huh?" is the last thing you hear before everything fades into darkness.

You wake in golden flowers and your first instinct is to panic, hands blindly grabbing stalks and ripping them from the earth, roots and all. Your second instinct is to sit up and look around. For a moment, you think Frisk reset, which baffles you, because they wouldn't do it before no matter how much you whined. Maybe you'd reset? You hadn't even realized you could do that- but no. You can feel moisture on the back of your head, and the memories return. You pat the back of your hair and can feel the blood- it sticks to your fingers in clumps that make you frown. You've been out for awhile. So much for that. You dig some monster food from your backpack- Frisk brought some of Mom's pie in a tupperware container and you feel better after you've eaten it.

Frisk is being unusually quiet, all things considered.

"Ay," you say, through bites, "Frisky. Wake up, buddy, we got work to do."

You sit in silence and chew on pie crust. Mom always said you ate too fast, but you'll let Frisk deal with the sore tummy later. The silence continues.

"Come on," you whine, and push yourself to your feet. Frisk's stupid frilly taffeta dress is ruined, stained with dirt and blood. Mom's gonna be pissed, she just bought the thing.  "Frisk! I wanna go home! Wake up!" You stomp your foot for emphasis, but there's no response.

"I'm gonna tear up your dress!" You yell, and after another moment of silence you rip the left sleeve off. No response. "Frisk! This isn't funny anymore, come on!" Your heart is starting to race and you rip at the lace, angry. Silence. You throw the backpack to the ground and tear the whole thing off, ripping it and yelling. Silence. You pull on the hoodie Frisk packed you in the bag when you start to get cold, but you stomp your feet and yell the whole time.

But no one comes.

"Frisk...?" You say, and your voice breaks. The sound echoes, empty, off the walls.

"Fuck you," you say, pathetically, angrily, a harsh snarl under your breath, "Fine, don’t wake up, see if I care! I don’t need you to get out of this stupid dump, anyway!”

You pick the backpack back up and leave the remains of the stupid dress in the flowers, stomping out back towards Mom's old house and out of the Ruins.

You stomp through the settled snow in Snowdin, and you're almost out before you think better of it and turn around. You pick up a stick and beat it against a mailbox, but it doesn't do much, so you slam your boot into it instead, screaming. The moist wood splinters beneath the force you put on it, buckling with a soft snap. You’re panting and you turn to the nearest building, ripping off the unlit lights and tossing them into the snow. You slam your fist through the window and it breaks- along with your hand, slicing through your skin like paper.

You stop, then, wheezing, and bring your hand up to your face, inspecting it. Your fingers are bent at weird, unpleasant angles, and it hurts like hell, but it’s nothing you’ve not dealt with before. You watch the blood well from the cuts for a moment before you sigh, calmed down, and tug a packet of instant noodles from your bag. You bite through them, crunching down and chewing decisively. Frisk doesn’t even really like these things- they only packed them for you. It puts a weird feeling in the pit of your gut to think about and you don’t like it.

You realize the house you’re standing in front of is Sans’s and you consider breaking in and seeing if he left anything weird behind you can blackmail him with later, but Frisk would be disappointed, and thinking that’s a bad thing makes you mad again, so you push the door open and stop in the living room, motivation lost. You rub your dirty boots into the carpet, frustrated, then sigh and turn, shutting the door behind you.

“Wow, what the hell? You really are a card,” Asriel’s voice chortles, and bursts from the ground, petals unfurling around his twisted face.

“Asriel-” you start. His face shifts into a nasty, oozy snarl.

“Don’t call me that!” he screams, “That’s not my name anymore!”

You grimace, “Yeah, okay. Flowey, whatever, sure.”

“How are you still walking around?” He says, shifting back to normal like he wasn’t just freaking out and totally overreacting, like always. You frown.

“Uh, I got up? You didn’t break my legs, asshole.”

He cocks a weird petally eyebrow at you, “Yeah, I wasn’t too worried about your legs, considering I took your soul.”

Your blood runs cold in your veins, “Excuse you?”

“Yeah, check it out,” he snickers, and his size quintuples, flipping inside of itself in fractalled folds and blossoming forth into something you can hardly comprehend- something weird and wrong, all thorns and eyes- not quite the thing you vaguely remember that he turned into with six human souls, but definitely similar, something reminiscent of a memory of a monster you never actually got to meet in this timeline. His roots are digging into the wall.

“Shit,” you breathe, eyes wide. Asriel laughs again, wildly, deliriously.

“Welp, buddy, I guess this is it, huh? I shouldn’t be too surprised you’re still stumbling around all soulless and whatnot, I mean, hey, look at me, huh! But this is the end of the line, so-”

You dance backward when you realize he’s going to attack you, just out of range of the thorns that burst from the ground. You were never good at this- dodging was always Frisk’s thing. You were far more direct.

Your hand rests on the stick you beat the mailbox with and tightens instinctively around it- your feet launch you to the right in a practiced motion that feels like muscle memory rather than your own ability. You block a vine by throwing the end of the mailbox that had broken off at it, and grab the surprised vine, swinging upward to get airborne and launch yourself into his stupid smug face.

You jab the sharp, broken end of the stick right in his stupid blubbering eye and he recoils, shrieking, vines thrashing. You aren’t good at dodging, but you’re sure as shit good at this.

He shrinks back into the wall, long enough for you to get your hands around his base and rip him out, roots and all. He shrieks at you, flails, bites, but you wrap your arms around him and bite back, teeth digging into vines and mouth filling with blood and plant juice. You both roll a few feet before he gives up and goes slack, collapsing on the stone walkway, keeping him out of the ground.

“God, why won’t you ever just die,” Asriel snarls at you, nose wrinkling up. He looks tired.

“Fuck you,” you spit. You can’t believe Frisk wanted you to come apologize to this asshole.

He gives you a weird look and narrows his eyes, “...Huh.”

“What?”

“You’re not Frisk, are you?”

You shrug and make a noncommittal noise. You half expect him to laugh, but he doesn’t, instead sighing with frustration.

“God, Chara, did you have to bite me? Ugh.”

“You were trying to kill me!” You snap, and huddle away, grabbing an abandoned vine and biting a chunk out of it for emphasis. Decent health restorative, it turns out. “Why the hell would you even take Frisk’s soul? I thought you were all fine and dandy with rotting away down here, huh?”

“Because screw you, that’s why,” he whines. Total crybaby. Idiot loser can never make up his mind. He presses vines like paws against his burst eye, flowery flesh reforming around the area slowly, thoughtfully. It looks painful.

“Better answer than that,” you snarl. He side eyes you.

“I didn’t think I’d get their soul,” he admits after a moment, straightening himself up onto his roots. You make sure they’re still on the stone of the walkway and not the soft earth, though, “I thought they’d fight back, like always. I figured I’d go in for the kill, they’d wake up, do their usual weird hug it out thing and then if I kept pushing, they’d kill me.”

“Oh,” You say, simply, and fold your legs against your chest. You both sit like that for a while, quietly.

“Yeah,” He says, eventually, quietly, “Anyway. Didn’t happen like that. It just sort of…” he makes a weird wiggly motion with a vine, “Poof. I guess. Or whatever.”

You frown, “Okay, yeah, poof, whatever, now give it back.”

Asriel pouts, “What, do you even want it?”

“Yes, I want it, it’s not yours, now give it back.”

You can see his roots creeping back towards the earth, “No. It’s mine now.”

“Are they in there?” You snap, “They’re just gonna spill that whiny feel-good bull into your brain until you go back to being a big blubbery crybaby and give up. That’s how they work and you know it.”

He gives you a long, tense look, and you’re both still for it, until a vine you hadn’t even noticed grabs one of your legs out from under you from behind and yanks hard. You smash face first into the ground and you see stars for the second time today. You can taste blood in your mouth.

“Go home, Chara!” Asriel yells, while you’re still trying to figure out which way is up, “It’s not like you even like them! Don’t think I forgot what you did! Just- just go away! Frisk’s my friend, now!”

He’s gone when you stumble to your feet, fists clenched. You pant and wheeze for a moment, then realize your nose is broken, pieces inside snapped. There’s blood draining downward from it and over your chin, and it’s really gross and annoying, and ruining your hoodie like Frisk’s stupid dress. You wipe it on your sleeve and pull a snack bar from your backpack. It makes you feel a little better, but not much, and you think Mom will probably have to fix your nose and maybe even your hand when you get back. You wave the hand a little, having actually forgotten about the pain you’d become so accustomed to ignoring it.

The cavern is silent, and so is your mind.

You shoulder the backpack. That idiot is right. Who cares about Frisk? All they do is hold you back and make you eat stupid butterscotch pie and cheese pizza, you’re tired of appeasing them and protecting them because they’re as big a whiny baby as your stupid brother. They don’t need your help. They could save themselves if they wanted to, you bet, even, so who cares. It’s not your circus, not your monkeys. Not your problem.

It takes you less than an hour to hike up to where the barrier was and only a moment to cross it. You hike down the mountain. You take the bus home. People stare and the blood on your sleeve and your face, but no one stops you. They never do. The silence is starting to become oppressive by the time you get home as the sun rises and realize you’re supposed to be at Sans’s- and yeah, you hate that guy, but you also don’t want to blow your cover, so. You turn away from Mom’s house and walk the half mile to Sans’s apartment- you’re almost surprised he lives alone, considering he’s practically codependent on his weird brother. His hero worship thing is totally creepy and annoying.

You knock on the door with the unbroken hand and wait. He looks tired when he opens it, eyes drooping on that sagging skull of his and when he sees your face probably covered in dry blood, nose crushed like a paper ball and the red stain on the front of your hoodie, he goes into panic mode and grabs you as if you were Frisk and you liked being picked up. God, you wish you had Frisk here to suffer through this shit, but you don’t.

“holy shit, kid-” he says, breathless, setting you on the counter. He goes rummaging under the sink for where you know the first aid kit is, because he’s total shit at healing magic. Not that he couldn’t be good, he was just lazy and worthless- the only way to get him to do anything was to murder everyone he cared about. Even then, he pretty much just gave up. He annoyed the hell out of you.

"this isn't what I expected when you said 'cover for me-' what the hell am i gonna tell your mom?"

You nearly say "tell her to suck a dick," before you realize Frisk isn't going to stop you and bite your tongue, hard. It hurts, but doesn't bleed. You just shrug.

"what happened?" He urges, wiping at your face with a wet washcloth. It's moist and gross and his hands are all hard and bony.

"Can't say," you say, vaguely, "But it was important." He gives you a long, weird look, and then goes back to cleaning the blood off your face. You don't wince when he touched your nose, because you're not a crybaby, and he takes your hand to wash that too.

You kick your legs against the cabinet beneath you and he puts some neosporin on your hand first. Your fist and face are a modgepodge of gauze and bandaids by the time he's finished his shoddy, slapdashed work, and you hop off the counter and onto the tile floor.

"Cool, well, I'm going to bed then," you yawn, because it's super passed your bedtime. He gives you a weird, suspicious look; but he can't possibly know, so you ignore it and head to his guest bedroom anyway, sleeping on top of the covers.

You wake up screaming. You see Mom’s dust in your nightmares and you laugh as it kicks up into the air under your shoes. You have to do this. You don’t know why but you have to do this, knife blades and white powder and unspoken apologies and laughing until tears pour down your face and you don’t know why-

You shiver and cling to your sides, gasping for air in the mid-morning sun. You bite into the pillow and scream into the fabric, muffled and furious, shaking, eyes puffy, and the door opens.

“hey, i heard you scream-” he starts, because he always does this for Frisk’s nightmares. Frisk wakes up screaming with your memories, feeling your sins weighing on their neck and this stupid idiot always comes and lets them sniffle and sob into his jacket while you grit your teeth and seethe. You hate him. You hate him.

“Get out!” You yell, shoving yourself up with a shoulder and onto your elbows, “Get out get out get out!!”

The door shuts with so little hesitation it offends you and you kick your feet and scream into the pillow, before throwing it as hard as you can against the wall. It knocks over a lamp on the guest bedroom desk (mostly Frisk’s bedroom) and you curl back into yourself, shaking, seething, snarling, angry.

Eventually you calm down.

You sit up and touch your face. It’s still broken, but it’s long since stopped bleeding. It’s a mess of bandages leaving sticky residue on your skin and soft padded gauze. Your right hand looks like a beehive of tan bandages and red stains, fingers are wrapped together like an obtuse mummy. You kind of want to smash it against the wall, but you really aren’t sure why, so you resist the impulse.

You spend a few more moment shivering on top of the covers because wow, it’s fucking cold in here, and it’s also really empty and definitely not lonely, because you? Lonely? Stupid, not likely. But it’s weird and quiet and you hate how quiet it is in your head and the ease with which you control your limbs is weird and almost frustrating because there’s no sense of accomplishment in it. You swing your legs over the side of the mattress and walk to the door.

“hey, buddy,” Sans says, as you walk into his kitchen and open the freezer where you know he keeps the frozen waffles. You grab the chocolate chip ones from the assortment box that Frisk had asked him to get (for you) and pop two in the toaster. Sans is watching you, silent, but you wait patiently until the timer runs out and the waffles come up with a ding, before grabbing one out with your unbroken hand and taking a bite out of it.

“where’s frisk, huh?”

You freeze mid-bite and turn to look at him. He’s leaning nonchalantly on the counter, chin resting on his arms. He’s scrutinizing you with careful eyes, you know.

“I’m Frisk,” You say, swallowing, narrowing your eyes at him. He’s figured something out, anyway, because, like always, you underestimated him.

“look, buddy, you think i want to have some dramatic confrontation and explain all the reasons i can tell you’re not? nah. i’ve known since the beginning you were in there, twisting them up with your venomous bullshit,” he says, leaning upward, and his face takes on a more serious expression. You grit your teeth. The waffle is burning your hand. “but hey, i say, let the kid do what they want, they seem to got it under control. only now i ain’t seen the kid since you got back. i’m not as stupid as i bet you wish i was.”

You smile, tersely, in a way you feel is casual but you can tell from his face isn’t at all, “what, you gonna kill me again?”

There’s a long silence.

“where’s frisk?” He says again, hand fisting on the counter.

“Asleep,” You lie. He doesn’t believe you.

You hit the wall with a thump and lose your waffle. You find you’re more upset about the chocolate chip eggo wasted on the floor than the fact your body is dangling four feet off the ground. You’d probably still eat it. You’d definitely still eat it.

“where’s the kid?” He says again, sidestepping the counter to stand in front of you. He’s doing that ridiculous eye-glowing thing that usually means you’re about to die. You don’t think you could save like this, so you aren’t sure what would happen if he kills you. It would be interesting to find out, but you’d still rather not.

“Sans! Ah- wh- what are you doing?” You say in your best Frisk voice, scrunching up your face in betrayal. He pauses just long enough for you to get the flats of your feet against the wall and launch yourself forward and into him against the sideways pull of gravity.

He cries out when you land on him, and you both roll backward into the hall, the whole world spinning and weird and blue. You raise both fists above your head because one good hard strike to the skull will take him out- and freeze. You could kill him, right now, easy, preserve your cover, but you don’t, hands stilled in the air, eyes wide. You see blood on his chest and tears in his eyes, yellow hallway through his ribs- you did this. You did this. You did this. Don’t make me do this.

He throws you off of him and tosses you back into the kitchen like a ragdoll. You lay on the floor and contemplate your existence, uncertain why you didn’t just end him.

“i’m gonna ask you one more time,” he says, standing over you, eye alight. You let your body rest, tired, “where’s frisk?”

“Gone, I guess,” you say, losing interest in him and looking at the discarded waffle, “Let me up.”

“no. where’s frisk?”

“I said, Frisk is gone!” You snarl, kicking your legs against the floor. Gravity is heavy, and all you manage to do is look like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

“what do you mean gone!” He screams, unlike him, tightening the pull of gravity on you. You want to kill him, you want to rip him apart where are the knives where are the knives! You’re terrified though that if you get the chance to, you’ll freeze up again, someone else’s guilt in your veins.

Someone else’s.

Definitely someone else’s.

“I mean,” you say, struggling heavily to your feet, “Somebody took their soul and left me in here like yesterday’s garbage, so, if you- would- please- fucking-” you say, taking several heavy steps toward him.

His hand shakes as you stomp toward him. Your heel digs into the waffle. “their soul?” His grip on you shatters like glass and you jolt forward, shakily, without the weight, stumbling. He gives you a long, broken look. If you were ever going to kill him, this would be the moment.

You turn away and grab the other waffle from the toaster.

“They’re not dead, I don’t think,” you say, and take a bite, “just, sort of. Asleep, I guess.”

“asleep?”

“Asriel took them, I guess.”

“that- you went back to the underground?”

You shrug, half-nod, and eat your waffle.

“we’re going to go after them,” he says, and you snort.

“Sounds like more effort than is really your thing,” you say, finishing your waffle. You eye the one on the floor. He sees you watching it and steps over, picking it up before you can.

“we’re going to get them.”

You don't know what else to do but agree and you pack a bag full of mom's pie from Sans's freezer and chocolate chip waffles. Sans keeps his eyes on you the entire time you're packing, hands in tense fists. He's overreacting, like a child.

You shoulder Frisk's backpack and glare at him. He steps toward you, and you know exactly what he has in mind.

"Oh, hell no," you say, stepping backward and baring your teeth, "fuck that, no shortcuts. I hate that shit."

He looks like he wants to frown, but he can't. Stupid skeleton face. "it's at least an hour and a half drive there, don't be ridiculous."

You shake your head adamantly, memories of distant music and bones tugging at the edges of your consciousness with sharp keratin claws. You shake them away, harder, "No. No way."

"now listen here, kid, you don't get to make that call, you understand?" He says, and you can see you've really pissed him off. Sans mad at you with nothing to lose versus Sans mad at you with everything to lose could potentially be very different enemies. You need to tread carefully.

"No shortcuts," you say, again, slowly, through your teeth, staring him down. He's staring at you through white pinpricks and you can practically feel the hate rolling off him in waves. You wonder, if you ever get Frisk back, they'll remember this. Maybe they'll like Sans less and you won't have to deal with him as much. And wouldn't that be nice?

But, you don't want Frisk back. Really, you don't.

"listen here you little shit-"

You whip out Frisk's phone and hit the second speed dial. He gives you a weird confused look, but goes silent when it clicks though and you roll into your best cheery Frisk voice.

"Hi, Mom!" You say. It feels weird on your tongue. You try not to talk to Mom much, leaving that to Frisk, because she always gets under your skin and makes you guilty and want to hate yourself, but you persevere, "Me'n Sans are gonna go for a drive up the mountain today and go for a dayhike! Is that okay?"

"Oh, of course, my child!" Her soft, gentle voice says, and your stomach rolls, "Do take some photos for my scrapbook, will you not? Tell Sans I said hello, and thank you for looking after you today."

"Will do, Mom!" You click the line off and your face settles back into stone. "If she sees your motorcycle in the driveway she'll be suspicious."

He gives you an utterly blank look for a long beat, "what's your name?"

"Chara," you say, without really thinking. You should have told him something cooler. Asriel actually got Frisk to call him the Absolute God of Hyperdeath, which is like, the coolest thing you'be ever heard.

"Chara-med to meet you," he says, and you groan and sneer and stomp toward the door.

"Let's just go," you whine, throwing it open and burying yourself in your blood-stained hoodie. It's really starting to grow on you.

You're a block away, clutching his ratty blue jacket in your fists on the back of his bike when he takes a shortcut to the top of Mt Ebott while you aren't looking. Your stomach churns and you want to toss up all those old noodles and pie, but you don't, you settle for stomping off the bike and throwing your backpack on the ground instead. You fold your arms and kick at it, viciously, trying to resist kicking him because he's too fuckin easy to kill and Frisk would be pissed at you so you beat the living shit out of your bag instead until-

Until he grabs you from behind while you kick and scream and struggle, writhing like a lizard's tail.

"would you- jesus christ, would you calm down for like five seconds-"

You scream like a banshee and bite him. He drops you and you lie on the ground and groan. He waits patiently until you're done.

"I told you not to do that," you say, not looking at him.

"tough bones, buddy," he grunts, picking you up by the back of your shirt and dropping you on your feet. You pick your backpack up and wonder if any of the pie survived.

"Whatever," you spit, and stomp ahead of him to the trail that leads to the opening maw of Mt Ebott. He follows, quietly, uncomfortably quietly. You can hear your sneakers on the dead autumn leaves but not his.

The cave is still open for you, and you're pretty certain Asriel couldn't leave anyway, even if he wanted to, but you check the edges for root marks anyway and don't find them. Sans watches you intently while you do, hands in his pockets. You can see the fabric roll as he kneads his fingers together anxiously.

You step inside through molded crest of what was once the barrier and through the end hallway, past the bits of wall and grass and the old, abandoned throne room, overgrown with weedy yellow flowers and dust, but not the dead kind, at least. Sans follows you with the same nonchalant silence.

"Asriel!" You yell into the oppressive darkness, "Hey! Come on, man, where are you!" There’s only silence in response. He probably doesn’t want to talk to you.

“you better not have been lying to me, buddy, cuz if so, you’re in for a-”

“A bad time, yes, yes, whatever, I know,” you say, giving him a look. He seems a bit put off, and you think whatever expression he’s making is his version of a pout.

“i wasn’t gonna say that.”

“I bet.”

There’s a tense silence as you make your way through the empty grey Capital, stone-coloured cathedrals and tired looking buildings bearing meager quiet and the distant hum of throttled wind.

You stop in the old judgement hall. Sans looks vaguely uncomfortable, probably dealing with whatever bullshit PTSD flashbacks he’s saddled himself with. This isn’t even one of those timelines, he’s such a self-pitying loser and christ, he annoys the piss out of you.

“Give me your jacket,” you say, turning to him.

“what? why?”

“Just do it,” He considers it for a moment, then slides his nasty ratty jacket off and hands it to you. His arms are weird and bony. You wish he’d worn long sleeves. You wrap his unbroken hand in the jacket and you kind of wish you’d used your own jacket for this, because it’s gross and sweaty, ew. You bundle it as much as you can and tie the sleeves around your fist and wrist to keep it tight. You can already feel it cutting off the circulation.

He’s watching you, cautiously, suspiciously, as you rear back and slam your covered fist into the closest window. It shatters like you knew it would, sending light-gold stained glass tinkling down to the ground in a shimmer of fractalized mid-morning light. You wrap both hands around a bit of metal framing from the interior and haul yourself up into the sill, bracing the flats of your feet against the base of the window. You knock off the shards still attached to the metal bar and wrap your arms around it, before kicking the sill and yanking backwards.

The years without attention have not done good things to the structural integrity of the bar and it comes away on the third forceful yank, and you fall backwards off the sill. Gravity catches you, and you tilt your head back to look at Sans, who’s got one arm up and a concerned expression on his face. Whatever.

You kick your legs beneath you and right yourself on the ground. You yank off his jacket and toss it back at him, flexxing your fingers a few times to get the blood moving. He looks dubiously at the glass covered jacket, before leaving it on the floor. You grip the bar with determination and both hands, wincing, and slam it into a pillar. The resounding note echoes through the acoustics of the hall even louder than you had anticipated, though you had already known it would be loud. You and Asriel used to get grounded for blaring airhorns in here. You could hear it for miles.

Sans covers his earless head instinctively and you kind of want to ask if he has ears? Because that’s weird- but you’re getting distracted, again, so you continue slamming the bar into the pillar until it chips and cracks, the sound screaming out of the hall and broken window like a dying wail.

“Okay, okay, geez, shut up!”

You let the bar go limp at your side, just barely above the floor. Asriel peeks in the broken window- he can’t burst from the ground in here, it’s all marble and stone.

“There you are,” You smirk, and point at him with the bar, “What’s up, bro?”

“Go away,” Asriel says, peeking still in the corner of the window, eyes narrowed, sneering. You can see thorned vines gripping the molding.

“Not likely. How you doing? Having a good time down here?” You say, swinging the bar back onto your shoulder with a dull thud, casually.

“…Yes,” he says, petulantly, like a child. He still is a child. You’re a child. This is ridiculous.

“right, okay, uh, anyway,” Sans says, interrupting you, and you turn to glower at him, “i hate to splinterupt, but,” you groan, loudly, “seems you have something that don’t belong to you.”

Asriel jerks in surprise when Sans grabs at him with soul magic, but Sans, like always, has utterly underestimated his opponent, and Asriel slams him against the far wall with a battering ram of thorned vines. Ha abandons them, plant matter dying and curling in on itself as soon as its struck. He disappears from the window sill and you abandon your ride along, hopping onto the window after him. He’s scrambling down the parapet of the hall to the cobbled stone street below, and you grip the bar in both hands, winceless and determined and jump.

It’s easily two stories, and you fall faster than Asriel can scramble, but he’s as predictable as always, blocking at you with vines as you jam the bar toward him. You bury it in plant matter with a white-red squelch and a familiar scream of pain. It stops your momentum with a jerk and you let go, falling the last half-story easily with a brief tuck and roll that only scuffs your shoulders and back with doubtless bruises, but hey, you’ve only had total control of this body for like, a day and you’ve already nearly destroyed it. Mom always did say you were too rough with your toys. With your brother. With your own life.

You stand up. Asriel is writhing on the ground, but he yanks the bar from himself and throws it to the side. It hits the stone street with a clatter and you don’t follow it with your eyes, watching him intently as he struggles back into whatever a fucked up plant monster calls “upright.”

“Twice! Twice now you’ve stabbed me!” He whines, voice breaking. You shrug and snort.

“Give me back my soul,” you say, simply, shifting your weight to the foot you didn’t land on. Shit, you think you might have pulled something, now, too. Frisk is gonna be pissed. You unshoulder your backpack from one side.

“It’s not yours!” He yells, and launches himself at you. You slam the backpack into him with a fluid motion he clearly didn’t expect, because the trajectory of the strike sends him into the pillar of the towering hall. He seems dazed and you grab him by the throat with your broken hand, which doesn’t even hurt anymore.

“It’s not yours, either, now give it the fuck back, Asriel!”

“I hate you! I always hated you!” He sobs, pathetically, and suddenly, your throat is covered in thorns. Your hand loosens in its grip, and you can feel their points digging into your skin, constricting, tightening, and your hand is going slack and your legs are shaking and you can’t- tear- them- o f f- a n d - i t s n o t - y o u ca @nnt t -

You’re gasping for air, bent over on your hands and knees, shaking and quivering. There’s the coal-and-sugar scent of magic in the air, burning the inside of your nose and you crumple to your side, straining your head to look behind you. Sans has gotten down here somehow, and he’s having a bad time fighting Asriel a few yards away. Those damn dog-goat skull things are back, blasting cinders out of the old, weak, abandoned structures, but Asriel isn’t fucking around.

You struggle to your feet and finally do get sick, your insides turning inside out and throat clenching and funnelling and screaming fire. You puke as quickly as possible, stumbling back to your feet, and it’s all over your shirt and your shoes and you hate the cinnamon fire in your mouth but you get your hand back around the discarded metal bar despite the blurry darkness the world has taken on and you get back to the fight, Sans sweating and starting to lose his thunder, shit out of shape like you knew he was, and he’s too slow to dodge the next vine, but-

The bar smashes into Asriel's face and sends his untethered body flying like a fucking baseball, a solid twenty feet into an old, overgrown garden. He looks back at you, a weird mix of terrified and furious and betrayed and a dozen unnameable emotions and wordlessly buries himself in the soil, cowardly fleeing again.

You’re a little proud, and turn to wave at Sans, who’s staring at you with the most concern you’ve ever seen, and you chuckle, because, what’s wrong? But then the motion of turning catches up with you and the whole world spins. You collapse face forward, arms ragdolling like limp noodles.

You wonder if you’re dying. You’ve died so many times, and it sure feels like it, but you didn’t win, and you don’t even know where you would go if you died. You wouldn’t have believed you ever had a soul to begin with if Asriel hadn’t been able to absorb it, but you sure as shit don’t have one now. Will you go anywhere? Will you go back into the darkness, into the soft earth, doomed to be plant food forever? Will you just cease to exist?

Will anyone even notice? Will anyone even care?

A pang of unfamiliar childish fear is the last thing that runs through your mind before you black out, emptied of adrenaline and to tired and broken to continue.

You wake in golden flowers and scream, panicked, because if you’ve reset without Frisk it’s all over, nothing matters, you fucked up, you can’t ever save them, you’ve ruined everything like you always do monster monster MONSTER MONSTER-

“Frisk!” Mom’s voice cuts through your screaming mind as the door slams open against the wall. You can see fear in her eyes and you pant- the only flowers in the room are in the vase on your bedside, settled in water. You’d forgotten Mom still grew them in her garden in the back yard, beside the tomatoes.

“I- I-” you say, because words aren’t coming. Your bed is soft, there’s sunlight streaming in through the window and Mom’s sitting on your bed, arms wrapped around you. Frisk’s photo scrapbook is on their nightstand beside their conveniently shaped lamp, their clothes are hung neatly in the open closet-

This is your house.

“Frisk, oh, Frisk, my child,” she says, voice soft and sad, the same tone it had the last time you were gasping for air in a bed while she hugged you, only with the wrong name this time, “I was so worried… I was so worried…”

“Wh- what happened?” You choke out. You hold your hands up behind her back, both unbroken, and stare at them, fingers shaking.

“Sans appeared last night with you in such a terrible way, my child,” she says, paws buried in your hair, “I did not know I even could heal such terrible injuries… Though I am glad I was able.”

Your first thought is mean, to mention that they wouldn’t be here right now if she’d learned healing magic before you died, but she probably learned it because you died, anyway, and you aren’t feeling particularly mean right now, so you just hold your tongue and rest your chin on her shoulder, nose buried in warm fur.

“Mom…” You say, quietly. Frisk isn’t here.

She leaves eventually, to let you get more rest, but you aren’t tired, so you just stare at the ceiling, before flipping open your phone and hitting the first speed dial on it. He doesn’t even answer, but the air pops silently with blue energy and then he’s there, in your room, looking very serious. You notice he’s wearing a new hoodie. It’s lilac.

“you tryin’ to get killed on purpose, kid, or are you really just that stupid?” He whispers, stepping up to your bedside. You narrow your eyes at him, and raise your hands in front of you, clenching them into fists and unfurling them slowly.

“Frisk’s better at dodging than I am,” you say, softly, harshly, “They’re the one good at not getting killed. All I’m good at is doing the killing.”

He grabs both your hands in one, cold bones biting into your skin. He leans in really close, “you get killed, buckaroo, i ain’t got anywhere left to put my friend back in. you think i’m excited about showing up at tori’s doorstep with her kid half dead? watch yourself.”

He stands up. He lets go of your hands. You throw off the covers and drop to the floor in your pajamas, walking to the closet and grabbing a green and yellow sweater from its hanger. Frisk got it for you. You’ve never worn it.

“and what do you think you’re doing?” He scoffs, clearly fed up with you, but who wasn’t, at this point?

“Get out of my room, Sans.” You put the sweater down on the bed and turn away from him.

“yeah, cuz i’m just gonna leave you alone after-” You take off your shirt, “oh. okay, fine, jesus, fine, whatever,” he says. You hear the door open and shut. You tug the sweater on, and change your pants. You pull on frisk’s hiking boots, soft leather with steel toes, a very practical gift from Undyne from last Christmas.

You open the window and crawl out onto the shingled second story roof. You drop into the soft earth on the side of the house and hop the neighbor’s fence so you’re out of sight and head towards the bus station.

“I am the demon that comes when you call its name.”

You adjust your grip on the knife handle, white knuckled fist deadly serious. You take a step forward in the dim cavern, footsteps echoing off the cave walls.

“Wait, don’t-”

“The evil that blossoms forth when weakness consumes you, when all you want is to win. You call for me, and I come. Because that’s all I do. Win.”

Human souls persist after death, their burning strength persevering ever still. No amount of absorption or death can stop a soul from beating, from being taken again. A human soul, anyway.

“Chara, wait, please, I- I changed my mind, don’t-”

“My human soul? My determination? Not mine, but a gift, given freely and taken for granted.”

“Please, just listen, I give up-”

“In turn, a trade. The only thing I’ve ever had to give. Strength, and the stomach to bear these sins.”

“I’m sorry-”

“I’m not.”

Haha, idiot, this is my body now! I can’t believe you fell for that shit! See you in the sunshine state dumbass!

You type the words with the same apathy you do most things and hit send to him, before snapping it shut and ripping the battery out. You drop it in your pocket for Frisk, for later, and settle back into the bus seat, head resting on the window. You’re so tired. You never used to be this tired.

You know why though. Frisk’s soul had corrupted you, their kindness, their dedication to heroism? It was disgustingly sentimental but it tainted you, a weird push-pull tug of pity that made being yourself exhausting. You’d never been good for much but stabbing and screaming, a fantastic example of a waste of space that your first parents had loved to bemoan to anyone who would listen, tied to a bedpost to keep you from tearing the cat’s hair out, to keep you from biting your parents arms while they slept, screaming in the night like a werewolf because maybe you were one, rabid and evil.

A real monster, they’d called you.

Frisk’s soul tainted that, made you believe, briefly, that if you tried hard enough, wanted it badly enough, you could settle for just being worthless and annoying and a bit of an asshole instead of black-blooded evil like you’d used to know you were. But that, of course, had been an optimistic delusion, on all party’s parts.

You’d just been born bad. Sick, diseased, tainted by an uncontrollable evil you’d probably earned in some past life or retroactively, maybe, time shit had gotten weird since you’d died, but still.

You let your eyes slide shut, hand resting on the hilt of the knife you’d slid out of the bottom of your closet, where Frisk let you keep it for sentimental value only, a reminder, you’d said, of a person you’d once been, a person you would die before being again, because they made you promise, because you’d wanted to promise, because you’d thought it was a promise you could make. More or less, anyway. It’s tucked into your waistband beneath your sweater, warmed by the heat of your skin, alive and pumping someone else’s blood through someone else’s veins.

You sleep for forty five minutes and wake when the bus arrives.

You’re hoping your message has given him pause and made him think you’re going anywhere but Mt Ebott- he’s not stupid enough to actually believe you’re going to Florida, but it seems on the nose enough to seem like a diversion while you potentially headed somewhere else, like North Dakota, or Mexico. Just to be safe, you avoid the barrier side exit to the mountain and climb the other.

The hole you once fell down, many years ago, before the body you’re currently poisoning with your presence had even been born, is still roughly the same shape and size, though far more weathered. There are flowers by the entrance, and soft grass where the sunlight touches. You stand at the edge and take a deep breath of fresh, above ground mountain air, hopefully your last, and let your knees buckle, gravity slipping you into the gentle embrace of darkness and rushing wind.

You fall into soft golden flowers, probably cushioned by some kind of long-ago cast magic, a remnant of a memory of a regret. They’re soft under your fingers as you rise, gently, and leave this room and a corpse you have no use for behind.

Asriel whips around, startled, to stare at you, like you’ve caught him off guard. You probably have. You’d expected to have to search for him again, for him to make this hard.

“Chara,” he says, frightened. You pull the knife from your waistband.

“I am the demon that comes when you call its name.”

The words are old, tired, but valuable. You taste them as they leave your lips and they’re bitter, vulgar, a true declaration of your soul. You practiced them on the way here.

“Wait, don’t-”

“The evil that blossoms forth when weakness consumes you, when all you want is to win. You call for me, and I come. Because that’s all I do. Win.”

“Chara, wait, please, I- I changed my mind, don’t-”

“My human soul? My determination? Not mine, but a gift, given freely and taken for granted.”

“Please, just listen, I give up-”

“In turn, a trade. The only thing I’ve ever had to give. Strength, and the stomach to bear these sins.”

“I’m sorry-”

“I’m not.” You tighten your grip on the knife that’s going to kill your brother and break your promise, “Not for this.”

His face twists and morphs into a mirror of your own- ah, no. Not your face.

You pause long enough for him to catch you off guard and slam you into the opposite wall with a wave of vines, but you’re done playing, you’re done pitying, you’re done pandering. You slice through them with the knife, duller than you’d like, but it does the trick.

“I’m sorry for a lot of things, buddy,” you say, ducking under a barrage with a quick tuck and roll and kicking up dust as you scramble back to your feet, “I’m sorry for pulling your ears and I’m sorry for shaving your head that time, I’m sorry for fucking up your drawings and I’m sorry for breaking all your toys and I’m sorry for telling mom you were the one who ate her pie when I did it and I’m sorry she believed me, and- and-” he swings at you, wildly, screaming, and you block last second with the blade of your knife. His vine embeds itself in it, and he shrieks. You yank it out and dig your way closer, “and I’m sorry I asked you to kill me! And I’m sorry I got us both killed! I’m sorry for a lot of shit, Asriel!”

He looks up at you, and you raise the knife at his face. He won’t be fast enough. He’s never fast enough. “But I can’t be sorry for this. I haven’t earned that guilt.”

You bring the blade down, hard, fast, and it lands in soil.

You look up, confused. He’s dodged it, ducked right out of the way. You pause only for a confused moment and raise the knife again- he’s crying, sobbing, and you bring it down again, only for him to slip out of the way again. His wailing is only getting louder, more desperate, even though his mouth isn’t moving and the sound is coming from you, it has to be him, has to be his crybaby bullshit again and you slice, jab, thrust- but he just, he just keeps dodging it, like it’s natural, like it’s easy, like he’s-

“Frisk,” you say, hoarse.

Your hands are tied to the bedpost. The ropes are rough, and bite into your skin in a way that leaves red scabbing marks you have trouble looking away from. It’s bright red, like cherries, like the sunset through the mountains, like blood. It is blood, but you like similes and you can’t think of anything better to compare the colour red to. The rope has a needly, painful texture, and it’s bright green, covered in thorns of that same blood-red.

Your hands are tied to the bedpost, and you can hear mom and dad whispering about you outside the door. A monster, she calls you. Dangerous, he says. Uncontrollable. Wild. A problem. Someone else’s problem, hopefully.

You tear at the ropes with your teeth and kick against the nightstand. A lamp breaks. Your wrists bleed. You’re crying.

Your teeth go right through the rope, and you don’t remember it going like this. You’ve never bitten through the ropes before. But you do, it does, it happens, and you wrench your arms away, rolling backward off the bed. You hit the soft earth with a thump, and the knife is in your hand. Frisk keeps giving you this look, this look, like pity, like an apology, like, like-

You bring the knife down and they dip backwards and away, effortlessly. There’s rocks beneath your feet, and old roots, and they trip you, but you don’t stop running. There’s sunlight between the leaves and a crisp autumn chill. You can hear birds and rushing water. There’s dirt under your nails and red on your wrists.

You bring the knife down. Miss. You bring the knife down. Miss.

“Stop,” you say, gasping. There’s sun in your hair and ropes on your wrist, “Please stop helping him.”

“Chara,” the flower says, and you thrust forward at it, blade first, a gift from Mom’s kitchen (Chara? Have you seen my knife? I need to cut the pie.) (No, Mom, I haven’t. Maybe Asriel took it?). Miss. Miss. Miss.

“Just let me win!” You shriek. There’s ropes on your wrist. There’s sunlight crawling on your back. There’s dirt under your nails. There’s a knife in your hand.

“Chara. Stop.”

You can’t, though. You don’t even know why, but you have to do this. You have to save Frisk. It’s probably the only good thing you’ll ever do, will have ever done, you have to do this, you have to do this.

There’s sunlight crawling on your back, as heavy as your sins, and dirt under your nails. The world is singing, singing, screaming, goodnight, goodnight, goodbye.

The knife goes flying from your hand. It lands on the grass with a dull sound you might be imagining and your wrists, your wrists, your wrists are tied to the bedpost. You struggle, and bite, and there’s blood in your mouth from where the rope is cutting through your lips and the insides of your cheeks, scoring cuts into your tongue, but you’re desperate and you’re tied to the bedpost but you have to do this you have to do this because no one else can and no one else will and you can only do one thing so you have to do it well-

You can’t move. Everything is blue and you can’t get up. There’s no ropes left on your wrists but they’re still red, red, red, and you’re so, so tired. You blink, because you’re confused, delirious, and there’s grass under your hands and dirt under your nails. The blue is gone, and you sit up, gently. Something is different. You feel calm, which is suspicious because a moment ago you were screaming and fighting and it takes more than a second for that kind of adrenaline to dissipate. You think you might have lost consciousness a bit there.

“hey. you awake?”

You look up. It’s Sans. He’s watching you with something halfway between hate and pity, and it makes your skin crawl. You sit up on your knees, and it’s only then that you notice Frisk’s soul floating gently a few feet away, next to a wilted, faceless golden flower. Your breath leaves your body and you want to grab them, greedily, but for a moment you can’t move at all, other than the shaking.

“yeah,” Sans says, and your attention snaps back to him, “you wanna pick that back up? it’s startin’ to make me antsy.”

You scramble forward, and your hands clasp together around it. You can feel the warm edges; and the texture of a soul is nearly impossible to describe. Beyond warm, beyond soft, like the physical manifestation of the word “home” in a tiny glowing package. A human being can’t absorb another human being’s soul, echoes gently in the back of your mind and you briefly wonder if that’s incorrect, or if you’re so evil as to not be human anymore (though thinking that feels a little narcissistic, even for you), or if you don’t actually have a soul anymore and you’re just, like, a body absorbing a soul. In the next moment, you’re too distracted by the familiar feeling of not being alone in your head.

A couple things happen.

The first is that you find you do, in fact, have access to Frisk’s memories from the last day. It’s not a cascade or anything, you have to really look to find them, and they only start about ten minutes ago, really, but you can. Phrases like “If you’re going to leave then don’t leave me here again, Frisk,” and “please let me die, Frisk” echo hollowly in your brain and you refuse to give them meaning or definition.

The second thing is that this causes you to realize in all likelihood, Frisk is going to remember every mean thing you said to their best friend over the past day or so, and that you tried to break your promise, and that you left them here. You can’t quite put a word to the emotion that crushes you like a vice, but it’s unpleasant, and vaguely reminiscent of guilt, or regret, or maybe just bitterness.

The third thing is that you stop trying. You step back, you shut your mouth, and you close your eyes. Frisk is talking to Sans (How did you know we were here?) (did you think i was just standing outside waiting? i’m a sentry, not a guard. i was tailing the flower. they think i’m an idiot.) and you’re sitting inside yourself with your hands clamped over your head to block out the world. As far as you’re concerned, you no longer exist.

Sans carries Frisk home and you hum that stupid lullaby Dad sang you while you were dying and ignore them. They take the long way back, Frisk on the back of his bike clinging to his jacket (the lilac one) and it makes you want to throw up again, because you know Sans’s shortcuts fascinate them and there’s only one reason they wouldn’t take one back.

Mom heals the cuts on Frisk’s hands and scrapes on their knees when you get home. She looks like she’s been crying. She doesn’t make them answer questions they don’t want to be asked, though. She knows better. Frisk was always independent. She knows she doesn’t have to the right to demand they let her know every challenge they force themselves to face after she hugged them goodbye, shut the door, and stopped answering their calls. You remember other moments with your mental ears shut and quiet to the world, refusing to be a part of it, Frisk huddled up in a corner of Waterfall after getting skewered by the fish girl a dozen times, crying into her voicemail, begging her to please just tell them it would be okay until the box was full.

Sans stays the night on the couch and Frisk tries to get you to talk a few times but you pretend you don’t exist and they leave you alone. You don’t know how many days go by like that, quiet, and someone else’s, but ven you’re starting to convince yourself you’re just a figment of someone else’s imagination and trauma, when Mom makes pasta. Not spaghetti, like Papyrus likes so much, but pasta, with the hollow noodles and white sauce. It’s something you really like, but you will yourself still and silent, background noise, and you don’t taste it.

With each day you’ve been silent you’ve felt Frisk’s concern, ever growing, ever reaching, ever pleading, ever gentle, ever kind. It makes you angry. It makes you bitter. It makes you sick.

“Please say something,” they say, out loud. Their fork clinks against their plate. You don’t say anything.

“Hm?” Mom asks, looking up, “Say what, dear?” She looks confused. Sans is glaring at Fri- at you. He still won’t go home.

“Mom,” they say, “I need you to know- they keep saying I’m not supposed to tell you but you need to know about Ch-” you clap your hands over their mouth. You can feel a rush of delight on their part, that they won in getting you to react but that wasn’t fair.

They fight you on it, arms going like marionette limbs and finally you just let them have the stupid arms and grab your legs when they’re not paying attention to them, kicking the table leg. Your chair tips over backward and you hit the floor with a thump that makes you see stars.

“What-” Mom starts, and you can see Sans watching you with this venom and he hates you and you hate him too.

“I’m going to my room!” You yell and, miraculously, Frisk lets you go there. You slam the door shut and slide down against it, burying your head in your knees. “Just leave me alone,” you whine, shoving your fists into your eyes. Frisk pulls them away and puts them on the sides of your face, picking it up. You shove your hands back into your lap.

“Why are you so upset?” They hiss, under your breath. You think maybe you’re trembling a little bit.

“I’m not!” Yeah, you’re definitely shaking. Why are you so upset?

“Chara? Please, come on, you can’t keep- you can’t keep hiding, I need you.”

“You don’t need me, no one needs me-” there’s words in your throat and you don’t know what they are until you pull them out like teeth. “Shut up! Shut up, shut up, just shut up, Frisk, I’m a demon, and I’m going to make you suffer just because I can so just shut u-”

You’re cut off by a sharp ping and the smell of coal-and-sugar. You snap your head into your hands and ball your knees against your chest and your hands shake, white knuckled against your head and you’re going to kill him you’re going to kill him you’re going to kill him-

“look, i don’t wanna tell tori about her weird dead ghost kid either,” he hisses under his breath, kneeling down. You don’t open your eyes, plucking hairs and counting them, letting the sting distract you because if he doesn’t leave you’re going to kill him and you can’t you can’t you can’t, “but if you keep harassing the kid i swear to god i will-”

“Sans.” Frisk says. You don’t want them to look up, but they do anyway, and it’s weird to feel them mad at anyone, especially him, “Can you give me like, five minutes? I’ve got it under control.”

He gives you a weird, confused look, “You do?”

“They’re not as bad as they wish they were. You’re just making it worse. I’ll talk to you later.” He looks dubious, suspicious, unbalanced, but he steps back and pings back out again. You kind of want to ball back up again, but you just go slack.

“You shouldn’t have yelled at him,” you say, defeatedly.

“I didn’t yell,” Frisk frawls over to the corner of your bed, pulls off the comfortor and returns to your spot on the floor, burying your body in it like a cave. You pull it over your head and let the darkness settle over the backs of your eyelids. “I was very polite.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll make it up to him. You’re having some kind of breakdown.”

“I’m not having a breakdown!”

“And I didn’t yell.”

You don’t really know how to respond, so you don’t.

“Did I kill Asriel?” You ask. Frisk’s quiet. Very serious.

“No,” they say eventually, “You were starting to wind down and Sans knocked you out. I killed Asriel.”

“What?? Why?”

“He asked me for mercy,” Frisk says, smoothing your hands through your hair. “He just… Didn’t want to be Flowey anymore. I can’t imagine what it was like down there, alone, and soulless, for so long. He asked me to let him go.”

“You could have taken him with us!” You want to sob. He’s actually gone.

“He didn’t have a soul to absorb,” they say, “I couldn’t save him.”

You focus on your breathing, a gasping mess. He died hating you.

“He didn’t, actually,” Frisk corrects, quickly, and you’re almost frustrated they didn’t let you say it out loud, “He only said that because you kind of stabbed him in the face.”

“It felt like he meant it,” you mumble.

“He liked to say he hated a lot of stuff, but he couldn’t feel hatred, either. He just wanted to get a reaction out of you.”

You look at your hands for a bit, “Did you feel that? The, uh, the stabbing. In the face.”

“No, I wasn’t really like… Awake, I guess, for that. I wasn’t really ‘there’ until you started rambling about being a demon.”

Your face heats up, “I worked hard on that speech.”

“Yeah, a twelve year old in a floral sweater, truly, the most demonic thing ever,” Frisk laughs.

“Well-! It. It was.” You flounder, because this wasn’t supposed to be funny, “It- it was. I was being serious.”

Frisk sobers, but they’re still smiling, “Yeah. I know. You got a thing for dramatics. You’re not a scary soulless demon or whatever, though.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You were pretty upset while I was gone,” Frisk comments, and you scoff, ready to deny it, “You wouldn’t have been if you didn’t have a soul. You wouldn’t have felt anything.”

You stop, and consider it. The logic is sound, but the implications make you uncomfortable, so you file it away for later consideration because you aren’t really up for it right now.

“Also,” Frisk says, pulling you from your thoughts, “Sans said you broke my face.”

“Oh. Shit. Uh, yeah.”

“Swear jar.”

“What?”

“You said shit.”

“You said I could curse once and you wouldn’t get mad,” you mumble, digging your fists into the duvet. Frisk laughs.

“I totally did, didn’t I? I don’t know if I should count it. Sans also said you called him a dumbass.” You purse your lips together. “And that you bit him.”

“He was being a jerk!” You whine, and roll over.

“He was only worried, you know. You two are kind of a mess, left to your own devices.”

You huff, face beet-red.

“I know you think I only keep you around out of pity,” Frisk says, with a sigh, “I’m not whatever perfect protagonist you and half the underground think I am. You know why I climbed Mt Ebott in the first place?”

You nod. You know.

“I’m not good at asserting myself,” they continue, “and I’m really not good at saying no, or being selfish. Like, at all. It’s not healthy. You? Oh man, you are really good at it. And I don’t mean that as an insult!” They say, hastily, when you frown, “I think we have a good balance, is all.”

You think about it for awhile, and they let you, patiently, working through it in your head. You like that. Balance, and all. It’s probably, like, unhealthy codependency, or something, but you, in your brain, unsupervised, killed your mom, and ruined the world. You weren’t built for this place, this world. Maybe any. Maybe you were. These days mostly you just threw tantrums and vandalized cake frosting.

“Would it be okay,” you start, and take a deep, slow breath, “If we went back out and finished Mom’s pasta?”

“Yeah. She’s probably worried, anyway.”

You slip out from the warm cocoon you’d buried yourself in and open the door, padding back down the stairs and into the kitchen. Mom’s putting some things away, but your plate is still on the table. You sit down, and you don’t think she’s even noticed you, but you take a bite of her pasta on your own. It’s cold now, but still really good. Fire magic really does make the best food. You notice Mom’s eyes on you, but she doesn’t say anything, and you’re glad even when she sits back down next to you to pet your hair while you finish dinner. You’ll tell her some day. Not today, but some day.

You’d wanted to dig it by hand, but Frisk had insisted upon the shovel. The earth is soft, even still, probably your doing, in a weird way of thinking. You’re careful of the root structures of the flowers, and careful not to dig too deep, because you don’t know how deeply Mom buried you, but you don’t want to touch your own body, like, ever.

You wrap the little bits of petals and stalks in the dusty blanket from your old room and strip the locket from your neck. Frisk doesn’t say anything when you put it on top and cover the bundle with dirt again, carefully replacing the flowers you’d dug out and set aside.

“so… the flower was your brother.”

You cut Sans a glare and he raises his hands placatingly.

“Yeah,” you say, and lean on the shovel, pushing yourself to your feet, “He was. You said you’d be quiet.”

“i thought you were done.”

“I was hoping that extended until we got back.”

He cocks an eye ridge at you, shrugs, and shoves his hands back in his pocket, leaning against the wall. Supervising, of course, just in case. It’s not the he doesn’t trust you, obviously, but that he doesn’t trust the world! Obviously! What a self righteous ass. Frisk pinches you.

“I didn’t say it,” you mumble, before trotting over to a patch of grass you were pretty sure you’d dropped your knife the last time you were here. Things are starting to grow around it. You pick it up and let the familiar weight rest in your hand before returning to the disturbed ground you’d been digging at. You flip it through your fingers a few times, thoughtfully, before jabbing it into the ground, hard. It kills a flower. You feel a little bad.

You stand up.

“Just take a taste, seriously, no one’s gonna be mad.”

Frisk eyes the pie on the counter, mouth watering. They clearly want it.

“Mom said not till after dinner,” they say, but they’re still watching the warm curls of steam rolling off the top.

“You saved the known universe, they’ll forgive you for eating a little pie before dinner.” You snort dismissively and they seriously consider it, before falling back on their haunches.

“No.”

“Spoilsport.”

“Hey! You’re not thinking about stealing a bite of your mom’s pie before me, huh??”

You both freeze. Undyne’s leaning on the doorframe with a smirk. You shake your head quickly.

“Good, cuz I called first dibs. I made the crust,” she says, proudly. Neither of you are sure you want it now.

“Is dad here, yet?” Frisk asks. She shakes her head and they wilt, only a little bit, before bouncing back and skipping into the living room. They avoid the tree because they know touching scratchy plants still put you on edge, which you appreciate, but even you’re starting to get the allure of all the pretty geometric packages wrapped in shimmering patterned paper. You really want to shred them. You wonder if Frisk will let you. They think yes, most of them, as long as you don’t break whatever’s inside.

“HUMAN!” Papyrus yells, when he sees you, lighting up like the lights he’s strung up haphazardly all over the house. He’s wearing an outrageous giftrot sweater with little electric lights sewn into it in pretty rainbow patterns. He’s very excited about christmas lights, but you vaguely recall that having always been the case. He scoops Frisk up and twirls them up into the air like an airplane and they shriek in delight.

“SANS SAID WE COULD OPEN ONE PRESENT BEFORE WE GO TO BED, AFTER DINNER. ISN’T IT WONDERFUL, HUMAN?” Frisk nods and you start narrowing down which is going to be the best one to open tonight in a mental checklist of size versus weight versus shape.

He puts you down on the couch, between him and his brother and you resist the urge to scoot away from him. Last year he convinced you to wear a ridiculous embarrassing hat for the holiday, but you’d never celebrated it before and you fell for it like a rube. He gets very obnoxiously into the Christmas spirit.

Frisk, of course, utterly ignores your sentiments and crawls right into his lap like the clingy koala child they are and leans over the side table to grab his hot cocoa and chug it before he has a chance to stop them. It’s hot, but good, and Frisk remembered at least to ask Mom for name brand.

“hey!” He says, sitting you back beside him. “geez, kid, robbin’ a guy on christmas eve? cold blooded.” Frisk gives them a milk-mustaches smile and you rub it off on their sleeve, feeling self conscious. Frisk still cuddles in against his side and kicks your legs underneath you while Alphys sits on the floor in front of the laptop she’s hooked up to the tv, browsing one of those movie-streaming sites for a good holiday movie. She glances back at the group on the couch and then grins really mischievously. You know what she’s putting on- Frisk showed her “The Nightmare Before Christmas” at Halloween.

She’s letting it buffer a bit before she hits play and the door opens. Mom’s bustling in with armfuls of groceries, looking rather harried. Sans scrambles out from under you to go help and Frisk clambers over to Papyrus for a lap to sit in eagerly.

“Is that everything?” Undyne asks from the kitchen. You can hear her clacking pots together and pouring water, turning the stove on. Mom passes a few bags to Sans and they ferry them into the kitchen together. You hear rustling and giggling that makes you both a little uncomfortable; Frisk thinks Mom’s flirting with him and you think he’s flirting back. Neither of you like it; but neither of you want to say so. Mom steps back into the living room looking harried and waves hello at you.

“Do you need anything, my child? I am about to cook dinner, and may become distracted,” she says, smiling, sleeves rolled up. Frisk shakes their head. She smiles and dips back into the kitchen. You like her smile.

Alphys starts the movie and scrambles back to the couch to take Sans’s place while he’s in the kitchen with Mom and Undyne. You know Undyne has been watching the turkey roast all day, they’re mostly doing the easy stuff, now- gravy, mashed potatoes, boiled asparagus- your stomach growls. Neither of you ever got dinners like this before you moved in with Mom. Alphys plays with your hair while you let Frisk sing along to the movie and you try not to fidget too much when her scaly hands tie bits of your hair back into odd, anime-inspired braids behind your ears.

Dad arrives mid movie and doesn’t say anything to Mom, but sits down at the chair in the corner and waves to you, because Frisk is singing. He has a bag with him that he shoves behind the armchair and you can see his old santa costume poking from it; he promised Mom not to show up dressed in it again, but you secretly hope he’ll do it later anyway.

Papyrus throws you over his shoulder when Sans leans out of the kitchen wearing reindeer oven mitts and calls “Soup’s on!” And carts you into the other room like a sack of potatoes. You get the head of the table, which makes you a little uncomfortable both, but everyone insisted, so you take it without saying anything.

You’re a big fan of the turkey. Slow roasted and well seasoned, it’s a real treat and Frisk lets you have most of it yourself, so you take a back seat for the potatoes, because you’ll be damned if Frisk doesn’t love potatoes. The room is warm and it’s odd to think of yourself as dead on a night like this, and it’s even odder to think of the meals you used to eat before you met monsters, cooling porridge and stale bread, whatever they felt like giving you, the dirty secret in the basement, the screaming angry child they wanted to forget they had.

You take another bite of turkey and wave to Sans for the gravy.

Papyrus insists on going first after dinner and even you don’t really want to begrudge him. He rips open a present from “Santa” (delivered early for the occasion, according to the note) which is, unsurprisingly, another action figure. He hugs it and immediately begins showing everyone its key features. You turn immediately to look at Mom.

“Can I pick one, now?” You ask, bouncing a bit. You can feel Frisk smiling at how excited you’re getting, but you’re too excited to act embarrassed. It’s present time and it is your turn.

“Well, actually,” she says, and you frown, “We already sort of picked it out for you.”

“Huh?” You say, looking from her to the packages under the trees.

“Which one to give you early, I mean!” She says hastily, stepping forward, “Well, in truth, it was Sans’s choice, and his gift- and as odd as it may be, he really insisted.” You grimace. Sans gives the worst presents. You were hoping to open a medium sized, heavy rectangle from Dad you suspected was an Xbox. Frisk takes over since you hate dealing with Sans and his stupid pet rock gifts and want to pout and mope about the maybe-xbox.

“i went back down to the underground to dig up some more lights when pap ran out,” Sans says, from the hallway behind you, and Frisk turns around to face him, and snaps control back to you so quickly you stumble to keep your knees from buckling under you, “and i ran into somebody i thought you’d, uh, wanna, y'know. share the day with.”

Asriel’s grimacing in his pot, a terra cotta thing with a red bow tacked onto the side. He leans back and gives you a begrudging grin that makes it look a bit like he wants to throw up, waving with a leaf-arm.

“Howdy, Frisky, buddy, uh, you. I’m uh, Flowey. Flowey the… Flower. Yeah.”

“Wh- you- it- Asri-” he gives you a very pointed look and you stumble, “F-Flowey- you-” you can’t even vocalize properly, but you’re shellshocked and startled. You’re glad you’re not holding Sans’s hot chocolate anymore because you would have dropped it.

“Yeah…. Right-o. In any case,” he says, puffing up and fluttering his petals, “I wasn’t quite ready just yet, I guess. And it’s your fault I’m here so, so… It’s your responsibility to take care of me. Or whatever. I still hate you.” He won’t look you in the eye and you aren’t sure what you’re feeling, but your hands are on the pot before you’ve evaluated the feeling. Sans clearly half expects you to snap Asriel in half and just as clearly would be fine with that, but you crush him against your chest, choking on air.

“I don’t hate you either,” you say, without even really understanding the words. He pauses, then lays his face on your shoulder gently.

You should say thank you to Sans, Frisk supplies, gently. You frown, and open your mouth to argue, before pursing your lips and rolling your eyes.

“Thnk y,” you mumble through your teeth, turning away on a heel back to the couch.

“eh? what was that?” Sans bemused voice follows you and you stop, and take a deep breath, sighing again.

“I said thank you!” You blurt, face burning beet red, before stomping back to the couch with your arms wrapped around your brother’s pot. You stand in front of Papyrus, who’s still looking at his new action figure, until he notices you waiting and moves your arms so you can climb into his lap under his ribcage and curl into yourself, knees up by your chest and arms wrapped tight. Mom’s watching you and looks really overwhelmed to see you so… Happy? You guess you’re happy. You’re not sure, but you know Mom’s not happy because she has her kids back. She still clearly doesn’t know. You have to tell her now, for sure, but not tonight. After Christmas, probably before the new year, but this, now, is for you.

“I wanna watch an R rated movie,” Asriel supplies to fill the awkward silence and Frisk titters with surprised laughter.

“Absolutely not!” Toriel scoffs and Asriel groans and whines and you smile at that because it’s weirdly familial. Asgore suggests an old black-and-white movie but you all finally settle on Papyrus’s choice of a Mickey Mouse Christmas Special instead. Frisk is paying attention you know, but you’re busy, distracted. Asriel is quiet, well behaved, better than you, and lets you hold his flowerpot in your lap. Sans sits down next to you at some point and ruffles your hair.

“don’t say i never did you any favours,” he says, smiling, before lowering his line of sight just so, and whispering, “remember this next time you find yourself making a judgement call.” He leans back into the couch.

What an asshole.