"The abyss doesn't stare back – it winks."
Log #742 | Location Unknown
Only tentatively would Gaster ever describe his situation as that of falling. Existing, even, would be a stretch of the truth. The sensation of nothingness was impossible, improbable, as how could one possibly explain a lack? No air to breath, nothing to see, to sense, not even blackness just-
Nothing.
It is not something one is able to assimilate to. Even after all this time – and truly, has any passed? A split second, or an eon, but nothing has changed, just has nothing has ever stayed the same.
He is eternally falling through a blank page. There is not enough left of him to even reminisce, not even the vague impressions like that of an erased mark on a notebook. He isn't even on the same plane of existence as the book.
With what little pieces are left, Gaster falls.
And with what soul remains, if any, he mourns.
Log #15,602 | Location Unknown
Once long ago, he had feared forgetting more than anything. He had been so afraid that his one flaw, his fatal error would result in not only the erasure of his being, but also the erasure of himself as a cognizant entity. It wracked the space his body should have existed in with such an existential dread that it overwhelmed, but as time passed – if it did at all – he learned better.
Gaster now knew that all he was capable of doing was remembering.
Small aspects, sometimes. The gleam of metal under fluorescent lights in his lab, the smell of the blue-spotted mushroom he could find nestled into the far corners of the underground, the sight of small footsteps in snow that never seemed to disappear, no matter how much more continued to fall.
He remembered hands that yearned to create, to amass knowledge, to make something so beautiful that it would remove the gauntness of his fellow monsters' physiques, heal bald spots and dull scales, brittle bones, and the look of utter lethargy in the eyes of his king.
Gaster had once believed it would be his hands that would bring about the salvation of his people, that would set forth a new age where monsters ruled the humans, and on top of the ashes of their society, monsters would exist freely again. Their children wouldn't fear hungry bellies, but would run wild, content and smiling under the rays of sunshine.
He had once hoped that his children could do so as well.
He hadn't thought of them as such, long ago. The two had been Gaster's experiments, and if he had been honest, his mistakes.
They weren't supposed to be sentient, weren't supposed to be anything more than clones, mannequins for him to inject and experiment on, to take apart and put back together as many times as it took to prove to himself, to Asgore, that all of this killing and waiting and repetition could finally stop-
Papyrus had called him father only once. He had spent that night screaming, begging, as both of his arms were forcibly removed.
Gaster, even now, will never forget the look on San's face.
Back then, he had been so angry, so furious, even as his soul was hardened. Determined to fix his mistakes, the missed opportunities that had been born inside his lab, disgusted with his failure and with the duo's very existence, until he had finally set them free onto the world in a mix of rage and pity.
Did they remember him? Their creator, cruel and unfeeling?
Gaster wondered, and he fell.
Log #78,913 | Location Unknown
There was something.
It was difficult for Gaster to even realize its existence after so long, to even recognize something so utterly foreign. If he had to describe it, he would call it a pulse. A breeze with no air, an earthquake outside of soil, the feel of a heart beating with no blood. It rushed over him, gently at first, nipping at his existence and making him forget for a single moment that he no longer possessed a form to feel such things with.
It lasted both centuries and milliseconds, and once it left, it almost felt like he was being erased all over again.
Gaster yearned, desperate for it to caress him once more, for any kind of stimulation in this forsaken void, but it is quiet and the silence is deafening.
As always, he is utterly alone.
Log #901,003 | Location Unknown
It happens again.
The former scientist had managed to almost completely convince himself that it had been but a hallucination, a vague impression brought on by complete sensory deprivation. It was as close as he had come to losing his mind, without truly having a mind to lose.
It hits him again, and this time, it is impossible to ignore – it arrives with all the hesitancy of an avalanche, and all of a sudden his is drowning in this pulse, his whole being, existing or not, is utterly filled with an alien sense of pressure, and were he a religious man he would swear up and down that it was laughing.
Emotions were ever so hard to discern after an eternity with nothing but his thoughts, but faint impressions and memories told him that this was joy, the subtle hints sinking into his very essence and shaking him. It felt as though he were coming apart and being put back together again, over, and over, and over, as long as the feeling lasted.
It didn't leave abruptly this time. Gaster could tell as it started to retreat, and couldn't help the panic that filled him.
Please! He wanted to shout. Stay! The pieces of him, the dust of his bones and the slightest essence of his soul, the very fragments of him that still Were, all screamed out, begging, desperate-
"It's okay." Words, actual, physical words, sound, he could hear it, he could hear-
"I'll come back to you! I promise." The pulse came once more, tinged with melancholy, until it faded, and its absence felt more like dying than falling into the core ever had, and he breaks into far finer pieces than his descent into non-existence ever had before.
Gaster fell, and he fell, and he fell.
Log #972,094 | Location Unknown
His every moment was consumed with thoughts of the pulse. It was an obsession, a compulsion, the only stimulation he had encounter in however long he had been trapped inside of this void, and he welcomed it. Welcomed it with ever fiber that he still possessed.
What could it have possibly been? A voice, an actual, physical voice permeating throughout the unknown, an abyss in which no light could penetrate, no sight nor feeling, but a voice, a voice and that warm, laughing energy, managed to penetrate it and wrap him up in it so tightly.
They said they would come back. He had to believe it. He had nothing left to hope for.
The voice had been an experience entirely foreign, and difficult to wrap his head around. There was no air for the sound waves to travel through, he had no body, no orifices through which he could process sound, and no true way of thinking and comprehending. His ability to be cognizant of his own being was a mystery. But even so, he could hear it. He could feel it. He wondered.
Gaster could not truly tell the voice's gender, or even its volume. It had been as quiet as a rain drop a world away, and as loud as an alarm blaring directly in his face. But there were some things he noticed. The voice was of a higher pitch, and tinged with an accent he did not recognize. They spoke in a drawl, with an interesting intonation, as though they were constantly on the verge of laughter.
Who did the voice belong to? Some unknown deity, finally come to take him to whatever occurred after death? Would he finally be granted release from this eternal purgatory? Or perhaps it was another monster, someone who had approached the core and perhaps managed to make contact?
At this point he would even welcome the voice of a human, anything to remove him from this endless suffering.
Please, come back.
Log #1,674,413 | Location Unknown
"Hey, uh… can you hear me?"
It had felt like eons since he had heard the voice, and it felt like waking up to hear it once more. Every iota of his being was focused on the voice, the same as it had been the last time, if more hesitant.
"Can you hear me now? Can you- wow, I love being a Verizon commercial."
While he had no idea what the voice was talking about, he still couldn't help but listen intently. I can hear you! He wanted to shout. But he had no body with which to do so, no mouth with which to form syllables, and all he could hope was that the voice would keep talking. He just needed it to keep talking.
"Shit-! I'll just have to try again. Um, I'll be back! It's okay!"
Stay! Please, stay! He wanted to beg, wanted to with all of his being, but it was futile. The voice faded, and the pulse that had accompanied it faded with it.
Gaster fell, and he waited.
Log #1,942,034 | Location Unknown
The voice returned. It returned again, and again, and again. He couldn't fathom the time between its appearances, didn't know if it was taking decades or just moments, but it soon became that his very reason for Being was waiting to hear its tones.
It was awkward, more like it was attempting a phone call with bad reception than shouting into the void. It babbled, and it spoke too quickly, and it slurred its words, but it was there, and it was reassuring, and it was something to cling to after so very long alone.
Gaster once did not think he could be lonely. He was wrong.
Often when the voice came, it seemed unaware that he could hear it at all. Gaster truly didn't even know if the speaker was truly talking to him – was there someone else in this void, devoid of any material being with which to communicate?
The voice liked to talk. It liked to curse, and it often made references to things he did not understand. Had so much time passed that it was referencing things from the future? Or perhaps even the past. Maybe an alternate reality reaching through.
It wasn't until a single instance that he truly began to learn about the voice his existence had grown to revolve around.
It had begun like most others – a testing of the 'connection,' of sorts. Sometimes this would be the only contact, and sometimes it would just be the beginning. He preferred when it stayed.
"Okay, so, this should be working. Um, hypothetically, you can hear me, and I'm not just talking to myself. Oh! I'm Lee, by the way! Its nice to meet you! I mean. As much as this is-" the voice, Lee, cut themselves off with an awkward laugh. "I'm gonna get you out of there. I'm so close, this has taken so fucking long but I'm close, I promise!"
Gaster wanted, with every essence of their being, for this Lee to be talking to him. Please, he wanted to tell them, please get me out of here.
He wanted to see sunlight. He wanted to hear laughter and taste food and he wanted to sleep in a bed, he wanted to hear music and feel water, and he wanted to Exist.
"We can do this!"
Please.
Log #2,007,799 | Location Unknown
Gaster grew to know much about Lee.
Lee was a girl. She was flighty and excitable and talked much too fast. Her favorite color was pink, she loved clothing, and once upon a time she had wanted to design clothes for children. She loved her friends, and she loved reading and writing. She loved swimming, and eating food, but not the process of eating it. She felt like she was wasting time when she slept. When she liked something, she threw her all into it. She loved her mother. She just wanted to make people happy, and she just wanted attention.
She was a human.
Gaster felt as though a part of him had known this fact for a long while before he admitted it to himself. He had spent his time in the silence pondering her, picturing what she might look like in his head. Would she be small? Would she have wings, or be covered in scales? How many eyes did she have? Did she have gills? Did she live on land? What was her family like?
Nothing he imagined truly fit. No image he could conjure fit that of the excitable girl with the odd accent.
Gaster had only truly admitted to himself what he had suspected when she had spoken of college. A human college that she had been going to on the surface. She was a human, and suddenly, he was furious.
It was her fault, it was her kinds fault that his people had scraped at the bottom of the barrel for centuries, desperately trying to deal with lack of resources and overcrowding, sequestered away in a world which they should have been ruling. It was her kind that had forced his hand when it came to an alternative method to dealing with the barrier, it was her fault that he had spent decades of his life desperately trying to make something that could change everything, and it was her fault that he was driven to the core in the first place, and it was her fault that he was trapped in the bottomless hell
For what felt like an eternity, he raged.
And eventually, it faded.
And once again, Gaster mourned.
And he fell.
Log #2,632,593 | Location Unknown
"So I'm halfway in the woods, squatting, and I look over and I make direct eye contact with the guy cutting the grass and I'm like, 'Oh shit I can't do this no- oh, fuck!"
Gaster jolted as an intense pulse, this one entirely unfamiliar, struck him. This one could only be described as hot, burning with a heat intense as that of a super-nova without having any temperature at all. It burned him. It ached. Phantom pains wracked his body and with no mouth he screamed as the very plane around him shuddered.
"No-! No, please, I almost had- I'm sorry, please!" The former scientist could make out Lee begging, her panicked words slurring together and becoming fainter.
Even amidst the alien pain wracking his incorporeal self, Gaster felt a knot of anxiety form within his being. Lee? Lee?! He wanted to call out, the very desire to do so seemed to consume him, but he was incapable of doing anything more than listening as hard as he possibly could.
Lee's voice seemed to glitch, cutting in an out as she cried out, until a single, horrifying scream echoed throughout the void, the loudest noise he had ever encountered in the entirety of both his regular and non-existence, until it fizzled out abruptly, the sound eerily similar to a computer error.
Desperation wracked whatever pieces of him existed.
Lee?
Lee, are you there?
Lee?!
Please?
There was no response.
Log #3,000,002 | Location Unknown
She didn't come back.
Log #6,095,403 | Location Unknown
He missed her.
Log #102,090,583 | Location Unknown
Log #175,654,586 | Location Unknown
Log #384,965,123 | Location Unknown
Log #734,928,543 | Location Unknown
Log #1,093,098,098 | Location Unknown
Please.
Log #3,483,828,667 | Location Unknown
Log #4,829,111,092 | Location Unknown
Log #6,989,123,134 | Location Unknown
Log #8,000,032,348 | Location Unknown
Log #9,903,546,702| Location Unknown
Gaster fell.
And fell.
And fell.
And hit the floor.
Log #9,903,546,703 | Location Undisclosed
Gaster awoke slowly. There was an intense throbbing that he could feel down in the very marrow of his bones, and it felt like someone had just recently put out a flame inside of his being. It ached.
It- ached.
His opened his eyes, realization hitting him with all the gentleness of a knife to the back, and he immediately regretted the decision as the light seemed overwhelmingly bright.
As he came further into consciousness, Gaster became aware of just How Much everything was. He could feel the roughness of the material he was lying on, made of some kind of stone, and he could feel every individual pebble digging into his bones like the sting of a scorpion. The slight chill burned like the most intense form of frostbite, and the very breeze felt like sandpaper.
He took a few ragged breaths, trying desperately to adjust to the onslaught of sensory information as it buzzed around him, causing the very world to blur, and finally took a moment to think.
He was alive. He was alive, he existed, his body- he opened his eyes tentatively, moving to look over his body and felt a shaking laugh leave him as a shuddered exhale as he took it all in – the same coat, the same hands, the same chip on his left knuckle, all his scars and his shoes and- he was exactly as he was when he fell.
Actually – Gaster, forcing himself to sit up slightly, discovered with a mounting sense of wonder, that he was in fact in the Core. His fall had been a moment he could not possibly forget, and this place was ingrained into his very essence.
It had not changed at all.
Gaster had to choke down an intense feeling of loss, for a moment – centuries, millenias, eons, had passed and nothing had changed.
Nothing had changed.
On shaking legs, the former scientist stood up, leaning heavily against the column near him, and after a moment of rest, made his way out of the building with slow, lumbering steps.
Log #5 | Royal Labs
Even after three months, Gaster couldn't help but find the heat of the Hotlands sweltering. In the same vein, it still remained overwhelmingly refreshing – it was pleasant for the sake of its unpleasantness.
It was a sensation, an intense one, and he treasured it as he never had before.
The scientist let out a soft sigh, looking to the side at the magma pools below with an indifferent expression. He had grown up seeing these falls. Yet somehow, it still seemed so ethereal.
When Gaster had awoken that day, it had been as though time had simply stopped while he was falling. His king had not noted his absence, his acquaintances and his intern hadn't noticed any particular changes within his demeanor, and life continued on. He had walked to his lab on shaking legs, sat down in his rolling chair, and his tea had still been hot.
Whether he had cried that day, no one would ever know.
Still, he was an adaptable creature, and if he had been given a second chance he was going to take it. He avoided the Core with a single-minded ferocity, refusing to go within 20ft of its entrance, unable to hold back the spike of fear in his heart. He refused to let his employees even consider further experiments on the matter.
He did his job as he always had, but only now did he truly understand just how much he hadn't appreciated the life he lived. His people still suffered, but they felt. They lived, and they loved, and they would die one day, but that finality felt like a blessing to him.
Gaster did not fear death.
He only feared falling.
Shaking his head in an attempt to dispel his melancholic thoughts, the scientist continued walking to the side of the building where the chemical waste containers sat, cautiously holding the vial of what had turned out to be an exceedingly toxic material that one of the underlings had managed to fashion. He had nearly turned the corner when he heard the faintest sound of – rustling? Pausing, the man slowly looked around the edge of the building, and froze. Within the shadows permeating the far side of the lab, Gaster could make out a form seemingly digging through one of the trash bins.
Curious but still cautious, he carefully set the beaker in his hand down on the ground before making his way forwards, stepping lightly as to make as little noise as possible. The rustling continued to grow in volume, until out of the bin popped a head which, upon closer examination was covered with blue hair.
It was a human. Gaster felt his steps stutter in surprise as he looked over the figure. They were messy, covered in dirt and grime, hair greasy and pulled back into an odd ponytail that stuck straight up. They were wearing some kind of pink ensemble, a tank top and sweatpants outfit, the top which read – garbage? Fitting, he supposed. They, or he supposed she, had a variety of bracelets on one arm, and they looked alarmingly thin. Even from here, he wagered he could count the creature's ribs.
He would have to tell the king. He would have to see if there was a way to synthesize-
"Oww, I think I ripped my nail off-!" The figure let out a soft whine, looking down at one of their hands with a wounded expression on their face.
Gaster felt as though the very world around him stopped in that moment – he couldn't breathe, he couldn't move, he barely felt as though he could think.
He knew that voice. He knew that voice like he knew no other sound in this universe, and it may have felt like a lifetime since he heard it, but he knew that voice.
Gaster took a shaking step forward, unable to help himself, and the human immediately flinched, looking up at him as he made a slight sound. She let out a sharp gasp, tired eyes wide in surprise and fear, and without thinking about it, he held his hands up as if to say he wouldn't harm her.
"Are you alright?" He questioned, his voice deep and thankfully devoid of the shakiness he could feel in his limbs. The girl looked nervous and held herself tightly, still standing beside the trash can, but gave a slight nod. "What is your name?" The question left him before he could even think about it, and it felt like his soul was in his throat. Please, he wanted to beg, please.
She seemed surprised at the question, but perked up slightly, as if beginning to think that he wasn't a threat.
"Oh! I'm Lee but my friends usually-" She cut herself off halfway through with a laugh, seemingly realizing that she was about to tell a joke he wasn't supposed to get. He did though. She had told him that joke over and over again, having been the kind of person who could tell the same story for years if you would let her. 'I'm Lee, but my friends usually call me disaster,' with that bizarre sound afterwards. He had hated it. He had loved it.
Gaster felt a soft smile spread over his features, and slowly offered his hand to her.
"It is okay." He told her, mimicking her first words to him. "I will help you."
She had saved him, whether she knew it or not.
And now he would her.
This is a oneshot I wrote for my best friend, who is very much in love with both Gaster and Undertale, but keep in mind I never actually beat the game, so all the characterization is based on her ramblings :P Thanks for reading, and I always welcome feedback 3