A kid in a hoodie finally sat underneath a tree because he was too tired to move, and because his little brother, wrapped up in a little red blanket, was also too tired to move, except much, much moreso.
The baby had been crying up a storm most of the way through to here. Down and through to here, specifically. They'd been below ground for a while now. The fall would've scared anyone enough to cause a clinging panic, let alone a baby; and the big boy in the furry old hoodie had forced smiles and whispered "Please, already" and "Calm down" and had pulled books from his backpack when they'd needed breaks, back when the snow hadn't picked up too much for them to afford them, to help the little guy sleep.
(And ya sleep well, you hear, little man?)
It wasn't necessary anymore.
The kid wasn't that old, but he wasn't stupid and he wasn't naive. He couldn't pretend not to know what it meant - the fact that all sound had died down with minimal change in their surroundings.
That there was no sound at all, other than snow crumpling below him as he dropped down, let alone baby sound.
His hands and the baby's face had gone bone-white. And as he knew he was awake, and that he was bigger and stronger, he could take that his hands were cold, sure. But the baby in them had taken all he could take.
And so now, at this point, the kid in the hoodie didn't even try.
He held the little red bundle gently in his lap, looking at a frozen, permanently-sleeping face. That was the cliche - peaceful as if in sleep. He thought for a couple of seconds - just a couple of seconds - about pulling out a book and reading it out loud. To send the kiddo off, maybe. Or, maybe... to take the edge off, for his own sake. But you know what, he couldn't, because he knew much better than that. He knew it was too late.
Pointless.
He cried, for a bit, and he didn't even realize he was crying. He felt his face getting hot, and the cold really starting to burn.
That was it.
He hadn't brought anything with him that could tell the time; the crying could've lasted for no time at all, or it could've lasted ages and ages. God, ffff, for God's sake, all the same freaking difference, at this point, before this point, at the point at which the meaning behind the quiet and the lack of squirming in his arms had permanently, solidly set in. He was unable to regret having taken the both of them here, because he was here and alone with the consequence, which was far more important - the reason he had taken the both of them here, he'd forget completely, eventually, a piece of an old life he wouldn't be forced to relive or consider.
All he could do was cry, over what had come after. The failure. The failure that had come after.
It was also too late to think about what he could have done.
It was too late not to have climbed up the mountain, and it was too late not to have taken a tumble into the caves. He'd thought they'd gotten off to a great start, once the fact that they'd fallen had processed, when he could still stand and when the baby had landed unharmed but screaming with something like some kind of stupid indignation on top of him.
Right now was right now. His baby brother wasn't unharmed, and he, himself, couldn't move anymore. The kid was more a creature of thought than of feeling, which might have been part of why he'd reject the memory of whatever he'd brought himself and his little brother to Mt. Ebott for in time; it had made sense back when he'd taken them out of the village, clearly, or he wouldn't have done it.
But all that said, here, snow and rows and rows of trees, it was fact.
It was too late to save either of them, if he'd already stolen any ghost of a chance his little brother had had at happiness (way too late and yet way to early to tell how it might have been! Maybe his little brother would've been just the way he was, calm and ever open-hearted, evaluating but curious he was; maybe he would've been the obvious, intense and with a rigid sense of what was right, and what the should be doing, the kid and their parents and himself), he'd already failed.
That was the first time he - who the heck remembers what his name was back then, another thing he'd forget out of a sense of pointlessness later - had ever given up. So really, viscerally, and totally. A precedent he'd set for the future, unwittingly and with ever-increasing resignation.
The kid might have still been crying when, in the snow, a pure, pure blueness started to glow.
The kid thought in some incoherent part that he might have been hallucinating, looking for an ice-cold comfort out here in underground snow. The glow had started from the little red bundle. Red had turned, no lie, straight-up to pure blue. No hue of green, no hue of yellow, no hue of purple or red. The purest, freest and yet saddest blue you could imagine. The big kid's favorite color, hence some of the unreality, the idea of making-it-up.
The blue light gathered up above the little red bundle until it, for all that mattered at the time, erased the color red from his conscious mind completely, and then it faded to a grayness.
A snow-in-the-old-evening grayness.
Red didn't exist anymore. Neither did green, or orange, or red, or yellow, or purple, or and shade of blue but the absolute purest, still glowing in the backs of his eyes.
And the kid watched it, that gray light of hopelessness, a mark of failure that tipped from its inexplicable heart shape to a spade.
No more color, period.
Until there was again.
Back to that blue. The realest blue anyone could dream. It culminated in the air and lit the spade-shaped light of gray blue again; one fading little source of gray becoming two little lanterns of blue. "I love you; I'm sorry" blue; "I don't know you as a person but I so, so want to" blue; "let it all be as it is as long as we all find peace" blue; "I'm glad I know you, and as I reach for the sky, I just hope you know that" blue.
The kid was past the point of being happy or consciously sad.
But it helped him give into giving in. The color blue was theirs, and it was all they had now; take away even their lives, apparently, and it was all they were left with. He and his poor little dead baby brother already gone, too little to have found futures had the base on which to stand in the color, in the color blue, on unfamiliar ground, in an unfamiliar land that swore, through the color blue, that it couldn't hurt them now.
The blue siphoned out of that second light, too.
And it snowed upward, and here, the kid shut his eyes.
Done.
Done and done, and good night, kiddo.
Sans can remember that if he tries, possibility-wise. He doesn't, generally, because he doesn't need to. He's cut loose and thrown away anything that might've come before, because it was a long time ago and it's no good now. That was then; it's all too different now.
After it, he still can't remember all of what came when - he's got a few memories somewhat buried at around the time he and Papyrus met Gaster, from before they were Sans and Papyrus.
He's got one of walking into a bar way back when, because that was where you go to get drinkable things, with that red bundle still in his arms, now wrapping up a bunch of bones that laughed and screamed and rattled. He hadn't been afraid when he and his little brother had woken up, or he doesn't think he'd been, now, in adulthood.
"Hey," he said up at the counter, grinning because that's what skeletons do. "Milk helps build strong bones, right?"
A few bar patrons turned around in their stools, eyebrows raised. An individual of a minotaurish nature chewed on a multicolored stalk of grass.
Flames crackled as good ol' Grillby leaned in. A younger fire-man back then, head burning just as bright and just as orange. He still doesn't know how fire-people are supposed to age; he's not gonna ask.
"You got anything back there for my bro here?"
Grillby didn't wear glasses back then; Sans maintained an illusion of eye contact, making a brief little game or play out of it. He didn't have retinas to strain looking right into the fire.
A hulking scaled green bear on a stool to the left - or it might've been a seal, or a walrus, or a hyena, or, heck, an icthyosaurus - coughed through long yellow teeth. "Grillzbzbzy's wants to ask, what's your names, kids?"
"I dunno, dude," Sans said, laughing without thinking, going with a flow, "We haven't asked ourselves that yet."
"Grillby's raising an eyebrow at you, kid," a long-tailed rabbit to the left of the ambiguous green creature said, as Grillby slid a glass Sans's way; Sans pulled a smile wide at Grillby, looking into the fire again for a way to tell, shifting Papyrus in his arms and tipping the glass to pour milk between the itty-bitty skeleton's teeth.
Logically, it had to have been after that that actually getting their names comes in. It's the moving in with Gaster bit that could have been just as easily before that as after that. Either he tried very, very hard to restore it or he made it up and told himself it was real, but he does have one vague memory of how that happened - a man cackling through a cave at a boy and a baby, both made of bones, telling them that they'd both catch their death out there, ka-ha-ha-ha...? And he can remember where it happened, too, that's for sure - Snowdin, because that's where Gaster's lab was, always had been, and always would be, for as long as it lasted in the realm of time and space, or for as long as time and space lasted.
You end up telling yourself to be sure on some fronts without prompting logical, conscious override.
"Hey, hey," Gaster called from his computer one night, "c'mere. Little friend, I want to show you something."
Sans did that, leaving Papyrus on a mattress covered with makeshift terry-cloth blankets.
Under white lights, facing one of the long sides of a narrow room, Gaster turned to him, little old not-yet-Sans, a four-foot-tall collection of bones in pale plaid pajamas, arms dangling at his sides with cardboard pop-up books, with a crooked smile of caved-in teeth.
"Look," Gaster said. "Look, look, look, look..."
Sans scooted up, leaning and pushing himself up on Gaster's lap to look at the screen.
A bunch of symbols.
"These," he said, "are, uhh - code. Code text. For my diary entries, if you'd like to put it that way."
"'Kay," Sans said.
"It's good for a scientist to keep a diary. A work diary."
"'Kay."
"You should get in the habit of keeping one, too. Just... just a diary, all right? Is your brother asleep? Ha ha, come on. I want to see you make your first entry now."
"I'm, uhh, not a scientist."
"Maybe not, but." A crescent-moon smile, and a lifted finger. "You've got it in you to be a great lab assistant. All right? Let's say that you're in training."
He scooted to the edge of the chair to allow Sans some room to sit properly. He watched Sans play with the mouse and play with the drop-down font list and grin like a self-satisfied little goofball as he started making an entry in comic sans. Gaster allowed it. Sans doesn't directly remember this, but he knows it happened because it was there blow-by-blow in his first entry. Gaster allowed that, too. He even chuckled about it, dryly, with his hand to his forehead. ("Gaster is laughing. He's pressing his hand to his forehead.")
Over time Sans recorded that Gaster started to nickname him "Sans", and that oh, man, I was just joking when his little brother asked But what's my name? and Sans said "Your name is Papyrus". He recorded vague mentions of experiments he didn't understand well enough at that age to end up having preserved anything meaningful of in the future, shame on him. He recorded up to Gaster leaving them with the whole Snowdin wilderness to themselves while he left for the Capital - something about a maintenance report on the Core; they were to guard the supremely interesting work he'd just begun with a great flame-spitting Gaster Blaster for each of them, presents for two very good lab assistants. Sans had kept both, for safety reasons. They spent all their time out in the snow; entries shifted from anything scientific to how far we made it from the lab today, that trick I played on my brother. Everything a game for two in sub-zero sub-reality.
There was none of that feeling of having a thought and then losing it when whatever happened to Gaster had happened. Game for two. Sub-zero sub-reality. Kids in the snow. They might not have even thought about Gaster in the days leading up to it; you don't remember what you don't remember. All of Sans's entries from Gaster's departure to "Who was Gaster?" were about Papyrus, still "my bro" or just "bro" in the actual text. "My bro's still calling himself Papyrus." "Bro's tired of the old books. Taking him to the library tomorrow." "Got a good laugh out of my bro today." A few mentions to the effect of "Bro actually thinks Gaster's gonna care if the shelves aren't alphabetized when he comes home." He hadn't been worried; he'd been glad that Gaster had left them by their lonesomes in a secure little pocket of the world, from the looks of it.
He thought it might've just been him when he came back in from the snow with Papyrus one night, opened up the e-diary he'd been keeping for... some reason, and looked at the name Gaster with a hundred percent disconnect.
He skimmed back. Gaster, Gaster, Gaster. He'd been keeping logs because of Gaster. Had they not just found this place when they were littler, an abandoned lab for a couple of guys who'd seen some hard times in their short days to take shelter from the snow in? The blasters he'd take for walks from time to time (as you do with blasters) were from Gaster. They were called Gaster Blasters. Gaster had logs in this computer, too.
Sans looked for them. He knew the computer like it had always been his. He'd checked password-protected file storage that he'd never put anything in and couldn't remember why they would be password-protected.
The logs weren't there.
He got up, ambled into the bedroom, and asked Papyrus what he knew about Gaster.
Papyrus said he hadn't ever heard the name before, and then got up from his mattress to fetch another bottle of milk.
Milk builds strong bones. He and Papyrus were already the same height.
This was the second time Sans gave in, notably, but he resisted this one. He slept. He woke up looking in to check the haunted hollowness in his head. Looked for answers to questions and hitting does it matters.
But there was nothing to keep the two of them there.
And while Sans got curious, Papyrus got restless. Asked him why they'd just stuck around here for so long. I'm languishing in here! ("Big word." "Impressed?!")
Duty-bound they were, if the content of entries mattered, to stay here, hold down the fort.
Still.
"Bro," Sans said one morning, smiling. "How'd you like to go on an adventure?"
They'd hit the road and not look back for a while. Sans wouldn't revisit the duty too hard. Papyrus would enjoy the trip. They'd drift, or Sans saw it that way, laying on the low side, Sans trying to keep Papyrus close and only partially succeeding. They came to the Capital. Sans kept the contents of the logs in mind - he looked up the Royal Science Division (practitioners of Royal Science) and caught a couple of creatures talking on the way out of the palace; he intercepted them, asked if someone named W. D. Gaster had shown up because of something-something the Core.
"Nnnnever heard of the man," said one, sideways-glancing at the other behind glasses.
"Nope, nope, neeeever heard of him," said the other. "Someone you know?"
"I'm a man of science," Sans said, grinning. It was a joke. A wink-wink-nudge-nudge for his own benefit. "Too bad you haven't heard of him." He winked, for an audience that wasn't there, pulling back on Papyrus's arm when the kid pulled first. "He's the reason I'm here today."
A big, unintentional prank, it was. The first sideways-glanced at the second again. The second sideways-glanced at the first. Glances. Glances.
"'Mmmman'," said the first. "Right."
"What's your name, kiddo?"
"Oh, uh. Huh. I'm Sans." And to carry on another joke: "And this is my brother Papyrus."
"That's my name!" Papyrus barked, turning in a bones-clacking flash to the two scientists.
On to the next again. Hands thrown up; ask what's real.
Reality held for a while after that. It seemed to, anyway. The sub-terranean sub-reality they'd been locked into twice over. A big ol' joke to fool around with. Over time, he could walk to a wall, and blink, and find himself on the other side; he could walk up the street and wind up down it with a thought.
Neat trick, ah? You've just got to believe that nothing is real!
Sans had known a few things he hadn't remembered ever learning. (Picked 'em up off of notes around the lab, he'd say, though all of the notes he'd found around the lab before they'd left had been in his or Papyrus's handwriting.) It had got him in on Official Practice of Royal Science, in time. Papyrus got even taller. He got even stronger and livelier. He looked out while Sans looked out at the fact that this reality wasn't going to hold any more than his and Papyrus's last couple of realities held.
He's come to accept that. His third big giving up.
However they'd come to be here, here had its own sense of time and space. And there was an anomaly in the time-space continuum, said the reports. For a short time, Sans had thought it might've been because of the machine, which has successfully reached outside of reality enough times to grab ahold of a few things that haven't looked like Gaster, if they've looked like anything at all - he's pulled photographs of things that haven't happened, or, worse, memories of things that, similarly, haven't happened, or happened differently. In this one, Undyne is Queen; in this one, he and Papyrus are standing in actual sunlight - distant memories of what the stuff looks like - and smiling happier than ever in a group of friends; in this one, Papyrus is getting cut down in battle. (With who?)
Maybe they've all already happened. Time has been resetting, and he hasn't even noticed. He mentally grips every single moment of deja vu he encounters - did it first to examine them, look at patterns; now, the anomaly getting no closer, he only does it out of habit.
He's asked himself, does he want stability, or doesn't he, and then ceased to ask. It isn't about what he wants; it's about what the anomaly wants. That's sun in that photograph; that's a human in that photograph. Monsterkind might've made it up to the surface once or in a future that's already been rejected, and were put right back underground with a reset.
For everything he learns, the future's an infinite loop, not an infinite line. He's started to move at a curve, while Papyrus, grown into a pure unreal mindset, moves with a nigh-godly amount of energy in a straight line that he doesn't even know is bending; Sans keeps moving to keep the two together. Papyrus doesn't know what Sans does, because he doesn't have to know. Let him have this; they could both use it.
Or, Sans is basically standing still, not so much moving. And in the standstill, he wants to cut that force out of time. Cut the loop. Freeze it. Lock the world in, turn this line into a path, stop imagining the curve; un-trap the two of them from this kept-on-keeping-on fall down the rabbit hole. He'll never get the chance, because how could he? It learns. He could corner it. Anyone could corner it and in a blink it'll never have been cornered.
But standing still, he's still caught up in Papyrus's jetstream.
When Papyrus says "Sans, I'm going on a journey to Undyne's," Sans sees where it's going. He's seen where it's going to go. Papyrus will be there until tomorrow afternoon; Sans tells him good luck and watches him wait all night via a flipbook of mental images with a grin like he's watching a favorite show with a great ending. When Papyrus says "Saaans, Undyne is throwing a party," there's a comfort to take in having their costumes all ready-to-go. "Sure to impress, bud," he says with a wink. Papyrus rides excitement faster and further forward.
Something to admire about forward momentum. Sans can keep up only because he's got notes for how the course goes. He doesn't know if it ends well, if it ends. But he's replaying and replaying the good parts.
Speaking of Papyrus, enough about Sans, right?
What about Papyrus? The Great Papyrus?! It's a pitiful story that doesn't include his, Papyrus's, potent perspective!
Papyrus was born (he was!) and raised (he was!) and has grown up a skeleton. (He has!) He's grown up tall and grown up right in the monster Underground in the Underground night. He was birthed, fully-skeletal and ready to face their cool, cool world, in 1995. The year is now 2015. Or maybe 201-something-else. Two thousand-and-one-something. He is twenty years old. Or something!
His and his brother's past is a mysterious one, but Sans has told him everything, or as much as he was allowed to. He's never mentioned a mother, so maybe they didn't need one? Which calls the previous mention of "birthing" into question, semantically speaking. However, regardless, Sans has absolutely told Papyrus about their dear old father, the Great Dr. Wingding Gaster, who left to do very very secret work in the Capital when they were still very young and who asked that they promise not to ever talk about him or his work ever again to anyone. Ever. This is fair enough by Papyrus, much as it pains him to leave the grrreat unsung.
(Besides, he doesn't even know what Gaster did! And there begins what Sans explicitly won't tell him. When Sans makes a promise, well, apparently, he keeps it. This is Papyrus's only experience with Sans acknowledging promises.)
And he? Oh, he. He.
He is truly great. Or, well, everything on the whole could be better, have opened up faster since he and Sans left home, but he's happy, anyway; in him - somewhere - a strictly metaphorical but no less powerful heart beats full of hope and joy. How far he is from having everything he wants, but where he doesn't have straight shots sky-high via hopes, he has dreams. And ever-so-arduous climbs to them, but they're no damper. Every hero must make a journey; every champion must prove himself! He's surmounted his first obstacle to true championhood - impressing monsterkind's greatest hero herself without even needing to demonstrate prowess in combat - and he's en route to becoming another, from nothing but a little bone-rattler in an inherited laboratory to
With some coaxing, Sans has come along for the ride to betterment. How terrible it'd be, terrible, for Papyrus to leave his dear brother behind! Undyne has signed them both on as sentries and stationed them in Snowdin Forest - the place where they were born! Ah, the freezing wind chills his bones to the child in him, and that child remembers the smell of the snow. (So crisp! So clean!) And they got an advance, which Sans used to put down a down payment on an adequate two-story house. Both their advances combined covered half of that down payment. But ah, alas, Sans must've worked something out. Sans does this, goodness knows how. Papyrus knows better than to question it. Sans has ways - ways of living with his lazy self, joking about over a life in which the serious must come first!
Both Sans and Undyne speak highly of him. That's proof that he's right, isn't it? Undyne dropped by the house to take him - ah, him being Papyrus - out for training, once. She'd laughed, and Sans stood there with his grin all fixed. "Your little brother's a pretty awesome dude," she'd said. "More people could stand to be this driven."
Maybe Sans is jealous. If he is, Papyrus doesn't blame him, and never let it be said that he isn't a generous skeleton.
His training's coming along great. Undyne saw fit to show him a special trick, once. She grabbed her spear tight and told him to bare his soul to her! Her head was bowed.
He did it. It was easy. He let his bones clatter to the ground and drew all the magic in him back in, and brought it ought shining - a flash! - in a bright gray heart.
Gather up all your willpower, she told him. Impose it on your foe!
She screamed through her teeth, swung her spear, and... well, hers was green.
He went home for the night laughing and laughing harder than he'd ever laughed, ever! Or maybe that wasn't true, but geez, he was just excited! Okay?!
He told Sans, bare your soul to me, brother! ("Heh heh, uhh, what?" "J-just do it!" "All right. All right.")
With Sans on the opposite side of the living room, with the lights low and everything shining white, he summoned it all up. Everything into pure color.
Another flash.
The TV rocked back and settled forward again. The curtains flapped. He and Sans both flew a step back each.
The room hummed.
(Pure life! And what's life without hope and belief?)
And they both stood frozen in the blue, blue glow of Sans's soul from his.
Papyrus felt himself beaming. "You know, I think blue is your color, Sans," he said, mildly winding up in tone.
He waited for Sans to laugh.
There was a beat. Enough in which for him to think You're impressed!
Then that thick old chuckling had come. Puffier than he'd heard before. Thicker. Hollower.
"What? What's so funny?"
"Hmm. Nothing." Sans's little white pinprick pupils flashed from one side to the other in their sockets.
"Nothing, really."
"Hey. Not nothing. This here?" Some heart rose into his laugh. That's more like it! "How do you do it, bro?"
"Hard work," Papyrus said. "And also natural determination! Err, things you wouldn't understand."
He didn't mean it meanly; it was matter-of-fact as can be.
"Well, maybe not," Sans said. He winked. "Buuut... I'll take tips from the best."
Something blue about willpower, all right.
But they've got a life in it together, after all.
Cross-posted to AO3.