Asgore skimmed a finger along the rim of his teacup. Steam sopped into the pads of his paw, wet, slick, but not wholly unpleasant. He drew his hand away and wiped it on his collar, drying his paws before the condensation turned cold. The tea itself was still too hot; there was no use burning his tongue when he had so much time. He'd give it a minute or two more to cool.

Thock.

His ears tensed. The single loud noise beat against the kitchen door. It was like a knock, but sharper and thinner than the rapping of knuckles. Asgore drew a breath in and answered.

"Is that you, Dr. Richter?" he spoke to the empty room.

Silence, for a moment, then the knob swiveled. The door itself scraped against the tiling with stammering, chalky beats. It finally got stuck one third of the way open, and Asgore's visitor gave up trying to push it further.

A bent neck appeared at the door's opening. It curved around to a small head and a sharp beak, which was clenched around the bronze knob. The monster unclamped his beak and flipped his head right-side up. The motion was fluid, like the slithering of a snake. The rest of his movements were carried out with staggered jerks and punctuated clicks as claws made contact with the kitchen tiling.

"I pray I'm not interrupting much, Your Highness." The ibis spoke in a staccato beat to match his gait. The few remaining black feathers along his neck puffed as he shook his head. A white coat concealed the rest of his needly frame. It held tight to the bird's body by the thick rumpled wings he kept clamped at his sides.

"You're not interrupting much at all." Asgore braced his paws to the side of his chair. Its legs scraped against the floor as he pushed himself standing. Asgore shifted his attention from the bird to the glass cabinets at his right. His arm swept out to display them. "Might I offer you something from the shelves? I got in a new earl gray from a small place in Waterfall. I'm quite partial to it, especially with some honey. Let me brew you—"

Asgore fell silent at the shivering sound of lab coat shifting against lab coat. Richter had raised one enormous feathered wing in dismissal. He shook his small, bony head. "Tea's not—well, not my cup of tea. I've had enough caffeine today. Rattles my feathers if I drink too much."

A moment of silence settled between them. Asgore redirected his attention to the three-legged stool tucked beneath the counter. He paced the distance, then grabbed it in a single paw. "I apologize that there's not more seating in here. Come, sit, let's chat about—"

"Where've you put the human skeletons?"

The stool dropped from Asgore's hand. It clattered, rolled a few inches, before resting with the brim of the seat and two of its legs propped against the floor. Asgore looked at it with no interest in retrieving it.

"You sure do interrupt a lot for someone who's talking to the King." He tilted just a fraction, glancing back to Richter from the corners of his eyes. "I'm being hospitable."

Richter swept into a low bow. His beak clacked against the floor, one wing spread entirely across his chest. "Sorry, Your Highness. Please don't mistake my bluntness for rudeness. I'm busy, and I value my time."

Asgore moved back to his seat, his body hanging heavier than it had a moment ago. He didn't bother pushing his chair back against the table as he fell into it. His eyes lingered only on the teacup, still wafting out silent steam.

"What do you plan to do with the humans?"

"I have a theory about their skeletal integrity. I wanted to do some analysis."

"And this is…your own project?" Asgore asked with a hint of disapproval.

"Oh, my apologies. I'll return to the project you assigned me—as soon as it exists." Richter pulled himself out of his bow. He matched Asgore's disapproval with a spark of disdain. "By all means, order me to return to doing nothing. It's been exhilarating."

"Are you unhappy with your position as the Royal Scientist, Dr. Richter?"

Richter shrugged. The coat ruffled up around his stringy, plucked neck. "Malcontent. The position is not much of an honor when it is in name only."

"I have a lot of responsibilities, Richter. I have not been snubbing you."

Richter gestured to the table, coat shivering once more. "Many responsibilities, yes. I'm second-rate to imported teas, it seems."

This evoked a near-silent snarl from Asgore. Richter hopped backwards at the warning noise. "Please excuse my bluntness," Richter followed up.

Asgore collapsed back in on himself. He didn't face Richter. "You're an unpleasant person, Richter. Excuse my bluntness."

"Fair enough."

Asgore crouched in, watching his tea cup intently. Richter still hovered by the door. He hopped from one foot to the other in mild agitation. If he understood his non-verbal dismissal, Richter did not act on it. He let the tension draw itself out, long and thin.

"I've…buried the humans out in the garden. There are four marked patches. The most recent is covered just in dirt."

Richter clacked his beak. He let out a small disgusted honk. Asgore looked up, confusion widening his watery eyes as Richter hopped faster.

"You buried them? For god's sakes man, why?"

"It's tradition for humans," Asgore answered on the defensive. "I do it to honor their rituals."

Richter stopped his jumping. He bobbed his head twice and ruffled his feathers. "That…makes sense, from their perspective. It wouldn't be manageable if humans just left their dead lying about." Richter nodded to himself. "Grim reminders, bad for morale, not to mention unhygienic. I've heard dead humans invite disease as they decompose."

Asgore looked on with fresh eyes. He forgot his distaste as something like fear edged into his voice. His fur sopped in the hot tea as he leaned forward. "Decompose?" Asgore stood once more, moving now toward Richter. "No. Human bodies hold their structure after they die. I can promise you this. They don't look any different after they die. They just—" Asgore bit down on the thought. "…Only monsters decompose, Dr. Richter. You ought to know that."

Richter met the King's advance with another step backwards, but he shook his head all the while. "You're misinformed. They don't decompose immediately, but humans definitely decompose. It's just slower, and gorier. Their flesh? That doesn't last. It loses its integrity. Little microbial creatures eat away at it. The bones stay, but that is it."

Asgore stopped his approach. Patches of his face, stripped of fur, had gone ashen. He appraised Richter with revulsion. "I've never heard of—I've never assigned you—How do you know this?"

Richter hunched in on himself. He clacked his beak. "Oh…oh, various sources. Human literature. Accounts from monsters who were alive before we were sealed down here. And you…you were…despondent after Chara's death. Someone had to handle their body."

Asgore's eyes darted to Richter like spears. "Toriel took their body."

"Eventually yes. The Queen never liked me. She had issue with me, uh-" The scientist shuffled uncomfortably under Asgore's probing stare. Richter coughed to clear his throat. "But uh, that's not—not what's important. Not at all, no. I'm just interested in the human skeleton, Asgore. It's surprisingly stable. Fascinating how it…preserves. Many monsters survive in bodies with far less structure than human bones. You and I are less composed than a simple human skeleton. It's an enigma. A curious one. I want to study the skeletons, or I want to leave, Your Highness."

Asgore pushed himself forward, a sharp, jerking motion that made Richter flutter backwards. "What does that mean? What makes it enigmatic?"

Richter smoothed his feathers back down. His snaking neck tilted away from Asgore. "Oh I shouldn't elaborate. I'm the Royal Scientist—meant only to sit around until the King orders me to a task."

"Richter."

Richter swallowed, twisting his neck inward toward his body as his eyes flitted around. "It uh—from what I gather, a human skeleton is stable. Stable organic matter is the core requirement to hold life, at least by uh…by monster standards. We've done more with less. Flesh matter, plant matter, half our citizens are hardly stable and yet they are clearly alive. But humans—they don't survive, can't survive, that way. No far from it. The slightest tear in their body means death; it's odd. They're so much stronger than us. What makes their tie to life so weak?"

Asgore moved in closer. His cape dragged in waves against the floor. His body, thinner than it had been before his declaration of war, still towered high over Richter.

"That's uh…broad picture though, Your Highness. You asked me what the enigma was, and that is it. Just a…philosophical question. What I want to do is simply study the bone st—"

"You think it's odd, Richter, that a human needs to…die…even though their skeleton remains so well-composed…even after their soul is harvested?"

"Well, yes. But-"

"Why, then? …Why does it happen? Why do they die, if you think they shouldn't?"

"I never implied-How can I compose an answer with so little information available?! I know nothing about humans. We have their bones—only bones. You're detracting from my point. I want to study their composure, not crack the secrets of human mortality."

Asgore had stopped listening. He heard only the ringing in his ears, the eager, clamoring, clawing wave of excitement climbing in his chest. He grabbed Richter by the wings, who squawked and pinwheeled his twiggy legs against the King's grip.

"You have permission to experiment on the human bodies, Richter. You also have a new assignment by my decree." He set Richter down, who wobbled on shaky unstable legs. Richter worked compulsively to flatten his thin spread of feathers. "If those bones should hold life, make them. I have the human souls already. And I have their bodies, buried out in the garden. I need you to figure out how to put the human life back into the bodies. If monsters can live fulfilling lives without souls, so can these humans. And it would only be temporary—killing them—just a quick sting."

"Oh certainly. Why don't I just switch off gravity for a day while I'm at it!"

"Fast and painless—I've gotten good, Richter. They don't suffer—and then…then you can put them back. Back in their bones." Asgore moved side to side, hands twisting in each other, keeping Richter boxed in all the while. "They could come back. I'd care for them. All of them. They'd be happy here, as monsters. I've done it before, cared for them before—Chara was happy here. We made Chara happy. We could do it again—We could—Tori and I—"

"Your Highness, please, I feel uncomfortably cornered," Richter sputtered. His feathers bristled as they brushed the corner of the room. Asgore leaned over him, unhearing. Thin tears pricked the King's eyes.

"Please do this for me Richter. If you think it's possible, then it is. You're brilliant. I'm sorry you've been bored. It's my fault, it is—I've been so caught up in…I thought I couldn't—I couldn't figure out how I would keep going—it was killing me, Richter. But you—bless you Richter—you've found an answer. You'll figure this out. I haven't felt this much like myself since before—no matter! This is your assignment. I'll…I'll get to the garden. You don't have the strength to unbury them. Allow me. I can face them now if they…if it'll be just a bit longer…I can make it up. I can. It's not too late."

Asgore twisted on his heel. He took to the door. His feet pounded, dense and muted, against the linoleum. He yanked the door open the rest of the way. It let loose a high, hollow shriek, and stuck no more. Down the hallway, the King disappeared. Cape and all.

Richter shivered. He wiped his beak in fast streaks down his feathers, attempting to flatten them. It did little to abate the churning anxiety in his stomach. So he hopped; he hopped and shivered and muttered curses under his breath. And when he stopped, he found himself standing alone in the King's kitchen. Alone, save for the single cup of tea Asgore had left sitting on the table.

Richter leaned over the table. He twitched his neck in the few moments he spared to investigate the tea, then drew away in distaste. The tea was no good any longer. It'd sat too long.

Cold now.

…

..

.

Cold.

Richter pressed his wing to the ridges crafted by the child's ribcage. He then drew back with a shudder. Humans were meant to be warm things, and this—well, this wasn't. It was cold as the ground it'd been exhumed from, and felt even colder to the touch. The bones were dense, heavy, dyed with coffee-like stains of dirt and rot, and they sapped up the room's heat without feeling any warmer.

Asgore had dragged the coffin down to the examination room, and he had wrenched the lid off. The splintering crack of wood, the eking snaps of board tearing from board still echoed in Richter's ears. He disliked it immensely—too loud, too dense, too violent. And the scent it left was too strong, the heady, mulchy stink of earth, the choking smell of cold decay. It penetrated every surface, ate into the marble flooring that was now streaked with dirt. Richter wiped his wing along his lab coat and shivered—not so much from the cold. It wasn't his first time handling a dead body. But the walls closed out everything else, the coffin took up so much space, and he could have sworn Chara had felt…warmer when they died.

Richter shook his head to clear it. The bones. Right, the bones. They belonged to third human King Asgore had killed, third out of four so far. This one had put up the least fight, and as a result they'd died the most intact. Time, pressure, and decay had loosened their shape though. The bones scattered along the floor of the casket; their shape was not quite right.

Richter focused on the pieces he could identify with certainty. The skull-he ran a single feathered wing along its temple to feel if this, too, was cold. Still icy, still solid and filthy, save for the deep gaping shadows that hollowed out their eyes and made for contours that Richter's feather slipped into. The jaw bone had fallen off, now resting slack against the side of the casket.

The rest of its bones were…small. Small and dirty and cold. They littered the bottom of the filthy coffin like twigs dropped from trees. Richter started to remove each with care. He laid them out on his table, recreating the creature in the coffin to the best of his ability. Clack. Clack. Sliiide. Clack. Bone to metal, bone to metal again. His plucking disturbed the thick layer of dirt that had sifted through the coffin's cracks, the layer that had buried small bones, and swept others away to the odd corners of the casket. They warped the human picture, scattered bits that had once held the child's shape. It made Richter's reconstruction imprecise. It built a child out of guesswork.

The puzzle of bone watched him as it took form on the examination table—a sloppy, disjointed, decrepit thing. It looked for all the world like garbage—gangling legs made from mismatched halves, strange bones placed where they most seemed to belong. Its right arm contained more tiny fragmented bits than the other. Richter felt himself swimming in the ugly certainty that what he'd made was not correct.

He glanced to his mulch-streaked wings. Grains dug into the folds of his feathers, chalked out the bare, plucked regions of his old wings. It dug into him, the cold smell of death. The uncleanly rot. He took to running his beak in a half-manic frenzy over his wings. Wiping clean, wiping clean, even though he still had half a casket to dust off. And—with any luck—three more after that. He squawked a curse to himself and swore he'd forbid the King from ever reburying these wretches.

After thirty seconds though, Richter stopped. He shut his eyes, exhaled, and drew his neck up to full height again. It was filthy work, filthy violent suffocating work. But it was his work, by decree of the King, and he was best to numb himself to it now. He'd done worse. He still had worse to do. A single dirty human corpse wasn't worth working himself up over.

Richter opened his eyes, and surveyed the puzzled-together skeleton on his table. The skull had tilted. Black empty eyes watched him curiously.

"You're not much of a human anymore, are you?" Richter muttered to the reconstruction. He knocked a wing against the table, and the skull lolled to the side. Its eyes, now to the wall, avoided his question. "…I assumed as much."

Richter used his feathers as a duster, and swept the dirt away from another stark white nub in the coffin. He plucked out a tiny bone, examined it, looked to the skeleton, then tossed the little bone into his metal discard bowl. It hit the brim with a clack and settled to the center. Destined for the garbage, as the whole thing seemed.

Richter exhumed another tiny fragment, and this one he tossed to the discard bowl as well. Because his guesswork stood little chance of finding the right anatomical fix for it; he'd done enough guessing already. And it wouldn't matter either way if he did. This human had been stripped of so much already—a missing bone or two was nothing to a thing without organs, without tissue, without a mind, without a soul.

"I speak too much for my own good. I could have left the King to his moping. Yes, I could have gone on with my marigold experiments (awful, boring things). I've created a strain that grows twice as tall, twice as fast. Wonderful for Asgore's garden." Richter hopped to the other side of the body. He clamped a wing to the skull and tilted it until it faced the ceiling. "I could have quit! I'm old; I've done enough work. I could have made good on my threat and left. Now I've got his hopes up. Now you're the only thing keeping him out of despair."

He moved with bobbing steps to the door. His coat trailed, swimming about his stocky legs. Richter spared a glance backwards. "I have just a few pieces of a long-dead human. The King won't be satisfied until I shackle a life to you. Wretched thing you are, what sort of life could you have? Not a human one, not a true one. I fear I'll turn you into something ghastly, human."

Richter paused, squawked a laugh and ruffled his feathers. "Oh yes, I'm attempting to drag your life back from death, and I do not even know your name. What do I call you? Skeleton? Creature? Child? Ghastly, ghastly thing I'm forced to make."

He hooked his beak around the doorknob. The door eased open, and Richter welcomed the blast of anti-septic laced air that burst through. The bones rustled with the breeze.

"Ghastly…" Richter huffed. He turned, and clicked the lights off in the examination room. "I'm taking my leave for tonight, skeleton. No, not skeleton—I have a name for you. Unless you have a better name to tell me in the future."

He moved to shut the door, and found the skull had tilted once more in his direction. Watching, with hollow eyes, until the door closed in its entirety.

"I'm giving you the name Gaster. …And I pray you don't suffer because of me."

A click followed, and blackness fell in its entirety on the corpse.