What do you know of my pain?
You claim knowledge of my story and what I have done, but you could not simply know the depth of my sin, the completeness of it.
Killing? Oh, it goes far beyond just killing.
I want you to try and think of every sick and twisted thing you can possibly imagine doing to another. Picture it all in your mind until you feel like you will be sick. Whatever you think of, I have done, and much more, I can assure you. I have done everything, over and over again, to everyone.
I have killed.
I have raped.
I have tortured.
I have rendered insane.
I have reached into hearts and minds and learned every secret there is to learn from them.
I have been worshiped as a God and slain them.
I have felt every pain and given them.
I have made the closest friends into bitter enemies and the worst of enemies into brothers.
I have made mothers kill their children to save themselves and let the guilt eat at them until they are nothing but hollow shells, willing to do any travesty imaginable just to escape their pain, and have watched children kill their parents and be cast aside to become nothing more than ghosts, barely even alive.
I have exposed people to their darkest fears just to see what would happen.
I have seen everything.
But most importantly, I have proven that all of them. Every. Single. One of them. Are false. The people you see are nothing more than masks, and they are fragile indeed. They are like clay, molded by experience and circumstance, hiding something much darker that lies at the center of everyone.
And not only have I learned how to reveal this darkness, thanks to their facades I can make them into whatever I want them to be. It's all a matter of finding the combination of buttons to push.
Now it's your turn.
A word of warning: this is not for the faint of heart.
Ryan awoke atop a bed of golden flowers, sucking in air as if he had been trapped underwater just moments before. His lungs felt like they were on fire; his whole body burned with an exhaustion that had become foreign for him after his months of training with magic. And like a fire, he felt like at any moment that exhaustion would consume him. Suddenly images of standing in an inferno filled his mind. The sound of his own screams filled his ears. He tried to push it aside, dismissing them as the afterimages of some terrible dream, but his mind would not settle, and his body did not forget the pain: the feeling of his flesh melting, of his bones cracking into charred splinters. It was all far too vivid to have just been a dream.
He forced himself to stand, attempting to reach out to his power habitually and regain some of his lost strength, but he felt nothing. Nothing but exhaustion and that ghost of some less-than-imagined pain. He shook his head to try to clear away some of the fog consuming it, and an even greater pain threatened to split his skull. He ignored it, trying to remember exactly what had happened: the barrier, Asgore, and then flames.
He had been in the barrier, but he could tell by the feel of the dirt beneath his sneakers that he wasn't there anymore. He then began to take in his surroundings and found that he knew exactly where he was.
The cave was small; its walls sloped up to a fissure in the ceiling that moonlight was just beginning to stream down from. Vines clung to its sides, descending down to lap up the pools of water that gathered around the ground's edges, and in the process twisting themselves around the weathered husks of ancient marble columns, more of which laid in ruins than not. He had been in this cave once before.
"That's right," a voice echoed in his mind. "We're back at the beginning." Ryan could almost see the image of the flower's sneering face like it was burned on the back of his eyes. Somehow, he knew that the flower was everywhere at once and yet nowhere. "Fitting, don't you think?" the voice went on.
Ryan's mouth fell open, flower only half acknowledged, as some of his observations began to settle over him. "No. This can't be happening." His voice came out as little more than a croak. The feeling being burned extended to his throat. Ryan squeezed his hands to his sides head, trying to shut out the voice and the lies it carried with it, to will himself awake from this nightmare. But it didn't work.
"It's no use." The flower's voice continued in his head. "This isn't some fantasy. It is all very real."
Ryan nearly collapsed off of his feet, but caught himself against the side of the cave. His breath came in heaves. The First Room: he knew what being back here meant, but he denied it all the same. There was no way he could have been too late.
"Accept it," the flower droned in his ear as if reading his thoughts. "I have won. All of your efforts amounted to nothing, just as I told you they would. The ending is the same. This world is mine, as are you, as they always have been. You may have taken that power away from me for a time, but that's over now."
Ryan tore at the air in front of him with a snarl, trying to tear away the voice. "Why?" he demanded. "Why bring me here? Just kill me and take my soul and be done with it!"
A soft laugh seemed to echo through the cave. "Now what fun would that be?" the flower mused. "You made me wait so long for this moment. Don't you think I at least deserve some time to savor it?"
"So what then?" Ryan half-goaded in his anger. "Are you going to torture me just like you did everyone else?"
"Oh, don't worry. There will be plenty of time for that soon." Ryan once again thought he could hear laughter, this time drifting in from a deeper part of the complex of caves and tunnels that waited beyond the first. "I wanted to show you something, before we truly begin." The voice seemed to whisper in his ear once more. "I want to show you how it all should have went."
Ryan suddenly found himself in a different cave, larger and taller. Overgrown weeds covered most of the cave floor. He stood on a path of weathered stone, several of which marked the ground around him. They converged at the cave's center.
The flower was there, before him, in the center of a stoned off circle of grass in the very crux of the cave. Behind him, a marble arch whose base was covered in vines loomed. Ryan could just barely make out the Delta Rune inscribed at its top. Shadows filled the space beyond it; a darkness that made it seem like this place was somehow detached from reality.
"Howdy," Flowey announced as Ryan stared once more in panicked disbelief at his surroundings. The sinister grin he knew all too well coated the flower's face. "Finally, I have you here," he mocked.
The sight of the flower before him again worked to shift his fear and panic back to anger again. "What did you do?" Ryan roared as he stepped up to the circle.
The flower's expression turned to one of genuine confusion. "What do you mean?"
"What did you do?" he repeated.
The flower then looked disappointed. "I was getting to that, my puppet. Have some patience, will you? It's the least you could do after I've shown you so much."
"No," Ryan said insolently. "If you think I'm just going to sit back and let you think this is over, you've got another thing coming."
The earth shook as masses of vines erupted from the ground before Ryan's feet. They hit him in the stomach, knocking him back and propelling him to the ground. Then they wrapped around his limbs and carried him into wall of the cave behind him. The impact made dots swim in his eyes. They continued to hold him there, suspended off of the ground, as the flower came closer.
"You don't seem to understand yet," he hissed. "I've already won. You're not in control any longer. I took back this world from your little friend, and I've already set everything back to how it should have been." The flower leaned his head to the side and drew even closer. "You want me to take you back? Take you back where? To that pathetic pretend life you thought you had? That life doesn't exist. It never did. You have yet to step foot out of this cave." Ryan's eyes widened as the realization dawned on him, and the flower grinned once more. "Do you get it now?"
The vines dropped him to the floor. Ryan sat on hands and knees, staring at the overgrown stone. He was back at the beginning, truly the beginning. Everything he had done was gone. All of his struggles, everything he had tried to do differently; it was all gone.
No, it couldn't be as simple as that; it couldn't all just be gone. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. And yet, it was.
There was no denying the dirt beneath him, the pain he felt from the blow he took, and the dampness of the subterranean air. It wasn't a dream. It was real. And somewhere, resonating deep within him, he knew that if he left that cave, everything else would be as it was at the beginning as well. Tears began to fall from his cheeks.
"Why?" he chocked. Ryan raised his head to look at the flower who was now back at the cave's center. "Do you really think I care that you've undone everything?" he asked defiantly. "You're just going to kill me in the end anyway. Nothing you do to me matters."
The flower's grin slipped for just a moment, and then he started to laugh. The maniacal cackle went on for nearly a minute before he calmed down enough to speak. "You think very highly of yourself, don't you? I seriously doubt your will is as strong as you claim. No one's ever is. As for why, why not? This world belongs to me. Why shouldn't I do whatever I please? And I have, for a long, long time. And that's the problem you see. I've been so bored lately. But now I have you."
"If you're tired of all of this, then why not just stop?" Ryan questioned. "I was trying to bring you back from all of this, Asriel; to break you free of the cycle you're trapped in. You knew that, and yet you've willingly kept yourself here. Why?"
"Asriel is dead," the flower said flatly, his expression blank. "I am not the monster prince you wish to 'save.' I haven't been in a long time." The flower's eyes then dropped. "I realized that at one point; too much of him is missing from what I am now. That's why I chose a new name. I accepted my fate." His mouth split into a grin once more as he met Ryan's eyes again. "No, I did more than that. I reveled in it." The flower rose up from the ground, spiraling towards the crack in the ceiling above them. "You can't imagine the freedom that has been granted to me, and the freedom that has been taken away. You can never understand what I've been through. And that is why there is no 'saving' what I have become. But, since you did go through all that trouble, I suppose I could try to explain some of it to you."
The flower then vanished, leaving Ryan alone in the cave, and his voice once again rang in his ears. "Get comfy," it said, "we might be here for a long time. Now, let's begin."
Vines burst from the ground once again and coiled themselves around Ryan's legs before he could react. He struggled to break free, but it was fruitless as the vines crept their way up his body. Thorns dug their way into his skin as they climbed and he could no longer hold back a scream of agony as their venomous fire flooded into him. The pain that had lingered from the supposed dream returned to him, and consciousness fled.
He shot up as he woke, ready to defend himself from whatever came at him next, but he was alone. He took a moment to absorb his surroundings.
He was in a room covered with red wallpaper. Small and square, it was practically empty but for a dresser and some shelves against one wall. An intricately patterned carpet covered the floor. He was in a bed small enough that everything below his knees was dangling over the end. He recognized that place as well. It had once been a part of his home. Bolting up from the bed, and fighting off a wave of dizziness as he did, he left the room.
He truly was back in Home. The room opened up into the familiar hallway he had not seen for a long time. Warmth he remembered well permeated the space, but he could not help but feel it tainted because of what had happened before he found himself here, and what he knew must still be happening. He could hear humming coming from the other room, and prayed that he was not too late.
He would have run if he would not have fallen to the ground trying. But he went as fast as he dared, keeping a hand to the wall much of the way until his head finally stopped spinning. When he made it to the other room, she was there. Ryan nearly wept from both fear and relief.
"Oh, you are awake, my child," Toriel said to him as she looked up from setting the table. A fire in the fireplace was the only light in the room. It made shadows dance off of her face, making everything feel even more like a dream.
"Toriel…" Ryan said softly. He hesitated in the doorway, thinking he should run; leave before anything happened.
The monster smiled back at him warmly. "I was worried that you were less than lucid when I found you, but it seems you remember something at least. Yes, I am Toriel, caretaker here in the Ruins. It is nice to meet you, child, though I suppose it is not exactly under the best of circumstances."
Ryan's heart froze. She didn't remember him. To her, this was the first time they spoke. The flower hadn't been lying. He had known it was likely true, but having the proof before him still struck him with a deep sorrow.
Then, the rest of the world seemed to freeze as well. He hadn't been paying attention to what Toriel had been saying, but she looked as if she had suddenly paused mid word. He took a step forward, she didn't move, her eyes stayed locked on where he had been.
"The gentle mother," the flower's voice came suddenly again. Ryan blinked, and suddenly he was there. A tangle of vines covered the table, and the flower rose up out of the center of them. Half of the room looked overgrown now, and like it had been that way forever. The fire in the fireplace was gone. Yet some unearthly half-light still filled the room and allowed Ryan to see exactly what the flower was doing.
"Queen of Monsters," he went on. "She was always considered to be the kindest of us all, but in reality she harbors more darkness than most." The Flower looked up at Toriel like one might a prized art piece in a collection. He rose up on a vine from the table and circled around the monster as he went on. "I learned everything about everyone over time, but she was my first, for everything. Any time I thought of something new, I always tried it on her before anyone else. And so, I've always felt like I've come to know her better than all of the rest. And it had come as a surprise to learn I could have known so little about my own mother."
The world seemed to flicker with static before Ryan's eyes, and for a moment he thought he could hear Toriel screaming a blood curdling scream, but instead of fading like a half imagined sound should, this grew louder. A terrible, wet retching seemed to choke the sound as the world resolved itself to his eyes once more, and what he saw horrified him.
He saw Toriel, bound to the ceiling by vines tied around her wrists. She was naked, and at least a dozen large wooden spikes protruded from her body, the sharpened points stuck out her front like they had all been rammed through her back. Her entire body was taught with the torment that they brought. Her eyes stared out at nothing in agony. Her jaw hung limp, screaming having stretched it to the point of uselessness. Another flicker and the flower hung before her, that sadistic grin coating his features. Toriel's eyes suddenly registered the flower's presence, and an even greater fear entered them. Then, vines swiftly shot out from the flower and impaled her eyes.
And then the screams became Ryan's own.
The world was back the way it was almost as quickly as that other one had come, and Ryan staggered back at the change. Toriel still stood motionless, mouth once again worked like she was halfway through saying something, eyes still holding the kindness he was familiar with seeing in them. But was there a hint of panic behind them now, or was that just his imagination? It was hard to distinguish as those images of her still hung in his mind. He couldn't imagine her remembering that, nor did he want to; it was too horrible to think about.
"What did you do to her?" Ryan demanded, his voice dripping with an anger that surprised even him. His own screams had made his voice even more ragged, and the question sounded more like an animalistic growl. How real had that world been?
The flower turned from gazing at Toriel and looked at him incredulously. "Do you really not get it yet? What didn't I do to her? Whatever you are thinking in your head right now, I have done, as well as everything else you could possibly think of and everything you can't." The flower drew closer to him, a vine came from somewhere and grabbed Ryan's head, turning it and forcing him to listen. "I have brought her happiness, fear, pain, ecstasy, all to the highest magnitude and in every permutation possible in between. So if you were thinking you could somehow 'save' her from me as well, you are already far too late. She has already experienced every possible anguish and pleasure at my hand, and everything else besides." The flower leaned in, whispering into his ear. "And you know what? She enjoyed most of it."
The flower released him with a forceful shove that almost drove Ryan off of his feet. As he staggered back upright, the flower moved his attention back to the boss monster. "But some things, I had found, she had already experienced long before I came along." Another vine reached up to brush Toriel's cheek, almost affectionately. "She has had a long life," the flower went on, "and it was far from a good one."
"-ave something to eat before we start discussing that, hmm?" Toriel brusquely said as the world suddenly resumed. The warmth of the fire returned to the room, and all signs of the flower had vanished. Her eyes flickered to him, and she looked confused for a moment while she likely tried to figure out how he was half a dozen feet from where he had been, then her eyes closed and her smile broadened. "You certainly look famished," she finished.
"Toriel," Ryan began desperately. He ran up to her and grabbed her by the arm. The monster looked down at him, puzzled, but he ignored it. "You have to listen to me. I… The flower…" He trailed off as he realized the monster was not moving again. The room was cold and dim once more.
"As a child, she was a slave," the flower continued as he rose up from behind the monster. "Her human masters told her that if she were ever to use magic, it would kill her. And so, she grew up in fear and agony.
"Magic is a part of monsters. We can as easily rid ourselves of it as you could rid yourself of all of your blood and still live. Monsters use magic unconsciously; it is not something you could easily stop, and so of course she could not do as she was told. Out of all of the strict rules placed on her, it was the only one she could not help but break, and the punishments for it were… severe."
Ryan thought that he heard the crack of a whip as static filled his vision once more, but this time he shut his eyes before whatever horror the flower tried to show him could manifest. It only lasted a second though.
"Later, she was freed," the flower said as Ryan slowly opened his eyes again, "and told the truth. She dedicated her life after that to the exploration of magic. She was the first 'Royal Scientist', in a way. She knows more magic than anyone else alive, and so she is more familiar than anyone with the horrors that magic can produce alongside the good: things that were discovered on accident, and on purpose, that would make you sick." A chuckle broke the flower's thoughts. "Yes, I learned much from her."
While the flower spoke, Ryan tried desperately to come up with a way to escape this hell, but what could he possibly do? He was powerless. He reached again with his mind and still found nothing of the energy he could remember permeating everything around him. It was like magic was just gone, and there was very little he could to without it.
As much as it sickened him, he would have to wait for an opening, and continue trying to convince himself that none of what was happening was real. It was a losing battle, and the flower seemed far from done with him as he went on.
"But I know more about her than just her past," he said. "In fact, I know her better than she knows herself. For instance: her greatest fear. It has changed many times over the centuries of her life, because that fear has been realized at some point every time. And that alone is nearly enough to break someone.
"So, she was not unfamiliar to pain when I began my little… experiments. But I think that only helped me, in the long run. When it comes to pain, it is all a matter of quantity over time. It's like trying to make a pie, in a sense; too much or too little heat or time and you end up with either mush… or dust." The flower looked to Ryan as if he expected him to laugh at some sick joke before going on. "It's a knife's edge's balance that is always different in every situation, and she has given me plenty of practice." The flower ran a vine across Toriel's face. For a moment, Ryan thought he could hear her screaming again. He reached forward, to try to pull the flower away from her, but as he raised his arm, hot pain shot up from his wrist, driving him to his knees. He looked down at his hand to find it missing, his arm now ending at the wrist. Blood spurted from the stump and he quickly clamped his other hand down onto it. The pain increased as the realization of the missing appendage dawned on his body. He shut his eyes to try to block it out, but then it was gone. He opened his eyes again to find his hand where it had once been. He flexed his fingers to confirm it was real. It was if he had imagined the injury. The blood still staining the floor in front of him, however, told him he had not.
"It's amazing the types of injuries a monster can heal from compared to a human." The flower went on as if he hadn't moved. "We have no organs, so the concept internal trauma is almost nonexistent; I've been stabbed in the chest enough times myself to know that. You could stir around all of our insides and we'd still be able to heal completely. That isn't to say it wouldn't hurt just as much. But the loss of a limb, a hand, say, is fatal. A monster's body will constantly expend energy to repair such an injury, but it will always be unable. Eventually, it will exhaust them to death.
"Exhaustion: that is the biggest risk of death amongst monsters. That, and malcontent. A monster can be struck down simply by the force of one's emotions. If it is simply one's intent to kill, and the monster's will is not strong enough, they could fall apart from just a scrape. It makes them fragile indeed."
The world around Ryan changed again. This time, he found himself standing on the main market street in Home. He turned around and found Toriel behind him. The monster was looking down at a group that surrounded her. She and the rest were all still frozen. The other monsters seemed to be cheering, and Toriel held a bashful smile on her face.
"So, what exactly did I learn from that?" the flower resumed. "I learned that everything I had done before could be accomplished other ways as well, and much faster most of the time too.
"As you know, I started by trying to help people. Get them to achieve their dreams and all of that. I spent a great deal of time indeed trying to make everyone happy, to find the 'perfect iteration.' It eluded for an eternity as I tried to figure out all of the right combinations. The whole time I thought that there was only one way it could succeed and I was trying to find it, but that's not how infinity works. Turns out, there are many ways, I simply wasn't thinking outside the box enough.
"Pain is a good motivator, after all. I understand humans will use it to train pets. It's so much easier than being nice, isn't it? Having to spend so much time gaining someone's trust to get them to do what you want, it's pointless, really. It took a few tries – she was my first, like I said, and therefore the messiest – but I eventually found that knife's edge and broke her wide open. Do you want to know what worked in the end? Hatred, for my father. She blames him for everything that has happened, even what happened to us. Isn't that delicious?
"After I played around a bit with my discovery, unleashed her on the rest of the Underground as a psychotic killer, and more besides, I found out something even more interesting: I didn't need to break her. That capability, to become one's own antithesis, already lay within her. It lies within us all. And I don't even need to do anything to coax it out. You see, it already controls you, all of you, and you're not even aware of it."
The world around them changed once again. Not to another gruesome scene this time, but to the door that connected the ruins to the rest of the Underground. Toriel stood before him once more; a sorrow filled her eyes that he knew all too well. Her hand was stretched towards him, but she was not reaching for him.
"You are just like all the others," she said as tears filled her eyes. "Then there is only one thing to do."
The light of magical fire came to Toriel's hand. Ryan threw his arms up to block, but the attack never came. He looked up to see she had become frozen once again. Flowey slithered in from behind and he looked between the two of them, amused. "After our deaths," he started up again, "she fled here, to the place where you fell, to try to protect any others that may wind up down here from my father's wrath in light of his new decree. Or at least, that's what she told herself." The light of the passage dimmed. Ryan thought he could hear the laughter of children, that if he turned around he would see them, but he did not dare look away for fear of another of those waking nightmares.
The light returned, and Ryan saw the flower now hanging next to Toriel's shoulder like the devil of her own conscience. "Deep down, though, she knew my father could never kill anyone else again," he went on. "The real reason she tried to keep the humans here was because she just wanted to play mother again. All she cared about was replacing me."
"That's not true!" Ryan wasn't sure why he had spoken up. He could still feel the phantom pain in his wrist from the last time he tried to interfere, but he felt like he needed to try something. He couldn't just let this go on any longer.
The flower turned to him, expression dark, lips drawn into a line. "It is true!" he snapped back. "It was nothing more than her own selfishness that drove her! A selfishness strong enough that she was willing to try to kill you rather than let you leave! She can't stand to be alone again!" The flower suddenly broke out in laughter. "You think that I am coming up with this out of nowhere? I know it is the truth because she told me so herself, and because I have toyed with that fact countless times on top of everything else.
"Some of the most fun I probably ever had was the time I managed to convince her to kill monster after monster or else I would leave her again. And, boy oh boy, was she not willing to lose her son twice."
Ryan suddenly felt something tug on him. Like the strings of a marionette, it felt like something had tied themselves around his limbs. It made his body feel taught; his joints feel like they had locked up. Before he realized it, he was walking forward, towards Toriel.
"Deep down, she is repulsive. Just like me; just like everyone else." The flower spoke as Ryan tried to fight against whatever force drove him, but not a single muscle lower than his head would obey him. He clenched his teeth as he tried to find the will power to break the hold on him. "And for that," the flower went on, "she deserves to die."
Ryan felt his hand wrap around something. He looked down to see it was a knife. He felt his heart start to race as the pieces came together. "No…" he said through his teeth.
"Come on," the flower reasoned. "It's not hard to rationalize it. You've just fallen into a world of monsters, things your parents used to scare you with stories of. You can't help but feel threatened by their very existence." Ryan continued to move towards Toriel who remained frozen with her own hand raised at him, that age old pain in her eyes that he had hoped he would never see again. He was nearly standing in front of her now. He could feel the knife in his hand like a lead weight, and try as he might to force his hand open and drop it, his body would still not obey. "And why would you take the chance to find out if they were harmless or not? Trying might cost you your life, so of course you would strike first to prevent any danger to yourself." Ryan moaned to try to shut out the flower's words, but they only seemed to work to wake Toriel up from whatever spell she had fallen under. The monster now looked at him in confusion, until she saw the knife in his hand, then her look changed to fear. "It's simply a matter of self-defense," the flower continued to say as Ryan took in the monster's panic, "of self-preservation, of survival; kill or be killed. That is the way the human mind works, is it not? That only one can survive."
Ryan's fingers curled around Toriel's throat against his will, forcing her to her knees. She looked up at him in terror. He tried to pull away from her with all his strength, but he just couldn't.
The knife in his other hand went into her mid and Ryan watched as her look of panic turned to one of almost pure surprise as the blade pierced her flesh. The knife drove itself upwards, tearing through her body. He could not distinguish between the sound of her robes tearing and her. The knife continued to cut until it pushed itself right up to the hand that Ryan had around her throat. His grip silenced her, but he could see the scream behind her eyes as they stared through him to whatever realm her pain made her inhabit.
Finally, the knife pulled free and his hand fell from her neck. The monster slumped forward, and in one swift motion, Ryan's arm lashed out and the knife severed her head from her shoulders. He couldn't look away as any of this happened. He couldn't even make himself scream at what he had just done against his will. His teeth were clenched to the point where he thought his jaw may never work properly again.
The head rolled on the ground until its eyes met Ryan's own again. Surprise still filled them, and tears filled Ryan's own. Suddenly, he felt his bonds leave him. His pent up resistance almost made him fall over as his body become his own again. He immediately ran to the monster, denial making him think that there may still be a way to save her. But the head fell to dust before he could reach it; the body did just a moment later. Ryan then fell to his knees in sorrow, sending some of the dust into the air.
Finally a sound managed to escape his mouth. It wasn't a scream, it was a groan. It sounded absolutely pathetic, even to his own ears. Then, his eye caught a light as it began to rise from the dust. He knew what it was though he had never seen its like before. He reached out to it, and the light seemed to grow as he did so. But, just before his fingers could brush the light, white seeds appeared in the air. They shot themselves at the light and it shattered as if it were made of glass. The shards of the soul disappeared before they even hit the ground. Ryan's hand fell as well in defeat. She was gone.
She was gone.
The flower slithered up from the ground in front of him, disturbing the pile of dust that used to be his own mother. "There, that wasn't so hard now, was it?"
Ryan's eyes snapped to the flower. He tried to cut at the creature with the knife that had been forced upon him, but his hand was empty once more. So instead he tried to grab at the flower, but he moved out of his grasp faster than the air. "You fucking bastard!" Ryan said through his still gritted teeth. He tried to push his pain and grief aside and instead focus on his anger. He found himself reaching once more for magic that just wasn't there for some reason. That failure worked to drive his anger further. He lunged at the flower once more, intending to rip him to shreds. But the invisible bonds returned to him again and he froze.
"Oooo, someone's angry." The flower taunted. "And at me of all things. That's strange; didn't I already explain that this is all your fault?"
"You made me kill her!" Ryan roared in defiance.
The flower let out a chuckle at his argument. "Believe what you want, but in the end, she died because of you."
The world shifted once more, and Ryan found himself back on his feet. They were beyond the Ruin's seal now. He stood at the chamber's edge while Flowey sprouted out of the center of the room. There was just enough light from the torches on the wall for Ryan to see the flower and nothing else.
"This is where it was all supposed to truly begin." The flower said. "You were never supposed to stay here. You should have run away as soon as possible out of fear and distrust. The seeds I planted in your thoughts when we first met should have prevented you from ever staying. You should have left, maybe even killed her in the process, and then we would have met again, here, where I would have killed you like the others so that the puzzle could finally be completed and I could be free of this cycle and explore a whole new realm with powers beyond even my imaginings.
"But, for some reason, you stayed, because somehow you knew. You knew what waited for you beyond this place, and despite my interventions, you continued to stay. It was as if my power over them had disappeared. I know everything to get them to do whatever I want and yet it wasn't working! You had somehow changed all of them, some of them without even having met them, so that nothing I knew worked anymore, and I struggled to understand why. At first I thought it was because you had the same power as me, but now I know the truth.
"For a long time, I thought of this world as a game, and now I know I was right, at least at one point. But this is far more than a game now, and I have you to thank for that, I suppose. You made this world interesting again. And that is why, when you did finally decide to leave, I let you go.
"In fact, I think I wouldn't have killed you even if things had gone the way they were supposed to. You see, one thing has driven me more than anything else since I woke up like this: curiosity. I wanted to see what you would do and how far that knowledge of yours went. Then, I decided, then I would sink my teeth into you. But almost immediately after you went on your way, you started to stay your feet again."
The light of the world grew and the air became chilled as Ryan's eyes adjusted to his slightly brighter surroundings. He was in Snowdin, he realized. The snow covered trees rose over his head along the path where he suddenly stood. Across from him stood not the flower, but Papyrus. Ryan felt his heart sink. "This is all wrong," the skeleton said and the words rang even truer in Ryan's own mind. "I can't be your friend," he said. "You are a human."
Papyrus then froze just like Toriel had. "This one was almost too easy." Flowey said as he appeared out of nowhere yet again. A web of vines knitted themselves between the trees that lined the path through the forest and he lowered himself down from it to the skeleton's shoulder. Once more the world seemed to grow darker than it should have been. "Despite whatever it was he did to change things, not everything was different. I was even able to have some fun with this blithering idiot during your time here. Praising him and pushing him to follow his dreams!" The flower rolled his eyes. "How absolutely dull."
For a moment, the two of them were standing in the street of Snowdin town. The buildings around them were all aflame. Ryan saw several monsters running from their homes. The flames licked at their fur and skin and one by one they fell to the snow in blackened lumps barely recognizable anymore. Ryan could hear the shouts of more in the streets beyond and one more shout besides. It was coming from Papyrus, he realized. The skeleton was on his knees in the center square before him. He had his head buried in his gloved hands. He was saying something. Ryan took a step closer and the words became clear.
"I'm sorry," the skeleton was saying, over and over again. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It wasn't my fault, I swear. I didn't mean to."
And then they were back. Papyrus was back standing the place where he once stood and Flowey hovered next to him once more. "Such a shame too," he continued. "This one is far stronger than any ordinary monster. Far stronger than a boss monster as well, and not even he knows how that came to be. And trust me, I tried very hard to drag it out of him. There's just nothing there.
"There is one other thing interesting about him, I suppose. No matter what I tried, pain never worked for this one, at least not physical pain. But as I said, I had discovered that I hardly needed it.
"Did you know the easiest way for him to become a Royal Guard is for his precious friend, The Captain, to die? There are other ways, of course, countless, but that course is the most natural. And almost always his wish turns into a curse. She knows he was never cut out for the job, and I know just how right she is. I'd hardly need to do anything for him to practically destroy the entire Underground. In fact it was harder to get him to not destroy a whole town than to destroy it! I have never seen someone as incompetent as him. It was a fun discovery, that his misery has nothing to do with me. That is the world's own cruel joke."
Suddenly, the vision he had seen took on a whole new meaning. "You're lying," Ryan denied. "Papyrus would never…"
"Oh, not intentionally, of course. He has, what you would call, a 'pure heart'; incorruptible. So it's ironic, really. But he is also so incredibly naïve and laughably gullible. I once convinced him that a human had disguised themself as the Captain and that the only way to undo the spell and test if it was the real one or not was to push her off a cliff! 'Don't worry,' I told him. 'It won't kill them. I made sure of it.' I was as simple as that! It was the first time I had talked to him on that run. You should have seen the look on his face when she disappeared into a puff of dust! That was a face I've tried to recreate on everyone since. Such absolute despair!" The flower let out another peel of laughter as he remembered his twisted antics. Vines then shot out to pick the skeleton up off the ground. The flower turned him over, examining him.
"I have absolutely no idea why the Captain of the Royal Guard would even decide to make this imbecile a sentry in the middle of the woods. He couldn't even get that right. He let you through, after all. And you fought in this very spot, right? Though 'fight' has a very loose definition in this instance. I will admit, it was fun watching you almost exhaust yourself to death. I didn't think that was possible for a human to do with magic. It was useful information."
"I will spare you, human," Papyrus said suddenly. The world was once more how it had been a moment ago. The light was back to normal, and his friend was standing before him, looking exhausted himself. "Now is the time to accept my mercy." Then he froze again, and the flower returned.
"Even if things had followed the right path, he still would have let you go." Ryan felt something in his hand once again, and he did not need to look down to know what it was. He tried to run before something happened, but it was already too late. His bonds had returned; he couldn't move. "But you didn't know any better," the flower went on. "By that point, you knew how much weaker monsters were than humans. They could never win in a fair fight, so they would have to get crafty, make you drop your guard. You couldn't trust someone you'd just met to just let you go. Not after what you had just heard in town; not after learning just how desperate they were for your soul, for freedom." Ryan's feet began to move on their own again. He still tried to resist, but it was halfhearted this time. He knew it would not work. He shut his eyes against what was happening instead, but then he lost control of even them. The flower made him watch as he walked up to his friend. "And so, you turned the table, and struck while his guard was down."
The knife came down at the skeleton's neck. It cut diagonally down through his body, and it almost instantly crumbled away to nothing. Only his head remained to fall into the snow. Ryan wasn't sure if he was awake again by that point or not. Before the skeleton could say anything if he was, Ryan's foot came up over the skull. He knew what would come next.
But, just as his foot hovered over what was left of Papyrus, the bonds that held him disappeared. Ryan's foot came crashing down before he could even realize it, and he sunk into despair as dust swirled with the snow around him.
Once more, he fell to his knees. He had been caught off guard. His lack of resistance had caused him to be the one to kill friend in the end. If he had just been fighting the flower, this wouldn't have happened. But he had given up, accepted that the flower would just make him kill anyway.
He had given up, and now his friend was dead not because he had been controlled, but because he had let it happen.
Ryan squeezed his eyes shut against that truth, trying to tell himself that it was not really his fault, but no amount of convincing could change what had happened, that he had lost hope to fast. His only comfort came from the fact that the skeleton didn't remember him. He wouldn't have felt the betrayal of his best friend running him through.
When Ryan opened his eyes again, he was back in the dense forest of the lower part of Snowdin. He had lived there long enough to know exactly where he was, but it had been a long time since he had been there.
The snow that coated the ground crunched as a familiar shape landed in front of him. The blue and white avian monster let out a sigh as it stared at the ground.
"No…" Ryan whispered, then louder, "Snowy, run!"
The Snowdrake jumped and looked up at him. "W-who are you?" he said timidly.
Then the world froze again.
"But, before we leave, there are a few other things we can't forget." Ryan was beginning to grow used to the flower's popping into existence. "Your little adopted Snowdrake, for example."
Ryan could not even bear the thought of anything happening to the young monster, not after everything else. "Why?" he said to the flower, fighting to stop any of his emotions from leeching through. He couldn't let him know how close to home he was hitting. "Haven't you already tortured me using him enough?"
"What?" The flower held the word for a long time in mock disbelief. "But I only tried one thing using him against you. There are so many other things I still want to try. But, none of that interests me at the moment. You're the only one I have my eyes on now, but you seemed to care very deeply for this particular monster. So why don't I tell you a bit about him as well.
"As a result of my… experiments, I know exactly how strong every monster is relative to each other. It surprises me, really, how you've somehow managed to gather some of the strongest around you. Yes, this one is special as well. You see, strong emotions make for strong monsters. And the loss of his mother… well, you've seen what that did to him."
He half expected the world to change at that point, but that still did not prepare him for what he saw. Snowy's back was to him now. He was crying out at the scene that lay before him. A pair of monsters seemed to be fighting with more ferocity than even Ryan had seen come from a member of their kind. One of them was Snowy's father, he recognized, the other was a Snowdrake as well, one he had never seen before. Snowy's father soared back from his kin and a wave of ice spikes impaled the other monster. The bird then landed on his victim and picked it up by the neck, dragging it further into the forest. That was when Ryan realized what it was that Snowy was screaming. "Mom!" he shouted to the point where his voice cracked. No, it could be…
That had been his mother.
The world returned as it was before. Ryan was left panting from the shock of his revelation at the end, and a thought clung to his head. Was that what actually happened to Snowy's mother? Or was that just another possibility that Flowey had a hand in. God, he hoped it was the latter.
"Did you know it is possible for ice monsters to melt?" The flower asked like nothing had happened. "Well, I suppose anything can, really. But for them, it's different. They'll start to get all slow, almost like a human when they freeze to death, but this is far more painful."
"Why are you telling me this?" Ryan asked.
The Flower tilted his head to the side, this time his confusion was genuine. "Because I found it interesting? Don't you? I figured you would, considering you cared about him enough to take him in. How could you do that without wanting to find out more about him? Isn't that how people grow closer?"
"Not stuff like that!" Ryan argued. "You should know that well enough. You were alive at one point as well, at least more alive than this."
"Yes, well, many of my memories of that time have long since gotten jumbled with the rest. There are several things that I remember how they work, but not why. The feelings behind the actions have escaped me, and so I must look for other signs: more physical traits that accompany different emotions and reactions. And to be fair, I think they're more useful, and more accurate."
Flowey drew close to Snowy. Ryan was tempted to try to pull the flower away from him, but after the last time he tried anything, he hesitated. "This one looked up to you like a father," the flower said. "He even loved you. You were the best thing to ever become a part of his life. But, of course, none of that was meant to be. If you had ever even come across him at all, you would have assumed the worst. After escaping the Ruins, and after I gave you fair warning for what awaited you out here. You would have killed him at first glance, afraid of being recognized for what you were and attacked, or having him fly off and tell others of your presence."
The invisible strings seemed to tie themselves around him once again. Ryan felt himself be jerked forwards. His head swam with the force of it, only whatever was controlling him managed kept him on his feet. His hand reached out and latched itself around Snowy's neck. As he did, the world moved again. Ryan watched as the Snowdrake's eyes quickly switched between surprise, shock, and then horror. Ryan tried with all his might to pull his hand away this time, but it only made him squeeze tighter. He could feel his hand getting colder; Snowy was trying to break him away using magic. In just a few moments, his hand was already numb, but it did not lessen his grip. Snowy's expression became one of panic. He looked up at Ryan, pleading to understand what was going on, and to not die. The grip was tight enough that no words could escape his mouth.
Then, as the light began to fade from the monster's eyes, something else entered them. The Snowdrake was suddenly looking at him differently, and Ryan instinctively knew what that difference was.
He recognized him; he knew exactly who was killing him. Somehow, the memories of the world before had returned to him at the last moment. As soon as Ryan realized this, his hand twisted to the side, and Snowy's head was nearly torn from his neck. The bonds fell away and Ryan dropped into the snow. The body of his friend fell to dust before him once again.
He struggled to form thought, but his head and his heart simply felt empty. He stared down at the snow for long minutes, until the reality he already knew sunk into his bones. "I'm sorry," he wept.
He had killed Snowy, his Snowy, the Snowy that he had come to know and love as well. This was exactly what he had feared would happen when he stayed in that town, that those he had gotten close to would simply be punished for it; that their love for him would be used against him. And now that nightmare had come true as well.
He buried his face in his hands, wishing he still had the knife to end his own pain. He had told himself the flower could do nothing to him, He had been wrong. Oh so wrong. "I'm sorry," he choked again.
"Ryan?" a new voice called to him. Ryan raised his head from his hands in shock. He saw that he was now back in town, and Sallie was walking up to him, concern writ on her face. "What's wrong?" She asked him. "You're not usually one to cry in the middle of the street like this." Ryan could tell she meant that half as a joke, but her voice was all seriousness. She wanted to know what was wrong was him, just as she always did. And not for the first time did he wish she didn't. She cared about him, just as she had before. She looked away from his face for a moment and frowned. "And why do you look like you're wearing clothes that were sitting on a shelf for a year?"
The monster grabbed his arm and pulled him up to his feet. Ryan was too dumbfounded to resist. "Come on," she said, "let's get inside. You can tell me then."
Sallie dragged him back to her house and inside the shop door. They went to the back room where she sat Ryan down on one of the piles of uncut cloth next to a table. The monster leaned against another table across from him. She looked him up and down. "I haven't seen you this brain dead since you first started training with Undyne. What happened?"
Ryan slowly looked up at the monster. He had cared so much about her. Too much, he knew now. "You should have left me long before you did," he said quietly.
"What?" she said before the world froze.
"Ah, yes, your… 'girlfriend'." Flowey said as his vines began to grow out of the walls. "The bar that held you back from me, from your fate, more than any other. Ironic that you should end up with her. I met her once when she was just an infant. I think, at the time, her mother intended to try to set the two of us up. I understand that many humans find that a bit odd nowadays. But we're from an old world, you understand, one that doesn't necessarily marry for love, though for monsters it was much more common, but it was not always the case."
Ryan was staring blankly at the floor as the Flower spoke. He knew what was coming; nothing he said would change it; getting angry wouldn't change it. And whether his hand was forced or wasn't it wouldn't change the fact that it was all his fault in the end. Maybe he could just wait it out. The flower slithered up under his nose. "No comment? You're not gone already, are you? I figured your 'determination' would have at least kept you willful for this part. No? Well, maybe this will wake you up: She didn't love you."
Despite himself, Ryan's eyes flickered to the flower. He chuckled. "That's right, she didn't love you at all. She was simply obsessed with the idea of love, of having a part of her life not linked to this frozen wasteland of a town. She latched on to you only because you were the first thing to cross her path that fit the description. It wasn't some fated meeting between a destined match like the two of you, and so many others like to think. In truth, there is no such thing as a destined match. Anyone can be made to fall in love with anyone, I've found. Under the right circumstances. Things do need to be a bit… drastic, most of the time, and more often than not it is not a healthy dependency. But, they all called it love at the time.
"Because what is love really? I've long since forgotten myself. And in my attempts to remember, I tried to put a more substantial definition to it than just some intangible emotion, but for everyone it was different. What definition can something have if there is no commonality between its instances? It's meaningless!
"That's when I realized there's no such thing as love. That which you all call 'love' is simply yet another manifestation of your own selfishness. The desire to not be alone, to be needed by others, to be acknowledged by others; you hide these feelings behind the word 'love' as some romanticized ideal, as some eternal staple of existence. But people fall in and out of love all of the time, don't they? After all, you yourself would have left her for dead if it meant a chance at saving me. And even she is not your first. I knew as much by watching you. So, deep down, even you must recognize its fallacy."
Ryan continued to remain motionless. Perhaps if the flower thought he was broken, this would stop, or at least continue somewhere else. He would rather kill anyone than Sallie, and he hated himself for admitting that fact, but what else could he do. But he knew he would be made to kill her, so he wanted to be over with quickly and did not egg the flower on anymore.
Then the flower's voice changed. "Now what if I offered you what you wanted?" Ryan's head snapped up at the familiar voice. It was not Flowey that stood before him now, it was Asriel. The monster prince was looking up at him, looking just as he had in the tapes. His face carried the same sick expression as the flower had, but Ryan hardly noticed.
It was Asriel, standing before him. He had waited so long for this moment that he nearly forgot what was going on around him. "What if I said I would abandon all of this and come back if you kill her?" the prince said once he was sure he had Ryan's full attention.
Ryan began to rise to his feet, still in shock. The monster continued to look up at him, his grin widening. "Yes," he went on, "I can do that. It's what you want, isn't it? You'd be willing to give up everything for me. Isn't that what you told her at one point? So you should be able to do this. If not, then clearly you don't want to save me so badly after all. And if that's the case, then I suppose I'll just leave you behind with her and find another that does truly care about me. There is the matter of the others you've killed already. Those will catch up to you very quickly. So don't go thinking you can just go back to that soft little life you had before."
The young monster stepped out from between him and Sallie. He waved at the rabbit monster. "So, who will it be? You can only love one. That's how it's supposed to work, right? So which is it? Me or her?"
Ryan felt the knife return to his hand. Asriel spread his arms out and raised his head back. A smug expression coated his features. Sallie's own movement resumed as well. "What are doing?" Ryan heard her say.
Ryan looked down at the knife, and then glanced to the prince. The reality of the moment dawned on him at last. There had been times, he realized, when he had wanted him gone just so this could all be over, and it started long before he had found himself in the Underground. And now he had that chance. This could all finally be over. It wasn't what he had wanted in the beginning, but was it really worth it? Was it really possible to do what he set out to do in the beginning? And now that he knew just how sick and twisted he had actually become, was saving him even the right thing to do?
Yes, he realized as he looked at the prince. Asriel was standing before him right at this moment. It was possible to bring him back and it is right to save him. He had known what the monster had done, and likely would do, since the beginning, and had decided none of that mattered then, and he still thought the same now, deep down.
He had told himself that he was willing to do anything to get him back, even if it meant going against the game. And he already knew that the path of not killing anyone did not have the solution he sought. He had tried to deny that fact for a long time, but it was the truth. What if this really was the solution?
His eyes turned to Sallie, and they locked with her own. He had seen that expression before, the fear and distrust trying to be masked behind her concern. It was same look she wore that day in the city, when he had nearly undone everything in his fight with Mettaton. He had been contemplating the same questions then as well.
She had been right to wear that expression then, and she was right to wear it now. "Ryan?" she said slowly. "Y-you're scaring me."
"I told you," Ryan began, "that you should stay far away from me. Several times I told you that." He took a step forward. Sallie took one back. She hit the table behind her, nearly falling over in the process. The flower was going to make him kill her one way or another; he knew that. What difference did it make if it was like this? It was her own fault, in the end, for getting too close. Ryan raised the knife. "You should have listened."
The monster tried to run, but Ryan pulled her back by the ears and rammed the knife through her back. The end of the nearly eight inch blade burst from between her breasts as she screamed in sudden pain. Light poured from the wound. Ryan bent the monster's head back to say his final words to her. "I'm sorry," he said. "I had to do this." The monster began to fall away to dust a moment after. "Goodbye, Sallie."
Laughter rang out in the now much colder room. Ryan turned to see the flower behind him once more and he felt his heart go colder than the air around him. He knew what that implied simply enough: the flower never had any intention to do what he said. He had been tricked.
"That's right," the flower said as if reading his mind. "I know how you tick." The flower came up close to him so that the abyss of his eyes was all that he could see. "I know you inside and out."
Then the world changed into one of pain. In a flash, he found himself strapped to a metal table. A bright light above threatened to blind him, but it did not work to completely hide the silhouettes of strange machines hovering above him looking dreadfully like limbs bent at the wrong angles. The mechanical appendages thrust down at his body before he could even express his surprise at his surroundings, their pointed ends impaling his limbs and his torso. Then, they dragged themselves up and down his body, tearing him to pieces. He felt them ripping whole muscles from his bones. He watched the machines pick them up from the blood that quickly began pooling beneath him and deposit them in a dish next to the table. He opened his mouth to scream, but another of the arms thrust itself through down through his tongue and all that escaped was a weak gurgle as his vision went white. The spike dragged itself down through his neck, tearing his jaw from his body, and as he heard the pop of the bone separating from his skull, consciousness finally, blessedly, fled from him.
He awoke with that pain still fresh in his mind. With a gasp of air, he pulled himself upright and took in his surroundings. The room was now dark, and those machines were thankfully gone. He looked down to find himself unharmed, but he found that he was still sitting on the same metal table, stained with what was likely his own blood, and jumped off of it just as soon as he realized. He ran to the door and out of the room; not wanting to be in that place any longer. Out in the hall, he immediately bent over and began to retch. The only thing he was able to empty from his stomach, however, was more blood, which only worked to sicken him further. He still had no idea if any of the nightmares he was seeing were real, but he was beginning to realize it didn't matter.
This was the flower's world now. In a way, everything that could happen was real, or had been real at some point. Even if all of the physical evidence vanished, the lingering memories told him all he should need to know.
A sudden spike of pain brought his hand up to his head. As he pulled it away he found that it was caked in dust and blood, and the weight of everything finally crashed down on him in full.
He had killed his friends. The flower may have had a hand in it in the beginning, but in the end it was his fault. This was the reward he got for trying, for denying his nature and trying to be something he was not.
How arrogant he was, to think that he could change things, that he could make them better. He had gone about it blindly, not sparing a thought for the consequences of fucking with fate. And now he was to be trapped in this endless realm of torment at the hands of the one he had fought so desperately to help.
Would he lose all of his memories without even knowing it? Had it happened before already? Was this even the first time the flower had done this to him? There was no way he could possibly know. His mind could be wiped at any moment and he'd be none the wiser.
That fear, the fear of losing himself, ran deeper than almost anything else in him. But even that was only a shroud to hide a deeper fear: what if he had already lost himself? What if the atrocities he had committed were simply only the ones he remembered? What if he had already done far worse?
He was helpless in this place. No, he was worse than that: he was nothing. Anything he tried, the flower could just wipe out like nothing ever happened. He was trapped, forced to do the flower's bidding like he already was.
He was nothing more than a puppet.
He found that he only had one question left.
A puppet for what ends?
Feeling no less sick, he pushed himself from the wall. When he straightened again, he found that he was not in a hallway at all. He was in the lobby of the lab. The flower stood before him once more. "Here we are," he began, turning his head on his stem in gesture to all around them. "This is where all of the fun happened! Though, you're already well aware of that." The flower looked down the length of the hall then glanced at the escalator leading to the room above which was powered down. "It seems our good Doctor has already up and left. Must have caught wind of what you did," he commented. "A shame; she could have told this part much better than I could. You see, this whole business of 'unlocking the secrets of the soul' began long before I came into the picture. And it would have been nice to see her again.
"I don't blame her for any of it, you understand, not really. How could she have possibly known her experiments would create me? Besides, the desire that led to my creation was not her own, she simply inherited it from others.
"She is probably the greatest example of that old theory that we are nothing more than products of the people we are exposed to. As a child, she had no one; an orphan, abandoned to the streets of New Home. Her only solace, she found in the imaginary worlds she conjured up around relics she discovered from the world above, simple toys really.
"She began to idolize humans, which only worked to isolate her even more. Until, one day, she was taken in by one of the former heads of this lab, and thrust into a pit that no one should have dug up in the first place.
"She showed great promise when it came to magical science, you see. She was the one who came up with the idea to harness and store magical energy the way we do now. But while she was cautious of the risks involved with using energy like that, her colleagues were not. More than one atrocity was caused by their little oversights, all of them kept safely behind closed doors, and the last of which killed everyone in this lab but her."
The lights were suddenly powered off, and Ryan was thrust into darkness. He hardly even blinked as his eyes adjusted to the light. He was more than used to things changing all the time now.
As the world resolved itself once more, he began to hear moans coming from nearby. Bodies of monsters he did not recognize littered the floor around him, all of them looked to be just barely alive. More than one had large gashes on their forms that seeped white light. They looked like something massive had clawed at them, and they had fallen trying to escape.
The floor began to shake, the tremor rising to a low animalistic growl that seemed to echo from everywhere at once. He heard a little girl scream from somewhere far off before something wet hit the back of his neck.
Ryan turned, slowly, and his eyes widened as they took in a large, canine creature towering over him, freezing him in place. It looked to be made of nothing more than bone in the half light of the lab. One blue eye stared down at him with a mechanical glow. More machines began to whir as the creature's head rose higher; it was easily three times Ryan's height. It let out a screech that made his head throb, and a white light began to build in its open maw.
The world reverted before whatever might have happened next.
"She alone carries the memory of those days, and they have left their scars," the flower continued. "She was left an orphan once more, not only by any sort of guardian, but in their life's work as well. But yet, instead of it destroying her, as it likely should have, she persevered. In fact, she became desperate; desperate to prove herself and regain the trust that was lost in her science. So when the day came that my father asked her once again to turn her attention to the barrier and handed her the souls of humans, she agreed immediately. And she kept going, despite failure after failure, because she had already failed too many times. She refused to abandon this road for another. She remained certain that the answer lay in 'determination.'
"So you see, all of the evidence points to the fact that all of her mistakes were caused by the mistakes of others, but that is not really the case, is it?
"The truth is, at her core, she's already just as bad as me. The only thing that held her back was how she thought people saw her. But deep down her curiosity drives her to the same madness it drove me. After all, she injected her best friend with the same drug that made me and other abominations as well. That's just a bit messed up, don't you think?
"I can never go back far enough to undo her past and explore her fully, but in any timeline that did not require more… direct involvement, she always came back here. Even if monsters had forsaken the quest for the surface, even if she found new passion somewhere else, even if this place fell into the molten rock below, she would return. The need for her science drove her, ever onwards.
"There are just too many unanswered questions in this world, and she is one of the ones that just has to know the answers. And no matter how many failures – even if she managed to kill every other monster in the Underground in the name of research – she would never truly stop. Not until the moment she died, which, more often than not, was caused by her own hand."
A knock came from the entrance, making both of their heads turn.
"Hey, Alphys, you still here?" Undyne's voice came from the door as it slid open. She had just enough time to notice the other two figures in the room as she stepped into the lab and for her eyes to widen in surprise before her head was severed from her neck. Then, time froze again. The monster's head hung slightly askew a few inches higher than where it should have sat. White light seemed to bubble around the two halves of the wound.
"Fuck!" Flowey screamed suddenly. "How many times do I have to tell you not to interrupt me?" It took Ryan a moment to realize that he was yelling at the monster and not him.
The flower took a moment to shake itself and then its smile returned once more. "I believe you are already very familiar with this one's… obstinacy," he said, addressing Ryan again. "She never learns her lesson the first time around, or the tenth, really. But I suppose I should be grateful in this instance. Saves us the trouble of going to her."
The flower disappeared into the floor and sprouted back up next to Undyne. He looked up at the monster almost reverently. "She is one of the ones I wanted to talk to you about most of all," he said. "I took my time with this one. It's what she rightly deserved. You see, where my mother replaced me with humans, my father replaced me with her. That's right, they are both guilty of that sin. But where my mother thought herself a protector, my father thought he could remember how to be a better king. But we're not here to talk about him right now."
The flower wound its way up Undyne's body. It grabbed her floating head and held it beneath him. Ryan simply watched from where he was standing.
"We have a personal history, remember? I can still remember some of those days in the training hall. Do you remember how she lost her eye? I never did like her very much, so a part of me thought she deserved it for what she did, even back then. She was always just getting in the way. Even after I became this she would not stop being a nuisance. Trying to get her to do anything was like trying to move the entire city of New Home into Snowdin. More often than not she would end up killing herself before I could get anything good out of her. And even that was harder than it should have been because of the damned determination she had been injected with. There was even a time when I thought that she might be an exception to the rule I had discovered, but I eventually cracked her as well.
"For too long I was trying to play off of her anger, but that wasn't her deepest trait, as it turns out. In the end, it was in her twisted sense of justice that I found her true self."
The Flower tossed the head to the side. As it hit the ground, it disappeared in a puff of dust that spread across the floor. "Allow me to pose a question: there are two caves, one has two hundred monsters trapped in it the other has three hundred. Both caves are about to collapse. You have the means to save them, but you only have the time to do so for one of the groups. Which group do you save?" The flower looked to Ryan who remained silent, staring at Undyne's body as it began to slowly fall away into nothing.
"Well," the flower went on, a measure of annoyance seeping into his voice. "Most logical people would try to save the larger group. And of course, the smaller group trapped in the cave would know this as well, but none of them want to die just as much as any in the larger group, and so they capture you and try to force you to save them instead. Now what do you do?"
This time, the flower did not wait for an answer. "Her solution was to kill those who tried to force her hand and try to save the larger group still. Sacrifice the few, to save the many.
"But in the act of trying to escape, the caves collapse. You make it out of the one, and the group of three hundred retreat into different caves. Two hundred in one, and one hundred in the other. However, both of these caves are about to collapse as well. Once more, the smaller group captures you and demand you save them. What do you do now?
"Her solution was to wipe them out faster. Collapse the cave and save the two hundred remaining. So, in the end, she saves two hundred and kills three hundred, all for trying to save the most people.
"You see, there's problem with that whole philosophy of sacrifice for the greater good, and that is that it ignores the fact that the body count adds up. Eventually the few becomes the many, but nobody acknowledges it. Because to do so would dig up a deeper problem, and that is that the weight on both sides of the scale is always shifting. It is a child's fantasy to believe you can save everyone, but thinking that losing a few to save many is the real life equivalent to that solution is an even greater fantasy. And that is a lesson that both of you still need to learn. Just as I had to."
"This is the barrier," Asgore's voice came as the lab vanished to be replaced by a pulsating white light that converged into a space beyond imagining. The King of Monsters stood staring to that void before he turned to face Ryan with a solemn look on his face. Then, just as the rest, he froze.
"And now we find ourselves where we once left off." The flower popped into existence between them. "But this time, you've left a trail of destruction in your wake. Countless monsters have died by your hand in an effort to escape this place until he is the last that stands before you.
"Now do you understand just how hopeless you little quest was from the start? You didn't listen to me, I told you: you will never be able to escape the bounds of this world. You weren't able to change anything. And that is why I will always win."
Ryan didn't even wait for the flower to finish. He was not surprised to find the knife in his hand once again. He walked past the flower and up to Asgore's still form and brought its edge across his throat. He drew back again, biting deeper, and then again until the head severed itself from his shoulders. Immediately, time resumed. Asgore had long enough to look shocked before he fell away. A small light floated where he once stood. Ryan reached out to it, held it in his hand for a moment, and then crushed it.
He turned back to the flower who wore a satisfied, and slightly surprised, look on his face. "Oh?" he said, "What is this?"
"I made my decision." Ryan said slowly, feeling like he had forgotten how to speak for a moment. "I already chose you. There's no need to show me this anymore."
"Oh?" the flower said again. His amusement was clear. "And what brought you to that conclusion?"
"You see, I've noticed something," Ryan began. "I know that in order for you to take my soul, you have to break my will. But there were countless ways you could have done that. This way was… oddly specific. I've also noticed the way you've been speaking, like you've been trying to get me to remember something. You think I'm Chara, don't you?"
The flower stared up at him blankly. The silence stretched, filled only by the strange moan of the barrier that seemed more feeling than sound. Then the flower broke out in laughter. "I know you're not Chara, you idiot. I knew that from the first moment I saw you. My brother is gone, but I can still feel them, even now. No, getting my brother back was never going to be as easy as waiting for him to drop down here again. Souls are not reborn quite like that. But, I have to admit, you two share a lot of similarities. So in a way you are right. I decided you would make a good proxy, until the day that I do find him. It will only take a little tweaking, and then I think I'll hardly be able to tell the difference."
Ryan looked down at the knife in his hand. "If that is what you think," he said softly, then with much more determination. "I'll be whatever you want me to be. What does it matter anymore anyway?"
After a moment, the flower cackled once more.
"I like that answer," he said. "I almost wish it wasn't so easy…" A thought seemed to occur to him. "Or is it really that easy?"
Ryan involuntarily took a step back from the flower, and he regretted it immediately. "You'll have to forgive me if I don't trust you," the flower explained. "I want to, believe me, but I also need to rule out that you aren't just saying that to escape… well, you'll see anyway." Vines began to coil around Ryan's body once more, and a fear he thought he no longer possessed the ability to feel returned to him. Come," the flower hissed. "It is time for us to really begin."