[Timeline 53]
The first couple of deaths had been slow - brutal, agonizing sessions of what seemed like atonement - but oddly intimate. Through them all he'd speak to you, his voice a soft caress even as his hands bruised and broke you. You remember your throat clutched between his fingers, windpipe constricting as you fought for breath, and in your ear Sans's whispered shushes, quietly reprimanding you for the mess of tears and drool running down your swollen face.
Disgusting, he'd said and squeezed harder, to think I could've ever loved something as low as you. Black spots had begun to dot the edges of your vision and your desperate fingers had struggled to interlace with his in a parody of handholding, trying to loosen the vice around your neck. His grip had slackened then, if only for a moment, then returned with renewed vigor.
It's only with your throat in his hands and the warmth of your blood dripping down his arms that you ever touch each other in this timeline. The feeling of bone against skin conjures up a faded dream of affection, a lingering persistence that mixes a certain tenderness into the violence and dulls the pain through a veil of residual memory. There's a small part of you that, even as the whole of your body screams at him to stop, wants to beg him to keep on going, to keep on smashing you into golden tile so long as you can feel his hands as he does it.
During your sixth reload you experimentally touch his face when he slams you against a wall and Sans jerks away as though he's been stung. He instinctively takes a few steps back, the lights in his eyes shrinking to pinpricks. For a few seconds there's no movement save the bead of sweat running down his skull, no sound but those of his shaky breaths. In that moment you think briefly about what it might feel like to slip your hand under that white shirt, what his teeth might feel like against your neck, what it'd be like to fling your knife behind you and throw yourself to to his feet, begging him to forgive you -
Instead you take a swing at him with a clenched fist and manage to just brush the sleeve of his jacket. Before your arm finishes its downward arc, you catch a glimpse of enveloping white flame bursting from a cage of bone.
Melting into ash feels almost like absolution.
There's no more touching after that.
The deaths begin feeling less like murders and more like executions. Instead of lazily directing fragments of bone towards your legs to cripple you, now he summons barrages of light and ivory that close in until there's nothing left of you but shreds of torn flesh.
You begin to realize that up until now he's only been toying with you. You begin to realize that you're totally fucked.
And yet he looks almost afraid of you, as if he knows that he'll crumble to pieces under the soft weight of your hands.
When you appear in that yellow lit corridor, bones begin jutting jaggedly from the floors and the walls before you can even begin walking towards him. Sans keeps his distance now, and keeps his face as expressionless as he can when he materializes those yawning canine skulls towards you.