"Sans! You lazybones!"
The skeleton blinked. He'd already been awake for hours, curled up in the corner of his mattress and clinging to his jacket as if his life depended on it, but he was anything but fully conscious. Pooling within the cushiony impression beneath his body was some hybrid of cold sweat and salty tears, but he was far too oblivious of his surroundings to notice.
The tangled string of events from his vivid dream was still fresh in his mind, and perhaps the only thing on his mind at all. It had felt all too real and familiar, even down to the gin, but the overdose of a finale was something so new and exciting that Sans almost believed it wasn't a dream at all.
Reliving the memory shouldn't have been this pleasurable.
"Sans?"
His eyes flickered alight; Sans remembered what came next. Instead of waiting for the routine knock at his door, he pinched himself astir and shuffled his way to the knob, twisting it before Papyrus had a chance to further disturb his diseased thoughts.
His brother was, of course, standing restlessly on the other side.
"You're… You're already awake?" Papyrus stepped rearward, holding the back of his hand at his forehead in an overly theatrical pose. Sans might've chuckled, had he not been so wrapped up in his morbid fantasies. "Color me surprised!"
"Yeah."
Sans strode past the young monster with frigid apathy, unknowingly pushing Papyrus aside as he did so. The starlike pupils in his eyes were so distant and small, and little more than the acute sensation of splitting into dust ran on repeat in his mind. The rest of this world proved dead to him.
After descending the staircase and making his way to the kitchen, Sans frantically began searching the counters until a certain pair of bottles caught his attention.
One orange, one blue. They were both untouched, just like before.
"Is something the matter?" Papyrus shouted from the second floor, looking down from where they likely should've placed guardrails. "I can't see you from here!"
Sans thought of the pills. He thought of a glass of water and a handful of antidepressants and his terribly elaborate dreams, and he thought of trying it all on his own. But he couldn't reach the sink, and that'd be so messy.
"Sans—" Papyrus panted, trotting down the stairs, "you know you can tell me anything!"
When Papyrus made it to the kitchen, he found his brother digging through the cupboard in a frenzy, spilling numerous utensils and spices in the process. Turning on his heel, Sans glared at his brother before pulling him violently through the air, bending the sheer gravitational force of his magic until they stood only inches apart from one another.
Sans' expression was blank, but his voice rang with something dirty, something desperate.
"Where are the knives?"
Papyrus winced, his bones trembling.
"The… knives?" the younger skeleton whimpered, face-to-face with his brother. Attempting to step backward only to be held in place tighter by his brother's magic, Papyrus' eyes darted wildly around the room, intent on looking anywhere but into Sans' own diminutive pupils. "The, um, drawer to the left! Probably!"
Sans dismissed his magic immediately in a bubbly wave of cyan, causing his brother to reel unsteadily to the floor. The smaller monster instantly began rummaging through each leftmost drawer until finally locating the discreet compartment where Papyrus stored his culinary knife set, relieving his nerves like the oceans from the surface: steady and serene.
"What d-do you need them for?"
Sans naturally picked out his favorite: the dagger-like paring knife. With his remaining prudence, he huffed, looking back at his brother who was still picking himself up from the cold kitchen tiling. "Look, just… stay down here, bro. Call for help. But whatever you do, don't come into my room, all right?"
Sans closed the drawer, knife in hand.
"What are you—"
"Just don't come in."
And with that, Sans vanished into thin air. When he blinked back into existence, he found himself alone in his bedroom, his door gaping open like a startled dragon's maw. He didn't know how long he'd been absent from the physical world, but he assumed his brother was still lingering in the kitchen, prompting him to shut his door immediately.
Just breathe.
Sans glanced down at the paring knife, observing himself in the blade's reflection. He was almost surprised by his own composure, like he'd done this all before. Exhaling, he lifted the blade and jabbed it into his soul without a second thought, staggering backward and colliding with his bedroom wall before falling onto the side of his ribcage. He curled into a fetal position amid the spreading puddle of red, grunting weakly as he slowly drove the knife further into his chest. Sans' mind was so fraught with static that he hadn't even heard his brother bustling up to his room, mistaking Papyrus' footsteps for the last throbbing beats of his crumbling soul.
"—or if you're invisible, but please say something! I can't help you if I don't know what's wrong!"
Sans smiled, sorrowful and contrite. This was the end, wasn't it? Everything he loved, everyone he knew, it would all be gone in an instant. He wasn't sure if he was entirely okay with that, but he surmised that he had to be. After all, he had nothing else to lose after surrendering all those years on the surface.
At least Papyrus wouldn't have to see him this time. Sans made sure to close the door, and…
The lock.
Sans gasped, only to be met with a mouthful of blood and a pained cough. He attempted to concentrate what little magic he had left onto the latch, but his aim was weak and disjointed, causing a sturdy shelf from the wall to burst into spiny little fragments. Before Sans could even lift his head to view the damage, a jittery hand fiddled with the knob at his door, swinging it open without a glimmer of hesitation.
"Oh, thank the heavens—"
"N-no, Papyrus, don't..."
The taller skeleton froze, caught somewhere between a gasp and a retch. Once again, Sans reached out a shaky hand to force the door shut, but only little blue sparks crackled in the air across from him, singeing the floor below. With one final cough, his body collapsed beneath himself in a powdery smog of blood and dust, his mental anguish ebbing away just as quickly. The paring knife was hardly visible underneath the inky chaos shrouding Sans' jacket, but it was all the taller skeleton could bear to look at in his muddled frame of mind.
Papyrus was too confused to feel anything at first, but something in his chest was stirring uncontrollably, erupting with an angry spout of sobs and hiccups. This timeline wouldn't end well.
Sans' head whipped up, his grungy mattress recoiling beneath him. His room spun around him in a flurry of chaos and delirium, coaxing him to scream into the shoddy walls for some impractical measure of help, but he held his breath.
"Sans! You lazy—"
"Papyrus?"
The pacing of a skeleton behind the door suddenly came to a pause. Rising from his bed and pushing his door ajar, Sans peered at his brother through the narrow opening only to witness his signature smile turn sour.
"What happened to you?" Papyrus asked in a rogue whisper, as if he were afraid a stranger would somehow overhear them in their own home. He could hardly take his eyes off the distraught sight of the smaller monster. Wide-eyed and flushed, Sans' breath was as erratic as it was loud. In the gentler depths of his soul, Papyrus hoped this was all just another one of his brother's brazen pranks, as much as he despised admitting so.
Sans let loose his hold on the door, exposing more of his disheveled appearance as it opened further. Grabbing his brother by the shoulders and jerking him down to eye-level, Sans spluttered a hysterical mess of words, bordering on incoherent: "Is this some kind of joke?"
"I don't know!"
Those three disgusting words.
Before the barrier was shattered, and before his miserable iteration of a world was set free, he'd hear those exact words repeated timeline after timeline. Hopelessly, he would try to find someone, anyone who might've noticed the universe's erratic timeskipping, but each response was the same:
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
It clawed at his very soul, warping his frame of mind nearly beyond redemption. He'd never imagine that phrase carrying the same vile context, not until now.
Sans bit back an arsenal of fervid magic attacks just waiting to be released in a fit of pent-up frustration, but Papyrus' childlike innocence was far too precious to rip away so senselessly. Besides, he'd never lay a finger on his brother—not in his right mind, at least. But Sans wasn't in his right mind, and he did lay a finger on his brother; an entire hand, in fact, as he forcefully grabbed Papyrus' wrist when he tried to check Sans for a fever.
Papyrus flinched, nervously tugging his arm away until Sans loosened his grip. Rubbing the sore edge of his wrist, the larger monster stared speechlessly at his brother, tenderness and concern glinting in his eyes.
Typical.
"I-I'm not supposed to be here," Sans mumbled. "I can't keep doing this..."
"You can't keep doing what?"
"I gotta—" he inhaled sharply, rapidly losing control of his breathing pattern. "I gotta go."
Racing past Papyrus, the older brother fled for the staircase before teleporting his way to the bottom of the steps, his thoughts scattered and aggressive. After reaching the door, he fumbled with the brassy knob before ultimately turning it and pushing his way through the snow-sunken doorframe, failing to shut it on his way out.
"Wait! Sans!" Papyrus' voice called out from within the house, but it was little more than a forgotten buzz inside Sans' head.
The horror was finally setting in—he'd killed himself. Three times, to be exact. But that wasn't even the half of it, was it?
Each time after doing so, his brother would fail to save him. And each time after that, he'd just come right back, like nothing ever happened. But there was something that stood between both, and Sans finally understood what was so persistent on keeping him alive.
The timespace continuum is in disrepair, and there's no telling why. The present becomes the past, and the future... it just crumbles away, like it was never bound to happen. Can't you remember?
He couldn't die.
So long as the continuum kept rewinding, death wasn't in his control anymore. Nothing was.
Sans stumbled face-forward onto the ground as he scurried across Snowdin's main avenue, screaming behind clenched teeth and raking the snow with his fingertips. He attempted to hold back an ugly sob, but the tears were already pricking at his eyes, evoking a fit of coughing and hyperventilating as he dizzily picked himself up from the frozen ground. Then, he ran—he wasn't sure in which direction, but he ran. Trees slid past Sans' peripheral vision, indicating that he'd somehow found his way into the forest, but it's not like he had any actual destination in mind.
He wasn't sure what to do so far from town. His mind was white-hot with a hundred sweltering thoughts, but he couldn't comprehend a single one of them, opting to just keep running instead. And running…
And then, he fell—again—but something was different this time around.
Sans hadn't tripped over himself, but rather, a vine. It melted into the ground as he was preparing to pluck it from its roots, leaving nothing but a little burrow in its tracks and a scowl on Sans' face. He shook his head, and if he weren't already blurry-eyed, he could've sworn another appeared in front of him, carrying a tiny, yellow flower at its crest. He knew better, but he couldn't shake the feeling that the plant was somehow sneering at him.
"Boy, you sure look upset."
