Sorry for the late update, everyone. It's been a rough couple of weeks for me. This chapter is a little on the short side, which I apologize for, but it's mostly filler stuff. The next couple chapters might be a little slow, but hey. Gaining comfort and trust in a group of people that you've grown to fear is a rather slow-going process.
Oh - on another note. I'm going to attempt at remembering to leave responses to Guest reviews at the end of chapters from now on. However, I also have a notoriously god-awful memory, so we'll see how long that lasts. *laughs*
I hope you enjoy!
DISCLAIMER: I do not own Undertale. That honor goes to the genius mind of Toby Fox.
From the moment Sans' slippers hit Toriel's doorstep, he knew things were going to be hectic. If the way the kid's breathing sounded more like gasps instead of breaths was any hint, it was obvious they weren't out of the woods just yet. Not to mention how light and... fragile, they felt in his arms. Kids shouldn't feel that thin. He could feel their bones. There was none of that squishiness he'd gotten used to feeling whenever he screwed around with Shiloh – during their horseplay, when picking her up, hugging her... even though she was thin, she was soft. From all of the skin and whatnot, he figured.
Frisk, however... They were just... not.
But he was getting off topic, here.
The front door opened before Sans was even in arm's reach. The look on Toriel's face was one of mingling strain and relief, but the moment they fell on a certain child's limp, unresponsive body in his arms, her expression was nothing short of pure devastation. She ushered Sans inside with a worrisome paw at his scapula, and wordlessly steered him down the hallway. He caught a glimpse of Shiloh sitting on the couch; she was craning her head to peer at the scraggly lump in the skeleton's arms, but was apparently trying to stay out of the way.
"My child?" Toriel called back to the curious human behind them, not pausing her stride, "Could you go and fetch a bowl and washcloth? Fill it with cool water, and bring it to the guest room, please." Shiloh nodded wordlessly, and Sans saw them get up, before entering the guest bedroom. There was a muffled, clattering sound as a person inside adjusted some sort of item. His mind connected the dots, and deducted that Alphys must have gotten here a few minutes earlier.
"hey, alph," he greeted quickly, transferring Frisk from his hold to the bed. The blankets were pulled to the side, but he hesitated on tucking them around the kid just yet. They were filthy – well in need of a bath, that much was for sure. Their clothes were ill-fitting and littered with holes. "hey tori? should we get the kid into something more... comfortable?"
The queenly monster came up beside Sans, and seemed to observe the human for a moment. The door creaked as Shiloh entered the room, and handed off supplies to her mother without prompting. Toriel sent her a loving smile, and drew close to Frisk's bedside. Alphys was setting up equipment at the side of the room – medical supplies, Sans wagered. There was a large, black duffle bag resting against the wall that he guessed was one of Undyne's – it had been hastily (but methodically) stuffed with various items. He caught sight of a few bottles – some filled with liquid and others with small pills – an array of different 'scopes for examining the body, and... what was that thing? It looked like a long, rectangular handheld game.
A muted conversation took place – Shiloh was eagerly going to fetch a spare set of pajamas for the other kid, and Toriel wiped some dirt from their face with her washcloth. Alphys was setting up some kind of retractable stand. For a nutrient drip, maybe? How she managed to get something like that over here was beyond him. Her Inventory boxes had to be filled to the brim right about now.
Sans rubbed his skull with a heavy hand, feeling the edges of fatigue begin to pull at his eyesockets. There was a foreboding feeling that permeated the air. It was practically radiating from the kid like a storm – he could nearly picture dark, weighted clouds swirling around them. He could feel it, and he knew Alphys and Toriel could feel it as well, but thankfully, they didn't bother to ask questions (yet).
It still astounded Sans that he could feel them calling out like that.
Now, that's not to say that "communication" between different SOULs was impossible. He'd heard plenty of stories about it before, even felt it himself a few times over the years. Monsters were beings made up of kindness, hope and compassion, and a SOUL was the embodiment of all that positivity. Mix that together with cup of internal turmoil, a dash of magic, some close contact, a concerned loved one, and presto! You've got yourself a recipe for subconscious connectivity. It wasn't common, but it happened. When the person experiences distress, their magic instinctively tries to seek out a source for help before that negativity can affect someone's stats or – in some cases – their HP.
Sans absently gripped the patch of jacket that covered where his own SOUL lay.
Sure, empathy was one thing, but he never thought it was possible for a single being to be this vocal. He literally heard the kid a street away, for crying out loud!
The skeleton released a long sigh under his breath, which morphed into a yawn. God, he was tired. And this atmosphere wasn't doing a whole lot to help – sucking the energy straight from his bones, it felt like. Replacing heat with an empty, forlorn sense of cold that seemed oddly... metaphysical. It was draining, to say the least; he couldn't help but wonder, if this was how it felt from outside, just what kind of state was this kid's SOUL in?
"Sans?" The voice of Toriel broke the haze, and Sans blinked, looking startled for a moment. She and Alphys were regarding him with careful, concerned expressions from where they stood. "You are looking a little... disoriented. Is everything all right?"
Shaking his head, as if that would fling away the stray thoughts, Sans let a lazy grin slip into place. "yeah, m' fine, tori. i'm just bone-tired, heh. been working my tailbone off lately, y'know?"
The concern was still there, softened by understanding. "Well, I would not mind it if you took a nap. You may use my room, if you would like to."
"nah, it's cool, tori. i'll just..." He paused to stifle another yawn, holding up a finger to signal that he needed a moment. Running a hand over his skull, the skeleton gave them another grin. "i'll go sit on the couch or something, get out of your hair fur a bit, while you gals take care of things in here." He spun on one heel for the door before anyone could protest, meeting Shiloh in the hall as she came out of her room, a pair of pajamas in her arms. She smiled at him, and he tousled the girl's hair in passing.
The heavy, void-like feeling faded with every step he took away from the guest bedroom, but its presence was still very powerful by the time Sans plopped down onto Toriel's couch. It was... smothering. With more familiarity than he'd like to admit. It was the same kind of feeling Sans had had since... he couldn't even remember when. A long time – well before Frisk came to the mountain.
The depression had lessened some over the years, but that didn't mean it was gone completely. There were still periods where getting out of bed was a lot more like running a marathon. The moments where he slept literally all day, but lay awake with his thoughts at night, making him too tired to stay awake at his various posts throughout the Underground come morning. Things had gotten pretty bad after Frisk showed up – after who knows how many RESETs, being trapped in that time loop with no end in sight, no control over where or when each little skip would happen. Being forced to relive the same ten minutes over and over and over again for what felt like an eon. All of those times where his brother, his home, his friends, his everything had been taken away from him...
All for it to come back with a knife to the ribs, or the blink of an eye.
It was taxing in more ways than one.
Letting his spine relax, Sans sank into the sofa's large, plush cushions, feeling some of the extra tension begin to drip from each bone like melting wax; a slow, steady process, but each little droplet gone leaving behind so much relief he could have wept.
As his body eased farther into the couch, he felt his thoughts begin to wander away from reality. They became fewer, farther in between, and more abstract in concept. He was bushed.
When Toriel came to check on him a few minutes later, Sans was out like a light, too deeply asleep to so much as snore.
When consciousness returned, it was unnatural and slow, filled with disgruntled murmurs and lots of shifting around. Eye sockets squinted open with a grumble, and Sans habitually rubbed at them with a hand. He yawned, and stretched, taking note of how a blanket had been draped over him at some point. toriel, he concluded with an absent smile, rolling over to lay on his back. She was always looking out for him. It was nice, having someone other than Papyrus fussing over his well-being. Not that he didn't appreciate Paps – it just... felt like there was less of an obligation involved. Plus, it kept his brother from getting too worked up, considering there were others to share his... workload, so to speak.
Anyway...
Why was he awake, in the first place? If the groggy weight in his bones was anything to go by, Sans could have definitely used a few more hours of sleep. His body was drained after putting in so much work to find the kid. Usually, when he was tired, Sans was dead to the world until he'd gotten his rest.
So why was he awake?
He sat up, reveling in the quiet darkness, thinking it over. He felt something twinge within his chest, and suddenly, it dawned on him. oh... The lights of his eyes flickered, glancing down the hall to his right. Waiting.
A few seconds later, he heard what sounded like a whimper.
Sans rose, adjusted his hoodie, yawning once more and stretching his arms above his head. Feeling a little more alert, the skeleton meandered toward the guest room. It was tucked between Shiloh's and Toriel's bedrooms, respectively, about halfway down the hall; he and Papyrus had spent their fair share of nights there – usually during one of Shiloh's sleepovers. She loved having her friends come over to visit, and Toriel didn't seem to mind it much, either. She liked having people around. Sans would wager a guess that it stemmed from all those years the matriarch had spent alone, living in the Ruins.
The door opened without protest, sliding silently over the carpeted floor. A gentle, blueish light met his eyes, which was a bit of a surprise, but hey. No calcium off of his nasal cavity. He wasn't as astonished as he should have been, spotting Alphys hovering by Frisk's bedside with some kind of device in her claws. Not wanting to startle her, he quietly rapped a knuckle against the door, and the scientist gave a little twitch. She glanced over her shoulder at him, and offered a tiny smile. It was returned, and Sans closed the door behind him as he stepped inside.
"hey, alph," Sans murmured under his breath, eyeing the thing Alphys held. It was that weird... whatever-it-was he'd spotted in her bag last time he'd been awake. It was large and rectangular – like a telephone, and was two-thirds the length of the Royal Scientist's forearm. There was a long wire leading out of the top; it had been slipped beneath the collar of Frisk's new pajama top (a black button-up made of fleece, patterned with white skulls, accompanied by matching pants. They were one of Shiloh's favorites). A screen took up the device's center, with a few buttons placed symmetrically on either side of it.
She flipped a switch along the left side of the device, and Sans rose a brow when a line cast across the screen, pulsing to an unheard beat. He sent Alphys a look, silently asking her to explain.
"I-it's a machine used to measure the conditions of a SOUL without having to summon it from the individual. So there isn't as much s-stress put on the person." Her fingers tapped at a few buttons, and the wavelength minimized, moving to the top left-hand corner of the machine's monitor. "You attach it to the patient's chest, and with some adjustments..."
A fuzzy, pixelated shape began to form. Her fingers carefully turned a dial next to where the wire ran from. The object began to sharpen.
"..An image of their SOUL will be formed, while the device measures its vitals."
Instead of responding with something contributory, Sans released a quiet, impressed whistle. "damn. kid must be sleepin' pretty deep, if this hasn't woken 'em up yet." If it weren't for the rise-and-fall of their chest, Sans might have thought they'd passed in their sleep. Alphys made an uncomfortable sound that drew his attention. That didn't... sound very good.
"F-Frisk had an... ep-episode, a few hours after you left the room. They woke up, b-but they weren't really... there. I-I think they had a nightmare. Toriel tried to calm them down, but... it must have triggered something, and the reaction wasn't very pleasant. They had a panic attack, and things got a little..." She twirled a wrist, searching for the right words. "W-well, 'violent' is a little extreme, but Frisk did try to get away from us, and it involved some kicking. They wouldn't calm down, so... I had to, uh... p-put them under..."
Sans stared at her, uncomprehending. She forced an uneasy smile. "Th-the serum packs a bit of a punch. Frisk shouldn't be waking up until... late morning, mid-afternoon? G-give or take a few hours..."
Her admittance left the skeleton in deep thought as the other returned attention to the device in her hands; a nightmare, huh? It must have been one hell of a dream. He rubbed at his cervical vertebrae with a hand, exhaling a sigh.
The next few minutes were silent, until whatever Alphys been tampering with apparently began to work. The gasp she released didn't bode too well. "O-oh, my stars..." He wandered closer, trying to peer over the reptilian monster's shoulder.
oh, what now? he found himself wondering.
"al? everything ok?" the question was accompanied by an unsure smile. "you're lookin' a little pale around the scales."
Alphys looked at him over her shoulder, then glanced back to the device. Sans came up beside her, and peered over her arm. At first, he was confused. All he saw was a grayish mass of... what looked like a human SOUL, slowly rotating in place to show off its features from all sides. It was a little dull, in terms of color – Frisk's SOUL had always been a bright, vibrant shade of red. This was more of a... pale, gray-brown. What was that thing? Maybe she'd set it up wrong. He almost suggested trying to press a few more buttons, to get the image to focus, but her expression caused hesitation. A few, uncomprehending seconds passed before it hit him.
He was already looking at Frisk's SOUL. There was nothing to adjust.
Alphys automatically passed the meter off to Sans, who held it with nothing short of utter disbelief on his face. Because there it was – the very culmination of Frisk's entire being, on a monitor, in his hands, right in front of him, and... it all looked so wrong.
For one, the heart was misshapen. There were... small, scattered cracks and indentations in its sides. They looked like little cuts and bruises. The color was alarmingly pale, the usual, determined red now a rosy-brown. Its glow was practically nonexistent. Sans noted a particularly large crack running down from the heart's cleft. That... was worrying.
Alphys spoke up, voice hollow with confusion and shock. "L-look at their stats..." She pointed at a small box of text to the left of the display. The abbreviations "LV", "ATK", "DEF", and "HP" were respectively lined up in a column.
His eye sockets went dark.
She must have taken his silence as an invitation to elaborate. "It... th-this meter is designed to record the strength of a monster's SOUL, w-which is why some of the data is m-missing. There's not as much magic in a human to take into account for accurate measurements." A claw gently tapped the question marks next to what should have been a scale of Frisk's metaphysical attack and defense. "But, on terms of... o-of their LOVE, and HOPE..."
When it came to things like this, is seemed like every last aspect to a monster's spiritual... "anatomy", if you will, had some kind of acronym.
ATK and DEF were self-explanatory; short for Attack and Defense; the scale of someone's physical and mental strength.
EXP was a measurement of someone's Execution Points, which fed in to their LV. The only way to get it is through killing another creature that had it.
LV, or LOVE, stood for one's Level Of Violence. The amount of how much EXP you had, organized into different tiers.
And HOPE... it was a lesser-known acronym, since most people didn't need to worry so much about it. Because the majority didn't have to worry about having low baselines when it came to HP
HOPE was the Heart's Overall Presence of Emotion.
In battle, it acted a lot like health points. If you were hurt, it dropped, and the weaker you become as a result. Hit zero, and you were dust in the wind. Its scale more or less represented... a monster's form of Determination. Their will to live. And in a place like New Home, the will to live had been everything. If it weren't for all of the hope and encouragement Asgore had given his subjects throughout the centuries, Sans doubted there would have been any monsters left to free, in the first place.
"I don't know how this is p-possible," Alphys admitted under her breath, temporarily breaking through the confused fog in Sans' skull. "I mean, for most monsters with a low LV, their base-HP is around twenty. But... but Frisk, they... I... I-I don't understand it... I've never seen something like th-this before..."
Just what was she talking about? Well...
The fact that Frisk had an LV of two (probably a result from their fight with Asgore, Sans realized), and yet, despite that... their max HP was at a whopping... one point.
Sans passed the meter off to his friend, running a hand over the curve of his skull. A dark feeling began to settle in his chest as pieces started to put themselves together.
Back when Frisk first climbed the mountain, they were at LV1 with 20HP – the average for younger monsters; children, specifically, though there were some older monsters with similar stats. Now Sans had seen those levels fluctuate a lot during the time Frisk spent Underground: from their initial no-mercy debut, to countless 'neutral' runs, ending with a final, genocidal timeline, before the kid tried to go pacifistic. Their LOVE would change in every single run, and their HOPE rose with each new 'level' that was reached. In this timeline, even, where the only act of violence they'd committed was fighting Asgore. In spite of it all, their HP had never gone below twenty. So, seeing as how the kid had gone up a tier, theoretically they should have a higher level of HP, right?
Yeah, apparently not.
Things only got more exciting when the scientist next to him made another, startled sound. There was a twitch of surprise when she grabbed his sleeve, pulling him close. "Sans... S-Sans, look!"
"w-wha-?" His eyes followed her frantic motions back to the screen in her hands, and quickly delved back into profound confusion. "alph... is... why is that...?" He blinked hard, as if it would made understanding dawn upon him. "is their hp... a decimal?"
Instead of answering, Alphys started to pace, muttering to herself in a fierce whisper. "Th-this shouldn't be possible," she was saying, "It's, i-it's impossible! H-how could someone... I-I've never heard of this before. Someone falling below 1HP, but they're s-still alive? Half a point... I-I don't understand it..."
Sans could only shrug, hating this helpless, unaware feeling rising in his ribcage. "maybe it's got something to do with all that determination humans have. if a human soul can exist after the body dies, why should half of an hp point be so unlikely?" A disgruntled sigh was his only response, and Alphys startled to fiddle with the hem of her lab coat. It was a nervous habit she had. Sans resisted the urge to sigh. "alphys."
He forced her to stand in one spot with a firm, but gentle hand over each shoulder. They made eye contact for a moment. "calm down, ok? i get you're worried – hell, we all are – but there's nothing we can do about it. so right now, until we can, we should focus on making sure the kid gets better. i didn't spend all that time skullking around a human city for nothin'."
There was a quiet groan of protest in response to the pun, but it got her to smile a little.
And that was a victory in Sans' book.
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"Jewelry Box" Guest - Why, as a matter of fact, yes, I will answer these questions. I'm really happy you're enjoying the story so far! As for the jewelry box mentioned in the first/second chapters, well... if I told you, I'd have to kill you... nah, I'm kidding (oramI?). Still though, I'm afraid I can't tell you just yet. But rest assured that I'm not going to write about it once, and never mention it again. While it has a minor part in the story, it does have a purpose in the story. But yes, I have decided what's going to happen to it. As for the world knowing what happened between Asgore and Frisk... well, let's just say some things may-or-may-not come to light in the future.
Pacifist Dragon - A, dang, looks like we caught another one... Welcome to the party, friend! Help yourself to the snacks and drinks. Everything comes with a free sample of feels. Enjoy your stay! xD
The Eager Reader - Well, I'm sorry to make you cry, but hey! I'll take it as a compliment, haha. Thank you very much - I'm very happy to hear you're enjoying the story thus far *hearts*
