Belly of the Whale
When Asgore carried him all the way from the CORE facility to New Home, Sans didn't pay much attention to their surroundings. Now that they are backtracking and he has a second chance to look around, he finds that he doesn't regret that much. There are empty, gray corridors all around them that seem to stretch on endlessly, and while it isn't as creepy as the hallways between the labs can get sometimes, it still has a very unsettling feel to it all. Like it's too empty, too quiet.
The view from high above of an endless sea of houses with flickering lights behind the windows doesn't help putting him at ease either. He was excited about seeing the one house, he didn't know there were that many. He didn't even know there could be so much space. Where are the walls? The ceiling? Where does all this open space end? Sans has to force himself to look away from it, to concentrate on the floor beneath his feet and hold onto Gaster's hand a little bit tighter. It's an irrational thought, but he feels that if he lets go, he'll just be sucked into all that air with nothing to stop him from just floating away into a big, empty nothing.
He is relieved beyond reason when they leave the gray walkways and return to the CORE.
Gaster is busy on his phone, like he has been during the entire walk, typing a giant avalanche of text. Sans can't imagine that it's actually for the sake of communicating with someone, his expression is too focused and not annoyed enough for that.
When Gaster notices Sans watching him, he looks down on him with a thoughtful face, the fingers still wrapped around Sans' hand twitching almost unnoticeably. "Ugh, alright," he finally mumbles, coming to a decision, and turns the phone around to show him a long wall of text that has hardly any resemblance to actual words anymore. Sans recognizes the pattern from some monitors in the lab and thinks it's called 'code.' "I'm hacking the cameras," Gaster explains as he goes back to typing. "You're a smart kid, right, you already know I wasn't supposed to take you with me."
Sometimes he says Sans is stupid and sometimes he says he's smart. One of these possibilities is infinitely easier for Sans to believe than the other.
"So I have to make sure no one can look at the footage and figure out where we went. Asgore's going to throw a hissy fit when he sees you're gone, and of course he'll know it was me, so I'm making it as difficult as possible for him to hunt me down."
Sans slows down a bit at that and almost looks back over his shoulder, even though the little house with the sweet smelling air and the kind people is long gone. "My choice," he says quietly. "I can tell him."
With an almost desperate snorting laugh, Gaster just proceeds to drag him along faster than before. "Nope, not gonna happen." He drops Sans' hand and holds onto his neck instead, pushing him down the hallway with a bit more force than strictly necessary. His other hand puts the phone back in his pocket and then harshly rubs his eyes under his glasses. "I'm signing about ten different death warrants for myself right now ‒ actually, make that a hundred for when the queen hears of this. Yeah, not a good foundation for calmly talking things out, not even with Asgore."
Sans remembers Gaster being a bit different than usual, a bit more tense after the fight with the human and he'd thought that was just because he'd lost so much HP and he would quickly be his old self again. But now it's a week later and Gaster's hand on his neck is twitching nervously, there is a sheen of sweat on his forehead and he looks so, so tired. Uncertainly biting his lower lip, Sans reaches up to him, tugging lightly at the hem of his sweater. When Gaster looks at him with a raised eyebrow, Sans pats his own chest where the wide collar of the oversized shirt is revealing part of his transparent skin. "Soul still hurts?"
Gaster frowns at him. "Yours or mine? Possessive pronouns buddy, use them."
And that sounds a bit more like him again, so Sans smiles as he carefully corrects himself: "Does your soul still hurt?"
"Nah." Gaster looks away, scratching the back of his head a bit uncomfortably. "Not more than usual." It's silent for a short moment, before Gaster starts as if he forgot something and hurries to ask: "What about yours? Anything unusual?"
Sans goes back to patting his chest, slowly and thoughtfully. His soul has actually been very quiet since ‒ since the thing that he isn't thinking about anymore. It's not that it normally hurts all the time, but he can definitely feel it in a certain way, like a pulled muscle. Now, even when he concentrates on it, there is barely anything at all. Not even its steady pulsing, which he can always feel, is all that pronounced anymore. He looks at Gaster with curiously widened eyes. "It's sleeping!"
"Very poetic," Gaster says with a grin and a shake of his head, "but not a very useful description from a scientific standpoint. What, is your soul lying in a little bed with a tiny pillow and blanket?" He provocatively gestures with his hands now, both amused and a little bit outraged at the useless statement, and Sans' grin widens. "Is it wearing a miniature pajama and a nightcap? Does it snore?" He flicks Sans' ear lightly when he doesn't stop giggling. "'It's sleeping.' Fucking brilliant. Gonna put that down in my report, 'Project SA-N5 soul status: asleep. Tuck in and do not disturb.'"
Then a sudden thought seems to hit him and he stops for a second, staring at Sans with a kind of surprised smile. "Holy shit. I just realized. I never have to write official reports again." A laugh bubbles out of him and he pumps a fist into the air. Sans doesn't understand why he's happy, but he laughs along anyway, relieved that the tired look is gone for now. "Oh my God," Gaster wheezes, a hand pressed to his eyes under his glasses. "No more explaining science to royal idiots. No more wanting to hit my past self in the face whenever I read my own notes. I can just, I can just write whatever the fuck I want!" His laugh still keeps going, but Sans is furrowing his brow now, a tiny bit worried as it starts sounding more crazy than usual.
Gaster holds onto Sans' shoulder as he stops to catch his breath for a second, still smiling, his hands shaking a little. "I can just," he starts slowly, his grin growing to reveal his slightly sharpened canines, "do whatever the fuck I want."
With a shake of his head and a last disbelieving giggle, he stands up again and straightens his glasses. "Why did I even want to be Royal Scientist in the first place?" he asks no one in particular as he keeps walking briskly and Sans has to hurry after him. "It's just rules and regulations and bureaucracy."
"But," Sans starts up and Gaster looks almost startled for a second, as if he forgot Sans was even there, "you already always did whatever you wanted?"
"Well, yes." Gaster fumbles with his coat sleeves and clears his throat, finally done with the crazy laughing and giggling. "But I had to worry about explaining it afterwards or hiding things or just ‒ ugh, talking to people to make them agree to what I wanted to do. In the end, royal sanction and resources are not worth the time and effort that goes into pretending to play by the rules."
He stops before rounding the next corner, going back to his code on the phone, then waves for Sans to keep following him after a few short moments. They proceed in silence after that, Gaster back to concentrating on hacking the right cameras at the right moment and Sans paying close attention to always stay behind him and not accidentally wander into the line of sight of an unhacked camera.
They can't use the elevators, Gaster explains, as they have complicated activation protocols that would take a long time to hack, so they stick to the stairs and to hacking the security doors to the staircases, which is a bit easier and faster, apparently. The way down is long and Sans isn't very good with stairs; he's a bit too small to just walk down as Gaster does it, so he has to crouch on his hands and knees and climb each step down backwards. It takes forever and Gaster loses his patience after only six steps, scoops Sans up and carries him the rest of the way on his shoulders. It takes a bit of floundering before Sans finds a decent way to hold on, because apparently pulling on Gaster's ears is a no-go, as his hands get slapped away when he tries. He just wraps his arms around Gaster's head instead, interlacing his fingers with each other on his forehead.
The place is mostly empty, it's the middle of the night after all, but every once in a while they still have to slip into an unused room or hide behind a corner when a guard on night shift or some scientists absorbed in their research walk by. Sans does begin to wonder where they're even going. Even though he's sure the creator has a plan, it seems weird to him to return to the labs when they're supposed to be hiding. Surely this would be the first place Asgore would search for them? He wouldn't even have to search, actually, since the other scientists living and working here would just see them and tell him right away.
But then, for some reason, Sans thinks back to the dragon book he read to Chara and how the princess, at one point, outsmarted the biggest and baddest dragon by standing right in front of its nose, where it had a blind spot and couldn't see her as she drove her sword straight into its throat.
When they enter a labyrinth of white corridors that Sans has never seen before and Gaster stops being all that careful, Sans taps his forehead to get his attention. "Are we hiding in a blind spot?"
Gaster actually chuckles a bit. "Now how come you're asking more intelligent questions than most of the pseudo scientists in this building ever would?" He stops to let Sans down from his shoulders and puts his phone away. A lot more relaxed now than before, he waves Sans along and they stroll through the slowly broadening hallway. Blue and red lights blink at them from monitors and shiny panels all over the walls and thick, shiny pipelines are installed above them on the ceiling. The typical, constant droning sound of the CORE gets louder the further they go, practically vibrating in Sans' bones at some point and almost canceling out all other sounds. The temperature is steadily rising as well and now Sans is kind of glad that he's only wearing his thin t-shirt.
Though for just a second, he remembers that he left his pink sneakers back at Asgore's and he gets a tiny bit sad.
"This is what this whole facility is about," Gaster explains, watching his surroundings with a strange expression of pride in his eyes. "The Core. The actual construct that keeps the entire Underground in working order, that is, not the CORE facility that houses it. That one's just an acronym for Core Operation and Research Enterprise. Bit forced, maybe, but Asgore really, really wanted to name it that."
When the next set of heavy, metallic security doors slides open, Sans has to stop in his tracks and squint at the harsh orange glow that suddenly assaults his eyes. He is staring into a wide, round hall in sterile white and gray, except for the thick, translucent walls on all sides that reveal a slowly moving stream of fiery liquid all around them. It's like he's standing in a small little capsule that's sitting in the middle of a lake of fire.
Beyond the glass walls, metal walkways and platforms are built like a spider's web over the lake, most of them inside their own little transparent tubes and spanning over too many stories to count. It's a construct so enormous that Sans can barely even see the point every single one of the walkways leads towards; from here, he can only make out the lower third of a white sphere far, far in the distance, seemingly floating above the boiling sea of fire, vibrating and puffing out clouds of white steam. A complicated geometric net of lines covers its surface, a series of thin looking cracks that emit a pulsing, blue glow in time with the steam.
If Sans didn't like all that space surrounding the road to New Home, then this is about ten times worse. He holds onto the door frame, legs trembling under him as he tries to concentrate on the solid walls of the hallway behind him, but his brain oh-so-helpfully informs him of the fact that no, they're not actually as solid as he thinks and if they were see-through, he'd have the exact same view of a burning ocean from there as he has from right here.
He feels smaller and smaller the longer he looks. It makes him dizzy just trying to wrap his mind around the size of everything, around the fact that those tubes with the walkways are obviously big enough for people to walk through them, but in the distance they're barely more than thin lines to his eyes, hardly even visible anymore where they connect to the floating sphere. How that blue glowing network on its shining, reflective surface looks delicate and fragile from here, even though each line is probably at least ten times as wide as Sans if he were to walk all the way up to it.
Gaster takes hold of his shoulders from behind and almost gently pushes him into the round hall, the hall that's almost as big as the laboratory that Sans spent most of his life in, the hall that is nothing but a tiny speck of dust compared to the globe sitting on the other side of its walls. The doors slide shut behind them and Gaster unforgivingly walks him all the way up to the glass, until he could press his nose against it if he just leaned forward a few inches.
The creator actually does press a hand to the glass, a somewhat wistful expression on his face, similar to Asgore's smile when he said "Good night" and kissed the top of Chara's head. "It's running on Sleep Mode right now," he murmurs, his eyes only shortly flickering in Sans' direction before going back to the shining sphere. "You should see it during winter, or when it counteracts the seismic waves of the volcano. A hundred times better than any Christmas lights. Oh, I'll show you the blueprints when we're inside! Best damn thing I ever wrote." He snorts a derogatory laugh and shakes his head, snapping a finger against the glass. "Who in their right mind fires the guy who built that?"
Sans swallows hard. "We go inside?" he repeats hoarsely.
It seems to snap Gaster out of his musings, as he swivels around on the heels of his shoes and walks off to the other side of the hall, over to some white panels in the wall. "Yep," he announces proudly, typing a code into a keypad that has the panels sliding open with a little whoosh sound, revealing a kind of cupboard that he now pulls two white suits and helmets out of. "See, that's the beauty of commanding the construction of something that nobody but you fully understands: You can build in all the secrets you could possibly want."
Gaster first helps Sans into the small suit that's still a little too big for him. It was probably made for someone of Freeda's statue ‒ or maybe even specifically for Freeda, Sans thinks. Putting it on correctly is a lot more complicated than Sans is used to from other clothes; it has valves and buttons, cables and tubes, and everything has to be connected in a certain way. There are metal plates in the shoulders and around the neck and the boots that come with it are so heavy that Sans feels practically glued to the floor. He hasn't even put the entire thing on when he's already sweating profusely.
It gets a bit better when Gaster adds the helmet. He has to fiddle around with it for a while, turn some valves and connect some tubes while Sans makes the glass front fog over with his breath. But then, with a little rushing of air, Gaster presses the last few buttons and the glass clears, the air around Sans' face cooling down immediately. It also gains a slightly metallic taste, but that isn't as bad as the heat, Sans decides.
"A thousand different people worked on this," Gaster resumes his explanation while putting on his own suit. "All commandeered by me and most of them not even scientists, but simple construction workers. I was the only one who even had the complete blueprints, everyone else just got a tiny part of the project that they were in charge of. If no one knows what the bigger picture looks like, no one notices all the little things you smuggle in that aren't even supposed to be there. And lots of little things put together add up to one really amazing big thing." He chuckles happily as he slides his helmet into place, obviously still proud of himself for fooling everyone.
It's extremely weird to see Gaster stomping around with those giant metal boots, but Sans doesn't have much time to watch as he has to fight the weight of his own suit to even move over to him where he's opening up the doors. There is a little white chamber on the other side, completely empty it seems, and once Sans makes it there he slumps down in relief a little bit. He'll have to leave the chamber again, of course, but for the moment he's just happy he can't see the Core anymore.
Then Gaster presses another set of buttons and a loud rushing of air sounds from all around them. "Decontamination," Gaster explains, his voice a little tinny over the speakers in his helmet. "It's a highly controlled environment in there, we have to make sure nothing volatile gets in or out."
"Even air?" Sans asks, huffing a little under the strain of his suit. He really hopes he won't have to wear it for too long, his muscles are screaming already from the effort of just standing upright.
"Air is never just air, kid. There are chemicals, particles, dust, skin flakes, all that jazz. And in there we have a heavy dose of radiation on top of it. That's what the suits are for, to protect us from radiation and extreme temperatures. It can get a little hot in there, what with all the lava." When the rushing of air around them dies down, he stomps over to Sans and holds him up by the upper arm. "Come on, it's just a short trip."
Sans frowns up at him doubtfully. If they're going to that pulsing white sphere ‒ which, if he understood this right, is the actual Core ‒ then it's much more than just a short trip. For obvious reasons he isn't very good with judging distances and the time it takes to travel them, but he just has to look at it and he knows that Laboratory 1, the largest of the labs, could easily fit at least a hundred times into the area beyond their little chamber.
Gaster apparently notices his skepticism, for he grins down at him with that expression he wears when he knows so much more than the person he's looking at right now. Luckily it's the 'I can't wait to show off'-variant of that expression, not the 'I almost pity you for being so stupid' one.
For a very short moment, Sans wonders if it's weird that he has such specific names for Gaster's different faces.
The doors of the decontamination chamber slide open with a loud hiss and clank, and even though the suit regulates temperature as best it can, a brutal wave of dry heat rolls over Sans' entire body. Before them stretches a long, rounded tunnel with glass walls so thick that they distort the view beyond into a flickering mess of a thousand different pieces ‒ like the jigsaw puzzle Chara showed him. Orange light fills the entire tunnel and Sans catches himself staring down at the surface of the lake. It's constantly moving in lazy swirls, forming giant bubbles that grow and grow until they burst violently and spray liquid fire everywhere. It seems like it should be loud, but it's almost completely silent inside their narrow tunnel. Their own heavy footsteps and the sound of their breath through the filters on their helmets are the only things he can hear.
Gaster drags him forward a little and Sans' head snaps back up. They begin tromping along the tunnel, which is rising steeply right at the beginning and Sans has to pause after almost every step to catch his breath. Cooling air is being pumped into his helmet and through the network of tubes along his suit, but it does nothing to keep him from sweating so much the heavy material clings to every part of his body.
It feels like an eternity passed, but he finally does make it up the slope and doesn't even have the energy for a relieved sigh when he sees Gaster holding open the doors to a metal elevator to the right of the tube. The elevator doesn't have walls, just a waist high railing, but it moves through its own glass tube, so it doesn't make Sans quite as nervous as he thought it would. Though it shakes a little when he steps inside and Gaster pulls the gate shut behind them, which makes Sans cling to the railing a bit more insistently than is probably necessary.
Loudly rattling and creaking, the elevator carries them upwards, then stops for a moment at a kind of intersection of glass tubes, before shooting off to the side and towards the Core along a thick rail. Somewhere along the line, Gaster has opened up a little panel on the side and plugged some cables into his phone, now typing code again and only occasionally stopping to look around, as if to orientate himself.
"There are about two hundred of these elevators in here," he says and Sans is glad that he now has something to listen to so he doesn't have to keep staring into the orange abyss below him. "All strictly programmed to only move in very specific ways and grant access to very specific areas. They are the only manner of transportation we have here, so the places we can or can't go are entirely determined by the programming."
Right before they reach another intersection, Gaster presses a combination of buttons on the panel and they stutter to a halt. There is some whirring and clanking above them and Sans leans forward, curiously watching as the rail at the intersection rearranges itself to open up a new path. Gaster grins proudly when they start moving again, very slowly going around the corner before stopping again while the rail behind them reverts back to its original state. Only then does the elevator pick up its previous speed again, flying along one of the thousands of tubes spanning over the lake, seemingly inaccessible from the outside.
"To find us in here," Gaster continues with a content smile, casually leaning against the handrail, "you'd first have to know it's even possible to enter the Core, which nobody except me does; then you'd have to know the exact path to the entrance through the elevator network, which, again, only I do. And even if you somehow found out about one and two, you'd then have to be able to hack the transportation programming, which I specifically designed to be unhackable by anyone but myself."
Sans might have asked a few questions, but right after Gaster finished speaking they suddenly drop down a few levels and Sans just gasps breathlessly as his stomach feels as if it's lifting up into his throat. With a loud clanking, they change direction again, now zipping around in a broad arc and picking up speed along the way. Sans is holding onto the handrail with both arms, watching as the Core steadily fills up more and more of his field of view. They dip further below it, unsettlingly close to the surface of the lava lake, and Sans can't see a ceiling or walls on the other side; everything is taken up by the enormous globe hanging over them, seemingly far too close already, even though they've barely even made it halfway across the lake.
"There are struts holding it in place, by the way." Gaster still hasn't moved from his casual position, while Sans is fighting the centrifugal force with all his might in an increasingly desperate attempt to stay upright. "I get really stupid questions from anyone who sees it for the first time. It's like, here, look at the biggest scientific accomplishment of the last five centuries, and all they want to know is 'How does it float?' It doesn't float. Also, and this is another thing I have to clarify way too often, it's not actually pulsating. That's the electromagical field surrounding it, which is so strong it's actually visible, so it creates the illusion of the matter beneath it expanding and contracting." When they drop down again even further, Gaster shoots Sans a quick look and chuckles lightly. "You alright over there? Please don't puke inside the helmet."
Sans might be a bit shaky right now, but it's less the erratic movement that's making him queasy ‒ it actually reminds him of the chair escapades Gaster and him had in the labs ‒ but the whole environment they're moving through. Looking at the Core makes him think of the images of planets he saw in Alphys' science books, which already made him feel terribly insignificant, even while just looking at tiny pictures.
Actually seeing a construct so incomprehensibly massive looming above him is beyond any concept of plain awe; it makes his soul shrink in on itself and his mind refuse to even form proper thoughts. As if anything he could think here could even come close to appropriately capturing the significance of this ‒ even just calling it a 'machine' feels insufficient. Sans looks at it, at this Core, the heart of the entire Underground, and it almost feels like an entity to him.
The entire way across takes about fifteen minutes, even at their increasingly crazy speed. The last five minutes in particular are an experience, with Sans constantly thinking they must be close enough already, there is no way those glowing blue gaps between the shiny, silvery plates of the Core's surface could be any bigger than they already appear. But then they keep going closer, and the gaps keep growing and growing until they're chasms, with a whole other world of intricate panels and cables and magical currents flowing inside them and producing that blue glow.
It's one of those chasms that they are headed towards, it turns out. What looked like a thin and delicate web of blue hairlines from afar is now a giant pathway further into the Core, wide enough for twenty elevators, possibly. Gaster has his phone out again, disconnected from the elevator this time, and as he types and types at a completely abnormal speed ‒ really, Sans watches as his fingers seem to blur from the rapid movement and thinks it shouldn't be possible to type that fast ‒ their entire surroundings change form. Silvery panels pop out of the seemingly solid walls to slide out of the way and open up a new passage, wires and tubes are bent to the side, entire sections get remotely turned off as they travel past it, only for the blue, crackling currents to jump back into action right behind them. Sans almost gets tired of watching the display, that's how long it takes to get to where they want.
Every once in a while, an uninvited, but painfully persistent thought pipes up in the back of his head, remarking on the fact that unlike the lab, this is a place he couldn't ever leave again without Gaster allowing him to.
He doesn't really know why that thought should matter. He wants to be here, after all.
"Here we go," Gaster suddenly says after about ten more minutes of navigating through the Core. The elevator slows down and two large panels right in front of them slide to the side with a whirring sound, revealing ‒ a remarkably plain looking hallway, actually.
Gaster seems excited, so Sans tries to not look too unimpressed. "I put a lab inside the Core." Gaster sounds like he's giggling with every word. "Fully equipped, fully functional. Probably even more so than the official ones, since I was the one who personally calibrated this." Despite the heavy metal boots, he practically jumps out of the elevator and lightly punches Sans in the shoulder as he climbs after him. "An entire lab! Inside of a nuclear magic reactor! Sometimes I truly can't get over how brilliant I am."
Well, alright, phrased like that it does sound impressive. But after the whole lake of lava, the seemingly floating and pulsating globe and the pretty light show of blue currents, Sans still thinks that the actual design of the lab could have been a bit more inspired.
It really does look boring. They go through another decontamination chamber, finally get rid of the suits and then Sans just trails after Gaster, who is jumping about the place and checking the equipment. The laboratory looks almost exactly the same as the ones back in the facility, only even brighter and entirely white. Everything is dusty and covered in plastic sheets, as apparently Gaster hasn't been here a single time since he built it.
He is busy unpacking everything and it takes a while for Sans to realize that he doesn't have to follow him anymore ‒ he can't leave this place anyways and nothing works yet, so it's not like he can get in trouble by exploring on his own. That's probably also Gaster's train of thought, because when he asks for permission he barely gets more than an impatient wave and a "Yeah yeah, just don't break anything. We can't actually afford to do that anymore."
So the first thing Sans does is find the parts of Gaster's secret lair that don't look like a laboratory. He wouldn't have assumed there even were any, but the first door he finds actually leads to a little office with no lab equipment in sight anywhere. It's still mostly white, with everything made of some kind of very sturdy plastic, but there is a chair with a soft cushion, a green, fluffy rug in front of the desk (at least Sans assumes it's fluffy, it's still imprisoned it its plastic bag like everything else) and a shelf full of books. Behind the next door is a sparse kitchen, equipped with a microwave oven and a very small, unplugged refrigerator.
It almost starts feeling absurd how normal everything looks. Already Sans catches himself kind of forgetting where he is, the whole journey here slowly fading into a dreamlike memory in the back of his mind, as if it never really happened. He finds a tiny corner in the lab, not a real room but still a place that's mostly free of science stuff, where there's an actual bed with actual pillows and a duvet.
It's too similar to being in a house. Sans suddenly misses the smell of wood, of flowers and sweet food. He knows none of the books in the office are about dragons, he knows there is no colorful collection of canned vegetables in the fridge and if he saw any toys or stuffed animals lying around, he would immediately slap himself in order to stop hallucinating.
He doesn't know exactly how long ago the Core was built, but the way everyone talks about it it must have been at least a couple of years ago. Gaster had put his plan into motion back then, very much aware that he'd someday need a place to hide, but he couldn't have known that Sans would be there too. There is only one bed, one chair at the small table in the kitchen, one office desk. Sans was never supposed to be here. There is no space for Sans here.
"Good news," Gaster yells from the other side of the room, his head having disappeared into a deep cupboard. "Even with the two of us, rations should last for at least five years. I had hoped for ten years free of social interaction when I built this, but I guess you can't have everything." When he turns around, he's ripping open the plastic wrapping of two plain packaged sandwiches, closing the cupboard behind him with the heel of his foot. "Hungry?"
Sans shakes his head. "Tired," he says, his voice coming out a little bit more whiny than he intended. But it is still the middle of the night and he just spent the last hour stuck in a heavy suit with metal shoes and shoulder pads.
Gaster sighs, chewing on his sandwich thoughtfully, and then gestures at the bed with the other one. "Well, take the bed for now. I'll find a way to set something up for you tomorrow."
With a tired nod, Sans starts unpacking the bedding, crumpling up the plastic sheets in a big ball next to the bed while Gaster watches him. By the time Sans is crawling under the duvet, yawning widely, he has finished his sandwich and went to dim down the lights in that one corner of the lab. Sans can barely keep his eyes open, but Gaster is thinking and almost nervously tapping his finger against the wall next to the light switch, so he still wants to say something. Sans watches him and waits.
"Hey, kid?" he starts finally, coming over to the bed to sit down on the mattress, one hand hesitantly landing on Sans' duvet covered shoulder. "You made a good choice here, you know. Coming with me to help me out. And, I suppose... you should know that I appreciate that." His other hand flounders through the air for a moment, maybe in search of a better way to say what he means. But then, with a sharp nod, he decisively ends the conversation and gets back up.
Sans closes his eyes, shuts off his mind and, at last, gets to fall asleep, forgetting all about choices and who he makes them for.
"Gaster." Sans is tapping his fingers on the armrest of the chair he is once again strapped into, trying to get the man's attention. "Gaster. Why did the noble gas cry?"
"Sans, seriously," Gaster mouths around the cap of a needle stuck between his teeth, "I am going to hit you. I'm going to take that one HP of yours and bring it down to zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero zerozerozero one."
A short beat of silence. "Because all its friends argon." Sans grins, reveling in the groaning curses that Gaster tries to articulate past all the stuff in his mouth. The jab of the needle is a bit more forceful than usual, but luckily it's not aimed at Sans but at the tube hanging from his soul. It's a bit uncomfortable, but ever since they installed the connection ports right into his soul, hooking it up to all kinds of machinery has become much less painful.
"You told that one before," Gaster helpfully informs him, after he finally takes the caps out of his mouth, puts them back on the needles and stores everything away safely. "At least try to come up with some new material."
"Challenge?" Sans grins and Gaster turns to him with a dark frown, pointing at him with another needle. "No."
After two whole years of being stuck here with Gaster, a lot of things about him are much less scary than before.
(And some are more scary.)
But by now, Sans recognizes an empty threat when he hears one and mostly knows how far he can push the man before his annoyance tips over into real anger. Right now, it's just nerves and lack of sleep, as well as frustration over still not having gotten anywhere with this line of experiments.
Sans, on the other hand, is mainly bored. He watches with a yawn as Gaster starts screwing cables to the ME display monitor, injecting some more contrast fluid into Sans' soul and watching impatiently as the scan slowly picks up the distribution of its magic particles. They still all appear in the same color, the same white as before, and Gaster throws his head back with a long, forcefully calm breath.
"Still no blue?" Sans asks unnecessarily, he already knows the answer of course, but some days he's just really not in the mood to sit by quietly ‒ if he does, there is a good chance Gaster just completely forgets there is another living being with him. Sans tested it once, how long they could go without exchanging a single word with each other, but he gave up after two weeks of nothing but silence and disgruntled soliloquies.
"Well, we've at least gotten to a point where there is a really white white on one hand and a more yellowish white on the other," Gaster grumbles, turning the monitor so that Sans can see the scan of his own soul, where it shows millions of tiny white particles circulating through his magic stream. "What color is that, eggshell? Or something equally pretentious, like, I don't know, vanilla cloud white?"
"There is a bluish one," Sans claims, lifting a finger and trying to point to it as best he can, what with his wrists tied to the armrest. "On the upper left crown."
Gaster leans closer, squinting suspiciously. "Where do you see blue there? That's all white. I wasn't even entirely serious about the eggshell one." He rips off his glasses and lightly pounds his knuckles against his forehead. "And I just said 'eggshell' unironically, what the actual fuck."
"It has a blue tint," Sans insists. "I call it misty mountain pearly blue white ‒ baby cream. Dove."
"Stop." Gaster stands up and puts his glasses on again. "It's supposed to be cyan and azure. And that's already a far more extensive chromatics vocabulary than I ever wanted to have. Incoming." Sans steels himself at the warning, as he only has a few seconds to prepare for Gaster's gloved hand reaching straight into his chest and tugging at his soul. With the other he pulls the overhead light closer and then he leans forward until his nose almost touches the transparent skin. Sans stares at the ceiling, reciting the periodic table in his head to distract himself from the breath being punched out of him, the taste of blood in his mouth and the rushing of magic in his ears.
"The particles themselves are definitely colored," Gaster murmurs, turning the soul left and right and examining it through the magnifying glass that's connected to his work glasses. Sans gasps quietly, the muscles on his arms contracting automatically as his body wants to fight the intrusion and his mind fights his body, chanting insistently that it's 'just a bit of pain' and 'nothing we can't deal with' and 'bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, barium...'
"The bloody machine still can't pick it up for some stupid reason, even with the modified contrast." With a disgustingly wet sound, Gaster pulls his hand out again and swivels back towards the machine, angrily punching buttons while Sans coughs and wheezes, desperately trying to spit the excess blood and magic dripping from his mouth off to the side. He's tired of spitting the stuff up on himself, he's running out of clean shirts for this month. And it's only the seventh.
"Good thing I'm not a fucking engineer," Gaster rants off to the side. "I mean, that would be convenient, can't have that around here."
"Call Freeda again," Sans suggests hoarsely, still catching his breath, but determined to not let this interfere with his goal of being annoying today. "She can teach you."
"I'm gonna teach you, shithead," Gaster grumbles, talking more to the machine than to Sans, but at least he's still acknowledging his input and not just simply talking to himself. "I'm teaching her! Still! Even though I'm basically non-existent as far as monsterkind is concerned, but here I am, passing on my best research to my fucking replacement so she can pretend to be solving this crisis legally."
"Everyone probably thinks she's way smarter than you now," Sans grins.
Alright, definitely venturing into dangerous territory here, he thinks, as Gaster fixes him with a cold stare, a low growl escaping him. "Watch it, buddy."
Sans just keeps up the grin, knowing full well that showing any signs of intimidation only makes the creator lose respect for him. Though even after such a long time with only the two of them, it's still kind of an amazing concept to him that he actually has some of his respect in the first place. It's weird, but Sans is getting a little older and it changes things, very slowly.
Sometimes he feels that it's becoming more dangerous, somehow. He hopes it's a wrong feeling.
Still, he takes care never to go too far, to always pull back a little after poking Gaster a bit too harshly. "She's not even officially the Royal Scientist," he says now with a shrug and Gaster nods, still glaring at him. "Of course she isn't, that would be ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as you trying to placate me, by the way."
His expression only grows more suspicious when Sans widens his grin. "Say, Gaster. Where does bad light ‒"
"No." Gaster's gestures are sharp and angry, but his tone of voice is just resigned. "I'm so done with this."
"No, just, where does bad ‒"
"Sans, I fucking swear."
"‒ bad light end up?"
Gaster throws up his hands and folds them on top of his head. "In prism. I know. I know all of these. I suffered through university with hundreds of wannabe science nerds who thought that kind of stuff was witty. Please stop."
"They just wanted to lighten the mood. Science is hard, I bet they had alkynes of trouble." Sans is even polite enough to add minimal sign language with his fingertips to clarify what he's talking about. Wouldn't want Gaster to miss the joke.
Apparently that didn't work though, because Gaster just stares at him in silence for a few seconds, entirely unimpressed ‒ which is not possible if he actually understood the joke, it was very impressive after all.
(Sans notices more and more how he apparently fell into this weird singularity where he is aware his jokes are bad, but somehow also sincerely likes them? A mystery he really shouldn't think about too hard.)
Then Gaster just turns his back towards Sans and keeps muttering frustrated complaints at the uncooperative machine. At least it sounds like muttering, because he's on Sans' right side. Even with turning his head as far as he can, Sans can't quite compensate for his bad ear on that side, so all the words just blend into each other and sound way too quiet.
They've been working on this for a long, long time, Sans thinks, leaning back into the chair and staring at the ceiling with a deep huff. Of course they have machines that can scan magic particles moving inside a soul and tell the normal, white monster ones apart from the colored human magic ones. But Sans has two types of human magic at once and trying to get the machine to differentiate between those has been nothing but a failure so far. Lately, their attempts just led to all of the particles being displayed in white (and some in misty mountain pearly blue white baby cream dove.) It's especially frustrating because the cyan magic acts so very differently from the blue one, so it seems it should be easy to pinpoint why. Except it isn't.
Gaster reconfigures the settings on the scan, pulls up another ME monitoring device and rearranges some cables, then waves at Sans with his routine "Cyan attack" command. Sans barely spares a thought to summoning a row of light blue bones protruding from the floor. While Gaster oversees the readings, doing his best to adjust the scanner hovering on both sides of Sans' ribcage to get the best possible angle, Sans keeps himself busy by letting the bones bounce up and down and then lazily using them to form words and images in the air.
"White attack," comes the next order after about ten minutes, and Sans switches the blue bones out for white ones.
"And blue attack," is the unsurprising conclusion following after yet another ten minutes.
"Direction or force?" Sans asks, already lifting up one of the little plastic balls they always use for these tests, letting it float in the air.
"Force," Gaster answers and Sans lifts an eyebrow at him even though he isn't looking.
"Arm?" he says with a hint of reproval, because Gaster knows full well his gravity magic works best in combination with a gesture, but still forgets to unfasten his wrist every time.
Every. Time.
It's not a good day to be snappy, it seems, because Gaster throws some non-vital instruments in his hand to the floor angrily before swiveling around and reaching for the restraints on Sans' right hand ‒ even though he knows that's his bad hand. Now that has Sans getting a bit ticked off and he bends his arm away as far as he can. "Wrong one."
"Oh for fuck's sake," Gaster explodes at him, standing up so abruptly that the chair clatters to the floor behind him. "You really have to stop being so pathetic about this." His movements while walking to the other side of Sans' chair are brisk and sharp, the force with which he pulls at the restraints at his left hand clearly intended to be as painful as it ends up being. "It's a psychosomatic issue, you know that full well."
Sans hates talking about this, he hates it so much, and he would keep his mouth shut if it didn't feel like he has to defend her as well as himself every time this comes up. "It's still real," he says, the usual argument almost getting stuck between his teeth on the way out, as if it's tired of being brushed aside as invalid.
"It's something your own brain talked itself into believing," Gaster counters, as always, and Sans can't remember how often they've had this exact exchange. "If you weren't so set on feeling sorry for yourself, you could easily talk yourself out of it again."
Sans angrily works his jaw, grinding his teeth against each other as he makes a quick gesture and increases the force of gravity on the plastic ball to such a high degree that it actually bursts upon impact with the ground. That's nothing new, though, and he just picks up the next one from the box to the side and repeats the motion.
"Oh, great," Gaster intones snidely, picking the chair back up and letting himself fall into it with an exaggerated rolling of the eyes. "We're back to breaking our limited resources. Genius level argumentation tactics right there."
"Better than having the same conversation over and over again and expecting different results," Sans says monotonously, breaking up their usual formula of bickering for the next half hour. He's angry, but tired, and every time they talk about this it feels just a little more pointless.
"Is it though?" Gaster continues provocatively, obviously not willing to let it go. "Is it really? Because one of these options merely has us quarreling a bit while the other destroys our equipment. But, hey, as long as you're having an outlet for your unprofessional displays of immaturity."
And Sans doesn't like being called unprofessional, of all things. It reminds him how Gaster almost views him as a real colleague now sometimes, but then before he can be properly proud of that achievement, the accusation of unprofessionalism drops him down several levels again and he's back to being nothing more than a subject, a SA-N5.
Part of him also wonders how to feel about the whole 'immature' thing; he's now about the same age Alphys was when he last saw her, and by now he understands at least a little bit that children are supposed to act differently than adults. Alphys certainly did. So on one hand, being immature probably shouldn't even be an issue for him, seeing as he is, in fact, a not yet entirely matured being. But on the other hand, he doesn't think he wants to be seen as an immature child in the first place, so the criticism does actually hurt him a bit.
... Also, today is apparently one of his overthinking days. How he loves those.
He decides to follow the path of least resistance and go back to their routine patterns of discussion, which seems to be what Gaster wants. "I didn't decide to make my right side less functional than the left," he argues without any passion or even real conviction. It's hard to be completely invested when part of him does feel pathetic for not being able to get rid of this, when part of him does believe Gaster that it's his own fault. When he knows full well that this only happened because he was too weak.
"Yes, fair enough," Gaster easily agrees, waving him off as though he went off on a tangent with that. "But how does that impact your ability to now make the decision to put some effort into fixing it?"
"It's not about effort," Sans mumbles, watching the creator's fingers tensely drum on the desk next to the keyboard as he waits for the scanner results.
"It's always about effort. Don't whine about not being able to change something when you're too lazy to even try."
"I'm not whining, you're whining!" Sans snaps at him, so tired of only ever being attacked and never fighting back. Gaster turns to him with a loud, derogative laugh, leaning back in his chair to regard Sans with his signature arrogant amusement and raises his palm at him in a mocking gesture. "Yes, please, go on and tell me about how you don't ever whine about anything ever. 'Gaster, I'm bored! Gaster, my soul hurts! Gaster, pay attention to me!' I'm so blessed that I never have to hear anything like that from you."
Now Sans has to look away in shame. With just the two of them stuck in the same place for years without any opportunity to leave, without any real space between them, it has become easy to sometimes forget his place. So yes, he recognizes himself in Gaster's mocking tone, recognizes easily that he should stop arguing now because he's in the wrong. "I don't whine about this," he still insists, waggling the fingers of his right hand, which at all hours of the day feels like it's fallen asleep. "That's just you."
"So, calling you out on your bullshit is whining now, is it?"
"It's not bullshit." Sans never raises his voice, he knows from watching Gaster that it's much scarier to remain calm and collected even when angry, but his voice becomes more rough and hollow when he's really mad. Like now, for example. "I can't fix myself by wishing real hard. It's a ‒ it's a psychological thing, you said that. That's something you need help with from others."
"Ah yes, spoken like a true wimp." Gaster's patronizing smile remains firmly in place, but his eyes are getting harder around the edges with each one of Sans' protests. The once completely smooth skin of his face is now permanently crinkly around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, but it looks especially bad today, after he spent the last two nights working on refining the contrast and the scanner settings instead of sleeping. "The kind of argument you only hear from people who have never, and never will accomplish anything on their own and are desperately trying to validate their complete lack of any talent. Should I start calling you Dr. Pollard from now on?"
Sans' eyes are tearing up a bit and he can't say if it's out of anger or because he's actually hurt by Gaster's insults. It's not like this kind of talk is anything new, but maybe they're just both in a bad place today. Trying to pull himself out of the conflict once and for all, Sans looks away and just points his chin in the direction of Gaster's office with the bookshelf. "You have books on psychology in there," he says. "Maybe read some. Might help with your own issues, too."
Even though it's definitely one of the most insolent things Sans has ever said, and to Gaster of all people, he doesn't expect the kind of pay off he receives. The words have barely left his mouth when Gaster's flat palm connects with the side of his head with a loud, resounding slap. His head is ripped to the side, smacking into the high neck-rest of the metal chair with such sudden force that he pulls the muscles in his neck. A ringing in his ears drowns out all other noise and the initial numb feeling in his cheek quickly drains away to be replaced by a sharp, throbbing pain.
It's not the worst pain. Compared to what he knows he can withstand, it's hardly even worth mentioning. Sure, the taste of blood is back in his mouth and one of his teeth now feels a little wobbly, but they're supposed to fall out soon and be replaced by better ones anyways, so that's not really a problem. Still, while he knows this isn't even close to as bad as it could be, something about this makes him pause, makes his thoughts grind to a complete halt as he lies there, bound and unable to move.
This was not for a test. Gaster hurt him, and it had nothing to do with science at all. Slowly, Sans turns his head back around. When he meets the creator's expression, it's an odd, tense grimace of disbelief and hectic calculation that he has never seen before. The hand that he hit him with is hanging loosely at his side, the fingers slowly curling and uncurling again, the other one is hovering in the air just below Gaster's chin, twitching nervously. For the longest time, both Gaster and Sans just remain as they are, staring at each other, one thinking and one waiting, numbly.
Gaster coughs. "That ‒ well," he starts, the almost-stutter accentuated by a nigh helpless little gesture with his raised hand. "That was a rather unnecessary act of violence." He sounds unsure, questioning. Like he isn't certain whether or not he really just did that. "How very unprofessional."
While Gaster appears to become more and more upset the longer he thinks about this, Sans is already calming down again. Really, what else did he expect to gain by continuously poking the man for a reaction? Surprise, he got a reaction. He leans his head back, the ringing slowly subsiding in his left ear and, of course, sticking around way longer in the right one. Gaster uselessly presses a few buttons on the machines, as if to just give his hands something to do, and Sans watches from the corner of his eyes while carefully examining the newly loose tooth in the back of his mouth with the tip of his tongue.
Then, the creator stops his nervous antics, sighs a deep, long sigh and takes off his glasses to rub his eyes. "Well, we're both tired," he says roughly, as he turns and unfastens the rest of Sans' restraints. "And the scanner needs to be reworked anyways. Let's just ‒ take a breather." He unplugs the cables from Sans' soul with unusual care, even though it doesn't make much of a difference pain-wise, and then waves him off the chair without once looking at his face.
The speed with which he wraps up all the cables connected to their ME particle scanning machine is remarkable; he is done and pushing the machine along with him before Sans has even completely climbed out of the chair. "I'll be in my office," he calls over his shoulder, finally with his normal voice again. "Don't disturb me."
Sans turns to see the office door slam shut, followed seconds later by the sound of a key turning.
Well. At least this means they're back in familiar territory.
The last time Gaster locked himself away for that long was when he was angry about not getting Muffet's soul for his tests, as far as Sans remembers. That was a long time ago. Back then he also locked himself into a separate part of the lab, meaning he could still do experiments. This time, he's just in his office. And yes, he has the machine with him, but he left all the equipment needed to make modifications on it in the lab.
The first day, Sans tries to keep himself busy the usual way. He practices his magic, careful about not breaking anything this time, but there's a limit on how often he can do the same attack over and over and over again before tiring of it magically, mentally and physically. He ends that first day early, shortly contemplating the risk of sleeping in Gaster's bed ‒ it's more comfortable than the collection of loose blankets and bunched up clothes that serve as his own bed on the floor. But Gaster doesn't like having to wake and move him when he comes back to take a nap himself, so Sans decides to avoid possibly angering him even more.
The second day, Sans would normally look at the books and either search for something new in the ones he already read a thousand times, or try again to understand one of the really advanced ones. But usually when Gaster dismisses him for a few days and does his own thing, he does so in the lab and Sans has to keep to the office and the kitchen. This time, he can't get to the books and it's a really annoying break in their protocol. He practices magic again, but grows tired of it even more quickly than the day before and then spends the evening half-heartedly taking care of some routine maintenance that he's allowed to do: refilling and sorting syringes, filing some reports on the rate of their resource depletion, recording today's radiation levels inside and outside their insulated laboratory (they're a tiny bit higher than normal, but still well within acceptable levels) and testing the continued functionality of some equipment.
The third day, he risks Gaster's wrath by using pen and paper for drawing. It's a senseless waste of resources, especially their supply of pens is getting scarce these days, so Sans draws the best picture he can with as few lines as possible, which means he spends more time looking at the empty page, thinking and planning, than he does actually drawing. When he's done, he keeps the picture for a while, staring at it to commit it to memory, then destroys it with the Bunsen burner and hides the ashes.
The fourth and fifth day, he sleeps. In Gaster's bed, because the side of his face stopped hurting and he doesn't care about making him angry anymore.
On day six, he opens up one of the panels that's covering the large windows on one side of the lab. The view is of the inside of the Core, naturally, and he lays in bed and numbly watches the display of shimmering blue magic and electricity jumping along delicate machinery. They're only supposed to open these panels when Gaster wants to remotely work on the actual Core and has to see what he's doing; the risk of increased radiation is higher like this, but Sans finds it's an acceptable price to pay for the pretty view.
Day seven is when the boredom gets so overwhelming that he's tempted to start throwing things at the office door. Luckily, he learned his lesson from the last time he tried to elicit a reaction by being a shithead. He wanders around the lab instead, looking for anything new to do and knowing full well that there isn't anything. There never is.
There is only one part of the laboratory that he has never looked at, and that's the corner where Gaster stores his personal projects. Sans wouldn't have thought it possible, but even in this enclosed space, Gaster manages to do things without Sans noticing. Sometimes it's on purpose. Gaster then tells him that whatever he's working on could be dangerous to Sans' soul and he locks him into the office or the kitchen for a few days. Sometimes it seems to just happen. Sans will go to sleep and when he wakes up the next morning, there is a new construct standing in the corner of the lab, half hidden behind the partition screen and covered by a white sheet. Gaster has never really made a big deal out of it ‒ it's just an agreed upon fact between them that, as far as Sans is concerned, that corner of the room doesn't exist. He's never even tried to look at it.
But it's day seven and Sans is so bored he fears parts of his brain will just start dribbling out his ears.
Peering behind the screen is much more anti-climactic than Sans expected, to be honest. Nothing world-shaking jumps out at him ‒ it's actually mostly stacks of paper. Sans leafs through some of them, but the theories and formulas written on them are a completely different level than the science that he knows so far. It looks even more complicated than the books in the office that he still doesn't understand and that hurt his head every time he tries to read them.
There are some unfinished machine parts and naked circuit boards, obviously attempts to put the theories written here into practice, but it's still a fact that Gaster is not an engineer. He thinks about stuff, he doesn't actually build it himself. Even the Core, which he is so insanely proud of it's almost ridiculous, is actually something he couldn't have built on his own. Sans knows that, and Gaster knows that Sans knows that, and it's been ground for one or two heated arguments already.
Sans puts the papers and unfinished devices away again carefully and inches his way past them. Further in the back are some data pads and monitors, as well as a large whiteboard leaning against the wall. It's full of scribbles and models of magic flow and soul science, obviously an ongoing process of trying to figure something out, judging by the smears where previous parts of the theory were erased and the red circled passages with large exclamation marks next to them. Curiously, Sans stares at it for a while, because it feels like he's seen some parts of it before. It's definitely about souls and human magic, that much he can make out. He wonders why that's back here with the projects Gaster deems 'not part of their actual work,' when it's obviously dealing with the same issues they're trying to solve out there.
Behind the whiteboard, pushed all the way into the furthest corner, stands the largest of the projects in here. It's about the height of a desk, as wide as Sans' small bed and completely covered in one of those white sheets. For a second, Sans grumpily thinks that a lot of fabric is being wasted back here while he has to make due with rolled up sweaters as pillows. But he quickly brushes the thoughts aside to continue his investigation, very slowly lifting up a corner of the sheet and peering underneath.
Whatever he's looking at here seems a lot more finished than all the other things stored in this corner. It's like a sort of ‒ capsule? Made of dark gray metal and with lots of little monitors, control panels and keypads. Thick, black cables connect it to the wall and some thinner ones are plugged into other machines off to the side, very similar to the ones they use while running tests on Sans' soul.
Sans pulls the sheet back bit by bit, rolling it up as he goes so it doesn't become an unmanageable mess of cloth that'll interfere with the large pile of cables. The top of the capsule is made of thick glass it seems, fogged up from the inside and ‒ and lit in a deep blue? Sans pauses, something cold taking hold of his stomach and squeezing.
It's not a capsule. It's a tank. Just like...
Throwing caution to the wind, he rips the sheet away completely, presses his hands on top of the tank and pulls himself up to get a better look. Underneath the glass, covered in thin tubes and cables and surrounded by a small circle of artificial, translucent flesh, lies a soul.
Glowing, deep blue, and pulsing.
With shaking hands and breath stuck in his throat, Sans tears his eyes away from the soul, drawn to the thick black letters that are printed beneath the rim of the glass.
SA-N6.