Bright room. Silent room. Warm room save for the cold ceramic tiles on his face. Though beaten and bruised from his petals to his roots, the pain lasted only a moment before a gentle brush of life ran its fingers up his stem. By the time he moved, he had been healed, restored to the brand new flower creature he had glimpsed in the mirror before taking a dive into these depths.

He blinked open his eyes, only to be blinded again by a harsh, white, pulsating light. Lying as near to the brightness as he did, from it he could acutely taste an odd, contradictory sensation of pain and pleasure. It rippled through his every molecule until cast into a state of mind he couldn't comprehend, as if all days of his life happened simultaneously. New reflections danced endlessly away from him like facing mirrors. What they told him of his future he instantly forgot, but the past … that lingered.

He remembered, now, why his face looked so foreign to him. He understood why he had run so blindly from the sound of footsteps. In his last moments alive, he had been hunted. In his last moments … With every new thought, a warm throb beat slowly, steadily stronger inside him: determination pooling in his core like an old friend.

The discomfort of standing so close to the brilliance quickly outweighed its euphoria. Just as the light had brought him to bloom, now it wanted him to wither. He crept away, back toward the walls of a lab he could barely see and out into the dark of the Underground.


Sans coughed and gasped awake. What was he thinking, teleporting again? Hadn't he learned from the last few shortcuts? Every fiber of his being shook under the strain of putting it through yet another jump. His soul, already in tatters, felt to be less than stitches now. He touched a hand to the spear wound in his side and found it fresh with dust. The bandages hung there uselessly, stripped away by the winds of the in-between.

He peeled them off. He didn't need them anymore. Finding his brother meant more to him than his own life. Even if his body resisted, he would carry onward, buoyed with so much hope and resolve he could be as determined as a full-blooded human. He flattened his hands to the cold laboratory floor beneath him and staggered to his feet.


The multicolored lock retracted the door in four quadrants. They slid back into the corners to reveal a short hallway and there, at its end, the final elevator. This pathway had always been eerie to you, but set to the sound of electricity already running, your hair now stood on end. You knew why. The moment the power generator became operational, Flowey always hijacked the lift and pulled you to New Home with no hope of going back. In every single timeline, this marked the point of no return. You wondered if that were still true.

On the floor just inside the hallway, a spiral of cloth stood out to you against the otherwise vacant tiles. Your hands dropped to lift the bandages, but they only fell again from your trembling fingers. You'd seen this kind of dust before. In fact, you'd hoped to never see that sickeningly beautiful shimmer like powdered silver ever again. Among the particles, something red painted them thick, like … blood?

The gallop of your heart made itself known with every throb of your aching head. You took a breath and reassured yourself the bandages held far too little dust to mean anything. Still, your fears only deepened. You ran ahead.

The elevator doors were closed. Never once had you found the platform anywhere but here, waiting, as if by destiny prepared to take you upward. You smacked the button repeatedly. A few delayed clicks and one angry screech of metal later, you were amazed to hear the lift rising from below. Before now, you had never thought the elevator went anywhere but up.

When the entryway slid open, you discovered an entire sheet of metal ripped off the interior wall and cast to the floor. In its absence, a new button had been revealed. Below the switches for New Home and your current floor, "B1," a neglected "B2" rested among several heavy layers of rust and grime.


If the frigid air and ghostly green aura of Alphys' usual stomping grounds were unsettling enough, the hallways Sans braved now could have been spawned from his darkest nightmares. Flickering, unstable lights shed rays on cobwebs thick with dust and free particles hovering like timeless snowflakes. The buzz of electricity shorted in and out. Smells of must and molding paper coated the air. It wouldn't surprise Sans if a leak had sprung down here somewhere. What doors lined his path had been shut tight, so utterly dark through their tall slat windows it was impossible to know what lay inside unless already familiar with them.

Luckily—and unluckily—Sans knew this place like the back of his hand.

He took a breath. Simply being here, undertaking this fool's errand, diving headfirst back into a hell he'd hoped to leave behind, would have been enough to strain his already shattered soul. He closed his eyes, wrapped hope like a tourniquet around the edges of that pitiful spade. There had to be a light at the end of this tunnel. Just a few turns down the long hallways, through a big red door, and he'd find it.

His steps cut a line through the dark dust of the floor. His memory of this hallway felt fresh to him as if it hadn't been ages since his last visit, as if he hadn't done everything in his power to forget the lab and all inside. The farther in he walked, however, the longer this hallway felt to become. He turned the corner and yet he was right back where he started. Or at least … it seemed he was.

This hallway looked different to him. One second it appeared younger than he remembered, then the next it seemed older. New doors became old doors, even no doors at all. The same cobwebs he saw earlier had been wiped clean—but in another blink of the inconstant lights, they padded the corners even heavier than before.

His phone vibrated so powerfully it could break. The universe buzzed his brain with confusion. His previous contact with the Rift had given him some immunity to temporal disturbances, but how long would it hold against the unraveled timelines swimming around him?

Muffled voices struck up conversation in a nearby room. Was there a light on under the door? Sans found it difficult to decide. A part of his mind said "yes," and yet another …

He slowly, cautiously reached for the door handle and pushed it inward—but found only the remnants of an abandoned chemistry lab. He had visited this room a handful of times before sealing the entire floor behind a spare elevator panel. By his recollection, he should have already passed it. It should have been the first door on his left.

More whispers reached out to him from down the hallway, and his soul surged with new hope. One voice sounded familiar, unique, isolated to the person he desperately sought to find here. He hurried back to find shifting shadows around the corner, flickering in and out of sight at the end of the corridor. He chased after them.

Running down the hall was as muscling against insanity incarnate. The farther he traveled, the worse it became. Time and realities flipped over him like the pages of a book. Voices echoed around the inconstant hallways, and soon he became unsure where their words were leading him, if anywhere at all.

The dialogue became more nonsensical, spilling over him from left, right, even sometimes above. He could no longer pinpoint a single direction, until the snippets of a familiar conversation reached out to him. In yet another chamber, he glimpsed two silhouettes: one tall, one short, both skeletal.

"It's what you wanted from the start, isn't it?"

"dings …"

"Am I wrong?"

"i just think that …"

Sans knew, then, that these voices he heard were only ghosts, stages in time blurring their lines. He turned away from the memory before it could go too far. His hand, already tight on his ribs, clenched their damaged bones a little further. The pain of it distracted him from pain of another kind. He pushed onward toward the other echoes beckoning him down the hall.

At long last, he reached a dead end. A large red door stood floor to ceiling on his left, mottled in age one moment, brand new the next. Here, he hesitated, phalanges flat to a surface so hauntingly carmen it could be painted with blood. It burned warm against his bones. Heat radiated through the metal like a hot stove, as if the heart of Hotland's lava pools rested on the other side.

What if he didn't find what he was looking for?

What if he did?

His second thoughts became third thoughts, then fourth and fifth, but the echo of his brother's voice on the other side snuffed all doubts into smoke like a low-burning candle.

The door creaked and scratched against its hinges unwillingly. A wavering light blinded him at first, but as his eyes adjusted, a familiar sight spread itself before him.

If he hadn't been so well acquainted with the Paradox Project's epicenter, the chamber would be completely unrecognizable as anything other than a disaster area. Old lab equipment, machines, vials, outdated tech and their broken components, all lay scattered across a dusty, cracked floor. Wires dangled from the ceiling; diagrams and posters hung singed and torn from the walls, dancing in the kinetic air. Burn scars blackened the ceramic tiles, jagged like a predator's teeth, snarling in a ring away from a deep, central crater.

A white-hot slice of light pulsated just above the gauge in the floor. Pieces of metal, earth, and more scientific debris hung suspended in the atmosphere around it as if in orbit around a small planet, but its shape was far from spherical. Its slowly undulating form twisted away through the air in a harsh ravine, a rift that faded far off into the universe itself.


The farther you ventured down these terrifying, inconsistent hallways, the more lost you felt. Left became right. Up became down. Even so, you sensed you were moving closer, wherever it was you headed. If only Alphys' cameras saw this far, you might have felt at least a little more confident.

With every step, your head throbbed as if seized with earthquakes, ready to split under the fiery pressure building at its core. You pressed on anyway. Sans was hurt. He could be in even worse trouble than you'd imagined. It would be all your fault.

After what felt like hours, you turned a corner into a dead end and a blood red door on your left. Your instincts took you toward the doorway first, but before you could even touch the handle, you stopped.

Beside the door, the wall twisted and morphed with a painful radiance like strings of light on the ocean floor. As bright as this ribbon might have been, it only glowed residually, as if just beyond the wall hid something so brilliant it burned straight through raw matter. It astounded you how you could have passed such an overwhelming sight for the red door, even if fleetingly. Had it even been there before? Whatever the case, the vision ran a shudder down your spine as if threatening to pull your every cell into an alternate version of itself. You shielded your eyes, and just beyond the glare, you caught sight of something. It spun in slow pirouette, hovering only an inch or so above the ground. It looked like a white, upside-down heart, a spade maybe …

A soul.

A monster soul.

Your stomach threatened to tear itself to pieces. Could it be … no. No, it couldn't. It just couldn't be Sans. You tripped over your own feet to reach it, though your head screamed in protest. On your knees, you reached out shaking hands to the spinning soul and, without a second thought, took it.

It hurt.

Just putting your hands on this tiny beacon burned through you like raw fire. The wall you'd once encountered inside your head shattered like glass. That misplaced soul faded away into the unusual light as if it had never truly been there, and your hands fell through to catch the ground. Your headache spiked in crescendo and then dispersed with a cloud of images in sepia.

You were more than familiar with the first image: falling down into the depths of the Underground in an attempt to cut short your existence. You expected your memory to darken here, the moment you landed among yellow flowers, when you'd hit your head and forgotten your name. This time, however, it continued past that.

Your eyes had only closed a moment and, when you reopened them, you saw Asriel. Not Flowey, but Asriel, the real Asriel, the small, shy little creature who only held your best interests at heart. You remembered how his white coat of fur had burned bright gold in a halo from the overhead light, like an angel. He bent a hand to you, asked if you were all right. And no, you weren't all right, but it definitely felt a little better to see such kindness—even if you had been convinced at that moment he was a figment of your imagination. After what you'd been through, day after day of hurtful words and harmful hands … .

You shuddered. That's right, you thought. You had forgotten the day leading up to your fall. Without that memory, your mind had pieced together the obvious, that you'd finally given in and stepped off the ledge to the underground after so many nights lying awake, picturing the act over and over and over again. But now you remembered it had been more than that. You hadn't just given in. You had finally lashed out; you had finally pushed back; and in doing so, you had revenged yourself on your abusers infinitely more than intended to—or rather, finitely more.

You felt sick. You hadn't meant to hurt anyone … had you?

Asriel took you to his parents, who would replace the ones you'd forsaken. Your eyes filled with tears now to remember that, after so many years, you'd finally found the love and care you'd craved, even if you didn't deserve it. Humans, such flawed and terrible creatures, only capable of pain and destruction, could never treat you the way these tenderhearted monsters did.

After basking in the Dreemurrs' love more than a year, your guilt and self-hatred gnawed you down to a husk. Despite what humanity had done to them, despite years underground at human hands, they had loved and protected you, a human child, with all their hearts. It took thought, it took time, but eventually you had a plan to repay them. Undeserving human that you were, for all your terribleness there was still something you could give.

You could give your life to set them free.

You remembered your plan. You remembered how it'd all gone wrong, how Asriel had been too afraid and goodhearted to go through with it. You should have known his edges were too soft to harvest seven human souls, even if it meant the freedom of his entire race. You—miserable human you—were as sharp as a butcher's knife. You could do it. You'd done it before. But Asriel was the one in control.

Broken beyond repair, your and Asriel's new body had fallen to dust inside the barrier, and it was all your fault. You'd killed him. You'd killed your sweetheart of an adopted brother. You had thought you would make Asriel stronger, but only served to ruin him. He lost his soul, and it was all your fault. Your perfect family tore apart, and it was all your fault. A loving marriage ended, and it was all your fault.

It was all your fault.

In the present, your tears fell fast down your face. If you could find your way to the ledge again, you would. All of this horribleness, every bit of it, wouldn't have happened if it weren't for you. Some part of you must have known, to be so desperate to save Asriel. Now, all you wanted was one more chance to start over again, to undo every terrible thing you'd wrought on the Underground, but that power was gone now …

Before you could thank the stars for no more memories, they continued. You remembered waking again, a second time. You were small, contained, beating with determination like a heart inside a flower's crown of gold, here in this very lab. Reborn. The rift in time, the one that lay beyond this wall, had stretched before you and Asriel's new body. You had stared into the power of all time and space, and it had stared back. Your determination called out to it, strong enough to command the clock. As your newly reformed soul lingered close enough to touch the breach in time, you stole a bit of its power for yourself.

Though you had been revived, you didn't have control. No, Asriel had control, like before … and just like before, you were helpless to watch from inside. You spoke, but he didn't listen—or maybe he didn't hear. If he received anything from you, it was your anger, your frustration. You had taken powerful magic into your soul, and here he squandered it on petty fights and dull games. He yet again failed your new chance to do things right, over and over and over. He didn't care about that anymore. He didn't care about your plan. He wanted to have "fun," to play with you forever, but forever on the same day grows stale before long. The games became more apathetic and cruel. Recalling the image of your friends now, falling at your hands, seared like a brand on your soul. Their dust scattered to the wind, one after the other, after the other …

Your heart filled with sound of their screaming, and nothing you knew of could silence it.

In the last shred of your memory, Flowey had learned of your grave—and upon visiting, you saw something unbelievable. At the mouth of the Ruins below the barrier, your body rising from its grave, jaundiced and slow but otherwise alive. You didn't think twice, or maybe you had no choice. You jumped home from Flowey and took the power of determination with you. But in the space between, you lost yourself—or maybe you'd chosen to leave it behind. You yourself reset to the person you were before becoming scarred, before you'd fought back against your human father and won. You forgot all this journey, all the damage that had made you who you were, even your own name. But now … now you knew.

Your name was Chara.


If Sans focused his eyes hard enough, he could see faint ghosts of his past selves. Their blurred lines clung to a customary path, often straight through the door to linger at a desk or counter space or the old chalkboard in the corner. His stomach sickened to see the ghosts of others as well: the golden blur of Alphys, the blues, reds, and greens of other team members, but more upsetting than any, a taller shape whose ivory paths seemed to fade in and out of existence altogether. He reached out to touch them, but his hand fell through what were only memories.

He turned his gaze to the brilliance of the rift, but his eyes didn't want to see it. His every molecule resisted the phenomenon as if it shouldn't be there, and by all rights, it shouldn't have been. This monstrosity stood as a testament to his own shortcomings, to science gone too far, to emotions run too high. If the grey monsters he encountered exuded a bitter taste, the rift emanated denatonium benzoate unaltered.

Despite instinct and past experience screaming that he step away, Sans chose to inch forward. He walked as near to the brightness as he could before his mind threatened to abandon him. His soul shuddered with fear, with anticipation, with every doubt and hope he had suppressed until this moment.

"dings?" he could only whisper.

For a long time, or what could have been no time at all inside this abomination, Sans waited for an answer. Everything around him continued to change, rolling like the tumblers of a combination lock in search of the proper pattern, but in that way it remained the same. The world didn't change in the way he wanted.

"i'm here, like … like you asked," he tried again … but again to no answer.

He waited even longer, but the more time he spent here, the more his doubts began to overwhelm him. Hope chimed in with excuses. Maybe he hadn't waited long enough. Maybe he was missing a piece of the puzzle. Maybe returning to the rift wasn't even what the grey ghost meant.

Or maybe …

The dim lights of his eyes dragged through the glaze of past versions into the current state of this broken test room. Here lay all evidence to the terrible truth. Here, he and his brother's team had cut a gash in the fabric of time, and time had cut back. Here was the last place he'd seen Wingdings. The last place.

Hope's binding around his soul loosened, and its deepest cracks only deepened. What was he even doing here? It had been more than a century. In a hundred years, he should have moved on. He was a scientist, for fuck's sake. All evidence before him—his lack of sleep, his family history, unusual visions and their magically vanished proof—he should have seen past the emotion and admitted to the most obvious answer.

He was cracking.

He covered his face with his free hand, the other still preoccupied with his dusting ribs. What a fool he'd made of himself, succumbing to his demons. Could he even return to you now, the failure that he was? After abandoning you for a hallucination? Swimming in the thought of it, his being felt infirm in a horrifyingly familiar way, a way he'd felt more than thirty times in a row …

The bright red door behind him scraped open again. When he turned, his eye lights shrank to see you there, clinging to the lintel as if letting go would send you adrift on a storm-ravaged sea. Your head of unkempt hair clung to the tears wet on your cheeks. Your shoulders shook. You shambled out into the typhoon.

Sans' eye sockets hollowed out to darkness like dead suns. You couldn't be here. You shouldn't be here. You had to leave, now, before the rift could swallow you up … just like his brother …

"kid," he said more quietly than he wanted, but it was all he had strength for. "kid, no. go back. it's too dangerous …"

He realized you were muttering to yourself. Your auburn eyes, wider than he'd ever seen, caught the light of the rift to glow nearly red. Was it odd, Sans wondered, to think you seemed healthier than before? Your cheeks actually had some color for once …

The nearer you came to the swimming, pulsating light, the more you tasted that rare magic of time. Your determination sang out to it, but to no answer. You reached out a hand. If you could just get close enough …

Sans saw where you were heading. Fear coiled around his insides like a reticulated python. Despite his better judgment and unwilling limbs, he hurried forward. He took firm root between you and your goal. If only he could teleport you away … but his magic ran so low that, even if a shortcut were to work in this unstable atmosphere, he could take you no farther than a few feet.

"the hell are you doin'?" he asked.

You tried to walk around him. He blocked you again. Your hands clutched the hair on your head like a lifeline, as if letting go would leave you to drown in the riptide. You set your teeth.

"please," said Sans, short for breath. "i'll go back with ya. i'll even book a room at the resort, like you wanted …"

"N-no, I have to …"

"you have to nothin'," he interrupted with more desperation than he'd ever betrayed before. "rift could wipe ya clean from existence. past, present, andfuture. is that somethin' you want?"

"Maybe."

"frisk."

"My name's not Frisk!" you snapped.

Sans' eye-sockets hollowed out entirely. As their caves bore into your skin, you sensed their sight running through you like water through a sieve. Just like in Judgment Hall, he was poring over your heart, and you knew then he could see you for the horrible, awful person you were. When he failed to breathe, you couldn't help laughing. It was too painful, too horrible, how fucked up you were, how fucked up the world was, all because of you. And now, he knew it too.

Sans shifted backward just a little. Every bone of his body quaked. Your level of violence was … significantly higher. Could you have been reduced to attacking monsters, just to reach him in time? The Frisk he knew would never do something like that. No, something else must have happened …

"i know it's not," he said quietly. "but what am i s'posed to say? you forgot your real name …"

"Well, I sure as fuck remember now," you said, voice quavering. Your hands found your face. "I remember. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g."

Sans didn't know what to say. He couldn't tell if you were laughing or crying, but one thing he knew for sure was that you were suffering. His soul ached more and more with every second he lay eyes on you. He lifted his hand, toying with the idea of reaching out to you. Was that even something you wanted?

Past the river of tears, you saw the power to reset forming in a layer deep within the gash. Even without your eyes, past the wild, endless screaming in your red soul you could feel it reaching out to you too, though still too far away. You had to grasp it. You had to undo this whole mess, back to the true beginning, or in the very least just back to forgetting …

Again, you inched nearer to that volatile tear in time. Again, Sans stood in your way. You squalled and clenched your hands into fists so tight your fingernails drew blood.

"JUST LET ME RESET," you screamed.

If Sans' sparse magic could run any colder, it would have.

"It's all my fault," you sobbed into the bloody palms of your hands. "If I can go back … maybe I can fix it …"

He felt faint. Gravity had never been a force greater than the one that pulled on his shoulders now. His mouth trembled in search of words before finally whispering, "you promised, kiddo."

"Frisk promised."

Sans' mind raced. More of his soul dusted away inside him than ever before. Everything you'd been through, all the laughter and heartache you'd shared over the years, felt to have been dashed against the rocks in one heart-stopping motion. His hope trickled away from him like sand in an hourglass. His hand on his ribs fell through to the cavity behind them as they broke away to dust.

"you promised me," he echoed, without really thinking. "you promised …"

"As if you wouldn't go back if you could," you said. "Save the one you really care about? I'm just a replacement. I've always been a replacement. So stop pretending to care."

Sans' soul broke in two. Despite all his thoughts to the contrary, his voice wouldn't rise above a decibel. He could only stare, despondent, eyes nothing but cavities as hollow as his chest.

You glared at him, your auburn eyes shining brighter and brighter in the rejuvenating essence of the rift. It had been so long since you felt this strong, and Sans, by contrast, never looked weaker. You could make it past him. Though he didn't understand, it would be better for him, for both of you, for everyone, if you undid this.

His mind was darkening, but he refused to let go. Even if you somehow managed to make it through unscathed, resetting now could just about rip the Underground in half. Everyone could be wiped from existence—Papyrus, Toriel, Alphys, Undyne—but even if that didn't happen, even if you didn't get that far, he couldn't stand by and watch you be destroyed. Even if you didn't care about him anymore … he still loved you.

You walked firmly toward the wavering lights and your lost power, your one and only hope for redemption. As you passed him, Sans stood stiffly, seemingly too frail to move. The lights of his eyes hadn't resurfaced since the start of the argument, but they illuminated faintly now.

Just as you felt the burning intensity of the rift on your outstretched fingers, a skeletal hand took you firmly by the shoulder. It slipped in its own dust to tear you away from the break in time, off into an unruly cyclone of a shortcut. The portal swirled you like Cabernet in a wine glass before casting you out onto the same broken floors just a few feet back. You lifted your head and blanched. The screaming in your heart fell silent.

Sans could only hope he'd succeeded. Falling down already as he was, sliding in his own shoes, he couldn't fight the momentum of pulling you back from the ledge. He had known he might not be able to. Now the rift seared against his back like white-hot silver, eating away the parts of him that hadn't already dusted. Your voice fell distantly over what was left of him to hear it. Though he couldn't be sure it was real, he took it as faint consolation he'd saved you from the void, even if only for a moment. With that last thought, his mind withered away to a peaceful emptiness, and the rift swallowed him whole.


Notes

OH NO

Don't worry, kids, we got like 8-9 more chapters. ;)

Also, as you probably noticed, we've come to the second of three major head canons I've been holding onto for the better part of this year! I am … so excited. If someone else has had this thought, I haven't come across it (which also makes me a little scared).

I've always seen Chara and Frisk represented by the fandom as two entirely separate people. When playing Undertale … that wasn't the sense I got. In my mind, you were always Chara, resurrected by the power of determination to resolve your unfinished business.

When you start the game, you make a choice.

When you choose pacifist, you leave behind the person you were and become the angel of light to save the ones you love. By reaching the end and saving the Underground in pacifist mode, you earn the name Frisk. You choose the name Frisk, because Asriel is right. You aren't Chara anymore. You've grown to become someone else.

When you choose genocide, you let your anger and hatred overcome you and thereby become the angel of death. When you meet Chara at the end of the game, you are facing yourself. Their eyes are open, their cheeks rosy, their skin a natural shade, but that's the only real difference between the two of you. After all, a body that's been dead this long wouldn't have those qualities …

I tweaked it a little to fit the narrative of the fanfic, but that's the main theory. And before you ask, it's possible we won't encounter my third head canon in this story, but it's definitely something I'm going to make art for some time down the road. Possibly a second fic after this one? (Not like a sequel or anything.)

I'm high on finishing this chapter so the next one might roll out pretty quickly. Cross your fingers!

Thank you for reading! If you have thoughts or feelings, I'd love to hear them.

Next Up! …