When Frisk calms down enough to exit the piano room, they walk down the tunnel to their left. Sitting by the statue, hood pulled over his head, is Sans. Their footfalls must alert him to their presence, but he doesn't move. His eyes are hidden under the folds of his hoodie, but they can't smell lavender.
Steeling themself, they keep walking towards him. When they reach a point a few feet away, they sign his name. He doesn't acknowledge them, doesn't even look up. Quietly, they tap their foot, then harder when he still doesn't respond. There's a dark patch spreading across his hood from where the water on the statue's dripping onto him as well. He must be sleeping.
Hesitant to touch him, Frisk goes for the next best thing. They scamper into the next room and fetch an umbrella, wedging it into the side of the statue so it covers him, all the while praying he doesn't wake up and impale them on the umbrella's shaft. Then they go get another one, which they reach up and place over the statue, so it too doesn't get wet. Their surprise when the music box inside begins to play is nothing to Chara and Flowey's reactions.
At first, Frisk can't understand why Chara's hanging onto them so tightly or why Flowey has pressed his face into their neck of his own free will, but then they listen. The music box's tune is the one the two sang with Shyren, the song Flowey plucked out on the piano. One that is obviously very important to the both of them.
"Mom," Chara whispers.
Frisk sits in a twin bed, staring at the door. From their side comes a voice, hissing across the room, "Do you think they forgot?"
"Shut up, Azzy. They don't forget."
"Okay." Asriel sounds unsure and Frisk rolls their eyes at him. They're about ten right now, so Asriel's nine and tiny.
"They don't forget, okay?" Their voice is sharp, unnecessarily so, and that betrays them. They're scared that Mom and Dad have forgotten, that the ball was too interesting. Maybe humans invaded and killed everyone and Mom and Dad are dead on the ballroom floor.
They almost start crying, but Asriel beats them to it, sniffling as he looks at the clock. "They're an hour late. They're never ever late."
Slipping out of bed, Frisk doesn't even spare a thought for their rumpled nightshirt. They crawl into Asriel's bed and curl their arms and legs around him protectively. He's still small enough that they're taller, although in the years leading up to their death, he grows taller and stronger. "They won't forget, you big crybaby. They love us too much."
The door opens, shedding yellow light on the scene within. Mom and Dad, still in their pretty clothes, Mom wearing the jewelry Asriel picked, come flying in and pepper their faces with kisses. Dad's are whiskery and Mom's are soft and Frisk- or rather, Chara, as it is their memory, as Frisk now realizes- relishes each one, releasing Asriel to bury their face in Dad's shoulder. "I am so sorry, my children," Mom croons, letting Asriel cry into her dress.
"Where were you?" Chara demands, trying to hide the lump in their throat by getting mad. "We thought you forgot!"
"Forget your lullaby? Never!" rumbles Dad.
Mom laughs and leans into him. "Gorey, dearest, I told you we should have left the hall earlier."
"What, Tori dear, and not pick up the treats?" From his pocket, Dad produces two bars of something bright blue, a shade Chara's never seen before. "According to the young lady who invented it, this is called Nice Cream. This particular flavor is Echo Flower Fizz. Interesting, is it not?"
Chara is tucked back into bed with a small taste of Nice Cream on their tongue, all that Mom would allow so late at night. Dad settles himself at the foot of their bed, which sags a little under the weight of both him and his ceremonial armor. Mom sits on the end of Asriel's bed.
The monsters begin to sing, in voices that don't mesh very well and aren't conventionally lovely voices. But Chara falls asleep to that melody, thinking as they drift off. They don't forget us, not ever.
…
don't forget.
Sans hears the music too, even in his foggy mental state. In the confines of his mind, he stops where he is reassembling his mental walls and sits down heavily. He can't remember why he's rebuilding these. All they've ever done is cause him problems. He loses so much when he rebuilds them, so many memories gone. He kicks one aimlessly.
He really shouldn't have done that.
There he is, slamming the kid into one of the judgment hall's columns. They don't make a sound, but the faces, the six faces above them do. Some shriek, some jeer, and the sheer animal noise of them is almost unbearable in its savage joy. Meanwhile, the kid has fallen to their knees, shaking like a child left in the cold. There's blood soaking through their sweater from where their skin has split on impact. Despite what must be horrible pain, they don't go for their pockets for food. Instead, even while their soul is fragmenting, they throw their knife on the command of the faces, all of which have twisted into rictus grins of mirth at their little puppet's last stand.
And Sans kills them. He throws one white bone attack their way and his timing is perfect, as usual. Just as the kid looks up, the bone slams right through their eye, the thing bursting out around the projectile and dripping. The kid's remaining eye widens and Sans pulls the attack back, sliding it out with a horrible squelching sound. Just as their mouth opens, he makes a quick motion and shatters their skull. His soul cracks.
And there he is again, hurling them into a pillar so quickly that their neck snaps, and his soul aches in response, the murder etching him a new line across it.
Again. They're bleeding through his sweatshirt as he hugs them to him, grinning at nothing in particular as he hurls the bones through them both. Through their chest and pulverizing his own vertebrae. They both die there in the empty judgment hall.
When the human RESETs, he's staring at the spot on the floor where his dust mingled with their blood. They catch him off guard and it's quite a surprise how long they can make one HP last before they stop toying with him. When they do stop and the actual battle can begin, his ribs are covered with gouges, where they've teased out little pieces of bone and thrown them to the floor like dice in some sadistic board game. This time, before he can say anything, dripping unprocessed ketchup out the slice in his ribcage, they close the distance between them in a few shambling steps and rip his head right off his body.
Just like Papyrus.
The three words are like a rallying cry to everything he's ever forgotten. Papyrus, so small that he can't even be a year old, cradled in his stubby arms, staring up with those big black eye sockets. Papyrus being pulled along in a red wagon as Sans works, reading his comics out loud in his wobbly baby voice and getting mad when he can't pronounce the words correctly. Sans having to talk him back into a good mood, his voice whistling through the gap in his teeth.
He can't believe he'd forgotten that. That he'd gone back and made himself forget that as easily as putting his hands over his eyes to play hide-and-go-seek.
He can't believe that he's forgotten that he used to work up at the palace, that he stormed in and demanded to be hired when he was about sixteen. No wonder Papyrus thought that waiting Undyne out was an acceptable way to join the Royal Guard. He can't believe he's forgotten Grillby trying to teach them all sign language as a present for his mother's birthday and the fact that Papyrus and his father loved the signs so much that it became a secret language for all of them.
And when he remembers why he forgot, he feels sick all over again.
Something had happened with the Core and Sans had been too close. He had only been eleven, talking easily with the workmen and playing aimlessly with his father's security badge while his father discussed something with the woman who'd built the Core up on the platform beside it. It had only been when their voices hit a point somewhere above
shouting that he'd looked up and seen the woman try and shove his father into the open Core.
And Sans had seen something else, something poisonously green, not forest-green like Undyne's special ability, but acid-green. It reached out to pull his father in, but seized on the woman instead. For a split second, his father was wearing a Royal Scientist's lab coat, with the golden flower on the sleeve, instead of his big black jacket. Then the woman grabbed him by the throat and they both fell into the swirling green vortex in the heart of the Core.
The resulting blast cleared the room. Sans woke up covered in dust, dazed and shaking. For a while he hadn't remembered who he was, or where he was, but Papyrus had pulled at his arm, crying his name in his baby voice. Everything had come back then, unhindered by the walls he would later rebuild over and over again. His right eye stopped producing magic, pulled into the Core with his father.
He had lost an eye in the Core's explosion, but he hadn't lost as much as the construction workers had.
The main lab was different when they entered it. Alphys's mother had gotten up to shoo them out, despite Sans's insistence that they were there to see their dad, and where was he, and "auntie, it's sans, it's papyrus, why don't you recognize us, auntie, please!"
They had somehow gotten back to Snowdin, where most of the inhabitants looked at them with renewed interest, the little skeleton brothers who had appeared out of nowhere one day. Without their father, their father who had been dragged into the Core and wiped from existence, they were just the skeleton boys who lived in that empty house on the edge of Snowdin Town. People liked to tell tourists about the fact that the skeletons had just appeared one day and asserted themselves. They heard the story repeated so often that Sans had convinced Papyrus to believe it while he tried to build a machine in the basement, something that would save their father and change everything for the better, keeping his father's security badge in a drawer and occasionally pinning it to his own shirt for motivation. He drew countless pictures of events and hoarded all the photographs in drawers in the basement even as his mind clumsily wrote them over. One morning, when he came trudging down the stairs, he didn't recognize the tall black smudge in the background of most of his pictures or most of the people in the photographs. He recognized Papyrus in some of them and himself in others, but everyone else was a stranger. He half-remembered the tiny yellow lizard girl with birthday cake smeared on her glasses, wearing a princess hat, but he didn't know why he was sitting next to her and the skeleton with the cracked face seated across from him was unfamiliar.
He sat there for an hour, willing himself to remember why these pictures were so important, until tears prickled the corners of his eyes from sheer frustration and he started destroying them, tearing every hand-drawn picture to shreds and using magic to melt the photographs into nothing but a toxic smell. When he was done, he pulled a sheet over the machine he'd spent three years building, shoved the remains of the pictures and his blueprints into a drawer, went upstairs and locked the door. The key he threw in his wastepaper basket and never thought of again. In the years that followed, he turned the machine into something else, a tracer, following Frisk through the timelines, but never once had he thought to open the drawers again, not remembering what he had.
Sans digs his fingers into the corners of his eye sockets and the song soaring through his skull only gets louder and more insistent. It's an old lullaby, one popularized by the fact that the king and queen used to sing it to their lost children. After the children's deaths, the people had begun calling it 'His Theme,' for their lost prince, rather than by its given name, 'Memory.'
And he's sitting by the music memorial. He takes his fingers from his head and looks around. There are umbrellas protecting both himself and the old statue from any water that comes dripping down. His first thought is Papyrus, but he can't hear his noisy little brother, which makes that pretty improbable.
When his second thought hits, he stands and looks around the statue's side. There they are, the kid. They're talking to the flower, making quick little hand gestures that the flower parries with a few sharp angry words. He hears 'smiley trashbag' a few times and assumes they're talking about him. He's been called worse, but to hear it coming from this freak of nature makes it just the slightest more irritating.
The fact that they didn't attack him while he was rewriting his own head doesn't fit in with what he remembers of them. Every time they smiled or shivered or bit their lip doesn't mesh with the shambling silent creature that didn't laugh at Papyrus's antics and repeatedly met with Sans in the judgment hall.
"Hi, Sans," the human's hands say and it takes him a second to process it.
He takes his hand from his pocket and touches his fingertips to his temple, pressing them outward as if he's saluting them. "Hello."
He's not quite sure if he's gotten it right at first, because the kid is staring at him in confusion. Then they start to smile, hesitantly. "Can we try again?" they ask finally.
"What?" he asks.
"Like this. Hi, my name's Frisk. This is my friend, Flowey." They stop smiling for a minute, but before he can respond, their face takes on a different set and they mouth 'And my name is Chara.' They have to repeat the last one a couple of times, but when he does get it, everything clicks. The use of 'we' rather than 'I,' the fact that when they were yelling at him their mouth said something different than what they fingerspelled. There are two people walking around in Frisk's body.
Sans wants to ask what the point is to this, but he's actually feeling pretty generous, mimicking their motions and trying to fingerspell his own name. "Hey, my name's Sans."
"Hi, Sans. How are you today?" Even the flower's looking expectantly at him, wanting him to play along.
"Fine, I guess. How are you?" It's odd how civility can seem so foreign, when it used to be the most natural thing in the world; a 'what's up' tossed to Grillby, a 'how's it going' left anonymously on Alphys's blog, a 'what's the matter' when Papyrus comes home completely burnt out and disheartened.
"Nervous." They give him a big smile and in that smile it's like he can see everything. He terrifies them, and he should if anything he saw in his memories was true. Anything that he ever did was meant to stop them, to cripple them, to kill them if possible. And still, they're sitting here hoping, even though it takes all their strength to keep from running away. Hoping that everything would be different this time.
"You're changing everything, yanno." He puts his hands back in his pockets to give himself something to do.
"You started it. I heard you. I didn't think it was you, but it was. You changed it all first. You scared them away." They're standing now, holding out a hand.
When he takes it, they blow a raspberry. Their hands fall apart so they can sign and what they say is nothing short of astonishingly familiar. "Ah, the old whoopee cushion in the hand trick. Never gets old."
He grins, and they smile at their own joke, and even Flowey sneers a little. Nothing is fixed yet, but it's a start.
…
It all started off just fine. It was finally Jules's turn to play and while she was a little tentative at first, her hope to be just like the older kids and her natural reflexes made her quite adept at navigating the Underground. It was at Waterfall when they first realized something was different about the eighty-ninth playthrough.
Sans was dozing at the empty sentry station in the area's first room and Monster Kid was nowhere in sight. Lewis started scribbling this anomaly down furiously, while Jules hovered over the arrow keys. "Do I talk to him?"
"Yes. Definitely yes."
Sans didn't even open his eyes, only laughed, a deep-voiced voice clip that they'd never heard before. It came through the speakers like a death rattle.
"Whoa, what the fuck?" Meredith asked, leaning back against Lewis's beanbag. "Brainiac, is that in the script?"
Lewis shoved his glasses up to his hairline, tearing through his notes. "This is completely unprecedented! Jules, two minutes off your time!"
The girl pumped her fist, if less enthusiastically than her friends. She wouldn't admit it, but Sans really creeped her out. As if he had heard her, his sprite's eyes opened for a split second onscreen, revealing the empty black hollows. Hurriedly, she piloted the little character into the next room. Everything was mind-numbingly routine for a while after that. Monster Kid showed up again to boost them up over the ledge, so Lewis dismissed his disappearance as a glitch.
She fought Undyne the Undying with a minimal amount of trouble and then she got to Hotland. There was Sans, at his sentry station. Waiting. As she walked past him, his sprite's eyes gained pupils, ones that followed her to the edge of the room and then looked directly up at the screen.
"It's just a bunch of pixels," she mumbled under her breath, gathering some amused looks from her friends as she tore through the Core and dismantled Mettaton NEO.
And then she was walking down the golden corridor, steeling herself for some Megalovania. Sans gave his whole spiel, then the battle began.
That's when it changed.
"I'm sick of being toyed with, kid," the speakers said in a distinct deep voice. "You know what's going on here. You know that you can kill me over and over again and I can't stop you. Quit writing shit while I'm talking, you little freak."
Lewis dropped his pencil.
Onscreen, the collective of pixels that made up a short chubby skeleton shook its head and stepped over the battle box, advancing on the screen. "I keep killing you. Over and over and you just keep coming back. And then I wake up at home like nothing ever happened. But something did happen. Something big. You kill everyone I ever cared about in this whole damn world and then you do it again. For sport. For fun. For interesting little facts you can tell your friends.
"Do you understand what you're doing? Do you justify it away? Because we're not your problem? You can just RESET over and over again and we'll go back to loving you or being scared of you or whatever you want. Because we don't have feelings? We exist. We live, we love, we learn, and ultimately you just kill us again. For the numbers.
"I am not your game." He was very close to the screen, his blue and yellow eye blazing. "I've done what I was made to do, over and over again. But, I think I'm done. And the six of you? You're done too. Don't come back here ever again. See ya in Hell."
The computer didn't just crash, it screamed like a dying animal as the screen spasmed blue and yellow, blue and yellow and green, and Sans raised his hand and brought it down sharply into silence.