You and I are here,
underwater...
Seconds are so dear,
underwater...
Searching for a light, to draw me closer...
I hold my breath in tight, bring me closer...
I feel your touch, will you pull me up again?
-Vertical Horizon, "Underwater"
Papyrus had stopped counting his magical steps around the two-hundred mark. The sounds of Waterfall had been completely silent for nearly half an hour, meaning that at this rate, he'd traveled at least a mile forward by now, and there was no telling just how far down he had gone.
He considered the math of it. each step was about six inches below the next, so even at two-hundred, that meant he'd traveled down more than one-hundred feet. In the darkness, it was hard to visualize just how distant that was, but he remembered Sans telling him once that some of the trees around Snowdin were fifty feet tall or more.
The skeleton gazed up toward the ceiling, searching for something, anything to remind him of where he really was. The wishing stones' glow had been lost to darkness for a long time, but somehow, he could still feel them there. He was still in the Underground, for sure.
His skyward-gazing caused his balance to slip, his magic reacting instantaneously to make an extra step for him to stumble back onto.
"...CLOSE ONE," he sighed.
He shifted the duffel bag around his shoulder and corrected its weight, making sure it was in just the right spot to continue the journey. Another step appeared, and another red boot sank its heft upon it, and the cycle continued a few more times until...
The platforms stopped appearing.
Papyrus tilted his head, unable to comprehend why he couldn't make another platform appear just below this one. He summoned one more platform, and gently placed his bag upon it, and turned to focus on the darkness below.
"ALRIGHT, ONE MORE TIME."
The blue glow of his magic surrounded both of his hands as he pointed them out in front, knowing precisely where it was supposed to go.
Nothing. A spark of light, but still nothing.
He tried again. Another spark, but he couldn't see just what was blocking his magic from working. He focused so hard on creating more and more, trying to see just what was wrong, but out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the bag beginning to roll.
"NO!"
He desperately shot his hand out, trying to catch the bag on another platform, but again, it was just an empty spark. He watched as the bag began to tumble into the abyss, watched as his plans doomed themselves to failure-
CLUNK.
The bag just sat there, illuminated by the magic it had accidentally rolled off of. It was resting on solid ground, the very bottom of the cavern that Papyrus was attempting to reach the entire time.
It smelled like lucky breaks and limestone.
Papyrus hung his head and shook it, chuckling at just how foolish he would have seemed. Of course the magic wouldn't appear there, he was trying to summon a platform into solid ground, and without the desire to accomplish something destructive, his magic lost to the cold earth itself.
He was here. He made it.
It hurt just a little bit less.
There was still a bit of mistrust fogging up his skull, however. The choking, inky darkness kept him from being able to see very far in front of his own face, even with the light of his magic. The floor still wasn't visible, and like a child dipping their toes into a pool, so did Papyrus test to see if there really was ground beneath his feet.
Finally, and with confidence, the red boots stepped off of his magic for the final time.
Even now, he was still wary, bouncing himself up and down on the ground to make sure it was real. He chuckled a small "NYEH-HEH-HEH," as he moved over toward his bag and unzipped it, inspecting the cargo inside.
"GOOD, IT'S NOT BROKEN."
He fished out the personal spotlight again, this time finding it to be far more effective in the field. He could finally see further ahead, and the cavern floor proved just how massive this place really was. He still couldn't find any signs of a wall or ceiling; he truly was in the middle of pretty much nowhere.
But...that sound...
He picked up his bag, zipped it shut, and shone the light toward where the sound was. It sounded like something was bubbling, and the surface of the floor began to appear more and more damp, as the scattered stones reflected the spotlights radiance. It made sense, he did follow the waterfall's direction as straight as he could.
Then he found it. The river from the waterfall flowed ever on. From here, it would either lead to an exit of the cave, or, as Papyrus hoped, The Void.
He still didn't know what to expect when it came to finding an "entrance." Every time he'd ever witnessed The Void was in his own dreams, in his own mind. Perhaps it wouldn't even look like that Grey place, but something told him otherwise. It felt so real, Gaster felt so real, that there wasn't much room for doubt in his mind.
Papyrus trudged on, red boots clomping on stone. A brother adrift without his sibling, a son searching for a father he barely knew. In the dark, other strange sounds began to echo and stir. To one side, he heard the loud moaning of some kind of machinery or another, probably coming from The Core, or some other place he didn't really care for. On the other, he could hear the sound of something skittering by, this was by far the more distressing of the two. It would make sense for some kind of animal or another to reside down here. Bats, for one, were a common sight in the Underground, although they stayed away from the more civilized areas.
But there were always stories. Always stories of terrible monsters, who preyed upon other monsters in the dark. Sans had always told Papyrus that they were a load of crap, but the skeleton still found himself here, in the dark, and trapped alone with his own thoughts.
And the sounds.
Papyrus never was one to feel fear very often. As a child, sure, but thanks to his brother's support, and his own innate confidence, he was able to weather just about any storm that brewed up in his life.
Something stirred in his subconscious. Knowledge of the past. A memory, perhaps, forming in his mind. He walked forward, finding out that something was causing it to unfurl itself in front of his very eyes. His vision blurred, and after a few moments, came back into focus, almost like he were watching an old movie.
…
Snowdin. He was watching himself back at Snowdin, at the entrance to Waterfall. He faced his first human friend, Frisk, here, hoping to capture them. Papyrus watched his past self stand there, confidently, smiling as he waited patiently for his prey to arrive.
Frisk stepped in from out of the fog, but something was wrong. The human's face was completely covered by their shaggy brown hair as their head hung low. Their steps were heavy, and their arms swung lazily to the side, almost like they were lurching forward like a zombie.
The fog rolled up.
AM I...DREAMING THIS?
"HALT, HUMAN!"
Frisk took a step forward.
"HEY, QUIT MOVING WHILE I'M TALKING TO YOU! I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, HAVE SOME THINGS TO SAY."
THE HUMAN...
"FIRST, YOU'RE A FREAKING WEIRDO! NOT ONLY DO YOU NOT LIKE PUZZLES, BUT THE WAY YOU SHAMBLE ABOUT FROM PLACE TO PLACE...THE WAY YOUR HANDS ARE ALWAYS COVERED IN DUSTY POWDER...IT FEELS...LIKE YOUR LIFE IS GOING DOWN A DANGEROUS PATH."
THEY'RE GOING TO...
"HOWEVER! I, PAPYRUS, SEE GREAT POTENTIAL WITHIN YOU! EVERYONE CAN BE A GREAT PERSON IF THEY TRY! AND ME, I HARDLY HAVE TO TRY AT ALL! NYEH HEH HEH!"
GOING TO...
The human took another step forward.
"HEY! QUIT MOVING! THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT!"
TO...
"HUMAN! I THINK YOU ARE IN NEED OF GUIDANCE! SOMEONE NEEDS TO KEEP YOU ON THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW! BUT WORRY NOT, FOR I, PAPYRUS, WILL GLADLY BE YOUR FRIEND AND TUTOR! I WILL TURN YOUR LIFE RIGHT AROUND!"
The human took three long steps toward Papyrus.
...KILL ME.
"I SEE YOU ARE APPROACHING. ARE YOU OFFERING A HUG OF ACCEPTANCE? WOWIE! MY LESSONS ARE ALREADY WORKING!"
DON'T.
"I, PAPYRUS, WELCOME YOU WITH OPEN ARMS!"
PLEASE!
His heart, no, his soul felt like it was rising up into his throat. He was about to watch his own death, something that nobody ever really experienced in their life. This fear was nothing like being afraid of the shadows lurking in the darkness, this was a fear of watching a dear friend...and watching himself...
Wait.
The human began to tremble in front of Papyrus' stoic confidence. That beaming skeletal smile didn't let up for even a second, those eyes giving off smiles of their own. Frisk looked up at Papyrus' face, as tears began to involuntarily stain their cheeks.
Frisk removed their "tough glove" and tossed it harshly toward the ground, and began to stomp on it.
"No! No no no no you can't make me do it! I can't do this, I can't do...this..."
A strange, black mass appeared to be pulling itself free from Frisk's body, coming out of their back. As the human began to sob uncontrollably, the shadow began to take shape, appearing almost exactly like Frisk, but more...sinister. A bright, glowing red heart shone underneath the swirling black mass, almost appearing as if it were imprisoned there. Even though the shadow had a brilliant, and creepy, red smile, its body language told Papyrus that it was sorely disappointed.
The Entity.
Wait...Papyrus could see this. Could his past self...?
"WOWIE! YOU DID IT! YOU DIDN'T DO A VIOLENCE!"
Guess not.
The viewer gazed on as his past self fell to his knees, embracing the sullen child. Frisk returned the hug in kind, burying their face deep into the chest-piece of Papyrus' "battle body."
"TO BE HONEST, I WAS A LITTLE AFRAID...BUT YOU'RE ALREADY BECOMING A GREAT PERSON!"
The crying continued. The Entity tapped its foot, annoyed, before walking away from the scene entirely.
"I'M SO PROUD I COULD...CRY..."
The skeleton wiped a tear from his eye sockets.
"WAIT...WASN'T I SUPPOSED TO CAPTURE YOU? WELL, FORGET IT! I JUST WANT YOU TO BE THE BEST PERSON YOU CAN BE!"
THIS...HAPPENED. I REMEMBER THIS. BUT...ACCORDING TO THE HUMAN, AND SANS, THEY REALLY DID GO ON TO...
"I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! I couldn't do it, I couldn't go through with..."
"SHH, HUMAN. YOU ARE SAFE. YOUR DECISIONS MAY NOT HAVE BEEN THE BEST, BUT...I CAN TELL. I CAN TELL THAT ISN'T WHO YOU REALLY ARE."
The two hugged each other tighter, as the chilly fog rolled in again, sweeping the scene away in one gentle stroke. The ever-watching skeleton found himself once again standing on the ground, holding a useless spotlight and, for the first time in minutes, he could feel the weight of the bag around his shoulder.
...but the water was gone.
The cavern floor was gone.
He was standing on something...gray.
Papyrus didn't know exactly how he'd found his way here. He didn't even think about it, but as that memory played on, he was constantly walking forward. He thought that it all took place in his own head.
How did he even get to this point? One moment he was following the water's trail, the next, musing on his own sense of fear. The last time he could remember feeling such fear triggered a memory, and...
...perhaps The Void summoned it, brought it to him.
Everything was gray now, as Papyrus stowed the floodlight back into his bag. The transition from reality to...not reality was more seamless than he would have hoped. He figured there would be a door, or some sort of magical flourish, but not something this...instantaneous.
He marched on. He had no choice now, there was no going back.
"DOCTOR! DOCTOR GASTER?!"
The words felt as if they were stolen from his mouth, drifting into the distance.
"...DOCTOR!"
He felt the Void devour his words, almost as if they were incorrect. He had to figure out the password, unlock the code, solve the puzzle.
"...DAD?!"
CLANK.
The sound of something metal clanged in the far distance behind him. Papyrus spun around and squinted, gazing off deep into the horizon, before he spotted it.
It looked like...a chair.
It probably would have been easier to follow Papyrus' lead.
Sans stood in the familiar cavernous hallway, chuckling to himself as he came upon the telescope he'd left here. The one he said he normally charged to use, but let Frisk try it once for free. Frisk didn't even see the red paint when they pressed their eye up to it.
"oh man, that face they made...i don't even think they realized."
He ran a bony finger along the cold metal of the telescope for a second. He was coming up to his potential destination, if what Flowey said was correct, and he was beginning to hesitate. It would be easy to go right back to the garbage dump and try to enter the Abyss, but...he didn't really have any tricks up his sleeve to get down there. He could try to manipulate his own gravity to fall slowly, but not knowing how far down it was, he wasn't sure if he had the strength to keep it going long enough.
Okay. It was time to move into the next room. The hallway between them should be where the door was.
…
Nope.
He found himself in a small room, with a cracked magical crystal resting on top of a lonely table. He identified it immediately as one of the "save point" rooms he had shown to everybody only a day ago.
One day. It was hard to believe that all this was happening in the span of just one day. Had it even been twenty-four hours since he broke down crying into his brother's always-open arms? The sun was setting when he came in here, but that encounter with Flowey definitely stole precious seconds. And now he was here, chasing a mysterious door that he'd never seen.
But there was something about this hallway that he remembered. He always felt it was a bit strange, and that there were days when it really did seem to be much, much longer than he'd previously experienced.
"must've played it off as me being lazy, but...maybe."
He started to press his hands up against the rock wall and move sideways down the corridor, feeling around for some sort of missing piece, or maybe a hidden switch like in all those movies from the human world. He made it to the very center, and he could feel like there was an almost infinitely thin vertical line separating one half of the hallway from the other, almost like the rock walls were made up of slightly different geological makeups. One side's texture was different from the others, and right here, at this spot, was exactly where it changed.
There still wasn't any door.
"hmm."
He grabbed a nearby rock and drew a line in the floor where the "split" occurred, all the way across the corridor. Backtracking to the telescope, he watched as he got further and further away, making sure he could still clearly see the line.
"if i...teleport right in the middle..."
The calculations were trickier this time around. Normally, for Sans to use his teleportation ability, he had to think of his surroundings like a grid on a map. He was in one square, his destination in another, and it took a lot of concentration to make longer jumps to places he couldn't see. It's why he always appeared at the exact same spot at Frisk's school if he wanted to drop them off or pick them up. He had a lot of little..."home" points in his head. Safe spots to teleport to where objects or people tended not to be.
Papyrus was another anomaly when it came to these kinds of powers. His brother wasn't able to teleport himself directly, but his magic could appear from any direction he wanted it to. Sure, it was limited to his sight, or perhaps his other senses as well, but it still had a smaller range. However, if Papyrus could shift his magic around, then perhaps with enough time, training, and tutoring, he could master that as well.
Who was he kidding? Sans knew that Papyrus would get it in two days, tops.
He placed his hands in his pockets and took a deep breath.
"What, can't get your hands into your pockets to use your precious 'shortcuts'?"
Obviously, it wasn't the case that putting his hands in his pockets was the trick. No, he recognized it early on that it was a nervous habit of his. Whenever he found himself uncomfortable or even mildly stressed out, Sans would find some way to hide his hands. Before he had this perfectly-sized jacket, he remembered plenty of times when he'd hide them behind his back.
For a second, he wondered if Frisk had encountered this door. Being followed by an anomaly threw all bets off the table when it came to time-line shenanigans. Maybe Frisk had even visited the void in one of their many resets. Or maybe, somewhere out there, there was another version of Frisk who had found their way in.
"focus," he said, shaking his skull.
He stared at the line again and re-calibrated the puzzles he had to solve. This wasn't a case of going from Map Point A to Map Point B. This was more like trying to land perfectly on the line between two "tiles," and he had to have everything just right. If it didn't work, he'd just find himself at the nearest "tile," but if it did...
The hands never left his pockets. After double-checking his work at least eight times, this was the moment to act. The magic in his left eye flared to life, flashing yellow and cyan, as he started the countdown.
"three..."
Flashing faster.
"two..."
Just think of it like swallowing a pill.
"one..."
He had to snap his fingers to jump-start the process.
…
Sans didn't even open his eyes before he knew that something was different. There was a strange odor in this place now, like the air was even more stale than the Underground's less-than-stellar quality. He felt like he was being pulled in two directions, but at the same time, he could hold himself together just fine.
He opened his eyes and looked down, first. The line he drew, the one he expected, wasn't beneath his feet at all. In fact, the cavern floor beneath him was almost immaculate, one might even speculate that it was clean enough to eat off of. He looked to the left, and about twenty feet away, was a line crossing the entire corridor. To his right, an exact replica of this very same line.
He was "in-between."
In front of him, almost as anomalous as his current "position" was a door.
Just a simple, wooden door.
His bony hand slowly reached for the knob. Behind here was something "black, and gray, and really scary." Hopefully his brother was making it a bit more hospitable, but he doubted it.
He grasped the knob and turned. As he did so, he noticed that the space around the latch began to twist unconventionally, almost like reality was altering itself. He pulled on the door, the gap between it and the cave wall beginning to warp the fabric of reality itself. It proved to be too strong for the lazy skeleton, and he let go.
"alright. you forced my hand."
Sans' eye glowed again, his magic slowly forming a blue aura around the door's knob. More calculations in his head, changing physical equations to manipulate its gravity from downward, to outward. Then, all he had to do was increase it, exponentially, and...
In an instant, the door ripped wide open, and he could feel the real world start to contort. Something, behind this door, was pushing him away, but at the same time, drawing his body further in. It felt like he was exploding out into an implosion, and any attempt at a last-minute shortcut was sure to end in failure. He was the calm eye of the storm amidst a raging tornado of the change to space-time he had forced. If his, and Gaster's, theories were correct, it would all correct itself back to equilibrium in a matter of moments.
It felt like an eternity.
Sans collapsed to the ground, choosing to remain there for a moment to regain his sense of balance. The rocky floor of the cave was gone now, replaced by a strange, yet still solid, material that appeared to be...purple?
He stood up and looked behind him, finding that the cave was completely gone. There was no mysterious hallway, no drawn lines, no door to speak of.
Just darkness.
He was standing on a small platform, surrounded by darkness.
His hands returned to his pockets as his mind raced. He had no idea where he was, and he certainly didn't know how to go back now. He should've followed Papyrus, and now he was stuck in his own version of The Abyss, not even knowing if he'd gotten to The Void at all.
"papyrus?!"
The platform was small, only about ten square feet, and strangely illuminated by an unseen source. Sans stuck one foot off the edge, feeling it tap against more solid ground that he was unable to actually see. He could walk there, it seemed, but it was so dark.
"...gaster?!"
Something in his chest seemed to react to the words. He felt as though his heart had skipped several beats, and he sharply gasped to get his vitals back in proper sync. He held a hand to where his heart would be, and the gears began to turn.
"...pap?"
Another skip. It felt like something was being pulled out of him.
"...doc?"
Even more skipped beats. Not that it would matter to him, he didn't really have a "heart" to stop.
"lil' bro?!"
Something was forming in front of him. The darkness began to lighten.
"dad?!"
It became gray.
A familiar fog began to roll in, and Sans recognized it immediately.
A lost memory.
It smelled like absolutely nothing at all.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: So...this work week is going to be pretty rough on me, and as such, I tried to get a chapter out a bit early. However, it might be a bit until I can get another one out the door, simply because needing to rest is going to take priority. Probably won't take longer than a week, hopefully, but just getting that out there. Thanks for reading! :D