You awake to find Sans' face a short distance from your own as he shakes you awake. Crying out, you scramble away from him, panting like a rabbit. "Why didn't my shield warn me-!?" you yell inside your own head. Memories of him attacking you are fresh in your mind.

A shadow passes over his face, the bony ridges around his eye sockets somehow seeming to grow harder.

"the anomaly - it broke your shield," he explains, his voice a little rough from some kind of emotion you can't identify. "is that why you're scared of me now?"

He can tell that you're not calming down, even now that you're completely woken up and recognized him.

"i guess i deserve it - i attacked you when you were asleep during that fight in the hall, and your shield defended you. this time, let's be honest - i coulda killed you if i wanted to - but i didn't. i'm not gonna hurt you."

You try to create your shield, but find yourself completely unable to. Apparently the gray anomaly had crushed it, and maybe broken something inside of you at the same time. The loss of it aches, and your throat feels choked at the thought of your own vulnerability now.

Run. There's nothing but a panicked animal inside of you right now. Run away. As far as you can. They won't stop hurting you. They'll never stop. If we don't have the shield anymore, all we can do is run.

"But he's not..." He's not THEM! A rational part of your mind tries to speak up, but gets totally drowned out as if it had been overrun by a stampede of millions of panicked, miniature you's. "How do you know he's not like them!" they yell. "He hurt us before!"

They have a point, but you saw him trying to help you earlier, even though most of it was fuzzy while you were being controlled. That had to count for something. He wouldn't have tried to save you, only to kill you now, right? Right...?

In truth, you don't have the strength to run. You're badly injured still with your wounds leaking blood. The anomaly took your body for quite a ride against your will, leaving you exhausted. You're pretty sure Sans can just teleport ahead of you if he really wants to, anyway.

So, what do you do when you can't run, and you're too stressed to talk because you're in the midst of a panic attack? Obvious answer.

You huddle into a ball, closing your eyes and withdrawing all your senses and caring into yourself, as if you're a little hermit crab pulling everything into its shell.

You shut down. The ground feels smooth against you as you give in to your body's wishes to just huddle there and conserve your strength.

"Some captain. Ha. I'm supposed to be responsible," you chide yourself. "But this is how pathetic I really am."

But when you look up after several moments, you see Sans sitting on the ground staring at nothing with black eye sockets. It's not a huge deal, and his expression is more blank than anything else, but it makes you feel sad.

Maybe he has his own way of shutting down, like you.

When you see that, you feel empathy, and you can't feel empathy without feeling like a person again...without becoming the real you again.

Now you're able to notice something you couldn't before.

"Sans..." you whisper, shocked. "your soul..."

Due to one particular ability of yours, you can sense the state of others' health without seeing it, and although you had seen his soul heart was in a bad state before, now the sight of it is breaking your own. Waves of self-hatred rush over you.

Why had you "asked" Aldyr and Sans here by giving them that look before you left the ship? You could've dealt with this on your own. You could've closed the tunnel before they could follow. Then Sans wouldn't have been near that strange gray and red demon inside of you, that strange combination of Chara's hate, and something else that you still didn't fully understand.

Sans coughs, somehow, turns toward you, and grins through the pain.

"well...remember what i said about the cracks in our souls? guess you could say we're really getting broken-up over it."

You half-smile. "That's...I don't know."

"Really sad," you think. "Is this what's happening to all of them?"

"yeah...not great, i know. not easy to do stand-up comedy lying down."

You smile a little more genuinely at that. "So, we're basically both dying. In a desolate world with no food, water, or medical supplies."

"yup."

"That's pretty sad. And lonely. No one to even bury us or anything when we're dead," you remark.

"yeah, but you know we'll be cheerful."

"Why?"

"because we'll be grave-less."

You laugh at that, before choking a bit on your own blood. "That one was pretty good," you wheeze through a cough.

"well. to be totally honest, i can think of one thing i can do."

"What?"

"i can use the rest of my strength to heal you," he explains seriously.

Your brows furrow. "You can heal?"

"yeah. it would only be making it up to you for wounding you in the first place, when ya didn't deserve it."

You try to shake your head firmly, not an easy thing to do lying on the ground. "That wasn't your fault. And anyway, if you hadn't I might never have been able to break through that thing's control. The pain of my injuries helped me to regain my senses."

"either way, at least one of us would live if i did it."

You close your eyes. "I'm guessing the effort would kill you," you say, determined to speak the truth. This was no time to be messing around.

"well...yeah."

You look at Sans again in the eyes. He has a kind look to him right now. You really like how it made his white eye lights look like stars. You feel a surge of warmth towards him.

"The ironic thing is," you explain, "I also have a bit of a healing ability, and it also drains me to use it. So," you grin playfully, "right back at you."

He looks surprised, then amused. "come on. there has to be some way to resolve this."

You fight through a sudden, painful wave of dizziness and try to think. The extremities on your hands and feet are growing cold, even though the surrounding air is not freezing. That had to be a bad sign.

He's not in a much better state, you can see, his soul shivering with the effort of maintaining its form. It reminds you of champion heavy lifters hefting huge weights, their muscles straining and vibrating with the effort.

Here you weren't sure if the effort was mental or physical, but you knew it was enormous.

The soul is more important than the body. The body is the soul.

Nice sayings that your mind came up with from somewhere, but you weren't sure if they actually helped you. They were also contradictory.

Hmm. On the other hand...aren't monsters essentially made of magic, and their magic is their soul?

"Hey, Sans?" you ask.

"yeah?" he replies, focusing on you again.

"I remember reading humans' malice affects monsters badly, and the intent to kill is what kills you - is the opposite true?"

He looks at you with surprise, and then grins a little, with some sadness to it. "heh. never heard that question asked before. guess it's just never come up. i don't know."

"Let me test it then. I have an idea - if I can combine a strong feeling with my healing, maybe the effect will be much greater. I won't do enough to seriously drain me, but if it works, maybe we can trade off healing each other.

He thinks for a moment. "so, heal each other until we're both better?"

"Yeah."

He looks concerned for you, but says "sounds like a good plan - just don't do too much. i think you're about to go into shock."

Oh. Well then, you didn't have long, if your meager knowledge of first aid was correct.

You nod quickly. "Just gonna do enough to test."

Slowly you extend your hands, shaking from weakness, over his chest area, gathering the golden-looking energy that was your healing ability, turning it into a beam of energy, like a shaft of warm sunlight.

You try to infuse all of your wishes that he would survive, and ... more than survive actually. Damnit, you want so much more than that. "Be happy," you think ponderously. "Or at least...feel a little bit better. I don't have much to give, but I hope this helps."

He breaths in quickly, closing his eyelids in a relaxed way. He's obviously starting to feel something.

Then you're hit with it. A feeling, or something much more than a feeling, hurting you to the core of your soul. "Crap crap crap..." you hiss through your teeth with pain. "His bone attack was agony, in physical terms, but this is so much worse than that..."

You try to hide it, but he snaps up his gaze at you when he hears the sound you make. "you gotta stop," he says seriously.

You hold out for a few more seconds, and then let go of your concentration, lowering your arms and panting, your heart racing with adrenaline. "Was that really what I think it was?" you wonder. "If so..."

He quickly grabs you then, healing you with his own green energy, focusing on the worst of your pain in your abdomen. He seems to be concentrating very hard. "papyrus..." he murmurs.

You feel the rush of green magic flowing through you, healing you. It might be your imagination, but for a moment you think you smell spaghetti, and feel a sense of contentment and pride related to it.

When he's done, he looks exhausted, but you feel considerably better. Although your wounds are still almost the same, you're no longer skating on the edge of consciousness, and you feel stronger.

You extend your hands, and focus again on healing him. It hurts badly once more, but you decided to just grit your teeth and try not to stop. Every moment you keep on trying is making a big difference. You can feel it.

His hard, but warm bony hands push yours aside, and he heals you once more. You trade off, slowly feeling your strength return and seeing the same in him.

But eventually, you hit your own tolerance limit. After several turns, and his emerald light had gone through you again and healed you, you extend your hands once more. You're now both sitting up, and he glances down at himself and your healing and up at you. You hold his gaze and keep up your own yellow healing warmth until you're sure you see some hope return to his eyes, and his soul is no longer shuddering.

Then you release your hold on yourself, and your head drops down as you gasp and tears start to trickle down your face.

"what is it?" he asks worriedly.

You try to contain the pain, mentally putting it into a ball and sending it away into a corner of your mind. The ball seems to resist your efforts, though, stubbornly coming back to the surface like it's filled with air and in water.

"I'm all right. All right." You lie. You've never been in worse pain in your life than right now.

"does healing drain you that much?"

You debate about telling him the truth. But the intricacies of how your Eldorant healing ability actually works seems like too much to try to explain right now. It's a powerful healing ability that can heal almost anything, and it lets you see someone else's health when you want to, but it has its drawbacks.

You decide to go midway, giving enough details so he won't feel ignored, but not overly complicate it.

"There's a sort of...backlash sometimes when I heal. It's a very small percentage, and it's not entirely physical..."

His eyes narrow keenly. "i'm hurting ya, you mean. with my damage." His voice is choked and bitter. Sans had caught on so fast.

You know what kind of "damage" he means. The kind that doesn't bleed. Soul damage. You hate yourself for not having a warm-sounding answer for that, when you desperately want to give him one.

Instead you hug your knees, and try to wait for the pain to subside. For awhile, there's nothing but darkness and agony behind your closed eyes.

You're brushing aside pine needles with a skeletal hand, dreading what you'll find on the other side...

"here," you hear Sans say, breaking you out of a trance, and you feel his boney arms and jacket around you as he hugs you.

"you shouldn't be alone with this," he says.

You don't think he's using magic now, but he feels warm, like he's healing you anyway.

"maybe i was alone..." he says, his deep voice shaking just slightly on "alone."

"but you shouldn't have to be."

You're mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted, so you decide to just stop talking and accept this for now. The tears come, and you let yourself silently cry it out, and gradually the pain in your soul subsides.

He lets you go, and decides to give you some encouraging words.

"by the way...thanks for not going along with it...for fighting back. against chara and the anomaly, i mean."

You hadn't expected that. "Really?" you think. "I was pretty ashamed of myself for letting that gray thing and Chara take me over."

Sans looks like he has something to say before anything else.

"i just didn't want to kill again," he says hollowly, looking away. A chill runs up your back when you think about how he almost did kill you, back when you first met him and he saw the anomaly inside of you, and you were blind to it.

You aren't sure exactly how many genocide runs he had lived through, but by the way he was acting back at the hall, you guess it was a lot. Not many people could stay sane after watching all of their friends and family murdered, let alone dozens of times.

Maybe he'd been getting close to the edge of completely losing it, like one or two other versions of himself that you could name...

Your face must be showing your sadness that's grown to the point of panic, because he explains soberly. "i can deal with the physical pain when they win. i've gotten used to it. but killing breaks my soul. a little bit at a time. even when they killed everyone else. even if it all gets reset. i never wanted to hurt them."

He's making you cry inside with the way he's talking. You won't let this one pass. His standards on what he expects from life have gotten so incredibly low.

"You shouldn't have to do either of those!" you yell fiercely. But really, you're yelling at the universe, not him, and he knows it.

You pull Sans in to another hug, with his skull resting on your shoulder, and softly radiate your healing golden energy. It's not as strong and direct like this, but you hope it will help a little. Your feelings speak without words through it.

"It wasn't your fault. They were a murderer."

Even though you haven't spoken aloud, he senses the words anyway. "they used to be a friend," he says quietly.