SAVEs and LOADs, LOADs and SAVEs.
Frisk was lying next to her brother on the comfortable couch, watching the news at a 90-degree angle with her head resting on the end cushion. That was the nice thing about having parents so much larger than humans: you always had plenty of room. Most of Asriel's body was lying on the side of Frisk's ankle-length housedress, a comfortable, lilac thing made of cotton, Dreemurr fur and the telltale red heart, which his head rested on. They watched the news for lack of better things to do, although today was a to-be-unhappened Thursday so who really cared? The last couple of school days had been, for lack of a better word, tolerable; Frisk's teachers had started treating her like just another student, Susan had stopped coming to that school, Thomas kept a respectful distance and never talked to Frisk, Jack still hung out with the Dreemurrs at school (I really should invite him over sometime, but that might make his life harder), Nicole had given an embarrassing and clearly rehearsed thank-you to Frisk for the legal services, right in the middle of lunch (Frisk had given an equally formal you're-welcome, and it was mortifying for everyone involved), and Gaster hadn't gotten happened and unhappened timelines confused. He had, however, come along each morning, specialized flask in hand, to give the Dreemurr kids homework on unhappened days: Asriel had to extract an emotion from Frisk. The first day had been happiness, and that was the easiest thing in the world to come by; Asriel had gently touched the not-a-needle to the side of Frisk's head and carefully intoned a couple of syllables, and Frisk's sensation of happiness suddenly evaporated, replaced moments later as her brain continued being happy. The second had been fear, and that meant 'go download a horror game'; Gaster had said that the vial was full of anxiety and dread rather than true fear, but it was close enough and what could Frisk possibly be truly afraid of anyway? The third was calm, which Gaster explained was a proper emotion and not just the lack of them.
"Hey, Az, you can do Gaster's homework now," she said, and her brother magicked the vial off the table as the weatherman informed residents near the Mt. Ebbot area that, yes, it would in fact be quite cold for the poor unfortunates who had to go outside today. As her calm went away, poured into a vial, she wondered if any weathermen were rememberers. ('Your high today is 33 degrees. I know, because I was there.')
The weather went away, replaced by the news, and it was apparently a slow news day- but it could never be a slow news day, not on an original day, and it took Frisk a couple of seconds after the anchorman said "Next up, we hear from a man who just got a call telling him to return his medicine to the hospital" to react. Just got? That was impossible.
"Does he know he's reporting lies?" Frisk asked.
"Yes," Asriel replied immediately. "It sounds like he's afraid, too, like he thinks that he dies when you LOAD." There had been a lot of debates about that on the Internet, the chans first among them. On the unhappened yesterday, Frisk had anonymously informed some particularly paranoid man that, no, he would be very much the same person as he was because that's what not remembering anything meant; in reply, she had been called a shill and a great many other things, alongside pictures of a smiling man with cold hands and an excellent sense of smell. Frisk had almost decided to take a selfie with Az and post it with her identity but decided that it was really better not to talk to these people or even read what they had to say. I'm trying to SAVE the world, and these people are trying to fit that into their conspiracy theories. Some people would never be happy.
She sighed. "I bet they'll just run the same fake story over and over again, too." Over and over again to rememberers, not to the masses. She didn't know what kind of backroom deals Trump and FEMA did to censor the news, but of course the censorship was unhappened right along with everything else and so it would never go to court. ('It happened in a timeline that didn't happen' was not valid evidence in any court; the police either prevented crimes or caught people in the act.) Frisk turned off the TV; what was the point of watching news that wasn't even real? She played with her brother's ears instead, eliciting a few soft bleats, her extracted calm returning. "It's a shame that stuff doesn't keep very long," she said. "Can you imagine selling it?"
Asriel chuckled. "Happiness and calm in a bottle! Actual happiness for sale, guaranteed to make you briefly happy. These statements are not approved by the whatever that is."
"That would be pretty bad. You want to do Mom's homework now?" In lieu of anything extra to actually study, Toriel gave them a book a day to broaden their horizons.
"Okay, you read Japanese comic books right to left, right?" Toriel had heard that there was a manga series with snails in it but didn't have time to read it herself, so she'd given her children all three volumes of Uzumaki to read.
"I think so, I've only seen a few."
"That reminds me, what are we going to give Papyrus for Christmas?" Asriel abruptly looked up at Frisk, as her heart started beating more quickly.
"I completely forgot I can give people things now!" Frisk Sholeas had lacked the money and the friends to even consider giving anyone anything for Christmas, and her gifts had ranged from school supplies to low-quality knockoff game devices from the dollar store. Frisk Dreemurr, with an eight-digit personal spending allowance, had only anticipated it as an excuse to spend time with family and friends. The idea that she'd be expected to give presents took her entirely off-guard. What would she give Papyrus? Or Sans? Or their parents? Or Kid, or Undyne, or Alphys, or everyone else she knew? She could have her brother and possibly her parents help with those things, make the gifts from 'The Dreemurrs' instead of just herself, but what on earth would she give her father, her mother, her brother?! She couldn't even really conspire with anyone else, not over voice anyway; Asriel would surely hear her. (She briefly lamented the loss of privacy, but she couldn't blame him for knowing what was going on with his life support system.) What could she possibly even buy him? What could he possibly even buy her? What, exactly, do you give to the royalty who has everything? She had to give something that she knew he'd like, that was how Christmas worked, but outright asking him was crass. She considered making him something, and that was what he'd surely do for her, but even if she could sew or build, how could her clumsy human efforts match his magic? She could give him a... but they already had... but they already didn't have, and she could get it. It'd be tricky, but she could call people to get around 'tricky'. Smiling, she petted her brother's ears some more as he picked up the first volume of one of Junji Ito's most famous works.
Five minutes later, they realized that their mother hadn't read it herself and had made a poor choice.
Fifteen minutes later, they agreed that Gaster should have given them yesterday's homework today.
"None of this is possible, is it?" Frisk asked when they were done, wishing for another vial or several to extract her fear. "Any of it?" Last month, she could have easily dismissed it all as just a scary book, but that was before she fell down a hole.
"I don't know of any kind of magic, any kind of spells, that can do any of this stuff," Asriel said, trembling a bit. "Our universe might be broken, but it's not this broken."
"Okay, yeah, change of subject. Let's start with the easy one, what do you want to get Victoria?" They talked Christmas for a long while. The monsters' tradition had been focused on things that the monsters could make for each other; in the modern human world, where you could just buy more or less anything, the personal aspects were depleted- but, hey, there was plenty of cool stuff! Asriel pointed out that the only kids who could ever get lavish Christmas gifts in human society were the kids who didn't really need them, and Frisk briefly felt guilty about being so exceedingly, gobsmackingly rich before dismissing it with a smile. She and Asriel deserved it, and all her friends did too, and that was before the Count came into play. I save a thousand people's lives every day- who's going to tell me I don't deserve opulence? Besides, the Dreemurrs had a Christmas charity event coming up, and her parents planned on giving money to assorted worthy causes. There would be various charities vying for their funding, and their representatives would be disappointed the first time around; the first Christmas, Frisk intended to spend with her closest rememberer friends.
Which now included someone she didn't expect. Sans had faithfully obeyed her instruction to make sure that Papyrus won his court case, in one of the laziest ways possible: by getting the memory spell from his dad and casting it on his brother. There were only a few monsters who had the patience, power, and know-how to do that, or so Frisk hoped, because if too many people became rememberers then the whole exercise would become pointless and she'd lose one of her critical advantages in life. At least Papyrus was able to deal with it (despite not fully understanding why Frisk staggered it the way she did) and knew how not to give things away- or at least if he did, he'd give them away in such a Papyrus way that nobody would realize what he was actually saying. Or, again, so she hoped.
But she didn't want to worry, Christmas was coming, the first actually good Christmas in her life. She felt hopeful for it again, a hope she hadn't felt since she was five, when she first understood what Christmas was supposed to be and had crushing disappointment take it away. ("There is no Santa, and if there were, he wouldn't visit chimeras.") It'd just take one phone call...
On the happened Thursday, she did make a brief, rehearsed, and instructive phone call to Jenkins in the privacy of the girls' locker room, but it wasn't about getting her not-parents sent to a CIA black site where they belonged. He couldn't get it done by the happened Friday, he texted her later, but Christmas Day would work.
After the happened Friday began Christmas vacation. It didn't feel like they needed such a long one; non-remembers would experience nine straight days of vacation after five days of school. But it was what everyone expected and planned for, and some of the students had existing vacation plans involving family in other states. Frisk could only imagine the conversations: "So, did you meet that Frisk girl at school? Was she nice? Can she really reverse time? Did her brother ever turn into a ferocious monstrosity from the pits of Hell?" The Dreemurr kids themselves planned to return to Disney World to finish their interrupted vacation, but since Christmas was on a Tuesday they spent the next three repeated days snowboarding, at rapidly increasing skill levels. Only people who understood how magic worked, who were few, knew why Frisk was willing to do flips holding onto her brother that she would have never attempted alone.
They had people to do things for them (Oh God, help me, help me please, I have 'people who do things for me'.) but Frisk and Asriel made a point of buying at least some Christmas gifts themselves, because whose gifts were these anyway? Crowds, even the worst crowds that Jenkins and his team warned them about, parted before them like the Old Testament's Red Sea. (What'd I expect, I am a religious figure...) Three people- count 'em, three- performed acts of obesiance upon seeing them. Two Catholics crossed themselves in shock. One woman had brought her seven-year-old girl forward: "This is the girl who saved you, Jessica. She's why you're not in the cold, cold ground."
The mortification continued until a boy about three years older than her gave a hearty "Hey, Frisk! What the heck are you doing here?!" Who was...? Oh, right, a kid from history class.
"Buying Christmas gifts, getting followed around by idiots" was Frisk's response, and the idiots dissipated like sea foam. People still kept a healthy distance away, especially when Asriel gave some of the more forward ones the stink-eye.
And they had twice as long to wait as the other kids, with Frisk in the very undesirable position of temporarily canceling Christmas so that Christmas Eve could be redone. She had, however, consulted Alice, who had already been expecting her to put SAVEs and LOADs in good places to triple the best parts of Christmas.
And then Christmas came, and it came with ribbons, tags, packages, boxes, and bags without a Grinch to steal them. (There was a Grinch-like monster that showed up on Christmas Eve in Boston, but the first time, a family dog had savaged it to dust, and the second time, a team of specially trained federal agents had pacified it.) Frisk SAVEd right when she woke up and the Dreemurr kids went through their morning ritual long before the sun came up, and their mother arrived with clothes just as they finished. They were heavily decorated in red and green, with patterns of snowmen and candy canes that somehow avoided being completely hideous, and Asriel received a lightweight, long-sleeved shirt and pants while his sister wore a warm, long-sleeved, nearly floor-length dress of cotton and Dreemurr fur, her socks matching the pattern. Their mother and father were wearing similar clothes, adjusted to their usual styles, although how could a kingly robe be kingly when its most prominent decorative element was reindeer? Frisk popped her hairband on and laughed at her reflection before walking downstairs with her family.
Breakfast was very light, just eggs on toast with some chocolate milk, but Frisk could have expected that; Toriel was making sure they had room for the Christmas feast. Their rememberer friends came in with the sun, the skelebros and their father first, Asmodeus second, bringing along his daughter. Victoria was overjoyed at being with her father again- he had promised her that he would be home for that one day, and he really did skip a day of his vital job to be with his daughter. ("I shouldn't," he'd told Frisk, "the same way you shouldn't if anything happens to just her. And yet, we can't do anything else.") It was a shame she was way too young for the memory spell, but other people could remember her experiences to give her an even better Christmas than last time.
Of course she wanted to open her gifts right away, and everyone else did too. Frisk had never seen such a large tree in a house (there was room for it!) nor so many presents underneath it. Some of them were from people who didn't attend; Alphys had gotten Victoria a large, expansive pink dress, probably out of some anime, to which she had festooned bells and which the little girl wanted to wear right away. You gave a four-year-old something with bells in a house of goats with superhuman hearing. Thanks much, Alphys, you eternal dweeb! Papyrus got Frisk and Asriel matching purple and green watches. A watch. He gave the princess of time a watch. Frisk had given Victoria a huge pink box full of Lego, knowing exactly how she'd use it, and Asriel had given her an enormous variety of Play-Doh, and her bells jingled madly as she unpacked it all. Sans and Papyrus gave each other bones, the same bones that they'd swapped back and forth for several decades. "THANK YOU SO MUCH, SANS! I REALLY WASN'T EXPECTING THIS!" Asriel gave Papyrus an extra-large briefcase full of pockets that he'd modified himself, and Frisk gave him a glowing recommendation to use in his advertising material; her parents looked somewhat disappointed, but Papyrus' face lit up as he realized he was being given something incredibly valuable. (To win such a famous custody battle was one thing; to have 'History's Most Important Person' tell everyone that he's the best lawyer ever was something else.) Frisk almost expected Sans to give them each a gift certificate or something else lazy just because he was Sans, but instead he splurged for a foldable hang glider specially designed and modified for the two of them. Frisk's eyes went wide. With Asriel providing lift every so often, they could glide for a very, very long time even without updrafts. Frisk almost asked where Sans got the money for it- where he got any money at all, actually- but decided not to.
Asmodeus gave the Dreemurr kids 4,320 small, spherical magnets, the kind that the consumer safety nannies had banned until the Trump administration put a quick end to that. He gave Toriel a thick bolt of extremely fine silk cloth, knowing very well that she'd eventually use it to make clothing and blankets for her children and his own daughter, and gave Asgore a specially forged, fully functional, three-pronged spear made of modern materials. (The human had made the 'Asgore Trident' as a project, never knowing that the actual Asgore would one day wield it. His Twitch and Youtube subscribers, already somewhat impressive, shot up thirtyfold when he revealed who he'd sold it to and who was destined to receive it.) Asriel gave his parents and sister somewhat small packages, and even Victoria stopped playing to see what they were. Frisk's was very light, and she slowly broke through the paper before spying the glint of precious metals. Letting the paper fall to the floor in astonishment, she held up the tiara, looking around it. She wasn't even sure what she was looking at, having never seen platinum or palladium in person before, and she didn't know that pink diamonds existed, although she was certain the purple gems were amethysts. It was clearly done entirely with his magic; no human hands could have produced such craft, which had details smaller than Frisk could see. She couldn't guess how much it was worth just in raw materials, but she knew its value: absolutely priceless. She slowly put her hairband on the table and put the tiara on, having nothing to say that wasn't some sort of awed expletive, while her mother and father put on their similar, larger crowns. Asriel and the rest of her family looked at her expectantly. "It's... amazing. Az, Mom, Dad, I do have a gift for all of you, and you will get it for Christmas this year," she said, smiling. Asriel looked curious but resisted the urge to ask. As his sister was the final arbiter of when Christmas began, ended, and restarted, he was sure she'd follow through.
Compared to that, the rest of the gifts were barely noteworthy. The Dreemurr kids had gotten Sans a bicycle to fit his frame ("He's got a really bony butt. No, you don't understand...") and gave Gaster a nightmarishly difficult pentagonal Rubik's cube variant with multiple layers, and they were quick to remind him that he ought to solve it only through turning the pieces, the way a human would. (It would take him less time to develop a functional, all-inclusive solving algorithm than most humans would take to solve it just once.) For his part, Gaster pulled out a large vial and touched an applicator to each of them; it wasn't clear where he got it all or how he extracted it, but he infused everyone there with a combination of emotions that could only be defined as the Christmas spirit. For the humans, it wore off in moments; the monsters felt it for the better part of an hour, and they spent it caroling. With all the different voice ranges, from Asgore's earthshaking bass to Victoria's mouselike pitch, the carols sounded like exactly what they were: very, very different people singing as one.
As Gaster's effects wore off, the group sat around the wood-stoked fireplace, talking and relaxing for hours. Frisk asked how Nicole's trial went; in the court of Judge Saibancho yet again, Papyrus had mercilessly dunked on the opposing lawyer, and the padded head cushion had gotten even more vigorous use. Asmodeus described his woes with making rememberers out of people who couldn't speak English; he'd had to interview translators and make them rememberers first. Frisk found herself dragged into playing Legos with Victoria (Frisk couldn't just tell her to go away; even if she wouldn't remember it, everyone else would), trying to follow the little girl's weird connections between concepts. Of course she put Play-Doh on Lego and vice versa, and Toriel had laid out a thin blanket to prevent a mess. Asriel was busy helping Sans ride a bike. He had magic to keep him upright, but using it took effort. Frisk was starting to think that Victoria's magic kingdom was a Stalinist nightmare of tyranny and bureaucracy, with the way she made up titles for each and every one of her kingdom's subjects (including the Play-Doh dragon, which she'd carefully magicked into sculptured realism), when the good smells began and Toriel called her family to a midday dinner.
The feast was comparable to Thanksgiving's. Toriel had prepared Christmas cookies as appetizers (instantly, voraciously disappeared; even powerful magic couldn't make them vanish that fast), thinly sliced ham, a large bowl full of steamed peas, plates of cornbread, oysters (Frisk didn't like the smell, but the monsters did), mince pie (that Frisk thought was a dessert but wasn't), a bowl full of pistachios shelled through monster magic, and- Frisk didn't even recognize it- an actual goose in gravy. She'd always thought 'the goose is getting fat' was just some old song. Toriel said that she had a dessert ready, but, even for an unhappened day, she wanted her family and guests to eat dinner first. There was plenty of sugar in the egg nog, anyway.
They feasted, and it was good. Frisk felt like she was in a Dr. Seuss cartoon. Watching Gaster eat goose was fascinating; he did much of his chewing outside his mask, politely, delicately tearing apart and crushing the oily bird meat. Frisk didn't like the taste of goose too much, and at Asriel's urging she managed to eat one oyster, but the pistachios were delicious especially since she didn't have to pull the shells off, and the ham, peas, cornbread, and mince pie were filling. She just had to remind herself that mutton came from sheep, not goats. While the happened day's dinner wouldn't go the same way, she knew exactly when to place her next SAVE point.
Asriel's ears perked up, as he seemed to be hearing something he didn't recognize. Toriel looked worried, and Asgore's brow furrowed. "Someone at the door," Asriel said just before the steady, firm knocking. A knock at the Dreemurrs' door? Perhaps it was Jenkins, who had been invited by Toriel but had formally declined. No, couldn't be, as he was out flagrantly abusing his rememberer abilities instead; he was going to propose to his girlfriend for Christmas, and if she turned him down he would have never done it. "I'll get it," Frisk said, thinking it might be some Christmas monster. There were Gyftrots and Santas out there, and she'd heard reports of a Krampus or two... but why would any of them show up here? Her human friends weren't allowed into the town for anything but school, Undyne was off managing the charity event that wasn't going to happen (she'd even invited at least one of the charities) and Kid was with her... who else was there? She walked through the foyer and carefully opened one of the large doors. "Hello?"
At first, Frisk thought that the visitor was a digging monster of some kind despite his human shape. His young face, similar in color and complexion to hers, was overlaid with a strange aspect Frisk couldn't put her finger on. He was roughly Frisk's size, wearing a green and yellow parka too big for him, the sleeves ripped at the wrists, his hands caked in dirt. His jeans were similarly oversized and ragged at the ankles, his boots bent out of shape- even the steel toes were severely warped and dented, the steel shining through beneath the filth. And then Frisk saw the scabbarded knife at his hip and the heart-shaped locket at his neck. Startled, she gasped and took a large step back just as he quietly said, "Hi, Frisk."
"That voice-" Asriel started, launching himself out of his chair and flying towards the door. One glimpse was all it took: "Chara?!"
The reaction was instant. Nearly everyone else rushed to the foyer, jostling for space, dropping forks and toppling chairs. Sans' left eye was glowing a brilliant shade of cyan. Asmodeus was fumbling in his pocket for his phone. Gaster was on the ceiling and his hands were out, all of them, floating around him in a random, threatening pattern next to four ready gasterblasters. Even Papyrus' grin had turned nasty. Victoria, seeing everyone else's reaction, sat frozen in place, her hands alight. Only Toriel and Asgore remained calm.
"Don't do it!" Asriel commanded before the group got there, holding out a hand, deepening his voice.
"Don't," Frisk emphasized. "Just don't. Anyone. None of this is going to have happened anyway, and we all know it. Especially them. They need a thousand or so people to steal my SOUL, remember?"
"I wouldn't have," Asmodeus grumbled, his hand still firmly in his pocket.
"I'll just LOAD, okay? If this goes bad. If they could just kill me they would have done it already, so chill out." Asmodeus considered flatly disobeying a direct command from the princess of time and realized that he was in no position to do that. His posture relaxed, he took a breath, and his hand stayed in his pocket with his phone.
"You can't cast it on this body anyway," the boy said. "It's just me in here this time. And I'm not Chara anymore. I'm Charles. Seven letters." There was silence for a moment, and nobody really liked that silence, and Papyrus cleared his throat even though he didn't have one.
"It's okay, we're not going to get mad," Frisk said, even though it was very much not okay and many of them were already quite mad. "Just tell us what happened, why you came here, how you came here."
Charles faintly smiled, still looking down. "I dug. The fence doesn't go underground." Frisk realized the simplicity of it: a single boy who could use his own strength to burrow through however many hundreds of meters of earth in however little time was outside the military's experience, the possibility unaccounted for. Humans just couldn't do things like that. "Frisk, when you won, when you beat me, I thought, how could I possibly lose, I'm Satan!" He suddenly started sobbing and fell to his knees, his body wracked with grief. "So I got mad, and I made the rest of them get mad, and I killed and I hurt and a lot of them died and I just wanted to hurt more... and then I decided that maybe if I had a body of my own, with its own brain, maybe I'd be able to see things the way everyone else did, that maybe I could figure out how that spell was cast on me," His talking grew faster and faster. "and then I had some researcher gain more LOVE and break into a lab, this lab in China full of genetically engineered embryos, and I thought I was being so smart..." His body shuddered with sobs again, for a full thirty seconds, no one else doing anything. Victoria almost ran to him, bells tinkling, but her father quickly grabbed her arm. "So I had the researcher put the embryo into a woman who killed monsters, and I had her kill more monsters, and I poured myself into it. I made the woman steal and murder and I took her to Afghanistan, and I used so much of my guys' power to make the baby grow faster, and faster, and when they gave me all their LOVE I just killed them, every day..." He was crying louder, his face buried in the soft carpet with his hands. "...and then I felt things, I felt sadness and despair and this, whatever this is, and I felt compassion and I know it's real... I'm so, so sorry, I'm so sorry, maybe if I can help you go back and make it not happen..." This is it, Frisk realized. This is who Chara always was. No epic showdown between the savior and the destroyer, no world-spanning boss fight. Just a lonely, angry kid who'd had some important stuff missing, who'd become a mass murderer because he didn't, couldn't know how not to be one. I never could save him. He had to save himself.
"You already did make some of it not happen," Asriel said, and Charles abruptly looked up at him, sitting up on his knees and wiping his tears with one strong, dirt-covered hand. Frisk noticed the rock flecks on his knuckles and wondered if he'd even bothered using a shovel or if he'd simply punched, clawed, and kicked his way through the ground. If she went out and looked, she'd probably see uppercuts for air holes. "Or you will have. I guess you've never heard your own new voice?" Charles touched his own throat, realizing. "Mom, Dad, you know whose voice this is, don't you?"
"Yes," Asgore rumbled, kneeling down. "Would that we could reverse all the pain you've caused."
"I already know we can't," Frisk said. "If we could, we would have done it." Chara looked down again. "But don't blame him, Dad! The one who did all those bad things wasn't him!"
"What?" the crying boy asked, confused.
"Az," Frisk started, although she was addressing everyone else in the room, "was Flowey really you? if I didn't have my compassion, would I be me? Charles, you just said, now you have a brain that works. You can feel compassion, and love, and regret. Chara couldn't do any of those things. So there's nothing to forgive."
Charles started to smile, wiping his tears away. "I guess Charles really isn't Chara. Az, thanks for never telling my secret."
"I promised I wouldn't," Asriel said.
"Oh, I guess you all want to know now, too?" Everyone stared at him, and he stood up. "I took a cat apart, when I was little. It was old, and hadn't caught any mice recently, so I wanted to see what it was made out of. And then everyone got mad, and my mom, she said that... she said that I was wrong and bad, and so did my dad, and they took away my... and then they started calling me 'char-a', because I didn't have... and I was so mad, I became Care-a, because if I was a character out of a story, nobody could do anything to me, nobody could hurt me. I cut their throats at night, and I walked away, up the mountain, to have adventures. Then I fell down, and I met Asriel, and I wanted to play but I didn't know what was right and wrong, and I just wanted revenge, on everything... Mom, I'm so, so sorry..."
"Frisk is right. You have gained something you did not have before, so you are not the person you used to be," Toriel said, putting a large arm around him, and he trembled in sorrow.
Asgore frowned. "I am not sure if the population can be made to believe that," he slowly said. "The humans may want you to be punished." Asmodeus gave a dark chuckle.
"Then we lie," Frisk said, her mind working furiously. "We say that some other devil came out of the underground and possessed Charles, but Charles overpowered it in the end. Or make something else up. Or we won't even have to because if we talk at the same time, I'm pretty sure people will not mess with us no matter what. They can't do anything anyway, they can't put him in jail because he's everywhere and they can't kill him because he won't really be dead." Asmodeus was nodding.
"You don't mind that I'm Satan?" Charles asked.
Frisk looked him in the face, smiling. "I do mind, but it only means you can do more good now. Just because you have crazy devil powers doesn't mean you have to be a crazy devil with them. Like, instead of making people kill more monsters, you can tell them to stop. I just wish you could do the same thing for people who kill humans."
"You don't understand..." Charles trailed off. He looked distracted by something.
"We can discuss what we do or do not understand at the table," Toriel said primly. "Take off your shoes right here, and take a bath. I will fetch clean clothes for you." Looks were exchanged between the guests and their Queen, but all of the Dreemurrs were determined to bring in their wayward child, and Asmodeus and Gaster had already relented, looking at each other in silent understanding. If the other half of That Voice was Charles, there was something that absolutely needed to be done. He tore off his boots, ripping them in half and bending the steel away from his toes, and his mother took him by the hand and led him away.
Gaster's voice oozed from him in a comfortable, melodic tone, and his blobby form detached from the ceiling and he flipped on his spindly legs back onto the ground. "I had wondered how such a thing could be possible without his cooperation. It appears I was correct to assume it was impossible."
"No choice now on what to do next," Asmodeus said. "Until we do it, free will is officially canceled."
"Just curious, but what happens if we don't?" Asriel asked.
"I LOVE PARADOXES! THEY'RE ALMOST AS FUN AS PUNS. WELL, SOMETIMES. AND WE SHOULD ONLY TALK ABOUT THEM. NOT DO THEM FOR REAL," Papyrus advised, before looking shocked. "I DIDN'T KNOW YOU COULD DO A PARADOX FOR REAL!"
Asmodeus nodded at the skeleton. "Unless someone here has a backup universe stashed somewhere I don't know about, we're not going to find out what happens." He turned to Frisk, an ineffable look on his face. "Before, he could end the universe by taking your SOUL; now, he might be able to end the universe without your help. In fact, if it's not done exactly right, I don't know what happens then, either." His hands started twitching as he fully realized what he was talking about.
"So, do you have a plan?" Frisk asked. "Like, what spell to cast, what syllables and all that?"
"Believe it or not, 'go back in time and remove EXP from people' isn't that hard of a spell to make up," Asmodeus replied. "It's just uncastable without deific abilities." He gave Frisk a pointed look. Gee, Asmodeus, you know how I feel about being called a goddess, thanks a whole lot for classifying me as one.
"Wait a minute," Asriel said, his ears springing back in fear. "This isn't going to do anything to either of them, is it? We're not going to make some kind of sacrifice here, are we?"
"No," Gaster replied, and Asriel sagged in relief. "The sacrifice was already made. It requires prodigious amounts of power. Which is why we can only do it to the concentrated nexi that Chara had created. We shall... we have used their power to remove their power."
"and then that's it, huh. devil kid goes back to beat devil kid and we all live happily ever after. he just gets away with it. the end."
"Sans, Flowey got away with it too!" Frisk snapped at him. "If you want to fight evil, you have to stop the evil, remove the evil. And maybe, sometimes, you need to fight, even kill people, but if we can fight the bad things directly, then we don't need to worry about things like punishment or retribution. Chara's gone, Sans, Charles beat him. But if Charles' body dies then they might come back, I don't know. I know he's covered in dead monsters, he's got to be maximum LV if there is one. But trying to fight him if he's got to help us, before or after, isn't going to help anything."
Asgore stared at Sans. "I forbid any of you from harming my son." Sans' blue eye finally stopped glowing.
"WELL THERE IS ONE THING WE AREN'T DOING FOR HIM," Papyrus pointed out. "HE'S NOT GETTING ANYTHING FOR CHRISTMAS!"
"Actually, wait," Frisk said, looking through the living room towards the roaring fireplace. "Az, can you..."
A few minutes later, Toriel led her adopted son downstairs. He was wearing one of Asriel's green and yellow striped shirts and dark pants, Dreemurr-fur socks on his feet. His hair had been thoroughly disentangled and combed, making him presentable for Christmas dinner. He was still silent and downcast, twitching every once in a while, and he took a seat on the other side of his siblings.
"Charles," Frisk said, smiling, "you came on such short notice, we couldn't get you the real thing. So, here. It's something you deserve." Charles took the gift in hand, and laughed, and Frisk and Asriel laughed with him, and soon everyone else was laughing too, even Toriel. It was, of course, a piece of wood that had burned to charcoal. Still laughing, Charles crushed it in his hand, and Frisk was wondering if he could make a diamond from it; instead, it was crushed to powder, and he sprinkled the powder back into the fireplace.
"Asriel, I've missed you so much," Charles said as they walked back to the table together. He wiped off his charcoal-covered hand on a napkin before digging into the goose that Toriel had set out for him. "Thiff if what-" He swallowed, not taking a small bite chewed thoroughly, although Frisk somewhat doubted if he even could choke. "This is what I..." He stopped suddenly, as if hit by something.
"What is it?" Asriel asked.
"What do you think?!" Charles shouted at him, angrily, and everyone else reacted before calming down. At least nobody spilled anything. "Don't you know what I still am? Don't you know what I can still see, what's going on in the world? You don't understand," he continued, more quietly, and Asriel heard a mote of the old Chara in his voice. "How could you? I'm in those people's heads, all of them. So much pain, so much rage, so much hatred and evil. Some of them... they're not people, not really, they're worse than I was. So many being born, so many children, so many..." He shuddered, and looked around the room. "It's the opposite of this. The opposite of this house, the opposite of friends, the opposite of Christmas. I tried to stop it. I tried to use my armies, the worst people in the world, to kill everyone who was causing the most misery. But it's still out there, it's just there... and it's not going to go away, not until we fix them, not until they stop making more children who are just going to make more starvation and pain..." He winced, concentrating. "There. She's only, like, LV 3 or 4, and they were so much bigger, but she killed them. Both of them. With a rock." Nobody, not even Papyrus, asked who 'she' and 'them' were. Victoria looked traumatized, but it didn't matter; she wouldn't remember this. "Next time, I'll know they're coming, so the rock will come sooner. Some of these people are trying to get possessed, because it's better than their lives." He narrowed his eyes. "There's a starving man in a North Korean prison camp, he killed only one monster so I can barely even hear him, who's been begging me to save him for three days straight. Three real days. I can't. I don't have many people there after they blew up Kim. Those guys use bombs on monsters." He stopped for a moment, making himself relax. "Asriel, Frisk, all of you. One day I want to be just here, with you. I'll be the last person on Earth with any EXP at all. Then all my crazy devil powers," he said, smiling at Frisk, "will be just me and not... innocent people. Or less guilty people."
"I WOULD NOT WANT TO REPRESENT YOU IN COURT," Papyrus said, and Charles broke out laughing. "THERE WOULD BE TOO MANY MULTIPLE COUNTS AND I DON'T KNOW IF COURTS CAN COUNT THAT HIGH! ALSO WE WOULD NEED TO BE IN A THOUSAND DIFFERENT COURTS AND I DON'T FEEL LIKE TAKING THE BAR EXAM ANOTHER HUNDRED TIMES."
"It'd be like the OJ trial," Asmodeus said. "If the name doesn't fit, you must acquit." Charles chuckled again.
Frisk looked at her new brother. The table was too wide to extend her hand across it, so she just smiled a sympathetic smile instead. "Charles, one day we'll solve it. Okay? Hopefully one day soon. If there's anyone who has the power to save people from themselves, it's us."
"You will," Asgore said. "Charles, Frisk, do you understand now? You are truly our future."
Charles laughed. "Dad, you used to tell me that. Over and over again, when I was little. I had no idea what you meant."
"Wait, he used to tell you that, too?" Frisk asked. "But it really is both of us, isn't it? Dad, how'd you know?"
Asgore smiled a broad smile and chuckled heartily. "'King' is not just a title, and not just a bit of authority either. I don't have W.D. Gaster's abilities, but there are things that I know. Although I did not understand them either, before now." He smiled again. "Go on, my children. Enjoy this day of merriment. Charles, if you see some miscreancy occur in the civilized world, you, too, are a rememberer with some power to prevent it."
"That's the problem, Dad," Charles muttered. "Most of this stuff isn't in the civilized world, not by your definition." He took another big bite of food.
Toriel smiled at him, holding a big, wrapped box. "Charles?" He looked up at her. "This is for everybody, but I believe you should have a share, too." She delicately unwrapped it, and his EXP-infused, genetically modified eyes grew to saucers as she revealed the extra-large, heavy box of assorted chocolates with sugary, fruity fillings of all kinds.
"You can just buy this stuff at the store now," Asriel reminded him, as he gently took the box from his mother's hand, shoving bite-sized candies into his mouth one after the other, chewing thoroughly to get the most out of the taste.
"y'know what we ought to bake him?" Sans asked, and everyone else at the table looked at him. "c'mon. you know this one."