Sans woke up. His skull felt full of fog and darkness. The thin, scratchy blanket around his shoulders held little warmth, but even that was enough to persuade him not to move. If he just kept his sockets closed and didn't get up then he could pretend...wait. His sockets were closed? Since when? He opened them.
The sight before him was familiar but alien. A nearly grey popcorn ceiling riddled with cracks and water stains stretched above him. Vaguely maroon wallpaper led down from that. A curtainless window was just visible behind his skull; the top of a closet peeked into his vision from the direction of his chin. He knew what he'd see if he let his skull turn. The lampshade wasn't worth the effort. Neither was the rest of his bedroom.
Welp, this was an interesting dream and all, but it kinda paled before the mess of his life right now. Heh. Paled. Because he was a skeleton. And his bones were white. And also he shouldn't be able to see anything more than empty black.
Just when he was about to fall back asleep Sans heard a voice through the walls. It was not quiet.
"NYEH! SANS!"
The door to his room burst open. He let his skull roll over to face it. His brother stood in the doorway in all his costumed glory. He was blinking at the wall, and when Sans went to look, he saw the handle was embedded in the plaster. Huh. Hadn't that happened be- oh. Right. This must be a memory. Next Pap would be chastising him and dragging him out of bed to the bathroom.
"SANS?"
His brother was looking at him oddly. Sans couldn't place the look. Had he ever seen Pap look like that? It was worried...but also confused? And concerned. And...well, he couldn't place the rest. It was complicated, clearly.
"ARE YOU ALRIGHT, BROTHER? YOU DIDN'T DO THE THING THIS MORNING."
A thing? What thing? He-
A tsunami of magic inundated Sans' SOUL. Papyrus was...Papyrus? He was there, he could feel him! It was Papyrus!
Sans was overwhelmed. His brother was here! He sent a pulse of absolutely ecstatic magic through to his brother as he fought with the blankets. Papyrus blinked. A glimmer of magic had flickered along the bond between them, but another had traveled through the walls and out of the room.
Sans hadn't noticed the second flicker. He was too busy sending a second pulse of love and relief towards his brother. The second was followed by a third, then a fourth; the pattern quickly devolved into a long stream of magic and emotion that was almost as fluid as the tears on Sans' cheekbones.
"SANS! STOP THAT. YOU ARE GOING TO WEAR YOURSELF OUT, AND THEN YOU WILL HAVE NO MAGIC LEFT TO GREET ME TOMORROW!"
Sans blinks at his brother for the first time in months, although it would be more linearly accurate to say it was the first time in approximately 11 hours. Then he was at his brother's side, the rush fueling a teleport because he couldn't bear to waste the time it would take to run over. Sans could hardly handle the second it took to wrap his arms around his brother and squeeze.
Grillby woke to a muddled mind, a muddled memory, and a muddled bed. His mind felt as though several important bits had wandered off, not just for a short break, but with the serious intention of not coming back for years. The rest of it felt like cotton-filled molasses clogging up the pipes of an intricate machine.
His memory seemed to have been fused with a particularly large clot of the molasses; bits and pieces of sensory input without any connection to to the rest had bobbed to the surface. All of it seemed grainy and dulled. It was a very particular kind of grainy and dulled. Unfortunately, the bit of his mind that knew what it meant was far gone.
His bed, at least, was easy enough to sort out. He jerked his way out from under the covers. Every joint was stiff. Every muscle was sore. These two facts made it rather hard to move, but getting out of bed...well, it did not demand much grace of an elemental as old as he. Just as Grillby had extricate himself from the tangled sheets a particularly large clump of memory burst free.
The bone slicing up through a human child's shoulder made a sound he never wanted to hear again. Two more followed, and the human snarled. Grillby turned in wonderment to catch the rocketing skeleton in his shaking grip.
"...Sans?"
The skeleton tugged at his grip.
"come on, grillbz. time to leave."
His flames popped in fury.
"...They killed Gerson. I cannot-"
His words dissolved in a slash of spreading pain.
That was...certainly something. He could not recall the last time he had seen Gerson. To think he was- no. Gerson was not dead. His mind finally caught up with the present timeline. Gerson was alive and annoying as ever, and Sans hardly ever moved above an amble. He only ever saw Sans when the skeleton came into the bar, and the warmth and protectiveness he had felt in the memory...ah. It had been a human in the scene, and that allowed for the possibility of a LOAD or a RESET.
Grillby's flames dimmed. If Gerson had died in a world before a RESET, he was probably feeling the effects now. And Sans would too. Both of them remembered more than he did, although how he knew that about Sans he would question another day. He would have to ask one of them what had happened. Living with that much of a-
Magic and emotion poked him in the ribcage. He reeled as the bond he had always hoped to build upon with Sans inundated him with confusion. He nearly collapsed onto the bed as Sans' own shock tripled his own. Then his flames soared and scorched the ceiling when elation overcame him.
Stars, what had happened in that last loop? Had they actually...and what was making Sans feel like this? It was suddenly much more urgent that he go and learn what all was worth remembering from the last loop, and he was fairly certain he knew just the monster to ask.
Grillby stood at the front door of the brothers' house. He had come here in such a rush, but his confidence had been scared off by the wreath on the door. He'd never gone inside the house that he knew of. He'd barely ever spoken to Papyrus. He didn't know if Sans truly did remember LOADs and RESETs, or if one had even occurred. He had no right to come here and ask. Why should he? As much as he admired Sans, and as strong as their unacknowledged bond seemed to be, their relationship was nothing more than the local bartender and his favorite regular.
But the bond was there, and it was strong, and, as if to remind him of the fact, it passed him another set of Sans' emotions. Desperate love filled him, more powerful than anything he had felt before. It overruled his hesitation and thrust him into the home.
He barely even registered the room he swept through on his way to the staircase. The only thing he was able to note was the smell of badly-cooked spaghetti. For some reason it gave him the echo of the feeling of sad.
The stairs were passed just as quickly. The upper hallway was where he finally slowed down; his own caution asserted itself at long last. Grillby had no idea what he would find in Sans' room. He'd seen the privacy signs on Papyrus' door. What if the brothers were zealous about it? He knew some monsters were. He had already forced himself into their home; entering their sleep space would be a thousand times worse.
But as he reached the hallway's end he saw that the door was already open. Indeed, it was so open that the handle was embedded in the wall. The brothers were in the doorway. Papyrus appeared as if he had been knocked off his feet by the smaller monster holding desperately to his back. Sans was hugging his brother with the same emotion that had driven Grillby to his door. Seeing that much emotion, negative emotion, on Sans' face broke Grillby's heart. He gave into his SOUL and let himself be absorbed into the pile of hugs. Learning more could wait. Right now he had a skeleton to attend to.
The CORE was annoyed. Sans wasn't nearby, and it didn't like when it couldn't find Sans. It wanted to ask Sans if the human had done the weird thing right. The temporal field outside of it felt different, so the plan had worked.
The problem was that it didn't know if it had fixed Sans because it couldn't find Sans. Sans wasn't here. But Sans could be somewhere other than here. Maybe it should look?
Looking was good. When the CORE reached out it found that it could feel farther than it ever had before. It could feel the yellow scientist and the very sad monster wearing metal who sometimes visited. It could feel the small armless one who had not fallen inside. It could feel the loud one. It could feel Grillby. It could feel Sans.
[Hi Sans. Hi! What are you doing? It is a hug, but there are three of you. Is it a hughug? or a hughughug? May I join the hugs?]
It felt Sans startlement, then it felt his happy content. It heard him think to it, "oh, hey core. yeah, this is a hug pile. if you can figure out how to join you might as well. why not? it isn't gonna end anytime soon."
The CORE was happy. Sans felt good. Sans was listening. Sans felt like Sans. It was glad the plan had worked, because it didn't like when Sans didn't feel like Sans. But now he did, so it was good. Now it had to find a plan to keep him that way.
It was later. Gaster wasn't sure how much later, given that time was...time was...well, time was confusing, even to a physicist of his caliber. All of the rules that he'd ever known got thrown out the window when faced with a SOUL of determination. But however insane as it may be, time still passed. Sometimes. Someplaces. Maybe.
His son was waiting in the treeline by the entrance to the Ruins. He'd gone to the door not long before. Gaster wasn't sure why, although he could see the place held some significance. But whatever reason it was, something his son had heard had made him hid. He looked furious, terrified, curious, and confused. Gaster had a feeling he knew what was coming next.
Sure enough, a familiar human emerged from the RUINS a short while later. Well, they were as familiar as a human could be whose sweater pattern was actually discernable now. The last time he had seen them, the human had been covered with dust. Apparently they hadn't built up enough, now. In fact, he didn't think they had built up any. Their LOVE was at 1, and their EXP remained a lovely, refreshing value of 0.
Sans seemed to have noticed the change too, because he didn't blast the human with a series of Blasters as Gaster admitted to himself he probably would have done. Instead, Sans let the human shiver their way on. He did smash a fallen log to pieces, though. His father approved.
Finally, the human reached the bridge covered with a very widespread sort of fence that would stop nobody from crossing it. The human, however, stopped. They trembled as, to Gaster's incredulity, Sans walked slowly up behind them. The skeleton stopped, probably speaking. He hadn't moved an inch before the human spun. Gaster gulped.
The human didn't seem interested in hurting his son, however. They were too busy trying to hold back the flood of tears oozing down their face. Gaster was surprised to see that the liquid was clear. The human's face wrinkled. Then they lifted their hands and made gestures Gaster was surprised to recognise.
They were using Hands. They were using Hands naturally. They were using Hands to sign three things, each repeated and mingled ad nauseum. The first was 'sorry'. The second, 'thank you'. The third was 'they're gone'.