Adrian
No one else tried to stop the humans on their way to Waterfall. The snow-covered evergreens standing sentry by the path and the white crystals that glimmered under their feet took on a still, almost eerie quality. Holding their breath, it seemed, waiting.
Waiting.
For what?
Ahead of them, the path tapered to what was hardly more than a narrow land bridge. As Nyssa and Adrian crossed it, they could feel the cold slowly fading from the air, replaced by a muggy humidity that clung to their clothes and skin and hair. From somewhere up ahead came a steady crashing.
In this new section of the Underground, Snowdin's sedimentary rock gave way to deep blue stone, carved in wave patterns as if to imitate the ripples of water. Small crystals that glimmered from their places embedded in the walls, like stars in a midnight sky, gave off the only luminescence visible as the humans left the magical light of Snowdin behind them. A large ice cube, thrown by the muscular wolf the humans had long passed, drifted downstream alongside them on the way to its final destination, wherever that was.
Farther down the path, waterfalls cascaded down from stone shelves high above, dampening Nyssa and Adrian's clothes in their spray. Adrian shrugged off the thick jacket he had been wearing since they had first entered Snowdin; he wouldn't be needing it anymore. The scent of Toriel's house still clung to it, woven into its fibers. As he put the jacket back into his pack, Adrian could almost swear he could still feel the warmth of her fur against him as she hugged him goodbye.
Goodbye, Toriel, Adrian thought silently. He thought of her still in the Ruins, silently mourning the loss of two more children. But maybe she wasn't so alone anymore. The third human was keeping her company, surely. Adrian wondered how Toriel could stand it, taking in child after child when every single one had left her behind. There was something broken in her life. Missing. He had sensed it when he stayed with her and he still thought about it now. One day, he hoped–maybe after the monsters were all freed–Toriel would finally be able to find her peace.
Xandre
Xandre stood still for the longest time, breathing heavily, trying to recollect himself. All the while his eyes never left the place where Toriel had made her last stand. It was strange how a monster so strong, so powerful, so eternal, could so easily be reduced to dust.
Reduced to dust, by my doing.
The soul marks on Xandre's hands and the Wingdings he had summoned faded rapidly as soon as Toriel died, becoming invisible again, awaiting the next time he would draw upon Wing's powers to take another life. Something Wing himself had been about to do before his own creation killed him.
Wing's dark side, the one he had tried to suppress all his first life, seemed to react to the kill, a feeling creeping into the edge of Xandre's mind that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Relief? Anger? Guilt? Triumph? Or just a cold curiosity that drove him to find out more?
I will, he promised.
Nyssa
After a while, the narrow passage widened into a chamber occupied by two monsters the humans didn't know, a glowing blue flower, and Sans. He sat with his feet propped up against a sentry booth, which Nyssa noticed had a layer of fresh snow on the roof even though there was none of it coming from anywhere in Waterfall.
"Sans? How–"
Nyssa grinned and shook her head at Adrian jokingly. "Sans has his mysteries," she replied cryptically.
There was a chuckle from the sentry booth. "You've got that right," the skeleton called back at them. "Now, care to join me?"
As the humans walked over, the orange half-fish monster next to the flower waved to get their attention, casting a fleeting glance at the flower as if he were afraid it would interrupt him before he could speak. "This is an Echo Flower," he blurted as soon as he saw that the humans were looking at him, giving the flower a look of triumph. "It repeats the last thing it heard, over and over…"
When Nyssa approached the flower and touched it, it gave an uncanny imitation of the monster, repeating his message verbatim. It was enough to send a small shiver down her spine.
"Hey, yo!" The smaller yellow monster, who had been silent until now, called out. He seemed to be a child, standing only slightly taller than Nyssa's waist height, and wore a striped shirt on his armless torso. He had small spines down his back, reminding Nyssa a little of Alphys. She had the feeling she had seen him frolicking in Snowdin Town the day before. "You guys! Are you both sneaking out to see her, too?"
"'Her'?"
"Yeah, her! Undyne! She's the coolest, right? I want to be just like her when I grow up. Don't tell my parents I'm here, though. Ha."
"We won't," Adrian replied uncertainly.
"And you, Sans?" Nyssa asked, ignoring the snow on the roof of the sentry booth as if she saw randomly placed weather phenomena every day. "What are you doing here?"
Sans shrugged nonchalantly. "Haven't you seen a guy with two jobs before? Fortunately, two jobs means twice as many legally-required breaks."
Nyssa laughed. "That's not quite how it works on the Surface, but okay, I guess."
"Hey, anyway… I know this is a bit of a random question, but what do you think of my brother?"
"He's cool," Adrian replied with a shrug. "And nice."
Why is he asking this when he realizes we've known Papyrus since he was born? Nyssa wondered to herself. Whatever, this is interesting.
"Yeah. Papyrus tries real hard. Like how he keeps trying to be a part of the Royal Guard. One day, he went to Undyne's house, since she's the head of the whole thing, and begged her to let him be in it. Of course, she shut the door on him because it was midnight. But the next day, she woke up and saw him still standing there, waiting for her. Seeing his dedication, she agreed to give him a chance at warrior training. As you can see, it's still, uh, a work in progress. But he's getting there."
"I can see that," Nyssa replied, smiling. Was it strange, the feeling of pride that filled her from the inside? The sense of accomplishment as if Papyrus's achievements were worth even more to her than her own? This, she realized, must be how Wing would have felt towards his sons. He was proud of his children, both Sans and Papyrus. So proud.
"I'm proud of him, too," Sans said, as if he could read her thoughts. "He's come a long way since… the beginning." He paused, and Nyssa knew he must be reliving the day Wing died, when their family broke apart.
"Yes," Nyssa agreed. "He certainly has."
Xandre
As Xandre went over what to do next, he walked back up the stairs into Toriel's vacant house in hopes of finding supplies that would keep him alive during the journey ahead. The place seemed so hollow without her, so lifeless. Xandre wondered what would happen to any other humans who would fall into the Underground afterwards, now that he had killed their guardian angel.
Maybe there won't be any more monsters by the time someone else falls down, he mused. He supposed that was what he was going to make sure of after he left the silent Ruins behind him. Go into the rest of the Underground and kill all of them until there were none left, no survivors to tell his tale. Once again, he marveled at the power that had been given him as soon as he fell, the power that seemed to come from the white shard embedded in his soul. The willpower to take this path.
He could sense that Wing had been trying to convince himself he had it in order to carry out his plan. Had he lived, maybe he still wouldn't have been able to bring himself to really do it, sure. But in the moments before his death, he really had thought he would be forced to commit genocide in order to eventually open the barrier. Kill the monsters of an alternate universe in order to free those of his own. The logic and the plan made sense, in a terrifying, twisted way.
When the CORE malfunctioned, Wing had died, but the darkness in his soul had not. Why else would Xandre be standing here alone, surrounded by the emptiness and the weight of all the lives he had taken?
Adrian
After depositing their items in a conveniently placed box, Adrian and Nyssa found themselves face-to-face with a massive waterfall that bisected the path they had been following, leaving no way to the other side but through the churning water. Worse, stones tumbled down the waterfall along with the cascading water.
"We're going to have to risk it," Adrian muttered. His eyes followed each boulder as it fell, vainly attempting to make out some regularity, some sort of pattern, in the way they came down. Giving up, he chose a time when there did not seem to be many rocks falling, and yelled, "now!"
Hurling caution to the wind, Adrian and Nyssa broke into a full-on sprint, spluttering as the water soaked their clothes and bogged them down. Their eyes remained fixed on the far bank. All that mattered was getting safely to the other side.
Pain blazed in a straight line down Adrian's arm, and he yelled, diving to the side. On instinct, Nyssa followed him.
"Ow," he moaned, clutching the part where the rough stone had grazed his skin. Luckily, it didn't seem to be bleeding, although it was scraped red and raw enough for it to make Adrian grit his teeth so he wouldn't cry out.
Looking up, he realized he and Nyssa had ended up in a dry cavern in the stone. The waterfall thundered on beyond their safe cove, only narrowly missing where the two of them crouched in between two patches of luminescent mushrooms. Adrian shifted his hand and realized that it had been pressed against a mess of sparkling pink fabric wadded up on the ground.
"Hey, what is this?"
Nyssa crawled on hands and knees to where Adrian sat and picked up the bundle, shaking it out. "It's a tutu," she said in disbelief, "and a small child's at that. How in the world did this get here?"
That was when Adrian noticed the dark stains smudged against the deep blue stone of the cave. They had been there a long time, and had had years and years to dry out, but it was still unmistakable what they were. Nyssa, following his gaze, saw them immediately and froze.
Nyssa
"Blood." Nyssa swallowed hard.
"Do you think–"
"There is something very, very wrong about this place," Nyssa breathed. Clearly, somebody had been killed here. Taking a closer look at the tutu, she realized that faint red patches marred its silky pink, as if somebody had come by here a long time ago and tried to wash the blood off of it.
On the wall, something caught her eye: a hastily carved heart shape, painted indigo. As if it were a marker of some sort.
Adrian picked up a sharp-edged stone from the ground and scraped it against the wall, leaving a lighter streak in its wake. There, he scratched three symbols: a sun, a hand, and a pointed flag. RIP.
"I have no idea what happened here," Nyssa whispered almost reverently, feeling as if she and Adrian were intruders treading upon a sacred tomb. She traced the indigo heart on the wall with one finger. Apart from the fact that it was wholly human, the carving was identical in appearance to her soul. "But whoever this is, whoever this was… I wish she'd made it to wherever she was going."
Adrian sighed. "Me, too."
Adrian
Without warning, clanking footsteps sounded out from a ledge above, accompanied by the creaking of armor.
"There's somebody here!" Adrian whisper-yelled, stating the obvious. He and Nyssa ducked into a large clump of tall grass. There they crouched, tilting their heads up to catch a glimpse of the ledge while hopefully remaining unseen. Somebody clad in silver armor with what seemed like a red ponytail streaming out behind her stood facing another figure. Although his face was in shadow, Adrian easily recognized Papyrus's tall, skeletal frame.
"H… hi, Undyne! I'm here with my daily report. Regarding those humans I called you about earlier…"
"Did you fight them?" the female monster, Undyne, interjected briskly. Even her voice was sharp and loud, commanding of respect.
"Y-yes! Of course I did! I fought them, ah, valiantly!"
"Did you capture them?" Undyne interrupted again. Her tone heavily implied how rhetorical her question was, and Adrian knew what she was really asking was, why do you not have two human souls with you right now?
"W-well…" Papyrus fumbled over his own words, staring very hard at the ground to avoid Undyne's challenging gaze. "No," he finally admitted, letting out a defeated sigh. "I tried very hard, Undyne, but in the end, I failed."
"Then I will take their souls myself," Undyne snapped.
"But Undyne, you don't h-have to destroy them!" Papyrus cried, moving closer to Undyne. "You see…"
She turned around to glare at him, and he began to back away, weak-kneed. "You see…"
"Papyrus."
"Y-yes?"
"Do you not remember what I have been trying to tell you this entire time? Humans are our enemies. They do not deserve the gift of mercy. I know your heart is in the right place, I really do. But protecting humans will not get monsters anywhere, nor will it improve your chances of being deemed worthy to be a member of the Royal Guard. Understand?"
"I understand," Papyrus replied, resigned. "I… I'll help you in any way I can."
With that, Papyrus left. Please leave, Adrian prayed, watching Undyne warily. Sure enough, she made a move to turn in the other direction. Adrian's hand slipped, shifting a piece of grass the slightest bit. He bit back a curse.
Undyne whipped around. "Who's there?" she demanded. Her eyes, two glowing pinpricks just visible under the visor of her helmet, fixated on him as she advanced towards the humans' hiding place.
Hey, everyone.
I know, I know, it's been ages. And I'm sorry. So much work, so little time. But I did promise my friend I'd release this chapter before my birthday. Since that's tomorrow, I had to panic-write the majority of this chapter.
Happy birthday to me, I guess...? It's time to go be a teenager.
Welp. See you in the next chapter.