Alphys woke up with her face pressed against the table. Sans was still beside her, watching her with uncertainty. The pain in her head was gone. Why had her head hurt in the first place? Oh yeah, she had remembered something, something important. Pain drew in around the edges of her mind.
What had she remembered? Someone was missing, right? Yes, the old royal scientist… whatever his name was.
She pulled herself back up again, and Sans let out a sigh of relief. Alphys groaned, both from the dissipating pain and the fact that she had landed in her stew. She picked an onion off Mew Mew's face. "I really liked this shirt!"
"Eh, don't stew over it, I'm sure it'll wash out." Sans seemed relieved to have found an excuse to make a pun.
Alphys chuckled, despite herself. Something about Sans nonchalant behaviour after the shocking experience moments ago was comforting. Perhaps that was why he made so many puns. "I think you're underestimating the staining power of ketchup."
"Paps is always able to get it out." He shrugged. He froze, his eye sockets going dark, not from an attempt at intimidation, but rather a petrifying self realization. He had talked about Papyrus casually, like he was at home, folding laundry, and not, well, dead. He didn't know if it was the sudden slip up, or that he realized he was going numb to the death of the people he loved most that terrified him.
"What if this is the time they don't reset? Or what if they decide to stop when everyone you care about is dead?" his own cynical voice asked.
"They'll keep resetting, they get bored easily." he told himself. That was just it, wasn't it? One horrifying idea to another. First, the knowledge that time was resetting in general had been terrifying. Then that he was powerless to stop it. Then the realization that at some point, it would stop. His data said so.
And that was perhaps the worst fear of all. The fact that the people he loved had been slaughtered countless times without even realising it was unsettling enough. But what if the ending, the reset to end all resets, the timeline to stop all timelines…
Was one of these?
What if it stopped, leaving Papyrus dead? Leaving Undyne or Alphys dead? What if the final timeline came through, and he was left alone, in the empty underground? Alone and forgotten with no way out. Alone with only himself for company. He would go mad.
Unbeknownst to the human, and to his own disgust, he too had become reliant on the resets.
They were awful, they took away any reason to try doing anything. They made daily life an exercise in futility and filled the air with the tension of 'when?'.
But…
But.
They brought everyone back to life. They returned the underground back to its original, hope filled self. His brother would gripe about his puns and lazy behaviour like always. The lady would be on the other side of the door, waiting for him to visit, to tell jokes, to laugh the beautiful howling laugh he had longed to hear the night before. He would once again be surrounded by people who loved and cared for him, people who had no idea what hell he had just gone through.
Sans envied them.
He didn't know what he would do without them, without the hope that they would be there once again, in their usual place like nothing had even happened. He needed that hope, the hope that the loss was only temporary.
Warm, pleasant, blurry memories flitted around the edge of Sans mind. He could remember laughs and bad food, shared with someone he considered his friend. Times he had thrown his knowledge to the wind and allowed himself to be slightly happy. The bright, rosy colors of a sunset on the surface.
The worst possible ending.
"Sans?" Alphys was trying to get his attention without startling him. "Sans, are you ok?"
"Yeah, I'm fine." he said. The easiest lie.
"How long has this been going on?"
Sans panicked. Had he been speaking out loud? No, no he hadn't. She was asking about the old doctor.
How long had it actually been? Timelines made it hard to keep track of, well, time.
"Since a little before the final exam day, when he was… lost." Sans couldn't come up with numbers, so this seemed like the next best thing. "I was there. I suppose that's why I was able to hold on to a few memories. You don't see something that horrible with your own eye sockets and simply let the universe, or whatever, take off with your memories."
"I can't believe I forgot." Alphys winced, trying to think about the situation in broad terms. "I mean, the position of royal scientist became conveniently open almost right after I graduated, and I didn't even think that was a little odd?"
"Don't beat yourself up about it. No one else remembers." He shrugged. "And you won't either, once that human gets bored of being dead."
"No wonder you-" Alphys cut herself off. "Sorry."
Sans shrugged, waving his arms forward. "Don't worry about it." If she thought the Doctor was the cause of his problems, then he was in no hurry to correct her. He was just the tip of a rather big iceberg and Sans didn't want her prying below the surface. He knew how she would react if she found out about the timelines, and Sans just wanted to ride out the rest of this one nice and slow and relaxed. Between the echo flowers and the concert night, he'd had enough fuss for this timeline.
"But it's not right that I just forgot!" Alphys seemed to be getting frustrated. Sans figured it was time to cool the conversation. Besides, he wanted to get back to the recordings before she tried to dig deeper.
"Well, now you remembered.' 'For the first time, actually." Sans didn't recall anyone ever remembering the Doc, but then again, the conversation had always flowed to timelines before anyone considered a non-existent entity. "So try not to... er... fire-get it."
Alphys snorted. "Sans, that pun wasn't even applicable!"
Sans pointed a finger gun at her as he headed back towards the monitor. "I know. Just a little throwback." He grabbed the folding chair, its legs squeaking obnoxiously across the floor. Thinking, or at least, tiptoeing around thinking about the Doctor would keep Alphys distracted for a while, he hoped. He felt slightly bad about dangling Gaster like a carrot, but he simply had better things to do, and by that, he meant a whole lot of nothing. No use starting today what could be undone tomorrow.
Alphys, on the other hand, was exhilarated. The very Idea of what might have happened to the Doctor made her want to throw on her lab coat and get researching. Theories formed and danced around in her head. Perhaps she could even figure out how to bring him back. Then, just maybe, Sans would be happy.
"Just like you freed everyone from the underground and made them happy?" her own condescending thoughts snided.
Just like that, Alphys' excitement burst, falling around her in shreds. What was she thinking? She couldn't go back to experimenting. With her track record she'd probably bring back the Doctor as an amorphous blob.
Still, A shred of her previous eagerness persisted, and her fingers were itching to do some science. She could do a simple experiment, something she wouldn't screw up. Ideas flooded in, but her fear filled her fantasies with explosions and fire and other horrible disasters.
Sighing, she dragged herself up and dug around under her desk for... something. Her hands grasped a small glass bottle and a small box. Baking soda and vinegar, the oldest trick in the book. She poured some of the powder into a mostly clean bowl, and poured the vinegar into it, watching it fizzle up and flow over the sides. She snorted at herself. A baby could do this. She should try something a little more extreme.
She was too afraid to use real scientific ingredients, so she just began mixing whatever she found under her desk. She tossed some flour, some of the baking soda, and sugar into another empty bowl. But those were not going to do anything by themselves, they were completely non-reactive. Her fingers wrapped around a stick of butter and she quickly peeled off the wrapper and tossed it in as well. Nothing happened, other than a puff of displaced flour. She took a crack at mixing everything together with her claws, but the mixture was dry and crumbly. It needed some sort of binding agent. She ran to the fridge, grabbing a carton of eggs. She glanced around the fridge, deciding on a whim to grab some of the human vanilla she had recovered, wondering if it would have any interesting effects on her aimless mixture of ingredients. She also spotted a chocolate bar, and grabbed it as well, shrugging and throwing caution to the wind.
The eggs provided the desired result, turning the concoction into a goopy compound. The vanilla did absolutely nothing, much to her disappointment. She unwrapped the chocolate, looking between it and the bowl. She didn't want to throw it in as one solid piece. She broke it up, melting chocolate smearing all over her fingers. She wiped her hands absently on her jeans as she looked at what she had created.
It was a gooey, chocolate chunk filled mess of ingredients. Other than mix together, they hadn't really done anything.
She pondered one last option, adding heat. She wasn't sure about that idea, fearing the mixture might somehow explode. She knew it wouldn't. The butter would melt. The moisture along with the baking soda would cause it to rise. The sugar would caramelize. Nothing in the mixture was set to explode, but she was worried all the same.
She pushed her fear to the side. She had started this weird kitchen experiment, and she was going to see it through.
She pressed a few buttons on the side of her fridge. She had turned the freezer portion into a sort-of oven while she had been fixing up Undyne's fridge. With the amount of freezers she had in the lab, she didn't really need one on the main level. She looked between the bowl and the heating oven. She realised that the plastic bowl would melt in the oven; she should put the mixture on something else, and possibly spread it into smaller portions so that if something did go wrong it wouldn't be catastrophic.
She dug up a tray and scooped a few handfuls of the concoction onto it before shoving it into the oven.
She sat back in her desk chair, contemplating what she had done. She had just mixed together a bunch of random things and shoved it into her oven. Had she lost her marbles? Hundreds of things that could have or could still go wrong flowed through her head, but she forced herself to wait. She didn't know what she was waiting for, but she had to wait.
Slowly but surely, an alluring scent began to waft through the air. Alphys couldn't quite place it, but it was so familiar, like she had smelt it several times in passing.
She once again heard the hollow snort of Sans smelling the air. The room went silent as he paused the monitor. She turned to see him covering his mouth with his spare hand, a little bit of saliva dripping through his teeth. Alphys cringed, she didn't know skeletons could drool, and that was something she would have preferred to go her whole life without knowing.
She could understand why, though, the scent from the oven was heavenly. She grabbed some oven mitts and went to pull the tray out of the oven.
She pulled it out and stared at it in silent shock. No wonder it smelled so familiar.
Cookies. She had baked cookies.
By accident.
In hindsight, she figured it should have been obvious. She had slightly known what she was doing. A binding agent, a rising agent, something to make it melty, something to make it sweet.
She pressed an oven mitted hand to her forehead. She had been doing chemistry. Simplified chemistry, but chemistry nonetheless.
Sans tried his best to saunter up without looking over eager. He wiped his teeth on his sleeve. "Geez, Doc. Warn me next time you're gonna pull a stunt like this." He snatched several cookies off the tray, shoving most of them into his empty pocket and one into his face.
Alphys slowly reached for one, but recoiled when her nerves prickled from the heat. Sans didn't have skin or a tongue to worry about burning, she did.
She would have to wait just a little longer.
Author's Note: Hello readers! We're coming up on the third act of this fic pretty soon, so I wanted to do a quick check in:
I realized that those of you who are interacting with this fic on this site alone might not be aware, so I wanted to mention it now: despite the amount of discussion about him in this chapter and the last, Dr. Gaster is not actually going to appear in this fic. I'm sorry if you were hoping to see him, but I hope you'll enjoy the rest of the fic regardless.
If you were wondering about Sans and Gaster's relationship in this one: I've decided to leave it ambiguous, so feel free to fill in your favorite or most applicable headcanon.
Thank you all so much for reading, and an extra thank you for the comments! You are the fuel that keeps me going!