You wake up suddenly, thrashing against sleep's paralyzing hold on your bones. Instinctually, you force yourself awake as though your life depended on it, raising your hand in front of your eye lights to try to focus. You touch your face carefully, confirming your existence, and realize you're drenched in glistening blue sweat.

You'd given up on bed sheets and blankets sometime over the last few months. When you wake up wrestling with them, they only make things worse, making you feel like something is trapping you, crushing you. Something with thorns...?

And then you wake up in bed again. It feels like years since you've gotten a good night's sleep, even though you've only been having nightmares like this lately. The nightmares you used to have constantly when you were younger had mostly settled down to an occasional occurrence. This feels different, and you have no rational explanation for it.

All you have is a sense that some inner part of you is trying to get your attention, yelling at you, but this other you's words are muffled, like he's trapped somehow. You keep mentally pushing at the block in your mind that separates you, but you can never break through.

Papyrus is worried about you, and he tries hard to make you feel better with good meals, and trying to help you talk through the problems. His comforting presence helps, like always, but you can't find an answer.

All you have is this odd sense that when you look at him, you want to cry sometimes, for some reason you can't explain, and you try desperately to hide it from him. But it's hard, and the way he knows you're faking it to hide your emotions and protect him is starting to create a distance between the two of you.

You can see he feels sad about it, but you just don't know how to explain what you're feeling. His cooking gets worse, which is always a sure sign he's depressed, no matter how cheerful he tries to act for you on the outside. It's hard to blame him when you're doing exactly the same thing.

But last night was a whole different story. Last night it felt like something horrible descended on the whole underground, and you were completely unable to stop it. Or...you thought you stopped it, and then you realized how wrong you were.

The sense of wrongness feels connected to the growing dread you've had for weeks now, except now it's expanded its reach beyond just you and Papyrus.

You go to a window quickly, looking out at the snow covered friendly little town your house is on the edges of, confirming something. Ok...the people aren't running around in a panic, and they seem alrite. Why shouldn't they be? But it feels like you should be attending a funeral right now...or a lot of them. You feel a terrible sense of loss and grief, looking at them, and it doesn't make any sense.

You shortcut to the workshop lab in the lower level of your house that you share with your brother, to try and clear your head. You always shortcut there so Papyrus doesn't realize it's the space where you cry alone. Actually, he's probably figured it out by now, but you don't want to make it too obvious, or he'll come and try to comfort you. Right now you just want to think this out.

Things feel a little better here. There's an odd machine that...he...made. You studiously avoid thinking about him.

It affects time and space around it slightly. He...the inventor...was trying to use it to get past the barrier to the surface by making a shortcut through space itself, or transporting everyone to a time when the barrier did not exist. But he could never make it powerful enough to succeed.

When you're close to it, your mind clears, just a little, as though the odd machine is making its own junction point in time and space. That had been one of the first signs that whatever was wrong in the world during the past few months was not just all in your head.

That other you in your mind is able to break through to you sometimes when you're here.

You'd started to sense the thoughts from that other you around the time your nightmares got worse. You've read a little about split personalities from old textbooks in the dump, searching for answers about what happened to you and Papyrus when you were children. But are split personalities just a human thing? You're not sure, but this feels something like that. It's like another you in your mind, living in your subconscious, with his own thoughts and feelings. But you don't have good communication with him. He's scared, and angry. You know that much.

You try to listen to him, but you have no idea what to make of what he says. You think you hear him sometimes screaming at you desperately. Realizing he can't communicate complex thoughts, he keeps repeating one word over and over, and finally it gets through to you. "FLOWER. FLOWER. FLOWER." But that's all. Everything else is buried so deeply in your subconscious that you can't access it.

It's unbelievably frustrating. If your own emotions when you look at Papyrus lately are a clue, something bad is happening to Papyrus, and "FLOWER" is somehow related. How?

You question Papyrus very closely and you do get out of him that he's been talking to a flower that's whispering strange things to him. It sounds like a manipulative personality. Your first thought is that someone is messing with him using an echo flower. But that's as far as you've gotten.

Besides those things, the only other clue you have is from when you asked Alphys to check you and Papyrus on a hunch. When she examined your souls, she detected slight damage that had no cause that she could find. It was a noticeable change since she'd examined you both half a year ago in a yearly health checkup.

You'd both been doing so well, too. After all you both went through for years, you were finally starting to feel...happy. Then everything suddenly went to hell.

You only know that last night it all got so much worse, and you don't even know why. It feels as though the scope of what is happening has suddenly increased for some reason. Your soul is crying out this morning as you sit alone on a chair in the workshop, with your skull in your hands and your bare feet bones curling painfully against the hard floor. Your soul is asking you desperately to listen, and you can't understand the details of what it's saying, no matter how hard you try.

Then the memory you're in suddenly shatters and ends, leaving you disoriented for a few moments. You'd been so caught up in it, it had felt real. When you touch your face, there's tears there, just like in the memory. But you're sitting on your sheetless bed in your room, like you remembered you were when you'd been contacted.

The Sans who asked you for the memory tells you,

"that's enough. this room is too important. if we keep going here, we'll show her stuff that we decided to keep secret. i'm not ready to trust her with that yet. gonna go somewhere else now. thanks. cya around."

You understand. He's the Sans who's talking to the weird human girl, the one who claimed to have some answers.

That means he's the Sans who matters right now. It's up to him to make the decisions and lead the way. It's everyone else's job to help him however they can, when he asks for help.

It sounds like your role is done. You showed him the memory he wanted.

But you wish he'd stay here a little longer. You hold these particular memories and their feelings for him, and for everyone. You help keep the feelings of the memory from being too overwhelming, by dealing with them yourself.

You wish he'd stay here a little while longer, so you didn't have to carry the burden of those feelings alone.

You don't want to be alone again.