You drift in and out of sleep, and you think you might have heard muffled sounds coming from Sans at one point, but they're quickly silenced when you shift onto your other side. When you wake up and find him, you search his face for some sign to confirm your suspicions, but his expression is carefully neutral, and if there was evidence, he must have wiped it all away.
Reflexively, you check on your abilities again as you sit up. Nope, still broken. You can't escape this world on your own.
"feeling any better?" Sans asks.
You take stock of your physical status. "Yes...at least, wound-wise. Your healing made a big difference, and with all that sleep, I don't feel like I'm dying anymore. But I feel really, really thirsty and hungry."
"sorry, i'd make ya something if i could, but there's literally nothin' but earth and dust here. there's no water anywhere, and even the air is dying."
"The air?" you ask, puzzled. You think back and remember him panting when he was using a lot of magic attacks in the hall. Does he actually need air, being a skeleton?
When you look closely at him now, you realize that like always he's breathing. You just hadn't thought about it since it's so expected of every human you've ever talked to, so that you usually just filter out that information, like the fact of your own breathing.
But maybe it's more noticeable now because he's breathing just a little too fast. He's breathing in a way that reminds you of a girl you once knew, who you traveled with to a hot desert. She didn't drink enough water and got heatstroke. When she was lying down, panting, she was breathing like that, like she needed the air more than usual.
You're not sure if breathing too fast means Sans has anything like heatstroke, but maybe there's some kind of equivalent for him.
You feel bad when you realize you haven't considered his own basic needs at all, this whole time.
"Come to think of it, are you hungry, or can you get thirsty, or things like that?"
"heh, it's sorta complicated, at least when you didn't grow up with it."
He feels the bones of his left forearm absentmindedly with his right hand as he thinks about how to explain it to you. The bones between his forearm and hand look delicate to you, and you wonder if they ever feel sore to him, like your muscles do to you sometimes.
"one thing we don't need much of is water. but you humans do, right?"
You nod. "Next to air, we need water more than anything."
"but you can still eat something without a lot of water right? like dry bread? so why is that?"
"Well, I guess it's because I use the water I already have to deal with it."
"you can still eat even if the food doesn't have water, right? it might not taste as good, and you'll start craving water pretty fast, but you can do it."
"Right."
"so think of magic as being like that for skeletons. all monsters are made of partly magic and partly what you might call normal matter. s'why we leave behind dust when we die. skeletons are no different, except we need less normal matter and more magic than most. our food is usually a combination of normal matter and magic, just like other monsters. humans usually eat food with just normal matter. but we can deal with it anyway, from what you might call our latent store of magic inside of us."
Since you have a curious nature, you have a keen interest in things like this, and it feels nice to have a good old nerdish discussion with him. He definitely wasn't in the mood for questions like this before, so you hadn't had the chance until now.
You're starting to catch on. "So sort of like we can use the water already inside us to digest food without a lot of water, you can actually digest food that doesn't have magic?"
"right. it doesn't really taste as good as our own food does to us...but since we're still partly normal matter, it's not like we don't get anything out of it. plus, all matter has some latent magic in it...background noise, you could call it. if food has been prepared by someone who is doing it with good intentions, like a kind person, then it seems to have a small restoring effect to our magic stores as well, although it's still not anywhere near as good as our own food."
"Hmm." You think for a moment. "So if I had food to make for you now, it would still help restore your magic, even if it was human food and not monster food? That's good to know."
"it'd help a small amount. it'd be better than just breathing the air." He pauses for a moment and you realize he's still breathing a little too hard for it to be normal.
"but there's another problem. you asked about the air. all monsters store some magic inside of them. we use magic to live, and what you might call the "used up" part of magic goes out into the air to be restored later by the natural processes of the world. the air itself has latent magic, so the magic we use up can be restored to some degree by breathing."
He chuckles and grins at you. "i know it shouldn't make sense, but that's why even skeletons breathe. it's not the oxygen we're looking for in our case, it's the latent magic. but with other monsters, it's both. they're a little more like humans that way."
"But it's dying? The air, I mean?" Your voice rises in concern.
"it means something is wrong with the soul of the world itself. i've never actually been alive after the timeline ends, so i didn't know for sure this would happen. didn't really think about it before."
His left eye sparks blue, momentarily raising alarms in you before you realize he's just using it to paint blue drawings in midair. It reminds you of the way you would write your name in the air with fire sparklers a long time ago, except his light blue magic is a lot more alive looking and prettier.
He's created a picture of the world, and there's a huge heart over it. Small particles surround the world like a blanket, which you guess represents the magic in the air of the world.
"if the world suffers too much harm, then the soul of the world can die. its soul is what restores the magic in the air of the world. if it dies, the magic in the air of the world will fade too. that feels like what's happening. chara killed the world, and now the remaining magic in the air is dying off too."
He shows you the final strike of Chara's that killed everything with one huge slash. The world's soul breaks apart and shatters, and over time the magic in the particles of air surrounding the world slowly disappear too. He lets the magical diagram slowly disappear too as he drops his hand, and his left eye light returns to its normal sparkling white.
"even if this world is physically here in the form of a huge rock, its soul is dead now."
Your brow wrinkles in an expression of worry. "Is that why you're breathing harder than usual?"
"pretty much. there's not as much in the air as usual so i have to breathe more to make up for it."
It's a heart-sinking realization when you consider how trapped you both are.
"I thought maybe you didn't have to eat, or you could go for a really long time without food, being a skeleton and everything. I didn't realize you actually need to eat and breathe."
"if the air was fine, i think i'd last for several weeks. we don't need much normal matter to begin with, and our nature requires us to store up a lot of latent magic just to be alive at all. so if something happens and there's no food, there's a lot inside of us to live on. but that's usually assuming we can restore some of what we use up from the air. the magic in our food is always better quality and has more of the elements of what we need than the air does, so it can't be a forever thing, but i'd probably be fine for weeks, if not months, before actually dying of starvation."
He takes a deep breath, like he's testing the air. "not when it's like this, though."
After considering for a moment, he says, "i'd say taking everything into account we're roughly in the same boat. at the rate the air is dying, i might not last longer without magic than you can without water."
"sorry, kid," he says, in answer to your chagrined, disappointed expression.
"I was hoping that if it took my ship several weeks to find us, maybe at least you'd survive that long, even if I didn't," you explain.
He shrugs. "to be alive, you have to live off something. that's true for us just like it is for you."
"i don't know as much about how humans deal with no water, but i estimate i'll probably lose consciousness in a couple of days. things will really get bad in about a week," he says, a little too casually.
You sense some emotion that's difficult to categorize, and you're not sure if your typical guesses about how someone would feel in a life-or-death situation like this are correct for him.
"I am sorry," you say, not knowing what else to do. "You don't deserve this."
"you don't either."
He shifts, seemingly trying to get his bones in a more comfortable position while sitting on the hard ground. He appears to think hard for several long moments before he speaks again.
"in a way, this makes things easier for me."
You're puzzled. "How so?"
"if i die, i don't have to worry about hoping anymore. hoping means you actually have to try, and trying's a lot of work," he says with irony.
"my brother keeps making me try. maybe because he thinks i'll dust if i don't ever try at all. but most of the time i'd rather just sleep, to be honest. that probably sounds bad."
"You'd really rather not have any hope than try?"
"sometimes it's easier, especially if your hopes have a tendency of never working out," he replies, his voice low with a raw edge to it. He looks away into the dark distance for a long moment, thinking.
You consider his words.
"That's true. It's really hard to hope for something and be disappointed. It's hard to want to try again after that, or see the point in it."
"but you're making hope practically unavoidable," he says, with a gentle accusatory tone. "despite the fact that we're both starving, you've still given me things to hope for."
"Like what?"
"like the hope that even if you and i don't survive, maybe there's still people out there who want to help free my world. people who care about us and are trying to reach us. it means that maybe what's out there beyond our world is both good and bad, not just bad."
"Then is hope such a bad thing?"
"i don't know. i just...i don't know." He sounds like he's not sure what to make of his own feelings.
"i usually exist in a state of trying to keep myself from feeling anything. it deadens the pain, ya know? but if you make me hope again, you're going to make me feel again."
He glances at you, and you read the conflicting emotions in his face. He seems to be feeling plenty already, so you wonder what he means.
"i mean, you come from a starship. how amazing is that? not only that, you can go between timelines...that's a much bigger deal than just flying on engines from place to place in the same universe. it's more like you can go between alternate realities. you're not just some aliens from outer space. you're more than that aren't you?"
"Maybe," you shrug and grin a little, flattered by how he said that.
"i wasn't sure if you meant well, so i tested you. i noticed i could sense your emotions in that mental space, so i showed you some of our history to see how you would feel about it. if you were hiding contempt for us, i'd know. but you felt compassion for us. you felt genuinely upset and outraged at the idea of us being hurt. in that case, you might actually mean what you said about wanting to help."
He put that much thought into it? You'd wondered why he had bothered to show you that, despite how much it cost him emotionally. Now you know.
With more careful movements of his hand, like the graceful waves of an orchestra conductor, he starts drawing sparkling blue lines in the air again. It's making you curious about what the lines could be, since it's not obvious right away what he's going for.
"so now there's reason to hope. but how will it feel if it doesn't pan out? whatever we tried in the past, it's never stopped things for good. the best we could hope for was to bore the anomaly to death. it was the only strategy that seemed to work on a consistent basis and for more than one timeline, and even then it only partially worked. after everything we've tried, after all we've been through, we're still not free."