Sans dumps his stuff on the floor and tries to flop over onto the couch, but Papyrus catches him first, hands hooked under both arms and scooping him off his feet. Sans dangles like a rag doll.

"BROTHER! WHY ARE YOU SO MUDDY?" Papyrus demands, raising Sans for a closer inspection. His hoodie is smeared with soggy dirt which wasn't there when he left home, and his sneakers are in an even worse state.

Sans tries to shrug. "been wallowing. like pigs do. gotta protect my delicate complexion from the sun somehow."

"AT LEAST TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES FIRST! JEEZ, DON'T YOU HAVE ANY MANNERS?"

"maybe one."

"ONE WHAT?"

"manner."

"THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!"

"well, in a manner of speaking..."

Papyrus drops Sans, who stumbles before finding his footing.

"hey, bro... have you, uh... been talking to that flower friend of yours recently?" Sans kicks off his shoes and launches them in the general direction of the mat by the front door.

Papyrus brightens. The brother he started out with is not-so-secretly suspicious of his stories about the flower, and rarely brings up the topic of his own accord. "OF COURSE! I WOULD NEVER WANT TO NEGLECT A DEAR FRIEND OF MINE! WHY DO YOU ASK?"

"...no reason."

The first two skeletons showed up more or less out of nowhere, so the arrival of a third doesn't invite much scrutiny among the monsters of Snowdin. Sans made a funny comment about the new one being a cousin, but they're obviously identical twins; they look the same except for the newcomer's oddly-shaped eyelight, they share a fondness for bad jokes and hoodies that look like they've never been in the same room as a bottle of detergent. They even share a name. Must be a skeleton thing, everyone decides.

A few monsters shake their heads at the idea of two Sanses teaming up to cause mischief, but he's different, the second Sans. He doesn't go out much, and when he does, he usually sticks close to one of his brothers, hanging around at Grillby's with his twin, or following Papyrus out in the woods to recalibrate puzzles. Alone, he can occasionally be seen at the library, sleeping with his head pillowed on his arms at a table near the corner, which the librarian tolerates since he isn't bothering anybody; he speaks when he's been spoken to. The consensus in town is that he's the shy one, a somewhat sickly-looking introvert who balances out the first Sans' lazy prankster ways and Papyrus' boisterous goofiness with a quiet and self-effacing nature.

At one point, an annoyed but mostly-joking Doggo asks a snickering Sans why he can't be more like his twin. On a different day, faced with a different Sans, the local shopkeeper detects the sound of rattling with her sensitive rabbit-ears and leans over the counter to ask how he's doing, with a softness in her eyes that he can barely stomach (and not just because he doesn't have a stomach).

That's not who he is, and this isn't home, and he isn't anyone's twin, and the Sans and Papyrus of this world are not his brothers. But the identity the townsfolk have imagined for him sucks less than the one he was once forced to embody, so he'll accept it.

Sans is napping in the library when the chair across from him squeaks over the floor. He cracks open an eye as a little monster kid flops belly-first onto the seat, squirms around to an upright position, then sits and looks at him like they're expecting something.

"'sup."

Monster Kid squints. They've never seen the new Sans up close before, but they've heard about his weird lumpy eyelight on the one side. "Yo!" they say, once they're sure they have the right skeleton.

Sans doesn't pick his head up off the table, so Monster Kid leans in extra close, voice dropping from library-quiet to a conspiratorial whisper. "I know about you."

"oh yeah?"

"Uh-huh, dude! Nobody listens to me but I saw when you first got here. You did that poofy rainbow cloud thing, and you were wearing that crazy outfit!"

Sans remembers the sensation of that thingforcing its way out through his eye socket and not much else from that day, but if the kid says they saw him then he'll believe it. "yeah, that was me. howzit going, bud?"

"Good!" The kid kicks their feet and goes back to their normal voice, forgetting all about the whispering. "But, yo, you gotta tell me how you did that, dude. It was COOL, I've never seen magic like it before! Where'd you learn? And how come you don't dress that way anymore? Like, with those shades and the hat and stuff."

Colorful clothes, a rainbow poof of magic. If the kid is solely going off that, then Fresh probably didn't directly interact with them, didn't go near them or speak to them. Thank god.

"Dude?"

"that... style... it's not my thing anymore. sometimes your taste just changes."

"What about the magic?" asks the kid. "And where'd you come from, anyway? I heard you were an alien that came from outer space, is that true?"

Sans laughs. "man, that would rule. but nah. m'just a monster from someplace else." If the kid jumps in to ask for specifics, he's got no problem with making something up, but they don't. "the magic, uh... yeah, can't do that anymore. if you were hoping for a demonstration, then... sorry."

The kid nods seriously. They were less interested in a light show (even it would be cool) and more in learning that rainbow-teleportation magic for themself to impress other kids at school, but if he can't even do it anymore then they must be out of luck. Sans looks kind of sad about it—as much as he can look sad about anything, with a mouth always curled up in a toothy grin—so they decide to be tactful and avoid pressing the issue.

"That's okay," the kid says. "You were sick, right, dude? You seemed, um... pretty sick. Like the puking kind."

"yeah. i got better."

Monster Kid looks at him dubiously. They're not overly knowledgable about much beyond Undyne's patrol route and what the ground looks like from two inches away, and monster medicine falls within neither of those two categories, but somebody going from bright and colorful and poofing around with cool magic to sleeping in a library and trembling like they're cold all the time doesn't seem like much of an improvement. Also there's his eyelight. It looks weird from this close up, and with his other eye socket always blacked out, they can't quite tell where he's really looking.

The kid slides down off the seat. "Okay. Um, I gotta go. I'm actually supposed to be doing homework right now, haha."

As they start to scamper off, Sans picks his head up from the table. "kid, wait."

They turn back. "Yeah, dude?"

"if you ever again meet somebody who looks like i did... whether it's me, someone else you know, or a complete stranger... and they're dressed like i was, using goofy slang you don't quite get... and they aren't normally like that... run away. if you got anybody with you, keep them away too, if you can, but get away. don't let that person near you. don't talk to 'em. don't let 'em know you exist if you can help it."

"W...why?"

"whatever they say about themselves, they're lying. they're not nice. they're not your friend. and by the time you realize it... by the time they let you see the truth... you might not be able to get away. and once they have you... they'll hurt you. they'll hurt you very, very badly. so just don't let 'em near you in the first place. understood?"

Monster Kid shivers. They've never heard Sans speak so seriously, and he's just staring at them without any little wink or hint at humor to show that he maybe doesn't mean it.

"Uh... s-sure, I guess," they mumble.

Sans watches the kid scurry off and
execute a modestly impressive maneuver to get the door handle open by headbutting it, only slightly undercut by the faceplant into the snow which instantly follows. Then he puts his head back down on the table and falls back asleep.

It's been a while since Sans last visited his buddy behind the door, so he heads out to the woods and brings the New Guy along with him.

Through osmosis, the new Sans already knows who the old lady is and why she took refuge in the RUINS. He also knows that two of her children aren't quite as dead as previously reported. He isn't going to spill the beans, though. His existence here has already pushed this world's fated trajectory off its normal path to some degree, and if he's learned anything while bouncing around those in-between places, it's that trying to play god never led anybody to a good outcome. (Also, humans are into some weird stuff. But the more pertinent lesson here is don't become an anime villain, you've already spent enough of your life running around in a stupid outfit.)

The pair sits side-by-side at the door.

"heya," says one.

"heya," says the other.

"Well, hello-hello to you too!" says the voice from the other side.

The Sanses exchange a look.

"so didja hear about the mathematician with a deathly fear of negative numbers?" begins the new Sans.

"Hmm... no, I have not!"

Sans 1.0's grin widens from goofy into downright shit-eating territory. "...he'd stop at nothing to avoid 'em."

There's a pause, and then a peal of old-lady laughter, faintly muffled both from the door and from how you can tell she has her hand over her mouth trying to contain it.

Then comes a knock.

"who's there?"

"Ho ho!"

"ho ho who?"

"My goodness, your Santa Claus impression is awful!"

New Guy snickers.

They go on like this for some time, passing jokes of similarly premium caliber back and forth, until the door lady hits them with so a monster walks into a bar and says ouchout of nowhere and they laugh in unison.

There's a baffled silence. "Wait... is someone else... how long has someone else been here?"

"so, about that—" "uh..."

"Oh! Wait a moment... this must be your brother, who I've heard so much about," the lady says from the other side of the door. "You sound so similar!"

"nah, that was my little bro. this one is, uh..." Sans looks at the new guy and thinks for a second. "he's my twin. just didn't mention 'em before."

He wouldn't be surprised if Door Lady thought his explanation was a bunch of bull, mainly because it isn't actually an explanation, but then New Guy comes up with hey, what's the difference between a sloppily-dressed guy on a unicycle and a classy bicyclist? ("attire," New Guy says, looking pleased with himself for the first time that Sans has ever seen) and she's too busy giggling to ask questions.

Before they leave, she slips him a folded recipe card, carefully written out in her perfect old-lady script. Quiche, something nutritious instead of the fast food Sans has freely admitted to always eating. He shrugs and slides it in his pocket. The recipe actually sounds pretty good, and he could use an extra excuse to get New Guy to get up and do something once in a while. Maybe they'll try making it sometime.

Asgore is waiting for them when they get home, sitting on the couch with paws the size of trash can lids folded on his lap like he's waiting for a bus, patiently listening to Papyrus going on some kind of dissertation about the benefits of deadly spikes in puzzles.

"AH, WHERE WERE YOU TWO? AT THAT ACCURSED GREASE PIT AGAIN?" Papyrus asks, less harshly than usual. He disapproves of his brothers' wretched dietary preferences and always will, but getting any kind of food into New Sans is still an effort, so he's allowing it for now. "KING ASGORE WANTED TO MEET YOU!"

"I hope that I am not causing any trouble," says Asgore, rising to his feet. "But I just happened to be in the area, so I thought that I should stop in and say hello. It is not often that a new monster comes to the Underground, after all!"

Undyne's report has left the king in an awkward position. Any threat to monsterkind must be addressed with the utmost seriousness, but it's such an unusual story that if anyone except his personally-appointed captain of the royal guard had relayed it to him, he'd think they'd read it in a book and then allowed an overactive imagination to get the better of them—though he can scarcely imagine why anyone might want to write or read about such needless sadism toward monsters when their historical records already contain so much of it. In any case, by Undyne's account, a starfish-like creature from another world had seized control of an unfortunate monster (identical to Sans the skeleton in every aspect, how strange!), dressing him up and using him as a vessel until they entered this plane of existence and the creature was lethally expelled from its host's body. Asgore is relieved that the poor tempest-tossed SOUL has been liberated from such a miserable condition, and as the king of monsters, he is duty-bound to maintain his safe harbor, but what else can he do with this knowledge? Abduction and assault are already violations of the law of the Underground (not to mention the basic character of monsterkind). He has no way to ascertain whether more of those otherworldly creatures exist, and if they truly are capable of manifesting in reality on a whim, then there are no walls or defenses he could build to keep them out. If such a threat were to appear someday, he could fend it off, but until then, he can't just preemptively execute every starfish-like monster out of paranoid fear that they might secretly be capable of bending reality and possessing others, or he would be worse than the cruel humans who sealed his people beneath this accursed mountain so very long ago. Asgore is the strongest of all monsters, and here he is again, all but powerless to help.

"yeah. uh, guess it isn't," the new Sans mumbles. He imagines telling Asgore where he and the other guy have been talking to. Yeah, that wouldn't go down well on basically any level.

The not-new Sans glances aside at a paper-wrapped package sitting on their kitchen table which definitely wasn't there before. The new Sans quietly wants to be just about anywhere except here.

"Hmm... how confusing this must be," Asgore remarks. "Ah—how do you prefer to differentiate yourselves? Are there nicknames I ought to be using, or..?"

"nah," says Sans, though he'd love to hear some suggestions from Asgore Yeah, Let's Call The Lava Place "Hotland" That Seems Legit Dreemurr.

"nah," Sans echoes. "nicknames... aren't my thing. rather just stick with 'sans', thanks."

"WE FIGURE IT OUT," Papyrus says, quietly kicking a pile of Sans' socks behind the TV stand. "BY WHICH I MEAN THAT I DO, SINCE THEY HAVE AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE IN KNOWING WHICH ONE IS WHICH!"

"yeah, it's a good time," says Sans.

"worked ok so far," Sans adds.

"How wonderful for you!" Asgore says. "It sounds like the three of you have adapted quite well to this arrangement, considering how unusual it is."

not really, new Sans thinks. Besides, he's spent so long up to his neck in clones of himself, having an absolute maximum of one other Sans in the room at any given time is a nice change of pace.

"I have been... somewhat informed of your situation. I won't intrude, as I'm sure it isn't pleasant to discuss, but if you are in need of assistance in any capacity... if there is something I might be able to do to ensure that you feel at home in the Underground... please do say so."

Why? Why's everyone acting so nice to him? Why _now_? Sans doesn't get it. He has absolutely nothing to offer Asgore.

"ok."

Asgore frowns at the flat response. "I mean what I say. You are a monster, after all. You deserve to... have a happy life, inasmuch as it is possible in this dreary place."

Asgore moves closer, meaning to lay a hand on the young monster's shoulder, but in doing so he gets close enough to see the SOUL in Sans' eye socket. Horror washes over him, because he can see the SOUL at all and because it looks like—torture, Asgore thinks. A SOUL that wasn't just injured once but forced near to its breaking point and held there, never outright destroyed but never allowed to mend as it should, akin to if a human had been cut open and the wound allowed to heal in such a way that their internal organs were still exposed. He hasn't seen such a grotesquerie since the war, and rage flares within him to think that this could have been inflicted on a monster, that anyone could have tolerated it, that he would have to see such cruelty. As quickly as the anger comes, his natural response as king and as a monster who's seen far too much in his long life is to help, to use his power to heal the scarred SOUL in the young monster's eye socket. He unthinkingly cups Sans' face between his hands, green magic igniting in his palms.

Big hands with splayed fingers lunge at Sans, and with no time to mentally prepare himself, he sees instead—

He can't fight or escape, can't call for help and it would be useless anyway because half the time the supposedly good guys and self-proclaimed protectors and the supposedly decent humans are already around and they know and never lift a finger to help, sometimes they join in, they don't care. No one cares—no outside help is coming—

Sans' mind protects itself with the only defense that's ever worked.

"What kind of miserable creature would do this to an innocent monster?!" Asgore rumbles, low and dangerous as a distant storm.

Sans doesn't blink. He'd flinched away when Alphys examined his SOUL, but this time he goes so still that even his seemingly constant baseline rattling has stopped, and the silence left behind is a quiet one indeed.

So quiet. The words wash past like they're being spoken in a different room. There's pressure on a skeletal face, near an eye socket, a skull is being held motionless. Green light emanates from the thing holding the face, close to the eyes, light tinting everything. Far away. Body moves or is moved by someone else. A hollow shell. The green light dims.

Asgore takes his hands away from Sans' face. Not only did his magic fail to repair the SOUL, but Sans is so very quiet that Asgore senses that he's made a mistake. "Oh, dear." He steps back, hands half-raised to where Sans should be able to see them, but it's too late and the king already knows it. "I'm sorry, I should have asked before I touched you."

Sans stares at nothing.

"...Are you all right?"

The original two brothers exchange a look.

"hey," the uninjured Sans says, gently. "you good?"

(A voice. A familiar one. Too familiar to mean anything, so easily ignored.)

"SANS?" Papyrus attempts.

(A better voice. One he doesn't want to hear. Papyrus shouldn't be nearby. Not safe... if it decides to...)

Sans is trembling again. Violently.

"uh, bro. maybe we should..."

Sans backs away from the three monsters until he hits wall, his breath hitching like he's about to start crying as his fingers grasp at the front of his shirt, twisting the fabric. Asgore looks utterly mortified.

"ok," says the standing Sans, trying for breezy and somewhat missing the mark. "hey, asgore, howzabout we, uh, head out for a while? can go and impress the neighbors with some cool new knock knock jokes i learned today."

Sans can't mouth anything but he gives a kind of almost-shrug, conveying something like you good? to his brother. Papyrus nods back, and Sans sets about trying to herd Asgore away, which would look hilarious in a less crummy situation considering that Sans is distinctly fun-sized and Asgore must've had to walk sideways to fit in through the front door. Asgore looks like he wants to protest, but sticking around won't do any favors to anyone, and so the big goat goes along with it.

Which leaves behind Papyrus and his adoptive brother, who's pressed to the wall and gulping air and shaking, shaking.

"SANS? BROTHER?" Papyrus says. "SANS, IT'S OKAY, HE LEFT... YOU'RE SAFE NOW. YOU WERE ALREADY SAFE BUT YOU'RE VERY SAFE NOW TOO!"

Sans isn't looking at Papyrus. He thinks. The lack of eyelights makes it hard to tell for sure.

"UM..."

Sans slides down to sit. That's a change but not a good change, unless it actually is, Papyrus doesn't know and he feels like a bad brother for not knowing. He would would hug Sans, because he seems desperately in need of comforting and hugs are a good thing, but if Asgore touching his face made him so upset, then Papyrus putting his arms around his body might scare him just as badly.

Papyrus lowers himself to sit as well, knees drawn up and arms around them. He's not very good at not being loud but he does his best. "I'M GOING TO STAY HERE AND SIT WITH YOU UNTIL YOU FEEL LIKE TALKING. OKAY, SANS?" Papyrus stage-whispers. "THAT'S WHAT I'M GOING TO DO. WE'RE HERE AT HOME, AND IT'S VERY SAFE HERE, SO WE CAN JUST WAIT."

And so he does. He waits. He sits and waits and Sans sits and quivers. This may not be the best spot for sitting, after what happened right by this spot I'm the living room just a few short weeks ago. But that was the moment when Sans was freed, so maybe it's a good memory for him? Papyrus doesn't really know. There are a lot of things he wants to ask questions about but doesn't.

For example: the starfish creature. The situation Sans had been forced into must have been horrific, and Papyrus' only comfort in the situation is knowing that his brother is safe now. Any other outcome would have been intolerable. But that starfish creature—it spoke so differently from how Sans does, and it had its own clothing choices, preferences, personality. It was a person. A person did what it did.

Why?

When he confided in his flower friend about the matter, the flower pointed out that the creature was clearly some sort of parasite, naturally designed to prey upon other beings for its sustenance. But that explanation doesn't sit right with Papyrus. Dog and rabbit monsters live together in Snowdin without anybody doing a murder; Undyne has a mouth full of pointy piranha teeth but she's never taken a bite out of—well she's definitely bitten other fish monsters, but not with the intent of eating them. Surely there was another way for the starfish creature to feed itself, one that didn't cause his brother so much pain. Maybe it didn't understand what it was doing? Maybe it was just making a bad decision; maybe he could've convinced it to leave Sans and taught it how to be a better person. Now he can't. It was in terrible pain after it was expelled, and he was so concerned about his new brother's condition that he didn't pay so much attention to what became of it. Later, all his original brother would say about the topic was that Papyrus shouldn't worry because the "thing" was gone, which wasn't the point.

It's... sad. It doesn't make sense to be sad for a creature that was hurting his brother so terribly, but he feels sad for it. And he can't discuss this with Original Sans because Sans has already demonstrated that he wouldn't understand what Papyrus means, and he can't discuss it with Sans The Sequel because Sans has spent enough time thinking about the creature that he surely doesn't want to think about it ever again in his life.

At least Papyrus has his flower friend. As much as Papyrus loves his brother(s), Sans worries about Papyrus, and Papyrus worries about Sans, and that's not a conducive situation for sharing one's feelings.

Sans blinks, raising his head as he refocuses on his physical surroundings rather than those overlaid by his own mind. He's shaking, he always is, but he takes a deep breath and it settles down to something more like the normal amount of rattling. "...fuck," he mumbles, burying his head in his hands.

"SANS! IT'S GOOD TO SEE YOU FEELING... NOT AS BAD. UM, KING ASGORE AND THE OTHER YOU BOTH WENT OUTSIDE, BUT I UNDERSTAND IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE AROUND THEM RIGHT NOW."

Sans lets out a long, raspy breath and shakes his head. He'd rather crawl under the couch and die than have to look at either of those two right now.

"THAT'S FINE! WHAT WOULD YOU RATHER DO INSTEAD? I COULD MAKE SOMETHING FOR YOU, IF YOU'D LIKE..."

Sans wonders why everyone is always trying to feed him, except he knows why. "n-nah. m'ok. just... kinda tired."

"THAT'S FINE! IF YOU'D LIKE TO TAKE A NAP IN MY ROOM, FEEL FREE. MY IMMACULATE DECORATING SKILLS CREATE A WONDERFUL ATMOSPHERE FOR RELAXATION!"

Sans mumbles something and makes a (by Sansly standards) hasty retreat, Papyrus hears his bedroom door open, and once it shut, he sags. He doesn't like the idea of letting his demonstrably not-okay brother isolate himself after such an upsetting episode, not one bit, but trying to push Sans into talking is the number-one way to ensure that he completely clams up.

He goes out to check on his other brother and the king, to tell them everything is okay.

New Guy sleeps through the evening and night and well into the next afternoon. Sans knows it's not a good sign, but he has no idea how to address the underlying issue; historically, Sans has not done the greatest job of taking care of Sans, and that's before you toss the pan-dimensional headcrab shenanigans into the mix... he can't even come up with a cute metaphor for this situation, it just sucks. It sucks that Asgore went home feeling like crap for upsetting New Guy and it sucks that New Guy had to suffer through so much before he got here and it sucks that Papyrus has to witness the fallout.

Sans responds by doing what he does best: making himself scarce and hoping somebody else will fix the problem for him.

On the second morning after King Asgore's not-completely-successful visit, Papyrus does one of the many things Papyrus is talented at doing, which is pushing Sans into being more active.

His new brother previously showed an interest in the flower, so Papyrus takes him out in the woods to meet him. The flower has never mentioned his name, so maybe he doesn't even have one, and they never have a set time or place to meet, but he always seems to know when Papyrus wants to talk, and he's always been such a sweet and reassuring presence, such a wonderful confidante. Maybe a little dose of flowery friendliness is what Sans needs.

As they wait around, Papyrus has the funniest sense of presence. Like he keeps thinking the flower is right there in front of them, or that... something is going on, but the only person they see is Gyftrot, who wanders past the little clearing at one point, grumbling to itself about the local kids decorating its antlers. The flower must be somewhere else right now, doing flowery things. Hopefully he's all right, whatever he's up to. For some reason, Papyrus feels a bit uneasy.

To fill up the quiet, Papyrus chatters in about whatever comes to mind: puzzles, his training with Undyne, ideas for the costume party he hears will be happening in a few weeks. Sans would normally interject with his horrible jokes, but this one doesn't do that very often, so Papyrus accepts it as a normal thing. His brother is okay. He's fine.

They decide to make snow-skeletons. Papyrus makes a majestic self-portrait rendered in snow; Sans makes a lump. Not even one of his better snow lumps.

Sans shares none of Papyrus' vague flower-related unease, he has no sense of anything going on except the two of them hanging around in the snow. Just him and his brother. Somebody who is not really his brother, but who's accepted him anyway.

Sans thinks, for the briefest moment, about asking Papyrus some questions, as he did with Undyne. Something like—what would you do if your brother disappeared one day and never came back? how would you cope? you would be ok, in the end, right?

He's not going to ask that. It wouldn't bring any reassurance, it would just stress Papyrus out. Not worth it.

(There is one person who's feeling more secure by the time the two brothers go home. Flowey is now convinced by what this Sans said about being no threat whatsoever...)

Sans doesn't know what wizardry his baby brother wrought, but when he returns home after making a weird promise to Door Lady, he and New Guy are out of the house and stay gone for a while.

The next morning, Sans pokes New Guy awake and informs him that they're heading out to the sentry station. The one in Snowdin forest, where it's quiet.

There are two seats, but New Guy decides to plop down in the snow, leaning back against the station.

"so," Sans says. "i'm guessing you don't wanna talk about the... 'thing'."

The actually-no-longer-totally-new new guy shrugs.

Sans folds his arms atop the sentry station and leans forward to look at the other guy, though all he can see is the top of his head. Still no cool twin-telepathy hive mind powers yet, but he knows his own tendencies.

"haven't talked to asgore or anything, but i can guarantee he doesn't hold anything against you. at all."

Another shrug. A couple of kids are yelling to each other in the distance, some of those teenagers goofing around in the woods. More closely, he hears (what else?) quiet rattling.

"just so you know... as i've said, i don't know all the specifics of what went down in your past, but... hey, you're still here, despite everything. you survived. that takes real strength. like, just considering the stuff that you've... mentioned... combined with what i personally saw... there's no way i coulda gone through all that and still held on like you did. that's something to take pride in, and having one crappy day doesn't diminish it."

"do you habitually walk into supermarkets and compliment the live lobsters in those tanks for being so resilient? or is this special treatment?"

"what?"

The other guy laughs bitterly.

aaaand now he's pissed, if he wasn't already. Welp! As somebody living in a subterranean cavern network under a mountain, Sans didn't think it would be possible to have dug himself any deeper without punching straight through to the molten core of the Earth, but he managed anyway. Awesome. Send help.

"that isn't what i'm..." Kshhht. receiving inbound transmission: shut up already. Okay maybe that was just imaginary, but he'll go ahead and take his own advice.

Too late.

The new Sans feels a surge of something nasty in himself like rising bile. The guy from this world always acts like this—so ridiculously gentle and careful, as if he naively believes a literal clone of himself would buy the sweetheart ploy for a second, would be won over by being called his twin. Sans knows damn well that the guy is just afraid that he'll Fall Down, forcing him to explain to Papyrus why their new quote-unquote brother had to be sent to a nice farm. Fuck that. Sans should hurt the guy right now, he won't expect it. Sucker punch him or lean in and say something absolutely vile, just to see the shock on his face. hey, bet you were wondering how "that" even works for skeleton monsters. wanna find out? i already know what you'd enjoy. might be fun.

Before he even knows what he's doing, he scrambles up to his feet and takes a shortcut away, sending himself halfway down the snowy path in the woods and out of sight.

Pain stabs through his SOUL like he just tried to yank a joint out of position, a nauseatingly familiar pain that lances out from his eye socket to the rest of his body, shooting down his spine and into his marrow, it radiates everywhere from his ribs to his legs to the tips of his phalanges. Familiar, beyond familiar, this was his existence for, for, he doesn't know how long and no word could convey it, it went on it never ended, never, never.

Sans drops to the ground on his hand and knees, clutching his face as he hisses and rocks, trying to breathe through the pain and praying he didn't just do something irreparably stupid. "y-you're ok... you're fine..." he mumbles to his SOUL, or basically himself, which makes no sense because he is his SOUL, whatever. "take it easy. chill. you're fine. just chill."

And at the same time, being so accustomed to mindbending pain that he can just separate himself from it, Sans wonders what the hell is wrong with him. What kind of messed-up freak even thinksof doing something like that to somebody who's only ever helped him? There must be something seriously wrong with him, he's sick in the head. At least that thing inside his skull was capable of pretending to not be a twisted freak.

The pain ebbs. Maybe it wasn't even that bad in the first place, he can't tell anymore. Sans sits back in the snow, still holding his face in his hands, and wonders if he did anything to his SOUL just now; he could use his phone screen as a mirror to check but he doesn't want to know. Would just be perfect, taking himself out because he didn't listen to Alphys' advice. Or maybe it's not that bad.

Maybe this is just what he gets for being such a shitty person.

He doesn't know how long he sits there, but he hears the light crunch of snow under slippers and doesn't even need to look up.

"sorry," Sans mumbles.

"...why are you apologizing to me?" asks the other guy, the real Sans.

"just, sorry."

Sans quietly looks at him, then holds out a hand. The guy isn't freaking out, so the Sans sitting in the snow assumes his SOUL looks okay after all. Or as close to okay as it ever is. After a long hesitation, Sans takes the offered hand and is pulled to his feet.

"hey, know what woulda been funny just then?" says the real guy. "whoopie cushion in the hand. gotta remember that one for next time."

"..."

They go home.

Sans has another piano lesson with Undyne a couple days after that, easily the roughest so far. The batteries in his keyboard ran out and he forgot to replace them, so he couldn't have practiced even if he felt up to it, and the inside of his skull feels like a TV that isn't tuned right. Everything's all staticky and fuzzy around the edges.

Undyne's already heard all about the incident with Asgore, and she's made a bold-print underlined mental note to avoid any sudden movements near Sans' face and especially near his eye sockets. As a fish cyclops to whom depth perception is just a fond memory, she can empathize with that particular... well it's not a fear for her but it's one hell of an aversion. She told herself she wouldn't bring any of that up if Sans didn't first, and she won't, but he's clearly feeling frustrated right now, sitting tense and staring at the piano and quivering like he's going to explode, which isn't conducive to learning anything.

"Alright, I'm officially declaring this a break time," she says, getting up and cracking her back.

"ok."

Sans is still sitting on the bench, fingers resting on the keys.

"That means you, too."

"ok."

He stares at his hands.

"hey, undyne?"

"Yeah?"

Fragments of sentences are floating in his hollow skull, refusing to coalesce into anything intelligible. He doesn't know what he meant to say or ask. He can't pretend everything is fine when the proof otherwise is right there in his eye socket, but he doesn't know how to ask for... for what, even?

When a minute goes by without Sans following up with anything, Undyne figures he isn't going to. "You wanna go hang out at Alphys' place? I was gonna head over a little later, anyway... you're both total nerds, she'd be cool with you coming along."

Sans almost says no, for the unspoken reason that it would feel likes doing some hardcore third-wheeling; across all the different iterations of the Underground he's unintentionally visited, those two ending up together is a near-inevitability. But he's an identical-except-shittier clone of an existing monster, so that sense of being superfluous is equally strong at the place he now calls home.

"...ok."

Undyne shoots Alphys a quick text message, and Sans finally drags himself away from the piano bench.

Over at the lab, they eat homemade strawberry ice cream—or heat it up and drink it, in Undyne's case—and watch some giant-robot anime, Alphys lying on her belly at the foot of her bed and Undyne sitting in front of it, and Sans burrowed in a nest of pillows. (He's a little jealous he never thought to try the ice cream as a hot beverage thing, it seems like the kind of thing that would drive Papyrus up the wall.)

Robots fight and fire missiles and occasionally stop to make out, and Sans wonders how that other Alphys is doing. He still has a little discolored dot on his arm where he thinks the needle went in; he saw her holding a needle. He wishes he could clearly remember the situation leading up to what she did. An injectable poison that can kill a parasite while sparing its host isn't the kind of stuff you'd just have lying around—and now that he thinks about it, unless her iteration of the Underground is the kind of place where giant fuckoff murder-syringes are standard equipment for scientists (which is, admittedly, most of them), then a needle capable of penetrating bone is a helluva convenient choice of improvised weapons, and he's never been so lucky. He wonders how long Fresh has been hanging around her world, if maybe she'd had prior experiences to warn her that he was bad news.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter much because he'll never see her again, any more than he'll ever be reunited with "his" Alphys or his own brother, but it would be nice to know a little something more about the person who saved him...

He drifts off to sleep before they're halfway through the first episode, and doesn't dream about anything much.

This world has friendly faces, food and drink, bad laughs—and there's a possibility that a different world also still exists, one where the Underground wasn't decimated, but where instead the monsters of Snowdin believe one of those wacky skeletons had some kind of mental breakdown and went permanently missing. It isn't impossible. Within the spectrum of alternate versions of world that exist, versions of events that could play out, it might not even be improbable.

On his better days, as they at and keep watch for a human who hasn't yet arrived, Sans tells Sans about some of the things he's seen, picking out the details that are funny or harmless and leaving out the topics that would keep him up at night. He rattles off an incomplete list of the other versions of him/them that he's indirectly met, all the fractal variations, ones with a blue bandana or red eye lights or a black sludgy body or pointy fangs or a reaper's robe or a curly golden circlet or a giant paintbrush or a human face or fingers tangled in magical puppet-strings. It raises so many questions. Why him? Why aren't there eight fucktillion Snowdin Librarians running around the multiverse, or whole schools of Undynes? He saw alternate versions of all kinds of monsters, sure, and there was definitely a disproportionately high number of "other" Papyruses, too, but the overall imbalance is ridiculous. Maybe all that futzing around with the machine punched a Sans-shaped hole in spacetime, creating a self-perpetuating cycle by which they keep falling into other worlds and sometimes dragging their little brothers along for the ride. Or maybe God exists, and She has a weird skeleton fetish, just like that parasite.

"think more of 'us' might ever show up?" Sans asks, crunching on a popato chisp.

The not-super-new new guy reaches up over the edge of the sentry station to snag a handful of chisps from the bag. "no idea," he says with a shrug. "if anybody intended to find 'me'... seems like they woulda arrived by now."

If those guys did come looking, it would be for Fresh Sans the kooky colorful goofball/abomination, so maybe they'd lose interest and leave once they realized the Fresh half of the equation was gone. He almost hopes they do, just so he can rub their not-actually-noses in it: what's good, dickheads? surprise, that slimy little bastard is burning in hell and i'm alive, none of you gave enough of a shit to acknowledge my existence while i was being tortured in front of you but i'm alive, i'm still here, and your SOULs are a thousand times more disgusting than mine because you watched it all happen and chose to do nothing, i'd say go fuck yourselves but you're already into that, every last one of you can go eat shit and die. He also hopes to god that they won't, that they'll all stay away forever and not give him the opportunity to provoke them, because some of them don't even pretend to have morals and an even greater percentage could singlehandedly wreck the Underground if they felt like it. One way or another, he has no control over any of their decisions, so there's no reason to get into any disturbing hypotheticals and make the other guy worry.

For similar reasons, he doesn't say anything about the true nature of the anomaly, or that he's seen the person Sans had once been searching for when he first tried to fix the broken machine, or that he knows roughly what the future holds: Frisk will fall into the Underground, and they might be monsterkind's angelic savior or monsterkind's destruction or, most likely, something in between—just a little kid in a scary situation. If the other Sans suspects "New Guy" has any kind of foreknowledge, he knows himself better than to ask for answers he won't get.

Sans' SOUL aches sometimes.

Searching around for the pie tins, Sans stumbles on a small wrapped box that had been sitting in the kitchen for a while, swept off to a corner behind a few packages of dried pasta and forgotten. Plain brown paper tied up with a shiny gold ribbon that's all curly at the end; there's a thing you can do with scissors to make ribbons look like that, but he never learned how, so he's always kind of regarded it the way humans probably do with magic. The box has a little tag on it with his name on it, and there's a 50% chance that it's his his name, so he unwraps it.

Yep. There's a teacup inside. Black with little skulls all over, like something a goth tween might gravitate toward, or maybe more like something a goth tween's mom would see someplace and buy for them. The skulls are all outlined with purple glitter.

Sans is somehow even less interested in glitter than he used to be, but even so, it's... okay, it's kinda cute.

He'll keep it.