Author's note: The previous chapter was the "true" ending to this story. Everything here onward can be compared to deleted scenes or DVD bonus features, and may or may not be considered canon to any degree. They will each be marked accordingly.

Canon Status: God, I hope not.

Fresh arrives in Snowdin with a rainbow POOF! and staggers on the slippery snow, almost faceplanting before he finds the wall of the house he's looking for and braces himself against it. There's a Christmas tree and some presents, there are houses with snowy roofs lining the street, and they're all spinning around him like a carousel ride. He squeezes his eye closed and rubs his arm where the needle went into the bone, whining like a puppy. It doesn't actually hurt or anything but like dude? Home slice? What kind of freakazoid pulls out a big gross needle and stabs a rad dude while he's minding his rad dude business? NOT COOL, DAWG! BZZZT! Nuh-uh! He did NOT consent to that!

He coughs wetly into his sleeve, then takes a nice little sippy from the SOUL and feels better. It used to freak whenever he did that, even more than it had already been freaking out. Now it just kinda sits there, and he doesn't know for sure if it just stopped caring or if it stopped being able to react as it began to run dry. Both, maybe. Booooooring!

Fresh knocks and waits five seconds and then starts drumming a funky beat with both hands but the door opens and LOL he almost smacks the guy behind it by mistake. A Classic Sans! He knew there would be one skullking around here someplace, but there was no guarantee that he'd be home. Here he is! BOOYAH!

(From the drained SOUL: perfunctory recognition, numbed by pain and LOLLLLLLL DON'T CARE DIDN'T ASK TALK TO THE HAND)

"EYOOOO my BROSEPH how are ya DOING?" says Fresh, with double finger-guns for good measure.

Sans stares. His eyelights dart up and down. He's led a weirder existence than the average monster, it can't be denied, but this is a new one. His clone in the doorway is wearing one of those oldschool windbreakers that hiss with every movement, and on his face is a pair of big dark shades with light-up letters spelling out SUP BRAH! in neon hues. Sans has to admire the guy's commitment to the aesthetic; it sorta rules, in a hey what if a tropical fish and a colorblindness test had a baby together? kind of way.

"sup?"

"Whassuuuuppppp?" The guy lurches at Sans and tries to sling an arm over his shoulders like a drunken sloth, but Sans slips out of his grasp and the guy stumbles. Is he drunk? He doesn't smell like booze, but Sans also doesn't have a nose, so he's not the best person to judge on the matter.

"huh. can't say i woke up this afternoon expecting to meet my counterpart from the radical dimension. woulda worn my good socks, at least," Sans says. "...that's what's going on here, right? you're, uh, 'me'?"

Fresh laughs. His Classic buddy is making the same rookie mistake that everyone makes in the beginning, but hey, close enough! "Sure am, my dude! Call me Fresh Sans, or just Fresh, s'all gravy to me! Need a favor from ya, broseidon!"

"sure, what, you wanna play pogs or something? papyrus might have some of those still lying around... i'd have to ask him when he comes back."

Fresh is HYPED about being the pogchamp, but, more importantly, Sans just confirmed that his brother isn't around without Fresh even needing to ask. Sweet! He could easily dispose of Papyrus if he got in the way, but it would waste time and Sans might take the opportunity to dip. And Sans said sure which means consent BOOYAH this is like the MOST perfect!

"Yeaaaaahhh my dude something like that, s— something—like—" Fresh doubles over in a coughing fit which turns into gagging. He clings tight to the inside of the skull with all of his tentacles, resisting the dragging sense of vertigo that pulls at his true body like a tide going out. The SOUL stirs feebly, an aimless twitch from a dying heart. The parasite clings to it, bites down on it, holds on.

Sans can't see what's going on behind those oversized sunglasses, but he cringes at the sound of retching. Is his lookalike sick, or something? He was all noisy and hyper five seconds ago. Fresh looks down at his sleeve, and so does Sans; slimy droplets of fluid the color of swamp water speckle the pink polyester.

"gross," Sans says, perversely impressed. "what IS that?"

Fresh is too dizzy to think of an answer, so he shrugs and wipes his mouth. The body is weakening, maybe dying. Fresh can feel it. Whatever substance Alphys injected into him, he's in danger. He might die... ...the parasite feels a frisson of fear at the realization, the only emotion it has ever known without the prompting of a certain human kid with a sentimental heart and an axe to grind. Even then, emotion might be too strong a word. The sense of aversion is the same as if it had just been thrust toward the edge of a cliff.

"try not to, like, keel over dead on the floor, ok? papyrus will insist on vacuuming... the noise scares our pet rock. it'll leave gravel everywhere. gonna have to clean THAT up, too... it's a whole thing."

Bodies can be replaced, new worlds can be discovered, and "friends" are worthwhile only to the extent that they're inoffensively familiar or sometimes useful. A thousand worlds could burn to the ground with its "friends" inside, its own progeny could be destroyed, the parasite would fling all this and more onto the pyre as a sacrifice in exchange for its own survival. When the stars are aligned and the wind blows in the right direction, it might act out a self-indulgent sort of remorse, but feeling bad is infinitely better than nothingness, the oblivion of death.

"no, seriously. you're ok, right?" Sans asks. "do you need a lozenge or something?"

Sans is trying to imagine how a skeleton could hack up a lung without actually having lungs when the glasses change to a new message (GET PWNED!) and Fresh equips an honest-to-god Wiffle bat and takes a swing at his head. Sans tries to dodge, but the two of them are the same size and have equally quick reflexes, and Fresh moved first; plastic cracks against bone as if it were solid wood, and Fresh laughs raspily at the satisfy CLONK! sound.

"Oop..!" Fresh tosses the bat aside and catches the dazed skeleton before he can collapse to the floor—AWWW it's like they're hugging!—and checks his new bff's skull to make sure he didn't break anything and compromise the usefulness of this nice healthy body. Knocking people unconscious is a lot harder than they make it look in the movies! Well, knocking them unconscious in such a way that they just go night-night for a little while instead of dying on him. Or ending up comatose and all that funky junky. Luckily, monsters are way easier to subdue than humans in that respect, since intent matters more than the weapon itself. Plus it's not like his sleepy skele pal NEEDS to be functional anymore!

Fresh glances over Sans' shoulder to the door. Sure would be un-hip if somebody were to walk in on him while he's changing, especially right now when he's feeling a little under the weather! Wouldn't want any interference brah! He wraps an arm around Sans' middle and slings him up over his shoulder, carrying him to the stairs. At the second floor he rummages through Sleepyhead's hoodie pockets, finds a key, and lets himself into the bedroom to the right.

He locks the door behind him and dumps his new body onto the floor, trying to suppress another fit of coughing. His ribs hurt and even his real body is hurting a little, which is just SUPER UN-POG YO. NOT GOOD. He slides down to sit on the floor and grabs his new body by the shoulder, flipping it over to lie on its side. The eyes are half-closed and the pinpoint pupils barely glowing. Sweet! Then he lays down in front of it, the faces of the two bodies nearly touching.

And now comes the most dangerous step of the process. "Fresh" may be one of the more dangerous entities roaming the world-between-worlds, but without a host's body to serve as its weapon, food, and hiding place, the parasite is a small and pulpous thing, as vulnerable as an exposed human brain and only slightly more capable of defending itself from a direct attack.

Sans—the body of someone who used to have that name—shudders involuntarily as a soft, slimy creature squirms its way out through an eye socket which at one point had belonged to him. In front of him is a distorted reflection, a skeleton with big round eye sockets and a blue hoodie. The neon outfit on his body is melting and disintegrating into colorful sparkles, which might have tickled if he were able to feel it.

With tentacles tinged muddy brown at the edges like the leaves of a sickly plant, the parasite reaches out to grasp the cheekbones of the monster it's claimed for its new host. Sans—the version of him who lives in this world, but won't for very much longer—slowly blinks, but he's too disoriented to grasp what's going on or where he is. His head hurts. Before this day is over, the pain will be magnified beyond all imagination. Something's touching his face.

What's left of the other Sans watches from a distance, as if he were looking up from the murky depths of a polluted lake. He sees the parasite crawling into his doppelgänger's eye socket and hears screams, thrashing; an elbow bumps into him, though he doesn't notice it, and then his reflection rolls away, screaming louder, the sound slightly muffled because of the hands clawing at the eye socket. Sans stares, hollow, as the world goes darker, like he's sinking down, down. The struggling seems like it's slowing, becoming uncoordinated, but the sounds don't mean anything. It's all so far away.

A puffy neon sneaker catches Sans under the ribs, making him gasp and curl up, but it isn't a hard kick, or really even a kick at all. He's just being pushed aside, out of the way of the door, at which point the sneaker steps over him as if he were a pile of dirty laundry and a voice grumbles cheerfully about a Wiffle bat. A hinge squeaks. The screaming has stopped. Some amount of time must have passed between now and... something else...

With a great effort, he turns his head, which feels like it's been filled with cement. In his line of sight is the corner of a treadmill, the wall, a mattress, a garbage vortex over in the corner. It isn't really his own house, but he doesn't know that. He's in a place that looks like the one where he belongs, as if he just went to sleep and had a bad dream, and now he's woken up, and none of it was real.

He's so tired.

Somebody yells wheeee! as they slide down the bannister, ending in a bumping noise. There's the sound of laughter, which becomes a racking cough, then retching.

Downstairs, Fresh retrieves his Wiffle bat and tosses it up like a baton, but he misses the catch when his hand twitches. He still feels nauseous and the SOUL in his eye socket is silently screaming, trying to make the body move differently, trying to force him to reach up and claw at his face.

Fresh huffs and puts his hands on his hips instead. "NOT cool, brah! If somebody saw that, I would've looked... hff... SEVERELY unradical! Why can't you just chillax, brah?"

The SOUL struggles in his grip. Fresh pretends to clear his throat and then takes a nice long sip of magic, which makes the SOUL scream and fight even harder, which just makes it taste better. So full of life, so nice and fresh, and the body it came with is much healthier than the old worn-out one, which had been approaching the end of its usefulness even before that VERY un-pog syringe snafu. He still feels dizzy and weird, though. He tells himself it won't last.

Fresh picks up his bat and exits this dimension in a puff of rainbow magic, just as he had entered it.

The house he leaves behind is draped in silence. If Sans feels any emotion now, it might be lukewarm contentment. All he wanted was a little peace, and for the thing inside his skull to be gone, and now he has both. Magic bleeds from his cracked SOUL, making the socket sting, but it doesn't really hurt much. Even the coughing stopped. It's over.

He closes his eyes.

Papyrus finds him, hours later.

Sans makes a small raspy noise as he's scooped up, his head lolling into the crook of Papyrus' elbow. The bedroom door was open—that detail stands out, for some reason, it's what told Papyrus that something was wrong as soon as he entered the house—Sans never leaves the door open. And while he's enough of a lazy weirdo to nap on the floor sometimes, he's a light sleeper. But Papyrus can't make his brother wake up no matter how loudly he says his name.

Papyrus calls Undyne, who relays the message to Alphys. By the time the two of them arrive, Papyrus has moved Sans to his own bed, not wanting to put him on that grubby old mattress he refuses to just throw away.

Sans stirs now and then, so he hasn't Fallen Down, but Alphys can't detect his SOUL within his ribcage. She doesn't even know how a SOUL could weaken so badly without its owner simply dying, especially because Papyrus keeps insisting that Sans was fine that morning. None of this makes sense to him. There were times when those awful puns and that goofy smile hid certain feelings that Sans didn't want anyone to see, but... it couldn't be that. Papyrus refuses to believe it. Undyne grinds her teeth, hanging back, unable to help and hating herself it.

Alphys eventually mumbles an excuse about needing to do something back at the lab, and Undyne sticks around until Papyrus says he'd rather be alone with his brother for a while. He sits at the bedside and reads aloud, just as Sans did with him when he was little, and his brother hovers fitfully in the twilight between consciousness and sleep, squirming and whimpering now and then, his grasping, crawling fingers digging into the blankets.

Sans senses a familiar presence nearby. Dimly aware that something horrible has happened to someone, that he witnessed something that the presence hasn't, he makes a sound, a fretful, incoherent wheeze. It's all he has left in him, and it isn't enough. A pair of arms scoop him up, cradling him against a bony chest as a voice he knows from somewhere shushes him like a babybones woken from a bad dream, telling him it'll all be okay. Sans shivers for a while, helpless and hopeless, then seems to settle down and fall asleep. He isn't trembling anymore.

He doesn't wake up.

The happiest thing to be said for the newly-infested Sans is that his ordeal is comparatively brief.

The parasite hunkers down in a safe corner in a distant world as soon as it realizes that something's still wrong, hoping that the SOUL of its new host will sustain it long enough for the poison to be flushed from its system. The strategy works. For a few days. Sans' existence during this time is a nightmare blur of confusion, fear, and unrelenting pain as the parasite feeds on him with greedy desperation, but it isn't enough, and the creature continues to weaken. At last, as it feels itself dying, it panics and siphons off entirely too much magic in one great gulp, instantly killing its host and ending his misery.

Then the parasite is alone.

The coarse dust of its final victim clings to its moist, delicate skin. Underneath, its innards are scorched by an acidic poison that burns like hatred and unshed tears until the gangrenous tissue sloughs apart and liquifies, pooling inside the body cavity to form a festering abscess ringed with patches of necrosis like the petals of a hideous flower. The parasite never did learn to how to feel true remorse or empathy, but now, in its final hours, it's beginning to understand how it might feel to be digested alive.

Does the parasite think? It has nothing else to do while it waits for death, so one might imagine that it would. What does it think about? Does it reflect upon its existence? Does it relive its adventures with whatever hollow sentimentality an unfeeling creature might harbor, or does it savor the memory of physical pleasures, the past meals and old conquests? Is it trying to distract itself from its suffering, or do thoughts and memories rise uninvited, like spirits of the dead? Does it dream of rescue, or dread some otherworldly retribution? Does it see faces? Whose?

Here's a better question:

Who even cares?

The parasite's corpse lies in that place for a long time, untouched by insects and scavengers. Nobody ever finds it.

"PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME," Papyrus says to the person he thinks is his brother, curling up next to him on the narrow bed and squeezing his hand as tightly as he dares. It feels so fragile. Hollow, like bird bones. "YOU CAN TELL ALL THE AWFUL JOKES YOU WANT AND I WON'T EVER COMPLAIN AGAIN... ...NO, I WILL, BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY. I WILL! JUST STAY WITH ME. PLEASE. YOU'RE MY BROTHER, AND I NEED YOU... Y-YOU CAN'T GO YET, SANS. YOU CAN'T. PLEASE..."

Maybe those words get through to Sans somehow. His long-abused SOUL has been drained of magic and left nearly in pieces, but he clings to life for almost a full day before his body calls it quits and he quietly succumbs, with Papyrus holding him close until the end. When Sans dies, he takes with him any hope of Papyrus and their friends finding out the truth of what happened.

And maybe that's for the best. Even if he'll never understand why it happened, Papyrus has the small comfort of thinking that "his" brother died peacefully, in a place where he was safe and loved.

With nothing left for him in Snowdin except painful memories, Papyrus moves to Waterfall with a few small belongings and a glass jar filled with dust. Undyne does her best to help him, but he never forgives himself. If only he'd been home a little sooner, or if he hadn't gone out at all that day, he believes—correctly, as it happens—that Sans might have survived.

Puzzle maintenance falls to Doggo until Undyne can find a new sentry for Sans' old station, but the dog monster isn't as diligent at maintaining the puzzles in Snowdin as Papyrus always was (even though it was actually his brother's job), so no one is there to greet Frisk when they leave the RUINS, or tell them jokes, or boast about capturing them. It comes as a sort of relief when they encounter Snowdrake and the other monsters wandering the forest, even though it means having to fight, because at least it also means that this place isn't completely devoid of life. Frisk has never seen this place before, yet they somehow sense an absence here, a feeling of loss.

And what happens next?

The disappearance of Toriel's friend beyond the door may have left her more morose than usual, or she might have been violently unwilling to let Frisk leave the RUINS because she knew they would have no protector, or she might have behaved exactly the same as always, having already lost so much in her life. Without those friendly skeletons around in the early stages of their journey, Frisk would surely be even less willing to trust monsters than they otherwise might have been. Meanwhile, with one of her sentries unexpectedly dead and her friend spiraling down into depression, a chronically stressed and frustrated Undyne would be so determined to take Frisk's SOUL that she would pursue them past the point of heatstroke, until they have no choice but to kill her in self-defense.

Unaware that they've just killed her best friend, Alphys would help Frisk, for a while, until the ringing of their phone annoyed them so badly that they threw it away. Already grieving for her other friend, Sans, and perhaps sensing something unsettling about the human's glazed eyes, she wouldn't have sent Mettaton to harass Frisk.

Hungry, scared, and numbed by their ever-increasing LV, Frisk would kill Asgore and Flowey without hesitation, just as they killed any other monster who threatened them, doing whatever it takes to return to the surface world.

With the entire royal family gone, the laws of succession dictate that power should go to the captain of the royal guard, then to the royal scientist, and then, in accordance with an ancient custom that must have made sense to somebody at some point, to a monster elected by the people of Snowdin. But in this scenario, Undyne would be gone, Alphys would quietly disappear not long after Frisk did, and the monster the people of Snowdin would have chosen wouldn't even be living there anymore, leading to days of hopeless bickering that might only end when Mettaton crowns himself. He's popular charismatic, and by this point, every other plausible candidate would be gone or dead, so why not?

Under King Mettaton's rule, the dead parasite would have what it wanted after all: an Underground where everyone and everything is so very bright and colorful, and everyone hurts inside.

Maybe.

Who knows?

Frisk will find out soon enough. Until then, it's a long, cold, lonely walk to Snowdin.