Author's note: This was originally written as part of the fifth chapter, and I liked it for what it is, but it didn't end up fitting very well, so I left it out.
Canon Status: 50%?
Sans and the trucker were on the road together for a day and a half before they parted ways; the human had insisted on giving him a little money first, casting a significant look at the rusted pay phone out in front of the diner before wishing his skeletal hitchhiker well and driving off into the dusk. A day and a half together, and hell if Sans can remember the guy's name. He'd mentioned it once or twice, and Sans probably told himself both times that he would remember, but then he forgot, just like he always does with new names. He used to have a near-perfect memory—he remembers that.
Well, whatever. He doubts he'll ever see the guy again, so it doesn't matter much.
Sans had dozed in the passenger seat for the last few hours, his skull resting against the window as the sun dipped below the line of the distant trees, and now his legs feel cramped from sitting all day. He stretches and checks his pocket, startled by the noisy jingling. The trucker gave him more than he'd realized. Definitely more than enough for a pay phone.
There are a few monsters in the roadside diner, even this far from Ebott: a skinny bird rearranging the dishes behind the counter, somebody in a black hoodie over in the corner booth, and a scarecrow lady shushing a fussy monster baby with a pumpkin for a head, trying to get them to eat their greens. Huh. Aside from the Vegetoids and Parsniks, which are root vegetables, plant monsters were pretty much unknown in the Underground. Not enough sunlight. He wonders what the kid's other parent looks like.
Sans slides into a booth. The seat's made of scratched vinyl, slightly sticky to the touch, and on the table are paper placemats with ads for local human businesses. The vibe is Grillby's-esque, little differences aside. He peeks under one of the placemats to see what's printed on the other side, but there's nothing. No word searches. Aww.
When the waiter brings over off a menu, they cheerfully inform him that both monster food and normal—they catch themself, stumbling over an apology, and then say human food—are available. Sans switches to looking at that instead, skimming over the words without reading them. He came in here because it's where that trucker guy dropped him off, but he isn't hungry. Or maybe he is? He can never tell anymore, so he usually just does his thing until somebody pushes food in his face, at which point he eats enough for them to stop making noises at him. He doesn't have a plan for what he'll do once he travels beyond the farthest edge of where monsters have settled, since he doesn't have the stomach for human food and he didn't think to bring a mop when he left Ebott. Maybe he'll turn back.
He yawns and leans his elbows on the table. There's a bottle of ketchup sitting by the napkin holder, and he's thinking about reaching for it when his marrow tingles with the awareness of being watched. Pretending that he's still reading the menu, he surveys the room: the lady sitting at the counter is shushing her baby, and the bird monster is saying something to the human waiter. Over in the corner, the guy in the black hoodie is staring at him.
Sans slowly leans back, his spine pressing into the fake leather seat. no. no, no, no, nononononononono not here, not now, not after everything, no. no. no.
Making a poor attempt at pretending not to notice the guy, Sans slides out of the booth and heads straight for the door. He has no idea where he's going. Trucker guy already left. Screw it, who cares, Sans just needs out.
The parking lot is quiet, with just a few cars here and there and dry tufts of scruffy grass are poking up through the cracks in the asphalt. They make a rustling noise when Sans walks over them. He has time to feel a little relief and then nearly jumps out of his skin when he sees the guy in the black hoodie leaning against the chain link fence off to the side of the diner, the furry trim on his hood ruffling in the tailwind from the passing cars. Should've seen it coming; Sans used to be able to pull the same trick.
A gold tooth glints as the guy tosses a handful of sunflower seeds in his mouth. "heya."
Sans is free now, the torture stopped, he was supposed to be safe. None of these guys should have had any reason to follow him, but here this one is. The tooth, the red eye light, his clothes and the way he moves, all of these details are familiar and yet unreal, like fragments of a half-remembered nightmare. At least this one isn't a literal nightmare. If that guy had been the one to track Sans down—or, worse, the guy with the strings—then he would be well and truly boned. Depending on who sent this guy here and why, he might still be boned.
i haven't done anything to you and i'm not in anybody's way, i'm weak and boring, leave me alone, please god just leave me alone, leave this place alone, Sans silently pleads. It takes everything he has to keep from rattling. "whoa, man, dining and dashing isn't cool. you should go back inside before somebody notices."
"just hear me out, alright? it's... aw, sheesh, this is hard t'explain," the guy mutters, crunching, then spits out a wad of seed shells. It leaves a wet splat on the cracked pavement. "i'm doin' a favor for somebody. got press-ganged into helping 'em search for a, uh, a certain guy. he fell off the radar and hasn't been heard from since, which ain't like him at all. s'pposedly ended up somewhere around here, in a manner of speaking... but hell if i can find 'em. i've been lookin' all over for you. figured you're the most likely to know what's up."
"me?" Sans keeps his sweating hands jammed into his pockets and his shoulders hunched to make himself smaller as he addresses the guy's shoes. "what do you want me to... i mean, it's not like i'm... uh, who is it?"
The guy in the black hoodie tosses another handful of sunflower seeds in his mouth. "a skeleton like you or me. EXACTLY like you or me. except with, uh, a certain retro aesthetic. bright clothes, interesting pair of shades, all this 'totally radical' shit. ...oh, he hates swearing, too. guy goes by the name 'fresh'."
Sans gives an infinitesimal flinch. The guy in the black hoodie rolls his eye light. Where he comes from, a timid mouse of a monster like this one wouldn't survive five minutes—no, even the literal mice know better than to show such weakness. Are Classics normally so pathetic? The secondhand embarrassment is agonizing.
"this place seems pretty untouched, but it's s'posed to be the right one. don't ya understand any of that stuff? AUs, timelines and all?"
The words might as well be from a foreign language, but Sans is beginning to remember that he had once been immersed in it, and the meaning slowly dawns on him: this guy doesn't recognize him. He thinks he's the one who actually belongs here! Sans almost busts out laughing, almost panics and turns around and flees back into the diner, but nothing would be stopping is stopping the guy from following him again.
"meh, that scientific jargon... it's all geek to me," he says, with a shrug so forced that he can't believe the other guy doesn't react. This is a moment Sans had been looking forward to, but only because it felt good to sit around and dream of of petty revenge; he never thought it was actually going to happen. Should he keep playing dumb, and wait for the guy in the black hoodie to realize? Should he confront him right now, and demand answers? The specifics of what this guy might have done are less certain—he's seen so many faces, way too many, and most of them looked the same—but he's seen him before. That gold tooth and the red eye light. The annoyed growl when Fresh magically censored out all his swearing. Sans saw it, he heard it. He was there.
"but, yeah. i know who you're looking for," he says, at last. "he's standing right in front of you."
The guy in the black hoodie stares blankly, and Sans waits for the flash of horrified realization, of recognition and shame, but the moment doesn't come.
"i guess it's confusing to a newbie like you, but this is someone else. he looks like you, but he's wearin' different clothes. acts different, too," the guy explains, as patiently as he knows how.
"i know. that's me."
"someone else, i said. you ain't him."
"what do you see in my eye socket?"
"huh?"
Sans reluctantly takes a step closer to the other guy, close enough that he can't possibly miss the SOUL in his eye socket. It glows more strongly than it used to, though the brighter light outlines scars and small fissures that hadn't been so visible when he was drained to the brink of death.
"look."
The guy shrugs. "ok?"
"what do you see? c'mon. this isn't a trick question," Sans presses.
"a soul."
"i'm the sans who was that thing's host," Sans says, as if he were trying to explain the punchline to a failed joke. "fresh. him. the body he was wearing... that's me. that was me. MY body. you... knew that, right? you knew that thing was controlling me? you've seen me without those glasses on?"
"i guess so."
Sans backs away. A car whooshes past, sending a stained newspaper fluttering between the two skeleton monsters like a tumbleweed. Sunflower seeds crunch between the other guy's teeth as he chews.
"i'm doing alright these days, in case you were wondering."
"ok."
"alphys says i should see a shrink, undyne and papyrus want me to be more active for the sake of my health... so i decided to split the difference and run from all my problems." Judging by the fifty missed calls and the anxious undertone to the memes his not-twin had been sending every few days, nobody is happy with that decision, but that's not his problem anymore. His phone's battery is dead.
"ok."
"it's been an interesting time, with all these humans around."
"ok."
"i jumped this old guy's bones last night. he wasn't bad-looking for his age, and i'd been mooching off him for like two days. it's only fair. then he paid me afterward." Sans jingles the coins in his pocket.
"what happened to fresh? the, uh, the real one. is he still around here someplace? guess he'd hafta be. if he'd grabbed a new body by now, he already woulda dipped."
Welp. So that's how it's going to be, then. "it fell off a cliff."
"hardy-har har. just fucking tell me."
"that's what happened. it fell off the edge of a cliff."
The guy in the black hoodie tosses the last of the sunflower seeds into his mouth, then folds his arms across his chest. "listen, pal, i'm only doin' this as a favor for somebody, ya get me? th' sooner you tell me where fresh is, the sooner i can find him and scram. m'not here to goof around."
Sans laughs. How else can he respond to that? "wow. you're absolutely grotesque."
The guy in the black hoodie glares. "didn't come here to have you bitch at me for no reason, either."
"is that all you have to say? you're not gonna express any, i dunno, sympathy? a little concern for my welfare? anger at the injustice of it all, maybe? no? nuthin? nada?" Sans slouches further down, somehow. "quick question, have you and i ever had sex?"
"what." The red light in the guy's eye socket flickers like an ember as he squints at Sans. "...what the fuck."
Sans shrugs. "i would say 'you and fresh sans', but if you two go back far enough, then he actually would've been wearing somebody else at the time, not me... and i could use a different verb if i wanted to be clearer about what happened. in any case, i was in too much agony to remember all the specifics, and most of us look fairly same-y once we're naked. did we bone or not?"
The guy in the black hoodie looks away, shuffling his feet. "uh... no..?"
Sans used to be able to read people like books, just like he used to be able to remember the names of new acquaintances and eat like a normal person and sleep without nightmares. As best he can recall, this guy wasn't of any special importance to the parasite, but his best doesn't count for much. The guy could be lying through his teeth. "i'll take your word on it," Sans says, definitely lying. "ok. next question: why didn't you do anything? why didn't you say anything?"
"listen, man..."
Sans waves a hand.
"i know, i know. you're lazy, as we all are. you're orders of magnitude less powerful than certain other guys, 'fresh' very much included. you couldn't have intervened even if you'd desperately wanted to. that's ok. it's better that you didn't. i wouldn't expect anyone to die for me, least of all... me. but you knew what the score was, right? you knew i was still alive. you knew that thing was a parasite. you knew it was inside me. you might've seen the messages on those glasses. my pleas for help. maybe you couldn't have known how much i was suffering... how much it hurt... but you knew i was being used as a puppet, right? even though you acted otherwise?"
The guy in the black hoodie hunches his shoulders as if he's trying to hide within the big fluffy ruff on his hood. "ain't like he ever asked for my approval before he did shit. nobody ever does." He spits out the final wad of seed shells and steps on it, scraping the sole of his sneaker over the pavement. There's bitterness in his last remark, but any possibility for empathy or understanding dies as soon as he speaks again. "i figured you were, like, asleep in there anyway. unconscious, comatose. not feelin' anything. eh, i dunno."
"wow." Sans laughs, and it comes out with a harsh quavering edge he's never heard in himself before. "somehow... you managed to come up with a scenario even worse than the truth. jeezus. if somebody walked into a hospital room and did all that with a coma patient while the nurse wasn't looking... and they were the one to have put that person into a coma in the first place... they'd go to jail. unless the victim's friends took 'em out first. and if they did, what jury would convict them? doubt it would even qualify as a sin."
The guy in the black hoodie doesn't know how to respond to any of this. He's not a bad person, really, and he's no less capable of compassion than the average monster, but he's lazy and laid-back by nature (or he would have been, if his home had been a more peaceful place), and he doesn't pick fights if he can help it. From his perspective, someone he'd once known as a playful, colorful, mildly creepy goofball has transformed into a twitchy, aggressive weirdo who refuses to shut up about an uncomfortable subject.
"look, man, sucks to suck and all, but that's got nuthin' to do with me. 'specially whatever shit happened before i even met you. or, fresh. whatever."
Sans keeps speaking as if he hadn't even heard. "but it's even worse than that. the thing took me away from my friends. away from my home. and they don't torture you or chew on your SOUL when you're in a hospital, last time i heard. so, again. can't really reiterate this enough. it was torture. and now here you are, trying to rescue the thing that tortured me. doesn't that seem a little strange to you? a little questionable? it could've been you in my place."
"You're real fixated on this, huh." the guy in the black hoodie mutters. "ok, so you clearly got some personal issues you're dealing with. it's fine. whatever. good luck with that. alls i'm trying to figure out is where fresh went, so gimme somethin' to work with here and i'll leave you alone."
Sans never used to be a violent person—plus or minus a few blood-soaked revenge fantasies revolving around a certain starfish creature and a nail gun, he still isn't—but now he contemplates tackling the guy in the black hoodie into the path of an oncoming cement truck. Issues. No kidding! Weird, where could those have come from? Or is this guy insinuating that he's lying about the whole story? He can't possibly think that, can he?
The murderous thought comes and goes, leaving Sans as tired as if he'd actually attacked the guy, or maybe not quite so tired as that, since the guy would easily rip him to pieces. But even if Sans could overpower him, then what? Hurting this guy wouldn't fix anything.
Sans turns on his heel. "aaaaaaand we're done here. seeya."
The guy in the black hoodie grabs Sans' arm to stop him from leaving. He tries to shake him off, but the other guy is too strong.
"nope. conversation's over," Sans says, pretending that the vice grip on his arm doesn't hurt.
"how hard is it to answer a simple fuckin' question?" the guy growls.
"why bother asking me anything if you aren't going to listen? sheesh. i don't know how to say this any more plainly. 'fresh' is gone for good. leave me alone. leave us all alone."
"'us?'"
"everyone in this world. there's nothing here for you. leave."
Two sets of eye sockets stare into each other. An eye light like an ember, and a fractured SOUL.
Sans tries again to pull free, and the other guy lets him go, the grimy fabric sliding beneath sharply-pointed phalanges. The guy in the black hoodie huffs and steps back, picking at a scrap of a sunflower seed shell caught between his triangular teeth. He could force an answer out of his mousy counterpart, if he wanted. If he reallywanted, he could call in the big guns and let the top-tier skeletons go through this timeline like a bully shaking lunch money from the pockets of some wimpy kid on the schoolyard. At the very least, he could keep sniffing around for the native Sans. But he's already done his due diligence, and this is getting obnoxious. He doesn't even like Fresh anyway.
"fine," the guy says, and shrugs. When he walks away, his black hoodie blends into the shadows around the side of the diner and the red eye light seems to wink out, and then it's as if he was never even there.
Sans watches the guy go. He looks at the rusted payphone.
Well past the point at which Sans could have called the guy in the black hoodie back to him, he realizes that he could've asked for help in getting back to his own world. Maybe the guy (or rather, whoever sent him) would refuse, or else they'd agree to try and help but never manage to find his particular place of origin among the infinite variety of alternate dimensions within the multiverse. He has no reason to entrust his safety to literally anyone he met in the places between worlds. But he could've asked. He could've tried. It might have worked. Maybe.
Sans laughs. He laughs until his ribs hurt and he has to sit down right there on the curb as bats flutter over the diner's roof. It's all just so funny that he can't stop laughing, not for a long, long time.