Fresh arrives in Snowdin with a rainbow POOF! and flops at the front door of the house, stumbling drunkenly on the icy snow except not drunkenly because booze is bad newz, dudez! Also drugs, gotta set a good example for the kiddos and say NO to drugs, that's how Fresh always lived his funky life, right up until some Alphys a few timelines ago decided to jab him with a big grody-looking syringe just because she thought his vibes were rancid, without even asking, which is BZZZT! a clear violation of consent right there, no way José, not cool at all!
He slumps against the door and heaves until greenish-brown fluid speckles the snow. Wack, dawg! Some kid is staring at him from under the Christmas tree in the center of town. BRUH? He wipes his mouth with his sleeve and forgets all about the kid when his not-a-stomach twists like a pretzel; he can barely stand and the SOUL in his eye socket is no help. It was running close to dry even before today and now the sucker's like an empty juice pouch, which is, like, severely un-radical.
Fresh falls into the house when the door opens, his arms flailing as he stumbles under Papyrus' arm, rolling into the living room. Papyrus! Papyrus! A Classic, he digs it, but where's the local Sans? This timeline is untouched by Outcoders and Ink-oders and weird odors so there's gotta be one skullkin' around someplace? Like c'mon?
(From the drained SOUL: dismay, feeble and mindless like a dead bug's leg twitching, as soon as Fresh lays eye on the Papyrus. Which is funky-fresh delicioso, top-tier misery, but now's not the time, broseidon!)
ANYHOO his skull feels like it's gonna crack open SPLAT like an egg (EXACTLY why you should NOT do drugs, ALPHYS) and on the fly he changes his fly plan, forgets about the local lol-cow Sans 'cause he reaaaaally can't afford to waste any more time, or else, uh, not gonna have a good time! Fresh bounces up to his feet. "EYOOO Papyrus dawg my man my broski my DUDE. I am PUMPED to see you like you are LITERALLY the EXACT person I was hoping to find right now." He offers double fingerguns for good measure, and his rad shadez change to BRO RUN SUP DUDE.
Papyrus stares. "SANS, THIS IS WHY PEOPLE THINK YOU'RE A WEIRDO."
"Chillaaaaax, my guy! And—listen—" Fresh doubles over again. Weird, he was trying not to do that, the body did it anyway. And the SOUL is baaaaasically donezo, he's deffo not getting any pushback from there. Super weird! "I n-need you to do me a solid, yeah my RADICAL broski?"
Papyrus scrunches his eye sockets. "IS SOMETHING WRONG, SANS? YOU LOOK SICK. AS IN FASHIONABLE. AND ALSO AS IN YOU LOOK... BAD. IN NOT THE FASHIONABLE WAY."
Home alone, radical! Poggers, even. Fresh takes ooooonnnnneeeee liiiiiiiiiiiiittle bitsy step closer, inside the skull his body shivers, blinks real fast, he feels... not poggers at all. Everything's moving kinda slow. "Yeah, like, about that, brah... my dude... c'mere for a sec? Just need you to... do somethin' for me! So, uh, howzabout liiike you grab my glasses for a hot minute? And I'll just..."
IT HURTS
The puppet strings snap and now something else is in control, a pulse that radiates from an invisibly small hole in the forearm from an intraosseous needle that had been driven deep into the marrow; the body shudders and drops to its hands and knees. The edges of the clothing slop together like spilled paint, the hat and the puffy coat and puffy sneakers and light-up sunglasses, they melt off and splatter into the carpet so that nothing remains but black shorts and a ratty old undershirt and a red eyeball peering out of the right eye socket. The body coughs so hard that it seems like the ribs will snap and then the eye slips out of sight like it had never been there at all, and the coughing turns into agonized and uncontrollable retching until a purple thing halfway between starfish and squid slides out of the mouth and plops wetly on the floor between the curled hands, slick as a newborn. It writhes helplessly and squeaks.
Sans spills sideways and collapses next to the thing, bones clattering empty and hollow with no attempt to catch himself. The red eye of the parasite roves around and around, the tentacles spasming and the slimy violet skin wilting into the color of rotten lettuce as the poison rages through its soft body.
The pet rock on the table rattles when Papyrus bumps into it, and Papyrus is rattling too, waiting for the part where this turns out to be a depraved prank, and for some reason he finds himself fixating on the carpet, which is splattered with blotchy colors and slimy stuff that he can't identify beyond a suspicion it's going to leave a really disgusting-looking stain.
"S...SANS..?"
His brother convulses, makes a sick gurgling noise, and then stops moving.
Sans awakens in a racecar bed with the blankets pulled up to his chin. In the dreamy moment between sleep and full consciousness, he's aware of nothing beyond warmth and softness, the flannel bedsheets enveloping a sore body. It's a nice feeling, but this is the part where that body will bounce upright, the vessel for a creature ready for more wacky adventures between realities. He makes no effort to move or resist; he barely exists anymore.
He waits. Since he isn't trying to move, he doesn't. There's nothing inside his skull except his thoughts.
Sans scrambles upright, hyperventilating, and claps a hand over his right eye socket, then his left. His sense of balance is off-kilter, almost like his center of gravity has somehow shifted up toward his left eye socket, but he can move and his SOUL—it doesn't hurt. It doesn't seem like it's hurting? He's so accustomed to pain that his body doesn't know how to register its absence. Maybe the SOUL would hurt if he poked it but he has sense enough not to do that. His hands slide down to his shirt. Thin fabric, cotton, he can feel his ribs through it.
"GOOD MORNING!" Papyrus announces. He's pulled his desk chair over to the bedside, and an opened book sits on his lap. An illustration of a pink bunny fills one page. "...METAPHORICALLY. IT'S ACTUALLY THE AFTERNOON. ALSO, YOUR MORNING SEEMED INCREDIBLY TERRIBLE. UNLESS IT REALLY WAS A PRANK AFTER ALL, IN WHICH CASE IT WAS IN THE WORST TASTE OF ALL TIME, AND..."
Sans expels a raspy wheeze and flops out of bed.
"SANS!"
Papyrus lets the book tumble to the floor in his rush to catch his brother—no matter what happened or where he came from, this is his brother—and Sans clings to him like he never wants to let go, his ragged breathing turning into muffled sobs against the front of Papyrus' shirt. The sound scares Papyrus almost more than the sight of that thing which came out of Sans' skull. Sans doesn't let people know when he's hurting, ever, and Papyrus absolutely definitely qualifies as a people. He turns to sit on the edge of the bed, letting his brother slither up onto his lap, and Sans trembles hard enough for his bones to rattle and he cries the way a baby cries, because everything is new and wonderful and scary, and he has no words for any of it.
"IT'S... IT'S OKAY, SANS..." Papyrus says, which feels like a lie, because it's hard to say everything's okay when you don't fully understand what was wrong. The squid thing is relevant, because cephalopods do not belong inside of skulls, but the overall lack of context here is throwing him off.
He rubs circles against Sans' back and hums, and they're sitting like this when Sans—the Sans who Papyrus has always known, the only one who'd existed in this world until today—pokes his head into the room.
"'sup. uh, is this a bad time to mention that his little 'friend' didn't..." Sans watches Sans cry. His eyelights awkwardly dart away. "...ok. sweet."
Outside the house, in a steel bucket in the shed, the body of the parasite is already beginning to rot.
Papyrus never seems to sleep, which is convenient, because in the beginning, the new Sans barely does anything except sleep.
His dreams are barely distinguishable from what had been his reality, a fractured kaleidoscope of monsters he knew and humans he didn't know until after he was taken; he screams for help and his SOUL screams as it's burned and twisted and gnawed, the thing inside his skull laughs at him, relishing his suffering as the magic that makes him him is drained out, consumed. The parasite feeds carefully, never enough to kill outright, only until he has nothing left and he's tired and wants to Fall Down, just wants it to be over... as its stolen body slowly deteriorates, the thing starts to consider what it's done, it speaks to a human and to other monsters who resemble the one it occupies and it begins to feel a hint of guilt, but it stays where it is and keeps up its fun-loving persona, and his SOUL is empty, his mind is gone, the person he had been no longer exists and has never existed and the body is nothing but a crumbling husk...
He squirms and whimpers in his sleep until someone nudges him back to reality. Awake, he barely thinks, only wants to go back to sleep even though the nightmares are waiting for him there. Papyrus fusses over him, stage-whispering soothing words as he strokes his skull, and he leaves big plates of spaghetti-shaped charcoal sitting next to the bed; the other Sans takes away the plates and leaves behind greasy bags of fries and burgers and paper soda cups with bendy straws, and sometimes he lingers a safe distance from the bedside to quietly watch him. Sans eats a little of whatever food is in reach, more because it's there than because he feels any hunger.
Outside the bedroom, Sans—the one who technically isn't from this world either, but who's been here with his brother a whole lot longer—keeps asking Papyrus to describe the details of what happened: the wild outfit (which Papyrus thought was cool), the other Sans' mannerisms (more confusing than cool), the squid-like creature that had been inside the guy's skull (distinctly not-cool). He doesn't know what to think, and meanwhile Papyrus is an anxious wreck, checking in on the other guy every five seconds and asking Sans if he's very definitely doing okay, as if he might secretly have a bad case of the skull-squids too. Which is. Pretty rational. Sans has a bad feeling about what would've happened if he'd been home instead of Papyrus, and more than a little relief at the fact that he wasn't, as selfish as that sounds.
He slips out to the workshop one night to run some scans. There's a distorted blip in spacetime situated a few days earlier, which corroborates what he'd already assumed but offers no particular insight. He'd scraped up a sample of the slimy green stuff before Papyrus cleaned the carpet, and he meant to send the parasite over to Alphys for additional biological testing, but the thing turned into mush after just a few hours, reeking to high heaven. No wonder the neighbors were giving him weird looks, he doesn't have a nose and even he could smell it from outside the shed. He snapped a picture on his phone as proof of the dead critter's existence, then went to the dump the next morning and tossed the whole mess into the abyss, bucket and all, watching it vanish into the dark with the rest of the garbage carried by the flowing water.
Grillby does a double-take before hesitantly setting out two menus instead of one, Lesser Dog tilts its head, and the bunny girl in the opposite booth blushes even more than usual, but all it takes is a wave of the hand and a breezy comment about a cousin visiting from New Home for almost everyone in the restaurant to collectively shrug and go back to their card games or conversations or attempts at jostling spare coins out of the jukebox when Grillby isn't looking. Turning up with an exact replica of himself, identical in every aspect beyond hoodie color (dark green versus blue—Sans didn't have a second blue hoodie, and for some reason the new guy didn't want red or black) and posture (somehow worse than that of original-flavor Sans) isn't even the weirdest thing a skeleton has ever done in this establishment.
Aside from when the resident Sans orders their food, neither one speaks. The former host to the parasite has nothing to say, and his current host has a host of questions he wants to ask, and the bunny girl is staring at the two of them like she's trying to beam a message straight into their skulls through telepathic communication.
Plebeian that he is, Sans has to use the regular kind of communication. "you can't stay in papyrus' room forever."
This statement doesn't take the new Sans by surprise. The other guy is a Classic, as the parlance goes. Wariness is a core aspect of the personality; he used to be the same way. He'd say he still is, but he wasn't wary enough when it mattered, and now he's not anything.
He slouches in his seat, in his borrowed hoodie, staring dully at the condensation beading the side of his milkshake glass. "ok. just tell me when to leave."
The words could or should be snarky but they aren't. The first Sans laughs, looking away and then quickly back when the bunny girl's ears perk up. "jeez, i didn't mean it like THAT. not gonna throw you out on the street... what kind of monster do you think we are?"
He waits for a chuckle, a snort, something. The other guy is trembling. It never stops. In a quiet room, you could pinpoint his location just from the sound of rattling bones.
Sans stuffs half his burger in his mouth and waits to finish chewing before speaking even though 1.) he's Sans and 2.) it's magic food and he doesn't even have an inside-of-a-mouth. "but, uh, how do i put this? to say it bluntly... i don't wanna watch you fall down. i don't wanna watch papyrus watch you fall down, either. and that's where this path leads. seen it happen to folks way too many times before."
He swallows, however that actually works for skeletons. The other guy stares at the milkshake in front of him. Sans is beginning to think that dragging him out here so soon was a bad idea, but they needed to be somewhere away from Papyrus and this seemed like the obvious choice.
"on a related note, you seriously should get that checked out." Sans taps a phalange on the rim of his eye socket. From the right/wrong distance, it looks like the other guy's left eyelight is super jacked-up, the product of a genetic quirk or a head injury or something. Got a funny shape to it. With only a table between them, it's impossible not to see it for what it is: a monster SOUL, or more like two halves of a SOUL, cracked down the middle and hanging together by only a few threads, webbed with layers upon layers of scars and semi-healed hairline fractures like a busted bone that was never allowed to mend right. It's gotten no worse or better since that first day, food and sleep haven't made a difference. The other eye socket is blacked out, hollow.
"ok."
"i'm not a doctor, but i'm, like, ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine six nine percent sure your SOUL shouldn't be... looking like that."
"yeah."
"or, uh. visibly looking like anything."
"yeah."
Sans is starting to feel like a jerk even though he hasn't done anything wrong, in fact he's explicitly going out of his way to not do anything wrong by this guy. It's like trying to pet an abused dog, only to see it roll over and show its belly. I submit, please don't hurt me. Also the dog used to have heartworms from another universe that made it use outdated slang while also gnawing on its SOUL, or something. What is even going on around here.
He slides an arm across the table and gives the guy's limp hand a squeeze, the way he sometimes does with Alphys. "we're on the same team here. you get that, right? i don't know your full story, and whether you discuss it or not is your own decision, but from what i, uh... picked up... you've been through some stuff. nobody deserves that. hell, even if you pulled off acts of such monumental dickery that you legitimately landed yourself that far into the red, karma-wise, i'd say you've paid your dues by now. and as far as i'm aware, you haven't done anything that bad. so." Sans feels like he's veering off-track a little. "...point is, i just wanna see you be ok. here and now. so does papyrus."
The bunny girl's eyes are bulging. Sans pulls his hand back and reaches for another fry, smearing it through the last bits of ketchup on the tray. "sheesh, look at me, being all earnest and sincere. heh heh. so much for my badass delinquent reputation. which i definitely have."
The other guy takes a sip of the melted milkshake in front of him. The rest of his food is untouched.
"hey, so, i've been thinking... we could get a really great 'who's on first' routine going, the two of us..."
Sans—the new one—does as he's told.
Alphys treats him as gently as she can, apologizing when her hands move too quickly toward his face and he flinches away. She's already been told what to expect, and she of all people knows just how badly a monster can be mangled and survive, but monster SOULs don't even work like this, a living monster's SOUL shouldn't be visible and a monster with one hit point shouldn't be alive with a damaged SOUL. Sans must already know. He can't stop shaking, she can tell he's trying but he can't.
"Have you been able to use magic?"
He shrugs. "i dunno. haven't used it... by myself, ever since the... uh. the thing."
Alphys steps back from the exam table, chewing her lip. Earlier, this world's Sans sent her a picture of the parasite's corpse. It looked like the kind of monster that would make its home in the deep caverns beneath Waterfall, in places so cold and dark that even Undyne never swims there. Only it wasn't a monster. Monsters don't do what that creature did. "It might be a good idea to... start trying, just a little bit? I would expect it to be more difficult than usual, but if your SOUL literally couldn't do magic, you would already be dust. If it hurts then obviously you should stop, but, otherwise... it should be okay? I, I think? I don't know. I've honestly never seen anything like this, not even from... um... th-those guys."
A Memoryhead rattles around in the air vent and makes a cheerful noise at Sans halfway between a dial-up modem and a guinea pig, which he doesn't acknowledge. Alphys doesn't know how to talk to him, either. Is he her friend, the same person who comes over to watch obscure anime movies and eat ice cream late into the night, or should she address him as a stranger in need of help? None of her theorizing about alternate realities prepared her for this particular scenario, given that she and her Sans were generally more concerned with the flow of time. And the potential of anime girls being real. ...Okay, that part was mostly her thing.
Alphys makes a few tentative efforts at green magic, hand hovering over Sans' eye socket as he trembles and sweats, but it has no effect and she can't think of anything else to try. If he were a human, she thinks it might be possible to re-fracture the SOUL and let the Determination pull the two halves back into a more stable shape, the way a surgeon would reset a broken bone. Since he's a monster, that would just kill him.
He's quiet when she breaks the news, as if he expected as much, and he stays quiet as he follows her out of the exam room.
As they take the elevator back up, Alphys wrings her hands, then blurts out: "D-do you want a hug?"
Sans shrugs for about the tenth time that afternoon. Alphys internally screams at herself, but she's made the mistake of already opening her arms, which exponentially increases the awkwardness of standing there and doing nothing, so she hugs him.
"Please take care of yourself, okay? I'm not worth much as a doctor, but if you want to, um, text, or chat on Undernet, or wh-whatever, I'm always online, hehehheh."
Sans nods against her shoulder. Wrapped up in her arms, he feels even more fragile than he looks.
Sans doesn't do as he's told; he sleeps and, under Papyrus' watchful gaze, he sometimes eats, and he goes wherever the other Sans tells him to go, but he never tries to use his magic and rarely gets out of bed.
He does inspect his SOUL now and then, leaning close to Papyrus' computer screen and squinting at the reflected light.
LV 1.
0 EXP.
That isn't right. The thing inside him killed people. Not often—it cared only about preserving its own existence and reproducing whenever it got the chance, and mass slaughter would do nothing to help it achieve either of those goals, but it had no qualms about taking a life to defend its own. And with its magic providing the raw firepower Sans lacked, 'Fresh Sans' was a much tougher entity than the sum of its parts.
The parasite was also, to use the parlance, a fucking sadistic freak. It enjoyed watching people suffer. It enjoyed his suffering. And if it did all that to him, what did it do to the people whose continued existence wasn't useful?
LV 1.
0 EXP.
So the universe or his own magic or God seem to believe he didn't pull the trigger on any of the people 'Fresh Sans' killed. Great.
Sans wonders what would happen if the thing were still alive and he got his hands on it. Would it count as a sin for him to take a nail gun and pin it to a wall, alive, and then heal it with green magic, and wait and see if it lasted as long as he'd had to? If it would, then KARMA and justice mean even less than he used to think they did.
But the thing is dead.
LV 1.
0 EXP.
He only remembers bits and pieces of the day the thing died, though at least he's got two monsters nearby who can corroborate what happened if he ever asks. The events before that point don't feel real, like real things that could actually happen to a person. And before that, he doesn't know. He was there and he saw what happened at the very beginning, whatever it was, but he can't bring any of it to mind no matter how long he lies in that racecar bed. He was in the Underground and he was himself, and then he wasn't.
What did he do? What did that thing make him do?
He doesn't think about it. He tries not to think about it. He can't think of anything else, in the times when he isn't just not thinking anything at all. He sees the faces of his brother and his friends, the people back home.
If the parasite snatched him away in secret and got the hell outta dodge, then everyone is probably okay. Papyrus would be scared and heartbroken, Undyne would be eternally pissed off on her friend's behalf, and Alphys would have a tougher time getting food for the Amalgamates without anyone knowing, but nobody would be hurt. If the thing grabbed him while he was near other monsters, or if he'd fought and struggled long enough for someone to see what was happening, then, well, that someone wasn't able to stop the parasite. There's no way Papyrus or Undyne would let him be taken without a fight, and they're both strong, but if they were caught off-guard, hit by an attack from what appeared to be a monster they trusted, fueled by killing intent...
Would that make him a murderer by proxy? Is he a brother-killer without even knowing it? Sans' own SOUL doesn't seem to think so, but he's unconvinced.
He shuffles back to bed and crawls under the blankets.