Chapter 8

Frisk sat at Napstablook's table and poked at the sandwich on her plate. It was kind of green, and it smelled funny. Napstablook said that he found it in the back of the fridge while he was searching for something to give Frisk. The human was unsure if the sandwich was supposed to look like this or if it had been in the fridge for a little too long. When she looked up to see Chara and Napstablook engaging in conversation with their backs turned to give her privacy, Frisk picked up then plate and flung its contents through the window behind her. Before either of them could suspect a thing, Frisk gently set the plate back on the table and folded her hands in front of her.

"That is why we are on our quest for the human items," Chara had finished explaining. "The more Frisk collects, the more of my past that I remember."

"If that is the case," Napstablook replied slowly in that depressed tone of his, "then the next item you want is a dusty tutu."

"Excellent! Where do we find it?"

"Oh . . . Undyne has it."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Did Undyne kill the human that the tutu belonged to?" Frisk asked, color draining from her face.

After Chara turned around first and assured him that Frisk was again wearing her mask, Napstablook turned around and, seeing that Frisk's plate was empty, approached the table and picked up the plate while he answered, "No, she did not. It was a gift from King Asgore when Undyne became Captain of the Royal Guard."

"That is an interesting gift," Chara said, sounding confused.

"It is," Napstablook agreed. "After you and Asriel died, King Asgore fell into a depression of sorts. It was some rambunctious teenage girl that helped Asgore through his dark times, so Undyne has almost become a sort of daughter figure to him. Undyne was always fascinated with the tutu one of the humans wore – one of the only human items King Asgore is known to have had. It was why he gave it to her."

"Wait," Frisk muttered while Chara seemed at a loss for words, "you just said that King Asgore fell into depression after Chara and Asriel died. Why would their deaths sadden him so much?"

"Oh . . ." Napstablook looked between Frisk and Chara. "That's right . . . Chara, you just said that you don't remember being alive. Yeah, Chara, you and Asriel were King Asgore's sons, with your being adopted while Asriel was his natural son."

Frisk felt the air sucked right out of her lungs. Silently, she turned her head to Chara. He remained still instead of his usual bob.

"As for the tutu . . . ," Napstablook continued, unaware of the impact of the news he had just shared with the two, "Undyne doesn't carry it on her person. It's in her house. Hey, she and I are neighbors. I'm sure if I asked her if I could borrow her tutu for a few minutes . . . Oh, who am I kidding . . . ? I can't even ask her for a cup of sugar . . . , let alone for her most prized possession.

"Anyway . . . , it's getting late. Frisk . . . , do you want to sleep in the guest room? Or you can have my room and I'll take the couch . . . ? Or you can just not sleep here at all. . . . Oh, no, I'm rambling, aren't I? Please, whatever makes you most comfortable."

"I can stay in the guest room, Napstablook. Thank you."

While Napstablook took the plate to the kitchen, Frisk crept towards Chara and softly asked, "Are you okay?"

"The guy who wants to rip your face off – and has ripped the face off the other humans who came before you – is my father," was how Chara answered, his gaze looked somewhere Frisk wasn't. "No, I am not okay. This changes so much. What if King Asgore killed me and Asriel was left to take the blame? Oh, and what about Toriel?! If we were her sons and we were King Asgore's sons, then Toriel was a queen! What was she doing in Ruined Woods instead of being with her husband? Do you think something happened to their relationship after we died?"

"Well," Frisk drawled, "it isn't too uncommon for couples to end their marriage when their child dies. It doesn't happen all the time at my village, but it happens enough for me to think that is what happened."

Chara sighed heavily. "Did I ruin their lives by becoming a part of it?"

"I think you're worrying yourself by overthinking this too much," Frisk tried to reassure. "Come on, let's go to bed. Perhaps you will feel better in the morning."

"I do not know," Chara replied. "You get to sleep on this information. I have to stay up all night dwelling on it."

"Trust me, Chara, I will not be getting any more sleep tonight than you will." Frisk led the way to where she assumed was Napstablook's guest room. "Maybe we can talk about it, or we can talk about something else. Whatever will help you process this better."

After Frisk changed from her dirty dress to a large pajama shirt Napstablook provided for her, she removed her mask and wiggled under the covers. The bed was dusty, as if nobody had been in the room for a few years. Amongst the cobwebs in the corners and the green sandwiches in the fridge and now the dusty bed, Frisk began to wonder if Napstablook liked the unkempt look or just never cleaned.

She quickly decided that she didn't want to know the answer.

"Chara," Frisk called after ten minutes passed with Chara just floating in the corner, "do you want to talk?"

"About what?" Chara mumbled, as if he barely had it in him to respond.

Pursing her lips, Frisk said, "You remember . . . when I said that I saw someone's face ripped off by one of the monsters before?"

This got Chara to turn away from the corner and face Frisk.

As she sat upright in the bed, Frisk held her hands together and rested them on her lap. Sighing, Frisk continued, "When I was . . . about six or seven, I was playing with my friends, and Kris threw our ball a little too far away."

"Is this the same Kris whose parents want you to marry?" Chara asked, drawing closer.

Frisk answered with a nod. "I went to go get the ball, but I wasn't paying attention. I didn't even see the carriage coming. However, someone else saw, someone else who wasn't about to just stand and watch as the horse plowed me over.

"A boy who was about twelve or thirteen tackled me out of the way. He risked his life to save me. It really got to me in that moment, that I could have been badly hurt or even killed, but this boy I didn't know and didn't know me jumped in front of the carriage just to knock me out of the way. You know, remembering all this makes me feel really dumb. Back then, someone who had never met me saw enough worth in my life to save it, yet I tried throwing it away by running here, to the forest nobody returns."

Not knowing that she was crying until she felt the hot tears running down her cheeks, Frisk wiped her eyes. She thought of this boy the night she ran into Ebott Forest. Had only she considered what he had done for her instead of choosing to follow in his footsteps.

"What happened then?" Chara gently asked, his investment obvious to Frisk.

"Well, it's not like we became friends or anything." Frisk shrugged while laughing without humor. "I guess that makes sense: big kids don't want to be friends with little kids, after all. Not that he was rude to me or anything; he always put up with my tagging along. I stalked him very openly, and he was okay with it. As silly as it is, I did have a childish crush on him. He not only saved my life, but he was so kind to me all the time, but the people in our village hurt him often. . . . What I know now that I didn't know then was that he was an orphan. A street rat, as the villagers call them. He was all alone to fend for himself. He had nobody. Well, nobody except this little girl who wouldn't leave him alone."

Frisk trailed off, and after a few minutes passed without her continuing the story, Chara said the next part for her. "He entered Ebott Forest, did he not?"

Nodding, Frisk answered, "Yes. I will never forget that day even if I live to be one hundred. We were sitting outside the forest, talking about the kinds of monsters that might live in it. We didn't know anything about the monsters that lived in the forest, just that nobody who entered the forest ever came out again. What's history in here is legend out there.

"Anyway, after a while, the boy apologized. It came out of nowhere, so I was extremely confused. I had to ask him three times what he was apologizing for. Finally, he said, 'For never seeing you again.' I didn't know what he meant. I never asked. The next day, he was gone.

"Months later, long after I knew I was never going to see him again—" At this point, Frisk covered her mouth to stifle a scream. This was a memory she didn't bring up often. Even now, six years later, it was still too painful to recall.

"Months later . . . I was playing with my friends again, and we heard a scream. Curiosity taking charge, I ran to see what was gathering such a crowd. I couldn't see over the adults, so I crawled between their legs to get to the front. Then I saw it. . . . There were two boys, one living and one dead, standing in our field of golden flowers. The dead boy was the boy from the my village . . . , the one I used to follow around all the time. . . . His face had been completely ripped away. The second was another boy about his age. . . . He was wearing the skin of the face of the dead boy."

Even recalling the memory now had Frisk tasting bile. The image was burned into her memory, haunting her worst nightmares. She reached for her scar and thought about how she knew how this boy died and still chose to enter this forest. Her fate was almost to be the same as his. What Frisk thought she wanted was something she had to almost experience to realize it was something nobody should ever want.

Chara hovered inches away from Frisk's face. Speaking softly, he said, "I am so sorry, Frisk. I cannot believe someone would force you to experience such a loss, even if I doubt he intended for you to see his dead, faceless body. . . ."

"I never understood desperation until I was the one planning to run into the forest," Frisk replied with a half shrug. "I never once blamed him, but for so long, I wished there was something I could have done to keep him from running to the forest."

"What was his name?"

"Oh, umm," Frisk scratched the back of her head. "The thing is, I don't know. I asked, but he never told me. In exchange, I never told him my name, so I guess we're even."

"Not knowing his name does not make this any less painful for you, does it not?"

"It makes it worse, honestly. Someone made such a big impact in my life, and I don't even know his name. It's like he never existed sometimes, like I imagined that whole summer."

"Shhh, Frisk," Chara said in an attempt to comfort her as she began to cry harder. He reached out to touch her shoulder. "He was real, and it is obvious to me how much you care for this nameless boy. You would not be so upset had he only been a figment of your imagination."

"I know, but I hate that my heart still feels heavy sometimes and all I can do is cry. I wish I didn't have to keep getting so upset whenever I think about him."

"Do not wish to stop being upset. Grief is love persisting."

Frisk forced a smile on her face. "Love? Don't be silly, Chara. I know I said I had a childish crush on him, but love?"

"There are many kinds of love," Chara said, seeming to settle across from Frisk. "There's the love between brothers and sisters, love between parents and children, love between friends – it is a shame that there's only one word to cover the many kinds of love out there, from the shallowest of puddles to the deepest of oceans. I am not saying that you were deeply in love with this boy, but it obvious to me that you loved him, perhaps as a friend or maybe a brother. Never apologize for displaying love, even if the form of that love is grief."

Listening to all Chara said made tears flow out of Frisk's eyes in heavier streams. However, these were tears from hearing something Frisk needed to hear. After the boy died and more recently her parents, Frisk felt she had to keep her tears in check. Now she was assured that it was okay to cry. Frisk wasn't weak to cry, but strong enough to show her love for the lost.

"Thank you, Chara," Frisk said, wiping her eyes. "That means a lot to me."

"I am glad my words had some worth." Floating away from the bed, Chara advised, "You should go to bed now. We will need to figure out how to get our hands on that tutu, and it will be far easier to plot when you are well rested."

"Okay, I'll try to get some sleep." Frisk wiggled under the covers, and as she pondered the things Chara had said, she told him, "Good night, Chara."

"Good night, Frisk."

"Chara?"

"Yes?"

"I know you said that we are not friends, but . . . I consider you a friend, and there's nothing you can do about it."