He comes around slowly, like waking from a dream.
His arm hurts, and Undyne is yelling indistinctly in the background - but that is nothing new. The pitch is way higher than he's used to, painfully so even, Papyrus doesn't know if that's actually true or if it's the ringing in his head that throws everything off-kilter.
He sits up, instinctively scanning the area for his brother and when he sees Sans, looking dazed but otherwise perfectly fine, he sighs. The others seem similarly disheveled but alive. Papyrus pops his arm back into its socket absentmindedly, only grinding his teeth a little at the sting. Maybe it would have been smarter for him to have asked Flowey what exactly the details were of his big plan before agreeing to help carry it out, though the outcome had been predictable, to be honest.
After a few minutes - when the spinning of the room has slowed to an unpleasant swaying instead - he gets up, watching as Frisk fuzzes over the others and the small smile they force onto their face when the Queen gives them a similar treatment, healing every tiny scrape or shallow cut they might have gotten in the fight.
They seem upset about something and Papyrus makes a mental note to ask them about it later.
"Papyrus!" The word sounds strangled, forced out too tightly and he turns his attention to Sans, who has the kind of look on his face he doesn't often have but which Papyrus knows from experience is the prelude to something unpleasant. "What happened, are you alright?"
Coincidentally this is the moment Papyrus notices that his elbow is not supposed to bend the way it currently is bending.
"It's fine-" he says hurriedly, already forcing the broken limb into a better position, but Sans is kind of hovering at his side now with a frown on his face. "I'll fix it. You're not very good at healing magic anyway."
For some reason, those words only make Sans frown more, as well as something else that Papyrus can't quite place. Like somebody just slapped Sans in the face hard, though he's pretty sure he didn't do that at all.
"R-right-" Sans mutters, and Papyrus doesn't have time to respond when Frisk runs up to them instead. He waves them off just a little, using his magic to fix his broken arm properly now and they get that same looks on their face, though it's a sudden thing, and by the time he even notices they're already moving on.
Before he realizes it they're all staring at the sunset, at the light bright enough to blind them, bright enough to burn them. Undyne is still yelling as she sweeps Alphys up in her arms and even Asgore, ever the picture of dignified grace, looks just a little too fragile painted in the colors of dusk. Sans is grasping at his arm desperately, tightly, as if letting go would be waking up from what still feels like a daydream. He is looking at the clouds like they will drift away forever if he doesn't capture them in his gaze.
And Papyrus, who doesn't know what to feel except grateful that Sans has decided to subject his unharmed arm to this death grip.
Maybe it is the illusiveness of it all. The merging of all this time, all these lives, wasted but now paying off into one moment of ethereal beauty which makes everything seem too brittle for him to enjoy. If he touches this, if he lets it break beneath his fingertips, then it will be swept away even quicker. All this perfection will just melt away with the fading sunlight.
Undyne rushes down first, throwing him just a sparing glance and a big grin and it's wrong. It's wrong because it should be him speeding down the mountain, he's sure. It should be him carried away in the wave of excitement that he suddenly lacks, the prospect of their future laid bare before their feet. He should be saying something, but no words allow themselves to form, let alone be spoken.
There's nothing.
Papyrus clutches at his chest slowly, wondering why when everything is so perfect, it still feels like something vital is missing.
And the clouds drift ever further from their reach.
He waits for it. A few hours, a couple of days, nearly two weeks. Waiting for this something to return to him. Papyrus is a firm believer in the world being stubborn and everything turning out fine in the end. And if the world won't comply, Papyrus himself is plenty stubborn too.
Used to be there wasn't anything he wasn't able to fix if he just tried hard enough.
(Then there came something so frighteningly uncontrollable Papyrus had no choice but to admit that some things are beyond hard work or goodwill. It had been difficult, rewriting the axiom of his believes, but it had helped that the source of this inevitable power was nothing more than his best friend the first time, and a child the second)
And it isn't quite like he has abandoned the notion. Maybe he is too hard on Sans for being complacent and stuck in his ways – and lazy, but that is something else entirely - at one point he has to confront that if even dying several times won't change his mind about this, there isn't much else that could.
Still, when faced with another sleepless night spent pacing his new room, counting the tiles on the unfamiliar floors of their temporary house until he knows them by heart, Papyrus has come to a point where he couldn't deny it any longer.
He has no fucking clue how to fix this.
This profound emptiness that has decided to settle down inside him, swallowing up an important, crucial part of himself that Papyrus can't quite name but had always taken for granted. He knows a little of what the humans call shock and maybe that's what this is, he thinks, sitting down on his bed again.
Maybe he just needs more time to adjust to the new setting, the new world around them. Maybe it isn't so bad that he can't laugh at his brother's jokes or share in Undyne's excitement. Maybe it isn't so bad that the socks on the floor don't anger him like they used to or that thinking about certain things doesn't even make him sad anymore.
Maybe this numbness is fine, just for a short while.
Change is not supposed to be easy. He forces a practiced smile and leans back just a little bit. There are certain things that can be compensated for, he thinks, he has been doing so for ages. Why should this be any different?
On the other side of the room Sans shifts in his sleep, the blanket slipping off him and onto the floor and Papyrus knows he should get up and do something about that. He doesn't like it when Sans gets too uncomfortable. He wants to get up and do something. It's chilly tonight, the weather creeping steadily into autumn, and Sans shouldn't get cold.
If he cared at all, surely he would get up and do something?
But by the time morning comes and Sans wakes up, Papyrus is still sitting on the bed, staring at the blanket crumpled pathetically on the floor.
He practices it the next few days, eases into the act slowly. It's not similar enough to what he's used to for it to be natural. In fact, it is way harder than he could have ever foreseen. Everything he says and does feels too exaggerated, overacted like the way characters sometimes do in shows aimed at children where everything needs to be theatrical to be understood.
The universe seems to have mercy on him at least in that everybody is way too distracted by their efforts adjusting to the surface and starting their new lives to notice him acting strange. Asgore and Frisk in particular are busy with smoothing over the newly established contact between humans and monsters and while they asked Papyrus to help, apparently thinking his way with words and friendly demeanor would do wonders as an ambassador, he declines politely, citing his need to look after Sans as a reason.
At least it is somewhat true. Sans is hopeless in all things practical and if nothing else Papyrus can find purpose in taking care of the finer details of their moving houses, as well as helping the Queen and Alphys sort through the literal pounds of paperwork that come with mass migration.
All he knows how to do is go through the motions, hitting every beat of a song he doesn't know the words of anymore, music sheets full of notes he can't read but which he can sing right on tune, without anybody noticing.
He knows how to fall in step with Undyne, matching her enthusiasm with ease and loudly debating on the uses of the more obscure human technology now available to them. He can groan at his brother's puns, he can smile at the sight of the constellations and the changing of the colored leaves. He can do all of this because they are just actions, and no matter how empty it gets inside or how much it starts to feel like nothing is worth caring about, actions are just choices and choices are something he can make, even if he doesn't feel them.
Thought it wasn't even their own choices that led them here.
"I'm going back up the mountain," Frisk lets him know one sunny morning when it's just the two of them in the kitchen, nothing but an empty carton of milk on the table in front of them. Frisk is always up at the break of dawn and Papyrus hasn't slept at all.
He doesn't say anything but realizes he should. They're putting on their shoes, but having trouble with the laces. Papyrus help them tie them.
"Have you told the queen?" he asks eventually, because they are looking at him with a guarded expression, waiting for his response. Frisk shakes their head, their hair is a mess but Papyrus doesn't say anything about it either.
"I don't think mom will like it if I go alone." They hop off the chair when he's done tying their shoes, zipping up the jacket he didn't even notice they were wearing in between the signing. "But she knows I have to retrieve something important."
"Sure." He watches them wrap a scarf around their throat, tucking the ends into their jacket dutifully. Papyrus used to wonder how a child like them, still wearing striped sweaters and with bruises on their knees, could climb the mountain and free Monsterkind all on their own. Now he knows there are no other children like them. "I won't tell her."
They don't respond but hesitate in the doorway for just a moment. He watches them, elbows on the table and whispering in the back of his mind that his smile does not convince them as it should. He used to be good at these things, but at least back then he was pretending at something familiar, hiding the pieces of his thoughts better left unfound and showing only that which was insincere, but still contained in his memories. It was like convincing people an apple is still fresh despite its slowly rotting core. Now there is no apple at all, yet he still has to pretend that there is.
"Frisk," he calls out. The word sounds slightly awkward coming from him, but they had asked him not to call them human anymore. They were on the surface now, there were humans everywhere. Papyrus doesn't care about meeting them though. "Be careful, ok?"
They smile at him and wave as they leave the house, the door slamming shut with a resounding echo, and he can just catch a glimpse of them taking off down the street.
He never asked them why they're going, he realizes.
It doesn't help that with each passing day he starts doubting if the apple was even real in the first place.
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