"It seems to have worked," Dumbledore said, as the machine vanished from sight. "That's good to see."
"We did test it, you know," Kurt said. "I earned those NEWTs."
Harry looked from Kurt to Dumbledore, convinced there was a story behind this, when the skeleton cleared his throat. It was an impressive noise, considering Sans didn't actually have a throat to clear.
"ah, we should go find flowey and bring him here before they get back," Sans told the group, sticking his hands in pockets. "i'd like someone with me just in case he got up on the wrong side of the flower bed this morning."
"I can't," said Kurt. "I need to be ready to block off the entrance if Flowey tries to run."
"I'll go," volunteered Harry. "I'd like to see more of the underground, and the others should stay together, right?" Dumbledore looked concerned at this. "I probably was in more danger last night, sir."
"i kept frisk safe through the underground," Sans said. He winked, "i promise we won't do anything boneheaded."
Harry eyed the skeleton. Ron let out another groan.
"Very well," said Dumbledore. "Do be careful, Harry. Remember that he is soulless, which could make him very dangerous. Stay close to Mr. Sans. You didn't think to bring your cloak, did you?
"No. I didn't think I needed it."
"Pity," Dumbledore said. "Good luck, stay safe."
Sans led the way though a stone stairwell into a long hall, that must have looked out onto an opening in the mountain, because it was covered in daylight.
"How far is it to the sunlit room?" asked Harry. He had a ton of questions he wanted to ask Sans, now that they were separated from the others. But that seemed like the question to break the ice with.
"oh, it's about a good half of a day's walk," said Sans, his eyelights glinting in the sunlight. Harry gave a start of surprise. "heh, heh, it'll be fine. i know plenty of shortcuts." With that vague comment, he took Harry's hand, detoured around a pillar, and vanished both of them out of sight.
They came up alongside a grey, colorless, stone house. "nice shortcut, huh?" Sans said, walking down the path away from the house. "That's the king's old home. he's not lived there for a while, but i think he'd appreciate it we didn't go tromping through it."
Harry's stomach felt like it'd just gone through a dive after a snitch that was near the pitch itself. "What was that?" Harry asked. "Apparition?"
"uh, that's wizard for 'teleport' right?" he shrugged. "maybe? i just know quicker ways to get between certain places."
They were walking along a cave ledge, overlooking what must have been the monster capital. Harry could see buildings, all hollowed from the rock itself. "This must have taken ages to build. How far below ground are we?"
"a very long way," Sans said. "couldn't go out. could only go so far up. down was the only way left. ah, here we are." They'd turned a corner, coming face to face with what could only be an elevator shaft. Sans pushed the button, opening the door.
To Harry's surprise, the floor was covered with what looked like vines, leaves, and other herbology debris. Sans stepped inside, and Harry followed after. Sans eyed the buttons, but instead of pressing one, he pushed a complex sequence of floors. "we'll cut through alphy's lab. but she didn't take visitors often, so you had to know the code," he explained. "sorry for the mess. flowey used it recently. tried to clean up after him."
The elevator door closed behind them, and Harry was taken for another ride, as this elevator didn't go gently up and down. It moved quickly, and lurched side to side too (which must have been monster magic), so his stomach lurched this way and that with it. And all the while, Sans stood there, grinning at him, with hands in his pockets. When they finally arrived in what must have been Alphys's lab, Harry stumbled out, feeling more than a little sick.
"heh, hope you deal with rivers better. but we get to walk just a bit first."
They walked down through the well lit lab, past a stairway, toward a screen that... "Wait, is that me?" Harry asked, looking around to try to find what was recording him. He finally spotted it, in ceiling, a small black semisphere that must have been hiding the camera.
"yeah. we installed cameras for the original scientist in all sorts of places. he wanted to keep an eye out for anomalies he thought he detected around the underground. alphys used them to monitor frisk's progress."
"Original scientist?" Harry asked.
"eh. don't think most people remember him," Sans replied. He moved to the console in front of the monitor, and pressed a few buttons. The screen switched images, showing a large golden flower looking up at something out of the camera's viewpoint. "oh, good, still there."
He led Harry out of the lab, and down to a dock on a river. Waiting for them was a cloaked individual standing on a long wooden boat. Sans stepped lightly down onto the boat, and Harry followed behind.
"I am the river person. Where are we going today?" it asked them without turning around.
"snowden," Sans told him. Her. Whichever. The river person didn't so much as start paddling, but the boat began to move, upriver no less.
"Sans?" Harry finally asked. "Can I ask a question?"
"why not?" Sans asked. "you just did."
"We... I mean, Frisk, and I, and other few others. We helped someone that we didn't know if we should have helped. Hermione asked if Frisk could look at his soul. It was yellow, mixed with black. She said she thought the black was 'LOVE'."
Sans looked back at Harry quickly, his eyelights had dimmed, and Harry began to lean precariously out of the boat before realizing what he was doing.
"No," Sans said. "LOVE... that kind of LOVE, is something that happens when you try to prevent yourself from forming emotional attachments. If you could see enough of a soul to think it was black, there wasn't a lot of LOVE in it." His eyelights blinked back on, and Harry began to catch his breath. "black, though. not sure. the science of souls isn't really my bag, so to speak. you should ask alphys."
"Alright," Harry said, still more than a little shaken from Sans's sudden change in tone. "What about pink?" he asked, but Sans just shook his skull negatively.
They rode in silence for a while, as the air got colder.
"Tra-la-la", the river person hummed, to fill the silence. "The man who speaks with hands still watches from outside."
"I know," Sans said, but he didn't elaborate, and Harry wasn't going to ask him to.
Snowdin was aptly named. Harry's shoes crunched across the ground. "Should have brought my cloak," Harry acknowledged. "How far is it?"
"eh, far enough that we're taking a shortcut," Sans said. For a second time, he took hold of Harry's hand, passing behind a tree. When his vision cleared, he was, again, coming up alongside a stone house that looked eerily identical to the first one. This one, though, seemed to be rather more colorful than stark grey stone... though the dying tree in front didn't fill him with confidence. It also was an area that was distinctly more cave like than anything had yet seen in the underground.
Sans ducked inside the house, emerging a moment later with a ceramic flowerpot that he tucked inside his jacket somewhere. "might not need it. but we might," he said. He led Harry through a maze of ruins, past some fake looking spikes, and down a really long corridor. The room they stopped in was dark, with only a narrow strip of what might have been sunlight coming in from the next room.
"next room's the sunlit room," Sans said. "you should probably wait here, though. i think there's two ways this could go. he might just wait for me to talk to him. let's hope he does that." Sans's eyelights dimmed slightly. "otherwise, he probably comes to you out here. so you might want to be ready to defend yourself until I get back."
"Alright," Harry said, pulling out his wand. Sans, and the flowerpot disappeared through the next passage. But he had only been gone for what might have been a minute when...
"Howdy!"
Harry's wand was at the ready as he spun around. From behind him a large golden flower had sprouted. And it was looking at him, with black beady eyes and a smiling face. He'd seen an image of Flowey, Sans had warned him, but the look of the flower still took Harry by surprise.
"I'm Flowey. Flowey the flower!" he introduced himself. His voice was the highest pitched, almost nasal, voice Harry had ever heard. "You must be new down here, aren'tcha?" the flower asked him.
"Actually," Harry said. "We were looking for you," he tried to begin.
"You were?" the flower asked. "Golly! You must know I'm the right flower to show you how things work around here!" And Harry could feel it. While Frisk's use of soul magic had been a gentle request, barely noticeable, even when you were expecting it, Flowey's felt like a demand, and Harry could feel his soul being dragged out against his will.
"Sans!" Harry cried out in alarm. "Flowey's out here!"
The flower paused momentarily. "Smiley trashbag is down here? With a human? Guess I need to get your soul before he comes back to find me." Around him, five things that looked like pure white seeds floated in the air, before homing in on Harry.
He dodged four of them, crying out in pain as the fifth one found its mark. "Asriel!" he cried out, "please, stop!"
Flowey glared at him, which was actually a pretty odd look. "You think I'm going to stop because you know that name? I may have been that person once, but I'm not him any more. And I'm not going to be him ever again, am I? So I'm just going to take what I can get." He fired more seeds at Harry, another one striking Harry's soul.
"Asriel, Frisk is here! She went to get.."
Flowey froze. In a completely different, almost childlike human voice he asked, "Frisk is here? She promised me! She was going to leave and live her life. With our... with her family." His voice reverted to the high nasal Flowey voice. "I guess we weren't really friends."
"No! She found a way to..."
Flowey fired more seeds at Harry, and he dove out of the way, wracking his brain for spells he could use to simply defend against the hostile flower. "Obscuro!" he cried, aiming a blinding jinx at Flowey.
Sensing the oncoming magic, Flowey simply pulled his body into the ground, and it passed harmlessly over his head. He popped back up, looking surprised. "A wizard, huh? I wonder how powerful your soul would be." A ring of seeds surrounded Harry.
"She's gone to get your soul! From the past! You could be Asirel again!" Harry cried out.
"My soul?" sneered Flowey. "My soul shattered with my true form a long time ago."
All of a sudden, a ring of ethereal white bones surrounded Harry, deflecting the onrushing seeds. "might want to listen to the young wizard, flowey. why settle for one soul when you can take a shot a seven. and your own as well," Sans said, appearing almost from nowhere.
"She found a way to retrieve it from the past, Asriel. She's waiting for you," Harry added.
Flowey stared at them, saying nothing, but whether he was starting to believe them, or just afraid of Sans, Harry wasn't actually sure.
"so i got a deal for you. come with me," Sans produced the flower pot. "and you'll get a crack at your body again. i can promise that to you," he knelt down and looked the flower right in the beady eyes. "May Papyrus not forgive me if I'm lying."
"You're serious. Fine... I'll go with you," Flowey said. He was halfway underground, before Sans interrupted with a tutting noise.
"nah. you'll come with me," and quick as lightning, he pulled the indignant flower out of the ground and placed him in the flowerpot.
"let's go," Sans told Harry, as Flowey sputtered his protests.
When Frisk and Hermione returned to the present, Sans and Harry were still both gone.
When they'd retrieved Chara's body from Sans's machine, Dumbledore performed some sort of charm over it. He then levitated it onto a conjured stretcher, and taken it to the cave mouth, leaving them in the care of Mr. Kairos. When he returned, he was empty handed. "I have sent young Chara ahead to Hogwarts. Madame Pomfrey will need some time to repair the damage buttercup poison directly does to the body. Now, may I see the soul you retrieved?"
Hermione held out the bottle, and Dumbledore took it into hand, examining it carefully. He looked from the bottle to Frisk and back again. As they did, Frisk began to wonder about that soul. She remembered thoughts she had, what Asgore had said a few months ago, what Asriel had told Frisk about her, how she hated humanity.
How deep had that hatred run? Frisk didn't know, and she wasn't getting an answer.
When Sans came climbing back up into the room, about half an hour later, everyone but Opal had grown bored. Hermione had pulled out textbooks to study, Ginny had engaged a few others in exploding snap, and Ron was pacing nervously.
Sans placed the flower pot in the center of the room, and stepped back with Harry, Kurt, Hermione and Dumbledore near the entrance. Flowey's eyes took everyone in. "Who's all this?" he asked, and Frisk recognized he was using Asriel's voice.
"People who've become my friends during my year at Hogwarts. People who've had the chance to learn about you, to meet our mom, and have learned that you're down here, cursed to be soulless. They're here to give hope," Frisk said, stepping forward, kneeling down to talk to the flower at eye level.
"There's no hope for me. I'm not taking a soul from them... Frisk?" he began, then he saw the light that was shining in her soul. It was a bright, red, determined light. And with it, a separate, silver light. "That's... that's a monster soul. Did you really..."
"It's your soul, Asriel," Frisk said, as the others stepped forward, to create a circle around him. "Take what you need."
Flowey said nothing. He turned to each of them in turn, not daring to believe what he was hearing.
Ron, with his orange soul ready to speak his mind, and show his bravery (as long as spiders weren't involved), nodded. "We can do this, we're ready."
Neville, last to volunteer, but only because he was the last to discover the task, and his just yellow soul. "It's only fair. You were brave enough to help someone you didn't know, right? How can we do less?"
Ginny, her green soul showing her kindness. Kindness enough to befriend a lost, lonely adopted child on her first day at Hogwarts. Twice. "No one should be alone, and you're not."
Opal, with a light blue soul patient enough to try to befriend the unfriendable... and patient enough to see Frisk on the broom for as long as it took. "It's alright, we know what we're risking. It's worth it."
Luna, her faith and willingness to be true to herself shining with her dark blue soul. "You need help, right? Daddy says it's never bad to ask for help."
Last, but not least, Stephen, his purple soul displaying his value for setting his sights high, and the perseverance to stick with it. "You can do this. We trust you."
One at a time, Flowey sent out an almost tentacle like vine to each of the souls around him. It felt like a pinprick piercing Frisk's chest and her soul. Around her came soft mumbles of pain. It hurt, even if nobody wanted to admit it. She could feel it, pulling on her soul, and it was a draining sensation.
For a moment, Frisk's vision went white. Then, what might have been minutes, or merely moments later, Frisk came to.
Flowey was gone.
In his place stood Asriel, wearing the same green and gold striped shirt she had seen him in so many times before. The others were staring at him. Frisk could feel him calling for his soul, and she let it go, joyously. But before it vanished inside him, she could see a surrounding coat of color, a small piece of each other person's soul, supporting it, keeping him from ever having to turn into Flowey again. And, in that instant, she knew. This wasn't damage, these pieces, given freely, would be replaced. Healed, by the souls they came from.
Asirel stumbled, unused to his feet, and fell unceremoniously to the ground.
He was crying.
Frisk, stumbling herself, hurried over to him. She helped lift him back to his feet, his green eyes shining. "I was so tired," he said, "of being a flower. And I thought I was going to be one forever. And... I can feel. I can feel each and every one of you. I had forgotten what it meant to feel others." He turned and clasped Frisk in a furry embrace. "Thank you."
Luna approached first, tapping the sobbing monster child on the shoulder. He released Frisk to look at her outstretched arms, and took the offered hug. The others came too, and though most of them seemed to expect a mere handshake, Asriel was having none of it, he embraced them all.
After that all, Frisk introduced him to Kurt and Professor Dumbledore, explaining their roles.
"And you," Asriel said, addressing Sans, "Do you even know how much of an apology I owe you, Sans?"
Sans shrugged, but he looked happy. "pretty big one, i think. my next burger's on you. but after that, don't worry about it. pretty hard living without a soul, so i can cut you slack. for me, anyway."
"Thank you," Asriel replied.
"I think it is time we returned to Hogwarts," the headmaster said. "There are, after all, people waiting for us there."
"I know..." Frisk began. "People?" she asked hesitantly. Could it be?
"Mom... Dad!" whispered Asriel, and he tried to hurry toward the Underground's exit, but he still wasn't used to his feet, and tripped a second time.
Frisk helped him up, and they all headed out into the midday sun, ready to take the trip back to Hogwarts.