For somebody who could not properly hold a pencil in his hands, Leo was excellent at shading with the pencil that he held in his teeth. Frisk was impressed, and kept looking over from her work to look at his with wide eyes, the picture of Edogeny coming to life as the monster bent over it laboriously. Politely, and in kind, he would then glance over to look at her work with a smile. Frisk was glad that she had decided to enlist his help after all; these pictures wouldn't look half as good without it.
They both worked without words on that evening, dinner eaten, homework done, and the setting sun shining through the living room window. Leo could not speak when he was drawing, and Frisk wasn't fond of talking when she didn't need to, anyway. She was in the zone now, trying to get a picture done that she should have done ages ago of Toriel her adoptive mother was napping upstairs. She ground her colored pencil to a stub, trying to get it in all of the hem of her robe, turning it a thick and rich color of blue.
She hadn't finished yet when she heard Leo give a cry as he dropped his pencil, "I'm done!" Edogeny's picture lay finished on the floor and with his foot he scooted it towards the pile that they'd been growing next to their little workstation.
"It's not a race!" Frisk said; immediately afterwards, she said, "Buuuuut I'mdonetoo!" And she threw her pencil down on the wood floorboards.
They both laughed when it bounced.
As Frisk handed off her picture for him to shade, Leo asked, "What's next?"
The child looked at the clock. 7:30. Leo was going to need to go home soon, and she had a bedtime at 8:30 when it was a school night. They wouldn't have time for a whole lot more. So in response, she picked up her phone and started to slide through the pictures, "Let's not do one by memory. Let me see..." A lot of the ones that she had captured from last Sunday and today look harder than she wanted to deal with right now. Eventually she found herself scrolling to the pictures of the Final Froggit "cloister" and she frowned; although she didn't remember clearly, there shouldn't be any new pictures beyond these ones. Still, she sideswiped.
Leo dropping his pencil again when he heard Frisk give a loud shriek. "!?" She had jumped up, coming onto her knees, her eyes wide as she stared at the cell phone cradled in both her hands. "What is it?"
"Uhh, uhhh," Frisk looked from Leo to the phone, and then did it again. "Uhh, I..." She came onto her feet. "I need to... Check something!"
"Huh?" Leo also stood up. "What is it?"
"I gotta go-" Frisk looked towards the door, mouth stretched wide in a grimace.
"Uh. Do ya need me to come with?" Leo asked.
"Yeah, you c-" Frisk started to say, and then she stopped when she looked at the clock and at the stairwell; it led to a hallway of blue bedrooms, and Toriel was sleeping in one of those bedrooms. "Actually, you should stay here. If – if Toriel comes down, tell her I'll be right back, okay?"
Leo wrinkled his nose. "Um, okay."
Taking a final look at the cell phone, Frisk dashed to the door and closed it with a slam, calling out as she did, "I'll be right back!"
For somebody who was so messy and vulgar most of the time, the child he had thrown his lot in with kept very clean quarters.
...Although to call the burrow that they had created out of the ground on the other side of the river "quarters" was stretching it a bit. Still, it wasn't as bad as he was expecting. It was a very large hole, wide and deep with enough space for three small people, and it looked like it had taken hours, if not days, to dig. When asked how they managed to do it, Frisk just glared at him and Flowey offered, popping out of the ground, that they had had "help."
The hole was dug into the side of a small hilly part of the ground, somewhat reminding Sans of a "hobbit hole" from that movie that Frisk forced him to watch, if such holes had no doors and no furniture and went just far enough to shelter from the wind. Along the floor, Frisk had set wooden planks that were now covered over with frost. Without either of them speaking another word, once Sans was fully inside the child had started chipping the ice off with a sharp edge of the pan.
In the very back there were even more planks, these free of ice, set against the wall. He studied them while Frisk chipped, the child not responding to anything else he said. Each plank had a name inscribed on it in marker; under each name, there was a series of tallies.
The names were all familiar. Sans read "Undyne," "Toriel," "Papyrus," "Dogamy," "Greater Dog," "Aaron," and countless more, enough that some of the planks were layered on top of each other. With that in mind, the tallies were a little bit disturbing. Finding "Sans" shuffled near the back, he saw only two tallies. Under Undyne's, seven. Most of the other monsters named on the planks only had one or two tallies, like his own.
Under Papyrus' name ... Were too many tallies for Sans to count at a glance. The plank was almost filled up.
"papyrus give you a hard time?" He asked, looking over at the child. They weren't even halfway done with getting the ice off; in response to the question, they stared hard at their task and scowled.
"...nah, it's okay," he said, looking back to the plank. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty... "he gave me a hard time too."
At this they looked up with confusion. "Your... Papyrus?"
"my-?" Twenty-five, thirty... He snorted, shaking his head, "no, no, i mean this one. i, uh, ran into him shortly after i woke up here. he tried to beat the tar out of me."
Flowey then appeared between the two of them, shivering while he spoke, "He did that? Boy, that must been a harsh introduction to this world!"
Still chipping, Frisk was smiling. "You caught him in a bad mood."
Sans didn't like that smile, especially not on that face. "yeah... does that... happen a lot? the beatings?"
The child shrugged and the smile faded. "Sans says that they're fairly regular. If he doesn't get out of the way when Papyrus is in a bad mood."
"... that's awful."
"He deserves it!" Flowey snapped, and then he cowered back when he caught Sans glaring at him. "I-I-I mean, they've always been picking on each other since before Frisk even came- Sans and Papyrus- t-that Sans and Papyrus, not yours. Papyrus wasn't even big enough to fight back until recently. And I know that if Sans could u-u-use magic, then h-he would be..."
"You always take Papyrus' side," Frisk growled, and the flower trembled.
Sans was staring at them both. The human had no interest in answering that stare, so again it was up to the flower. He said, softly, "It's just the way that things are here." Then he added, looking carefully at the skeleton's face, "But... It isn't that way in your world is it?"
Sans shook his head. "no. it isn't at all like that where i'm from."
"M-must be nice..."
He didn't have a reply to that for a minute. Yes, it was nice. It was so much nicer, the Sans from this world had decided to take it for himself. Sans' expression hardened. "and now that guy who you say picks on his little bro is over there with mine," he said at last.
If he was the type to get angry over little things, Sans would have been enraged to hear Frisk giggling from where they were kneeling, following that statement. "Sucks for your Papyrus," was all they said.
Flowey shook once more; if not for the fact that he started to talk again, Sans would have said aloud that he kept shaking like a leaf, "Oh! W-w-w-well it might not be that bad. Li-like I said, he can't use his magic."
"yeah..." one eye widened, the brow of his skull raising, at that. "how exactly do ya figure that?"
"I know," Flowey said, smiling weakly, "Fr-f-from experience. He can't do any attacks. Mental block."
He wanted to ask what experience that was exactly, but with a sigh Sans let it go. "i wish that his papyrus had that mental block. have a bad feeling i'm going to run into him again when i go back to his house."
"Why go back there?"
He grinned wryly at the flower. "i can't figure out what relationship this guy has with this world's alphys without rifling through his stuff, now can i?"
"Alphys didn't mention Sans when I talked to her," Frisk spoke up.
"oh, you talked to her?" Sans asked, and then the scowl returned to the child's face. "how far did you get, anyway? i was wonderin' that since you're staying all the way back here."
Frisk didn't reply. After a moment, they brushed hair out of their eyes and murmured, "If you want to avoid another beating from Papyrus, you should probably learn how to act like this world's Sans."
"i kinda got the impression that he would beat me up no matter which sans i was."
"A lot of people are going to beat you up when they realize that you aren't the real Sans," they snapped. "You want to get everyone suspicious?"
The skeleton just shrugged, and she huffed, going back to the chipping that was starting to make her hands look red. Watching her work for a little while, and then looking back at the Papyrus Plank, Sans scratched his head. "well okay. i'll bite. can you tell me about this world and its sans?"
As it turned out, there was a lot to tell. Sans' spirits deflated with every word.
Blue Sans was at least a better listener than her own. In this case that was a very good thing; if she had kept getting interrupted every other sentence the way it would've gone with her Sans, she would have just given up and stopped talking altogether. Still, it made her feel a little uneasy, having somebody pay this much attention. She became more and more aware of the gaps in her own facts. Flowey had even disappeared before she began, so he wouldn't be chiming in with his mysteriously-gotten knowledge. She drew, as best as she could, on what Sans and other chatty monsters had relayed to her over the weeks.
The law of this underground world was "kill or be killed".
It wasn't just a statement of pessimism. Monsters in this kingdom were encouraged to kill each other, or to at least kill something, by the rewards that were given to those who were capable of it. Killing others was how monsters grew strong- at least, as far as she could understand, it was the fastest way- so there was a clamor to become strong, always. In such a world, everybody who wasn't a relative was looking to pick a fight with you, to kill you and become strong in the process. If someone was strong enough they would get everything. Job opportunities in the royal guard, for one thing, and money from the king- she assumed. This was a law that the king of the monsters, and the strongest one of all, had put in place centuries ago.
"why would asgore write such a stupid rule?" Blue Sans had said, in one of the few times that he interrupted.
"More food and junk for everybody else, obviously," Frisk had told him. There was no overcrowding problem even in this dark enclosed place.
This kind of rule also applied to humans. Almost every monster underground wanted to be the one to kill a human for their king. That carried more rewards than anything else. After his son died, Asgore's hatred of humans was more apparent than ever before, inflaming a conviction to finally break the barrier and bring his people to the surface, once he had the power to lay them all to waste. For this, he needed seven human souls. He only had six.
Blue Sans told Frisk that he knew this part already, and she'd scowled, "Oh fucking fine, then."
In Snowdin the king's "kill or be killed" law was also in effect, although not a lot of the monsters were strong enough to even carry it out. Just the suspicion of violence lived in every monster instead, hateful eyes watching each other for the day someone tried to pick a fight. In the capital, New Home, it was ten times worse and ten times more violent. So the strongest monster living in Snowdin, Grillby's "bouncer" aside, was Papyrus the Terrible- Blue Sans snorted when she said that name, and for once she didn't disagree with that. He was a member of the Royal Guard already, along with the canine unit.
They were all looking for her.
That was where she finished when he interrupted again, "not sans, though? he wasn't looking to turn you in?"
"... ..." Frisk sighed, roughly and heavily, before saying, "Course not. Would I have gotten so close- well, not you, but to him- I mean when I thought that you were him- if- if he-! ...Yeah you know what I mean, retard."
"i guess," Blue Sans shrugged. "so. why is that?"
Now it was Frisk's turn to shrug, looking at the ground. She had finally finished chipping off the ice from the planks of wood, and now her hands were sore. "Buncha reasons." She looked up again and squinted. "You know, you're a long way off from passing as him."
He didn't look impressed with the topic change. But he left it, murmuring, "ya think so?"
"Well for one thing, you don't even look like him anymore," she sneered. "And you never sound like him."
Frowning, at least with his eyes, Blue Sans reached a hand to his teeth and shook his head, "feels the same to me. maybe nobody else will notice." She gave him the most condescending look that she could muster, and only said in response was, while lazily winking again, "but that couldn't have been what tipped you off at the start. what was it?"
"..." Now this, she had to think about, her thumb pressed against her lips. "Buncha things. Like..." She looked back at Sans and shrugged, mumbling, "even when your face look the same, your eyes were different. Always those pupils. My Sans has just one big red and yellow eye, almost all the time. It's really badass."
For a second, Blue Sans' eyes changed to reflect what she described, only one socket filled by the iris flashing blue and yellow. "he was like this all the time? that sounds exhausting."
"That's what makes it so badass!"
"uh, what else?"
"Well your voice too. You sound too relaxed. Like some kind of sleepy smart-aleck."
"that so?"
She snorted, "My Sans lives in a hellhole and he knows it. You sound like you..." she gestured sharply, searching for the words. "Like you don't know it yet. PLUS," he looked like he was going to talk again, "You called me 'kiddo'? What the fuck was that?"
He blinked. "well. what am i supposed to call you?"
"He calls me twerp. Pipsqueak. Uh... rugrat sometimes? 'Little shit' if he's in a bad mood."
Now Blue Sans looked angry, if that was possible with that smile, "i'm not calling you 'little shit'."
"I'm not saying you HAVE to, that's just one-" She sighed again, roughly, frustrated. "Whatever, you fucking prude."
It was cold in the burrow. Blue Sans paused, thought that statement over, and then grinned at her as his posture relaxed. "... heheheh. do you even know what 'prude' means?"
She didn't. Frisk's face turned red. "Never mind! Another thing is, Sans was helping me whenever I was out here in Snowdin. And in other places, sometimes." Blue Sans' eyes widened with some surprise. Frisk added, "But no one else knew that. So don't tell anyone. ...You know, maybe you should be writing this stuff down."
"mmnah," Blue Sans shook his head, closing his eyes. "sounds like too much for me to remember. i'll just wing it." Much to Frisk's disbelief, he then sat down and put his hands behind his head, leaning back on the rough wall of the burrow. "but first, i'm gonna take a nap."
"What?"
He cracked one eye open a fraction. "it's nighttime. what, don't you sleep?"
"Not when I have something important to do."
"relax, kid, i'm taking a break," he said, closing his eye again. "tomorrow i'll go to papyrus' house and see what i can find out. if we're lucky, other me might have left a few schematics lying around and i won't have to go to hotland at all."
"Then shouldn't you be checking that out right now?" Frisk asked.
Blue Sans didn't reply, relaxing where he lay.
"... Can't you teleport?"
"...zzzz...zzzz..."
The Blue Sans is obviously faking snoring.
Frisk shook her head, straightening up.
Although it did sound fake, Blue Sans didn't move even when she poked him with the sharp end of her pan multiple times. The child chewed on the side of her mouth in slow irritation.
What phrase had her Sans taught her before? "You're just dicking around, retard!" She called to him, watching for a change in his expression. There was none. He continued what he was doing, whether it was "sleeping" or sleeping, peacefully. "Didn't you say you want to go home? Hey!"
No change. Whatever happened, it had happened fast.
Frisk sat in place for a while, chewing the sore insides of her mouth, watching this person who was so unlike her Sans.
Even if there were, after all, some similarities. She uttered a low growl that nobody else heard, feeling her legs started to go numb under her.
With her blood rushing and her irritation high, as well as with the cold coming in outside and all of the thoughts, intrusive and her own, crawling in her head, and then... the sick feeling that gripped her heart in an instant- Frisk couldn't sleep the way that he was. She suddenly wasn't tired. Instead, the child got back on her feet and crawled out of the burrow. "i'm taking a break," he'd said. Well, she knew what that meant. There was a nasty scowl on the girl's face, and she held her pan tight.
"Take your break, then." Frisk said, and started off over the snow, watching the other side of the river for when the first buildings of Snowdin would appear beyond all the traps. "I'll find out what he did myself."
Oh. I guess it's off to Papyrus' house.
Papyrus and Sans' house loomed in front of her; although it was peaceful and quiet that night, the child wasn't looking at the house when she approached. She kept looking rather, back at her phone with continuous, anxious glances. At the picture that was displayed to her; occasionally she would have to press a button on the phone to keep it lit, as she just couldn't stop looking. She was trying to find out the trick.
Trick or no trick, her heart was pounding. So Frisk pounded on the door instead. For a brief second she wondered if Papyrus was even awake. But that was a dumb thing to wonder. Of course he was awake. She'd never seen him sleep once. Still, it was taking him a while to answer the door, a while that she really did not appreciate. She took another glance towards her phone.
What she hadn't accounted for was the possibility that someone else was also awake. The door opened, and the next thing Frisk knew, she was staring at Sans.
Although Sans looked very different. Frisk looked from the phone to his face once, twice, three times. All while the monster stood there with some surprise, blinking at her. "uhhh... what's up?"
What she saw on the phone was reflected in reality. Or maybe it was the opposite. On the day that she had taken his picture, and she had noticed that he was acting strange, her phone captured the likeness of a skeleton with a perma-grin filled with sharp teeth, a skeleton with harsher eyes. One of his teeth in the picture was made of gold, and now standing in the doorway a gold tooth also shone at her on the real Sans. His face had changed to be completely unrecognizable, at least as unrecognizable as short skeleton monsters could be from each other.
And so now Frisk couldn't think of anything to say, even as he was standing there waiting.
So Sans spoke to her first, his expression hardening. "... what's with that face, twerp?"
She didn't know what to say. She didn't know what this meant. She stammered out, her voice hoarse, "Wh-where is P-Papyrus?" But then suddenly she wondered if she really wanted to see him. If she took a picture of Papyrus with her phone, would he change too? Become ten times scarier?
"inside," Sans said coolly. His grin had become menacing. "like i said, what's up?"
Frisk's heart was beating harder than ever. The last time she had SAVED was only two weeks ago, but those were two weeks that she wasn't eager to repeat. And if she did repeat them, then what would happen for this...?
Sans is blocking the way.
He came down from the front step, and Frisk backed up several steps herself. "you look like you've just seen a ghost, frisk," he said, still grinning huge in that menacing, toothy way. "why're you holding your phone like that?"
"I-I wanted... who... why..." She struggled for words. "What happened... To you?"
"what's that supposed to-" Sans cut himself off mid-sentence by quickly closing the distance between them; he grabbed the phone out of the child's hands and pushed her back. While Frisk recovered her balance, he looked at the picture and then back at her. Studying her expression. "hahah. now that you mention it, though, i do seem to have changed recently."
"I- I'm gonna go visit with Papyrus," Frisk tried to say as she ran to the door, but he grabbed her sleeve and pulled her back. His fingertips, his fingertips looked so sharp, they were poking holes in the fabric.
Sans took a deep breath, still grinning at her. And then another one. A quicker one. And then he took a fourth breath. As though the air had gotten thinner. While he was doing that, Frisk tried to pull herself back towards the door and in response, he yanked hard on her sleeve. She wanted to tell him to stop, that he was going to stretch the sweater, but-
Sans said, in the kind of voice that she knew she had never heard before, "fucking seriously? three days? that's the longest I can go for? idiot. fuck," his breaths were accompanied by the curse, "fuck, fuck, fuck." His eyes changed, glaring at Frisk. One socket went black, and the other one was nearly filled by a bright red eye with a pinprick black pupil. "fucking phones."
A chill went through her entire body. "Um..."
"lucky for me that you're stupid, i guess," Sans said, still breathing awkwardly. "amirite? hahaha fuck."
Her only hope was trying to wiggle out of the sweater, but when she tried to do that he let go and grasped her arm instead. More chills were shooting through her body. She took a deep breath, "Hel-"
You called out for help.
But Sans was faster.
Sans' red eye flashing yellow, the two of them disappeared.
Next Chapter: Papyrus the Terrible
