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DAY TO DAY
Chapter 7: Yourself
Try as you might you continue to be yourself.
The flower was gone.
Asgore didn't question how or why it had disappeared – possibly it had been lost when being sent back from the Core laboratory, or possibly some careless young monster had just picked it on a visit to the garden. Alphys hadn't been answering Asgore's calls lately and there was always a steady stream of guests in his home, someone stopping by for some tea and a chat and a chance to feel the sun on their face, so he never bothered to pry. Still, that flower had been like a companion to him over the years; sometimes, when he had stepped into the garden, the breeze had bent it in his direction, and he'd liked to imagine it was saying hello. He decided that was why, whenever he stared too long at that small scrub of earth where it had once stood, he felt faintly unwell, a melancholy that coated his insides like tar.
Still, there were plenty of others, and all of them were in need of watering. He finished off his latest cup of tea, picked up his watering can, gave it a brief, musical shake, and got to work.
It was a nice day; he'd just made a note in his journal, before grabbing his can and going downstairs like always. But unusually quiet. No visitors, no calls, not even the usual daily report from Undyne, and she normally called like clockwork. He'd thought about popping out for a bit, checking to see how she was doing, but then he'd decided to just leave her to her own devices. Children grew up, after all; it had been a good many years since she'd first run into his throne room and attempted to drop-kick him in the back. Between the Royal Guard and that perpetually exuberant young skeleton she kept telling him about, she had her own little garden that needed tending.
He avoided looking at the covered throne in the corner, same as always. He blocked out the barrier's heartbeat, same as always. The pollen smelled sweet and the earth lay rich, same as always. Birds were singing. Flowers were blooming. Water droplets clung to their petals iridescent as pearls.
His ears perked up. Someone was walking down the corridor outside. Small feet, but steady steps, footfalls innocuous as a ticking clock. He smiled and tipped out the watering can again.
The footsteps crunched and rustled as the visitor stepped into the garden, stopped in the plants behind him. He could feel their gaze on his back.
"Oh, is someone there?" he said. "Just a moment! I have almost finished watering these flowers."
He emptied the can, gave it a last shake, and set it carefully on the ground beside him. He turned around.
"Howdy! How can I…"
The words stopped dead in his throat. He felt his smile flee. He nearly tripped over the can as he took a step back.
The child looked exhausted. Eyes heavy-lidded, hair a tangled mess, shoulders slightly stooped as if bearing up invisible weight. Silent, unsmiling, his clothes hanging on him like sacks; the breeze briefly pushed them to the side so that the harsh angles of the bones beneath poked through. His only weapon a thin stick held delicately in one hand like a conductor's rod, and not a hint of malice in his expression. Yet there was a potency about him. The world seemed to distort in his presence, time and space creaking around where he stood like a lead ball on a rubber sheet, and even all the flowers briefly bent in his direction as if welcoming him home.
But Asgore noticed none of that, at first. What he noticed was the deep blue and purple of the child's shirt – except that he was knee-deep in the flowers, surrounded by their jolly gold and green, and for a moment his shocked eyes briefly swapped those colors, turned the world photo-negative, so the clothes were gold and green and those shut eyes were wide open and that grave expression and pale face became smiling wide, rosy-cheeked, and time broke loose in his head, it snapped from end to end like elastic pulled too tight, and as it did he remembered it all, the new child, the happier times, the sickbeds, the disappearance, the dust on the ground, the tea all gone cold, the bedrooms lying empty and the basement ever more full, the days he'd met the other fallen ones and then carried those canisters to the cavern beyond like a pallbearer, those terrible days and all the terrible days in between, all of them made heavy and cold by the weight of anticipation for a day that he didn't want and couldn't hold back no matter how hard he tried, the day that was today. In an instant he fell through the expanse of those long years and crashed back into the present, where the child was still watching him, either not noticing or not impressed by his shock – except that he saw sympathy in that face, and something else. Expectation. The seventh child, waiting for him.
Asgore said, "Oh."
And the future reached out, and grabbed hold.
He remembered the future.
He remembered how you never know it's coming until it's there, and then it's there.
Winter had come and wiped the land clean. The snow here was recent and unmarred, and it made everything uniform – the earth's contours flattened, every blade of grass buried, the snags of tree roots sleeping deep beneath the white. The only marks were his footprints, deep and even-spaced, stretching from the horizon to this bare wooden park bench under a gaunt and leafless tree. Viewed from a distance, the prints looked like markings on paper – like punctuation, an interminable pause.
It was a strange place to arrange a meeting. But the other children's families had chosen stranger.
He gathered his coat around him as the wind picked up and bit through all his layers – the coat, his clothes, the pelt underneath. He'd melted the snow around the bench with a clap of his hands so he'd have somewhere to sit, but he set no more fires. If someone were to emerged from that horizon, following his footsteps, and saw him sitting alone and wreathed in flame, it would make a poor first impression. So he suffered the chill, hands on his knees, his hair unkempt in the wind.
On the edge of the wind he thought he could smell tea, sickly sweet. He stared at the footprints he'd left and noted the snowy spaces between them, and how the wind teased the loose snow in eddies and sent it drifting like dust. The flat disc of the sun strained through the clouds overhead like a circle of blank glass. A gale whipped through the tree's upper reaches and rattled like a pneumoniac's breath. And as the tree shivered, the splayed fingers of its branches cast their twitching shadows around him, clutching and desperate.
He took all these sensations in stride. He flipped through them like playing cards. He didn't notice the crunching footfalls behind him, or the leaner shadow that approached and merged with his own. He faced forward and watched the slithering breeze sift powdery snow into his marks he'd left behind. In time it would erase all sign of him, only for new signs to be left and left again.
"Dad?"
The voice behind him hesitant and small. Asgore turned around.
Asriel there. Beneath the shadow of the leafless tree. Bundled against the cold, huddled into his clothing, round wet eyes staring out. A gleaming red canister held between his hands like a lantern. Ankle-deep in the snow and the snow marked by his weight but no prints behind him or before him or anywhere around, like he'd dropped out from the sky, like he'd come from nowhere at all.
Asgore's breathing creaked. The landscape tilted and spun before his eyes. Asriel's expression turned panicked.
"Oh, no, please don't freak out! It's just me! Really just me, I mean, I know this looks weird, but I didn't mean to sneak up on you, I asked Sans to drop me off because I thought it'd be quicker than driving and I guess he missed the target or something…hey, Sans, tell him that you-" He turned around and saw no one there. "Wait, he was just…" He ran to look behind the tree, ran back around to look behind the tree from the other side, then stopped, and groaned, and rested his head against the trunk. "I really hate that guy sometimes."
When Asgore had at last confronted Frisk in the barrier cavern, awash in warped twilight with the six human souls standing by like witnesses, the events that followed had been rushed and confused. Toriel returning with Undyne and the rest, and then choking vines, and a twisted but somehow familiar voice, and the cavern mobbed with monsters and a blinding flash of light – and when it had faded, the barrier was gone, and the cavern mostly taken up by an enormous tree that had Frisk and Asriel sleeping among its roots like strange, fallen fruit, all of it impossibly alive. Asgore had picked up Asriel and held him for what felt like years, waiting to wake up. Part of him was still waiting.
"Asriel," he said, with effort. "What on earth are you-"
"I brought you something."
Asriel slogged back through the snow and around to the other side of the bench. His worried face twitched for a moment when he noticed Asgore's overcoat. It was a voluminous brown thing stiff and thick as a welcome mat, and the first time he'd seen it, Asriel, who still had a somewhat erratic grip on his emotions, had laughed himself into hysterics; once he'd managed to calm down, he'd said that the coat made his father look like a giant potato. But this time he just shook his head for a moment and held up the canister. It was actually a Thermos, lid screwed on tight, its surface fogged with condensation.
"It's freezing out here," he said. "And I didn't know how long you'd be out, so…"
"How did you know I was out here at all?"
"Oh. Right. Um, so, Mom told me what you were doing, about trying to find the humans' families to apologize and all, so I told Frisk, and then Frisk told me that Sans told him, and we talked about it for a while and Frisk told me that I should talk to you about it, because I-"
"All right, all right, consider me educated." He sighed and took the canister from Asriel's hands. "I'm just surrounded by conspiracies in this family, aren't I?"
"At least we didn't climb a mountain this time, right?"
"Yes, I suppose there's that. Come and sit down."
Asriel hoisted himself up on the bench as Asgore popped the Thermos open. Out drifted the smell of sweet lemons. His face lit up.
"Well, I'll be. I thought I was fresh out of this stuff."
"You are, but Mom had a little bit left in her pantry." Asriel tugged on his scarf – Toriel had knitted it for him, deep purple shot through with stars, in metallic thread that shimmered in the cold afternoon light. "This really is the last of it, though. End of an era, haha."
He sipped and smacked his lips. "Not bad. Still nowhere close to mine, of course, but another few years and you'll be as good as your dad."
"Mom made it, actually." The Thermos froze halfway to Asgore's mouth. "I mean, me and Frisk asked her to do it, but she didn't need much convincing, for what it's worth."
"Well. How nice." And then, much quieter, "Please never tell her what I just said."
"Secret's safe with me. She wouldn't be mad, though. She can't make your tea and you can't make her pies."
"I'll get it right one of these days, I swear."
"You could always come to dinner someday and just try hers again." Asriel looked down at his swinging feet, kneading his hands together anxiously. "I don't think she'd mind seeing you again. You know, she and Sans are really-"
"Asriel. It's fine." He smiled and ruffled Asriel's head. "Really, it is. What your mother gets up to is her own business."
"Yeah, but-"
"I'll admit I spent a fair bit of time wishing things were the way they used to be. But not just with Toriel. With…well, everything." He took another deep drink of the tea. "But it's passed. Now all I'm concerned with is taking care of you and Frisk. Which is challenging enough on its own, trust me."
Asriel said nothing.
"That said, I don't approve of everything she and Sans have been up to," he added. "They appear to have permanently damaged Frisk's sense of humor, for one thing."
Asriel remained silent. His head hung low. The hollow wind and rattling tree provided Asgore's only answer.
Asgore cleared his throat. "So…you know why I'm here."
"Yeah," Asriel said. "That's why I'm confused."
"How so?"
The wind plucked at Asriel's scarf, his ears, the tuft of fur on his head. It was the only movement about him. He sat so rigid that he barely seemed to breathe.
"Mom worries about you," he said at last.
"Toriel worries about everyone. It's one of her best-"
"So do I. So does Frisk, even though he tries not to show it. And if anyone else knew what you were doing, they'd be worried, too. So why aren't you?"
Now it was Asgore's turn to stay silent.
"This is dangerous, Dad. I mean, we're just sitting here, and any minute whoever you're waiting for might show up and j-just…" His voice shook and he took a sudden, fierce breath, and let it out, and spoke again, calmer. "I know all the things you did after me and Chara…you know. And I know it was for the best."
"It might have turned out well, but that doesn't excuse it, Asriel." Asgore's voice was stern. "I should not have to tell you that."
"But they might not even care. You know how dangerous humans can be when they're angry, Dad. So do I. None of us want you to-" His voice cracked again, and he sighed in disgust and covered his face, waiting for his breath to steady. "I'm not gonna try to talk you out of it. I just don't want you to get hurt. That's all."
"I understand."
"Then why aren't you worried?" He lowered his hands and his stare lanced through Asgore. "Shouldn't you be at least a little scared, after everything that's happened?"
Asgore bent down a little, tapping the canister contemplatively. The wind teased at his hair, sifted more snow into his trail of footprints leading into the horizon. The skies had started to darken, from the color of slate to the color of iron.
"I dearly wish I could say something like 'maybe you'll understand when you're older,'" he said. "But I don't believe that would pass muster with you, would it?"
Asriel smirked at that, despite himself. "Yeah, I think that ship's sailed."
"Mostly I think about something one of the fallen children told me," he said. "A very philosophical young man, in his way. He made it clear that I'd be punished for my actions. Someday, somehow. It stuck with me, I suppose. I waited for that day to come. And instead, look where we are. The barrier is broken. Monsters are living alongside humans. Your mother doesn't seem to entirely despise me. And you're here." He smiled at Asriel, then turned back to the landscape. "I feel…indebted. Like something is overdue. This is the only way I know to make amends. It's not as though I'll go looking for trouble. But if trouble should find me, I won't run away from it, either. I've been ready to invite it in for a long time."
"What if it already came?"
Asgore glanced over. Asriel had quietly moved to the far side of the bench, bent double, bony fingers laced before him. His voice had gone queerly flat.
"Dad. These people you're seeing…how much longer before they get here?"
"I'm not sure," Asgore said. "Could be a while. I showed up early, what with the weather and all."
"Okay." He shook his head and laughed; it was completely mirthless. "I had a feeling I'd wind up telling you this sooner or later. I guess now's as good a time as any. Better to do it without Frisk around. Same as last time."
Asgore recognized that tone. He shivered a little at the memory of it.
When Asriel had first returned home, he'd taken it upon himself to confess everything he'd done to Asgore and Toriel, alone, while Frisk remained unconscious, sleeping off whatever tribulations had brought Asriel back from death. Except it hadn't really been a confession; it had been a purge, with all the messiness and pain that implied. Asgore still didn't like to think about it, and couldn't have remembered half of the things Asriel told them even if he tried – his son's story of his twisted resurrection and the madness that followed had quickly devolved into barely-coherent screaming as he tried to force the words out through his own tears, clutching his head as though he wished to tear those rotten thoughts out the thin sheathe of his skin. It had taken a full day, and by the end of it Asgore was exhausted as he'd ever been, both he and Toriel worn to the bone just from their efforts to soothe Asriel enough to stop him from hurting himself. Asriel had shut himself away in his room, and not come out again until Frisk had woken and done whatever he did to lift both their spirits again. He'd gotten better. But something inside him scabbed over, after that day. His hopeful expression would occasionally turn dim and faraway when he thought no one was looking. And whenever he alluded to those dark times again, his voice turned flat and contemptuous, tinged with bitter amusement. It made him sound like a stranger. It was the way he sounded now.
"You remember what I told you before, right?" Asriel said. "How you were the first person to see me when I came back?"
"Of course. But Asriel, you don't have to-"
"Dad, please be quiet and let me talk."
Asgore shut up. The wind murmured between them. The smothered sun continued to slip down to the horizon, growing dimmer as the clouds thickened.
"After I visited you and Mom, and figured out what was…different, about me, I had to start finding other things to do," Asriel said. "You know I got tired of being nice to everyone. It didn't do much for me, after a while. So I had to think of something else. That's when I thought about the souls." His upper lip twitched, exposing his fangs; old and rancid hunger bubbled out from his voice like sewage. "I could do all sorts of things if I could get you to give me that power. I wanted those souls, Dad. I really…really wanted them. So my first idea was to just do everything from the start. I showed up in the throne room. Pulled my crying act. And after I spent enough time with you, I said that I knew about the human souls. That giving them to me would be enough to turn me back." He angled his face toward Asgore. "And you said no."
"I'm sure that I didn't mean-"
"I'm not blaming you," he said. "I would never, ever blame you. You promised you'd find another way, no matter how long it took. But obviously I didn't care about that. So I kept resetting, trying to find something to trick you into giving them up. I couldn't get to them myself, even though I knew where they were. I tried ripping them up, but it's like they were…stuck there, in the ground. You must have made one heck of a strong spell to lock them in like that, huh?"
"The best one I could manage," he said, with a hint of pride. Then he looked down, gazed into his warped reflection in the canister's surface. "I suppose I thought they deserved to rest. After everything they'd been through."
"Maybe that's why you wouldn't let them go. I tried everything, Dad. And not just being nice, either. My temper back then was horrible, you have no idea. It didn't take long before I stopped pretending to care." He said, in a dragging singsong: "I said that I hated you, that you were a bad dad, that I was glad Mom left you, all the usual stuff. Then I threatened to hurt you, and that didn't work. Then I threatened to hurt her, and that didn't work. And then," Asriel's fists clenched, his knuckles cracked, his claws dug into his skin, "then I really stopped playing around."
Asriel's speech was careful and casual. He spoke with the tone of someone describing an uninteresting film. The wind bit and the sky stained blacker as he told Asgore about the rewound time, and the creaks in the night, and the taunts outside his door in the voices of people he knew, and the warping shadows by his bed, and the lashing vines on his back, and the mangled garden and crushed thrones when he stepped downstairs, and people arriving with polite requests to see the canisters, and the teary-eyed hostages begging the same, and the shrieked accusations, and the howling laughter in his sleep, and the torn and dust-stained robes deposited at the foot of his bed, and the stinging thorns that tore at him every time he took a careless step, and the stinging pellets that burned him every time he turned his back, and the hissing voice by his ear that infected his dreams, and the journal's pages blackened with scrawled mockery and promises of worse things to come, and the same twisted graffiti scrawled in mud and thorn and dust across the face of his house and the streets of the capital, and the vines that choked the capital where the streets lay heavy with dust and the air rang with that deranged laughter, and the vines that tore down his house and smashed the artifacts of his memories in the rubble, and the vines that in their desperate clutching fury infested even the barrier cavern and ripped it down stone by stone in a mad attempt to eviscerate the souls from their hiding place and instead only caused the ceiling to collapse and the barrier's light to die and leave those huddled and weeping remnants of monsterkind to be trapped forever – this litany of cruelty upon cruelty upon hundreds more unspoken cruelties, devised by a mind that no longer had anything better to do than devise new ways to be cruel, and always with the same demand, unrelenting as the barrier's heartbeat, as the oncoming and merciless future: "Give me what I want, and this will all be over."
He fell silent, if only to catch his breath. It had begun to snow again, in slow plump flakes that spotted their clothes with moisture. Asgore looked up at it. He didn't feel the chill when they landed on his face.
"Oh, Asriel." It was all he could think to say.
"I tried again, and again, and again." His whole body quaking now. "And eventually I got bored. Same old story, right? Pathetic. Unlimited time, but no attention span. You didn't give me anything to work with. If anything I tried had just gotten you angry, or made you say you hated me, I could have figured something out, but nothing did. You fought me when you could, but that was nothing useful, just self-defense. You wouldn't change, Dad. You kept trying to make peace. I lost track of how many times you offered me tea. Even when I was hurting you, you still had that look on your face. That one. The one you have now." Asgore felt his face, to better understand what he meant. "Understand? No matter what I tried, you just wouldn't change.
"So I got bored. And I got so frustrated that I started making mistakes. You began to figure out that I was resetting everything whenever I messed up. And then, one time, the last time, you. Y-you." He swallowed hard. "You guessed my name. My real name, I mean. And you told me. That you knew who I really was all along." He shook his head hard; droplets flew off his face. "No idea if it was true. You sure didn't seem to recognize me when I ambushed everyone at the barrier. But after that I decided there wasn't any point. If you could just grin and bear it even knowing w-who I was, there was n-no p-p-point."
"Asriel-"
"So don't tell me that you deserve to be punished, okay? I don't care if you hate me now, or don't want to see me anymore, or whatever. You've gone through enough. I saw to that myself. And," he said fiercely, "don't you dare say that it doesn't count, just because you can't remember it. It all matters. Everything we do, good and bad. It's never going away." He let out a deep, shuddering breath, and added, "So there."
The snowfall was heavier, now. It frosted the little bench like dust. Asgore set the Thermos down; the tea inside was still warm. He watched Asriel's shoulders quiver, his hanging ears obscuring his eyes from view.
He asked, "Are you all right?"
A long pause. Then:
"That's not fair," Asriel said. His voice a harsh whisper. "You can't just listen to all that and ask if I'm all right. Were you even listening?" He covered his face. "I don't get why you won't hate me. I don't…I just d-d-don't…"
Asgore reached out and pulled him in close, engulfing him in the rough folds of his coat. Asriel buried his face in the fabric and wept, his body shaking under Asgore's palm. Asgore stared forward, frowning, dry-eyed. He noted how Asriel already seemed a little taller, and felt a fresh, unfamiliar twinge of pain in his shoulder. New aches. The both of them were getting older.
"I have no right to judge anyone for what they've done, Asriel," he said. "And even if I did, you're my son. No matter what happened, I could never hate you."
"I know that," Asriel sobbed. "That's what I was always afraid of…"
"It's all right to be afraid. But we can't just run away from what scares us. That was my mistake." He sighed. "I was so scared of the consequences of that promise that I tried to keep the future away. But you can't stop something like that. Instead, for so many years, I just felt like I was living through the same day, over and over again. Always dreading what would come."
Asriel let out a slightly strangled laugh. "I know the feeling."
"We've all been through a lot, haven't we? And there might be even worse things waiting for us. But I think that's all right, now. The future might have terrible things in store, but it's still the future. It's still worth cherishing. Despite everything."
More time passed. Then Asriel said, "I think you can let go now."
Asgore released him and he moved away, sniffling and wiping his eyes. He tried to laugh again.
"I was doing better that time, right? Almost got through the whole thing without cracking up. Haha."
"A few tears are nothing to be ashamed of, Asriel." Asgore offered him the Thermos. "Have a sip of this. Your throat must be dry."
"Yeah. Wow, how long was I talking? It's gotten really dark." He looked hopefully at the sky. "Maybe they won't show up?"
"Possibly. It wouldn't be the first time. I'll hang around until the sun sets and then head home. No use in staying out here all night."
Asriel drained half the remaining tea at a gulp, swallowed, licked his lips, and set the Thermos back down and stood up. "I should probably get going, then. I'll give Sans a call, hopefully he can pop out of nowhere like he does and take me back home."
"Would you like to stay?"
Asriel stared. His mouth opened and closed, like he wasn't sure what he'd just heard. His father's expression was placid, genial.
"That's…that would be a pretty awful idea, Dad." He attempted a smile. "I mean, the reason you went through all that in the first place is because me and Chara died, right? If they just saw me sitting here, it'd make things even worse. I don't-"
"Asriel," he said quietly. "Would you like to stay?"
Asriel went stiff, his claws plucking worriedly at the threads of his scarf. After a long moment, he sat back down, huddled against the chill, and rested his head against Asgore's coat. Asgore put an arm around his shoulders and pulled him in closer.
"Mom's gonna kill me," he muttered.
"She let you go in the first place, didn't she? That means she trusts you. Especially after all that's happened."
"Can you stick around for a little bit after you drop me off? Say hi to Frisk, at least."
"I can do that, certainly."
"Promise?"
"I promise."
Snow filled in Asriel's small, scattered footprints behind the bench; already Asgore's own were barely-seen impressions in that carpet of white. It clung to their clothes like wool and reflected the scant twilight like a prism, so that even as the sun became nothing more than a thin layer of paler gray at the meeting between earth and sky, dull and tarnished as the side of a coin, it was still bright enough for them to feel like they were under glass. Asriel held the Thermos against his chest, red as a beating heart. There was no longer a hint of wind; the whole world seemed to be holding its breath.
He said, "I hope they understand."
And Asgore wasn't sure what he meant, but still answered, "So do I."
In time, on that ever-dimmer horizon, some stranger might appear thin and dark as a tally mark against the bleached landscape, bearing any number of unknown intentions. In time, this bench might stand empty, with two fresh sets of prints leading away in the fresh snow, new marks that would be erased and remade and remade again. There was even the chance that more familiar visitors might arrive, family and friends who, like Asriel, had decided not to let the king face the future alone. These possibilities and more passed through both their minds, but they said nothing. They faced forward, sharing each other's warmth. The two of them, the unmarked earth, this fragile and fleeting moment – all silent, and treasured, and awaiting whatever might come.