17. Foreboding

[[File 17.1 JA]]

Artificial stars glimmered faintly from cavern walls. Small, indistinct sparks, in a never-moving constellation, drifted distantly above his head, while nearer sources of light set his jacket ablaze in blue. Sans sought to avoid stepping near the Echo Flowers – not only because their murmurs haunted – but because he wished to escape detection. They glowed like lamps. Better to slip between stalagmites, hanging to the shadows, and creeping far off the main trail in meandering detours… than to be sighted by another traveler on this road.

He hoped no one would recognize him, even if he did slip near another soul. Yet the disadvantage of being a widely-traversed monster was that, even here, deep within the Waterfall caverns, so far from home, he could chance upon someone he knew. Nor did it help the individual he stalked would draw attention; there would be more than the typical share of traffic to the roads with a human around.

Yet again he yanked at his hood, pulling it over his forehead as far as it would go. Afterwards his fingers shifted a scarf amassing around his cheeks and nasal concha. It felt scratchy, uncomfortable, unnatural… he did not enjoy wearing it. Had he no need to conceal his face and slip quickly through the dark, he would not have wrapped it around his neck.

The scarf belonged to Papyrus, not to him.

He could still feel the dust upon its fibers.

Somehow, that did not unnerve him. It would have at one point. He might have gagged when he was younger, choking on the weave and the dust, trembling at the morbidity of the item and its proximity to his teeth. But today, he only whispered a sentence in his mind.

i'm sorry, bro…

He was apologizing for his numbness. He hadn't cried this time. He hadn't cried the last few times. He still felt uncomfortable wearing the scarf, but…

He forced himself forward around another stalagmite.

Technically he could have rushed back for his own clothing back home – teleportation allowed him that luxury – yet he could not find within himself the effort to do so. He could hardly find the effort to continue stalking forward. What worth was this, keeping the human in sight, keeping his identity obscured? What worth was any of this?

But with the little motivation he still had left, with the dying hope he held for the future… he had picked up the scarf as he traveled past it, wrapped it around his neck, and continued after the murderer.

Now he slinked through the Waterfall caverns. He continued adjusting the scarf around his neck as he stomped forward, hoping that somehow a new positioning would feel slightly less scratchy, slightly less uncomfortable.

It never quit itching.

While standing sheltered behind the shadows, Sans cast a long glance forward. He could see the silhouette of the traveler he trailed, that tiny but impacting human. As they walked obliviously away from Sans down the road, they swung a right hand which bulged twice its typical size. It was some thick boxing glove they wore. They had used it to murder monsters.

Sans was… supposed to care about that.

His fingers shuffled through his jacket pockets until he pulled out a small electronic device. He pulled the gadget close up to his left eye, squinted, and sought to make out the numbers. Perhaps it read MW 568. Maybe 569. He hoped it was the former, but suspected that was not the case. Not with how this human had been acting.

Footsteps echoed hollowly through the tunnels. The human strode past an Echo Flower and their shadows bounced for meters each direction, haunting the corridors with their exit, ghosting the hallways with their entrance. Their blackness oozed over Sans for a second; he was drenched in dark, coated in their oily profile, before they stepped on forward. Echo. Echo. Echo. The clopping of their footsteps haunted more than flower whispers.

Sans brushed against stone for another step forward. His hood obscured much of his already-weak vision, but he would not lose track of the human. He needed to keep telling himself that… that… it was worth it.

"Hi there. I almost didn't see you." The voice ricocheted through the hall, booming off the ceilings and spinning down passageways. "Why ya hidin' in the corner there?"

Sans could hear no response. But he knew, even though he couldn't see it, that some other monster stood in the hallway… that the human had spotted and approached them.

another death coming.

His hands rested steady in his pockets.

"C'mon out an' play with me," said the high-pitched voice of a human child. They sounded almost as though they were coaxing a dog. "It's okay."

Sans could see a second form now, a fish-like head with wide eyes and trembling scales.

The human set down their glove.

"See? I'm not gonna hurt you." And they began to hum. "How's that? You like that?"

The monster began to hum back.

And melodies arose, and countermelodies, and harmonies, and increasingly bold and delightful music, and the tune turned into a song, and the song turned into a ballad, and the ballad turned into a masterpiece. A monster swam by. Paused. And another. Another. A small crowd began to form, watching human and fish together make music. Sans could not believe how many monsters conglomerated together… had there really been so many travelers this day in Waterfall?

Yet for all a commotion was starting to arise, he remained rooted in the distance. He found himself again tugging at his hood and itchy scarf.

you're sparing her…

Hand touched fabric.

…so why did you kill my brother?

[[File 17.2 SA-20150710-#-#]]

Though the crowds dispersed, monsters continued babbling excitedly. A host of jabbers crashed one on top another above Sans and Papyrus. "I'm gonna get my stuff and be outta here by tonight!" "I can't believe it!" "He did it he did it he did it!" "We're free!" The loudest voice, resounding right above Sans, exclaimed its own particularly jovial oration. "DID YOU SEE THAT, SANS? DID YOU SEE DID YOU SEE DID YOU SEE? THE ROYAL GUARD WALKED STRAIGHT THROUGH THE BARRIER! WE DID IT! WELL, THEY DID IT, BUT BY EXTENSION, 'WE', BECAUSE I AM MORE OR LESS ROYAL GUARD, TOO!"

No one seemed disconcerted. No one seemed disconcerted about the Royal Guard's departure.

No one but Sans.

He glanced back, apprehensive, letting his brother's delighted dialogue roll over his head sin response. He strained to hear the clunk, clunk, clunk of armor disappearing from the underground.

ASGORE had not mentioned the war against humanity in his pre-barrier breakage speech. For all the king had declared war vocally, loudly, gallantly after his childrens' deaths, proclaiming he would march forth against humanity upon taking seven SOULs… not a single word of aggression had entered the Throne Room today. An intentional avoidance of inevitable brutality? He remembered ASGORE's implied offer to him – to leave the barrier first with a contingent of skilled fighters. That would suggest the war's promise still held, right? These monsters would fight upon reaching the surface? Or had the king's reluctance to pursue violence convinced him to enter the world in peace? He had never been good about waging his own war.

All Sans knew was the Royal Guard marched forth first. They were the first to pass past the barrier's remains. To safely examine the state of the surface world… or… to clear a path?

[[File 17.3 IH-20150701-#-#]]

Concentrate. Concentrate concentrate concentrate.

Had to remember. Had to recall something he had not technically experienced: another world in a separate timeline with a separate Sans.

what had that the human been talking about?

"The nice old lady's okay." "I did what you said to do." "The flower wasn't there but now it is." "Now things are worse!"

As much as their words seemed to Sans like incoherent babbling, he doubted the human had truly spewed nonsense. The words carried meaning to the child, and because the child had consciously relayed the information to Sans, this likely meant the information would be pertinent, relevant, informative to him, too.

If only the human had not sprinted off after shouting their cryptic comments about a lady and a flower. Sans would have appreciated the opportunity to ask follow-ups enquiries for clarification.

Little to mull over and examine, as it was. Poor situations… a flower…

…a lady.

A lady.

A nice old lady.

His friend on the other side of the door.

"The nice old lady's okay."

Somehow, something tickled at the back of his mind, as though a true memory were burgeoning forth out of the impossible. Sans scrunched his eyesockets shut and forced himself to concentrate further on the topic. What could his strange sense of déjà vu inform him concerning the woman within the Ruins?

Memories… memories of another timeline…

The child would have been the one to reset the world and return to this time point. As the individual with the most determination, all they would have had to do was blink and will themselves back in time. Their phrase, "I did what you said to do," could have been an indication Sans himself, in the previous parallel world, had instructed the child to initiate the time travel.

This kid had returned to their prior SAVE point.

They had come back here to relive this moment… why?

A sense of foreboding washed over him. He paid it heed. This strange sense of repeated days carried useful information. It came as a tell-tale indication some individual had reset the timeline and traveled backward to form a new chronology. Whenever an individual restarted an event, they created two parallel worlds, and because those parallel worlds arose from the same situation, they remained weakly coupled. That sense of foreboding he experienced could guide him to understand, if not fully recall, the previous parallel world. He needed to understand this hesitancy of parallel world Sans.

Emotions.

Sadness.

Pain.

Shock.

Sans frowned.

He did not know from where the thought came, but it came nevertheless.

She had… died… hadn't she?

Died.

Somehow he knew it were true.

The memories were coming back to him, if memories they could be called.

"The nice old lady's okay." The human had shouted that sentence out of seeming nowhere, yet they needed motivation to shout this information.

And now, now Sans stood right next to the Ruins door. He had knocked. Several times. Loudly. With no response.

but if i told this kid to go back in time to save her… why is she still dead?

[[File 17.4 GA]]

"The establishment of successful time travel does not merit a rest."

"You've been getting grouchier and grouchier, and that's probably because you won't take a break!"

"look at you, doc. the bags under your eyesockets are bigger than your glasses. you need –"

"If anything," Gaster continued, completely ignoring Sans and Rain's protests, "our recent extraordinary breakthrough requires even greater concentration and more dedicated pursuit to the science. The goal of our project might now be within reach of our lifetimes, so long as we do not slack now that the 'hardest' part of the research has been completed. I suspect the most challenging nuances of the –"

"you've heard how minds function faster when they get a good night's rest, right?" Sans forced himself into the conversation before Gaster could ramble up a longer excuse. "maybe you'd get more productive hours in if you slept. might want to try that? maybe? good idea? am i right?"

"This meeting was scheduled not to harp upon me for my productive work ethic –"

"'productive,' my ass," Sans scoffed. "i know we're all workaholics, but you're long past becoming a workaholicholic, if not a workaholicholicholi –"

"– but to debrief you two on my latest discoveries and observations of short term parallel universe jumps. Unless," and Gaster glared at Sans, who was still repeatedly rubbing one balled fist over the other hand's knuckles. "…you want to waste all my time signing one word repeatedly." Sans quit his signing, shrugged, and laid both his hands on his lap. He maintained his glare on the scientist, though.

"Good."

Gaster raised one hand to adjust his lab coat. Instead of neatly fixing his appearance, he wiped something goopy from his finger onto the collar. He elected to ignore it.

"There appears to be no straightforward method to reverse the strange limitation set by the establishment of a past time SAVE point. As we suspected, once I have selected the time instance to which I plan to return, I cannot reverse the choice. I can create a new SAVE point at a more recent chronological instance, but cannot proceed further backwards again. The presence of a new SAVE point appears to erase the presence of the old, and renders the older time stream inaccessible."

"it's sort of like those old video games," Sans laughed, "where you could save once, but once you overwrite the save, there's no turning back."

"…yes." Sans doubted, from Gaster's hesitant response, that the Royal Scientist had ever played a video game, "…exactly like that."

"That said," the Royal Scientist continued, "I suspect there may be a second, more chronologically dated point which can be accessed by erasing the one existing SAVE point in entirety. Without the presence of a SAVE point to ground the time traveler in their backwards journey, they will continue traversing backward in the timespace continuum until they reach a 'starting point.'"

"Like, their birth?" Rain asked, puzzled.

"Uncertain. It could be birth. It could be further back than that. Or maybe sooner, I do not know. I have not yet attempted to make such a jump, nor have my computations been conclusive. Before I do this jump, obviously, I would wish to make sure it would be a time point much more recent than my birth. That would provide… complications… if that were indeed the point of the reset."

"reset? that's a good name for it."

"So we have SAVE points and RESETs," said Rain. "Or, I guess, one SAVE and one RESET. You either redo your entire timestream completely, or you go back to one specific point and not any further. That seems like it could be a… problem… since we want to go further back than that. If you can either go to one moment you pick, or to some very far back point you can't choose… then how do we go back hundreds of years?"

"Indeed a challenging question, and the reason why we cannot afford to slack in our efforts." Gaster stared speculatively downward at a pile of papers. Or perhaps it was an unhappy glare; Sans could not see what Gaster was rereading. The doctor reached forward, scratched at a print letter, and rubbed off another small trickle of goop.

Gaster abruptly stood up, back stiff and arms straightened like rods. "Excuse me," he said. Without another word, he marched off, presumably to wash off the frustrating mystery gunk from his hands.

Sans and Rain glanced at one another.

"Was that just me, or…" Rain struggled to finish his sentence. "…or were his hands leaking?"

[[File 17.5 CO]]

He almost felt like throwing his phone against the bedroom wall. He could excuse the Royal Scientist's quiet and reclusive nature on a regular day, but not today. Not today. Not today of all days.

"alphys! alphys, i know youre there. pick up your goddamned phone, alphys!"

And yet the dial tone continued moaning. He would hear her voice mail message soon. She would not garner the social courage to listen to the voice mail for another three months, did he choose to wait for the beep. His message would be pointless.

Angrily, Sans snapped his cell phone shut, waited ten seconds, and then impatiently phoned her again. The distal phalanx on his pointer finger angrily stabbed the buttons.

"its gonna keep ringing 'til you answer, alphys," he muttered as another monster outside his window crumbled to dust.