A/N: I'm so, so sorry. I really am. I meant to write a happy thing. I wanted to write a happy thing.
Instead, I get to give you a warning: Main Character death ahead, as well as VERY SAD SKELETONS.
Also, actual note: FFN has weird formatting involving Sans' boldfaced speech, so I had to change it from how it was previously. Parts of words kept getting deleted, and I can't figure it out. This site is odd and also the bane of my existence.
Edits made on Feb. 1 to the 1st and 3rd chapters. Formatting and some sentences restructured. And thanks to everyone who's reviewed/followed/favorited! Honestly, it's so unironically nice to have my math class interrupted with reviews and the like (no sarcasm). I'm sick right now, so it really made my morning.
The two days pass exactly as they always do, time split between his brother, sentry work, the probably-failing telescope business, and Grillby's.
At exactly four-o-three on the day, he waits, hidden in the trees, magic pulsing underneath his bones.
At four-o-five he hears it: the door to the Ruins, opening for the first time in God-knows-when, followed by a surprised gasp and a squeal of laughter.
Laughter. Laughter's good, he thinks as the kid bolts into the snow, picking chunks of it up with their bare hands and throwing it around. They're not even carrying a stick this time, but the bandaid on their cheek and lips covered in the sticky remnants of a Monster Candy tells him their trek hasn't been easy.
He follows them for a bit, watching from the shadows as the human goes from joyous and playful to shivering and sniffling. Even as far back as he is, he can hear the chatter of their teeth, and they don't seem to notice the stick he breaks.
When they reach the "prison" his brother built, he appears behind them and speaks.
"Human."
They tense, but do not turn around. The skeleton smiles and in a low, leisurely voice, continues.
"Do ya' know how'ta greet a new friend?"
The kid whirls around, hand outstretched to him. The grin on their face almost...reminds him of something, but he can't place what. "You shake their hand!"
Their hand stays extended, the grin solidly in place. It's red with cold, but soft and clean. No dust hides in the nails or soft crevices of their palm.
They're safe.
After the joke (to which the human laughs like no other), Sans chuckles and lifts the kid onto his shoulders with a flick of his wrist. It's not that they deserve it, but they do seem to be keeping the promise they had/never given him, in that other timeline.
Before the reset. The first reset any Sans had ever instigated.
He grimaces at the memory, suppressing a shudder so the kid doesn't know what's up.
And besides, he's a good judge of character. Most of the time, anyways, and where he fails, his brother comes through in spades.
"Come on, kid," he says, the smile on his face growing wider with the child's surprised giggles. "Let's get you hid. My brother, Papyrus, now he's a human-hunting fanatic…"
The longer he watches this kid, the more fond of them he becomes. He interrupts their date with his brother with incidental trombone music, follows their treck through Waterfall (isn't it strange how they know the answers to the puzzles, before they even come across them?), roots for them in their flee from Undyne. It takes so much longer than it did any other time, but he's grateful. Which is strange; gratitude isn't something Sans has felt for a long time.
Whenever he comes across them, they somehow wind up back at Grillby's, eating fries and ketchup and talking about everything from stars to souls.
"Hey, Sans," they say in one such meeting. The clatter of glasses and the dull roar of both the jukebox and the drunks make it difficult to be heard this late in the evening, but the bar is a better place than anywhere for a nice plate of food and (generally) good company.
"Yeah?" the skeleton responds through a mouthful of fries and ketchup. "Wat'cha need?"
"Is it okay if I…um…"
"Spit it out, kid, these bones don't have all night."
He watches from the corner of his eye as the kid looks away, staring for a moment at Doggo in the corner before letting their vision pan around the bar and back to him. They seem...sad? He's not sure-human faces are too fleshy for him to figure out. He downs a shot of ketchup as a chaser for his fries while the kid stares at him, expression unreadable.
"Kid?" He asks, completely concerned now. He faces them, abandoning his food and giving full attention to the little human in front of him.
"Do you…" they start, closing their eyes a moment before blurting out, "Do you want to see the surface? Like, really want to see it?"
Sans' soul drops somewhere around his pelvis. Out of all questions from the cheery child, this wouldn't be one of them. He starts to speak a couple times, but words fail him. The kid grows more upset the more he tries, until he finally gets out, "what? Where's this comin' from, huh?"
They look at their lap, their brown mop of hair obscuring their features as they fiddle with their thumbs. "It's a simple yes or no question, Sans. Please," they say, barely loud enough to be heard over the sounds of the bar.
He takes a breath and leans back in his chair, eyes flicking from the ceiling to the child and back again while he thinks. "Well, yeah, I guess," he says after a moment. "Everybody does. Fresh air, and breeze, and trees so big they scrape the sky...that's what everyone says, at least. It's a hope, and probably better than, well, here. But kid, that doesn't answer my question: where's all this comin' from?"
The human doesn't answer, instead opting to ignore him while they thought. Finally, they look at him, their grin so big it hurts his soul.
"Well then, Sansy," they chirp, and grab his hand. The skin against his bone is warm, and soft, and he wants to hide this little thing away where no one can find them because if they go to Asgore they will die, make no bones about it.
"I'll make sure you get to see all that, okay? Just leave it to me." They hop down from their bar chair and wrap a quick hug around his legs before weaving their way through the crowd. Halfway through, they turn back and yell, "and make sure to save enough money for Papyrus! He's always wanted to race!" before bolting out the door.
Sans sits in the dim, comfortable lights of his favorite place in the Underground, staring in confusion and more than a bit of fear at the door where the human left until his brother comes to get him. He doesn't know how long he's been there, but when he leaves, the lights lining the trees and buildings are dimmer in a simulated night.
He doesn't see them again until the least favorite part of his job comes. He stands and waits, motionless and emotionless in that long hall, where he's killed countless versions of the same human that is coming to face him now.
When they enter the hall, slow and limping and covered with burns, his soul stops. Unlike other timelines, where he'd waited for the human to get to get to him out of apathy or laziness, now he's frozen to the spot as the child limps to him, head down, grunting with the effort.
"Hey, kid," he says, voice hollow and growing more lifeless with the echo. Their head jerks up and their eyes meet his empty sockets.
"Hey, Sansy," they manage, their voice barely hiding a whine. "I uh… ran out of gold," they chuckle. "I'm trying to make it to the next…"
Sans waits a beat for the kid to continue before taking a breath. "D'ya mean the save, kid?" He asks, even though he knows the answer.
Saying the human is shocked would be an understatement. "H-how do you…" they stammer.
"I know a lot of things," he replies. "How'd you get like that, though? Why not just go back and try again?"
The kid shrugs, using the movement to try and hide a wince. Sans huffs and looks at the ceiling, the windows-really, anywhere but the burned, bloody train wreck that this kid has become. How're they're still alive is beyond him.
"Look, pal," he says, impatient now. "I can't help if you're not going to talk."
"I don't need help, Sans. I'm fine, just a little banged up, s'all. I've gotten worse from Undyne."
He raises a brow at that and makes a show of looking the kid up and down. "That doesn't seem like 'fine' to me, kiddo. Look, there's a save right before here, let's just go and use that, okay? Patch ya right up." One flash of blue and a surprised squeal later, he's carrying a protesting, squirming human back down the hall.
He shouldn't be able to see the glimmer that surrounds a SAVE, but it reacts to the kids determination and glows brighter the closer they get. When the brightness is engulfing, he uses his magic to set the kid on the ground.
"Here we are," he says, ignoring his friend's glare. "Now SAVE. I'll be right here, so don't even think about runnin' off." Not that they could regardless, in the state they're in.
He looks away while the kid does their thing, however reluctantly they do it, and soon enough a scowling, pale kid steps beside him. They're healed, but the sure as hell don't seem happy about it.
"Done?"
"Yeah."
"Good. Now, buddy. Pal. Amigo," Sans drawls, eyes down to pinpricks as he gazes at them in his peripherals. "What the hell was that about?"
The human takes a moment to answer, and when they do it's terrifying. "I just wanted to see how far I can make myself go. I'm outta gold-didn't lie there, and...Alphys told me. Undyne told me. Asgore needs my soul. And I… I'm going to give it to him."
Sans sucks in a breath, feeling his soul grow hollow with dread. "Kid…"
"No, look, Sans," they say, voice filled with determination. "You want to see the sunlight, and the trees. Alphys wants to study the stars, Mettaton wants to be a star… I'm going to free you. I want to."
"Can I change your mind?" He asks, voice quiet and eyes hollow. After all the things this kid has been through, he doesn't want them to go.
The human looks at them, their tiny face so different than it was just a couple days ago in Grillby's. Their eyes are hard, cheekbones sharp through their skin, stance not unlike Undyne's.
Human expressions have always been difficult for him, but he doesn't have to know what a pout or vague disappointment look like to see the answer in the kid's eyes.
"Yeah," he sighs. "Thought so. Hoped not, but...still."
Silence rings between the two for a long while before the skeleton breaks it.
"Kid."
"Yeah?"
"...Thank you."
"Anytime, Sansy."
He smiles at the familiar nickname, and lets the silence fall between them once more.
After a time he doesn't know or care about, the two stand. Sans doesn't know how they had both wound up propped against a wall, leaning on each other, but they did.
It was…nice.
For a last meeting.
Sans stretches the stiffness from his bones while the kid dusts themselves off. A quick, normal moment much like others the two have shared, but this one Sans wants to save. He would rather be here in this damn hall, sitting with the human, for an entire lifetime than let them die.
"Kid," he says, voice barely more than a whisper. He couldn't make himself louder if he tried. That kind of thing's hard to do when the entirety of his soul feels empty and silent. "Wanna ride?"
"Nah. Rather walk. I wanna-" they choke, the first show of emotion they've given him all day. "I wanna...savor this. I wanna live, for a bit longer."
And with that, they begin to walk, leaving the skeleton to follow.
He asks them if they're scared.
"Of course," they reply with a shrug. "I'm going to die. It's only natural."
He tells them they don't have to do this.
"But I do," they say, looking up at their friend through floppy brown bangs.
He tells them that everyone loves them.
"That's why I have to do it, Sans. I love them, too."
They don't speak again until the end of the hall.
When the human says goodbye, Sans says nothing. He waves slowly, an action stopped as soon as they run off into the next room. His arm is suddenly too heavy to hold.
His everything is too heavy to hold.
Magic is harder to do when a monster's soul isn't in it, but after an hour he decides he can't just stand there anymore, waiting for a human who will never come back. The room flashes blue, and Sans is sucked into the Void, an indecipherable mess of binary and code flashing around him.
All that pain, and for what? He thinks, walking through the Void until he feels his room materialize around him. It didn't do anything. He sits on his bed, head in his hands, iron springs squeaking with his weight. Defeated. It didn't matter when they killed everyone, and it didn't matter when I helped them reset. None of it.
Sans heaves a huge sigh, curling his hands into fists and pressing them into his eye sockets. Is a god damn happy ending too much to ask for? He thinks, wincing at the loudness of his soul. Because it's really beginning to seem like it is.
He doesn't know how long he stays like that, on his bed, head in his hands. When he finally stands, all he knows that his brother is worried, and the barrier has been broken.
The human is nowhere to be found.
Papyrus doesn't understand where they went, or why they're suddenly being hailed as a hero, but he's in tears for days.
The rest of their friends aren't any better. Alphys and Mettaton aren't seen for...shit, he doesn't know, but it's a long time. They don't answer their phone, or messages, or their front door. Mettaton takes a leave of mourning from TV, and when he comes back he's acting, and for the first time everyone can tell. Undyne is pissed; she can't stop moving, every word is either a sob or a growl. The first time she saw Sans, she almost killed him.
"You could have stopped them!" she screamed, holding the small skeleton off the ground by the collar of this shirt.
"No," he answered, voice hollow. Pap had stared, shocked-it was the first time his brother had spoken in days.
Undyne had dropped him unceremoniously to the ground a moment later. She had seen the look in the skeletons eyes, and it scared her.
Monsters move to the surface over a period of years. Sans is the last to go, after Toriel. Undyne had been one of the first to leave, going with that child-killing bastard monsters call a King to oversee the process. Papyrus went on ahead of him to get their new home ready, and Alphys and Mettaton were constantly back and forth, moving their lab equipment and research, or business and personal effects respectively.
He wants to go, to feel the sun on his face and see the sky for the first time in this life. He just...can't. He's stuck. He sits in the now-abandoned Grillby's, chugging a bottle of ketchup, wishing with all his soul that the human was back. Everyone is happy now-they got to go outside. They get to leave. It's everything monsters had ever wanted, everything the human had ever worked for.
They should've gotten to see it.
Instead, their soul is sitting in a jar somewhere, fragile and red and hurting, because of him.
Because he couldn't stop them.
Because he wanted to see the fucking sky.
He doesn't even notice he's thrown the glass ketchup bottle until he hears it shatter against the far wall, red semi-liquid glistening in the dim lights of the once-cozy bar. His breath heaves, his soul burns.
Sans has felt this sort of rage before. It manifested in bones through a torso, blood spatter on a blue sweater, the small comfort of a red scarf underneath a jacket.
Now, he's ready to avenge all that.
The bar, once filled with patrons, lights up blue and it's empty.
The throne room, when Sans arrives, is empty. Light streams in thick golden rays from holes in Ebbot's ceiling, making the dust that covers the throne all the more apparent.
Sans walks through the throne room, the New Home, the halls and labyrinths of the Castle. He walks slowly, with a purpose.
These are the last steps the human took before they died.
Before they gave themselves up.
He's probably being too...angsty about this, or something, but he doesn't really give a damn. The kid was his friend, for fuck's sake. The two of them have been through too much shit too many times for him to just let a sacrifice drop. It's rare he loses this friendship. Each time it hurts the same.
Where the Barrier once stood is now a bright blue, a swatch of sky. It's startling in it's intensity-it's more than he ever thought it would be.
He turns away, staring into the Underground for a long, long while.
An indeterminable amount of time passes before he hears footsteps behind him, heavy and unsure.
He knows who it is before they even speak. Even so, he stays silent, despite the buzzing of rage in his bones.
"Sans," the King of all Monsters says, his deep voice hesitant and sad, and Sans has to force his magic to stay within his marrow.
"Kid killer," he replies, flippant and callous, cold even. He hears the King's intake of breath and counts this as a victory.
"Sans, I had no choice-"
"You had every choice," Sans growls, eyes empty pits. "Every choice. You didn't have to kill them, any of them."
"And what was I to do? Let every monster in all the Underground wither away and die? I could not."
Sans spins on a gold piece and the room brightens with the color of the human's shirt as the King is pulled down to the smaller skeleton's eye level.
"Look, you sick son of a bitch," he snarls, watching Asgore's eyes light with fear with the same kind of glee he associates with human blood on tile. "You killed children. Who'd done nothing wrong. Who fell down a fuckin' hole in the ground. You are a vile, twisted monster. You're the kind of person human children hide from. And worst of all, Asgore, you murderer…" he stops, eyes going blank as the King catches himself, "you killed my friend. And for that, King or not, I will never forgive you."
The King stands with as much dignity as he can muster while Sans turns away. "Go. I'll watch this godforsaken hole in the ground. My brother's outside, my friends are happy, and I can see the sky and feel the air. That's what they worked for," the skeleton says, voice drifting down to a murmur the longer he talks. He's exhausted now that all the rage has gone out of him.
Sans waits ten seconds before repeating his order. Reluctantly, the King turns away, back towards the open air. Before he leaves his former home, he turns back to see the small skeleton watching him, face impassable. Asgore heaves a sigh, and calls to his once-subject.
"Sans."
The skeleton doesn't answer. Really, he just wants the King to leave already, so he can go back to Snowdin and start an indoor garden. Or...something. He doesn't know, but he's not leaving the Underground. He can't. Not after everything.
"They -the human, that is- they wanted me to tell you. Their name. Frisk."
Sans hangs his head, shoulders slumping, one had brought to his face and he laughs. A cold, hollow, broken sound that would move the heart of any that heard it, human or monster.
"Thanks," he heaves out, voice choked with something thick and too hot.
The King turns once more, and says, "and Sans, the souls? They're in the coffins, down the hall. All seven of them. Take care of them. Take care of yourself."
And with that, the King is gone. A moment later, so is Sans.
The caskets are moved one by one to the basement of his home, so he can better keep watch. Sometimes, he cleans them, or reads to the souls trapped inside. He doesn't leave the Underground, instead opting to let his friends and brother visit him and host travellers or tourists. Soon, a small town springs to life in the skeletal city surrounding the Castle, and the Mettaton Hotel reopens, but Sans is in charge and lives in Snowdin, and everybody knows it.
The third time he met this kid, he should've just killed them. It would have been easier that way.
They should have seen the sun and sky together, not just from a square in a mountainside or the inside of a coffin.
Happy endings don't come to those who deserve them. It's a lesson this Sans learns well. One that he will-hopefully-not pass on to those who follow.
Because there is a reset. There always is. He just has to wait a little longer for his friend to get the determination back to do so, that's all.