"what is wrong with me?"
"the way i looked-"
You look at your hand, extending it and seeing its brilliant bluish-white contrast against the darkness, lit only by magic.
"SANS, PLEASE STOP!"
A deep shiver runs through you.
Your Gaster Blaster nudges you again with its snout, rumbling sadly deep in what would be its throat, and you turn and hug it around its huge skull, even though you're not really able to reach your arms around it.
"s'ok. i'm alrite now, see?" It cheers up, grins, and licks you sloppily, a wide trail of glowing blue saliva now covering the front of your jacket.
You give its nose a pat. "thanks. ya did good. you can go on home now," you say, dismissing it from duty, and it disappears along with its blue flames, leaving you in the darkness you deserve.
You just sit and stare straight forward into the darkness, and you have no idea how much time passes. It's as though your entire train of thought freezes.
Maybe you cry. Maybe.
You don't let yourself think about why. You want it to stay like a numb, dull ache. You're afraid that if you start thinking too much, you'll break into one of those deeper levels of your own memories. You'd much rather just blame it all on yourself, and retreat into self-hatred and despair, than go there.
Eventually though, even your body, made of bones and magic rather than soft flesh, starts to complain at you for sitting in one place for so long. Its distraction is a welcome relief in some ways, forcing your thoughts into more practical and less depressing paths.
You decide to shortcut back to Rose and see if she's scared to death of you now, or if she'll accept your apology for being such a screw-up that you almost killed her for having the wrong expression.
But when you get there, you're disappointed to see she's unconscious, and you can't wake her up. You inspect her for injuries, but it doesn't look like a physical problem that you can see.
When you check her soul, you notice that it looks relatively motionless compared to a normal soul. Did she get attacked while you were gone? Has she somehow mentally put herself back into a sort of stasis mode, even though she can't use her shielding ability anymore?
Did she do it because her health is low and there's nothing to eat or drink here? Is this some kind of self-induced coma state to help her survive longer on less resources?
Maybe if you hadn't scared her and left her alone in the dark, she wouldn't have ended up like this, but now you can't even talk to her.
Not that you were able to really do anything about the crack running through her soul before. Souls aren't healed easily, as the cracks in your own soul remind you.
When you look closer, you see something concerning. She's slowly losing fractions of HP.
You try healing her again. The drain slows to a crawl but doesn't stop.
What now? You don't know. There's a profound dearth of options. All you can do is watch over her, and wait.
Life gets really boring after that. There's literally nothing in this world except dust, the two of you, and the anomaly and Chara, if they're still out there somewhere.
You try talking to Rose, sitting up next to her.
"not sure if you're awake in there, or if you can hear me, but i'm sorry i got mad at you. from your expression, i thought you had planned this all out. you looked sorta guilty."
Were you just being manipulated, again?
"maybe you did, but even if that's the case, i don't think you're as bad as the others. there's a part of you that wants to do the right thing. so if you're in there because you're afraid of me...maybe i acted that way because i was the one afraid of you. i won't do that again. at least, i'll try not to. i hate making promises on such a lousy track record. i'm not exactly a star at keeping them, you might have noticed."
You pause, thinking.
"that gray cloud...the anomaly. it seems to live on fear right? it liked messing with us. just like chara liked to mess with me and frisk. they enjoy seeing other people fight and hurt each other. i guess they get off on it or something. if you let them beat you here, then they win. i think maybe you're stronger than that. so don't give up, ok?"
There's no sign that she hears you. Her soul glows softly, shimmering with a slow rhythm of light across its surface.
You can't think of anything to do but wait, and meanwhile you might as well catch some sleep.
You summon Gaster Blasters again and ask them to act as sentinels against anything that might attack you from out of the darkness, and four of them surround the two of you, their huge maws and alert eyes pointed outwards.
You lie down awkwardly. The ground isn't much of a bed, and your bones are raw and sore, but you make do, taking off your coat and using it as a pillow. Your dreams are full of rain and misty clouds.
When you wake up, your body feels a little bit better, along with your magic having recovered some more. You slowly stand up and pull your coat on again, before checking on Rose and your surroundings.
Nothing has changed. You feel an odd sense of relief and disappointment at this. Relief, because this wasn't all reset away. You've been getting interested in this timeline and you don't particularly want it to start over. But disappointment that Rose's state hasn't changed at all and nobody's come to rescue the two of you.
Is this just going to go on forever? You can last a long time without food or water, but not forever. Even a skeleton like you needs some amount of nourishment. You will eventually waste away. As for Rose, she must have a limit that will come a lot sooner than yours.
You try again to get through the world barrier with your shortcut. You can see the code that makes it up, but it very clearly denies access to you. Evidently you're not allowed outside of your homeworld, even if it's really just a copy of your homeworld.
After fruitlessly attempting that for awhile, you go looking for Chara and the anomaly, to see if you can spy on them or something, or at least verify that they're not planning to attack. But you can't find them anywhere in this world.
If you had to guess, you'd say the anomaly can probably go to whatever world it wants to, the same as Rose and a few of the players that the other you's met in person. You'd bet it's carrying Chara with it wherever it goes. They seem to have some strange connection.
Your boredom begins to peak. You try to replicate what Rose did by creating a tunnel with her imagination. But even though you were watching carefully, it's obvious to you that there's some kind of trick to it. That makes sense - obviously anyone with an imagination isn't going around making tunnels to the multiverse. You can't recreate what she did no matter how hard you try with your own magic.
As a last resort, you return to Rose and debate anxiously about your options. You stand with your hands in your pockets as you wonder if you should talk yourself out of this. Finally, you put out one hand and very carefully draw out her soul and put out your hand to touch it. It pushes you away as if your hand is a magnet with the same polarity as itself, but it doesn't do anything else.
You had hoped to reach her somehow this way, or wake her up, but it's not working. The more you push on it, the more it pushes back, but it feels weak and fragile. But you're afraid that doing anything else might hurt her more, like when the anomaly broke her shield, so you stop.
You sit down cross-legged, thinking. What would Papyrus have done? Obviously he wouldn't have hurt her in the first place, and then she wouldn't be in this wounded condition. And then he wouldn't have scared her and made her retreat into unconsciousness.
You know he'd be sad about how you acted if he knew.
"well, i can't be as awesome as him. that's why he's papyrus," you reason.
You feel a sharp pang of guilt as you realize you never came home. Does time work the same between worlds? Has Papyrus been waiting for you, searching for you, for days?
How many times has the player killed him while you've been gone...?
At least when you're there, you take up some of the player's time, so there's that much less time that they have for hurting the others.
But you can't do anything to help anyone right now, and like always, there's nothing you can do about it.
A few days of sleeping and more boredom haven't changed your situation any, except that it has changed you mentally.
It's rare that you really get this much time to yourself. Now that nobody's getting killed in front of you, and nobody's asking anything of you, it's much easier to see what your true neutral mental state is.
It's not good at all. But as bad as it is, you can detect it has gotten just slightly better due to nothing happening to you for awhile. After a brief valley of self-pity and panic over being trapped here, you resolve to make the best of things, and now your mind has loosened up and calmed down enough for a little trickle of cheerfulness to run through your usually abysmally depressed mental landscape.
You've taken to passing the time by talking to Rose and telling her stories, in between attempts to heal her.
You figure it can't hurt, like talking to someone in a coma, and hoping somehow it'll help them come out of it.
"so i said to him, it has to go in the pot to work. cooking's a fine art, and you gotta be gentle with your food to have it turn out right. papyrus said, "BUT UNDYNE TOLD ME YOU HAVE TO PUT YOUR WHOLE SOUL INTO IT!" and then he crushed a tomato against the wall, and it was just dripping there in a huge lumpy mass. i really admired his enthusiasm, so i didn't have the heart to tell him that punching your tomatoes against the kitchen wall is not in most cookbooks."
You grin at the memory. Undyne really has been good for him.
"he really puts his whole heart into everything he does. he trains all day, and pretty much the only thing that can get him to settle down enough to sleep is a bedtime story. i have to do it or he'll literally stay up all night, and then he'll be a little...cranky the next day. but when he was a baby bones that wasn't always enough. sometimes he'd get nightmares and he wouldn't calm down. when that happened, sometimes the only thing that was good enough was to sing to him."
Your eyes drift shut, and you begin to hum from memory.
You sense movement, and hurriedly open your eyes again.
Rose's soul has shifted inside her body, still moving almost imperceptibly until it comes to a stop.