Bright room. Silent room. Warm room save for the cold ceramic tiles on his face. Though beaten and bruised from his petals to his roots, the pain lasted only a moment before a gentle brush of life ran its fingers up his stem. By the time he moved, he had been healed, restored to the brand new flower creature he had glimpsed in the mirror before taking a dive into these depths.
He blinked open his eyes, only to be blinded again by a harsh, white, pulsating light. Lying as near to the brightness as he did, from it he could acutely taste an odd, contradictory sensation of pain and pleasure. It rippled through his every molecule until cast into a state of mind he couldn't comprehend, as if all days of his life now happened simultaneously. New reflections danced endlessly away from him like facing mirrors. What they told him of his future he instantly forgot, but the past lingered.
He remembered, now, why his face looked so foreign to him. He understood why he had run so blindly from the sound of footsteps. In his last moments alive, he had been hunted. In his last moments, he had taken a red soul and become something powerful. With every new thought, a warm throb beat slowly, steadily stronger inside him: determination pooling in his core like an old friend.
The discomfort of standing so close to the brilliance quickly outweighed its euphoria. Just as the light had brought him to bloom, now it wanted him to wither. He crept away, back toward the walls of a lab he could barely see. Then, time turned away from him, and he slept in his flower pot once again.
Sans coughed and gasped awake. What was he thinking, teleporting again? Hadn't he learned from the last few shortcuts? Every fiber of his being shook under the strain of putting it through yet another jump. His soul, already in tatters, felt to be less than stitches now. He touched a hand to the spear wound in his side and found it fresh with dust and crimson. The bandages hung there uselessly, stripped away by the winds of the in-between.
He peeled them off. He didn't need them anymore. Finding his brother meant more to him than his own life. Even if his body resisted, he would carry onward, buoyed with so much hope and resolve he could be as determined as a full-blooded human. He flattened his hands to the cold laboratory floor beneath him and staggered to his feet.
The multicolor door retracted in four quadrants to reveal a short hallway and there, at its end, the final elevator. This pathway had always been eerie to you, but set to the sound of electricity already running, your hair stood on end.
You knew why.
The moment the power generator became operational, Flowey would hijack the lift and pull you to New Home with no hope of going back. In every single timeline, this marked the point of no return. You wondered if that were still true.
On the floor just inside the hallway, a spiral of cloth stood out to you against the otherwise vacant tiles. Your hands dropped to lift the bandages, but the wrappings only fell again from your trembling fingers. You had seen this kind of dust before. In fact, you had hoped to never see that sickeningly beautiful shimmer like powdered silver ever again. Among the particles, something red painted them thick, like … blood?
The gallop of your heart made itself known with every throb of your aching head. You took a breath and reassured yourself the bandages held far too little dust to mean anything. Still, you ran ahead.
The elevator doors were closed. You smacked the button repeatedly. A few delayed clicks and one angry screech of metal later, you were amazed to hear the lift rising from below. You had never considered the possibility that this elevator went anywhere but up.
When the entryway slid open, you discovered that an entire sheet of metal had been ripped off the interior wall and cast to the floor. In its absence, a new button had been revealed. Below the switches for New Home and your current floor, "B1," a neglected "B2" rested among several heavy layers of rust and grime.
If the ghostly green aura of Alphys' usual stomping grounds had been unsettling, the hallways Sans braved now could have spawned from his darkest nightmares. Flickering rays shed light on cobwebs thick with dust. Particles hovered like timeless snowflakes. The buzz of electricity shorted in and out. Smells of must and molding paper coated the air. Sans would not be surprised if a leak had sprung somewhere down here. What doors lined his path had been shut tight, so utterly dark behind their tall slat windows it was impossible to know what lay inside unless already familiar.
Luckily—and unluckily—Sans knew this place like the back of his hand.
He took a breath. Simply being here, undertaking this fool's errand, diving headfirst into a hell he had hoped to leave behind, would have been enough to strain a healthy soul. He closed his eyes and wrapped hope like a tourniquet around the edges of that pitiful, shattered spade. There had to be a light at the end of this tunnel. Just a few turns down the long hallways, through a big red door, and he would find it.
His steps cut lines through the dark dust on the floor. His memory of this hallway felt fresh, as if it hadn't been ages since his last visit, as if he hadn't done everything in his power to forget the lab and all inside. The farther he walked, however, the longer this hallway seemed to stretch. When he turned the corner, he stood right back where he had started. Or at least … it appeared that way.
This hallway looked slightly different to him than last time. One second it appeared younger than he remembered, then the next it seemed older. New doors became old doors, even no doors at all. The same cobwebs he had seen earlier were wiped clean—but in another blink of the inconstant lights, they padded corners more heavily than before.
His phone vibrated so powerfully it could break. The universe buzzed his brain with confusion. Though his contact with the Rift had given him some immunity to temporal disturbances, how long could it hold against the unraveled timelines swimming around him?
Muffled voices struck up conversation in a nearby room. Was there a light on under the door? Sans found it difficult to decide. A part of his mind said "yes," and yet another …
He slowly, cautiously reached for the door handle and pushed it inward—but found only the dark remnants of an abandoned chemistry lab. He had visited this room a handful of times before sealing the entire floor behind a spare elevator panel. By his recollection, he should have already passed this door. It should have been the first on his left.
More whispers resonated from farther down the hallway, and his soul surged with new hope. One voice sounded familiar, unique, isolated to the person he desperately sought to find. He hurried back to find shifting shadows around the corner, flickering in and out of sight at the end of the corridor. He chased after them.
Running down the hall was as muscling against insanity incarnate. The farther he traveled, the worse it became. Time and realities flipped over him like the pages of a calendar. Voices echoed around the inconstant hallways, and soon he became unsure where their words were leading him, if anywhere at all.
The dialogue became more nonsensical, spilling over him from left, right, even sometimes above. He could no longer pinpoint a single direction, until the snippets of a familiar conversation reached out to him. In yet another chamber, he glimpsed two silhouettes: one tall, one short, both skeletal.
"you think … want you to give up?"
"Please. All … splitting timestreams, even … 'Paradox Project.' You've never … failure would …"
"dings …"
"Wouldn't it?"
Sans knew, then, that these voices he heard were only ghosts, moments in time blurring their lines. He turned away from the memory before it could go too far. His hand, already tight on his ribs, clenched their damaged bones a little further. The pain of it distracted him from pain of another kind. He pushed onward toward the other echoes beckoning him down the hall.
At long last, he reached a dead end. A large red door stood floor to ceiling on his left, mottled in age one moment, brand new the next. Here, he hesitated, phalanges flat to a surface so hauntingly carmen it could be painted with blood. It burned warm against his bones. Heat radiated through the metal like a hot stove, as if the heart of Hotland's lava pools rested on the other side.
What if he didn't find what he was looking for?
What if he did?
His second thoughts became third thoughts, then fourth and fifth, but the hum of his brother's voice on the other side snuffed all doubts into smoke like a low-burning candle.
The door creaked and scratched against its hinges unwillingly. A wavering light blinded him at first, but as his eyes adjusted, a familiar sight spread before him.
If he hadn't been this acquainted with the Paradox Project's epicenter, the chamber would be completely unrecognizable as anything other than a disaster zone. Old lab equipment, machines, vials, outdated tech and their broken components, all lay scattered across a dusty, cracked floor. Wires dangled from the ceiling; diagrams and posters danced in the kinetic air, singed and torn against the walls. Burn scars blackened the ceramic tiles, jagged and snarling like a predator's teeth around a deep, central crater.
A white-hot slice of light pulsated just above the gauge in the floor. Pieces of metal, earth, and more scientific debris hung suspended in the atmosphere around it as if in orbit around a small planet, but its shape was far from spherical. Its slowly undulating form twisted away through the air in a harsh ravine, a rift that jutted far off into the universe itself.
The farther you ventured down these terrifying, inconsistent hallways, the more lost you felt. Left became right. Up became down. Even so, you sensed you were moving closer, wherever it was you headed.
With every step, your head throbbed as if seized with earthquakes, ready to split under the fiery pressure building at its core. You pressed on anyway. Sans was hurt. He could be in worse trouble than you imagined and it would be all your fault.
After what felt like hours, you turned a corner into a dead end and a blood-red door on your left. Your instincts took you toward the doorway first, but before you could even touch the handle, you stopped.
Beside the door, the wall twisted and morphed with a painful radiance like strings of light on the ocean floor. As bright as this ribbon might have been, it only glowed residually, as if just beyond hid something so brilliant it burned through raw matter. That you could have passed such an overwhelming sight, even if fleetingly, astounded you. Had it even been there before? Whatever the case, the vision drilled a shudder down your spine as if threatening to shift every vertebra into an alternate version of itself.
You shielded your eyes. Just beyond the glare, you caught sight of something even brighter. It spun in slow circle, hovering only an inch or so above the ground. It looked like a white, upside-down heart, a spade maybe …
A soul.
A monster soul.
Your heart threatened to tear itself to pieces. Could it be … no. No, it couldn't. It just couldn't be Sans. You tripped over your own feet to reach it, though your head screamed in protest. On your knees, you reached out shaking hands to the spinning soul and, without a second thought, took it.
It hurt.
Just putting your hands on this tiny beacon burned through you like cosmic fire. The barrier you had once encountered inside your mind shattered like glass. That misplaced soul faded away into the unusual light as if it had never truly been there, and your hands fell through to catch the ground. Your headache spiked in crescendo and then dispersed with a cloud of images in sepia.
You were more than familiar with the first image: falling down into the depths of the Underground in an attempt to cut short your existence. You expected your memory to darken here, the moment you landed among yellow flowers, when you had hit your head and forgotten your name. This time, however, it continued.
Your eyes had only closed a moment and, when you reopened them, you saw Asriel. Not Flowey, but Asriel, the real Asriel, the small, shy little creature who only held your best interests at heart. You remembered how his white coat of fur had burned bright gold in a halo from the overhead light, like an angel. He bent a hand to you and asked if you were all right. And no, you weren't all right, but it definitely helped to see such kindness—even if convinced he was a figment of your imagination. After what you had been through, day after day of hurtful words and harmful hands… .
You shuddered. That's right, you thought. You had forgotten the day leading up to your fall. Without that memory, your mind had pieced together the obvious, that you had finally given in and stepped off the ledge to the underground after so many nights lying awake, picturing the act over and over and over again. But now you remembered it had been more than that. You hadn't just given in. You had finally lashed out; you had finally pushed back; and in doing so, you had revenged yourself on your abusers infinitely more than you had intended to—or rather, finitely more.
You felt sick. You hadn't meant to hurt anyone … had you?
Asriel took you to his parents, who replaced the ones you had forsaken. Your eyes filled with tears now to remember that, after so many years, you had finally found the love and care you craved, even if unworthy. Humans, such flawed and terrible creatures, only capable of pain and destruction, could never treat you the way these tenderhearted monsters did.
After basking in the Dreemurrs' love more than a year, your guilt and self-hatred gnawed you down to a husk. Despite what humanity had done to them, despite their years underground at human hands, the Dreemurrs had loved and protected you, a human child, with all their hearts. It took thought and time, but at long last you had formulated a plan to repay them. Undeserving human that you were, for all your terribleness, there was still something you could give.
You could give your life to set them free.
You remembered your plan. You remembered how it had all gone wrong, how Asriel had been too afraid and goodhearted to go through with it. You should have known his edges were too soft to harvest seven human souls, even if it meant the freedom of his entire race. You—miserable human you—were as sharp as a butcher's knife. You had done it before. You could do it again.
Even with your vicious teeth gnawing at his soul … Asriel could not.
Broken beyond repair, your and Asriel's new body had fallen to dust inside the barrier, and it was all your fault. You had killed him. You had killed your sweetheart of an adopted brother. You had thought you would make Asriel stronger, but only served to ruin him. He lost his soul, and it was all your fault. Your perfect family tore apart, and it was all your fault. A loving marriage ended, and it was all your fault.
It was all your fault.
In the present, tears fell fast down your face. If you could have found your way to that ledge again, you would have. All this horribleness, every bit of it, would not have happened if not for you. To be that desperate to save Asriel, some part of you must have already known. Now, all you wanted was one more chance to start over again, to undo every terrible thing you had wrought on the Underground, but that power was gone now …
Before you could thank the stars for no more memories, they continued. You remembered waking again, a second time. You were small, contained, beating with determination like a heart inside a flower's crown of gold, here in this very lab. Reborn. The rift in time, the one that split the universe just beyond this wall, had stretched before Asriel's new flower body—your new body. In that moment, you had stared into the power of all time and space and it had stared back. Your determination called out to it, strong enough to command the clock. As your newly reformed soul lingered close enough to touch the breach in time, you bound yourself to it and all it touched.
Though you had been revived, Asriel—or rather, Flowey—was the one in control. You spoke, but he did not listen, or maybe he did not hear. If he received anything from you, it was your anger, your hurt, your frustration. You had taken powerful magic into your soul, and here he squandered it on petty fights and dull games. He again failed your chance to do things right, over and over and over. That goal didn't matter to him anymore. Your plan didn't matter. He wanted to have "fun," to play with you forever, but forever on the same day grows stale before long. The games became more apathetic and cruel. Recalling the image of your friends now, falling at your hands, seared like a brand on your soul. Their dust scattered to the wind, one after the other, after the other …
Your heart filled with the sound of their screaming, and nothing you knew could silence it.
In the last shred of your memory, Flowey had learned of your burial place—and upon visiting, you saw something unbelievable. At the mouth of the Ruins below the barrier, your body rose from its grave, jaundiced and slow but otherwise alive. You did not think twice, or maybe you had no choice to begin with. You jumped home from Flowey and took the power of determination with you.
In the space between, you lost yourself—or maybe you had chosen to leave it behind. You had reset to the person you were before your scars, before you had stepped from the ledge above, before you had fought back against your human father and won. You forgot that journey, all the damage that had made you who you were, even your own name. But now … now you knew.
Your name was Chara.
If Sans focused his eyes hard enough, he could see faint ghosts of his past selves. Their blurred lines clung to a customary path, often straight through the door to linger at a desk or counter space or the old chalkboard in the corner. His stomach sickened to see the ghosts of others as well: the golden blur of Alphys, the blues, reds, and greens of other team members, but more upsetting than any, a taller shape whose ivory paths seemed to fade in and out of existence altogether. Sans reached out to touch them, but his fingers slipped through what were only memories.
He turned to the brilliance of the rift but his eyes did not want to see it. His every molecule resisted the phenomenon as if it should not be there, and by all rights, it should not have been. This monstrosity stood as a testament to his own shortcomings, to science gone too far, to emotions run too high. If the gray monsters he had encountered exuded a bitter taste, the rift emanated denatonium benzoate unaltered.
Despite instinct and experience screaming that he step away, Sans chose to inch forward. He walked as near to the brightness as he could before his mind threatened to unravel. His soul shuddered with fear, with anticipation, with every doubt and hope he had suppressed until this moment.
"dings?" he could only whisper.
For a long time, or what could have been no time at all inside this abomination, Sans awaited an answer. Everything around him continued to change, rolling like the tumblers of a combination lock in search of the proper pattern, but always unsuccessful. In that way, it remained the same. The world did not change in the way he wanted.
"i'm here, like … like you asked," he tried again, but again to no answer.
He waited even longer, but the more time he spent here, the more his doubts began to overwhelm him. Hope chimed in with excuses. Maybe he hadn't waited long enough. Maybe he was missing a piece of the puzzle. Maybe returning to the rift wasn't even what the gray ghost meant.
Or maybe …
His eyelights dimly dragged through the glaze of past versions into the true state of this broken test room. Here lay all evidence of his terrible past. Here, he and his brother's team had cut a gash in the fabric of time, and time had cut back. Here was the last place he had seen Wingdings. The last place.
Hope's binding around his soul loosened, and its deepest cracks only deepened. What was he even doing here? It had been nearly a century. In a hundred years, he should have moved on. He was a scientist, for fuck's sake. All evidence before him—his lack of sleep, his family history, unusual visions and their magically vanished proof—he should have seen past the emotion and admitted to the most obvious answer.
He was cracking.
He covered his face with his left hand, while the other remained shakily preoccupied with his bleeding, dusting ribs. What a fool he had made of himself, succumbing to his demons. Could he even return to you now, the failure that he was? After abandoning you for a hallucination? Swimming in the thought of it, his being felt infirm in a horrifyingly familiar way, a way he had felt more than thirty times in a row …
The bright red door behind him scraped open again. When he turned, his eyelights shrank to see you there, clinging to the lintel as if letting go would send you adrift on a storm-ravaged sea. Your head of unkempt hair clung to the tears on your cheeks. Your shoulders shook. You shambled out into the typhoon.
Sans' eye sockets hollowed out to darkness like dead suns. You couldn't be here. You shouldn't be here. You had to leave, now, before the rift swallowed you up … just like his brother …
"kid," he said more quietly than he wanted, but it was all he had strength for. "kid, no. go back. it's too dangerous …"
He realized you were muttering to yourself. Your auburn eyes, wider than he had ever seen, caught the light of the rift to glow nearly red. Was it odd, Sans wondered, to think you seemed healthier than before? Your cheeks actually had some color for once.
The nearer you came to the swimming, pulsating light, the more you tasted that rare magic of time. Your determination sang out to it, but to no answer. You reached out a hand. If you could just get close enough …
Sans saw where you were heading. Fear coiled around his insides like a reticulated python. Despite his better judgment and unwilling limbs, he hurried forward. He took firm root between you and your goal. He wished he could teleport you away, but his magic ran so low that, even if a shortcut were to work in this unstable atmosphere, he could take you no farther than a few feet.
"the hell are you doin'?" he asked.
You tried to walk around him. He blocked you again. Your hands clutched the hair on your head like a lifeline, as if letting go would leave you to drown in the riptide. You set your teeth.
"please," said Sans, short for breath. "i'll go back with ya. i'll even book a room at the resort, like you wanted …"
"N-no, I have to …"
"you have to nothin'," he interrupted with more desperation than he had ever betrayed before. "rift could wipe ya clean from existence. past, present, and future. is that somethin' you want?"
"Maybe."
"frisk."
"My name's not Frisk!" you snapped.
Sans' eye-sockets hollowed out entirely. As their caves bore into your skin, you sensed their sight running through you like water through a sieve. Just like in the Last Hallway, he was poring over your heart, and you knew then he could see you for the horrible, awful person you were. When he failed to breathe, you couldn't help laughing. It was too painful, too horrible, how fucked up you were, how fucked up the world was, all because of you. And now, he knew it too.
Sans shifted backward just a little. Every bone of his body quaked. Your level of violence was … significantly higher. Could you have been reduced to attacking monsters just to reach him in time? The Frisk he knew would never do something like that. No, something else must have happened.
"i know it's not," he said quietly. "but what am i s'posed to say? you forgot your real name."
"Well, I sure as hell remember now," you said, voice quavering. Your hands found your face. "I remember. Everything."
Sans didn't know what to say. He couldn't tell if you were laughing or crying, but he knew for sure that you were suffering. His soul ached more and more with every second he laid eyes on you. He lifted his free hand, toying with the idea of reaching out to you. Was that even something you wanted?
Past the river of tears, you saw the power to reset forming in a layer deep within that timeless gash. Even without your eyes, past the wild screaming in your red soul, you could feel it reaching out to you too. You had to grasp it. You had to undo this whole mess, back to the true beginning, or at the very least just back to forgetting.
Again, you inched nearer to that volatile tear in time. Again, Sans stood in your way. You squalled and clenched your hands into fists so tight your fingernails drew blood.
"JUST LET ME RESET," you screamed.
If Sans' sparse magic could run any colder, it would have.
"It's all my fault," you sobbed into the bloody palms of your hands. "If I can go back … maybe I can fix it …"
He felt faint. A force greater than gravity pulled on his shoulders. Resetting now would undeniably kill him. You knew that, didn't you? You had to. He had told you as much. Did you not care?
His mouth trembled in search of words before finally whispering, "you promised, kiddo."
"Frisk promised."
Sans' mind raced. More of his soul dusted away inside him than ever before. Everything you had been through, all the laughter and heartache you had shared over the years, felt to have been dashed against the rocks in one motion. His hope trickled away from him like sand in an hourglass. His hand on his ribs fell through to the cavity behind them as they broke away to dust.
"you promised me," he echoed, without really thinking. "you promised …"
"As if you wouldn't go back if you could," you said. "Save the one you really care about. I'm just a replacement. I've always been a replacement. So stop pretending to care."
What remained of Sans' soul broke in two. Despite everything he wanted to say to contradict your statement, his voice couldn't rise above a decibel. He could only stare, despondent, eyes nothing but cavities as hollow as his chest.
You glared at him, your auburn eyes shining brighter and brighter in the rejuvenating essence of the rift. It had been so long since you felt this strong, and Sans, by contrast, never looked weaker. You could make it past him. Though he didn't understand, it would be better for him, for both of you, for everyone, if you undid this.
His mind was darkening, but he refused to let go. The bright red core of his soul flickered to light, just once more. Even if you somehow managed to make it through unscathed, resetting now could rip the Underground in half. Everyone could be wiped from existence—Papyrus, Toriel, Asgore, Alphys, Undyne—but even if that didn't happen, even if you didn't get that far, he couldn't stand by and watch you be destroyed. Even if you didn't care about him anymore … he still loved you.
You walked firmly toward the wavering lights and your one and only hope for redemption. As you passed him, Sans stood stiffly, almost too frail to move. The lights of his eyes hadn't resurfaced since the start of your argument, but his left eye illuminated now.
Just as you felt the burning intensity of the rift on your outstretched fingers, a skeletal hand took you firmly by the shoulder. It slipped in its own dust to tear you away from the break in time, off into an unruly cyclone of a shortcut. The portal swirled you like Cabernet in a wine glass before casting you out onto the same broken floors just a few feet farther back from the rift. You lifted your head and blanched. The screaming in your heart fell silent.
Sans could only hope he had succeeded. Falling down as he was, sliding in his own shoes, he couldn't fight the momentum of pulling you away from the ledge. He had known he might not be able to. Now the rift seared against his back like white-hot silver, eating away the parts of him that had not already crumbled. Your voice fell distantly over what was left of him to hear it. He took it as faint consolation he had saved you from the void, even if only for a moment. With that last thought, his mind withered away to a peaceful emptiness, and the bright light of the rift consumed him.
Notes
OH NO
Don't worry, kids, we got like 8-9 more chapters. ;) (I lied; it's 6 ^^;)
Also, as you probably noticed, we've come to the second of three major head canons I've been holding onto for the better part of this year! I am … so excited. If someone else has had this thought, I haven't come across it (which also makes me a little scared).
I've always seen Chara and Frisk represented by the fandom as two entirely separate people. When playing Undertale … that wasn't the sense I got. In my mind, you were always Chara, resurrected by the power of determination to resolve your unfinished business.
When you start the game, you make a choice.
When you choose pacifist, you leave behind the person you were and become the angel of light to save the ones you love. By reaching the end and saving the Underground in pacifist mode, you earn the name Frisk. You choose the name Frisk, because Asriel is right. You aren't Chara anymore. You've grown to become someone else.
When you choose genocide, you let your anger and hatred overcome you and thereby become the angel of death. When you meet Chara at the end of the game, you are facing yourself. Their eyes are open, their cheeks rosy, their skin a natural shade, but that's the only real difference between the two of you. After all, a body that's been dead this long wouldn't have those qualities …
I tweaked it a little to fit the narrative of the fanfic, but that's the main theory. And before you ask, it's possible we won't encounter my third head canon in this story, but it's definitely something I'm going to make art for some time down the road. Possibly a second fic after this one? (Not like a sequel or anything.)
I'm high on finishing this chapter so the next one might roll out pretty quickly. Cross your fingers!
Thank you for reading! If you have thoughts or feelings, I'd love to hear them.
Next Up! …