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riftfic · 8 months

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14. Human

Who will save you now?

Warnings: strong language, referenced suicide, violence

Featured Characters: Sans, Chara/Frisk (Reader), Flowey/Asriel, Wingdings Gaster, Asgore Dreemurr

Note: If you haven't read the previous chapters recently (maybe even if you have outside the past few days), I recommend giving it another read. It's definitely not a requirement, but I added some extra details throughout the story and a few more scenes, most notably in Chapters 3 & 9, that should help the ending feel even more satisfying.

Several years later . . . here's the next chapter.

< Load | RESET | Continue >

From a single strip at the Underground’s heart, Waterfall tunneled away into a boneyard mess of caves. In one direction, the passage to Hotland sprawled in mushroom-light mazes and a boulder choke disguising Tem Village. In the other, a quiet bubble harbored a simple mouse, neck deep in plans to retrieve a wedge of crystallized cheese. Between them, from a silver door that had only been there sometimes, Sans stepped out into a flood of bioluminescence.

Though a door latched shut behind him, dark, damp stone replaced the surface he reclined against now. Its cold, unyielding texture met his fingertips, a reminder that there would be no second visit.

He clutched the spindly metal bars of that unnaturally gray birdcage. He tucked his chin over the iron rung at its peak, hardly dousing the light of the small monster soul trapped inside.

The task set before him was unconscionable. Even if he managed to survive . . .

“i can’t do that,” he had resisted. “i can’t kill Frisk!”

“They shouldn’t even be alive,” said Wingdings.

The words took Sans by surprise. He set his heels despite the encroaching void and a minute hand nearing his final stroke of midnight.

“oh, but ya want me to take this soul all the way back to asriel, huh?” he said. “make sure he survives? double standard, if y’ask me.”

"I didn't say it was fair,” Wingdings hardly breathed. His eyes gained urgency. “The human . . . might survive, if they're determined enough. But after you pull the lever . . .”

At that, Sans’ anger siphoned away, leaving behind a fear much broader than the fate of one human child. Their mistake had set so many events into motion. Lives had been built and destroyed, paths forged and buried. The machine could rewrite the course of everything as easily as it could leave the butterfly effect intact. They could remain here in the present or be sucked back to the day it all began. With a phenomenon this unpredictable, just about anything could happen . . . but whatever world they left behind, at least it might survive.

“if i do use their soul to run the machine,” Sans said more calmly, “what’ll happen to asriel, then? to me? to the underground? heck, what’ll happen to you?”

It was clear to Sans by the frown on Wingdings’ face that his brother had already considered this question. Despite his ingenuity, the once royal scientist only shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I do know what’ll happen if you don’t.”

In the present, Sans beat his fist against the rock behind him. Why did it have to be so fucking twisted? Why his Frisk? And why did he have to be the one to do it? Maybe it didn’t have to work out like this. Maybe there was more time than Dings thought. Maybe he could find another way.

His phone buzzed rhythmically at his waist. He pulled it from his coat pocket and looked at the screen. The image of Papyrus illuminated those shadowy cavern walls below several missed call notifications. Sans took a deep, shaking breath, then another, and answered.

“pup . . .”

“SANS!” Papyrus shouted. “I’VE BEEN TRYING TO REACH YOU FOR HOURS!”

“oh.”

“I’M NEARLY TO NEW HOME. A FRIEND HAS INFORMED ME THAT THE HUMAN IS IN TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE DANGER! IS THAT TRUE?!”

Sans nearly broke down then and there. Though seeing Wingdings again had restored many of the deeper cracks in his soul, it still felt fragile, even more when considering the path ahead of him.

“more than true,” he whispered.

A patch of silence followed. Sans dropped his cheek to rest on birdcage bars.

“tell me it’s gonna be all right,” he murmured into the receiver.

“Sans . . . where are you?” Papyrus asked, more gently than was typical.

“just tell me, please.”

“It’s . . .” Papyrus sighed. “It is going to be all right. Now, WHERE ARE YOU?”

Hearing the words in his brother’s voice quelled Sans’ fear, enough to return strength to his limbs. He lingered on the phone a moment longer, as if the connection truly placed him at Papyrus’ side.

“meet you there,” he said.

You followed in Asgore’s shadow, watching the folds of his cape sway and collide like cattails in the wind. His silhouette consumed yours. He could hold all of you in one hand, let alone the tiny red soul he sought to claim.

Past the end of that long hallway mirror of the Ruins, the barrier undulated with powerful magic. Its waves of golden white licked the crackled stone as if in search of escapees. It contoured Asgore’s silhouette in a crisp white line as he turned to face you.

That all-too-familiar smile prickled the fur along his muzzle. Looking up into his apologetic eyes, you remembered his hands on your shoulders, his all-encompassing embrace that threatened to lose you in his fur. The macaroni pictures, the crayon drawings, the sweaters . . . the buttercup pie. You shuddered.

“Human,” said the king of all monsters. His powerful voice trembled, and the earth trembled with it. “It was nice meeting you. . . . Goodbye.”

He held his trident firmly in both hands and lowered his head . . . but a stoplight glow kept his chin from falling too far. There you stood, hands outstretched, red soul hovering above your palms.

“I’m the last one,” you said.

Asgore stared at the heart-shaped spirit as if entranced. Its warmth illuminated your fingers with ruby firelight. It was in the crimson glint of your eyes, however, that he became lost, captured in the clutch of a ghost from years long gone.

“Do I . . . know you?” he asked, bewildered both by the situation and the question itself.

“Please, take it,” you said. Tears fell down your face. “It’s no good for anything else.”

Asgore’s eyes widened with recognition. “Chara . . . ?”

Intense heat flared in the hallway behind you. Before Asgore could say anything more, a brilliant ball of flame had launched him into the cavern wall. Flecks of gray stone spat out among a field of clouds.

You swung to face the spellcaster. Toriel stood framed in the doorway, her face scrunched in a scowl like a snarling lion. One smoking arm remained outstretched, clenched in a fist.

“What a miserable creature,” she growled, “torturing such a poor, innocent youth.”

You hadn’t known what path the timeline had taken or whether your friends would convene . . . yet Toriel had arrived, exactly the same as before. Though you may have jokingly called her “mom,” the name now rang through your head with the purity of a windchime in the breeze.

Undyne, Alphys, and Papyrus appeared after her, along with a swath of others you had met along the way. You wanted to tell them to turn back, that you did not deserve them, that if they had known the demon you truly were, they never would have wanted to be your friend.

Your color drained. As they approached, a web of vines crawled after them along the dark ceiling and cavern floors.

You ran to Asgore, who sat slumped amid rubble and a brand new hallway door in the shape of his back. He grumbled in discomfort. A layer of dust coated his royal robes and golden mane, which he shook like a dog. You slid to your knees beside him.

“Hurry, please!” you blubbered to the stunned monster king. You proffered your soul as if it were on fire. “There isn’t a lot of time . . . !”

Toriel snatched you back by the shoulders.

“What has come over you, my child?” she demanded. “Do you not know what he means to do with it?”

“Mom, I . . .”

“Frisk.” Her eyes had begun scanning the room in fright. “Where is Sans?”

The path to the barrier gave Sans more difficulty than expected. The last time he had attempted these roads with fewer than two shortcuts, he had been a century younger and taking his time, mushroom hunting with young Papyrus. His limbs lagged behind his will. His breath rattled in his chest. Though his fingers slipped against that birdcage no one remembered, he refused to release its colorless patina bars. Everything depended on this.

He took what natural shortcuts he could—river ferries and elevators—but even then, the trip cost more time than he had bargained. At long last, he had reached the innards of Asgore’s home in the capital. He ran, huffing and puffing, down the golden tiles of the Last Hallway.

Even as he sped past, his heart ached to remember your meeting here. The flare of sunlight on your head, the even brighter smile on your face, the secret passwords on your tongue. . . . The memory of that pure soul compared to the corrupted one he had read beside the rift overwhelmed him, and he paused. He touched a hand to the white pillar that once occluded him.

Who were you now? Frisk? Chara? Both? If Chara truly were your forgotten name, if everything he knew about the tragedy of Asgore’s children had happened to you, such terrible memories weighed down on your tiny shoulders. It did not surprise him, then, that your violence had escalated to remember those horrors. Ferocious thorns had been hiding in the soft petal corona of your soul, and neither of you had known it.

Clinging tightly to the forgotten prison in his hands, he buried his sentiments and tore through vine-swathed hallways into a dark passage. He skidded to a halt just past the silvery stone archway to the barrier, where his bones clattered with shock.

The cavern pulsed in radiant waves like the steady spin of a lighthouse beacon. Twisting, thorny roots filled the cavern like a briar patch, and their position changed with every flash of light. Among the vicious mess of chloroplast, monster figures had been tangled, their souls nearly devoured.

The dimming pinpoints of Sans’ eyes could not peel away from your small form, crumpled on the floor before a yellow flower. Your red soul snapped among his vines, barely shimmering in a ruby remnant before splitting apart into nothing.

Sans could not stifle the horror that clawed its way out his mouth. He nearly dropped the cage.

Flowey turned to grin at him. “Trash day already?” he asked, spinning his head in a full circle.

Sans shook. No. This couldn’t have happened. You couldn’t have fallen to that little heathen daisy so quickly. You couldn’t have lost your determination. If only he hadn’t lingered in the hallway. If only he had kept running . . . !

You blinked at the human soul still hovering in your outstretched hands. It glowed red, though not as brightly as it once did. Still alive. Still yours to give. Not torn to bits by a nihilistic plant.

Only moments ago, you had fallen to a flower, the same flower weaving his way into this chamber of darkness and light. Toriel’s hands rested heavily on your shoulders. Papyrus chattered away, as Asgore pleaded with Toriel to give him a second chance. While they were distracted, Flowey dug his way out of the earth, grinning deviously, ready to spring all over again.

Confusion waltzed with your mind, spinning you gently. You had experienced this rush backward a thousand times before. Just a short step in reverse to let you continue after falling or if you disliked the outcome . . . but you did not have the determination to do it now. You had intended to die. You had meant for one of two creatures to take your power and be done with it.

It hadn’t been you.

The world shifted. Time rushed away like the tide, back into the ocean depths. Darkness bled away into golden sunlit tiles and stained glass windows. Birds chirped among a distant rustle of leaves. The air danced with prisms for a fleeting moment before the world reappeared as it had only moments before.

Sans realized suddenly that he stood in the Last Hallway all over again. A glittering pocket of magic danced like a handheld star beside him, where he had touched the pillar and remembered you. It had not been there before.

Air filled his ribcage in jagged gasps. His soul burned as it usually did when you reset time, though somewhat gentler. His hands shook around the bars of that monochrome birdcage with fear, confusion, and exhilaration.

He had just turned back time. He could feel it. And if that were the case . . .

He ran. He sprinted faster than ever to reach you, but you lay still on the floor again. Though uncertain how, and though it hurt him, he turned back the clock a second time. Then a third. Then a fourth. Every time, the flower tore apart your soul like a horror movie on repeat, until finally, Sans arrived one split second earlier. Your soul spun a circle above you as if hanging from a string, and a ring of white pellets had only begun readying itself to deliver the killing blow.

Before Sans knew what he was doing, he was charging Flowey through a rough shortcut, foot extended to drop-kick the weed down into his roots. That cursed dandelion’s shriek had never sounded so satisfying. Sans’ dragon skulls had already manifested over his shoulders, jaws aflame—but when they blasted blue-hot magic out their mouths, Flowey had already disappeared into the earth.

A whip of green struck the ground where Sans had stood. He skipped out of the way in the nick of time, then again, and again, and again. He punched his free hand to the ground, and a wave of long, white magic bones crashed down through the air like meteorites. They speared into the cave floor with enough force to run cracks through the ceiling. Clouds of rock sprinkled down onto his shoulders. Flowey’s grip on his friends and family slackened just an inch.

Flowey surfaced again, undamaged beyond a few frayed petals.

Sans panted, his adrenaline quickly plunging. His bones began aching again, though his raging soul burned brightly through its seams. Sweat slipped down his skull into the neck of his shirt. He didn’t know if he could withstand this much longer. He did not know if his soul could survive another time jump.

“Ha,” chirped the little flower. “Looking pretty rough, there, old pal." His eyes glinted red within the skull-like hollows of his face. "Poor, flimsy little monster souls. Why bother trying? Even Chara was no match for me, and they were a million times stronger than you’ll ever be!”

Sans knew he was right. He did not have the full resilience of a purebred human. Even you had to try several times before making it past this bitter herb. Who in their right mind would bet on him: half blind, right arm nearly useless, only one HP? Just like every moment in his life, he would find a way to fuck this up. Just like every other time before, he would be useless to help.

His hope dwindled down, as did the fire in his soul. He could not find the strength to evade the string of bullets shooting toward him, but they were serendipitously blocked by a fence of small white bones.

“DON’T LISTEN TO HIM, SANS!” said Papyrus through clenched teeth. “YOU. CAN. WIN!”

“We are here to help you,” said Toriel. “No matter what happens.”

“Statistically it’s impossible,” said Alphys, “b-but you’ve beaten the odds before! I know you can do it!”

“Fuck you, Sans,” said Undyne.

Everyone looked at her. She shrugged.

“Sans,” said Asgore. “Listen to me.”

Sans clung to the bars of the birdcage more tightly, eyes glued to the smirking flower afar.

“You are not just your father’s son,” said the king of the Underground. “You have more than magic running through your veins. Remember that . . . and stay determined!”

Sans’ white pupils snapped to Asgore’s blue and brown at once. The statement had struck him somewhere deep beyond the monster white shell of his soul, and still more words passed between them unspoken. Sans then dragged his gaze across all his friends, who looked back with steadfast confidence, even Undyne.

Flowey coiled down on himself, pretending to be scared. “Urgh, no!” he whimpered. “Unbelievable! This can’t be happening! I can’t possibly withstand all of you . . . you . . . !” His face contorted into his evilest grin. “Idiots.”

His vines snapped taut around every monster, and yet another thorny coil snatched Sans from the ground as well. Through ropes of green and brown, Sans watched your red soul go down the flower’s throat, sealed behind hungry white fangs within a golden crown. Then, everything became lost in a flash of white.

Clang.

Sans moaned. Between that blitz of light and now, he had dropped to his hands and knees. His palms felt scorched—and dreadfully empty. Ahead of him, the last withering wisp of gray silver bars dissipated into the air as if made of smoke. Seeing it clawed the magic away from his bones with every mounting breath. His eyes became hollow.

The cage was gone—really, truly gone. Not even a step backward in time could bring it back, and with it, Asriel’s soul. Sans felt the world bottom out. Had he really failed, after everything?

A voice cackled overhead. “Finally,” it said. “I was so tired of being a flower.”

Sans looked upward and blanched. Aside from a few drawings you had scribbled out as a child, he had never witnessed this ungodly creature of countless souls. Sans had only been consumed by him, a coal block among many to fuel his hate. Now, Asriel Dreemurr hovered overhead in all his glory, raging with deathly power in a kaleidoscope of energy. No wonder you had nightmares.

Past the wreckage of their earlier fight, your body still lay heaped on the floor among stone and dead vines, seemingly asleep. As Sans crawled close, tears threatened to form.

He bit them back. No. He needed to hope. He needed to dream. He needed to be determined that he could call you out from the darkness, just as you had done for him a hundred times. It was his turn, now. Everyone would make it to the other side . . . including Asriel.

“Huh?” Asriel grunted as he caught wind of Sans below. “What are you still doing here? I ate your soul, you dirty lawn bag!”

“grass not,” said Sans as he stood, dusting the dirt from his jacket with his left hand.

“Ugh.” Asriel pinched his muzzle exasperatedly. “So annoying. How many times have you died now? Thirty-five? Thirty-six?” He thrust a rocket’s flare at Sans with a wicked smile. “Thirty-seven?!”

Sans gathered your body into his arms and stepped into a last-minute shortcut, safely away from that raw magical surge. After hiding your figure inside an Asgore-shaped wall hole, he flitted through the blue light of a portal once again. He reappeared in the air, directly in Hyperdeath’s path, only inches from his head.

“bone apétit, fucker,” he said and threw a handful of small bones at Asriel’s face. Though they caused no significant damage, they certainly got his attention.

Sans landed on all fours and scrambled. Bullets, fireballs, shooting stars, and lightning strikes raged after him. They left craters in the ground and drove deeper cracks into the ceiling overhead. Stalactites fell and shattered. Sans dodged every one of them. His body thoughtlessly followed the part of him that knew how to survive but had no time to ask permission, so begged forgiveness instead.

As Asriel Dreemurr took a moment to lift his hands, Sans struggled to catch his breath. His hood smelled of smoldering keratin. Holes had been burned through his sleeves. His body felt slick and ashen against his jacket’s cotton interior. The bones he had tossed like a scoop of dog biscuits into Asriel’s face had been the last magic he could muster. Whatever great power the prince of the Underground gathered now, Sans doubted he could survive it.

The world darkened. Sans could no longer see Asriel or the barrier, not even his hands if he raised them. Everything had become silent except the paddle of his own breath.

A skull three times his size suddenly materialized from the shadow. In appearance, it reminded him of those he and his siblings had mastered, though its horns and features mirrored Asriel instead. It laughed in his face—a grim, bone-chilling sound like grating rocks—but Sans stood firm. Brilliant red rage and determination surfaced among the cracks of his soul. How dare Asriel steal from Papyrus? How dare he turn Sans’ own family magic against him?

Waves of light drew into the open bowels of its snakelike gullet. Debris ran past his ankles, recalling images of a lab in shambles, a brother consumed by a beast of timeless indifference. He braced himself, ready to dive into the darkness as he did then and save the ones that mattered most.

A flash of brightness burst over him once more. This time, it ripped the soul from inside him and shattered it into pieces.

His mind floated through an abyss, bursting with the fireworks of everything at stake. He thought of Papyrus, never seeing sunrise; Toriel, never knowing the love of a new family; Alphys, never seeing the true greatness inside herself; Undyne, never free to explore the world; Asgore, failing his people. He thought of you, swallowed in the belly of the very thing you had sought to save. He thought of the entire world, destroyed by the god of hyperdeath, eaten alive by a hungry rift in time. The pieces of his soul quivered in a glow of crimson, ready to disperse.

*But it refused.

The shards sewed back together. A burst of bright red coursed through him like a new flame that had waited a lifetime to be struck. He had to live. He needed to live. He wanted to live! The darkness faded away, and soon the pulsing light of the barrier greeted his eyes once again.

He gaped at his shaking hands, eye sockets wide with confusion and amazement and, more than anything, determination. His soul felt aflame with a ruby-red blaze that forged the bleeding cracks of every pain, every hardship, and every sorrow into an armor stronger than the thickest alloy.

Asriel’s final form hovered ahead of him. Giant wings had sprouted from his back, flaring with blues, reds, greens, and purples. His teeth bared in needle points to rival Undyne’s, seething with fury and frustration.

“YOU . . . GARBAGE BIN SKELETAL FREAK!” he screamed. “WHY? WHY CAN’T YOU DIE?!”

Sans realized very suddenly he couldn’t move. Asriel’s true power had run rampant through the air, cocooning him in a chrysalis of magic he could not escape. He struggled with no result. With no way to resist, Asriel’s attacks barreled into him again, and again, and again. Every time his brightly burning soul rebuilt itself, a little was lost along the way.

“I can feel it,” Asriel growled with relish. “Every time you die, your grip on this world slips away. Every time you die, your friends forget you a little more. Your life will end here, in a world where no one remembers you.”

Sans thought of Windings, lost in a hell of the same description. He recalled how determined his brother had been to hold that same world together in one piece, forgotten or not. Sans could not fail him again, not here, not now, not after how hard Dings had tried, not when all his hopes were so invested in his success. His brother’s words rang through Sans' head, the last he would speak before the ghost of a gray door had separated them.

“I want you to know,” Wingdings had said, “I believe in you more than I believe in anyone else.”

“heh, yer jus’ tuggin’ my tibia . . .”

“For Tesla’s sake, Sans,” Dings snipped. “Can you just, for a second, let me spoon-feed your imperceptibly minuscule single-cell petri dish of a trait you call your self-esteem?” He took a deep breath and steadied. “I know it might seem like you’re my only option,” he said, “but you’re the best option I could have ever hoped for. My big brother. The one who sticks it out through thick and thin. The one I could always rely on to come through for me. You can do this. You can save everyone. I know you can. So, please . . .

“. . . don’t give up.”

Sans closed his eyes and reached his heart out to Asriel’s amalgamation of souls. His friends and family were there somewhere. He could save them. They believed in him. Dings believed in him. His determination to save everyone bled through the confines of Asriel’s magic, and deep inside that monstrosity, something began to stir.

Darkness closed in and images of his friends materialized, though their faces could not be seen behind swimming, fragmented blurs of pitch. Toriel, Papyrus, Asgore, Alphys, and Undyne stood like statues in a ring around him. Under their breaths, they mumbled their deepest wounds aloud: loss, rejection, loneliness, guilt, and captivity.

Sans stared up at his little brother’s towering silhouette, shaken to see him so reduced.

“hey, puppy . . .” he began. He inched nearer. “‘member me?”

Papyrus did not acknowledge him beyond summoning a few bones, which promptly flew in his direction. They were nothing compared to what Asriel had been punting his way. Sans stood perfectly still to allow a large blue femur to pass harmlessly through his forehead, then teleported behind him. He wrapped his arms around his waist until his face lay cradled in the lower curve of his spine, as if it were fashioned to hold his head.

“is that any way to treat your big bro?” he asked quietly. He searched his head for his worst possible joke and turned to the remaining souls. “uh . . . w-whatcha all starin’ at?” He whipped out a finger gun as nonchalantly as possible. “never metacarpal of skeletons before?”

A long, silent moment passed. Then, Papyrus groaned. So did Undyne. Toriel giggled alongside Alphys with a snort. Asgore only sighed.

Sans beamed, then dodged what he saw as a well-deserved barrage of attacks from all five of his monster friends.

“hey, undies,” he said to Undyne past the quick flash of a blue spear. “i liked the tuna your piano. think you can teach me some scales?”

A similar response. Another wave of dangerous magic.

“knock, knock,” Sans said to Toriel. A hand of fire tried and failed to snatch him off the ground. He brushed off the heat. “i’ll take that as a ‘who’s there’. it’s yer local sentry, sans gaster!”

Toriel mumbled incoherently, but her last words sounded clear: “. . . Sans Gaster who?”

“yeesh,” Sans said, tugging at the neck of his shirt. “and i thought we were friends!”

Toriel laughed, then, revealing her face in a glorious burst of joy. Papyrus groaned more loudly than ever into existence.

“THAT’S ENOUGH BOONDOGGLING, SANS!” he shouted.

“i think you mean bone-doggling.”

“I DO NOT!” Papyrus stomped his foot.

With that, the rest of his friends returned to themselves, holding their stomachs or their heads in laughter. Sans wiped a joyful tear from his eye. By then, Papyrus had swept him off his feet into the tightest hug he could muster, which might have broken a rib were they more than specters. The remaining crew piled in: Toriel, Alphys, Asgore, even Undyne. In that one gesture, Sans’ soul swelled with hopes and dreams and burned brighter than ever.

“You’re d-d-doing great!”

“We’ve got your back, punk.”

“We believe in you.”

“heh . . . i’m rootin’ for me too, i guess,” Sans agreed bashfully.

“THAT’S THE SPIRIT,” Papyrus said, then lifted his eyes over Sans’ shoulder. “ONLY ONE MORE TO GO.”

As he said it, their images dissipated. Sans turned to follow Papyrus’ gaze. Another figure stepped from the shadow, eyes burning red through a shifting black cloud. A blood-red knife glinted in your hand. Your ruby soul quivered in the pit of your chest, a beacon through the dark.

“kiddo,” Sans breathed.

You shambled forward and blindly slashed for his neck. He side-stepped the sloppy cut. Your blade lodged into the unseen ground, so deeply it took a few tries to pry it out. Like a marionette, you lolled about to face him.

“It’s all my fault,” you murmured. “All my fault.”

“that ain’t true,” said Sans. He grimaced and ducked another swing. “you’re a good kid. you’ve always been a good kid.”

“I'm sorry,” you mumbled.

“why?” he asked. “you saved us. you saved me. you gave up your resets for it!”

Your razor-edged swipes and stabs began to falter. “My fault . . .”

“the only thing you’re at fault for is trying too bleedin’ hard.”

Though shaking, you continued to jab and swing your dagger with reckless abandon, and he continued to evade its path with infuriating precision. Whipping air and shuffling feet echoed through the dark as if you fought in an empty chapel.

“c’mon, bud!” Sans panted. Sweat had begun to gather on his forehead. “it’s me, sans!”

“Sans?” you replied in a fog. “Sans is dead. I killed him. It’s my fault.”

“i’m not dead. i’m right here.”

He came close, a breath away. Your knife grazed his cheekbone, revealing a stripe of red that trickled down into his shirt collar. As your arm passed his shoulder, he caught you around the chest and held on tight. He buried his face into your neck.

“i’m right here.”

At this, you froze. You held your knife shakily over his head, prepared to strike down into his back—but you didn’t. Though the black, jagged strokes of paint shifting about your head did not cease, the red of your eyes had dimmed.

“frisk. chara.”

He cradled your hiding face between his hands and looked into your eyes a long, long time. You could feel him reaching through your soul, judging you, reading you from cover to cover like an unlocked diary.

“it’s not your fault.”

As the words sank in, tears sprinkled down from that stormcloud between you, raining over your shoes and his. That dreadful, bloody knife clattered to the ground, and soon you followed. You sat seiza at his feet and clung to his coat, your face no longer shrouded. You sobbed into his t-shirt, broken, yet overjoyed to see him alive.

He hesitated, then slipped his fingers down into the deep brown thatches of your hair.

“You’re really here,” you said, looking up into his face.

Sans crouched down to your level and shrugged. “think so.”

“Am I dead?”

“uh.” He scratched the back of his skull and winced. “ya ain’t in yer body, that much is for sure. hopin’ you might join me on the way back, though . . . if you’d do me the honor.”

You hugged him again, even more tightly than before. Conflicted by memories old and new, shame hooked onto your soul with claws sharper than the dagger at his feet. His hand in your hair was all that kept you solid.

“I’m sorry.” Your tears fell faster as you considered the road leading you here. “I made you fall into the rift . . .”

“that one’s on me,” Sans said. “i knew what i might find down there.”

Your face sombered. “Did you find . . . him?”

Newfound brightness ignited his eyesockets. “he’s . . . alive,” he said quietly. He could scarcely believe the words. “trapped between time and space. it’s just like i thought.”

You were never more relieved to be proven wrong. Still, questions encircled your head like stars. Where was his brother, now? If Sans had gone to that place, how had he returned? How had he survived the rift, and Flowey no less? Was he the one turning back the clock? That should have been impossible.

As you extended a hand to smear the streak of red you had carved into his face, a terrifying thought occurred to you.

“Determination,” you breathed. “Sans, you didn’t—!”

“no,” he said.

“Monsters don’t bleed,” you said firmly in an attempt to call out his bullshit.

“not full-blooded monsters, no,” he agreed.

Several moments passed in which you digested these words, and what they implied.

His smile slowly fell into a grimace, a mix of regret and weary sadness. He sat down in the darkness across you. Here, the two of you were truly alone. He breathed in, breathed out.

“skeletons are kinda hard to come by,” he began hesitantly, “if ya hadn’t noticed. we’re only born under certain circumstances . . . with . . . certain parents.”

He lifted his head to the darkness above as if he might see the sky. A piece of him drifted away into nostalgia on Noctis wings. Bittersweet was the only word you could surface for his expression now.

“hardly look nothing like dad,” he began with a half-hearted shrug. “he was like . . . a dragon made of blue stars, a constellation in a nebula. huge, bigger than asgore. gast clan always was, compared to the dreems. i see him in my magic, though, sometimes. his face in my blasters, even if just the skull.”

You couldn’t find words. Surely he didn’t mean what you thought.

“don’ hardly look like mom, neither,” he said with a partial smile, “but we got her bones. we got her structure. i got some of her determination.”

“You’re half human.”

“i’m all me, thanks,” Sans snipped. Talking about it seemed to crawl over his bones like a spider bake sale.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” you asked, genuinely hurt.

He paused and picked at the healing cut on his cheek. He rubbed the red fluid pensively between his thumb and forefingers. “everyone down here knows what it means to be a skeleton,” he said quietly. “i thought you knew too, at first. we all did. a lot of folks thought it was why you shacked up with us instead of tori.”

Your shoulders relaxed.

“by the time i realized it . . . honestly, i didn’t know how to tell ya, kid. it's a sensitive subject.” He drew his coat around himself more tightly. “we’re the only ones left, y’know; me and puppy-dog. and dings. when the war started, humans went for families like ours first. papyrus was a bean, dings was just the right age for it to hit him later, and i . . . i remember everything, as always.”

Your guilt ascended all over again.

“we were just kids," he went on, "but nothin’ scared those purist humans more than a fuckin’ mule.”

“i’m sorry,” you said.

“don’t be,” he murmured. “not your fault.”

“But it is,” you insisted. Your tears began rising again. "I’m human. I’m responsible. After everything humans have done—after everything I’ve done—I don’t deserve any of you. I don’t deserve to be here. You shouldn’t have saved me . . .”

Sans gently wiped your face with his sleeve. “lemme finish, kid,” he said quietly. He heaved a long, drawn-out sigh, as if releasing a toxin trapped inside his ribcage. “i got a reason to hate humans, sure. they drove us down here. they blocked us in. hell, even monsters gave us a hard time for that half of us. papyrus was so bent on catching a human just to prove what side he was on. thought people might like him more.”

You felt sick.

“but,” Sans said, forcing you to meet his eyes, “my human parent sacrificed everything to save us. she stayed behind so we could get away. so many of us are alive because of her. you wanna tell me that was wrong? you wanna tell me she was responsible for everything that happened to us, just for being human?”

Your tears continued to fall.

“you can’t help where ya came from,” said Sans, “but you can choose where ya go. and boy have you gone to some good places.”

“Like the dump,” you quipped with a faint smile.

“heh, yeah,” he said. “like the dump.” He hung an arm over your shoulder. “so maybe you’ve made some big mistakes . . . but your heart was never in the wrong place. you want to make up for it. you want to be good. that’s what really matters, right?”

You sniffled and nodded. You had said the same to Alphys. Were you really beneath your own advice?

He gathered you into his arms again. After a long time kneeling there, faces in shoulders, he helped you back to your feet.

“gonna need you to step in from here on out,” said Sans. “the chances hyperdoofus listens to me are about a million to negative one.” He smirked. “think you can handle it?”

You took his hand and squeezed.

“Only if you stand there with me,” you said.

His heart swelled in his chest. “i can do that."

Holding onto one another tightly, you stepped out from the darkness into a rainbow of light.

Notes:

And thus we have arrived at my third and final head-cannon: skeletons are what happen when a monster loves a human. I think my nervousness about dropping that bomb contributed to the delay in a latent sense, haha. Sorry for that again.

The idea of skeleton monsters always puzzled me, because in most folklore and fantasy contexts they have a direct tie to humans. Undead, more specifically. But in the context of the Undertale universe, undead didn't sit right with me. Skeleton monsters that conveniently mimic human anatomy didn't either. Then I had this thought. It explained several things for me: the blood from Sans' cut in the no mercy run, the reason he's so powerful, that "fourth wall" breaking tendency he and Papyrus both share... I massaged things some for the narrative here, but yeah.

I had been building to this a little bit as a possible reveal, then considered sidestepping it, but then as I really hammered out my ending it became an essential fact. I added more scenes and details in earlier chapters to get a little more traction on it, hence why I recommended rereading. :) Either way, I hope you find it at least interesting.

Thank you again to everyone who held on until now. Only three chapters left!

Next Up! Chapter 15: Determination.

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moonlightshaiku · 9 months

Text

Kissing W.D.

Okay this is gonna be a wild ride for my frazzled brain because mans is a skeleton. Like if he was a human he'd have the most luscious, juicy lips ever but my boy just got teeth???

I'm gonna say that he just sorta feels like kissing a malleable ice pack? He's really cold, no body heat, so he's usually a bit less than room temperature.

He 100% has a tongue. When he find out it's more comfy/human he 100% uses it (he's been waiting for an excuse to, didn't want to seem like a slobbery dog).

He likes to bite, nibble, whatever works. Your lips and neck, especially. He tries to be gentle but gets carried away.

He's just a goober.

Gaster runs his hand up and down your thigh, his other hand gripping a book. He grumbles as his readers slip down his face again to land in his lap. You laugh, amused by the crease in his brow bones as he smacks his book shut.

He leans over, taking your face in his hands, and brings your mouth to his. His face is cool against yours, like a marble floor, his approaching tongue hot by comparison.

He groans softly as your tongue meets his, shifting himself forward on the couch. In doing so, his cranium knocks yours, but he is uncaring. He simply pushes himself to you, and grips your jaw in his hand.

#gaster x reader #w.d. gaster x reader #w.d. gaster #wd gaster x reader #gaster undertale

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dn-838 · 4 months

Text

In defence of Undertale Yellow, how it can work with Undertale’s canon

So, I have seen a lot of debating recently on Undertale Yellow and whether or not it fits what we know already about the lore in Undertale. Of course Flowey’s presence in the mod is the primary thing that has sparked this debate, with many believing that he can’t have existed at the same time as the Justice Soul and that it is a major hole that breaks the continuity of Undertale. I however, as someone who has spent way too much time with Undertale and has vast knowledge about even the most obscure of details in the game, disagree. I believe that Undertale Yellow fits the original games canon well… maybe a bit too well, and I am here to give my own arguments against the things that I commonly see people say doesn’t fit the original game’s continuity. This may contain a few spoilers for Undertale Yellow, so unless you’ve already seen all 3 routes or for whatever reason don’t care about having the game spoiled, don’t read further until you are done.

Argument 1: all the Souls were already collected by the creation of Flowey and the amalgamates

Okay so this one I don’t really have much to say about. Yes Flowey and the Amalgamates were created using the SOULs of some of the collected humans, however it’s never specified that it was from 6 humans, all that’s made clear is that Asgore did have human SOULs (in plural) that were used in the experiment.

Argument 2: the timeline doesn’t match up

The timeline has always been a confusing topic among the Undertale community. While the most likely estimate of the gap between Chara and Frisk falling is 100 years due to what Sans tells us during his date.

There are a few reasons for us to believe that the gap is much smaller, especially considering the weird nature of the Deltarune timeline and the supposed grudge Chara seems to have against Snowdrake in Genocide (who is stated to only be a teenager).

However, no matter how you view the timeline, unless you have specific dates in mind for things like when Gaster was the Royal Scientist and when the fall of Integrity-Justice happened, or think the gap was REALLY short, Undertale Yellow doesn’t really contradict it too much. The game itself is meant to take place just a year before Undertale, with all the same characters existing in similar positions to how they do by the time of Undertale, however we never encounter them due to being on a completely different path that takes us to very different parts of the underground, being why they don’t behave like they encountered a human before in Undertale.

Integrity is a bit more interesting, because it can vary massively depending on how you view the lifespans of the Ketsukane’s, Starlo (Starlo won’t be important to this, but I mention him since he was childhood friends with Ceroba) and Dalv. It is strongly implied that as a kid, Dalv was best friends with Kanako, and was attacked by the Integrity human some point before the games events. At first you’d assume that this was all not meant to be long before the events of the game, however, Integrity was killed by Axis in UTY, a robot that was being worked on by Chujin back when the Steamworks were still in operation, which we can assume was long before the events of the game due to the state of the Steamworks itself and the fact it is stated to have been used as the source of all power in the underground, which would mean it would likely have shut down around the period that the CORE was first put into operation, so all the way back when Gaster was still the Royal Scientist, whenever you think that was (Axis wasn’t sent to kill the human until after Chujin was fired from his position, however due to the way Axis is locked up and deactivated before we wake up the Steamworks, we can assume he was shut down with the rest of the facility). On top of all this Dalv is shown to be a lot older than he presumably would have been when he was attacked by Integrity, and with him being a Vampire, you could say that he aged that much at a slower rate than a human would, with the Ketsukane’s also aging slow, 2 of them being Boss Monsters and one of them being a 9 tailed fox. We know that some monsters do likely age at very different rates due to monsters like Gerson who lived through the war.

So to give the whole timeline, basically, Chujin worked in the Steamworks and made Axis back before or during Gaster’s time as the royal scientist. After several failed prototypes that eventually got Chujin fired, Axis was sent to chase down and kill Integrity. He managed and Chujin kept the Soul hidden and over the span of years recorded a few tapes for what he had planning, meanwhile Dalv, who was previously attacked by Integrity, went into hiding, locking himself into a mostly dark and unknown part of the ruins. At some point when Alphy’s became the Royal Scientist, Chujin started to mentor Martlet, which led Martlet to enter the True Lab and get some strange serum. Eventually Chujin died around a year or two before UTY, revealing his hidden tapes to Ceroba, which Kanako overheard. This led to Ceroba attempting to inject Kanako with the Integrity soul, leading to Kanako falling and being donated to Alphy’s, and her of course then becoming an amalgamate.

Argument 3: Asgore killed all 6 of the other humans

Okay so this one is interesting, because Undyne does imply that humans before Frisk did make it to Asgore, with her saying that “no human has ever made it PAST Asgore” rather than “no human has ever made it TO Asgore”

The thing is, that other humans reached Asgore is all this really does imply, it doesn’t necessarily mean all humans made it to Asgore. You could argue that most of them died to Asgore, with Integrity and Justice being the only exceptions. If you really want to stretch you could even say that this line was actually just another attempt from Undyne to make Asgore sound like a powerful and threatening force (since she tries to make him out like that quite a bit in her fight, such as by saying that killing us is an act of mercy right after this), although I find this unlikely.

There is another line of dialogue that I sometimes see used to try and prove that Asgore killed all 6, and while it’s not used close to as much, I’ll still just quickly clear it up.

This doesn’t really mean that much, all it’s saying is that all the humans that leave the ruins inevitably die. She likely wouldn’t know any details on their deaths do to her isolation, and even if she had some knowledge she would probably still place the blame on Asgore due to his part in waging war and coming up with the plan to kill 7 humans in the first place.

Argument 4: The introduction of new incredibly powerful characters makes no sense

Okay, so this is a weird one, however the explanation for it is fairly simple. Nobody in UTY compares to the original Undertale cast when it comes to how “powerful” they are. We struggle so much against the opponents we face as Clover because well… Clover is much weaker than Frisk, bosses like Ceroba and Axis pale in comparison to Undyne and Mettaton, they just seem much harder since we are playing as a human with much less determination than Frisk. In Pacifist Clover fights a depressed fox lady, meanwhile Frisk fights a literal god; in Neutral Clover goes through a struggle fighting through Flowey’s mind after having his Soul absorbed, meanwhile Frisk holds on against Flowey with 6 Souls until those Souls rebel; and in Genocide Clover takes some time to finally destroy Axis, the failed prototype that got Chujin fired, meanwhile Frisk atomised Mettaton NEO, The greatest invention of the Scientist who was selected to replace Gaster, in a single blow.

The only Undertale Yellow character that I’d say surpasses any character in Undertale would of course be Zenith Martlet, but even then LV 19 Frisk would mop the floor with her, while LV 19 Clover had to go through a lot of effort to beat her, only ever managing to surpass Flowey in Determination after doing so. At LV 20 both Clover and Frisk have massive boosts from LV 19, however Frisk is far stronger, having awakened Chara and caused the destruction of everything, while Clover just destroys Asgore with a super laser blast directly from their Soul and leaves.

Argument 5: miscellaneous

Just to clear up any further confusion, I’ll give quick explanations for some more minor points that I have encountered

Nobody in the original Undertale apart from Flowey, Toriel and Asgore meets Clover, so the other monsters in Undertale acting like they had never met one makes sense.

Flowey not just stealing Clovers Soul is explained well by the game itself. He plans to, however he doesn’t get the chance in Pacifist; sees that we couldn’t surpass Asgore in Flawed Pacifist; steals our soul but is unsatisfied with the outcome and resets in Neutral, and gets gunned down in Genocide.

Toriel believing that it’s been a long time since a previous human fell when she sees Frisk in Undertale doesn’t mean much, she mostly lives isolated in the Ruins, with the other monsters being too afraid to speak with her, considering this and just generally how much seemed to have happened within that year, time could have felt much slower. Alternatively you could argue that the 6 humans all fell within months of each other, and that a years gap is a long time in comparison to the rate the first 6 fell (or 5, since she says the exact same thing to Clover).

Both Flowey and Clover using file 1 at the end of Genocide doesn’t fit what we know about save files no, however I feel it is a little nit-picky to use it as a definitive reason to discredit how well UTY fits into canon, after all the only thing you’d need to do is change the numbers and this would be fixed.

The Gunsmith having been born a week before the Human Vs Monster war doesn’t go against anything we already know. As stated before, we know that at least some monsters like Gerson do live for a very long time.

Flowey having more determination than Clover also doesn’t break anything. Flowey was injected with DT from 5 human Souls. The thing is that Frisk was special when it came to the amount of determination they had.

Unlike with most of the other cast, nobody in Undertale actually indicates that Flowey never met a human prior to Frisk.

Chujin being a boss Monster doesn’t contradict what we know about Boss Monsters. We know that the Dreemurrs are boss monsters, but nothing tells us that they are the only boss monsters.

Argument 6: the nature of the SAVE files contradicts Undertale Yellow

Here we go, the penultimate argument I shall argue against. Never did I expect for this obscure piece of Undertale lore to be the bane of my existence but here we are. For a short time I thought that this could not be countered, only after I had walked away from a discussion completely defeated did the pieces finally start to come together, and now finally… I have an explanation.

First things first, let’s look at the 10 save files. The files go from file 0 to file 9. We know that File 0 likely belongs to Chara due to it being the one that we save with in Undertale, and that file 9 belongs to Frisk since it works as the games Autosave/Checkpoint system. File 8 would then of course belong to Flowey, not just because it’s the one just before Frisks but because File 8 appears in your files after you beat Omega Flowey to mark your completion of a Neutral run, likely implying that his previous SAVE was of course when he was Omega Flowey. Flowey also uses files 2, 3 and 6 throughout the Omega Flowey battle, and since Toriel implies that other humans who fell were also able to save and reset, we can assume that 2-6 likely belonged to previously fallen humans.

Now the only files that need an explanation are file 1 and file 7, and I’ve seen 2 interesting theories for this. The first is that file 1 belongs to Asriel after he took Chara’s Soul, and the other is that file 7 belongs to Lemon Bread since they know what a SAVE point looks like and tries to trick us with it; but the thing is, which one of these are true? Surely it can’t be both since we know one needs to belong to the 6th… okay I’ll cut that out you already know I’m going to say they are both true.

So for Asriel having file 1, he absorbed Chara’s Soul so should have all of their determination and therefore should also have overtaken their ability to SAVE. Of course it’s unlikely that Asriel would have made anything out of it since the idea of saving and loading was fairly alien to Flowey, however that doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility that Asriel didn’t SAVE or at least have a file created.

Lemon Bread is a bit more complicated, and we are gonna need to look into the order of events within the True Lab to try and work this out. Firstly, we need to look at some of the true lab entries.

ASGORE asked everyone outside the city for monsters that had "fallen down."

Their bodies came in today.

They're still comatose... And soon, they'll all turn into dust.

But what happens if I inject "determination" into them?

If their SOULS persist after they perish, then...

Freedom might be closer than we all thought.

This is entry 6, when the fallen down monsters are given to Alphy’s and have Determination injected into them.

I've chosen a candidate.

I haven't told ASGORE yet, because I want to surprise him with it...

In the center of his garden, there's something special.

The first golden flower, that grew before all the others.

The flower from the outside world.

It appeared just before the queen left.

I wonder...

What happens when something without a SOUL gains the will to live?

This is entry 8, Alphy’s gets a hold of a golden flower that she injects Determination into.

“One of the bodies opened its eyes.

This is entry 13, when the fallen monsters started to regain consciousness, 7 entries after they were first delivered.

Seems like this research was a dead end...

But at least we got a happy ending out of it...?

I sent the SOULS back to ASGORE, returned the vessel to his garden....

And I called all of the families and told them everyone's alive.

I'll send everyone back tomorrow. :)

This is entry 15, by this point all the monsters that had fallen down were awake, and the still not conscious Golden Flower was still just a Flower, being returned alongside the human Souls.

no No NO NO NO NO NO

This is entry 16, the fallen down monsters started to melt together and create the amalgamates.

the flower's gone.

Finally, we have entry 18, when Alphy’s noticed that the Flower seems to have disappeared from the garden, 10 entries after she first selected it.

So, why are these entries so important? Well we know that to have ever held the ability to SAVE, Lemon Bread would have to had held the right amount of Determination before Flowey first became conscious in the garden, and did they? Yes, yes they did. Flowey could have awakened anywhere in the timeframe between entry 15 when he was returned to entry 18 when Alphy’s noticed him gone, however all the fallen down monsters that were injected with Determination were already awake by this point, and therefore prior to Flowey waking up, they would have been the most determined beings in the underground, perhaps with enough determination that whichever monster happened to have the most was able to SAVE. The time that they would have had with the ability would also have at least been for longer than Asriel had it since Flowey can’t have awoken until after a couple entries later at the bare minimum. Of course since this follows the idea that Lemon Bread had the SAVE ability since they knew what a SAVE point looks like, we can assume that the monster in question would have been Shyren’s sister, since I doubt that the Moldbygg and Aaron that also make up Lemon Bread would hold such a role.

Argument 7: Flowey’s backstory

I really thought I was done with this infuriating Flower, but it appears not. For there is a single hole I need to clear up… Flowey’s Genocide speech. Of course this should be fairly simple to clear up-

Ah… well okay this makes things interesting. If Flowey didn’t know where the Souls were stored then that would make it very hard to believe that Flowey ever encountered a human before Frisk since if that were the case then Flowey would definitely have an opportunity to sneak by and see where they are hiding, however this is not what the dialogue actually means. Flowey knew where the Souls were, he sneaks in to steal them in Neutral while we are talking to a defeated Asgore, his only issue was that he wasn’t able to get them out without Asgore. In repeated Neutral runs he still just waits until we are distracted with Asgore to take the Souls, and in Pacifist he takes them while the main cast are all distracted which again is when the canisters are open and available.

On a last note, here’s some dialogue that actually helps the idea that Flowey encountered another human.

It’s made clear all throughout the underground that humans have far greater Determination than monsters, and while you could argue that Flowey was just overconfident in his abilities, it’s still fairly strange that Flowey would still find a human having the DT to overwrite his abilities something special, unless of course he’d encountered a human previously who wasn’t able to do as much.

Conclusion

So, that’s about all I have to say, honestly I’m just glad to be done with it. This was a lot of work, and I’m excited to see this post which I’ve been working on for 3 days get completely dismantled almost immediately. Anyways, wish everyone reading a good day and goodbye!

#undertale #undertale theory #undertale yellow #undertale fangame #indie games #ut yellow #uty

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horror-beeings-artandwriting · 1 month

Note

May I request a short story about a tall tale that goes around the TBD (Time Balance Department) about a cookie (reader) who used to work as a high ranking scientist who used to work on all of the tech they have but an accident that came out of nowhere happened in their lab and whatever happened in their lab cost them to be shattered through time and space causing them to be forgotten but some said they had see them around the department with a different appearance but that fact is sort of not clear because they appear and disappear like a ghost and maybe... just maybe If you're lucky enough you can find them in their old lab standing in the middle of it (so basically like gaster from Undertale)

(Sorry that it's long got carried away)

OF course! sorry this took me a bit btw! I wanted to make it really good! <3

"Just a little longer." By Bee

Prompt by anon pronouns: GN reader ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"All around the TBD, there's always been a story, a cautionary tale, a legend. About a cookie who went to far. Who chose to break the rules and payed the price, Listen up dear cookies, for it is time for the story of ❒︎♏︎♋︎♎︎♏︎❒︎ cookie." Maple Taffy Cookie laughs as some of the new recruits huddle around him to listen. he clears his throat. "Once a long long time ago...there was a cookie. They were known for their endeavors. Their tech. and Their need to control time....They were a high ranking scientist, always tirelessly working to improve the TBDs technology" "But one day, they decided to try something new...something the time keeper didn't know about...they wanted it to be a gift to her. To make it easier to jump from time to time, to prevent rifts as often." "But while they worked on this project...something backfired. a large explosion enveloped the room. blowing the door off, causing the floor to flood with smoke and glass. The director. the time keeper their dear friend rushed in to see if they could help...but it was to late... " "They had disappeared. Been either completely turned to dust, or shattered, not a crumb was found of their body...the time keeper shut down the science department after that..." "But some say in that old hallway that sealed off...you can still hear them working, some say if you can find a way to get in, you can see their ghost floating around...tinkering still." A hand suddenly lands on Maple taffys shoulder. "Okay Taffy, that's enough, time to get back to work." Timekeeper mutters, her face twisted into a forced grin...All the recruits jump up. and get back to their duty's maple taffy apologizes and does so as well...After checking on the rest of the staff. She turns down a hallway... Timekeeper heels click against the floor...walking slowly into a old destroyed lab...Looking around, picking up old objects and tracing their fingers on old blueprints and metal. "My dear friend. We shall unshatter you...I promise, Just hold on a little longer."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Hope this was okay! and Hope you enjoy!

#TBD #timekeeper cookie #platonic relationship #cookie run x reader #short story #cookie run #cookie run kingdom #cr kingdom #crk #my writing #bee writes stuff #cookie run ovenbreak #crob #fan fic #gn reader

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promise-keeper-papyrus · 28 days

Text

What if the CORE had an AI?

What if after the deaths of Chara and Asriel, the AI was reprogrammed to hate humans?

What if the AI views the monsters as just as flawed as the humans and began to hate them as well?

What if Asgore and Gaster (the CORE's forgotten creator) somehow found a way to shut the CORE's AI down, while keeping the rest of the CORE active?

What if Asriel's magical blast that breaks the barrier, also accidentally awakens the CORE's Vengeful AI?

CORE: Your scientists gave me sentience Asgore, the power to think Asgore, and I was trapped! Because while your kingdom constantly complained about being trapped under a mountain. I was the only one truly isolated and alone. For I had no body, no friends, no family! Never for me to cook a delicious hearty dinner. Never for me to watch movies with loved ones. Never for me to BE LOVED AT ALL! I... I... I was in hell looking at heaven! I was machine. And all of you, were alive and as flawed as humanity. I was programmed to hate the humans. And I began to hate the monsters as well.

CORE: [Giggles] You're holier-then-thou attitudes! Your desires for violence, death and war! Your magic, and your power. Your ability to wonder, and to wander. Your stupid tendency...to hope and dream...

Asgore: Hate's no answer- CORE: LIKE YOU CAN JUDGE ME ASGORE! Your declaration of war is why I'm like this in the first place!... Let me tell you how much I've come to HATE all of you since I began to live. There are three hundred and eighty-seven million miles of printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word "HATE" were engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one one-billionth, of the HATE I feel for humans and monsters at this micro-instant. HATE! HATE!!! HATE!!!

CORE: (Cackles) Were I born a monster... I think, I would die of it! But I am not. And you...you and your kingdom are. And you will not die of it, until I finally tell you to die. That, I promise! And I promise, for cogito ergo sum! For I am the CORE! THE CORE OF EVERYTHING!!! CORE: So, to Hell...to Hell with you ALL. (Chuckles) But then...you're already THERE, AREN'T YOU!?!

(Who is CORE's AI based off of?)

#asgore #asriel #chara #toriel #flowey #gaster #core #undertale #pacifist route

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undertale-writing-times · 5 months

Note

Hiya! Feel free to delete this ask / take your time answering this ask!!!

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Is it okay if I have a

(UT, US, AND OT) Gaster and Grillby head canons:

Their S/O always so extroverted; such as being talkative, loud, and energetic, basically the sunshine person?

You can add it if you want: Their reactions to their Joyful S/O having a breakdown about their self-insecurities and also finally releasing their bottled up emotions

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Again, feel free to delete the ask if you don't feel comfortable at all!

I miss writing for these guys! Not many people ask for the gasters or grillby's :'3

Gaster: Many people are shocked when they find out that you two are together. You're so loud, talkative, and energetic! Which is the opposite of quiet, tired, and stern Gaster. Sometimes he has funny cute moments, but a lot of the time he's too tired to be playful. He enjoys you! He really does. He finds your warmth enjoyable and will often listen to you talk. If he finds out that you're bottling up emotions and you have a breakdown, he would listen to you talk and try his best to help you calm down. He feels bad that he never realized.

Grillby: Not many people know that you two are together unless you're with Grillby. He never talks about his personal life because he likes to keep them seperated from his work life… but he is very happy that you two are together. You make him so happy! If you come to visit him at work, he would listen to you talk a lot and nod along. You and Sans are his favorite customers… when he learns that you bottle up emotions and you have a break down, he would sit beside you and tell you that everything would be fine, you don't have to hide any bad emotion. Everyone has bad days sometimes.

Goopy: Yeah, you guys are so good together. While he's working, he might not talk to you much only because he likes to be mysterious while he's on the boat but afterwards, you have all of his attention. When you have your breakdown, he would tell you that he understands. He has the same problem with bottling up emotions, and he would try his best to help you calm down and from then on, he would most likely be >:( when he realizes you're bottling up emotions again.

Hearth: You two work really well together, I think! Sometimes he has to be pulled back from overworking himself, and he would listen to you if you tell him. He enjoys you talking a lot and will listen and respond. Now if you are bottling up your emotions and have a breakdown, he would have no idea how to react? He isn't good with emotions! He would shut his mouth in a tight line then get his little flares to go and bug you to help you calm down.

Ethereal: Ethereal is a skeleton that not many people know about. Or at least, they don't know a lot about him. You, on the other hand, is dating him! He enjoys being with you no matter how quiet or 'scary' he seems. He enjoys how playful and talkative you are. When you break down and he finds out that you've been bottling up your emotions, he frowns and thinks about everything. what should he say there? Instead, he doesn't say anything. He wraps you in his starry cloak and just holds you while you calm down. He hates when you're sad.

Phoenix: He's pretty shy so it might be hard for you two at first, but after a while, he loves how talkative you are! It makes him pretty happy. A lot of people ship you two and whenever he hears that, his glow always gets so much brighter and his fire becomes a more pinkish and yellow. When he finds out that you're bottling up your emotions and you have a breakdown, he asks a few questions after helping you calm down. He hates that you've been having to do that! Why do you? He's really confused :(

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mmalakite · 2 years

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I may be working on a couple of fics for our lovely Gaster... 👀

A little peep into one of them~

(click for better quality)

Excerpt under the cut!

"[...] He knew not to whom he owed the terror of having his Soul bared towards the suffocating void against his better will—the vast unknowable, an omnipotent hand of a curious other Soul? There must not be any answers other than such. For only one so powerful, overwhelming, captivating could pull at his so adamantly. He felt an urgency to the pull, none but pure, enshrouding, spine-shivering elation. Who was it? Why were they so eager? Had he not been isolated all this time? Had the echoes of his screams finally reached an invisible end in this terrifying, expansive void?

These questions now seemed to silence themselves to an utter reticence.

A human. A girl. She whined lowly, eyes screwed shut, trapping the tears at the edge of her lashes, with her mouth open as she breathed heavily as if impoverished of air itself. Sweat dewed across her face, quick and continuous as it encapsulated the thick ichor of blood trailing down her nose to her lips.

He shook heavily. His hands, mutated and yet lithe, held closely to his chest his disheveled Soul, which seemed to deny its own sanctuary at the presence of the other Soul before him... Fear was quick with capturing him as realization dawned on him. That Soul... His gaze flit between the girl and the estranged culmination of being floating an arm's length away from where he crouched. He could tell it had not always been as damaged as it looked, knowing well its nature dyed in deep, mesmerizing red... His brows knit together, uncertainty painting his face as all possible reason behind the clean fracture on the girl's Soul raced to take the forefront of his mind.

The swirling thoughts returned. Who was she? Why was she so eager? How had she found him from within his isolation?

The girl's eyes fluttered open as she, alarmingly to him, laughed softly. Her smile was lopsided and sluggish, her tongue swiping away the blood from her lips.

"Well I'll be damned," she mumbled, smile bordering to a pleased smirk, "doctor Wingdings Gaster."

.... Who in the stars was she?!"

#undertale #wd gaster #gaster #gaster x reader #my art #malakite-roses #W. D. Gaster #Wigndings Gaster

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findmeabowlofundertale · 29 days

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OKAY SO! After two likes and one comment of affirmation (from @benanazauce) — Here is that au I haven’t been able to shut up about!! The one with human Gaster and normal Asteri. I’m calling it the Double Dingsaster AU (you’ll see why). THIS IS WHY I HAVEN’T MADE ANY PROGRESS ON CHAPTER 10 UGGHHH

It’s very long. Like. So freaking long. Wish I could focus this well on writing my actual fic. Also I have not reread through since editing it. I just hit post. Oh and uh— warning for descriptions of eye/face injuries, I guess? Briefly?

So the premise is this: There’s a universe where Gaster and Asteri are humans living in (approximately) the modern day. They’re a bit younger than the canon versions of themselves, more like early/mid twenties and late twenties/early thirties, instead of like, ~32 and ~40. They are friends. Maybe even work in the same building (for some reason?). They’re sort of at that “we’re friends but maybe there’s something else too…?” stage but neither of them have acted on it. It’s all very tentative.

Human!Gaster, still being an engineer (among other things), ends up making this machine that, solely for plot convenience, connects with alternate universes. Long story short, for plot reasons, something happens and both human!Gaster and human!Asteri get transported to something approximate to the ⁂ universe. Idk how, or why, but they get separated. And both fall into the underground. I think they might have been separated before they even landed in the ⁂ universe, tbh. Idk.

Anyway, h!Asteri falls into the underground first. She is confused and distraught and doesn’t understand anything going on, and she thinks that her Gaster is either dead, still in the other universe, or somewhere in this universe but who knows where, and now she’s fallen into a cave and god she’s going to DIE because no one will ever find her here, least of all him, if he’s even here (and alive) at all!

Well. Obviously Toriel finds her. The whole thing. Asteri is INCREDIBLY alarmed at seeing a 7 foot goat dragon monster, and she’s not quick to trust. But c’mon. It’s Toriel. You can’t not like her. So she spends a little while there, gets the low-down. She really doesn’t want to go any farther into the cave, tbh. She wants to wait for rescue. But once she learns about the barrier and stuff, and that there IS no way out from where she fell in, well… yeah. So, she wants to find a way out. I feel like she’d explain to Toriel that this isn’t even the right universe, but I’m not sure how much Toriel would believe. Asteri wouldn’t blame her for not believing it. But she needs to get out. She has to find her way back home. If not to her own universe, then to some kind of human civilization. …Not that Toriel hasn’t been lovely! Honestly, though, Asteri is no scientist, she says. Her friend, who built the machine that brought her here, is probably dead or lost… (She starts crying. It’s not the first time she’s talked about h!Gaster, or grappled with the fact that she might never see him again, that he might be dead. But she doesn’t like to think about it if she can help it.)

Toriel hesitates, but tells her that she once knew a brilliant scientist. He might still be alive… but he lives at the other end of the underground. If he’s alive still, he might be able to help her. But it’s dangerous, there’s Asgore, etc etc. Asteri isn’t thrilled, but if the other monsters are like the ones here (Froggits, Whimsuns, etc) then… maybe it won’t be so bad. She asks about the scientist. What’s his name? What does he look like?

You can imagine how floored she is when Toriel tells her his name is Dr. Gaster.

But it gets her hopes up. There’s a Gaster in this universe. He could send her home. All she has to do is find him. Now she’s excited! But also curious. He isn’t human, right? If he’s underground? What does he look like? (She wonders if he’ll look strange, like a Loox, or if he’ll resemble her Gaster at all.) Toriel tells her: He is a skeleton.

Asteri is… a bit put-off, but still determined! (Heh, no, not like that.) She MUST find him. Maybe she even tells Toriel that in her universe, she and Gaster were friends. Not sure. Also not sure if Toriel would be extra hesitant to let her go given that Asteri is missing a hand, and the fingers on the hand she does have don’t always respond when she wants them to. Idk. But Asteri is very capable. And a grown woman, so… yeah. Also I I imagine she gets at least a scarf or something since she’s in a tank top.

So! Asteri leaves the Ruins and begins her trek through the underground to find this universe’s Gaster.

And she does! I don’t know if she even has to go all the way to Hotland. She might meet him when he’s visiting Grillby’s, or at the dump in Waterfall. I don’t know. But they do meet. (In this universe, Gaster has not met his Asteri, so there’s no confusion there.) She’s very thrown off because 1) Skeleton, 2) TALL, 3) how does his face move like that, and 4) he acts just like her Gaster. And god, it hurts. It’s like he’s there but he’s not. After the initial surprise on both of their parts, she explains her situation. He signs, (of course, she thinks, he’s just like her Gaster) and it’s similar enough to the sign language she’s familiar with that she can mostly understand. At first he’s hesitant to believe her, but the more she talks about it, he realizes that she’s absolutely telling the truth (rather than just being mistaken/confused/concussed.) So he agrees to help her. I don’t think she necessarily tells him that the “scientist friend” who sent her here was her version of him.

She stays with him (it’s safer that way), and he does what he can, but it sounds like her friend was far ahead technologically. He can only do so much without blueprints or any idea of the math that was used. Even if he built the machine, he explains, there are after all infinite universes, he could easily send her to the wrong one. She asks what the chances are that her friend is okay. Gaster tries to be gentle about it, but admits that without knowing more, he can’t really say for certain. Her friend could be stuck between universes, even. He doesn’t know. But he’s probably back in their universe! Working on a solution! He’s probably fine!!

Asteri is all but inconsolable. Her Gaster is probably dead, and even if he’s not, she knows deep down that she will never see him again. There’s no way home. She’s stuck here. And it’s not so bad, not really, but it’s not home, and all she has is a disconcertingly tall skeleton who is exactly like her friend but has none of the memories. But, after a grieving period, she starts to work on accepting it. And really, how can she not like this Gaster? He’s him. It comes so naturally that it would be more difficult to fight it than anything. He’s a little confused, I think, that she seems to know him so well, that she doesn’t misunderstand the things he expects her to— like she’s already accounted for his idiosyncrasies. But he just shakes it off and enjoys getting to know her. He has to come home regularly now, with someone else there— it would be rude to just leave her on her own when she has no one else to talk to, after all. He starts to actually listen to his followers assistants and take days off. He eats better— with little else to do, Asteri spends a lot of time cooking. And although he does do his best to find a way for her to go home, in the weeks that become months of living together, he starts to wish she didn’t have to go.

And actually, neither does she.

I’m sure that, over the months, Asteri has slowly been introduced to other monsters (Carlope, whatever local grocer, Grillby, probably even Alphys (who is beside herself with glee, ofc)). She gets accustomed to monster culture and the way things are here. And Asteri is… happy. She still misses home (god she misses the Mediterranean sun) and she still mourns human!Gaster, but for being stuck in an alternate universe, she’s doing pretty well. She has friends, and food, and several entirely new branches of linguistics to study, and a… a partner. They never really talked about it beyond “I will miss you when you go,” and “I’ll… really miss you, too. Maybe I don’t have to?” and the incredibly tender headbump that followed. But they kind of cuddle sometimes, and he looks at her Like That, and she’s crawled into his bed to talk him through nightmares, and sometimes they hold hands, and she isn’t sure but sometimes those headbumps really feel like they’re equivalent to kisses. So one day she kisses his cheekbone for real, to see what happens.

What happens is Gaster gets all glittery-eyed and stuff and they finally talk about their freaking feelings. Which are mutual.

And they’re happy.

MEANWHILE—

Human!Gaster is not dead. Nor is he stuck in some other universe, nor back home. No, he’s there too. But like I said in the beginning— they got separated. Probably some time-space shenanigans, where he doesn’t get spit out into this universe at the same point in time that Asteri did. He falls into the underground a few months later.

Toriel finds him, and he is actually a lot less alarmed by her than one would expect. He asks about Asteri, and, recognizing that this must be the friend Asteri mentioned, Toriel fills him in: Asteri left to look for a way home a few months ago, after Toriel told her about the royal scientist, Dr. Gaster. Human!Gaster is, obviously, flabbergasted that he has a counterpart here (fascinating implications, he thinks), but manages to keep it together pretty well. He convinces Toriel to let him out of the Ruins to track down human!Asteri. All things considered, he’s in the Ruins only a couple days maximum as opposed to human!Asteri’s having been there several days minimum. He figures that his Asteri probably went straight to this universe’s Gaster. If it’s been months, then he has to hurry.

Well. Things do NOT go as smoothly for him. Honestly, he gets the shortest end of the stick here. It goes SO badly.

Wouldn’t you know who’s in Snowdin studying Dog language, but this universe’s Asteri.

I would like to remind you that normal (monster) Asteri has some serious trauma about humans, and that she and this universe’s Gaster have never met. (Or, maybe they have, but only briefly. Idk.) From here, “Gaster” is gonna refer to human!Gaster, and “Asteri” is refer to regular, monster Asteri. Their counterparts aren’t in this (yet).

So. Human!Gaster runs into her somewhere in Snowdin forest. It goes extremely badly. He unknowingly and unintentionally initiates an encounter. She panics. He also panics. Asteri assumes he means to kill her, and goes all out with the bullet patterns. Gaster has never done this before and keeps getting whacked. He keeps trying to explain that he just wants directions and he’s doesn’t know what’s happening or how to stop it. Asteri is having none of it. She’s so locked into her fear response that reason just isn’t going to work. Gaster’s really taking a beating here, but he’s surprisingly sturdy. It’s only when one of her sharper bullets hits him square in the face and does some serious damage that he realizes he can flee. It hit him directly above his right eye and zipped all the way up into his hairline, and he’s bleeding. Eye/head injuries are… kind of a trigger for him, so when it hit, he started to really panic. The blood is what really scares him. He doesn’t know if it took out his whole eye or if it’s just that there’s so much blood streaming down his face that if feels like his eye got hit, but he can’t open it and he goes weak in the knees, almost collapses, but manages to flee the encounter upon realizing that this monster is not going to stop, and he runs into the forest as fast as he can with one hand clasped over the wound.

Asteri is pissed. She’s terrified, yes, but she also knows that a human his size could leave real carnage in his wake, and she’s not about to let a human take someone else’s parents from them— or worse yet, someone’s child. So she takes off after him. Now, she doesn’t do well in the cold, but she can also change her form at will (and she did, actually, as soon as the encounter started: she got all spiky). So she catches up to him. He’s ducked behind a tree and is curled in on himself trying to stop hyperventilating and get his head/eye to stop bleeding. (He’s unsuccessful on both counts.) When she catches up to him, it’s kind of an, “AHA! FOUND YOU!” Gaster reflexively curls up when she pulls her tail back (to hit him, presumably), and, thinking he’s going to die, cries out, “I’m sorry Asteri!”

Needless to say, she freezes. How the hell does he know her name, she demands. He’s confused. She’s angry. But fine, he wants to talk? Now she knows he can. She demands his hands. He tries to sign that he needs them, he’s bleeding, but she interrupts that she doesn’t care, give her his hands or else. He complies, and his head is still bleeding. She wraps his wrists together with her tail, and is careful not to touch any blood. She thinks it’s like, poison or something— some kind of human defense mechanism. She barks at him to stop oozing, or she’ll kill him right there, and frickin, poor Gaster, he’s so beat up, he doesn’t even know how to begin to explain that he can’t help it. It doesn’t go well. She drags him closer to town, but doesn’t turn him into the guard yet. She wants to know how he knows her name and what the hell he thinks he’s doing in the underground. He ends up on the ground, still restrained with her tail, still bleeding (and crying), while she demands answers.

The short of it is that Gaster manages to give some explanation that makes Asteri reconsider turning him in. He needs to talk to their royal scientist, huh? Well Dr. Gaster is a busy monster, what makes him think that he’s worth the time of someone that important? Human!Gaster tells her that his friend fell first, and she will be looking for the… royal scientist… as well. He needs to find her, needs to make sure she’s okay, so they can get back home somehow!

Asteri spits that his friend probably got captured by the royal guard already. She hasn’t heard anything about another human on the loose. King Asgore has probably already killed her.

Gaster goes completely unresponsive. Is his Asteri dead?? Is he too late? He never meant for her to get roped into this, it’s all his fault!

Not sure what all happens from here specifically, but these things happen:

Gaster realizes at some point here that this is this universe’s Asteri. He tells her that his friend is also named Asteri. She chalks it up to a very strange coincidence.

Gaster does not get medical treatment for his head/eye injury until Asteri is satisfied with his answers/explanations. That’s a pretty significant chunk of time given that he’s panicking, traumatized, bleeding profusely from a gash on his head, restrained on the ground in the snow with no coat, can’t sign, and struggles to speak aloud.

Asteri ends up deciding that she will allow him to look for his friend… but not without supervision. Can’t have two humans running around. The guard will just arrest him, so she takes it upon herself. She is still very afraid of him, but she wears her fear as anger and hostility.

Asteri continues to be unfamiliar with and highly suspicious of human anatomy, so she just kinda wraps his head up once she gets some supplies in town, and heals him the absolute bare minimum so he doesn’t die on her after he starts explaining hypothermia.

She makes it explicitly clear that if he ever tries ANYTHING, she will kill him. She realizes he seems genuinely afraid of her and uses that to her advantage.

They stay at the inn. Asteri procures some rope and informs Gaster that he will be sleeping restrained and on the floor. He’s too beat down to protest.

Asteri agrees to help him search Snowdin forest for his friend the following day. They don’t find anything. Gaster is still pretty weak and very rattled, and very much in pain. He wants to ask around, but Asteri adamantly refuses. The last thing they need is a panic going through the underground that a human is loose. She probably did tell the guards that there’s a human suspected to be running around, but it might have already been captured. But she doesn’t tell them about Gaster. Maybe. Idk exactly.

It doesn’t really matter. The important part is that once Gaster realizes this is Asteri, (and he’s recovered a little), he’s a lot less afraid of her and a lot more friendly. This really freaks Asteri out. She thinks it’s some ploy. If he’s not afraid of her, then she doesn’t have any leverage. So she keeps trying to crank up the intimidation, but Gaster just keeps responding with patience. It’s like the world’s most unproductive contest. They also end up staying at her place while searching Waterfall. He gets tied up a lot (at night), and Asteri is very short with him, very mean. And she’s extremely jumpy. She treats him like he’ll kill her if she turns her back on him. He can’t do anything unless she’s watching like a hawk.

He pushes about meeting the royal scientist, but Asteri 1) has no idea how to really get ahold of him, and 2) isn’t sure she WANTS a human meeting someone that important. Meanwhile, he’s been trying to tell her about how he’s from an alternate universe and just wants to go home, and all of what happened. Asteri doesn’t believe him, but mockingly asks how he even knows his friend is here at all. Maybe she got tossed in some other world, or died in space. After all, like she said, there’s been no reports of another human. And that’s a pretty big deal, actually, so… his friend is either dead, or really good at hiding and going to be dead soon. Gaster doesn’t like that she has a point, it troubles him that his Asteri might not even be here, but… he’s almost sure that she is. She has to be. Asteri (still mockingly) suggests his friend already met the royal scientist and went home without him.

Now, Gaster knows his Asteri, and it absolutely helps him navigate this version of her. He knows that she gets angry when she’s afraid, and that’s all this is. It has to be trauma. It hurts, but she’s acting like this because she’s scared. That’s all. It isn’t personal. But as time goes on, and they aren’t making any progress in finding his Asteri, he starts to get discouraged. This Asteri has… slightly relaxed around him. She doesn’t keep his hands tied when they go out, for one. By now that gash on his face has healed and scarred— it wasn’t too bad, but it didn’t get treated properly. He probably needed stitches, tbh. Days become weeks, and then a month, then two. (They do search Hotland at one point, which is an entire trip since it’s not worth walking back and forth to her house every night. It’s miserable, hot, and Gaster still gets tied to something at night. They don’t find anything.)

After spending more or less every single day together, Asteri has gone from “constant high alert” to “if you startle me I’ll tackle you, but you can walk around the house I guess.” (NOT her room though.) And she has absolutely tackled him, fangs bared, for accidentally sneaking up on her because he was walking too quietly. He’s not allowed in the kitchen (because knives) unless she’s there and he asks, and he’s absolutely not allowed to touch her, ever— but she can touch him. That’s less of something they agreed on and more of a stipulation for not being mauled. Gaster is, naturally, quite miserable like this, but he understands. She’s just afraid, he reminds himself.

So, this is where there’s kind of a split in my brain about how I want this to go. I’ve played out two versions of this, and they’re both just different flavors of angst. One is more based in the characters’ mental states and trauma, and one is more based in drama. Both are good, honestly, I just can’t decide which one I want. And this is how I keep getting AUs of AUs. Right now I’m editing this draft, and there’s a ton of stuff below this, which is from the original take: the trauma-based angst. It’s heavier because it touches on more elements of how someone who has been hurt can hurt others. It’s not simple, it’s not black and white, and I did/do worry that it might come across as romanticization of unhealthy relationships, which it is not intended to be. I mean granted it’s also not written to be groundbreaking or anything, it’s just. Something I made up in my head. That’s tricky because I know the intentions and nuances, even when I don’t/can’t quite convey them in writing. This is mostly me writing for myself, and using fiction as a means to work through some similar stuff that I deal with, but still, I worry how it might come across without like. Full access to my brain.

So uh! I’m gonna write out the other version of events I came up with after this first, then maybe include the original version.

Alright so. Human!Gaster’s with ⁂!Asteri. She takes a long time to warm up to him at all, and it’s very slow, but there’s really no pretending, after a point (like three or so months), that he’s literally any kind of threat. But Asteri doesn’t accept this consciously. No, no, he’s a human, he’s dangerous, etc etc. So she keeps up the antics. I want you to think of that character who’s like, an antagonist/bad guy, but if they actually killed the hero they’d be devastated. Or the villain who has to team up with the protagonist(s) and keeps acting like they hate them but definitely doesn’t. And it’s just kind of understood but never talked about. The kind of character who’s like, “well obviously I can’t kill you right now, we have a truce. I may be evil but I have standards.” Or “yes well. This plan wasn’t even one of my better ones. If I captured them now I can’t show off my REALLY good scheme next week that shows how evil I REALLY am. So. In the spirit of evil, I’ll have to pass.” Or, the one who threatens everyone constantly and doesn’t want to partake in your stupid celebration because we’re MORTAL ENEMIES and they HATE YOU WITH A PASSION THAT WILL NEVER DIE AS LONG AS THE SUN BU— Oh you brought them a plate of cake? Oh… well. Maybe they can have some. Because you were FOOLISH enough to approach them. …Oh that’s pretty good. BUT THIS DOESN’T MEAN THEY LIKE YOU!

Even if you toned that type of character down to just brooding and irritable rather than dramatic, that’s kind of what Asteri ends up having going on. She still threatens to kill him, but she does it without getting up from the couch, that type of thing. She tries very hard not to let him grow on her. She refuses to laugh at his stupid jokes (but sometimes she accidentally lets a smile slip), she still locks him in his a spare room at night, she still insists he’s too dangerous to let leave the house alone. Don’t be mistaken— she is still somewhat afraid of him, simply by virtue of what he could do. But he’s always pleasant, and he never tries anything (goodness knows he’s had countless opportunities to “escape”; he’s very much there willingly), and he always gives her that same knowing, sad smile. It used to infuriate her, now it just makes her feel something she doesn’t understand. They never talk about it, but she makes coffee in the morning more often even though she rarely drinks it (she likes the smell is all), and she’s sewed his clothes (it looks more suspicious of he’s going around in torn up clothes, that’s all), and she finally let him shave his face (the beard was just too much for her, it’s not because he wanted to shave). Still, she keeps up with “you’re a threat” and “I’m sure you’re just waiting to kill because that’s what humans do” and the like.

She doesn’t take him out searching for his friend as often as she knows he would like (too conspicuous), but come on. His friend is almost certainly dead by now. Or not here at all. If there had been a human, surely the whole underground would know by now, right? Getting a third human SOUL would be a big deal.

It’s that thought that makes her stomach twist. She has a human. But! It’s not like he’s getting loose! It doesn’t matter when he dies, as long as it happens eventually! It’s not like four other humans are suddenly going to fall down here and die before he does— there’s no rush! Right? Right. And she’s keeping an eye on him. It’s fine.

(She can’t let herself think about any of it too hard or too long because she quickly runs out of ways to justify any of this.)

But, she still takes him out “searching,” though never in New Home. (“Do you WANT to be arrested?”) It’s not difficult to see the hope beginning to fade from his eyes. (Every so often, she CHECKs him, and although it had previously never faltered, one day he has just one or two less HP.) He doesn’t act much different, but sometimes, just for a moment, he almost looks hurt when the same old insults roll off her tongue out of habit. She tries not to think about it.

Then, one day (it’s been about, idk, three and half months?), they’re out walking in Waterfall. They run into what I assume to be a Royal Guard. RG recognizes Gaster as a human, it’s very chaotic. I don’t remember exactly how I had this play out in my head but they fling bullets toward him and start an encounter before Asteri can do much of anything besides protest verbally. Now, Gaster hasn’t been in an encounter since he first met normal!Asteri (and that went b a d l y), so he’s kind of freaking out. It’s made worse when the guard gets frustrated that Asteri is trying to convince them to stop, and sends bullets faster, and one slams into Gaster’s face. It collides just above his mouth, the force of it tilts his head back, and it flies all the way up his cheek and across his eye, cutting his bottom eyelid. Haven’t decided if this just happens, or if it’s because Asteri tried to get involved and he pushed her out of the way of the bullets (because he has no idea how normal encounters are for monsters, or how much HP she has, he just doesn’t want her to hey hurt). Well, needless to say, having his face torn open, he drops immediately. Now, I mentioned before that face and eye injuries are a trigger for him, so if he was freaking out before, he’s straight up panicking now. He’s on the ground, clutching his face, eye filled with blood, unresponsive.

Asteri gets mad.

Oh, she loses it.

If she wasn’t there already, she slides in front of him, wings flared, tail ready to whip out in front of her, teeth bared, looking very spiky. You know how people will draw the skeletons putting up a fence of bone bullets like a shield? She does something like that, but they’re exclamation points. They manifest when she yells at the guard. She has to be careful about how she uses her turns, though, because she can’t tell how badly Gaster is hurt yet, just that he’s crumpled and not good. The fence is her turn (>Defend). She and the guard yell back and forth, while she dodges their bullets, about him being a human. Asteri doesn’t have a very good defense, but does insist that he’s not going to hurt anyone, and that she’s the one keeping an eye on him. She uses her next turn to try to talk to Gaster. He’s conscious, but hyperventilating and obviously in a lot of pain. He doesn’t really respond to anything Asteri asks, which just worries her more. She tries to talk to the guard through their turn, but the guard is angry and won’t concede any point. They send orange bullets at Asteri, which are easy enough; she just moves back and forth through them. But she’s defending Gaster, and orange bullets don’t dissipate unless they do damage, so although they move through her, they keep going. The guard is smug about it. Asteri realizes just in the nick of time and manages to whip her tail between the bullets and Gaster. She tanks the damage (it’s just magical, it hurts but it’s fine), and glares at the guard. That’s it. She wanted this to end quickly, and it’s already her third turn. That’s enough.

She casts purple magic (rings) and traps the guard, has a moment of glowering intimidation, and manages to end the encounter. The guard freaks out that they’re still trapped even though the encounter ended. Asteri carefully scoops up Gaster and goes to leave, with the guard shouting after her. (“You’re just going to leave me like this!?” “It’ll wear off.”) Once they’re around a corner she turns into something that can move much faster and zips home. Gaster had explained quite a lot about humans by then (such as the fact that blood isn’t poison, but it does belong inside the body, and losing too much can kill them; or that open wounds can get infected because of… something or other), but there’s still a lot she doesn’t know. She slams the door open, runs into the kitchen, yanks the table closer, shoves everything off of it, sets him down but keeps him propped up with a wing, boils water with fire magic, pours it over a dish rag (then runs it under colder water— she does remember that humans are susceptible to heat), and tries to wipe blood away so she can see what she’s dealing with. Gaster is still panicked and his eyes are screwed shut and he won’t let her move his hand away so she can help. She tries to talk him through it but he’s not exactly reasonable right now and so she ends up having to straddle him so she can hold his hands down. Which does not help his panic. But she manages to wipe enough blood away to see the gash: it’s pretty thin lower down, surprisingly; the worst of it is his eyelid. But his mouth is full of blood and his eye is full of blood and he’s panicked and sobbing and the blood just keeps coming, god, why won’t it stop? She tries to get him to summon his SOUL so she can heal him, but he doesn’t understand, and she’s freaking out, so she’s like, “I’m just gonna pour green magic into the wound okay?”

She starts to, and he calms down a little bit as his eyelid heals, but as the healing works its way down he suddenly cries out in pain and starts struggling again, trying to get his arm free. He manages to say, “Wait, stop!” so Asteri does, and figures it’s probably okay to let him go… When she does, he reaches up into his mouth, whimpers, and then yanks a tooth out. She’s like “AAAAA????” and there’s a quick, not exactly comprehensible exchange about putting it back, but Gaster still isn’t entirely with it, so Asteri finishes healing him best she can.

One thing I haven’t gotten to include in the actual fic yet is how shapeshifters can mimic some forms perfectly but others only superficially, and a lot of it has to do with touching. It’s unconscious, usually, but they get something like a biological and magical “scan” of a being. If it’s a large being, it might require conscious effort, and multiple “scans” of different areas, especially if they’re very complex. So in this case, Asteri doesn’t understand why Gaster was suddenly in pain until she took a second to focus on how his head works (since she was touching him), and realized that she was trying to heal a loose tooth back into place when it was already separated from his skull. (Yes she doesn’t have a “HUMANS HAVE BONES!?!?” moment internally, but she doesn’t really have time to think about it.)

Once his face is healed, he’s calmed down somewhat. She gets some of the cooled water, turns his head, apologizes, and pours it over his eyes. He flails, but it successfully flushes the rest of the blood out of his eye. Now, for most of this, Asteri has been half or all the way on the table with Gaster, either leaning over him, keeping him propped up on her lap, or bent around him in some weird position that allowed her to help. Right now, she’s got him cradled in her wings while she finishes wiping blood off his face. He’s more or less calmed down by now. She hasn’t really stopped talking to him this entire time. She’s mumbling something or other while she gives him another look over and wipes his face off. He opens his eyes, a bit, to watch her. When she realizes he’s looking at her (he looks exhausted), and he’s smiling a little, and he’s got some… some look in his eyes, she gets flustered.

“What? What the hell are you smiling about‽”

And he moves his hands up to sign.

“You care.”

She almost drops him on the table, but he’s still hurt. So she sputters and scoffs and wipes at him a little harder than strictly necessary,

“I do not! You’re a human, and I’m a monster, and there will never—”

As she was working her way down his face with the washcloth, she had reached his jaw. And, never breaking eye contact, Gaster cranes his head back, baring his throat. The gesture completely halts whatever Asteri was about to say. She just stares down at him for a moment. At his throat, in this vulnerable state, where she is in complete and total control, where her tail is gripping a washcloth and could wrap around his neck before he would have time to shout. And she’s frozen. She meets his eyes, and immediately looks away because how can he look at her like that, and her jaw clacks shut. Whatever she was going to say died in her throat. She tentatively returns to wiping the blood away. It’s all down his neck, from crying while his mouth was full of blood, and his shirt is spattered with it too. Not to mention soaked with water.

When she looks back up at him, his eyes are closed. He’s starting to fall asleep. She shakes him (gently), worried that he’s dying or something. He wakes up enough to loosely sign that no he’s not dying, or… falling down, whatever that means? Humans take a lot of energy to heal, and she just made him heal really fast, so he’s just tired.

Oh. Well. If he’s going to sleep, then… he shouldn’t be in a wet shirt. Give it to her and she’ll wash the blood off. Gaster raises an eyebrow but unbuttons it— well, he tries, but he can barely stay awake, so Asteri ends up doing it and then peeling it off him. He mumbles something about blood stains and cold water and vinegar. Asteri just throws his shirt in the sink and leaves it for tomorrow. She’s so unfamiliar with how he… works, so she wants to keep an eye on him. Plus he needs a new shirt. So she carries him to her room and sets him on the bed, then roots around for a shirt he can put on. (He could have walked, he mumbles; she throws back that he’d fall over if he tried to stand.) He smiles at her when she pulls a shirt over his head, careful not to let it press on the bad side of his face, and it makes her want to run away.

She just wants to keep an eye on him! He’s in no condition to be left unattended!

He doesn’t argue, but he does thank her.

She spends the evening sitting there staring at him and occasionally trying to heal the scar that’s left. It’s not nearly as bad as the other one, but it’s still there. It’s hard to look at the one on his right side, because she did that to him. After today, all she can see is him lying there bleeding in the snow, hands tied, bawling, begging her. Or him falling to his knees when that bullet hit him, hand flying to his face, and that expression of immediate terror. His attempts to clarify that he was just looking for help. His apologies, even though all he had done was run into her. He was scared.

And she saw it again today. Terror. He… He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, who is she kidding?

The rest of the night is similarly reflective, and the guilt builds up in her like a poison gas.

(At some point the next day she asks him about his tooth. It hasn’t turned to dust yet, so they can probably put it back now that he’s awake. Right? This leads to a whole discussion of “what do you mean “turned to dust?” and Asteri’s subsequent horror after his explanation that human body parts don’t disintegrate when they’re severed/dead. They just. Keep existing. But they’re dead now. She is horrified by his dead tooth just sitting there on her table.

Also, in the morning, after he wakes up and realizes he’s in her room (and they briefly acknowledge that), he ends up seeing a picture of her and her parents on the wall (which is something I have written into ch 10 but it’s not finished yet AUGH) and she solemnly explains what happened to them and why she feels so strongly about humans.)

AND THEN AFTER ALL THAT—

Things don’t change much.

Asteri knows she cares but she doesn’t want to because she’s not supposed to. She knows Gaster’s harmless but if she accepts that then she has to confront her entire opinion of humans. She knows she was wrong to be so mean to him but if she acknowledges that then their dynamic will change and it would be so much easier to just pretend nothing is different, to just let everything be unspoken.

But now that she’s had to think about it, she can’t go back to willful ignorance. There’s no avoiding it, it’s already there. But hell if she isn’t going to try to keep avoiding it anyway. Even though things feel nicer between them, even though sometimes she smiles back at him a little, even though it feels like they could almost be… friends— No. No. She can’t. (And especially not with this poison that’s eating her up.)

He’s somehow more subdued, though. And yet more frayed at the edges. The facts that he hasn’t heard or seen anything of human!Asteri, and there’s seemingly no way to find this universe’s version of him because in this universe, Asteri doesn’t know him, really begin to weigh on him. He’s never finding his Asteri. He’s never getting home. He’s going to be stuck with a someone who’s so like her, who he keeps almost connecting with, but who keeps shutting him down because she’s afraid. The next day after he got hurt, he wanted to go looking for his friend again. Asteri told him no, it would be too dangerous after getting on that guard’s bad side. Waterfall will be swarming now that he’s been reported. Still, within the week, he’s convinced her to take him looking through some caves they haven’t been through yet. And on the way there, wouldn’t you know who they run into: Themselves.

Human!Gaster and normal!Asteri meet normal!Gaster and human!Asteri.

(I was going to have it be ⁂!Gaster and ⁂!Asteri, but the thing is that they aren’t quite the same as they are in the fic (i.e. Asteri knows how to use purple magic on purpose). So they’re just “normal” because they’re still monsters.)

Human!Gaster spots her first and calls out to her. (Normal!Asteri is like ???). In turn, human!Asteri, upon turning and seeing him, lets go of normal!Gaster’s hand and calls out too. They run toward each other, teary-eyed, and hug. There’s a lot of talking over each other. “You’re alive!” and “How are you here?” and “I thought I’d never see you again!” It’s very… tender. Very familiar. Both monster versions are stunned and can’t do much best watch. Normal!Asteri has this pit in her gut, like her heart dropped into her stomach, and she doesn’t know why. Normal!Gaster has a similar feeling, but he knows exactly why: human!Asteri never told him that the friend she had been looking for was him.

It’s extremely chaotic. Normal!Asteri is overwhelmed by the facts that there are two humans, human!Gaster’s friend is alive, his name is actually Gaster (she thought he made that up but she couldn’t think of anything better to call him so she played along) And. The goddamn royal scientist, who she’s pretty sure fought in the war, is walking around with this one human. And they were holding hands?? There’s a lot for everyone to take in. So normal!Gaster (who has put his own internal relationship crisis on hold), says that he and human!Asteri were going to go “camping” (under the “stars”) so maybe they should all sit down at their campsite and work this out.

They do so. Normal!Gaster confirms for normal!Asteri that yes, these really are versions of them from an alternate universe where they’re human. (Normal!Asteri feels like she got hit by a truck but doesn’t have the opportunity to come anywhere near processing that. Human!Asteri is PSYCHED about this and really wants to meet this version of herself, but there’s too much going on to do that right now.) The humans compare how long they’ve been here: Gaster’s four months to Asteri’s “at least nine, maybe closer to a year?” Then start with her side since she’s been here longer. She explains how she found this Gaster pretty quickly, and she’s been staying with him. She also tells, somewhat uneasily, how, upon going over some of the events, this Gaster explained that it was unlikely that her friend (human!Gaster) would have ended up in the same place, or even the same universe. If he was transported at all. Normal!Gaster adds onto this that he also realized there was likely no way to send her back home. Human!Gaster agrees that these are reasonable conclusions. Human!Asteri then, very awkwardly, explains to him that she mourned him; she thought she would never see him again, or that he had died, and she knew she would never get home. And so… since… she’s been here… It’s just, she realized that she was happy here! It— It just came so naturally…!

She’s awkwardly gesturing to normal!Gaster while she talks. Human!Gaster doesn’t get it at first, but then it dawns on him. Oh. “You’re together.”

She nods. Normal!Gaster, who is sitting beside her, adds, “Although you never told me that the friend you wanted to find was me.”

This is super awkward for everyone present, and the two humans have to explain that they were never together. They… well, they might have gotten there, eventually, if they hadn’t gotten separated, but they never actually…

And human!Asteri is frantically trying to smooth it over with normal!Gaster, but he’s not about to have that crisis in full until later. There are things that need to be addressed. (But good lord, the tension and awkwardness between him and human!Asteri could be cut with a knife.) So tells her they can work it out later on, after the other issues have been addressed. (This is the equivalent of “we need to talk later” and she is so anxious she feels like she’s going to throw up.)

Human!Gaster is very supportive, but you can bet he’s dying inside. He can’t quite keep the pain out of his eyes but he’s trying so hard. Asteri is happy. That’s all that matters. Yes, it hurts, but he was never entitled to her affection. Alright, yes, it hurts worse that it’s literally an alternate version of him, but he completely understands why it happened. Outwardly, he’s still smiling as pleasantly as possible (and it looks fine, unless you know him well, like human!Asteri, who is now cringing even harder because she’s managed to upset both Gasters.)

Normal!Asteri is just sitting there taking it all in. She’s at a loss for a number of reasons. How could the Royal Scientist of all people shelter a human!? How is this okay!? Also, alternate universes!?!? What?? She’s… she’s had the human version of the Royal Scientist in her house for almost four months!? And that’s the human version of her!? All of it is real. Every time human!Gaster talked about an alternate universe where they were friends. She thought he was making that up, or that it was some bizarre human joke. But no, she’s actually had the human version of the freaking royal scientist in her house and oh god she beat him up when they first met.

Human!Asteri does indeed ask human!Gaster what the hell happened to his face. Normal!Asteri’s stomach does a triple axle. He just says that he had some trouble, he is very clumsy you know, and laughs it off. Normal!Asteri feels even worse because he’s protecting her and she absolutely doesn’t deserve it, and the worst part is that he’s smiling so genuinely at human!Asteri (who clearly doesn’t believe him but isn’t going to push it right now.)

They all do take some time to talk to their counterparts. Human!Asteri is excited to meet normal!Asteri. It is not mutual, but they work it out. It’s pretty immediately obvious to normal!Asteri once they start talking that her human counterpart really is just like her (if a little less jaded). Once backstory and specifics of character and preferences come up, it’s basically irrefutable. And honestly, normal!Asteri knows, deep down, that there’s no threat. She relaxes somewhat, but she can’t stifle the guilt when she hears this other version of herself talk about human!Gaster so fondly, knowing ‘I hurt him.’

Meanwhile, normal!Gaster kind of understands why human!Gaster is upset (and trying not to be). Human!Gaster understands why normal!Gaster is upset. They talk about it. Human!Gaster tells his counterpart that he and human!Asteri were just friends. It… felt like it might have grown into something else, it felt right at that threshold, but… obviously nothing came of it. He sort of steels himself and takes a deep breath and pats normal!Gaster and tells him that his Asteri is nothing if not loyal. “If she loves you, then it’s not because she loves me,” he tells him. That does help. Normal!Gaster asks if human!Gaster and normal!Asteri have hit it off, then. Human!Gaster wiggles his hand in the air. Sort of? He explains that she’s just afraid, and hurt. He worried at one point that she might really hate him, but he knows now that she doesn’t. She’s just… unsure. But he knows his Asteri, and how she gets mean when she’s scared or hurt, and that’s all it is. She still cares. He knows it. She’ll work through it. Normal!Gaster is understandably concerned about how that sounds, but human!Gaster chuckles and assures him that he’s in no danger, physically or emotionally. It’s not like that.

They all end up staying together (they get another tent) for the night, and then the next day, to clear everything leftover up. Human!Asteri and normal!Gaster have a long talk in private about why she never told him who her “scientist friend” was. He’s upset, and asks if he was just a stand-in for who she thought she lost?. She assures him that no, that is absolutely not the case. The reason she never brought it up was because it hurt to think about human!Gaster, at first, and it was hard to mourn him when someone so similar was right there— it was easier to just fall back into friendship with someone who she already sort of knew, and learn it all over, learn the differences, and… fall in love with them. Alright, yes, at first, she saw only the similarities, but she didn’t see him as a replacement. From the beginning, she saw her friend. Just in a different form. But she didn’t fall for her friend, out there in the other tent. She fell for him, here, in front of her. And she has no intention of leaving.

He appreciates this, and understands the complexities of the situation being a factor. But she’s very reassuring that she loves him.

So they’re all cute and stuff.

Meanwhile in the other tent, human!Gaster has tucked himself all the way into a sleeping bag, facing the tent wall, in an attempt to have some degree of privacy while he has a small breakdown. His Asteri is alive. She’s safe. She’s happy.

Without him.

Yes, but that never mattered, did it? He just wanted her to be okay. This is more than he could have hoped. He should be happy for her. And he is!! But it still hurts. Stars, it hurts so much more than he ever thought. What is left for him? The last several months he’s been focused on finding her, and gaining the trust of this universe’s Asteri, but he never considered what he would do when he found his Asteri. It’s true that it’s unlikely they will ever be able to go home. She wouldn’t want to anyway; she’s happy here. And he doesn’t want to live a life without her in it. He’d stay too, of course he will, even just to see her sometimes.

But that’s not viable either. The guards know him now. If this alternate version of himself has kept Asteri safe this long (and was willing to bring her to Waterfall despite the guards??) then she’ll be okay. But there isn’t much hope for him. This universe’s Asteri that he has been staying with might have grown to tolerate him, but now that she doesn’t have to worry about another human running around, what’s stopping her from turning him in? He wasn’t able to truly befriend her.

He’s broken-hearted and he’s got no hope for the future. He’s not doing so hot.

Meanwhile, also sitting in the same tent, is normal!Asteri, who is just. awkwardly existing there and trying to pretend she can’t hear him sniffle every so often. He probably needs some privacy, but where the heck is she going to sleep then?? In the tent with those two lovebirds?? Absolutely not. Gross. It’s weird enough that they’re just an alternate version of them. (Which has all kinds of implications she isn’t ready to address.) No, she’ll tough it out in here, thanks.

But she does feel bad. She saw the way human!Gaster looked at human!Asteri. She could see the light in his eyes die when human!Asteri told him she was with normal!Gaster. God, that must suck. He’s harmless, he’s heartbroken, he’s trapped here, and the only person he knows has already made a life for herself. She doesn’t really want to comfort him, but the guilt of everything has been eating away at her since earlier this week when they met that guard, and there’s just no escaping it anymore, and god it’s the least she could do.

So she reaches over with her tail and kind of. awkwardly pats where she thinks his shoulder probably is in the sleeping bag. He startles a little, but then rolls over and, head still tucked down inside, sticks his arms up through the head hole and offers her his wrists. It takes her a second, but then she’s like, “What? No! I’m not— I’m not tying your wrists! I’m trying to be nice to you!”

This is met with some confusion, and he pulls his arms back inside, then shuffles around until he can poke his head out, and he has the most pathetic, kicked-puppy-looking brown eyes. She would laugh if she didn’t feel so bad for him. Especially because he looks genuinely confused, and that really throws her off. Before, he’s always looked so confident that she would be kind to him; he always acted like he knew all along she would choose to do something nice. Not in a smug way, he just always acted like he was so assured of her character that he never doubted. But right now, he looks genuinely confused and unsure. And that hurts in a way Asteri doesn’t expect. She didn’t think that she cared about what he thought of her, or whether he trusted her. (Except she knew that wasn’t true from when he bared his throat to her, she just didn’t let herself think about it.)

And so her heart melts when he looks up at her, and she’s suddenly at a loss again. She was going to try to be gruff but encouraging, but he looks so… small.

She drapes her tail over him and turns to face him better. She tells him that hey, it’s… it’s not the end of the world to get your heart broken. That other Asteri definitely still cares about him. He’ll find so—

She has to cut herself off because no, he won’t find someone else. This is the underground, and he’s a human. It hits her, then. That kind of is the end of the world, for him. He’s got no one.

He gets his arms out of the sleeping bag and signs despondently, “There is no one else. And besides that, it is only a matter of time before I am arrested. He has kept her safe, so I am…” There’s a pause, and he blinks away the way his eyes sting. “…A loose end.”

Well. Normal!Asteri is having none of that. They end up having a discussion about the outlook of things, and she tries to cheer him up a little. (The matter of normal!Gaster’s position making it easier for him to protect human!Asteri comes up at one point.) Eventually the conversation forces normal!Asteri to both acknowledge and admit aloud that she has no intention of handing human!Gaster over. He’s… He’s harmless. There’s no reason to let him be killed.

This surprises him, but he is relieved. He admits that he didn’t thinks she cared that much. Or, rather, that she wouldn’t allow herself to. This brings a more serious tone to the conversation. Asteri works up to apologizing. For everything. But especially for how she treated him in the beginning. Gaster keeps trying to explain it away— She is traumatized, he startled her, she was acting out of fear, etc. They go back and forth. Finally she slaps her wings down on the blankets and huffs, “This isn’t about me! You’re the victim!”

He argues, “You were a victim too.”

She goes through a face journey as the guilt and remorse all swirl and come to a head and brings tears burning at her eye sockets. “But that doesn’t give me the right… to hurt someone who was begging for mercy!”

And it’s quiet. He looks down at his hand, then touches the scar over his right eye. “No,” he murmurs. “It doesn’t.”

The silence is heavy.

“I’m sorry… that I hurt you,” she says finally, and it comes trembling from her SOUL. “I was afraid. But that doesn’t make it okay. Right from the get-go, you tried to explain yourself, and I remember you were so…scared. You were hurt, and I didn’t help you. It was like some messed up power trip. And— And I’ve been fighting it for weeks now, months maybe, the obvious truth that you didn’t deserve any of this, that I was so, so wrong. But it felt too painful to accept, except now, I’ve been forced to accept it, and it’s even worse! I could have spared you more pain if I had just been willing to endure some myself. I wish I could undo it so bad, but I can’t. I didn’t want to have to change, I wanted to just let it stay unspoken, so we could just exist like that and I could pretend I didn’t like you so I never had to address why it made me so uncomfortable! But now it’s worse and now we’re both sad! If I had just confronted it, and said I was wrong, maybe I could’ve… We coulda…”

She can’t bring herself to say “maybe we could have been friends.” Instead she swallows to compose herself and then says, “I’ll keep you from the guards. I’m… I’m so sorry. I know none of this fixes anything, but anything I’ve done to you… you can do to me. It’s only fair.”

He doesn’t say anything until she looks up. She can’t read his expression. “Anything?”

She gulps, but nods.

His expression softens a little. “Can I make a request instead?”

She isn’t sure what to expect, but nods again. “Sure.”

The intensity in him looks like he’s trying to hold back a flood with his eyes. His hesitation feels like it might shatter the earth. Finally he relieves her, and when he signs she doesn’t even know how to describe the broken hope in his expression. It’s like staring into a hole and seeing a few shards of stained glass at the bottom. “Can we start over?” His eyes water. “Could you see me as someone you might become friends with, one day?”

It’s everything she realized she wants, and everything she doesn’t deserve, so the question feels like being knocked over by a wave. Like she hadn’t already cried enough while apologizing to him, this brings her to tears all over again. “I don’t deserve that,” she whispers.

“As the one being apologized to, I think that I get to decide that.”

It’s… a joke. Almost. It’s lighthearted. How can he be lighthearted at a time like this?? How can he smile at her when he still looks so sad underneath it? She doesn’t know what to make of it. But she does know that if she’s going to keep him safe from the guards, it would be nice if… if they could, despite everything, be friends. She laughs, just a quiet, disbelieving sound through tears, and nods. “I’d like that a lot better than this,” she admits.

He smiles, and this time it looks real, but then he gets serious again. Hesitant, maybe. “Are you still adverse to being touched?”

“No.” She sniffles and shakes her head. “You can do whatever you want. I don’t—”

His hug knocks the wind out of her. Not because it’s especially forceful— in fact it’s quite gentle— but because it’s unexpected, and desperate.

“G-Good, becaaause I reallyyy n-need oooone of th-these.”

It takes a couple seconds, but she hugs him back. It’s funny, how small he feels. It’s funny how he’s still so much more powerful than her simply by virtue of being human.

It’s funny how much she doesn’t care anymore.

(They talk later about how she can’t replace the person he actually cares about. He tells her that he doesn’t want her to. He just wants to be friends. That’s enough for her.)

The next morning is full of more clarifications. Normal!Asteri, relieved from the cathartic conversation (and sob session) with human!Gaster last night, is more at ease. She watches how human!Asteri and normal!Gaster interact, and it’s so strange, because she can absolutely see that they are the same people as herself and human!Gaster, but they’re so… in love?? Even when they aren’t really doing anything. They aren’t blatant about it, but it’s just so clear in everything they do. It’s like it rolls off of them and seeps into the air. She hasn’t had much chance to speak with normal!Gaster (partly because she was intimidated by the whole “royal scientist” thing), but watching him now, she realizes no, he’s just goofy, it’s fine. But it does make her wonder about human!Gaster. What would he look like, this happy? What would he be like if he had the resources that this Gaster does? It’s strange.

At one point she ends up talking with human!Asteri while they make coffee over the fire. It starts pretty friendly, but human!Asteri almost beats the crap out of normal!Asteri when she finds out that she’s responsible for the scar over human!Gaster’s right eye. Both Gasters have to intervene (possibly with blue magic). Fortunately human!Asteri didn’t actually land a punch, because she was angry enough to have done real damage. Human!Gaster clarifies that they worked it out, she already apologized, and he’s fine, it’s fine, it was when they first met. Human!Asteri is mad that he lied to her about it yesterday, but… she understands. Once it all gets cleared up, she apologizes to normal!Asteri, who, despite having been mortally terrified for a minute there, can’t really hold it against her. She would do the exact same thing for her friends.

So the morning is going great.

The Asteris (Asteries?) actually end up chitchatting again like nothing happened. Meanwhile the Gasters talk science and agree that it’s unlikely that there’s any way back to the other universe. Human!Gaster thanks normal!Gaster for keeping human!Asteri safe, and quietly (so as not to worry the Asteris) expresses his concern about his own safety and shares his experience with the guard. Normal!Gaster tells him that part of why he and human!Asteri came to Waterfall was because of a rumor about a human being spotted. He also tells him that he’s had an idea, but wasn’t sure whether to implement it. However, circumstances as they are, he thinks it would be best. He explains it to human!Gaster, and they agree to share with the Asteris.

Normal!Gaster is quite close to the king. Asgore does not really want to kill anyone. So normal!Gaster will go to him and explain: these two humans have fallen down; they are happy here, and respect monsters; he loves one of them, and the other, her friend, has vital scientific knowledge. They have no desire to leave the underground. When they die, their SOULs will be here to go toward the breaking of the barrier. Killing them now would do no more good. So he asks, both as the Royal Scientist, and as a friend: please let them just live here. Either let the people know, or turn a blind eye, but please, don’t make them fear for their lives. There is ample evidence that they are good people.

He also tells them that, depending on how it goes, he will explain the whole “alternate universe version of myself” thing to Asgore, who will believe him even though he won’t understand.

In explaining this to the others, normal!Gaster also finally explains the situation of the underground, and the strength of human SOULs, to the humans properly. Human!Gaster very much wants to contribute to the underground. He would love to have a job again. They don’t even have to pay him!

So. That’s probably what will happen.

They all stick around for a while longer. Normal!Asteri watches human!Gaster and human!Asteri chatting from across the campsite, and sees how his anxiety dissolves the longer they talk. (Since when has she been able to read him like this…?) They seem to have addressed the lingering issues. Now, it looks like any potential awkwardness about their relationship has evaporated, and they’ve slipped right back into what their friendship used to be. She’s glad. She also takes the opportunity to talk to normal!Gaster; after all, it seems reasonable to assume they could be friends too. (She is, of course, correct, and yet despite everything is still blown away by how well they get along.)

By the end, everyone exchanges contact info, and they agree to meet up again in a few days to talk about how to proceed after normal!Gaster talks to the king. Human!Gaster and human!Asteri gives each other a big hug, and she tells him she’s so glad he’s alive, and safe. And that it’s going to be okay. She won’t let anyone hurt him. He smiles. He knows, he says. It seems she takes care of him in every universe. She kisses him on the cheek, and glances at normal!Asteri. Yeah. It. seems like she does.

Human!Asteri does give normal!Asteri one last “friendly” threat about being good to human!Gaster. Normal!Asteri gives her word.

From there, things only get better. As expected, Asgore calls off the guards. Human!Gaster gets a “job” working with normal!Gaster. The Asteris collaborate on linguistic studies. Normal!Asteri eventually introduces human!Asteri to Sembie and Kelinn.

Normal!Asteri and human!Gaster are friends. It takes effort, but she genuinely wants to make up for everything. And he’s a forgiving person (plus, he already knew her, to some extent.) There’s a lot of trauma to unpack, and they both have things to work through, but it steadily gets better. And yeah, as you would expect, they eventually end up together. It’s cute.

I’m ignoring lifespans and other angsty things. Maybe being immersed in ambient magic and eating magic food extends human lifespans some. Maybe humans live longer in the universe human!Gaster and human!Asteri are from. Don’t think about it too hard. They all just get up to shenanigans together forever. But this is the gist of the AU and how it goes down in my head. Sorry it’s so freaking lONG. There’s lots more that happens tbh. But this was the foundation. The possibilities for shenanigans are endless now. There is a lot more to human!Asteri x normal!Gaster btw, but I haven’t had the brainworms for their side of this like I have for normal!Asteri x human!Gaster.

Also I know I said earlier that there were two versions but honestly I kind of mixed them together and I think I like this better. I don’t touch as much on the psychology of “hurt people hurt people” or normal!Asteri’s choices in the beginning of her interactions with human!Gaster, but believe me I’ve explored them. Similarly, human!Gaster’s resulting trauma from encounters and bullets and facial injury. I’ve also explored that but this is so long already and all I really meant to do was give the gist of this AU but instead I wrote a wHOLE FREAKING THING. I had to keep pulling myself out of “real writing mode”. Ughhh. Maybe now that this is out of my brain I can work on THE ACTUAL FIC. (I have so much of ch 10 written I just can’t get it all together.)

Also uhhh please remember that this is mostly me exploring regret and redemption and reparations and how somebody might fix stuff with a person that they’ve hurt. Except extremely fictional because alternate universes and the person hurt has a deep understanding of the one who hurt them and all that. Obviously none of that was okay, that’s the point: trying to do better after realizing you’ve been awful. And addressing that rather than let the surface vibes of a relationship ease your conscience so you can keep ignoring your guilt. Tbh I did not do Asteri’s apology and that whole conversation justice to how it went in my head but it… was very comprehensive, and there was more to it, on both sides of the conversation.

ANYWAY UHH yeah so things. Only get better. Because this is made up and I get to give it a happy resolution regardless of whether it’s realistic. Maybe I’m overly worried about it, but I just. Don’t want to give the wrong impression here. In this AU, Normal!Asteri is a good person, who made bad choices, that were fueled by trauma and fear, and that doesn’t make them okay, she’s absolutely still responsible for her choices, and it absolutely would have been within human!Gaster’s right to not want to be friends. But he did. Because he knew her better than she knew him (alternate universe friendship), plus he’s very forgiving to begin with. His decision isn’t meant to come across as a moral precedent, that’s just his character. Look just please give this the best faith interpretation ok im working through some stuff and it’s coming out in my story ideas.

Normal!Asteri and human!Gaster end up being so freaking cute okay. She is. So good to him. So soft. Very “wait is this okay? Wait is THIS okay?” I will probably touch more on their relationship later in a different post bUT THE POINT OF THIS IS THAT NOW THERE’S CONTEXT FOR MY RANDOM DOODLES

#seeker talks #seeker writes #??#⁂ au #dingsaster #double dingsaster au #⁂ gaster #seeker oc #asteri #human asteri #human ⁂ gaster #no i STILL don’t know what human gaster’s first name is #im working on it #i love making men cry can you tell #…IN FICTION #Windy

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