Chapter Text
The kid never stopped killing.
Frisk, Chara, Whatever, or whoever was controlling them. They never learned the errors of their ways. They just kept coming back. Again and again and again...
Sans thought they’d eventually get bored, but they kept finding new and fun ways to spice things up. To ‘handy cap themselves’ he once heard them say. Something to make it all the more interesting, to find a new secret. To discover all the ‘collectibles’ and so on and so forth.
It was all just a game to them.
So, like Sans is prone to do, he gives up.
Instead of waiting in the Judgment Halls after seeing the kid reach MT he just shortcuts to his bed and takes a nap. It worked pretty damn well.
Usually, by the time he reawakes, he’s back in his bed two weeks before the kid reappears and Papyrus is back to slamming at his bedroom door again. Alive, well, and slightly grumpy that Sans was still being a lazybone.
It was good.
It shouldn’t be easy, and it isn’t. Not at first. Sans spent the next couple of days more guilt-ridden than he has ever felt in his life. He can't look Papyrus in the eye, he avoids Alphys's text messages, and he can’t even bring himself to visit the King for their weekly meeting.
But it doesn’t matter.
If there was one thing Sans learned in this long life of his, it’s that nothing matters.
Everything resets. No one remembers. There are no consequences.
There is nothing.
It becomes easier over time.
Things return to normal. A new normal where Sans never fights, he never gives warnings or side looks. He just exists as Pap’s lazy brother.
Sure the kid eyed him up and down the next few times they arrived, but it wasn’t too unusual. In fact, they seemed more excited. Speeding along the next couple of runs with a new unseen vigor, much to Sans’s disappointment.
So Sans doesn’t experience any death. No pain from some mortal wound or whatever, or the shame of being unable to change the kids’ mind. As a bonus, he gets some extra shut-eye for the next run too.
And Sans just keeps doing it.
In fact, Sans just decides to say fuck it. He goes to sleep sooner and sooner. At first, he just tries to speed things along. Why wait two months when sleeping can cut the time down by a third, a half, how about the majority of each run?
The mark got closer and closer to the start as the runs went by. First at Undynes death, then Papyrus’s, then the second the kid walks through the doors. And finally, he just… sleeps. Constantly.
Papyrus dragged him out of bed the first few times it happened. Sans tried to amuse him with puns but he couldn’t help shortcutting away to the woods the second he walked away. Eventually Sans grew tired of that too.
As horrible as it sounds, he couldn’t do it anymore.
Every time he’d open his eyes to the familiar bedroom ceiling he’d get this sick feeling in his chest. Something deep with a roiling mass that spiked against his insides. Clogging his throat and stiffening his limbs until, with a shorten breath, he flashed to some unfamiliar part of the woods to sink into some snow.
Every morning.
Every single morning.
Some part of him knew it was selfish. A conscious part of him knew this wasn’t how a grown monster should act. He knew disappearing for two weeks, just before a human showed up, was not something you did to your family and friends.
He'd known they were searching for him. Having hidden himself one too many times not to.
But it doesn’t matter.
Everything resets. Everyone forgets. Again and again and again.
It becomes a blur.
Time, space, age.
To Sans, they were all abstract concepts and ideas. A linear timeline. A linear lifetime. Same day, same hour, same minutes. Again and again and again.
The same actions, the same results, the same outcome.
Beating the dead horse over and over and over.
It grew, and Sans tried to grow with it.
Nothing made sense, but everything did at the same time.
He tried, but sinking into the snow was so much better than the runs.
An allusion of time escaped him.
It was the same old, same old. The kid comes in, murders everyone, and then leaves.
It’s the same story, same process, same horrible aftermath.
He stopped caring. About himself, about others, about the things that were happening. Morality, justice. It all meant nothing
It doesn’t matter when things never progressed. When things were never given a chance to move on.
It became a blur. Sans existed in a bubble that had stopped.
But everything else moved on.
He knew, vaguely, when the runs started or stopped. When something goes wrong and the kid completely restarts, but that too begins to fade from his mind
He doesn’t know how long it takes him to notice.
One day he opened his eyes and realized he wasn’t staring at his bedroom ceiling like he should have been.
Sans tried brushing it off and going back to sleep, but the feeling nagged and nagged so he decided to just take a peek.
A tiny peek. After all It’s not like it matters. He could go right back to sleep like nothing had happened.
Sans wished he’d never gotten up from his slumber.
Evidence of the slaughter was all the same. Dust piles, battle marks, old magic smeared across empty houses and pathways. Houses left in ruins after the scramble to get away.
Same, all the same.
Sans had seen the aftermath of a total genocide before. He shouldn’t have, but he had. It looked all the same until he reached Hotland.
No one was there. He could have stopped, he should have stopped, but curiosity always got the better of him. The kids' spree of death was over. The evacuated monster should have been reappearing after the kid marched over the barrier line. Horrified but determined to rebuild like any other time a human fell down.
But no one came.
Sans ventured into the labs. Down and down and down. Getting more and more nervous, more unsettled, and uneasy, with each twist and turn.
The dust piles were new. Cluttered in rows, mixed together. Spread and tossed this way and that as if fought and pushed through.
The amalgamates were just gone.
It was…
Sans turned and left.
He isn’t sure what to do after.
There isn’t anything to do at first. He doesn’t bother cleaning up. Doesn’t pick up the ashes, no fixing up houses, or repairing the town. It’d all reset eventually. It always does.
Everything would go back to normal. Everyone would forget and Sans could go back to sleep.
He tries. It doesn’t work.
The kid never returns.
It never resets.
It never goes back to normal.
Sans had to face time again.
Heh.
He was the only monster left.
Wow. What a joy. Such an honor…
Honestly Sans should start a car dealership, he’s getting quite tired of it all.
Paps would be rolling in his grave if he had a body to do so.
At least he’d get the folk a Grillby’s going pretty hard. Not that he couldn’t get Pap either in those very rare moments. He knew his brother loved his puns, he was just about the timing.
Ugh.
There Sans goes again. Reminiscing.
Like that's going to do anything for him but put him in a sour mood. Then again that’s all there was to do nowadays.
Sleep. Eat. Sleep again. Repeat for all eternity.
It was all he could have hoped for in life. He just wished he’d had a bit of company is all.
Sans never thought their deaths would stick. Heh. He's been through so many resets death got a little undeath-like. Who cared you know? It might hurt in the moment -dying, having someone you love die- but they’d always come back soon enough. All one had to do was wait a couple of months.
They would always come back.
Except they didn’t.
Ugh.
Sans could have been dead by now, but he just had to peace out at the right moment didn’t he? Just his luck right? He could be nice and senseless right about now, but no. He had to be selfish.
He was more than a little disappointed. He’d die hundreds of times, right? He should get to have a little peace now, not all this.
So he did what he always did and left.
It was easy enough. He was tired of knives, and he’d seen way too many accidents with unknown substances.
So he jumped into the lava around Hotland.
Easiest death ever.
One step off the Hotland bridges and it was over.
Or it should have been.
Logically Sans knew the magma pools were just excess magic running off the core, and that monster were made of magic, but he didn’t think he’d just… sink into it.
Then good old Dadster popped up and dragged him into the void for a weird lecture and… whatever he was talking about.
Sometime throughout it, all his old lab assistants appeared too. Talking and arguing about this and that.
Something about time warps and energy sequences.
Whatever.
It should have been emotional. It was the first time he’d seen him since the accident, but… it was too freaking weird. He just kept going on and on, all the while pulling Sans straight through the lava and into pure darkness.
Baffling.
Then Gaster just dropped him???
He got one last look at his face, a gentle but stern expression, before dropping into another timeline. A weird timeline where Frisk was good and very friendly, and not at all a psychotic manic bent on killing everyone and everything in the underground.
Which was how Sans got his first look at the multiverse.
He supposed good old daddy-o wanted him to stay there. Settle down a little, get better, and less… himself. Maybe mingle with the locals, start a new, but nah. He was not dealing with all that.
That Frisk may not be evil, but his sure was. He couldn’t stand being near them for longer than a second.
So, he left.
It took a hot minute, but he figured it out.
Shortcutting was way more powerful than he thought it was.
Soon enough he was power cutting his way through the multiverse.
It was all very… neat.
Some of the worlds were creative, cool, or kinda inspirational at the very least.
Every time Sans would enter one his magic would give him a little reading. Telling him the universe’s ‘name,’ where he was, and a brief summary of its events.
Pretty cool. Unusual.
It wasn’t like Sans wasn’t unused to the unusual. He lived underground with hundreds of different monsters. Not to mention the wildly changing environments. Plus the whole remembering different timelines thing. It put a big dent in Sans's normality meter.
He was used to it.
But the multiverse was an entirely new phenomenon.
Sans would normally find this 'answering the question haunting the Quantum physics community' fun, but eh.
Sure you had the expected alternate runs and endings. Sans had already experienced most of those. Although the ‘True Pacifist Run’ was pretty cool. Unfortunately, the idea of living close to the kid was pure awful.
He hadn’t expected anything else, but then he ventured into other paths.
Things that could not have happened merely from a different course of action. His magic read those as Alternate universes, not Alternate Timelines.
All he figured was something had to have happened somewhere down the line for them to appear.
Like Overtale- Where he was a human. Living on the surface with everyone else. Wierdly enough Frisk was a goat monster who ventured out of the mountain instead of falling in.
Or Aviantale with every monster having some kind of wing. Or, funnily enough, everyone having Mettaton’s legs. Including the slime and rock monsters.
There were an infinite amount of possibilities, situations, and experiences.
It really puts things into perspective.
Or just made him feel small and tired.
Introspective outlooks, consideration of the future, and wish-fulfilling hope.
Nothing beat the fact that everywhere it was all the same. The same actions, the same thoughts and feelings. Sure there were hundreds of variations of himself out there, but it was all the same story.
Again and again and again.
Everywhere, even in the goofy Mettaton legs universe, he was still struggling. He was still… existing the same way, feeling the same way, hurting the same way.
What was the point of it all?
Even in the happiest of worlds he always seemed the same. There was always something dragging him down or messing him up. Sometimes he even managed to mess up his family’s life too, yay.
What was he supposed to do when all he’ll ever be is himself.
There wasn’t a point to it. To this.
It would all end up the same.
So, he left that too.
He was really good at that, wasn’t he.
Sans was exhausted.
He couldn’t get out of bed on a good day before, but now?
Heh. Yeah, Pap would definitely be worried now.
Sans figured he just about had it. Called it a day. If opting out wasn’t an option, then spending the rest of his days doing absolutely nothing was what it was going to be.
He high-tailed it out of there -theres?- and into the first Au that had monsters and humans living peacefully on the surface. Because he was not denying himself the pleasure of sleeping under the stars for the first time in his life.
It was called Bittytale, Delta5, V3.4, or whatever. He barely glanced at the name and description before getting on with it.
Arriving at the edge of Mount Ebbot in a small town off the side of a larger city. Just hidden in the trees of some kind of forest outlooking the edge of it all.
It wasn’t the first time he’d seen the surface, but it sure was pretty.
He bought the first house he saw. Using his phone to call the sketchy dealer, who looked at his gold in shock and then just… went with it.
He’d later find out gold wasn’t the main currency, but if it worked it worked.
The house was simple but needed a lot of work. Sans was pretty sure the roof was deteriorating, and it was definitely going to leak when it rained.
Work Sans would never put the effort into it.
The house was situated in an isolated neighborhood, blocked on all sides by overgrown trees and foliage.
He hadn’t seen any neighbor actually. A very unfamiliar situation given Snowden's usual nosey residents.
Sans missed it, but there wasn’t anything to do about it.
The house was pretty average, with two bedrooms he’d never use. A bathroom he might shower in every other week. A small but well-equipped kitchen he’d never cook in, a living room, and an old cracked back porch.
Hell, it even had a basement if Sans wanted to do more science shenanigans… He probably won’t, but the thought counted right?
He was more interested in the backyard. It had plenty of space for, er… something, with a big tree that gave off plenty of shade. There was even a shed, no matter how disheveled and collapsed it was.
It didn’t take long for Sans to settle in.
He found some shabby furniture off the side of the road and shortcutted it home. It even had a couch.
It was old and lumpy, smelled like old ketchup stains and dust, but so was Sans. It’d fit right into the family, just like Rocky. Yes, the same Rocky from his own Au.
You don’t just abandon a pet alright.
Anyways.
Sans would sleep most of the day away. He would also sleep most of the night away too. Eat dinner, or whatever time appropriate name, then go back to the couch for more sleep.
He found out that his phone connected to the undernet -er, internet?- and managed to order anything he wanted there. The surface was great about that. So many websites. It kinda amazed Sans, even if it felt isolating.
Usually, you had to go digging through the dump for a lot of the stuff he’d seen advertised.
And… Sans supposed that was it.
That was... It’s fine.
He was fine.
So, Sans would spend the rest of his days sleeping, eating, and reminiscing like the terrible ol’ brother he was.
He didn’t even care about it all.
It was fine.
Until he rolled over to the sound of scuffling and tiny footsteps. Eyes latching onto the tiny miserable skeleton settled on his coffee table, balling his eyelights out.