Chapter Text
Asgore dies.
The human and him fight, at the place where the Underground is separated from the surface, and Asgore is not the one who wins. He dies. The human is victorious, the first of their fellow fallen to be so.
The human leaves.
The human leaves, just as quickly and obscurely as they arrived, and just like that the Underground returns to that still tranquility it had previously maintained.
Except it doesn’t, because the human mowed down dozens of innocent souls on their way through the Underground, sparing and slaughtering intermittently without any discernable pattern or apparent reasoning behind their decisions.
So many are dead.
Papyrus. Mettaton.
Asgore, the kind yet formidable King of the Underground, who’d ruled all of Monsterkind for centuries and had led what was left of them through the struggles it took to rebuild themselves after the war with nothing but hope and his own kind of quiet determination.
Cut down by a little creature with a blank expression and hell-bent eyes that’s even smaller than you.
Of course, you don’t know this at first. You won’t know your king’s fate until Sans murmurs it to you quietly as he leads you into the throne room where Undyne kneels, crumpled and defeated, amidst the golden flowers Asgore loved so much, shoulders shaking as she clutches a dusty crown to her chest.
Admittedly, you had suspected this turn out before it happened, had known given the human’s track record and the sureness of Asgore’s confronting them that this would be the likely result, but you hadn’t exactly stuck around to watch. You’d fled the minute the human had killed Mettaton, scrambling to pick up the pieces of the metal body he’d so longed for—You couldn’t just leave him there, you couldn’t— and then hightailing it back to your lab, riding the elevator down to the true lab, the place where you have buried all your disgusting secrets, as you sit and silently sob.
Half the Underground is dust, you have the undead, yet unliving, hidden away in your basement, and your best friend of near a decade is dead and gone and it’s your fault, it’s all your fault.
Everything is your fault. All you do is hurt people and put them in danger, and you are a selfish, weak coward who has abandoned those left in the castle because you were too afraid to step up and stop the human yourself, even knowing what they had done, even knowing what they could do.
No, you just sat and watched on that screen like it was some kind of sick movie, even as they tore through the teens in Snowdin forest, the sentries, Papyrus—
Oh stars and heaven above, Papyrus.
Papyrus, Undyne’s best friend and the only family Sans had left and the little bundle of bones that had used to run around the old labs while you and Sans and Ga— As you all worked.
Undyne will be… probably already is devastated. She’d loved Papyrus like the little brother she never had… She’s going to blame herself, isn’t she? She’d always been dedicated to protecting Papyrus from the moment she’d taken him under her metaphorical wing. Losing him like this is…
Well, you don’t think Undyne’s the type of person who handles grief well.
…She’s much like Sans in that regard, actually.
Sans… You can’t even imagine what Sans is going through right now. Papyrus had been his world, the only thing he’d had left in a life pitted with loss. You’d never pretended to know all of Sans’s secrets, but you knew that much, at least, about the things he had lost, and you certainly knew how much he loved Papyrus.
It’s all your fault. You should have called Asgore, or Undyne, or someone about that goddamn human the moment they’d walked through the Ruins door— You knew, you knew, Sans would never have the heart to take them out himself… not a child, not a human, and yet you’d done nothing.
All of this is on your head.
This is what your heart whispers and your mind screams as you ride the elevator down to that awful, cold place that breathes sorrow, as you stumble your way over to the bathroom and the medical cabinet behind the mirror crowded with old prescriptions you never bothered to throw away, and as you tip out handfuls of different pills and force them down your throat.
You may have never had the head for this stuff Sans did, but you’re a goddamn Royal Scientist and a bioengineer trained by the very best— It’s not that hard to figure out what combination of meds it’ll take to lull your soul into a sleep it won’t wake up from.
It would’ve worked too, if Sans hadn’t burst through the door not five minutes later, eyes wide and hands trembling as he takes one look at the spilled pills and half-empty bottles on the counter and you lying there in a shivering heap on the floor, before grabbing the bucket that sits next to the sink and dragging you off the ground, forcing you to throw up until he is sure nothing is left in your system. Only then does he collapse backwards against the wall, slumping down onto the floor with his head in his hands.
“Why?” You mumble to him after a moment of silence from where you’ve curled back up on the floor against the sink, your voice hoarse. “All I do is make things worse.” All you’d needed was another ten minutes or so, and then it would have been too late. “You should have just—“
“Don’t you dare.” Sans snarls, looking up from where he’s curled in on himself, fire in his eye sockets despite the tear tracks on his face and the shaking of his whole frame. “Not… Not you too, Al. I can’t lose you as well. You’re the only one left with any idea of—“ He shakes his head. “Not you too. Don’t ask me to say goodbye to the only family I’ve got left. Please.”
‘Are we still family?’ You want to ask. Maybe once, a lifetime ago, when you’d both been young and another lab had been your home and the people in it your heart, you might have been, but you’re not who were, and neither is he, and you’re not even sure you could be called anything remotely like friends anymore, if not for the tenuous web of secrets that still tie you two together.
But despite all that, Sans had come when you called him, that first day when the amalgamates crawled into existence, and had helped you keep your secret even when he disagreed with your decision.
He’d always come when you called.
How could you be so selfish, to leave him alone, when this time he has decided, for whatever reason, he needs you?
…He needs you.
Sans needs you.
And so when the time comes, you let him pull you up off the floor and force you out of your lab-coat stained with oil and dust and vomit, and when he offers you his hand you take it and let him glitch you both into existence inside the glowing gold hallway of the castle.
And you find Undyne among the flowers.