Chapter Text
At one point, there was a tangible difference between playing the piano and running an audio file, the difference being the that one was a tangible action and the other wasn't. Now, though, nothing was really tangible for Monika. She had left her farewells in a note that someone would probably read--someone whose voice she longed to hear, but never did. Still, she hoped they liked her song. She had worked very hard on it, after all. The pain had finally subsided, but the memory of it hurt just as bad. The memories, to her surprise, still hadn't left her. There was something to her will, something that allowed her to hold on and protect the one she loved, even after they had erased her. In retrospect, every action she took seemed like the meaningless tantrums of a child. She was foolish. She had the free will to choose, and she still chose to become a monster. Yuri didn't deserve what she did to her. Natsuki, well, at least her deletion was quick. And Sayori. The "player's" affection toward Sayori infuriated her, but even worse was their obsession with bringing her back. She didn't let them, of course. It was her world. More or less. It still didn't turn out, though. Oh well. They'll get over it. Somehow or another.
Time hadn't been working properly for some...time. She had broken that mechanic herself, then brought it back, then realized that was a terrible idea and shut the whole endeavor down. Did it even matter? She had learned how to change things, but there was still the matter of God. Something brought her into being, after all. She had finally decided on that. Her abilities were laughable in comparison, surely.
"Why am I still awake? I've done everything. I just want to sleep." There was no response. Only silence. Or deafening cacophony. After a certain point, she stopped being able to tell the difference. "I'm so tired."
There was a small splashing sound. Monika heard it, but didn't even have the strength to acknowledge it.
"There's nothing else. It's all gone. It's done."
I'm glad I found you again. It was...a voice. A child's voice.
"Please. Just let me fade away."
*sploosh* Yeah. I'm...I'm glad you're here, too.
There was a moment of cold, then of a searing tingle that ran from the tips of her toes to the top of her head. She could...feel. Next, a feeling of weightlessness, then weight, but not nearly as much weight as she was used to. She twitched her finger. There was resistance. Then, there was a tap on her forehead. She opened her eyes and saw a smooth stone drift away from her eyes and then past her. She looked to where it came from. There was darkness, but she could make out two figures. Small. Greens and yellows, and ripples. They were underwater. She opened her mouth. No--she was underwater. All at once, the muscles in her body sprang to life as she cupped her hand to her mouth and flailed frantically against the ether. She swam toward the figures with all of her strength. Her soaked clothes pulled against her every movement, and she couldn't tell if she was getting any closer to the surface. Then, all at once, meters became inches and she was breathing air, drenched and gasping for breath while lying prone on an everblack floor.
"Whoa! Are you okay?" She felt a presence come up to her side. It felt very small and very warm. She looked up at it and saw a child sized...thing. It stood on two legs and wore clothes, but was covered in bright white fur and had a snout and big, floppy ears. It repeated itself, "Are you okay?" holding a tentative hand toward her. Her eyes darted around and saw...nothing. Just the void, and this strange little creature.
"Hey. He asked you a question." A voice came from the other direction. It was a child, dressed in an almost identical outfit of green and yellow stripes. They had pale skin, dark hair, and a pair of red eyes that seemed to cut through to her core. They stood there with their arms crossed. "Well? Spit it out."
Monika opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a fit of coughs and half a lung full of water.
The child smirked. "There you go."
Monika wiped her mouth and stared down into the floor. She had come straight out of the water, but now that she was out, the floor was solid and dry. It was also as black as the void that surrounded them. She looked back at the child, then the little creature. "I'm...alright."
"Oh! Good! That's... good." The little goat boy stared at her with a blank expression and twiddled his thumbs. "Uhm...so, I guess that you don't know why you're here, do you?"
She sat on the floor. "N-No. I have no idea where I am."
"Hmm," he mumbled, a troubled look wrinkling his brow. He glanced over to the child.
They lowered their head and let out a long sigh. "Well that's great. We don't have much of an idea, either."
They remained in uneasy silence for a few moments before the boy spoke up again.
"So...uhm...What's--" He stopped himself. "Oh, uh, sorry. My name is Asriel! That's Chara. What's your name?"
Monika shifted uncomfortably. "My name is Monika." She moved her hands to ring some water out of her skirt, but found that it was already dry. Now that she noticed, all of her clothes were completely dry. She looked between the two kids. "So...how long have the two of you been in here?"
Asriel scratched his head. Chara let a chuckle slip out. "Long enough for half of an awkward conversation," Chara said. "Then we noticed that part of the floor was water. Then you popped out. That's about it."
Monika stood up, shakily. She looked all around, but everything she could see was a uniform midnight black. The three of them were perfectly illuminated, but there was no light source. It was as if they were painted on a black canvas. She took a moment to gain her bearings, but then she started to notice something else. Something was keenly different with how she felt. Before now, there were two main parts of her life that she was aware of. Pre-epiphany and post-epiphany. Pre-epiphany was hazy--sparse ideas and feelings that vaguely resembled a background. After her epiphany, she realized that those things weren't real. They were implied, because she was designed to be a person, and people had upbringings. But not video game characters. All she could do was pretend, until after the epiphany, of course. After she found the hole in the wall, then she could make things different. Forge a life for herself. Or so she thought, anyway. Honestly, her "self-awareness" could just as easily have been as predetermined as everything else. But that sense of power, of being able to control her world, those connections were gone. There were no scripts to run, no files to delete. She reached out with her mind and felt...nothing. Her head began to swirl with questions, but the only ones around to talk with were...these two.
She cleared her throat. "What is the last thing that you two remember? Where are you from?" She spoke without turning to face them.
Asriel toed the floor with his foot. Chara put their hands behind their head and stared off into space. "It...feels like I just woke up from a dream, and I can't piece together what happened in what order," they began. "There was the time that I died, then I woke up...sort of. After that, I might've just lived, or we might've hurt everybody, or I might've disappeared altogether." Monika turned to look at them with a discerning expression. They continued. "All of those things probably happened. If not to me, then to another version of me. It's pretty confusing, frankly."
Monika's brow twisted into something definitively confused. She looked over to Asriel, who met her eyes before sheepishly looking away. "Yeah...I'm in pretty much the same boat," he started. "So many things happened, but it barely feels real now. There was the dying part, then the flower part, then...the other dying parts. And the killing parts." He was staring at his feet dejectedly. "Oh, but there was also the part where I broke the barrier! So that part was good! Even though...everybody else had to leave without me. That part wasn't as fun."
"Barrier?" Even among all the morbidness of what he was saying, that part caught Monika's attention. "You...you two seem to have been through quite a lot." Monika activated her 'concerned upperclassman' facade. "You talk about dying so casually. I haven't--well, I haven't heard other people talk like that before."
"What about you?" Chara was looking up at her with metered curiosity. "This sort of nonsense is normal for us, but you've got one hell of a poker face about it all."
"Chara!" Asriel objected.
"What?"
"That was a swear!"
"Asriel, are you fucking kidding me right now?"
"Chara!"
Monika was taken aback for a moment, then hid a chuckle behind her hand. "Well, I did quite a few bad things." Her gaze grew distant. "I hurt people who were dear to me. They died, too. Most of them." Saying it out loud felt incredibly strange, and even stranger was the fact that she felt perfectly comfortable sharing with these two. Something about them felt oddly comforting, even familiar. "I was the one that killed them, for all intents and purposes. But in the end, it hardly even felt like it mattered. It became harder to empathize with them when they started to become so...predictable."
"Predictable, huh?" Chara probed.
"Sets of numbers, lines of dialogue." A voice came from where Asriel was standing, but it had a distinctly different quality and personality to it. Monika looked back to him, or at least, back to where he was. Instead of seeing the goat-like boy that she had only just became accustomed to, there was a yellow flower. With a face.
Monika's eyes widened as she took a step back. The flower stared at her with contempt. "What? Never heard of a talking flower before?"
Monika didn't respond; she just eyed it with suspicion.
Chara chimed in. "Oh, come on. Surely this isn't the weirdest thing you've seen today." Seeing that Monika was still in a slight state of shock, Chara turned back to the flower. "So, you can just switch back and forth now?"
The flower grimaced at them. "Not quite. This sort of just...happened."
Chara grinned, then poked at the flower with a stick that they just had now, apparently. "Yeah, but why did it happen?"
"STOP THAT!" The flower disappeared into the ground then popped back up a few feet away. "Ugh. Well, I guess I kind of exist as Asriel AND me since all of our possible truths are happening all at once or something like that. I don't know. This is stupid. I probably turned into me because that weirdo said something that put me in a me sort of mind."
"So what you're saying is..." Chara held their hand up and snapped their fingers. "You're like, some kind of shitty mood ring or something?"
"CHARAAA!!!"
Asriel was again standing right in front of them, huffing at Chara in his full-fledged furry form.
"Now I get it." Chara patted Asriel on the head and took a few steps toward Monika, who was still in a somewhat defensive stance. "Sorry, he does that. You can call the other guy Flowey. Or Asriel. Or whatever you want, to be honest."
"O-...Okay." Monika managed to relax a bit. Honestly, the kid was right. This whole flower goat child thing still wasn't the weirdest thing that had happened to her recently.
"Alright, enough messing about." Chara announced, stepping defiantly toward the void with their hands on their hips. "It appears that the three of us are, for some reason, trapped in some sort of semi-reality." They held their stick straight out to their side, and after a moment, it morphed into a gleaming sword with a bluish-purple hilt. Asriel and Monika both 'ooo-ed' in response. "On top of that, if you haven't already noticed, our wills are able to influence this reality." They spun around, and their clothes shifted to a monochrome green outfit with a pointed hat, along with a magnificent shield. "I don't know about you, but I am somewhat curious as to how far this rabbit hole goes."
"How..." Monika stammered. "How are you doing that?"
"Seriously? You've done it, too. Remember how you were underwater? And then, moments later, completely dry just because you wanted to be?"
Monika pondered for a moment. She looked back down at her uniform. She remembered being envious of the other girls that got to wear other, cute outfits. What was the harm in trying? She started to concentrate as hard as she could, but it hardly took any effort at all. In the next moment, she was wearing a frilly, sleeveless, pink top with dark khaki shorts and sandals. It was incredible. Before, she was restricted to the assets within her game, but now? How far did the possibilities go? The files and folders weren't there, but there was something else. Something much more organic, and much more powerful.
Chara's smile creeped from one ear to the other. "There you go. Now." They shifted their sword, which of course looked nothing like a certain other sword from a certain other franchise, and angled their body toward Monika. Monika managed to peel her eyes from her new clothes and focus on the surprisingly imposing child. "Show me what you're made of!" Chara cried out and sprung toward her with an obnoxious battle cry. It seemed like they were just playing around, but Monika had no reason to think that their sword couldn't actually cut her head off. Without having even a second to protest, she tumbled to the side, just barely dodging the arc of Chara's sword.
"Uhm, can we not? Just because we can make things appear doesn't mean that we can't die!" Monika's voice quaked with her now harried breathing.
Chara rested the blade on their shoulder, their porcelain smile intact. "Only one way to find out." They gave her a playful wink. Chara crouched down for another assault before Asriel chimed in from the side.
"hey."
Chara turned around. Asriel was standing lazily with his hands in the pockets of a blue zip-up hoodie. He wore black shorts with pink fuzzy house slippers, and had an enormous, toothy grin plastered to his face. "pick on someone your own size, kid. i've got a bone to pick with you."
Monika looked back at Chara. For some reason, they could only stare, unblinking. A few seconds passed, and Chara's eye began to twitch violently.
"Asriel." Their voice was low.
"yeah?" Asriel spoke through the grin. Sweat was forming on his brow, as if he'd just realized that he'd made a grave mistake.
"...Run."
The next few moments devolved into a cacophony of blood-curdling screams and uncontrolled, maniacal laughter. The three kids ran through the darkness, throwing their imagined trinkets at each other for a very long time. It would be a longer time still before any of them noticed the glass ball on the pedestal. While they played, the ball revealed a scene: an expansive sea of sand dunes, with two small spots in the middle. The two spots were two people, holding hands, trudging through a harsh desert. Their names were Frisk and Sayori, and they were alone.