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Chapter Text

    Alphys was awash in the nostalgia of that fated day as the sunrise nipped at her scales pleasantly. Something about the way each blade of grass received its own blessing from the sky affected her in a nigh spiritual way. She had barely had any moments slow and quiet since coming up to the surface; her friends were a whirlwind of turbulence she was relentlessly swept away in. The moments she got to herself she was too tired to appreciate, or too deep in the backlog of anime. Too tired, and too burdened yet. 

    During her quiet moments she couldn't help but feel an itch, like a loose end hadn't been tied. She hadn't known she had shared it until the previous day. She and Undyne had taken Frisk off Toriel's hands for a day because Frisk insisted that someone other than Toriel took them clothes shopping. Toriel hadn't expected Frisk to know a word like "antiquated" as her previous human child had arrived quite a long time ago from an era where reading wasn't a commoner's craft, and Toriel had taught that child up to the royal standard of learnedness herself. Alphys wasn't sure where Toriel even found someone selling Elizabethan vestments, and was absolutely happy to help Frisk avoid looking like a renaissance faire.

    As they traversed the town, they had passed a flower shop. Frisk had been shuffling on in front of Alphys while she was tweeting a stray thought, and when Frisk's gaze had idly glimpsed over the display, their eye caught onto a single yellow flower sunk among the others. Alphys stopped and followed their gaze and the stray golden buttercup, which looked like it was mistaken to even exist in that bouquet at all, jumped out at her immediately too. 

    Because it had been on her mind. It has been on Frisk's mind. 

    She had already been vaguely making plans. But those plans became actions in that moment. It had been nibbling at her but knowing someone else thought at all about it made it a chew. She had no idea what had become of her monster. It frightened her. She supposed it frightened Frisk too, though the pained look had been more like resigned regret. She had the impression there was more to the story than she knew, but she didn't dare pry and make a fool of herself over a hunch or open a wound she didn't need to. 

    She just needed to verify that flower's fate to feel safe again. 

    So here she was. On top of that hill that was both the epilogue and introduction to every monster's life, ready to tread back into a memory that was shy of a month old. And so, she did. Descended into the ghost town of New Home, traversed the Core and took the Hotland elevator down, looking around every corner just in case there was a buttercup growing out of an odd corner. Her first destination, supposing she didn't run into the object of her fear too soon, was of course her old lab. She had the key taken away when she lost her job after confessing to her mishaps, but as the entire Underground had been abandoned she figured a little unlawful entry wouldn't rattle any chains. It wasn't even difficult to do since Asgore's home had been left wide open for everyone exiting the barrier, and the key was in a drawer, and the passwords to the keypads were never changed as nobody had been assigned after her. 

    But even before all that... everything was already unlocked. Unlocked or busted open. She tensed when the front door was open, she tensed more when the elevator had to run up to the ground floor before opening to allow her down. Someone had come here and hadn't left yet. But the flower didn't need an elevator! He hadn't used it when he escaped. She knew that much, because up to the day he came out of the ground and snapped vines around her he had never disturbed the elevator. She knew little about him otherwise, having thought she had merely carelessly lost that specimen to her own incompetence or to a zombie dog. (She would believe they could eat the pot too.) Whoever was down there was certainly not the buttercup she had pumped determination into. 

    She was feeling more and more like the protagonist of a horror story but she pressed on with only a few nervous shuffles in the elevator. The lab had never been as eerie to her as it apparently was to others, but now it was unsettling as if she was walking into her own house knowing there was a serial killer inside. But what she found was more shocking than her nightmarish imaginings. 

    When she entered the DTE galley, the first thing she noticed was that the machine was thrumming with power, which was odd because it hadn't been activated since she used it sometime after her appointment as the Royal Scientist, so there's no way she would have left it on. The second was that all the blueprints for the DTE and a ton of parts were sprawled over the ground around it. The third was that there was a monster child looking up at her from where he had been sitting among them, and his fur was melting in patches. He had long ears... horns... claws... a protruding jaw... just like... 

    "T-t-t-t-t--" Alphys swallowed and breathed, "There was a child left down here? Oh my God!" She rushed over and picked up his arm, startling him immensely but not starling her priorities. He wasn't hurt, but... the melted patches of fur, like he had got gum in it but it was all his own white locks, were concerning. Her eyes moved to the Determination Extraction Machine and back. No, impossible that he could have injected himself with determination, she thought. There was none left outside a human or monster body. Or a flower one. "Are you... are you hurt?" 

    "Dr. Alphys," he said a little breathlessly and yanked away his arm, albeit not with aggression. Merely, he was asserting his personal space. "What are you doing here?" 

    "Saving a child, I guess?" She laughed, unnerved, "I'm not a 'doctor' anymore though, just Alphys." 

    "Right." 

    He looked her over thoughtfully. It was strange. Alphys was starting to feel like treating him like a child had been... misplaced somehow. She felt like there was more wisdom in his eyes than hers. His small frame had withdrawn from hers with a social grace much greater than hers as well. And, well... he was surrounded by diagrams she barely understood herself and didn't give the impression he was struggling with them. A library book from Snowdin Librarby sat under his thigh full of little tabs of paper. A translative dictionary, the purpose of which was obvious considering what he was trying to read. 

    He broke the quiet in which she had been looking over his workspace in his own time to query her. "Did you forget something in the Underground, Alphys? Surely nothing in the lower lab has value to you anymore." 

    "Oh, yeah, kind of? But it's not as important as getting you out of the underground and..." her mind paused for an imperceptible moment, "to your parents." 

    "Oh, don't worry, I know the way out. Finish your business and forget about me."  

    Alphys pressed on the cue of the nagging suspicion in the back of her mind. An impossible, insane suspicion. "Do they... know you're here? Your parents?" 

    The child hesitated. "Yes." He was lying, but his face didn't betray mischievousness, but rather sadness. Grief even.  

    "Do I know them? I'd feel better about it if I could just call them and verify that." 

    "Jeez, Alphys, you haven't become any less pushy since that entire charade with Frisk," the child sighed. Alphys's face reddened from being reminded of her behavior, a little aghast that someone thought she hadn't changed because she thought she had, and a little aghast that he knew about all of that. It had been televised, but, most had only understood it as just that, not as an insane plan to get Frisk to like Alphys. The child seemed to read her perfectly as he continued, "But at least it's a good, kind type of pushy." His soft childlike demeanor shifted, hardened into a serious expression. "Don't tell them. You can't tell them." 

    "Oh. My. God. No way." Alphys suspicion became a panicked flurry of thoughts. Thoughts of surprise, curiosity. An overwhelming amount of the curiosity. And a shameless bubbling of excitement. 

    The little boss monster got up from his menagerie of paper and politely extended a hand. "Howdy, I'm Asriel." 

    Alphys almost squealed. "You're.. you're... SOOO CUUUTE!" Asriel's expression grew dull like he was suddenly trying to leave his body for a moment, like he had made a mistake, but Alphys didn't notice. "I always wondered what a little boss monster would look like oh my goood! Was Asgore this adorable as a baby?" 

    Asriel's still unmatted fur rustled. "I'm... I'm not a baby," he muttered. His stunted development of body hadn't hit him like this before and he hadn't expected it to since he was going to be a flower again anyway, and yet. 

    "Oh my god... I have to..." Alphys strained, "No you just asked me not to and I can already kind of see how that might be complicated. Oh god I can't let this slip out on social media, I'm so bad with oversharing but this definitely, I can't..." 

    "Can I see your phone?" 

    "Yeah," Alphys handed it over dazedly, continuing to babble herself into a mutter. Asriel dragged through her contacts quickly, most of which were fast food lines, to find nothing under "F". He scrolled back up and started reading contacts one by one until he found the correct one under "D". "Dreemurr, Frisk". He cringed a bit. Not that he was upset, it was just hard to suss out what he was feeling, or supposed to be feeling, about that long after all the souls had left him with only the residual elements of feelings. Overall, he was fine with what he had found out, slightly amused maybe. He gathered his courage and made the call. It picked up. Alphys started to quiet down and listen. 

    "Frisk?" Asriel asked into the receiver. Usually when you call someone they say hello first, however this was Frisk so instead he got a startled sound indicating he was recognized. That was pretty much an answer that he had the right person. "Howdy! It's been a while, hasn't it? My time is coming to a close, but before I could fade into being a flower again," Alphys choked on some words loudly enough for Frisk to hear, "your good friend Alphys came to visit me. I thought you should know, so you can explain things to her if need be and help keep her from spilling the beans." 

    He could sense Frisk's distress on the other end of the line. "... Sorry, we have to say goodbye again, huh?" Slightly louder snuffling. "Are you..." he breathed unable to ask if Frisk was happy when his grip on what that meant was so loose, "Did your hopes and dreams come true?" Frisk nodded into the receiver almost violently. "Good. Thank you for taking care of them. I need to deal with Alphys now, since she's awfully confused, but it was nice to talk to you again." He hung up. 

    "Yyyyyooooou'reee...!" Alphys worked up a crescendo, "The prince AND the flower?!"  

    Asriel know he was in for somewhat of a speech, so he headed towards the elevator. "Come on, let me offer you some tea." 

Chapter Text

    "So, they're NOT back together... and that smiley trashbag is my mom's boyfriend," Asriel groaned. There was something humiliating about that. He didn't disagree that his mother and the skeleton were probably a good match-- though his mother seemed to make very insufferable relationships-- it was just that Flowey had been frustrated with him more often than not. Asriel didn't hold anything against him, but he was glad he would never have to face Sans in this post-reset life even as an ally.

    Alphys raised two scaly eyebrows. "Trashbag?" Asriel shrugged. He didn't have anything against Sans now but that didn't mean he didn't see him realistically. Alphys shrugged it off. She couldn't imagine anyone having a grudge against Sans T. Skeleton but she was aware that he was truly a living trashbag. Takes one to know one.  

    She groaned internally at remembering Sans' full name. Since getting to the surface, all the monsters had been required to get Social Security numbers and figure out what to write on forms for gender and race and all sorts of nonsense to the point where monster specific forms were being developed. Until then, most of them had chosen surnames on their own. That's how Frisk ended up a Dreemurr from Toriel keeping Asgore's surname despite them not being married, and how Sans had managed to pick a name for him and Papyrus that tired out anyone who had to say it aloud.  

    They had spent hours talking about minutiae like this after spending hours helping Alphys figure out what the hellish conspiracy she had stumbled upon all meant.  They had passed enough tea through themselves to make an elephant pee its own body mass. And Alphys was already feeling at peace, like she had wanted to before coming here. Asriel clearly wasn't a bad guy. 

    "So... what was your plan if you found a bloodthirsty flower instead of me?" he queried. 

    Alphys looked a bit embarrassed, in retrospect finding her plan a bit lacking. "I was going to try and trick you into the DTE machine... somehow." 

    Asriel giggled, more relaxed with Alphys than he was that morning. "I like your plan. In fact, that was my plan also." 

    "Oh. Huh? Oh! You had the blueprints down there, I totally forgot," Alphys's mind wandered back there. Seeing his melting fur. She'd been seeing it all day and now she fully understood why it was happening. Sort of. She still didn't really understand Determination, just its effects on monsters. 

    "It's broken. I think I can fix it, but I was unsure how I was going to operate it so actually I was wondering if you could assist me..." 

    Alphys ran that suggestion through her mind. She had painstakingly put that machine together, she could probably fix it and do the deed and be home by the meal known as "eating chips in the late afternoon while watching anime and putting on a pot of noodles at like eleven PM". The part she was unsure about was, "Why?" 

    Asriel looked at her like he was surprised she asked, then like he was rethinking it. "I'm going to regress into Flowey soon. And Frisk doesn't have a purpose anymore, no need to access their determination and control the power of saving. I'm afraid that power will come back to me, and while I have no desire to use it right now I can't ensure that I will think that way forever, especially when I'm gripped by loneliness down the line. I want to prevent the worst ending... I don't want to close the underground again, if that's even remotely possible." 

    "But if you have no soul and no Determination, you'll just be a dusty flower again," Alphys cringed, "I don't want to... k-k..." her beak snapped shut, a little afraid. 

    "I wouldn't ask you to assist in my death! I mean, I don't intend to die at all, I just want the bare minimum DT to live and, um," his smile was shy and embarrassed, "Take care of the flowers in the Underground." 

    Alphys breathed out and relaxed. "Yeah okay, we can do that." 

    "...But, was your plan NOT to kill Flowey?" 

    "...My plan was to unmake a determined flower that didn't possess a true sense of self, let alone that of my ex boss's son." 

    "I'm not allowed to judge but I think that's fair." 

    Soon they were back in the lab, after Asriel finished a last cup of tea before he probably lost his taste buds forever. That kind of thing is why he had let nearly a month pass before he properly started working on his plan. Alphys wriggled her entire waist up into the machine and started digging around while Asriel cleaned up his workspace, feeling a sense of duty to put them back where they originated. Alphys spent half an hour repairing and adjusting the machine for him, while he mused about what he was about to do. Walk the plank and sink into the depths, embrace his fate. When he stood in front of the DTE he was content. It revved up, glowing along the seams in a light that was pure white and yet looking into it you felt you could see the entire spectrum that made it up inside. 

    "To make sure I get this right the first time," Alphys fiddled with the controls, inputting specifications, "What's your LOVE and EXP look like?" 

    "One and Zero." Alphys looked back at him in disbelief, urging him to explain. "For all my frustrations with the predictability of life, I was also afraid of making permanent changes. Flowey was reset completely when Frisk took control, and any EXP gained after that," he remembered tearing apart his father's soul and guiltily enjoyed that last tiny twinge of regret he was allowed to feel before he took the plunge, "was reset by Frisk. It doesn't mean I'm innocent." He smiled wryly at Alphys and she smiled back with pity before turning back, missing the follow-up sigh. 

    "Since your current form is just a collection of dust being held together by DT and residual Soul, once we do this you're going to have... maybe an hour before you're, um... yeah, and like... 30 minutes before you can't walk."  

    "More pressingly... the DT you take from me. Take it with you. Give it away, destroy it, just put it out of my reach." 

    Alphys paused thoughtfully. She reached towards the canister that was about to be filled red, like she was deciding something. "No... I'll leave it here." She stopped him from getting out a 'but' by shushing him. "I'll put a barrier around it, though. One monster soul's worth of potency. The weakest barrier there is. Any one single monster or human could break it. But not a flower." 

    Asriel nodded slowly. It made sense, but... "Why?" 

    "I... call it intuition, or... maybe I'm too scared to feel like I had a hand in something wretched... I just feel like I should leave it here just in case you need it, and one single person with good judgement could free it and maybe... I don't know..." she trailed off. Asriel smiled and agreed. He couldn't argue with the power of hope anymore. 

    "Okay but you're going to have to do one more thing for me then. Put the same barrier over the Underground, one that anyone can pass through except a soulless flower. So, I can't go out and trick anyone down here." She agreed. "Let me say goodbye now, then, since I have something I need to do in that hour estimate you gave me. Thank you, Dr. Alphys. Goodbye." 

    Alphys flipped a switch. 

    When she walked out into the sunset anew, she wasn't sure if she was less or more burdened than before. 

Chapter Text

His body was heavy, like he was a flower piloting a monster suit. It was like his skin was a him-shaped water balloon and could burst and dissipate the water all over the floor in an instant. But he trusted Alphys' judgement on this. Not because she'd been trustworthy in the past of course, but because he had decided part of his new determination was to protect the hope he was entrusted with. Hers, Frisks, whoever thought him worthy; he meant to make sure they didn't regret it. So, she would be right because he needed her to be right.  

The moisture in the air around Waterfall and Snowdin certainly helped soothe him when he passed through, since his feeling was that when he dried out would when it would be done. The dust clinged to him sticky and damp and would do so for only so long. He wondered if Alphys hadn't considered him leaving Hotland in her estimate. Maybe he had longer here. 

But once he was in the ruins he lost that comforting sentiment and started to stop thinking just enough to power down and down and back and back all the way to the flowerbed that had started it all by breaking the fall of his second-best friend. 

"Howdy, Chara," he mumbled, feeling as if he was having a private conversation that could be overheard, "It's me. Your best friend." He let out a miserable but gentle laugh. 

"I know what you're thinking. Gee, Asriel, how come mom lets you have two corpses," Asriel giggled and then abruptly didn't giggle, "That was morbid. This is what I get for adopting a sibling like you, huh?" He waited for an answer. It didn't come. A bit of his arm felt numb. He sat on the bed of flowers before it spread to his legs as predicted. 

"Even though we died together, I came back. I tried to visit you but you weren't in the coffin, so... yeah. By the time I figured out where you were, I had stopped thinking it was important. I had stopped thinking anything was important. Sorry. I even dilly-dallied for a month before now, because I figured I should make it a special visit after I made you wait so long." 

He felt his jaw numb too, like the nerves were disconnecting. The special relief of dying as a monster; no pain, because the magical form stopped working first. Not that he was dying. He was just... shedding his skin. What he could still feel of the buttercups underneath him made him wonder; was Flowey that gentle to the touch? Did his petals feel that way when you pinched them and drug your paw pads along them? He sighed, hoping Chara could hear him think what he could no longer say. 

When he had first died, the things he was thinking had become his creed as a flower. The regret had shaped him. This time, if that was the way it worked, he wanted to instill a sense of duty into it. He wanted Flowey to be born with a respect towards the hopes and dreams of those around him. He knew Flowey couldn't feel but he could have values, right? 

His face laid into the ground, eye level with the buttercups. There, he realized he was making a small mistake. If he kept distancing his identities as Asriel and Flowey, how could he expect Flowey to carry on Asriel's will as if it was his own? Why would Flowey think of himself as Asriel if Asriel didn't explicitly think of himself as Flowey? It hurt, but he had to embrace it at this crucial moment. Even if the whole thing was him overthinking it, it just felt important. Like he needed to do it all right this time. 

He mentally reached out to Chara again. "It's me," he thought, "Your best friend. All of me. Your brother Flowey. The monster who killed king dad. The flower that was a prince. The monster who was a murderer." He felt like his thoughts became whispers as he went on that way for a while. 

Eventually bits of him crumbled away. He closed his eyes once, and when he opened them he was looking into a scattered pile of dust. 

His fears were gone. His painful unresolved grief for Chara, gone. His painful, unachievable hope, gone. 

--- 

The next few weeks were just him basking in the calm. He had done a few things earlier to ensure his comfort as the only resident of the underground. Firstly, was getting the core going. He had to extend the conveyor belt of the ice machine in Snowdin to go all the way to the water, for one-- he never understood why that wolf monster had to throw the blocks when they could have just made the belt slightly longer. That was actually a strangeness about the entire core-- it was always full of workers, but once you started picking apart what their jobs exactly were, you realized they were pointless. Each job, like the belt, could be fully automated if you just made small and obvious adjustments. Asriel hadn't been an engineer, but Flowey had all sorts of time to spot these very simple to make changes during the dark period. And thus, Asriel had made them, patched it up into a marvelous self-sustaining energy source. Nothing of the inner workings, but he had faith in them since they had never crapped out on anyone before. Even when he tried to sabotage them in a previous life. 

Next was food, which was no problem at all. Asriel had lived off remaining food in the Underground, but now he was a flower it was simple enough to eat through his roots. As long as Mt Ebott had rain, he had food. 

After that, it was all up to him. He started doing as he promised-- taking care of the flowers. All of them, in fact. The buttercups on his sibling's grave, the ones in the throne room, in the trash dump, the echo flowers, the cacti... he had even gathered up all the houseplants from everywhere and congregated them close to other flowers in their appropriate climates in order to make his route efficient. Though he wondered if he shouldn't make his route efficient, so he would lengthen his activities by even a little bit to fill time. After all, he had pretty much eternity to fill. 

When business was done, he started reading. Reading and reading and reading. Reading and learning. He had been using a dictionary before to translate those DTE machine blueprints, and he was delighted to find a beginner's guide to actually learning this monster language. He had heard it being spoken before he died, he was sure, though recalling where gave him a headache. But since being a flower the first time he hadn't heard it again. He figured it must have been a dead language, so he felt that it would be right at home with him. He decided to learn it. Just because he had the time. He spoke it to Chara as he tried. 

"Let's see," Flowey used a vine to push up a page and flip it over, "To say 'I miss you' is..." He used his vines and his speech bubble in tandem to express it. He got a chill. But shook it off. 

"It says here how to say 'hello' but instead I'd like to say... point down, flag, a human cross, thumbs down, six-point star." He does it, vines and mouth in tandem. A stronger chill comes on. 

 He remembered the breeze he had felt during his one time on the surface and his petals tensed. He was failing to have a traumatic experience, instead his lack of feelings leaving him an instinctual sense to flee. Then he wondered. There were no breezes in the mountain...  

The empty cavity his heart was supposed to be in settled and he smiled in satisfaction at his own reaction. Despite everything, he was still him. 

Chapter Text

    All his worries from before had seemed a bit dramatic now that he was... well, himself still. In his change from dying to waking up a flower, and in his change from a hideous beast into a fragile child, he had quite tumultuous transformations in attitude and outlook in previous transitions. This time, becoming Flowey was not only anticipated but there was no difference between his mindset as Asriel and Flowey. Just like he wanted, he was an otherwise unchanged person just in a very hollow shell. The continuity was something he had desperately needed. 

    And that continuity came in an unexpected way. When Alphys had left back for the surface, he hadn't expected her to ever come back. When he felt the vines he had left around the New Home entrance get tugged on barely over a week after seeing her, he didn't expect to rush over to see the same scaly yellow lump to greet him holding a stack of DVDs, and a blank journal. 

    "Hey, I know better than anyone that you got to have a guilty pleasure or two to distract you from your low moments," she insisted and pushed them onto the living room table of Asgore's old house. Flowey was reluctant to accept them not because of pride or guilt but because he knew the kind of anime Alphys liked and he was definitely not going to watch Mew Mew Kissy Cutie or similar, so it felt like a waste. The journal, too, was a waste, but was a much larger oversight on Alphys' part than not asking about his favorite genres. 

    "This journal, is it for me?" 

    "Yes!" Alphys's tail bounced and flapped against the floor enthusiastically, "I figured it would be less sad if um, if something happened to you, if you left a record of who you were and... and... I mean I didn't want to presume, it's fine if you just draw in it or something, it's yours now, I just wanted to offer the chance..." 

    Flowey looked at her amused and teasing, feeling a little of his old attitude but with a more innocent leaning. "Alphys, I don't have hands." She stopped, let out an 'oh', and picked up the journal before he shot a vine out of the ground and slid it back out of her hand onto the pile of DVDs. "Heh, gotcha, I can write with magic silly billy. Has being in the surface world made you forget how to be a monster?" 

    Alphys looked flustered but she nodded mildly. "Actually, it has been kind of a culture shock. I tried to use fire magic on a human stove and... well, at least Undyne was practiced in cleaning up explosions." 

    They continued on talking about little nothings like the other day, this time less about people Alphys thought would be of interest to Flowey and more about herself and adjusting to surface life and aspects of it she hadn't anticipated. It certainly had changed since the brief period Asriel had seen it, more than the Underground had ever changed since conception. If he thought that the Underground had been a stagnant, predictable place before... 

    As she was excusing herself Flowey rolled a couple questions that had been on his mind since she came around in his mouth, hesitant yet sure he had nothing to lose. "Alphys... you know you don't have to come here, right?" 

    "...Is it okay that I want to?" 

    "I guess, but, why bother?" 

    "I, um," Alphys was obviously trying to figure out why herself, but she came to a conclusion, "I guess I want to show my gratitude?" 

    Well, that wasn't what he expected her to say. Pity, guilt, he could understand those to some degree. His petalled head tilted aside, urging her to explain herself. 

    "I guess, you see, I just wanted to undo my last mistake at first... I was afraid of the violent flower I had left behind coming back to bite me, or worse. I was paranoid, and I couldn't live that way again. And I was willing to... do anything to stop feeling that way. But you made it easy. I got to have a peaceful conclusion, just like the last time! And then I started thinking... you know... I've learned a lesson, right? Maybe... just maybe... I can try again... and when you called me Doctor, even though I told you I wasn't one anymore, I started thinking 'I want more people to look at me that way again'... so uh..." She grew bashful, this being the first person she was telling about her plans, "There's this crowdfund to support monsters getting into the existing education system, so I decided after we parted I'm going into human robotics and biology." 

    Flowey was stunned. "Oh, okay. Then," he got to the other question that was nagging at him, "Do you think maybe when you come to take back these DVDs, you could bring some books instead?" 

--- 

    He ruminated on Alphys all night. He couldn't believe anyone could look at what he was on that afternoon and see hope, but he found no platform to disbelieve her either. 

--- 

    His adventures in learning, now feeling somewhat encouraged by Alphys' mutual goal, had led him back into the lab to search out more hefty reading material. He knew where Alphys had stashed all her predecessor's books and research and he figured the person who made the core probably engaged in some incredible literature. And, well, he shouldn't have such frivolous thoughts but he figured having something fresh and current to talk to Alphys about would be better than only being a sponge. Assuming she came back. He hadn't pressured her into returning, had he? He hummed away the thought and dragged the thickest book he saw from the cupboard of defunct personal items. The vine pushed it out and it thudded onto the ground, knocking the spine and opening up in front of him. He realized this book was the thickest for a reason. He only got to look at the shining light blue orb nested inside the carved-out pages for a moment when a dog darted past him and grabbed it. 

    "You're still here?!" 

    He shot out four vines and snapped one around each leg to stop the little white horror scampering out of the cupboard, then pulled a fifth to smack it on the back of the head and make the artifact pop out of its mouth. Once he let the dog go, it rolled on its back and begged for pets as if it had done no wrong. Flowey still didn't like this dog, but he wasn't really capable of running it out of the underground so he ignored it. 

    He held up the orb in front of his face, sitting in a pedestal of curled vine. It was alike something he had seen before, only unique from it in colour. The red one had always been equally mysterious to him but knowing there was at least a pair opened up possibilities. Parts of a puzzle? He couldn't think of any puzzles he hadn't solved in the whole Underground, but what else were mysterious orbs for? 

    "Hey, doggie," the dog's ears perked up at the sound of being addressed, "where's that red artifact? I know you had it last." He got a couple borks in response, and then nothing. About what he expected from the enigmatic dog. He huffed and put the artifact in his inventory. 

    No, he TRIED to put it in his inventory. It wouldn't go. If he wanted to take it anywhere he was going to have to slowly roll it there. Great. 

    At least he had something to do. 

Chapter Text

    He spent a couple days in that cupboard, it being equally as comfortable as anywhere else for Flowey, working patiently through books. He had a pile for ones he could tell he wasn't ready for, seeking out instead the ones that were more basic or detailed. It wasn't something he got to fully explore about himself after Chara came into his life and made it fuller, but he knew he had always been a bit of a bookworm like his mother. He had initially inherited her interest in cook books and joke books, but in his later stages had weened onto encyclopedias on plants, which led him into monster herbology... but eventually, his tastes just encompassed whatever someone had deemed worth writing in their closed environment, or whatever rarely made it down Waterfall intact. He wasn't surprised that the renewed solitude had reverted him back into being a bastion of curiosity that would intake whatever he had. 

    So, that's how he began learning physics. 

    << The common hypothesis before our modern theory was that physical space was a continuous entity one passed through as they moved. In actuality, though we perceive it as a series of contiguous spaces and the most common way to traverse them is sequentially, these spaces are fully independent and traversing from one to the next sequentially facilitated by connective zones is only the simplest way to traverse them. It is fully possible, once one can identify the value that identifies the space their body presides in, to merely write over any value themselves and essentially move into any space they wish. 

    A WARNING: Do not attempt to visit a space you've never been and identified the value of personally. You never know when you can just teleport into a fire pit or even into a space that has no sequential zones conjoined to them.  

    Monsters with a physiology that uses a means of perception other than the intake of light often describe an ability to "see" through the phone because the phone undercuts the contiguous illusion and connects directly between non-sequential spaces. All monsters are capable of doing this, but these particular monsters tend towards the ability more naturally. >>  

    Flowey flipped back through a few pages, frowning. All that made sense to him from experience, but there was a part missing from the explanation: How to find and rewrite these values. Clearly there had been at least one guy in the Underground who could answer that for him but asking didn't feel like a real option. But knowing it was possible was cool. What would he use that kind of knowledge for, he wondered? His mind jumped to some paranoid conclusions but he shook them off, as they were merely speculative. 

    A cold, glass-like material bumped into his stem and ripped him from his reading. The artifact, and behind it a dog nudging it towards Flowey. He rustled his leaves. "Oh, now you WANT me to have it?" He looked into it and it did nothing back at him. "You know I can't put it in my inventory, right?" The dog yipped at him and nudged it into him with a vertical swipe of its paw. Flowey grew curious. He wrapped a leaf around it and pulled it in, and it fit into his inventory neatly. Strange. Strange he couldn't do so before, but stranger that the properties of the orb had just... changed. Strange that the dog had known it had changed.  

    "So... the red one?" he pressed his luck with the dog. It rolled over and begged for pets. Fair enough. Flowey entertained the dog for a while before it darted away. He was ready to shrug and call it a victory, but the dog reappeared after moments with the red orb itself clenched in its maw, wagged its tail at Flowey, and then darted out of the cupboard and towards the lab elevator. Flowey sighed and ducked into the ground after it. 

    The chase was long, dragging him out of the lab and out of Hotland itself. He started figuring the dog was going to put the artifact back where it belonged, but it went beyond that. He caught up to it scampering around where Sans' telescope used to sit (of course, he had taken it with him to the surface and probably used it to see real stars now) but it still dashed into the next room. Flowey followed it but the moment he moved zones he froze. This wasn't the room with the crystalized cheese. Nor did this corridor contain a dog-- instead, the red artifact lay on the floor in front of a door. This was getting quite spooky. 

    Foremost he grabbed what he had come for and pocketed the orb for safekeeping. He looked up and down the corridor. If he hadn't been a flower maybe he wouldn't be so eager to know what all this was, but he was and no hesitation tainted him as he pushed open the unassuming grey door.  

    Except it didn't "open" per se. He was outside it, then he was inside it. That wasn't even the most startling part, however. The real problem was he was suddenly taller, heavier, and... fuzzier. Still empty inside, but in form very different. He bit back his apprehension. There was something just off about his form that he felt sure it wasn't quite "real". He was still Flowey, he felt it in his core and in his mild disconnect from his supposed own limbs. He wasn't going to freak out, yet. He was in a finite white room. Ahead of him stood a... person? A form like a person. It was like a monster who hadn't been finished, the silhouette of something that could be but wasn't. Even as Flowey thought it he felt insane. 

    "Howdy," he greeted, and was returned a joyful clang before it faded into the floor. Flowey got the sense that it was shy. "Getting the sense of" anything was all he had at the moment, so he rolled with it. With his companion gone all the room was was a white box so he attempted to re-examine the corridor, however when he turned the door was gone. Oh boy. Welp. 

    He started groping the walls, from where the door had been and around. He touched around the floor, especially where his spooky friend had escaped (and that was comforting, confirmation that it was exitable), and he wanted to test the ceiling as well but he was just too short, it was too bad this illusion had picked this form of his to-- 

    That thought was cut off. He had been tentatively reaching towards the ceiling to no avail, and then suddenly he was touching it though it should have been impossible. He looked down and took it in-- striped shirt gone, floor far further from his eyes than he was accustomed to yet again. He wanted to feel a minutia of joy over it but still that emptiness prevailed. No mind. 

    The ceiling was also solid. He took a seat. 

    "Guess I should start trying to figure out how to teleport." 

--- 

    He was there for a while. He came to understand more why he knew instantly that his form was, he supposed, illusory. He noticed he didn't blink, didn't itch, didn't breathe. He was puppeteering it, maybe. He'd noticed these things instinctually, because even a flower was born knowing how to be alive. He didn't feel the need to do any of these things, but as he became aware he wasn't doing them he eased into doing them anyway. Not because he needed to, but because the normalcy was... nice. Even emulated normalcy. The problem that followed that was... enigmatic at first. He kept having spurts where he felt like someone was mumbling to him, but there was only silence. Like daydreaming and then hearing someone say your name and snapping out of it. Eventually he noticed these chills were happening whenever he blinked. Curiously, he closed his eyes. Yes, the murmurs were there, inside the darkness. Trying to make them out was like listening through a wall. And there was something about it that just didn't seem right, like he was trying to... hear pictures. 

    Oh, wait. That was it. Why would he HEAR something when he closed his eyes? The murmurs focused as he looked into the blackness under his eyelids. A bunch of boxes and lines manifested, and he remembered them from his beginners' book to Wing Dings. 

    "2" 

    "6" 

    "4" 

    He opened his eyes and he was much closer to the ground, which was blue and damp and unsettled by his living roots. A dog was sleeping curled around his stem and slobber was on his best leaf. 

Chapter Text

    Flowey believed in hope and dreams now, but he wasn't so sure about fate. He knew from experience that possibilities were limited and that cause and effect were absolute, but also that no outcome was guaranteed. There was no guarantee that the world, the ending he resided in was "fated" to be the one that got to continue to exist long after the others. And in not believing in fate, he also didn't believe a convenient series of linked events could simply happen unbidden. And yet, he also wasn't sure this annoying demon dog could be orchestrating mind bending encounters with spooky ghost people in impossible spaces all on his own. But, it was an... ally, in whatever the hell this was. Probably. So, Flowey felt he could at least take a chance on enlisting its help with something. 

    First, he burrowed to Snowdin and pulled out a box from under the communal tree. He looked up into the roof of the Underground in lieu of the sky and asked Santa not to be too mad at him for this since these presents were left forgotten anyway. And he needed what was inside: a pair of walkie talkies, salvaged from the dump and repaired as a gift for the slime family children. He had no idea if the slimes could operate these things, but it's the thought that counts. And gratefully someone was finding use in them now. He held out one of them to the dog, which he thought he really should name if they were going to have a business relationship, and put on his most polite tone. 

    "I've seen you cross space non-linearly before. If it's not too much trouble, could you take this to 264 for me?" The dog regarded him for a moment, then rolled over and flashed its tummy. Flowey supposed that was a deal. Delighted, he went all in on the best belly rubs one could give with a bundle of vines, even rubbing his petalled head against it (he remembered how soft they were) and making soothing noises. The dog melted, non-literally, and when it finally trudged away it looked as dreamy as a dog with like three facial expressions could. It had probably been a while since anyone doted over it that much. Flowey waited almost no time at all before the dog was back and started licking itself with no mind to its company. 

    Time to see if this deus ex nonsense paid off. 

    He buzzed with excitement and a wrapped a vine around the walkie talkie, tightening it in order to push down the button on the side. Of course, the slimes wouldn't have been able to use fine controls, how thoughtful and convenient. The moment it was depressed, he had to yank the receiver away from his head. 

    And ungodly amount of noise poured out of it at first. He could hear music and speech mingle incoherently. But it died down as quickly as it started. 

    "HELLO? HELLO? IS THIS THE RIGHT NUMBER?" 

    Flowey pulled the device back to him. "This is a walkie talkie." 

    "OH! TRUE! YOUR VOICE IS DELIGHTFUL BY THE WAY. MOSTLY BECAUSE I HAVENT HEARD A VOICE BEFORE BUT I AM CONFIDENT YOURS IS PARTICULARLY FANTASTIC. OH, AND LOOK AT ALL THE STUFF AROUND YOU, DELIGHTFUL AS WELL." 

    "Your voice is unique," Flowey noticed as his new companion rambled that his speech was fancier and covered in serifs, "Are you a skeleton?" 

    "A SKELETON? I COULD BE. THERE'S NOTHING ABOUT ME THAT SAYS I AM OR AM NOT. THERE IS NO GLOSSARY, THERE IS NO PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERNCE, AND SUB-DEFINING A MONSTER AS A SKELETON OR NOT IS MORE OF A SOCIAL IDENTIFIER THAN A PRACTICAL ONE, BUT IF MY VOICE IS A PREREQUISITE FOR WHAT YOU KNOW AS A SKELETON THEN I SUPPOSE IT IS TRUE." 

    Flowey was maybe already regretting talking to this verbose person. 

    "YOUR NAME?" 

    There was a conflicted moment on which name to give him. Alphys had continued calling him Asriel and he had felt conflicted there, but he just accepted it. Nobody had asked him outright in a long time. 

    "Oh, howdy I'm Flowey." 

    "LOVELY!" 

    "Can you stop yelling?" 

    "YELLING?" 

    "In all capitals." He desperately hoped this person wasn't Papyrus 2. He actually liked Papyrus, but two of Papyrus would be a little overwhelming for one world. 

    "OH! My mistake, I forgot or never learned the proper way to speak. Now, Flowey, my new best friend, can you see this room? Close your eyes and it should be easier. You looked across to 264 before from 269, MM's room, but if you replicate that now with a proper pathway between us you should be able to see in here. Are you familiar with the theory?" 

    "Yeah, actually," he responded, and followed the instructions. He felt like he was doing it right, but behind his eyelids all he saw was blackness. "I see... darkness." 

    "Only darkness?" 

    "I think so?" Flowey struggled with the question for reasons he wasn't sure of. Darkness was darkness, right? He wasn't worried about getting it right because he sensed this excited maybe-skeleton was about to tell him the deal anyway. His first impression of the guy(?) was that he was like a child who wanted to show off the A+ on his test and was about to burst. 

    "I suppose that would be how you would see it, but in fact this room reaches beyond merely black. In this room, light is more than just absent but reaches negative levels. You cannot see anything here because it un-exists. Things that were, never were. You can't see me either, correct?" Flowey confirmed as much. "Right, because there is no me. Not yet! Tell me, my new and only friend," In the room under Flowey's eyelids, images surfaced. "Have you ever wanted to play god?" 

Chapter Text

    What had proceeded in that room, after given a little more explanation as to what he was doing this for, was tantamount to a fashion show. His new acquaintance pretty much explained that as is he didn't really have a form of his own but he could produce images that didn't belong to anyone else and he figured with Flowey's help he could design a form for himself. Flowey's role was to make sure what he produced resembled an actual monster and not an amalgamation of objects. 

    There were some surprising things in the bits and pieces he was shown. There were ones that felt like the man in 269, incomplete, some of them resembling actual things he had seen in the Underground. He was surprised to also find parts of a form he took after yanking six human souls, also incomplete in parts and in other parts just stuff he felt like he could have hypothetically used but didn't. The most surprising thing was finding full, finished forms of Papyrus. 

    "Interesting!" his companion exclaimed when Flowey asked about it, "So that's what these are. I thought it was weird that such a complete person was banished here and yet didn't have a sense of self like mine banished with his form, but now I understand. Only part of him was severed from his self. Interesting. Well, he's a skeleton so I guess I'll use his donation as a base for myself." He set the Papyrus aside, and started picking out other pieces of things, assembling them onto Papyrus' frame like a dollmaker game. 

    What was produced initially, Flowey easily shut down. It was impractical and honestly quite creepy, with finger guns pinned onto the hands unnaturally and similar mismatched parts. Flowey suggested keeping it simple: to begin with, two people could not sport that battle body so a change of clothes was in order. And it would be odd to keep Papyrus' face. 

    "Oh, actually! There's one I have picked out for that. It's the only physical part of me that was made, I think. It's probably my face, but it's a bit incomplete. It has my name on it so it's definitely mine." 

    "You do have a name then?" Flowey inquired and sensed the other pause. Good to know he could, since he'd been chatting non-stop since they met. 

    "I didn't tell you, did I? Whoops. It's Gaster. Probably, hu hu." With that, he produced the "face" he had referred to. It had no eyes, but they could work on that. 

    The end result was reasonable. They re-arranged Papyrus a bit so they weren't as same-y in shape and stature-- they made him a little more reserved instead of the wild dynamic way Papyrus composed himself. Brought his shoulders in, legs longer but torso shorter. Gloves that never belonged to a Madjick adorned his hands, and they refashioned some kind of proto-Toriel's robes but left the scarf loosely over his shoulders because Gaster insisted it was a cool touch and nobody would suspect his stolen figure based on a scarf of all things. And of course, they found some simple eyes for the face, at least after Flowey had shot down some realistic photoshop eyeballs. 

    "Well, that was fun. How are you going to make this you?" 

    "I'm not, you are. You have determination, right? I can see it in you. It's the only way for a monster to persist post-mortem after all." Flowey felt a chill. He hadn't told Gaster anything, but the guy had read so deeply into his truth so easily when nobody else could.  

    "I do, but..." 

    "You don't need to determinate me, I was never killed-- I need you to access the power of saving and create an entry for me. Record my existence. Associate it with the assets we appropriated so I can have a physical form." 

    Flowey chewed through that prospect. He had already decided he wasn't supposed to use that power, so he hadn't even tried. Didn't know if he could and didn't want to know. He was looking down a slippery slope that was a one way to an abyss. Not to mention he had never saved anything that didn't flipping exist in the current state of the world, it hadn't occurred to him to try and save something unreal. It sounded stupid even right now. 

    "I know I've come this far just on curiosity, and it's been fun don't get me wrong, and you're kind of a cool guy but... I don't know anything about you. For all I know you're a million-year-old demon sealed away by the King and I'm on the verge of breaking you out of jail or something, you know?" He heard Gaster hum through the walkie talkie. "I mean, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't also a little apprehensive about messing with these powers..." 

    "So," Gaster interrupted, "If you knew more about me and about the power of saving you would feel more comfortable saving me?" 

    Flowey hesitantly agreed. 

    "That can be arranged." 

Chapter Text

    In my life that only exists referentially I was the Royal Scientist. I was brilliant. It's not pompous to say so: I was designed to be truely brilliant. That's the only reason I still exist, my influence was so ingrained into monster life that I couldn't be rid of. Ever think about how scary it would be if you fell out of the world and it existed perfectly without you? This world couldn't live without me. It would have to have been built again from the ground up. It wouldn't have even been the same world. I was an irreplaceable gear. The primordial goo of reality. I was the father of all modern monster science, practically the ground the Underground walked on. Erroneous monsters have fallen into the void besides me and simply vanished from consciousness, but I couldn't be fully erased without the whole thing crumbling. 

    Even though I was essential to the point I could not be removed, I also breached what you could consider God's domain and wasn't allowed to be. This probably sounds like I existed in an alternate version of the world, but back then the world wasn't even whole. You won't remember, but even you experienced similar changes to mine in this primordial state of the world. Nothing was set in stone until the day reality "woke up", now forever written with the "you" that you are now. So, you see, I never really existed as you have, but my workings did. 

    In order to keep the wanted elements of Gaster in and the unwanted parts out, a special value was created. Maybe through intelligent design, maybe through a natural procedure I haven't cracked yet. This value was intentionally inflated to relate to all sorts of erroneous functions. A phone-call from nobody. A piece of paper with a slightly different face. A bunch of assets retaining pieces of me. A hundred different functions, none of which could exist at the same time. So, each of those pieces of me could only exist one at a time, thus scattering me over time and space. 

    Why was my fate thus? It was because I desired the power of creation. More importantly, if the world had solidified with me in it, it could only be stable if I achieved that goal-- the natural conclusion of my character-- but doing so conflicted with the requisite narrative of our world. I became paradoxical. So the world adjusted so only the parts of me it needed remained, and put the rest of me to sleep. 

    What did I create in the hypothetical world that didn't happen? It doesn't even matter. It wasn't what I wanted to make-- which was everything and anything, of course, because limits are dull-- it was that I could do it, and the world wasn't able to facilitate that. 

    But here's where it really gets fun with a capital F, because the predestined world can only stretch so far. Flowey, you haven't tried to access the power of saving since then so you don't know but this world isn't as fixed to causality as you remember. The period in which this world was rendered absolutely only went up to a finite set of possible moments. The one you know best is the one you're in now-- the barrier was broken, the Underground freed. After that moment, nothing was certain any longer. We entered a new era where the rules allowed for a more vast and free existence. THIS is where reality begins to truly split, become random and unpredictable. Where there were 0s and 1s, and sometimes 2s and 3s, we've reached an era where the possibilities can go... hypothetically infinitely! 

    This is a world where I am allowed to exist. I almost dare say I was always meant for this era. I mean literally, if there is a creator, he only meant for me to be found at the edges of the finite and infinite.  

--- 

    "On the subject of that skeleton, Papyrus? I find him quite an oddity because he is essentially the opposite of me. It seems like only parts of him were redacted by the world, but something about him as a person was so essential that he was able to remain." 

    "You know, I did always like him the best. There was something exceptional about him," Flowey mused, "I guess if I were to try and reason it out... If your supposed super-intelligence was too much for this world to handle, then the thing that rooted him here would have to be his super empathy? His super kindness? He's a very feelsy skeleton, is what I'm saying. I can't imagine an Underground without him pumping its heart." 

    Gaster seemed pleased with his hypothesis. "So, not to be pushy but if you could just pull that cerulean artifact from your inventory and let me escape being a disembodied voice, that would be grand." 

    Flowey sighed. No lie, he was really liking the tale this guy was spinning. It solved a lot of his existential worries if true, and his mind said there was something very right about it all, but every drop of water in his little flower body trembled at the idea of touching the power of saving at all. It was a good cause but even then, did he have the right after abusing it so much? 

    "Can you wait just one more week for me to get a second opinion?" 

    Gaster agreed in a delighted tone, giving the sense that he was the kind of guy who took a "maybe" as a "yes". 

Chapter Text

    "Ha-ha, you idiot," Flowey snickered into the walkie talkie on day three, "That's an illegal move. You forfeit the game to me." He could sense Gaster bristle defensively in the next room. 

    "I don't like being tied down by rules," he muttered, likely watching Flowey clear the checker board for another attempt, "I'm destined to break them after all." 

    "And look where being 'destined' to break them got you," Flowey flashed a vindictive little smile. 

    "Ooh, I like it when you get clever with me." 

    It wasn't so surprising that the two of them had taken to each-other so quickly. After all, Flowey had a lot of practice being social in his previous lifestyle. He was probably more socially apt than any sociopath had the right to be-- most didn't get to make as many mistakes as him and get away with them and learn from them. Even so, he didn't think he was putting on a face for Gaster like he used to for other people. If anyone was being fake and manipulative here, he reasoned, it must be Gaster given how much he had to gain. He stayed conscious of that the whole way, more prone to a rational way of thinking as a heartless flower. However, keeping a certain distance between them didn't mean he couldn't get some fun out of it. 

    On day four, they spoke more about Gaster's understanding of the workings of the world. There was a vibration to his words as he rambled on about variables and speculative timelines, obviously loving every second he had an audience. Flowey took his chance to ask about how to perform teleportation, and Gaster started by correcting him that "teleportation is actually even easier than walking and incredibly boring" before actually getting into the meat of how to traverse non-linear rooms. 

    "Once you understand how to reconfigure variables moving between two rooms is peanuts among what you can do, buttercup," he smiled smugly before instructing Flowey to grab a nearby object. Having been in his mother's abode in Home-- where he had moved all his favorite books since it had a pretty spacious bookcase-- he vined a log out of the fireplace that he would never burn because flowers and fire were a bad combination and placed it on the living room table. 

    "That log is made of three parts-- first its physical form. Second, the simple variable that defines whether it exists or not which you should think of as a zero or a one. Third, the variables that determine where it is which is sub-divided into the room number, the horizontal parameter, the vertical parameter, the rotational parameter... Are you getting all this?" Flowey nodded as much of it was in the material he read, it was the mechanical aspect he was waiting for. But he didn't mind this extended explanation as when his nod reached Gaster he received a delighted hum of approval back. "There are a few mechanics with which to change this fabric of reality, but in essence you need to be able to 'write' it. Luckily, you've actually written before. The power of saving is one method of 'writing'. If you had ever tried, you may have been able to alter a single variable in your save instead of merely recording all the active ones at once..." 

    "Actually, I did, I think," Flowey realized, "When I had taken the six human souls, I was able to load Frisk's state without changing my own." 

    If Gaster had eyes, they would have gleamed. "Pushing the boundaries, a man after my own heart. Anyhow, that makes things incredibly simple. Remember what it was like to access the power of saving-- you don't need to DO it, don't make such a face, just do the same thing but instead of accessing the save state, just alter the existing state. Turn that log from 1 to 0." 

    He did it. It was incredibly simple when Gaster explained it that way. The log left the world, unmade. He turned it back, and it came back. 

    "Now if you want to move rooms, just access your own spatial values and change the room number. Congratulations, you've mastered it." 

    "Neato." 

--- 

    On day six he finally brought up the artifacts. 

    "That's my soul trapped in a crystal, basically," was the unexpected answer. He went on to explain fully-- which was great, Flowey kind of loved Gaster talking his petals off (or would have if he could feel love) -- that in order to tether his being to the world his heart had ended up staying in a physical capacity locked in a form that didn't move or think. He proceeded to explain that in the process of coming back, he intended to switch the form of the orb with the form they had made together and pretty much wrap it around his soul to become a complete monster. "That red crystal... isn't mine though."

    "If your soul isn't inside you, are you like me? Empty inside? An unfeeling husk?" 

    Gaster gave him an empathetic murmur. "No, even though my body, mind, and soul are in three pieces, my souls still exists and I can feel it. You just outright don't have one, therefore..." he trailed off. Flowey nodded, content, against the receiver. That was fine, he didn't want anyone to suffer the way he had. 

--- 

    On day seven, he bit down his pride and asked Alphys for her phone again. 

Chapter Text

    "Howdy, Frisk, it's me... Flowey." 

    He was now pretty practiced in seeing over the phone, but this was the first time he wasn't just looking into a vast void of nega-photonic nonsense holding a disembodied voice. There were sights, sounds, smells-- cinnamon, butterscotch, snails, new books, and... dirt, which he was highly accustomed to. He figured that was coming from the Frisk-sized hiking shoes and muddy coat by the door out. He could hear his mother humming in the next room, but when Frisk realized Alphys wasn't the caller they moved away until that sound faded away. 

    "I'm sorry I kind of keep interrupting your happy ending like this, but I'm... a little lost. To the point, I don't really trust myself for obvious reasons. And I'm on the verge of making a decision that could be a huge mistake. But I trust you... and I don't want to saddle you with the burden of making my hard decisions for me, I just want your opinion," he swallowed, let Frisk confirm they were willing to hear him out before moving on in a whisper so Alphys definitely couldn't hear even a room over, "Is it okay if I use the power of saving to try and save someone else? Do I even... have that right? After everything?" 

    Frisk opened and shut their mouth, thinking through their answer. Unusual for Frisk. Frisk was prone to a very carefree approach to things-- they hadn't even hesitated to tell Sans his brother was uncool when they'd patronized Grillby's together. Hadn't spared Undyne's feelings when spilling the truth about anime's legitimacy. Frisk was kind of cutting for a 12-year-old. They wouldn't think twice about sparing Flowey's feelings, especially knowing he had none. So why? 

    "Asriel," they began, giving Flowey mild discomfort like when Toriel had used his full name when she was upset with him as a child, "The pedestal you put me on is too high." 

    Flowey scoffed. "I regard the savior of the Underground too highly?" 

    "YOU broke the barrier, dummy." 

    "And you saved me." 

    "Eventually." 

    They both paused, one confused and one working up the courage to say what they had to say next. Frisk's voice was quiet, maybe a little afraid if Flowey was reading them right, when they continued. 

    "You're not the only one who took some bad routes with that power, you know?" 

    "I don't remember you doing anything as bad as I did." 

    "That's right, you don't, I deleted it all," Frisk sighed, "I guess it's fair we share our secrets." 

    "When I first fell into the Underground... I mean, the FIRST first... I didn't know anything. I went in blind. I didn't know anything, and when I saw a monster my instinct wasn't to make friends with it! I was really scared. I had never met a monster, never known anything could be so much weaker than me. In the surface world before, I was the one who was the weakest you know? So, I couldn't have known just... hitting it with a stick would make it burst into dust. And I'd never seen a human die, let alone a monster, I didn't know what I was doing. And when I died and came back it felt so unreal, I just kept moving. My LOVE went up... I wasn't as scared... it got easier... and... I didn't even start out trying to be positive like you did, okay? I'm telling you this because you need to understand that my first choice was the wrong one, and your first choice was the right one, so if you want my opinion... I think you're more suited to making a hard decision now that both of us refuse to go back. We only get one chance, our first chance, now. Even though I made some bad choices, I'm not going to stop making them because I'm afraid they'll be wrong, so don't you either dummy." 

    Frisk hung up. At the end they sounded a little frustrated, maybe even mad with him. He was a smidge embarrassed but his nerves on the whole thing HAD died down with Frisk's brusque telling off. He supposed that was all he needed. He knew a week ago what he wanted to do and had only felt more strongly about it in the time he and Gaster spent entertaining each-other. He returned to the next room and let Alphys have her phone back before having another little chat. He didn't tell her everything he had been up to but he did prod her for her thoughts on a few things Gaster had told him. She seemed to be largely disinterested in creation theory. Not for a lack of capacity to understand it, but her sentiment was more or less that there was nothing she would go to such far-fetched means to create when she could just build with her own claws. Probably. It was a pleasant chat, and Flowey realized it was quite freeing to talk to her now that she wasn't just a bunch of finite lines of dialog in his mind. She was a huge nerd... but so was he. 

    They parted and he pulled out the walkie talkie, depressed the button on its side, and called out, "I guess we have a deal, friend." 

Chapter Text

    Gaster had pretty much been preparing him for this procedure all week. Blipping a piece of wood in and out of the world was cake, and he had a lot of faith in the hypothesis behind the procedure Gaster had been working on since the birth of the universe itself. They had both run through it the day before Alphys visited, they ran through it again after she left.  

    The first part was sewing together the body and the soul. The mind, it had been explained to him more verbosely than he could relate it back in his head, could come last because monster bodies knew how to live on their own. Similar to how a human baby knows how to pump its heart, it would need no consciousness to function and therefore was safest to bring into the world on its own. To verify his hypothesis-- or so Flowey claimed, though really, he just wanted to practice so as to not mess this up because even if there were contingency plans he REALLY liked when Gaster sounded impressed with him-- he took the abused wood log up as a guinea pig. It wasn't an irreplaceable thing. The procedure was simple: he had to redirect its entity to draw from a different "image" than the one it was using. So, the entity "wood log" would stop drawing the form "wood log" and draw whatever other form he chose. It was pleasantly easy to do, and the log became a cactus in no time. 

    "What did you name your body, again?" 

    "spr_wdgaster_0.png" 

    He put his attention to the light blue artifact and repeated himself. Delete the entry linking the artifact's form to the crystal... write in the new entry... save... reload... success. On the table lied a tall skeleton in a robe, white gloves and scarf, with an unusual skull. His vines flopped on the cadaver's chest. It was breathing, slowly and deeply as if asleep. A soul hummed inside.  

    Monster souls, while always the same in form, gave off their own kind of aura that other monsters felt through a sixth sense. Simple monsters had simple souls-- Papyrus was like a parade, Sans like steadily walking down a corridor with no end, Undyne like swimming through a rock concert, Alphys like tight clockwork turning faster than it should. The most difficult souls to understand were his parents', likely as a sign of them living a long time and carrying much more on their shoulders. Toriel was like a warm hug in winter and a cool breeze in summer, yet also a fire in autumn and a storm in spring. Asgore had the quietest soul he'd ever known, a tea party where every seat was filled for better or worse as the gentle murmuring could be either comforting or deafening depending on the day. His own soul, when he had one, was like a soft pillow until Chara had come into his life. After that his malleable young soul had changed and got more complicated... he thought growing up was what did it but in retrospect, after meeting Frisk, he knew it was more specifically the influence of Chara that had warped his heart like that. 

    Gaster's soul, though: you could feel its long captivity had wounded it. It was like it was trying to rip out of its shell violently. He could feel it trying to reach out anywhere and everywhere like a bunch of hands pushing on the walls of its bubble looking for a single break so it could pour out. It was really... depressing. He didn't need to feel the sadness to know how sad this was. He knew the whole time how exceptionally hellish Gaster's situation was, but the guy's demeanor and attitude effortlessly assuaged pity. But seeing this made Flowey feel guilty for hesitating in the first place. 

    "Ready?" he asked rhetorically. Gaster hummed back, still more chipper than he had the right to be.  

    No time like the present. This time, he needed to write a whole new property to the body and sew Gaster's consciousness to it. No practice runs on this-- there was only one consciousness to try it on. Make the property for consciousness... direct it to draw upon the character information for W. D. Gaster... save... load. He looked up into the skeletal face. It was quiet. Still breathing. He muttered his name and papped his forehead with some dethorned vines, then frowned. 

    "You in there, buddy?" A magic hand popped up in thin air, startling him, and began flailing wildly. Or so he thought for a moment, before picking up on that fact he was being spoken to in very rapid Wing Dings. "Slow down! I'm not that good at reading these! ...H O W T O M O V E... How do you move? Uh, golly, I don't know if I can explain that," he snickered quietly, relieved his friend had made it in safe and sound. He used vines to pilot the limp man into sitting up on the table, legs dangling over the edge and robe riding up on joints it was catching onto, making Gaster look like a sloppy mess even for a skeleton. Feeling his body moved once seemed to give him a better idea of what he should be doing, and soon enough he was slipping his pelvis off the table and getting his feet grounded one after the other. He tugged his dress out and smoothed it out then led his hands to his throat, looking frustrated. 

    "You're not a human with a voice box you know, you can speak to me the way you've been speaking to me the whole time."  

    Gaster coughed, embarrassed. "How do I look?" 

    "Cooler than any other skeleton I know." 

    "I meant more as in, do you notice any concerning anomalies in my physical self?" 

    Flowey knew that's what he meant, he should have figured Gaster would be a disaster at taking a little compliment. He checked him over anyhow, working together to give it a full physical and stress test. Flowey checked his stats. 

    W.D.GASTER 10 ATK -100 DEF 

    * A MONSTER DOCTOR DOCTORS MONSTERS 

    * HE IS TAKING A SHINE TO YOU, DON'T RUIN IT  

Chapter Text

    "Inside a mound of dirt, a concrete wall, of the atmospheric barrier around the planet, what's the difference?" was Gaster's response to being probed on why he hadn't left the Underground immediately. Rehabilitation had gone off without a hitch-- Gaster had mastered the act of living over a few days. Control over his body and magic had come to him like he had always had them. Which apparently in a sense he had, in the life he had never lived, but thinking about that metaphysical nonsense was something Flowey was ready to take a vacation from. Not retire from, just... enjoy the fruits of his labors a while. 

    Gaster however, was jittering inside and out to get to business. They had reclaimed the laboratory in Hotland by firstly stripping left-overs of Alphys' occupation from it, then unearthing the vaulted remnants of Gaster's non-life. When things started being put in their places, it started coming into focus that this lab had always been borrowed space. Alphys' had made it her own, but when Gaster's stuff had been unpacked and littered the place it became clear that this space had always been meant for him. It felt normal and natural. But after it was fully reclaimed, Flowey transformed it further by bring a touch of himself into it-- flowers, mostly. A dirt trough in the floor since pushing his body through the cracks between the tiles of the lab was tiresome. Some personal effects yanked from his preserved bedroom in New Home also made it in-- particularly, they cleared a shelf for books and Chara's locket was tucked in it too. 

    The fourth day into Gaster's new life, Flowey had made rounds to tend to all the plants of the underground and when he returned and the doors slid open, he was greeted by one of the many houseplants he had adopted leaping at him and start lapping a leaf at his face. Gaster was shortly behind it, grabbing the sides of its pot (which had sprouted little nub feet) and raising it at arm's length. 

    "Cute, isn't it?" he beamed, skeletal face betraying an abundance of pride.  

    "K-kind of, yeah," Flowey responded. It WAS cute, by the acquired aesthetics of a living plant, but in his mind he was more interested in reasoning out what he was looking at. "Did you put a dog consciousness in my ficus?" 

    "Yes." 

    "For fun?" 

    "Yes." 

    "Where did you get the dog consciousness?" 

    Gaster scurried over to his work table and freed a little white dog he had bound up to stop from moving. The dog was unharmed, and in fact started yipping at the ficus, which yipped back. "I made a copy." That was all Flowey needed to know. As long as he wasn't ripping things apart to make abomination ficuses, he could do as he liked. 

    "I named the dog Toby so I guess this guy is... Obyto. Alphys will love it." 

    Gaster hummed, sounding a little disappointed but not particularly perturbed. He insisted Flowey come attend him and review what he had done with the ficus. Not much had changed with the two of them-- Gaster still wanted to talk his petals off about science, and Flowey was still brimming with enough curiosity to listen. 

    "So, you see, I've reached the epitome of what I can do with remixing assets. Creating new ones, that's the dream." 

    Flowey nodded thoughtfully. "Well, we all had to come from somewhere to begin with, so..." 

    "Exactly," Gaster beamed and reached down to ruffle Flowey's leaves. That was new. Physical praise was probably a sign that Gaster was getting used to expressing himself with his body. For Flowey it was a little awkward-- he had the pride, but it lightly reminded him of the cavernous hole inside him. He felt like something should have moved there, but there was nothing TO move, so it didn't. He decided not to think about it, as he was rote to do. 

    He didn't expect the serious face that Gaster met him with next. 

    "My motivations have changed slightly," he said evenly, which was unusual because he tended to be highly emotive with his speech, "Reasearch for research's sake has always been enough for me, but I find now that I want to complete my research so I can give something back to you, dear friend." 

    "Oh, everything I've learned has been reward enough." 

    "A reward, huh," Gaster pondered for a moment, "I was thinking more of a gift." 

    "Uh... okay," Flowey laughed, not knowing how to respond, "Do what you like. I'm not going to tell you that you can't. I really cannot take care of too many ficus dogs, though." A hum of agreement. "And y'know, you could just chill out and watch some anime with me." 

    "Ani...me?" 

Chapter Text

    They laid in the buttercup patches together, matching striped shirts ruffled and hair matted with sweat and giggles falling out of them freely. They hadn't touched any of their toys this afternoon and they hadn't needed to because when they were together the fun was unending. Never had two people so different clicked so well, like halves of a whole. That's how Asriel felt about them. They laid on their sides facing each-other and Chara's joyful expression calmed into a loose sadness. That's how Chara was, and that was okay. Chara was allowed to be sad. Chara was allowed to be anything they wanted to be, with Asriel.  

    "Hey, Chara," he whispered gleefully, digging in the pocket of his shorts, "I got you something." 

    Chara took the locket and it glimmered in the soft artificial light. They sat up and turned it over in their hands, finding the latch and opening it. "It's... empty?" they said in an unimpressed tone. 

    "Not at all. In there, I put a lot of things. My hopes that we can stay like this forever, my dream of seeing the surface with you, and my love for you as the coolest sibling a monster could ask for!" 

    Chara lowered the locket, looking more grieved than they should have after receiving such a gift. "Would you give me your love even if I didn't have any to return?" Asriel shuddered, questions in his eyes and his fur on end. "Would you let me have your dream even if I didn't share it?" He suddenly couldn't breathe, even though the warm calm of the afternoon still grounded him. "Could you hope enough for us both to survive in this disgusting world?" 

    "Yes."  

    A clang sounded in his ears and the pressure left. He was the same and everything was fine. 

    "I'll cherish it," Chara smiled and put the locket around their neck. "So, keep your promises. Be the better half of both of us." 

--- 

    Flowey stirred gently from his dream. It had been a while-- as a flower he rarely slept. Rarely more did he sweat, though it occasionally did happen from the determination that pooled in his stamen. He ignored the drip trailing from his eye and looked for what had stirred him. Gaster wasn't too far away, tinkering at the work bench. The boney doctor heard him stir. 

    "Didn't think you could sleep." 

    "I didn't when I was an axe murderer. If I do it here and there it helps reset my brain, I think." 

    "Also, I didn't presume you could dream. What was all that muttering about?" 

    Flowey hummed, considering: the topic was personal but he didn't really think of it as a secret. The entire Underground knew of the prince and his human sibling's story to some extent, and the truths shared between him, Frisk, and the dead didn't really factor into what he had been dreaming about. So, he shrugged. 

    "I was having a bit of a memory and a bit not, I guess. Thinking about my sibling, Chara. They, uh, died young." 

    "I'm familiar with the tale. Actually, I have some doubts about the popular version that I wanted to ask about," his eyes gleamed with that look he got when he was getting into some hard science but he quickly reeled it in, "But I have the decency not to pry. I'm just saying that as a man of knowledge I noticed some... inconsistencies in the story, such as how it doesn't account for what happened to the human soul after you fell." 

    "Oh, it... uh..." Flowey scrunched his face, reaching to a memory much older than his age given the number of resets he had lived, "I had it until I died in New Home... I guess I don't really know. Crud." His stem twisted. He felt like a bad brother for the first time in a while. 

    "Well, what happened to the human souls after the barrier was broken?" 

    A much less distant memory to call upon. "They flew off and returned to their owners like every other soul." He gasped, "Has Chara's soul been in the ruins this whole time?" 

    "If that's where the body is, likely. I guess that's why Asgore didn't have it, then," Gaster leaned back over the work bench, apparently satisfied. 

    Chara's soul, still out there, lingering as human souls did... what a thought. Had he never pondered it before because he lacked the curiosity, because he didn't want to think about it, or was it because deep down... though he loved his sibling... he knew they were dangerous together. HAD been dangerous together. And acknowledging that Chara was still out there ran the risk of leading to something else?  

    "Are you... shaking?" 

    Flowey shook his head but the skeleton still crouched down and started running his thumb over his petals soothingly. He didn't fight it. He was too busy trying to understand the swell in his stem. Meanwhile, his companion was giving him a look that he could read all too well, but he didn't understand the place of. 

    Looking at the flower, timid and confused, had filled Gaster with an apprehensive sense of determination. 

Chapter Text

    Flowey didn't have a plan on how to explain Gaster to Alphys. He had the inkling that if he explained the whole thing to her she would understand-- however, she was already keeping secrets and though Gaster himself wasn't particularly a secret, explaining his origins would tie into keeping the secret of Flowey's persisting existence. Therefore, not really something she could tell anyone, therefore a secret. It wasn't something he intended to hide, however. If Alphys ever had a reason to step into the lab, she would realize her "dead" predecessor's things were everywhere and there would be questions. So, the only real conclusion he came to is that he had to come up with a cover story to explain how the old Royal Scientist had been un-dusted, that she in turn could tell to others without being burdened nor raising suspicion. 

    The good part was that nobody had really known what had happened to Gaster. Maybe the hope that he would just show up is what kept Asgore from appointing Alphys for so long. So, there was some hope there that people who should have known him well would swallow him showing up that easily. They decided to leverage that. 

    "So, after my experiment... went wrong..." he said it with a strained voice, having been vocal about not liking the part of the story where he failed something but letting it be part of the narrative with enough insistence, "I was flung forward through time and I woke up in the Underground recently with somewhat jumbled memory. So, if someone remembers me, I may just brush off not knowing them as amnesia... this feels a little contrived." 

    "Trust me, I know every monster in the Underground better than they know themselves. They'll eat it up." 

    Alphys came when she was expected to, once again burdened with amenities. Being greeted by Gaster nearly made her drop the books and DVDs, but by the time they managed to get her drinking tea in her old laboratory and hearing them out, she had calmed her nerves... but not her nerd excitement. 

    "THE W.D. Gaster, though, I'm never washing the hand I shook with again... er, pretend you didn't hear that... oh man, everyone's going to freak when they hear about this... I'll just say I found him down here when I was picking up something I forgot, that makes sense right? Oh, oh oh, you should come with me, I'm meeting a ton of friends after this and they'll all be super psyched! Asgore will probably let you crash at his place, he probably remembers you the best..." 

    "Meeting some other monsters sounds lovely, however," he looked directly as Flowey, a smile of full certainty on his face. "I think I'll return here, actually. I quite like it, and there are some things I can do down here that I can't do up there." Flowey felt kind of light at the sentiment. 

    Alphys looked between them, cheeks puffed slightly in a thoughtful expression. "You know, you could come too Flowey." 

    Flowey's lightness was rapidly replaced by a weight. Before he could open his mouth to protest, Alphys continued. 

    "Look, you didn't change in the way you were afraid you were going to, and even if you wrapped them up in vines and stole their souls you know with one vouch from Frisk they're all going to give you a chance. I mean, I would say I forgave you but I kind of made you in the first place so I don't really get to do that? But if anybody protests, I'll! Um! I'll ask Undyne to back me up!" 

    Flowey wobbled gently to and fro. God, it sounded nice. She made it sound really simple. Of course, Frisk's friend, of course they would sway his resolve so quickly. "What would I tell them? Who would I present myself as?" 

    "I have no secrets, I'll just explain that I gave a flower a personality with DT. Anything beyond that shouldn't come up, right? Only me and Doctor Gaster would ask more questions, and we're in on it." 

    "The smiley skeleton?" Flowey grimaced. If Sans decided to end him this time it really would be the end. In fact, Papyrus would remember him and whatever he said could set Sans off. 

    "Doesn't Sans value privacy more than any of us?" 

    "Are my parents going to be there?" 

    "Toriel will drop Frisk off but otherwise, nah. We have dinner with Asgore on odd weekends and with Toriel on even ones but you can't have every kind of fun with either of those old-fashioned monsters around." 

    "If I'm thinking about doing it then I've already decided to do it, haven't I?" 

    Gaster produced an empty pot from Flowey's greenhouse corner of the laboratory, grinning. 

    He hoped Frisk had this in mind when they had urged him to make hard choices. 

Chapter Text

    They were way early, having come together to the cafe at a sooner time than Alphys had planned to part, and thankfully Frisk was the first one to join them at the venue. Toriel, also thankfully, didn't come in with them but merely dropped them off and waved at Alphys through the glass of the front end. Frisk was in a state of pure glee. Meeting a new monster had been impossible, they had known the whole underground before leaving, until now. A new monster encounter was worth getting hyped over, apparently. Once Frisk had checked, flirted with, and eventually spared Gaster (who had been open for sparing from the start and Frisk had simply insisted on acting up to him anyway) they briefly ran over who he was, and also Flowey's cover story.  

    "What changed?" Frisk tilted their head curiously at Flowey. He didn't meet their eyes, a little embarrassed about being here after insisting on saying goodbye forever at least twice. 

    "I guess I tried some of that hope stuff," he grumbled so only they could hear his vulnerability. Them, and Gaster who was holding the pot and very well couldn't be shut out of the conversation, who chuckled over it and received a slightly fiery pout from below in return. 

    Undyne arrived alone, looking more casually dressed than Flowey was used to but apparently not lacking any weaponization because the moment she locked eyes with him she yelled, "HEY IT'S THAT FLOWER!!!" and pulled a magic spear back, holding it in a tense, shaking hand while Alphys pleaded with her to wait a moment. She refused to lower it until Alphys got done explaining and even then, she gave Flowey that "I'm watching you" gesture. Then she actually managed to notice the skeleton holding the pot and they exchanged a pleasant greeting, ending with Undyne looking pointedly-- teasingly? -- over at Alphys in order to receive a flustered look back. In their time on the surface, Flowey could see, the two had formed some wordless girlfriend language. Gross. 

    Then everyone thought Napstablook arrived but they mumbled they had actually been there first and kind of faded like they were going to leave until Frisk intervened. The ghost hovered quite away from the two he didn't know, more comfortable near Frisk and Undyne. 

    "Is Mettaton coming this time?" Alphys probed the ghost, who lit up more happily than Flowey had ever seen him. Looked like those two had worked things out. But the answer was no, Mettaton was pursuing about half a dozen careers. It seemed that Mettaton's happiness was Napstablook's happiness, even if he didn't get to hang out with his cousin as much. 

    Next was the real test of Flowey's will. The skeleton brothers didn't arrive together-- in fact, Sans was the one who appeared first. But unlike Undyne, even though he looked disgruntled he wasn't one to lash out and ask questions later. 

    "hey, didn't know i needed to bring my hand buzzer," he winked at Frisk who stuck their tongue out at him playfully, "i'd ask who the fresh meat was but he hasn't got any of the stuff on him." He paused in case anyone wanted to laugh, groan, or throw a tomato at him. "anyway, hey, i'm sans and this is my brother papyrus" 

    Papyrus threw open the cafe door with incredible timing. 

    "SANS!!! DONT HOLD US UP AT THE DOOR AND THEN USE YOUR TELEPORT TRICKS! WHATS THE POINT OF HAVING A COOL RED CAR!!!" 

    "i got in a sweet on-cue jape though," he said, voice as jovial as ever but eyes fixed on Gaster and Flowey like he was unsure what to make of them. Papyrus continued to blow a fuse in the background as he struck up a conversation. "so, uh, these are a couple of familiar faces." 

    Gaster was on point with his amnesia cover story. "Oh, do you know me? I'm afraid I suffered some memory loss and--" 

    "i don't," Sans interrupted, "just your face. i, uh, found it in the garbage you could say. not sure how i'm seeing it here now." His eyes flicked down to Flowey. "and let me guess, frisk just keeps bringing em around to their side. classic frisk, absolute ledge." 

    "More or less that..." Flowey trailed off, picking up the clues but unsure of what to make of them. He hadn't failed to think about it before-- he had seen Gaster's face before, throwing up death beams, but what was he to take from it? In the mean-time, Sans wasn't pulling those out again so he called the encounter a success. 

    "HEY!! ITS BEEN A WHILE!!" Papyrus finally noticed the potted friend, looked up at Gaster and exclaimed, "IS THIS YOUR BUTLER? IT MUST BE TOUGH WITHOUT LEGS." 

    "Nah, this is my friend Gaster," Flowey responded, tension in both himself and Sans fading away under Papyrus' sunny influence. "It's been too long, dinosaur breath. What are you up to?" 

    "WHAT! AM I! UP TO?" Papyrus puffed out his chest as if he were about to announce something grand. "MOSTLY UNEMPLOYMENT. I WANTED TO WORK WITH THE HUMAN ROYAL GUARD BUT THEY INSISTED I GO TO A 'POLICE ACADEMY' AND THEY GAVE ME A 'PHYSICAL', WHICH I FAILED. BEING ONLY BONES IS A STANDARD I CANNOT RAISE ABOVE. I TRIED WORKING AT A SPAGHETTI DISPENSARY BUT THEY TURNED ME AWAY BECAUSE THEY CONSIDERED HAVING A SKELETON HANGING AROUND IN THE KITCHEN AS 'UNHYGENIC' AND THAT I NEEDED MORE EXPERIENCE. IM THINKING OF OPENING MY OWN POLICE-SLASH-RESTAURANT WITH LOWER STANDARDS, BUT THERE ARE HURDLES. MANY HURDLES." 

    Gaster leaned down slightly. "This is that Papyrus you spoke of so highly?" 

    "Yeah, but don't flap your gums about what I said or it'll go to his head," Flowey replied quietly, but he could tell Sans heard every word. It didn't seem to do them a disservice, however, as the stubby skeleton man relaxed a bit. Actually, he was shaking a little, clearly holding in a laugh. Flowey frowned at him challengingly and his shoulders hitched around his lack of ears. 

    "what gums?" he wheezed privately to them. Gaster actually snorted a little, and that made Flowey guffaw at him in disbelief, calling everyone's attention to them. Sans took control of the stage instantly. 

    "Hey, what comes out of a skeleton when they cry in Hotland? A Gas-tear." 

    "Oh my god stooop," Undyne pleaded even though she was slapping her knee in delight. 

    "no can do 'dyne-o-might, I would say it's in my blood but--" 

    "You don't have any?" Flowey interjected playfully. 

    "that too, but also... papyrus hates my jokes so much it's not even bone-y." 

    "YOU CAN DO BETTER THAN THAT, SANS!" 

    "dont i have the coolest most supportive brother." 

--- 

    Things eventually died down a little from Sans' impromptu open mic. The sheer number of people at once was overwhelming, so when smaller conversations flared up Flowey was grateful. But of course, it was also a chance for him to get cornered into a tough conversation. 

    "so," Sans began, watching Papyrus chatter to Undyne out of earshot but clearly addressing the anomalies in the room, "the w.d. gaster, practically back from the dead. kind of a miracle." 

    Gaster was relaxed, and Flowey wasn't sure if he should be. The practical newborn didn't know Sans like he did, didn't know to be careful with what he said. "More of an eventuality. The miracle is having a friend there when I came back, to support me in re-acclimation." He beamed down at Flowey, and Flowey turned his cheek... not because he was shy about it or anything, being openly praised to other people.  

    "aw that's cute... but, uh, some things bug me. your face is a start, but on top of that there's..." he looked Gaster over, and then in the eyes, "come on buddy, surely you know what's on my mind. don't make me do a whole bit. that face just isn't something that supposed to exist in this world." 

    "If it's not then why do YOU have it?" Flowey questioned, looking to fend off Sans on Gaster's behalf-- partly because he could feel a little too much excitement buzzing in the hands that tapped on his flowerpot. Yeah, he couldn't trust Gaster to be careful, he was already chomping at the bit to talk about his dang science. 

    Sans chuckled. "oh boy, i wasn't sure but i didn't expect to get a slip up that good. flowey, my good buddy friend pal... there's only one reason you would know about..." he paused, and Flowey followed his eyes across to the other table where Frisk was gazing over. They mouthed at Sans-- no, probably to the lot of them. "NO FIGHTING". Sans gave them a shrug and a sigh, looking back with less of an edge than he had a moment before. "huh, didn't know flowers could sweat." A leaf raised to his stamen and he wiped the gooey mess away, now completely flustered and nerves out of control. 

    A boney hand rubbed the back of his stem comfortingly. He looked up at Gaster and saw him in the same relaxed state. His smile was warm as if to say not to fret so much. It... sorta helped him calm down for some reason. Sans watched them with a lopsided smile that implied if he wasn't contractually obliged to, he wouldn't be doing so. But, probably wouldn't be frowning either. 

    "sorry, it's me who's getting off on the wrong foot here. let me try this again, let me be more direct... where did you come from and where did you get those bits you're wearing?" 

    "Nega-photonic space, trapped at conception to maintain stability of the finite period but freed at the dawn of the infinite period. All the assets I used are repurposed copies of unused or trash assets also from the nega-photonic void." 

    Sans whistled, "so the finite period DID end, thank crap, i've been rattling my bones trying to confirm it and here you are. confirmation." Flowey was surprised he even kept up with all of that. He supposed it would be arrogant to think he wouldn't, but... Gaster had taken MANY more words to explain it to him, it kind of cheesed him off. "okay in that case i got a really, really important question for you." 

    "Shoot." 

    "my brother over there," he jabbed a fleshless thumb towards Papyrus, "did you meet any of him in the big bad void" 

    "Some, yes." 

    Sans sighed. He looked tired, but happy. Happier than Flowey had ever seen him. He thought he could see a watery glimmer form at the edges of Sans' eye sockets but Sans rubbed them out faster than he could confirm what he saw. He was aloof again in no time, looking down on Flowey and sighing. 

    "you aren't gonna cause trouble, right? because i can't afford to let you cause trouble even once now. it's all permanent from here on out." 

    "Not planning on it." 

    "then we're cool. but im watching you." 

    "Honestly," Flowey grinned, rebellious, "I hope I can count on that." 

    "hey, no cheekiness among those who all lack cheeks." 

--- 

    The party didn't die down for hours and many, many cups of tea, which he realized very late were full of spiders. The attendees dripped away until Frisk remained with them, waiting for Toriel who had apparently fallen asleep with her face in a stack of ungraded essays until Frisk called to remind her to pick them up. The three of them sat on the curb outside.  

    "So, Frisk," Gaster began, "I've heard a lot about you. Almost your entire adventure was relayed to me by this little stalker," Flowey stuck out a tongue at him at the comment, "So I was quite eager to meet you and my, it wasn't a disappointment." 

    "I heard some stuff about you too, I thought you were that creepy pasta guy in the white room though." 

    "Oh, Mystery Man? No, he's just a playful guy who gets embarrassed when you acknowledge him. Anyway, I actually had a request I wanted to make of you!" 

    "I'm listening," Frisk responded, folding their arms cool and aloof as if they thought they were in a film. 

    "You have an exceptional soul, one that has achieved the maximum amount of hope, compassion, and love capable in your kind. Would you be willing to donate that piece of it?" 

    "NO!" Flowey spoke up. "What the hell are you asking? You can't take that!" 

    "Wait, sorry, I was unclear, I don't need to take it I just need to copy it." 

    "Oh," Frisk pondered, "That sounds okay?" 

    Flowey tugged on Gaster's robe in order to get him to come down to whispering level. "Is this for something you haven't told me about? Is it important?" 

    "Yes, and maybe." 

    Frisk had already produced their soul, shining red and tickling their striped shirt with its brilliant glow. "It won't hurt, right?" 

    Gaster reached over and pinched the heart, pulling on it and seemingly stripping a layer off it that formed into a copy. He shifted a small canister out of his robe-- had he prepared that before they even left? Did he have this in mind the entire time? -- and safely tucked the soul copy away. 

    "You're going to make someone very happy, Frisk." 

    "Even better, you owe me a nice-cream now." 

Chapter Text

    The two of them trudged up Mt Ebott together, though Flowey could have broken out of his pot and made it to the entrance in no time by burrowing he definitely didn't mind accompanying Gaster. And if he had, well, he would have missed out on the view from the ridge outside the exit as it manifested over time while the sunset dunked beneath the horizon. He had seen the blue daylit sky once before in a nightmare, never before the REAL stars, and he was beginning to think the night-time was more his jam. Not so much Gaster's, whose acclimation to Hotland was marked in his shuddering chills, so he didn't ask to linger. But silently he thanked... he didn't know who, God? Alphys? Hope itself? Whatever, he was just grateful he could be under this sky even just once. 

    Gaster was yawning incessantly by the time they made it to the lab, but he took the time to carefully mount the soul containment glass over his work-space for later, mentioning briefly that if he didn't keep it locked up it would probably try and return to Frisk-- meaninglessly, since Frisk could only have one heart. Flowey noticed the heart wasn't exactly like Frisk's full and gorgeous one: the full outer layer of the heart was there but it was like a piece of glass half filled by smoky water. He wondered-- if that was the part of Frisk's heart that contained their hope, compassion, and love, what filled the rest? Monster hearts ONLY contained those things, normally. His thoughts wandered back to when he had possessed part of a human soul. He didn't even remember any of those things being in it, but he didn't remember what WAS there either. Thinking about it made him feel weary, or perhaps he felt as such because of the day he had and was just compounding it. A pillow dropped next to him, giving him a start. 

    "If you can sleep you should have one of these," Gaster smiled at him coyly before heading towards the stairs to be adopted into the easily drawn cube. 

    "Hey," Flowey called quietly to stop him in his tracks, "I'm tired but my head is buzzing and I slept recently already. Can we... chat until one of us falls asleep?" A delighted jagged smile was his agreement, and he was offered a thin arm to wrap his roots around to circumvent the perils of the elevator. 

    He had been upstairs once during their takeover of the lab to assist with the furniture (while Gaster was more mobile, Flowey was much much stronger and more suited to that kind of thing as he had a body of mostly water and not brittle magic) and it had undergone a single major change. The walls, particularly around the bed, had been scarred by tiny, tiny bullet-based writing. It was impressively tidy, and most of it was in Wing Dings. 

    "Er, did all this have to go on the walls?" 

    "I can't sleep if I think of something and don't make sure I don't forget it." 

    "I have a blank journal you can keep under your pillow you oaf." 

    Grumbles were returned. Gaster grabbed the bottom of his robe and made to pull it up past his knees and presumably over his head before he stopped, remembering the concept of modesty, and looking over at Flowey for approval. Flowey turned around and closed his eyes to allow Gaster to strip it off and get under his sheets. When he turned back, his companion was propping his skull up on one elbow and throwing his remaining pillow at the ground for Flowey to recline on. 

    Settled in, he began to look over all the cave writings. He wasn't of the mind to try and translate it all, but he was happy to examine the diagrams and guess at their purpose. One looked like blueprints for a handheld scanner-- that scanned what, he couldn't say. The more interesting stuff was clearly theory on the Soul, images of hearts dotting the equations-- both upward and downward facing ones. 

    "Does this," a vine creeped from between the bed and the wall and indicated the bit he had been musing over, "Have anything to do with that copy you made?" 

    "Yes." 

    Flowey waited, but more didn't come. Odd. "You're not going to explain your brilliant scheme, Doctor?" A hum came back, Gaster's eyes wandering over the formulas he had written. 

    "It's an idea for soul transplants. It's a little bit medical and a little bit psychology, so it's kind of an unstable and inconsistent procedure. I haven't tested it, of course." 

    "But you made that copy, so you intend to." 

    "I usually love how sharp you can be, but I feel like I'm being scolded by a mother." 

    "I'm not scolding, I think it sounds great... I'm just not sure why you're being cagey about it." 

    "How about the full explanation in the morning?" 

    Flowey hummed, more or less satiated by the promise. "So... how did you like other monsters?" 

    "I like them. They were all so... alive, unique... it's humbling. I could never make so many diverse people even if my research reached that stage." 

    "If you become able to make a monster or human from scratch, what kind of person would you even make?" 

    Gaster pondered that. He pondered long enough to make it clear he hadn't thought that far. "I guess nothing, I would just be happy knowing I could." 

    "That's why you're allowed to be this smart and not Alphys, she would make her waifus in a heartbeat." 

    "What about you, though? Will you make something when we reach that point?" 

    Flowey felt heat creep up his stem at the 'we' and the foregone conclusions made. Even though it was an 'if' just a moment ago... what was his skeletal friend even driving at?! Geez. 

    "I could make my parents a better son I guess," he laughed hollowly. "I'm kidding... that would be all sorts of cruel... I dunno, there's nothing new I would want to bring to this world, it's fine as it is." 

    "Aha, meaning there's something you would bring back!" Gaster looked at him excitedly, like he was knowing something. Flowey had an inkling he was catching onto some wrong conclusions. 

    "I don't know if I would want to make Chara in the image that I have of them, I would just end up resenting it for not being the real Chara. The surprises, the things I couldn't have guessed about them, matter, and I could never replicate what I don't know, you know?" As soon as he stopped talking he could hear etching on the wall. "What did I say about writing on paper?" he jibed, but Gaster was muttering as he wrote, something about being inspired to add randomized variables. Flowey sighed and closed his eyes, not knowing how long he was going to be drowned out and managed to slip into sleep. 

Chapter Text

Back in the room in which he died, among the flowers and the artificial light streaming through the pointless windows. He was staring at himself from two sets of eyes. One locked on to the pathetic little buttercup, the other on the pathetic little prince. They spoke to each-other, they spoke to themselves. Their thoughts overlapped, unless they didn't. 

"Would I really deny them the chance at another life after our mistake?" 
"It wasn't a mistake, I know that now." 
"Sparing the humans? Yes. Making promises I couldn't keep at the price of their life, however... I  entrapped them when I said yes. I sealed their fate when I lied that I was ready." 

The voices began to split. 

"It was what they wanted, I can't keep finding new ways to take the blame," the little goat murmured desperately, "I can't keep moving the goal-posts forever." 

"I can't be forgiven if I never ask for it," the Flower broke into a creepy smile, "The truth is you're afraid we don't deserve it." 

"The truth is, I need them more than they need me." 
"The truth is they need me but I'm scared I'm not enough." 

"The truth is that I'm afraid bringing them back is selfish." 
"The truth is that I'm afraid letting them stay dead is selfish." 

"I claim to love the sides I don't see but also coil in fear of them." 

"I miss them." 
"I want them to take away the pain but I don't trust them--" 

--- 

      Flowey awoke breathless, which was strange since he didn't have lungs. The voices were already distant and faded and he was already forgetting the intensity of it all. The hum of the artificial lights in the lab were overwhelming in comparison. The pillow he had slept on was yellowed from his petals rubbing off on them as he had likely twisted and turned. He felt pathetic and was almost relieved to see Gaster had already taken leave of his bed ahead of him. He used a vine to flick the pillow back on the bed despite its state and groaned at the thought of having to burrow through the innards of the laboratory floor to escape this elevated room. 

    Rather than suffer that immediately, he sniffled and turned to all the cave writings. Gaster had promised him an explanation in the morning and if he wasn't here, his notes were as good as anything. Besides-- reading his notes and understanding them with no explanation would get him one of those iconic compliments down the road, and he did love those. He stretched his stem and closed in on the scrawling, warming his mind up to tackle some Wing Dings that likely covered some very complex terminology. 

    The first part was ideas on what he had admitted to-- heart rehabilitation. It noted the parts that made up human and monster hearts and questioned what parts were required to live, that kind of thing. The second part was partly notes on something they had spoken about a couple days earlier: the human souls returning to their owners on the day the barrier broke. Gaster seemed to care particularly about what caused them to behave that way, and tether soul to body. His conclusions were more of a brainstorm than anything, with options crossed out here and there. The third part was where the notes got really interesting, all relating indirectly to his opus project a.k.a. creation theory. In this specific branch he was considering the recreation of complex things that had existed in the past that the creator wasn't intimately familiar with. Off to the side was the hasty blueprint of a scanner that was... a handheld x-ray machine meant to detect spiritual matter through physical matter? Interesting, probably more useful to check humans than monsters whose bodies were magic and would just interfere with the reading. 

    Why had Gaster been cagey about these notes, he pondered for not long at all before the ghost of a stomach he once had dropped. The other stuff had been natural enough, but what practical use did Gaster have for a spiritual matter scanner? There was only two bits of spiritual matter in the Underground. Gaster's soul, and Chara's. And one of those souls wasn't something Gaster would need a scanner to examine... No, maybe he was jumping ahead of himself. Who knows what secrets that unorthodox body held, right? 

    ... He knew. He had made it. It wasn't unusual from a monster body in the slightest. 

    The lab doors downstairs slid open and he jolted. He found himself a little afraid of what he might find down there, but once he pushed himself through the walls and out of his more comfortable dirt bed and saw just the doctor holding the scanner he had tinkered together he was able to relax somewhat. 

    "Oh good, you're awake, I wanted to speak with you-- hey!" Gaster yelped as a vine snuck up his robe from the ground under him and wrapped tightly around his arm, yanking it into the air and forcing it straight so the scanner was waving in the air. Another vine plucked it safely from him and pushed it across the polished floor to where Flowey could see it. He ignored Gaster's feeble struggling of gentle magic versus strong physical matter and took a look at his findings. 

    * CHARA 10 ATK 20 DEF 
    * HOPE: 0 
    * COMPASSION: 0 
    * LOVE: 0 
    * PATIENCE: 12 
    * BRAVERY: 0 
    * INTEGRITY: 0 
    * PERSERVERENCE: 2 
    * KINDNESS: 0 
    * JUSTICE: 32 
    * DETERMINATION: 54 
    * TERMINATED 

    "Well, that surprise was what I was going to talk to you about but it seems like you put it together more quickly than I was prepared for. I should have known better from you! Could you, erm," Gaster's voice squeaked and Flowey noticed he had lifted Gaster off the ground and was squeezing his arm so hard the bone was creaking. He quickly unwrapped his appendage and let Gaster massage his arm and his robes back in place. His face was somewhat flushed and it irritated Flowey. Having actually looked at him standing next to the work desk, he noticed Frisk's soul copy was dislodged from the mount. 

    "Yeah, I'm putting it together. What did you need Frisk for?" 

    "You see the readings, don't you?" 

    Flowey grew even more irritated. Normally he would have loved being given a chance to fill in the blanks himself, but right now he really just wanted answers. Nevertheless, he looked back down at the scanner. The numbers added up to 100 so he figured he was looking at percentages. "Determination" being the overriding trait struck him as odd but he wasn't completely sure what it meant. 

    "Chara... was really strong in determination levels? But they died while we were on a mission. If we had failed back then and they could retry it, they obviously would have determinated us and tried again. Heck, I would have used their soul power to do it without even knowing I could." Gaster nodded but spoke nothing, waiting for him to keep at it. With that as a clue to go forth he stared at the scanner more but nothing clicked. He had never experienced the inability to determinate until Frisk's stronger will had usurped it. When he died, he was underground where only monsters were and none of them could have prevented him from tapping the power earlier. He looked up, lost, eyes admitting he needed Gaster to walk him through this and receiving a kind smile in return. 

    "Their hope is an extraordinary factor. All monster souls and most human souls have hope, but without it there's no way of accessing the power to determinate. Even on your death bed your monster soul would have to have some hope in it, but you and Chara shared that power and they may have averaged your hope so low it basically didn't exist... For example, if your hope was only 1 then theirs and your hope would have been 0.5 and too small to access determination. Actually, even 2 hope may not have done it. Scan Frisk's copy." Flowey dragged the scanner back across the room obligingly and pushed it into Gaster's much more workable hands so he could do it and hand it back. 

    * FRISK 0 ATK 0 DEF 
    * HOPE: 100 
    * COMPASSION: 100 
    * LOVE: 100 
    * PATIENCE: 0 
    * BRAVERY: 0 
    * INTEGRITY: 0 
    * PERSEVERANCE: 0 
    * KINDNESS: 0 
    * JUSTICE: 0 
    * DETERMINATION: 0 
    * HERO OF THE UNDERGROUND 

    The zeroes on the last seven entries were of course due to it being just a partial copy of Frisk's soul, that made sense. The part that puzzled Flowey was the enormous numbers at the top. Were these not percentages as he had assumed? 

    "If that scanner worked on my soul or any monster soul it would look more like... 33 hope, 33 compassion and 34 love, with deviations per monster. Monster souls are a division between these three traits and cannot exist with zero of any. Human souls, however, have two much more complex layers-- the seven traits listed make up the layer they need to live, and the dominant one determines the color of their soul. The other layer technically isn't needed to live, and in fact most humans don't have a 'complete' one like Frisk does. They are truly special, maxing out in every category-- most humans would have a percentage of each. My point is that human souls are made of four independent quotients, and Chara was missing three of them all-together, so I was going to..." 

    "You were going to stitch Frisk's into Chara to make it so they could determinate," Flowey concluded for him in horror. "Are you an idiot?! That would send us back to before Frisk was even born! We would be back underground, so far back, and I would have to... I would have to either follow Chara's plan properly this time or somehow stop them and then live that entire nightmare again, or..." His panic was interrupted by Gaster dropping to his knees and cupping his petal-framed face in his hands. He looked almost as devastated as Flowey felt thinking about the nightmare he'd just envisioned. 

    "Do you think I'm really short sighted enough to throw you AND myself back to hell?" Flowey took a moment to let the light rubbing of his petals to curb his shock and mull that over. He shook his head and Gaster relaxed and let go. "Right. I'm smarter than that. I meant to bring them back to the here and now, in a better world. That's where I needed to consult you, though I didn't imagine it to be such a charged discussion... actually, I thought you would be excited." 

    Flowey swallowed nothing. He couldn't say his feelings were mixed about the idea of reviving Chara out loud, that would make the concerns too real. That would imply things about his feelings towards Chara he didn't want to tackle. Things he WOULD have to tackle anyway if Gaster had his way. But not yet. 

    "What did you need from me?" 

--- 

    Hours of discussion later, Flowey was able to translate from numbness into detachment. Hypothesizing instead of contemplating. He was able to put his mind into task mode instead of lingering on apprehension. But that didn't mean they were getting anywhere fast. 

    "We just can't safely recreate something I did with the power of six human and thousands of monster souls. To overpower Chara I would need at least one human soul and I sure don't have that, and I'm not going to exhume any now. Not only does my mother deserve that much, she would catch me one-hundred percent digging up her garden." 

    "I agree we should be ethical in all we do, so why not a volunteer?" 

    "Frisk? They probably... would. Between the two of us we probably would be able to overwhelm anybody else in terms of determination, so my lack of soul wouldn't be an issue..."  

    Gaster looked pleased with their conclusions but Flowey gave him a look that made him falter. 

    "But they would have to be dead for me to absorb their soul, so obviously that's not an option." Gaster's face made it obvious he had been short sighted there. 

    "And a copy of their entire soul made by a monster is just data, it can't actually substitute in power," he groaned. Flowey hadn't seen him hit a dead end like this before. Despite his outward displays of frustration, when he looked him in the eye he only saw drive and patience. When he was looked back at, he felt like he was being drunk in-- Gaster would act frustrated, look over at Flowey and then take a breath and start ploughing the topic again and again. That's what he did this time as well. 

    "Reverse it. Frisk takes your power instead of you taking theirs." 

    "I have no soul to take." 

    "...we get you a soul, then." 

    "Are you just winging your suggestions right now?" 

    "Yes." 

    "How do I get a soul without stealing it?" 

    "We acquire one that doesn't belong to anybody." 

    "How?" 

    "I... find one in the trash?" His voice wavered. 

    "Seriously?" 

    "No," Gaster sighed after being called out on his childish suggestion. But then his eyes lit up. "Wait, yes." Flowey looked at him like he had cracked but he didn't seem to pay mind. 

    "Friend, where do defunct assets go when people depart this world?" 

    "I don't know, I'm kind of agnostic at this point, so..." 

    "The answer is nowhere. Nothing ever truly leaves, it just stops being referenced. The power of determination proves it-- when one is dusted their soul and physical form and mind all stop being referenced by reality but turning back the clock returns the state of the world to when they were being referenced. It would be impossible for the fallen to return if those parts of them ceased to exist somewhere-- they're not recreated, they're just put back where they belong. Now, I had parts of me still present in the world so we were able to connect those parts and refer my soul to my mind and this body-- as long as any one piece remains tied to the world, I should be able to make it reference a defunct asset it once did. If it's a soul then it will naturally spring back to its owner if the mind or body and the soul match... but... hmm..." 

    Flowey rustled his leaves, unbelieving what he was hearing and a more than a bit excited, "What, what's 'hmm'?!" 

    "If the soul ever pulls towards the body as it naturally does, you could end up dusted since the body is outside reality. Actually, not even dusted, maybe worse. Trapped out in nowhere forever." 

    "So, bring the body here too!" 

    Gaster paused and then sheepishly nodded. "Right, duh. Just because I don't need the body for the exercise doesn't mean I can't acquire it too." 

    Flowey stared at him in disbelief and Gaster looked back with his gears clearly still turning too quickly for a while, until they stopped, and then weened into rotation again. 

    "Oh, I can make you a full monster again." 

    "Idiot, why were you jumping ahead to do something as hard as revive my sibling when you could have done THAT!" 

Chapter Text

    All hesitation had been forced on both their parts. It seemed like the correct thing to do was to go over it again to make sure the hypothesis wasn't wrong, despite how urgently they wanted to do it. Gaster was incredibly eager to try it to the point he couldn't even keep himself still long enough to write it down. Flowey chalked it up to excitement over doing some practical work, as most of what the skeleton had been doing in his time was hypothesize and study. He had descended into murmurs as Flowey descended into contemplation. The idea of becoming whole again had existed in his mind before all the way back to before he had tried to die the second time. Not having the pieces to genuinely consider the possibility before, this had come onto him only slightly less fast as it did Gaster. It was heavy, but... he yearned for this idea to pan out more than anything. More than bringing back Chara. 

    Guilt hit him like a rock. Being a flower had been his punishment. In acknowledging he hadn't done wrong in sparing the humans it hadn't changed-- he betrayed Chara in one way or another, and that was enough. Shaking off those shackles now had to mean something. He came to the conclusion it meant that reviving Chara, should it succeed, was the right thing to do. Make amends so that it wasn't unfair of him. His mind found a new certainty-- his feelings may be mixed about Chara but he was going to face them soon. He owed it. His thoughts were broken by Gaster tapping the lent journal in front of his face. 

    "I think we should add this to the formula," he circled his white finger around a passage and let Flowey read it.  

    "A physical AND magical form? What, you want to merge the flower and my real self in the middle of the procedure?" 

    "I can do it easily." 

    Flowey shook his petals dismissively. He had no doubts Gaster could perform any feat he wanted to at this point. "Why, though?" 

    "It would be normalizing-- you've spent much longer as a flower than as a monster-- and you wouldn't have to give up your determination, which would be helpful to the resurrection exercise." That last part was all Flowey needed to agree to it. He didn't need determination for himself, but he would keep it for others' sake. He had used it to save Gaster, after all, so he knew he could do good with it. Gaster mentioned he felt ready to enact the plan and Flowey timidly nodded. They carefully pulled his roots from the soil and brushed them off so he could be laid on a gurney.  

    "Close your eyes," Gaster suggested with a caring tone of a kind he hadn't heard directed at him forever, "The sensations are going to be odd but try not to do anything to distract me." One agreement met him, Gaster placed his fingertips on the stem he was about to transform. Flowey started going over the steps in his head, echoes of when he did something similar himself not that long ago. 

    The connection to his soul sprang out first, and it was agonizing. It was like filling a cavity in his chest with something too big for it, stretching him out. Nervousness, excitement, and hope filled him more strongly than he could have felt for a very long time. The difference was overwhelming-- he knew the action of being nervous, for example, but really and actually feeling it was so much different. He had forgotten what it was like just after initially waking up. He had forgotten the shock of being hollow. Now he was feeling it in reverse. 

    His body connected just in time for his urge to cry to manifest in it. It had only been a second between returning soul and body, and the bodily responses to his feelings were just as difficult to take. His eyes, still closed, scrunched up further and he felt his head ache and his heart constrict with exhilaration. He felt Gaster's hands rub his chest soothingly and try to lessen the response. If they weren't there, maybe he would have gone into a panic attack. As it was, he could focus and soak in that one thing first instead of everything hitting him like a sack of bricks. 

    Gaster had also been right about the physical body helping him normalize. The magical parts of him were like manipulating water. He had done it before, of course, but he was way more familiar with the solid plant flesh that sort of sat under his skin now. His first movement was to go up and clutch his aching head-- probably aching from being overwhelmed by feeling absolutely no sensation and then everything-- and felt a buttercup sitting behind his ear. Not just behind it, it was connected innately, the stem disappearing under his floppy ear. 

    There was one more sensation that ebbed through him, and he realized it when he had touched himself and felt his form shifting. He was growing, more rapidly than a monster usually did. Expanding, getting taller and thicker. After a few moments it died down and his balance kicked in and he was able to open his eyes and shift into a seating pose. He looked into Gaster's eyes-- the entirety of the skeleton much smaller than he remembered-- and he found pride and a little bit of embarrassment. The man looked away. 

    "Let me go find you clothes." 

--- 

    He was settled into a lab coat that was too small for him and a cup of tea he didn't think he would ever have been able to drink again. The coat was the only leave behind of Alphys' wardrobe, understandable since she had been fired and had no need of it. It covered what it needed to until he could go raid the underground for something more his speed. What he could feel right now was pure happiness. Him, happiness. What a joke that had come true. What a simple thing he had forsaken ever having again. He realized even the month he had spent holding together his decaying form after the Underground was set free had been so much number and less alive than normal. 

    "We are going to have to be thorough in examining your body," Gaster mused while he had been checking the blooming buttercup on Asriel's head out of curiosity. Something about what he said gave Asriel pause, but he didn't know why. He wasn't prepared to deal with feelings he didn't get when he was already overwhelmed with the ones he did, so he dismissed it. 

    "Do you think I need to do anything special to maintain this body? I mean, as a flower I needed water, but as a bigger flower maybe I'll need more water. Crap, I need to eat now, too... heh, what a pain, how did I let you talk me into this?" he teased, emptying his teacup and discarding it. "I'm going to run around and water my plants!" 

    "Let me come too, just to supervise in case of unforeseen complications." Gaster got up from sitting on the desk, as he had lent the only chair to Asriel to enjoy, and went to pick up the watering can. It used to sit on a trolley with all the things Flowey needed so he could push it around more easily, but now he could carry a simple watering can without needing to push it and burrow along with it to slowly get from place to place. As such he plucked it from Gaster's hands and started jogging out of the lab door. He wanted to feel the heat and the water and the snow and the muddy air of the ruins through real monster flesh for once, smell the flowers, and enjoy the simple things just a little before anything could fill up his time. 

--- 

    After the flowers were watered and Asriel claimed some clothes from Snowdin (a pair of jeans, a collared shirt, and a cardigan), they had to re-structure the lab slightly to accommodate a new body. They decided sharing a room wasn't so bad, assuming Gaster used the journal instead of scratching into the walls in the dead of night. Getting a new bed wasn't difficult once Asriel confirmed he could still call upon vines from the earth as he could before, just tedious as he had to get it all the way from New Home to the Hotland elevator and to the laboratory. Gaster carried a chair to add to the work table by looping his arms through the armrests and carrying it on his back. Asriel let him do it instead of using vines because he thought it made the guy feel like he was helping. 

    They were pretty much prepared to pack it in after a long day, until the most unexpected thing happened: he felt a tug on the doorbell vines he had strung up at the exit of New Home. It was a long way so he told Gaster to stay and cool off, since the skeleton had "monitored" his condition for hours with no alarms going off, and took the shortest route he could to get to Asgore's house. However, his visitor met him halfway and collided with him at the top of the elevator that ran through the hotel. 

    "Asriel!" Frisk breathlessly called out to him before stopping and drinking in what they were seeing. He mildly shrugged and told them it was a long story, since they seemed panicked and it had to be super urgent for Frisk to climb half of the mountain in what outside was the dead of night. Alphys did trail far behind them, stubby lizard legs not carrying her as fast, but he had to wonder what Toriel thought they were doing. 

    "Asriel," Frisk repeated, "Uncle is sick!" 

    "Your... Uncle?" He was sympathetic but that didn't really qualify as a reason a 12-year-old would climb a mountain in the dead of night to tell HIM. 

    "Uncle Asgore!" 

    Oh. 

    Oh no. 

Chapter Text

    Reality was stupid and cruel to him once again. He should have considered this as a consequence once he noticed he had grown by a few hundred years. A few hundred years' worth of normal energy transfer from his father, that is. If he were a human and not a boss monster, it would have been about 15 human years. No wonder they thought he was sick-- a childless boss monster suddenly aging that much that fast had probably never happened before. But through the power of deduction, it was possible they might question Asriel's status as a deceased person once they figured out what was happening to him. 

    "I was going to give you this on our weekend meet, but since Frisk dragged me here I grabbed it now," Alphys sighed and presented him with a box adorned with the image of a sleek modern phone. It had a paper attached to it with a list of phone numbers in a variety of handwriting. Alphys, Frisk, Papyrus, and even Undyne (in Alphys' handwriting) were on it, as well as a pizza delivery number with a note that they did indeed cover Mt Ebott. 

    "Oh wow, I don't know what to say, thank you." He didn't put as much enthusiasm as he would have normally because of the poor mood, but he was quite happy to have a phone. 

    "Think of it as insurance that I don't have to run out here in the middle of the night again," Alphys joked, albeit averting her eyes knowing that making light of the situation wasn't 100% appropriate. "Toriel thinks Frisk is having an overnight anime marathon with me... which we were, but then Tori called because even though they're divorced she's the closest thing to Asgore's next of kin sooo she wasn't sure she could pick up Frisk in the morning and needed to ask if I could keep them longer while she remained on emergency for this, and then she told Frisk about him and Frisk uh, 'convinced' me to come out here..." She took a really long sigh. "I didn't imagine THIS. I'm glad Asgore is probably not actually sick but wow." 

    "You'll keep me updated on him, right? Actually, Frisk will probably hear and tell me first," he smiled gently down at them. They now had the wherewithal to be a little timid-- the last time seeing him this big he had been bullying the heck out of them after all. He could tell they would get over it, they were just working off the old image they had. They nodded, confirming his hypothesis. 

    "You're tired, aren't you?" Alphys asked them, receiving a hesitant nod. "Maybe we should stay the night, since Tori isn't gonna look for you. I can sleep anywhere just fine if there's any space for Frisk." 

    "I just moved a second bed here so I guess we can manage." 

    He led them upstairs, though Alphys probably didn't need help finding her own old bedroom, and up there they found Gaster sitting up in bed scrawling into the journal. Alphys looked pleased it was getting use even if it wasn't how she intended. Frisk crawled into what was supposed to be Asriel's bed and in the space by their feet Alphys kicked off her shoes and crawled into a donut like some kind of large scaly pet. Asriel was considering grabbing a comforter and spending the night on the floor or something when Gaster caught his attention and slid over in his own bed. It was a tight squeeze, but he grinned and took up the offer anyway. Gaster took the whole blanket to cover his shame, which was fine because Asriel was stuck wearing jeans to bed anyway due to short sightedness. 

    Even so, sleep evaded him for a while. Perhaps, he mused, because sleeping three days in a row just wasn't something he knew how to do. Even in his pity month he had been unable to sleep properly. But that, too, turned out to be fine when Frisk hissed for his attention and started a quiet conversation. 

    "Are you going to tell Toriel and uncle?" they inquired, causing him to groan low. 

    "Gee, I miss them but I decided a long time ago they didn't need me opening up old wounds..." Frisk nodded with a sense of appeased worry. "...but, given how things panned out, at least Dad will figure out things on his own to some extent." Frisk sighed and nodded, and Asriel was silently glad someone was watching after his parents. If Asgore and Toriel still had anything in common, it was that they were the type to silently bear burdens without letting other people see through them. Being old and dependable monarchs meant having few peers. Even if they were only twelve, if Frisk could take care to worry about them here and there and notice when they struggled, that was good. Nobody noticing Asgore's troubles had led him to stealing six children's souls after all. Or so he was thinking, however Gaster huffed next to him, revealing that despite being curled face to the wall that he was well enough awake still. 

    "We should take responsibility for the fallout of our endeavors," he mumbled sleepily, "Not at 2AM however." Asriel laughed quietly in apology and rubbed Gaster's bumpy back through the sheets. It seemed to help settle the skeleton back in and he was breathing as if asleep again in a minute. In the meantime, Frisk apologetically had pulled the sheet up over their mouth and scrunched their eyes shut. Asriel had always wondered if the human even COULD sleep for more than a couple minutes and managed to confirm at least 20 minutes before following suit. 

--- 

    In the morning they had all hiked out of Mt Ebott together after a brief chat. Asriel had thought about it, and apparently so had Gaster who brought it up first for Asriel's consideration. It gave him a stronger sense that he had the right idea-- letting Asgore figure out his son was mysteriously and suddenly alive and then giving him no closure on why or how or where he was... that was just no way to leave the man. It may even drive him mad. Toriel might harbor some doubts, but she had well and truly moved on with her life after Asriel and Chara had died. She'd suffered more fallen children, but she had eventually gotten closure on them as well. Asgore had stewed on it and his single brief mistake for hundreds of years. He wasn't even over his divorce in that time-- unlikely he had handled his children's deaths after having tantamount to sworn war over them. Not to mention Asriel had revealed himself before and knew exactly what kind of reaction his father had to a flower claiming itself as his son-- Toriel had doubted and probed for proof before letting her heart believe, but Asgore would have bit it if it HAD been a lie. So eager for it to be true before, Asriel knew he wouldn't rationalize it away if he reckoned it once. 

    So, they split up, and Asriel and Gaster lingered outside the hospital until Alphys texted them that Toriel had picked up Frisk thus confirming her absence from the hospital. When they asked the receptionist, a human who probably knew little about monsters, where they could find him they asked who they were. Asriel hesitated and claimed to be a cousin rather than tell the truth. Any monster would have recognized that as a lie with their familiarity with the royal family's history but to a human a goat was a goat. At the door his momentum slowed enough to feel nervous. He told himself he had done this reveal dozens of times just out of boredom to calm himself down. Seeing him halt, Gaster grabbed the door handle himself and opened it so he had no choice but to throw him a grumpy side glance before heading inside. 

    Asgore didn't look so bad. He had wrinkles where he hadn't before, and his gorgeous golden mane had desaturated a bit, but he wasn't going to keel over tomorrow. He wasn't even quite old enough to be called elderly yet, and still easily beat Gerson. For certain his collapse into illness was caused by the suddenness of the change and not old age itself claiming him. He would still be kicking for a few hundred years as long as he wasn't dusted. Already he didn't look all that sick and was certainly remaining here for observation due to the unusualness of his condition and not because of any health threat. He looked tired, but tired was a look he wore often back underground. 

    Asriel had come wrapped in a hoodie to cover all his distinguishing features, but when Asgore's gaze ripped from the sunlit window to him his eyes widened anyway, the white fuzzy snout being enough for him to at least see a ghost. It confirmed to Asriel he had already drawn his conclusions. He lowered the hood and let out a meek "Howdy." 

    "Did I die? Is that why you're here?" Asgore pondered aloud. 

    Asriel shook his head, tongue stuck in place. He began by walking towards the bedside, but by the time he got there he practically tripped into Asgore's fluffy embrace. He didn't know he had been tearing up until he noticed his fur and Asgore's shirt being moist. A large hand comforted the back of his head, and he could feel Asgore's breath falter and hitch and knew he was crying too. 

Chapter Text

    "It's not stolen, I always meant to give you my magic to grow," Asgore had reassured him once Asriel had explained... well, most things that had happened. Especially concerning how he was here now which included giving an only slightly fudged account of where Gaster had come from. Asgore was one of the few people in the world who would "remember" Gaster, he had been warned, because he was simply that old and actually lived through the same period Gaster was technically from. The amnesia cover story would have to do. Asgore had asked few questions and none of them rang of mistrust, as Asriel expected from him. He felt a little bad taking advantage of that trust in the now but so much of it was just too out there to explain-- if anything, Asgore would have appreciated him being cagey with such world-bending secrets. Nobody was likely to beat Gaster to perfecting Creation Theory, but still. 

    The hardest part to explain was Flowey, of course. Asgore understood that all fairly quickly-- he had been aware to some extent about the power of determination, he had overseen much of Alphys' work before she had stopped reporting it. Flowey had been watching him fight Frisk and had seen them solemnly tell him how many times they had seen death at his hands already and the sorrowful nod he had given them. He could see Asgore recall Frisk's pained plead for mercy and look at him in a similar way, sympathetic. For the second time in his life, he was forgiven where he didn't really deserve it. 

    "I'm sorry, my son. Even though I don't remember it, I failed to be what you needed back then." Asgore brushed his hand over Asriel's furry head comfortingly. "I'm just glad there was someone here who could heal you now. Don't tell anyone, but your skeletal friend has made me happier this day than I even was the day our people were set free." 

    "That would be an awkward thing for the people to hear," Asriel giggled, the two of them exchanging cheeky smiles. 

    "Now I am left with only one regret instead of three," the king sighed. Asriel's face fell halfway, but he didn't let his heart break over hearing that. He couldn't make the same promise to Asgore as he had to himself, because revealing his resolve over Chara and then failing would be worse than just letting Asgore forget his hope but surprising him should it be successful. The king pulled his head up to kiss his son's forehead one more time. 

    "Now, how about you let me meet your boyfriend?" 

    Asriel could hear Gaster choke outside the door. He didn't mind that Gaster was listening-- he had been dragged all the way here and had nothing to do but stand by the door after all-- but he was certainly embarrassed at his father's presumption. 

    "I don't know HOW you got that idea, but he is not my boyfriend. He's more my mentor." 

    "Oh... you were saying how cool and impressive he was so I just assumed. When you were little and had a crush on Chara you would always talk up how cool they were, even the slightly creepy things they did--" 

    "I didn't have a crush on Chara either, Dad, oh golly," he whined, sure even his fur was going to turn red if this conversation ventured to how much he doted over Chara. Gaster came in after a moment likely spent collecting himself after being embarrassed by the actual king of monsters and introduced himself, corroborating the amnesia story. 

    "We used to be good friends," Asgore said with a lonely smile, "I would like to at least offer you a cup of tea when I am able to and catch you up on your life before the accident. Gerson will want to see you as well, it could be quite a gathering." Gaster was non-committal towards the suggestion at first but conceded that it was a good idea for him to get out on his own instead of being attached to Asriel's hip all the time. 

    When they parted, Asriel felt lighter and didn't know what he was apprehensive about to begin with. 

--- 

    "You know, I don't think he believed us. We ARE two young, handsome bachelors living out in the middle of nowhere together," Gaster teased as they were climbing the mountain once again, but now one of them sans a flowerpot and able to enjoy the nippy afternoon breeze and the earthen smell of the dirt trail. Plus, the waft of greasy, greasy human fast food they had picked up out of curiosity. 

    "We are each at least a couple hundred years old, not even counting resets and bondage outside the linearity of time." 

    "Denying only that insinuates the rest is true." 

    "Guess you got me, then, we must be handsome hermit bachelors," he laughed in good nature and shook his head, dragging the ornate door to the outside closed behind them. By the time they got to the lab and laid out dinner on the worktable, Gaster had fallen into quiet thought and Asriel nudged him out of it. "You're looking troubled, friend." 

    "Hrm," Gaster muttered, taking a moment to perhaps collect his thoughts and indulge in a human burger. He was ready to talk once he had taken the first bite. "I think I'm envious of you and the king. I must have been born but whoever birthed me is tantamount to a stranger to the me I am. This is the first time I really thought about the merits of having family. Honestly, I'm a little sad." 

    Asriel looked at him with such deep pity it seemed to make Gaster uncomfortable. They both picked apart their food for a minute in silence, waiting for him to figure out what to say. When he did, his voice came out quiet and meek. 

    "You can make one. Don't let me stop you-- we can pursue our interests while you have your own friends and family." 

    "Asriel," Gaster built up a warning tone the kind of which usually came with middle and last names, "You can't stop me from pursuing anything. I'm here because I don't see anywhere better for me to be right now." 

    "In a hole in the ground with an evil flower was your ideal life?" 

    Gaster sighed. "Doing the work I love to do, in a place I love to be, with a person I enjoy the company of... if that happens to be giving a ficus plant life, in a hole, with a scary flower, so be it." He polished off his burger. "Where is that ficus anyway?" 

    "I water it every day, it seems to like hanging out in that one cave in Snowdin with Toby." 

    Gaster hummed and stood up, only for a mangled bunch of burger pieces to fall out of the seat of his robe and onto the floor.  

Chapter Text

    No unexpected guests, no urgent to-dos, Gaster and Asriel were finally able to settle down after the turbulent few days that had preceded. They had wordlessly agreed one day to cool off and collect themselves was due. They started off their day by pretty much ignoring it. Asriel had woken up to Gaster reading in bed. Not a usual read of his, either-- Gaster was prone to using books as reference material only. Asriel hadn't even seen him sit down and just read instead of flipping to what he needed briefly. But today he was quietly absorbing the contents of one that was, judging from the cover, one of the few old monster classical texts from before the war. Asriel hadn't read it personally, but he knew the basic story since it was pretty much legendary: the tale of the first human. It was a sobering tale of how the first monster had given life to the first human by breaking off a piece of its soul and putting it in a body of water and earth, only for that human to ask for more until the monster gave its child all of itself. Then the monster's other children would ask for the human to give back, and when they refused the eldest killed them and was the first to take a human soul. His descendants would supposedly inherit that power, creating the bloodline of Boss Monsters. He had naturally heard it, since it was about his own ancestors, but in truth it was no more than a fairy tale designed by monsters long ago to explain nature when they didn't understand it.  

    "You're reading fiction?" Asriel teased, still wrapped up in his bed covers. Gaster startled for a moment, likely lost in his own world before being addressed, but looked pleased that Asriel was up and talking to him soon after. 

    "I'm reading disproven science! Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to waste time treading barren ground." 

    Sure that wasn't how that phrase was supposed to go but generally agreeing, the goat yawned and got up. It was noon, according to the clock. His mind turned to lunch, joy filling him when he remembered the phone he had put to charge last night and the slip of paper tucked under it. Monster-kind was no stranger to pizza any more than it was to ice-cream or hot dogs or burgers. He would have to enchant it in order to avoid it ending up on the floor like Gaster's poor burger but it was worth the effort. 

    The human on the phone seemed a bit flummoxed when he told her where to deliver to but she assured them yes, it was in their range, she just never expected someone to actually call out from that far. Having realized making this trip up the mountain would become very old over time, he had actually made special note of the room number and finally started practicing the transport technique to blip up to the old chamber instead of navigating all the elevators it took to reach it. It was as simple as walking out the lab door and into the hall. When he looked behind him the throne room was sure enough there instead of the lab he had come from, which was disorienting but surely something he could get used to. 

    Looking back to the entrance he yelped when he looked directly into a pair of deep black eyes. Deep black eyes belonging to a skeleton holding a pizza and... wearing collared shirt and slacks and a goofy little hat. 

    "pizza delivery for a skeleton and his pet flower," Sans T. Skeleton said in a monotone voice, yet with a smile that told he was playing it up. 

    "Not the name I gave, but if that's a veggie supreme I'll take it off you anyway," Asriel responded, coming down off his initial surprise. This explained how that pizza place could afford to send someone all the way out here. He pulled out his coin purse and started counting out gold but Sans stopped him. 

    "humans don't take raw gold pieces in payment anymore, bud." 

    "Oh... well, crud," Asriel furrowed his brows in disappointment.  

    "...buuut i'm on my break soon, and i wouldn't mind spending it by buying a pizza and eating with friends." 

    Asriel sized him up. He had never imagined Sans the skeleton being chummy enough to buy him a pizza. He had "made friends with" Sans in previous lives but the skeleton never warmed up to him that much. He was a guarded guy. But then again, he had been a dangerous element worth being guarded against. This was a good sign, he decided, and invited the skeleton to the laboratory, knowing he could follow through the same way Asriel had come. 

    "so," Sans began looking around the place, "where's the party?" 

    "Gaster's up in bed still, let's just eat the pizza up there." 

    "you're speaking to my heart with that. flowey up there too?" 

    Asriel froze, his sloppy miscalculations going through his head. How had he let his guard down unthinkingly? He'd expected a human stranger to deliver and didn't take a single moment to evaluate that consideration after he'd put it out of his mind even though Sans should have set off alarms. Instead of offering Sans one of the many amendments he needed to, he instead asked a confused question. 

    "...you made that offer not knowing who I was?" 

    Sans shrugged, "i mean obviously Doc and Flowey are here even if they have a guest. a friend of a friend is a friend. or, well, they're frisks friends so a friend of a friend's friend is a friend." 

    "You really will take any reason to slack off, won't you?" 

    "i'm getting the impression you know me." 

--- 

    Several tedious explanations later while three of them sat on Gaster's bed with the pizza box laid over their row of legs, Sans was caught up on the whole "the royal son is back" deal and was relatively unfazed. If anything, parts of the conversation left him looking like his mind was wandering to other places. Asriel thought he probably knew why, but he wasn't going to press Sans because, well, he knew better. However, Gaster didn't. 

    "Telling you doesn't seem like such a bad thing considering you may find use in applying our procedures to your brother, yes?" 

    Sans gave Gaster a look that made Asriel feel the urge to get between them, were he not already in the middle of their seating arrangement. But that look quickly faded with a sigh. "yeah, maybe." 

    "Maybe?" Gaster puzzled, making Asriel with even more that he could stop him prying with his mind, "Do you not want to make your brother whole again?" 

    "hey, what do you know?" the humor usually omnipresent in Sans voice was absent, "pursuing that goal got me in a lot deeper trouble than i was prepared for when i was younger, not all of us are perverted enough to start messing with the world order just because we can--" he cut off there and upended the empty pizza box in order to push his back up the wall quickly. Asriel was surprised to find a vine had lashed out at Sans and had thudded against the wall between the skeleton's thighs just after he dodged out of the way. He received a glare and he blanked, an anger he didn't know had taken him abated and the vine slithering back onto the floor. Gaster squeezed his arm in concern, or perhaps to draw him back thinking a fight was about to break out. But his intent had already died and Sans only looked about as grumpy as before and slumped back into his seat. 

    "sorry, i don't normally lash out but i get defensive aver my bro." 

    "Same, sorry, I haven't dealt with anger much before," Asriel agreed, glancing at Gaster who seemed oddly pleased underneath his concern. 

    "...trying to 'fix' papyrus is how i ended up discovering the nonsense that is our world's time scale, which has made me unhappy more than its helped papyrus, so i'm not keen on the whole topic." 

    Asriel nodded. That was more Sans had probably talked about himself ever in front of him, it was a bit surreal. Thousands of attempts to get anything out of him failed, and yet here they were now. Gaster's eyes fixed on him, questioning, like he still wanted to pry but was actually bending to Asriel's recommendation as to whether that was a good idea or not. Asriel shrugged small, forgetting that Gaster took "maybe" or "I don't know" as "yes" when it suited him. 

    "What is your brother actually lacking, if I may ask?" 

    Sans seemed to appreciate his guts in prying, but still mulled it over for a minute before coming to make his own resolve. "love." 

    Asriel laughed disbelievingly. "Papyrus, lacking love? He loves himself and literally everyone on sight." But Sans didn't join in the laugh, he was serious. 

    "he... contradicts himself. he talks like he doesn't have a single friend but he clearly does. me and undyne would probably die for him we love him so much, everyone who used to live in snowdin adored him, all the dogs adore him... he and fluffybuns started getting along really well after we were freed and i'm sure the king thinks of them as friends. but even now, he keeps the goal out of reach... he still thinks nobody's out here acknowledging him. on top of that he lies constantly to try and fit other people's standards... including downplaying how much he knows, giving different accounts of what he likes or dislikes per person... he'll even do things that hurt him for approval... he doesn't feel the love of others and he doesn't love himself even though he's the most caring skeleton i know." 

    Asriel listened to Sans fade out. He couldn't and wouldn't make Sans suffer hearing the stories but he himself had experienced this side of Papyrus in ways the brother couldn't know about. The Flowey fan club was one of the more innocent examples. It was kind of crushing to re-contextualize everything he knew about Papyrus, but it also made something click horribly. A horrid feeling bubbled on his chest and before he knew it a strained laugh came out of him, definitely rubbing Sans the wrong way but he couldn't help himself. 

    "That's why I was so obsessed with him," a few tears added themselves to the cocktail of feelings bursting out of him, "He's just as broken and lonely as I was, huh? No... he still kept his integrity, that's why he was so interesting. No matter what, he doesn't get bitter about it or lash out. Geez. Papyrus is... really strong and cool, isn't he?" 

    It was Sans' turn for an inappropriate laugh. "he sure is." 

    Quiet pervaded them for only a few moments. 

    "he is and he deserves another shot from me, huh?" 

    Asriel thought about his sibling and brushed the slight dampness out of his fur. "Yeah." 

Chapter Text

    * ERROR 

    * HOPE: 31  

    * COMPASSION: 26  

    * LOVE: 43 

    * PATIENCE: 0 

    * BRAVERY: 0  

    * INTEGRITY: 0  

    * PERSERVERENCE: 0 

    * KINDNESS: 0  

    * JUSTICE: 0 

    * DETERMINATION: 7 

    As he read the scanner, a set of hard white fingers pried it away. Gaster was giving him a careful, examining look. Since Sans had left, his phone number added to Asriel's phone and vice versa so he could consult them in the future on Papyrus' situation, the two of them had been quietly leaning against each-other, backs still pressed to the wall behind the skeleton's bed. That is, until Asriel had gotten up and gone downstairs to grab the scanner and point it at himself. Gaster had followed and made disconcerted eyes at him as he did it. 

    "Sometimes you're better off not knowing yourself in such empirical terms. The soul is much more than a set of numbers." 

    "I was just... we need to make sure mine and Frisk's Determination will add up to overwhelm Chara's," Asriel huffed, his nose sniffling involuntarily. Gaster was giving him an intense look he didn't enjoy. 

    "You're upset, talk to me. I won't judge." 

    Asriel's mind slowed down. He felt tears welling up. He hadn't even felt like crying when he spoke to his father, but then again, he was still reacclimating to his own self. He didn't want his old crybaby behavior to come back, however, so he took a deep breath and quelled it as best he could. Gaster was right that he had come away from that conversation in a bad mood, but he wanted to try his best not to let it overwhelm him in front of someone who didn't know him as that wimpy crybaby he was when he was a child. He wanted to be better and cooler when Chara came back than when they left. He would suppress the urge to cry if he could help it. His eyes felt heavy but his determination had suffocated the urge for now. 

    "I'm angry at myself," he spoke carefully, knowing he needed to give Gaster something to satiate his concern, "For being less than Papyrus. Actually, Frisk too. I'm angry at myself for having been so much less than them while holding the same circumstances and powers." His eyes were no longer meeting Gaster's but he could assume what he would see wouldn't be anything he wanted to deal with. "Frisk thinks we're on the same level because we both hurt someone but they were operating under fear. I was just arrogant. What is it about me? I thought I could be absolved because I had been hurting, but Papyrus felt the same hurt and never once went off the rails like I did even when a sociopathic flower pushed him to. What about me is so," he paused as the last words swelled and popped out of him, "HECKED up?" 

    Silence followed, so eventually he led his heavy eyes back to Gaster and was surprised to find him not looking at him with discomfort or disgust or similar, but contemplatively. There wasn't even a hint of frustration in that either, he looked like he was solving his homework and not being asked by a serial killer what made him tick. It should have made him uncomfortable to be looked at like that, but he knew Gaster better than that. Gaster loved science and engineering, and to be looked at like a project was probably the most intimate way anything could be looked at by the skeleton. He was looking into Asriel's gears and trying to explain how they worked. He was worth understanding. That alone made him sober up a little from his outburst. After a while, Gaster answered. 

    "It's because you're like me," came the surprising reply. Asriel opened his mouth to protest, but Gaster literally shut his mouth, each hand resting on the top and bottom of his muzzle to keep him quiet. They didn't force his mouth shut, but they deterred him from speaking. 

    "If I could, I wouldn't be able to stop myself from pushing every boundary. The only thing that stops me right now is consequence. You can't not believe me, I was imprisoned as an eldritch horror because of it. I don't want to hurt anyone, but if I had the power to undo any hurting... I don't know how long I would hesitate. I see that in you, too. You're naturally curious, hungry to know what you can do and how the world works. You're also highly philosophical, and it was easy for you to use that to turn your hurt into a weapon." 

    Asriel couldn't help but choke out a laugh. "Most people trying to be comforting would say 'there's nothing wrong with you', not ACTUALLY answer what's wrong with me." He was received with a frown. 

    "But that's what I AM saying. There's nothing wrong with being curious or philosophical." 

    Asriel took another deep breath. He starting to think Gaster had some out of touch ideas about what the original Flowey had been like. Maybe even spun himself some lies to come to terms with it. Would their friendship break if he understood? That scared him, but he couldn't lie to him either.  

    "I had no goal or purpose in hurting people, Gaster. What do you think I was actually getting out of doing it?" The skeleton finally looked shocked and his hands slid away like he had been touching a rabid dog and just realized it could bite him. He continued. "I did it because I was bored, I made up reasons to justify it that didn't even sound pious to myself. I didn't care. Everyone was just a set of instructions I would figure out because I had nothing to do. I didn't even like it when I was hurting people." 

    The hands came back, now patting his cheeks. A bit more appropriately apprehensive this time, however. "If you came to hate it, why didn't you just let time move on?" 

    "I did. How do you think Frisk hijacked my power? I let the day they came to the Underground happen, and here we are." 

    The bone fingers where etching lines into his fur as Gaster continued to think about all of it. Asriel was relieved to see he wasn't rushing to get away from him, but he dreaded what thoughts were packed into that skull. 

    "Your explanation feels fishy. There was really not motive behind any of it? I can't imagine you being so mindlessly cruel." 

    Asriel shrugged helplessly at him.  

    "Do ever think about what it would be like to kill me?" 

    He shook his head so vigorously his ears beat against his shoulders. 

    "If I personally said it was okay and you could reverse it after and I wouldn't remember it, would you want to see me die?" 

    "That's morbid, Gaster, golly, do you really want to know that?" he answered with a reproachful tone. 

    "That's not a no." 

    "It's an 'I don't even want to think about the answer'." 

    "A yes, then." 

    Asriel firmly removed the hands from his face, irritated at the both of them for the exchange. He threw himself into the desk chair and folded his arms so he could rest his face in them on the top of the work surface. He knew shutting down wasn't doing anyone any favors, but he could feel the beginning of another urge to cry that he didn't want to acknowledge. He didn't want to feel this disgust aimed at himself. 

    "What about Chara?" 

    Asriel sucked in some air, hating where this was going even more. "What about them?" 

    "You once said to me you wouldn't want a false version of Chara from your own image because the things you didn't know about them were important. Do you feel a need to know those things?" 

    "Of course, I want to know everything about Chara..." 

    "Why?" 

    "They're my best friend." 

    "So, it's because you love them?" 

    "I, uh," Asriel stumbled, lost for a moment in remembering that was even something he was capable of now given the weighty conversation, "I love them, yeah, of course." 

    "Do you like other monsters?" 

    "Yeah, I do..." 

    Gaster sounded way too pleased for his liking. "Then isn't it possible you did what you did because you love everyone and just wanted to know everything about them?" 

    Asriel swiveled the chair around to give Gaster the full force of his disbelief. "That would be immensely screwed up if it was true." 

    "Yes, well, I'm not out to prove the murder part was actually cute and innocent." 

    He sighed and ran his paw through the fur of his head. Chara pervaded his mind in the way they always did, with a mixture of apprehension and longing. He wanted to tell Gaster he was off his rocker, but his feelings toward Chara honestly matched what he was saying in a way. 

    "Saying I love every monster I hurt is a bit much. But at first, I did want to love and be loved, so maybe a small part of me was trying to, I don't know, know someone intimately. Even if it was in a messed-up way. I was still hurting after Chara and I had our 'falling out', and I was upset with myself for not understanding them properly, so... maybe." He frowned pointedly at his companion. "But I was also arrogant and cruel and YOU need to face the reality of that. No amount of rationalizing is going to change who I am. If you can't," he tried not to sound like the idea was upsetting to him but cracked a little anyway, "be friends with me without sugarcoating my past, then don't lead me on any longer." 

    A hug enveloped him without hesitation, and he felt at least one layer of tension leave him. Gaster wasn't warm or soft like his father, but in exchange he also wasn't a heavy blanket of fur. It was nice.  

    "I said I wouldn't judge. I just want to understand." 

    He nodded into the sheet between his face and the rib-cage underneath and yet again resisted the urge to weep, but at least this time for a happy reason.

Chapter Text

    Gaster had suggested taking at least a day to relieve the stress, but Asriel was antsy. He didn't insist on doing anything hasty since their last exercise had unforeseen consequences, but he wasn't going to stay idle either. So, in order to feel like he was making progress he had already begun negotiations with Frisk via text message. He sent them a detailed explanation late at night before he and Gaster had cuddled up into the skeleton's bed, working off the emotional turbulence from earlier with closeness, and in the morning, they had simply texted back two images, one of a bear in a pose resembling The Thinker and one of a bus that said "GONE2SCHOOL" in funky text. He figured that meant they would respond later. 

    When he got up, he first wandered to the elevator and into the secret lab. There was one more ingredient he might need to make this work, and it was no longer protected from him anyway. The container of determination Alphys had helped pull out of him was easy to extract, the barrier much simpler to break than the one that had occluded the underground from the outside world. Alphys wasn't very strong to begin with, he might have had trouble if it had been someone like Undyne or Sans trying to keep him out but even they would have been beaten by his monster soul and seven determinations. He thought he would feel bad taking it, but instead he found himself holding a little pride. He imagined once he would come to take this in order to do harm, but never had he imagined using it to do good. He would have to thank Alphys for her foresight and trust later. The container ended up mounted next to the Frisk replica so everything was in one place for whenever the time came. 

    Gaster turned out to be equally bad at taking a break, because he was nowhere in the lab when he had returned. He used the lab door to pass to Chara's grave to see if he was there, but he wasn't. However, there wasn't nobody there either. His surprise at seeing a human he had never met lying in the flowerbed was quickly replaced by curses. He HAD realized this could happen a ninth time and had closed up the hole with a weave of vines ages ago, but when he looked up he found they had been deliberately pulled aside. Not something that could be done on accident. 

    He started by checking if the child was breathing, something he knew humans and monsters mutually did when they weren't dead, and they were. He didn't know what to do with an unconscious child however, so he started rummaging through the kid's belongings to start. They were carrying a phone, to his relief. The contact list was short and comprised of only the entries "Home", "Sis", and "Teacher". The first one seemed like a good bet, so he called it. And, of course, when it picked up he peered across the line into the room beyond. 

    It wasn't anything like what he thought of as a home, it contained a reception desk to begin with. He was also surprised to find the person who had picked up was a monster. He recognized her as one of the old librarians from Snowdin. She had said hello but he was so put off by what he saw that he hung up without answering. That clearly wasn't the child's parent. He tried the sister, but she didn't pick up, which he figured was due to it being school hours as Frisk had implied. That was likely why the teacher also didn't pick up. Worst case he could call the sister later in the day, he figured. 

    In the meantime, he gently prodded and shook the human child, willing them awake. They actually responded with a groan and the prying open of their eyes. They looked like they weren't all there yet when they tried to focus on him and called out. 

    "Miss Toriel?" 

    Asriel shook his head. Knowing this kid knew his mother made him uneasy but it wasn't going to change that he would be sending them home ASAP. 

    "You know monsters, so you knew what was here. Did you come to the Underground on purpose?" 

    The child nodded, sitting up and rubbing their sore spots. They adjusted a ballcap on their head and smoothed out the jersey that sat open-buttoned over a sweater. Asriel noticed a bat poking out of their messenger bag's sides, held in by the velcro straps. He thought for a second about seeing Frisk reluctantly brandishing a knife at Asgore and then internally cursed himself for connecting the two. He wasn't going to draw this child into a battle and this child had no reason to do the same.  

    "Why are you here?" he asked, patient and putting forth as much kindness as he could to make the kid feel safe. 

    "I wanted to see this place." 

    "What for?" 

    "My sister lived here." 

    The only human who had ever "lived" in the Underground had died longer than a human lifespan ago, so that made little sense to Asriel at first, but having had an interspecies sibling of his own he managed to put it together. 

    "Your sister is a monster, huh." He got a nod in return. "Her name?" 

    "Loren." 

    The creepy child from Waterfall. 

    "And yours?" 

    "Hoshie." 

    He handed back the phone he had looted off the girl. "Call someone to come pick you up, and I'll show you where Loren lived before they get here." The child agreed and dialed the "Home" number, speaking to the receptionist herself and wincing a few times. She informed him someone could pick her up after school hours were over, which Asriel figured was a small blessing for him to stop him from busy bodying all day as he had been bound to do. 

    "Let's take the slow route then." 

    Instead of dragging them directly to the lab or elsewhere, he started along the old familiar ruin path. He stepped on the buttons at the first sealed door and headed through, but the child loitered, looking curiously at the message on the wall and the buttons and putting together the solutions herself. She looked satisfied when she finally followed. The next room made her wear a scrunched up disappointed face when she saw the solutions just scrawled along the walls. Forward on they met with the spike room and, knowing the spikes were pretty difficult to actually hurt yourself on, he stopped and gestured. 

    "Do you want to try this one?" 

    Hoshie didn't hesitate to start running around the room looking at all the pieces before heading along the spike path. She remembered part of the path at first, but when she hit a tile that didn't budge she started testing every spike trap around her to find the one that would recede. Nevertheless, she looked pleased to make it to the other side. She didn't look pleased to see Asriel make a vine path across the moat to walk around them, however, and called him a cheat. 

    They went on like that through the entire ruin, with occasional hiccups. The rock monsters had left and he had to bridge the moat again instead with a small apology. When he got to the old tree and the house beyond it, he asked Hoshie if she wanted to eat. She nodded and he used the kitchen door to shortcut back to the lab and grab some stuff from the fridge. Gaster was back at the work table, but he didn't stop to say much more than, "We have a guest, so stay decent." 

    He threw some snails, chips, and chocolate on a plate. Monster food, but he knew from Frisk that it was acceptable for human consumption. The main difference was that it didn't spoil and didn't need to be digested. The snails didn't seem to please the child so he indulged himself instead. It wasn't like he cooked any of it, so he wasn't offended. 

    Their trek through Snowdin was a little more eventful as all of Papyrus' old puzzles hadn't been recalibrated since Frisk had solved them all. So naturally, he used vines to reset them as quickly as he could while Hoshie covered her eyes. He couldn't say he wasn't having fun doing these puzzles at this point, and he knew them intimately after having solved them a hundred times so doing them backwards was refreshing in a way. Eventually they did get to Waterfall and she seemed more gleeful than ever before. Even to someone who enjoyed the luxury of the surface their whole life, there was something special about this nearly untouched natural cave. And of course, to Hoshie it was extra special for her own reasons. They lingered here more than before, and he figured he would have to skip Hotland for the most part to make sure they could meet with her ride. Re-activating those puzzles would be more of a pain anyway. 

    The day was moving on by his estimation, so he offered Hoshie his hand and he pulled her through a door to the end of New Home, the chamber before where the barrier used to stand, and they waited and talked. She told him about herself more-- she met Loren at an orphanage and they both went to Toriel's school. She loved baseball, as if that wasn't obvious from looking at her, and Loren always told her how jealous she was of her skill. But to Loren, just having arms seemed to be what she was jealous of. Occasionally Hoshie would ask Asriel a question about himself, and he had to dodge a few that he wouldn't want her mentioning to other monsters. Eventually he heard a car outside on the mountain trail, and Hoshie tugged on his sleeve to come but he pushed her out alone. He didn't want to be seen if it happened to be a monster out there. Still, he stayed and listened responsibly to her leaving and meeting with her escort. He caught bits and pieces. 

    "I'm sorry, I just--" 

    "Up the mountain alone--" 

    He was straining to recognize whose voice that was, sure it was a monster voice he had heard before, when his phone rang and he hastily picked it up and hoped the two outside hadn't heard it. It was from Frisk. 

    Frisk: mom went to pick up a kid from the mt watch out 

    "--floppy ears and horns just like you, miss--" 

    His heart skipped and he started heading back into the depths of the underground, but he heard padded feet run inside behind him and knew he had been glimpsed before he had rounded the corner. He was beginning to think fate really wanted his secret to get out whether he liked it or not. He reluctantly turned to face his mother. He thought to say hello or try to say anything at all to ease her into the revelation, but when he saw her expression he had no idea what to say to it. 

    "What are you doing in this forsaken dirt mound!" she wept furiously, before grabbing Asriel and pulling him into her arms. He relented and hugged his mother, already fighting the urge to join her in her tearful reunion. She pulled him away by the shoulders and looked him over intensely, like she couldn't quite believe it and the illusion was going to break any second. But she took his hands and tugged towards the exit anyway. 

    "Come on, let's get you home and you can tell me what in the world happened!" 

    "Oh, no, I... I live here, this is my home mom," he got out, wishing he had said something more important to her for the first time as himself in centuries. 

    "What do you mean you LIVE here? The barrier is broken, we have a new home," she laughed, somewhat maniacal. She needed to compose herself but he wasn't going to tell her that. "Even so, I have to get Hoshie back and... I'm not just leaving you here, I JUST found you and you have so much explaining to do, my son." 

    He considered his options. "Do you have room for a plus one?" 

Chapter Text

    It was a tense drive. Hoshie had unwittingly been the cause of most of it-- when they emerged from the Underground Toriel had not bothered to contain her weeping, but when it stirred concern in the little girl she had finally found it in her to regain her composure. It was a lot to explain to a preteen. But that didn't stop Hoshie's curiosity. 

    "Why is the nice mister monster coming with us?" 

    "He's my son, he's coming to stay with me," Toriel replied with the barest amount of control over the tearful joy in her voice. 

    "Is he also your son?" she pried more, looking into the backseat where Gaster sat across from Asriel and tried not to look completely uncomfortable. Asriel wasn't sure what was wrong, wondered briefly if he had forced the skeleton's hand into coming with but only long enough to remind himself that he was a big boy and could have said no easily. It wasn't like he had been shy to meet new people before, nor shy to meet his other parent. He would have to investigate it, he decided. 

    "No, dear. He's a guest of mine." Her eyes checked him in the rear-view mirror, her feelings towards him a little less clear. His presence had clearly puzzled her and the reason why was obvious enough, but it seemed to be lower on her priority list of people coming back from the dead. 

    Eventually they pulled up in front of the Sunrise House, subtitled a "home for neglected children" with a newer sign underneath that said "monster accommodation offered". Toriel got out and escorted Hoshie inside, with a reluctant glance back that made Asriel think she was afraid he wouldn't be there when she returned. When she was inside he let out a held breath he didn't know he was keeping in. Nervous energy was radiating from both the remaining "guests" and creating a foul atmosphere he would have to try and clear before Toriel got back. 

    "If you regret coming, I can always walk you back once I have the room number for my mom's house," he offered, tone with a forced lightness to assure he wasn't pushing his friend to leave. 

    "Hm? I'm happy to be here. Or, I will be once I'm out of this motorized wagon," Gaster trailed into a discontent mutter. Asriel stared at him, now properly reading the negative energy coming off him. 

    "Gaster, you don't even have the equipment to be carsick," he shook his head, his own tension unable to hold up under the stupid revelation. "If you're feeling ill it's because you're convincing yourself you should, you know. Monsters without physical biology only feel sick that way because they mentally believe they should because of traumas or phobias or... or because they're a dummy who gets himself carsick." 

    "You know you don't have to explain that to me, is there an invisible human around listening to you exposit all that?" Gaster scoffed, and Asriel laughed and waved his paws as if to say he was backing off.  

    Before he could delve into the matter anymore, his mother came back and got back in the driver's seat. Rather than get the car running, she stopped there and took a deep breath. The tension crept back into Asriel for a moment but receded when she spoke. 

    "I missed you, sweetheart. Where," her voice cracked with her miserable joy, "Where were you? This whole time, nearly three hundred years, I thought you were gone?" 

    Asriel heard her break, impressed with her for having held on this long to avoid upsetting the child but hating to hear his strong, proud mother like this. He got out of the back seat and into the front passenger seat, and when he got there he put out his arms and let her fall into his hold. It was something he couldn't do last time they had had this conversation, nor something he had even thought to do. If he had, he could have used his vines to do it. He could have done more than nothing. 

    "It's a long story, but I WAS dead. I didn't just hide from you. I've only been myself for a few days, actually. Since the day Dad got sick." 

    "Oh, I see," she muttered, putting that together quickly as she was a sharp woman, "Does your father know?" 

    Asriel hesitated, not sure if he should put his father under the bus like this but unwilling to lie in this matter. "He does, I visited him when I heard." 

    "How did you find out about that while living in the mountain?" Her voice was way too calm now, and he really didn't like where this was going. So, he didn't speak at all at first. He found himself wishing he could see her face to tell what she was thinking, and then quickly regretted wishing for it as she actually obliged by parting their embrace and giving him one of the oldest Mom Looks in the book. The kind where you were supposed to admit to what you did because lying would make it worse. 

    However, what he owed to Frisk was greater an influence than his natural fear of disappointing his mother! 

    ...No, it wasn't. 

    "Frisk told me." 

    "And how did you even MEET Frisk if you were dead until three days ago?" 

    "Oh, no, I've um, been alive for about five months in real time, but I was a flower?" Despite it being the truth, it sounded fake and insane when he was staring down his maker. "It's honestly a long story, but I asked Frisk not to tell so please don't be mad at them." 

--- 

    There was a very expository drive home and when they arrived, Frisk was there with Sans, likely procrastinating together if the untouched school worksheets were anything to go by. Neither looked too surprised by the guests, and Sans looked downright relieved. 

    "Frisk, I believe you have met our guests. Sans, this is my son Asriel and the former Royal Scientist, Doctor Gaster." Sans made no move to greet them. 

    "we're acquainted." 

    Toriel stared at him like he told her he'd killed her cat. "You, too, failed to mention my son was alive?" 

    "remember i texted you yesterday about finding new contacts that could help me with my brother's condition?" Toriel nodded, face softening. "i didn't want to goat on their bad side. sorry." 

    She was still upset but couldn't help the short giggle that forced its way out of her at the inappropriately timed joke. "Okay, fine. If it was for your brother, I can forgive it." She took a deep breath. "However, Frisk is grounded for a week." The child in question gave a thumb up like it didn't even bother them. It was a punishment they were willing to bear to meet in the middle. "And Asgore and Alphys are going to make it up to me in due time." The tension and disappointment melted off her after a calm moment, and she was working her way back to joy in no time. "We're going to have chocolate-apple pie for dinner to celebrate this reunion! Asriel, my darling son, come help me in the kitchen." 

    He agreed and followed her, briefly checking with Gaster who was content to simply settle down with the others and work off his remaining nausea. Cooking with his mother was much more relaxing than anything else so far had been-- learning the recipe for himself had always been a long-lost dream of a previous life he had never lived. His mother's gentle and patient style of teaching was something he had left there too. When Toriel set the pie into the oven and finally sat down and let her gears stop running, she seemed content to just stare happily at his face. 

    "I never thought I would see you as a young man... you look more like me than your father," she chuckled, and then desponded. "Your sibling didn't... Chara IS still dead, right? This miracle couldn't be that generous, could it?" 

    Asriel hesitated. "You shouldn't get your hopes up, but don't despair either, please." 

    Toriel gave him an odd look, reminding him of Gaster when he made that "maybe or lack of no is a yes" face. "Are you worried I'll fall down? It's been nearly three hundred years and I haven't yet, my child." 

    Silence overtook them for a while. 

    "Reading between the lines makes it sound like there's a chance of seeing them again," Toriel whispered. 

    The slightly taller goat shuffled his foot. He realized he trusted her much more to handle a peek of their plan than his father. Would it be so bad to suggest? "If Gaster and I can both experience a miracle, who is to say lightning can't strike thrice?" 

    Toriel looked at him as if she was peering into his brain to fish out a more direct answer. When it didn't present, she made a small smile and simply replied, "I suppose so." 

Chapter Text

    The dinner table didn't naturally accommodate five people, and yet they didn't quite use the accommodation it did offer either. One end of the table remained empty while the other sat the Hero of the Underground themselves. Asriel was used to the heads of this exact table belonging to two boss monsters-- even upon separation he had noticed them always sitting at the same end of the table they used to when they were together. Now, Toriel and Sans occupied one of the long sides together, opposite himself and Gaster. Judging by how the placements were set out before his mother had added two, this wasn't a change of pace for them either. Toriel was close enough to the end to help Frisk with their homework sheets while they ate, and Sans was close enough to her to give her enthusiastic nudges when he made a joke, and to lightly slap her arm when she did. It was... weird, of course, how couldn't it be weird? However, he had imagined himself having a problem with someone "replacing" his dad. Now he was here, he didn't really care at all about that. It was just so alien, and like something had really died somewhere along the line without him paying attention. Traditions thrown out, the vestiges of a time past not even present. He knew it was a good thing if his parents weren't clinging onto the past, and it was a little dramatic to get huffy about table seats, but his parents had separated with absolutely none of the emotional support given to him that you would normally afford a child in that situation and, given his previous emotional state, he hadn't really given much thought to the whole affair at all in regards to how HE was supposed to feel about it. He was upset, obviously, but at the same time... the rest of his life was so vastly disconnected from the past anyway, it was also a drop in the sea. 

    And still, even if things were different he was among friend and family and the warmth was still there. The comfort. The sense of safety. He should have lost these things, but they were still here in new ways. 

    Once Frisk had finished both homework and pie they took the time to give each monster a peck on the cheek or cheekbone starting with Toriel, then Sans, then Asriel got one on the snout complete with a cheeky giggle that drew a grumpy "I know you're playing with me for a reaction and I'm not playing back" look from him, and then pausing in front of Gaster until he lent down and asked for one too, and then they dismissed themselves to bed. Sans looked to Toriel. 

    "i should head off and get papyrus his fluffy bunny fix, then. text me if you need anything," he told her, and then headed into the kitchen in order to presumably hack his way home, or at least Asriel thought until he saw Sans leave from the kitchen side of the doorway with a piece of pie. His mother looked happier than he'd seen her in the months since he'd awoken as a flower. She didn't even seem bothered to pick up the dishes immediately like she used to-- surely the skeleton's influence, or perhaps just because she was eager to talk to her son. 

    "I can't believe you hid from me, this is already doing so much to heal my old heart," she began, folding her arms over on the table as if trying to lean closer to him in a small way, "It will do good for Asgore too. It'll do good for everyone to have their prince back." 

    Asriel's fur stood on end. "Whoa, whoa, who is everyone?" 

    Toriel wasn't prone to being stopped in her tracks but he got her this time. "Uh, everyone dear. Monsters." 

    "We're not... telling everyone." 

    "We have to tell everyone," she replied, her tone getting stern and matter-of-fact. When he was little, he would always stop at that sound and usually agree, because it was a command. It did make him falter out of habit, but he didn't back down. 

    "We don't." 

    "They need to know the heir to the throne is alive, they need a future." 

    The two of them looked at each-other tensely. He could tell Toriel didn't know how to deal with this. Out of the nine children she had been involved in rearing for varying amounts of time, none of them had reached the rebellious teen stage let alone being a fully-grown adult. Especially not a prince who was trying to shirk his duties. She was at a loss for words, of course she was, because she couldn't imagine why he wouldn't want this. In this she was a stranger to him. But, Gaster wasn't. He cleared his absentee throat and cut through the building atmosphere. 

    "I don't think Asriel wants to be king, madam." 

    Toriel looked even more lost. He could understand why-- it was a 180 degree turn from how he had acted as a little monster. He had always been so full of pride and always making little remarks about how he would give free pie to everyone when he was king. He probably would have, if Chara hadn't happened. He would have been everything as a king that his parents had been as monarchs, he was sure. But now, he was tainted. He would always be the person who had picked their lives apart at the seams in another time and place. He would always know too much. He would never be able to handle the publicity, either. 

    "It's not a responsibility you can just throw away," Toriel sighed. 

    "If I had stayed dead nothing would have changed," Asriel replied, "And it's not like... you can judge me on that account." He expected Toriel to be astounded at his bold accusation, but she actually laughed. If anything, the tension left her. 

    "You really are more like me than your father, he's much too cowardly to say that, or even think it." She leaned into her paw tiredly but smiled at him. "If you're sure then be sure, you can't just decide you want the throne later and start a civil war." 

    "I'm sure I'm sure." 

    "What ARE you doing with your life, then?" 

    "Uhhh," he glanced over at Gaster, "Physics, biology, and a bit of philosophy?" Gaster laughed openly. 

    "And some theology." 

    "Ugh, the theology." 

    Toriel shook her head, letter whatever in-joke they were having slip by her. "Well, there's no Royal Scientist at the moment and nobody qualified to take the position that hasn't been fired, perhaps Doctor Gaster could take his old job back and you could be his assistant?" 

    Gaster shook his head. "We are working on personal projects at the moment." 

    "Together." They both nodded at her. "In Ebott, alone?" They both nodded again, but with more suspicion. She brought her previously forgotten and empty teacup up to her face to hide her expression. Asriel balked at her. 

    "Not you too, mom." 

    "Well I'M not making a new heir." 

Chapter Text

    In order to get his mother off her line of thought in regards to his and Gaster's relationship he had firmly agreed to sleep on the chair in the living space, but his resolve wavered and he ended up crawling to the guest room and finding the skeleton curled up firmly to the wall side of the bed. He smiled thinking of how the guy had predicted him so well and went ahead and shared the guest bed anyway. He knew it was possible to sleep back at the lab and then cut back to the house in the morning, but it felt dishonest. Staying the night and being woken up with Frisk was just more satisfying.  

    Frisk was technically the reason they had stayed at all. His mother's breakfast was a huge perk, but they had ended the night consulting Toriel on the topic of getting Frisk involved with their work since permission was something they couldn't avoid needing now that they were outed. Of course, telling her exactly what the project was about wasn't a good idea, and they also had to dance around what made Frisk the only person they could ask for it. Even if they told anyone about the tenuous and fickle rules of their universe, they didn't want to give away Frisk's secrets. It would change the way people looked at them in a way a near-teen shouldn't have to deal with. So, they told her Frisk was merely the human they knew and trusted who had the most experience and knowledge of monsters and insisted that was irreplaceable. The difficult part was that Toriel wanted to oversee the experiment and all the proceedings. Which brought them to breakfast. 

    "So, the step outline is," Gaster carefully explained to Frisk, "That you will temporarily absorb his soul and then the two of you will be piloting the same body. You'll have different tasks you have to do at the same time-- he will fuse SOUL data to the lost soul, giving it access to the power of de-termination, and you will use the power to SAVE the subject. It will naturally try to de-terminate to before it terminated-- you need to let it reset its own state but overpower it and prevent anything else from turning back." 

    "I've never done that before..." 

    "But I have, remember?" Asriel made a grimace at Frisk, who he could see look into their memory of things that un-happened to remember what must have been one of the more disturbing parts of their adventure.  

    "But that was just you and I left, and you had," Frisk faltered, looking at Toriel, "You were a lot stronger." 

    "But we've done it on a universal scale plenty of times. The only important part is that we overpower the subject, take over their ability to affect anyone but themselves. You alone are probably strong enough to stay the master of the power, you just need me for my expertise." 

    "Huh, yeah, makes sense."  

    From Toriel's face she didn't agree it made sense at all, which was absolutely fine with everyone else involved. The less she could piece together the better. Still, worry marred her fluffy features. Worry directed at him. He understood what she was thinking, but this time was different. This wasn't a repeat of past events, he wasn't reliving a trauma, and most of all he trusted Frisk. Genuinely. It actually gave him pause-- if Chara had asked for his soul and not offered theirs, would he have been more reluctant back then? 

    "So, we can do it today if nobody's busy!" Gaster blurted out. Asriel just now realized Gaster was getting excited and was probably dense to his introspection at this point. They had agreed to be idle about it for a while before, but having the whole concrete plan laid out for Frisk made waiting a tedious waste of time, true. 

    "Okay," Frisk agreed, "How do I take your soul?" 

    The room paused. Gaster paused and hummed pensively, implying he didn't know. He looked to Asriel, who looked sheepishly back. 

    "Well, it takes a massive amount of energy to take a living soul. Even with about six human souls worth of energy, taking the soul of a guarded monster is impossible," he spoke through experience, "But I'll lower my defenses against Frisk because I trust them. And we're only taking mine, not every single soul in the Underground, so... calculating how much energy we'd need is kind of a guessing game but... maybe if we used the Core, we could..." 

    Toriel, surprisingly, spoke up. "A human can absorb a monster with just their own soul power if love is involved. If the monster loves the human enough, that can power the exchange." 

    "No offense to Frisk, I like Frisk, but I don't think I like them like that." 

    Toriel shook her head. "You said you trust Frisk enough to let them handle your soul. The love between friends is just as good as between partners." 

    He looked at Frisk, feeling heat creep up his neck as they gave him a weird kind of smug look. He quickly looked away, deliberately deigning not to deny it, and confronted his mother. 

    "How do you know that?" 

    "I'm old, dear." 

    "That's not what I asked." 

    She smiled sadly. "Remember that old story I told you about the first Boss Monster?" 

    "That story isn't true." 

    "No, but every legend starts in truth." 

    He relented. It wasn't like trying it and failing would ruin the experiment, so he dully extended his paw to Frisk and urged them to take it. Frisk did so, looking at the paw and back to his face as if trying to puzzle it out. He briefly wondered if Frisk even had it in them to take the very essence of someone's being as their own, the drive to possess someone like that. He also felt stiff and realized if he was going to make this work he was going to have to do a better job of lowering his defense. 

    He got off his chair and knelt down by Frisk's. It reminded him a little of that day way back when he sat at Chara's bed-side and watched them waste away to sickness, except Frisk looked back down at him with a sort of kindness Chara didn't possess. He ruminated on that kindness, remembering the first time he saw it directed at him. Remembered the emotion welling up in him. Remembered the hug they gave him afterwards, the warmth he was gifted when he didn't deserve it. The patience he had been treated with since. Yeah, he could admit there was a tenderness in his heart for this kid. Soon he felt Frisk touch him where a human heart would be, which was fine if it was the kind of imagery they needed to use to pull his soul out of him. He felt a tug on his being and was elated at first, but the tug only did that much. Nothing came out of him. Disappointing but not unexpected. He shook his head. 

    "Yeah, we're going to need to use an artificial energy source, this isn't working--" 

    "We don't," Frisk said softly, their hand leaving his chest and squeezing his arm. He felt that old familiar determination burning inside, and his heart almost skipped at the sensation. Frisk stood up, pulling him to his feet as well, and turned to the other two and told them to stay where they were. They took his hand and led him out the front door of all things, around the house and through the fence to the garden behind it. A huge tree shadowed it from the far corner, blanketing the graves he had been told about, and the field of golden flowers that managed to persevere even here just to taunt him with their presence. Frisk took a deep breath, seemingly taking a moment to prepare themselves for whatever they meant to do in this garden. Before he could ask, they spoke up. 

    "Draw me into an encounter." 

    He stayed still, surprised and aghast. They repeated themselves. 

    "Start an encounter with me." 

    "Why?" 

    "It's fine, just do it." 

    It rubbed him the wrong way, he had no beef with Frisk after all, but he was just going to spare them off the bat anyway and it's not like either of them would hurt the other, so he did it. A square drew itself on the ground under Frisk's feet, a magical barrier encasing them in his encounter. Frisk started it off with the standardized move and checked him, which made sense because they were trying to lower his defense after all. On his turn, he lazily rolled a fireball over the corner of the field where he couldn't possibly hit Frisk, and they didn't bother moving as it passed by harmlessly. 

    * TAKE SOUL 

    Frisk's small arm reached for his shirt and tugged on his soul again but it didn't come out. Nothing had changed to make it do so. He rolled another fireball idly by them to pass his turn. 

    * INSULT 

    "That's the best attack you can come up with?" 

    "I have tons of cool attacks, but you've seen them." He rolled another fireball harmlessly over the corner of the field. 

    * INSULT 

    "Too much of a 'fraidy goat to throw something harder at me?" 

    "I'm not going to hurt you," he frowned, passing his turn the same way. 

    * INSULT 

    "As if you even could." 

    "You know I could, I have before." 

    * INSULT 

    "Not now, though. You think you're being kind and gentle but really you're just scared." 

    "...How is this supposed to foster love between us?" 

    * FIGHT 

    Suddenly, a knife swung at him, nicking his arm. Moisture from the plant membrane under his skin bubbled out of the cut. He looked at Frisk, holding the offending item-- a gardening tool they had picked up god knows when, but certainly before the encounter began. Meaning they had intended to use it as a weapon the whole time. He huffed and didn't say anything about it, throwing another dead fireball and not even letting it cross the border of the barrier to be even the slightest threat. 

    * FIGHT 

    They hit him with it again, and a tiny bit of natural fear washed through him. He still didn't believe Frisk was going to kill him, but anyone would naturally have a moment of fright when sliced open. 

    "This isn't funny." 

    * FIGHT 

    He took another blow. He KNEW Frisk wouldn't dust him, but he still felt apprehensive as his HP went lower. 

    "You're taking it too far, Frisk." 

    * FIGHT 

    He KNEW Frisk wouldn't dust him, but he still felt hurt they were doing this to him. 

    * FIGHT 

    He KNEW Frisk wouldn't dust him, but he was becoming angry that they were abusing that trust. 

    "Cut it out!" 

    * INSULT 

    "What a crybaby." 

    "STOP IT, CHARA!" 

    He froze. The two of them looked each-other in the eye for a long moment. Frisk didn't look confused or upset. His hands came up to his face and wiped away tears he hadn't meant to shed. He hesitantly threw a fireball that sputtered out before it could even roll out of frame. 

    * CHECK 

    Frisk looked at the results and back at him, a little sad but not like they saw something they didn't expect. He tried to throw out a fireball but it was just a few embers that harmlessly fizzled out. 

    * TALK 

    "I'm not them." 

    "I know." 

    * TALK 

    "But I have the capacity to hurt you just as much if you let me." 

    "..." 

    * TALK 

    "You trust me, but you trusted them too. You love me as a friend, but you loved them too. You gave them your soul and they hurt it. I can hurt it too." 

    "..." 

    * BARGAIN 

    "I can't get you to trust me not to hurt you, but I can get you to trust me to hurt you. I'll kill you right here and now and take your soul and make your wish come true if you want it." 

    "..." 

    * CHECK 

    "..." 

    * TAKE SOUL 

Chapter Text

    Frisk's relief washed over them both. The borders of their encounter melted away as he was spared. Frisk wrapped their arms around themselves in an embrace meant for the extra presence residing inside. 

    Can we ever have one of these moments without it being really dramatic? he joked, eliciting a giggle and a shake of the head. They let go and sat on their knees in the flowerbed, eyes now showing Flowey the space he used to occupy. There was a corpse, for want of a better word. Monsters didn't leave corpses, but he was special. A large plant matter form that resembled his silhouette was slumped on the dirt, and he figured this was what it felt like for humans to look at skeleton monsters. A little grotesque. He was looking at what resided under his skin most of the time. 

    Getting someone to agree to die is one way to lower their defense. But you didn't want that, did you? Frisk shook their head. Of course not. That's why I couldn't agree. 

    "Ha ha, you care about me." The comment earned Frisk a firm shoving back into the flowers, where they let out a content giggle before making themselves sober up. "Seriously though, I was scared you were going to let me do it for a second." 

    Your offer was real? 

    "Yes." 

    A quiet anger diffused from his soul into Frisk's. Frisk chuckled nervously in response. 

    "That's your love for me speaking, right?" 

    You would jeopardize your happy pacifist ending over my stupid whims, you're an idiot. You know what LOVE does to a person. 

    "That's why I was scared." 

    Silence overtook them for a moment while Asriel calmed down. Once Frisk sensed that he had done so, they continued. 

    "Your defense actually went up before I took your soul." 

    What? 

    "I mean, it went down when I was insulting you but it was higher than even before just before I grabbed it." 

    Well, whatever, you got it and that's what matters. 

    A sly grin covered Frisk's face regardless. "Must have been quite the energy spike to compensate." 

    Hey. 

    "I thought a little spike in compassion would work but not THAT well." 

    The soul is a bit more complicated than a set of numbers. 

    "You might love me a little too much. You know we are strictly platonic, right?" 

    I do like you but the way you're acting makes me want to deny it. 

--- 

    The two of them eventually re-entered the house together, Frisk piloting the body since it seemed like the polite thing to do was let them take the lead in their own container. Asriel had summoned some vines to pull his corpse from under the arms, it not being too heavy for them since it was just a big hollow plant. Toriel seemed a bit miffed about dirt getting dragged indoors but she wasn't going to openly complain. She was more interested in examining her merged children, as if there would be any outward signs if there was something wrong with them. As soon as they insisted it was best to get on with this as soon as possible, Asriel took over long enough to pop them into the Ruins via the living room door, Gaster leading Toriel through after them. 

    Toriel looked nostalgic at the old cavern, left to her own devices as the other three set up. Gaster fetched the soul copy from the lab, while Frisk and Asriel looked apprehensively over the stage of their project. When Toriel noticed them looking down at the flowers, she gave them a sad look. 

    "That's where I buried your sibling." 

    "I know." That's why we're here. 

    Frisk monologued internally back at him for the first time. She's going to figure it out. 

    She probably has but wants to keep plausible deniability in case it fails. 

    Gaster came back with the canister and a shovel. 

    And there it goes. I'm gonna have to have you close your eyes for this, Frisk. 

Chapter Text

    Hunched over a dirt hole with their eyes closed, little human hands were guided by bone ones until they rested comfortably on a dirty sweater. Asriel supplied the mental image of Chara from the day they died so Frisk would know what they were pawing at, and to warn them away from wandering their hands too far in any direction lest they want to touch something that had been warped by three hundred years of decomposition. The courtesy might not have occurred to him some time ago, if he had not heard from Alphys about how shocked humans had been to meet the skeleton brothers. He was glad he had, when he felt the revulsion churning in Frisk's stomach. 

    I guess you don't know what it feels like to be anxious in a human body.  

    I have a gut of my own.  

    Then you're mistaking yours for mine.  

    A gentle, thin hand came to touch their back. Frisk didn't like it, felt it was a bit more intimate than they liked from someone they didn't know very well, but they settled down knowing it wasn't directed at them. Asriel made them take a deep breath and nodded, causing the hand to withdraw. It wasn't the time to be having second-guesses, feelings would come after. Frisk agreed, tucking away his hesitation for him in the back of their minds. A helpful ability, yet one that could quickly turn disturbing in the hands of a more malevolent partner, he thought. Frisk responded to that thought with an unnerved amusement. 

    They cleared their minds and recited the steps as Gaster grabbed one of their hands and in it placed the warm, pulsing plasma that was Frisk's soul data. They could feel it pulling a bit towards Frisk, towards its original home, but there was no room for it there so it allowed itself to be pressed against the chest of the sweater below them. There, it began to pull the other way as if it could sense the void it was meant to fill. Reassuring. 

    They pushed the wriggling plasma till it was flush against Chara's chest, and Asriel started affixing it together. It trickled in, the numbers went up-- one hope, two hope, five, twenty, ticking up until the numbers hit maximum. Then something felt off, not about Chara but about them. They felt something rend itself out of Frisk, flowing down their arm and into the cadaver. Frisk told him not to notice, to trust them and forget that sensation-- he couldn't really, but he swallowed down the panic because there were bigger things at stake if they didn't start save stating right now. 

    They opened their eyes and saw each-other, Asriel standing in his own skin again. But they were still connected, this wasn't reality even if it was real. They both knew this place, this feeling, and they didn't even need to look to know they were standing in the gateway between, where they had reset their lives many times each before. And over Frisk's shoulder he saw a similar child, knees to the ground and head limp, not even breathing. He didn't call out, because this just wasn't a place for dialog, but he saw they were slouched over the reset button. Frisk walked over to the CONTINUE prompt, ready to go back to reality exactly as they had left it. He couldn't help but hover a moment more. 

    He knew that sometimes people who were otherwise sane could stand on a bridge and think, with no desire to do so, that they could just jump. He himself was not even close to sane, but while he had no temptation to touch that RESET button it was still... there. With Frisk's determination in his hands, it was more in reach than it had been since they met. It was, for the first time since rehabilitation, a real possibility that he could just go over there and hit it. He wouldn't. But he could. There was something immensely satisfying settling inside him as he passed it by to join Frisk, like an ex-alcoholic turning down a drink at a party. He didn't need it anymore, didn't want it anymore, and for the first time he wouldn't touch it purely because he chose not to and not because it wasn't even a possibility. Frisk looked proud of him as they kicked their lives back in motion. 

    And promptly toppled forward into the grave. A moment of panic and disgust radiated from Frisk before they realized it was empty, just a dirt hole surrounded by displaced buttercups. Toriel was the one to rush over and pull them up, she herself looking pretty weathered and disheveled. 

    "Where did they go?" they both asked as they brushed dirt off their face and out of their hair. Toriel and Gaster were at a complete loss, neither of them having seen anything strange occur until Frisk had fallen into the hole.  

    Where were they before they died? Get out of my body and go there.  

    Asriel agreed, glad to find Frisk was more reliable than any preteen was allowed to be. He took over, raising their arms and stirring up magic like he had done once before, handing it off to Frisk so they could expel him from their body and send him home. Their vision flashed white and he awoke where his plant construct had laid, feeling very stiff but shrugging it off-- until he tripped over himself because his legs now felt too long and his body a bit lighter than he remembered. He forced himself to stop being in such a rush and got up more slowly and acclimated to being the master of his own form again. He nodded to Frisk, knowing they would give the other two the short of what they had been thinking before separation, and started out the Ruin entryway to cut quickly to New Home, the last place Chara had been before he took their soul. 

    It was deathly quiet, which it should have been except for the fact he really wanted someone to be disturbing the place. He headed towards the hallway containing all the bedrooms to find his own old shared bedroom door cracked open. His heart skipped and he rushed inside only to find nobody around. But the sheets were disturbed, and there was a pool of vomit leaking off the bedside. Disgusting, but elating! Chara had been here! ...And was still ill. He cursed internally. 

    And then he was falling face first back into a dirt hole. He felt Frisk with him, shocked as he was, and soon Toriel was back above them and pulling them out as they ruminated in silent horror. 

    It wasn't me, they both told each-other and knew it to be true. They released Asriel back into his body again and he acclimated much faster, headed back to New Home much faster. When he looked down the hallway the bedroom door was open again, but that meant Chara had already left, in even more of a hurry this time as they had managed to trail vomit out into the hall. It trailed towards him, towards the entry hall, so he suspected they had passed through to the living room. That room was empty, so he passed through to the kitchen and his heart leapt. The cascade of brown bobbed hair on the back of Chara's head was unmistakable. It was frazzled as if they had been in bed for a week-- which he supposed they had, if he remembered correctly-- and their striped shirt was askew in a way the tidy old Chara would rarely suffer, but still. He was about to call out to their back when he saw at their feet a trickle of blood, and a knife clatter onto the floor as it had been dropped from their hands. His eyes widened and they slumped forward into the countertop. 

    "Ch-chara?" his voice trembled, snapping their sibling out of whatever mindset they had been in to not to notice him there. Wide, frightened eyes circled around to him before they grew hazy and Chara collapsed, smacking their head on the counter and giving themselves a concussion. 

    He managed to stop himself and Frisk falling into the grave this time, but he was making their hands tremble for a different reason. Frisk felt his panic and shock and dug into his mind for an answer as to why. He quickly shut them out and stopped their probing before they could see something really unpleasant. Again, they separated and he rushed away, this time cutting right to the kitchen to head Chara off. But they weren't there. He waited a moment, but they didn't come. He began to traverse the house back to the entry all and through to the bedroom and this time Chara was there, an unfortunate third bout of vomiting making it all the way to the floor this time. They were trembling but sitting up, clawing at their chest. When he opened the door they looked up, exhausted as they should be and looking downright miserable. 

    "Did you... do this to me?" they asked. Asriel nodded, his latent fantasies of a joyful reunion already wiped from possibility in his mind with the way Chara was looking at him. Their scowl rivalled any their mother could come up with. The hand clawing at their chest became desperate. "Take it out," they growled, "Get it out of me." Their nails dragged over the cloth harmlessly, but something about the motion hurt Asriel's heart anyway when he remembered the blood that had been trickling from there just before. 

    "Did you bring me back to suffer? Is this revenge?" Asriel felt horror creeping up his throat but he couldn't respond, spellbound, feeling his nightmares crawling into his ears rather than the voice of his beloved sibling. He stepped forward anyway. "Or are you so naive that you thought this would make me happy?" He pushed closer even though he felt like he was about to cry. "Or did you not care? Did you just want to see what would happen?" He froze, stricken at the core of his anxieties, but Chara coughed once and the vulnerability of it broke him out of his reverie and he completed his journey to the bedside. There, he collapsed onto Chara and wrapped his fuzzy arms around them. He felt them still their hand and shudder, leaning into him and stilling. 

    "...Don't cry, you know I hate it when you cry." 

    He didn't entertain their request. 

Chapter Text

    Frisk was doing what damage control they could with Toriel, assuring her that nothing had gone horribly wrong to cause Asriel's behavior. The skeleton they didn't know as well how to deal with, but he didn't press very hard for information past an assurance the exercise had likely succeeded. Though he seemed put out by how the aftermath had played out, there was zero chance he recognized he had gone through two extra resets and a little odd behavior was no reason for him to think of it.  

    Frisk knew from experience that time travelling had this odd ability to convince people it wasn't happening. Deja-vu happened but people would just shrug it off like an intrusive thought or a passing craving. Sometimes when Frisk felt especially bitter, they thought of it as a kind of defensive reflex to avoid the cosmic horror of predetermination. Goodness knew the truth had affected themselves, Asriel, and Sans poorly enough. In fact, once in the middle of the night shortly after returning to the surface it had occurred to them that maybe they weren't so immune to such self-imposed blind spots. Sure, they remembered their first day in the Underground-- the tense harvesting of LOVE they would never be able to forget-- but they also felt like somewhere in the middle they had blacked out a timeline here and there. Where they consciously knew they spent maybe a few weeks reliving the same day in the Underground, they felt older than that. Much older. When they spoke to those who should be their peers they felt like they were out of place. Originally, they had put it down to them seeing a bit too much, but then there were the times where they didn't know where certain behaviors came from. Like the first time Toriel let them use a knife in the kitchen, they had been praised for how they handled it and the way they carved through the carrots and the smell of the puree they made of it had brought other things to their senses-- a deafening drone and the stale, mossy smell of decaying stone. Why did it overcome them with nostalgia? They deigned not to think about it. 

    Soon they were able to excuse themselves for a moment via the ringing of their phone. they were surprised to see a number that they had only ever used to re-negotiate pick-up times and that kind of thing-- Sans preferred to speak face to face, and it was a preference he could afford to keep since he had no respect for the rules of space, so long as Frisk wasn't in the middle of after-school club or the like. Obviously, he was calling because he had no idea where Frisk was, in this case. They picked up. 

    "hey kiddo, asriel left his phone at your house. did you go to brunch or something?" Frisk shook their head, knowing Sans would hear it somehow. He and Papyrus were weird like that. "well are you still together? i need to talk to him or doc g." 

    Frisk gestured at the requested party and put it on speakerphone. They didn't want to be excluded. Sans didn't seem to mind so much, since he went on with what he had to say anyway. 

    "i just got an activity spike from my anomaly monitor just now, a pocket about five minutes long just appeared out of nowhere. we're having this conversation for the first time now, because the finite pocket booted back from the end of the five-minute period and there hasn't been a boot back from after that yet." 

    No wonder Sans didn't mind them listening in, it would have gone over their head if they weren't a little wiser than they should have been, if they hadn't learned a bit about Sans and then made him forget it incidentally in a previous life. When had Sans told them all that anyway? It must have been when they got the key from him, that was the only time that made sense. 

    "And if there is a next time, this conversation will go differently and we will know we are trapped in finite time and how long. Good insight. But not necessary, because we caused the anomaly." 

    "oh, uh, wow, you're kinda casual about ripping apart space-time," Sans let out a humorless laugh. Gaster didn't seem to notice, probably deep in thought but even with Frisk's extended experience with monsters' strange expressions it would always be hard to read a skeleton's face with surety.  

    "It should have been seamless, however, not something any device should have been able to pick up. What were the timestamps of the beginning and end of the anomaly?" Sans told him, and he peered at the clock on the face of Frisk's phone and nodded. "The start point was when we made our alteration. Frisk, you were joined with Asriel, did he time travel?" 

    Frisk shook their head. Given Asriel's reactions, he was as shocked as they were. Frisk had no doubt of it. 

    "Then it was Chara. Who knows what happened in those five minutes to make them do it, however. Whatever it was, Asriel must have solved it because we are not looping again right now as evidenced by this conversation." 

    "you seem to know more about this than i do now. nice change of pace for me, honestly." A pause came and they could hear Sans fiddling with something else, clanking against the plastic case of his phone as he handles both. "...well i'm not reading a potential complete collapse of reality like last time, so just give me a heads up next time you do this so i don't have a heart attack." 

    "You don't have a heart," Frisk chimed in. 

    "ouch kid, takes one to know one," he teased, clearly knowing they meant it literally, before hanging up. Frisk felt a light tension leave them, having escaped a conversation with Sans about time hopping without getting outed and then brutally pranked for once. Now there was room for them to feel anxious about Asriel's absence. It was obvious he had been deeply unsettled just before he last departed, and well... Frisk wasn't ignorant. There were a couple ways to engage a reset, but who would want to redo just five minutes? Frisk had never reset five minutes after a reset except in once scenario: dying fantastically quickly. Usually to Undyne, who was quite close to their save point for that encounter. It didn't make total sense to them yet, but it was the most likely reason their experience accounted for. 

    Asriel finally returned. On his back was a limp, tired looking child probably their own age and geez did they look awful. Their skin was blistering in patches around their mouth and they looked absolutely resigned, with vomit staining their sweater and hair looking like it had been sweat into for days and rubbed into a pillow. 

    "We need to take them to a human hospital," Asriel told his mother, who was caught between tear-eyed shock and the drive to get into action and do just that. Soon they had all landed back at Toriel's house and the goat family was packing into the car, Gaster making hurried promises to look after Frisk. They made sure to grab Asriel's forgotten phone, which was laden with missed calls from Sans on the home screen, and pushed it on him before they left. His "thank you" was probably for more than just the phone, but Frisk wasn't ready to accept that thankfulness yet. Not when they weren't sure this was all a good thing. Not when it looked like they had just helped bring Chara back just to die again, and maybe trap them in an infinite loop reliving Chara's death day forever. 

    Gaster was looking at them funny. What was it? Perceptiveness? 

    "Don't worry, even if the human doctors don't know how to deal with it, Asriel would probably spend as many lifetimes as he needed to find the cure." 

    Frisk nodded agreeably, unable to relinquish the skeleton of his ignorance. That was the kind of thing Frisk would worry about, not be relieved for. 

--- 

    The weight of his baggage wasn't something Asriel could put on Chara's shoulders when they were wilting like that. He was secretly a little indignant he had been forced into a position where it simply wasn't the right time to talk-- Chara wasn't even awake now, having been given treatment that was apparently exhausting them enough to sleep through what had, three hundred years ago, reduced them to a painful writhing. Surely the pain was still there, at least they got to forget it for a while this time. He needed desperately to talk about where they were now and to know why Chara had carved their own heart out in their kitchen. But no, not in front of Toriel and not while they were fighting for their life. 

    Toriel was pretty absorbed in her own emotional tumult, staying at the bedside and gripping the rail. She would probably only leave to fulfil her obligations after he promised to watch over Chara with equal amounts of vigil, he supposed. And he would convince her, but maybe for the wrong reasons. To monopolize any of Chara's time out of a selfish need to know what the hell he had gotten himself into. Because of all his imaginings of how this day would pan out, all of them were less terrifying than this-- knowing and understanding nothing about the "five" minutes Chara had been back from the grave. 

    He squashed down his frustration as much as he could and decided to take a sitting nap to pass the time just a little closer to when his heart wouldn't be this vexed. 

--- 

    His phone vibrated at him in the late night, Toriel now asleep herself at the other side of the hospital bed. It was Frisk's number, but when he got out of the room and picked up it was Gaster who spoke to him. 

    "Hey, are things alright?" 

    "Chara is likely to live," Asriel said with not nearly as much heart as news like that should be delivered with. 

    "Good, but are things alright with you specifically?" 

    He remembered that he could peer over the line and see his unguarded face. He cursed internally and sobered up his expression. "Last time we did this both of us died, and this time only one of us almost died, so things are already improved." 

    Gaster hummed. "Sans came back to the house and we spoke a bit more about his research-- if you can call it that, it's not exactly based in the scientific method," he began, and went, and didn't stop going for a while. Asriel was listening, understanding, and his mood gradually improved. Everything he was told was pretty clinical and comfortable, and he realized partway that this was Gaster trying to relieve his mind. How did he know he would be awake and brooding this late? How did he know he needed this? Those levels of personal insight unnerved him in a way, familiar to him as a tool of manipulation, but what pervaded him mostly was a sense of comfort he sorely needed. Of course, he was sure Gaster also just wanted to talk science. But eventually he ran out. He muttered his thanks and Gaster tactfully didn't acknowledge it with more than a smile on the other end of the line. 

    He was surprised to find Chara sitting up when he returned. Well, slouched and occasionally stifling wracking coughs. They noticed him come in and immediately gave him glare of anger. It confused and saddened him but he came and retook his seat anyway. 

    "Who were you talking to?" they asked. 

    "A friend of mine, Gaster," he replied to their apparent displeasure. 

    "Don't leave me," they demanded. It was a tone he had heard before, but the emotional response it stirred in him was unlike one he had addressed it with before. They noticed, and they looked even more angrily back. "Don't look at me like that, what right do you have?" He was paralyzed at the jaw again. His courage was snuffing out. 

    "You were asleep," he bargained guiltily. 

    "So, you abandoned me for your own comfort, again. At least I know where we stand." 

    They huffily turned over to face Toriel and work out a bout of coughing and Asriel was left feeling lost and crushed, and unable to approach Chara at all about the entire day. 

Chapter Text

    Things were tense and Chara didn't speak directly to him as much as he would have liked, but he did stay with them the duration of the hospital stay. They were discharged quickly enough, once they went through an examination and were prescribed some medicines and given a couple dietary recommendations to avoid exacerbating their condition. They already looked less sickly but purged their breakfast before they reached lunch so were clearly not. It was a hurdle to let the humans release Chara into his care, but they genuinely could not identify Chara's carer-- of course not, because anyone worth calling their carer was a goat monster or had died a couple hundred years ago. 

    On that account, he wondered if there was any culture shock going on in Chara's closed mind. He didn't know what humankind was like three hundred years ago except for what one could gleam from the trash that passed through Waterfall, but monster kind had changed tons. He himself had a time adjusting even as a flower. Monsters themselves didn't change too much in any essential way, but technology did. In fact, it had occurred to him too late that whatever Chara heard from beyond a door should have been plenty confusing-- what did they know about cellphones? Nothing, presumably. Monsters didn't have them before they died. 

    He could have transported them anywhere immediately, but he walked them instead. This was his chance to sequester them and finally have some kind of discussion about what happened. He had spent the morning working up the courage and prioritizing the questions. However, he wasn't able to start his script before Chara did what Chara did best and surprised him. 

    "Asriel," they called him, voice less harsh than it had been so far, and indicated the floral pagoda not far outside the hospital. He agreeably followed them to it to sit down, and they continued their streak of baffling the heck out of him. "I'm sorry." 

    "You are?" he exclaimed. Chara had never apologized to him for anything before, ever. They had never apologized to anyone as far as he knew. 

    "You've been distressed and I have been feeding that distress knowingly because I was upset with you. It was petty." 

    "Oh," he gaped. His heart was filling up with relief. There was still a relationship here, Chara wouldn't apologize if they didn't want anything to do with him again. "I'm sorry too, for, you know." Chara shook their head. 

    "Don't be, I shouldn't have wagered my life on a losing bet. I think deep down I knew you wouldn't go through with it." 

    That rubbed him the wrong way. He was quickly forgetting all the questions he had originally wanted to ask. "So you regret the plan failing? Even though we're here now anyway, under the sun?" 

    He couldn't understand the look Chara gave him and they said nothing, apparently disinterested in pursuing this line of introspection and quickly derailing it. 

    "Why did you change my soul, Asriel?" 

    "It was... part of the process to bring you back." 

    "I see." They looked thoughtful until a few coughs scratched their way out of them, and he had to simply rub their back for a while was they powered through it. Once they could take a breath they continued. "I thought you were trying to change me because of what happened." 

    "How did you even know there was a difference?" he furrowed his brows, "In five minutes no less. We expected some minor change, but..." 

    Chara looked like they were going to answer something, but they slowed to a freeze before their eyes widened and went to their chest, their neck, and they looked up at him with a genuine panic he wasn't used to any more than apologies. 

    "My locket, where's my locket?" they heaved, suddenly jerking around to let loose some more watery vomit into the flowerbeds of the pagoda. He cringed a little. 

    "I have it, at home in the lab." Chara stumbled to their feet and grabbed his hand, pulling him to his feet. But before they could make much progress to wherever they thought they were going, he anchored himself and stopped them. "If you want to go get it that badly, I can get us there in a flash." Chara nodded and seemed to calm down to a reasonable level of distress over the missing jewelry. Before he could lead them to a door to use as a gateway Chara reached up and groped his shirt, pulling him down to their level (even with the added plant matter humans were just physically so much stronger than monsters) and reaching inside to pull his own locket out and lay it on the outside of his shirt. 

    "Don't hide it, it's proof you're MY best friend." Asriel laughed and nodded in agreement before leading the two of them to the closest store, not caring at how confused the keeper would be to hear the bell chime and have nobody enter. 

    They landed in the lab and Chara gave it a glance around, still clearly anxious but able to be simultaneously curious about the space. Suddenly he was nervous about what his living space said about him in a way Alphys or Sans's gaze hadn't. Chara had seemed a little envious of Gaster before, what would they have to say about so intimately sharing a space together? Their sharing of books and work? His parents had made him a little self-conscious about his closeness with Gaster, but Chara made him especially nervous for some reason. He went to the bookshelf he kept the locket and retrieved it for them, and when he turned back Chara was holding the container of DT from the workbench. He wasn't alarmed, but of all the things that could have piqued Chara's curiosity he expected this the least. 

    "Careful with that, it's kind of dangerous," he warned, and Chara looked at him with a fond amusement but put it down regardless in order to receive their precious locket necklace. They brushed it with their fingers, finding not a tiny bit of dirt budged because Asriel had been taking good care of it since he retrieved it from New Home. They kissed it fondly before putting it over their head, and Asriel couldn't help but feel immense pleasure about it.  

    "Do you remember when you gave me this?" Chara asked, loving nostalgia brimming from their voice. Asriel hummed and nodded in the affirmative-- he had dreamt himself through the memory not long ago after all. "Do you remember your promise?" He nodded again. "Good. Then you'll have no problem reverting this alteration."  

    He became confused and more than a little bit unsettled. "What, why?" 

    Chara was patient with his implied disobedience. "Because this isn't the way my heart should be." 

    He hesitated. "Is having love, hope, and compassion not strictly a good thing? Why not try it out a little at least?" 

    "You said you would be those things for me," Chara smiled, and it chilled him for some reason. 

    "I didn't think it was literal, I thought you were just a bit depressed," his mind turned to an unpleasant topic, but the one he had been hoping to address in the beginning and this was his chance to, so he did. "Not to mention that hope is what stopped you from dying in the kitchen yesterday." Chara's insincere smile faded away into a cold stare. 

    "It's also WHY I died in the kitchen yesterday." 

    Asriel's heart seized at the implication that in some way that dead timeline had been his own fault for stitching it into Chara's heart. Chara didn't let up just because of that, however. 

    "I'll only ever tell YOU this, because you're my best friend, okay? I was born with a perfectly normal human soul. I chose to remove those parts, and I was happier for it, so please do right by me and take it out." 

    "That... that's insane, are you serious?" He grabbed Chara's shoulders and seemed to surprise them immensely. "How? And why would you butcher your heart like that?"  

    Chara's reaction was, yet again, completely unexpected. Chara wasn't one he knew to raise their voice or cry or really get upset or even passionate about anything, and he never saw them snap quite like this. They swatted him off them angrily. 

    "Asriel you have KNOWN what is like to have this power, why do you THINK I wouldn't want it?" 

    He backed off, gravity pulling the puzzle together in his mind finally. He felt foolish, and not. In fairness, the idea that Chara had ever experienced the power had not crossed his mind once Gaster had explained Chara's lack of Hope because how could he have speculated that that wasn't simply always the case? On the other hand, Chara had come back and de-terminated more than once of their own volition and hadn't been phased by it at all. The first time for him had been downright disorienting, he had doubted the previous reality had even happened even though he remembered it like he would a previous day and not as a dream. The second time he did it he was naturally unsure it would even work. Chara had killed themselves maybe twice in ten minutes with zero hesitation. His sibling was hacking their way through some coughs, clearly distressed but eventually managing to speak. 

    "Your monster soul doesn't need determination, and mine doesn't need hope. We can break out of this cycle just by discarding these parts and moving on. Don't complicate it, it's not as nuanced as you think it is." 

    He almost nodded in resignation. Almost. But he held back when a particular thought occurred to him, one concern he needed assuaged badly before he could entertain anything else. 

    "Maybe, but first... do you mind telling me how you knew I had the power?" 

    Chara's subsequent anger was directed inwards. They made a frustrated click. 

    "Another reason compassion and love are a joke, they make you stupid when you get emotional."