Chapter Text
Two silhouettes stand against a backdrop of blinding light.
You feel like you could stay in this golden hallway forever. No, forever’s come and gone; all that’s left is you and him and here. All you can do is lunge ever forward, ever towards him as he side-steps your advances. There is nothing else. You don’t know if there ever will be anything else, or if the two of you will be locked in this dance forever, following the same steps for eternity. (Despite his words, you think maybe that’s not so bad.)
Here, time and place are both foreign concepts. You’re not sure if you can even consider yourself you anymore. Is it always the same you respawning at that shadowed doorway, or does someone else take your place every time? One version of you left to rot in the emptiness of death, while another is created to try again–an endless cycle of death and rebirth, born from the ashes of monsters and determination. Are you really the same person you were at the start of all this?
No, you suppose not. You used to be a whole lot worse at evading his attacks, for one.
An infinite number of yous, an infinite number of Sanses, an infinity of infinities, and yet…
It’s always the same.
“It’s a beautiful day outside. Birds are singing, flowers are blooming…”
You’ve heard this all before, so many times you’ve memorized it. You’ve memorized all of it, up until he starts dropping hints about a special attack. (Then, without fail, he slams you to the ground until your bones shatter and your Soul splinters and there's nothing left to do but reload.)
His words go by maddeningly slow. Each syllable is drawn out to maximum length, as if his speech was going by letter by letter rather than in whole words. From your perspective, it almost feels like he’s taunting you with his deliberateness. (You bite your lip, feel the skin tear, taste the metallic tang of blood. You are so tired.)
He might be. You wouldn’t put it past him.
“on days like these, kids like you…”
You tense, bracing yourself for his attack.
Despite the sheer number of times you’ve faced it, he still manages to get you from time to time. You wonder if that’s a testament to his strength or if you’re just that bad. Probably the latter, you decide; after all, he is the easiest enemy. If you could only touch him…
His left eye bursts with citrine-cyan light, and the atmosphere crackles with the force of magic; bones materialize out of thin air to tear you asunder–but you’re already off the floor, throwing yourself through the air, the current of your Soul tugging your body in and around the lattices of his attack. You weave up and down, side to side, without a scrape. Seamlessly, you sprint and duck and dodge the beams of light sent to incinerate you. One wrong move, and ash’d be all that’s left of you.
You know the pattern. You’ve seen it enough times. Sometimes he plays with his words, tries to throw you off, and sometimes it works, but ultimately it’s all the same. Your moves, his moves… They’re all just variations upon a theme that you’ve spent plenty of time picking apart.
Just before it’s your turn, he looks you dead in the eye. Your heart skips a beat.
“here we go.”
It tires him more to bend the rules and dodge your attacks than it does for him to attack you, so you go on the offensive most of the time, only heal when your body is hardly in any position to keep fighting, when your limbs are hanging limply off your body and there’s swathes of crimson spread across the golden tiles. It helps that you’ve stopped paying attention to what he’s saying, for the most part; why bother when you’ve got it down almost verbatim? (You are so tired.)
“that’s your fault, isn’t it?”
“you can’t know how this feels. knowing one day, without warning…”
“or is that just a poor excuse for being lazy? hell if i know.”
“i can’t afford not to care anymore.”
Words blend into words; bones blur into walls. Skip, skip, skip! Jump, jump, jump! Your breath is starting to come in harder. Your heart is pounding hard against your chest. You were never the most athletic person before this, and despite how much experience you might gain from your many reloads, your actual physical body doesn’t change from the you at the save point. If you weren’t mainly powered through your Soul and determination, if monsters weren’t fragile beings formed of magic and dust, you would never have made it this far. Instead, you ignore your body’s limits–the beating of your heart, the breathlessness, the burning in your muscles. You keep attacking, knowing what he’s going to say, knowing he’s going to dodge, knowing it won’t do anything–he can’t keep at it forever, he can’t keep at it forever, he can’t
(But you can, and he knows it, and he keeps going anyway. Maybe you’re not so different after all.)
The world is little more than a confused mess of white, yellow, blue, black–
–
–
and red.
How careless of you; you slip up. A stray bone smashes against your skull, you lose your balance, and suddenly you’re plunging into a sea of bones, and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts and all you can do is hurt and roll and move, for fuck’s sake, move. Your eyes are fuzzy and unfocused. You still can’t seem to catch your breath. Everything feels too hot, too tight; you’re suddenly claustrophobic, a trapped consciousness slowly leaking out of a too-small body. Blood, your blood, drips onto the floor, and you hope, vaguely, you don’t slip in that too. It’s thick and red and sticky like the ketchup Sans drinks, and you imagine, briefly, his teeth on your skin, his grin stained scarlet.
It hurts.
It hurts.
You feel exhilarated.
You’d thought you’d lost your perception of pain a long time ago. In another life, in a place not far in distance but time. As you died again and again at the hands of a man who desperately wished he didn’t have to kill you.
You’re straining yourself now. You jump off a platform with a bit too much haste, and as you hit the ground, your shoulder twists out of its socket with a disgustingly familiar pop. You don’t flinch. You don’t scream. It doesn’t even bother you. Instead, you keep moving, keep dodging, wait for the right moment to pop it back into place and shove a piece of snow down your throat. Its cold numbs you all the way down.
(you made a snowman really happy.)
A little bit of life comes back to you after a moment, but the bleeding doesn’t stop. You kind of miss the bandage, if only as a fashion statement.
He’s brought out the skulls again, and it’s bright, it’s too bright, it’s too much for your aching head, where are the goddamn blinds? The light outside is reflected onto the seemingly spotless tiles and there’s sunspots everywhere and you’re wondering how there’s sunlight when you’re underground (that’s obvious, asshole, it’s magic, like everything else). The room is superheated as Sans sets off explosion after explosion; everything is a haze from a mix of heat, light exposure, and blood loss. You’re half-tempted to down another snowball the next chance you get, but as luck would have it, you never make it that far.
You realize it’s over when you hear a blast go off point-blank, and then there’s nothing but the heat and the ringing in your ears and it’s like your entire Soul’s been dropped straight into a vat of boiling acid.
His pain is different, a kind that you know in your bones you will never get used to. It’s more than just hurting. It’s a thousand needles being pressed individually into your skin; it’s the countless tiny impacts of a sea being emptied, drop by drop, between your eyes; it’s soft, pure, white dust, coating your feet, your hands, your face, until it’s filled your lungs and you can’t breathe–
You feel your sins crawling on your back.
Against Sans, even a small scrape can mean death. But against you, even death is just a reload.