Chapter Text
Blood. There’s so much of it. It’s in my lungs, it’s in my throat, my mouth, my eyes, it hurts, I can’t breathe, why can’t I breathe-?
Frisk shoots bolt upright. They're laying in a bed of flowers, and their skin is starting to itch as the flowers poke through the gaps between the knit of their sweater. Their heartbeat echoes in their ears, remnants of the strange dream they’d just had. They rub their throat, still feeling the blistering heat in their windpipe.
They stand, scratching at their arms. Are they allergic to these flowers? Sure feels like it…
The dream lingers in the back of their mind as they make their way forward in this unfamiliar and weirdly well lit cave. No matter what else they focus on, they can’t seem to shake it, and they can still hear their heartbeat beating steadily.
“Howdy! I’m Flowey! Flowey the flower!” The voice of a young boy says. “Jumpy today, aren’t we, haha! Nearly spooked you out of your skin there!”
Thump, thump.
Thump thump.
Frisk had indeed jolted back when we heard the new voice. Looking over the room, there’s no other person in there, so where did it-?
“Ahem. Down here,” the boy’s voice says again, mildly irritated.
Looking down, there’s a flower with a face. A real face, not googly eyes and a mouth drawn on in sharpie, or whatever other thing Frisk might’ve expected to see. The flower blinks and smiles, leaning in closer. “There you go! Took you a moment, huh, human?”
Frisk walks towards it. “You’re… Talking to me.”
“Sure am, buddy. What, never seen a talking flower before?” Flowey asks.
Frisk shakes their head.
Thump thump.
The beating continues. That’s… Strange. They put a hand over their heart. It’s out of time. The heartbeat they’re hearing isn’t their own.
They still feel it in their own body. It tugs at them, in their limbs. It’s steady. It’s slow. It’s… wrong, something’s wrong with that heartbeat. Whose is it? Is it m-
“Are the caves alive?” Frisk asks instead.
Flowey laughs. “What are you talking about, ‘are the caves alive’? No, silly. The caves aren’t alive. Why would you ask that?”
“The heartbeat in the walls.”
Flowey squints at them, his face dropping the friendly facade for a second. “The what.”
“You don’t hear it?”
Flowey looks at them incredulously and then seems to realize he’s doing it and goes back to smiling brightly. “No, silly. Maybe you’re just hearing things! How hard did you hit your head on the way down?”
His voice drips with falsified concern, but he has a point. If the fall knocked them out, gave them that weird dream… Maybe it’ll go away soon. Their head does feel a little off, they suppose, and their thoughts are strangely louder than normal. Also, this is a talking flower. Something weird is going on here.
They shake their head, trying to clear the echoes. “Harder than I thought, I guess…”
“Cheer up, buddy! Here, let me show you something cool,” Flowey says beckoning them a little closer. They take a few steps forward and feel their breath get sucked right out of their lungs.
They gasp for a second, trying to regain their breath. “Wha-?”
“This is your soul, the very culmination of your being!” Flowey smiles, the glowing red reflecting in his eyes and revealing a dull, hollow look behind them and the too wide smile.
The edges of their perception grow weak and fuzzy, their vision starts to spot.
They reach out for it, but it is just slightly too far out of their reach.
“Neat, isn’t it? It’s pretty bright! I’ve never seen a human soul with this much determination,” Flowey pulls the soul further away and Frisk can feel their body lurching forward with it, trying to get it back, their chest aching at its absence. “But I’m sure you know what a human soul looks like.”
Coughing up blood. Vines sprouting inside my lungs, the thorns tearing up my throat as they come back up-
They shudder as their soul is returned to them. Flowey is nowhere to be seen,
They feel fine… what just happened? We remember Flowey turning suddenly and attacking them, but I didn’t see any of it-
Frisk jumps again at Toriel. “I am the caretaker of the ruins…”
The heartbeat continues to follow them through the ruins as Toriel leads them through and eventually leaves. Their skin still itches, so they take a minute to wade through one of the rivers going through the puzzles in the ruins. It helps. Maybe they are allergic to those flowers.
They let Toriel take them into her house. The heartbeat continues to follow them in, seemingly not confined to the cave walls. Despite this, the warm lighting and the crackling fireplace is pleasant. They're almost able to ignore the ever present and ever growing feeling of being watched. Being seen.
They sit with her near the fire and let her read to them.
Thump, thump.
They lean their head on her knee, letting their eyes close peacefully as her voice, kind and loving, washes over them. It’s a tone that they’ve never been spoken to in before. It feels more like she’s talking to someone else, talking to her own child, rather than some kid she took into her home.
They’re not sure why they ask, but they feel compelled, “Did you ever have your own kids?”
She looks down at them, frowning. “My child, you are my own now.”
Frisk shakes their head, looking away. “No, I mean, like… Real kids.”
“Blood does not make a family,” Toriel says gently.
“But did you?” Frisk presses.
“I have had others, yes,” Toriel doesn’t seem satisfied with the fact that she has to give in, but I’m sure she knows from experience that this is not a battle she can win so easily.
“What were they like?” Frisk asks, more attentive to this than the storybook she had been reading.
“My first, he… He was creative. He loved playing make believe with his older sibling. They could spend hours out in the gardens of our old home, just playing their game of pretend,” Toriel looks wistful, the memory fond.
“How did he have an older sibling if he was your first?” Frisk asks curiously.
Toriel pats their head. “They were adopted. Not even six months older than him, and they found that so funny. Goodness, how they teased him for it.”
Yes, they can that in their head so clearly. They can close their eyes and picture his face-
Crying.
His jaw is falling apart.
There’s a hole in his face, it’s expanding-
Their eyes shoot open again.
Toriel doesn’t even seem to notice. “My eldest, they… They were pessimistic, but they were always so smart. They had so much to give. Sometimes… I think they gave too much. …. The flowers, below the entrance you came through…. They only started growing after my eldest was…”
She blinks tears out of her eyes, the liquid soaking into the fur below. “Ah, I am sorry. It’s been so long, but I will never stop grieving for them.”
“O-oh..” Frisk says, regretting asking.
“It’s alright, my child. Here, it is getting late. You should be off to bed now,” Toriel stands, guiding Frisk to their new bedroom.
At the door she kneels to face them eye to eye. “Goodnight. Sleep well.”
“Thank you. You too,” Frisk lets her pull them into a hug.
They part for the night and Frisk settles into bed. The steady beating of the strange heart in the walls even manages to lull them to sleep.
It’s all over me. I can’t feel the misfired bullets in my body, I can’t feel anything from that body anymore. But I can almost, almost, feel the blood, thickened by the fine powdery dust, caking into my hair, around my eyes, leaving a trail of drops in the grass to be washed away with the next rain.
He hunches over the body. He’s trying to stop the bullets from hitting me. It’s too late for that. You can’t help me anymore.
I’m already-
There’s a hand in their ribcage, grasping the bones, shoving them out of their places, trying to tug their soul out of their chest. They feel the fingers pulling through their lungs, leaving their fingerprints stained on the inside of their body.
Red eyes stare into their grey, blood falling out of a half decayed mouth and onto Frisk’s face. Their hands are still inside Frisk’s organs, hot enough to burn. Strands of hair fall over their face like the thick blood over their skin, the white collar of their shirt. There are bullet holes all over their rotting body, and vines growing their way through skin, tearing a hole through their clothes, giving Frisk a clear view inside their chest cavity, their lungs expanding and contracting, their heart beating slowly, steadily, in time with the rhythm in the walls, in the floor, the off beat pulsing Frisk feels in their arms and legs.
The heartbeat you’re hearing is mine.
Frisk struggles against the corpse, unmoving save for the involuntary impulses of the body, trying to keep alive something that’s already dead. It doesn’t even seem to see them, eyes blank and clouded over. Dead in every way, except for the heart.
Thump thump.
Thump thump.
Frisk is pinned to the bed. Blood falls out of the gashes the vines emerge from, and, to a lesser extent, the bullet holes. It pools in the bedsheets, weighs down the blankets, dampens Frisk’s own clothes.
This is how I die, you think.
And as soon as that thought crosses Frisk’s mind, the body starts to fall away, just like the face of the boy in their head. Crumbling to dust. They get out of bed as quickly as they can, stumbling as far away from it as they can possibly manage. I need to get out.
The heartbeat taunts them as they push through the front door, but there is no back yard to escape into, the house is built into the cave wall. How is anyone supposed to leave-? They can’t go back inside the house, they just can’t-
I’m still here with you.
The basement. That was the only place in the house they hadn’t gone. Maybe there’s something down there, some way to leave. There had to be. For their sanity, there had to be.
They press past the feeling of being watched, of being followed.
Why won’t it leave? Please leave me alone.
Through the basement, struggling to open the heavy door at the end, and making a break for it down the long hallway.
…. It’s quiet, save for Frisk’s breathing.
And the heartbeat out of time with their own.