Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The full moon hung big and silver in the sky, bloated on its own light, and beneath it something bleated and screamed until the sound tore itself raw.

On the lower hill the young sheep lay in the grass, a lamb really, its legs twitching in rhythms that didn't match anything properly living anymore. Blue Moon's bare hands were buried wrist-deep in its stomach, wool flying away in clumps that caught the breeze and tumbled down the slope like dandelion seeds, except these ones were matted and dark. He punched it, his small fist connecting again and again, his knuckles splitting against ribs that had already caved in minutes ago. The stone next to him gleamed, smooth river rock that fit perfectly in his palm, and he grabbed it without thinking because his hands knew what they wanted before his head caught up.

The first blow cracked across the lamb's skull and the sound was wrong, too hollow, like breaking pottery. The second splattered, and the third made his whole arm shake from the impact. Blood sprayed across his face in hot flecks, dots of it freckling his nasal ridge, catching on his teeth when his mouth fell open to breathe. It soaked into his dungarees in dark blooms spreading across faded denim that had been blue once, maybe, before years of farm work had beaten the color into something closer to grey.

He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, clumsy and smearing, cursed at the corpse beneath him.

"You deserve it!"

The words came out strangled, his voice cracking on the syllables.

"You deserve it!"

Louder this time, spitting the consonants.

"You deserve it!"

A shriek that echoed down the hillside and got swallowed by the rice paddies below.

This was practice. He knew that, had known it when he'd first lured the lamb away from the pen, when he'd felt its trust radiate up through its skull as it followed him into the dark. Practice for when he'd finally be strong enough to do this to something that mattered, to someone who looked at him sideways or whispered behind cupped hands or told him to put his gloves back on before he touched anything important. The full moon poured power into his bones like liquid mercury, cold and heavy but still never quite enough. Still too weak. Always too weak.

They were scared. The villagers, Toriel, even Dawn sometimes when he thought Blue wasn't looking. They saw what he could do and they locked it away behind gardening gloves and rules about where he was allowed to stand, which crops he could tend, which animals he could feed. He had potential, raw and enormous, could feel it writhing under his ribs, and they were terrified he'd figure out how to use it.

A grin crept across his face, stretching wider than it should. He dragged his fingers through the blood pooling around the lamb's slack mouth, brought them to his own lips, and his tongue darted out to taste. His eyes falling closed, the metallic flavor coating his teeth, sharp and forbidden and so much better than anything Toriel had ever cooked.

"Blue!"

The voice cut through the night and shattered everything.

He knew that voice the way he knew the weight of his own bones, had heard it every day for twelve damned years, bright and earnest and always, always looking for the good in things that didn't deserve it.

Dawn.

Footsteps pounded down the hill, they were uneven and stumbling, too fast for safety on grass that was slick with dew and now other things. Blue heard his brother call his name again, the word cracking in the middle, heard the fear underneath the concern.

"Are you hurt? Blue, are you okay?"

Dawn must have thrown his clothes on in the dark, must have heard the bleating or the screaming or the horrible wet sounds that came after, because his shirt was on backwards and his dungarees weren't fastened right. He was out of breath when he reached the top of the hill, gasping out questions that Blue didn't bother answering.

"What are you doing out here?"

Blue Moon stayed hunched over the lamb, shoulders curved, head down. Let Dawn see the silhouette first, the shape of something wrong before the details clicked into place.

"Blue, are you hurt?"

Silence.

Dawn's footsteps slowed, stopped. Blue could feel his brother's hesitation radiating across the grass between them, could practically taste the moment Dawn's instincts started screaming at him to run.

Blue bit down on his tongue hard enough to make his eyes water, then slowly turned his head to the side. Just enough for Dawn to see the grin, still there, still stretching, still wrong. He’d been caught.

"You're not supposed to be here."

The words came out quiet, almost conversational.

A pause, long enough for three heartbeats if either of them had hearts.

"Go back to bed."

But Dawn didn't move, didn't turn around, just came closer instead because of course he did, because Dawn never learned, never understood that some things were meant to stay in the dark. His foot landed in the grass with a sound that wasn't grass at all, a squelch.

Dawn looked down. Moonlight painted everything in silver and shadow, turned the blood soaking into the earth into something that looked black, spreading in a pool that had already grown wider than Blue remembered making it.

"Eugh."

The sound punched out of Dawn's throat, small and involuntary, and Blue watched fear bloom across his brother's face like mold on a slice of bread.

"Sacrifices have to be made."

Blue's voice was barely above a whisper now, as if he was more so talking to himself than Dawn, his fingers still tangled in blood-matted wool.

"It decided to spend its last minutes with me."

He paused, tilted his head to study the corpse like it was art, like he was proud of what he'd created here in the dark.

"Isn't it sweet? That it wanted me to ease its pain?"

Dawn shifted sideways, just one step, just enough to change the angle, and the moonlight showed him everything. The lamb's body, torn open and wrong, ribs jutting out like broken fingers. Its face, caved in on one side where the skull had given up. Blood everywhere, on the grass, on Blue's hands, on Blue's face, and the smell hit Dawn all at once. Copper.

He'd played with this lamb yesterday. Fed it from his palm, felt it butt its head against his leg in that way baby animals did when they wanted attention. It had been fine. Maybe a little more tired, but happy, if sheep could be happy.

Now it looked like it had been rotting for weeks.

Dawn's hand shot up to cover his mouth, a gasp strangling itself behind his fingers.

"What have you done?"

"I was useful for once. I offered help."

The words came out raw, almost desperate underneath all that false brightness he was layering on top of them.

"You know… When I grow up I want to be just like you, Dawn. Helpful."

Dawn stepped back. His heel caught on grass and he windmilled, arms flailing before he caught his balance, and the words landed wrong in his chest because Blue Moon had never wanted to be like anyone except himself, had never looked at Dawn without that specific flavor of resentment that came from watching people smile when you walked past, from hearing Toriel's voice go soft and proud whenever she said your name like it meant something good.

Blue Moon pushed himself up slowly, his knees bent, his weight shifted off center like he was testing if the ground would hold him or if he'd sink straight down to whatever place cursed things went when they stopped pretending to be normal. Blood dripped from his fingertips in thick drops that hit the grass too loud for how small they were.

"You... you killed it."

Dawn's voice shook, cracked on the last syllable, and he hated sounding weak, hated sounding twelve.

Blue Moon turned around fully now and Dawn could see his hands properly for the first time, the bare bone stained red past his wrists, blood caught in the joints where his phalanges met, these were the hands everyone made him cover up, the hands that rotted crops and soured milk and made chickens stop laying for weeks, and right now they looked like they belonged to something that crawled out of the old temple well where villagers threw broken things they wanted to forget.

"I just helped out. It got a little messy."

Blue Moon's tone was almost casual, like they were discussing whose turn it was to feed the pigs.

"Where are your gloves, how can you forget, you're, you're..."

Dawn couldn't finish it, the word catching in his throat like a fish bone.

"Cursed?"

Blue Moon finished for him, head tilting down so moonlight caught the curve of his skull, painting shadows across his face.

"I can never feel what it's like to pet a sheep. It's fluffy... and warm… I like it… but… the gloves always get in the way."

He said it quietly, almost to himself, fingers flexing and unflexing like he was trying to remember the sensation of wool between his bones. The performance was flawless, definitely practiced, designed to pull at Dawn's sympathy the way it always did because Dawn always believed him when he played the victim, always softened when Blue Moon brought up the gloves and the separation and how unfair it all was. Pathetic.

Truth was Blue Moon took the gloves off constantly. Late at night when everyone slept, behind the barn where nobody checked, in the forest where the shadows grew thick enough to hide in, his hands could feel everything just fine, every texture and temperature, every subtle variation in the things he touched before his curse rotted them. The gloves were just another cage the villagers had built around him and he'd learned years ago how to slip out of cages when nobody was watching.

He'd been watching the lamb for days. Not because it was dying but because he'd been killing it slowly and deliberately, petting it when the other sheep were grazing on the far side of the pasture, just a touch here and there, nothing anyone would notice at first, his fingers stroking down its spine while he whispered how soft it was, how warm, how perfect. The curse had seeped in gradually, turning the lamb weak and stumbling, making its breathing go shallow and wrong while everyone assumed it had caught some common sickness that would pass. Dawn probably didn’t even notice.

Tonight the moon had been full enough and the lamb had been weak enough and Blue Moon had called to it in the darkness, voice honey-sweet and coaxing, promised it relief from the pain he'd caused, led it up the hill to this spot where nobody would interrupt.

"You killed it! On purpose! Admit it!"

Dawn's shout cracked across the hillside and some awoken birds exploded from a nearby tree, their wings beating panic into the air. Tears welled up in his eyes because this was wrong, this was so far beyond the small cruelties he'd learned to expect, the lies and the bullying and the animals that mysteriously went lame or stopped eating after Blue Moon had been near them.

"Look what you've done!"

"Its time had come."

Blue Moon's voice stayed level, factual, like he was explaining crop rotation.

"No it hasn't!"

Dawn was shouting now, properly shouting, loud enough that someone in the village might hear if the wind carried sound right.

"That's still a baby!"

"It was sick."

Blue Moon shouted back and something in his voice shifted, it went defensive and sharp like a blade being drawn.

"Because you made it sick!"

Dawn's words came fast now, tripping over each other.

"You know better, you... you know better! It's not like this is the first time, Blue! I know what this is about! I can't keep this a secret anymore!"

There had been others. A chicken last month that Dawn had found behind the coop, neck wrung, feathers scattered in patterns that looked almost deliberate. A cat two months before that, one of the temple strays, discovered behind the woodshed opened up and arranged in careful lines. Dawn had cleaned up both times, buried the bodies before anyone else could see, told himself Blue Moon was just curious, just trying to understand how things worked inside, just expressing frustration from being trapped behind gloves and rules his whole life.

Blue Moon's head snapped up too fast, almost violent.

"Yes you can."

He moved closer to Dawn, one of his hands reaching out, fingers spread wide and still dripping.

Dawn pushed the hand away, his palm connecting hard enough to sting.

"You can't hurt me. I'm stronger than you, it's useless."

The words came out steadier than Dawn felt, pulled from some deep place that remembered standing between Blue Moon and the village children, taking blame for things his brother had done because the alternative was watching the villagers' fear turn into something worse.

"I wanted to protect you but you... you know what you're doing. You’re enjoying this."

Blue Moon stared at his hand, the one Dawn had pushed away, watched blood slide between his finger bones and drip from his wrist. Air huffed out through his nasal cavity in short bursts, angry and hurt in equal measure.

"It's the moon."

He muttered it like a prayer, like an excuse he'd repeated so many times it had worn grooves into his thoughts. 

"I can't do anything about it."

"Stop making up excuses!"

Dawn tried to look away from the lamb but his eyes kept dragging back to it, kept cataloging new details he didn't want to see, the way its legs were bent at angles that legs shouldn't bend, the white of bone showing through the torn flesh, the grass around it already starting to brown and curl where blood had soaked in, withering under the curse that leaked from Blue Moon's bones even after death.

"I can't tell if you're scared or just disgusted..."

Blue Moon's grin crept back across his face, slower this time, more deliberate.

"I like both."

"That's it. I'm telling Mama."

Dawn's voice went hard, decision crystallizing into something he couldn't take back.

"In fact... I'm telling her everything!"

Blue Moon's head snapped up again and this time his whole body went rigid.

"No."

The word came out flat and dangerous.

"I'm going to tell her you've been stealing food from the offering shrine and blaming it on wild animals. I'm going to tell her about the cat. I'm going to tell her you pushed Ayame into the irrigation ditch and lied about her slipping. I'm going to tell her you've been going through her belongings at night looking for... for whatever it is you're looking for."

Each secret landed like a stone thrown at a glass pane, fracturing something that had been cracking for years and years.

"No... no… you wont."

Blue Moon's anger built behind each denial, rising up through his chest and into his throat where it threatened to choke him. His whole reputation, the careful image he'd constructed of the cursed but trying younger brother, the one who couldn't help what he was but was doing his best anyway, all of it would shatter the moment Dawn opened his mouth. The villagers already feared him and if they knew what he'd really been doing, what he was capable of when nobody was watching, they'd drive him out or worse. Kill him.

"You’re supposed to protect me! We had a deal!"

Blue Moon's voice cracked into something high and desperate.

"A pinky promise, Dawn! We swore!"

"This is going too far! What are you going to do next, are you going to..."

Dawn couldn't say it, couldn't push the words past his teeth even though they both knew what came next on this path Blue Moon had chosen.

"Kill someone?"

Blue Moon interrupted, finishing what Dawn couldn't, and his voice had gone quiet again, contemplative like he was testing how the words sounded, how they felt in his mouth.

"Yes. You'll be the first if you tell any of our secrets."

"Your secrets!"

Dawn was yelling again, hands balled into fists at his sides.

"The promise is all about your secrets! I don’t even have any! You're going too far!"

"I think I'm on the right path."

Blue Moon muttered it, almost to himself.

"I'm just as much a gift from the gods as you are, Dawn."

He took a step closer, then another, closing the distance between them until Dawn could see flecks of blood on Blue Moon's teeth, could smell copper and rot radiating off him like heat.

"And I'll prove it. Even if I have to sacrifice everything."

Another step.

"Even you."

Blue Moon's hand shot out and pressed against Dawn's chest, his finger spreading wide, leaving behind a perfect bloody print on the faded denim of his dungarees right over where his soul would be if either of them had whole ones instead of halves.

"Get away from me! This is one of your stupid games again!"

Dawn shoved him back, stumbling backwards himself, hands scrabbling at his chest trying to wipe away the blood but it was already soaking in, already staining, and his face twisted into something between disgust and terror as he smeared red across the fabric and only made it worse.

"You're not a gift..."

The words came out as a whisper, meant only for the space between them, but they carried more weight than shouting ever could.

"When will you finally learn that..."

Anger bled into his whisper.

Blue Moon swallowed. He had never seen Dawn like this, had never heard his brother's voice go cold and honest and stripped of the eternal optimism that made him so beloved, so praised, so everything Blue Moon wasn't.

"You're a threat."

Dawn's voice came out small, pained, something was breaking inside him giving up the trust in his brother.

"I should've known best."

And then he ran. Turned and bolted back up that hill, his legs pumping, feet slipping on grass still wet from blood and dew, and Blue Moon's chest seized up like someone had reached in and grabbed his ribs.

He let out a sound somewhere between a gasp and a choke.

"Get back here!"

His voice cracked, went high and furious.

"You coward, Dawn, get back here! I’m not done with you!"

He started running. His legs felt wrong, shaky, as if they were borrowing energy from somewhere his body didn't have access anymore, and his brain was screaming at him, alarm bells clanging that he was weak, too weak to run like this, too weak to catch up, too weak to do anything that mattered. The thoughts just poured gasoline on his anger and suddenly his speed picked up in a way it never had before.

Dawn was running straight up the hill, both of them tearing through parts of the village now, gravel crunching and spraying away from their feet in little explosions. Then the stairs. The temple stairs, hundreds of them, worn smooth from generations of villagers climbing up to pray and leave offerings and pretend the gods were listening. Pathetic.

Blue Moon's grin spread across his face so wide it hurt. This was perfect. This was his chance. This was meant to be. He wasn't allowed past the temple gates, never had been, the villagers had made that clear years ago after the first incident nobody talked about anymore. But Dawn was allowed. Dawn was always allowed everywhere.

Dawn hurried up those countless stairs, Blue Moon behind him, and at the top by the archway stood one villager on guard duty, probably half-asleep until he saw Dawn sprinting upwards like something was chasing him.

Dawn reached the top and shoved past the guard without slowing down. The guard opened his mouth to say something and Blue Moon was already there, using the split second of distraction to barrel past, and when the guard grabbed for him Blue Moon kicked him hard in the crotch, felt his foot connect, heard the man make a sound like all the air being punched out of a bellows.

Blue Moon took a leap and crashed into Dawn from behind, both of them going down hard, and Dawn landed wrong on his left arm, the impact making him yelp in pain, the sound was definitely sharp and young and scared.

Blue Moon towered over him, grinning down, his breath coming fast and shallow.

"You idiot."

He whispered it, almost tender, like sharing a secret.

He got up, looked at the big pomegranate tree in the middle of the temple courtyard, it was ancient and gnarled and sacred, its branches heavy with fruit that glowed faintly in the moonlight, some dark as dried blood, some golden pale as pearls.

Dawn tried to get up, clutching his left arm to his chest.

"Don't touch it."

He was shouting now, fear making his voice go ragged.

"So you know."

Blue Moon hissed it, turned to look at Dawn sprawled on the temple stones.

"You knew all the time?"

His tone shifted, went hurt and accusatory.

"One of these stupid fruits could fix me, Dawn. You knew that? You knew and you never said anything?"

"How do you even know?"

Dawn asked, and he sounded terrified, like this was worse than the lamb, worse than everything.

"A little shadow or two whispered to me what everyone's been hiding."

Blue Moon said it casually and wandered closer to the tree.

"They tell me all sorts of things when they come back at moonlight. All the secrets people think they're keeping. All the lies."

He reached up toward the branches.

"But I'm far beyond getting better."

He chuckled, the sound wrong and broken.

"Too late for golden fruit and divine intervention."

His hand closed around one of the black pomegranates instead of the golden white ones that hung higher up, fruit so dark it looked like it was rotting on the branch, and he plucked it. The stem snapped with a wet sound.

"No!"

Dawn finally got up, lunged at Blue Moon, tried to rip the pomegranate out of his hand with his right hand since his left arm was useless and screaming in pain. Blue Moon punched him, his fist connected hard right in the stomach area where the spine was, but Dawn's foot was already swinging, caught Blue's leg behind the knee and made him fall backwards.

Blue Moon hit the ground hard, back against stone, the pomegranate flying from his hand and rolling aside, and Dawn was lurching at him already, rage and fear making him sloppy. Blue Moon's hand scrabbled across the ground, found one of the big decorative rocks they kept around the tree, it was jagged and heavy and perfect, and as Dawn closed the distance Blue Moon swung it up and connected with his skull.

The crack echoed across the courtyard.

Dawn tensed, his whole body went rigid, then collapsed forward onto Blue Moon like someone had cut all his strings at once.

Blue Moon shoved him off with a grunt, Dawn's weight rolling to the side, and Blue Moon crawled toward the pomegranate on his hands and knees, fingers scraping stone, reached the fruit and grabbed it like it might disappear if he wasn't fast enough.

Behind him the guard was finally stumbling up, one hand still clutching his crotch, and he rang one of the bells outside the temple, the sound clanging out across the sleeping village, danger danger danger.

Blue Moon leaned against the ground, hands trembling so badly he could barely grip the fruit as he tried to split it open. His fingers kept slipping, scratching on the thick skin, and he put more pressure, felt something give way, the pomegranate finally cracking open with a sound like tearing flesh.

The inside was dark red, dark blood red, its seeds gleaming wet and purple-black in the moonlight.

God, it smelled good. Sweet and rotten at the same time, coppery like blood but also like summer fruit left too long in the sun, and his mouth flooded with saliva.

"I'll never be the weak one again."

He mumbled it, almost praying, brought the split fruit to his mouth, and yearning took over, desperate and consuming, he bit down into the exposed seeds and they burst between his teeth, flooding his mouth with juice that tasted like everything forbidden, and he swallowed without chewing, reaching for more, his fingers digging into the fruit to scoop out more seeds, cramming them into his mouth like he was starving, like this was the only food that had ever mattered, like maybe if he ate enough he could fill up whatever was hollow and broken inside him.

The temple bell kept ringing, villagers would be coming soon, torches and weapons and consequences, but Blue Moon didn't care, couldn't stop, the pomegranate juice running down his chin and staining his already bloody dungarees even darker, seeds catching between his teeth, and something in his chest was changing, twisting, filling up with heat and wrongness and finally, finally, power that felt like it belonged to him.

But the taste twisted in his mouth, went from sweet to something that tasted like pennies left too long in standing water, like blood but still… wrong, and Blue Moon couldn't swallow anymore, his throat locked up tight and the pomegranate seeds sat heavy on his tongue before his body decided for him and he retched, bent forward as everything came back up in a violent heave that splattered across the stone pavement and his hands, dark red juice mixing with something blacker, thicker, and the smell hit him wrong, made him gag again even though there was nothing left to bring up.

His hands. He looked at his hands and they were shaking, trembling so bad his bones rattled inside whatever held them together, and the fingertips. The very tips of his phalanges were darkening, bone going from clean white to something closer to ash, to char, spreading inward like frostbite in reverse, and it hurt. It hurt like nothing he'd ever felt before, a burning cold sensation that crawled up from his fingertips toward his wrists, eating at the magic that held his form together.

Blue Moon made a sound, something between a whimper and a choked gasp. Tried to rub his hands together like that would somehow scrape the darkness off but it kept spreading, kept crawling, and where the darkness touched something else was forming. Something acidic, viscous, thick like tar but moving, breathing almost, coating the bone in layers that gleamed wet in the moonlight.

Everything else faded out. The temple bell clanging somewhere behind him. He was inside himself now, trapped with the sensation of his own body betraying him piece by piece, the rot climbing past his wrists now, past his forearm joints, eating at the magic that made up his radius and ulna, turning his white bone into something fouled and wrong.

His chest seized. Not metaphorically, literally seized, the magic that animated his ribcage going haywire as pressure built inside, this horrible heavy weight like someone had replaced his insides with wet sand. He could feel it. Feel his bones rotting from the inside out, the corruption spreading through him faster than he could track, faster than he could think.

Then the noise started.

Whispers first. Faint enough he thought maybe he was imagining them, maybe the pain was making him hear things that weren't there. But they grew louder, more insistent, voices layering over voices until it sounded like a hundred people were all talking at once directly into his skull, their words bleeding together into this incomprehensible susurrus. He couldn't understand what they were saying but he felt the wrongness of it, felt these things trying to push into his mind and make themselves at home. For eternity.

Blue Moon clawed at his head. Fingers scraping at his skull like he could physically dig the voices out, catching on bone and leaving scratches he couldn't feel over the cacophony building inside his thoughts. The shadows always whispered to him, always had, but this was different. This wasn't the quiet murmur of secrets as usual. This was invasion, was violation, was something fundamental breaking inside him and letting things in that should have stayed out. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Make it stop. Make it stop make it stop make it stop.

His limbs went rigid, locked up at angles that weren't comfortable at all, they weren't natural even for a skeleton whose joints didn't work like flesh and muscle. Every bone in his body tensed simultaneously and he couldn't move, couldn't breathe, could only exist in this moment of complete sensory overload while the transformation kept eating through him.

He looked up at the sky because he couldn't look anywhere else, his neck was frozen in that position. The moon hung there, full and bright and–

It was changing. The pale silver disc bleeding red from the edges inward, blood seeping across its surface like someone had cut it open and now it was hemorrhaging light, and the red wasn't the gentle pink of sunset, wasn't the warm amber of autumn. This red was violent, was angry, was the color of fresh arterial spray and old dried rust and something older than either. A super moon.

A blood moon. The words floated up through the chaos in his mind.

The light touched him and everything got worse.

His eyes ignited with pain so sharp and immediate that his whole body arched backward, his  spine bending at an angle that would have snapped a human in half. Something was wrong with his eyes, the irises that let him see burning away like someone had doused them in acid, and he was screaming but couldn't hear it over the voices still chattering chattering chattering in his skull.

When the burning stopped he could still see but everything looked washed out, colorless, except. Except the moon. The blood moon shone down on him and his eyes drank in that light like they'd been starving for it, and when he blinked, when his eyelids scraped across his eyeballs, something felt different.

His vision was changing. The darkness eating up his bones had reached his eyes, replacing the normal eyelights with something else entirely. Something that glowed faint milky white, like eyes that had been dead for weeks.

Blue Moon managed to move one hand up to his face. Touched beneath his eyes and his fingers came away wet. Wet. Something was running down his face in twin tracks and when he looked at his hand the moisture was red. Blood. He was crying blood.

"Blue! Blue! What are you doing up there!?"

The voice cut through all the others, clear and sharp and undeniably Toriel, and reality snapped back into focus like someone had flipped a switch. The temple courtyard. The pomegranate tree. Dawn sprawled on the ground a few meters away with blood running down his nose and not moving.

And Toriel

She was climbing the steps, was almost to the top, and the guard who'd been doubled over was trying to tend to Dawn, was pointing at Blue Moon and shouting something about demons and monsters and protecting the sacred ground.

Blue Moon staggered to his feet. His body felt heavy and light at the same time, like gravity couldn't decide how hard it wanted to pull on him. The voices in his head had quieted to a constant murmur now, background noise he could almost ignore if he tried hard enough, and the pain had settled into this deep ache that radiated from his bones outward.

Toriel reached the top of the stairs. Stopped. Stared at him with an expression he couldn't quite read, something between horror and grief and disgust all mixed together.

Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

“Demon.”

The word hit him like a physical blow. Not monster. Not cursed. Demon.

Something bubbled up in his chest. Laughter. He was laughing, this raw raspy sound that scraped out of his throat.

"And you raised it."

The words came out rough, came out broken, his voice not quite his own anymore, pitched wrong and layered with harmonics that hadn't been there before. He could hear the whispers underneath when he spoke now, could hear the shadows adding their voices to his.

Toriel took a step back.

Blue Moon brought his hands up to his face, fingers splayed, and the laughter kept coming, kept pouring out of him even though nothing about this was funny. His face contorted, the grin that had been there before twisting into something desperate, something that hurt to hold.

"You knew. You knew what I was and you kept me anyway. Heck, you even could've fixed me!"

But instead everyone kept him like a dog that bit, kept him locked behind gloves and rules and lies about divine gifts and cursed touches, and for what? So the village could sleep better at night pretending the thing living among them was just a normal child who happened to wither crops?

The laughter cut off abruptly. Turned inside out. Became something else entirely that he couldn’t control anymore.

He was crying. Actually crying, the blood tears streaming faster now, and his hands were still up near his skull but now they were trembling again, shaking so hard he couldn't hold them steady.

"I didn't want– I just wanted– damn it."

Wanted what? To be normal? To be loved? To be fixed? To be anything other than this cursed broken thing that everyone feared and nobody trusted? To matter the way Dawn mattered, to have Toriel look at him with pride instead of careful management? 

The sadness hit him all at once, this crushing wave of grief for something he'd never had and never would, and his face crumpled, the desperate grin collapsing into an expression of such profound helplessness that even he could feel it pulling at his features. Why was he acting out like that?

"Blue Moon."

Toriel's voice had changed, gone soft and careful like she was talking to something wild that might bolt. She took a step forward, one hand reaching out, and Blue Moon watched her come closer with eyes that glowed milky white in the blood moon's light.

"Baby, let me help you. Let me–"

Her hand was almost close enough to touch him now. Almost. But something was happening, something Blue Moon didn't notice at first because he was too focused on her face, on the way she was looking at him like maybe, maybe she still–

The shadows were moving.

Not the normal shadows, these were his shadows, the ones that whispered secrets, the ones that had always been his only real companions. They were pooling behind him, rising up from the ground like smoke, like tentacles, like appendages that shouldn't exist but did, forming themselves into solid things made out of the same substance goating his bones.

Blue Moon was so lost in his own emotions he didn't notice them growing, didn't notice them reaching, didn't notice them coiling around each other and extending toward Toriel who was still stepping forward with her hand out and trying to reason with him

"Please." His voice cracked. "Please I didn't mean to, Mama please. Believe me."

Her fingers brushed his shoulder and the tendrils struck.

They wrapped around her throat before either of them understood what was happening, solid enough to squeeze, quick enough that her eyes went wide with shock before fear could even register. More shadows joined the first, winding around her neck, her torso, lifting her off the ground as she gasped, as her hands flew up to claw at the dark tendrils choking the life out of her.

The Blue Moon froze. Watched it happen. Watched her struggle. And for some reason suddenly cared.

"No." The word came out small. "No no no stop stop!"

But the tentacles didn't stop. They didn't listen. They were his but they weren't, were responding to something deeper than his conscious thoughts, something primal in him that felt threatened and cornered and was lashing out with everything it had. They knew deep down Toriel deserved it.

Toriel's eyes found his. Her mouth worked, trying to form words around the pressure crushing her windpipe, and what came out was barely a whisper but he heard it anyway.

"Blue. Baby. Let go. I–I’m begging you, I promise I won’t be mad–"

He tried. He wanted to. Wanted to pull the shadows back, wanted to make them stop, wanted his mother to look at him like that for one more second, with care instead of fear, but his body wouldn't cooperate, his magic wouldn't cooperate, the tendril had taken on a life of their own and were squeezing tighter, tighter.

"Stop. STOP!"

Toriel's struggles were getting weaker. Her hands fell away from the tendrils wrapped around her throat, hung limp at her sides, and her face. Her face.

The crack was quiet. Almost polite. The sound of a neck breaking shouldn't be quiet but it was, this small decisive snap that cut through everything else, and Toriel's body went completely still.

The tentacles dropped her.

She hit the ground in a heap, folded wrong, her head at an angle that heads didn't go, and Blue Moon was staring at her, at what he'd done, and his hands were coming up to his mouth but they didn't stop there, they kept going, tangling in his skull, pulling at bone that wouldn't come loose.

What a show. How…

Weak. 

Weak sentimental GARBAGE.

These words sat on his tongue like rust, like something he needed to spit out before it poisoned him from the inside. Blue Moon stared at Toriel's body crumpled on the temple stones and his hands were shaking but not from grief, not anymore, from something hotter and uglier that burned behind his ribs where his soul was supposed to be. He doubted still possessing one after all of this.

"Weak. You were so weak… and… pathetic."

He said it out loud this time, testing how it sounded, letting the syllable crack in the night air. His voice came out rougher than before, layered with those whispers that hadn't stopped since he ate the pomegranate, and he liked it, liked how it made him sound bigger than the scared twelve year old farmboy who wore gloves so he wouldn't hurt the goddamn chickens.

That version of him was dead. Had to be. Because this version, this new thing with darkness coating his bones and blood running from his eyes and shadows coiling at his back like extra limbs, this version wasn't scared of anything anymore.

"You deserved it."

He told Toriel's corpse, his milky eyes glowing faint in the blood moon's light, and the shadows tendril behind him in agreement, in hunger for more, and maybe something that felt like applause. She'd called him demon and she was right, wasn't she? Had always been right, had known from the moment she picked him up that he was wrong and rotten and cursed, had known and kept him anyway like some kind of charity case, some broken thing she could fix if she just tried hard enough… or told him what to look for.

Well. Look how that turned out.

Voices were rising from down the stairs, shouts and screams mixing together into white noise that Blue Moon picked apart into individual threads. Someone crying about the demon. Someone else yelling to get weapons. A woman's voice high and terrified asking where Toriel was. Where were the boys? What happened to the boys?

Blue Moon tilted his head toward the sound, the movement jerky as if his neck wasn't quite attached right anymore. Footsteps pounding up the temple stairs, dozens of them, the entire village probably, woken by the bells and the screaming and whatever horrible thing their collective nightmares had been warning them about for twelve years. Should’ve been a warning early on.

The first villager crested the top step and froze.

Blue Moon turned to face them fully and watched recognition slide across the man's face, watched his expression shift from confusion to understanding to pure animal terror in the space of a heartbeat. The man's mouth opened, closed, opened again like a fish drowning in air. Hilarious, really.

Another villager reached the top. Then another. Then five more, ten more, a crowd forming at the temple entrance with farming tools clutched in shaking hands, pitchforks and hoes and shovels that had tilled the earth that morning and now were being pointed at him like weapons.

A young fox woman near the front raised one trembling hand, her finger extended straight at Blue Moon's chest.

"A demon!"

Her voice cracked on the word, went shrill and panicked. Other voices picked it up, passed it around the crowd like a contagion.

"Demon."

"It's a demon."

"The cursed boy, he's become a demon."

"We have to kill it."

That last one came from somewhere in the middle of the pack, an older man's voice rough with fear pretending to be brave.

"Banish the demon!"

Someone else shouted, and the crowd shifted forward half a step before their courage failed and they shuffled back.

Blue Moon felt his face split into a grin.

"Ooooh, banish the demon!"

He mocked their cadence perfectly, pitched his voice high and scared the way theirs sounded, then dropped it back to that new rough register that vibrated with shadows.

"Oh noooo! He’s gonna kill us!"

The crowd flinched. Several people took actual steps backward. Blue Moon's grin got wider, started hurting where it pulled at his jaw joints but he couldn't make it stop, didn't want to make it stop.

"I was so easily preventable."

He said it conversational, almost friendly, like they were discussing weather or crop yields. Took a step toward them and watched half the crowd surge backward, the other half frozen in place by terror that overrode their ability to run.

"You know what you should've done? You should've just killed me when you had the chance. When I was small. When I couldn't fight back."

Another step. His boots scraped against stone still wet with Toriel's blood and left dark footprints across the courtyard.

"But you didn't. You let her keep me. She fed me. Clothed me. Gave me gloves and rules and told me to be good, to control myself, to not touch anything important."

His voice was rising now, getting louder, and the tendrils behind him were rising too, growing taller and darker and more solid with every word.

"And where did that get you?"

He flung one hand out toward Toriel's body and several villagers gasped, several more turned their faces away.

"Where did that get HER?"

He was shouting now, properly shouting, his voice echoing off the temple walls.

"It's all thanks to Toriel!"

Blue Moon spread his arms wide like he was presenting evidence, like he was a performer taking a bow.

"I hope you'll see her in hell!"

The words tasted like copper and pomegranate seeds. Blue Moon swallowed and felt power surge through him again, felt the blood moon overhead pouring itself into his bones like liquid energy.

He didn't feel weak anymore. Didn't feel small or scared or wrong. The moon was feeding him something huge and terrible and so so perfect, filling up all the hollow spaces inside him with purpose, with strength, with violence he'd been holding back since the first time he touched a plant and watched it wither.

A rabbit man near the front of the crowd raised his pitchfork, the tines shaking so badly they rattled against each other.

"Stay back, demon! We'll, we'll…"

"You'll what?"

Blue Moon interrupted with a cruel grin.

"You gonna kill me? Go ahead. Try."

The man's nerve broke. He turned and tried to push back through the crowd, tried to flee, but there were too many people packed too tight and he couldn't move fast enough.

Blue Moon felt the bloodlust rise up his spine. It wrapped around his thoughts and squeezed until everything went red-tinted and simple, until the world narrowed down to prey and predator. He liked this exciting new game.

He moved without thinking, without planning, his body was clearly operating on instinct that was older and meaner than conscious thought. One second he was standing by Toriel's corpse. The next he was in the crowd, his acidic hands grabbing, burning, tearing whatever they could find.

The first scream was cut short when his fingers closed around someone's throat, the curse eating through the fur and flesh and magic in seconds, turning living tissue into rot. The body dropped and Blue Moon was already moving, was already reaching for the next target, the tendrils lashing out around him like whips, like extra arms that grabbed and squeezed and slammed villagers into the ground from heights that made their bones crack and break.

He couldn't stop. Didn't want to stop. Every boundary he'd built inside himself over twelve years of being told he was dangerous, being told to control himself, being told to wear the gloves and stay away from the animals and not touch anyone without permission, all of it shattered at once and what poured through the cracks was hunger.

Not for food. For this. For violence. For the look in their eyes when they realized he wasn't weak anymore, wasn't controllable anymore, wasn't the thing they could cage and manage and pretend was almost normal if you squinted hard enough. Because he wasn’t normal. He was special. And he’d show them all.

A woman tried to run. Blue Moon's tentacle caught her by the ankle, lifted her into the air, and brought her down hard enough that the impact echoed. She didn't get back up. Good.

A man swung a hoe at Blue Moon's skull. The acidic coating on Blue Moon's bones caught the wooden handle and rotted it to splinters in seconds, then Blue Moon's hands were around the man's wrists and the screaming started and didn't stop until Blue Moon's fingers found his throat and squeezed.

More screaming. More running. But the crowd was bottlenecked at the stairs and they couldn't all escape at once, kept trampling each other in their panic to get away.

Some he killed with his hands, feeling their magic dissolve under his curse like sugar in water. Some he killed with the tendrils, letting those new appendages wrap around their necks and torsos and squeeze until things inside went pop. 

Blue Moon stood at the top of the temple stairs, breathing hard, surrounded by bodies that weren't moving anymore. The courtyard was painted red and black, blood mixing with the acidic residue his curse left behind, and the few villagers who'd managed to escape were visible as tiny figures at the base of the steps, running toward their homes, toward anywhere that wasn't here.

He looked down at the remaining villagers who hadn't made it up the stairs yet, who stood frozen at the bottom with their makeshift weapons raised, their faces pale with terror in the blood moon's light.

Blue Moon spread his arms again.

"Fear me!"

His voice carried down the stairs, echoed across the village, bounced off the rice paddies and the farmhouses and the sleeping animals that were starting to wake and sense danger in the air.

"I am a gift from the gods! Fear me or–"

A sound cut through his speech. Small. Sharp. Distinctive–

Snip.

Blue Moon's milky eyes went wide. His whole body went rigid. That sound. He knew that sound. Had heard the shadows whisper about it, about the things that cut through dimensions, about the beings that came for the dead.

Scissors.

But he'd killed everyone up here. Toriel was dead. The guard was dead. The villagers who'd made it to the top were dead. Dawn was unconscious. There was nobody left who could–

Blue Moon spun around and saw something that shouldn't be possible.

A figure standing by the pomegranate tree where no figure had been before.

It stood three meters tall at minimum, maybe taller, it was hard to tell with the way the shadows fell across its form and made the edges blur. A dark cloak hung from its shoulders, the fabric singed at the bottom like it had dragged through fire or something worse, and the material rippled when there wasn't any wind to move it. A pair of Grayish wings folded against its back, massive things that looked too heavy to fly with, and when Blue Moon's eyes tracked upward to the figure's face he saw a skull, different from his own, with a rune carved into the forehead.

A Reaper.

He held a pair of scissors in one skeletal hand, the blades gleaming silver and intricate, detailed with engravings that caught the light. As Blue Moon watched, the Reaper closed the scissors with a soft snip and the air behind him sealed shut, the portal he'd apparently cut through reality closing like a wound healing in fast forward.

The Reaper knelt beside Toriel's body, his movements slow and gentle, and one hand hovered over her chest where her soul would be if souls were permanently visible things. Blue Moon watched as something white and glowing emerged from her corpse, lifting up like it had been waiting there the whole time for someone to call it forth. Toriel's soul. Small and heart shaped and cracked down the middle, but still recognizably hers, still carrying whatever essence made her Toriel instead of anyone else.

The Reaper brought the scissors up, positioned the blades around something Blue Moon couldn't see, an invisible thread connecting soul to body, and cut.

The sound was quiet. Almost gentle. The soul drifted into the Reaper's other hand and he tucked it somewhere inside his cloak where Blue Moon couldn't follow its path, and just like that Toriel was gone.

Blue Moon stared at the scissors.

Those scissors.

He wanted them.

The desire hit him suddenly and overwhelming, this need to possess those blades that could cut through dimensions and harvest souls and probably do a hundred other crazy things he hadn't even thought of yet. 

One of his tentacles shot forward before he'd consciously decided to move it, faster than a thought, faster than the Reaper's apparently slow reflexes could track, and the appendage wrapped around the scissors and yanked them out of the Reaper's grip so hard and sudden that the ancient being just stood there for a beat, its hand still extended, looking at the empty space where his tool had been like he couldn't quite process what the hell had just happened.

Blue Moon caught the scissors. The blades were cold, colder than metal should be, and something about them resonated with the darkness coating his bones, like they recognized each other, like they were just meant to be together.

The Reaper straightened up slowly, his skull tilting down to look at Blue Moon with eye sockets that had glowing white circles, and his voice when he spoke was dry and ancient, and clearly fed up.

"Give them back."

It wasn't a request. Wasn't even really a command. Just a statement of fact, the way you'd tell someone the sky was blue or fire was hot or something, like there was no possible universe where Blue Moon didn't immediately comply.

Blue Moon turned the scissors over in his hands, watching light play across the engraved blades, and his milky eyes reflected the metal back at the Reaper in distorted mirror images.

"How can you even see me?"

The Reaper's voice had shifted, confusion bleeding into that ancient roughness.

"Humans can't see Reapers. Monsters can’t see Reapers. The dead can't see Reapers unless we allow it. You shouldn't be able to..."

He trailed off, his glowing gaze tracking across Blue Moon's transformed body.

"What are you?"

Blue Moon didn't answer, was too busy testing the weight of the scissors, opening and closing them to hear that satisfying snip sound again. He walked toward Dawn's body, still sprawled unconscious near the pomegranate tree, his movements casual like he had all the time in the world, like there wasn't an ancient death entity demanding his attention and a whole village down the stairs waiting for their doom.

But the Reaper's patience snapped.

"Give them back. Now."

Blue Moon grabbed the back of Dawn's shirt, his acidic fingers almost burning holes in the fabric, and hauled his brother partially upright, Dawn's head lolled forward like a broken doll. Blue Moon looked at the Reaper, looked at the scissors in his hand, looked at Dawn's limp form, and his grin turned sharp.

"He's not dead."

It wasn't a question but the Reaper answered anyway, tight with frustration.

"No. He isn't. His time hasn't come. Now give me my scissors before you do something you'll regret."

"His time hasn't come yet. Is that so?"

Blue Moon repeated the words slowly, testing them, and something clicked in his head, a realization that made his whole body go still. He spread the scissors open in front of him and cut.

The air split. Not like tearing fabric, more like reality had been holding its breath and suddenly exhaled, and where the scissors cut a slit opened in space itself, a thin line of absolute darkness that expanded as Blue Moon pulled the blades down, growing from a crack to a gash to a portal large enough to shove a body through.

On the other side was nothing. Just void. Just empty space that seemed to go on forever in all directions.

"You must be Death."

Blue Moon said it conversational, almost friendly, looked at the Reaper over his shoulder while still holding Dawn in front of the portal.

"Don't."

The Reaper's voice cracked.

"Don't you dare!"

"He doesn't deserve to stay here and survive."

Blue Moon's fingers tightened in Dawn's shirt, his other hand still holding the scissors.

"He doesn't even deserve to be mourned after I kill him and you take his soul. I know your games. I know how this works. He gets to die properly, gets collected, gets remembered. Gets peace."

His voice was rising, getting louder, the tendrils writhing faster behind him in response to his agitation.

"He doesn't deserve any of that. Not after–not after everything!"

The Reaper took a step forward, hand outstretched.

"His time hasn't come. You can't just–You don't understand what you're doing."

"I understand perfectly."

Blue Moon's grin was back.

"I'm making sure he suffers. Really suffers. Wherever this goes. However long it takes. He doesn't get the easy death. He doesn't get you showing up to collect him. He doesn't get anything. He doesn’t get a damn memorial on this stupid hill!"

"Blood Moon."

The Reaper said it like a name, like he knew somehow, and Blue Moon's head snapped around because he'd never heard anyone call him like that.

"Blood Moon, listen to me. That portal leads to. You can't just throw someone into the void between dimensions. They'll drift. They'll. His soul will–"

But Blood Moon wasn't listening anymore, was already moving, already shoving Dawn's limp body forward with all the strength his transformed form possessed, and Dawn went through the portal without waking, disappeared into that absolute darkness like a stone dropping into deep water, and the last thing visible was his boot vanishing past the edge.

"Oops… my bad."

Blood Moon pulled the scissors together and the portal sealed immediately, snapped shut and Dawn was gone, not dead but not alive in any place that mattered, just. Gone. And finding him would correlate to searching for a needle in a hayloft.

The Reaper stared at the space where the portal had been, his skull expression unreadable, but his whole body had gone rigid with something that might have been shock or horror or rage or all three mixed together, which is something you don’t see from a Reaper.

"The audacity."

He said it quietly, almost to himself, and then louder.

"The absolute audacity of you. Do you have any idea what you've just done? Do you comprehend the cosmic laws you've just violated?"

Blood Moon brought the scissors up to his face, tilted them so he could see his reflection in the polished metal, and for the first time since his transformation he got a good look at what he'd become. 

He looked like a demon.

He looked perfect.

"Yeah."

He breathed it against the metal, his reflection distorting in the curve of the blades.

"Yeah, I think I'm starting to understand."

The Reaper moved faster than something that size should be able to move, crossed the distance between them in a blur of dark cloak and ash colored wings, and his skeletal hand grabbed Blood Moon by the front of his blood soaked shirt, lifted him off the ground like he weighed nothing, which comparatively he probably didn't.

Blood Moon's tendrils lashed out instinctively but the Reaper's other hand made a gesture and the tentacles froze mid strike, going rigid like they'd been turned to stone, completely immobilized.

"You bratty little boy."

The Reaper's voice had gone cold, colder than the scissors, colder than the void Blood Moon had just shoved his poor brother into.

"You deserve a punishment worse than death. You'll face death as mercy by the time I'm done with you."

Blood Moon squirmed in the Reaper's grip, his feet kicking at empty air, and tried to bring the scissors up to cut at the hand holding him but the Reaper grabbed his wrist with inhuman speed and squeezed until Blood Moon's fingers spasmed and the scissors clattered to the ground.

"No no no."

Blood Moon was gasping now, struggling, watching the scissors hit the temple stones and bounce once before settling.

"Those are mine, I need them, give them back."

"You need to learn what consequences are."

The Reaper bent down and scooped up the scissors with his free hand, never loosening his grip on Blood Moon's shirt, and the blades disappeared into his cloak somewhere Blood Moon couldn't reach anymore.

"I'll come back when you've learned your lesson."

The Reaper's voice had shifted again into a heavy promise.

"Hunger shall gnaw at your bones."

He said it so formal, ritualistic, like pronouncing a curse, and Blood Moon felt something shift inside him, noticed a weird feeling settle into his chest that hadn't been there before, something hollow and aching. Itmade the emptiness he'd felt his whole life seem gentle by comparison.

The Reaper opened the scissors again, cut a new slit in the air beside them, and this portal was different from the one Blood Moon had made, the edges crackling with purple energy, the other side showing only darkness but a different quality of darkness, not void but absence, not nothing but the space between things.

"Wait. Wait, you can't."

Blood Moon's voice cracked, it went high and desperate.

"You're supposed to just–You're not supposed to–I'm not–You can't just–"

"I can do whatever I want."

The Reaper said it flat and final undertone, shifted his grip on Blood Moon's shirt, and threw him.

Blood Moon went through the portal backwards, his arms windmilling, his mouth open in a scream that got cut off when he passed the threshold, and the last thing he saw before the portal sealed was the Reaper's skull face watching him fall, expressionless and unmoved and absolutely done with his nonsense.