Sans

You put the phone down. Paperwork. Ha. It's refreshing, actually; it reminds you of a long-gone past, of sitting at a desk and poring over technicalities. The mental exercise of getting something done. It's challenging, probably good for you, but pointless - it's not as if anyone's going to stay dead, anyway.

Or will they?

You don’t know. This is uncharted territory for you, off the resets, that nebulous period before the timeline is reset again. Sometimes you think that they might get tired, that one might even stick.

This time, they've decided to only spare Papyrus. (You can’t wonder why, because the reason makes your heart and your mind hurt at the same time, ripe with temporal paradox, a minefield of potential insanity. You need your head clear.) Fact: your brother is alive, therefore you have a reason to keep on living. While he’s trying his best, King Papyrus with his too-voluminous cape (attached to his neck by a silent monster on a silver chain last week; you saw him place the brooch with the Kingdom’s insignia around his neck for the impromptu coronation) is busy with the people. Smiling at you and everyone else, so confident, so hopeful. You would not pick a better leader for the underground than your brother, but the very idea makes your bones click in rebellion. The dragon killed the king for his soul to escape, taking the hope of the underground with it. This one won’t. So you glide down from your branch. You snap their neck.

They’re a tiny thing, crumpling like wet paper in the snow. The soul flies up to your hand easy as breathing, beating purple. Something pulses thickly in your chest, fills you up. You can’t tell Papyrus — he won’t go to war, he’s not made for it, and you think, maybe I will end this once and for all.

The moment right after a reset never really stops being awful. Over time you’ve learned to control your emotions, just in case you come to with Papyrus's voice ringing in your ear. You wake in a snow pile with Papyrus’s statue winking down at you and a bottle of ketchup stuffed deep inside your coat, cold sinking through your bones. So this is the save point. It has been for a while, as far as you and your alternate-timeline selves can tell.

You’ve got a system for checking timelines, graphed and coded with ultraviolet light in your basement. Most of the time you don’t bother checking on them. You’ve already figured out that the timelines all end after the happy ending, correlating directly with the arrival of the dragon. By the time you pull yourself together and take a shortcut back, Papyrus’ll have come back from his morning patrol, smiling and bursting with energy like always. You have the timing down to the minute: if you hang around the entrance — ah. There they are. A striped head pokes out of the door, whiskers twitching, otter-slick fur on end from the cold. Thing is, they look harmless. Sometimes they are.

“Heya.” you say, just to deviate from the routine, and the kid’s eyes flicker away from you. Ah. They know what they've done. You smile as you talk, though, the permanent upturned grin of your carapace, and hold out your hand. They take it with a look of resignation in their eyes, and you snicker despite yourself when they yell and stumble back in shock. Let it never be said that Sans the Fae was out of surprises.

They’re rubbing the spot where the buzzer went off with a faint twist to their facial muscles. Time-travellers: they think they know everything. “Yeah, go through the gates.” you say. “My brother made the bars too wide to stop anyone.” They pass and you follow, steering them behind the lamp as your brother’s footsteps grow louder. You think, idly, that you should have pushed them into the abyss below. (They’d just come back, madder than ever, and the thing about the kid is that they can do things that they can take back, but you’re the one who has to live that day over and over again.)

The thing is, you’ve accepted it. You’re okay with it, insofar as one can with being doomed to a futile existence, doing nothing to smooth the way.

Except the kid exists, and that throws a wrench in your nonexistent gears and your plan to do absolutely nothing. The first couple of times you were set to accept it as a freak variable, that the old lady found a dragon hatchling like she’d told you about and decided that they could protect themselves.

You discounted it when you had your first white nightmare: straight from snow to golden corridors swirling with dust kicked up by your wings, disbeliefhorrordetermination in the kid’s eyes and then you died, and the world ended. You woke buried in Papyrus’s wings and gentle voice, the way it always was when he was sure that everything would turn out all right. You shook inside him and felt cornered. The claustrophobia was worse than being killed. Wasn't that weird, that you now knew what it was like to be killed? Yeah, Sans. You’re going crazy. One day the kid’ll come and you’ll just laugh and laugh and laugh.

The kid does, sometimes, on their good runs. They snort in surprise and giggle when they’re expecting it and cough when you add a buzzer to the mix like they’re grinding their lungs out. Sometimes they smile at you and ask for ketchup on their fries at Grillby’s, then kill Papyrus on their way out of Snowdin, see them try hard to spare Undyne and destroy Mettaton on live TV. Sometimes they tell you about the dragon behind the secret door, the one they found while sparing every monster as they went.