Chapter Text

Winter had come and wiped the land clean. The snow here was recent and unmarred, and it made everything uniform – the earth’s contours flattened, every blade of grass buried, the snags of tree roots sleeping deep beneath the white. The only marks were his footprints, deep and even-spaced, stretching from the horizon to this bare wooden park bench under a gaunt and leafless tree. Viewed from a distance, the prints looked like markings on paper – like punctuation, an interminable pause.

It was a strange place to arrange a meeting. But the other children’s families had chosen stranger.

He gathered his coat around him as the wind picked up and bit through all his layers – the coat, his clothes, the pelt underneath. He’d melted the snow around the bench with a clap of his hands so he’d have somewhere to sit, but he set no more fires. If someone were to emerged from that horizon, following his footsteps, and saw him sitting alone and wreathed in flame, it would make a poor first impression. So he suffered the chill, hands on his knees, his hair unkempt in the wind.

On the edge of the wind he thought he could smell tea, sickly sweet. He stared at the footprints he’d left and noted the snowy spaces between them, and how the wind teased the loose snow in eddies and sent it drifting like dust. The flat disc of the sun strained through the clouds overhead like a circle of blank glass. A gale whipped through the tree’s upper reaches and rattled like a pneumoniac’s breath. And as the tree shivered, the splayed fingers of its branches cast their twitching shadows around him, clutching and desperate.

He took all these sensations in stride. He flipped through them like playing cards. He didn’t notice the crunching footfalls behind him, or the leaner shadow that approached and merged with his own. He faced forward and watched the slithering breeze sift powdery snow into his marks he’d left behind. In time it would erase all sign of him, only for new signs to be left and left again.

* * *

The flowers had stopped growing.

They still lived, of course, every one, and in the throne room’s borrowed sunlight, the molten gold of their petals was bright enough to hurt the eye. They shuddered and shook in unseen breezes, bending towards the exits, the tea table, and the thrones with a mute, eerie unity. Their citrus-smelling pollen drifted through the sunbeams in specks; already the sheet that covered the throne in the corner was stained by their residue.

But they only reached a certain height and no higher, and though their seeds took to the soil with almost frightening eagerness, the perimeter of their growth only extended so far. The outer tangle of greenery in this garden was unblemished by yellow, as though a warding had been placed over it. King Asgore wasn’t entirely certain how long it would take for them to die. He watered them daily, just to be safe.

He took a breath and raised his hands. The teakettle burst into flame.

It was a nice day today; he’d made a note in his journal. He’d started taking his tea down here now, instead of the house with its empty reading chair and cold unlit hearth. Down here he could hear the birds, and feel the sun, and keep an eye on the flowers – especially the one in the garden’s center, which seemed just a bit taller than the rest, the gold of its petals a touch more rich. He watched it now, as the orange flames licked around kettle. These petals made an acceptable tea, and the flowers grew back in a matter of days.

He shifted in his seat, staring at nothing. The small chair creaked dangerously under his weight.

“Your Majesty?”

His head jerked up, then back to the kettle. Steam was shooting out the spout in a solid white jet and the metal had already acquired a disquieting glow. He quickly waved a hand to douse the flame, and then looked to the throne room’s entrance. A dark silhouette stood in the entryway, wringing its hands; since it was wearing gauntlets, this produced a rusty, scraping whine that made Asgore’s eyes water. The figure noticed his expression and stopped, placing its arms rigidly at his sides.

“Howdy there,” Asgore said, and put a hand to his forehead. “I’m sorry, and you are...?”

“Royal Guard enlistee 05, Your Majesty!” He clanked, saluted, and stiffened even further, to the point where his armor vibrated with the effort. Asgore sighed as he tried, and failed, to place the voice. The Royal Guardsmen had expanded since his decree, and they weren’t easy to tell apart at the best of times – they all wore the same full-body black mail (dredging uncomfortable memories of the war), and they seemed reluctant to refer to themselves or each other by anything other than their enlistment numbers, at least when he was around. This one had curly ram horns emerging from the sides of the helmet like spirographs, and the voice, underneath the echo of his armor, was probably male.

“Be at ease, young...man,” he hazarded. “We’re all friends here.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. Sorry, Your Majesty.” He lowered his arm by inches and the jittering from his mail decreased minutely. “I just came to report something. I probably should have called ahead-”

“It’s all right.” He hastily poured the boiling water into the teapot. “I’m not much good with a phone anyway.” He wasn’t – most of the phones that fell from the surface were too small for his hands, and he spent so much time in the garden that he was seldom around to take a call. It used to cause Toriel no end of frustration.

“Oh, my buddy can relate, trust me, this poor guy can’t even look at one of the things without breaking it in-” 05 seemed to notice that he was becoming unacceptably relaxed, and went rigid again. “Er, what I meant to say was, me and Enlistee 06 hold the Snowdin post. The one outside the Ruins, I mean. And while we were on guard, I thought I heard the doors open, and across the bridge we found-”

Asgore straightened up in his seat, palms flat on the table. “She came back?”

“It’s another human, sire.”

The silence that followed was very loud. Asgore felt a subtle shift in his expression; he was unsure what, exactly, about his face had changed, but it was enough to make 05 take a hasty step back to the safety of the doorway.

He said, “Bring it here.”

“Yes, King Asgore, 06 should arrive with it any minute now. I just wanted to tell you first that-”

“There is nothing else to say.”

He rose, the little chair creaking back into shape. 05 saluted hard enough for the flat of his hand to clang off his helmet, and then ran off. The flowers bent low like an audience.

When 05 returned, Asgore was seated at his throne. In one hand, he held his trident, dark and iridescent red, magically spun from the very air. In the other, he held a flat-bottomed glass jar. One more relic from the war. Its surface shifted like mercury. His face was hard-set and unblinking.

He remembered the night Asriel returned home.

When he and Toriel had found Chara’s sickbed empty, the sheets still darkened by Asriel’s hysterical tears, they’d turned the entire Underground upside-down overnight. Searched everywhere, except the one place they both knew he’d gone – the one place they couldn’t follow. Half the kingdom had been alerted by them desperately calling his name, and that half had gone to tell the other half that their prince was missing, and all of them had searched and searched as Asriel stumbled back through the barrier, in the dead of night, and crumbled with no one there to see.

Asgore still wondered if he should have just stayed by the barrier. At least then he’d have gotten a chance to say goodbye. He’d first thought that after discovering Asriel’s dust in front of the thrones, piled in front of Chara’s body like an offering and staining the cold clay of his flesh. As he’d knelt there with the dust running through his fingers and Toriel standing over him, too shocked even for tears, he’d felt a terrible heat in his chest. And when he’d stepped out of the castle to find the assembled multitudes there, all of them reading the bad news on his face, he’d taken that heat, and let it loose.

He was never one for speeches. Much more suited to small talk. And so he’d kept his words short. They’d been butchered and beaten and locked in the dark, and now it turned out even that wasn’t enough, now two faultless children were dead. It was someone else’s turn to suffer. Humans feared what monsters could become? Then he would become what they feared. Chara had fallen, and he had died, and now every human foolish enough to venture here would follow his example. Their souls would break the barrier and reduce that cruel world above to ash. Asgore’s son was gone; all he had left was time. And in that time, there would be a terrible reckoning for what humanity had done.

He’d felt the anger writhing in those words. And it wasn’t until the last of them had escaped his throat and he’d seen that anger reflected on the crowd’s faces that he’d realized his mistake. Too late to take it back. The thunderous cheers had shook him to the bone; no chance of his voice ever being heard over that din. He’d felt Toriel’s stare on him like a cold wind as he’d turned and retreated back into the vacant, ransacked house.

For a time he’d felt like a sleepwalker. He would go to bed and wake up and retreat to his garden with tools in hand. Sometimes he would water the same patch of earth for hours until it was nothing but drowned and squelching mud. He’d been dimly aware of Toriel’s voice, reasoning with him, then warning, then begging, but he’d just kept his head down until the sound went away and then waited until dark so he could go to sleep and get back up and do it all again. Until he’d come home one day to find the house feeling emptier than usual, and, unsure of his own mind, visited the carved stone coffin in the basement only to find its lid cracked and nothing but darkness inside, the air around it oddly cold.

Fully awake for the first time in days, he’d run out, down the halls, and stopped dead in the castle antechamber, where the Delta Rune was printed in stained glass and silhouette all along the hall and the columns’ shadows cross-hatched the shining floor. Toriel had been there, her back to him, something limp bundled in her arms. The clank of his regalia gave him away; she’d turned her head just enough for one half-lidded eye to lance through him, without anger or pity. She’d stared at him like he wasn’t there. And then he’d seen Chara’s pale arm dangling from her grip, a single loose strip of gauze hanging from one wrist like torn skin.

Even then, it might have been possible to take it back. She had waited for him to speak. But he couldn’t find the words; it was as though his throat had locked itself up in fear of another disastrous speech. As they stood there, mute, an unseen bell had tolled, the sound filling the space between them. And when the resonance of that single chime died away, she had turned, and walked, until the shadows at the far end of the hall consumed her.

That was the last he’d seen of them.

He had her throne safely covered up and put aside; he’d kept her chair and her things as they’d always been. He’d learned to avert his eyes whenever he walked past the childrens’ room. And he’d expanded the Royal Guard, and broadened the reach of their posts, to one spot in particular – outside the Ruins, the furthest away one could possibly go, with that great stone door permanently shut against Snowdin’s freezing winds. So that someone could be there to greet her, when she changed her mind. He was certain that she would eventually change her mind.

Instead, someone else had fallen. That was what the jar was for. Human souls lasted for a remarkably long time even without bodies, as if sustained on their own bare, haunting glow. This shifting glass took that light, reflected it back on the soul, forcing it to consume and recycle its own limitless vitality. If even one of them had been filled during the war, that whole disastrous affair might have turned out very differently. And now it looked like the artifact’s time had come around at last.

He wondered if it was one of the humans who had killed his son, and his grip on the trident tightened.

From outside the door there was a low rumble like rocks rolling down a steep hill. 05 stepped back into the doorway. He appeared to note Asgore’s menacing pose, his grim expression.

“Your Majesty. Presenting Royal Guard Enlistee 06, and, er...the prisoner.”

Footsteps like small earthquakes. The entire doorway went dark. And even Asgore couldn’t help but look surprised at the shape that now hulked in the throne room – the king was on the bulky side, but 06 was at least a head and a half taller than him and quite a bit wider. The guard’s black helm was like an overturned bucket; it was impossible to tell what he was under that armor, other than “gigantic.” Still, he looked almost meek as he ducked into the chamber, carefully keeping the toes of his mammoth sabatons away from the flowers.

Asgore opened his mouth to ask where the human was. And he saw how one of 06’s arms was strangely stiff, and followed that expanse of metal down to the ground, where it terminated at a fist the size of a small boulder. One pinky was extended. And the human held it tight.

She was a tiny heap of contrasting colors. Her jumper sky-blue and the ribbon in her hair thin and red as a capillary. Pale skin and wide eyes so dark they seemed like holes in space, staring owlishly at him. If size was any judge, she was even younger than Chara had been.

Something flashed in the sun. A knife, held at her side.

Asgore managed to say, “It..she has a weapon.”

“It’s a toy, Your Majesty.” 05 tried, and failed, to make that sentence sound professional. “When we first encountered it, we-“

A throaty rumble, high overhead. It took a moment for Asgore to realize that it was coming from 06. A voice so deep he couldn’t even make out the words. But 05 sighed, and corrected himself.

“When we encountered her, she didn’t seem violent. And we, you know, tried to disarm her, but, uh, she started crying, so 06 gave it back.” There was another tectonic mutter from 06. “Okay, fine, I gave it back. I fully accept the consequences for my-”

“It’s all right.” Asgore’s voice sounded like it was coming from far away. “Leave her with me. I’ll do what needs to be done.”

The girl continued to stare. If she’d blinked, Asgore hadn’t seen it. 05 straightened up again.

“Yes, Your Majesty. We’ll be off.” 06 didn’t let go. 05 glanced at him, then sidled over and elbowed him sharply in the back – which, considering the height difference, was closer to 06’s knee. “Come on, man.”

With great reluctance, 06 shook off the girl’s grip. She made one feeble attempt to catch his hand as he turned away, but he pushed her back and left the room, head bowed, 05 hurrying behind. Asgore remained stiff in his seat until the vibrations of 06’s footfalls died away.

The girl kept watching him. Her tiny body shook like the flowers’ stems.

Asgore released his trident and it fell and dissolved in a shower of red sparks. He stood up, leaving the jar behind, and walked over to her. Her head craned up, up, always meeting his gaze, even as he buried her in his shadow. When he knelt down in front of her, she barely came halfway up to his chest. The toy knife shuddered in her grip.

He reached out to her. She cried out and swung the knife.

Asgore hissed air through his teeth and pulled back his hand. There was a deep gash across his palm like a white and toothless mouth, its edges trickling dust. The girl’s knife tempered by her fear. And out of the corner of his vision, he saw the toy fall to the ground, and looked up to see the girl’s hands clapped over her mouth, her eyes gone even wider with horror and shining bright with tears. Her breathing began to hitch and break.

He scooped her up and stood upright and started to pace the room, burying her face in his beard. A practiced movement, almost reflexive; he’d done it often with Asriel.

“Shh. There, there,” he said, as she sobbed into his neck. “It’s all right. Everything is going to be all right.”

He patrolled the chamber until her breath calmed, and then rocked her a while longer, her bones fragile beneath his grip. He held her at arm’s length. He could have nearly enfolded her whole body in the palm of one hand. He tried to smile.

“I am sorry if I scared you. My name is King Asgore,” he said. “I am the ruler of all the people here. What-” is your name, he started to ask, but the words died in his throat. He fell back on an old standby: “Would you like a cup of tea?”

The girl nodded.

“Please, have a seat. It may be a bit cold, but...”

He settled her own in his own chair and poured the tea – it was still warm, no doubt owing to how long he’d kept his flame on the teakettle earlier. He mixed in sugar and honey until the drink became a tarry, cloying slurry, then placed the cup in front of the girl and knelt at the opposite end of the table.

She looked into the cup as if expecting to see an omen there, then slowly raised it to her mouth and sipped. Then she smiled, and drank deeper. Asgore watched silently, his hands gripping the edge of the table so tight the wood threatened to crack. He didn’t even feel his wound anymore.

When she’d had her fill, she set her cup down and crossed her palms in her lap. She still wouldn’t speak. Asgore tried to fill the silence:

“How did someone like you come all the way here?”

She blinked. And then, she said, “I fell.”

Her voice was so small and faint that it seemed to come from the bottom of a well. And that appeared to be the end of her answer. He searched for another question. He found it skulking at the back of his mind.

“Before you met those two – the ones in armor – did you see anyone else? Since you fell?”

She nodded. “I stayed with a nice lady. She looked like you.” Another lengthy pause as she dredged up further speech. “She was nice.”

Asgore fought to keep his expression calm. His chest felt uncomfortably tight. Like his breastplate was crushing him. His ears had started to ring.

He turned and stared at the empty doorway. He deliberately looked away from the girl for as long as possible. But when he turned back, she was still there, the same pose, the same expression. She didn’t even seem to consider running away.

He kept his voice steady. “Did she...say anything about me?”

“She said.” The words escaped in fragments. “She said to be careful. And. She asked me to tell you something.”

“What was it?”

“Um.” For the first time, she looked away, her lips pursed as she tried to remember. Then her face lit up, and she rose her head. “She said, ‘Please do the right thing.’”

Birdsong leaked in from the crags high overhead. The flowers rustled like laughter. This room was so close to the barrier that he thought he could hear its pulse. That ceaseless hum, that bass beat.

“Excuse me,” said the girl. “When can I go home?”

The Royal Guard enlistees’ hesitation. The silent rebuke in his wife’s eye. And then, the despair on his people’s faces. The fierce, furious joy he’d kindled with that promise. The thought of what that joy would become if he tried to take it back.

“I would like to go home, please,” she said.

Here and now. It was just the two of them.

His hands shook against the table. Then, all at once, they stilled. When he spoke, his voice was measured and calm.

“Didn’t you know?” he asked. The girl tilted her head, and Asgore smiled. “You are home. This is all just a bad dream. A city under a mountain? A kingdom full of monsters? And now you’re having tea with their king.” He chuckled. “It’s all a bit silly, isn’t it?”

She bit her lip. “It feels real.”

“Well, you know what that means.” She shook her head. Asgore leaned forward, his voice quiet and conspiratorial. “It means you’re a very good dreamer.”

The girl blushed and smiled again; for a moment, she looked like Chara. Asgore clutched at the table like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

“And since you’re such a good dreamer,” he said, "you must know how to wake up, correct?” Another shake of the head. “Well, it’s quite simple. All you have to do is close your eyes and count backwards from ten. And by the time you finish, you’ll-” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat, and said, “You’ll be home.”

She didn’t hesitate; she trusted him now. Those wide, dark eyes closed, and the girl began to count, silently mouthing each word. The sugar-clotted tea’s aroma was suffocating. The fading sun gleamed on the discarded soul jar, on the knife left in the garden. He hoped that these waves of nausea would overtake him and carry him off into unconsciousness, but he stayed awake. He listened desperately for any visitors, some distant footfall outside the door, but nobody came.

The girl mouthed, “One.”

He took a breath and raised his hands.

* * *

(Knock, knock, knock.)

Snowdin.

Impossible to tell day or night here. No cracks in the cavern’s high ceiling to let in the sun; the snow that fell crystallized in overhanging shadow, and as it clung to the earth and the trees it reflected every ray of light a hundredfold, bathing the entire region in a pale, quiet glow. But he’d waited until the last vestige of sun in the garden had died, and made his trek back here. Every house on the way had been shut and darkened. No one had seen him pass through.

(Knock, knock, knock.)

Leading away from the Ruins’ scarred stone door were a pair of footprints so small that they were almost invisible. They continued over the bridge, and met two more pairs – both larger, one unreasonably so. Only the larger prints continued after that. She had gone without a struggle. The guards had carried her away.

(Knock, knock, knock.)

The door insulated the Ruins from sound as well as the chill, and their old home was a fair distance away from this entrance. His knock likely wouldn’t be heard. But he was prepared to continue for as long as it took. The sound traveled amongst the trees and echoed back at him like an accusation.

(Knock, knock, knock.)

His shoulders were hunched, his head bowed. The deep purple of his mantle and the crown perched between his horns shone like aurora in the still night. His wounded hand sent out fresh pangs of pain; he hadn’t bothered to heal it. Beside his foot was a small, wrapped box.

(Knock, knock, knock.)

“Who is there?”

His fist froze; his breath caught in his throat. The voice was hushed and anxious, but unmistakable.

He couldn’t say anything now; there was nothing left to say. But for a moment, he lay his palm and forehead flat against the stone, eyes shut, ignoring the way the door burned cold against his skin. Then, he turned around, and walked away. The door grinded open behind him. He felt someone's gaze on his back.

He treaded over the girls’ footprints and erased them with his own; when the door to the Ruins closed again, the box holding the girl’s ribbon and knife was gone, a small indent in the snow the only evidence it had ever been there. Before long, it snowed again, gentle and slow, but enough to mar the prints and eventually blot them them out completely. Time moved forward, and swept clean all their traces in its wake.