Chapter Text
It’s the strangest feeling really when the alarm wakes you up. Blaringly loud, battering fiercely against your cloudy thoughts. You bury your head further into your pillow, fruitlessly grasping at the last wisps of a half-remembered dream. The sunlight that filters through the gray clouds outside is hardly bright, but it seems to be just enough to dissipate the memories like mist.
You push back hair from your face, spitting out the dried strands from an even drier mouth. You taste the bitterness of sleep and dead air and ready yourself to look at the time and date. The alarm keeps on sounding, seemingly indignant that you’re still on your elbows, unwilling to move.
It’s become a routine thing. Dream. Wake. Dread . Whine about the unfairness of it all.
You glance sharply at the date and time, heart hammering and dread curling heavy at the bottom of your chest. You know before you see the red digital numbers that nothing has changed...or maybe everything has changed all over again.
It’s hard to analyze things when you’re caught in a time loop.
Back and back and back to a year ago again.
The clock reads 6:30 AM on a dreary April day and an ugly bitterness seems to well up inside you, blocking your breaths and battering against the back of your lips until you shout-
“Fuck. Shit. Damn. CRAP! WHAT IS THIS?!”
You sit up quickly, rubbing at your eyes to clear away the tears, but nothing helps because everything in the past year was for nothing. (And the year before that, and the year before that.) The tears overwhelm you, and you are left with just a terrifyingly neutral apathy that somehow feels worse than the anger that had buoyed you the first time through.
The alarm keeps chiming, and you press the silencing button mechanically, still curled up in the nest of blankets you piled onto your bed to give you some sort of sensation. Anything to help you feel like you were still here...still existing.
It’s all so predictable. Just like clockwork...the blocky red numbers change soundlessly. It’s 6:58 AM by the time you’ve gathered up the pieces of your miserable looping life and let your bare feet fall dully onto the ugly green carpet. You’re still wearing the warm gray sweats and the loose t-shirt with a faded star pattern. ( An outfit you were positive you had thrown out at least half a year ago...or would it be in half a year?)
Your blue scrubs are still in a well-remembered pile by the closet door, when you clearly remembered freshly laundering them for the last week of clinicals.
Everywhere you looked, nothing was in the same place it had been yesterday, but everything was in the same place it had been approximately a year ago. How cruel it was, that time could give you a whole year to hope and dream and work hard, and then snatch it all back.
But something within you still thuds softly, and it is this that pushes you to stand and to get ready for a long day of classes.
“If not for me, then for them.” You mutter quietly, memories shifting through the apathetic gray to help you a bit in your efforts.
It’s somewhere in between you washing your face and talking yourself into another year-long existence of trying that something miraculous happens...something altogether unexpected and not like clockwork.
It’s a small thing in the grand scheme of it all, but the muffled shattering of glass on the other side of the wall you share with your never-been-seen neighbor is a blessing.The clock shows 7:23 AM.
Something is different, just a little something, but it’s just enough for hope to bloom as full and golden as the “contraband” yellow flowers that sit on your kitchen table.
You’re running late, but there’s something that keeps you rooted on the little, woven “Not Welcome” mat in front of your neighbor’s apartment door.
You stare long and hard at the dark whorls on the wood, briefly noting that the numbers are a little lopsided. You’ve passed this door thousands of times, never taking notice of it all, caught up in the misery and difficulty that was your life as a nursing student.
But today...today it might just be the most thrilling thing in existence.
Something had changed. And it was this new development that made your heart race. Your loosely formed fist was poised to knock, hesitating because there was real fear that you had imagined it all. And thinking logically, small deviations hadn’t been unheard of. The past four time loops had taught you that.
But this was unprovoked by any changes you had made. This was entirely independent on whether you decided to walk this way or that, or had decided to go somewhere a few minutes later or earlier.
You can feel your pulse thudding heavily, everything else soundless save for the sharp breaths you take and the slight shifting of your boots on the mat.
The shattering of glass still echoes in your thoughts, giving you a strange kind of courage. So you knock, accidentally hitting too hard in your excitement and waving your hand in the air to dissipate the blunt pain radiating from your bruised knuckles. You mutter curses under your breath, sneaking glances at a woefully closed door.
No answer.
You try again.
And again.
But nobody came.
You glance at your phone, noting that anymore time spent staring at the door and you wouldn’t even make it in time for your biochemistry class.
So quickly, you adjust your gray backpack so that it is slung in front of you. You hastily rummage through and tear out the corner of a sheet of lined paper and dig for a pen. (You’ve never been very organized.) You pull out the first one you touch and frown when you look at the color. But there’s no time to judge your finals’ week writing tool choices.
You pen a small message, using the rough wood of the door as a flat surface.
The note is pushed under the door, wrinkled and messy. It rips slightly as you shove it haphazardly through the slim crack. Then without looking at the door anymore, you fix your backpack to rest heavily against your back and proceed down the hallway with lighter steps.
For reasons you cannot fathom, your hands are clammy and you wipe them fruitlessly against the sides of your jeans. Your force yourself to keep walking, all the while deciding that today will be a day of deviations because you refuse to let the dull, gray apathy cloud your life again.
Golden hope sways headily in your thoughts, and brings the smallest of smiles to your face.
He’s been through this routine before. He’s been through the timeline resetting crap way back when the sky was just a story and stars were just corporeal crystals set into an abysmally dark cavern.
This time is so much worse. Because at least back then, the timeline had never extended longer than a few months at best.
Here, it was a year. A sad, pathetic collection of days racing towards a circular end. It swallowed itself whole, an Ouroboros-like hell filled with the constant knowledge that nothing was right.
And here, he knew nothing. He knew nothing but what he had experienced himself and this world was so vast, possibilities rushed in from every angle, every side until his head hurt trying to wrap his head around it all.
But the worst part of it all is the gnawing guilt. The “what-ifs” and the countless patterns retraced to back before the looping year.
And the wall his desk sits against is once again bare. He knows what waits for him in his mailbox. The Mt.Ebbot Chronicle , an innocently rolled up local newspaper. But he doesn’t need to read the headline or article that spans the front of the page.
Not when he can easily keep re-reading the barrage of texts that had caused his phone to buzz crazily the last day before the timeline had started.
From: Tori
[Sans. This is Asgore. Tori is not feeling well enough to message you
Frisk is...missing.]
1 Call from Tori.
From: Undyne
[Hey!]
[Have you heard from Papyrus recently? He was AWOL from our training session yesterday.]
6 Missed Calls from Undyne.
1 Missed Call from Unknown Number.
So no, he doesn’t need to read the paper or turn on the news to know that a search has been called for the missing child ambassador of monsters and the missing skeleton monster that had always been such a kindly soul in that small town at the base of Mt. Ebott.
He doesn’t need to do anything to know the speculation that will arise from other humans, that maybe Frisk was kidnapped or that Papyrus is also gone and that the trail will run clear across the country, fading somewhere in between fields of corn and large gaping chasm that is spanned by a dark, deep river running with fiercely sweeping currents.
He knows that a year from now, the search will end when he fails to find anything but a tattered red scarf and a blood stained patch of a musty old striped sweater.
He knows that no matter what he does, no matter how he deviates or fights or tries, the outcome will be the same, and the timeline will reset.
But he can’t help but feel an immense relief every time, because waking up to a dreary April morning and the muffled cursings of a frustrated neighbor means that Papyrus and Frisk are alive again and that there is still a chance.
And that’s all that keeps him moving. There is still a chance, but the same long-held nihilism from before has come bursting back, because a future that had once extended out as far the stars was now cropped back to a year of torturous anticipation and he’s barely holding it together.
So when the muffled shouts come again across the thin wall and his phone is blissfully silenced, he is left alone with his blaring anger at odds with his gray apathy. It takes so much effort for him to even pull back the covers and he hates it so much.
He doesn’t know if he wants to die, but the thought whispers at the back of his head.
He’ll just be back here when the loop is over. Before he knows it, his sight is filled with a searing blue and the anger that hadn’t been winning up until the thought is now all he can feel. It burns...it burns and he is tired and so fed up.
He gives a small flick of his hand. A pretty blue vase, with the words “WORLD’S SECOND BEST BROTHER” painted lovingly on it, is sent flying across the room to shatter against the wall he shares with his noisy neighbor. The noise is deafening, and the water and wilted flowers that had been inside are strewn all over the ugly green carpet.
When he sees what he broke, he slides out from under the cover gingerly, and picks up the pieces regretfully. He’s long learned that crying does nothing to fix the situation, so he wipes away whatever tries to fall from his eyes on the back of his sleeve.
“I’m sorry, Paps. Sorry, Frisk.”
And he stays sitting stiffly on the floor of his bedroom, cradling the shards of the vase to his chest.
The really loud knock that comes from his front door is startling enough. Annoyance flickers through him at first, wondering if the person outside could not read. He ignores it and the softly nudging thoughts that attempt to break through his haze.
As different as this is, this is a direct consequence of his throwing the vase.
Knock. Knock .
He doesn’t answer.
He sighs in relief when the knocking stops, only to tense when he hears the slight crinkling of a paper being shoved underneath his door.
Sans steps very slowly into his slippers. He shuffles just as slowly through his room and across the living room. He pauses only to set the pieces of the vase onto the coffee table and then heaves a deep breath when he looks at the balled up little paper dusty and torn from its journey into his abode.
With near trembling hands, he reaches down. And he doesn’t know why, but the thought of golden hope sparks at the sight of the note and he tells himself to stop being so rib diculous .
(Old habits die hard. Humor is his only way to fight back.)
His breath stops when he turns it over and there, scrawled in purple glittering ink.
“You made my day change for the better. Whatever you broke was just enough. Thank you for that.”
-B.
And as cryptic as it all is, the golden hope curls delicately molded petals slightly, still a budding thing.
But your words are just enough too...or maybe more than that. He’s not sure, but he’ll be sucked into the Void before he rules out the possibility that he is not alone this time around.