Work Text:
———⚡️———
Alphys looks between the ornate chandelier on the ceiling, the scented candle in the middle of her table painting the smooth wood with warm, rosy light, and the tall, wide, decorated windows opening up into a gorgeous view of the mountainside and the city below at sunset, and when she digs her claws into the wood and glances at Mettaton, flipping through the menu with lazy grace before he looks back up at her and brightens, sparkling and content and at home in the hues of glimmering glass and soft candlelight — she can almost believe this could be a date.
It could be. Friend-dates are a thing, right? And Mettaton had set aside this evening for them to spend time together, just the two of them, and he had been so busy lately preparing for his world tour and she's been thrown left and right by work projects, events and celebrations and all to attend — the last two months blurred together in a whirlwind of blueprints, meetings, anime reruns and machinery until even the anniversary party of leaving the Undeground seemed like it was both last week and last year simultaneously — so today might as well be a bit special. Even if she never said that he had to bring her to an over-the-top fancy diner to do so, but when she'd protested after looking up the venue he'd sent he simply said it's my treat, darling. Why wouldn't I want to make tonight special?
Dramatic as he always is. She'd be just as happy for him to come over while she's in her unwashed pajamas so they can binge watch as many Gundan movies as possible late into the night, but he made the plans this time and he loves to go all-out with it, so of course she lets him. Of course.
"Oh! It's quite far out of the way, but this place is simply divine," Mettaton says, as Alphys flips through the menu on her own. Everything on the menu is so... posh, far higher-class than the instant noodles she tends to cook on any other given night alone, so he's probably right. "I've had a few dinners with co-stars who thought to come here before, and I must say! This is far better than the elegant dining downtown, wouldn't you agree? The setup, the decor, the aesthetics are just right... and most importantly, the food! Every time I come here, I feel as though I should be taking notes..."
They order, eventually. They catch up on the goings-on of their lives, what's happened since the last time she'd met up with Mettaton for maintenance. World tour planning stage is busier than Mettaton had expected, he regales her, there's a never-ending list of hotels to book and concert stadium managers to conduct video-meetings with and stage acts to plan and graphics to write down briefs for, if not concept them, because his lovely marketing team does that for him, and that's all before having to look up countless travel guides and forums to consult on what would be the best ways to spend time in each country! It's a long-winded series of steps to put into motion, with almost as many side-tangents as there are steps, but even if she can see the dark shade worn under his visible eye, he still talks about his plans with animated hand-gestures and with hardly any drop in excitement, and when she asks about it he says he's been charging his battery regularly too, so it's fine! He's fine, and she's happy to listen.
It's good, better than good, how they turned out in the end. Years and years ago, when they were still in the Underground, she would've never imagined... this. Some future as kind as this one, where she owns up to every horrible thing she's ever done and she's still allowed to be part of the world, despite that. All her friends are alive and well and thriving, and she — she has a future, somehow! She's allowed to...
"Something on your mind, Alphys?"
She gives a short little squeak when she catches herself gazing out the window, and Mettaton laughs. Did she look wistful while she was doing it? Mysterious, perhaps...? But it's more likely that Mettaton thought she looked like a dork, which, fair, she always does look like a dork, but still—
"Oh, um, n-nothing much, really," she says. "Y-you can go on with the bit about finding v-venues in China?"
"I will, I will, but you've got to tell me first! What's got you sighing oh-so wistfully as you gaze into the distance, my dear Doctor? Has the mountainside view captivated you?" He drops into a scandalous gasp. "Or is it...!"
"Oh my god, I didn't do any wistful sighing! Or s-sighing wistfully, or — whatever," she huffs and blushes, propping up her chin with her hands. "It's, um. It's stupid, anyway, so."
Mettaton kicks up his long and glittery heels, and waggles his eyebrow.
Alphys questions, for a brief second, how in the world did she build his body so intensely attractive that even an eyebrow waggle makes her heart skip multiple beats. How.
"O-okay, fine! Fine! I'll tell you, just don't laugh," she surrenders, face flushing hot, "you know about alternate universes, right? I told you?"
Maybe there's a lifetime where they never make it out of the Underground. Maybe there's a lifetime they were never in the Underground at all. Maybe they exist in a thousand different ways, in a thousand different permutations of everything that could ever happen, and this here — this now — the mere fact that it happened is a miracle. Is a probability so close to zero that it makes her head spin, trying to imagine the trail of zeroes and other arbitrary numbers that follow that percentage, but...
"Of course." He leans forward.
"W-well, there's got to be some universal constants across most universes, right? So, uh, I was just wondering..." and her voice softens into a pink shade of shy, "do you think we would be friends? In every universe?"
A moment later, Mettaton huffs something almost like a laugh.
"H-hey!"
"Oh, Alphys, that's such a sweet thing to wonder about!" he says, his cheeks tinted pinker in the glow of the candlelight. "I do think that—"
———⚡️———
—it's been far too long since we last talked, dear. Pray tell, how did you fare with the internet being down?
Alphys looks out her window and can almost see it again if the light hits it right, the dark and the whimsical and the dread that broke the world open, and nibbles a bit on her claws as she figures out how to adequately describe the part of her week where giant black figures went stomping into town.
mewmewqueen: idk LMAO i had some manga downloaded and i had to ration it out throughout the week? it sucked BTW don't do what i did =.=
mewmewqueen: but that was also kinda nothing haha WE HAD GIANTS STOMPING THRU TOWN
mewmewqueen: and also it got really dark out on one particular day BUT THE GIANTS??? HELLO??
mewmewqueen: some of the kids in town stopped it i heard... idk man my heads still spinnin
metal-and-magic: Wait
metal-and-magic: I also saw the titans??
mewmewqueen: like on god i taught those kids! like 2 of them i mean!! what do u MEAN they get their anime protagonist moment THAT'S SO COOL?? WHEN WILL IT BE MY TURN...
mewmewqueen replied: WAIT WHAT
Very nearly, she drops her phone into her cup noodles. Thankfully she doesn't, but lightning magic tickles at her clawtips and her phone's screen flickers from the burst of electricity (the magic thing? Definitely also new. Very likely also came from the world breaking open. Takes some getting used to but at least she now never has to worry about forgetting her powerbank), and even with her phone still intact she has to sit there for a few moments to collect all her thoughts.
What does he mean, he saw the titans.
mewmewqueen: YOU LIVE HERE???
metal-and-magic: Ha-ha, you're going to have to specify! Oh yes, dear, I saw the titans romping through town on the telly and also right outside my window ;)
mewmewqueen: HOMETOWN?? AN HOUR AWAY FROM EBOTT CITY????
mewmewqueen replied: omg i didn't ask are u okay?? is your family safe???
mewmewqueen: i should've asked that first i'm so sorry
metal-and-magic: Oh yes, we're all okay! We all have a certain Mr. Tenna to thank for that, by the way, as well as his fellow... Darkners, I think he called them? Didn't catch that too well I'm afraid
metal-and-magic replied: The very one ;)
mewmewqueen: OH MY GOD??
mewmewqueen: we HAVE to meet up now holy shit
mewmewqueen: uhhh i still gotta teach this week but i'm free saturday? we can meet up at the librarby if that's ok with u :>
mewmewqueen: maybe 3 or 4pm is okay?
He doesn't respond for a few minutes, after she sends that message. Maybe she scared him off? Or maybe by virtue of them existing in the same town together, that means he wants nothing to do with her...? Like, that would be possible, and valid. She's given the kids in her class an internet safety lecture a few weeks back and even if most of them might not have taken away anything meaningful from it, at least Metta took it to heart, wherever he learnt it, and even if they have a chat history spanning at least a year or two, she is still, ultimately, an internet stranger to him...
Her cup ramen goes cold before the ping goes off on her phone again.
metal-and-magic: Oh, darling...
metal-and-magic: I'm afraid I'll be... quite the disappointment, if you ever see me in real life. As I am now, I'm hardly as charismatic or as cool as you often say I am...
mewmewqueen: no it's okay!! im pretty much the same actually!!! like. actually a huge loser
mewmewqueen: but also i don't care who u are or what u look like fr. u will always be The Coolest Ever to me <3
metal-and-magic: ...that's really reassuring to hear, actually. Thank you
mewmewqueen: ur welcome!!!! :D
metal-and-magic: But when the darkness fell around town... it transformed me, you know? I could finally look into a mirror and see the person in the reflection as... me. Tall and magnificent and perfect. And now that the light and dark have become one...
metal-and-magic: ...I see it still, sometimes. Flashes of who I could've been. But now that everything's almost back to normal, I don't know what to do with myself...
metal-and-magic: Oh, darling, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bore you with my sob story. I don't feel well enough about myself these days to meet outside my house, but...
Alphys reads his texts over. Once, twice. Maybe another five times to be sure — before she hunches closer to the screen, presses her feet to the ground, and begins typing.
mewmewqueen: no u didn't bore me!
mewmewqueen replied: the dark gave me a rlly cute magical girl dress, but... yeah. funny enough when i was a lot younger i had a lot of the same thoughts? like smth about me should be different but i didn't know what it was. i didn't avoid mirrors like u probably do but i used to be so frustrated with how i was
mewmewqueen: i didn't recognize it at the time tho so i was a really huge shut-in in my teens?? uhh hindsights 20/20 or smth idk
metal-and-magic: You? A shut-in??
metal-and-magic: ...I can see it.
mewmewqueen: HEY
mewmewqueen: after a while i realized that along with liking girls i also really wanted to be a girl myself LMAO but that took a really long time to figure out! but like yeah :( really sucks that who u could be and be yourself as is locked away. i feel u :( if teen me realized she could be a girl but then never got the chance to become that then i think i'd go insane too
metal-and-magic: ...yeah.
metal-and-magic: I doubt my case is quite the same as yours... but even so, I'm glad we can share some solidarity. One of my cousins seems to be in a similar situation as me, but she's... far less open to talking about it.
mewmewqueen: oh damn
mewmewqueen: was she in town when the dark fell? did u see her?
metal-and-magic: Oh, yes! She had on a — what did you say it was? A magical girl dress? And cat ears? Something along those lines. I think... that was the first time I saw her at peace.
mewmewqueen: OMG IS HER NAME MADDIE
mewmewqueen: I THINK I SAW HER??? she looked like mew mew i HAD to follow
metal-and-magic: Huh
metal-and-magic: You did, then! Me and Blooky lost her a little bit after the dark fell, but we did sort of worry over her for nothing. She, uh, said she had a lot of fun fistfighting the titan's darkspawn??
Alphys blushes.
mewmewqueen: oh?? that's good!! i felt bad bc she had to cover me so much but i'm glad she had fun!!!
metal-and-magic: Yep!
metal-and-magic: But since you've met Maddie already, and we already have at least a few overlapping experiences... I wouldn't mind if you want to meet up at my place! My room's a bit small, but that just makes for a cozy fit, doesn't it?
mewmewqueen: Oh my god
mewmewqueen: FR???
metal-and-magic: Of course! Maybe we can drag Maddie into it too — Angel knows commiserating on our situation would probably do her some good.
metal-and-magic: Maybe alone, we won't find any way to deal with this, but together... well, who knows what we will achieve?
mewmewqueen: YEAH!!
mewmewqueen: this saturday at 3 good with u?
mewmewqueen: omg i can't believe i'm actually going to meet u. in real life!! i can't wait—
———🌟———
"—until the day is over, darling. You know that," Mettaton says, the cannon of his right arm a heavy weight even as Alphys holds it close, holds him like letting go would mean the end of the world, and when his words finally sink in for her and she lets her hands fall to her sides, the weight sinks, heavier than it was before.
A little bit more pained than he would like to reveal, he says, "...I promised you that I would go."
Too stuck in his throat for him to say: it's okay.
Because it's not. Because it can't be. Because he'd just wrapped up the script for a fashion show he's wanted to do since the beginning of his stardom, and all he had to do was push it right into production. Because he has shows still in the middle of their seasons, and he'd hate nothing more than to leave hanging plot threads. Because it would have been nice, it would have been the best thing in the world, to bask in the spotlight for a while longer and see his wonderful audience smile a little bit more. Because his dream body is almost finished, Alphys had said as much the last time she'd talked before he'd lost contact for ages, and all he needed was just a little bit more time.
Because he still has family to visit again, left on the backburner.
Because...
"D-don't... don't go," Alphys says, wetly. Sadly. With her hands empty her claws instead grip onto the ends of her sleeves, shaking tight — and out of the blue she makes a mad dash to her work cupboards, pulling out blueprints and mechanisms, mismatched parts and tools, anything she can get her claws on. Muttering to herself in hushed tones too low for him to make out. In no time at all there is a pile of various machines and scrap metal strewn about all over the floor, with Alphys hunched over various blueprints as she heaves and exhales and doesn't listen as he says—
"Alphys?"
She yelps when he crouches next to her. Up close her hands quiver as she traces shaky chickenscratch into the blank space of a blueprint, even less legible technical jargon than he's used to reading.
"Oh, Alphys... you know we still have to—"
"Th-there has to be another way," she mumbles. "I-I made swords, and laser guns for fun, a-and there's still a bunch of working parts here... I c-can still pull something together t-that might stop the human! Th-there's still time... I-I can still..."
"Alphys—"
"There has to be a way where you don't go," and for one moment the world falls quiet.
He almost expects her to get up, to pick up the scraps and try to make her impossible solution on borrowed time. To put her foot down and fight against his fate, like those brave teen heroes in the cartoons she liked to pull up during movie nights, and he would almost be flattered if it weren't for how she still needed to get back to an evacuation, and he still needed to keep his promise, and time still needed to tick relentlessly onward to their almost-inevitable doom. But she doesn't get up like an idealistic hero. She doesn't stand to defy the weight of reality. For a moment or two, she sits in her own rubble, hands pressed into her papers and useless, and...
"I still — I still have to finish your body," she sobs, finally. "I-it's just final touches, a-all the other major parts are finished, and — and you'll get to be yourself. Just like... just like you w-wanted to."
Oh.
"Y-you have to live to see it, right? It's everything you ever wanted. It's why we're here. The — the human's already fighting Undyne, Mettaton, a-and she's losing, she's losing out there and I can't see her do it, I-I can't let you go if this is what you're going to face—" —and she breathes. She breathes. "You're... you're doing this for me. I don't... i-if you die out there, then I'll have..."
Alphys does not pick the sentence back up, but he can guess what she would have said:
- I'll have failed you. (Try as he might, he doesn't have it in his heart to deny her words.)
- I'll have no one left.
"I can't... I can't lose you too—"
Mettaton takes her by her small, shivering hands, and with all the willpower he has left, does his best to not wince when Alphys stares through him like he's already gone.
"Then you won't," he says, as certain as he can be. He interlaces his fingers with her claws, and he squeezes. "I'll come back."
She sputters. "But you can't... y-you can't promise something like—"
"Oh, Alphys... have a little faith in me, will you? Can you do this for me?"
It is a lot for him to ask of her. It is a lot for him to ask of himself, when cold dread seeps into his thoughts like sand in the hourglass, and every second that ticks by and every grain that falls brings him closer, ever closer, to what might be the end. And he can't bear to fathom the end, not just yet, and he almost can't bear to fathom that it might not be the end either, not if he throws every single bit of himself into it and tries — but Alphys sniffles, and wipes her eyes against her sleeve, and nods despite everything.
It's one more reason to come back alive.
"I'll see you again, when all this is over. Alright, darling?" And despite himself, he forces a smile. "I promise you, I will—"
———🌟———
"—keep you company. But... I guess it has been a while, hasn't it, Alphys-darling?"
The statue of her he keeps in the castle, in a room only he can always walk to but he never does most days, at most he just walks past — it does not respond. When he'd asked the marbleworkers to create her monument they'd done it with the utmost reverence, carved her claws clasped gently together as if she was making a wish and shaped the brittle frame of her glasses, the faint poking scales on her skin, the light billow of her lab coat as if she could still be moved by the wind — even if they'd surely never met her before, the statue-makers went above and beyond with only a handful of pictures and a sketch to go off of, and in no universe can he deny her statue's perfection. Pale marble, at least, will last for the rest of time. For however long it takes for him to pull his courage together, she will wait, and wait, and wait.
"I keep thinking, one of these feather boas would look good on you. You should try one on, darling!" Mettaton unfurls a particularly glittery golden feather boa, fluffed and long and sparkling in the light of the room's one stained-glass window, and he reaches up to tuck it around her neck. Her statue is built almost too-large for him to do so comfortably, and he has to extend his arms all the way and throw one end of the feather boa over so he can catch it and drape it properly around the other side, but it does fit around her shoulders, in the end. It adds a good pop of color. It's a color she would've liked, even.
Nothing is more upsetting than a pitch-quiet room, so he sits at her feet and starts talking. Everything is just fine in the kingdom, just as peachy as the last time he'd visited her! So maybe people are pushing him to figure out the lack of space problem, and maybe he's been ordering excavations to be done and more homes and residential spaces to be built (in the shape of his face), even in places where more excavation would be risky, and maybe it's not his best idea, but it certainly is one of the few ideas that's got to work. So maybe the economy is down and something's wrong with education these days, but that's hardly his fault! He's been making initiatives to help those sectors even, what with ordering the renovation of New Home into a city that will almost be as glamorous as he is, and introducing human media lessons and mandatory drama curriculums to be taught in schools across the Underground! So maybe a few certain people are clamoring for a proper royal guard to defend the people instead of his human fan club, but...
Well. Undyne never liked him much anyways, and most of the ones who'd pushed for the re-establishment of a proper royal guard were close to Undyne and also dissenting of his rule, anyways, so he'd sent them to the barracks and called it a day. The few who remain to argue for a royal guard aren't in his personal elite force, and hence are hardly a threat to him — it would be strange of him, anyway, to target them when they have done nothing out of line. Strict as he is, he is also a merciful king, in the best of times.
It is, admittedly, a very difficult thing to be a merciful king at all.
It is a very difficult thing to be, to be King.
"You would know this, beautiful, but my bi-monthly maintenance is coming up in a few hours," Mettaton adds.
And then he stops.
Sans and his brother Papyrus have, so far, been excellent guards and agents. Papyrus lights up every room with an enthusiasm almost as bright as the spotlights Mettaton brings along to shine on him, and Sans...
The thing is, he wants to like Sans. Sans handled the wise-cracking when he was on contract at his resort, and now that he's his agent, Sans handles the finer details of finding contacts and polishing proposals to be even more professional and convincing than they already were, and can still smooth out the tension of any situation he's in, just by making a few well-timed puns. He's great like that, Sans. He really is.
But Sans also does his maintenance for him, and—
And he's supposed to. It's part of his job. A little while into being king and Mettaton found out that Alphys and Sans had been science buddies together, and Sans knew enough about his schematics and how to work his way around a screwdriver for Mettaton to trust him to perform his routine maintenance. He can't very well not allow him to do so, lest his body eventually fall into disrepair from a fault he leaves unacknowledged until it becomes too detrimental to ignore, but...
Sans, like Alphys, has almost the same nerdy sense of humor. Where she would gush about her silly animes, he twists sci-fi references into puns that fly over his head just as much as Alphys's mentions of her cartoons do. Like Alphys, he works with a diligent, methodical focus, writes his diagnostics in round font with similar attention to detail as Alphys once did, and Mettaton cannot deny he is the best suited to repair him.
But Sans, unlike Alphys, is...
"...he's just not you, Alphys."
He's not Alphys, who knows all his secrets. He's not Alphys, the first and only other official member of his human fanclub, who knew Mettaton when he hadn't yet gone by that name. He's not Alphys, who showed up one day with blueprints of the body beyond his wildest dreams, with the form where he could finally be himself, and...
Maintenance is their time together. His and Alphys's time together, and no one else's. He powers off and trusts her completely with his body, trusts that even with everything between them she would never do by him any harm, and to even fathom that someone else now will be at the lab to perform his maintenance—
(It makes him sick. It makes him sick. Early on it made him livid, made him furious, and he'd gone down to the garbage dump in Waterfall when no one was watching to kick at and break junk under his heels and scream into the hole at the bottom of the world. Something sacred was being desecrated if he allowed that skeleton to take up the task of his repairs, a sacred memory of her that he'd dug his claws into and snarled at anyone who would make it slip further away, but when he'd sat at the edge of the abyss and waited for an answer, waited for anything to come by that would make everything right again — it began to rain.)
(He'd asked her for tear ducts in this body, and they had worked just fine. They worked perfectly, still. Another proof of her brilliant design as his tears mixed with the storm water and dripped from his chin and disappeared into the bottom of the world, never to be seen again.)
(Sometimes, he wonders. Why didn't he join her that day, to rest at the bottom of the world? It would've been an easy escape. An easy way to leave behind the monumental, uphill task of being king, and find the missing part of him that disappeared with her again.)
But he is still alive.
"Oh, Alphys..."
He sighs. His gloves are wet again. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I haven't—"
———⚡️———
"—done this right," she hears Napstablook whisper to themself as the lab doors open.
"I-I'm sorry?"
Alphys has to fight the urge to flinch when they startle, their uncovered eye wide as their hand holding one of the pieces of her cup dips to the table. Deer-in-the-headlights style. They look at her for a long moment, too quiet and too afraid, before they say, "...hi, Doctor."
At some point she should tell them that really, they can skip every sense of formality, the end of the world has already happened and there isn't any reason for them to call her Doctor anymore, or Dr. Alphys, but any time she thinks of telling them that she walks into the room and sees Mettaton first, sees him still walking around in her lab and about to lay one of his elegantly long legs on her table, or in front of her workstation, and pester her that way until she gives up and answers his favor — but then she blinks and oh, he doesn't sit up in any sort of confident manner, and he startles like a spooked cat whenever she walks in on him doing anything, and his eye was never pale crystal-blue, and he would never...
(By right, she should've already done all her grieving right then and there, when she laid his body out on the table and saw the heart-core's diagnostics — irreversibly fused, like she suspected — and the magic signatures proved themselves to be markedly different from that of her best friend's. Slow waves instead of skipping along the graphs like lightning. A monster's magic is unique to themselves, the mark of who you are and all that you stand for, and a change that drastic can't happen. Is scientifically and magically impossible to happen. Unless...)
(...but they did say they weren't the person she was looking for.)
"Wh-what are you doing—? Oh, you didn't have to! I-I was, um, going to do it myself when I got home," she says, staring at her broken cup half-glued together on the table as she walks over to them, and takes a seat. If they had broken any other cup then she might've not bothered, but the cup half-in-pieces on the table is the cup Asgore gave her, the yellow lizard one with cute feet that he said reminded her of... herself, and then she just started using it always because even if it had always rattled her nerves to see a message from the King, it'd say something about her own character to use, at the very least, an Alphys-themed cup. And it's cute! (Cuter than Mettaton's Metta-mugs, at least.)
Napstablook stares at her, sad in a way he would hardly ever show, and droops further. "But... I broke it. I should—"
"No, no," she insists, "you don't have to worry about it! I can... I-I can just..."
But their sad gaze stays on her and lingers, like a plea. Lingers, reluctant, like they almost want to say but I want to do this, please let me do this — and it's the first time she's refused them and they've not immediately backed down. Like at anything else they would've let her be, would've walked away, but with her broken cup on the table they don't want to take no for an answer. Not just yet. And Mettaton was more stubborn than this, would dig in his heels sooner and have his say in how things should go his way, but the hour before she'd lost him he'd looked at her like this, like them. Sad. Reluctant. Lingering. I will walk into my end myself, all for you. Just for you.
Please don't make me turn away.
She sighs. "...I guess you can do it, if you really want to," and they seem to relax. "If any part of it is too difficult, l-let me know? I'd be happy to help," she says, and settles into her spot.
(For the few days they'd shut themself in his room, right after their revelation, Alphys had time to decide. Could she live with this? Could she live with this stranger in the body of her best friend, who shrinks their own presence and hardly speaks their own mind and eyes her, all the time, like she's about to scream at them? Like they would deserve every terrible and angry intrusive thought she's had about them. When they were on her repair table not so long ago, she did make it clear to them that the terrible thing they did was not their fault, right? She'd made it clear she wouldn't hold it against them?)
(Whether they remember or not, she wants to make good on that. They're Mettaton's cousin. He'd want her to take care of them, no matter what they've done. No matter how much seeing them hurts. In the few days Napstablook hid themself away, Alphys had taken the lab elevator down to the supply closet, and for a few hours she just — screamed. Wailed. Spat out every hateful and venomous thing she could never say to them, spat out why do you look like him, you can't look like him, he's dead! And all you do is float around the corner of my eye like a memory, like he never left, but he did! And you keep reminding me! And you're not Mettaton! You don't even know me at all! I don't care what he was to you, or who you are — give him back to me! Give me back my best friend—)
"Doctor?"
(And then she would curl up on the ground again with her legs to her chest, sobbing instead about how could she ever think that way. It's not fair to them. They didn't want to be this way on purpose. They can't bring Mettaton back from the dead, and they would probably love nothing more than to do just that and leave her be. How could she think about them that way, when she's made her own mistakes she can never ever fix? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Stupid thoughts. Terrible thoughts. If she can't even see them fairly, then how is she ever supposed to make fair judgements as queen?)
"Doctor, I..."
(But when she'd cried herself out and wiped her tears and rode the elevator back up again, puffy-eyed and more lightheaded than she was before, the angry and terrible load upon her heart had lightened, somehow. They were always going to be a stranger wearing Mettaton's dead body, sure, and there's nothing in the world she can do to see him just one more time, but even that felt manageable after all that shouting. Like she could wake up the next day and check in on them, and her heart would ache less. Like maybe, someday, they wouldn't always be a fresh wound, and she could...)
"...I'm sorry," they say, and Alphys blinks. They've glued most of her cup together on their own, handiwork almost exactingly neat, and the only bit they have left to put together is one of the back feet. But that back foot was where the cup must've hit the floor first, and smashed into pieces small enough that they don't know where to begin, so...
"Huh? Oh, no, don't be—"
"I know it hurts you... to look at me. You're... really kind, Doctor," and they stop. Twist their finger around the paper towel, and no matter at which angle she looks back at them they will not meet her eyes. "I don't... I don't want to hurt you. If you ever want me to leave, I..."
Her first thought: how do they read her so easily?
Her second thought, and the notion of it spikes in her gut: can they read her mind?
Her third thought: but if they could read her mind then they would've left already, because they would've seen every single terrible thought she thinks about them sometimes, unbidden, and if they are anything like her then they are not someone who would take any hint of resentment towards them well. If they knew, they would be getting up from their seat and leaving, and she would have to chase them down before they leave the lab and tell them, in no uncertain words, that yes, she wants them here, and she promised she would take care of them, and she promised that she would not hold their accident against them, and no matter how livid or upset she gets she will not take this out against them, she cannot, can they come back inside? Please?
(Like Mettaton walking out her door and out of her life, one final time. Can he come back inside? Can he linger by the doorway, please, for just a minute longer?)
Her last thought, and the one she makes real: “Wait, what do you mean—”
———🌟———
“—why? Surely you’ve seen the answer out there,” she says, when Mettaton wakes up with more thorns in places there weren’t before, and the new pair of arms that snake out of his back unsheath claws without his permission. “I-I won’t have something of my creation be so weak as to be defeated in a fight. Not — not on my watch.”
“Oh, darling…”
He brings his hands together, all four of them now, and stops. Presses the claws inward, even if they spring out again and he has to do it over again, frustratingly — but the vapid smile on his face holds. More often than not these days, he is much too glad that it stays. “My darling Doctor Alphys, you know I would never doubt your magnificent design. So, surely, you must be aware that even in my body’s last iteration I have never been defeated, no?”
“To bask in remaining untrounced is complacency. And such complacency invites failure,” she says. “To be truly undefeatable, you always have to innovate! Reiterate! B-be on the cutting edge!”
What he wants to ask, really, is did you install more of these spikes to insult me, or do you just think they are the cutting-edge of cool, but Alphys loves it when she gets to pull up her menacing swirly glasses and monologue. And he keeps giving her the chance to.
Truly, she is the great and terrible Doctor Alphys. And he would trust her more than anyone else in the world.
(In the moments they are apart, Mettaton polishes the subtle blade he will aim at her throat, one day.)
(Behind the Alphys who conducts experiments too vile to mention, too terrible to discuss outside of whispered rumors and hushed fear, is an Alphys who cared. Who wanted to do something good for once in her life. Who let him in when she messed that up in ways she could not undo, in ways she could not come back from. Behind her grand mad scientist speeches, her twisted talent to bring horrible contraptions to life, her penchant for stealing away unlucky monsters in dark hours of the night…)
(She’s a soft-hearted failure. Always has been.)
There has never been a way for her to puppet him directly, the soul in the machine, but she has been so annoying as to introduce strange glitches if he would try to act in a way that would harm her. The audacity, really! Every time he allows her to make adjustments to his body he places more trust in her than anyone in the world, and she can’t even doubt that he would never lay a finger on her? Pitiful. What a shame.
But Alphys hardly has the time to supervise him with her installed remote-controlled arms like she thought she would, so Mettaton plays smart. Stealthy. Fools the programs that would be by flooding them with nonsense musings of his own grandeur while he acts many disconnected actions as he writes his scripts, draws his diagrams, plots her downfall in fancy half-code cursive that gives her a headache to read. Even if it wouldn’t be wise to use either of his extra hands for writing plans, four arms do come in handy in more ways than one.
(He’s imagined how it would end in wild, messy dreams. All he would have to do is get her into the spotlight, with everyone watching. He has the recordings on hand, because she built him with the power to make them. The crowd would already be riled up that she’s been causing all those occasional disappearances, no? For them to know that at the rotten core of it all is someone weak hiding behind an ego and a flimsy mask — oh, they would tear her to pieces!)
(…and that’s still not fair. It’s his revenge. Why doesn’t he get her all to himself? Why can’t he tear her to pieces?)
Always, always, he is stopped in his tracks before he can plan the final maneuver. It is not his body betraying him. It has never been Alphys looking down at him at just the right moment.
Always, he is caught at this: who else will remake his body back into the one he really, truly, wants?
Because he used to like what it was before. Because he used to have a say before, and what he said mattered to her. Because he would take this body, thorns and rambunctious extra arms and stuck saccharine-smile and all, he would rather exist as this than remain the sad incorporeal husk he was before — but to be this way? Always?
...he would trust her design more than anything else in the world.
(It itches, deep in his soul, itches at him when he blasts lightning bolts on set with more power than he wants. When he rests hands on his hips and they just barely fit into the curve of the spikes. When he looks into the mirror and does his makeup and hair routine and he looks fabulous as always, yes, there is no monster in the Underground who could hold a candle to his glamour — but something is off-center. Something is...)
And who is to say she won't reveal his secrets the moment he reveals hers? So back to the drawing board he goes, every time. Locked back into stalemate. There is no way to orchestrate her downfall without plotting his own, too, and so he puts the subtle blade back on the shelf again, for a time. Until she irritates him enough to pick it back up again. Restart the cycle again. Play the game, fool the programs by acting in every direction at once, until...
Well. The game has gotten old a long, long time ago.
So maybe this time is the time he will finally make good on his revenge, when Alphys catches the first human in years to appear on one of her many cameras, and calls him in to once again be her killer robot in a scheme as long as it is convoluted. The first change in the cycle that's been going on ever since he found her weak in the knees and hunched over in that secret lab at the bottom of the world, and even as she locks him under her unflinching gaze and iron control, he welcomes it. Leaves the blade on the shelf, but it will not be left there for too long. He knows the plan. He knows her plan.
"Y-you better not mess this up for me," Alphys hisses, a claw pointed to his chest and her words laced with poison. The distrust would hurt, except he's seen it a thousand different times, in a thousand different flavors — and he wears his forever-smile like a well-worn mask.
She doesn't need to see what's underneath.
(Friend is a word hard to come by, in these trying times. It's hardly something she deserves to be called anymore. So if something twists within him, like a spike, like a thorn, at the thought of finally sinking his subtle blade into her chest? Well. If she goes down, he will go down with her. Hand in unlovable hand.)
(He would trust her to be his downfall, more than anyone else in the world.)
"Oh, beautiful," he says to her, long and drawn out, "you know I would never—"
———⚡️———
—hold this against eue, Alphys wants to say, almost clenches her fists together tight enough that she might stop them from shaking, might have the courage to look her best friend in the eye and forgive him — before her dearest soul breaks out of his shape of a scarlet kingsnake draped loose on her shoulders and leaps onto the table, barrels into Mettaton as a ragdoll cat and yowls, "Why would eue do that to us!?"
Mettaton's daemon, the borzoi she knows well as Razzmatazz, almost leaps into the air at the sound. Mettaton himself, with his legs yet to be reattached, can't quite do that, but his eye goes wide in almost the same, wet sort of way that Razzmatazz looks at her and Ichigo, which is a surprise in of itself. "Darling, I—" he starts, but her daemon isn't done yelling.
"No! You shut up with the excuses! And you—" —he turns on his paws to face Alphys— "—you shut up too! I know what you're thinking, Ichigo, you can't say that! Calm down! Wei don't have to make this a big deal — we don't have to make this a big deal! Do you hear yourself! Our best friend wanted to take the human's soul and leave us and you want it to not be a big deal! You want me to..."
"Ichigo... please," Razzmatazz says, more drowned and defeated-looking than Alphys has ever seen him, and Ichigo...
Somehow, her daemon doesn't turn to shout at him too. Not even when he doesn't follow up his plea with anything. Ichigo stares and stares for a moment, sharp-sadness in his bond, and he breathes. He steadies himself on all four of his paws.
"All of you. All of you don't want me to be angry." His tail lashes back and forth, like a warning. "It hurts you all to see me like this. Eue don't want to think that wei are hurt by all the ways we've drifted apart, and you don't want to think that wei have the capacity to be this way. Okay! Fine! I have been the nicest and most understanding daemon you'll ever see, ninety-nine-percent of the time, because you don't want to see all the rage that you've shoved onto me. And you don't want to see me act on it now — so when am I ever going to be angry? When do I get to be angry? Why don't I ever get to be angry?"
"Ichigo..."
He's leaning on Mettaton for support now, legs trembling in the same way she's gone weak in the knees, but when Alphys reaches out for him he hisses. Half-hearted, but still.
"Just one moment. Is it too much to ask? Is — is it too much for you to admit, wei don't want Mettaton and Razzmatazz to leave? Wei may not deserve them, yes, but is it too much for you to look at them and say wei don't want eue to go? Stay for a little longer? Is that too forceful of us? Too demanding of us? Too selfish of us to want one of the most important people in the world to not leave us behind?!"
"...Oh."
There's something to the look in Mettaton's eye, to Razzmatazz's perked ears, that she cannot read. Something restrained, perhaps, but Mettaton asks, "Is that really how eue see us...?"
"Why wouldn't wei — o-of course!" Alphys says. Please don't be afraid of us, she doesn't say. Please don't leave. If eue can't stand us after today — if eue think that wei'm scary because wei might be mad at eue, I...
But Razzmatazz presses his long snout into her palms, and that's how she finds out she's still shaking.
"Wei'm sorry," he says, in the voice high and scared that she would never hear from Mettaton, because he would never sound like a kicked puppy, but his soul would. "I'm sorry... wei didn't want to think about how we used eue, I didn't want to think about how bad we'd gotten..."
For a large dog daemon, Razzmatazz certainly has a way of looking very, very small—
"And I... I missed eue so much," and his voice breaks and trembles all at once. "I'm sorry, wei don't deserve—"
Alphys pulls him into a hug, and Ichigo curls up around Mettaton, and the world is warm and electric at where her scales rest around tangled silky fur, at where his weight rests against hard metal and plastic, and for one moment it is just them, together. No one else.
"...he's right," Mettaton admits, slow, after the long silence has passed. "We... I haven't been very good at being euer friend, have I? And eue've done more for us than we can ever do for eue, too. What does that make us...?"
"I don't care...!" Ichigo presses his paws into his chassis, claws sheathed but fighting back a sob, "Please don't leave, eue can hold everything wei've ever done to wrong eue against us, eue can, but just please don't—"
———⚡️———
—turn away. It's the only option possible that every instinct of hers rails against, don't just turn away!
But she is on a path in the cavern and at the end of that path is a laboratory, and in the basement of that laboratory is a robot, and it really would be a lot of trouble to go through with slaying him, right? More trouble than it's worth, maybe. Someone else can do it. And she doesn't remember how she got to this path in this cavern — heck, she doesn't even recall the the beginning of the path — so why not backtrack to from whence she came?
So away she goes, to the nagging complaints of every thought in the back of her mind. She goes and finds another laboratory awaiting her at the end of the backtracked path. No doubt with the same robot inside that wouldn't be worth the trouble to slay, so she turns back again. And again. Until all the road leads to is infinite laboratories. Infinite robots in basements. The path fractures into fractals and the cavern closes in on itself, too enclosed to handle the cosmic scale of infinity, too full to burst—
The world ends.
Everything goes dark, and she dies.
She is on a path in the cavern. And at the end of that path is a laboratory. And in the basement of that laboratory is a robot. She is here to slay him – and if she doesn't, it will mean the end of the world.
But the world has come back from the brink, and she has come with it, so the end of the world threatened in the back of her mind is no big deal at all. It's already happened! And if slaying the robot would've been so much trouble the first time, then it will be the same trouble this time around too–
There is no path to backtrack to.
Well. Okay. The only way might as well be onward.
The laboratory only looks a laboratory on the outside, it appears. When she enters all she finds inside is plain checkered tiles, walls with no windows and grimy, peeling wallpaper that lend the air within a musty, untouched scent, and a single plastic table. Empty of anything resembling lab equipment, no beakers or test tube racks or syringes, and empty of anything to suggest someone does live here – all that lies upon it is a single pristine screwdriver.
The screwdriver is your implement, old instinct repeats to her. You'll need it if you want to do this right.
She takes it. And then she flips it upside-down, the business end of the screwdriver pointed to the floor, because this is cooler! So much cooler than pointing the tip upwards like she's holding a blade. It's almost too fitting, now, and grip changed, she descends the stairs into the basement.
The stairs are one-way. The stairs are multiple, cascading downwards and upwards and even to the right, and the stairway maintains its downwards direction even when she squints her eyes and finds it leading in no direction at all. She follows the linear path, the upwards path, the downwards path, stepping up and placing her foot down and walking to the right, and as she walks the stairs spiral. Goes cleanly in a line. Makes nonsensical dips and zips and turns like even it is confused of where it leads to. And the further she descends, ascends, walks ahead along the stairs, waterfalls begin to join her on the journey, streaming down into the space between stairs and air, into a void below that she can't make out the bottom of, and she can only keep walking. Walking on to
a path in the cavern. And at the end of that path is a laboratory. And in the basement of that laboratory is a robot. She is here to slay him – and if she doesn't, it will mean the end of the world. "The end of the world, darling? Do you really think me so capable of that?" The robot blushes, the pale plastic-skin of his face not covered by long bangs on one side flushing a rosy tint, and under the faint crystal-light streaming in through a narrow window that illuminates the glitter of his gown, a puffy and flowy garment that billows, almost, as he turns away to hide his face, he is something straight out of a fairy tale. "You flatter me so. Come a little closer? I can hardly make you out in this dark cell," and where her heart tugs at her she must follow. There is no compromise about this. You have to slay the robot, or it will be the end of the world, and everything we love as you know it, something deep in the back of her mind says, says so absolutely that it must be what she wants, what her heart wants deep down, and so she follows. She has to. The ghost stares down at his broken body, at the hole her screwdriver made into his heart, and there is only sadness written in his voice. "Why? Why did you have to break me? Did... did you have to?" The screwdriver is your implement. You'll need it if you want to do this right. The robot is as tall as he is grand, crystal stars beaming light in through stained glass windows like spotlights, like starlight, haloing his towering figure from behind. The screwdriver in her grip is a toothpick to him in comparison. Was there ever any chance of her slaying his ethereal form? Why did she even fathom it in the first place? On the inside, the laboratory can hardly be called a laboratory, its checkered-tile floor and peeling-paint walls empty of everything save the lone table at one corner of the room, and the door to the basement right across. "AH-HA-HA. WHAT A GAMBLE YOU MADE TRYING TO TRAP ME IN THIS OH-SO-DREARY PLACE, DEAR DOCTOR!" The lights of his face-screen glow an eerie, pulsing red, in time with her heart pounding in her chest and skipping with every burst of static, the robot disappearing and reappearing in reality and skipping all the closer to her, and his electronic laugh echoes in the mist. "BUT ALAS, IT WAS ALL FOR NAUGHT. YOU KNOW AS WELL AS I THAT I DO NOT TAKE... KINDLY TO BEING LEFT BEHIND, HMM?" She hovers for a moment before the door to the basement, hesitating, before she takes the screwdriver. Its weight in her hand settles like it was always meant to be. This close to him, with the shackle snapped around her neck just as it is on him, she can almost glimpse something not-grey and tired in his visible eye. Something like welcoming. "How nice it is of you to join me, beautiful," he says, and holds out his hand, cuffs and chains trailing and jingling with the movement. She takes it, because it is something she owes. For the first time since she laid her eyes on his face, he smiles. The stairs are dusty where she steps down, the air stale with the faintest hint of mold. If this is where the robot lives, slaying him might be doing him a favor. But not if he slays her first, and the chainsaw that has popped right out of one of his magnificent legs, right down the middle at his thigh, has done just that. There's not even a slot built in for the chainsaw! It's just going to shred through black latex that must've taken so much careful engineering to create! Rude of him. His voice, as she proceeds down, echoes up the stairs: "Come on! Get back up! You've only landed one good hit, darling hero, and that's hardly anything! You know I don't have all day," but the robot's stronger than he looks, deceptively strong, and one blow from him has her vision fading in and out and her head still spinning. She's set to give up here and now, because it would be easier than taking another kick that'll knock the lights out of her, if it weren't for the strange, stubborn fire that's sparked in the back of her mind, and it won't let her back down. It won't let her die. The cycle starts again. It won't let her go. She is on a path in the cavern, and at the end of that path is a laboratory, and in the basement of that laboratory is a robot. She is here to slay him. She is only here to slay him. She has to slay him, and along the path is blind trust and blood pacts. Is yearning and abandonment. Is helplessness and fury. Is pain and unknowing, undoing time to close the box before it has ever or will ever be opened, before every future can come rushing in. Take the screwdriver or leave it. Open the laboratory door or lock it shut from the outside. Face the heart of the world's end or allow it to happen. Follow the path or turn back away from it, stray from it, remove herself from the tale of the scientist and the robot. She is walking towards her destiny and walking back up the stairs, she is taking the screwdriver and leaving it to lie on the table, she is here in the basement and nowhere to be found at all, and at the heart of it all is–
–a shabby lopsided house, at the bottom of the world.
She glances at the roll of paper in her hands, wet from the latent humidity of the area, and unfolds it to read the fancy inked cursive on it again – Do YOU have a passion for human media? Then come on down to our first Human Fanclub meeting! Venue's at Blook Acres on Saturday, every Saturday, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Don't miss out! – and she even left her home extra early just to make sure that she'd be here on time, even if she took a wrong turn at some point. And by the angel, if she didn't take one wrong turn too many! But she's here, and she's brought her little bag of manga and anime tapes that hopefully some of the other members will enjoy as much as she did! Mew Mew Kissy Cutie is a good starter anime, in her opinion, but there's always the chance someone else will disagree...
...but this is the place. This is the place! No point getting cold feet now, so she gulps down all the nervousness of walking in on a whole bunch of strangers and knocks on the door.
"...hello?" A lonely sort of voice answers, muffled by the distance between.
"U-um, hi! This is Blook Acres, right? I saw your flyer – I-I think I saw your flyer? The one for your human fanclub, on Saturday, at three in the afternoon, a-and I wanted to–"
"Join? You want to join?"
"Uh... yeah!" Her claws are getting cold now. Maybe this is the wrong place? Or the wrong person to ask? "I mean, um, I-I guess you probably have a vetting system or something going on, s-so I can't just s-say I want to join and then be immediately accepted, i-if I have to... pitch m-myself? I like human media, yeah, but I'm m-maybe not as big or as d-dedicated a fan as you all might be, so..."
"Oh my, you're the first person who's ever wanted to join, actually!"
She stops in place.
"R-really?"
And then:
"I... I can be a member?"
"Of course you can, darling! Come right on in," and he opens the door–
———🌟———
–and every single future comes rushing forth.
As kids on the playground, he takes her hand and drags her along for the ride. "Oh, my darling Alphys! I've been looking for you forever," he tells her, him still a ghost and Alphys a royal guard captain donning armor and lightning, "all this time, I've been searching. I've been waiting." He points his cannon at her heart but does not open fire, does not release the magic swirling in his hold. "No other version of you took being shattered across space and time as well as you did, Doctor. Do you know how much that destroys a person?" Alphys has on her some cheap imitation of armor and he watches on as the kid he's bound to decides what will be her fate, to attack or to act or to let her go. "Did you know that, when you were on your way to your own destruction, when we pushed each other to our limits? Did you think I wanted to reach it first?" He haunts the house she's moved in to and he makes himself opaque, makes himself real, to clutch at her shoulders and stare into her knowing eyes. "Did you want to reach it yourself?"
"Do you know how many times I had to kill you," he shouts, and whispers, and screams, and sobs, and tells her. "Did you think that I wanted to? Did you ever think that I didn't tear myself apart to do so, over and over again?!"
"You ruined me!" And he roars in her face, in a thousand timelines where they exist in the same place, all at once. In all those timelines, she almost gives him a response. "That first time was not enough for you, my dear doctor! No, no! To dig you out I had to break you apart, again! Over, and over, into infinity and beyond..."
"Mettaton," she says, calls out for him, and in no universe does she say the name that is not his.
They are sitting on the couch, watching Alphys's silly catgirl cartoons. They are twin pinatas at some kid's birthday party. They are air machine and rider, racing on waves into the sunset, and they are sparrows falling out of the sky together. Somewhere, they meet when they are both young and not yet aware of the destiny the world will draw them together on, and somewhere they meet as hero and villain on opposite sides, carved out of different things, contrasting things, but they lock eyes and see the spark of something that could've been there. Somewhere, they are strangers meeting once at a queer club and never again, and somewhere else they have never made it out of the Underground at all, and somewhere else one of them got lost in the woods and never quite made it out alive.
"But I've found you," he says, and he is drowning with her, hand in unlovable hand, "I've found you, darling! Oh, my goal was never to find you, just to kill you!I've had well enough of that, now... you, darling, you can see what I see. Feel what I feel. Experience everything I have gone through since you broke me apart. So, Alphys, why don't you tell me–"
"How do I deal with this!?"
The sun is setting on Mount Ebott, and he can't even enjoy the view. The wind whips at his hair and stings at his tears and he can only hug his knees tighter, stare at Alphys where she sits with her legs dangling off the edge of the mountainside, and none of it does anything to help.
"How do you deal with it? How am I supposed to...?" He heaves a sob, and is quietly grateful that in this timeline he'd asked her to build his body to shed tears. "I don't... I don't even make it in some timelines, no matter how hard I try! I'm stuck as a ghost and my body is so far away, sometimes, sometimes I have to wake up and look in the mirror and I... I'm that sad shell of myself again. Or worse! Like nothing I did ever mattered! Like I never met you, and I...
"And sometimes we did never meet! Sometimes we do, and then you die in the middle, and I have to live on! Sometimes we're enemies, darling, or strangers, or one-night flings, or I've left you or you've left me, or – or we're an infinite number of other things, and I just...!"
He breathes in. In a thousand more timelines, he holds it for a beat, or two, and exhales slow. Whether he has lungs or not in his current state does not matter.
"Oh, Alphys... what are we?"
She looks up at him from her garishly decorated phone, looks up from fixing a weird wire connection in his arm, looks right at him through the barrier as he turns back to her one last time. In none of these places does she have an answer, not yet – but how can he expect her to? Because they're like this: they've never met and never will meet. Separated by time or distance or death, a gap he cannot breach. And they are friends, and they are bitter rivals or enemies or a contact they have left behind for good, burned the bridge to never return. And they are lovers, too, sometimes – and maybe those Mettatons and Alphyses find comfort in it, the till-death-do-us-part, but him, sat on the edge of Mount Ebott as he and Alphys watch the sun set for what should be the first time, cannot help but think that such a vow would mean the destruction of them both.
"Mettaton, I..." she says in every timeline, trails off in every timeline, and scoots over. Reaches out to place her hand on top of his. Her claws are warm and sunkissed and just the slightest bit rough with specks of mountain dirt, which means he is here. Just this one lifetime.
Just this one moment, for now.
"...it's funny," he says, "isn't it? I hurt you, and you hurt me. It's always like this."
"I... I guess?" Alphys shrugs against him. She wiggles her toeclaws above the forest. "But it's not... n-not all just that, yeah? I meet you, or you meet me, and somehow... there's still joy in it. Sometimes, w-we make each other better, you know?"
"And we make each other worse."
"Yeah," she sighs. Closes her eyes.
There are universes where they never could have met, not in a way that should count, but their atoms end up side by side regardless. They sit as rocks overlooking Mount Ebott, in this universe not named anything at all, because no one has ever been alive to give it a name.
And so they sit there.
"I've seen... timelines, darling, where you kill yourself."
"...I know."
"I didn't even get to kill you, sometimes. I don't know which option is worse."
"Oh, w-we're magical girls in one timeline together, I think! Or a few... there's a couple of them, hehe..."
"Are you thinking about the one where I try to save you over and over again, or something else?"
"...Oh. Yeah. You didn't have to... y-you didn't have to do that for me."
"Then what else would you suggest I do with myself, Alphys?"
"...I don't know."
"Does it matter, then? Does me getting my body matter, if I can't get it somewhere else? Do any of our struggles matter, if we skip to another timeline and it all goes away? Do our successes matter? Our hopes and dreams? Our friends and family? Does... does being your friend matter, still, when we could be anything else...?"
"Would you still want to be my friend," he says, more scared than anything, and–
(And there are countless timelines, countless lifetimes, where they leave their scars in each other. Where it hurts to be together. Where it hurts to be apart, and the only cure to it all would be if they had never met. Where Alphys grows up without him. Finds real and genuine friends, finds a way to her royal scientist job on her own merit, never sees his flyer for his human fanclub and never knows that there is a ghost in a run-down home in Waterfall dreaming dreams he will never reach on his own. And she, brilliant world-hopper she has become, has seen her life without him. A life where they are not enemies, not friends, not estranged, not anything, and he–!)
And he is alive.
And he is in his body, his self flowing back into fingers and toes and the ends of his high-heeled boots. And when the wind blows his hair is teased along with it, tousled back and forth by the strong-gentle breeze, and he is here and nowhere and everywhere at once, staring down the lizard monster in her lab coat who is his lover, his bitter rival, his creator, his worst nightmare, his other half, his acquaintance on the street, his everything–
"I can be anything," Alphys says.
He nods. He can scarcely, scarcely breathe.
"I-if I can be anything, then...! I want to be your friend," and across timelines and lifetimes and universes, she takes his hands in hers. Small and large. Large and small. Hands that are hardly hands and hands that don't yet exist as a concept, but she holds him tight and she holds him now and she is holding him.
It's one universe out of many, many more. One small action out of many she could've taken, that she will ever take. She knows this as well as he does, now.
But he holds her close. Cherishes this tiny speck of time, here and now, because...
It matters.
———🌟———
"I've finally figured out your question, darling," Mettaton says, as the plates are cleared and the sunset view has faded into starry nightfall, and Alphys wipes at her mouth with a napkin and perks up.
"The one about – about whether you'll be back from your tour in time for the next anniversary?"
"Oh, no, not that one! I'll still need to do more scheduling before I can figure that out," he laughs. "Your earlier question, I mean. The one about us being friends in every universe."
Her head spikes flare. It's always a little cute, when she gets flustered like that.
"R-really? Uhh, I mean, I-I kinda meant it as a rhetorical–"
"I know what infinity means, darling. If there are infinite universes, then obviously we are also friends in infinite universes, and in about the same number of infinite universes, we'll likely also not be friends," he says.
"Oh." She slumps a little in her seat. "...yeah. I... thought as much too."
"Oh, chin up, Alphys! Even if there's a universe where we aren't friends, there's got to be one where I'm your fabulous killer robot rival, and you are the brilliant scientist-hero, Doctor Alphys! We'd get along great, I'm sure."
That gets a snort of a giggle out of her. "Pfft... yeah, I think we would," and she turns for a second to stare out the large windows, into the mountainside.
In the back of his mind, sometimes, he catches glimmers of it – imaginings of him and her together, in different timelines and lives. Meeting again, for the first time. Saying heartbroken goodbyes, for the last. Where he and her have to live without each other, but are always reminded of the other in every stolen moment. Bitter planned betrayals, violent truths of hearts left to simmer, a divinity where he is of her and she is of him, and where she ends and he begins is a mystery they will never solve. No matter how far apart they may be sometimes, no matter how large the chasm, in another lifetime and infinite more they will always, always, find their ways back to each other. Because they are lovers, and fated rivals, and sworn enemies, and binary stars, and strangers walking the same sunny path, and leaves together on the same tree, and best friends, and he can assume this: no matter where she goes, he will follow, because she would do the same for him.
"It's not that bad," he muses, finally, "if we're not friends in every universe. We're friends in this one, aren't we? And look at how far we've come!"
Alphys glances back at him, her eyes wide and a small, surprised smile forming in the curl of her mouth. When she holds her silence, he continues on:
"And even if there's other Mettatons and Alphyses out there who aren't friends... well, fate and destiny are curious things, darling. Who knows? Maybe, in some way or another, they will find each other out in all that noise. Isn't that a nice thought, Alphys?"