Chapter Text

prologue

I stared out the window
hands glued tight and sore
praying to god knows what
that you would sever what’s stuck
with something shiny from the kitchen drawer

—modern baseball, apartment

There’s no good way for Sans to ask the question.

And it might be overkill to even try on his part, honestly, because the shadow lurking in the corner of his little episodes (he staunchly refuses to call them visions, thanks, he’s not a fantasy-novel protagonist) didn't exactly communicate a game plan.

It didn't tell him, in any sort of explicit terminology, what it was after. What it wanted. Why, out of everything that's happened to them already, it chose to show him those very specific snippets of an evil baby edgelord Papyrus at two of the worst moments of his life. It didn’t tell him what it had to gain by completely recontextualizing every single unkind thought Sans has ever had regarding his counterpart's brother in the process.

It was one thing, hearing the other sans's stilted recollection of the night Papyrus had raped him on a stranger's bed. It was quite another to temper his instinctive flare of rage long enough to consider the fact that Papyrus had been sixteen at the time.

He'd been a child still himself, barely a few years out of stripes. Sans definitely isn't making excuses, there is no excuse, but—

Sans just...can't quite seem to stop himself from remembering his own Papyrus at that age: anxious and always wired, snapping at everyone around him by default, vicious-drunk nearly every night he could get away with it. He can’t help but think of how Papyrus had been seemingly held together by little more than spite and a constant, slow-simmer rage.

((He can't stop thinking about plates smashing against the kitchen walls, and his own shaking claws barely able to keep hold of the broom and dustpan. He can't stop thinking about the way his vision would sometimes go staticky and grey with terror, or how his breath would catch in his aching chest listening to Gaster and Papyrus screaming at each other from the next room over— listening intently for the dull thud of a body colliding with drywall again, though he never could do anything to stop it.

He would just answer the door, when the neighbors came knocking, and he would smile, and he would reassure them that of course he’d tell his family to keep it down. He would lie through his wicked teeth and tell them that no, nothing was wrong, just teenaged tempers run up broadside against the stress of being a single parent, you know how they can be, you understand, whatever useless platitude would make them drop the issue. Apologies after apologies, tripping over himself with how sorry he always was—but none of it for the monster that really deserved it the most.

He would do nothing at all to help his brother, in short, and still his own Papyrus is so hideously grateful to him. Still, his own Papyrus will tell him these awful private things when he’s blackout drunk: wobbly, shameful little secrets like you saved me, you know that, without you I probably never woulda made it this long. 

He will point-blank refuse to clarify when Sans asks him what the fuck that means, exactly.

They both know perfectly well anyways, even if neither of them ever manages to say it aloud. Sans is pragmatic enough to understand the impulse on some level, his brother’s aching brain seeking any available relief. He gets it, even if it makes a sucking horror open up in the very center of his soul, panic flooding his whole body at the idea.

He can't picture his world without Papyrus. He doesn't want to, he doesn't even want to consider how empty the house would echo with his brother gone. Even if his mind skitters around the topic like an insect avoiding the coils of a hot stove, he also can't stop wondering what that particular predisposition means for the other Papyrus, exactly.

Did he lie motionless on his mattress, too, staring at his bedroom ceiling and praying for the world to end? Did he have scratches clawed all down his forearms, obvious enough—embarrassing enough— that he never pushed his sleeves up in mixed company either?

Did he wake up most nights choking on the screams he couldn’t force himself to swallow? Did his soul pound sometimes like it was trying to rip its way straight out of his ribcage, did it leave him shaken and shaking and scared and flinching at his own shadow and if it did—

Had he ever had someone there to help him through it?

The other Papyrus had looked so small, curled up in that damp Waterfall cave. He had looked so painfully young.

He had been so painfully young.

He’d been twelve years old, and he had not deserved what had happened to him. ))

There’s no excuse, Sans reminds himself firmly, but there are reasons. His own Papyrus’s bad habits didn’t occur in a vacuum, after all, and he’d had at least some measurable degree of support, even if Sans is well aware of his own missteps in that regard.

How badly would Papyrus have cracked under the pressure if he’d never had anyone to hold his hand through the worst of it at all? If his very definition of ‘worst’ had been cranked up to eleven and he had subsequently been left to mire through it alone?

So by extension, surely the universe owes the other Papyrus that same allowance. Surely he deserves that chance as much as any of them. Surely he can’t just be left to rot in his own self-imposed isolation. That isn’t justice. That isn’t fair. 

And if the universe doesn’t see fit to restore the balance on its own, well. It’s had plenty of time. It’s had ample opportunity, as far as he’s concerned. 

Sans is just going to have to do it himself. 

He doesn't manage to bring himself to ask if sans knew about the website, exactly. He doesn't manage to spell it out in any real detail. He can't come up with any way to do it that doesn't reveal far more than he'd want to, in case sans has been kept entirely in the dark about that particular dirty little secret.

He hasn't actually met the other Papyrus yet, and even still he's certain that he owes the guy that small courtesy.

Instead, he tries: “So...your brother started working pretty young, right?”

The other sans is sprawled across the bed on his belly, buried in a book he’d borrowed from Papyrus. He’s been parked there for the past hour at least, totally engrossed with the tattered pulp sci-fi novel. He doesn’t seem to care that its front cover is missing, or that a healthy crop of Aspergillus sp. laces down its broken spine.

He’s sneezed sixteen times that Sans has counted.

“We both did,” he says without looking up, or any inflection at all. “Once Pap started spending so much time out of the house and bringing in some gold, it just kinda made sense for me to pick one up, too. Or three,” he allows with a faint smirk at his own wordplay, turning the page. “Raising a teenager’s expensive, and the more the doc lost it, the—uh, the more Core-sick he got, you know?—the less he remembered shit like, I dunno, the whole ‘payin’ rent on time’ concept.” He shrugs. “Plus, being stuck alone with him was...not ideal,” he offers after a beat, biting the t sound off as though it had personally offended him.

Sans desperately doesn't want to ask for details, but he's learned his doppelgänger well enough to know that little sliver of vulnerability might have been a deliberate test.

He's so closed off when he wants to be, so careful to play his cards so frustratingly close to his chest that he rarely exposes anything without meaning to—though it's admittedly difficult to read his intention when he's this diligent in avoiding Sans's gaze, either way.

Still, where there's a crack, Sans has found he often opens up willingly with a gentle nudge, and that is a marked improvement over the half-feral paranoid suspicion that had practically oozed out of him when he'd first arrived.

It's almost as though he's beginning to believe, at least a little bit, the constant reassurances that Sans wants to help carry the weight of his personal albatross.

((It’s a step.

It’s a step Sans is going to blow straight to hell within the next forty-eight hours by fucking off to his home nightmare dimension and abandoning him to Papyrus’s tentative grasp on functional adult behavior—but it’s still a step.

He’s counting it. That’s progress.))

“Was he...worse with you, the sicker he got?” Sans asks softly, fully prepared for his counterpart to shut down under the scrutiny. Instead, he’s pleasantly surprised to find that those dim pink eyelights flick towards his face, perhaps searching for a trace of pity in his expression.

“Weirder,” the other sans clarifies, when he evidently finds none. He wrinkles his nasal cavity. “He had, like. Straight-up tentacles towards the end of it all, you know? Body couldn't keep itself together under that much exposure to the Core, I guess. His face and his hands stayed okay for the longest time, so he could at least sign once he'd lost his voice, but...they'd started to melt too by the time he finally bit it.”

Softer, brow ridge furrowing, he continues. “He really liked to fuck by those last few weeks though, which was kinda strange—it must have been something about all that neural feedback, it anchored him in that body somehow. He was always more coherent for a while, after.” Color streaks across his cheekbones faintly when he finally blinks, as though he's only just realized what he'd said. He drops his eyelights back down to his book, shoulders already hunching into his all-too-familiar defensive posture. “It was like bad fetish porn, man. I don't really wanna talk about it.”

“Fair enough,” Sans manages with only a faint strain to his voice, because he’s getting better at this, he’s learning where he needs to be cool and neutral and keep his own feelings out of the equation entirely. He’s learning that his doppelgänger appreciates a sounding board for the most part, but absolutely panics at the idea of his dreadful experiences actually affecting Sans in any real way, so.

The very least he can do is not add to the chaos by, say, putting his fist through the nearest available wall in response— no matter how much he might want to break something at the mere thought of Gaster and his tentacles.

Instead, he pulls in several deep breaths through his nasal cavity, and focuses on unlocking his jaw from its rictus clench. Instead, he carefully unfolds his fingers from their instinctive fists, and smooths down the front of his hoodie.

He keeps calm, mostly by sheer stubborn willpower honed by years of strictly-scheduled meditation practice. The other sans studies his own scuffed knuckles quietly and doesn't seem at all on the verge of losing it, so he's guessing the deep-breathing technique must keep him looking relatively unruffled.

“Why you so curious about our work, anyways? Ain’t nothing interesting about us up ‘til Pap got into the Guard, really. Few food service gigs, some courier work, nothing too different from what you got here, I bet.” sans kicks his bare feet behind him like a teenager and folds the corner of his page down to mark his place, abandoning his efforts to read entirely. He pushes himself up into a sitting position, scoots to the edge of the mattress and keeps himself curled tightly, protecting organs he doesn't even have probably on instinct alone.

“Just wondering, I guess!” Sans lies in a perfect chipper little trill. “It really helped my Papyrus, you know? Meeting new people, building new relationships...I think Muffet was the first person besides me he’d heard say anything nice to him in years, he really kinda flourished there. What, uh...what was it like for yours? D’you remember?”

His counterpart considers it for a moment. “He liked it at first, I guess. He wouldn't shut up about it for like, a week, and he wasn't a real excitable kid. I always thought Grillby's old man was a hardass, way he'd tell it, but the dude was nice enough to Pap.” He props his chin on one hand. “Always sent him home with leftovers for us, although Pap stopped eating them pretty quick. He said all the grease made him sick, but I always thought the place maybe stressed him out a little more than he let on. He refused to eat there ever again, from what I remember, even after Grillby took over and the menu totally changed. I can only imagine the horrors he must've witnessed in that kitchen,” he says with a soft noise that nearly qualifies as a laugh. “A stickler for cleanliness the guy ain't, but he makes a hell of a burger.”

“Grillby?” Sans manages to ask even through his green-grey haze of nausea, certain he knows exactly why Papyrus boycotted the whole establishment.

Certain, just as completely, that his doppelgänger has absolutely no idea what had happened there.

Desperate to offer something to keep the conversation light and normal he says, “We’ve got a fire elemental that runs a little bakery in Hotland with his sister by that name. Any relation, do you think?”

“Probably the same dude,” the other sans agrees, wrinkling his brow in contemplation. “Our Muffet has a tea shop and a terrifying drug empire out that way, so...I guess that makes sense?”

“As much as any of this does, I suppose,” Sans agrees. “Did he work there for very long?”

“Nah—six months, maybe a year, I can't remember exactly. He picked up a few shifts here and there for a while afterwards when things got really tight but Pap started hitting the books pretty hard by that point for his entrance exams for the Academy. He didn't really need to work anyways, since I had the sentry job and everything. I convinced Gaster to hand over the household finances once he got bad enough, and we got by just fine up until he died. Shit got hard again after that, for a while.”

“Yeah,” Sans concurs, low. He remembers those lean years all too well, though it’s only recently that he has the context to fully understand what a shock that must have been for his brother, to go from running a household with their father’s considerable—and more importantly, dependable— paycheck, to a reality riddled with the fallout of Gaster having never existed at all.

Gaster’s disappearance from the mortal plane meant that he’d left no trace behind: no inheritance, no insurance, no worker’s compensation or death benefits, no buffer at all to separate them from their impending debts. Sans recalls all too easily the sharp, familiar ache of hunger in a belly he doesn't even technically have, even all these years later. It was only a stroke of luck that the house had been in Papyrus's mother's name instead.

“You remember,” the other sans confirms with that same fond little crinkle to his eye sockets that he gets every time he notes one of their shared tragedies, some little dark spot where their timelines bleed into each other.

“I remember Papyrus working four jobs while I camped outside Alphys’s place and begged her to train me,” Sans replies, and it's his turn to keep his eyelights downcast, shame burning hot beneath his sternum. “I remember yelling at him about leaving his dirty clothes in the hamper for weeks, because both of us were working morning until night even if only one of us paid any bills with it. I remember telling him he was wasting his potential in dead-end jobs, because I didn’t understand why he was doing it.”

“Yeah,” his twin murmurs, “I always wondered if Pap would pull this shit, if he found out. You guys are a lot alike, you know?” but he doesn't say it with any malice, clearly doesn't mean it as an insult even as it makes Sans bristle in outrage. “You're both so desperate to take on the responsibility, you're so eager to be a martyr, you skip right over the fact that me n' Pap are adults, too.”

Sans blinks. “Uh,” he says, but does not get any chance to elaborate.

His counterpart barrels on, louder: “We made our choices, your brother and me. We knew what would happen when we killed Gaster, we knew you wouldn't remember. That was the point. You were supposed to have a chance to live without it, you were supposed to have the chance to be normal.” If he had hair he'd be pulling at it, surely, with the agitated sound his claws make scrubbing over the back of his skull. He laughs, and it's a cold, bitter thing spit between his razor teeth. “You were supposed to be happy,” he says and his voice trembles just a little, just enough that Sans knows tears (and their accompanying crisis) are imminent.

What Sans should do is argue. What he should do is tell his twin that he’d missed one glaring flaw in that supposed plan, inform him that whatever the intentions had been, it was downright cruel to strip all of the other Papyrus’s history and motivation from his very concept of himself, since it left him with such a terrible end result but no idea of why he acted the way he did.

He should ask, even if it’s immeasurably hurtful, if sans had ever considered that hollowing his brother out into a shell containing only faceless violence and terror could be part of why Papyrus is so deeply unhinged.

He doesn't. He can't.

Instead, in a tiny, wavering crackle of a voice, his soul suddenly heavy as wet cement in his chest he asks, “Papyrus........killed his dad?”

“Oh, shit,” the other sans winces, eyelights guttering out in black panic. It startles him to his feet. “Oh shit, did he really not tell you? Why the fuck—he told me before he told you?”

“I guess so,” Sans says, numb. He can feel the cement clinging to the backs of his ribs, even if he can't feel anything else.

“I didn’t—I mean, I kind of asked him, I just assumed—it h-had to have been him, since he w-was the only one who remembered his old man, you know? Well, him and U-undyne, I guess she—she must’ve helped with the security footage. The, the cameras, the cameras in my universe they hadn't worked for months and fuck why am I still talking, I just—I'm really sorry dude, are you okay?”

Sans isn't. Sans isn't sure if he'll ever be okay again, because now he has to backtrack through a whole shared history and scrutinize his brother for that budding, terrifying potential. He has to look at the same monster who routinely falls asleep in front of cooking shows with one hand still stuck in an open bag of chisps, and somehow contend that image with one where Papyrus had consciously chosen to murder his own father.

His whole world sits six degrees to the left now, and he is—

He is not coping.

“He—he doesn't have any LOV,” Sans says desperately, knowing full well that he's grasping at straws. “How—he'd tell me if he did, they wouldn't allow him to keep being the Judge if he did!” You must be wrong, he doesn't say, but the intent comes across pretty clear regardless.

“It didn't give me any, either,” the other sans says a bit more gently, shrugging one shoulder. “I guess since technically he just blipped outta existence, it's not like I actually attacked him. It didn't seem to count. Seriously, are you alright? I've never seen your eyelights go out before.”

Sans laughs, entirely without meaning to, and his counterpart’s sockets narrow in suspicion. “Tell me how you did it,” he requests, instead of explaining the joke and subsequently ruining what had made it funny in the first place.

(( Instead of asking how his own brother had done it. ))

“Shoved him into the Core,” his doppelgänger says, flat, eyelights locked firmly on his face. “And I'm not sorry for it. You wanna know why?”

Desperately, Sans does. Desperately, he needs something to slot into the new cracks that have formed in his mental image of his brother, some information to patch over the wounds and try to make some sense of it all. He nods frantically, mouth too dry to speak.

“I wasn't a lot of fun for him, towards the end. Turns out, if you keep on throwin' the same plate at the ground and just gluing the pieces back together, you eventually wind up with somethin' that's pretty damn useless as a result.” He shoves his hands deep into his sweatpants pockets, and glares at the poster behind Sans's head, voice measured and flat like he isn't describing something straight out of a horror movie. Sans hopes it makes the recollection a little easier, because the visible fight for dissociation makes it way harder to watch. “I didn't cry or scream or fight anymore. I hadn't, for years probably. I just sorta...laid there and let it happen. It pissed him off bad, too, and that kinda made it all worth it.”

He never goes into this kind of detail voluntarily. He never talks about how he felt during, though Sans has never been acutely aware of that absence before. He’s never once described more than the barest shape of events, all allusion and polite gaps and none of the ragged, festering flesh of the violation itself.

“Get that look off yer face,” the other sans growls, accent twanging a little more harshly against his consonants the way it always does when he’s embarrassed. His shoulders hitch up just the barest degree. “I ain't doing this if you're gonna give me the kicked-puppy thing the whole fuckin' time, bro.”

Sans fights to school his expression into something cool and neutral, fights to remember his breathing. He drags a shaky breath in through his nasal cavity, but he still feels like he’s choking on it. “Sorry,” he rasps, and means it so much that his chest aches. “Sorry, please, just—tell me what happened. Please.”

“I caught him in Pap’s room,” the other sans says, almost too softly to hear. “We had—we had an arrangement, you know? I cooperated, and he left the kid alone. He wasn't allowed to be in there at night, much less with the door closed. Much less— ” his voice breaks, and he's suddenly moving, bare feet pacing the faded carpet as though he's a shark, and it would kill him to keep still. “I stopped him before anything happened. He just....touched Pap, I guess, but Pap stayed asleep the whole time. He didn't know. I got there in time. I—I cooperated for him that night, and then I pushed him into the Core the very next day. That's why I'm not sorry. I had no other way to stop it from happening again.” He reaches the nearest wall and makes an abrupt u-turn, stalking back towards the mattress with his gaze still fixed somewhere faraway.

“Gaster would have raped him too,” Sans offers in spite of the way it makes his doppelgänger flinch. He’s used to pushing past that twinge of guilt by now. “So you killed him before he got the chance.”

“You know how I feel about using that word,” the other sans growls. “We had an arrangement.”

“An arrangement where he had carte blanche to rape you with his tentacles so long as he left your little brother alone. It’s important in recovery to acknowledge the gap between your own perception and what was actually occurring.”

“Fuck you and fuck your mom and fuck your recovery,” the other sans snaps, coming to a halt only a few paces away with his face twisted towards Sans where he’s perched at the foot of the bed.

His eyelights are practically pulsating, molten hot pink with rage. Nonsensically, Sans registers that it’s a really pretty color. “Were you even listening to me, you little nutjob? I killed Gaster to protect my brother. Now riddle me this, asshole: why would your brother, the laziest fuck in the Underground, plot and execute a whole entire murder with a girl he barely knows?”

Oh.

Oh, no.

“Yeah, sweetheart, there it is,” his doppelgänger sneers with a sort of vicious glee. “So why don'tcha go ask your brother why he loves you enough to kill his own dad to keep the family dog safe? Why don't you go ask him what Gaster was gonna do to you, and then you sit there and tell him he was wrong for protecting you the only way he knew how. You think any 'a that was easy? You think that was a simple decision for him to make? Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on, Sans. Your brother would die for you.”

Which is. Which is fair, more than fair, even if the delivery wasn't exactly gentle, even if it steals the breath from lungs he doesn't have. “You're right,” he croaks, only barely registering the sting in his sockets that means they're welling up with tears. “You're right, I didn't— I didn't understand,” he manages, barely, and his voice breaks and the tears fall and his chest hurts and he feels like he's dying, and there's not a thing in the world he can do to stop any of it, really. “Now I do.”

“Aw fuck,” his doppelgänger murmurs, his expression easing into something softer and a perhaps a little pained. His eyelights dim to their usual affectionate rose. “Hey, I didn't mean to make you cry, I—oof,” he grunts as Sans rockets into his chest, burying his wet face in the curve of the other sans's shoulder and wrapping his arms around the much-smaller ribcage, until he swears he can feel the bones creak in warning. “Ow, gimme some warning next time there, big guy. You're heavy.”

He doesn't cringe, though, and he doesn't squirm in the hold, he just stands there and lets Sans hug him. Even pats his back a little bit, when the hug lingers for far too long.

((That’s progress too. ))

And really, what gets to Sans is the fact that he can’t stop it. He can't undo any of it. He can't ask Papyrus for an explanation, even, at least not right now.

He can't handle an explanation right now.

He can help though, he can do something to begin repairing the damage done to his family. So even if he doesn't ask his initial question directly, this conversation is what cements his decision. It's what he carries with him as he's packing a few things into his backpack and considering first aid supplies and as he's sat at his desk, staring at the blank pages that will be his goodbye letter to his brother.

There will be time, he tells himself, when this is all over and done with, when he has everyone together and safe, that he will be able to have this discussion with his brother. Without the ghost of Gaster breathing down their collective necks, it will be so much easier to let Papyrus fall apart when he knows they have the luxury of sparing the bandwidth to help put him back together.

It’s kinder to remedy the worst of the fracture first, sometimes, so the damage can even begin to repair itself properly. Technically, everything that follows still counts as mercy.

It’s kinder, sometimes, to hammer a broken bone back into place, heedless of how it might make the patient scream.