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They’re still curled up in a blanket on your sofa when you peek out. You gave them all the spares in the house—they only seem to have one set of clothes, and those were so battered and caked with blood and sweat and grime that they had to be washed. It’s too cold here in Snowdin for a child with no fur to sleep in their underwear without lots and lots of covering.
Their shirt and shorts are in the dryer now, their tights hung up to air dry. They wouldn’t give you their stained apron, tucking it away in their inventory instead, and you’re not willing to press the point. It’s a good thing, maybe, that Burgy didn’t try to wash their clothes himself; he barely knows how to do his own laundry. The faded pinks of his Burger Emporium uniform don’t matter to him, where you would keep them as crisp and cheerful as the day the clothes were issued if you could.
You wondered, morbidly, whose dust you were filtering through the pipes and tubes of your washing machine. If enough was left for their families to hold proper funerals. If their families were left, to begin with. If all the blood belonged to the human, or what.
They’d had blood crusting their sweat-greasy hair still, when Burgy had left them with you. When you showed them the shower and offered to wash it for them, their red eyes had gone huge and their chest had hitched and they’d slammed the door in your face. It’s clean now, shiny and smooth-looking where it’s not crumpled against the sofa arm.
They look as small and harmless as any monster child, but feeling out their stats makes the inside of your mouth taste like ash. Thirteen LV, higher than all but the king and the few survivors from the war a thousand years ago. Thirty-four AT, even without counting the strength they’d gain from the burnt frying pan they carry with them as a weapon.
When you told Burgy how amazing it is that he was able to stop them just by giving them free food, he laughed. Not—not mockingly, but an unhinged and despairing sound, his grin overstretched on his face.
“Don’t ask me to pick the little weirdo’s brain to tell you how their logic works, because I don’t know a god damn thing,” he told you. Then he sighed and tucked his cigarette back into his mouth, inhaling long and slow. Smoke-smell mingled with the odors of fast food and lava when he breathed out. “The problem now is, now that they’re not murdering everything in sight anymore, we’re stuck with them because they had to go and imprint on me like some weird baby animal. What the fuck are we supposed to do with them now?”
“We’ll figure it out,” you’d told him then, slipping your hand into his while he scratched irritably at his ear with his free fingers. Before all this, you’d never quite been able to reach out and touch him, despite all your flirting and your obvious signals. But it seems natural now, in a hollower underground, to seek out physical contact. Comfort, and a little more than that.
The child stirs but doesn’t wake, and you return your thoughts to them.
You’ve never given that much thought to humans before, to just how different from monsters they might be. So you can’t really judge just why a human child would deliberately kill every monster they fought, let alone why the promise of free food would render them suddenly docile, so much so that immediately upon leaving the MTT hotel they spared the first Vulkin they met.
You can’t really judge, but if they were a monster, the implication of what culinary charity means to them would have you awfully concerned.
There’s no way to change what they did in the past, and you have so much responsibility to deal with right now that there’s hardly a point in dwelling on it. All you can do now is concentrate on the present.
And making the present more bearable has always been your job.
You make rice porridge for breakfast, thick and sweet and syrupy with a heavy covering of powdered cinnamon and cardamom. The human is sitting up on the couch and turning around rustily when you glance to the side, just in time for you to retrieve two bowls from the pantry instead of just one. They sit heavily at the chair across from yours, still draped in so many blankets that they look like a head of cabbage; their eyes don’t leave you until you set their bowl and utensils in front of them.
“Careful, it’s hot,” you tell them brightly. They ignore you and reach for their spoon. Their hand hesitates for just a moment, and they make as if to lift their opposite hand instead before seeming to come to a decision and grabbing the utensil in their left hand after all.
They eat steadily, with stilted motions, face growing progressively redder. But they don’t stop until they’ve picked every grain of rice off the bottom of the bowl. Hopefully this means they enjoyed it.
“What’s your name?” you ask them as you stack your bowls and utensils together. They raise their head and stare at you—it’s the first time they’ve met your eyes for longer than a blink, and their expression is totally unreadable, their hooded red eyes nearly unblinking. “We can’t just keep calling you ‘the human’ forever if you have one.”
They open their mouth, producing a dry and croaking sound. They close their mouth, swallow, and try again. “Chara.”
Their voice is very small and very hoarse. It seems as though they haven’t spoken in some time.
“Chara,” you repeat, and give them your best big smile. “That’s a nice name.”
They look away from you.
Chara doesn’t talk much but stares a lot: At you, at your décor, at random points on the wall where you can’t see anything of note. They don’t move very far from the sofa, either, but when they do they’re clumsy and uncoordinated, dragging their body in an awkward shamble like their soul is a hook and their physical form the fish caught on it, and they’re pulling themself along by sheer willpower.
They’re unable to put their tights on when you return their cleaned and dried clothes to them. They struggle for several minutes, and you’re debating the usefulness in offering to help them given how they reacted to the idea of you washing their hair last night when their heel catches in a run and tears one leg of the tights all the way down to the heel.
Chara hisses aloud and drops the tights on the floor in disgust, pulling their shorts right on over their underwear instead. They sit on the couch and pull their bare knees up to their chin, sulking.
You scratch your chin, frowning a little. It’s going to be a while before you can bring them to Burgy, since his shift runs late today. And you don’t know about leaving Chara home alone. If they’re going to come with you while you work, they’ll definitely need warmer clothes.
But for now, you kneel down just past arm’s length from them, and smile when they tilt their head to glower at you.
“I’ve got to start working on making more ice cream now,” you tell them. “Do you want to help churn the custard?”
Their heavy eyelids seem to raise just a fraction, and after a long expressionless pause, they nod.
You expected them to crowd you while you mix the ingredients at the counter, but curiously, they just sit at the kitchen table again instead, their gaze on your back steady. In the end, you have to bring the bowl to them, sitting across from them so that you’re both leaning forward on your elbows.
“You’ve got to stir steadily until it reaches the right consistency,” you explain, and demonstrate very briefly. “I can trade with you when you get tired. While you’re stirring, I’ll add in a little pinch of magic from time to time. That’s the trade Nice Cream secret—how it won’t melt for hours no matter how hot it gets.”
They nod seriously and give you a silent thumbs up. Smiling, you hold out the long spoon to them; they take it in both hands and begin to stir.
Chara churns the custard with a single-minded fervor that almost comes as a surprise, the tip of their pink human tongue peeking out from the corner of their mouth. Sweat stands out on their forehead and cheeks, but they refuse to give up, pumping their arms in circles stubbornly.
Every few minutes, you raise your hand over the bowl and turn your fingers in a little circle counter to the direction Chara stirs, dripping tiny bits of your magic into the mixture like sprinkles. Chara folds it in neatly every time.
“That looks about right,” you inform them at last, and they ease off, shaking their arms out. “You can lick the spoon off if you want to, I’m going to sit this in the fridge for a while so it’ll set.”
Chara nods obediently and removes the spoon; you take the bowl to cover it and put it with the other batches that are almost ready to be packaged into sandwiches and wrapped. When you return to the table, they’re still licking the spoon clean almost studiously. They look a little like Burgy eating an ice cream cone, and you hide your smile.
They put the spoon in the sink without you having to tell them to, and you reach to pat their head in thanks. Chara flinches away. That same raw expression from last night is back on their face. You pull your hand back and lower it to your side, uselessly casting about for something to say, ears starting to droop. Chara returns to the couch and curls up in the blankets again, knees pulled to their chest, eyeing you.
“I’m sorry for startling you,” you offer. They say nothing. They don’t move.
You sigh, though you try to keep it on the inside. There’s still work to do, so you sit back down at the table with your stack of blank wrappers and your marker. These need to get finished before you put the ice cream sandwiches together and fold them up.
Unfortunately, you’re having a hard time concentrating on writing compliments today. Between You’re just and the great it would take to finish a wrapper, your imagination wanders off—thinking about things like what you and Burgy are going to do today, and if Burgy is really all right taking care of Chara, and if Chara is really all right being taken care of by Burgy. How you’re ever going to make Chara warm up to you when they’re so skittish. Whether you’re going to have any customers left at all, now that so many monsters are gone.
You try to keep yourself focused. It just doesn’t work very well. Some of your hug drawings wind up a little scribbly.
“Bored,” a voice says very near to your shoulder, startling you out of your reverie—and nearly out of your seat, too, because you have no idea when Chara got so close. Their red eyes bore into you like—well, like the lasers in Hotland’s puzzles. “Bored,” they say again, insistently. It’s almost snappish of them.
“Well, would you like to help make today’s wrappers?” you ask. They tilt their head to one side, so you point to the one you just finished. “Nice Cream is the frozen treat that warms your heart! So on the wrappers, we put something nice. A compliment or encouragement or a cute drawing. Do you want to try?”
Chara sits in the chair next to yours. You pass them your marker and a blank one, and wait to see what they’ll do.
As with breakfast, they have trouble deciding which hand to use, and as with breakfast, they settle with their left. Forehead scrunched in concentration, they draw a big heart across the wrapper. After some consternation, they switch the marker to their right hand and painstakingly add a slightly lopsided band-aid to it.
“That’s really good,” you tell them, beaming. Chara makes a face and switches the marker back to their left hand.
You watch them a little while longer to make sure they’ve got the hang of it and aren’t writing anything too strange. They draw a lot of hearts and flowers, and a few more band-aids. Occasionally they write out STAY DETERMINED in big blocky caps instead. Their writing’s pretty neat for a kid, but they must not be very satisfied with it, because they go back to drawing pictures mostly. Maybe it has something to do with how clumsy they are, the difficulty they appear to have moving.
They’re doing the thing with their tongue again. It’s sort of cute.
Anyway, you get the buckets of finished ice cream and the soft cookie sandwich ends, and you start putting them together and wrapping them. Practiced as you are, it only takes you about as much time as Chara spends drawing or writing on the wrappers; the two of you fall into a neat rhythm, and Nice Cream sandwiches stack up on the table next to you like bricks.
Eventually they run out of wrappers, and just sit and watch you as you finish off the last sandwiches.
“We made good time,” you tell them. “You did a really good job. Now we’ll be able to head out and sell these much earlier than usual!”
They stretch out a hand to the ice cream stacks hopefully, staring at you from the corner of their eye. You chuckle and move your stock out of their reach.
“Later,” you promise them. “I’ve gotta make you a healthy lunch first.”
Chara sighs, but doesn’t protest.
After spicy lemon and cabbage soup with noodles, you load your cart and bring Chara with you out into town.
The civilians have moved back in slowly, now it’s clear throughout the underground that the human no longer has any will to fight. It’s still very quiet, and the monsters who remain spook easily, but Snowdin has begun to take on a little of its old life.
As you’d expected, Chara shivers in the cold with their bare legs. You stop by the general store and quietly ask the storekeeper if she has any child-size coats you can buy; she says she’s got hand me downs from her sister’s kids, and sells you two for 20G each. You can make that up easily if sales go well today, and you present them to Chara glowingly, giving them their choice of which to wear. They watch you for a long, long time, only pulling the red one on after you nod to encourage them.
You set up your cart in the usual spot and hunker down to wait. Chara waits alongside you, first leaning on the cart, then pacing around it.
It’s been a few hours before they frown and tug your sleeve, complaining “Bored” again.
“You can go play Ball Game if you’d like,” you suggest, pointing out over the course. They follow your finger, pensive, and go stumbling off through the snow. You resolve to keep an eye on them while you wait for customers.
Some eventually do pass by—an Ice Cap, and a few of the town monsters who seem to be here more to check on you than to buy Nice Cream, unfortunately. (Though when you ply them winningly, they hand over 15G and let you push a bar on them.) When they ask about the human, you explain in as much detail as you can that everything’s okay now.
Your attention continually strays to Chara themself. They seem to have taken it upon themself to win at Ball Game, or at least collect every possible result, and to that end they’ve been running back and forth chasing the egregiously slippery snowball for hours.
You only played the game for a while as a kid before you got bored of outdoor roughhousing and decided to devote your time to cooking instead, but you remember enough about it. There’s a spell set on the course to make new snowballs when the old ones are melted or sunk, and there are seven ways to win. It was set up to teach kids about… virtues? You’re not sure anymore. It was a long time ago.
Chara’s collected all of the cool colors—purple, blue, green, cyan. They’re faster and more accurate now, and they successfully win the yellow flag.
You point them out to your customers. Maybe you still don’t understand why they did what they did, but—look at them. They’re harmless now.
The customers trickle off, and you’re left watching Chara. This time it only takes them about nine or ten seconds to complete the course. When they sink the snowball in the hole, a red flag pops out.
It’s the hardest of the rewards to get, but they don’t seem pleased. They look at it steadily for a few minutes, then leave, trotting back through the snow to stand before you.
Their face is scrunched up tight—maybe from the cold, you think, but they’re also rocking back and forth on their heels.
You’re about to ask them what’s the matter, but they take a deep breath and say, “Try as you might, you continue to be yourself.”
It’s the most words you’ve heard out of them at once, and they’re smiling, but there’s something off about their expression. They continue rocking from toe to heel, giggling, but the sound is thick in their throat, as if they’re about to burst into tears.
You reach into your cart and pick out a Nice Cream sandwich. It’s one of the ones with a wrapper you wrote, and you hold it out to Chara.
They freeze for a moment, and reach out to take it with hands that shake. They turn it to examine the wrapper, and although they don’t speak aloud, their lips move as they read it: Love yourself! I love you!
They undo the wrapper, revealing that you’ve given them one of the chocolate ones. They seem to perk up as they eat it.
When they’re done, they fold the wrapper neatly and stick it in their pocket, then kneel to wash their hands off in the snow.
“Burgy should be getting off his shift any time now,” you tell them. “Let’s get this back home so that we can go meet him, what do you think?”
Chara doesn’t say anything, not even a thank you, but they stick close to you while you walk, and as you head to meet the Riverperson so you can take their ferry to Hotland, they hold your hand.
Burgy is irritable as usual getting out of work, but he’s brought a fresh Starfait, which he hands to Chara straight off. They accept it and sit down on the steps leading to the hotel immediately to eat it.
“Rough shift?” you ask?
He grunts. “Too many people coming out to see the big hero who somehow saved the underground. Like, ugh, if you want to lick my shoes, you could at least do it while I’m off the clock and not liable to get yelled at by my freaking boss! And as for him! As soon as I report for duty, he wants me to model even more weird costumes! Says it’s a reward for my services! Hah!” And he kicks at the dirt for good measure.
You cover a smile, knowing that he won’t be happy knowing you think his fits of temper are cute. “If you’re already irritated, shouldn’t you have a smoke? Doesn’t that usually calm you down?”
Burgy flushes under his fur, looking at you and then away. He scratches the back of his head and grimaces. “I’m not gonna light up around the kid,” he grumbles. “Isn’t the smoke, like… bad for kids’ lungs? Sure they’re a little freak, but as long as they’re following me around, I don’t have to go out of my way to mess them up.”
He’s sweet, and you tell him so. When he squawks, you lean in—heart pounding at your own daring—and peck him on the cheek. He squawks again, blushing under his fur. You hold his hand and stare at your feet, grinning.
“Uh… so,” Burgy says at length. He’s still not retracting his hand from yours. “How’s the little weirdo been treating you today?”
“They’ve been good,” you tell him. “Unbelievably good. I’m a little worried about them, but… not in a way that’d explain them killing so many monsters. I can’t possibly imagine why they would have decided to do that. It just doesn’t make sense.”
You expect Burgy to scoff at your naïveté—he does so often enough—but instead his expression grows serious as it rarely does, and he scratches his head again.
“The hell of it is, I agree with you,” he says. “If they weren’t shambling around barely talking the same way they did when they first came to the Burger Emporium, I’d think they were a totally different kid altogether. There’s something weird about all this.”
Chara looks over their shoulder, and you frown—for just a moment, it seems to you like their right eye had turned the palest blue. But when you blink, both their eyes are red again. Maybe you were just imagining it.
They get up and trot towards you in awkward steps, empty cup still clutched in one hand.
“That goes in the garbage, kid,” Burgy tells them, pointing; Chara nods, but you see them slip the cardboard star that decorated the cup’s rim into their pocket before they throw the rest away. “Anyway—we’re going back to my flat, man. You’re—uh, welcome to come with us if you want?”
The smile that splits your face is an enormous one, and you feel like you could float.
There’s a future, here, in your boyfriend’s kitchen: Pancake batter in a bowl and ready to cook, your human child asleep on the sofa under multiple blankets, Burgy’s hands sneaking up under the hem of your shirt while you forget about the rest of the world for a while.
That night you dream of a soft voice you’re just getting to know saying I’ll fix this, I’m so sorry. We’ll fix this. Even the third one will cooperate this time.
You’re going to be free.
“One vanilla, one strawberry, and one chocolate please,” the prince says, beaming, pushing two heaping pawfuls of gold at you.
“Certainly,” you tell him, smiling at your three favorite customers. You don’t even need to ask—you hand Asriel his vanilla Nice Cream, give Frisk their strawberry, and pass them Chara’s chocolate to give to them. You ruffle their shiny brown hair, too, and they giggle.
“Hey, no fair that Frisk’s the only one who gets pet!” Asriel yells gleefully, and lines up for ruffles of his own. You laugh and indulge him: Midday rush is over on the beach, and only the Dreemurrs and a few assorted human and monster friends still remain here. It’s been three months and freedom is still a bright and shiny thing, fresh as today’s blue sky.
Having fluffed your human savior and your tiny prince, automatically you reach out to pat quiet Chara’s head too, forgetting; they flinch back. But before you can retract your hand, they grab it in theirs, bringing your pad down to rest atop their hair.
They close their eyes and hold you there, strangely wistful. Asriel looks confused. Frisk’s expression is sad.
For a brief moment, you’re overwhelmed with the oddest sense of nostalgia.