Chapter Text
Opening his eyesockets, the skeleton found himself staring at the endless ceiling above—an night sky stretched out overhead, too vast to see the end of, filled with stars and nebulae that painted the eternal darkness in brilliant colors. It had been specially designed to look exactly like the night sky of Outertale, because the owner of the room had always been utterly fascinated by the stars of the AUs.
The stars were beautiful, mesmerizing. A lifetime ago, he would have certainly been captivated by a sight like this.
“So, how are they doing?”
He asked casually, trying to move his neck. He only managed to turn it a little, but that was enough—his eyelights caught sight of the silhouette of a figure in a white lab coat moving around the laboratory, preparing whatever was necessary for his treatment.
Ending up here was an outcome that had been accounted for, even if he had woken up slightly earlier than he had anticipated.
Not that it was surprising. He had never once closed his eyesockets without having to face the nightmares that clung to him every second his mind was not awake.
“...”
The other person did not respond, ignoring the skeleton lying on the patient bed who had awakened from his coma, continuing instead to work with the metal device in his hands that looked like some kind of brace. He did not stop moving for even a second. His mind worked better when he kept moving.
He picked up a wrench from the toolbox and broke it down into tiny particles—on closer inspection, it was a cloud of ‘0’s and ‘1’s in the place where the wrench had once been—before recombining them into a new shape: a five-pronged metal tube, fitting neatly into his palm. The remaining material from the wrench turned into a perfectly shaped metal block. He installed it into the device, connected it with several other tubes, and wired them through. The device was now almost complete. It only needed the program uploaded, and then it would be able to function smoothly, and hopefully it would do exactly what it was supposed to.
“Heh, I know I know,” the bloody skeleton said, having expected the other person’s silence treatment. After all, what he had just done was unacceptable to him. It would be hard to blame him for not wanting to say a single word to him.
His eyelights shifted away from the moving figure and instead focused on his right arm.
It was tied securely to a small metal table placed beside the patient bed, the arm completely immobilized, numb like the rest of his body—except that unlike the rest of his body, it could still move, just not according to his will.
It was glitching uncontrollably.
At times it twitched, at times it trembled, at times it convulsed, at times it went still.
One second it was his arm, the next it was the arm of some Undyne, blink and it became Toriel’s arm, blink again and it was the arm of a skeleton with five finger joints, twisted at highly unnatural angles.
If he weren’t being given a dose of enflurane, this would hurt like hell.
“But really,” he said with a hint of playful provocation, “how am I supposed to determine the extent of the damage from that last stunt if you won’t give me the numbers?”
He had been unconscious before he could see the final result of the operation, not to mention that his memories of what happened before he lost consciousness were also extremely hazy. It was fairly certain that this was because his condition before he completely collapsed had been shit, but oh well... that was the limit of what this ruined body could endure before the damage became irreparable.
He had abused this body to the absolute limit.
The other person stopped what he was doing. He turned and looked directly into Geno’s eyesockets.
He opened his mouth, and his words were cold, announcing the patient’s current condition: “You have auto-correct”. The weight of his words made the air feel like it could be cut with a knife. It was a warning. Not the time to joke.
Because this condition was not a joke. Geno’s code had been infiltrated by code that once belonged to others. Those codes, unsurprisingly, still retained what remained of the wills of the beings they had once belonged to, and being the OUTcode he was, his code was mistaking those invading codes for the correct ones. As a result, it was self-destructing the code that made him who he was in order to make room for the invading code, which then leeched in and withered away, dragging the correctly placed code along with it. It was a cancer at the informational level.
Cutting off eye contact, the glitchy skeleton turned toward the computer and started typing. It took him a few seconds to find the file he had been working on earlier. Its code had been adjusted a little since the last time he checked it—most likely by Sonna at his request, since he had not had the time to review it carefully himself.
Summoning his screen, he copied the file into his interface, opened the device file in his hand, and dropped the code into the proper categories: ‘operation’, ‘installation’, and other similar sections.
“...”
Geno fell silent for a few seconds after being informed of the condition of his body.
“Damn”. It was not a surprise. He had predicted that something like this might happen when his code, which had already been an OUTcode for like forever, came into direct contact with code in an area of high instability.
No.
What surprised him was that he was still in one piece.
He had expected this condition to spread across most, if not all, of his body, based on how long his source code had been exposed. The fact that the auto-correct had only affected the entirety of his right arm was probably because Error had worked his tailbone off extracting all the invading code from his source code.
Having completed the final step of installation, Error brought the device over and began the process of putting it on him. With one hand he removed the restraints holding the bloody skeleton’s arm in place, and with the other he pressed the twitching arm down, carefully loosening his grip a little whenever the convulsions became too strong so as not to accidentally break the arm.
He waited patiently. The moment the arm returned to its proper shape and became still, he attached the device to it. “Move and I’ll give you another dose of enflurane,” he reminded him.
A glass container was attached to one of the openings in the device. Any invading code, or any code that withered away, would be drawn out and stored there. Once the foreign code had been cleared away, recovery could begin.
That is, if this machine actually worked the way it was supposed to. He was not very good at being coding, so he could not do the whole process of extracting all the invading code by hand. He only dared to do the part he was most familiar with: the source code. And that was because he knew all of Geno’s source code. Source code did not change even when a being became something else, but everything else changed and evolved continuously. In any other situation, he would have performed the code filtering the same way he did everything else, not caring about the failure rate.
But not this time. Because it was him, technology had been chosen to ensure that nothing would go wrong.
They had already had the design for a long time. Neither Geno nor he himself would be able to perform a code filtration for one of them if necessary.
But only now was this thing actually being built and completed. What kind of result it would produce still needed to be observed closely throughout the entire process.
“I won’t. I’m not that stubborn.”
Geno assures the other, feigning a ‘hurt’ expression because the glitchy skeleton's words made him feel hurt by his lack of trust in him.
“In rare cases, unfortunately,” Error replied, looking unimpressed.
With the device in place, he no longer had to worry about his strings coming into direct contact with Geno’s auto-corrected arm. Pulling the strings from his eyesockets, he flung them up to the ceiling and wrapped them around the device. Using his strings to secure the arm, he made several adjustments to prevent most of the more violent reactions while ensuring that no damage would occur even if the spasms became too severe.
Walking over to the medical supply cabinet, he pulled out a brand-new infusion set and checked it over to make sure it had no defects. Once satisfied, he returned to the side of the bed and carried out the procedure of inserting the infusion needle into the other’s left wrist.
Then he summoned a bone with a sharpened tip, raised it up—
And stabbed down.
“...ngh—”
He pushed it in just deep enough to reach his bone marrow, then pulled it out, checking to ensure there were no broken bone fragments left in the wound. After that, he inserted the other end of the infusion set into the newly opened wound on his right wrist and secured it with medical tape.
It did not take long for the red liquid from his body to be transferred into the other body. His body could handle the deficit of DT as a coder better because he was an error. As an error, the DT his body naturally produced was pure, and his rate of DT recovery was the fastest among all errors.
“Straight from the source,” Geno said without blinking as he watched his younger brother stab himself in the wrist. He could not help it—his bones were harder than the material used in ordinary medical tools, though the puncture still went in more easily than usual.
“I’m burning that much DT, huh,” he commented flatly, staring at the stream of red liquid flowing into his body. He wondered how much he had burned just to put that off. He would not be surprised if he had nearly burned himself dry just to finish that command set.
The amount he had burned was clearly enough to require replenishment every few hours, and that said something, because his DT was not like most other people’s. Like Error, he did not obtain it. He had cheated. And, combined with his existing will, he had turned something that was never originally his into part of himself. That made the amount of DT he had absurdly ridiculous when compared with other OUTcodes who were also coder.
His eyelights shifted away from his own arm being infused and toward the source of the fluid being transferred. He wondered whether the black skeleton had gotten any rest after everything he had done. Judging by the somewhat exhausted demeanor, he guessed the other had not slept for several days, and must have started working immediately after dragging him back to the Laboratory.
In the corner near the door sat a trash bin overflowing with used infusion sets. His eyes narrowed when he caught the glitchy skeleton’s eyelights. “How long have you been up after infusing DT for Bluescreen?”
“...”
Geno’s expression turned into a glare directed at his younger brother. Then, a subtle smirk.
As much as he felt bothered by Error’s behavior, he also saw an opportunity to tease the grumpiest of the three. “And now you’re being a hypocrite.”
“Speak for yourself,” Error scolded, grumbling while staring at the screen to keep track of the process.
Rolling his eyes at the implication in the bloody skeleton’s words, they both knew the other was no better than him when it came to this matter. And even worse if they were talking about other things...
“Hey, you can’t count that as lying!” Geno protested with exaggerated devotion while defending his own way of doing things.
After all, they had not gotten this far by accident. Everyone involved with them knew it well, even if not everyone agreed with the way he did things.
“A part of the truth is not the truth,” Error frowned, glaring at the white skeleton, annoyed by his tricks and by how he always succeeded in provoking him every time they debated this matter. Even to this day, he still wondered how they had ended up in this kind of relationship despite their differences, despite the fact that they were almost complete opposites in viewpoint and values.
“What you provide is closer to a lie than the very words you speak when you drink them from the original truth,” he shot back, and this would be a debate that would never end between them.
“Heh—”
Geno snorted, amused by a bit of normalcy amid the entire chain of multiversal events unfolding around them.
“As much as your Justice demands, I have all the Patience in the multiverse for you.”
That line was so familiar between them that it had become a habit that was hard to break, but it was not a bad habit. It had never been. He always reaffirmed his own words again and again, in different contexts and situations. Every time he said this, it was the truth, and Error’s Justice told him so every time.
Because neither of them could deny that they were alike in one way: both needed constant reaffirmation. That was why he wanted the black skeleton rather than anyone else.
“...”
Error stared at his brother, then clicked his tongue with a snort, cutting off eye contact and focusing his attention on the screen in front of him, on the continuously running lines of code it displayed—at least, trying to.
But he could not deny that the other was telling the truth, and that it got on his nerves because this answer did not do anything for the debate that had gone on forever between them, yet it did an excellent job of making him embarrassed, annoyed, and unwilling to keep talking to him all at once. Geno kept pulling this trick every few years, and he always fell for it every time. They had done this so many times that he no longer bothered trying to look ahead and dodge it.
“Idiot,” was all he could manage to say.
“Come on, I’m a genius. That’s been certified several times”, Geno replied in a tone that was half teasing, half cheerful. Teasing the other had never been boring, he knew that well, even after all this time.
Guess who was the strategist and talented leader who had guided their network? He could only name a few names that could rival him in this regard, and they would fit on one hand even if the whole history of the universe were counted. He knew himself well, and he knew he was only that good, even if his moral compass was not exactly the best.
“And the dumbest genius the multiverse has ever had the misfortune of witnessing,” Error added. He rolled his eyelights, unimpressed, though he did not deny a truth that had long since become impossible to dispute.
“Close enough,” Geno chuckled before adding, “but insane sounds better though.”
“Insane is an exaggeration,” Error rejected the idea.
To outsiders, what Geno did was certainly at a level of incomprehensible, unfathomable madness, but to those who were really there—this man was one of the sanest among them.
“You lack psychopathy, not to mention that you know exactly what you’re doing and where it leads.” He replied with a glare at the one who could easily become one of his worst rivals, while at the same time also being one of his greatest allies.
No matter how much love he had for the bloody skeleton, he could never allow it to define him.
“Yeah yeah yeah.”
Geno gave a thin smile in response to the black skeleton’s sharp stare. He had been waiting for the part where they would talk about the event that led to him lying here.
“I know you’re mad,” his eyelights wandered to anywhere that was not Error, but eventually he made them look directly into the other’s eye sockets, deliberately meeting his eyelights. “You have every right to be mad.”
“After all had his say in this, you know full well what he said,” a trace of guilt rose in him when he mentioned his counterpart, because he had dragged the other into this mess from the very beginning. Even so... “but I do not regret it,” he could not find even a trace of remorse in himself for what he had done, unfortunately.
“I would still choose that path even if I could do it over again.” He could not say he felt regret, because that would be a lie, and he had promised not to lie anymore.
“And you think I shouldn’t have a say in this shit too?”
Error had not raised his voice in a long time, but he had no intention of taking that back. He only raised his voice when he was truly pissed, and it had been a very long time since he had been this pissed. Really, a very long time.
He clenched his teeth, tightened his hand into a fist, and he was shaking—he could feel it. Taking a breath to calm himself, it did not help much. He fixed his eyelights on the screen; he did not want to look at Geno—not right now, not when he was angry and the reason for that anger was the man lying on the hospital bed. It would be better for both of them if he let his mind focus on something else right now, because then he could also stop himself from overthinking.
Taking another breath, he continued.
“You planned everything behind my back, even convinced Player in, and somehow made that kid believe I was in on that god damn plan, all while keeping it away from me!” he finally failed to keep the last bit of his composure intact.
“No.”
Geno said it plainly.
No long explanation.
Just one word.
Bare.
And clear.
Having not reacted when the other stopped what he was doing, the white skeleton continued, “It wasn’t fair at all. You should have been the first to know.”
Keeping his voice steady, he went on, “Of all people, you, are the one who would understand best why I chose to take it down that way,” because Error had been there before, too many times to count, and he knew he understood better than anyone else what it meant to make a choice, knowing this was the only thing one could do in a sea of possibilities, none of which led to a good ending. He chose the one with the best result.
“And you’d be the one to again it the hardest...”
That was all. The glaring difference between the two of them, between yellow and cyan.
“Your Justice and Integrity could never allow a plan like that to be put into action. It was that simple.”
Error being Error, the most stubborn person the bloody skeleton had ever known, the glitchy villain with a moral compass as corrupted as his traits. The brother he would never trade for anybody else.
“...”
Error clenched his eyesockets shut.
He did not want to see it any more than he wanted to hear it.
He gritted his teeth so hard that several of them cracked, then took a few steps away from the medical bed to get some air. He needed to breathe.
...
Hahhh—
. . .
“...”
Geno watched the other’s back in silence.
…
“I’m not mad”
“...”
He stared at the black skeleton. His eyesockets widened slightly.
After a second, Error turned to face him, finally allowing their eyelights to meet.
He was still grinding his teeth, but this time not as hard.
“Don’t get it mistaken,” he began.
Raising his clenched hand, he forced it open. In doing so, that hand became limp and stiff, just like the arm undergoing the DT infusion. Exhaling, he turned fully toward Geno.
“I’m pissed as fuck, and you’re lucky I didn’t punch you the second I saw you instead of saving it for later.”
He looked at the other with bullet-sharp eyelights, harsh and rigid, anything but mad. Funny, or perhaps cursed.
“I want to be mad,” he admitted.
There was something breaking in his voice, as though it were echoing in a cave. He rarely showed himself to be vulnerable, rarely showed anything truly sincere. These days he did not have much of that luxury left.
Looking at the screen, he opened several files, a smaller one, and two auxiliary screens for displaying parameters. They really needed to update their measurement tools. He looked at the screen without breaking eye contact; he knew he needed to explain himself. This was not his other brother, the one who could read people disturbingly well compared to a person who did not fully understand the concept of emotions.
“I understand why you saw it as the most viable option. You and your damn moral compass—if yours can even be called one.”
“I just—...” his voice trailed off.
It took him a few seconds to find the right words for what he was feeling. He was only slightly better than Geno when it came to understanding and explaining his own emotions, or emotions in general. After a moment, he found it. “Disappointed.”
“Okay?”
He did not deny that he would absolutely have opposed that plan, but opposing and stopping were two different things. Their network had survived for a reason: they could oppose or disagree with each other’s choices, directions, even ideals, but they never stopped one another from carrying them out. Refusing to assist, yes. Not helping to clean up afterward, maybe. But stopping from the beginning, no.
Not everyone in the network followed this way, or adhered to it absolutely, but as the core of the network, the three of them had never once gone against that unspoken agreement.
“I’m disappointed that you pulled that shit of a plan off. Thinking you couldn’t even say one word to me.”
“. . .”
Geno no longer looked into Error’s eyelights. He could not.
Could not anymore.
Hehehehe...
He wanted to laugh.
Laugh at this situation, laugh at the choices that had brought him here, laugh at himself.
But he could not.
He had not been able to laugh at things like this for a very long time.
Since the day he made that promise.
But what was he supposed to do when he could no longer laugh it off? Well, something else would come out.
Something far more real and uglier.
“It’d be better if you said you were real mad.”
A reprimand. Directed at himself.
He wondered what expression he had now. Sad? Happy? Thoughtful? Mad? Numb? Empty?
Whatever it was, it was enough to pull that expression out of Error of all people. The way his younger brother looked at him—a sad, sad look in his eyelights—that expression always hurt him. It hurt. It hurt a lot. It hurt more than any physical or mental wound he had ever experienced.
The worst part was that this was not what the black skeleton should have been feeling. Looking at him, he should have felt anger, not sadness. It should have been anger.
Looking into the other’s eyelights, he could feel his throat dry up, constrict, making it hard to breathe. He knew his throat was tightening even though he could not feel anything from his body because the anesthesia was still in effect.
“Looks like I fucked up real bad. Once again.”
“Quite obviously.”
He masked his emotions behind a cold, emotionless shell. Though they had known each other long enough—far too long, in fact—Error only did this to save face. Both of them knew very well that his act had been seen through long before it even started.
And then they fell into silence again.
...
Even so, despite silence being exactly what they both needed right now, he knew it would not help them in this case. It did not work. It had never worked. His past relationships had already proven that enough.
“Tsk—”
And so.
He refused to let this conversation sink into silence here.
If he let it go this time, he knew it would be difficult to bring it up again later, and that would do no good for any of them.
What he feared the most, though, was how it might affect Geno if they did not handle it as they should.
“I know you want to treat us like him.”
?
Something dropped inside Geno’s nonexistent stomach.
He stared at Error.
A beat.
Then two.
Before he could find his voice again—
And when he did.
“As much as you’re disappointed, please...”, his voice was so small he could barely hear himself speak.
“Don’t... put it like that.”
...
Taking a breath, Error continued to hold eye contact with the bloody skeleton. He knew he needed to clarify his point, and he also knew he had to do this—for himself, for Geno, for the sake of their malfunctioning family.
“You don’t realize it, but...” It was not the same, not even a little. But in the eyes of someone who was deceiving himself, the smallest details were all reminders. It was bad, but it was not wrong. Without the past, there would be no present, yet sometimes it was difficult to separate the past from the present. Sometimes everything blended together and one saw that distant past reflected in their present reality. And he would be lying if he said he did not know that feeling.
“Fresh’s antics remind you of Papyrus, and me on my better days too.”
“And I’m not talking about the Papyrus you have. I’m talking about the Papyrus you lost.”
No matter how he tried to reassure himself, no matter how he wanted to frame it, the truth was always there. No matter how deeply it might be buried, even a tiny fragment of information could expose every deception.
...
He looked at the bloody skeleton, who had stopped responding, and sighed.
Lifting a hand, he rubbed his temple. He could feel a headache coming on. He had already anticipated the worst possible outcome of this conversation, but actually watching it play out was another story.
Hah...
Geno’s expression made him uneasy—that empty expression he was too familiar with. It had once been the expression permanently resting on his own face. At some point in the past, whenever he looked at himself in the mirror, that emptiness stared back at him—the expression of a man who was dead while still alive.
The time when he looked at his hand and saw white bones instead of multicolored ones.
But that was long ago, and it was best left to rot with the rest of what he could call his past. The past of the big bad Destroyer of Worlds—now that just hilarious.
Giving the other time to process his own emotions, he looked away from him. He knew he had done all he could. The rest was something only his brother could do himself—to pull himself out of the hole he had sunk too deep into.
And Error did the thing that, perhaps in a lifetime ago, he would have laughed at.
Being the atheist he had always been. He folded his hands together, closed his eyesockets.
And prayed.
Not to anyone in particular.
He just needed a point of support, a spark of hope to keep going, to continue.
Clenching his hand and then loosening it, he forced himself to focus on the screen, but in the end he still could not ignore it any longer.
His right hand was shaking.
His own DT was running low as well. And he was not in the best condition to recover it as fast as the amount he was drawing out, not to mention the amount he had already drawn earlier to transfuse into Bluescreen.
Removing the infusion tube, he patched up the wound on his own arm with a bandage, did the same for the white skeleton, then tossed the used infusion set into the trash can. Opening a side window, he set the timer for the next transfusion—two hours later.
Pulling the screen with him over to the computer, he picked up the thermos from the desk with his free hand and took a sip from it. Dark hot chocolate and heavy cream—bought for him by After from Ccino’s café earlier. It was not the best thing for recovery, but right now liquid was really the only thing that would go down his system. It was either chocolate or nothing. Everything else would either fail to digest properly and come back out the same way it went in after about an hour, or he would vomit it back up immediately after swallowing it. There were no exceptions. They had tried, and he had vowed never to repeat that miserable afternoon again.
“With enough RESETs, noticeable changes will appear.”
He spoke to no one in particular, his finger sliding across one of the reports from one of their local observers, codename Maellin. Not exactly a coder, but she frequently observed the AUs around her world. The findings in her report were not a new conclusion. It was a theory that had existed for forever. It was just that Error had never publicly wanted to admit it, for many reasons. That piece of information would destabilize the fragile balance their network was trying to maintain. They did not have the capacity to handle something like that. They had already suffered enough losses from Fatal’s incident—losses that could never be recovered.
“...”
Geno stared up at the ceiling above. The room was dark, but he still felt everything was blinding, even with the night sky overhead and the blue light emitted from the huge computer covering more than half the wall on the other side of the room.
He had too many things on his mind right now, mostly the things he had done and why he had done them—the things that had brought him here. The painful realization that even now, he still could not let go of the past. With every action, every step, he saw a black skeleton when he did one thing, saw a purple parasite when he did another, but there were also times... when he saw the tall skeleton with the scarf he was wearing in place of the other two while doing what he did—the thing he only recognized when it was pointed out, and even then he did a shit job of accepting it. Even now it burned in his marrow, smoldering in his bones, eating into the small fragment of SOUL he had left.
And he knew he needed a distraction from this feeling before it swallowed him whole. He needed to deal with these emotions before he lost himself, and he clung to the only thing he could at the moment—trying to see through the issue.
“Tell me something that is not a hypothesis,” his voice came out rougher than expected, but he did not care. He just needed to hear something from his brother—anything, to shift his mind somewhere else. He could see the image of the black skeleton in his head, the way his brows would furrow while looking at him, that angry frown. If Error were angry at him, maybe he would feel worse, but all he could feel was anxiety, disappointment.
And he felt sick at himself. Guilt, wish he still capable of feeling remorse.
Error did not look back. He only set down the blue thermos with gold accents. Looking at the blank screen of the large computer, he said something he knew he knew well.
“You wish to move on as much as you wish for a family that your current self can fit into without missing a beat.”
Absentmindedly touching the golden star embroidered on the left sleeve of his coat—the star that was his, his light, the thing that had guided him and, ironically, the only thing he could not bring himself to say no to no matter how hard he tried. But a price was a price. He was willing to pay it again even if he had a second chance.
“And you’re still not sure whether you even know how to do that.”
One second.
Then two.
By the third second, the bloody skeleton could no longer hold back a grin, because that line sounded impossibly familiar even though it had been relayed through Error.
“The next line is from Fresh, right?”
“He told me to add that line.”
The black skeleton turned only slightly, his gaze unimpressed, but there was no denying the trace of softness inside it—despite the fact that anyone who pointed out even such a small detail would get punched.
“Knew it.”
Geno smiled faintly, feeling a strange warmth in his chest, even if it was completely buried beneath everything else he felt. Then he turned his attention toward the closed door.
“Also, can you come in? I can’t really feel you in this state when there’s a door between us.” Normally, when he was healthy, that would not have been a problem. But those were other days. Today, right now, he needed both of his brothers—the black one and the multicolored one. He really, really needed both of them, no matter how pathetic that feeling might be.
“Heh, knew my bro would peep it pronto! Ain't nothin' stayin' zipped from ya for long.”
A cheerful, energetic voice announced itself as the 90s fashion disaster walked into the room. Fresh made his presence unmistakably known the moment he was called in.
At first he had intended to barge in immediately after Error was done, but he chose to give his two brothers time to breathe and waited patiently outside. The reason he had not been inside from the beginning was because... the parasite was not comfortable seeing one of the only two people it considered part of its pack lying motionless on a hospital bed like that. It did not like seeing Geno this way. Besides, he knew his presence would not help his glitchy bro at all. He knew the other could handle this.
“I could say the same thing to you two.”
Geno whispered more to himself than to the other two, looking at his brothers—the black-boned one and the multicolored one. He felt so many emotions looking at those two skeletons. So, so many different emotions.
Yet one of the strongest, surprisingly—
Was love.
He loved them. Both of them. As much as Papyrus.
He loved them so much it hurt…
And he knew he was not worthy of this relationship.
Not worthy of this affection.
When he had more than once proven that he would be willing to go against them if necessary.
He felt guilty toward them, toward himself, and he cursed himself for being unable to feel regret.
No remorse.
A feeling of dread rose in his throat, growing more bitter as he looked between the two of them.
How many more times would he have to prove, over and over again, that he was willing to put them aside so that they would finally leave him?
...
“Will you stay with me?”
And despite that thought, he knew he was selfish. A terrible, selfish man to the extreme.
A man who could not let go, no matter how much he wanted to.
All because of one simple reason: he could not bear the idea of being alone again.
...
Silence.
Only silence answered the bloody one’s question.
...
The two skeletons exchanged a look, silent.
Then the colorful one pulled out a metal baseball bat and sprang toward the medical bed.
“All right broski!”
Fresh declared excitedly, swinging the bat exactly where he had aimed it.
BANG!
...
Error stood watching. His face blank, for once not complaining when the parasite punched a hole through his laboratory wall.
“Just this time,” he began, “I agree with the bat.” He clapped once at the end, adding dramatic effect while keeping his face deadpan, following Fresh’s madness.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!”
Geno cried out in a fake panic as Fresh’s swing barely missed his skull and hit the wall instead, leaving a huge hole in it.
“You can’t treat someone who is dying like that!”
“You’re always dying. And the code processing will go just fine even if you’re out.”
Error waved a hand dismissively, turning back to the large computer screen.
“Rad to know tha’, glitchy bro!”
Fresh pulled the bat free from where it was stuck in the wall. His eyelights narrowed beneath his sunglasses as he seriously considered knocking his bloody bro unconscious, but decided against it because he thought big G had already been through enough.
Instead, he tossed the bat up toward the ceiling, sending it flying out of the area.
“Hahh... feelin’ totally tubular,” he said with satisfaction, rolling his shoulders, feeling much better after landing that stress-relief hit. Not many things could make the parasite feel anything, but Geno’s words were definitely one of the things that could tickle out the closest thing it had to emotion. It was actually really strange, but he did not hate it. Surprisingly.
“You can’t even feel that.”
Error rolled his eyes dismissively, not bothering to look back even when Fresh threw something at his ceiling again. He would definitely not give in like last time if that fucking parasite started nagging him to make a copy of his favorite baseball bat. They already had enough to deal with just from random duplication damage alone.
“Please don’t start another one of that now... my fragile SOUL can’t handle it,” Geno drew out his voice, and it came out more effectively than he expected—too effectively, in fact, to the point it sounded somewhat unstable.
That earned a look from the other two.
...
“Okay, that was a little more cringe than I expected—” he laughed awkwardly before calming down.
“But seriously... will you?”
...
Silence answered again.
This time, the answer needed to be serious. No one knew where to begin.
Not Error.
And certainly not Geno.
So it was finally the youngest-in-spirit of their family stepped forward. The parasite had observed and learned enough from the time they had spent together that, even if it did not fully understand, it still knew what it should do.
“My radical bro, I heart ya big time, but that’s, like... the most un-tubular thing you’ve barfed out in ages.”
And if Fresh was the one saying that, then it said something. It was probably not wrong to say he was the most functional one emotionally among the three, amusingly enough, even though he was the one who understood emotions the least.
“Like, fer realz? What kinda question is that, yo?” He crossed his arms, his glasses flashing BRUH-??.
Error shifted to the side of the medical bed, dragging the screens with him. He rubbed his temple while frowning at the one lying there—the source of his recent headaches. He wondered whether he should give Geno another dose of enflurane. The black skeleton looked older somehow, even though he could not age at all. Probably because of his stress level lately. Asgore knew, the last time he’d been this stressed was during the whole Council incident.
“Do you remember who was the one who came up with the idea of becoming a family? Who asked us to become brothers in the first place?”. That was not even a question.
“It was your idea from beginning to end. Don’t think you can escape from it now.”
In other words, Geno was stuck with the two of them whether he liked it or not. They had come this far, and out of everything the bloody skeleton had ever regretted, he would not let them become one of those things, no matter the reason.
...
“Heh—”
Geno wanted to laugh. He really wanted to. But if he laughed now, he did not know whether he would still be able to control himself afterward. His body still felt as numb as ever, and his mind could not decide whether he even still had a body below the skull. Yet he could not bring himself to care.
After a while, he finally gathered enough strength to say, “You guys are the best.”
“Yeah, yeah. Everyone in this house has issues, but don’t think that means you get a free pass.”
Error said dismissively, though he could not stop the corners of his mouth from lifting slightly. After all, he could not be as harsh as he wanted when faced with that expression of the other. Still, “We’ll talk about whether you move on or not later.”
“You’re still not off the hook yet.”
“Yea, ’m G bro! Ya in majorly boned!”
Fresh leaned dramatically against the medical bed, sitting right on the edge of it as he looked at the motionless skeleton.
“Hehehe—”
The laugh slipped out of Geno more naturally than it had in months, after having spent so long trying to suppress it and keep it from turning into something hysterical. His emotions really were hard to control these days.
“Can’t imagine if I didn’t.”
Looking up at the night-sky ceiling above, he had another question.
...
“Stay with me?”
“Through the rest of the filtration, I mean.”
The black skeleton looked at the bloody one before turning away.
“Don’t expect me to chatter.”
“Totally, my bra! Always ha’ time for some FRESH time with the fam!”
Geno opened his eyesockets once more. It seemed he had fallen asleep.
The first thing he noticed was that he could feel his body again—except for his right arm.
Looking over, his arm was still inside that device. It seemed the filtration process had completed. He could see the thinning density of the ‘1’s and ‘0’s, and it made him shiver. It looked like he had really fucked up his arm badly to get a result where the code density in his arm had been cut in half. It was likely that part of that had to do with restoring the sensory connection to the rest of his body.
He moved his eyelights around the room. He could see part of Fresh’s skull poking out from where he had sat down and fallen asleep beside the medical bed, had removed his trademark hat, and Error was slumped asleep in the blue office chair that After had gotten for him last year.
Everyone was asleep, huh.
He looked back up at the ceiling. The stars looked down at him in return.
“...hk—”, he bit his tongue when he felt his SOUL tremble in his ribcage. But he could not help but laugh. This was too funny not to.
He wondered what they saw, the first glitch that broke the rules they had set, the mistake they had failed to erase, the existence intruding into this world without permission.
“Sorry, but not today. Not ever,” he whispered under his breath.
He was not sure whether he was speaking to himself or to them, the ones who were watching.
The battle they were preparing for.
They were losing, and they were trying to lose as slowly as possible, doing their best in the role of a group of blind and deaf people trying to stop the universe from collapsing onto itself.
They were willingly walking toward their own ending, and he did not know whether this was something worth becoming if it did not even guarantee anything for the remaining members of their network. And yet now there was only one thing he cared about above all else.
He did not blink, smiling as they turned away.
...
Difference.
They said to learn to move on, yet—I still don’t know how to.
But words cannot describe how much I want to move on.
For my very own family.