What was the worst part of hell? There were so many versions to choose from. So many ironic fates to fear. The torture, the hellfire, the hopelessness. People had become quite elaborate in theirs ideas of suffering over the ages. Yet down here in her perpetually resetting hellhole, down here where she was forced to witness her body used as a weapon, down here where she had so little control… the worst thing about hell may very well have been the taste of that fucking honey flavored granola.

The other victims of the Underground may have seemed to be left a little off kilter by Chara’s new strategy of basically spamming the world with constant resets but it left Rain feeling downright nauseous. The world was always spinning. She felt the same pain over and over again until it just became an annoying pattern to be ignored. Her eyes danced around in her head, they stumbled around a few steps, threw up, caught their breath, then did it all again.

She tried to come up with new ways of fighting back during this chaos. She attempted to drag her heels in the darkness to keep Chara from returning. She brawled with her through the void in an attempt to regain control when they fell back into existence. She tried smothering her in smoke to choke her memory- something she had learned from Chara herself- and even tried to trap her in a dream; desperately hoping that that was what the other souls had been trying to do when Chara had fled. Yet none of it worked. It didn’t even slow her down. She just kept going.

Falling.

Healing.

Rain.

Reset.

Over and over again until no one could remember.

Falling.

Healing.

Rain.

Reset.

Thank god Rain eventually realized that if she burrowed down deep enough into their shared existence she could keep all of the dizzying sickness at a respectable distance. It was still there, like the persistent ringing in one’s ears, but she was getting pretty good at forcing herself to not be aware of it.

Chara didn’t stop throwing them back into the darkness until the darkness stopped being so…empty.

It was subtle at first. Sometimes the void shimmered like a summer road and little cracks of darker darkness could be seen at the edge of their vision. Sometimes, as they drifted past, Rain could not help but think that those cracks almost looked like the unblinking sockets of a distorted face- watching them in grinning silence.

Eventually it became too unnerving for the both of them and they finally stopped.

It was then, while throwing up their breakfast yet again, that for the first time in a long time they reached a unanimous agreement with one another: never eat anything resembling granola ever again under pain of death.

The room was spinning so fast they could barely move. They just rolled around in the weeds clutching their stomach and coughing. Everything was an ugly, uneven blur that could reverse direction on them at any given moment, causing them to groan and squeeze their eyes shut all the tighter against the nausea. Yet still it was preferable to the unblinking gaze of the void.

Flowey must have still had some vague sort of hunch that something was up because after the first two or three resets he had stopped showing up again. But apparently that did not mean that he had left; only that he had remained in hiding. And regardless of said hunches, his memory had indeed been wiped clean and the sight of a feeble, groaning human soon proved too tempting for him to resist.

“Howdy! What’cha doing rolling around on the ground like that?” He chirped, appearing from his designated spot when Rain and Chara failed to get up and wander over to his location on their own like they usually did.

He didn’t give them his big spiel about gaining LOVE or showing them the ropes this time so they ignored him while they continued to try and get the room to stop spinning. It took all of their combined effort just to keep from gagging again.

“Golly, you sure look like you’ve had it rough! Are you ok, buddy? Why don’t you come on over here and lil ol Flowey can lend you a hand.”

Chara rolled her eyes. Flowers didn’t have hands.

“Isn’t he going to eventually shoot us?” Rain wondered.

“Probably.”

They tried to get up, felt the world shift underneath them, and collapsed back onto their belly. They both knew that they needed to take action against both Flowey and each other soon but they just… they needed a minute first.

“Hey, buddy, you listening?” Flowey huffed, patience growing thin. “It’s not very nice to ignore me.” His high pitched voice was going raw and demonic. Behind them they heard the rustling of plants being pushed aside. The familiar sounds of vines scraping and sliding across the earth warned them of his approach.

In the blink of an eye several layers of vines snapped down around them, dragging them through the mud with no small degree of roughness. “On second thought,” he chuckled, “go right ahead! Ignore me! Closes your eyes. Pretend this is all just a bad dream! Call out for help if you want. Go on, cry.” The vines constricted, small thorns biting into their skin. Chara struggled against his tightening grip. “No, no, it’s alright. Don’t get up.” He chided, blossom face dipping down to look at them. “This makes my job so much easier!” There were bullets forming in the air above them, shimmering in the faint light.

Rain waited for them to fall, content in the idea of just letting Flowey win, however short lived that victory would be.

Chara freed her hands, enduring the scrapes and reaching out to snag Flowey by the head.

He jerked back in surprise, recognizing something familiar in her dark eyes. His vines flailed and tried to push her back. He tried to wrench her arms away as her fingernails dug deeper into his face.

“What are you doing? Let go!” Some of the bullets bit into them, making scores in their arms. But it did not cause Chara to release him.

“You’re right. This was easier.” Chara commended.

Rain flinched in surprise, realizing all too late that she had miscalculated. She rushed to the surface to fight for control, to try and stop the inevitable from happening. But it was too late. The petals tore. The stem snapped and the vines went limp, their dead weight clinging to her body for a few short moments before they began to wither and fade.

Rain’s movements slowed to a halt. She had still been trying to catch her breath. She had thought Chara was too sick to do anything. She thought Flowey was going to win. She stared out from behind her eyes in numb shock as withered petals fell in her lap.

She had lost.

Chara sighed, rolling onto her back and tossing the petals up in the air overhead so that they could engage in a short dance with the falling raindrops before settling in around them once more. “Well, that sure was a lot easier than before. Are you still going to fight me? Now that he’s gone? They won’t get a warning this time.”

Rained shifted uncomfortably within their mind, tired and unsure of herself. “Then I will have to be their warning.”

Chara rolled her eyes and pushed herself up onto wobbly feet. “Fine. Have it your way. Here we go again.”

***

Rain was very good at screwing things up. Chara made sure to remind her of this. She had fought and she fought and she fought until she was worn out.

Chara used the Ruins as her hunting grounds. She was determined to find any wayward monster she could and strike them down so that their single drop of power could be added to her own.

If Rain let her kill then she would become harder and harder to fight back against in the long run but if she tried to save every monster they encountered, then she would wear herself out. In the end it had not been a situation Rain could win. Chara taunted her with every monster she failed to save and slowly wore her down.

She did not want Rain causing extra trouble when they met Sans so she had adopted the simple strategy of letting Rain pick her poison and then drowning her in it. If she wanted to save everyone, Chara would let her try until she was too worn out to move or speak. If she wanted to only save those who stood a chance of stopping them, then she would move about freely and hunt down everything in sight before ever confronting one of the stronger monsters. That way even if Rain was well rested, the balance of power between the two of them would remain in Chara’s favor.

Because of this, when poor, kind Toriel found them at last all caked in dust and waiting for her outside her own home, there was little Rain could do to save her.

She cried out in desperation but her words never made it past the walls of her mind. Her soul was a cloud of burning lights and arcing fog that clawed against the black smoke that smothered her. She ran herself ragged trying to save Toriel, reaching out against her growing constraints to try and do something to salvage a run that had gone off the rails the moment Flowey had died.

Chara let her struggle. Good. Let her waste the last of her energy now. Let her soft heart lead her off on a fool’s errand. She was trying too hard to play the hero when she should have been playing the strategist.

Three resets worth of delays later and it was over. Toriel was dead.

Chara tried in vain to catch her mother’s quavering soul but it broke too fast, leaving Chara with arms held up towards the broken light and her lips stretched thin in knowing disappointment while Rain stared on in defeat.

It was strange for Chara to see Rain fight so hard to save someone she barely knew. A stranger she had hardly even understood.

Just as Chara was willing to do whatever it took to erase all remnants of the memories that clung to her like scars, Rain seemed desperate to save everyone and everything despite the cost such a struggle inflicted upon her. In a vague sort of way, like remembering a dream, Chara believed she could have once understood this desire. Yet she had chosen to discard the parts of herself that Rain’s own soul seemed so desperate to cling too.

That was fine. In the end Rain would let go too. Just like Chara had. She would eventually find peace in the silence they had made. She would one day understand that trying to care for these people only resulted in being given memories that were too painful to visit.

Chara went around the house and collected her usual things after her victory. She looked at herself in the mirror and examined the light grays and whites of dust in her hair. It looked like resetting had given back the fiery red color again but it was already fading fast. How curious.

There were no vines to block the door when they turned to leave this time. There were no awaiting footprints in the snow when they stepped out into the snow. The silence felt good. If it wasn’t for the cold wind one could stand out there among the trees with their eyes closed and forget the world even existed.

Chara wondered if Sans would still be out on patrol today. Or would he be off sleeping somewhere now that Asriel was not there to stir up trouble?

Rain was an annoying weight in her shoes as they slogged through the snow. She was in a weary panic. She was no doubt trying to think of a way to save him.

As they approached the sentry station the familiar sound of footsteps broke the relative silence of the ice-flecked wind. Rain fought for control, grasping at her hands, her voice, her legs- anything. Scream! Run! Drop the weapon! The ideas bounced around in their head in a wordless, primal way. Remember. Remember! Remember us! Fight us! Stop us! But Rain was too worn out to do anything. Chara had too much LOVE.

The footsteps stopped in front of them with a heavy crunch.

The two souls remained frozen in place, their back turned to Sans and their body held at attention while inside their mind the two entities chased each other round and round in exhausting circles, like the sun chasing the moon.

Sans’s voice seemed heavier than usual when he finally spoke. More worn out. “human, turn around. don’t… don’t you know how to greet a new pal?”

He remembered something. But not enough.

Their whole body shook. Screams clawed their way up their throat but died behind their lips. Their fingernails dug into their own skin as their hands spasmed. Their knees wobbled, perpetually on the edge of giving out. The two beings fought on in a storm of thunder only they could hear.

Their stillness worried him. “uh, hello?”

“No, no, no, no! Sans! Fight her! Fight her!” Do you job! Why wont you do your job!"

Ever so slowly, their body shuffled around to meet him. There were deep shadows etched under his eyes and in the corners of his mouth. Perhaps out of hope, perhaps out of habit, as always, he was holding a boney hand out to greet them.

Their arm trembled as they took his hand. His boney fingers brushed against their bare skin. His hand seemed to be the warmer of the two.

The stress lines and shadows against his skull relaxed a little bit. “there we go. see? i’m not so bad. nice to meet you. my name is sans. sans the skeleton. you're a human, right?”

Chara frowned, looking down at their hand in confusion when no childish farting noise greeted them.

He took notice of her look. “what’s the matter? never shook hands with a skeleton before?”

“I was expecting a joke.” Chara admitted, her other hand tucked behind her back so that he could not see the odd bulge of the fire iron in her sleeve.

“a joke?” His shoulders seemed to tense a little. He looked at them with a wary eye.

“Yeah.” She blinked at her own stupidity and quickly added, “Tthe lady in the Ruins said you like to greet people with jokes.”

He relaxed again and laughed. “oh. so you are friends with the ol' lady, huh?” He shrugged. “ sorry, just wasn’t feeling it today.”

Their lips twitched as Rain tried to scream. Chara turned it into a smile. “Want me to tell you a joke instead then?”

His expression brightened a little. His stance became a little less guarded. He didn’t seem to notice that she was still holding his hand. “eh, sure. what the hell, go for it.”

“Knock, knock.”

“whose there?”

“No! Sans! Run! Run!”

Chara smiled, tilting her head and swallowing the screams.

He frowned at her amused silence. “uuh…?”

Her grip tightened against his. The fire iron slipped out of her sleeve as she yanked him forward, using his own momentum to drive its cutting edge against his ribs in an arc that mirrored the knife strike that had once ended their fight in the judgement hall.

“Oh, sorry!” Chara chirped, smile turning into a maniac grin.

His eye turned blue. He grunted in pain, hand going up to the strike.

Flicker.

The world around them shifted, going dark for a second. Yet she refused to let go when he attempted to teleport and ended up being carried off with him, reappearing a few yards back, against the tree line.

“That should have been mercy!” She spat.

He tried to summon something as he clung to consciousness, a warm red painting the snow around him as he staggered. He tried to stop her despite his vision going fuzzy but the attack went wide.

She twisted the poker so that it snagged between his ribs and used it to yank him towards her, letting go of his hand and catching him by the skull. She shoved him head first into the trunk of a nearby tree with a loud crack. The flames in his eye guttered. He gasped, a large spiderweb of cracks running up the left side of his skull. He slid to the ground, blind eyes never leaving hers.

She could feel Rain’s hot tears against her cold skin again. She also felt her power increase.

With that newfound power, in Rain’s greatest moment of despair Chara locked her soul away in her own mournful darkness and whispered: “But nobody came.”