For a moment the dream rippled and the shell of her imagined reality trembled. Perhaps it was because she was remembering the night she had been told she had to go home and rest after having joined the search parties for two consecutive days. She had refused to rest after Daniel and his parents had gone missing but eventually she collapsed in exhaustion and had to be sent home.

She had just woken up from a fitful sleep the next morning when she got the call from one of her neighbors who had gone up to the mountain with her.

They had found the bodies of Mr and Mrs Hearting.

Daniel was still missing.

As best as they could tell, they had been driven from their campsite thanks to a mild shower that had turned into something much more sinister during the night, creating an unexpected mudslide that had washed away their gear. They had probably been seeking shelter when the second slide hit, burying them.

After she hung up the phone she fell to the cold hardwood floor of her room and waited to cry, yet nothing happened. She should have cried for the loss of parents better than her own. She should have cried to release all the bottled up stress she had been holding back on a vague hope. She should have cried because Daniel was an orphan now.

She should have cried because he was probably dead too.

But she just felt empty. It was like she had finished a book that had ended its story mid-sentence. There was still this air of waiting for something else to happen- but this was it.

It was in this moment of hollow grief, when she felt like a gaping black hole had opened up in her chest, that she raised her head to look out of her bedroom window and watched as it warped and wobbled , becoming something else.

A familiar dread rose up inside her. The illusion of her safe haven was cracking. She was waking up. She had accidentally chosen the wrong memory to hide in and now her grief had opened up a literal window back into the present, causing the walls of her dream to grow thin and her awareness to sharpen.

“No.” She whispered, rising to her feet and looking down the long dark tunnel opening up before her, spying a familiar face on the other end. A name came to mind. A name she should not have known at this time in her life: Mettaton.

He was alone; the room dark save for the glare of a few abandoned computer screens. He danced about on his single wheel, making grand gestures as he spoke. His frame was scratched and dented. In some vague sort of way she understood that this was because it had taken a lot more risk and effort for him to goad Chara into chasing him this time around.

“Why?” She asked aloud, looking down that warped, tunneled view that lead back to the waking world and feeling only a sad sort of confusion. “You are weaker than her. Weaker even than me. She has already killed you before. She has already killed your friends, your family… everyone! She has broken into every house and scattered every resident to dust. Don’t you remember? This is pointless!”

He could not hear her. He could not respond. Yet still she could imagine what he would say if he could: “I know that darling, but I still have to try.”

For a moment she reached out to him, hands pushing through the inky blackness that pressed in around her and kept her feeling numb. She knew that on the other side of that shadow, that window, there would be only pain. There would only be punishments awaiting her attempted good deeds. Yet still, out of habit, she felt like she was supposed to try.

There had been something she had been trying to figure out back in that world. That life she had chosen to hide from.

A question.

An answer someone had wanted her to find. A way to beat Chara that always hid just out of sight-

She withdrew from the opening.

No. No, the darkness was too thick. She did not wish to penetrate it. She would rather stay on this side were it was safe. Death was a mercy. One she could give but not receive. Chara may have been right all along. Maybe it wasn’t the two of them that were sick but the world itself that was corrupted. It had to be. It wouldn’t let her die!

She tore herself away from the window, yet its afterimage followed her whenever she thought to look. She watched the robot shed its outer shell and reveal its brilliant humanoid shape, boosters flaring in brilliant arcs of strobing light.

She could now see all the little details she had missed during their first time around. The way his jaw was set and the way his lips were pressed. The way he kept his elbows close to his body like he wanted to just pull his arms all the way back up against himself in an act of protection. He was afraid. He knew this was suicide...Yet still he tried.

“No.” She murmured, closing her eyes. But the darkness of her lids was nothing but an illusion in this dream. Still the image faced her. She watched him make his stand, brilliant and shining. The closest thing the Underground had to a sun or a star to look up to. And then like a star, he fell; burning brighter and brighter until he burned himself out and fell away into nothing but a jumble of burnt and broken parts. Coolants and magic seeped from his joints, his eyes fading to black. Then there was only silence.

“I don’t want to see this!” She screamed, causing the walls of her dream to tremble against the sound.

It was the grief had had forced her to see this. The grief had made the walls of her dream too thin. This memory had awakened all the things she had been hiding from.

She would just have to hide in some other time. She still had places and dreams to hide in.

The window changed. It became an opening into another memory. Without bothering to look at where it would lead, she leap through the opening, eyes squeezed shut.

She fell into a new memory and made herself forget.

This was a mercy.

***

She wiped the pollen and sap from her hands. It was done. She had caught him and torn him down in their old bedroom of all places. The mistake had finally been corrected. She had made it to the end once more.

She was surprised that Rain had not tried to fight her when she killed Asriel. After all it was the only possible moment left in time where everything could have been ruined. Yet she had slept right through it. She had chosen to dive too deep into her dreams and had not woken up. Good.

Now all that was left was Sans. Annoying, lazy, good for nothing Sans. After that she would at long last be able to take her father’s soul and leave this accursed place. She could move on to do the things she had been too weak to do as a child. At long last she would be the strong one. She would be the one in control.

She looked down the road to the awaiting entrance of the golden hall. It had been a very, very long time since she had been back here. So many resets had passed them by at this point. So much time had been lost to her pointless battles with Rain. But she still remembered the song she had made for the impending fight. She remembered the rhythm. She remembered his attacks and the order they came in.

He would give her trouble. He always did. But she knew now that he could be defeated. He was alone. He had chosen to be alone. Silly creature. As was often the case with his type, in the end he was his own worst enemy.

She took her time to prepare. She sharpened her spear and kitchen knife- her true friends together again at the end! She redid the tie on her ponytail so that her ashen hair did not get in her eyes. She even went out and got some food to take with her in case she needed more sustenance to keep up with the demanding healing that would take place.

She would probably have to wake Rain again for this at some point. She imagined she would put up a fight for a while out of habit but using her to dull and heal the pain would be important. After all, they had no doubt gotten a little rusty after all this time.

When she got up to the entrance she stopped and took a deep breath. She knew what was next. She did not like it. She did not look forward to it. It had been fun once upon a time but now all the days had stretched off into forever and she no longer found this place amusing. She just wanted it to be done and over with.

She stepped into the hall, warm light bathing her pale skin. She looked off to her side, watching a familiar shape step from the shadows. Her lips were set into a tight, long-suffering line at the sight of him. Here we go again.

“heya.” He greeted, voice smooth and casual. It made her eye twitch.

She bit off each word with a growl. “Hello Sans.”

As he stepped out into the light she noticed something new about him. Something curious. He wore the same worn slippers and blue coat, the same black pants and battered orange scarf as always, but his face had changed.

There was a thick branching line of cracks running up and down the left side of his face. Among a haze of hairline cracks, a more pronounced two-pronged fork managed to mar the upper and lower ridge of his eye socket. The largest crack even managed to sweep all the way back to behind where his ear would have been.

She offered him a curious frown. He had not had that back in Snowdin. But he had had that exact pattern of cracks over his eye when she had slammed his face into a tree a few resets back.

“gee lady, you look like you have seen a ghost.” He remarked.

“In many ways I suppose I have.” She was starting to see more and more of these consistencies bleeding over from timelines that should have been erased. The color for her hair was not regaining all of its red color when she reset and sometimes monsters seemed to be taken up by a moment of familiarity that confused them. Papyrus’s promise to show them mercy across timelines may have been one of these examples as well. Then there were the darker cracks of darkness she saw when traveling between resets. The cracks did not face. In face they seemed to be growing with every death, reaching out as if to snare her.

And now there was this. More cracks. Probably a weird side effect of the way she had been abusing the resets to purge and cloud memories.

She wondered if he knew how he had gotten such a mark. Or had he just woken up one night to find that it had always been there?

Internal monologue of curiosities aside, Sans had his own comments to make. He was drifting towards her with his hands in his pockets now. He looked this way and that in a casual manner as if he had only come here to appreciate the murals and stain glass windows that framed the walls.

“you know what i hate about dreams? they start to fade as soon as you wake up. the important parts are always the first to go. trying to remember them just seems to make them fade faster, ya know? “then, one day, you see something and it sparks your memory.” He snapped his fingers, still not looking at her. “but by then it’s too late to be worth anything anymore. it’s too late for that memory to be useful. its time has already past. so instead you’re just left standing there kicking yourself in the pants because now that you can remember it, it all seems just so obvious.

“so, you try to remember the rest of the dream before it’s too late. but it just keeps happening. you keep remembering things only after their time has passed by. again and again and again, things always come back into focus just a little too late to be worth anything.” He closed his eyes and sighed, seeming to take a moment to compose himself before he looked up at her. “so, i guess what i’m trying to say is… hello again, rain. i can tell by the look on your face that we have done this all before.” He chuckled and his eyes went black. “you must be some kind of sicko, aren’t you?”

Chara twirled her spear back and forth, causing it to make a sharp swishing sound through the air. “Oh believe me Sans, it was fun for a while but I don’t want to have to do this again any more than you do.”

The little pricks of light returned to his eyes. His expression became sheepish and strained. He rubbed the back of his neck, an odd dry scraping sound. His worlds were weighed down by a shy, weary sort of honesty. “then, uh… don’t? just walk away. i won’t stop you. it would actually make me really happy. er, well, sort of. happy may be an exaggeration at this point. i just want my friends back. so, why not take a load off and reset?”

Chara scowled at the notion. “I’m not getting cold feet, Sans. I just overlooked something the last time I was here.” She looked at the yellow pollen staining the underside of her chipped fingernails. “I could have destroyed the Underground a long time ago but it still takes a human and a monster soul to cross the barrier.” She shook herself from that train of thought before she explained too much. “But the error has been fixed. Don’t worry, this time your death will be permanent.”

He looked down and scuffed the floor, nodding to himself a little. “heh. i'm almost tempted to let you through then. if it was just my life on the line, i’d let you do it. i really would. things would be so much easier if i just stopped waking up. but what you have done down here…what you have done to me, what you have done to my friends- to my brother- i couldn’t wish that on the rest of the world. even if they did end up trapping us all down here with you.”

His non-dominate eye had faded into darkness and the blue flames were growing stronger in his left socket. The cracks in his skull were a good look for him. The blue light seeped through them and painted a new set of ominous shadows over that side of his face. It was creepy.

He took a deep breath, the cold light in his left eye growing brighter and more defined. “so, i have to warn you, after all the things you have done, this time it won’t be quick. because obviously frustrating you won’t work. so this time, if you really want this, if you decide to take that extra step forward… its gonna get messy.” Ah, there it was. His signature grin. Stretching wide and sharp, the look of Cheshire mania.

Chara stepped forward. Let the dance begin.

***

Her stomach was a nervous beast. It whined and gargled and curled in around itself in an uneasy fret. Each bump in the dirt road caused it to jump. She couldn’t get it to calm down thanks to the thought of what would soon come next.

She had tried. She really, truly had. Her parents would know that, right? She had been alone. She thought she would be doing this with him. She thought she would have more support. Hell, she thought she would have more money.

More time.

More confidence.

Empty soda cans rattled around in their cup holders and the radio buzzed and warbled with static that leaped up from the background to consume the station’s droning voices every now and again. The voices grew more and more faint with every passing minute.

“you… picked a…beauty… one Chara….wait, why are you looking.…..like that?”

“haya….gee…ou…..seen a…ghost…”

“I……have….”

“…you know what I hate about dreams?”

She turned the radio off. Reception always started to get kind of shoddy around here anyway.

She listened to her windshield wipers squeak back and forth, smearing droplets across the glass. She chewed her lip and rounded the corner, splashing muddy water up onto the old blue paint of her truck.

She took in a long, slow breath. There it was. The house she grew up in: same as ever. She had been hoping she would not have to see it again so soon.

Her foot eased off the gas for a second but then she saw her parents waiting for her on the porch. She pressed on. She couldn’t let them see her slowing down as soon as she saw them.

She rolled up into the gravel driveway and made a quick act of getting out to greet them. A fake smile was already being painted over her chewed lips. She tried to sound happy to see them. “Hello!”

Her father remained silent and crossed his arms over his chest. He gave her a long, hard look before leaving.

Her mother blew out a long curl of smoke from her nose and grunted. She did not bother to get up off of the cement stair she was sitting on.

Wood rot, cheap beer, pine and nicotine. These were the smells of their house; of her empty room now waiting to be occupied once more. The stench clogged the air despite the drizzling rain.

She started pulling out her luggage.

“What did I tell ya?” He mother spat.

Ah. Starting already then. Alright. “I did my best, mom.”

“Well your best was shit.” She flicked the ashes from her cig. “I told you, you wouldn’t be cut out for college. What did I say?”

“Are we really going to start this now? I haven’t even unpacked yet.”

“I told you, you were not cut out for business administration and management. I told you, you wouldn’t be able to do it. But oh you swore you could!” She threw her hands up in the air. “You swore up and down that you could do it!”

“Mom, I can do it. I swear I can. It’s just- it’s just been hard. I’m not giving up yet.”

“Oh yeah? Well it sure the hell looks like you are. Moving right back in to leech off your parents after you blew all your money on booze and parties.”

She spun around, the beast in her belly now roaring with anger and frustration. “I did not go to college to party!” She slammed the door shut and slung her bags over her shoulder. Her arms were shaking. “I worked my ass off every damn night! But you know what? The money still ran out. My grades still suffered. I spent all my time studying and waiting tables. When I should have been sleeping I was applying for grants and when I should have been eating I was trying to fix my truck!

“But guess what mom? It’s hard to get to work when your car won’t start and it’s hard to pay for parts when you can’t get to work. It’s hard to make friends that can help you out when you have spent your whole life isolated on a fucking mountain and it’s hard to get grants when you can’t keep your grades up because you spent so much time studying and so little time eating and sleeping that you eventually just break down! It’s hard to keep getting back up again by yourself when there is no one there to find you when you are down!”

Her mother jabbed a finger at her. “Don’t you dare take that tone with me! You can’t come crawling back here and give me lip like that! I swear to god if you so much as spit one more goddamn word at me you can forget about having your old room back!”

She ground her teeth together and glared holes into her mother’s face. She focused on her narrowed green eyes, dull orange hair and the frowning stress lines of her expression. She couldn’t afford to get kicked out before she had even unpacked. “Sorry.”

Her mother took another drag from her cig. “Damn right you are.”

She forced herself to look away and try and grab a few more things from the truck to carry inside. “I should only be here for a month or two. If I can keep the truck working I can work at the diner in town. Once I get some rest I will look into other options.”

Rain paused mid potion. The world wobbled again, threatening to break the dream. Golden light was punching holes in the cloud cover overhead, spilling out onto the unkempt grass. For some reason she was given the impression that this angered the clouds. They were descending from their proper place in the sky and billowing towards her like rolling fists of smoke.

The radio leapt back to life and buzzed at her. “Why so quiet, Sans? I miss all your bad jokes!”

The dark clouds wrapped around her arms and legs and tried to drag her away. Her mother stared on, eyes dull and lifeless as she continued to smoke.

Rain struggled against the familiar pull of Chara’s grasp as she tried to drag her through the floor of her dream and pin her into place with shadows. Chara wanted to balance her in a half sleep so that she could act as her protective membrane against the oncoming pain. She wanted a human shield.

The raindrops began to display reflections of a golden hall. A hundred thousand twinkling reflections of a skeleton conducting a symphony of magic watched her from within every raindrop. The world became a storm of remembered encounters where Sans stood alone before her, pushed to the edge at last. She saw the last corridor and Chara's last obstacle standing before her in all his worn down glory; clad in orange and blue.

She pulled away from the snares of smoke and shadow. She ran from the hidden eyes inside the rain. She managed to get the door to her truck open and dragged herself inside, hands sticky with unexplained blood as real injuries began to seep into her illusion. When she looked down she saw cuts and punctures forming all over her body. A pain that had once been a distant ache to be ignored was becoming far more overwhelming now.

She slammed the door shut, severing the searching tendrils of Chara’s presence. She crawled across the seats and pushed the other door open, adrenaline coursing through her as she tumbled out of the other side of the truck and fell into another memory.

***

She cursed under her breath. Rain had managed to escape her attempts to pin her down. That girl was getting really good at running away from her problems.

Chara dodged the walls of bone, swaying this way and that as they arced up from the floor and sliced through the air where her head should have been. Several smaller attacks came flying out at her from behind the curve of multiple pillars, cutting at her arms and shoulders as she tried to roll out of the way of one attack only to push herself into the path of the next.

“Come on Sans, don’t give me the cold shoulder! I am starting to miss our little talks.”

She was panting, slipping on her own blood. Dammit. Of the two of them Rain had become the more skilled at healing. She needed an opportunity to eat and catch her breath but Sans had already offered her his “mercy” for this encounter. She needed to try and stall him some other way.

“what’s the point? i’m sure you have already heard everything i have to say by now.” He picked her up and flicked his wrist, sending her cartwheeling across the room only to be whipped back around at the last second and sent back towards her starting point.

A thick bone came spinning towards her just below knee level. She didn’t have time to doge it. It crashed into her with a sickening snap and her legs fell out from under her. She screamed, falling to her side.

Spikes of splintered bone rose up from the stone one by one, short and barbed and catching on her clothes as they sank into her skin.

He pinned her there, bleeding and broken but unable to die. There was a grim, determined look to the set of his jaw. It was hard to tell what he thought of all this. Maybe he had enjoyed this once upon a time. But he had grown numb to the thought of vengeance in light of knowing it would not stop her. Something inside of him had broken. His eyes were haunted but just like poor little Rain, he continued to go through the motions for the sake of saying he had.The memories bleeding in from past resets were not an easy burden for him to bare.

“Well then, if you won’t talk, I will.” She rasped, a bubble of blood forming in her throat. She had managed a few close calls with him this round but he was still too damn good at dogging for her to hit him.

Oh well. This had been expected. It was going to take her a few tries to remember the rhythm. This round was over. It was time to make things end.

“I will tell my a joke of my own.”

“really? you are going to do this now?” Sans asked, a hint of frustration painting his voice.

“Why did the skeleton bleed?”

He glared at her, teeth flashing in the light of his own magic.

“Because everything he did was in vein!” She gave a shaky laugh when he did not react. “It’s ok, you’ll get that one eventually. I’ll tell you a different one.”

Two more spines dug into her shoulders. “i’m really not in the mood.” He warned.

“No, no, this one’s funny!" She promised."Why did the chicken cross the road?”

Sans cocked his brow, pacing a slow half circle around her as he watched her bleed.

“To get to the other side!”

“uh, ok. sorry lady, never really got that one.”

She twitched a finger, trying to hold it up in thought. “Ah, but why did the chicken want to get to the other side?”

He shook his head. “heh, dammit rain, I don-”

“To be with all your dead friends of course!” She threw her hidden knife at him, gritting her teeth as the motion caused his attacks to dig ever deeper.

He twisted out of the way; teeth bared and eyes narrowed before he struck her down with a fatal blow from a solid wall of rolling bone in his brief moment of anger.

Ah. There. Now she could reset.

His shoulders relaxed when he saw what he had done and understood her motives. He took a moment to compose himself while she bled out. “heh, cleaver. i guess i let that one get away from me, didn’t i? oh well. guess i will have to try and remember not to do that next time.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “hey, actually, i think I do have a joke to send you off with… knock, knock.”

The world was fading. It had been a good try. She would do better next time. She smiled. “Whose there?”

He was quiet for several seconds. “mercy. but no one came.”

***

Daniel’s house had been left empty. They never found his body . She held on to the hope that he was still out there somewhere but one could only come up with so many believable excuses and scenarios for how he could have survived alone up on the mountain before the days ate away at those theories and laid them to rest.

The Hearting’s house had been left in the possessions of Daniel’s uncle from his father’s side. He was a friendly man with a family that decided to keep the house and use it for visits and vacations since their line of work often had them passing through the area now and again. They had let Rain housesit for them a few times in the past before she had gone off to college; more as an act of kindness rather than out of any sort of necessity of their own.

She had been trying to get a hold of them for the past few days in hopes that she could get permission to stay there for a while instead of her parent’s house but so far she had not been able to reach them. They were a busy bunch of folks and their last known phone number was outdated.

Truth be told it hadn’t stopped her from breaking in during her worst days. They always kept a spare key hidden in the pile of lumber stacked against the side of the house. When she failed to get the job at the diner, or anywhere else in town for that matter, she spent quite a few afternoons hiding in her old childhood safe haven; too ashamed and afraid to go back to her parent’s house where she would have to face her failure.

She took a few odd jobs from distant neighbors when she could but it wasn’t enough. Things didn’t get any better with her parents. Every night was filled with screaming and she was getting damn good at dogging the projectiles of their drunken tantrums. Why her parents had not divorced by now she would never know but they seemed to favor her as an alternative way to vent their frustrations with both her and each other.

She tried to be good. She tried to make them happy. She wanted to make them proud. But they never really seemed to have been interested in that. They had never been that enthusiastic about being parents in the first place.

Honestly the only thing she could do to make them happy would probably be to just stop existing!

…Hah.

She wished that they would just tell her what it is they wanted from her. They always told her what she couldn’t do. They always let her know which things she was bad at but they never bothered to tell her what they thought she should be doing instead.

What was she supposed to do? What could she do? She would give anything to know. She would give anything if she could just close her eyes and let someone make these choices for her, because she was obviously not good at making them on her own.

…She started visiting mnt. Ebott.

It started out innocent enough. She used to bring flowers up to the base of the mountain in the summer as a memorial to the adopted family she had lost. But as time went on and the arguments at home became more common, her attempts to find work less hopeful and her feeling of being trapped more smothering; she started to take drives up to the mountain more and more often for vague half-formed reasons.

She started to linger until the sun set and wandered higher and higher up the long abandoned trails. Sometimes she didn’t come home at all. She just slept under the stars. Sometimes it was because she just couldn’t bring herself to go back to her parents’ house. Sometimes it was because her truck was having engine troubles. Troubles she chose to ignore every time she drove back up the mountain.

She would sleep for a while, wake up and walk a little farther, then camp for the night. She was aimless and flirting with a danger she couldn’t find a reason to care about.

Lots of people had climbed the mountain and had been fine. You just didn’t hear about them because they came back down in an uneventful manner. She wasn’t being that careless, she insisted. Not everyone who visited the mountain never returned. Sure, there were lots of accidents, way more than there should be. But…

but..?

But she didn’t care.

She had stopped believing in Santa Claus when she was five.

She had stopped checking for monsters in the closet and under the bed when she had started hiding there herself.

She stopped praying to gods when Daniel never came home.

And now she had stopped believing in the curse of mnt Ebott.

She was looking for something. She wasn’t quite sure what. And when she did eventually start to get an idea of what she was trying to find, the thought was quickly pushed away before she could think about it too much.

Yet still she climbed higher. The terrain became more dangerous; her truck and campsite drifting farther and farther away with every step. Yet she did not turn back. She could not bear the thought of climbing back down again.

She missed having friends.

The Heartings had been her friends. She wanted to be with them again.

Maybe she would find her place on the mountain too.

She had wanted to go with them after all. They had invited her but her parents had told her no. Maybe she could have saved them if she had gone with them. Or maybe she would have died too. Neither outcome sounded all that bad anymore.

It began to rain.

She was too far up to make it back down before the sun set. She started to look for some natural shelter to huddle under.

That’s when she found it. A cave with a face that had been rubbed away by years of stormy weather and had begun to lose its ceiling to erosion. The arcing sides of the cavern still held some protection against the storm however, so she pressed herself up against them and watched the water run off the walls.

There was a large hole in the center of the chamber; deep and dark and gaping. It swallowed all the water that ran into its maw.

A thought pricked at her mind.

Was this what she had been searching for?

She got up and inched a little closer and looked down into its depths. There was not enough direct sunlight for her to see the bottom.

The thought grew stronger.

Wouldn’t it be so easy if she just…?

She backed away. The dream’s illusion began to peel back. She was beginning to remember. The darkness inside the hole swirled and congealed into a dull reflection of an all too familiar scene. There was Sans, fighting the good fight all over again.

She bit her lip and glared down into the pool.

This was a dream. She had already done this. She had already jumped. She had already fallen. If she did so again she would not die. She would simply wake up.

Still the thought rattled around in her head. She felt excited for some reason.

She had found it. She had found the thing. The thing! …What thing?

She rubbed her temple and closed her eyes. She had been so close to understanding something before she had given up. She had been trying to figure out how to stop Chara but the thought kept escaping her.

There were so many things she could not see clearly anymore. Her name, her age, the address she had lived at, the collage she had gone to- they had all been taken away from her when she had fallen. Those parts of her had died. Chara had left them in the darkness when she had pulled her into the light.

Why?

Because it was easier to control something that didn’t have an identity of its own.

As stood at the edge of the pit once again, unable to die, she swore she was close to understanding something she had been overlooking but she was running out of time to figure it out.The answer seemed so obvious yet impossibly far away- like the reflection of the moon cast in a puddle.

“What’s the point of going back if I don’t know? I can’t change anything. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to jump again.” She wondered aloud. She wanted to stay here and enjoy the rain. Enjoy the moon, the stars…the sun. She had never realized how much she had come to miss them.

She looked up towards the sky to appreciate them once more but her heart sank as she did so. Only the distant, rough-hewn ceiling of a cavern waited to greet her now. The dream was unraveling. This was not real. There was no real sky here. No real stars, no real friends, no real progress. Only dying memories.

She stared into the pit. The pool. The window that lead back to the present. She may not want to jump but the truth was she was already at the bottom of that hole.

She watched Sans fight for a while longer, clenching and unclenching her fists as she slowly worked up the resolve she needed.

Chara’s presence was boiling around the edges of the hole now. Shadowy threads crawling out across the stone like prying fingers searching for a hold.

She was missing something. Something big and important and so obvious it was probably stupid. Nut maybe he could help her. Maybe she could ask him. He wouldn’t be kind about it but maybe he could help her find the answer.

She sighed. “What the hell. He’s going to be dead forever soon anyway. May as well try before hes gone. Not like I can’t just come back here when I’m done anyway.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

For the second time in her life she took a blind leap into the darkness. But this time, her reasons were very, very, different.