She heard a soft ding and the swoosh of the elevator doors opening. The unexpected noise disrupted the silence and made her eyes flutter open.

She was learning to recognize the soft swish and tap of Sans’s slippers. He never seemed to bother to wear anything else when she saw him. Hell, half the time she saw him he was still wearing that blue coat of his even though they were sitting on an island in a lake of magma. Even as a skeleton she got the impression that this wasn’t completely normal.

She sighed. She couldn’t have been asleep for more than fifteen minutes. All that nap had done was make her feel even more worn out and on edge than usual.

She stared up at the ceiling. Chara was still asleep. No doubt dreaming of her climb up the mountain now. Poor thing. It hadn’t been her fault. She hadn’t been a bad kid, once upon a time. Not that she would listen to Rain if she tried to tell her that. She continued to attempt to reach her but Chara attacked her if she tried.

Rain waited until Sans had stopped near her door before she spoke. Her eyes remained fixated on the little dog-shaped splotch above her bed. She had decided it kind of looked like the dog was trying to make something out of a star-shaped splotch off to the side. What was the dog creating? “Is it time for another field trip?”

“yeah. how’s it goin?”

She was starting to hate it here. They kept having to strap her down during tests and Sans always had to be on standby so he could pin her if things got out of hand. “She’s sleeping. Sleeps most of the day now.” Which was good. When she was awake she was a nightmare. Rain was struggling to keep her in check when all she had worth fighting for right now was the continued monotony of her cell. Conversations with either of her two guardians were rare and distant, held over the mic for the same reason the room remained so empty: safety. She was dangerous. Toxic. Borderline feral. She understood this and did not blame them for these precautions but that did not make it any easier to stomach.

There was little indication of the passage of time down here. The hallway lights shut off when Alphys went to bed but their power supply seemed shoddy so sometimes they would turn back on again. Or off, leaving her in the dark for a long, long time before anyone noticed.

She hated that darkness. It did not feel entirely empty. Sometimes it was so quiet it was unnerving.

Sometimes she swore she heard things disrupt that silence.

Chara didn’t like it either so she slept through it. Rain did too, when she could.

Her salvation from the boredom came in the form of Papyrus’s letters. They were worth their weight in gold down here. Which was saying something because he would send her several pages worth of conversation each day. It was nice to have someone to talk to. Even if it was a long distance secret that only managed to chip away at few minutes of each day.

It had been a while since she had gotten a new letter now though. She assumed that was because lately Alphys and Sans had been busy working on their next project and Alphys didn’t feel comfortable giving her mail when Sans was around.

“you commin?”

She turned her head to the side. Sans had shut down the energy field and was frowning at her, perhaps looking a little concerned. She couldn’t be sure though. Even after they had solid proof that she had been telling the truth, he remained distant.

“Yeah. Sorry. Just thinking.” She peeled herself away from the blankets and rolled out of bed. She smoothed out her clothes and snatched up a nearby scrunchie so she could twist her hair into a ponytail. “Just a little out of it right now. Been a while since I have gotten any sleep.” She had been avoiding nightmares. There was no shortage of material for night terrors floating around in her head now.

sans led her down the hall, her bare feet tapping along out of rhythm with his own footsteps. “how long has it been since you slept?”

She had to think for a moment, recalling various tests she had been called out for recently. “Remember the series of tests where I fell asleep on the table? The one where you mentioned Toriel staying with you? How long ago was that?”

He cringed a little. “getting close to three days, bud.”

She straightened herself as they stepped into the elevator, keeping her chin high and her voice matter-of-fact. “Then it has been three days.”

He didn’t seem to like the sound of that. “maybe we should put a pin in this one then. wait until you are more alert.”

“I’d rather not waste time.” She glanced down at him from out of the corner of her eye. “I’m always tired Sans. I’m sure you know the feeling. I can’t just grind to a halt now. Not when I’m finally making progress.”

“guess you could say we got a skele-ton of work to do then, huh? guess sometimes you just gotta work yourself down to the bone to get things done.” He chuckled to himself and Rain rolled her eyes, lip twitching in acknowledgement of the pun but not finding it particularly amusing. Her eyes began to stay up to the crack in his skull as the silence began to grow.

He cleared his throat. “you’re uh, your staring at it again.”

“I thought Toriel would have healed it for you by now.”

“believe me kid, she took a crack at it. wore herself out and slept all afternoon. didn’t change a damn thing.”

Rain was torn between observing the crack and observing the changing numbers on the elevator dial. They were going down farther than usual today.

“seems it’s just the trend now, y’know? phantom scars are all the rage.” He gave her a sly wink. “and you know me: i’m a trendy guy.”

She looked down at his faded pink slippers. “Clearly.” The elevator slowed and the door finally opened, spitting them out on the bottom floor. The air was uncomfortably warm. “I don’t get it. My scars are different from yours. Most of them come from this timeline. I got hurt and didn’t reset. Things didn’t heal right for one reason or the other. And the special ones that jumped through time? I got those by touching the cracks. So how did you get yours?”

He cocked his brow. “Cracks?”

“The darkness I go through to reset time.” She pursed her lips, mood rather cagey at the thought of the place. Yet his silence continued to prod at her. She hated silence. She had had enough silence in that room of hers. “It’s sort of like that thing you teleport through but… bigger. Different in some ways. When you teleport it’s like taking a secret passage way between spaces. When I reset, it’s like I’m stuck In the walls between reality or-”

“a membrane. between timelines. between possibilities.”

She shrugged. She had never considered thinking of it like that. The Dark was just The Dark. Her mind grasped for a better description but it evaded her. The Dark was just the Dark until suddenly it wasn’t. Until suddenly she woke up and she was alive again.

…The Dark was just… The Dark.

And the darkness kept getting darker.

“When Chara started to spam true resets to make sure everyone’s memory was completely wiped, I started seeing cracks in it. Spots that were a deeper black than before.”

“was that all you saw in there? just the cracks?”

Was she imagining things or did his voice sound unusually tense? She scratched her head and tugged at her ponytail. She stopped in the hallway to think. Sans let her. “Just more cracks inside the cracks I guess. I didn’t like to go near them. Direction is kind of weird and weightless in there but it always felt like I was standing over a deep hole. I didn’t like it. Sometimes it felt like they were looking at me.”

He tilted his head a little. “were they?”

She opened her mouth then stopped. Her first thought had been to say yes. But that was not right. It couldn’t be right. The darkness was empty except for her. She rubbed at her arms and hummed with unease. “When I killed myself for the first time,” She saw the edges of his smile falter and she looked away. Had she told him that little detail yet? “It was while we were fighting you. She wanted to go back and try again but I wouldn’t let her. We fought for control in the dark for a long time. She wanted to go back. I didn’t. So we got stuck in limbo for a while. Existing in a place like that… it’s bound to mess with your head, right? So yeah, I guess I did start to believe there was something else in there. Something watching me. A color other than black. A face that wasn’t there.”

Sans relaxed, his easygoing mask sliding back in place as he whistled through his teeth. “spooky.”

“Yeah. Spooky.”

They resumed their walk. “anyway, getting back on track to your original question about the scars, i think we have a rough idea about what has been happening. you keep running back and forth along the same point in time, yeah? time doesn’t like things like us excessively traveling in any other direction but forward. i imagine what you are doing ‘s kind of like scribbling back and forth on a napkin with a pen until it tears. you’re stressing the membrane and brushing up against the jagged edges of all those executed timelines you snapped off.

“my guess is that some of your more, er, synchronized habits left echoes that continued to resonate through the void; bordering on becoming fixed points in time. so even if you didn’t hit me in this timeline, the echoes of past timelines are still bouncing around and i am somewhat attuned to my own echoes. so i guess you could say i got hit in the head by a force of habit.”

She appreciated him trying to make light of things but all she could manage was a guilty cringe. “You did not just make that joke.”

He cleared his throat and went back to being serious when he realized he was making her squirm. “guess what i’m trying to say is that you must have been pretty committed to giving me this thing.” He tapped the crack. “you were so determined to do harm that time remembered what it shouldn’t have.”

She pursed her lips. She had never wanted to hurt him but she knew he was still having a hard time seeing her as a different entity from the one who had killed him. “So everyone has them.” She concluded at last, her voice a grim drone. It was not a question. Just a gray sort of resignation.

“whoever you killed the most, yeah. i got em, tori has a few, and undyne is all sorts of messed up.” He hesitated for a second. “hey, uh, how did i get this anyway? didn’t get your order right at the ol hotdog stand or somthin?” He rubbed his skull.

Rain winced. Her mouth suddenly felt dry. “Um, I uh, she ambushed you right outside of the Ruins. By that bridge with the cheesy wooden bars. She was really angry and kept resetting over and over again for the- for the fun of it. She would catch you across the chest with a fire poker then she would um, she’d crack your head against something. A tree, usually.”

“oh.” His eye darkened a little but he tried to hide it. “guess that explains the headache when i first saw you by the bridge.”

“You were watching us?”

“‘course i was. guess it’s a good thing i didn’t go say hello, too. the synchronicity of your fight with undyne caused her scars to rupture and knock her flat on her ass- and she’s tough as nails! hate to think what would have happened if i became aligned with our first meeting.”

An uncomfortable silence stretched between them as they came to a cross section and went right. It took a lot of bravery to make herself ask about what he had skipped over. “Does Papyrus have a scar too?”

His eyes really did go dark this time. His hand paused over the door handle of the room he was about to lead them into. A little glass window allowed the bright lights within to spill out into the hallway, only seeming to emphasize the blackness within his skull instead of lessening it. “yeah.” he rasped. “just one. He was complaining of neck pain around the same time you came through. he keeps rubbing the same spot and doesn’t even know it. it’s on one of his lower cervical vertebrae.” He chuckled, a deep mirthless sound. The sound of someone who needed to vent without breaking something. He yanked the door open a little harder than he had to. “lucky for us, i doubt he ever put up a fight, right? bet you didn’t have a grudge to settle or a long drawn out fight to force you into doing extra resets with him, did you? bet you just hit him once and walked away in each timeline.”

He pushed his way inside the room, keeping his back to her as he went. She waited for him to move ahead several steps before she followed, mouth sewn up tight. She gladly let their conversation die.

The room ahead seemed a little more used than the others. It wasn’t as dusty or dim. The lights were still strong and the walls clean enough to make her squint after having stepped out from the dim hallway. Several lockers lined one side of the room and all of Alphys ‘s equipment was pushed up against the opposite wall. Papers, charts, graphs and a wealth of clipboards covered in messy scrawl all but consumed the area. The room held the faint smell of fast food.

A large hole took up most of the floor. Down below she could see the glow of electronics and hear the soft hum, beep and whine of tech ticking away within the walls of the pit. Heavy layers of scaffolding had been laid out across the cavity. Her familiar metal stretcher was in the center of the room, waiting for her above the hole and below the toothless grin of a rather unnerving mechanical monstrosity.

It was a large skull, somewhat resembling a bird with its mouth on sideways. Several thick black tubes protruded from its back and wove their way into the walls above. The skull was dull red, like dried blood. And despite her efforts to tear herself away from its oddly black sockets, she could not. She once again felt like perhaps she was being watched by one too many sets of eyes.

“Is this yours?” She asked, cringing away from the skull and lingering near the lockers without realizing it.

Sans glanced over his shoulder at the monstrosity but did not look at her. “not really. alphys built this one.”

Were skulls just a trend in the Underground? Between always being followed by Sans and Papyrus, having had far too much experience with the laser skulls in the Judgments Hall, that strange face she refused to believe she saw watching her from the cracks in time, and now this- she was starting to think monsters just had a skull for damn near every occasion.

“Looks like something you would have had a hand in. Reminds me of those damn dragon skulls you have.”

“they were designed by the same person.”

Before Rain could ask any more questions, Alphys rushed into the room from a different entrance, looking a little disheveled and sweaty. “Ok! Ok I’m here! Sorry that took so long. T-there, um, there was a p-problem with one of the refrigerators in the um, in the b-back.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

Rain scowled in confusion but Sans seemed to know exactly what she was talking about.

Alphys hurried over to the table and started undoing the straps. “D-do you remember what we will be d-doing today, Rain?” Rain watched Alphys work. Her hands were shaking. Maybe this place gave the scientist the creeps too.

Rain tucked her own hands in her pant pockets and watched Sans out of the corner of her eye. He was leaning up against the back wall now, pretending to read some papers. She knew he was faking it because she could just make out the little white lights of his eyes watching her while he feigned work. “Extracting Determination, right?” She answered.

“Right! Since the machines seem to register two souls, I think it may be possible to extract Determination from C-Charas soul and not yours. I-it should give you a-an edge over her if we can pull it off.”

Rain stared up at the skull, inching a little closer. It looked like the thing was going to come to life and eat her at any given moment. “Why don’t you just get rid of all of it? Suck out all the Determination at once and call it a day. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about any of this ever again.”

Alphys jumped, head smacking up against a low hanging tube. “T-tha-that would kill you!” When Rain did not immediately retract the suggestion or show any outward hints of shock it only made Alphys all the more nervous. “A-a-and besides! You, um, the, uh, th-the machine has never h-had t-to hold that much Determination before! It would run out of room before we…before you ever…” She stopped herself and laughed; one hand going up to cover her crooked smile as she shrank away from Rain’s silence. “Never mind. It-it doesn’t matter! I’m s-sure that’s not what you meant to ask. Sorry. It was r-really stupid of me to get so flustered like that.”

Actually that’s exactly what she had meant to ask. She turned away from the scientist. “Its fine.”

“An- anyway, everything should be ready. If you want to hop on the table we can get started. Th-this is going to be new territory for us s-so if anything starts to feel t-too uncomfortable just let me know and w-we will shut it down.”

“You have never extracted Determination from a living thing before, have you?”

“N-no.” Alphys squeaked quietly.

Rain gave her a reassuring smile that felt a little flat thanks to all the shadows under her eyes. “It’s ok, Al. I have probably come back from stuff worse than anything this old skull could throw at me. “ She swung herself up onto the table. “Let’s go. I can feel her starting to wake up a little.”

Those words were all it took for Alphys to fall back and Sans to take her place. While the little scaled scientist scuttled off behind her control panel and started to warm up the machine, Sans appeared at her side without sound or warning and began to strap her down for the ride.

“i’m guessing I don’t really need to tell you that sensory, auditory and visual hallucinations are all going to be a possibility?”

“Sans, please, I have not slept in three days. Just this morning I was watching two rabbits jousting on my bedroom wall.”

“still, things may get pretty intense here.”

She caught something manifested in his eye. Not exactly worry- he knew death was never the end of her; but there was still something there. Something she couldn’t quite place.

“I’ll handle it.” She assured.

“great.” He drummed a hand against the table after making sure everything was secure. Alphys called him away from across the room but Rain snagged him by the sleeve before he could go. He turned to her with a questioning look.

“Why is she so nervous?”

“alphys always has something she thinks she needs to be nervous about.”

“Can I trust her? Like, really trust her? To get the job done?”

“she will do her best, kid.”

Rain chewed on her words for a second in consideration before she decided she may as well spit them out. “Sans, you two know I want you to do whatever it takes to make things safe again, right? I don’t care if it hurts or is unethical. Do whatever needs to be done, ok? and just…be honest with me. Don’t hide anything.”

He seemed surprised to hear this confession. The hard lines of his expression softened a little and some of the earlier hostility melted away. “those are some brave words you’re sayin lady.”

“I’m tired, Sans.”

He gave her hand a pat. “i know pal. i know.” His hand slid away and then he was out of view. “try and get some rest after this one, yeah?”

She was left to stare at the toothless, sideways maw poised over her; its long, narrow jawline pointing down at her chest.

“Ready when you are!” Alphys called.

“ready?” Sans asked from somewhere off to her side.

“Do it.”

Her body tugged against the creaking straps for a second when Sans pulled her soul up to the surface but the shock was nowhere near as strong as before. This was becoming routine now.

The already humming machine began to all but roar with power. The heat of the many working systems in the pit down below made the air extra warm and a magic based light began to grow inside the skull. The jaws began to lower over her soul, growing longer and narrower in their attempt to reach her. The air tasted like ozone and crackled with energy.

Chara’s awareness flared out in alarm, waking from her secretive dream and breaking into another mild panic. “Again? You are doing this again?” She snapped. “What is wrong with you? When will you give up and realize that this is your life now? My life, now!” She fought against the restraints but it was no good. Rain grit her teeth and tried to force her back down. It was becoming harder and harder to do as time wore on down here.

Magic began to run down the twisted jaws of the machine, arching like electric currents and slowly forming into strange misshapen teeth; long, sharp and sliding into one another until they became two long K9s. They moved and twisted like anything but real teeth.

They pressed their back against the table, sweat rolling down their forehead. Their heart raced with a shared sense of unease as the magic needles angled down towards them.

“What is this? What are they doing? What did you let them do?”

The needle made contact with their soul, the sensation as distinct as an electric shock. Rain yelped, cringing against the discomfort and squeezing her eyes shut. Chara was not so lucky. She screamed inside her head.

“everything ok?” Sans asked.

“Right as Rain.” She grunted, face twisted in a grimace. Ok. This wasn’t so bad. Uncomfortable but not bad.

“Become one of us.”

Rain frowned. “What?”

“I said we are ready to begin the extraction.” Alphys chirped.

“Oh. Ok. Go for it.”

Another static shock. Rain felt a shared sense of pain vibrate through her like she had just been knocked head over heel by a boiling ocean wave.

“No! No! Stop it! Stop it! It hurts! Don’t let them take it!”

“We have to be strong.” Rain thought, more to herself than Chara.

The teeth of the machine began to glow red, the color growing stronger and stronger with every passing second. The red began to coalesce like condensation, running back up the jaw in little droplets in defiance of gravity. The swirling darkness attached to Rain’s soul writhed and trembled, thrashing against the needle of magic.

“I will kill them for this. I will kill everyone! Make it stop! It’s mine. It’s mine! It’s mine!”

Rain tried to keep her mouth shut. She could feel it too, distant but still there; the Burning, biting, draining pain. She felt the detached sensation of being sucked dry of her will to do anything. It felt like someone was stacking rocks upon her shoulders and scooping out her chest until she felt both heavy and hollow at the same time.

A voice seemed to echo from the rusted skull. Its words a whisper of static pooled together by the nearby technology. “Lorem ipsum docet”

There was that feeling again. The feeling of being watched by too many eyes.

Rain opened her eyes and gasped when she saw a large off-white shape seep from the ceiling. A wad of half-formed, gaping faces dripped down onto the skull and congealed together in a mass like crumpled paper, sliding ever closer in twitchy, jerking motions.

“Uhh, hey guys? You know those hallucinations you warned me about?” The words hurt. Why did they hurt? She had to hiss them out from between her teeth.

Alphys looked up from her panel and gasped. “Sans!” She shouted.

“I’m seeing some really weird shit right now guys!”

“You'll be with us…shortly.” The thing rasped, its dozen or so eyes all fixated on her. The air around it crackled like static as it pressed itself close to the machine and scraped its way towards her on a set of fingernails made of ugly, cracked teeth.

“Where is it? I don’t see it!” Sans’s voice was tense. Rain could see him moving around the perimeter of the pit, blue coat just visible out of the corner of her eye.

Both Chara and Rain began to press their back against the table, panic pricking at their mind. “I don’t like this!”

“Sans, it’s on the skull!”

“shit. i see it!”

“I’m shutting it down!”

“Don’t let it get near me!” They shrieked in unison.

“calm down. i got ya.”

“It’s not real. It’s not real.” Rain assured herself, her word sounding more like a plea for the thing to go away.

“It’s real. It’s real!” Chara howled.

“Hold still.” It hissed, falling from the machine’s jaws and onto the table as little flecks of blue pulsed across its misshapen wad of a body. The creature shuddered, an unseen force trying to yank it away as it clawed towards her.

“it’s broken up into too many pieces! I can’t get a good grip on it!”

The room was beginning to spin. The pain was growing. Their fear was spinning out of control. She felt her energy draining away. Chara tried to yank control away from Rain, pushing them to the brink of a reload in her bout of desperation. Yet Chara’s Determination had been drained. Rain fought against her, keeping them balanced between the realm of reality and the void, struggle to push her back.

The grinning mass of teeth and bottomless shadowy eyes reach out and touched them, the teeth of its many-faced appendage biting into their skin.

Rain’s mouth opened. The whole room felt her scream but no sound came out. Their soul shuddered, both sides burning with a terrible agony.

She fell into darkness.