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Even before Sans was fully awake, he knew something was wrong.
His subconscious was pulling at him, trying to drag him down to somewhere dark and far, far away. It wasn’t that unusual; every day had been miserable lately, and he was in no hurry to wake up and greet the morning. Better to let the soft cradle of sleep rock him back and forth until his brother forced him awake.
But this was different.
It started off as an itch. Not the kind of itch that one got from an illness, or, as he imagined, the type that fleshy monsters felt when they were bitten by a mosquito. A monster could simply scratch those, or at least slap some lotion on and ride it out.
No, this itch was something else entirely. Like a bug skittering up an arm or leg. Of course he could slap it away, but the sensation of tiny legs crawling over bone wouldn’t leave his mind for a long while after, not until he could distract himself.
And though his subconscious was trying to distract him now, he couldn’t let himself be drawn under. His soul felt split in two, one part warring against the other for domination, as he was left stranded somewhere in the middle, unable to sleep but unable to wake.
The itch was growing, spreading from his legs, to his chest, to the underside of his ribs, until finally it was at the base of his neck, spiraling around his cervical vertebrae.
It was then that Sans pushed past the murky undercurrent and woke up.
His eyes fluttered several times before his eyelights summoned properly, and even when they did, the world around him was a blur of malformed and indistinguishable shapes. He reached up to brush at his sockets and clear his vision.
Or he tried to at least. A soft cry fell from his teeth as something jutted into his shoulder, sliding beneath the blade. He struggled desperately to loosen it, but his motions only managed to wedge it further.
Why were his hands above his head anyway? And… was he standing?
“Oh, the trashbag is finally awake!”
Sans stopped all movement. The voice had invoked an instant feeling of pure, unadulterated hatred that had sprung from some deep, primal place in his soul. Every instinct told him that the owner of that voice was a danger to him and to all monsters. Especially his brother.
Oh God, his brother.
A surge of magic burst through his chest, finally sparking his full vision. He was in Waterfall, strung up in some abandoned cave littered with dripping stalactites. There was no light but for the dim illumination from a nearby group of echo flowers, which cast a ghostly blue over the cavern walls. Papyrus wasn’t in sight, thank God, but where the fuck was he?
“Oh no you don’t.”
Pain. Tight, endless pain punctured his soul as something wrapped around it, driving him to the brink in the blink of an eye. His sight flickered as he flailed uselessly, and although his mind was fixated on the constriction in his chest, he could feel something stabbing into his joints, harsh edges skating against the inner part of ribcage. He was shouting, though what exactly he was saying, he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that it was his own voice echoing back at him.
All at once, the pain stopped.
He hunched forward, a creaking noise reverberating through the cave as he shifted his weight, and sucked in the cool air in great heaping mouthfuls. Something warm and wet was leaking down his cheekbones, but the sensation was faded behind the aftereffects of whatever had just happened.
“Hee hee, you sure are loud!”
Numbly, Sans looked down.
He was lifted several feet off the ground, wrapped in a mess of tangled green creepers. In the center of his chest, peeking out between his ribs, was a bright yellow flower smiling brightly at him.
A deluge of memories hit him in a flash. His brother boasting of his new best friend, a “very respectable flower monster” as Paps had put it. A printout of the timeline discrepancies, all data pointing towards a critical anomaly. His former coworker warning him forebodingly of horrible things to come in some hazy nightmare.
It was this thing. It was this… flower. He didn’t know how he knew it, but in that moment, all doubts had formed into a hard, inescapable certainty.
He had to get away.
Without thinking, he called upon his teleportation magic, manifesting his desire to appear in some distant outreach of Snowdin to shake the flower loose. It was a bad idea. As soon as he tried to displace himself, his arms yanked against some unseen restraint. With a sickening pop, Sans felt the limbs go out of place.
He sucked in a sharp breath. There was no pain. At least none that his mind seemed capable of processing. But he knew the moment he moved, he’d be writhing with it, and once he got started he’d be unable to stop himself. He just had to hold still, for the love of God.
“Oh, that was a bad idea, trashbag!”
The flower curled around his chest, sneaking upwards until it was adjacent to Sans’s skull. A tight, barely-controlled shiver crawled through his spine as the itchiness – caused by the thorns, he realized – lingered over his bones.
“You’re supposed to wait until I start the fun!”
“what the hell do you want?” Sans asked through gritted teeth.
“Oh, I’m just curious!”
“…curious? about what?”
“About you, silly!” The flower winked. “You’re a fascinating guy! Hee hee, and I’ll admit, maybe I want to get a little bit of revenge too. That last reset sure was something, wasn’t it?”
Sans’s soul froze at the confirmation.
Armed with this knowledge, he attempted to summon a wave of bones at the ground near his feet, anything to break the roots that were holding him up. The magic kindled within his chest, threatening to solidify into an attack. Then then vice around his soul tightened. Tiny cinders of cyan magic floated uselessly to the ground, sputtering away as quickly as they had come.
The flower seemed to have noticed his efforts because its grin was even wider now.
“Did you just pass gas?” it teased. “I didn’t know skeletons could do that!”
“let me go,” Sans demanded, voice brokering no negotiation. “now.”
Usually he’d try to joke around, play it cool. But this monster? No way. He knew there was no chance of stopping it with his usual methods. Something was wrong with it. He wasn’t sure it was even a monster at all.
And that scared the crap out of him.
“Aww, you didn’t even say please!”
A vine snuck around Sans’s skull and with only the lightest of touches, it slowly twisted his head towards the flower. The motion forced an unseen tendril to slip further between his shoulder blade and ribcage. A sharp, burning sting sprung from the bones, and though a low groan gathered in his throat, he held fast, refusing to budge even an inch otherwise.
But now he was looking directly at the flower monster, and with that sadistic smile scrawled across its face, all he wanted to do was pulverize it into a million dust-sized pieces.
“What’s that look for, huh? You mad that little old me caught the big, scary death ray skeleton?”
Fuck. Sans had used his blasters on the damned thing. Shit. Fuck.
“You know, that really hurt! And it was super unfair too! I mean, you take one look at me and you know exactly how I’ll attack! But you? You have way too many secrets!”
His mouth twisted into something downright malicious.
“Maybe we could just pry those secrets right out, hmm?”
The vines began to move again. Sans held very still, even as the thorns pressed and prodded into his tender bones. All he could do was pray that whatever this flower was about to do wasn’t going to jostle his arms too much or he very well could die right here.
God. He could die. Death had never seemed that big of an issue, but now that he was staring in its face, his soul was filled with regret at all the things he had failed to do. For himself. For his brother. For Alphys. For –
His train of thought was halted as one of the vines clawed into the back side of his neck, grating past the small pad of ectoflesh that made up his conjured throat.
“no, what the hell are you –”
He choked on the final word as an earthy mass surged past and pressed down on his tongue, tiny little spikes perforating the appendage. He gasped out a tiny scream which was quickly stifled by the blockage. Tears were falling openly down his face now as the tendril continued to wriggle and slide, dragging the sharp thorns through his mouth. With a detached sense of horror, he felt his tongue parting in half as the flower tore through the permanent ectoflesh as easily as a knife cutting through butter.
Even with all his determination, he couldn’t stop himself from moving at that point. His legs spasmed as the flood of ectofluids filled his mouth and spilled over the edge of his teeth. He only rocked his arms the slightest bit.
That was all it took.
An unearthly scream, drawn from some otherworldly realm, broke past the obstructive vine in his mouth and bounced against the cavern walls until all he could hear was his own voice endlessly playing in his head. Desperation, born not of logic, but of a basic, instinctual impulse, was smothering his thoughts, blinding his vision, telling him he needed to escape, escape, escape!
He tried to teleport again. It didn’t work.
His arms were jerked yet again, this time pulling them to their limits. Screeching words were spilling out his mouth now, though what he said or whether the flower could understand them, Sans didn’t know or care.
He had to stop himself from moving. Please, God, he couldn’t move or he’d die.
Maybe he wanted to die. This pain… This pain!
A distraction. He needed a distraction.
The echo flowers. They were standing nearby, fluttering in a gentle breeze. He followed their movements, inhaling whenever the wind paused and exhaling when it returned.
Where was the wind was coming from? Was it the Surface? Maybe there was a hole in the ceiling. More likely, it was just the Underground’s usual weather patterns. Did anyone even track that sort of thing in Waterfall? No one traveled far from the main settlements if they could help it because if they got lost, there was no saving them.
The yellow flower was speaking again. Sans ignored it. Whatever it had to say would be of no use to him.
He wondered if anyone would ever journey down this cave. It had to be some distance away from most monsters or they’d have come when he had started screaming. God, would that be the noise the echo flowers harvested? His endless screams? Or would the flower whisper something to them to cover up the evidence?
His thoughts stuttered again. Two more slender vines urged his mouth open, slowly pressing inside. Desperately he tried to focus on the echo flowers again, to think about how they grew, to ponder all the things he had ever heard from one.
The vines were slinking upwards, pushing into the empty cranial space at the top of his skull.
The itch, which had been ever-present but long-since discounted after the rest of the pain, came to the forefront of his awareness. Somehow, this was worse than anything else. Every fiber of his being rejected the presence of the vines in his head. Nothing should be inside there. It was like worms squirming inside his head. No, that was too small, too innocuous. They were more like rats, the thorns acting as teeth as they scraped along the untouched bone.
“nngggh,” Sans wailed, wishing against all reason that the flower would give up. “ngh, plgh dghnt.”
The flower giggled.
Damningly slow, the tendrils explored the empty space, licking every hidden crevice and corner. His fingers twitched uselessly in the air, sending little jolts of pain through his arms. It was so wrong, so utterly and irrepressibly wrong.
After a couple of minutes of investigation, the two vines finally paused along the inner rim of his right eye socket.
“Hmm,” Sans could hear the flower pondering as it clasped its tendrils along the opening, “You sure are taking this like a champ! I thought you’d be dust by now!” The flower smiled brightly at him. “You’re pretty weak, you know!”
“plgh,” Sans begged, tears forming just past where the appendages were hooked. “plghhhh.”
“Wow, Mr. Trashbag, didn’t anyone ever teach you that it’s rude to talk with your mouth full?”
The flower applied the tiniest bit of pressure, the two vines tugging gently in opposite directions. There was no pain, but it was just like when a dentist wiggled a tooth before yanking it; Sans knew it only meant trouble.
But there was nothing he could do.
“You know, this feels really weird!” It increased the pressure, and Sans dug his fingers into his wristbones as a tiny flicker of pain rose from his face. “It’s like there’s this weird, tight, little – hrrgh! – canal separating the rest of the skull from the eyes.”
Sans’s magic kept igniting and dying as the flower pried the inflexible bone further and further. All he could think was that the bone shouldn’t move that way. It was too far, too far.
And all the while the bulk of the flower’s vine was pushing into his skull, filling the empty space with an unnatural and unending writhing.
“I’ve always wanted to see what the inside of your skull looks like though! I hope it’s different from how the inside of your arms look.”
Horrifically, the bone began to creak under the pressure. It was that noise, more than anything else that sent him into a blind panic. His body twisted and turned as he tried to mindlessly throw off the flower before it could break him. In his struggle, the radii and ulnae, overextended and frail, finally popped right out of their sockets, bringing a fresh wave of pain that had him screaming again.
Yet even as his humeri dropped to his sides, and even as his vision went black from the overwhelming agony, he didn’t stop himself from trying to escape, from trying to scrabble at the vines with his amputated arms. The thorns were rubbing roughly into the delicate canal, penetrating the delicate bone, driving that ugly itch so deep inside him, he couldn’t handle it.
“nghhh! ngh! plgh!”
His vision blackened as the appendages burst through the final distance, dismissing his right eyelight. He could feel the little tips peeking out from the sockets, squirming almost salaciously against the rims as they continued to pull and pull and pull.
“plgh! owh duh nthng, plgh, plgh, plgh. plghhhheeeeeeeeeeeeee –”
The final plea escalated to a wordless shriek as a loud snapping noise filled his skull, the flower finally having pushed the socket past its limit.
Everything stopped. All the tension, the stress, the pain, fled his body in a rush. He couldn’t feel anything. He couldn’t see anything. There was absolutely nothing but for the sound of that bone finally breaking apart.
Though his sight was still cast in shadow, he could feel his body collapsing to the ground. It awakened his senses, but only dully. The pain was present but faded, as if hidden beneath the surface, still trapped underwater.
Somewhere close by he could hear someone sobbing.
Ha. That was pretty funny. Why would someone be crying when he was the one hurt? So silly.
His body bounced up and down as he laughed hysterically at the thought. Whoever was crying got louder.
Eventually his senses caught up to him enough that he could hear the flower muttering next to his head. It was too quiet to hear past the sobs, so he tried to be as still as possible so he could focus all his energy on listening. The sobs immediately died away.
“– do look like that on the inside, but that’s okay! This was a fun little experiment! I almost felt something this time!” The flower tittered. “How about you? Did you feel anything?”
Sans didn’t speak. If he concentrated he could feel something. He didn’t want that though.
There was a noise. So close, so sickening.
It was the rats. They were still crawling in his head.
“Aw, silly, if you didn’t feel anything, you should’ve said so! But don’t worry.” There was a soft rustling and his head felt so full, so disgustingly full. “I’m sure you’ll feel something when I do the other one!”