[CLOSED] A COUPLE OF BONEHEADS

[spaghettimonster]

Who: Papyrus, Papyrus' Nightmare, and Sans
What: Accidental napping leads to an accidental nightmare
When: Season 1 Day 15, late at night!
Where: The carnival grounds.
Warnings: Whatever comes with a nightmare, brother issues, maybe body horror.

Papyrus never meant to fall asleep. Really, he'd meant to not sleep at all while they were here, after the Ringmaster's first announcement. He could stay awake, stay busy, for a few days. If push came to shove, he could take a nap in the trailer, surrounded by his earlier attempts at dreamcatchers. Maybe a week without a nap was too much, or maybe he underestimated the power of the sleepy tea. Either way, it was his own fault, and no one else's, and he'd be sure to say so to the Ringmaster if he ever got the chance.

Maybe thirty minutes into picking up debris from around the ferris wheel, metaphorically skull-splitting yawns began to strike. Strong enough to make him dizzy. He leaned against the base of the ferris wheel, rubbing at his eyesockets, and considered going back to the trailer for a bit. In the minutes he considered this, he dozed off. After a week of depositing his creations near trailers and in the ownership of public nappers, there were no more stashed away in mysteriously deep pockets or secret phone-based dimensional storage spaces.

The skeleton sleeps.

The churning of the dreamworld twists his thoughts to unpleasant, frightening places.

The ambient magic of the place gives them form.

Shadows drip up, coalescing into a long, wavering figure. Its viscous form settles, as much as the word applies, with a bipedal form with long pale fingers... and a white, skeletal mask of a face. Broken, with cracks running through it and no particular distinction of the teeth. Like it had been partially melted, and even one of the eye sockets dripped nearly shut.

It was a mostly-forgotten dream, one that Papyrus preferred to avoid because... it made everything feel gray, and broken.

Like he felt, at the idea that Undyne was having so much fun that she couldn't bother to call. Like Sans wanted nothing to do with him. Like the people just wanted Asgore back, that they cared nothing for all the encouragement Papyrus had tried so hard to give them...

Lɪᴋᴇ ᴇᴠᴇʀʏᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴡᴏʀᴋᴇᴅ ᴘᴇʀꜰᴇᴄᴛʟʏ ᴡᴇʟʟ ᴡɪᴛʜᴏᴜᴛ ʜɪᴍ.

Comments

[spaghettimonster]

"'A lot,' huh," He nudges a foot into one of the gashes in the ground, one probably left by a wayward bone.

A lot is, in at least two ways, not the answer he wants to hear. It means this has been going on maybe longer than he can imagine. It means who even knows what Sans remembers anymore, and no wonder he's being so weird and distant, and saying that he isn't who Papyrus remembers. A lot can change in a year, let alone... however long this was.

But they're finally talking again, so he makes himself keep thinking about what to ask, instead of yelling whatever first comes to mind.

And, admittedly, it's probably hard for Sans to describe how much time has rewound. How would you? The total amount of time lost? The total number of times things went back to an earlier state? Listing both out, and letting him guess how long the longest amount of lost time was? Figuring out all of that would be boring and awful. He couldn't blame Sans for avoiding figuring that out, when it's so much worse than other things Sans avoids.

"No, nevermind that. I can guess the answer, and it's 'too much,'" Papyrus offers. He stops poking the ground and sits next to his brother, instead.

It occurs to him that, if Sans could ask for all those memories with a contract, so could Papyrus. That if he ever really wants to know, he could just do the same thing; stay another year, ask another favor. The Great Papyrus could withstand it.

But there were more important favors to ask, first. Finding a way to make the rewinding stop, so everybody would go free and stay free. And... And, first, maybe...?

He drums his fingers on his knee, unable to quite keep still with a sudden exciting idea.

"Sans! Do, do you remember... the furthest things go back to? Is there any chance that things will go back to... when Undyne, and, Asgore, and. Everybody. Were still... around?!"

[osteothropy]

Sans shudders at that question, and knows that he doesn't want to answer it seriously. He hates how transparent it feels now. Like both of them know that something is wrong, but that he still had the audacity to lie about it. His fingers clutch around his opposite arm uncomfortably.

"It... yeah," he barely manages, still shivering slightly, causing his bones to rattle ever so faintly. "Way before the human. Before... all of that."

Of course that's what Papyrus is still worried about. He's believed until now that those people were irreversibly gone. Everyone was gone in the freshest of his memories, too, but... for the longest time, it's felt as if everyone is both alive and dead simultaneously. Schrodinger's Friend Circle, or something.

"It was always centered around one person. It used to be someone else, but then... when that human showed up... the first one. It was them. Always them. Sometimes... lots of people got hurt. Others... not so much."

Except him. Sans was always still around for some reason. Someone has to ruin their fun. Or maybe he was just a coward.

[spaghettimonster]

Papyrus positively slouches with relief at Sans' first answer, at the news that Undyne's really not gone forever. Mettaton, and Alphys, and Asgore, they're all cause for gladness too, but especially his boss, his friend.

His relief fades back a little as the answer goes on. There's lots of subtle social signals that Papyrus sometimes misses, but not something as fundamental as the rattling of an nervous or unhappy skeleton.

Sans seems miserable, and no wonder.

"The human, the one I was friends with, hurt lots of people? Not just... the ones trying to hurt them?"

It was one thing, to think that maybe they'd had something to do with Undyne, and Mettaton, and Asgore disappearing. All three of them had... been really vocal, really clear, about what they meant to do with a human.

But he doesn't remember Doctor Alphys meaning to do anything awful to them. Indeed, he remembers that she'd been just like him, giving them advice and help! Lots of messages on Undernet, all about guiding them through the puzzles of Hotland! So why would they have ever hurt her...?

[osteothropy]

Sans honestly doesn't get it either. Over time he'd come to expect that the anomaly was searching for something - some kind of reaction from him, or the others, that they never quite got. But if Sans knew the answer to that, maybe it could have stopped a long time ago.

"Yeah," he says again, obviously reluctant. "Sometimes. Other times... I almost thought..." He trails off, a rare moment of looking as small and damaged as he feels. It's stupid, how he remembers feeling somehow betrayed when they made the wrong choices, like he knew they were capable of doing better. But yet...

"Sometimes they played nice. Sometimes they almost seemed like... a friend? Just maybe one that was scared, and got pushed around by the wrong guys. One that made some mistakes. But..."

He looks down at his hands for a few moments, thinking about it.

"...The last one I remember living..."

He trails off. After long moments of failing to say it, he just shakes his head ruefully, staring at the ground. He doesn't know if Papyrus realizes that he was potentially on that hit list, but Sans doesn't have the heart to tell him.

[spaghettimonster]

After a surprisingly long silence, Papyrus decides to fill in the gap for his brother. The answer seems obvious enough.

"The last one... Was the same one as me! Because, I'm here! And I don't plan to go home, until we find a way to fix everything..."

He hesitates. If the obvious answer were the true one, though, would Sans have trailed off so strangely? Wouldn't he have moved on to some other point? He pushes on.

"Otherwise -- this is too much like a comic book, I can't believe I'm saying this -- otherwise, there'd be another -you- back home! Or, another me??"

How unsettling. To go back home, time rewound so everybody's alive again, the barrier broken so they can live freely on the surface, his story told so he can be popular and respected without bearing the responsibility of their hope... Only for there to be another Papyrus around?

[osteothropy]

Sans actually chuckles, very softly, at Papyrus's apparent distress. It breaks him away from the depressing reality he was just thinking about, and only a subject much more abstract and complicated to explain. He'd wonder about this problem, too, if it hasn't already been explained to him over the years.

"Nah, it doesn't work quite like that," he says, his tail loosening from its bundle. "Though... how it actually does work may be something we have to see for ourselves." He's been researching it for a while, and he's not quite sure, even now. "From what I've gathered, our timeline is in a state of temporal flux up until all of its pieces get put back in... meaning folks like you and me. Once we go back, or commit to not going back..."

He gestures vaguely.

"Doesn't matter where we got pulled out, the timeline is going to try to balance itself so things make sense. I've been told to anticipate it being pretty confusing."

[spaghettimonster]

"Wow, I don't understand all of that," Papyrus admits after a moment of knee drumming. "I'm not in two places at once. That's good news. But..."

Commit to not going back? Not at all an option. But, if something happened to them, while they were out here. If they died...

"If we don't get back home, it'll be like we just disappeared...? With no hints how or why?"

How terrible. At least he'd had Sans to tell him something, unlike how most people had avoided the names of those who'd disappeared. If both of them never returned... Undyne would never find out what happened to her best and brightest recruit. Sans' many acquaintances would miss his horrible humor. And unless one of them chanced into the carnival...

[osteothropy]

Sans falls quiet for a few moments. There's really no good answer to that, or ways to mitigate how uncomfortable that might be to think about. Eventually, he shrugs his shoulders weakly.

"Yeah. I guess so," he says. He looks down, taking a bit of a darker turn, but mostly it's just sad. "Not too unusual, though. Back home."

[spaghettimonster]

It takes Papyrus a few seconds to speak, which is nearly an eternity.

"That all. Seems plenty unusual to me. People don't just disappear," Undyne, Alphys, Mettaton, Asgore. He corrects himself, "usually. There's hints."

They're being honest. Relatively honest. Honest enough. He might as well fess up.

"...I knew something was wrong, about Undyne and the others leaving. Everyone was... too sad."

They were never on vacation. But if time kept rewinding, keeps rewinding, it's like they're not really dead, either. So the polite not-quite-truth, in that case.

"I never guessed the rest of this. All these secrets, these things you couldn't say before. Are these things why you've been... avoiding me?"

[osteothropy]

"...Yeah," he says after a pause, thinking over that question. "I guess they are."

There's more to it than that, and he wants to explain, but it's difficult. Explaining why he does the things he does is one of the worst aspects of fessing up, because it means relating it to what he's thinking, and what he's been going through. Uncomfortable facts about time travel are much more distant.

"There was... never any point in gettin' into it, back home. With the way things were. I... I lied about what happened. Because... it was sort of true. In its way. They were going to come back, eventually. I just didn't... there wasn't any point. In making it worse."

He hadn't wanted to deal with it, and from the way Papyrus and him had always dealt with conflict he'd expected Papyrus wouldn't want to deal with it either. It was just so convenient to avoid.

"But after being here, away from all that... after remembering everything I did... I didn't know how to... talk about it. I didn't want to tell you, until it was fixed." He looks away. "That's what I've been tryin' t'do."

[spaghettimonster]

Papyrus shakes his head. This mix of vindication at guessing right, and being blown away by surprising reveals... It's all a bit difficult to keep track of. Especially for what, a half hour conversation? It almost feels like he's still dreaming.

"That's very noble and selfless. But also... a little bit silly?" Is there a more pleasant way to say that? The last thing he'd normally want to do is get on his brother's case for actually working hard. But if the work is making him lovely and miserable, what's the point? "Following my example to work hard is very flattering! But there isn't any point making this worse either. Two people can get the job done in half the time!"

He considers, tapping his chin, then clarifies, "well, maybe not half the time. I don't know much about this time stuff. So my help isn't a full share yet."

[osteothropy]

And there you have it. It's something Sans had known, in a way, all along but didn't want to face - if he shared this burden, he wouldn't have to be alone anymore. At the cost of Papyrus's ease of mind, maybe, but... if the other option was breaking down and avoiding his presence, what choice does he have? Heh.

"What can I say," he says, a bit of life coming back to him as the relief of this admission slowly takes effect. "I'm a silly kind of guy."

He'll take it, though. He has to remember - this time around things can be different.