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There’s a faint sense of warmth on your face. It’s so familiar that for a moment you’re back at the beginning, but when you open your eyes the lighting is all wrong.
“Bet I killed Sans faster than you did.”
Flowey snorts. “Is that what you tell yourself to sleep better at night?”
“Yeah. Because it’s true,” you say, stretching out in the grass. “How many times’d it take you?”
When you look over at him, Flowey’s morphed his face into something truly horrendous. Thinking hard does that sometimes. “Uh... 98?”
Something stirs in your chest, shifting; a faint pressure on your neck. “Chara says you’re full of shit.”
“Ugh, fine! 102.”
You grin into the grass. “Either way, we’ve got you beat. How’s 87 taste?”
“Yeah, well.” Flowey sniffs, peering at you from the corner of his eyes. “That’s probably just because even when you were actively killing his loved ones he still liked you deep down and stuff.”
The next words that come out of your mouth aren’t your own. “You’re still mad that we unlocked a boss battle you couldn’t,” Chara says. Your voice always sounds a little louder when they use it. More confident.
Not that that’s hard. As rarely as you speak, the circumstances that raise your voice above a whisper are few and far between.
“Which is complete and utter bullshit!” Flowey sinks into the dirt and pops back up again a little farther away. All the easier to see him posing, changing his face like characters in a play. “Do you know how many times I tried to get a reaction out of her? Killing her guard and her friends and her family would make her mad for a while I guess, but soon enough she’d just get all sad and mopey. And boring.” He spits out the word in disgust, face back to normal. “I still half think you just made that all up.”
“Think about it.” You turn over on your side, facing him. The ground isn’t exactly comfortable, but you don’t really care enough to sit up, and you don’t have to worry about using your hands here anyway. “Y’know Undyne cares about other people more than anything. Take them away and she just...” You shrug a shoulder. “Deflates.”
“Yeah, but you did that, too, right?” Flowey protests. And then stops. “Wait. No, I think I get it. It’s because even though you killed a bunch of the people she loved, she still had hope.”
Something he couldn’t have offered her, though you think he’s already caught on. “If she beat me, she’d save everyone that was left and get to take my soul. You couldn’t have been able to offer that.” Not that he couldn’t have tried; you remember him saying once that he’d never been able to take the souls from Asgore, and wonder how many of those attempts had just been him hoping to find out what dangling a human soul in front of a desperate monster would do.
From the way he scowls, your guess must’ve been pretty accurate. “Keep rubbing it in my face, I dare you.”
It’s Chara who smiles back at him. “What’re you gonna do? Kill me?” they goad. “Better make it count.”
“I will destroy you,” he promises. “You will die a lot and it will hurt.”
They reach over with your hands, beckoning. “Hey can you come here a sec, I just remembered it’s been a super long time since I played loves me, loves me not--”
“Keep waiting!”
You don’t make any effort to stop them from lunging forward, mostly because Flowey’s already burrowed under the ground by the time their hands hit the patch of dirt where he’d just been. It’s kind of nice to see them messing with each other, anyway, when you all know that they don’t really mean it.
Flowey blows a raspberry somewhere behind you, and the weird shriek Chara makes hurts your throat a little.
It hadn’t been all sunshine and rainbows right from the start -- nothing ever is -- and Chara hadn’t wanted to tell Flowey they were still here for even longer than it took him to stop insulting your choice in footwear, but after coming back here twice a week ever since the barrier broke, they both eventually warmed up to the fact that it was okay to want to be okay. It’s hard not to become a trio like you have when you’re the only ones in the world who could truly understand how it feels to have done the things you have. No judgement. No fear. No secrets, mostly.
Resets will do that.
You wonder, sometimes, why it’s so easy to talk about. As if everything had happened to somebody else; as if the people you’d hurt -- who had hurt you -- aren’t the same friends you have a dinner date with later. Is it weird to joke about the people you’ve killed as if they weren’t real?
Except nothing that happened was real. Not in the way that the dirt under your fingernails is real; not real like the weight of a knife in your hands; not half as much as every odd look when you get the timelines mixed up in your head and give the wrong answer to a question you weren’t even asked.
You would compare it all to a bad dream, if the way it had Asgore’s voice ringing through your head didn’t send some part of you reeling. Even then, maybe that’s exactly why it’s the one comparison you always seem to draw.
You still have that dream, sometimes -- or maybe it’s a nightmare, or would be if it in itself wasn’t too tired to scare you anymore -- eyelids heavy and crusted shut, a hand in yours, a voice: Wake up! You are the future of humans and monsters...
When memories and dreams are so easily corrupted; lost; stolen; how much are they worth?
The only proof of it all exists between the three of you. The memories you share. A measure of regret. How much is that worth?
You freeze your hand in place where it’d been inches from Flowey’s petals. He looks up at you in terror, until you blink away the flashback and all he looks is bemused.
“What, do you want to see me grow it back or not?”
“It took eight hits for us to kill you,” you say. “I think that’s loves me not.”
Chara is the one who lets your hand fall back down. You can tell you’ve taken them off guard. They don’t say anything.
“...That many?” Flowey only looks a little uncomfortable as he smiles. “Well, that’s almost touching.”
“I’m sorry.” For a moment you’re not sure if you’re apologizing for killing him or for killing the mood, until you say, “I wish I’d cared enough to hate you,” and you decide it’s time to stop talking.
“Well, okay, cool,” Flowey says, except it’s not. “What the hell is giving you PTSD flashbacks all of the sudden?”
You’d feel bad about how abruptly you leave Chara to the front if they didn’t do the same to you all too often. They flinch from it hard enough as it is, and you waste no time in hunkering down away from the controls. You think you’re in a bad mood today. You don’t want to ruin it when it seems like Chara and Flowey are actually letting themselves have fun for once, and you send a vague approximation of those feelings to Chara in the hopes that they’ll understand.
They start climbing to their feet, which you weren’t expecting. They dust off your shorts and pick the smallest pebble out of your knee. “We should go outside,” they say. Not “leave”, but it amounts to the same thing in the end, and you nearly protest until they say, “Wanna come?”
Flowey shrugs, somehow. It involves a slight twisting of his stem and a fluttering of his petals that must have taken some practice to get right. “Not really, but I might as well.”
There’s a rope ladder at the end of the cavern. No one had really insisted on it, but on one of your trips inside the mountain you’d reached the flower patch only to find the ladder hugging the rock wall. Not that you mind making the journey through the throne room, but...
Well. You don’t call it a journey for nothing.
Chara tugs on the rope a couple times to test it before they begin the ascent. A breeze greets you when you reach the top. The sudden warmth after the relative coolness of the caverns would be uncomfortable, if the way it reminded you of the first time you emerged from the throne room wasn’t anything but disorienting, sunset casting long shadows over everything, except this is the wrong side of the mountain entirely for something like that. Flowey might’ve been onto something with the PTSD flashbacks.
Maybe the whole casually talking about it thing isn’t always as easy as you thought.
“Dude, you’re starving,” Chara says, patting your stomach over the sweater.
Am I?
“Yeah, did we not eat today?”
You wrack your brain trying to remember; breakfast? Nope. Lunch? Uh... Hm.
...I kept thinking about dinner tonight and forgot, you finally admit, and Chara shrugs.
“I guess that’s soon enough.”
Chara picks their way down the mountain much more carefully than you would have. Then again, they might have climbed Ebott to disappear, but you remember them telling you that falling into the Ruins had been a complete accident; it would make sense that they’re afraid of stumbling across another hole in the mountainside and plummeting to yet another death.
Watching them step over the brush through your own eyes, it’s easy to pretend you’re somewhere else, looking at it all from a distance. It’s a heavy weight in your gut to think that Chara might feel the same way sometimes; existing nowhere except inside your own head, without a body of their own. Do they miss it? Trying to think of how often they get to take the controls, the stone in your stomach grows a little heavier to realize that they usually only get the chance when you need the comfort of stepping back.
Selfish, you think. Definitely selfish.
“I can feel you thinking in there,” Chara says, interrupting your train of thought. “Stop it.”
...Stop thinking? You raise an eyebrow at them. Or more like, you raise an eyebrow on the face you’re both sharing, looking incredulously into the middle distance and knowing they’ll appreciate the gesture.
“You know what I mean,” they huff. You think they do appreciate it though - there’s a smile in there somewhere. “You’re thinking too much about the past. We both know nothing good ever comes from that.”
Yeah, you allow. I know. It’s just...hard not to sometimes.
“Yeah,” they return, voice soft. “I know.”
Flowey is waiting for you at the bottom of the mountain. “Ugh,” he says when he sees you. “Took you long enough.”
He just says that so he doesn’t have to admit he’s enjoying the fresh air, you say, making Chara snort.
“What?” Flowey says, frowning. “What is it? Did Frisk say something?”
“Just the truth,” Chara replies pleasantly.
“That’s fine, then.” Flowey rolls his eyes. A length of vine stretches up from the earth towards Chara’s outstretched hand, wrapping around their wrist so Flowey can pull himself up. Rare enough as it is that he decides to let you carry him through the village instead of simply making his way underground, you decide this is something you may be better off not commenting on, in case it makes him do it less.
It does make you curious, though.
“So, are you coming tonight?” Chara asks, following the thread of your thoughts.
He makes a face. “Eh. I don’t know,” he says, even though both you and Chara agree that him coming this far means he’s already decided.
“Papyrus was hoping you would,” Chara mentions, as if they didn’t know how Flowey would react. “He said he was going to make something special.” They look at him sidelong. “Think: pancakes, but with your face on them.”
“Oh,” Flowey says, “okay, now I have to go.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say, you dumb fucking flower.”
“UGH.” He crashes his face against Chara’s arm - probably because that’s the only thing he’s able to hit them with. “I regret being privy to half of the fucking references you heap on me.”
“No you don’t,” they say. “You love it.”
“I guess.”
The walk back home isn’t particularly long, but you start to notice a twinge in your ankle as you go. Maybe you strained it earlier without realizing. Now that you’ve realized, you’re beginning to wonder if that’s not the reason Chara was so careful going down the mountain.
They hum for a moment, considering something.
“Flowey, tell Frisk they’re a good person.”
“They’re not,” Flowey says.
Chara splutters. “The fuck! That’s not what you’re supposed to say!”
The sudden question and Flowey’s immediate response is almost enough to make you laugh, and you probably would if Chara wasn’t too focused on not strangling him to let you do so. A hand hovers ominously close to his stem as it is, but he only looks up at them unimpressed, something like a frown on his face. There’s a tightness somewhere in you, almost like guilt or shame or something, but the feeling of watching from a distance is back, so you just watch, not saying anything. Not really feeling, either.
“Maybe if you’d let me finish,” he says.
Chara’s hand twitches. “Keep talking, then.”
For a moment, he just frowns again. “What do you want me to say? That someone who’s killed other people is a good person? That murder can be chalked up to a simple mistake?” He scoffs. “We all know that isn’t true. Trying to claim otherwise would just make me a hypocrite. None of us are good.”
“This isn’t exactly helping.”
“Are Toriel and Asgore good people?” Flowey asks.
“Of course they are.” There’s real offense in Chara’s voice.
“Even though he killed little kids just like us?” He doesn’t smile as he says it. “Even though she let him?”
“That’s--”
Flowey doesn’t let them answer, plowing on mercilessly. “What about Undyne? She was perfectly fine going along with it until she became personally invested. And do you really think Papyrus is so dumb that he didn’t choose to ignore what capturing Frisk would mean? And Gerson, he was perfectly fine taking money from a kid who was willing to buy anything if it meant staying alive just a little longer. What about them? Are they good?”
“This isn’t fair.” Chara’s hand is clenched into a fist now. Even though you still feel distant, you reach out to them, trying to smooth down the edges you can feel beginning to fray. They take a breath. “Do you even have a point you’re trying to get to?”
“Good people don’t exist,” Flowey says. “There’s only people. The only difference is that it’s up to you whether you’re a person who does good things, or a person who does bad things.” He does smile this time. Maybe it’s just you, but something in it feels less antagonistic and more reassuring.“Or both.”
The houses around you are becoming more and more familiar as you get closer to home. There are a few people outside, walking or enjoying the evening in their lawns or playing on the sidewalk. Some of them you recognize from the Underground, but Chara doesn’t quite see them enough to think to wave back when a few call out greetings. You’ll have to apologize to them later, you think, mildly disgruntled.
You’ve never really thought of yourself as a good person. Then again, you’ve always been hard-pressed to think of yourself as a person to begin with; always in the background, blending in, something to be forgotten about until you get in the way. Observing. Almost like you know how Chara tends to think of themself as a tool. The both of you have broken at least as many things as you’ve tried to fix. There’s some sort of art form, Chara told you, where you take broken pottery and piece it back together with gold, with the whole idea being that it’s more beautiful for being shattered. Something about it had appealed to you when you’d first heard of it. Thinking about it now, you can only wish that the same thing could apply to a person.
You don’t know how much time could be added up from all the loads and saves and resets, but you’ve spent a long, long time trying to be good.
“Next time I think about asking him for advice,” Chara says, and you know they’re talking to you, “remind me that Flowey is not a good life coach.”
“You asked,” Flowey scoffs.
“Yeah, whatever.” And then, “I mean, I guess you’re right. I never really thought about it that way.”
“I have a unique perspective,” Flowey says. “It’s the depersonalization.”
“You have got to stop using Sans as a proxy for therapy.”
“Hey, if he’s going to be spending all that money every month, he might as well share the love.” He pauses. “Share the LOVE?”
“Okay, that’s a good one,” Chara admits. “I’ll forgive you if you let me use it and take credit.”
“Deal.”
There are much more cars on your street than there usually is. You’re a little late. You don’t have to check to know that there aren’t any new messages on your phone, though; everyone knows where you went, and that you usually stay a little longer than you should. You’re still not used to the idea that people are waiting for you. Are willing to wait for you. Are sure that you’ll come back.
“Hey,” Chara says. They stop in the driveway, away from the door where someone might hear them. “Thanks.”
There’s a slight curl to Flowey’s lip when he looks at them, and for a moment you’re sure that he’s going to reply with something sarcastic. The expression drops from his face after a moment, though, and you can tell he’s struggling to find the right words.
“We’re just people, Chara,” he says. “I think we just keeping fucking ourselves over because we keep trying to be something more.”
Chara hesitates for a moment. “Do you think we’re getting better?”
“A little,” Flowey says. “At least we’re trying. And, Frisk... I think you’re doing a pretty great job so far.”
Chara’s hand hangs loose at their side. It doesn’t take much to take it for yourself, and you bring it up, a small smile on your face.
‘You too,’ you sign. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
“Idiot,” he says.
Chara laughs. “Come on,” they say, closing the distance between you and the door. “I’m pretty sure everyone’s waiting.”
“We can’t have that,” he replies.
Voices start to carry from the house now that you’re listening, laughter and yelling and music. Home, you think to yourself.
‘Bet we can get more sprinkles on our mashed potatoes before Mom stops us,’ you sign before Chara can open the door.
Flowey snorts. “Bet I can stack more checkers on Sans before he wakes up,” he says.
“Oh, you’re on,” Chara says, and as they step inside, you already know that first place is something you already share.