Chapter Text
Determination
Valley fields of butter yellow flowers, soaked in sunlight. Warmth on an upturned face.
Mountains, distantly gleaming, ever patient and enduring in a young and volatile world.
A father watches his children play amidst green grasses as golden petals float lazily in the afternoon glow.
Another face begins to turn to him, and he waits to see the smile.
Gaster jolts awake, burning and cold at once, unexplained sorrow a weight on his soul. Weak starlight from a night with no moon glitters distantly through the wide windows of his monkish bedroom, the blackout curtains drawn aside and billowing in fragrant nightly breezes.
He sighs and sits up slowly, removing his boney palm from where it clutched at his chest over his soul, grasping his sweater in a death grip, to begin rubbing exhaustedly at his eye sockets. Wearily he rises, the mattress creaking in protest as if to chastise him about getting more sleep.
He steps to the window, his feet sweeping the floor as he attempts to shake off the remnants of the dream.
He’s had this one before, but not in years. It had been reoccurring, and somewhat maddening, when he had first returned to the corporeal world, and rejoined his sons. Every night, it had been the same. He always woke suddenly, frustrated and desperate to recall their face. He had the thought more than once that it could have been a memory, except he could not recall ever seeing such a place.
He remembered precious little of the accident, and only a scattering of memories from the time before that. An error in the construction of a machine designed to break the barrier had thrown his soul like refuse to an incinerator to burn in the blackest space imaginable, a place between places that he’d begun calling the Void. He snorted at himself for having teased their former king for being unimaginative when naming things.
The Void had been like death itself, or what he imagined that to be like, at first. Endless nothing. Like something between dreams and waking. Slowly he’d regained some semblance of consciousness, but only enough to recognize that there was nothing, that he was nothing but a thought drifting ceaselessly in some sort of limbo. If he thought he had been afraid of the slow crumbling of his sanity before the catastrophe which had flung him into a tarry hell, it was nothing compared to the terror he had known after, persisting somehow where nothing else seemed to exist. He had been there for hours, or an eternity, he had no way of knowing. He hadn’t known light again until his tattered soul had been snatched, like a fish on a hook, when he had been jerked from the void and slammed mercilessly back into existence.
One hundred years he’d been missing, that’s what they told him when he’d overcome shock well enough to process the sounds of their voices again. To a monster, that was something like 10 years in the life of a human. If that person in the dream had existed, they would be long dead. Windings shuddered and tried to push away thoughts of the void.
Not tonight. He thought with gritted teeth. Not. Tonight. You took me once, body and soul. Never again.
He turned his thoughts to the most unnerving part of it; if it was a memory, whoever the human was, he had the feeling they had been a part of their little family. So why was it he couldn’t recall their face? Someone so close to them, he should remember something about. Himself, Sans, Papyrus and…the human. He hadn’t succeeded yet in remembering so much as a hint of a name. He had only the vague notion of sadness to accompany an impressionistic, faceless blur. His little impromptu sabbatical in the void must have had greater impact on his mind than he’d previously thought. When he’d spoken of it to his sons, both had said they had no memory of such a place, nor any memories of another member of the family. There was the added complication of the time frame; in the dream his sons were children, and the being was distinctly human. Though he now remembered next to nothing of that time, he could recall enough history to know that in that era of the world, a time even before their race had been imprisoned beneath the mountain, a human would not have been permitted to live on their lands.
By the time his sons were old enough to walk, tensions between humans and monster kind had been at their peak, and war seemed an inevitability. The king himself would not have minded the presence of a human, but the humans had grown to see them as something like demons. They thought of them as bloodthirsty, strange, and what they had begun calling their “magic” was unnatural and a thing to be feared. They had taught their children fear through bedtime stories for decades, and the new generations no longer knew monster kind as a race of peaceful beings. If a human had been discovered on their lands, it would have been assumed to be a prisoner of monster kind, held captive to be used as leverage.
There were some humans who had sided with monster kind, disbelieving the picture of horrors painted by their own kind. His heart had been warmed by the idea until he discovered that those humans, if found out by their own, would have been branded as demons themselves and destroyed. For such reasons, it was forbidden in the monster kingdom to associate with a human. Had a human lived with them at any point, they would not have been able to for long. Another thing that bothered him was his own emotional response. Why the heartache? The dream itself wasn’t a sad one.
He pinched his nasal ridge against the headache trying to take over his skull. His magic was raging, still surging like adrenaline from the abruptness of his waking, pounding against the inside of his cranium. Insomnia had some nasty side effects.
He glared at the stars for a long moment as if demanding answers, before sighing again in defeat and heading back to his bed to catch perhaps another hour of sleep before it was time to wake and begin another early day at the lab. His fear of being unconscious was overshadowed by his mind’s need for rest and as his thoughts began to slow and scatter, he hoped this time he wouldn’t dream.