Chapter Text
“They say it’s what you do, not how you do it that makes you a good person. But does anything you’ve done actually matter if you’re so different that the person who did those things isn’t you anymore?”
“It’s done!”
He laughed maniacally, overcome by the sheer beauty of the creation before him.
“After all these years… I can uphold my oath. My life’s work is complete!”
He grabbed the cup he needed for the last step and stood above the beaker, adrenaline and excitement rushing through him as he readied to finish what he had been working on for so long.
He couldn’t keep himself from laughing again.
“With this… it will finally be done!”
Suddenly, the door slammed open, startling Sci who jumped, landed on one of the test tubes on the ground which rolled out from under his foot and sent him flying into the textbook he was using to hold up his bookshelf, colliding with a magnificent crash that toppled over the stacks of books, falling into each other like dominoes around the room.
Standing at the door overseeing the destroyed state of the room, was Sans’ younger brother, Papyrus. He stood there in his pajamas, a scowl on his face as the 11-year old walked into the room, completely unfazed by the destruction.
“Sans!” He pouted (adorably, although it was hard to see on the floor covered in a pile of heavy textbooks), “You’re using the creepy laugh again!”
Sans groaned, rubbing his head as he pushed himself up. “Sorry, bro.” He surveyed the damage, wincing at a twinge in his side. He was not looking forward to cleaning that up. Maybe he could sneak back into the lab and grab the cleaner solvent…
“Wait, why are you up so late? Sans looked up at his brother, a thought suddenly occurring to him. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“Brother,” Papyrus said with the most condescending face Sans had ever seen him make. “It is 7:30 in the morning.”
Sans froze. He could have sworn it was 11:45 the last time he checked! Whoopsies.
“I… didn’t realize. Guess sleeping messed up my sense of time a bit, due to how I went to sleep at a normal healthy time last night.” Sans lied, weakly.
“Sans you can lie better than that.”
“Oh come on, I even removed my watch before that one! You know what they say, only time can tell.”
“Sans. That one didn’t even make sense in context.”Papyrus’ scowl deepened.
Sans sighed. “Alright, I forgot to go to sleep last night.” He relented.
“I knew it!” Papyrus declared, his face lighting up in such a way that Sans knew he couldn’t be mad at him.
Papyrus walked over to help push more textbooks off of Sans, letting him stand up and dust himself off now that he was few.
“I just can’t lie to that face, can I?” Sans smiled fondly at Papyrus who puffed his chest proudly.
“My face IS quite magnificent! Any lie said will quiver in its presence!”
Papyrus struck a pose, and Sans clapped. His little bro was so cool.
“But nevermind my handsome face!” Papyrus turned back to Sans, his hands on his hips. “What was so important that you skipped sleep? And use your creepy evil laugh?”
Sans’ eyes lit up. “Oh! I was just about to finish a formula for-” He cut off, his eyelights shrinking to pinpricks.
“Oh Angel, where’s my-” Sans searched frantically on the ground before spotting his cup on the floor, the substance spilled and seeping into the ground.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” He shrieked, falling to his knees before the gruesome scene in front of him. “MY LIFE’S WORK!”
Papyrus peeked over his shoulder. “What? Sans , that just looks like spilled coffee.”
“Papyrus, you don’t understand! That ”spilled coffee" is a formula I’ve spent YEARS perfecting so that it could be perfectly combined with those caffeinated sodas we found in the junkyard!”
“...You were going to pour caffeine into more caffeine.” Papyrus deadpanned.
“Yes! And it was going to be beautiful!” Sans sobbed, slamming his hands on the ground. “But it has been TAKEN FROM ME.”
“Oh my STARS, Sans!” Papyrus groaned, exasperated, “I’m going back to my room!If you need me, I’ll be up in my room reading “Peek-a-Boo with Fluffy Bunny 4: Fluffy Bunny Gets His Revenge”!”
He turned to the door, but a thought occurred to Sans before he could fully leave.
“Hey, Papyrus? Isn’t that a library book?” He asked.
His brother paused in the doorway. “Yeah?”
“A school library book?” Sans continued.
“Yeah…?”
“And didn’t you say it was 7:30 AM?”
“Yeah? Sans, what are you-”
“School is in 30 minutes,” Sans interrupted, his voice dark.
Papyrus froze.
“OH-”
They sprung into action, rushing to get Papyrus out of the door. Luckily, the school he went to had a uniform, which made choosing clothes and getting dressed much easier so Sans could quickly make breakfast while Papyrus shoved his uniform up.
Papyrus finished just as the toast popped up, and Sans quickly put the sliced ona plate and buttered them up as his brother ran down the stairs yelling.
“Sans, have you seen my-”
“In the closet!”
“I looked in the closet!”
“Look again!”
“It’s not- oh, there it is!”
“Was it in the closet?”
“Nope!”
Sans sighed. “Well, glad you found it!” He poured a glass of milk and set it on the table, along with the toast, which sans had added a generous amount of honey to, just as his bro liked it.
Papyrus slid into the kitchen. His shoes were untied and his collar was unkempt, but Papyrus paid it no mind as he downed the milk in one go, set the glass in the sink and ran to the front door, grabbing the toast and his bag along the way.
“Thanks Sans this looks great see you later!” He shouted.
“Wait!” Sans grabbed Papyrus before he could leave and pulled him into a big hug.
“Stay safe out there. And don’t let that Mr. Larson tell you what to do, that man is the most incompetent science teacher I’ve ever seen.” Sans whispered, giving papyrus one big squeeze before letting go.
Papyrus laughed. “He’ll get a certified Papyrus talking-to if he tries!”
“Attaboy.” Sans stepped out onto the front step so Papyrus could get through the door.
Papyrus shut the door, giving one last hurried wave goodbye before he bolted off to school.
Sans waved back, and his smile lingered for a few seconds. It slowly fell into an expression of grim determination almost as soon as Papyrus was out of sight.
Sci turned back into the house, closing the door behind him, quietly cutting himself off from everything that tethered him to this place, this time.
Now? It was time to get work.
Sci had always thought cleaning to be a waste of time. Why put something away if it was going to be used again? Why make it harder to get to a frequently used item for some superficial reason like “looking nice”?
Of course, Papyrus disagreed with him vehemently. He has always been a little neat freak, so the house stayed moderately clean and Sci got yelled at if he left so much as a sock out on the couch.
He was thinking of leaving more out, just to mess with his bro a little. Just to send a message.
(Sci thought it looked better cluttered, anyways. Leaving the rooms in the house empty felt… wrong, somehow.)
However, despite his personal opinion, he knew the difference between organized chaos and an unhelpful mess, so he set about tidying up his workroom.
Sci hadn’t had time to clean before he had to send Papyrus off, so the room has stayed in the, admittedly, rather destroyed state from earlier that morning. Which would be a lot to fix on his own.
Sci groaned, and went off to find a broom.
His life’s work was mopped up with little fanfare (Sci only cried a little bit!), the books were righted, and the rest of the room slowly became less of a hurricane of clutter and more of a tornado. Maybe a typhoon. Not that Sci was too familiar with the weather. Living underground would do that to you.
The cleaning was tedious and repetitive, but despite Sci’s usual enmity for it, he found the work to be surprisingly calming.
At the very least, it distracted him from the steady beeping of the tracker on his desk.
The tracker (and its beeps) had been a constant in his workroom ever since Sci had moved it here, and before that it had been a fixture in his lab as soon as it was completed.
It has only stopped beeping twice. Once when it was broken a few minutes after Sci had adjusted the signal. And once when it had locked on to said signal, days later.
That had been a false alarm. Sci had nearly cried when he realized.
He’d vowed never to get his hopes up again after that.
After around an hour of working, the room was nearly clean (read: barely clear enough to walk from one end of the room to the other) by the time Sci’s side had started to hurt again (He knew that trip would have consequences). He put away his supplies, grabbed his computer, and began work at his desk.
Where the tracker was.
Angel, the tracker.
Sci tried to concentrate on his work. Alphys has sent him some files he needed to look through, about the core maintenance and energy output. It was important data, Sci had specifically asked for it so he could cross-check some of the calculations with a few he’s done for the local power grid.
Behind it all, the tracker kept beeping. And beeping. Reminding him why it was there. Remanding his attention.
…Would he ever be able to find Geno…?
…
“...Okay, okay. I can’t work on this right now!” Sci shut his laptop, rolling his chair over to the machine in the corner of his room.
He’d begun work on it a few years ago. Almost immediately after he’d left the Save Screen, and Geno, behind.
Geno. Sci missed Geno. Was it weird to miss someone you’d known for barely a moment? Sci didn’t know how long he’d spent with Geno, but Sci would never forget it. It wasn’t often you got trapped in a void with an older version of yourself, after all.
Sci met Geno almost four years ago. One of his machines, made to let him shift things through space-time (don’t ask, he had been on a LOT of caffeine and wasn’t exactly thinking straight), has instead shifted HIM through space-time and dropped him on the doorstep of Geno. Who was Sci. But in the future.
At first, Geno hadn’t been thrilled to have Sci around. Sci hadn’t understood it at the time, but he’d reminded Geno of everything he had been before the decisions that had gotten him in the Save Screen. And that probably hurt to think about. So it made sense that Geno hadn’t been welcoming.
Sci had been excited at first. But he’d quickly picked up on the older him;’s distaste for conversations with his younger version, and though Sci was desperate to learn more about Geno, the cold reception to his questions left him… discouraged.
After a while, the clear disdain Geno held for Sci just… became part of life. Any positive part of being stranded in the Save Screen died out. Sci was stuck with the person who hated him, with no way out, far from his brother, his life, or any reason to keep going.
Sci had never felt more alone.
And then… Geno felt more alone.
And then… Geno had come. And although even looking at Sci must have been painful, he sat with him and talked to him and helped him out. Even though he hated Sci. Even though Sci had done nothing but annoy Geno since he’d come to the Save Screen.
Geno had pushed past everything and saved Sci.
So Sci had promised to save Geno in return.
Hence, the machine in the corner of his workroom.
Using parts from his original transporter, three years, and a lot of coffee, Sci had cobbled together a work of technological genius that would be able to lock onto signals far across space and time and avoid destroying the world in the process.
Or. He hoped it would. Okay, honestly, Sci wasn’t too sure about that last part. He didn’t have that good of an understanding of space and time mechanics, so a couple of things he had programmed into the machine were more rough estimates than anything specific. The parts from his transporter had picked up a… something? From traveling across space-time, and it melded with the machine in such a way that it would occasionally do something that Sci couldn’t even understand. But it worked! That was the important part!
Except, it hadn’t worked.
The last year had been spent fixing and tweaking and recalibrating and praying. But the Angel hadn’t answered his prayers, and the hunk of junk refused to process anything.
Until just a few days ago, when he made the tracker.
It was a small project, originally meant to be an add-on to the machine, until sci had linked the two and the machine actually began to work. It had just hummed to life, glowing a soft white that Sci did not remember including in the design but IT WORKED and he wasn’t going to question it!
The two were linked. The machine would power the tracker. The tracker would calibrate the signals coming from the machine and lock on the the frequency that matched the one Sci had isolated from the remanence of data he found from the Save Screen.
(Sci still had a piece of Geno’s scarf. It ripped off one without Geno noticing, and Sci had found it lodged in the transporter.)
The tracker had been beeping steadily on his desk for a while now. He didn’t have any way to muffle it, and the walls in the house were thin, so it was lucky that Papyrus was loud enough to pretty much entirely cover the quiet sound. It was lucky that Papyrus wasn’t really interested in anything Sci did, because that kid was a quick learner and had absolutely picked up enough skills just watching Sci to realize what he was trying to do. Sci did not think Papyrus would be okay with Sci traveling through space-time without any safety measures.
Sci would argue that he’d done it safely enough before, but he’d have to tell Papyrus about all that to prove his point, so that was off the table. And… okay, maybe even then he wasn’t sure about the safety of before. Transporting TO the Save Screen had been fine, if a bit of a rough landing, but transporting back… yeah, that was a different story entirely.
He didn’t want to leave Papyrus alone, either. He’d done that enough before all this started, and was not a fan of being any more of an absent brother than he had to be for his job. So it was a good thing time traveling allowed him to pinpoint at what time he came back. Barely a second would pass by the time he found Geno. If it worked properly. If not… well, working in a lab had its risks, and Sci had prepared a safety net for Papyrus as soon as he’d become a royal scientist anyways. Just in case something happened to him and Papyrus had to continue on alone.
Thinking he’d left his brother alone for months had been one of the most nerve-wracking experiences in his life. Sci loved Papyrus. He was loud and genuine and innocent and kind. He was everything Sci was not, and deserved so much better than Sci could ever give him. Why Papyrus looked up to anyone like him was a mystery and a miracle that Sci would never be able to understand, but he was willing to work endlessly to be worthy of his brother’s pride.
Other than that, his life had been pretty normal since he’d come back. He didn’t talk much to people, content to stay with his brother and science and machines. It suited him just fine, no matter how lonely it made him seem. Normal life had actually been a bit strange to adjust to after spending who knows how long in a void, and Sci still found himself forgetting to eat or sleep for days on end (which worried Papyrus to no end).
In any case, there wasn’t anything he could do about that now. So instead of thinking about that, he worked on the machine. It didn’t need much, not even any regular maintenance, but Sci found it relaxing to tune-up the wires and smooth out the code. It quieted the buzz in his brain in a way that no other project had done.
He hadn’t worked for very long when fatigue started to claim him. Maybe… pulling an all-nighter last night wasn’t the best idea?
Sci scoffed. The very idea was preposterous.
But nevertheless, Sci pushed away from the machine and reclined back in his chair, curling up in the corner and resting his head on the arms.
Was it the most comfortable place to sleep? No. Was his cot back in his destroyed lab? Yes. Was he going to walk all the way back to Hotland to grab it?
Not for all the gold in the Underground.
Sci thought about that for a second. Okay, maybe for all the gold in the underground. That was a lot of gold. Sci wasn’t gonna pass that up.
He wasn’t getting any gold, though, so Sci stayed put in his chair. He didn’t really want to leave his workroom anyways. What if the tracker went off and he wasn’t there? What if he slept through it and abandoned Geno again?
Sci yawned, and his eyes slowly shit on their own. Not to sleep. Just to rest his eyes a bit. Yeah.
He pulled his lab coat closer toward off the chill in the room, and sat there, his eyes closed until he-
drifted off.
It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes later that Sci was awoken by rapid, intense beeping.
Sci groaned, mourning the lack of a rest despite how he
d insisted he wasn’t going to sleep. That didn’t matter. He was tiiiiiired….
Wait, why was there beeping? He’d completely disassembled all of the alarm clocks in the house months ago, how did they come back? Were they here for revenge? To disassemble him? Sci would fight any that tried. Sci bet he could drop-kick an alarm! Sure, he’d never fought anyone, but he could if he wanted to! Would drop-kicking an alarm be easier or harder than drop-kicking a rooster…?
As Sci shook off the last bits of grogginess, he registered the source of beeping as the tracker which didn’t have a snooze button, so all hope was lost.
Hm. Maybe Sci wasn’t quite as awake as he thought.
Wait. The tracker was beeping?
Sci shot up in his seat, scrambling off it to get to the relentlessly beeping tracker on his desk.
“The tracker! Did it…?!” He frantically checked the message onscreen the machine.
[100% MATCH. SIGNAL FOUND! REQUEST ACCESS?]
Sci didn’t know what the “request access” was about, but he hurriedly punched in “yes”.
[NO REQUEST NEEDED. PLEASE STAND BACK FOR LOCATION ACQUISITION.]
This Sci was ready for. As the machine hummed and glowed brighter, Sci grabbed the tracker and secured it around his left arm, weaving it between his ulna and his radius.
There was a bright light and Sci shut his eyes, going a bit lightheaded again. When Sci opened his eyes again, he was standing in front of a rip in reality. He was a void… made entirely of white, so not the Save Screen.
But the tracker’s ever-present beeping placed Geno’s signal in there, so Sci stepped in without a second thought.
Which, in hindsight, was a very stupid thing to do. But Sci did it, and soon the tracker led him further into the void and he couldn’t go back anyways. The portal had closed.
Sci trekked on, barely paying attention to anything other than the tracker. His adrenaline was through the roof, no adrenaline left, and his body was buzzing with anticipation.
The tracker kept beeping, although, strangely, didn’t point in any particular direction. So Sci just kept moving forwards, checking the signal and adjusting to no results.
And then, he saw something off in the distance, breaking up the white.
Sci gasped, and immediately began sprinting with reckless abandon. Was it him? Was it Geno? Was it something that could lead him to Geno? Was it Geno?
If only he had looked up, he might have seen the webbed ceiling, with scores of souls tied up and flashing a warning for anyone foolish enough to go near.
If only he had thought for a second, he might have felt the air (or lack thereof) shift as he got closer, a feeling of static in the air increasing and radiating wrong wrong wrong.
If only he hadn’t gone in that portal in the first place, he might have avoided what was to come. He wouldn’t have to go on a blind, hopeless chase for a man that didn’t even exist anymore.
Sci approached the figure, and instead of a familiar, welcoming face, with white clothes and an ever-bleeding wound-
Sci found a foreign, scowling skeleton wearing all the primary colors at once and somehow still giving off an aura of danger that had Sci frozen in his tracks.
“You’re not…” Sci trailed off as the dark skeleton looked at him, frowned, raised a hand, and filled the air with charged magic.
If only he had dodges.
Sci shrieked as he felt his soul explode with pain, his HP falling to zero as everything-
went-
black.