Chapter Text
The void was dim and grey. A figure focused into view and he hummed. The Masked Man wore a dark brown kimono that covered his entire body and his hands. He wore a black cloak and a hood over his head. He began to turn. A porcelain mask came into view that covered his entire face. The eyes were outlined in black and the rest of the mask was a pale white, but there were details of a human nose and lips.
— — —
Sans sat up with a groan. He was lying on an open suitcase with two photos taped to the top part of it. He sighed and brought himself to his feet. The metal giant that he was inside swayed. He stepped out and looked inside of the small space he found himself in.
The floor and walls were a dull grey and there were pipes, water, and a few boxes a bit farther away to Sans’ left. There was light coming out of a hole in the ceiling.
Sans turned into the small “hallway,” if it could even be called that since it was more of a small walkway. He knew that he was much smaller than the world he was in, of course, because of the size of the briefcase. No other reason.
He began to walk when he stopped once more. A nome was standing a foot in front of him. Reminders of a distant past come to haunt him, he thought. Sans stepped toward it, but it ran. Sans followed, flicking open his lighter that he’d found shortly after arriving.
Sans walked along the floor, listening to the sounds of his prison. It creaked and moaned as it swayed slowly. He noticed a small, unlit lantern and lit it with his lighter. He wanted to be back home. Back in his messed up bed in the underground with his friends and the feeling of snow falling in Snowdin, the water dripping onto his skull from the ceiling in Waterfall, the warmth of lava on the ground and in the air in Hotland, and the neatness of the Capital.
He stared at the lantern for another moment before he pulled open a vent door with difficulty. He wished he had some new company already. He tugged his jacket around him. It was wet, but his damp pants, shirt, and jacket was all he had. His bare feet hurt from his journey without any shoes. Running and running on straight bones was bound to hurt eventually.
He crawled through the vent and crawled up a small ledge inside of it until he reached the end. He dropped out in front of some stairs and machinery on the wall. Sans stepped onto the stairs and stared at the misty void to his left and right. Enormous chains connected the walls.
The skeleton scanned his surroundings. “ i need to leave and go back home, ” Sans thought, more serious than he thought he ever had been.
He continued until he got off the stairs and then walked forward until he saw a small alcove in the wall. On the floor in the middle, there was a porcelain statuette of a masked man in a kimono. The same figure in his dream. Sans grabbed the statuette and launched it away, listening to it smash into small pieces. Black mist seemed to come out of it, flowing out of view.
He crawled under a boarded up door through a gap and saw an odd room with a couch, a dresser, a bucket, weird machinery, a box, and a stripped bedframe with a thin mattress. There was another vent above the bed. He hopped up onto it and jumped up and down on it, just like he was a baby bones again.
“You’d Jump Even Higher If You Knew What If You Knew What Slept There!”
A voice echoed around him, but it faded like the wind. He hoped he wasn’t going insane from being in the prison as he searched for the source. With a shake of the head, Sans got inside the vent and dropped onto a mattress in the next room.
In front of him were two very long legs dangling from the ceiling. The man hung himself, evident by the chair beneath him and an envelope on the ground next to the chair. No time to think about it. He needed to escape this place. Sans looked at a door with an eye and a handle that he couldn’t reach and began to drag the chair toward it.
“ sorry, but i need to borrow this. ” Sans thought to himself, pushing back the guilt of using a dead man’s chair to leave.
He jumped onto the door handle using the chair and swung into the next room. Inside, some of the floorboards were warped or broken. Black goo covered the left half of the floor and the wall had some holes in it so he could see the blue-grey mist behind it.
At the end of the goo, he noticed that the room got bigger. There was also a fridge with two handprints on it. He pulled it open and a nome popped out, scurrying away.
“ wait, come back! ” Sans called softly, glad to see any more proof of life in the prison.
Sans took a deep breath and followed the nome into a small hole that he began to crawl through. The nome sat next to an unlit lamp, so Sans lit it and watched the nome perk up and warm its hands. He walked around the lamp and gave the nome a gentle hug. He needed something to ground him. His mind was running with memories from before he ended up in the metal giant.
He wanted to go back home, where he wasn’t the size of the Annoying Dog that— where everything was the right size.
He crawled back out of the hole and headed back to the fridge that was now open and had many shelves that he climbed up to get to the wooden slant roof above. He jumped onto the next floor and listened to the sound of the giant fan outside of the large holes in the walls. He heard a squelching sound and a black tube leech came crawling at him after dropping from a pipe on the ceiling. He ran from it without a problem, since it was thankfully slow, and jumped across the gap between where it was and the next platform.
He ran across the wood, ignoring the aching in his heels. Two out of three leeches on pipes dropped down but Sans ran into the next door too quickly to make them interested in taking his life. Inside the small room, there was a lever above a box to his left. Sans jumped up onto it and grabbed ahold of the lever, using his weight to pull the lever down.
The lever opened sliding metal doors and then raised another gate door behind them. Sans slipped through and jumped across a small gap in the ground where the two platforms were probably supposed to go out and connect to each other above more misty nothingness. He ran underneath a rising metal grate door and began to pull off the bottom board over a boarded doorway when the metal gate shut behind him.
“ because why should i be allowed to go back if i forgot something? ” Sans thought, sighing aloud.
When the board flew off, it hit him in the head, making him slam into the ground. Ouch. Thanks a lot. For some reason, wherever he was wasn’t allowing him to use his magic or die from one hit like he would’ve in the underground. It also made him feel less exhausted. Useful, but he didn’t like not being able to use magic. Sans always avoided getting himself hurt since he knew that one hit could dust him instantly. But wherever he was, he was fine if he got a bit hurt.
He crawled underneath the boarded door and ended up in a room with a suspended lantern that he couldn’t reach, a large hole in the floor, and a nome that ran away from him. When Sans tried to chase it, some boards beneath him broke, sending him falling into black goo.
Sans pushed himself to his feet and noticed multiple leeches coming toward him. He turned on his lighter and walked into a dry area and noticed three or four more came for him from his right. Then, even more around him. He began to run. He had to avoid the leeches. He wasn’t naïve, he knew they’d kill him as soon as one even dared to touch him.
All he could hear was his soul, the leeches screeching and squeaking, and his footsteps. He ran past the leeches and around their gaping maws, bouncing over a few until he reached a wood slab over a doorway. He pushed against it until it fell.
He was unscathed. He walked through the door into the dark, relieved that the leeches didn’t follow him. Sans hopped over the gap of planks on the small bridge in front of him. When he got across, he lit a lantern to his left. He went up a wooden plank ladder just to the right of it and turned on his lighter, prompting a nome to run out from behind a bucket across a wooden plank.
Sans carefully walked over it and up some wooden stairs going the other way from where he came. The metal giant creaked and moaned again, its foreboding song echoing through the chambers. The path forward was a dead end, so he turned right and walked along the path until he noticed another small gap to his left. He jumped across and turned to walk up the stairs to his left. At the top, he followed the path to his left turned onto a U-shaped path. At the end, there was a crank just big enough to put both of his hands on.
He moved it counterclockwise and saw a door opening on the other side of the dark room. Light poured in and as soon as Sans let go, it started to close quickly. Sans sprinted away and jumped over the gap in the U-shaped path and dashed toward the door. He slid under the door a second before it closed and ended up in a very grey room with a large fan on the wall.
He noticed a vent door down and to the left of the fan and pulled it open. A nome ran out and into a hole in the wall in front of the closed door. Sans ran over to it and crawled through. He dropped down off of some oversized boxes and ran out onto the bridge.
Overhead, he heard something being dragged against the ground. He looked up and saw the form of a giant humanoid creature dragging some kind of box or cage across the bridge above him.
Once the creature passed out of view, he noticed a makeshift rope made out of a sheet dangling from a window. He began to climb onto it, hardly holding on. As he got to the top, he realized that the window was quite small, a bit bigger than he was, and it was barred. He squeezed through the bars and landed on another box in a bathroom. The sink was abnormally tall, but he noticed yet another unlit lantern next to it. As if it was habit, he walked up to the lantern and lit it.
He pushed open the cracked open door and found himself in a room that looked oddly like another bathroom with an L-shaped counter that had toilet covers on top of them. Gross. Who would willingly sit side by side with someone to go to the bathroom? There were rolls of toilet paper on the counter, the floor, and a shelf on the back wall. There was also a crate of toilet paper on the floor and a lever up high on a wall. He noticed a barred doorway with electrically charged wire over it, stopping him from being able to run through.
Sans walked over to the crate of toilet paper and grabbed the handle, pulling it over to the base of the wall below the lever. He hopped on top of the crate and launched himself up onto the lever’s handle, bringing it down. The lights and the electricity cut off and he began to run through the room toward the door as he heard some sort of timer begin to click.
He squeezed through the wires and began to sprint through a dark playroom. He ran through the room until he reached the other barred door on the other side and squeezed through. He began to run past seven doors in a hall and ran into a room with wet floors, stone children, a pillar, a bed tipped on its side, and a wall of cages on the other side.
As he stepped inside and almost began to run across the room, a large, robotic eyeball on the wall opened and began to emit a golden light. It looked at the pillar first, then the bed, and then the wall. Then, it came back the same way in a perfectly timed movement. He guessed that the stone children were turned that way because of the light. He wasn’t sure how, but he didn’t exactly want to find out. As soon as the light moved to the other wall, he ran behind the bed. Then, once it looked back to the pillar, Sans ran over to the wall of cages.
He jumped up onto a box to reach a lantern on another. Once he lit it, he noticed that he could climb the cages up to the next level, and then he noticed a hole in the wall behind him. He climbed up to the top and then turned directly right to drop down onto another box, a locker, and then a couple more boxes. He heard a nome and crawled through the hole, ending up in a room with boxes, a painting of a nome, another unlit lantern, and a nome standing in front of it.
Sans ran up to the nome and gave it a quick, strong hug before he let it go to light the lantern. He sat down for a moment next to the nome, who mimicked him in sitting down. He put his head down on his arms, taking a few minutes to process everything. He was tired, high strung, and he felt a twinge of hunger. He wanted to go home.
With a groan and a sigh, he stood back up and jumped up on a box, jumping grabbing onto the edge of the vent. He crawled back through and walked back over to the lantern and the cage ladder. Sans climbed back up and went along the five closed doors, turning left past two more into an open room.
Inside, there was a bed that looked oddly like a familiar hospital bed, a pool of black leech goo coming out from below the bed in a puddle, and a large drawing of an eye beside the bed, looking at the headboard. There were paper drawings of eyes scattered all across the floor around the puddle. Sans avoided the goop and grabbed another statuette and exited the room, throwing it down onto the lower floor with the glowing eye.
Sans went back to the cage wall and passed by it, going into an open doorway. Inside, there were tons of beds that matched the one in the other room. The only difference was that there were children on them. Sans slid under the one directly in front of him as a door opened on his left.
The creature from earlier pushed open the door with his grotesquely long arms. His legs were oddly short compared to his arms and he sniffed around, stretching and wiggling his arms. His neck creaked as he felt around until he reached the door that Sans came out of, and the Janitor left. Once he guessed that the Janitor couldn’t hear him anymore, he ran out from under the bed and ran toward a doorway on the other side of the room.
Inside, he climbed up two stacked cages on his left and jumped onto a shelf on the wall. From there, he jumped up onto a higher shelf in front of him on the back wall. He crawled across it and squeezed through the vent. He lit his lighter to see and went through the rest of the vent until he landed on some kind of box on the other side.
Once he began to walk across the wooden floors, a gut wrenching feeling filled his body, making him instinctively crouch over and grip where his stomach would be. He felt his teeth begin to change and get sharper as his jaw unhinged. A forked tongue made its way out of his now open jaw. His phalanges grew sharp. He didn’t pay any attention to it as he felt his eyes go red. He had no idea how he was going to eat any food here, since he figured none of it was monster food. What was going on?
Sans ran forward until he got to a small side hallway next to a barred off cafeteria. He felt another viscous hunger pang and he stumbled forward, clutching the magic body he’d somehow managed to summon. He couldn’t use any magic but that. As he continued past the bars, he noticed a child, his height, sitting slouched over on a bunch on the other side.
He couldn’t see what the boy looked like, but he seemed to be concerned as he looked over to the hooded skeleton. The boy on the other side stood up and glanced at the bread he held before he tossed it through the bars.
Sans stumbled toward it, sinking his teeth, now sharp as daggers, into the center of the bread. It wasn’t monster food, and he didn’t have a stomach, so he wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but he would kill to not feel the painful hunger pangs. Out of the corner of his eye, above him standing on boxes, he saw a familiar black figure. He ignored it and devoured the loaf of bread before him, the boy watching before he sat back down.
“ ...thank you, ” he said to the boy, and nodded to him in appreciation. Sans jumped up the boxes where the shadowy figure stood and squeezed through the broken bars. His feet screamed up at him when he landed hard on the cold concrete.
He ignored the noose and the cages as he ran through a doorway. It seemed to be a shower room, the floor still uncomfortably wet. He ran by and passed into another room, where he ran across a metal bridge. The doorway before him was buzzing with electricity, so he turned left and on top of some crates. If Sans climbed the stacked crates, he would probably be able to find something to turn it off.
He climbed up crates with grating and jumped onto a raised crate that he otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach. He climbed up more crates, and at the top, saw a cube of a couple crates swaying back and forth through the air by a thick chain. Sans lit a lantern at the top and sprinted from an extended part of the path onto the top of the crate. He looked around, not seeing anything else, until he looked up the chain and saw another platform at the top.
“ that could work… ” Sans thought, putting his fingers through the gaps of the chain to get a decent grip. At the top, he glanced at the distance between himself and the platform. Untrusting of his abilities to launch himself from the chain, he climbed a bit higher before catapulting himself off.
He climbed up some more grated cages after landing, which was really starting to hurt his fingers. At the top, there was a pulldown lever on the wall to his left and a lever on the floor in front of him. He pulled down the lever on the wall that he could thankfully reach and the chained cube of cages raised to just below his level, so he’d be able to jump on the top again.
Sans moved to the lever on the floor and moved it from the middle to his left, which brought the cage coming to him. He paused. If he timed it well, he could move the lever all the way to the right and jump on, making it to the other side, where there was yet another platform. He wondered how some of these were able to be accessed by those working in the prison, like the Janitor.
He breathed in and out, calming himself before he moved the lever all the way to his right. He heard the gears spinning and began to run to catch onto the side of the cube. He landed hard on it, but pulled himself up with a pained wheeze. Once it reached the other side, he climbed up the chain and jumped to the higher platform.
He heard some sort of mechanical buzzing and saw a messy filing cabinet, a lever too high on the wall, and another electric gate. The cabinets on the right were extended just enough, but the middle and left cabinets weren’t. He pulled out the bottom one on the left completely, and then pulled out the middle one on the left as much as he could without falling. Jumping onto it, he prepared to jump onto the top at an angle, since there was a fourth cabinet on the left. Sans made the jump anyway, and let out a sigh of relief when he made it.
He jumped off, wrapping his hands around the handle on the lever as he fell, and as the lever reached the bottom, he was enveloped in pitch black. He huffed and turned on his lighter, shoving himself through the gate to the left of the filing cabinet.
In that room, Sans noticed a hole in the floor. A rope dangled by the floor below him and went sort of bar above him, and connected to a box on his level. He’d seen that type of puzzle before. He lit the lantern on the far side of the room and freed a nome from a cage. It made a noise of…curiosity, Sans guessed, as he released the nome. Once it could, it popped out and ran into the room he came from. He ran in and found the nome tucked in a small area between the gate and the cabinet. He squeezed it close, letting the feeling of a small, quick heartbeat match his own soul’s quick beats.
Sans went back to the room with the rope and pushed the box off the side, waiting for the end of the rope to reach him. Once it did, he put his hands through the center of the noose and sunk down, down, and down. He prayed his aching hands would cooperate as he went down the darkening path of metal pipes and walls. So many nooses in this cursed place.
Once he let go, he found himself in the shower room again and the box went right back down without Sans’ extra weight. As he ran through the shower room again, more leeches squawked and chittered as they came toward him. He weaved through the squeaking leeches and ran to the gate at the other end of the metal bridge, thankfully no longer buzzing with electricity.
He wheezed from the extensive running as he went through the gate and ended up in another room with the glowing eyeball. He hid behind a cabinet and once it looked to his far right, he ran behind another thing of boxes. Sans ran behind a janitor’s cart and scrambled to catch up with it as it slid by, shielding him from the eyeball. The prison swaying made this so much harder.
The eye locked onto the cart, and he went behind some stacked crates. When it looked away again, he ran through the doorway. There, he could see blue mist blurring what he could see in the distance to his right and left. He dropped down metal stairs and started to run across the bridge in the middle until it started to split. A box fell down the gap and Sans just barely made it over the side. He jumped up onto a crate that would give him the height to reach safety. He made it up and watched the box he stood on a few moments before plummet down into the mist.
A grate closed behind him again, but he just shook his head and continued. He ran through the dark room as a door opened before him. Two nomes ran out in front of him and into the next room.
“Look How The Canary Has Flown Its Cage!”
Sans looked around. Did he hear the voice again? Whatever it was sounded a bit mocking, like someone making fun of him. Rude.