Haunting a reaper in training

Sci's not paid enough to deal with this (2)

He didn't succeed.

"A thing" Sci ended up saying, looking unimpressed at Red. The Underfell Sans shrugged lamely. "That's not a lot to go off. Care to elaborate?"

"Remember the Multiverse thing that put as all in quarantine in our AUs?"

Sci groaned, already feeling the stress on his skull rise again. His shoulders slumped as he looked at Red with mild exasperation. It seemed like everything was related to that incident these days. He couldn't even go outside his AU to help the rest. Sci's AU, or more accurate, his timeline, was in jeopardy if he left because of that very same Multiverse quarantine, as Red put it.

The code had already been unstable way back. Back when it was just Sci and After, more so when it was only Sci left of the supposed trio of Sanses Aftertale should have. But now? Now it just needed the slighlest push to topple over and destroy itself.

Sci was grateful Red could still come over and exit without problems, but he himself was a key player on the codes. The only Sans Aftertale and its various timelines had left. He couldn't in good conscience try to leave the AU, he just couldn't risk Aftertale as a whole because he wanted to access the Multiverse to hang out.

And while he wasn't sure if the AU would destroy itself or adapt once more, he wasn't about to test his luck when countless Science Sanses had perished already on the span of three months.

"Are you serious right now? How could I not remember that?" The bitterness in Sci's voice was obvious. Red winced. "You know I'm the only Science Sans left because of it."

Sci took off his red glasses, busying himself with cleaning them on his sweater. He used that as an excuse to look at his task, avoiding direct contact with Red's eye-lights.

Countless copies, all gone in an instant. There wasn't even anyone to blame, it just happened naturally. It wasn't an easy pill to swallow, especially when he was still at risk of that happening to him. Where once there were countless copies of Science Sans, there was now just once. Sci himself.

"I'm still here thanks to my timeline's tie to Aftertale, but we don't know if that won't change."

Sci tried very hard not to think about that possibility. He wanted to go out there and help, everyone on the Sanses council needed him now more than ever, and yet... When he thought about how fickle glitched AUs were, he couldn't help but see his Papyrus and wonder what would happen. Would all of them die, as if the Destroyer himself had passed through or would they become glitches, similar to the likes of Geno and Error, forever handicapped by their own shifting code?

None of the options seemed appealing, he couldn't risk everyone like that. He couldn't risk Papyrus like that.

Red clenched his hands and gritted his teeth, yet again reminded of a topic he had tried to not think about. He tried to avoid thinking about what could happen to Sci, too, but he wasn't all that successful, so he tried to steer the conversation away from that particularly uncomfortable and daunting topic instead. "When it happened, Goth was sent to his mother's AU. The Save Screen, specifically."

Sci visibly froze, his eye-sockets widening. Goth had been closer to him during this incident than he wanted to admit, but he never would have known or noticed if he wasn't told due to the different timelines. If Goth had ended up on the Save Screen, it had to be during After's or Geno's phase. To be trapped in the Save Screen during the three months that took everyone to be able to get out of their AUs couldn't have been nice, and that was putting it mildly.

If Geno was to be believed back when he was still around and they talked about their AU (because that's the kind of thing they did back in the early days, how much Sci missed those relatively simpler times), Goth would have been alone all that time with just an unstable Gaster lurking around in the darkness. Sci grimaced.