UnderAsriel

38 - An Ending

Darkness.

That was all there was. Pure, empty, glorious darkness. Like sleeping, except it was real. Physical. Silent. There were no nightmares. No dreams.

Kel sat up. She felt... airy. The pain was gone, her chest uncrushed. Her muscles no longer ached, her head no longer hurt. In fact, she felt better than she'd ever felt. Better than she'd ever hoped to feel.

So.... I'm dead?

She hadn't felt the blade hit her chest, dig into her heart. She'd seen no blood, no shreds of flesh. Just the knife, swinging down, flashing in the light.

And then darkness.

But... not darkness like the dark sky of the arena. She'd thought that was death, too, but this - this was real darkness. Absolute darkness. No matter where she looked, where she turned, everything was the same. The same black. The same nothing.

She glanced down, and her body was there - but, it wasn't really her body. It was glowing, glowing white in the dark. And she wasn't wearing her red uniform anymore. She was wearing the clothes she'd worn the morning she'd set off after Frisk, except they were fresher, cleaner, crisper, like she'd bought them five minutes ago. Her vest was no longer missing a button, her boots no longer cracked or worn. 

And she noticed with a spur of delight that her dad's bandana was wrapped once more around her wrist, glowing white just like everything else about her.

My dad...

Her dad. If she was dead, and he was dead, did that mean -

She sprang to her feet, and it felt like flying, like she barely had to move and she was up. Her body was light, whole. Indestructible. Almost like she was floating, weightless.

"Dad?" she asked hesitantly, and then, "Mom?"

Her voice echoed through the darkness, an eerie echo, like being inside a subway tunnel. There was no answer. She turned in a circle, peering through the shadows, and her heart sunk somewhat within her, because the darkness was everything. It was all that could be seen. There were no other people, no other lights.

What did she do? Was she supposed to, like, walk through the darkness?? Walk until she found someone? Was she going to find someone??

"...Sans?" she tried next, hoping beyond hope that the cheerful face of her dead friend would loom suddenly out of the shadows.

"I am afraid not," said a low voice behind her, and Kel spun around, startled.

She swore he hadn't been there two seconds before, but there he was. A thin skeleton, slightly shorter than Papyrus, but taller than Sans, and unmistakably unfamiliar. His head was round and narrow, his dark sockets lit with shining white pupils. There were cracks running down his face, above his right eye and below his left, like someone had taken a sledgehammer to his skull. He was dressed in black robes that draped down to the floor, so that he looked a bit like the darkness himself, but he was glowing white, just like she was.

He was honestly pretty frightening, and it didn't help that those white pupils were boring directly into her own. She took an unconscious step backward.

"Uh... hi?"

"Hello," said the skeleton. The response was strangely automatic, like he was some sort of robot. Adding onto that, he was very... well, empty. There was no emotion in his voice, or in his eyes. 

"I am Dr. W. D. Gaster. A pleasure to meet you."

Didn't seem like much of a pleasure to him. Kel squinted, wondering what the heck this guy was doing in her afterlife. Was he Satan?