songs for the fallen

frisk meets a flower and has an existential crisis

Frisk 
_____

They really, really shouldn't be alive.

They don't know how far they fell, only that it was far enough. Only that they should be dead and bloodied with their bones smashed into bits on the cave floor, not sitting up no worse for wear than scrapes on their hands and a nasty bruise on their butt. Which does hurt, to be entirely fair, but not nearly enough for someone who fell so far they can barely see the top of the pit they jumped through anymore.

They can just make out the rim. The darkness that obscured the bottom of the cave is, paradoxically, gone, and pale, weak moonlight filters down through the gaps in the stone ceiling far above. They push themself to their feet in the dewy flowers, squinting into the darkness that surrounds them and trying to figure out where exactly they are. There's no way they'd be able to climb out. Even if they could, they don't want to. They don't want to go back to Ebott and its unseasonable snow and the people who care just enough about them to look at them like a fly they wish they could swat. They peer down at the flowers, wincing at their relatively minor butt bruise as they try to figure out if the golden blossoms are the same ones that had just started their seasonal bloom in the center of town when the snowstorm hit.

They shake themself off, surveying their surroundings. Rugged pillars rise around them on all sides, reaching up towards the hole in the earth like drowning hands desperate for purchase, swept away on a rocky sea. The stone enclosing them is a tannish gray, hints of purple pebbles interspersed closer to a tunnel leading deeper into the mountain. Frisk knows how this kind of thing works. They watched plenty of horror movies from behind foster-home couches, neglectful guardian after neglectful guardian oblivious to where they stood peeking through their hands at the screen. Rule number two of horror movies is don't go into the basement. (Rule number one, of course, is don't split up, but seeing as they came down here all on their own, they don't think they need to worry about that.) Perhaps the cave tunnel isn't a basement, but it's the closest thing they can get this far beneath a mountain. Frisk knows a lot about horror movies. They know this is a bad idea.

They also know, in a horror movie, going into a creepy tunnel is the only way to progress the plot.

So they do. They follow the passage around a corner, ignoring the strange cloudy feeling blotting at the corners of their mind. Their head feels heavy, and their vision is a little out of focus--maybe they're a little concussed. That's the most reasonable explanation, giving how far they fell, but their head doesn't hurt. It just feels...crowded.

They push through into another open cavern. There's only one flower in this one. It looks lonely, standing in the middle of a patch of scraggly, dull cave grass. Somehow, Frisk gets the feeling that something is very much not right here.

That feeling is proven to be correct when the flower opens its eyes.

Flowers are not supposed to have eyes. Frisk hasn't gone to school since they were eight, but that's around the age you start learning about the life stages of plants in science class. They know about seeds and sprouts and buds and blossoms and fruiting and wilting and decomposition, on a very basic level. Nowhere on their second-grade teacher's Life Cycle Of A Tomato Plant poster was there anything about plants having eyes. Or mouths, for that matter. Plants can't talk.

This one doesn't seem to care.

"Howdy!" it says, petal-rimmed face twisting into an uncanny display of cheerfulness. "I'm Flowey! Flowey the Flower!"

"That's a dumbass name," Frisk says, not really thinking about it. For all they know they're dead and this is some kind of twisted purgatory for kids who kill themselves. The talking flower certainly isn't helping them feel very real right now. "I hope you didn't pick that out yourself."