The Undying

Memory Modifier

"As far as I know, you can't. Shortcuts leave no trace, and it seems to me that they're going to be too well-hidden to find in a more conventional way if they're having to shortcut to it"

"Well then what the hell are we going to do?"

At that, Sans looked down at the place where his hands rested on the table that held the monitor. Undyne was surprised to see his bodily magic spark and tears form, falling softly onto his carpals and staining them blue. "I don't know" he said simply, his voice breaking on the last word.

Undyne was beyond shocked. She had never seen Sans cry. Not even when his father--

She pushed the thought away and laid a hand on his shoulder. He flinched slightly, but didn't make any move to shove her off, so she stayed where she was.

"I-I'm sorry" he said, wiping hastily at his face. "I don't know where that came from, I just...this could mean some seriously bad things. You...you have no way of knowing how bad"

She just looked at him for a moment before speaking. "Well, then, asshole. Maybe it's about time you told me"

X-X-X-X

Undyne eyed the little device warily. "Sans, are you sure about this?" she asked, for about the hundredth time.

"Nah, I'm never sure of anything when I'm wasted"

She glared at him, not entirely sure he was joking, and he chuckled darkly. "Just for the record, I am sober at the moment"

Despite herself, she felt her body relax slightly in relief.

"Well, mostly"

"Oh my god, shut the fuck up and just do it already"

She still couldn't quite believe everything she'd been told, but she figured that with the things she had seen already today, she should really just accept it.

According to Sans, they were stuck in a sort of time loop, caused by an anomaly in the form of a human child. He'd said that they "reset" the timeline every few weeks, killing all different combinations of monsters, sometimes killing no one at all and actually taking all of monsterkind up to the surface to live happily for a few days before starting all over again, and sometimes hunting down and killing every single monster in the underground.

For what equated to years, Sans had been forced to endure this alone, telling no one, living the same stretch of time over and over again with no way to stop it, no way to predict who would survive and who would not.

When he'd told her about the times Papyrus had been murdered for his kindness, offering encouragement and telling the human how much better they could be even as his body turned to dust, she had offered him the scarf back. She'd seen him die once, and Sans had been forced to see it, find his dust, thousands of times. She thought he deserved it far more than she did, but he'd only shaken his head. "I was serious when I said to keep it, Undyne. I've worn that scarf far too many times, and it's always ended with...well..." and he'd rubbed at his sternum through his shirt absently, refusing to tell her exactly what had happened.

He'd continued with the narrative a bit more quietly after that, telling her how he'd started drinking every reset because, as he said with the most mirthless laugh she'd ever heard, he couldn't even kill himself properly, he'd just come back next reset. So he'd needed an escape. In one of the resets, apparently, he'd drunk a little too much and ended up in the labs. He didn't say why he had gone there, but Undyne was fairly certain that she knew.

He said Alphys had found him, and he'd let everything out. Every reset, every death, all of his pain, came spilling out amidst sobs and pleas to just leave him alone to stop feeling it all.