Eyes of Stone (Gaster!Sans x Reader)

12. The Day I Saw

"chara." My voice was heavy, wavering slightly with dread. Goosebumps erupted on my skin and my hair stood on end, a coldness hovering over the back of my neck.

"Howdy. Was wondering where you'd got up to," chara spoke, an eerie dryness to her voice, like she was incredibly bored. I could almost see her picking at her nails, "That idiot was able to give you your memories back.." she hissed, her voice echoing like we were in a tunnel, bouncing off imaginary walls. I breathed silently, my chest rising and falling quickly. I felt my soul heavy in my chest, resonating with fear and a prominent lack of bravery. If only I had a soul of bravery, or determination. What good would integrity do me in the long run?

"Integrity.. You're honest, and you live strongly by morals..." Honesty? It wasn't like I could attack chara with the truth, or try and bap the immorality out of her!

Unless..

"Frisk.." I muttered, attempting to unravel some of the mystery around me, and also hoping to stall for time before chara inevitably pounced. Something stirred in the air, but chara was hopefully too distracted to notice.

"Yes, Frisk. There were only so many timelines she could go through and repeat before breaking something, someone. And then, I arrived," chara spoke maliciously, as if there was something so obvious that she knew and I didn't, "Well, 'arrived' as a loose term. Being outside of reality has its ups and downs.." She mused. I was left to glance around me as chara's voice felt like thick but seamless smoke, hanging like wet laundry in the air. The fact that I could only hear her voice but not see her body only sent surges of trepidation running up and down my back, like my heart was pumping it as naturally as blood. How a teenager could do this to anyone seemed ridiculous, but I had a feeling that chara was much, much older than she first let on. She had a youthful appearance, rosy cheeks, striped sweater and all; but the way she spoke- it was as if she had seen all there was to be seen, and I was catching the running theme of timelines in both chara and Frisk. Timelines and chara's seemingly expansive knowledge of them implied that she had an equally large experience of them.

A heavy pressure was absentmindedly building behind my eyes as I pushed for answers in my frustrating lack of memory. It was as if a huge chunk had been bitten out of my mind, and I knew it something to do with not just chara (that much was obvious, she was the canon villain here like most video game tropes), but also Frisk. It was as if we were sharing memories. I decided that there was a lot more going on here that presently I couldn't figure out, that despite the time difference and the fact that she died a long time ago, our lives were still very much intertwined.

I need to ask G about this, I thought to myself, but as soon as I thought it a painful ache rose up in my soul, my actual soul, and it was so physically there it sent me reeling. I remembered something we had talked about years ago, months on top of that, something about souls and how they're connected to emotion and feeling. Like, monsters couldn't live without compassion and love, that's how their souls worked - however humans could live without it. chara was a prime example for that, but even there I wasn't sure if she was entirely human. Every human at least once in their life must have felt some sort of compassion, if not then, I couldn't see how that was humane, ironically.

We had a lot to learn from monsters, I concluded. However, I had bigger fish to fry than simply pondering over the nature of souls. That was a conversation saved for Alphys and G, if I ever saw them again.

"What do you want, chara?" My voice was slightly reedy, but held a new courage to it, not quite bravery but something close enough to get me on my way.

"I want exactly what Dr Gaster wanted," chara giggled as I caught my breath. Even after all this time, he rarely left my thoughts, and I knew that when he was still... alive, he had a desire for my soul, despite its prominent capacity of pathetic-ness, or so I thought at the time.