Number All my Bones: There and Back and There Again

chapter four: a blackness

We went into the nullifier room, and there she stood.
Betty. It makes me sick to call her that now. The word "Betty" starts at the bottom of my chest, taps the backs of my teeth, makes a sweet sound that reminds me of a bird's song.
Betty came a few moments later. I didn't even bother to look at Alphys' worried face or Jessica's slightly less terrified one. I only saw Betty. Betty.
"Alphys, you know what to do. Let me through."
The door opened, and the creaking of the metal against the ground turned into a sort of grinding, and it prepared my instincts for the fight. I'd turn Betty into nothing more than that piece of metal. I'd do it quick, and I'd be home to have dinner with my other son. I'd do it ruthless, and I'd do it with a smile.
This was the type of person she'd turned me into, and it was the type of person she'd get.
Where did the cloud go? I'm not sure where the cloud went. But wherever it went, it filled me up and made me into something different, something I don't like to think about now whenever I wake up in the middle of the night.
I was brutal. I was enigmatic. I was dazzling. For once, for once, I was everything my son wanted me to be and more. I was a god. And I hoped to God that Sans was watching from above and getting the best kick he'd ever had out of this.
I must have done some things to her that would take medical paragraphs upon paragraphs to describe. I must have dislocated so many joints, broken so many bones, comminuting at least two. I must have slammed her head against the wall until she was slumped for the rest of the battle. I must have rendered her entire right hand unusable. I must have been what the Anti-Monster Department always thought I was and what I always thought I would be. Something I was always ashamed of becoming.
A monster.
But the funniest thing was I stuck far, far away from her the entire fight. While she lay clinging to the wall, I made my way to the center. Each and every time I tried to get even an inch farther away from her, the image of my son lying too still brought me brought me back to that same acute closeness. Each time I tried to get even an inch closer to her, her scythe cut and choked at me until the loose part of the sleeve underneath my arm was all but ribbons.
I could get hurt.
But in my eyes, I was still more divine than anyone else I knew. And I leapt towards her. I broke more of her, her arm trying to writhe itself into action after me shoving it into the wall. But there was one thing that was always constant: I never looked
into
her
eyes.
And I rejected everything. Each and every scientific principle, I tossed to the side. I was a flaming fire. I was a pool of water, submerged to the neck and blown on by winds chilled to the negatives. With each principle I tossed to the side, there was a part of Betty I took hold of, tossed to the wall. Her foot. Her hand. Her arm. She was my ragdoll.
But never her eyes. Never her eyes.
In an instant, I felt something stir. It started at my center, reaching in a vortex out towards the blind spot right in between my eyes, cascaded outwards. And in a sudden moment, it wasn't mine. I felt something uncontrollably uncomfortable, something I hoped I would never escalate into... dread.
She was dread. And she was fierce.
I could even feel my son leaving me.
In a few seconds, I whipped around, noticed the same powers, the same blasters I had invented when I was a child, leaving me. She was taking them away.
I couldn't let her do this. I put up my leg, barreled into her, did a part of what I thought had to be done, but she waved an adieu to me, and in an interval of time my brain couldn't process, the back of my head was slamming against the wall on the other side of the room.
No. No. No. It couldn't be like this.
I tried to reach out to her, to evoke every single image I could, each ounce of anger, all of them primal, all of them unwanted. All of them horribly, utterly unscientific. All of them cascading like waters on the beach.
It couldn't be like this.
It couldn't be like this at all.
And Betty's hand had lifted, and she had turned me into her own ragdoll. What was once mine, those beautiful Blasters I had carved from my own sweat and love, was now in her hands, the same hands that grasped onto that stupid, serpent-javelin.
Blood.
Blood poured down.
At first, I took a portion of it off of the back of my head, winced, and stared at it. It's a wonderful thing, one that I had only studied in humans up until then. The loss of it could cause confusion, such as I was very well under. Hemoglobin. It requires a complex cardiovascular system in humans, the heart to channel the blood through the veins, and when the blood grows deoxygenated, useless to any organ, it goes back through the capillaries or another waste system to the heart.
It really is wondrous. And we were given that wonder.
I didn't know why. But I couldn't react as what was once mine betrayed me. Betty made sure of it. I was back down on the floor, a piece of my own vomer lying safely in my palm. I was back on the side, and I coughed out this same wonderful blood. I was on the floor again.
I was so fragile. So fragile.
And I was such a failure. Such a failure.
I looked up at the son. Could my son be there? I reached out to it, if only a little. My right arm was beyond repair, but my left hand could reach all the way past my head.
And so what if he was there? What good would that do? I'd failed everyone. Where- where did Betty- Papyrus. Oh, God. I'd failed Papyrus. His smile made me close my eyes. No, I was unworthy of heaven, or wherever my son went. Heaven was a myth. I was a scientist.
My son had went nowhere.
And we'd all be headed in the same path.
Betty. Where is Betty?
Just as I closed my eyes, I felt my back explode, and the world turned black.