Horror awoke rather abruptly to the smell of smoke.
It didn't smell like a fire exactly, or anything else of a similar dire nature, He quickly deduced. Maybe Crooks had lit a candle. Or started the fireplace. Something small and menial.
Honestly it was scarely noticeable, but Horror hadn't gotten the nickname "bloodhound of the underground '' for nothing. He could easily sniff out a human anywhere from the Ruins to the Capital.
He laid in bed for a moment. Ever so slightly irritated, selfishly debating if the scent was truly strong enough to spark an actual investigation or if he was better off rolling over and letting things handle themselves. Sound sleep had been hard to come by ever since Lust had retreated into himself. Old feelings like guilt and remorse, feelings Horror had long since snuffed out of his calcified heart had snaked their way back into his chest to roil like indigestion as he lay awake at night. Dreamless sleep exploded into technicolor as even unconscious, his mind decided to torment him with memories of how things had gone. Nightmares crawled through his head at night as he dreamed of killing Lust instead of the stray human that had been unlucky enough to wander too close. He imagined the sandy grit of monster dust on his hands and Lust's big, fearful eyes looking up at him, begging him to stop. It scared him how real these nightmares seemed.
In his dreams his bitter loneliness morphed into something starved and ravenous. Tearing apart Lust with trembling teeth, hungry for warmth.
But he woke, cracking open his eye sockets to see butter yellow light leaking in through the curtains and the boards nailed on the windows and, not to his surprise, no fire. The smell still floated on the air, barely there. The sheer quietness of the house only serving to draw attention to it.
Distantly, Horror wondered if Crooks was home from his early morning wanderings yet. Probably not. He'd probably wake everyone in Snowdin with his fussing if he was.
With bones creaking as he rolled out of bed, Horror shuffled around on the floor for a moment trying to locate his jacket and his slippers and his senses. Any chance of going back to bed completely evaporated as the cold that perpetually seeped into every corner of the house soaked into his thin, ratty shirt and sapped any remaining sleepiness from his body as he gave a irked shiver. A part of him prayed something was actually on fire if only to make this tedium worth it.
His clock, still reliably trugging along despite the years, flashed seven thirty.
Slinking through the hallways he passed Lust room, the room ever so slightly cracked although no movement or sounds gave away whether life resided inside. He sniffed and walked past with barely a glance. If Lust was going to act so nonchalant and indifferent towards him, then so could he. Two could play this game.
He only got to the top of the staircase before he lost the game he started, helpless to the loneliness that gnawed at him like hunger. For a moment he paused, waiting expectantly to hear Lust's soft murmur or the chime of a dog collar, like his anticipation would summon Lust like a ghost from hell. When the house remained cruelly silent his resolve cracked like the supports of a shoddy foundation.
Pulled taut in a brief struggle between his pride and his desperation, he caved and backtracked quickly to check in on Lust's room.
He chalked the silence up to Lust finally giving in to sweet depression and deciding to sleep in late, like any sensible sans, so he was somewhat dumbfounded to find the room empty. Quickly issuing yet another once-over, Horror once again happened upon the simple answer that Lust simply wasn't here. No mutt, no obnoxious teal boots beside the door, no Lust.
The whispers in the back of his mind he'd spent so long hushing flared to a roar. Lust wouldn't be dumb enough to wander outside again, would he? He knew the dangers, the risks. Did he truly resent Horror enough to run away even if it meant running to his death? Common sense told him that it was unsensible, but was it really? Beautiful, glorious, unpredictable Lust. Horror hadn't a clue what he could do.
Then a thought popped to the front of his mind like a bubble surging to the surface of water.
Had Lust tried to use the machine to go back home?
The thought inspired immediate panic, like an insistent, burning fear that pushed Horror to action before he could even identify the emotion. For a monster his size, he was surprisingly light on his feet, racing down steps with an urgency he'd thought his body had long forgotten.
The machine, unfinished, was more dangerous to Lust's safety than the outside world could ever be. A faulty and rushed jump across the multiverse could easily fracture a person across the space time continuum, unspooling lines of code like frayed thread and creating knots in the fundamental matter of the universe until their existence was scarcely more than a question mark. There was a reason no one in the underground so much as remembered Gaster.
He emerged in the living room in a frenzy, hoping to find Lust sitting on the couch in perfect peace, perhaps a bit puzzled to see him looking so frazzled. But the couch sat unapologetically empty
Horror spun on his heels to head towards the back door, his nerves becoming increasingly strained when he found the long row of deadbolts unlocked.
The force with which he opened the door was nearly enough to rattle it off its hinges. A burst of cold, frigid air greeted him outside. As well as Lust. Leaning against the railing of their small rickety porch, cigarette in hand.
Horror's adrenaline thrummed so high, he was momentarily confused by the picture in front of him, nerves still pinched on a trigger hair while he attempted to reason out whether it was still necessary to check the shed.
Lust broke the tense silence first.
"Good morning?" He question, raising a hand shyly
He almost wanted to strangle the cheeky bastard.
"You're…" Horror breathed for a moment. "Alive."
Lust seemed charmed by the statement, amusement flickering in his eye. He paused and shuffled through the contents of his pockets for a moment before his hand eventually appeared with an unassuming pack of cigarettes. Flicking open the pack and offering it invitingly towards Horror, he could see it was full aside from the lone cigarette Lust had snatched for himself.
"Alive and well," Smoke wafted from the sides of his mouth." Although you don't sound the happiest about that."
Horror eyed the pack warily as if it would jump out and bite him, before looking back to Lust. Dumbfounded and relieved all at the same time he couldn't quite put his thoughts into words so he bluntly asked; "Since when do you smoke?"
Lust shrugged. "I don't. I quit three years ago."
"Yeah… I'm sure you did. It seems like your recovery is going swimmingly, huh?"
He chuckled and a plume of smoke burst into the air with his exhale. "Well I couldn't think of a better time to relapse."
He waved the open pack of cigarettes in Horror's direction before Horror finally conceded and plucked a thin stick from the pack, not needing much convincing for a good time. Taking it between his teeth, he flicked his eyes up to see Lust offering a lighter in his direction. It was a soft pastel pink, with pried off safety and a few inappropriate stickers crudely pasted on the side. The kind of lighter you could find halfway across the multiverse and still know who it belonged to.
Horror shook his head in rejection to the offer before pointing at the cigarette in his mouth with sly eyes. "Look"
With a snap of his fingers, his sickly blue magic crackled to life, lighting the tip in a flare of cyan. Lust eyes widened, shamelessly impressed.
"That's definitely one hell of a party trick."
"I've had plenty of time alone to practice," He murmured, fiddling with the newly lit cigarette. "If you haven't guessed by now, there isn't much to do down here."
Horror took a long drag, allowing the smoke to seep in and curl around his ribcage. The pleasant buzz of nicotine temporarily quieting the constant anxious hum in the back of his mind.
"You smoke? Like, regularly?" Lust asked with benevolent curiosity.
Horror shrugged. "There isn't much to do down here." He repeated.
He hadn't smoked at first, Crooks would never let him. But when the food ran out, so did people's inhibitions. He'd been a religious chainsmoker for a few odd years before the cigarettes ran out, the soil too toxic to grow tobacco anymore, and the dump picked clean of anything of value.
"Sorry if they're stale. I've had them sitting in my inventory for ages. Told my brother I was really quitting this time."
"Kudos effort at least. Surprised you lasted this long before cracking anyway. Had I known you had cigarettes on you, I'd have ransacked you the minute we met."
Lust laughed, dripping charisma like he had a leak. "I would have let you have them."
He glowed in the quiet morning light, all soft and sweet around the edges. Just being around him again brought back a kind of life to Horror that made his heart flip in odd ways while he struggled to maintain an air of indifference, struggled to pretend like Lust's acknowledgement alone wasn't what he was here for.
Silence hung in the air for a moment beside their shared smoke. Horror stole a glance in Lust's direction, unsure of what to say. Of what needed to be said
Sorry, maybe? Some sort of apology seemed like a courtesy, if only Horror had any idea of how to initiate one. Anything soft and kind inside of Horror had wilted a long time ago and reaching for tenderness felt like grabbing at air.
Lust was nothing like that, a patron saint of kind smiles and stories, smoke forming a faux halo around his head. So heavenly the cruelty Horror had shown him felt sacrilegious. There was something that needed to be said here and now but with every attempt Horror came up blank.
So instead Horror said "Where's the mutt?"
Lust hummed, flicking the ash off the end of his cigarette and pointing to a rotted crabapple tree hardly a few steps off. Just underneath, tucked between a few hallowed roots, sat a ball of fur with a wagging tail. "It's good to let them run around, right? We both needed to stretch our legs."
"He stole my wrench the last time you let him out here."
"And it's only a matter of time before he steals your heart too."
'Like you haven't already,' An adoring voice in the hidden crevices of Horror's mind whispered. But it sounded to foreign to him, too fond to say aloud so he just said; "I'm not a dog person."
"You're not a people person, either. But look at you, getting out of bed early just to keep little ol' me company."
"You weren't in the house, I thought you had almost gotten yourself killed again."
"See? You care about me~"
Horror went strangely silent at that retort. Unsure of whether to deny or confirm. He couldn't help but feel guilty about his feelings, half afraid to get caught in the midst of his affections, desperate to be loved back. But Lust still caught a glimpse of the hunger in his eyes, and he smiled. "It's not such a bad thing," he murmured, distractedly putting out his cigarette. "I care about you."
The words ate Horror alive, setting his heart alight and leaving him so startled he barely uttered out a "Yeah."
"Y'know thought that maybe when we fix the machine, I could still talk to them. To Dream and Ink and Blue, and I could tell them about this place. My universe might be a lost cause, but not yours– they could do something, they could help."
The idea that any universe that could create someone as lovely as Lust could be considered a lost cause made Horror laugh. "And what exactly is so bad about your universe?"
"We just sorta…fucked ourselves over," lust said, flicking the butt of his cigarette over the porch. Delighted in the fact the Crooks isn't around to criticize him about littering. "Literally."
"Really?"
"Well, yeah. The birth rates in my universe dropped so low that monsters were sitting on the edge of extinction. LUST was a quality isolated from a single human soul, and lust injections were given to all monsters that were of age. It was supposed to reverse the rampant infertility."
"Did it?"
"Of course not. How could it be that easy?" Lust said bitterly. "What it did do was induce a permanent state of heat and make Underlust the biggest laughingstock on this side of the multiverse. You get used to being the butt of the joke after so long."
"Oh."
Somewhat stunned, Horror took a moment to process the implications of such an event. His memory of what heats were like was fuzzy, and half baked. A distant part of him remembers the few biology lessons on what a heat was; simply a period of heightened arousal monsters underwent periodically after reaching adulthood. A drive meant for the continuation of the species. To Horror, a monster without a mate, it'd been an unnecessary pain in the ass– the sheer irritation prone to making him snappish and cranky.
But that had been before. After starvation kicked in, heats became quite the rare phenomenon in the underground. Unsurprisingly, baby-making quickly dropped low on the list of priorities in the face of survival. How many years had it been since a baby had been born in Horrortale? Nobody knew and no one quite cared to figure it out when everyone was so preoccupied with finding their next meal.
The information shined a new sort of light on Lust. Horror wondered how he could keep his composure so effortlessly under such circumstances, constant heat would have driven him crazy a long time ago.
"That's the problem you tried to contact Dream and Ink about." Horror said dully.
"Yeah," Lust confirmed, trying not to seem embittered. A stark contrast to how Horror wore his resentment on his sleeve. "I thought they might care– that they might do something. It was a pipedream, sure, but at least then I could say that I did all I could."
He turned his gaze to the distance as if that could hide the wet, sorrowful look in his eyes.
"I tried talking to Ink once before. Begged him for help after months of trying to contact him. And do you know what he said to me? He said; "That's just how things are". He said it was the fate that was written in the script of my universe– all of it. Down to the name, Underlust. And he said couldn't help– that he wouldn't."
Instinctually, Horror moved closer, reaching towards him, torn between wanting to comfort Lust and allowing him the dignity of being left alone in his grief. He knew the inherent humiliation of being seen wallowing in your own misery, the embarrassment of being made undone. Lust put on a strong act, swallowing the shake in his voice, but Horror could still see how his hands trembled in the wind.
Horror's fingers grazed Lust's jacket, and the smaller monster seemed to crumple, curling into his chest, clutching the patchwork of his coat. His hands hovered for a moment, partially scared to fully embrace Lust. Scared to finally indulge in what he had wanted for so long. It was like fate, how their bodies fit together when Horror finally wrapped his arms around Lust, cigarette abandoned in the snow, the two of them clinging to each other on the rickety porch in their tiny edge of the multiverse.
Lust's breaths came out in small puffs that hung suspended in the frozen air.
"I don't blame you for killing that human, y'know," Lust said in a muffled whisper. "It scared me, but it's what you had to do. It was all you could do."
"I'm sorry." He says, still, even though he knows the Lust never harbored any true anger towards him. Neither of them need the clarification. For Horror, it's a confession, a repentance, almost a vow with how gently he bows his head to place a chaste kiss against Lust's skull.
The action comes so easily that Horror scarcely realizes what he's doing until it is done. He freezes at the realization, surprised by it and by how easily it came to him to do it, but it's too late. Lust was already looking up at him with big eyes. Already pulling him down by his jacket to kiss him again, properly this time.
Horror can't help but realize that this must be it, the moment he's been waiting so long for. With the way his soul quivers in his chest, bursting at the seams, it only serves to prove that this is the reason he's hung onto life for so long, for so many years in a half-dead universe. Maybe it was all just to get to this one moment.
His entire world briefly contracts until it contains nothing but him and Lust and the thick soft heat between them. Lust's hands latch around his neck, rubbing soothing circles into his vertebrae so sweetly Horror shivers and his muddled mind remembers just how experienced Lust is at this. Lust seems so much bigger than he is, sucking in Horror– consuming him just as easily as Horror surrenders. Inhaling when Horror exhales, hearts beating in sync, falling into a rhythm he never wants to escape from.
Horror was helpless to stop his head from reeling. Stars, he was going to die like this. If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow– Tuesday. It was certain, Lust was going to steal his soul and eat him whole. And he didn't mind in the least.
When Lust pulled back from the kiss Horror lingered for a moment, his eyes closed, his heart full and fat and lying prone between them. Too exhausted to be anything but honest.
He savors the taste, the smell, the moment. It almost feels like something he deserves. Something like love.