The Grim ReaperThe conversation is mostly quiet. Your voice is weak leaving your throat as you doubt yourself, doubt this will help anything, doubt this will leave any imprint at all. And Sans… he forces his voice down whenever the mask of laziness breaks and he would want to shout, and cry, and kill.“How many times?” he asks again. “I don't know,” you answer again. “I would tell you, you know. If I knew. But I don't.” “Order of magnitude,” he mutters. You sigh, wrecking your memory for an estimate. “Hundreds? Thousands?” He's quiet. Yes, it is a lot. “And you remember it all?” he asks. You laugh. “Of course not!” He flinches. Timeline upon timeline, with you the only one who remembers anything. And you forget…? It's a merry-go-round without a purpose if you forget. “Tell me…” he says, almost eagerly, “tell me about the pacifist route.” He likes to hear about that. He's happy to hear that he was happy, in another timeline. That his brother was happy, and that everybody was happy. But you don't know what else to say beside what you've already told him. “After everybody leaves into the sunset,” you say, “the world goes black. Only vaguely I remember…” Crossing out faces in a fit of desperation, a very satisfied feeling in your gut that isn't your own. “One or two things that happen on the surface… Then everything is black… And I can only reset or wait in that darkness forever.” You are sitting on a bench in Waterfall. The abandoned quiche is still hidden under it. Sans knows that you know about it and you've chosen to leave it be. “It's a curse for me as much as for you,” you say gently. Sans shakes his head fiercely. “It's not the same!” He forces his voice down. “It's not the same. You have a choice. We don't.” “You call it a choice?” you chuckle, very wearily and very humourlessly. “Wait in the darkness forever? You call that a choice?” “You can break out of the curse,” he repeats and his voice is firm with conviction. Raindrops splash and resound. After a while you admit: “I could.” “See?” he says, relieved. “Why don't you?” “I would go crazy,” you tell him honestly. “You must understand – I can still think clearly when I'm in the darkness. I can still count seconds. My mind still ages. I think, and reason, and forget. And after I forget the last of my reason, I will come back into the world… as Chara.” He winces when he hears the name. That timeline he does not like to hear about. “It's either an endless circle of living… or giving myself away to a demon. Either an endless circle of living… or an endless circle of destroying.” “There must be a way,” he shakes his head. “Look who's talking!” you bark with laughter, and flinch away when it comes back to you from the damp cave walls. You have changed. You are different from when the loops started. Or was there nothing before the loops, either…? Sans keeps shaking his head. “There's a way for you, not for me. I'm just… heh, how did you put it? A video game character. I feel pretty damn alive but you say I'm scripted. I'm helpless because I don't ever remember. You do remember, therefore…” He takes a deep breath. “The choice is yours.” Of course. The choice is yours. The choice in how fast you want to go mad. You've thought about this. There is no solution. Just living on. Slogging through the shit and the dust. Nothing more. You don't want to think about it anymore. “Hey…” you say as something occurs to you. “You know how there's a tonne of neutral endings, but only one pacifist route and only one genocide route?” He nods a little. “You know what makes these two special?” He looks at you, hard and terse. He can't forgive you how excited you are about this. He keeps doggedly quiet. “Come on,” you tease it out of him, “I know that you can figure it out.” “Because I've figured it out before?” You just smile. “Fine, I'll humour you. On the pacifist route, you don't kill anybody. On the genocide route, you kill everyone you come across.” “Wrong!” you cry out in delight. Sans rolls his eyes. His memories might be reset every time, but he's damn good at making new observations. By now he can read you just as well as you can read him. And he saw this coming from miles away. “Especially in the genocide run, you're dead wrong there.” He scowls (as much as he can, anyway) and you realise you've just made a pun. Because by now he also knows that you've held his dust countless times. And he knows that it's because his attack patterns are always the same. Because he does not remember. “It's not that I kill everyone I come across,” you point a finger up, a perverted version of a teacher and student, “it's that I actively seek out monsters that I can kill. It's that I'm determined to kill everybody I possibly can. I roam the area for hours, looking for monsters which have escaped my attention. Until Chara tells me that there's nothing more to kill, I'm determined to keep killing.” “Great,” he mumbles and he looks like he's going to be sick. “On the other hand,” you show him mercy, “the pacifist route is all about the determination not to kill anybody. I'm given the choice again and again and I doggedly keep choosing: mercy, mercy, mercy!” You take a breath to calm your excited voice. “Do you understand what the difference is? If I just walked around the Ruins aimlessly and killed whoever I came across, I wouldn't start a genocide run. It requires that I want to kill everyone. It isn't killing on a whim. It's making the decision to kill all I can kill. No more than that, no less than that.” “A fucking sadistic desire,” Sans spits through gritted teeth. His pupils have disappeared, leaving his expression dead. “It is!” you exclaim, happy that he understands it. You count the minutes from the last time you saved when you see a yellow and cyan flare and your body is incinerated. “That was rude,” you say, dusting yourself off. “Huh?” Sans seems disoriented. He always is. “I've loaded,” you tell him. “You killed me.” “…Oh.” He takes the explanation with only a second's delay. “What triggered me?” “I was too happy about killing people,” you tell him honestly. “Then I'm not surprised that I killed you,” he mumbles. “You're pretty close to losing your temper right now,” you agree. “Anyway. The last thing you heard…?” “I asked you to tell me about the pacifist route.” “Oh.” You rub your chin. Repeating conversations in endless variations… “You know, I don't get the happy ending unless I'm completely devoted to the concept of killing not a single monster. I think that…” You tilt your head. “Yeah. Toriel can tell. She can tell when it's worth to find me and stop Asgore from killing me. She'll only do it if I'm determined to save everybody. Maybe it shows in the body language? Maybe she can read my mind. Anyway, she only comes when I want to get the pacifist ending, and when I work for it relentlessly from the moment I fall into the underground.” Sans mulls this over. “How can she tell when to come out of the Ruins?” he asks. You turn to him. He can read you and you can read him, and right now he's had an idea and he's holding it from you. “I don't know. She watches Mettaton's final show on the TV?” “Does she have a TV?” “She doesn't,” you admit. You sit quietly. In your head you try to remember countless conversations, countless sensations, countless events. Then you understand what Sans' idea is. “You tell her,” you breath out as things fall into place. “It's not Toriel who can tell that I want to save the world. It's you.” You look at him incredulously. “You know, you might be just a video game character just like everyone else… But you, you are the most important one. You are the judge. You can tell when I want to kill everybody, and when I want to save everybody.” A pang of emotion runs through you and you hide your face in your hands, sobbing and laughing at the same time. “I can choose, but it's you who makes it happen.” The Grim Reaper watches you with dead eyes and you feel that he understands it all much better than you ever could. |