#cactus-writes

Somehow, Snooze managed to convince him to fix his and Snore’s corner table. How they broke it Replay doesn’t know, because every time he’s seen them the brothers are asleep.

“Th’ screws go inta tha’ one. On th’ left.” Snooze’s remarks are muffled from where his skull is pressed into the couch, sleeping mask riding up. His limbs are sprawled all over the place, left leg hanging off the couch while the right rests on the arm of the sofa. His hands are limply gripping his short blue robe in a pitiful attempt to keep it from falling off. One of his pink slippers is dangling on his foot, the other already on the floor.

He’s not even looking at Replay.

“Not even looking at me,” Replay grumbles, glaring from the corner of the room. His back is to the wall by the kitchen, keeping every exit in his sight. “Why not do this yourself? Since you don’t like how I’m doing it.”

Snooze raises his head slightly to look at Replay. He’s still tense, though less so than before. His glitching has calmed down to a steady resting pace instead of the constant static it was spewing earlier. He watches Replay fiddle with the screws, subconsciously stimulating his mind. He lays his head back down.

“Bonding time, man. You build, an’ I g’ve ya’ my ‘pinions. ‘Sides, ‘m not strong ‘nough to fix a table.”

Repay rolls his eyelights but concedes, unscrewing the screw he had just placed in order to place it in the left leg. If he’s being honest, the table looks more lopsided than when he took it apart, but he decides he doesn’t care. If you tilt your head far enough, it looks functionable. The brothers wouldn’t notice a difference anyways. Probably. “Same person. Calling me weak?”

“Nah, y’ve done some crazy shit. Got yerself leveled up. High score ‘n shit.”

Snooze turns himself over to bury deeper into the couch, the other slipper finally falling off. It lands with a quiet thud on the floor, reunited with its other half. Replay thinks he hears him start to snore.

Snooze’s back is to the room, leaving him vulnerable to an attack that could come at him.

Replay hesitates before giving in, dragging himself and the broken table over to his friend acquaintance. He positions himself so that he’s at the other’s back, close enough to protect and yet still having enough room to get an attack ready.

Hours go by, Snooze sleeping away as Replay curses at the table. He has already broken three screws with his hammer, and just bent a fourth. He’s just about to throw a table leg when he hears a door open. He jumps quickly into a crouch, his tool falling to the floor, visible eyelight a pinprick while the one covered by his eyepatch flickers with pent up magic. He’s just about to summon a blaster when he sees Snore walk through the kitchen.

He’s walking with a pep in his step, but his exhaustion is obvious. His normally expressive eyes droop with a lack of sleep, and his arms that are normally swinging around are at a slow sway by his side; even his feet seem to drag across the floor. He ruffles through the fridge before pulling out a tub of spaghetti. Snore doesn’t even deign to heat it up before he grabs a fork and digs into the cold noodles.

Replay huffs a slightly disgusted sigh and slowly deflates, sinking back onto the ground as the adrenaline rushes out of him. He glances up when the Papyrus enters the room.

“Oh, hello other brother! Sans brought you over I see, how wonderful! Ah, do excuse my attire, I’m afraid work was quite harder than usual.” He looks a little abashed, but holding himself strong. His voice is loud, more than his own Papyrus, and if it wasn’t for the way his eyes kept flicking towards the stairs Replay would’ve thought he was up for conversation.

“It’s fine. Go to bed. You look tired.”

Snore lets out an inaudible sigh of relief that he quickly disguises as a laugh. “Well, how am I supposed to argue that logic? Very well. Good night, other brother!” He trudges up the stairs as quickly as his tired body will allow him. The slam of a bedroom door and a muffled “Whoops!” signaled that the skeleton made it to his room.

Silence fills the house. But it’s not a bad silence. It’s not like the anti-void, where the loudest shout is drowned out by the deafening quiet.

No, this is homey. Content. Peaceful.

Safe.

Replay finally acknowledges his own drooping eyes, and with another quick check of the room decides a little nap wouldn’t hurt. He quickly picks up the hammer from where he dropped it on the floor.

Tool in hand and his back to Snooze, he drifts off.

——————

He can feel everything and nothing, the biting cold that surrounds him being fueled by the burning desire to feel something, anything.

By now he’s past the point of being hungry. Every stabbing cramp has turned into a mock caress. If he believed hard enough, it could almost be a really tight hug.

He’s starting to look wrong. The slash across his chest hasn’t healed yet, and ERROR signs keep popping up around him. Parts of him are starting to look like static, displaced where it should be whole.

It hurts.

At least, he thinks it does.

Logically speaking, he hasn’t felt any different from when he first came here, that being feeling the effects of being slashed across the chest with a knife, and then not having the injuries heal because his world is broken. The excruciating agony he had felt before faded into a background sting, feeling akin to a paper cut (he ignores the fact that he’s a skeleton and therefore cannot actually get a paper cut).

He lifts a hand to unzip his sweatshirt and pull up his sweater. He pokes a brittle finger at the cut, digging in the tip slightly before inspecting the appendage. There’s dried blood, and he can feel a tiny pulse of pain, but his finger isn’t red. The wound finally stopped bleeding.

With a sigh he drops his shirt and flops onto his chest, arms and legs out like he just fell to the ground to make a snow angel. His eyes close, and for the first time in a while he decides to try and sleep.

He immediately tenses at the sudden noise to his right.

He quickly flips over into a defensive crouch, left hand ready to form a blaster while the right holds a sharpened bone. His sockets squint as he analyzes what’s in front of him, eye light shrinking in apprehension.

His body deflates as his breath leaves him, arms falling limply to his sides like a puppet cut from strings.

Before him stands Papyrus. He’s a tall, lumbering figure above him, scarf resting against his chest and hands on his hip bones.

He can’t decipher his expression.

“Pa…Papyrus?” Sans’ voice is weak, croaky from a lack of water. He reaches an arm out, the limb shaking as he makes a grab for his brother. “Is that… you?”

Papyrus says nothing. He stares with blank eyes, none of his usual enthusiasm with him. His gaze sharpens as he steps back from his brother’s outstretched hand.

“Are you proud?”

Sans halted his reach, confusion and apprehension filling his mind. “What?”

“Are you proud. Proud that you slaughtered the Underground. Murdered me.”

Sans is silent. The only sound in this white prison is his increasingly heavy breathing. He grits his teeth. “I did what I had to,” he grounds out.

Papyrus bellows a laugh, but there’s nothing humorous about the situation. It sounds mocking, disbelieving. He crosses his arms, fully glaring now. “You didn’t do it because you had to. You did it because you wanted to. Because you enjoyed it. Admit it, you had fun.”

Sans shoots to his feet, any hesitance he feels at seeing his brother drowned out by the blinding rage he feels boiling in his bones. “Don’t you say that! You don’t understand! You never have!” He feels tears gathering in the corners of his eye sockets, fingers clenched painfully tight. “You don’t get to have a say in this because you never remembered.” He goes to poke Papyrus as he shouts the last bit, but as soon as he’s about to touch him his brother dissipates, fading out of sight. “What…?”

“You always have been a hypocrite.”

Sans whips around as the voice comes from behind him, and stops dead in his tracks, body tensing and soul beat pounding.

What used to be his brother is now some deformed creature. His skull is shattered at the top, his teeth are long, sharp, and mishappened, shiny with the saliva dripping out of his dislocated jaw. What was once a bright red scarf is now a sticky, metallic red as blood pools from Papyrus’ neck. He’s dusting in various places, his left arm almost completely gone.

He looks dead.

He looks like when he died on Hack 572, when Sans, for just a moment, wanted to let loose, give in to the craze he’s been feeling for ages. Maybe it would spook them enough into finally stopping if he started to look forwards to the massacres he would have to enact.

It didn’t. He can still hear their praise, their congratulating applause.

He had never been more repulsed. He never tried to enjoy it again.

Sans stays silent. He has to, because his brother is right. He is a hypocrite. But he has to be. If he wasn’t, he doesn’t know how he’d live with all he’s done. He wished he was never born. But he never gets what he wants, does he?

A piercing shout rings through his skull as Papyrus is suddenly in his face. “You are scum! Filth! You have disgraced the Underground, and you have failed me! You don’t deserve to be called my brother, you bastard!”

Before he can react, his brother- no, he doesn’t get to call him that anymore- releases a bone attack, striking him on his left eye socket.

He doesn’t feel anything for a moment, struck still at the mere thought of his brother hitting him with the intent to cause harm.

It burns.

He can feel it as his skull cracks, pieces of bone falling into his skull as one of his main mana lines is destroyed. He can already tell there’s damage to his eye light, although how severe he doesn’t yet know. Blood and dust pours down his face, painting him in his own gore. He goes to attack Papyrus back, but nothing is there.

Nothing, except his own bone attack still directed at his face.

Silence rings throughout the space, for once not accompanied by an ever-present ringing.

Sans thinks about what had just happened.

He sits down in his own dust and begins to laugh.

He never got that.

W. D. Gaster was leagues above Sans Serif. They never would have even been in the same building.

He would block out his longing spend his free time by tearing through any book he could find laying around the office, flipping through the yellow, weathered pages with the covers barely keeping the books together.

There is one book that he can remember. It was about monster anatomy, each chapter a different guide about each type in the Underground. It was alphabetized for an easy search. They even had skeletons, for as few of them that were there. He thinks Gaster helped to write that part, his name somewhere in the credits.

He doesn’t remember all of the medical jargon- he finds he is starting to forget a lot, these days- but he does remember a section about broken bones. About wrists. He remembers reading that it can take up to three months for an injury there to heal.

He hopes he can remember enough about being a scientist, because he has a hypothesis.

If he breaks his wrist, and it takes about three months for the injury to heal, then he knows at least three months have gone by. He would be able to keep track of time.

But it would hurt. He knows it would, because Papyrus broke his leg once, and he wouldn’t stop crying. Different limbs, but the injuries are close enough.

He sits up from where he lay on the floor of the Anti-Void. He doesn’t know how long, but it’s been some time since the incident with his hallucination. He’s been getting more of them, quick whispers coming from behind and a looming figure in his peripheral.

He hasn’t resummoned his magic yet. He’s scared.

There are more glitches, too. The ERROR signs have spread, and small patches of… static have started to show up as well.

He takes off his sweatshirt and puts it off to the side, the pile of clothing reminding him of what he looks like whenever he dusts. It pulls a slight smile out of him.

It’s not a happy memory.

He rolls up the left black sleeve of his sweater, unwilling to cause further damage to the shirt; it’s the only other thing warming his chilled body, after all. He then unwraps his scarf, laying it on his crossed legs for an easy reach. He’s going to need it soon.

He reaches his right hand up, wrapping his phalanges around his radius and ulna.

He hesitates.

Is he really doing this? Does he need to know the time that badly? Is there another solution that he can think of?

He takes a deep breath and closes his sockets.

He squeezes his hand into a fist.

The bone cracks.

He releases a pained yelp, hissing as he forces himself to not let go. He closes his hand tighter, determined to see this through. He can feel his bones bending under the pressure he is forcing, a slow arch inwards before the bones break with a snap. Small pieces of bone chip off, barely enough to make a difference but noticeable all the same. They dust before they can reach the floor.

He releases his wrist with a startling quickness, almost like he didn’t think he would go through with it.

In any case, it’s too late to turn back now. He grabs the scarf from his lap and makes a makeshift sling. It’s a shabby job, a bit loose, but it’ll have to work.

Bones set, and a long wait ahead, he pulls his sweatshirt underneath him in a makeshift pillow and lays down. It’s not comfortable: his wrist hurts, and he’ll definitely get a crick in his neck.

But this is his life now. He might as well get used to it.

————

His wrist is healed. It’s a bit crooked, but it’s healed. If his hypothesis is correct, then it’s been at most three months.

He breaks his wrist again.

——————

Fun Fact: Replay broke his wrist 60 times. That’s at least 180 months of healing total. He’s been in the Anti-Void for at least 15 years.

Wingdings Translation: