#hackertale!papyrus

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.