Flesh of our fathers, I am no one's fault.
i remembered that post about gaster the other day and... then i got really sad about my boy obviously akldjajkdsa
since I didn't finish the fic he never really got to finish growing, and even though I am proud of him in MAYEM, I do still wonder what he might've been like if I'd been able to figure out exactly what version of this person was the one who grabbed Sans out of the Core and fell in instead.
I just discovered your 'language-(wingdings)' tag on this blog. You are amazing, and I need to acquire and read a copy of 'The Wise Man's Fear' as soon as possible. ✡🏳✞🕯☼☜ 👍︎🏳🏳☹📬︎ (Windings font for lack of clickety skeleton hands to sign with)
((I either go 0 on worldbuilding or i go 100 on world building otl
I’m glad you enjoyed! And yes wiseman’s fear is an absolutely wild book hahaha)
Gaster does jump down the elevator shaft, and uses his magic to craft bones as steps to slow his descent, and finally rip through the elevator at a basement level, far below where the elevator usually goes. Beneath Fig’s arboreum and everything.
And he does find sans, but more importantly--
He finds Ursama and Serptrine’s assistants looking over another skeleton, a little bit taller than Sans, and hidden away in a separate room. He doesn’t have Sans’ odd bone deformity from the DT overdose, but almost looks the same age all the same.
Ursama demands to know what is going on that Gaster burst down like this, clearly destroying the elevator and definitely committing a crime in doing so if nothing else, on top of his kidnapping charges.
Gaster is going to uh. Take those kidnapping charges again. He walls up the room with bones and grabs Sans to run--and Sans talks to the other little skeleton, who todders over, and holds on, too.
Unfortunately, Gaster has only really one place to go, and that is back to his apartment. Which he does. And then barricades the door. And then shouts across the wall to Po-Yo that he needs someone to deliver a letter for him. Po-Yo gets a carrier (from chapter 6, Ava) and Gaster slides the message he needs delivered and the handful of gold pieces under the door.
The letter is addressed to Asgore.
Gaster never thought he would want to call the attention of an old monster down on himself, but right now, he’s the only one higher ranked than Serptrine that Gaster can think of who might object to the discovery of creating child monsters for warfare.
In the meantime, Gaster barricades his wall and sets the kids up in the back room of his house and tells Sans to tell-- the boy’s designation is ‘PS-1’ (Prototype Skeleton 1) rather than ‘CS-1’ (Control Skeleton 1)-- to hide if anyone other than he comes in.
But PS-1 seems to understand his speech just fine. And he doesn’t know what to make of that, except that someone has been teaching PS-1 the same way he taught CS-1.
He makes them tea, and ignores anyone pounding on his door, and hopes no one pulls out magic or the royal guard. But the pounding on the door stops, and he isn’t sure how much time passes, but there’s not quite enough food in his apartment for three people. There was hardly enough for one.
He doesn’t want to leave his apartment and come back to find both skeletons gone.
He tries to pass the time by talking to them and figuring out what was going on. And this is what he learns:
PS-1 has been outside of the building before. PS-1 knows how to summon his magic. PS-1 has a rotating series of caretakers. PS-1 has seen Sans before.
PS-1 has a LV of 7.
Gaster dreams about murder.
Eventually through a lot of hand gestures and struggling conversation, he starts making a plausible scenario:
Sans has been taken from his room at night periodically. This is probably where PS-1 met him and they had a ‘comparison’ between the control subject (Sans, who is not being pushed to learn much or learn an agenda) and variable subject (PS-1, who is being trained very specifically towards a goal.) The mistakes and ‘mistakes’ Gaster makes with Sans are corrected with PS-1 and it’s led to a very strong, dangerous, and unhappy toddler in his apartment, and that toddler is getting very hungry.
The good news is that PS-1 seems to like Sans and will calm down when comforted. The bad news is that while Papyrus (Sans named him) doesn’t seem interested in ‘rebelling’ by attacking his new ‘handler,’ that doesn’t extend to furious pouting tantrums, fits, and crying.
At some point, Papyrus summons the biggest attack he has— a strange, toothy skull sort of thing. It might’ve been dog-ish if not for the horns.
Gaster recognizes someone trying to copy his dragon skull design and has to retreat for… a while. It’s sort of like setting off a firework show at a wake, maybe a ‘celebrating of life’ if you were being optimistic, and then turning around and finding your fireworks being pointed at people.
After a long while of hiding where Gaster can start to feel exhaustion weighing on him and is certain the low-magic meals are really starting to affect the kids, too, there’s a knock on the door and a familiar voice coming through.
Choris is a cat monster with a messed up ear and bad personality, but he grew up under Gaster’s parents and they went through college together. It is not an affectionate relationship by a stretch, but jealousy doesn’t mean you want them to fail, and so they’ve kicked each others’ asses through things a handful of times.
Today, Choris has shown up to say things like ‘I bet you haven’t been outside this whole time’ and ‘do you even have food in there? I bet you don’t. You haven’t even checked your mail. Get your shit together.’
Then the mail is shoved under Gaster’s doorway and the thump of several bags of groceries is heard outside the door. Once the footsteps are gone, Gaster reaches out to grab the food and hurriedly makes the kids a meal before checking the mail.
One of them is a response from the king, alerting him to an investigation and for his testimony to show up at x day. Which is almost immediately. Tomorrow, or in nine hours, even. People probably would’ve shown up to his house and broken in if he didn’t show up, holy shit, he would’ve died (but only emotionally, not literally.)
The idea of showing up in front of a Fucking Boss Monster is absolutely psyching his little traumatized brain out, but he has already kidnapped like two people barricaded himself in an apartment building for several days, so he doesn’t really have any room to say he’s paralyzed by nerves.
Still paranoid that someone is going to come swipe them when he’s not looking, Gaster gets Sans’ crutches and tells him he’s in charge of Keeping Papyrus Chill, and takes them with him (in a backpack for transport) to the castle for a Fucking Hearing.
(Once they’re there, they get out of the backpack, but he is extremely not interested in people spotting them on the street and asking questions, because he has absolutely no doubt that someone has gossiped this all the way back to Snowdin by now. )
Serptrine and, unfortunately, Ursama are there as the ‘hey we need to break the barrier’ team, and Gaster shows up with two skeletons half his height wearing stripes, holding onto both his leg and each other.
It’s pretty obvious who Asgore sides with. Everyone knows the moment he looks over at the kids.
That doesn’t mean everyone is happy. Serptrine is removed from his post as head scientist, the position is suspended, and Ursama is on leave for a bit, or at the very least is no longer Gaster’s direct superior. They also forget to really give him a new superior. Or if someone is assigned, they aren’t claiming him, and when he’s told to return to the lab for regular work, he finds no one is really looking at him or minding him much at all. People he casually spoke to seem to acknowledge him a bit, but that’s about all.
Whether they thought he was in the right to kidnap Sans and Papyrus or not, a lot of people also now view him as The Guy Who Stole Our Best Chance at the Surface.
Yes, humans are falling down, but it’s… taking a long time. And then people are in danger and killed each time. And they’re still relying on the strength of humans when they use that captured power. And what about when they get to the surface, and then there are still humans out there to deal with?
If they’d just Had Someone Who Could Handle the Barrier and the Humans Beyond It…
Haven’t you ever heard of the needs of the many? If five children die to save a city, how is that the wrong choice?
It’s easy to dream big about a project that barely got off the ground, but seemed to have some promise—especially if one of the experiments was successful and managed to end the last human’s rampage.
...but Gaster has a child at home who has just learned about jigsaw puzzles, and who takes the newspaper from him to do the word searches and junior jumbles in pen.
Then again, Gaster has an advantage in being kind, here. He’s never believed they would make it to the surface again, anyway.
++
As Gaster raises the two and deals with ostracization at work (which started out as just spite, but then was picked up as a hint by others, and has grown into a Habit) he uses the lack of oversight to start building small CORE experiments.
He’s doing his best with the CORE but still works a lot on it at home, which Sans watches him do when he’s not watching over Papyrus.
Because that is unfortunately quickly becoming Sans’ job. He’s still pretty young and needs crutches to stay upright for long stretches of time, but Papyrus has proven to be A Little Troubled, especially since he started talking more.
He’s fond of fighting, which is normal for a monster child, but he’s actually fighting with intent to harm, because that’s what fighting has been for him this whole time, and at LV 7 it’s very difficult to break that sort of habit. You can think of LV as a disability almost— it makes it more difficult to move through life, as you’re on constant “when all you have is a hammer” mode. They had a fun incident where upon getting very frustrated with a puzzle, Papyrus summoned bones from the floor and one of them happened to have Moderate Contact with Sans’ knee.
Sans ultimately has a monster version of hemophilia—a small cut can still cause him to bleed out. This eventually affects his magic to create KARMA, where his max ATK being small still bleeds out a little bit longer than would otherwise be expected.
It is still a very frantic and uncomfortable trip to a healer, where Papyrus ends up left alone in the house because Gaster didn’t know what to do when you had two kids, and one needed the healer, and the other had caused the wound.
Papyrus has been extremely careful about injuring Sans since then, and they’ve gotten him to somewhat release his pent up energy by doing ‘trick shots’ with his magic. Spelling things with his bones, biggest and smallest bones you can possibly make, haha hey kids what about bones that go backwards?
Whatever was in that DT was fucking potent, because Gaster was a pretty good kid with magic for his age, but Sans and Papyrus outstrip him fast enough that at some point theyre just swapping tricks with each other and doing things Gaster is pretty sure aren’t physically possible but. Whatever. Fuck it.
He’s going to do physically impossible shit too if he ever gets this geothermal shit up and running.
...it is definitely not all fun and games. Most of the time, it is the opposite. When Papyrus grows old enough to start to care more, he starts thinking a lot about morality, and LV, and finds that he can’t even remember where all of it came from, and he doesn’t know if he should want to or not. But he still likes using magic. Even though he’s careful now, he still thinks fighting is fun when he goes out and duels kids in the backlots (the monster equivalent of kittens fighting each other) .
He and Gaster eventually work out that maybe it’s okay to be happy, even when you’ve done something bad in the past. Puzzles are very popular now, even though they’re historically military traps. Magic is even more innate and expressive than a hobby, though, and over the years Papyrus can hone it to be something different. Maybe knives aren’t only used for murder. Maybe you can fight to defend, too.
Papyrus decides he’s going to be talented enough he never loses control of his magic ever , and can avoid even the most accidental, normal mistakes.
(Sans, who curls up on the couch and watches Gaster do physics on the coffee table at night, also starts talking about those sorts of things. Some childhood conversations cropping up that Gaster doesn’t know if they’re normal or if it’s because of where Sans and Papyrus come from-- or if they’re the only ones talking about this at all, even, because these talks feel like the only conversations that have mattered in his whole life sometimes. His parents were kind, and supporting, and loving, but no one has ever said ‘I’m sad’ and then followed up with it—with something other than a quip, or a joke. But he and Sans and Papyrus keep talking instead.
The people in the underground don’t like talking about the unfixable. Maybe it’s because of the puzzles, he thinks. Maybe the underground has decided that no one would ever make a problem there wasn’t some way to solve.
He doesn’t think there are ways to solve some of them. He doesn’t think there’s a way to break the barrier that will let them survive outside. He doesn’t think there’s an answer he can give Papyrus about how he can feel the LV in him surging with excitement when he fights. He doesn’t think there’s a way he can tell Sans that no one person can fix everything.
“But I guess I have to try,” he says, like a joke and a quip, and exhausted.
“you just said you couldn’t,” says Sans, who has grown out of his crutches and gained a few centimeters height.
“Yes. But if you’re in a position to do something , aren’t you obligated to try?” Gaster replies, trying his best to stay in this conversation for Sans, who is so distressed lately, and yet he is already so very tired. “If you’ve got the ability, aren’t you obligated to try?”)
++
(Gaster dreams about finding Serptrine, wherever he is in retirement, and murder. He also thinks about Papyrus, and how frustrated he is at his LV, and his childhood stolen away by other people’s choices, and the cessation of possibility. He thinks about Papyrus who has changed, and so has decided everyone can change if they want to, even if Gaster argues that Papyrus didn’t choose to be a killer— Gaster never chose to be an angry, lonely child. But maybe he did. Maybe he decided going with his emotions was easiest, and maybe he had to grow enough to find the will to reach for something that wasn’t his first impulse. The first impulse to violence.
He doesn’t know. He was just a kid. But he dreams of killing Serptrine, and when he wakes, he does not follow his dreams. For a crime committed only in imagination, maybe that’s the best he can do.)
++
Gaster talks a lot about Snowdin, when he’s feeling good. He wants to go back some day, because it was such a strange little town, and so much room, and so much more welcoming than he remembers being anywhere before. They never go back to Snowdin.
His work on the CORE gets him promoted to head scientist after several years of the position vacant and in limbo. A lot of the anger has had time to die down, though there are a few brief surges after he takes the position and starts focusing the whole of the lab towards electrical production.
Sans and Papyrus have started schooling. Sans tests well and is good at theory, and is rocketing towards college, while Papyrus gets stuck in the minutiae, and seems to be enjoying himself plenty well refusing to move up until he has gotten a perfect score on every assignment each level can throw at him. Fudging to give him a perfect score does not work, as he only trusts his own grade evaluations, and his criteria are mysterious and vague.
Sans—in a very aggressive move on his part—starts to work at the lab.
Many people have gone and been replaced since he was a child here. He wanders through halls he barely remembers. He rediscovers Fig and Jam (still very young— fish mature differently, though Jam has sprouted some legs and walks on their own sometimes) and helps some in the medical wing before Gaster Very Firmly transfers him into field work and sets him about laying the wires through the underground that will eventually carry their charge. It is an absolutely mind boggling undertaking, especially with something not actually functioning yet, but Sans finds he’s actually a pretty social guy, and laying groundwork gives him a lot of time to goof off some and talk with the locals.
Fig and Jam transfer to the CORE building site. The tubing twists and turns like roots an the central walkway is laid out like a maze. It was almost inevitable, with how more areas grew upon each other as needed, more power rods and catwalks anywhere they could go.
In what seems like a very short time, the CORE starts to tower at the deepest edge of Hotland. It reaches so deep they need elevators to reach the lower floors by the end, and yet they still have to build on the outside around those same elevators. Eventually the moving floors are installed, just to try and keep everything stable.
DT extracted from the atmosphere over the years starts to be moved to the CORE site, because as volatile as DT can be, it’s also one of the few substances that can temper materials steeped in magma, without allowing the metal to melt.
The channel from Snowdin is dug. Wires are laid. Small central generators are set up, to distribute the energy from within the communities—
And Sans gets a feeling one day. Not a bad feeling or an omen. A whim, probably, and goes to visit the CORE, knowing they’re near the end of construction and Gaster is going on three days of nauseas energy and Red Buffalo, and soon he is going to explode.
Sans finds no one on the upper floors, and no one on the walkways. Someone’s been posting motivational posters on the wall, things that started to sound a little like sentimentality and anxiety and a wild hope holding all the mess together.
When Sans descended to the lowest levels of the CORE, on the floors just above the magma, something was wrong. Different.
It was cold, for one. Or chilly, at least. The heat from the magma was always rising, but this wind had a bite of cold to it— and as Sans opened the first door to the observation deck, there was light that shouldn’t have been there. The whole platform down here was lit by magma glow, and yet, this light was shining instead.
For a moment, he thought, perhaps, it was electricity. A lightbulb. The first one to turn on, maybe.
And then he opened the door wider, and he saw oblivion.
It looked like a hole. A white hole, hovering just above Gaster’s head, in the dead center of the room.
He could see other things around that said there should be others in the room— Fig and Jam’s water cooler. Head Guy’s binder of notes. A plate of lightly smoking bagels, partly eaten.
And Gaster, just staring into oblivion as it grew slowly bigger, like a dark drain letting all the world around it just spill in.
And Sans, who was small and lightweight, and who hadn’t had a thought to brace— stumbled forward, and was caught in the current.
It did feel like water. Like the world rolled up around him, and all the air sucked away, and plunged him into a bright, white ocean.
...and like a fish, something hooked him. Caught him right in the soul.
It flung him out, bright purple, and into the elevator a room away, where he didn’t crumble, but blacked out just long enough to miss how The End, losing one mass, took another in his place.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
hey fuckers i’m backing up the blog and will be posting a conclusion once i finish outlining it but i’m getting this link up before tumblr dies in a dumpster fire like we all knew would happen one day
Dude, ask her! If she IS part of it, she will know where they took him. If she's innocent, she can help. Either way, it's better than blindly running around.
Are you out of asks ahain? I would send some, but I have no clue how to proceed from where we are. :(
((no, shh, you're fine!! I will continue I've just entered finals ish and need to write papers and people around me are dying [this is normal] . I may have anotehr livestream to try and kick my butt into gear, but I do have a moving forward plan, I promise, adn then we'll be in the clear for just random things again and it'll be ok))
