The Barrier shimmered faintly.
A thin line between everything that had happened-
Sans stood in front of it.
The red smoke bled from his body in slow, endless strands, curling into the air and dissolving into nothing. His posture was still loose, hands hanging at his sides, head slightly tilted forward.
The Underground was gone.
Beaten from the fight, hanging on to the last of their HP.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Just the weight of everything that had led here pressing down on both of them.
The fight was not like before.
The air warped violently as Sans stepped forward, his form flickering in and out of place-not teleporting, not quite-breaking space between moments.
The human reacted on instinct.
Their movements were sharp, desperate, fueled by something deeper than thought.
But it wasn’t enough anymore.
Sans didn’t dodge everything.
Attacks tore through him, grazing bone, cracking structure-but he didn’t slow. The damage didn’t matter. He was stronger. More determined.
More determined to kill the human.
And the smoke whipped the human, throwing them back, their body slamming against nothing as the red smoke twisted around them.
They hit the ground hard.
The loop wasn’t resetting.
But the feeling of it was still there.
The human lunged forward-
The world around them began to fracture.
Timelines split through; the coding screamed.
This fight was not programmed to be like this.
The more it split, the higher Sans' LV rose.
Snow from Snowdin flickered into existence for a split second beneath their feet-
Waterfall’s echoes rang out-
Bleeding into this moment.
The human was bound by his smoke, only for a second.
“...you kept going,” he said quietly.
“again... and again... and again...”
Their soul flickering faintly inside their chest.
“...i used to care,” he continued.
The human’s eyes widened.
It ripped out of the human’s body with a violent snap, glowing red with raw Determination, pulsing wildly in Sans’s hand.
The human collapsed instantly.
“...this is what did it, huh,” he muttered.
The Determination didn’t flow.
Every ounce of will that had kept the world looping.
The human twitched weakly on the ground.
The red smoke flared violently, his hollow soul pulsing brighter-stronger-hungrier.
“...not enough,” he whispered.
Sans stood there for a moment.
Through where it had been.
Sans stepped onto the cliff.
There was no reset behind him.
A figure stood behind him.
Their eyes glowed faintly.
“...figured you’d show up,” he said.
Chara tilted their head slightly.
“You’ve changed the path,” they said.
“...yeah,” he said. “kinda the point.”
“You consumed the Determination,” Chara continued.
“You destroyed the soul.”
“...you ended their loop.”
Sans’s eye flickered red.
“good,” he said. “that’s what i wanted.”
“You’ve mistaken what happens 'after'. You've never seen what happens 'after'.”
They gestured behind him.
“...doesn’t matter,” he said. “i’ll make more.”
“You are still inside it. And there's only one man that's ever left it.”
Sans’s expression darkened.
Chara’s smile widened slightly.
That same wrong expression.
“If you cross that boundary,” Chara said, pointing toward the cliff's road-
“The game will reset. Credits roll.”
The words struck harder than anything else.
“...i killed everything.”
“...there’s nothing left.”
“Because this is where it ends.”
Sans looked out over the cliff.
The sky stretched endlessly.
So close, yet untouchable.
“...so that’s it,” he said quietly.
“And exist in a dead world.”
Sans’s eye dimmed slightly.
For the first time in a long time-
Sans took a step forward.
“...guess it really is the point of no return.”
Sans looked down at his hand.
At the hollow space where something used to be.
The Underground was gone.
Everything he had fought for.
Everything he had destroyed.
Sans glanced back at them.
“you know, for someone giving me a lecture about all this..."
"...didn't you help them?"
"I stopped halfway through."
"...you stopped halfway through."
"It seemed reasonable at the time."
For the first time since killing the human, he actually looked confused.
"you spent who-knows-how-many timelines helping them kill everyone..."
"...that's the dumbest thing i've ever heard."
"that wasn't a compliment."
The wind blew between them.
For a moment, neither spoke.
Then Chara's expression became serious again.
Sans looked back toward the road ahead.
The path stretched beyond the cliff.
That's all it would take.
"...then what's the point?"
Chara looked toward the horizon.
"You misunderstand what a reset means."
"The one who guided the human."
"The one who forced the loops."
"The one who repeated this world until nothing remained."
"As sure as anyone can be."
The wind carried their voice across the cliff.
"This world has reached its conclusion."
"The story has been exhausted."
"The player got what they wanted."
"Or perhaps they didn't."
Sans looked at the road again.
"The reset creates something new." (killer reff OMG! He did it again!!!!1!)
The red smoke curled around Sans's shoulders.
"What happens after the reset is unknown, except a few knowns."
"There will not be another Frisk."
"There will not be another Sans."
For the first time, Chara's voice sounded almost honest.
That probability hung in the air.
"...that's kinda terrifying."
The thought settled into him slowly.
The player would be gone.
No more watching the same story play out forever.
No more fighting an enemy that could simply reload and try again.
If there even was a next world-
Not to anyone standing here now.
Something new. (OMG HE DID IT AGAIN!!1!!111!)
The sky stretched endlessly ahead.
For the first time since he had become aware of the timelines-
For the first time since everything began-
The future wasn't visible.
The red smoke drifted away into the wind.-
As if even it was waiting.
Waiting for him to decide.
Ahead of him was oblivion.
He shoved his hands into his pockets.
"...guess that's the thing about shortcuts."
"you eventually run out of them."
Then he took another step forward.
The edge between what was...
And for the first time in forever-
Sans didn't know what would happen.
For a moment, everything went quiet.
No distant echoes of resets.
“...guess i’ll find out,” he said.
And then he stepped through."
It didn’t feel like breaking through something.
It felt like being removed.
The moment his body crossed the threshold, the world didn’t react.
It simply... stopped including him.
There was nothing to move through.
For a split second, something tore.
Like every connection he had to everything else had been cut at once.
Sans didn’t move at first.
His body lay where it had landed, limbs still, mind struggling to catch up to what had just happened.
Not even the faint hum of existence he was used to ignoring.
Slowly, Sans pushed himself up.
Like his body had to remember how to work again.
No walls, no sky, no edges. Just a blank, empty space that went on forever.
It didn’t even feel like it fully left him.
Sans took a step forward.
His foot hit solid ground.
There was something here.
Even if nothing else existed.
“...so this is it,” he muttered.
(This art was made by my beloved boyfriend @ilkuuk)
[Hi hi! It's me, the author! I'm going to open up asks for him right here after this piece of art in the story! And it may or may not be canon based on the questions! So ask Smokey a question, and there may or may not be art made for the answers! Keep reading for the canon ending for this story!~]
Check out asks here: link
Sans turned slowly, scanning the empty expanse again.
Nothing changed. Nothing moved.
“...kinda over-whitening,” he said.
There was no one to hear it.
The silence pressed in. The silence was loud.
Sans shoved his hands into his pockets.
“...alright,” he said quietly.
There was nothing to finish the sentence with.
Just endless, unchanging white.
No destination or direction.
Because standing still felt worse.
“...left, right, left, right...” he muttered to himself.
His voice became the only thing that proved he was still there.
“...heh. guess i finally found a place where shortcuts don’t matter.”
The space didn’t respond.
Didn’t acknowledge him at all.
After a while, or what felt like a while, he started talking more.
“...so this is the part where something shows up, right?”
“...big scary thing, mysterious voice, cosmic explanation...”
Sans laughed again, but quieter this time.
“...yeah. didn’t think so.”
He stopped walking eventually.
Not because he reached anything.
Because there was no point.
Every direction was the same.
“...hey, paps,” he said suddenly.
The name hung in the air, Unanswered.
“...you’d hate this place.”
“...no puzzles, no colors, no... anything.”
“...no spaghetti either.”
Sans’s grin twitched slightly.
He didn’t know when the thoughts started changing.
At first, it was just boredom.
“...there’s gotta be something,” he muttered.
“...there’s always something.”
His voice echoed inside his head more than in the space around him.
“...rules. systems. code. something.”
Nothing existed to respond.
“...don’t tell me this is it,” he said, quieter now.
The silence didn’t answer.
He started trying things.
Shortcuts, which he didn't know if they worked, everything was the same.
“...i know you’re there,” he muttered.
He didn’t know who he was talking to.
But he kept talking anyway.
“...you gotta be. something’s gotta be running this.”
The white space remained perfectly still.
At first, it was a subtle flicker in his bones.
A hesitation in his movements.
A twinge in his vision that didn’t belong.
A static blue seeped through him.
Like a broken signal caught between worlds.
Fingers. Eye sockets. Joints.
A cold, electric hum that he could feel in the marrow of his bones.
The red smoke never stopped.
It leaked from him in thin threads, curling through the static like liquid fire.
His overall hue darkened.
Shifting through patterns that resembled flickering television static.
Or at least, it felt that way.
Hours passed, then days, then years-though he had no way to measure them.
The white Anti-Void stretched infinitely.
And the impossible nothingness around him.
Not anyone he could name.
Not anything that existed here.
He only knew some things that were left behind in his mind.
And he did not remember why.
He knew the Player had done something.
Something terrible, something that left him here.
It was just a shadow at the edge of his mind.
Fading, fractured, incomplete.
And yet, he remembered a word he couldn’t fully understand.
And somehow, he knew it was tied to happiness, His happiness.
And something had been broken.
He came to a simple conclusion.
"I had left... to fix them... to fix Player."
He moved, because moving was all there was to do.
The static shifted around him.
Patterns flickered over his bones and skull, changing constantly, but always cold.
The red smoke leaked from his body.
Trailing behind him like a ribbon of fire in frozen water.
The only warmth in the endless white.
Every step pressed him further into obsession.
Everything else was gone.
Years passed, or what passed for years.
His body continued to warp.
Bones elongated slightly.
His skull cracked here and there, never fully broken, never fully healed.
His eye sockets remained hollow.
But the static inside them moved.
A low, constant static beneath the words he still spoke aloud.
“...Player,” he whispered one day.
To the white space around him that couldn’t respond.
“...LOVE...Papyrus...fix...Player...”
Every step, every pulse, every flicker of static and smoke reminded him:
Not exactly what he had been.
A walking flicker of blue static,
Red smoke spilling from his bones,
Carrying memories, hate, and obsession.
Shifting subtly as he passed.
Responding to him in ways that were not words,
Toward a goal he barely understood.
Everything else was gone.
