↕ - a memory that may or may not have happened
It was always difficult remembering meetings with Gaster after his incident, almost as though the universe itself wanted to scrub every last hint of him away. Because of this, it was sometimes difficult to discern whether his visits with him were real or a half-remembered dream or the like.
Unfortunately for the universe, Sans was used to remembering things he wasn’t supposed to.
He was standing by the telescope he used to prank people with, carefully looking from side to side. After a few times of repeating to be absolutely sure no one would pass by, he pressed his back against the wall behind him. Next, he balled his hand up into a fist before knocking a few times on the wall. “Knock, knock.”
When a few moments had passed, he heard a muffled sound behind his ear, a noise that sounded like an ocean made of radio waves, garbled and slowly fluctuating up and down in pitch. By now, he knew that sound to be the static noise that breaks the silence otherwise present in the void of space, the background hum of the universe.
He also knew that it was asking him, “Who’s there?”
A different wave of static this time, presumably saying, “Canoe who?”.
“Canoe let me in already? I don’t want people thinking I’m crazy for talking to a wall.”
The response was an odd, rapid-fire clicking noise, rasping gasps for breath every now and then betraying it for the laughter that it was. Then, he felt a knob materialize beside his hand and he grabbed it, turning it and pushing back at the same time to pass through the grey door that had appeared in the wall. Once he was through, he turned around to face the man still attempting to regain his composure. His father, Gaster. Grinning up at him, he gave him a quiet little, “Hey, Dad.”
Once the taller skeleton’s snickers abated enough, he returned the grin with the permanent crescent smile he wore now and held his bony hands out in front of himself. They floated in the air, disconnected from his body, yet somehow still a part of him. Suddenly, they broke apart into the individual bones that they were comprised of and those bones swirled in the air before him before beginning to reconnect to form floating symbols. After one symbol had been fully formed for a few seconds, the bones disconnected to begin working on another, making it so that two or three of them could be in progress at once. First came a hand pointing downwards, then a symbol of the stars, two dots in a row, and so on until a message encoded in wingdings formed and passed before his eyes.
“Hello, son. Are you ready to begin?”
Sans nodded, chuckling at the distorted whistling sound that passed for a sound of eager approval from his father. He stepped forward, preparing for another day of attempting to unravel the mysteries behind the anomalies they found within the timelines.
The following hours passed by in a blur of work when he looked back on it, the universe’s way of attempting to wipe Gaster from his memories. But, when he finally stepped back out of that grey door, he carried with him a sheet of paper that had both his own chicken scratch handwriting and messy, looping wingdings on it. And that was proof enough to him that his continued visits with his father were, in fact, real.