He felt the grip on his soul abate by mere inches. The tips of his feet scratched at the floor. Sans was aware of things moving in the background, dark shapes undulating and converging like something from a nightmare.
He didn’t want to listen. He didn’t want to hear what the doctor had to say. It brought back too many memories, of being young and being stupid and quietly doing as he was told; and worse, of wanting to hear even the slightest hint of praise. The lab was his whole world. From the moment he opened his eyes, first started to comprehend, the only face he knew, the only voice he heard, the only god that existed in his life, was the Doctor. Sometimes wrathful, but mostly indifferent. Mostly indifferent…
[He’d stolen scraps of paper to scribble on. It had not been one of his smarter ideas. There were few places to hide anything in his room, and the Doctor knew every single one. By the time the Doctor returned in the morning, it had been too late to hide them; he’d passed out, having spent most of the night writing and drawing to his heart’s content.]
[ The look that had passed over the Doctor’s face as he pulled the papers out from under his sleeping body, had frightened him. He stood in the corner, head bowed, shoulders tensed. The Doctor was silent and that was always worse, it was always worse when he was quiet, it meant he’d screwed up, it meant he’d disappointed, it meant he failed.]
[He’d wanted to cry at the unfairness. It was so quiet when he was gone. He’d just wanted…he just wanted something to do. The Doctor left without saying anything. He spent hours sitting in the corner, agonizing over the potential punishment.]
[But when the Doctor came back, it wasn’t to punish. A book was dropped on the floor. An order given, to read the whole of it by the end of the week. And that was that.]
[He devoured it cover to cover in one night and spent the next three days reading it over and over]
One of the tentacles grabbed at his arm. A barrage of bone shot out from the ground, severing it before it could get a grip, but there were many, and without the ability to move, Sans knew he wouldn’t last long. He tried to wink out of existence, but with the grip on his soul, the only thing he managed was a slight shudder through space-time, appearing exactly where he was.
[I do not expect you to understand. You are soft… spoiled… revoked of any comprehension of consequences. And now, given how many times he’s died before, I’d bet I could kill Papyrus right in front of your eyes and it wouldn’t even faze you by this point]
More bones burst out of the ground. They rose around Sans and fell around him like a shield, severing anything that got close and trying to block the rest of the onslaught. Mostly it was to block Sans expression, the slight twisting of bone that betrayed his anger, his fear.
Don’t answer. Don’t answer. Gaster wasn’t interested in the answer, he was interested in reactions. So instead Sans directed one big reaction- A looming disembodied skull appearing from right behind his bone shield, to fire his answer right at the Doctor’s stupid face.
Gaster's own blaster materialized in an instant, maw like a gator with the speed of a ravenous wildcat, opening it's jaws to catch and deflect the opponent's energy blast with a dull guttural "Raagh."
Magic sparked, shards of blue slicing thin burns into Gaster’s cheeks, chiseling away the tiniest fraction of his HP. Then the scientist’s own blaster shot forward with vicious chomps in order to shatter the blaster looming behind Sans.
Tentacles shattered against the flurry of bones, but seeing that Sans’s movement was growing strained Gaster didn’t slack with the fresh batch of tendrils, continuing in his attempts to apprehend rather than harm.
.... The day his creation began to speak back to him Gaster knew he was going to get more than he had bargained for.
The relationship was kept purely intellectual, for Gaster knew that if he had attempted to play a parental role he would have undoubtably failed. He had always been bad with people, especially bad with children, having no patience for anyone's flaws except his own.
Asgore alone could speak to him, get anything out of him, held any sentimental value with him.
Then with the completion of the core came the soul experiments... and Sans.
Gaster hated what Sans was, but he was infatuated with what he could've become, and now he was attempting to spare him not only for personal necessity... but also for the vague sense of what little was left to scrounge.
In his early years Sans had showed signs of curiosity, and Gaster decidedly enforced this curiosity with a vice-like grip. His intention was to create something new out of the failed experiment, something that... like his core generator, like everything he poured an ounce of effort into... would ultimately serve to benefit all of monster kind.
He should not have built a second one.
Perhaps things would have turned out different then. If only he had destroyed the younger skeleton at the first sign of utter incompetence, or otherwise kept Sans so intrenched in his studies that he couldn't be lead astray by the allure of a cheerful grinning idiotic companion who knew nothing except a desire to please and an inability to follow through.
Gaster had been granted an endless sea of time to pass in the void, but he sensed that even if he had used up every second of that eternity musing over all that had happened, he still wouldn't have understood why Sans chose Papyrus over everything....
... Perhaps it was something Asgore would understand.
Either way, what did the past matter? The future was still ever-approaching and in terrible jeopardy.
Let Sans escape. Let him tell everyone he wished everything he wanted to say.
It wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t believe him.
Gaster would make sure nobody believed him.
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