Chapter 4

Too Too Solid Flesh

The clock read twenty minutes to four when the telephone in Chara’s room rang. Chara sat bolt upright, woken instantly from their uneasy doze. A beam of sunlight had snuck past the voluminous natal plum bushes that grew outside Chara’s window and through a chink in the aluminum blinds to strike Chara in the face; the much-abused copy of WATCHMEN had slid from their chest and splayed open on the floor. Chara wasted some moments looking around for the cell phone they didn’t own, then fumbled for the room phone’s handset.

“Yeah, talk to me,” Chara grunted.

“Chara? It’s Frisk.” There wasn’t any mistaking the whispery voice of their friend. “I’m ready to head back over with Asriel. Dad’s going to drive us. Are you still up for this?”

Chara twisted their mouth a little at Frisk’s use of “Dad”. I hope I can see my dad soon, they told themself, not that wisecracking skeleton who’s boning Mom now. “Yeah, I’m as ready as I’m ever gonna be,” they answered aloud, keeping the sour taste of their thoughts out of their voice.

Frisk heard the sourness anyway. “And, uh, don’t worry about Dad—well, I guess I should say, Sans—getting on your nerves. I’ve instructed him to be on his best behavior around you and anyway he’s gonna stay in the car while I visit with Asriel. I, well, I hope you get to liking him more eventually.”

“Yeah, so do I,” said Chara without enthusiasm.

“You wanna say a few words to Asriel before we leave home? I didn’t want to wake him up just yet but I’m sure he won’t mind. It’s just that he, well, he needs a lot of naps sometimes.”

“Um...uh, no. Just head over. I’ll get to say as many words as I like to him soon enough.”

“All right. Be there soon.” The soft-spoken voice of their friend grew softer. “It’ll be all right, Chara. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Chara made a dismissive sound. “Oh, I’m over that,” they said.

“Are you?” Frisk asked, their voice even gentler now.

“...No, actually I’m terrified. But I’m not going back on my word, not this time.” They paused for a few moments, drawing a few steadying breaths. “Frisk? How did Azzy react? When you told him I was ready to see him?”

“Ecstatic. But scared, too. Chara, I’m pretty sure that Asriel’s just as anxious that he might screw this up as you are. I don’t suppose that’s much consolation, though.”

“You’re right, it’s not.” Chara grabbed one of their pillows and hugged it tightly to their chest, trying to imagine that it was fluffy young Asriel in their embrace and that they were succeeding in turning Asriel’s tears into smiles with some joke or jest or maybe a wildly embellished tale of life on the Surface with those mythical creatures the humans.

“Chara, are you all right?” Frisk asked after a longer than usual silence.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, yeah, just...thinking. Anyway, enough chatting. Don’t stand there on the phone talking to me; tell the comedian it’s time to taxi you and Azzy to the mental institution.”

“Your wish is to me a command, your royal highness,” Frisk solemnly intoned.

“Fff—” Chara flung the pillow down and jumped to their feet. “If you ever address me like that again I’m gonna find out who your pharmacist is and bribe them to fill all your prescriptions with breath mints.”

“No you won’t!” Frisk’s tone was infuriatingly bubbly. “That would be mean. And you’re way too much of a sweetheart.”

“Did you just call me sweet?” growled Chara. “Argh! Frisk, what the hell?”

“I’m trying to make you pissed off at me,” explained Frisk.

“What the hell is that supposed to accomplish?”

“Cheering you up, of course! You were kinda sounding like you needed it.”

“You—ugh.” Chara shook their head, bemused. “I should be angry that you’ve got me clocked like that, you know?”

“Sure, I know. I also know you’re smiling right now.”

Chara tried to prove Frisk wrong, but failed; they couldn’t erase the smile. “Frisk, just grab Azzy and haul your annoying know-it-all ass over here already, will you?”

“I love you too, Chara.”

“Yeah...that’s true, isn’t it...” Chara sank back down to the bed, sitting on the edge of the mattress. “One of these days I might even figure out why.”

“Just chalk it up to me being a lovable weirdo.” Even over the phone Chara could practically hear Frisk’s own smile. “See you in twenty minutes or so, Chara. Bye for now.”

“Bye, Frisk.” Chara carefully replaced the handset and stretched themself out on the bed. They reached for WATCHMEN but after a few moments gave up on their futile attempt to distract themself in its pages. Instead Chara lay quietly on the mattress, curled onto their side away from the window, and strove to direct all their attention to the regularity of their own breathing.

The minutes ticked by....

---

“Uh, hey…”

The strange voice broke into the darkness and emptiness that had engulfed Chara as they fell. It was a small voice, childish in its intonation, quavering a little as if tinged with shyness or fear.

“Can you hear me?” The voice grew louder, as if its owner were coming nearer. “Are you hurt?”

Chara groaned and opened their eyes. Faint, grey light seeped around the edges of their field of vision but otherwise the darkness scarcely lifted. Their hands moved over the surface onto which they had fallen. It was hard and flat, stone perhaps, but their groping fingers also felt loose dirt, cracks and pits, and tufts of grass or weeds. Tentatively Chara planted their hands on either side of their aching head and began to push themself upward but in an instant, with an agonized wince, they dropped themself back down to the ground: stabbing pain had shot through their left arm the moment they had begun to support their weight on it.

“Oh!” The strange voice filled with dismay. “You are hurt!” Chara heard a sniffling sound. Was the owner of the voice...crying? “Oh, no...what should I do? Maybe you shouldn’t try to move. Maybe I can go get Mom, she can fix you up.” Then Chara felt the lightest of touches on their shoulder.

With a sudden effort Chara pushed themself away from the touch with their one good hand, rolling partway onto their left side to face the voice. They were greeted with the sight of an enormous cavern, its full extent invisible in the shadows that surrounded them on all sides. What light there was streamed in through fissures in the craggy roof, spread out above them an unguessable distance over their head. Ranks of stone columns, most of them wound about with climbing and creeping plants, towered over Chara. And two feet away from them stood a monster.

At least Chara was sure that the beings whom they had been instructed to call “mother” and “father” would have called this diminutive being a “monster”, or worse. But there was nothing particularly monstrous about this monster, whose soft brown eyes wet with tears were staring at Chara out of a long, white-furred, goat-like face framed on either side with comically large and floppy ears. Fuzzy paws stuck out from the legs of the monster’s brown trousers and from the sleeves of their yellow- and green-striped pullover. Chara had intended to snarl some challenge at the interloper who had dared touch them without permission, but the impulse died the moment they saw the sadness in the monster’s tear-dimmed eyes. Instead, Chara found themself moved to do something they had once thought they would never do again; the corners of their mouth twitched upward into the ghost of a smile.

At this, the monster’s eyes brightened and they smiled in return, revealing the twin points of a pair of stubby fangs. They raised one of their paws in a little wave.

“Howdy,” said the monster, their voice still quiet and a little shaky. “My name is Asriel. Don’t be afraid. Do you have a name?”

Chara opened their mouth but for a few moments no words emerged. Their mind struggled to adapt itself to this astonishing new phenomenon, this crying goat-child-monster who wore sweaters and spoke English, and to devise some adequate explanation for it. They’d fallen a long way and landed hard; possibly they’d hit their head so badly they were now delirious? Or maybe they were unconscious still and dreaming a remarkably solid-feeling dream.

Or maybe their “father” and their “mother” had actually been right about something for once, and Chara was now dead and in Hell, and the goatish creature before them was the spawn of Satan.

For a moment Chara felt a stab of horror. They had been schooled often and schooled forcibly in the theology of damnation, and despite Chara’s defiance the schooling had left its mark; Hell was, to Chara’s shame, still something they secretly feared. But, as they regarded the little goat-child in their stripey jumper and studied the monster’s sunny countenance and brown eyes aglow with the light of friendship, Chara’s fear dwindled from a terrifying nemesis into a mere annoyance. Was this all that his ersatz parents had succeeded in teaching them? Here right in front of them was a marvel that Chara had never dreamed of, yet they were wasting time and thought on programmed-in fears of demons and devils?

And if this is Hell, thought Chara, I’ll take it in a moment over Heaven. Their tentative smile grew warmer and broader.

“Hi, Asriel,” they finally replied. “I’m really glad to meet you. My name is—” Then they halted, again temporarily wordless.

They had been on the point, out of sheer ingrained habit, of quoting to Asriel the name that their “mother” and “father” had taught them to call themself when asked. But that was not their name. How could a name assigned arbitrarily at birth possibly hope to be an appropriate and meaningful fit for who they were now? Not that their “parents” had accepted this reasoning, when their child had dared to bring it up. “Father”, in particular, had been predictably harsh in his reaction...

They had chosen a fitting name for themself anyway, a chance discovery in a textbook on biology. They didn’t know if the name had any special meaning aside from being the name of a particular genus of green algae. But they knew they liked the sound of the name on their tongue when they whispered it to themself, liked the slightly alien flavor of the name, liked how it felt neither a masculine nor a feminine name nor even a human name at all. And, most importantly, the name wasn’t just another of the many things that their “mother” or their “father” had insisted on cramming into their child’s head. The name was, in fact, one of the very first things they could think of as being truly their own.

“Um, you okay?” asked Asriel diffidently. “You never finished saying what your name was…”

“Oh, uh, yeah. Sorry. Anyway, Asriel, my name is—”

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“Chara?” asked a voice.