Undertale: SAVE
Tempo

Featuring misuse of SAVE features, reality hackage, and one watering can that Goat Mom will not ever be getting back.

~ ~ ~

The barrier was destroyed.

But your SAVE still hung in the corner of your mind.

Months had passed since you led the monsters out of the Underground. But you could still feel the SAVE, buzzing like the static from an old TV screen. From time to time, you'd reach out and touch it, never to load it. Life was pretty good.

Living with Toriel made you feel safe and loved. You helped her run errands for her new school and around the house. She made sure you got plenty of hugs and made you feel like you could do anything.

Talking with Asgore made you feel important and smart. You brought him iced tea while he worked in the school garden. He listened patiently to your problems and always helped you solve them.

You had a really great family, one half at a time. But bringing them together turned awkward fast. Silences stretched on, each of them fighting to sift the right words from the wrong ones, until one or both of them would find some reason to leave. Something was broken there. Something that'd been beautiful once. You friends said you were too young to worry about it. But you did. You thought about it a lot.

At night, you laid in bed and thought. That SAVE floated in the back of your brain, always ready. You couldn't think of anything you'd do differently. Resetting to when you first fell into the Underground wouldn't help either. The actions you'd taken there played out again and again in your mind, even the mistakes you'd erased. You dropped into their lives long after they split up. You could only fix mistakes you were around to make. Maybe it couldn't be fixed.

Still, you felt bad for Asriel. You could feel him, standing there in your SAVE file. You felt like you failed. You hated failing. He deserved better than you failing. You'd solved all kinds of problems by not giving up, but you couldn't help feeling like you gave up on him. It felt bad.

At the very least, you thought it might be nice to talk to somebody else who knows what it's like to die. That was messed up and you didn't want to feel messed up. But you were pretty sure the people who loved you didn't want to hear about all the times they killed you. Maybe Sans could've handled it, but he'd never tried to kill you. The guy was completely harmless. But Asgore? Hearing about how he'd killed you fourteen times would mess him up, so you never brought it up. Just like how you never brought up that one time Toriel was trying to scare you into not leaving the safety of her Underground home and accidentally killed you with a blast of fire when you tripped on your own shoelace. You'd been double-knotting your laces ever since.

Asriel might understand, though.

You stared at the dark ceiling. Everything that sucked was because Asriel was dead. Asriel being dead sucked. With everything else you fixed, you'd think one dead goat kid wouldn't be a problem.

Late one night, the idea got too tempting. The last few months were pretty cool. You could relive them. No big deal. You just had to talk to him. Maybe you'd notice something you missed. Plus, there was a guy in your class named Dave and you'd been calling him Chad accidentally, so it wouldn't be all bad to write the last couple months off. You briefly mourned the loss of these months with your new mom and dad, but you could have all those moments again. You just had to make the right choices. So you reached for it.

But the SAVE didn't work.

You tried it over and over, but it just didn't work. Normally, you just sort of grabbed onto the strange buzz of the SAVE file and pulled it toward you. Even reaching out your actual hands didn't help. You couldn't even touch the familiar static crackle of your SAVE. "Huh."

You didn't get a ton of sleep that night.

After school the next day, you went to the mountain. There, you could touch your SAVE file, but it was different. Fainter. Farther away. As the days passed by, you could barely reach your SAVE at all. The SAVE power was fading away. But maybe, you though, with what little power you had left, you could SAVE something else… You just had to figure out how.

That had been a week ago.

Then, today in the school garden, you found Asgore installing new branches on a plum tree. He explained how you could take a piece of one plant and graft it onto another, if they were close enough. Sometimes gardeners did this to make apple trees shorter so they were easier to pick. Asgore, though, just wanted almonds, apricots, cherries, nectarines, and peaches growing on the same tree because it was cool. Since coming to the surface, he'd really started to like the plants around here, and how fast they grew in the sunlight. He usually sent fruits and vegetables home with you. Toriel usually didn't talk about them, but she made them into pies. It made him weirdly happy. Something about grafting plants stuck in your head, though. If it worked for plants, then maybe…

As soon as you finished talking to him, you biked back home and trudged up the side of Mount Ebott, Toriel's snail-shaped never-used watering can in hand. The tricky part was not spilling it while you climbed down the rope to the Ruins. But you'd had practice.

Once on the cave floor, you watered the bed of golden flowers that once broke your fall. Sunlight shone off their cheery petals. You stepped on a candy wrapper. With no monsters here to tidy up, leaves and litter now piled up in the Ruins. You sprinkled a water-sausage dose of water on an especially large golden flower.

"Golly! How great that a stupid human has come to the exact same spot to visit. Again." Flowey trembled with outrage under the delicate deluge. "Are you aware I can move around?"

"Yes." You continued watering him.

"I don't need you to water me." He shook the water off his leaves with great scorn. "I can just move to get water. I even could move to meet you at the entrance to the cave." His eyes blazed up at you, even as his smile sweetened unnaturally. "Except that this is the place you always come to."

"Yep." You set the watering can down and started wandering around the Ruins.

"I don't like following you around." His roots churned the earth as he burrowed after you. Besides some spiders, he was basically the last monster in the Underground. "I just want to see what you're doing so I can make fun of you."

"I know." After poking around the ancient stone balcony, you found a plastic toy knife stuck in the dirt. You picked it up. As you brushed years worth of dust from it, you reached back to your SAVE file. It felt like the static left when you turn off an old TV. Instead of just grabbing the whole SAVE and pulling it over yourself, you felt around inside it. It took a long time, but you eventually found what felt like a toy knife in the SAVE file: right where you'd just picked this one up.

You set the knife on the ground, then pulled just that tiny part of the SAVE toward yourself. The ground in front of you went black for the blink of an eye, then the knife reverted to sticking back out of the ground...where it had been for years.

"Huh." You smiled, just a little.

Flowey sneered from the dirt at the edge of the balcony stonework. "What are you trying to do?" His stem wiggled as he pursed out his lips in mocking, eyes wide and sparkling. "Still looking for a happy ending?"

You ignored him. Okay, since that worked, you had to try something else. You took a marker from your pocket, then drew a smiley face on one of the pillars. It was a little lopsided, but it would work. Reaching back to the SAVE again, you groped in the dark until you found that cold stone of the pillar and pulled it toward you.

The smiley face flashed black and vanished.

You nodded.

Across the chamber, Flowey stretched out an enormous groan. "Are you just going to sit here being stupid forever?"

Stroking your chin helped you think, or at least you thought so. "You could always help me."

"Ha ha ha ha..." He threw his head back and laughed. "You naive idiot. Don't you think I have better things to do with my time?"

You looked around the crumbling and somewhat-trash-filled Ruins. But you didn't say anything. You had another idea to test. You reached into the SAVE again, but this time you felt for something white, fuzzy, and full of love. It took a long time.

After reaching through a whole bunch of twisted and thorny vines, you felt warm fur. Whatever it was had horns and a delicate muzzle with fangs. With great hope, you tried to pull it toward you. It didn't want to budge.

Okay, no big deal. Maybe you needed both hands. You reached your other hand into the SAVE, but it wasn't as easy as bringing your hands together in normal space—your other hand had to search through too and find the something with that same warm fur. After several minutes, you found something that felt pretty similar, though you couldn't feel your other hand, so it was tough to know for sure.

Well, you didn't come this far to quit. Especially since your arms were falling asleep. Gathering all your strength, you pulled hard. With a grunt of effort, you accomplished nothing. You tried again and again and again and finally something started to take shape between your hands. Reality fought against you, but you kept trying. It felt like you were starting to make progress...

A cheery custom ring echoed from your cell phone. As you were still wrists-deep in magic, you didn't answer. It kept ringing.

"Are you seriously going to let that it ring forever?" Flowey pressed leaves to the petals where his ears would be. "Are you too stupid for phones now?"

"I'm not going to answer it." You'd recognized the ringtone instantly. She'd picked it herself. You kept focusing on the foggy swirl of white between your palms. "It's Mom."

"Golly! Perfect little Frisk is doing something Toriel wouldn't approve of?" With a crooked smile, the flower lashed out a vine, snatched the phone from your pocket, and flipped it open. "We wouldn't want you to get in trouble." He slapped it to your ear.

"Greetings!" Her tone gained a touch of concern when you hesitated, due to the various magical distractions. "Frisk? Are you there?"

"Uh, hi Mom." You tilted your head to pin the phone against your shoulder, hands still gripping that part of the SAVE with all your might.

Her voice brightened. Pans clanked like she was messing around in the kitchen. "I was just calling to ask what you wanted for dinner and when you'd get back from the library."

"Oh, I don't know." Your teeth gritted as you fought with reality itself. "Maybe pizza?"

A good-natured chide entered her tone: "You cannot have pizza every night, my child."

"Whatever you wanna make, then." The entity in your hands started to solidify. "I'm sure it'll be great."

She hummed absently as she thought it over. "If you're quite certain I can't convince you to try snail pie..."

You groaned as your entire being strained against the SAVE file.

"Very well. Snails are hard to come by up here anyway." You heard paper rustling over the phone. "I have been reading about these 'casseroles.' They're rather like pies."

You tried really hard to not let her hear what you were doing to reality. "Sounds great, Mom."

She bleated in a pleased way at your response. "I was buying the ingredients for what's called a 'shepherd's pie.' The human at the meat counter gave me the strangest look when I bought—"

The phone went dead.

"Mom?" You paused at pulling the part of the SAVE file further into reality. The cell reception inside mountains was terrible. "You still there?"

"Your own 'mom' hung up on you?" Flowey propped his leaves on his stem and smiled with all the mirth of an old bag of fertilizer. "Gosh, you must be a terrible kid."

Reality warped around your hands. A furry white figure bounced into being, knocking you on your rump. The phone, still silent, clattered to the stonework.

No clean black snap of a SAVE this time, just a weird lingering darkness that spilled out onto the rubble. Through the strange black haze, Toriel walked up to you, bearing a kind smile. Her strong, yet gentle demeanor filled you with determination. She knelt in the soft grass beside you. She took a quiet breath, then cooed: "HOI firsk!!!!!! awwAwa humans TOO cute!! (pets u)." Her hand patted your head about ten times in rapid succession.

You and Flowey shared a look of absolute horror.

"Not okay! Not okay!" The flower screamed as his leaves pattered at your socked ankle. "Gosh! What's wrong with you? Load your SAVE!"

Unperturbed by your or the flower's reactions, the totally-not-Toriel lulled a gentle "fhsdhjfdsfjsddshjfsd" and vibrated intensely.

Before you could reach out to the SAVE again, the black aura rippled, then dispelled like a fog on the wind, taking the strange creature with it.

Beside you, actual-Toriel's voice rang out from the phone. "Frisk? Can you hear me?"

You jumped, then snatched up the phone and whispered as if you've just been shushed by a librarian: "Yep! I gotta go though."

"Very well!" She whispered back. "Get home soon, my child, and we shall see about this shepherd's pie. Oh, someone's at the door... I love you dearly!"

"You too, Mom." You stood up and brushed the dirt off your pants. Then you touched your head, hair still tousled from the patting.

The phone blinked off as she hung up.

Flowey turned slowly to you, looking mouth hanging open. "That was..."

You studied the space where the Temmiel appeared, just to make sure it was actually gone. "...scary."

He bobbed his head in a nod. "Let's never do that again."

"Yeah..." You nodded. As the utter absurdity sank in, you couldn't hold back an amused snort.

The flower's gaze snapped to you, then a snicker broke from his lips. "Did you see? She looked—"

"—so totally normal!" You slipped into hysterical giggling.

"But her voice! It was just…" He spread his leaves forward, at a loss for words.

Your whole body convulsed with amusement, threatening to double you over. "…totally a Temmie!"

Rocking back with a deep laugh, his voice cracked. His laughter became musical and soft. "Mom's never gonna believe us!"

Laughter paused instantly, you blinked in disbelief.

Flowey caught your gaze. Just as quickly, the strange flowering plant sprouted a few extra thorns and cast a poisonous glare at you. "I just said that to mess with you." He bared crooked teeth. "You really are wasting your time."

Watching him from the corner of your eye, you sat back down and tried to think of just one more way to hack a SAVE. You didn't have much of an inventory to work with. You had a SAVE file, but that was from right after you'd defeated the absolute GOD of Hyperdeath and you didn't dare SAVE over it. You had a reset too, but that would take you back to when you first fell into the Underground. Not much help to you now, since you'd put so much work into getting things right. You'd have traded that reset for another SAVE file in a heartbeat.

"Hmm." Your mouth straightened into a firm line. That reset was sort of like a SAVE, just one you couldn't change. Maybe they weren't different after all. You looked down at one of the stone blocks in the floor. It had a corner missing and a deep scratch across it, both covered in super old moss. Using your fingernail, you scraped some moss off the block, just enough to make a mark. Then you reached, really carefully, to your reset. The reset felt harder to press into than a SAVE, but otherwise the same. It took you a few minutes, but you managed to grope your way to the right block. You felt for the missing corner, the groove too, then you pulled it toward you.

With a black flash, the missing moss returned.

Good. But even your reset didn't go back far enough. What you were looking for had vanished years before you'd ever gone into the mountain. "Hmmf."

"Golly, I just can't believe how much of an idiot you are." The flower gave you a vicious grin. "Did you come here without any plan at all besides lying to your 'mom'? Keep lying to her and she might replace you, like she did with all those other kids."

Flowey. He could SAVE too. He'd done it when he was trying to kill you. Had killed you. Lots and lots of times. The only reason he couldn't SAVE now was because he'd lost enough determination to have less than you. And if he had a SAVE, he probably had a reset too. And the last and only time he entered the Underground was when he came back from the surface, as Asriel, wounded and dying. You couldn't be sure, but it seemed like a good guess. So Flowey could get what you were looking for.

Too bad he'd never help you. He was a total jerk.

"Are you just going to stare at me like a freak?" Flowey squinted and straightened his sneer out into a flat line. "That's how you look right now, stupid. Don't you have anything better to do?"

But he wasn't the one in your SAVE.

On a whim, you reached into your SAVE file again. You felt around for something green and scared, something with thorns and horns. Once you found him, you didn't pull him toward you. Instead, you pressed your way inside him. You felt weird about it, but sometimes friends had to make their best guess what their friends would want. Besides, you'd reached out to SOULS inside Flowey before. This wasn't all that different.

For a long time, you didn't feel much of anything, beyond the sharp pangs of regret and a longing for the impossible. Being this close to your goal filled you with determination. Hope swelled in your chest. You pressed on. Minutes crept by, but you never once pulled your hand out of the TV static of the SAVE, even when your arm started to go numb.

"You know you look like a moron, reaching into the air like that." Flowey rolled his eyes. "I can't believe anybody even pretends to love someone as freaky and stupid as you."

You ignored him. He had no idea how close you were. You had no idea either, but you weren't willing to give up. You'd freed all the monsters by not giving up, so it hadn't let you down yet.

"Toriel doesn't know you're here." Flowey bobbed smugly. "That means she wouldn't approve."

You kept ignoring him.

"My my… What would Toriel say?" Sneering in your face, the flower sprouted a caricature of your adoptive mother's face and frowned tearfully from between his petals. "My child, how could you? Practicing forbidden magic! And at my dead child's grave! How positively awful!" He cackled, changing back to his usual self. "You know, that might be what it takes for her to kick you out of the house. You're not really her kid, so it wouldn't be that hard."

The words drew a cold and heavy knot in your chest. "She'd never do that."

He rubbed his leaves together. "Oh, wouldn't she? She kicked out Asgore. Her disappointment broke him. It'd break you too, fragile little Frisk. When even the ultimate goody-goody Toriel doesn't want you around, there's no hope left for you."

You clamped down on your expressions. The flower didn't have anything better to do than distract you. Instead, you pushed that his stupid ideas away and thought about what to do next.

The pool of sunlight shifted from the golden flowers and along the cave floor. The air started to cool. Your back felt really sore from sitting hunched over on the cave floor, but you stayed put, not wanting to lose your place. You only had so much time before Toriel figured out you weren't coming home and used her mom-sense to track you down. Once that happened, she'd never let you out of her sight and you might never get another chance to try this before messing with SAVES got impossible.

TV static.

You almost missed it, since your hand had been soaking it for longer than you wanted to think about. Tracing your fingers back, you found the strange place that had more of that weird tingling static. Bingo. Asriel's.

"Heh." You smile a little bit.

"What're you laughing at? You think this is funny? You're sitting in a hole staring at nothing!" He reached his leaves out and made strangling motions at you.

Beside the SAVE, you felt another object with that weird static. One of those has to be the reset and the other was a SAVE file. You poked each of them. One was soft, like a butterscotch pie. The other one was just a little bit firmer, like a butterscotch pie left on the floor all night. You reached into Asriel's reset. The old computer monitor fuzz feeling got stronger.

So much for the easy part.

You reached further inside, groping around the Underground an inch at a time. But you knew what Asriel felt like now. And you had a good guess of where he was. So, slowly, slowly, you reached out of the Ruins. You got a little lost at one point and felt your way over some monsters catching bugs by the water, so you had to backtrack. Even as Flowey made more fun of you, you pressed on. As you passed Hotland, you weren't sure what would happen if you touched lava inside a reset file, but you figured it wouldn't be anything good. You made sure to be extra careful. It took forever, but you finally managed to feel your way into New Home.

After feeling over lots of silky, sticky, and slimy things, you found the gate that lead out through the barrier. You pressed against the barrier that kept the monsters in, but it had no give at all. No big surprise—your SAVES ended at the barrier, so his reset probably did too. Sweeping your touch down along the floor, you felt all over for Asriel.

You didn't find him.

For a moment, your heart tightened. Were you too late? Had he already died when the reset formed? Part of you wanted to give up. Mostly your butt, since you'd been sitting on the stone floor for hours. But you knew this was your best chance. And you figured you were in trouble with Toriel by now anyway, so there was nothing to lose.

Feeling frantically around the smooth stone floor, you didn't find any trace of him. Then you took a deep breath. You didn't come this far just to give up. You searched inch by inch, fingers splayed for any hint.

Finally, finally, you found a fuzzy, floppy something.

It felt a lot like the fuzzy somethings that flopped against your face when Toriel or Asgore leaned down to hug you. Sure enough, you felt the rest of his little goaty form. He was in bad shape. Torn cloth, fur clumped with blood. You winced. You weren't there. You couldn't hurt him, you told yourself. Feeling around him, you brushed by a faintest wisp of something rising off him. Gripping onto it, your heart contracted with terror and expanded with hope. It felt more alive than anything you'd ever touched. You'd never really touched a SOUL before. Now you had.

"Ha!" Your laugh echoed in the cave.

Flowey bolted sunflower-straight to stare at you. He looked too surprised to say anything.

You had the kid's SOUL now. But pulling his body toward you, that would just have him dying in the present. That wouldn't work.

But that's why you'd kept that SAVE around all this time. With your other hand, you reached into your SAVE. This one was easy. Well, not easy, but partial success filled you with determination. Plus, you were way more familiar with existences that were your own. Your fingers practically sprinted to the golden flower patch. You knew it by heart, by touch. Sure enough, a slightly tear-dampened goat kid stood there. He felt hollow and weird, but perfectly real as you snagged him by the shirt.

"Are you...smiling?" The sneering flower stretched out of the ground to hover in your face. "Since when can you smile?"

Both hands clenched, you yanked hard. Your arm muscles trembled from the tension. Groaning, you dragged your hands together. A faint white fog swirled between them. The air popped around you as you tried to load parts of two different SAVES on top of one another, wind buffeting your hair. The black haze flickered in and out as you pressed your tired hands together. It repelled like two magnets, but you squeezed it closer, closer, even as leaves and dirt and candy wrappers blew around the cave to hit you in the face.

An unseen force wrenched Flowey by the stem toward you. With a shriek of terror, he dove into the soil, only to unearthed and dragged toward the orb. His vines blasted out of the dirt one after another, whipping back into the swirl between your hands. He wrapped his stem around a stone pillar. "Aaaahhhh!" His leaves clutched at the pillar, his body stretching fully out of the ground now, straight into the space between your hands. "What are you doing?!"

Even as dust made an epic voyage up your nose, you pressed his reset and your SAVE together. It'd sort of worked with Temmiel. You'd just stopped too soon. Well, right on time, considering it went back to normal. And anyway, you'd sit and do this a hundred or a thousand times if you had to. Failing didn't matter. Continuing did.

Coming unwound from the pillar, Flowey's head snapped back toward the part of reality you were breaking and fixing. His eyes blazed with fury even as his voice broke with fear. "You're so stupiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid!"

The mist started to collect into a short goat-shaped person.

You had this.

Teeth gritting, your face started to hurt from grinning like a doofus. Tears wicked down your dusty face, catching in the edges of your smile. You stood up, back popping, butt numb. You licked your dry lips. With all your determination, you forced the handfuls of reality together until they turned into a soft little goat hand.

Blackness shot up the length of Flowey and flashed over the whole room.

You closed your eyes, convinced that you'd deleted yourself or something. Then the room snapped back into being. You clutched a hand on an arm in a striped green and yellow sleeve that lead to a really confused-looking little goat guy.

He blinked, then looked around and at you with tearful eyes. His free hand patted over his chest, making sure he was real. "F-Frisk?" He squeezed your hands. "Am I—?"

"—totally not a Temmie!" You flung your arms around him in a gigantic hug. Through the dust in your nose, he smiled like golden flowers.

He hugged you back. He was just as furry as you remembered from that night months ago. He gripped you so tightly that it was a little hard to breathe, but you didn't object. You could put off breathing for a little while for his sake.

As you gently patted his back, you wondered how you'd explain him just showing up. Put a bow on him and present him to Toriel? Maybe just watch TV with him and wait for her to notice? Plenty of options, all of them good.

He nuzzled into your shirt. "I'm sorry I was a jerk to you again when I was a flower."

"It's okay." You rubbed your palms on his back. "I started tuning you out after a while."

His big sad eyes peered up at you. "How long do I have this time?"

"Huh?" You pulled back a bit to study his face.

He looked down, fidgeting his fingers together. "Before I turn back into…you know."

"Uh, you won't?" You may have only figured out the rules today, but the rules of magic didn't just change.

"But I don't have a SOUL!" He waved his paws at his sides, long striped sleeves flapping like some weird bird.

A little laugh bubbled up through you. "Sure you do."

Worry widened his eyes. "Whose?"

"Yours."

"But whose was it before?" He studied the fronts and backs of his paws, as if they might not be his own. "Where'd you get it?"

"Yours. You." Okay, you had to admit that wasn't the most helpful answer. "From your SAVE. Um, do you know how grafting prune trees works?"

Muzzle slightly open, he stared at you. "What?"

"Never mind. Just something Dad talked about today." You waved your fingers to shoo the topic away. "Look, the important thing is you're a monster again." You paused for a moment. No, calling him a monster was actually not mean. "For good."

A distant teakettle noise came from somewhere, getting louder and louder. It took you a few seconds to realize it was coming from Asriel. The little goat guy gave you the biggest hug.

The faintest wisp of peace rose from your heart, taking a long-carried weight with it. You smiled. For the first time since the barrier fell, you SAVED.

A couple seconds later, he jerked up from nuzzling into your shoulder. His eyes shot wide at something behind you. "What's that?"

You followed his gaze to a blot of in the dark. At first you thought it was a trick of the shadows, but it floated in place no matter how you moved your head. The two of you stared at a strange black shape in above the cave floor...right where Flowey had been clinging to the pillar.

Asriel tensed, grabbed you by the hand, and dragged you to the far side of the cave, aware from the shape. Before you could argue, he began emitting a soft moan of worry, never letting go of you. "Seriously, Frisk, what is that thing?"

You squeezed his silk-furred paw, then shook loose. Stepping carefully closer, you peered down at that unnatural shape. The rip in space-time hovered about a foot off the ground. About six inches across, it was pitch black, hazy, and faintly writhing. It positively drank up light. Before the goat could notice, you grabbed a stick from the cave floor and poked the spacial anomaly. The front part of the stick stopped existing. Your studied it closely: a clean sheer. "Huh." You poked it with the stick a second time, just to be sure. Same result. "It's like...a hole. Right where you were before I pulled you out of the SAVE." You poked it with the stick a third time, just to be sure. You were going to need a new stick soon. "That didn't happen when I messed with the moss... Maybe because you already had a body?"

"Oh my gosh!" He lifted his sleeve-covered paws to his muzzle. "Bringing me back punched a hole in reality!"

"It's not a very big hole." You tried to comfort the kid as you tossed the remainder of the stick into the floating blackness. "Maybe no one will notice."

"It's probably some sort of terrible...doom hole that'll suck us all in." Asriel paced the periphery of the cave and freaked out. "I'm too young to die! I'm only 20 seconds old!" He hiccuped something between a hyperventilation and a sob. "I'm not even trying to destroy the world this time, I promise!"

You knelt and studied the rip in reality for another second or so, then placed the watering can upside down over the top of it. It fit snugly. Grabbing an old napkin from the cave floor, you wrote "doom hole" on it and placed the note atop the can. "There." You turned, hoping this would soothe the goat.

The goat was not soothed. "You can't just write 'doom hole' on a watering can!" He flapped his arms wildly, long sleeves fluttering. "People are gonna look!"

You stood up and stepped back to admire your handiwork. "No, they won't. It's clearly dangerous."

His white paws fought their way to the front of their sleeves to shake in your direction. "Has that ever stopped you?"

"Ugh." You rolled your eyes. "Fine, hang on. I'll put 'warning' on it." As you turned to clarify the note, the can was eaten from the inside out. The blackness swelled outward, silent and writhing. You crossed your arms. "Oh hey. The doom hole's expanding."

The watering spout clattered to the cave floor, cleanly sheered off. The rest of the object was gone, lost to the small, strange void.

Asriel yanked his ears with a bleat of panic.

"Relax." You placed a hand on his shoulder. "We can fix it."

"Can we?" He clutched your arm and looked to you with desperate hope.

"We'd better!" You chuckled a little. "Otherwise, Mom's gonna be super mad."

"Mom!" He started toward the rope you climbed down. "We should go get Mom!"

"What's Mom gonna do? Throw fire at it?" You were pretty sure fire was not a solution for doom holes. "She doesn't know anything about SAVE states."

Asriel gestured frantically at it, striped sleeves flying back over his hands. "Yeah, like we know anything! We need an actual magician."

"No, we can't go get Mom—she's thinks I'm at at the library." You'd be in enough trouble for ending reality. Best not to add to the list of infractions. "Besides, the doom hole's getting bigger. Who knows how big it could get before we could bring her back here?"

He jabbed a claw toward the blocky object in your pocket. "Just use your phone!"

"Oh, I actually get pretty bad reception here." You pulled it out of your pocket and shrugged at the lack of signal. "We are inside a mountain."

Asriel clamped shut his muzzle and bleated internally.

You sighed. "I just smooshed your SOUL, mind, and body back into one piece so Mom and Dad can win another Nose-Nuzzle Championship." You jerked your thumb toward the doom hole. "I think we can handle this."

Pure absurdity was what Asriel needed to hear, apparently. That soft and musical laugh came tinged with terror, but at least it made an appearance. You could get used to a laugh like that.

You smiled a little. "Okay, so how do we fix it?"

Asriel wiped his eyes, misted with mirth and misgivings. "Go back to a SAVE?"

"Can't. I only have one SAVE file and I SAVED over it when I put you back together." You swept your bangs out of your face. "Just use your SAVE, but only pull that part of the room from it."

"My SAVE?" He stood within hugging distance of you.

"You have a SAVE file and a reset, just like you did as Flowey. I felt them when I put you back together."

Asriel wilted a little. "I don't know how to do that."

"I guess I can try it from my reset." You stretched your hands, prepping to dig around in the ether again. "I just hope reality doesn't notice if I end up in the room twice."

The kid raised his paws, too-long sleeves drooping off them like leaves. "What'll happen then?"

"Dunno." You shrugged. "Another doom hole?"

Bits of stone fell off the pillar as the doom hole ate it away. About the size of a beach ball now, the doom hole had cleanly sheered away about half the stone column. Little trails of dust traced down from the ceiling like ghosty grey ribbons.

Asriel pressed his floppy ears over his eyes. "We are so dead."

You patted him between the horns. He felt warm and soft. His horns weren't very pointy.

Biting his lower lip, he looked out from under his ears and tried not to cry. Well, cry more. He stuck out his shaky paw for you to grab, though.

Your hand closed around his. "I'm reaching out to my reset." Your eyes closed as you lifted your free hand. "Feeling around for the stone column..." You poked around until you found the right stone pillar. "Okay, I think I found the right one."

Uncooperatively, the massive stone pillar decided on that moment to tumble down. It fell in sections, like layers of a cake. A bunch of them hit the doom hole as they dropped, and landed with whole bites smoothly missing. The rest whacked down to the cave floor, some breaking open with thunderous cracks. The roof of the cave made a huge snap as it cracked. Dirt and rocks started to rain down.

"Aaaaaaaaahhh!" Asriel grabbed you by the middle and dragged you back away from the collapse.

With a grunt, you yanked the SAVE toward yourself.

Blackness flashed across that part of the room.

Your caprine companion bleated in panic and clutched at you. He buried his face in your shirt.

"See?" You dusted a little rubble from your hair. "No big deal."

"No big deal?!" He unwrapped himself from you.

"Yeah, you've just gotta use only one part of the SAVE." You shrugged at the column, which stood in one piece. "Now it's your turn."

"What?" He grabbed his own horns in despair. "No way!"

"You did it a bunch of times as Flowey." You left out the part about him doing it to try to kill you.

"I know! I'm sorry! I don't think I can do it. Can we just go home now?" The small goat shrunk a little. "I really wanna see Mom and Dad."

"No, we have six more things to do." You heaved a sigh. "Besides, they're my mom and dad too, and that makes you're my younger brother..." You squeezed him around the middle. "...so you have to do what I say."

He flopped his paws flat toward you, palms up, long sleeves flipping down. "I was born hundreds of years before you!"

Rats. You'd never had a brother or sister before, but that usually worked on TV. "But you were dead all that time, so it doesn't count." You crossed your arms. "Besides, you're the only one who can do this next part."

Muzzle down, he looked up at you. "I am?"

You pointed both index fingers at him. "Remember when you had all those SOULS in you as Flowey? And it gave you like six more SAVE files?"

"I'm trying really hard not to." His toes pointed toward each other as he fidgeted with his ears.

"You still have that in your SAVE file?"

"Yeah... From when I was..." He winced at the thought. "Why?"

"I need you to put some other kids back together, using their resets." Your fingers swished around like it was no big deal. "Like I did with you."

"I dunno, Frisk..." His droopy ears drooped further. "There's no way I can do that."

His ears were actually super adorable. You really wanted to touch them, since they looked so soft, but figured that might not help your argument. You looked in in the eyes instead. "I've seen you do amazing things. "

He dipped his muzzle and hid behind his ears a little. "You're sure you can't do it?"

"I'm sure, but it'll be easier than with you. After all, they weren't in bad shape when they got here." You decided not to talk about how he felt to you when he got back through the barrier. "You won't have to cram their SOULS back into them or anything."

He rubbed his blunt white claws together. "...How do we get started?"

~ ~ ~

Standing at the entrance to the Ruins, you waved to the group of six kids as they hurried together down the mountain. They wore a weird mix of clothing, everything from tutus to cowboy costumes, though none of it more than five or ten years out of date. You'd called Sans to have him wait in the road at the base. He was kind of a weirdo, but he'd help them call their parents, since all the phone numbers they knew had changed. The skeleton had been happy to help. The guy was never up to much.

Asriel stood beside you and waved bashfully. "They were scared of me."

"You're a monster." You gave him a reassuring smile. "We pulled them out of their resets, so they don't remember monsters at all."

Shoulders slouched, he looked at his feet. "I don't like when people are scared of me."

You looked him over. "Yeah, I don't think that'll be a problem. You're not that scary."

Even as his ears drooped extra far with weariness, he managed a smile back at you.

Now that the kids were halfway down the slope, you leaned toward him and whispered out the side of your mouth: "You know, we're probably lucky we don't have a doom hole for each of those kids."

"Don't remind me." His tail sank. His shoulders followed. "I never wanna see a SAVE file again."

Your SAVE file felt impossibly far away now. Even if you went back into the Underground, you weren't sure if you could use it again. "We probably won't."

He watched as the kids vanished into the trees. "How long since Mom called you?"

"Dunno." You glanced to the setting sun. "Hours, I guess."

Guiding you by the shoulders, he nudged you a little further away from the hole above the Ruins. "You're not worried?"

You chuckled a little. "Dad was covering for me."

"My dad?" Ears swaying as he tilted his head, he looked at you out of the corner of his eye. "Why would he do that?"

"I'm not sure." You shrugged. "I think he knows what I'm trying."

His eyebrows rose. "And he let you do it?"

You thought back to his quiet anxiety when you told him you were going to Mount Ebott. He hadn't tried to talk you out of it, though he'd told you to be careful and how much he cared about you. "He feels bad. He never wanted to hurt anyone. All he ever wanted was to be with you and Mom." You stretched your sore body. "Plus, I didn't give him all the details."

Asriel looked up at you again. "Because it was really dangerous."

"Because he doesn't know what a SAVE is and would've thought I'd gone nuts." You rubbed the dust from your eyes, but couldn't do much about how tired they felt. "Besides, he would've cracked and told Mom everything."

A small smile took root on his muzzle. "We should go home. Wherever that is now." He looked down the valley. "Mom is probably worried."

You pulled the phone from your pocket. Since the phone call, it had a dozen messages, all from Toriel. You'd texted back every time, so she knew you were okay. Up until you'd gotten the last missing human back, you hadn't told her were you were. Her only reply since had been: "Stay there."

"She's coming to get us." You took his paw. "So I've got about five minutes before I get grounded for life."

With a chuckle, he squeezed your hand. He looked out at the horizon. "The sky is really pretty. All this time, I never forgot what it looked like."

Still holding hands, the two of you watch the sunset melt into a fading glow.

Eventually, he sat down cross-legged before you.

You knelt beside him. It felt weirdly comfy, sitting with him. Like you'd done it forever. "So there is one other thing..."

His eyes turned to you, his face lit in every hue of the setting sun. "What?"

You felt kind of goofy asking, but you had done a bunch of crazy things today already. "...Is it okay if I touch your ears?"

He straightened in an instant, then blushed a little. "Sure?"

You touched his fluffy goat ears. Super soft and warm in the cooling air, they filled you with determination, even as he let out a shy squeak. Maybe especially then.

~ ~ ~

You heard Toriel before you saw her. Sticks snapped underfoot. Leaves rustled. Breathless bleats of impatience filtered through the underbrush. A slight shake of the bushes was your only warning before she popped out of the brush. Nostrils flared with effort, arms pumping with effort, she chugged up the rocky slope.

Asgore emerged from the treeline a few seconds later and leaned against a tree, several yards back. "Young one!" Waving to you, he shouted between gasps. "She is too fast. She power-walked up the mountain."

Seeing you, she broke into a flat-out sprint. Then, about thirty feet away, she slowed again, her gaze locked on Asriel.

Her eyes turned to you, brimming with questions.

You shrugged.

Upon reaching you, she fell to her knees and pulled him into a desperate hug.

Asriel bleated with relief into his mother's shoulder. Even muffled through her heavy purple robes, the kid had some serious crying power. It echoed down the mountainside and down into the Ruins.

She clutched him to her chest. Tears streamed down her face.

Catching up at last, the larger goat knelt, still only at eye level to you, and wrapped them both in an enormous hug. He started crying too. Maybe it was a goat monster thing?

Toriel tensed for a moment, but made no move to push his arms away.

You crossed your arms and watched quietly, not wanting to ruin the moment.

With a teary smile, Asriel stuck his small white goat paw out from the tangle of hug toward you. A slow grin spread across your face as you really carefully took it, like it was the most important thing in the world, and let him pull you into the hug. Toriel and Asgore wrapped their arms around you too. Long moments passed in a crush of fluffy affection. Surrounded by a bunch of crying goat monsters on a mountain in the dark might not sound great to someone else, but your heart soared in your chest. It felt good, like that's where you were supposed to be. Caught up in the emotion, you wiped your eyes on Asgore's floral-print button-up. He didn't seem to notice.

Finally, once everyone had cried all over the place, Toriel pulled back just a little bit and rested her muzzle atop her son's head. She looked at you. "But how is this possible?"

You shrugged. "Oh, you know, we kinda broke reality a little bit."

Asriel grabbed her robes. "We fixed it, though! Please don't ground us."

Toriel laughed as she wiped her eyes. "Very well, my children. But don't think you can escape of being grounded every time one of you is resurrected."

Asgore's massive paw settled on your shoulder. His kind eyes twinkled down at you. "Thank you, Frisk."

You rubbed your tired hands together. "It wasn't a big deal."

"What are you talking about?" Asriel popped up in his mother's arms. "You could've died! Or been erased from existence. It was really brave. And that was before we almost got sucked into the doom hole."

Toriel's eyebrows went up. "Doom...hole?"

He turned his muzzle up to face hers. "And we would've been down hours ago, but we had to save the other children."

She blinked. "Other...children?"

Panting, Asgore padded up to her. "The ones who took the other trail down. The humans who fell into the Underground, if I am not mistaken. The ones I..." He wrung his great paws. "Seeing them gave me hope that Frisk succeeded." He gave you a misty-eyed and grateful smile. "I have never been so glad I was right."

"You!" Still clutching you and her son, she turned to poke at claw to Asgore's chest. "You knew about this!"

A whine escaped his closed muzzle as he tried to look anywhere but at her. "I did..."

"You didn't want to help me paint my snail figurines at!" She squeezed both of you tighter in a one-armed hug. "You were helping risk my child's life!"

Asgore squirmed his huge body. "That's not fair! I love your painted snails. Besides, your houseplants were in terrible shape. And was I supposed to stop the child who has unique magical powers from trying to correct my most tragic mistake?"

After a moment's reflection, Toriel crossed her arms, though the slightest hint of a smile crept onto her tear-streaked muzzle. "You and I shall talk about this later." She turned back to you and Asriel. "For now, I think it best if we go home. You'll both catch a chill out here."

"H-home." The kid wiped his eyes with his sleeve, which seemed a losing battle. "Okay."

She took him by the paw. Holding her breath, she made a gesture with her other hand. Bright white flame flared to life in her hand, almost blinding in the blue dusk. It lit up the path down the mountain, floating just above her clawed fingertips. She glanced to you, then to Asgore. "This way."

In the middle of your first step to follow them, you were lifted off the ground. Asgore's strong arms held you to his chest as if you didn't weigh anything at all. He smiled down at you, the firelight glinting off the moisture on either side of his muzzle and in his beard. He took big, careful steps down the slope.

An unfamiliar rush of heat flooded your face. You weren't used to being carried.

~ ~ ~

In the dim glow of your bedroom nightlight, the heavy outline of Asgore sat on the floor, slouched against your bed, snoring faintly. Breathing evenly, the robed form of Toriel lay against him. After everything that'd happened today, neither could bring themselves to leave.

You lay in bed, just watching them. You'd never seen them this close before. At least, not when they weren't being crushed by the same magic vines or something. You tried to be really quiet, not wanting to wake them up, worried it might break the spell.

A soft voice cleared its throat behind you. "Frisk?"

You rolled over quietly. "Yeah?"

The kid lay curled up under the blankets with you, wearing your spare dino-print pajamas, more securely tucked in that you thought possible. "Why did you do all this?" He hugged your still-pretty-new teddy bear. "To put us back together, I mean."

After thinking for a moment, you whispered: "'Cause you're good." You squirmed, not sure how to explain it. "You were only messed up by mistake."

He nodded. "And you're good at fixing mistakes."

You shrugged. "Plus, you told me to take care of your mom and dad."

His muzzle pressed to the back of the teddy bear's head. "And that means taking care of me?"

"Well, yeah." Pride swelled in your chest. Belonging too, which was still an unfamiliar feeling.

"I guess that's fair, 'cause I'm gonna take care of you too." He reached out a paw across the bed.

You took it. "Deal." With your free hand, you mussed his ears, then noticed a delicate scent clinging to your fingers. "…Are you supposed to still smell like flowers?"

His eyebrows rose with concern.

You stuck out your tongue.

His quiet goat giggle filled you with determination.

~ ~ ~

A little something in honor of the game's one-year anniversary.

SillyNekoRobin gets the blame for encouraging me to write this. X) Everyone knows I don't write fanfictions if left to my own devices.

Time is weird in Undertale, but since Toriel and Asgore won the 1998 Nose-Nuzzle Championships and the game is set in 201X, none of those six kids could have been missing for more than a decade or two.

Creative consultant: Slate
Edits: Apollo, T-Kay, Ivic Wulfe, SillyNeko345
Art: Tom Fischbach - http://twokinds.deviantart.com/ (Used with permission.)

Undertale is amazing. If you haven't seen/played it, buy it here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/391540/ Then come back and read this story.

• Tempo