Chapter Text
If you're reading this, I am dead.
It matched what the flower had said-- all of it. How a human had fallen and had started slaughtering everything and everyone without discretion or remorse. How Undyne died trying to face them-- or it, or whatever it was. How everyone who hadn't evacuated had been killed.
Asgore struggled to keep his hands from trembling. Dead. How badly he had wanted to tear that word away from his heart and cast it out with the weeds. Yet here it was, plain as day, in Alphys's own messy handwriting.
I wanted to call. I was going to explain everything, she wrote. Several words had been scribbled out; others had been crammed into the margins. But I couldn't. I had every chance to stop them after they left the Ruins. Or when they evacuated Snowdin. I could have even called you then. But I just watched. Powerless. Stupid. I could have called when Torie
A whole line had been erased, seemingly written again, and then hastily crossed out. Asgore put the note down slowly without shifting his gaze. Alphys shifted on her heels in front of him. He sat in his throne room rather than this 'true lab' and she was rambling about her robot- He's still out there, she scribbled in the margins, he's going to die trying to stop them I can't do anything about it- and how she'd be willing to take the position of royal scientist if he would be so kind.
And then, before his eyes, she faded to dust.
His head pulsed when he snapped out of the fantasy. It had felt like so long ago she had called him on the phone (and 'someone' had called but hung up instantly 3 times before) asking to show him an invention that would 'make a lot of people happy'.
And now, a noose hanging from the rafters of this place she called her 'true lab' with nothing else in sight. He would have spread her dust over something she loved if the whole lab hadn't been covered in it. Was it from disuse, or...?
He closed his eyes and tried to place events into their proper order. Everything felt so... unreal. It had happened so fast.
"They're not like Ch- they're not like the other humans!" the flower had cried, back when it found him. Asgore had tried to calm it down, but it had been inconsolable. "They're going to kill us! They'll kill you! Everything they died for will be for nothing!"
But the only noise he and the flower had heard was the distant, phantasmal chirping of birds-- a call from the surface that both of them had left behind in their own right long ago. All the other flowers danced in a faint breeze.
"Th-they should be here!" the flower had said. Asgore had cast a worried look. "I- I mean it! They've got the knife a-and the locket and it-- it's not them, it really isn't though--"
"There, there."
The flower had tensed as stiff as if about to snap in half when Asgore embraced it. It had stopped trembling as if someone had flipped a switch. "It will all be alright."
They had waited. They had waited longer. They heard a distant din of noise in the halls, and then nothing. Asgore turned to keep watering his flowers. The strange flower (he had never met one that could talk before) bit his cloak. "They're going to kill you! They're gonna... they're..."
But nobody came.
Asgore had lived through his share of tragedy. Now, back in the present, he wasn't sure if he should feel guilty for how numb he felt as he skmmed over the rest of Alphys's letter. He folded it carefully and placed it in a pocket.
His feelings didn't matter. There was only their feelings, the few hundred that remained of monsterkind, small enough to fill a room in a lab.
They're... well, surviving, with the few cots and provisions I have down here. They're in the other room, waiting for me to come back. They don't know what I've done. I can't stand to think of how disappointed they'll be in me. How disappointed you'll be in me. I don't deserve it, but when this is all over, I hope I can see her again.
Everyone froze when Asgore entered. They had been all huddled together, not so much surviving down here as simply waiting to see what would happen next in the short time they still had. Dozens of familiar faces poked out of the crowd from all across the Underground, but he still couldn't help but scan for Toriel. He stopped himself before he caught himself looking for Asriel, too.
His eyes settled on a small monster child. Their jaw was clenched tight to prevent their teeth from chattering. Asgore noticed a part of their shirt was missing-- and a cloth with similar texture was wrapped as a makeshift bandage around another child’s wound.
Asgore took off his cape and bent down to one knee. Several children reeled back as if about to be struck. Others started to cry. The monster kid just sat and watched, lifeless, as Asgore draped the cape around their shoulders like a blanket.
Their nonchalance in the face of danger reminded him of the skeleton.
"there's a little something I think you should've seen a while ago," he had said. Asgore had found him in a great hallway leading to his throne room, breathing heavily, struggling to stand. Beads of sweat rolled down his face. It had been after the flower and he had waited for so long for a threat that never appeared.
"don't worry about the human. they're gone. it's over," the skeleton had said. "i saw to it."
Snapping Asgore out of his thoughts, a bear-like monster finally stepped forward. "King Asgore... you're... alive?"
He cleared his throat. "Um... yes. I am. Since I am here," he said.
Nobody dared speak a word, as if this was an elaborate trick. Then the crowd erupted in whoops and cheers as the first ray of hope had shined down on them in the form of their partially-absent king.
"I knew that Dr. Alphys would do it!" a rabbit monster exclaimed. "Everyone! We're saved!"
"I-it's over?" a girl asked.
"We're gonna be ok! Asgore's here with the SOULs!" another said.
"Yeah! Three cheers for Alphys!" "I'm so glad you're okay, Asgore!" "We've got tah thank the doctah for all she's done!"
Asgore couldn't look any of them in the eye. His heart weighed almost as heavy as when he had to announce the funeral for his children. Alphys, Undyne, all the others-- they were like his children, in a sense. Undyne had taken Asgore to school when everyone brought their parents to talk about their careers and made him introduce himself as The Guy She's Gonna Beat Up. Alphys had been such a polite young girl, offering to watch the two of them spar even if her meeting with Asgore was an hour afterward, insisting she really liked it for some reason.
You're going to need them, Alphys wrote. The human SOULs. It's the only way to beat this human. I've seen them fight. The hatred in their heart is great enough to kill even you. Please... don't wind up like the others because I didn't warn you.
Before he read her note, before he left his throne room, the flower snapped at him. "Hang on, are you just going to leave the human SOULs behind?" the flower had demanded. His voice had returned to a steady tone, but he still tripped over words as Asgore started to leave. "You're not gonna stand a chance without them! None of us do!"
"I've negotiated with unpleasant humans before," Asgore had said. "Should this all be true, I'm sure it's just a misunderstanding."
"Misunderstanding? Do you have brain damage?" the flower spat. "Murder isn't a misunderstanding! Do you think the war was a misunderstanding? Do you think what happened to your children was a misunderstanding? Don't just let it be for nothing!"
The flower gasped as if realizing what he had said. When Asgore turned around to face him, hurt, he had already vanished.
"King? You alright?" someone said.
"She's gone." The words slipped out of him. He had spent so long holding everything in to the point of breaking, he was surprised he didn't deflate like a balloon as he spoke. "Doctor Alphys is no longer with us. I'm afraid I arrived too late."
Panic sank its claws into the crowd. Asgore heard questions shouted, demands posed-- it felt like the only one silent was the young monster in the cape. They caught Asgore's eye and looked away uncomfortably.
Asgore knew that face. Chara's "I'm fine" face, the smile they tried to hold when Asgore was accidentally poisoned with buttercups. The smile they defaulted to even as their tears crumbled into sobs.
What is it you know? Asgore wondered about the monster child. But he simply cleared his throat. The sound silenced the surviving monsters at once.
"Out of respect for the late doctor, I will not spare the details at the time."
They'll know I was a coward, Alphys wrote. I couldn't even show them... what I really did. I let them all go, even if its sentencing them to their deaths too. It should be me instead.
"This is no place for us to hide. Let us congregate at the royal palace. We will be safe there," he said.
"You just don't want to tell us that the human killed her!" a monster shouted.
"Tell us what happened to Doctor Alphys!"
"Was it the human?!"
"Are they down here right now? What are we supposed to do?"
"I can assure you that there is no human present--" But the booing of the crowd enveloped his voice. The roar of voices molded into one sick being that filled the room like smoke. Anger. Confusion. Hopelessness.
"We lost our homes, we lost our families, and now you can't tell us what's going on?!" a shopkeeper said.
"If we leave here, that human's going to pick us off like flies!"
"Where even were you when--"
"SHUT UP!" a smaller voice shouted. Asgore spun around. The flower had emerged from a crack in the floor, the noose dangling from his mouth. He spat it on the ground before Asgore's feet. "THIS is what happened to your oh-so-special Doctor Failure! No wonder she did it with you ungrateful lot of losers weighing her down! Golly, it's not like she saved your worthless lives or anything!"
The air ran thick with their silence. Asgore's ears were ringing. The flower was shaking again, either from rage or from fear still, he had no idea.
"Do you dolts ever use your brains? That thing between your ears? If the human got down here to kill Alphys, all of you would be plastered over these walls like a janitor's nightmare by now! Now the less time we waste turning on each other, the less time they have to find us and slaughter all of you jerks! Okay?!"
That quieted them. The monsters looked at one another, as if thinking that they had once been a race famous for their unity.
The first person to move was the child with Asgore's cape. They took a small step forward. The sound of their heel on the tile resonated in the empty lab. "Yo, if... if Undyne couldn't take them out, we're done. There's nothin' else we can do."
"Not quite," the flower said. He gave a sly wink. (Asgore was sure Asriel had picked that up from Chara, or had that been the other way around? Oh, the memories.) "I have a plan."
---
The Underground seemed to groan under the people's collective footsteps, as if it just had a taste of nearly being empty for the first time in ages.
Asgore couldn't help but study Hotland as they marched through it. The Snowdin survivors seemed most affected by the heat, used to the opposite type of climate. He offered them encouraging smiles whenever they could, and some of them even smiled back. But without the SOULs, that’s all he could do. The little flower initially had curled around Asgore's shoulders, but at Asgore's request, it took up the back of the crowd and urged on anyone who fell behind.
MTT Resort stood abandoned for the first time since it had been opened. A single light bulb spat out its sparks, flickering once, then dying again like the rest of them. Alphys's lab may have been the last place to have power-- it had run on a multitude of homemade generators and backup generators; it was vitally important that the human SOULs stay protected.
The elevators in the CORE had gone out as well. Without the people of Snowdin working diligently to cool it, the CORE had shut itself down to prevent from overheating.
He wondered when he would have noticed the Underground had gone dark. In New Home, the only light he needed shone from the distant sun. This was how distant he was from the regular monsters, he thought.
(Sometimes he talked to them, the SOULs. He wouldn't bring them out, but he felt as if they could see him there, standing before the Barrier. He spent days going about the same routine as he had before they died and she left. And when the nagging feeling of his SOUL growing heavier weighed him too much and when his sins dragged their nails down his back, he sat before the barrier and laid his SOUL out for them to see.)
"Psst."
The flower had popped out of the ground near Asgore's feet again. It (he?) seemed to untangle its roots from the grate of the CORE and wound its vines like a snake up Asgore's arm. He let it happen, mesmerized. "Hey. You must wanna hear about my plan, right?"
"I cannot say I am not curious," Asgore said.
"It's simple. You're not gonna use those SOULs, are you? Everyone talks about them." He gestured at all the monsters that had followed them. They had stopped for a short break on the walk. Some of the monsters were facing exhaustion, not having slept since the nightmare all started. Others had never walked so far in such heat. "They all want the end of humanity. You know that."
"... Yes. Of course," he said meekly.
A few of those injured in the evacuation and a few of the weaker monsters were close to... 'falling down' already from the weight on their SOULs. Monsters were beings of emotion, and right now, beings of despair. The least Asgore could do for them was get the elevators working so they could get to safety in a hurry without needing to walk.
The most he could do was break the barrier and let the fresh air fill their lungs.
"You can't stand the idea of those six humans giving their lives for nothing, though, right?" he urged. "Oh... nevermind. You wouldn't understand..."
"Wait," Asgore said, and the flower stifled a smile. "I... I do not understand, but... I do not want their deaths to have been for naught."
"Murder isn't a misunderstanding! Do you think the war was a misunderstanding?” he heard, in his mind. “Do you think what happened to your children was a misunderstanding? Don't just let it be for nothing!"
"It's simple." He leaned in to Asgore's ear, whispered: "Give the SOULs to someone who can use them."
"Wh... what?" He said. Asgore cast a glance at all the monsters camped around the elevator door, as if hoping in vain it would open. He looked back at the flower, who looked gravely serious.
"Golly, I'm... I'm sorry for speaking so directly to you again," the flower said. "I just... well. I've also lost a lot in this mess. My mother..."
"That... that is horrible. I am so sorry," he said.
"It doesn't have to be that way, though!" the flower said, smiling. "She doesn't have to die for nothing! I may not be much, but... if I could use a human SOUL, I could make it all right. I could try my hardest to make up for all the hurting that humans have made us feel!"
His voice wavered. "I... I do not know. It does not feel right."
"I understand," the flower said. His disposition had shifted almost completely from when he first appeared to Asgore in tears. He smiled now, his petals fluttering. "I get too scared to take action, too. That's... well, that's how I lost my mom. I watched the human cut her up."
"I cannot imagine what that pain is like."
"I haven't told anyone else this..." he said. "Everyone else has lost so much, they're only focused on themselves. But you, you're so caring... you've been here for me since the start!"
Asgore was about to speak, but the flower's next words hit him like a poisoned dart: "Even though you lost your own kids to 'sickness'... life just isn't fair sometimes. We were just born at a disadvantage, you know," he said. "My mother always said there should be some way to make it right."
(through kindness and understanding, flowey thought. but who cared? he was technically kind of using kindness here.)
"I... I must think it over," Asgore said. "I have always felt as if this was my burden to bear--"
"Okay! Don't wait up for me, I've gotta go look for her dust," he said. "She always wanted it spread over other golden flowers. They're so special... I wonder where they come from?"
Asgore reached out and touched the flower gently. His smile twitched, but before he could say anything, Asgore took him into another embrace. Gentle- he couldn't crush Flowey- but firm enough that he couldn't wriggle out. The old man smelled like cut grass. A vision flashed before Flowey's mind- awakening, alone, after death- and he tried to dismiss it. The seeds of it just stayed stuck all over the edges his consciousness.
"I am sorry you have suffered through so much," Asgore said. "We will make sure your mother is not forgotten, I promise you. Thank you for coming to talk to me about it."
"H-hey," he said weakly. "It's... you know... it's..."
"You do not have to say anything more. It is okay," Asgore said. When he pulled back, the flower looked uncertain. Asgore gave a reassuring smile. "You have tried to smile for long enough. Smiling to cover your pain will leave you with nothing inside. Thank you for telling me the truth."
"Yeah... the truth," he said. He couldn't meet Asgore's eyes. "Thanks, King--"
"You may just call me Asgore." He gave a gentle laugh. "May I ask your name in return?"
He hesitated. He moved to speak. He stopped, looking away, smiling weakly. "... Flowey."
"It is nice to meet you, Flowey," he said. "You remind me of an especially tall and proud flower from my garden. Despite everything that has happened, it makes me happy to be able to speak to a beautiful flower such as that."
"I've gotta get going," he said in a haste. "Th-think over what I said, okay?"
"I shall," he said, retaining his calm.
He disappeared under the ground. Asgore stood, about to announce that they would continue their walk to the palace.
A ding halted his words. All heads turned to see that the lights of the elevator had turned on. Asgore watched his startled reflection in the sleek metal doors vanish as they opened, welcoming them as needed.