Chapter Text
He wants to rip it out.
It burns inside him, scorching, painful. What seemed only natural to ignore earlier had rapidly turned into an undeniable suffering – like a smudge on the edge of a window. It was so easy to look past it when you were staring outside, but as soon as you become aware of its presence, suddenly it became everything you could see, hovering at the edge of your peripheral vision.
And the soul was everything he could feel now.
It hurts. Not the sharp unexpected pain of outside influence. No, Asriel remembered dying. He remembered their blood staining his fur and the dust clinging to the air like snow. He remembered their face, eyes slightly open, dull brown irises and shadows cast by lashes and the unusual cold feel of their skin against him.
Their soul had already been gone and not much later, his own as well.
The one inside him now isn't his. Flowey isn't sure how he could tell, initially. Unlike human souls, monster souls all look identical. But he can feel it. A dull throbbing permeates his being whenever he tries to focus on it, hones in on the stray magic thrumming away inside him.
It's warm.
And really that's how he should have known it was Papyrus, even without the circumstances. It's always Papyrus in the end. When he was empty – soulless – when he couldn't bring himself to care for his mother's tears or his father's grief, it had been Papyrus who made him falter. Emotions were too hard for him to grasp back then, something he had experienced once but in such a tenuous way that it started to feel more like a dream than reality.
He knew the concepts of sadness, and anger, and joy. He knew they existed inside others and maybe at some point inside himself. But as time unwound around him and he frayed the edges of linear fabrics, each repeat made the idea more disconnected. In the end, it was getting simpler to doubt if they had existed in the first place. It was getting almost better to just imagine the giant trick everybody and his mind must have been playing on him.
Because if killing his own parents didn't spark anything, truly there must have been nothing there in the first place.
Flowey rapidly grew tired of pretending something was inside him that wasn't.
And Papyrus, who had all these things but kept them hidden.
"I was jealous," he tells Frisk. The room is still dark, the curtains revealing only the dim shine of a streetlight outside and in here he can almost imagine it's them. They really do look like each other, and for the first time since meeting them it illicit some hurt inside him.
For the first time since meeting them, Flowey misses Chara.
"I didn't feel anything, but I guess part of me was still bitter he had so much of what I lacked," he says.
Frisk stares at him, brow furrowed and he can practically already see their mind ticking away at solutions for what they perceive to be yet another challenge on their path. Asriel had never known the true meaning of determination, but Flowey knew all about it.
They rubbed at their face quickly, a nervous tick perhaps, and then signed with steady hands. "But how did this happen?"
'How should I know' is what he wants to answer, finding solace in the newly regained rage burning in his chest. Sure, he had known annoyance before, but it had been the kind of pettiness a child feels when throwing a tantrum, not a real emotion but a reaction to what they deemed as the world treating them unfairly.
It hurts.
But before he can say it he already knows the answer. It's not an epiphany so much as it's just a prolonging of the dawning realization he had been experiencing since yesterday, but it still feels like the slow swelling of a flood. And if that had been the earthquake surely the tsunami was still to come.
"The souls..." And Frisk looks up with wide eyes, as if they already understood. "All the souls in the Underground. I took them but..." Guilt, that's a new one for Flowey. Asriel knew all about guilt probably. "I also thought you put them all back."
Frisk bites their lip, another bad habit. "I didn't do anything. I thought they went back on their own. They must have."
Flowey tries to remember how it felt right after but the whole experience has turned into a blur. All he recalls clearly is the sense of power flooding his veins as he absorbed life force not his own, both human and monster alike. In that suspended, fragile moment he had been neither. And then the sudden draining of everything leaving at once. "Well, clearly not all of them."
"Did he do it on purpose, then?"
He laughs, because despite everything they should really know better. Truly, this was just getting sad. "Gee, I'll let you take a guess. There's only one of those idiots foolish enough to do something this horribly selfless."
Frisk nods. "How?" they ask again.
"No clue, this hasn't exactly happened before. You'd have to ask some authority on soul physics." He falters there, because what he is going to suggest next sounds like a terrible idea even to himself. But it's either this or stick with the uncomfortable burning. It hurts. "You do know one, after all."
"We'll go see Alphys first thing in the morning then. I'll think of some excuse." Frisk adds a reassuring smile to the end, like they're trying to convince him this isn't some fucked up turn of events neither of them could have predicted.
He doesn't say anything.
But it hurts too much to sleep.
He dreams that night, for the first time in longer than he can name.
Maybe dreaming has to do with your soul. Maybe he just became too cynical to believe in anything beautiful anymore.
But that night he dreams of flowers. He dreams of Chara, smiling in that unguarded way Asriel was only able to pull out of them once or twice. They held his hand as they counted the petals and wished for better things for their family.
Really, they had loved their new family. And they loved them.
And for the first time, Flowey embraces the grief of losing a sibling.
Alphys looks nervous to see him.
He always suspected she knew – Alphys probably knows more than anybody would be able to guess and in that way she reminds him of Papyrus. But that's probably the only similarity and they are not here to discuss Flowey's creation. Her expression warps into one of perfect confusion when Frisk asks to speak privately instead. Says it is important.
Undyne isn't home. She's probably with Papyrus.
The house looks exactly like Flowey thought it would, a perfect dichotomy between order and chaos. Neat stacks of papers and carefully laid out furniture are intercut by empty cups of ramen and the occasional pizza box. The blanket on the couch is perfectly folded but the cushions are in disarray. It reminds him of his own house growing up.
"S-souls?" Alphys asks, as if she hasn't so much as heard of them before. She fidgets with an empty coffee cup on the table. Flowey still thinks it's weird to see her without the lab coat, though somehow she doesn't look as small anymore without it.
Part of him always felt a begrudging respect for the royal scientist.
Frisk doesn't beat around the bush. "Monster souls. I want to know more about them."
She doesn't ask why. Flowey knows Frisk has a lie ready and waiting – something about a school project perhaps. Alphys probably knows Frisk would lie too, so doesn't bother. "What exactly do you need to know?" she asks instead, leaving the cup alone for now.
Frisk shares a glance with him, the resoluteness on their face catching him off guard. He still can't shake the idea that they're making a horrible mistake. "I want to know what happens when a monster's soul leaves their body."
If the question came as a surprise to Alphys, she did a good job covering it up. Flowey can see she is thinking the answer over, and can't help but notice the nervous energy from earlier has completely evaporated. Fascinating, how the right subject matter could do that for Alphys.
After a few minutes he was starting to think she wouldn't answer, but then she looks up with a humorless smile. "Normally, they would die."
"Normally?" Flowey asks, and her eyes flit over to him for a brief second.
"I-I mean-" The nervousness is back with a vengeance. Flowey can probably guess why. "Monster souls can not sustain themselves like uh, like human souls would. They're made of magic, the body is just a container. Usually, when a monster dies... their soul dies."
"Usually?" Frisk inquires. He can tell they're doing their best to seem calm, but their leg bouncing against the table betrays their inner apprehension. Alphys must have noticed, but she's either choosing not to comment on it or is too lost in her own train of thought.
"There are exceptions to the rule, there are always exceptions..." Alphys mutters under her breathe. Then she looks up at them again. "But they're probably not important for you to know. They barely ever happen."
"But hypothetically speaking," Flowey cuts in before Frisk can respond, and he knows the sharpness of his voice unnerves her but he feels too hurried to think about it. "what would happen to a monster without a soul."
"Well..." She trails off once again, hands clenched in front of her. Frisk clears their throat softly, and the sudden noise seems to snap her out of the contemplation. "The soul is a culmination of everything a monster is, their very essence given shape. Even if a monster could survive without it, they would lose all this magic keeping them in physical form. It would be a gradual process I'd imagine, but one which results in death eventually. Unless something else can be put in its place."
Frisk nods their head. "Like what?"
And Alphys looks right at Flowey when she says it. "Like determination." She hastily covers it up with a cough, rubbing her claws against each other. "O-or something else that uh, has the same properties, I guess. But determination would be one of the only substances I can think of that has proven to work." Another glance at Flowey. "In theory..."
There's a fleeting moment of awkward silence in which Flowey doesn't know what to say or do, except feel profoundly uncomfortable. He knows Alphys knew. But how much did she know? How far back? What about his parents-
It clouds his mind suddenly, the soul burning inside him.
He blinks back into reality just in time to see Frisk ask their next question. "What about the other way around? Can an empty monster receive a new soul?"
Alphys must have not expected this particular thread of speculation. Once again her anxiety seems momentarily forgotten by the scientific reasonings needed to consider a viable answer. Flowey knew before why Asgore had chosen her, but now he could also see why.
"Again: in theory, yes," she posits out loud, "but it would have to rely on you getting an intact monster soul from somewhere else and that just isn't feasible. I'd imagine it would have side effects we-"
Once again Flowey interrupts her mid-sentence. "What about soul rejection?"
"S-soul rejection?"
"We're talking theory right?" he adds. "Then let's say theoretically you could take a monster soul out of its body. Keep it intact for however long you need it, and then tried to put it back in. Could the body reject the soul."
Alphys shook her head immediately. "That's not possible," she says, all traces of hesitation suddenly gone again. Flowey had imagined this might be something she has encountered in her research to break the barrier of the Underground, but had not expected her to be so thorough as to have exhausted all avenues to a scientific certainty. "The body is made of the soul's magic. It can't reject its own soul without rejecting everything else."
Flowey wants to respond, but the words get caught behind thorns and snow.
A memory comes back to him, engulfs him, and if this isn't the tsunami they had been waiting for he doesn't know what it is. But at that moment it unfolds before him, the pages of a storybook torn out and puzzled back together, an image repressed.
He remembers killing Papyrus plenty of time. But he only now remembers Papyrus killing himself.
Not directly – never directly – but sometimes he would say it without words, express it in actions. And Flowey had shrugged it off, because he had not understood. He hadn't understood anything about Papyrus in the end. But Papyrus had smiled in a way that set him on edge, and brought the proverbial blade down on his neck many times.
He could not reject his own soul without rejecting everything else.
Without rejecting life itself.
Either the room started spinning, or Frisk is playing a cruel joke on him. It must not even be noon but suddenly it feels like the darkness of the shadows is creeping in on him, taking all heat with it and leaving him frozen. He can't see anything.
Dimly, he catches Frisk making gestures but he can't decipher them through the sudden rush of breathlessness. And he doesn't have lungs so it shouldn't even be a thing – instead, it is his own magic, tight and wound in on a foreign soul that burns inside him.
It hurts.
Frisk must have thanked Alphys, because she gives a short reply and then they're outside, the sun bright and burning, burning like the soul inside him. They get right around the street corner before Frisk puts him down, knees scraping against the pavement, getting dirt all over themself.
"Asriel!" They say his name with such urgency. He still can't get used to their voice. It sounds nothing like Chara. He has never missed Chara before but now their absence feels as painful as the soul does. "Asri-"
"Shut up!" he snaps and pushes them off with sudden vigor. They fall back onto their butt, hands raised slightly as if to show they're unarmed. "Shut up! Don't call me that!"
They swallow, crawl back onto their knees and use their hands to talk again. "Sorry."
Flowey wants to apologize too but he doesn't know what for. "We're back to square one," he says instead. "What do we do now?"
Frisk smiles. "We'll find some other way. We'll fix this. But first, let's go home, okay?"
He is pretty sure his home died with Chara.
And for the first time since waking up in a dimly lit cavern, confused and alone, without a body or soul, he is also aware of how much that hurts.