Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Snowy couldn’t remember the last thing Mom had said to him. It had seemed so inconsequential at the time, the same sort of encouragement she would give him before he left for class. She’d probably have said “take care”, or something along those lines, but he wasn’t sure if she had added any additional reminders, any advice for him.

Had she said his name? He hadn’t been paying attention.

Now it didn’t seem like Mom would say anything ever again. Her body was almost completely still, her breathing slow and shallow. Occasionally, she would twitch and jerk as some vital part of her body failed or began to fail.

Snowy couldn’t bring himself to look at her for too long. He couldn’t look away without feeling guilty, either. Any moment could be her last, and he wasn’t sure he would ever forgive himself if he happened to miss it.

So he settled on a middle road and looked at the floor. Mom was kept at the very top edge of his vision. It still didn’t feel right.

His father swung the door open with more force than was necessary, already speaking as he slammed it closed behind him.

“Son. There’s been an opportunity. That might save your mother.”

Snowy had to force his head to crane upwards. Disbelief leaked into his voice. “What? How?”

“The Royal Scientist. She’s passed out a request. For those who have fallen down.”

His father had the relevant documents in hand, and Snowy bolted out of his chair at Mom’s bedside to snatch them from him.

“She says that with the power of determination. She can make your mother’s SOUL persist after her death,” Snowy’s father said, as if Snowy weren’t already reading it. As if he didn’t expect him to understand whatever was on it.

But he did.

“Dad, it’s just her SOUL. She won’t be able to talk or move or… anything!”

“Son! The SOUL is the ess—”

“I paid attention in class, alright? No thanks to you. There’s nothing in here about giving it back, just stuff about, about research or progress whatever. You’re—this is giving Mom away to be used as a tool!”

“Son.” His father said it in the tone that made him want to scream, or break something. “Your mother will live on in a wa—”

“It says right here. That her dust will be returned in three to five working days for funerary purposes.”

Snowy’s father knelt down to eye-level, as if he were five instead of fifteen. “Son. They are offering ten thousand gold for each body. Enough to—”

“You want to sell Mom for some quick cash?”

“No! You’re getting it all wrong. All twisted. Listen—” Snowy hated people telling him to do things he was already going to do “—think of it this way. Your mother… is already on her way. Nothing is going to change that. The only difference is whether we can get the—”

“I’m not letting her die in some lab. Reject it. Tell them we’re not taking the offer.”

His father rose to his full height. An apprehension crossed his face, and Snowy’s gut sank.

“I already signed the papers. They’re coming as soon as possible.”

His entire body shook. The words came out stuttering, broken. “With—you didn’t even ask me?”

“Time is of the essence. Son. We don’t know how much longer she has. Any delay. It could mean she doesn’t make it.”

Snowy clenched his wings, dug his talons into the floor hard enough to score the paneling. “You could’ve called. I know you and Mom didn’t want me to get my own phone yet but the home phone works just fine. Why didn’t you call?”

“I… ah. The connection was out then. I would’ve done it if I could have. I promise.”

Snowy wanted, very desperately, to believe that. To submit himself to the lie that it was a tragedy of circumstance, that the man who called himself his father did what he could, made a gamble and lost.

But he didn’t miss the hesitation in the reply, that gave away how the excuse might have been made up on the spot.

And even then…

“Well you know I don’t want it now. Stop it. Tell her to call it off.”

His father was silent for another moment. “Son. Snowy.”

“No.”

“Sometimes in life. You have to come to terms with doing things you don’t want to do.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Please don’t do this. Don’t let this happen to her.”

“I know you’re a strong young man. It will be hard. But you will pull through—”

“No! Stop it! You—this isn’t even my choice! I’m not doing it! You made this choice that I have to come to terms with!”

“Snowy. I know it might sound unfair. But this is not your place to choose. I’m her husband as much as you’re her son.”

Snowy screamed hard enough his throat hurt. “If it’s just your choice, then it isn’t hers! You chose for her like you chose for me! Do you think she would want this?!”

His father’s beak fell a fraction, eyes blinking in apparent shock. He seemed to have to swallow a lump in his throat before he could speak. “Son. We do not know. There’s no way to know anymore.”

“Tell me. To my face. That you think she would want this.”

His father closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. Steeling himself for the sheer audacity of the lie Snowy knew he was about to spew.

There were footsteps approaching the door. A knock.

“Hello! We’re here on behalf of the Royal Research Division. Is this the home of Mr… Iceberg?”

“Yes. In a moment.”

“No! Don’t! Call it off!”

His father opened the door, to someone reading off a clipboard and another who was large enough to carry Mom in one hand. Snowy ran ahead, trying to put himself in the doorway. His father held him back with a strong wing, not even bothering to turn back. “Excuse my son.”

“Don’t do this! Please don’t do this!”

The monster with the clipboard had a look of pity. “I’m sorry, kid. Legally, you aren’t eligible to contest this.”

“To hell with ‘legally’! I’m not letting you take her!” Snowy retreated to Mom’s bedside, blocking the way to her. The three monsters in the home approached, cautious.

“Son. Please. Don’t shake this up more than it needs to be.”

“I’m going to stay here for as long as it takes. I—”

Snowy put a wing back, laying it on Mom’s chest, to try and dredge up some small dreg of motivation or willpower or whatever it was that he needed to make it through. To spend however many hours guarding her bed until she passed on.

But she was cold. So, so cold.

The chill he felt dashed all thought from his mind. It must have been visible on his face, because his father chose that moment to grip him by the shoulder, hauling him away as Mom was lifted into the hand of the oversized reptile.

“No! No no no no no! I can’t let this happen, you can’t do this, you can’t do this!”

Snowy thrashed, fighting his father’s grasp every way he knew how, pushing, pulling, twisting, screaming, going completely limp to try and drag him down.

Nothing worked. Out of options, he released a bullet, a small sickle point-blank at his father's chest.

The impact was ineffectual—he could've dealt more damage if he just punched, scrawny as he was. But he couldn't bring himself to do anything more. It was still his father.

There was a scream, and it took a moment for Snowy to realise it wasn’t him that was making it. His father responded with a bullet of his own, a solid sphere. It sent him across the floor, ears ringing.

Mom was already being carried out the door. Snowy kept his eyes open as he summoned the strength to dart forward, turning his head as he pushed against his father to keep her limp body in sight.

Until the door swung shut, and he had seen the last of her. His strength gave. The grip on him pushed him away, leaving him prone on the ground.

Snowy left himself that way for a long time.

He skipped school the first day after, then realised that simply being home, in the apartment where it had happened, even in a different room, was utterly suffocating. Going online didn’t help—all his peers had to say to him were condolences and all of them felt like hell to read. Looking at other profiles felt hollow. Most of the games he’d liked had been bought out, turned into MTT-brand pay-to-wins.

“Son,” was the first thing his father said to him, at dinnertime. The food didn’t look or smell nearly as good as Mom had made it. He grabbed the bowl and trudged back to his room.

“Listen to me,” Snowy heard through his door halfway through his meal. He put on something random and turned the volume as far up as it could go.

He set his alarm for the next day two hours early, even before his father would wake up, and slinked off as silently as he could.

There was ample time before class started. Being out there, without a clear goal in mind, or either parent accompanying him was something new to Snowy, embarrassingly enough. He found someplace to eat. Expensive, but he supposed he could just steal extra from his father’s wallet. Then he wandered New Home, to wherever he felt like. Solved puzzles for the sake of solving them. Spent time gandering at the latest Mettaton statues.

It got hotter the closer he approached the city center. The crowds grew large, even at this early an hour. New Home’s proximity to the Barrier and the surface was said to help with ventilation, heat dissipation, but the air still had a stifling quality to it, that forced him to move from building to air-conditioned building.

He turned back once the sun rose on the other side of the Barrier, and the heat began to feel like needles jabbing into him. Snowdrakes weren’t built for environments like this—there was a reason most of them had decided to linger in Snowdin during the Long March.

School, as it turned out, wasn’t much better. His classmates had more of the same to say. Even the teachers felt the need to shower him with pity. Any other kind of attention would have been better, but this was the type where it was hard to tell which condolences were genuine and which were only given because they didn’t want the loser kid who just lost his Mom to feel even worse.

He needed to break it, somehow.

“No frosting? Blegh,” he said at lunchtime. It managed to make it even worse, because he heard laughs that weren’t there last time and knew those were definitively out of pity.

He snuck out after that. Too sloppy an escape to not be spotted, but he assumed that the same pity would prevent anyone from going after him.

Now there was lots of time to kill.

With the city center off the table, the other direction to go was away. Away from it all. Snowy walked through the outskirts, where there were more construction sites than finished structures. The feel of New Home became incoherent here, as different prospectors had fought for the space. Quaint, single-story homes stood in the shadows of monochrome high-rises. There could be a row of identical suburbs on one side of the street and undeveloped granite on the other.

The CORE came into view from behind a cave wall, stretching the mile or so from floor to ceiling, lit from below by the red glow of the lava sea. The radiant heat was barely noticeable at this distance, but the fact that it could be noticed at all made him shudder. What kind of monster would live someplace like that?

He continued further and further away, until the platform of rock that held New Home simply gave way, into a drop so far he stopped being able to judge depth. The rest of the Underground was laid out before him—the orange mesas of Hotland, the glowing teal of Waterfall, the light blue of Snowdin, and at the far edge the purple brick of old Home. 

There were numerous tourist traps lining the dropoff, with restaurants that had windows and balconies overlooking the view. He’d been to one with his parents once. It had been nice, until he’d realised he could get the same view a few hundred paces away, without needing to pay for anything.

There were no facilities where Snowy stood. Nothing but a fence to keep anyone from falling off. It was an old, rickety thing, likely set up and forgotten about for years and years. He placed both wings on the dusty railing, gazed outwards for a long time.

A small part of him marveled at how easy it would be to haul himself up and over, to fold his wings on the way down to make the impact as swift as possible. Almost unconsciously, he leaned further forwards on it.

Then the old thing began to give, and the rest of him focused everything on pushing himself back, screaming, going on all fours to maximise stability on the rock.

No. He couldn’t. Not like this. It would be the last thing Mom would want from him.

The fence had sagged almost imperceptibly. There was no doubt that it would finish breaking away, if someone were to lean on or near that spot. He couldn’t just leave it like it was, but there wasn’t anything on hand to write with and he knew nothing about fixing something like that.

He settled on picking up a particularly sharp rock, carving out crude warnings on either side of the breakage. Another part of him wondered if he’d only made it more likely that someone fell through here, drawing attention to it. He knew more than a couple schoolmates that’d lean on it, not just in spite of but specially to spite the warnings.

But what was done was done. The words couldn’t be un-carved. Mom couldn’t be brought back. All Snowy could do was hope for the best.

It took some time to find his way home, but it wasn’t like he was pressed for it. He envisioned never getting back, just wandering to… wherever he needed to be.

He lingered in the hallway for some time. Sat with his back to the door, sat opposite it, hovered his wing over the doorbell, considering whether to ring it or just walk in like he hadn’t been missing all afternoon.

Someone beat him to it. Snowy stepped to the side as the deliveryman rapped their knuckles on the door. There were hurried footsteps, and the door swung open.

“MTT Delivery Services. Got a package for Mr. Iceberg.”

“Yes. That is me…” His father’s eyes trailed from the deliveryman to meet Snowy’s. “Oh. Son. Good to see you’re back.”

Snowy scowled. The deliveryman handed the parcel over, then awkwardly strolled off.

“I was worried sick about you.”

The feathers around his father’s eyes seemed mussed up, but he couldn’t tell whether he actually had been crying, or if it was just a trick of the light, or his mind.

Snowy hadn’t seen his father shed tears when Mom had fallen down, so it was even harder to believe he’d done so for him.

“Come in. Please,” his father said, setting the parcel on the entry table.

“They paid you already? Couldn’t wait a single day?”

His father’s beak fell a fraction, and Snowy had the answer.

“Son.”

“Stop it.”

“You don’t even know what’s in it yet! Here,” he said, grabbing the parcel, taking it apart. Inside it—an unopened box for a brand new cellphone. Better connectivity was advertised on the cover.

Snowy slammed the door behind him hard enough that he felt it in his feet. “Is this some… horrifically elaborate joke you’re playing on me? Because right now I’m not putting it—”

“Snowy! Son! Please. You understand. That I’m hurting as much as you are.”

“Honestly, I think it would’ve been better if you just got that phone for yourself instead. Or was that what you did? Did you just tell me that because you—you somehow think that that’s the right—you can’t even—”

His mouth was moving faster than he could form coherent sentences. He had to steady himself, putting a wing on the wall next to a framed picture he couldn’t bear to look at.

“Slow down. Steady yourself. You’re talking faster than you’re thinking.”

“Shut up. Shut up. Hold on. Because you have enough to buy another phone anyways.”

“It wasn’t like that. I promise.”

Snowy couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact, because it would be a chance that he would see his father was lying. He stormed off to his room and made a deal of locking the door as loud as he could.

His father was nice enough to leave dinner outside his door, at least.

The next few days weren’t any better. The feeling at school abated, at least, because the average student only had so long an attention span, and the teachers had better things to focus on.

The counselor had been let go to cut costs.

He tried for another pun, and got the same pity laughs. That meant skipping school entirely. Nothing seemed to be done about it, and he couldn’t decide whether that was good that they were leaving him alone, or bad that they didn’t care enough to bother with him. Could it be both?

It left him with only the city to take up his time. He wandered, trying to build up a mental map of New Home, but found it far too chaotic to grasp. The closer he got to the castle, the more the buildings merged with and into one another, until it might as well have been a single continuous structure, packed full with monsters a good head or two taller than he was. Utterly suffocating. No wonder everyone was harping on about overpopulation.

He tried to lie all day on a bench in the outer fringes, in lieu of rotting in his own bed, but the anti-homeless spikes tripped after ten minutes and asked him to pay to lower them.

Time at home was mostly spent preoccupying his mind with whatever slop was available online, and finding the will to search for the suitable object to spread Mom’s dust on, because he sure as hell didn’t trust his father to do it. Would it be a picture? Her wedding dress? Her favourite bracelet?

But that became irrelevant, because the dust never arrived. Not after five days. Not after ten.

The one solace he had was out of reach. It made him angry enough to sit down at dinner, to confront the man who was his father.

“It’s not arriving.”

“What isn’t?” his father said, looking aside to play at being innocent, to attempt to deflect the conversation.

“Mom isn’t being brought back.”

“Well. You know how the postage system is. Give them some time.”

“Sure. As if they didn’t somehow arrive in fucking hours to pick her up the first time.”

His father grew stern. “Son. That was an urgent affair.”

“And sending the dust back isn’t?”

“Not as much as receiving her was. I’m content with a little delay on their part.”

“Yeah. You are.”

His father stood up. “Son! Snowy. Do you think you’re the only one grieving?”

Snowy suppressed the urge to flinch, and remained seated. “Sure does seem like it.”

“Boy. You have to understand. That not seeing it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You think I don’t want to cry? To scream? They only gave me two days worth of break. You know. I—”

Snowy heard shuffling coming from the front door. Mail was slipped in through the slot.

He leapt out, pushing his chair out to bar his father’s way, and dashed for it. Once the mail was in his wingtips, he made for his room.

His father threw himself against the door before Snowy had time to lock it. The force was overwhelming, forced him back. A wing slipped past, then a foot. It took all of his strength to hold the door still.

“Son. You aren’t thinking straight. Give that to me.”

Snowy held the letter off to the left, away from his father’s angle of sight.

“You don’t even know what that is.”

“I don’t care.”

He tore it open, unfolded the contents, and started reading.

His eyes widened. Slowly, he let up on the force, and his father squeezed his way in, snatching the letter from his hands.

It took a moment, but for the first time in a month or so, Snowy saw a smile grow across Dad’s face.

Hey Mom! I’m so so glad you’re alright! Everything was really bad after you left and dad was getting really mad and weird and there’s a lot of stuff I gotta tell you in person. After you went away I felt so fucking terrible and I didn’t feel like doing anything anymore but you’re all fine now!

Sorry I’m rambling. This is all so sudden I’m still trying to process all this. I thought you were gone forever but somehow you’re back!! It really doesn’t feel real like I’m still dreaming or this is some fantasy but you’re actually alive again!

How did it happen anyway? They said some shit stuff about determination or something and it would let you keep your soul after death. They never said anything about your body so I guess they were wrong? I guess it doesn’t really matter, I don’t really care, you’re just back again and everything can go back to normal.

See you soon!

Snowy

Hey Mom. So they told us that they need to keep you for a couple days? Didn’t say why, but I guess there’s still some tests to be run since you somehow came back to life!! And I looked online and everyone is saying that every other monster’s also alive!! Must be really weird huh?

I’ve been so happy I actually can’t stop smiling. Everyone is actually happy now. I told a joke at dinner and dad actually laughed at it!!! Why can’t you get a job at the ice rink? There’s been a hiring freeze! hahaha.

So excited.

Snowy

Hey Ma. I know it’s probably for confidentiality or something like that, but it’s really weird how you’re not sending anything back. I thought there’d at least be some confirmation that you’re getting them but right now it feels like talking to nothing. Even if I know you’re there. It’s also taking longer than usual to send you back. Everything alright there?

Also, I’ve been thinking. The determination you’ve been injected with, it brought you back from almost-dead to completely alive again, it’s supposed to help you persist after death. I’m wondering, if you just keep getting that, can you live forever? Would be really nice, right? You won’t have to die. I won’t have to lose you ever.

What does the snowman eat for breakfast every morning? Frosted flakes! hahaha.

Still excited

Snowy

Hi Ma

It’s been really weirdly long that you’re being kept there. Dad and I are getting worried, I checked online and everyone else was also getting really worried and mad sometimes. Are you sure you’re alright? If you can tell a guard or scientist or whatever to send something back to us please do it. Really.

Ok maybe that’s too sad for the entire letter. What did the yeti astronaut say before taking off in his rocket? “Ava-launch!”

Hope you’re safe

Snowy

shit shit fuck fuck fuck piss shit fuck

to whoever’s reading this, kiss my fucking ass. eat my shorts. come over here and do it. i double drake dare you. the return address is right there on the outside. just give me SOME signal that you’re getting this and it isn’t just going into a pile somewhere.

eat shit and die

snowy

hey ma. this isnt going to reach you, is it? youre probably just dead somewhere, arent you? far far away from here with people who keep their mouths shut for some fuckforsaken reason because they cant admit they fucked up.

i really really wanted to believe after the first few days. that everything just needed time to work out. but i guess i was tricking myself as much as they were tricking me. nothing ever turns out like that in real life.

i hope wherever you actually are, ma, youre happy. im going somewhere else too. no not with you. you wouldnt want that. im going somewhere that doesnt need me to constantly be inside a building to not pant or overheat or want to die. im going somewhere where i can actually be happy.

i just hope i can actually make it there.

goodbye mom

snowy

Chapter Text

The alarm was vibration-only, phone pressed against Snowy’s chest so it would wake him up anyways, four-thirty in the morning.

He moved, gathering supplies. A memento, three days’ worth of portable food, his phone, a powerbank, his wallet and a large wad of cash from his father’s. Snowy left the credit card behind—it would be too easy for it to be tracked and canceled.

On that note—he crept into his father’s room, snatched his phone from the nightstand, and checked it for location-tracking apps. Still nothing to be found—whether it was because his father simply didn’t know how or genuinely respected Snowy’s privacy, he didn’t know and didn’t care. The time for respect had long passed.

The accumulated weight felt surprisingly light on his back, considering the effort he was about to undertake. It had him second-guessing himself, that maybe this wasn’t anywhere close to a thought-out plan at all.

Snowy pushed himself out the front door anyways. Any plan was better than continuing to stew in that mire. He could replenish supplies as he went. There were bound to be enough odd jobs to keep him afloat in the meantime. And then…

Something, to make things more permanent. There was enough time to think about it on the way there.

New Home was the only part of the Underground with something resembling a proper day-and-night cycle. Sunlight came and went from beyond the Barrier, and the population of the city naturally synchronised their sleep cycles to it. The result was that New Home was subdued, less lights on, fewer people in the streets. Less chance of being spotted by a prying neighbour that might tip his father off.

There was only one bus that went where he was headed, at this hour. The air conditioning belched nothing but lukewarm air, every second seat was stained enough to lightly reek, and the appearance of the only other passenger made him move to sit as far away from them as was possible.

The fare was cheap, though.

The bus took off. Past the outskirts, past the rocky plains. It hadn’t even been forty minutes when Snowy passed further from home than he ever had.

Dark blue and gray transitioned smoothly into orange and red, and the air became hot. He had to point the air-con away from him, but the heat built up within the bus itself, becoming trapped beneath his feathers. He panted. In a stroke of desperation, he cracked the window open a hair, only to receive a blast of wind that felt almost searing.

The rate at which Snowy went through his water was concerning. Hotland didn’t have many rest stops, considering the environment, and the few close by—he’d checked—had liquids at dubiously expensive prices. The costs of having to keep them from evaporating.

An hour into the journey, the engine at the front of the bus groaned, and the vehicle slowed by a considerable fraction.

“Ah, damn,” the driver said.

Snowy couldn’t help but let out a little “What?” of disbelief.

“Sorry, kid, engine’s getting old. Can’t handle the heat as it used to. Gotta get it fixed up.”

The driver pulled over at the nearest stop, by a settlement that couldn’t have held more than a hundred monsters. Snowy set one foot on the ground, and yelped, pulling it back up.

He didn’t have footwear. He'd never planned on stopping here.

He tried to remain in the bus, sprawled out across two seats, but it wasn’t working in the slightest.

Then it turned out that the engine was practically on the verge of giving up. Obtaining the replacement would take the driver a couple of hours. He refunded Snowy’s fare and then some as an apology, but what was ten Gold supposed to do?

When he was stranded in a place that physically hurt to exist in?

One step at a time, Snowy decided. Quick, jumpy steps, as he strode his way into the nearest shop. Even in the interior, the air was hot enough that he had to cut loose with his magic, firing freezing sickles in a swirl around his feet to keep cool. It drained him.

“You have any shoes that can fit bird feet?”

The shopkeeper eyed him curiously. “You look a long way from home, kid.”

Stop making conversation and just get me the stuff already. “Sorry, this wasn’t part of the plan. You see that bus over there, right?”

The shopkeeper furrowed their brow. “To be honest, this is the first time I’ve ever seen a Snowdrake in person. I’ll take a look at what I might have.”

What Snowy got was a pair of sandals meant for dragons, to accommodate how spread out his toes were. He forked over money for more overpriced water, and a towel which he tore in two and bundled up in between each foot and sandal, so they wouldn’t awkwardly flop behind him as he walked.

There was a dingy inn in the town, but remaining here for any longer than necessary might as well have been a death sentence. More settlements were visible from here. Larger ones.

He had to keep moving.

“You sure you’re alright heading off by yourself?” the bus driver asked him, as he passed. The sole passenger only stared.

“Better than staying here, that’s for sure. You don’t want fried chicken stinkin’ up your bus, yeah?”

The joke had been a spur of the moment thing, but Snowy imagined it had made the driver laugh just enough not to give any more thought about stopping him.

Snowy trudged forwards. Fighting off the heat with magic would exhaust him more than it helped, so he relied on water alone. First by guzzling it down so fast he felt squeamish, then directly pouring it over his body. Anything that went outside the bottle evaporated at a ridiculous rate—he could see the plumes of vapour wafting off of his feathers.

Somewhere down the road, there was a shortcut to bridge a gap, bypassing the winding mountain paths. It could cut down at least another half an hour of walking.

That shortcut took the form of a puzzle. Thin platforms like pillars arranged in a grid, steam vents installed on the tops of each of them. He was supposed to figure out a route through. Only, he was fully capable of flying.

Snowy beat wing, and knew he was going to be feeling the exertion later—flight, to most winged monsters his size, was as vigorous an activity as sprinting was. In such a hot environment, it was difficult to concentrate on his movements.

Even more so when he passed low enough to a vent that it detected him, sending a wave of steam slamming into him, knocking him off-balance. Scrambling to course-correct, he hit the top of the nearest platform at an angle, skidding across the rock, right onto another vent that sent him back into the air.

This time there wasn’t a vent on the side he slipped towards. His feet left the ground, and he shot his wings out to grip the edge of the pillar. Hot rocks bit into him, and he screamed as he heaved himself up to stable ground.

Snowy felt spent. He might have laid there until someone asked him to move, if not for the fact that heat was still rapidly seeping into him from the stone below. He had to push himself back up.

Just flying around the entire contraption was easier.

He was leaving a trail of feathers behind him by the time he made it to the other side. He staggered to a boulder, leaned on it in lieu of allowing himself to fall down. Gulped down half of everything that remained in the bottle and doused himself with the rest.

Then the heat, impossibly, grew even more intense as footsteps approached. He looked—and there was something like a person-sized walking volcano.

“Heey. You ‘kay?” it asked, a carefree smile plastered across its face.

“Oh, I’m just—agh, resting myself. Taking a break. Hold on, um.”

Even talking was taking the breath out of him.

“Ahh! I’ll help!”

With what? We’re still a good distance from anything, and you don’t look like you have anything with you—

“Healing magmas!”

The Vulkin did a cute little hop, leaned forwards, and shot red-hot globs of molten rock out of the opening on its head.

Snowy screamed, throwing himself to one side. The lava passed within a wingspan of his face, and already-weakened feathers curled at the heat. He ran, and it chased, spewing more projectiles after him.

It wasn’t fast, fortunately. The road bent around a section of rock, and he hid behind it, sweeping more ice magic over himself to cool down.

“Why ruuun?”

“Sorry! Um, I’m not like—I’m not made of fire, alright? Or lava. Or whatever. This isn’t helping—damn!” A small fire burnt at the rag in one sandal. He kicked it off and stamped at it to put it out.

“Ah… Not… Helping? Ok…” it said, clearly dejected. Snowy felt bad, even if it’d come dangerously close to killing him. They were in the middle of nowhere, with no one to witness it. The wind might have even blown his dust away, and his father would have never found out what had happened.

Why was that mattering so much? It wasn’t like Snowy wanted his father to know anything anyway, alive or not.

“Well, you’re a local here, right?” he asked. “Do you know the fastest way to the closest rest stop with air conditioning, or should I just follow the road?”

It pointed. He was too winded to manage a thanks, and continued.

There was an elevator where he’d been directed to. The doors dinged open to release a gust of gloriously, gloriously cool air. Snowy went inside, jabbed the button to close the doors and sprawled himself out across the floor.

How many times had he done that now? This was pathetic, absolutely pathetic. At least there wasn’t anyone to see him.

Snowy took the opportunity to rest up, cracking open a biscuit packet. He was woefully behind schedule, but his father wouldn’t be waking up for at least another hour. There was still time.

Halfway through the meal, the elevator dinged. It moved alarmingly fast, and by the time the doors opened he’d only just finished stuffing the packet back into his bag. Crumbs still dotted his beak. The person on the other end stared—as much as someone could stare with an eyeless diamond for a head, anyway.

“S-rry, s-rry,” Snowy mumbled, pushing his way through, trying his best not to choke on the fragments of biscuit still in his beak. The heat up here was lesser, thankfully, and a rest stop was in view. He breathed out a sigh of relief.

And spotted something else, a great distance away. A monolith of a building, situated at the edge of Hotland itself, extending downwards into the rock. “ROYAL LABORATORY” was displayed in large, glowing letters at the entrance.

Snowy went right for it. Nothing else mattered. The trek was almost effortless, in comparison.

“Hey. This is Snowy. I’d like to visit someone here, please?”

The door remained shut. He turned his gaze upwards, to the camera positioned just above it.

“Okay. Sure. You can know I’m here with that there, so I should just plop myself over here and—”

Faint, shuffling footsteps, from the other side.

Snowy’s wing went out, slamming against the steel of the door.

“Alright, I know you’re here now. Please, I’m not—not mad or anything. I’m just really confused right now. It’s been so long—”

From within the structure, a door opened. More footsteps, then a second sound to mark that same door being closed.

“No! No!” He pounded ineffectually at the door with both wings. The metal rang out, but held firm. “You can’t do this, you can’t—do you understand what you’re doing?”

Silence from within the compound.

“It’s been twenty-three days and, I think, eight hours since the moment you were originally supposed to send her back. I didn’t track that—someone else is. Someone else who’s also got someone here or maybe not here at all or whatever is really going on.”

More silence. Of course, there was a chance that whoever was inside simply wasn’t the Royal Scientist, and he’d just been yelling at some poor cleaner for the past minute. Just to make sure, he pulled out his phone and went to Alphys’ own account.

look. if they just died sometime after coming back anyways just tell me tell us. maybe you feel like thats betraying us or something but its honestly much much worse that you keep so quiet like its something else that happened. im tired of waiting im tired of wondering and stressing just tell me plsase

Sent, with an attached picture taken of his memento.

Blocked just a moment after, too little time for her to have read through it.

The phone went back in his bag.

“So that’s how it is. Running, hiding from everyone because you’re too scared to tell anyone anything. What is it? What happened? Why don’t you want to tell me?!”

Silence, damning silence.

“At the very least, I know you’ve got no choice but to listen to me right now. I’ve got, I dunno, an hour or so before I need—”

The sound of running machinery, one which he recognised from the elevator he’d taken. Escaping.

Snowy clenched his wings, pinched his beak hard enough that he felt it warp from the force. Everything inside him was a storm, and there was nowhere for that storm to go but out. Two shotgun sprays of ice-cold sickles, ricocheting off the steel, one going high enough to shatter the glass of the camera above. Shards peppered the floor.

…

Maybe that wasn’t a good idea. With all the pent-up emotions given form, discharged from the body, all that was left was worry, exhaustion. He’d just shot off enough bullets to seriously injure someone, not as much as the Vulkin had, perhaps, but an obscene amount nonetheless. This was royally owned property, was she sounding the alarm already? He heard heavy footsteps from afar—how long was he going to be locked up for? How much money would his father need to pay? Enough to make that lump-sum payment seem paltry?

All that anger and bravado faded away, and Snowy was worried she was still watching from wherever she’d run off to, through a broken camera lens.

He ran. Around the perimeter of the building, then down a slope. A thin river ran nearby—he made a break for it.

There was someone there.

“Tra la la. I am the riverman. Or am I the riverwoman…? It doesn’t really matter. I love to ride in my boat. Care to join me?”

Score.

Riding on a boat was another first for Snowy. He dipped the tip of one wing into the water, letting it splash and froth against him. The air grew cooler, as they moved away from Hotland. A smile grew on his face.

“Tra la la. The angel is coming… Tra la la,” the riverperson sang, as they passed Waterfall by.

“What?”

“Ah, forgive the ramblings of an old soul.”

The water became suffused with a faint teal sheen, from the runaway bioluminescence of the swamps. Echo flowers bloomed on the riverside. A serene sight. Snowy sat himself down at the edge of the boat, soothing scalded feet in the cool water. He plucked at charred feathers, released them to fly off.

“You look like you’ve been through quite the ordeal,” the riverperson said.

“Damn. Is it that easy to tell?”

“Do share, if you are so willing.”

Snowy considered.

“I came all the way from New Home. My Mom… passed, and everything got way too hard to handle with my dad. So I just left. To stake out a life for myself. Would’ve already gotten to where I’m going by now, but the damn bus broke down halfway through Hotland and I ended up having to take the long way around.” He gave his best shot at a smile. “You can see how that turned out.”

The riverperson chuckled. Snowy felt a little better.

“To run off and carve out your own life,” they said. “So young, and all on your own?”

“Well, um—of course it’s going to sound bad when you say it like that. I’ve got a plan set out and everything, but I guess I can’t tell you, in case anybody comes around asking for me. Sorry.”

“No need to apologise.”

Snowy let himself sag a little more. “And besides. Even if this does turn out to be a bad decision after all… it’s not like staying at home was going to be any better. I know it sounds like I’m just some whiny kid, but asking me to just stay put would have been… impossible, alright?”

“Worry not. Every once in a while, a youth comes along who’s sorely underestimated by their elders. And from what I've seen…”

The riverperson turned their head to face Snowy. He made out only shadow beneath the baggy cloak, but there was, unmistakably, the impression of something looking back at him. Something different from every other gaze he’d been shot in his lifetime.

“There’s a good chance you’re one of them.”

Snowy’s chest lightened further. “Thank you.”

They continued. The water grew frigid, enough for him to take his feet back on the boat, and before long, snow began to fall. Naturally formed snow, instead of the stuff pumped out or magicked up in climate-controlled chambers for city children to play in. It blanketed the ground, piling on the leaves of evergreens. The cold air was sharp against his nostrils as he breathed it in, but it was a natural kind of sharpness. A chill that his species was built for.

He’d spent a minute here and it felt more like home than anything ever had. The riverperson tilted their head, and he got the impression they were smiling.

“Your stop, then?”

The snow felt natural to step through. The shape of his feet spread his weight around, so as to avoid disturbing it too much. Snowy waved as the riverperson continued further onwards, to places unknown.

There was a town visible in the distance. He took stock of his supplies—more depleted than he wanted them to be. He needed to hit up a shop or two, and an inn to sleep off everything that just happened.

The landscape was hilly and broken, but trekking through it was a breeze when it felt good just to exist.

Rustling leaves drew Snowy’s attention. Not far off, a tree that poked up from behind a low hill shook.

“Hello?” he called.

There was a pause, and he caught what might have been a hushed whisper. Something like a, “Dude…"?

Snowy waited, but whoever was on the other side didn’t move to approach. “You don’t need to hide. I don’t mean trouble or anything,” he said, trying to sound more sure of himself than he actually was.

Again, nothing. He decided to round the hill himself.

It was a surprising sight. Another Snowdrake, in their native environment. His feathers were green, and he was perched up on a branch, right leg dangling in the air, left wing braced against the trunk of the tree. What stood out the most was the absolutely gigantic pair of shades stuck to his face, hiding both eyes.

“Yo,” the other Snowdrake said.

“Um. Yo?”

“And I thought we were the only Snowdrakes around. Who might you be?”

Need to make a good first impression! Hit him with the Snowy classic!

“I’m Snowy. It’s ice—”

A burst of laughter interrupted him, even before he started the second sentence. The other Snowdrake almost fell off the tree in the process.

“—puhhahah! Sorry—sorry—no, I mean sorry. Damn. Snowy. Is your name.”

“—to meet you.”

“Like really sorry. It’s your name and all—I can’t help it and—oh, yeah. Ice. Hah. That’s funny too.”

Dammit.

The Snowdrake leapt off the tree, approaching. He was a fair bit taller than Snowy. “Okay, nevermind that. Name’s…” He seemed to pause for a moment. “You can just call me Chilldrake. I sorta rule these woods here, more or less, along with my bro.”

A delinquent. It wouldn’t do Snowy any good to get on his bad side, whether he liked Chilldrake or not.

“Oh. Cool.”

“Now, how did you end up here? I can count the number of Snowdrakes ‘round these parts on my wings and you definitely aren’t one of them.”

“I… walked.”

Chilldrake looked him up and down. “Must’ve been a real long hike, for you to look like that.”

“Is that what everyone latches onto, now? Yeah, getting here took a bit—”

“Oooh, wait, are you a runaway?!”

Fear flared in Snowy’s chest. If they knew how vulnerable he was, there was no telling what they would be willing to—

“That’s metal, man. Come on,” Chilldrake said, motioning for Snowy to follow. “You gotta meet my bro. He’s king in these woods, and the absolute sickest guy I know.”

He followed through the snow, past hills and creeks whose water stung to the touch. Where the trees were taller, wider, there was a treehouse built into one of them. A simple box with the trunk penetrating the middle portion, as big as his old bedroom had been.

Another Snowdrake, also green in colour, came to the window. His head turned to look at Snowy.

“Now, who’s this?” he asked.

“Hey, bro! This is Snowy! Come down and check him out!”

The Snowdrake leaned forwards, putting both feet on the windowsill, and leapt off, kicking up snow where he landed. Chilldrake cheered at the act. “Just play it cool, and you’ll be fine,” he whispered to Snowy, as the elder brother approached.

Up close, Snowy could make out how the frames of his shades were pointed, at the ends and bottoms. Two triangular lenses. The elder brother was taller than Chilldrake as Chilldrake was taller than Snowy, and confidence oozed from every step.

“A blue one. Quite the odd fellow, aren’t you. What’s your purpose here?”

“Yeah, so, Snowy’s actually a runaway, and he—”

The elder brother raised a feather to silence Chilldrake. “I think he should speak for himself.”

Snowy wanted to think up of some lie that would get them off his back, but there wasn’t enough time to come up with anything and not have them suspicious. Besides, there was at least one person here that would prefer the truth.

“Yeah, Chilldrake’s right. I came here all the way from New Home.”

“To stay, or just stopping by? Actually, not that you’ve got any place left to go, no? Unless you plan on climbing the walls to the Ruins?”

“I’m… staying. Came here to start a new life.”

“Hah! Then things have gotten a little more interesting here.” The elder brother turned his head to one side, touching a wing to the bridge of his shades. “I’m Blizzard. Let’s give you some ground rules.”

Blizzard strolled over to another tree, leaning against it, one leg folded so the foot was against the trunk. “First off: every rumour you have and will hear about me is true.”

“...What?”

“It doesn’t matter what they are, or how embellished it might seem. Maybe you might think it might just a couple of scared kids blowing things out of proportion, but they say those things about me because I do those things. Got it?”

This wasn’t an optimal situation.

“Second: I’m the type of guy to hold grudges. You think about wronging me—expect consequences. Could be in a day, could be months or even years from now. But I will not forget the shit that’s done to me.”

Blizzard strode uncomfortably close. Snowy could make out how his breath fogged up in the cold.

“But I am a fair man. I believe in paying back. Could be money, could be a favour or two, so long as I think it makes up for things. But you should try your best to settle things quickly, on your own terms, because if I think you’re taking too long? I’ll settle affairs on my own terms, and that doesn’t tend to look pretty.”

This was incredibly far from an optimal situation.

“Thirdly: you can always find protection, under my wing. We help each other out. The same thing in Two will apply to you, to a lesser extent. Would be a good choice, I think, for someone like you. Just give us the word and we'll get you initiated.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Good. And fourthly… never fraternise with Jerry.”

“...What?”

“Trust bro on this,” Chilldrake said. “Jerry’s like, the absolute worst in all Snowdin. He’s all—”

“You’ll understand me the moment you meet him. Really, nobody would ever willingly associate themselves with Jerry—the rule’s more meant to stop folks from using him for things, because I don’t even want that. At your kindest, ignore him.”

“Um. Okay?”

“That should be all for the moment. I trust you to figure the rest out yourself, else you aren’t cut out for this place.”

A momentary silence, as Snowy looked around.

“Actually, where is Snowdin Town from here, actually?” Chilldrake pointed. “Thanks, dude.”

The town itself was quaint. One main street, commercial buildings on both sides, next to a residential area. There was an inn(!) which he promptly entered and booked a room for three nights. It was a third of his remaining Gold, but there weren’t any other options.

The room was smaller than his previous one, just a bed, nightstand, table and chair, and a light. A small painting hung from the wall opposite the door.

But it was free of his father’s presence, and he didn’t need air conditioning for the air to be cool enough to comfortably sleep beneath him. Those two factors made it leagues better than his old place.

Snowy treated himself to enough food to fill himself, then brought out his memento. A printed photograph of him and Mom, the side containing his father neatly cut away. He fell asleep with it clutched tight against him.

Tomorrow would be the first day of the rest of his life.

Chapter Text

Snowy shook the exhaustion out of himself. Out in the fringes of the Underground, far from the only source of surface light, there was little reason for the population to synchronise themselves with New Home. Day and night were only suggestions here, and that fact was taking some getting used to.

The door to Grillby’s opened, and the living flame walked out, having closed up for the “night”. Snowy stopped leaning against the outer wall of the building.

“Hey, uh, Mr. Grillby?”

Grillby turned around. Was that the right honorific? Was Grillby his first or last name?

“I’m wondering if you’ve got any employment activities open? I know I’m not the most qualified person in the Underground, but I’m sure I could help clean up or wash dishes, or maybe prepare drinks?”

Grillby remained silent, leaning forwards to look Snowy over.

“Or wait! I’m good at comedy. Probably. Ice to meet you and all that. You think I could do some standup there?”

The fire straightened back up, folding his arms.

“Is that a yes, or…?”

“Grillbz says he doesn’t need any help at the moment. And besides, it didn’t end well, the last time he took a Snowdrake up,” said someone from behind him. An older bird lady. Grillby was still silent, but he didn’t motion for her to go away—a translator? Snowy had seen stranger things.

“Oh. Okay.”

“Why’s a kid like you trying to get a job in a place like Grillby’s, anyway?”

Snowy considered. Other teenagers like Chilldrake and Blizzard were one thing, but having adults how he was a runaway was another matter entirely. He’d be reported, sent right back to his father, who would only be even more furious at him.

“Money, duh. What other reasons are there?”

“Kid, I’ve never seen you before. You new here?”

“Yeah.” There was no hiding that fact. Snowdin’s population probably didn’t even hit the quadruple digits—it was a place where everyone knew each other.

“This is the last place you go to, for a kid wanting a side hustle. You try the library yet?”

“I have, actually,” Snowy said, trying to contain his frustration. “Just this morning. Didn’t take.”

“The shop?”

“She said she’d think about it. But that was yesterday.”

“Then why the rush? Out of anyone here, she’s your best shot.”

“It’s sort of urgent. Time sensitive.” The sensitive part being his stomach. “I’m trying to cover all my bases. If one offer falls through, I still might have something else.”

The bird put her wings on her hips, smiling just a tad. “That’s city-slicker talk if I’ve ever heard it.”

Was it that obvious? This wasn’t good.

“Okay, nevermind that. I don’t need you prying, I’m sliding off.” Snowy walked at a brisk pace, trying to stifle his panic. 

In a small town where everyone knew each other, nobody in their right mind would offer employment if someone showed up out of nowhere and asked for it, especially when there were countless other, more familiar candidates. To get a sustainable job, he’d have to gain the town’s trust, and to gain the town’s trust he would need a job to persist long enough for them to familiarise themselves with his presence.

According to the shopkeeper rabbit, the skeleton brothers had managed it, with time and sheer confidence. Neither of which Snowy had in large supply.

There was no easy way to go about doing it. The one offer still on the table was tenuous at best, but if that fell through as well…

Then what?

This was supposed to be a better life than the one he was running from. Snowy was feeling more and more like an impulsive idiot by the moment, but admitting that would mean returning to stifling New Home. To his father. He didn’t want to even think about what that failure state would entail, so he forced his thoughts elsewhere.

Dinner. That was a solvable problem. He still had enough for another day in his pack, but that was better kept for emergencies. He needed to familiarise himself with what Snowdin had to offer, and wiggle his way into being a recognised face.

The restaurant was a small place. The food was… food. It didn’t stand out in terms of taste, but it had enough to fill him for the night.

Snowy had sat near the entrance to get people to see him as they passed, looking as natural as he could manage, and maybe owing to that, someone approached. Chilldrake slid into the seat opposite him, and then greeted.

“Heyo, Snowy!”

“What the—uh, hi?” Snowy shuffled in his seat, looking down and away, unsure of how exactly to react. Was this how small town people talked?

“Sorry, sorry, guess I’m getting a little too excited. Town’s small, been a long while since I’ve seen a new face around. And my age, too!” Chilldrake leaned in closer to Snowy, resting his head on his wings. “Care sharing a little about yourself?”

“Huh? Like, right now?” Snowy said, looking around. There were still a good amount of townsfolk around him, some of which had had their attention drawn to them. It wouldn’t do him any good for them to overhear too much.

“Let’s keep it quiet, at least?”

“Yeah, we can do that,” Chilldrake said, not lowering his voice at all. “So, about you.”

“I’m a comedian. I make jokes and stuff.” It was the only thing he felt comfortable telling—any other relevant aspect of his life and he would be unnecessarily dumping on someone he hadn’t known for a week.

“Sick. Hit me.”

There wasn’t enough time to make one up on the spot, so he opted to reuse one. “What does the yeti say before the rocket takes off? Ava-launch!”

Chilldrake paused, parsing the joke, mouth still open in a slight smile.

And stayed like that for longer than anyone Snowy had ever seen take to get it—not just one of his jokes, but any joke as a whole. Up close, he could make out Chilldrake’s eyes behind his shades, blinking slowly, shifting about under apparent mental effort.

“Oooooh! Avalanche!” Chilldrake finally said, laughing. A small but genuine chuckle, for a pun he’d taken a good five seconds to get. “Anymore where that came from?”

“Um.”

“Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry, art takes time, I know. Keep it up!”

“Uh, wait! If it’s zero degrees outside, and it’s going to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold will tomorrow be?”

Chilldrake took even longer to parse the joke, squinting behind his shades, moving his wings in what Snowy assumed was an attempt at mental math. Snowy took a bite, chewed, swallowed, and Chilldrake was still going. His beak fell fully open the moment he actually got it, as if he’d come upon the meaning of life, or the secret to shattering the Barrier. “Ooooh! Right! Because like, zero times zero is still zero! Damn, you really are a whizz at this.”

Chilldrake snatched up a piece from Snowy’s plate and put it in his mouth.

“Dude?!”

“That looked nice, sorry.”

“I, um, sorta really nee—” But that was just hoisting his troubles onto someone who couldn’t do anything about it again. “Not cool, man. Ask first.”

“Okay, okay. We can do an I-O-U, so you can do that to me next time and we’ll be even then.”

“I—yeah, sure, we can do that.” If he even made it that far.

“So, got any gigs lined up? That why you came here?”

“Oh no, got nothing at the moment. It… would be really nice, though.”

“Then try for it! I’ve seen shows just as funny as you.”

Who would even be willing to take him? “I’ll…. think about it, I guess.”

He needed to change the subject. “So, what about you?”

“Oh, yeah, duh. Would be rude if I didn’t give anything in return. I’m Chilldrake, you know that. Second coolest kid in town. Most of the time, when I’m off from school—”

Weird. Snowy hadn’t expected a delinquent like him to actually go to a school, with the talk about ‘owning the woods’ and all. It was still a mandatory thing, he figured.

“I hang out with my bro and the rest of the gang in the woods, shoot the shit, whatever. You should meet them, actually—can you pick out a time?”

“I’ll… also think on it. Sorry, I’m trying to get settled down here, things are a bit hectic right the moment.”

“That’s cool, that’s cool. All the time in the world. Anyway—”

“I don’t think anybody here appreciates listening to this nonsense.” The interruption was from someone who’d stopped by—a central, hump-shaped body supported by four thin legs, arms sprouting just beside where the eyes were, and a smell that made Snowy wince. “So I’m not sure why you two are talking about it so loud.”

“Hi, Jerry,” Chilldrake said, squinting in annoyance.

Jerry scoffed. “Hello, ‘Chilldrake’. That’s what you want to call yourself now, right?”

“Old news, pal. Hell’s your problem?”

“What the hell is your problem? Is keeping quiet a foreign concept to you?”

“Could ask you the same thing, man.”

“Well sorry for speaking up on behalf of everyone here. Just look around you for once!” Jerry said, motioning to the people who were looking more at him than at the two of them. “You think anyone here likes this? Huh? Does the other guy even like this?” he said, getting uncomfortably close.

Snowy stumbled over his words. “I—look, we can head somewhere, elsewhere, we don’t need to—”

“See?! You’re not even aware of—”

Chilldrake put a wing against the hump of Jerry’s body and heaved, attempting to shove him over, but Jerry proved to be too stable to topple. He pushed back, and Chilldrake collided with the table, falling to a sit.

“Oh, so now, since you can’t win an argument, you’re just resorting to assault instead?”

“I can’t win an argument if you’re too stupid to understand anything I’m saying!” Chilldrake’s wing clenched against the snow on the ground, and he flung the resulting snowball at Jerry.

“Alright alright stop it!” Snowy yelled, getting in between the two. “Just shut up. We can finish up and leave.”

“Snowy, you can’t just give in to Jerry like that.”

“No. You don’t need to do this for me.”

“See?” Jerry interjected, putting spindly hands on what approximated hips. “Told you he wasn’t—”

“You shut up too,” Snowy said, putting a wing in between him and Jerry. “I don’t remember giving you any sign of agreement. Piss off.”

Jerry folded his arms. “Way to be ungrateful. I thought I’d stop by to help a newcomer out, but if you don’t want to appreciate me, then I guess I won’t bother offering any more assistance the rest of your time here.”

“Go ahead.”

“Don’t think I’m joking. You have no idea what you’re missing out on.”

“You want another snowball in your face?”

Jerry scoffed, and strolled off. The silence hung heavy, with the eyes of everyone nearby on them.

“So, uh, you wanna keep chatting?” Chilldrake said.

“Think the mood’s been too soured. Sorry. I’m tired—I’ll just go back to the inn.”

“See you around, then.” Chilldrake picked himself up off the floor, shook the grit off his back like a canine, then pranced off. Snowy finished what remained of his dinner, then headed back.

There was only one night left in his schedule, and there hadn’t been anything that even remotely hinted at any other opportunity opening up. It’d burn through more of his money, but it would be better than trying to find a spot to sleep out in the open. He’d read enough horror stories over the net.

“I’d like to book for tomorrow and the day after that, please.”

The rabbit furrowed her brow. “I’m sorry. This place is fully reserved for the next five days.”

Snowy’s gut sank. “W-what?”

“You can book nights for after those five days right now, if you want. We should see those slots filled up soon enough.”

“Do you… do refunds?”

“Standard policy is that we can refund half the price of the initial purchase if you cancel before then.”

Snowy considered. It would be a harsh five days, but if he were to actually find other accommodations in the meantime, it would be a waste of eighty gold, which was a lot considering his current situation.

But what other accommodations could he have access to? Could he use the shopkeeper rabbit’s house, even as someone who hadn’t been here a week? Knock on random doors to ask to crash? There wasn’t anything resembling a homeless shelter here, because homelessness simply wasn’t a problem in Snowdin. He’d brought that issue here, with his arrival.

Chilldrake and Blizzard? He had made a good impression on one of them, but not “let him stay over for an indefinite period” good, and only on the junior member of the sibling pair. Did they live out of the treehouse, or was that something they simply used as a base of operations?

Blizzard did say that members of his group looked out for each other. Would that include housing him? Even if it did, how long would he have to wait before they would be willing to extend such help?

He was feeling more and more like an idiot.

“Sir?”

“Um, let me think about it.”

Snowy wanted to force himself to sleep earlier, to gain more strength for the following day, but of course it didn’t work like that. His mind was still racing, and fighting to keep it clear only kept him from drifting off.

The treehouse was easy to spot, when he knew where to look. People were already gathered there—Chilldrake and another monster at the base of the tree, Blizzard looking out the window. They turned to face him as he approached, all of his belongings heavy on his back.

“Ooh, Snowy! Nice of you to show up. Jerry isn’t going to show his face ‘round here, not after what we did to him last time.”

Bringing the words out of his mouth was an endeavour on its own. “I, uh, would like to, like—”

“Spit it out already,” Blizzard said.

“...What can I do to make you guys give me a place to crash over?”

Chilldrake and the other monster were shocked still, but Blizzard only smiled, heaving himself over the window to land onto the forest floor. Same way as last time, but it still got a small cheer out of Chilldrake.

“Ran out of choices, or money? Or both?”

“Uh…”

“No, no, you don’t have to say. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is, of course, what you’re willing to do for it.”

“I can do…” Snowy swallowed a lump in his throat. “Whatever you ask. Just promise that you’ll actually provide me with something once I’ve done that.”

Blizzard scoffed. “I don’t think you’re in any position to ask me to swear anything.”

Not good. 

“Uh, I…”

What could he do, to earn some semblance of respect? Backing down would only let him be seen as weak, which left the option of doubling down, or something in that vein.

“You don’t need to promise anything, obviously, but the way I see it—it’s really not a good look to back out of your side of the deal, once I do mine. Trust is a big deal where I come from, and, well, I imagine at least some of that is true here as well. Other kids are going to be less willing to deal with you, if you pull anything like that.”

More stuttering than he would’ve liked, and he’d come up with most of it on the spot and was only hoping that it ended up being, at least, partially correct.

“An interesting thing, you are,” Blizzard said, smiling. He angled his head slightly to the side, to address the one behind him. “Ice Cap, what do you think?”

“He’s pr—”

“I asked the other guy for a reason, Chilldrake. Feel like you’ve got a fair bit of bias in his favour.”

“Sorry.”

Snowy forced himself to be still, because any movement could give away how much he was panicking. Ice Cap moved to speak.

“What should I know? This is literally the first time I'm meeting this guy in person.”

“An opinion from a neutral party tends to be helpful in decisions like this.”

Ice Cap shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like much, especially if it took him three days to mess up bad enough to come to us. If you’re asking about that trust ramble, I guess I can’t poke any holes in that. It’s not wrong, per se.”

Snowy relaxed a hair—maybe this could go better than he’d thought.

“But it does reek of trying to be a smartass. Heavily. I mean, a nobody like you, spouting shit like that to Blizzard of all people? It’s like you’ve never been punched in the beak, or took a bullet before.”

Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. He had to try to salvage this, steer this back on course.

“Am I wrong, though?”

“I feel like you’re just proving my point, here.”

Dammit. He was.

Blizzard let out a small chuckle. “Too inexperienced in the world, are you? Ran away out of sheer impulse?”

“No! Not an impulse decision! I thought about it for w—for a long time, alright?! I weighed my options and chose the best one. I’m here because there’s nowhere else I can be.”

“Mmm. That’s a sore spot for you, isn’t it?”

Snowy bristled.

“I’ll go ahead and take your word on it. I extend that modicum of trust. But I do notice you didn’t bother opposing my first question.”

He’d messed up. His own words were pressed against him, now. There wasn’t any wiggling out of this. “I… yeah. I guess I really am just an idiot, in the grand scheme of things. I admit that. But I’m willing to learn. I’ve learned a lot since leaving home, actually. Learned stuff I’d never have thought about if I just stayed back there. I know I’m inexperienced and I’m working on it, oka—”

“That’s quite enough, Snowy.” Blizzard had approached over the course of the conversation, and his presence made Snowy shy away, breaking eye contact. “You’re asking for us to provide you housing for an indefinite period.”

“Y-yes. Anywhere is fine, just give me something I can stay in—”

“You understand what you have to do, to earn such a thing?”

“Join you, right? That’s what you offered, when I first arrived?”

Blizzard smiled, and Snowy had the thought that he’d had another thing in mind, until Snowy had unwittingly replaced it with something even better for Blizzard, digging an even bigger hole for himself.

“I think, seeing as he’s the one who’s been with you the most, we can let my little brother decide on the initiation rituals?”

“In between those two trees, next to that cliff over there,” Chilldrake said from beside Snowy. “Ya see it?”

“Think so.”

The brown shape, “Gyftrot” as they called it, was pressing itself up against a tree. The two approached with careful steps—the shape of their feet meant they made little noise on the snow. Somewhere close by, Blizzard was keeping watch over the two of them. His presence was palpable.

“You picked out your item yet?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

They closed the gap. Snowy could make out more details now—Gyftrot had been adorned with no less than half a dozen miscellaneous objects, and owing to its quadruped body plan, it didn’t have an easy means of removing them. Wire strung through its antlers, boxes taped to its back, and inexplicably, a small white dog nestled quite neatly within its antlers, which Gyftrot was currently working to dislodge.

“Come on, come on, just get down already!”

The reindeer pressed its antlers against the branch, to try coaxing the dog into getting off, but the more it was jostled the further it shrunk away.

“Please, at least not on the outer edge. Feels like my neck’s gonna snap.”

It was a sorry sight, and Snowy was about to add to it. He opened his pack, and retrieved one of the oversized sandals he’d come to Snowdin with.

“Where’d you get your wings on that?”

“Long story. I’ll tell you later.”

He wrapped his wing around the sandal, and drew back.

“Sure you can hit it from this far out?”

Snowy wasn’t, but any closer would have risked alerting Gyftrot. He felt a pressure mounting—this was flagrantly inconveniencing a helpless creature, but he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. Two pairs of eyes were on him. Either Gyftrot had a little more weight on its head, or he’d have to spend the foreseeable future on the streets, with Blizzard as an enemy.

He needed to alleviate that pressure, somehow.

“It’s, ah, snow problem.”

As usual, Chilldrake took a moment to parse it. He chuckled—way too loudly. Gyftrot swiveled to face them, the dog scrambling to stay balanced.

“No no no no! Not now!”

“Damn, sorry ‘bout that! After him!” Chilldrake took off after it, Snowy trailing behind.

“Is there a blue one now?!”

They kept up the chase, keeping Gyftrot against the cliffside. It came across a patch where a puddle had frozen over, slipped, and Snowy flung the sandal.

The sandal hit the antlers, but didn’t catch on them. The reindeer shook its head, and sent it flying off the side of the cliff. Snowy could feasibly glide down and retrieve it, but climbing back up was another matter entirely.

One sandal left. It’d couldn’t be that hard, right?

Gyftrot fled through the woods in short, fast bursts, but they followed at a pace that could almost be described as leisurely. They didn’t need to rush, and Snowy wasn’t in the mood to do anything faster.

It grew tired before they did, and huddled up against the foot of a smaller cliffside, maybe in an attempt to reduce the amount of places they could approach from.

Big mistake, considering the both of them could fly.

Snowy peered over the edge, seeing Gyftrot lower its burdened head to rest, and released the second sandal.

But the thing wasn’t exactly aerodynamic. The sandal careened about in its fall, striking the cliff face just soon enough for Gyftrot to hear. It darted away, and the sandal bounced off the snow.

“What problem do you have with me?!”

“...Sorry?”

“Really?! Sorry?! Is that all you have?!”

Snowy had no idea how to even begin to compress everything down to a story brief enough that Gyftrot wouldn’t just run off halfway through explaining, much less deliver that story without Chilldrake overhearing. He could only stare blankly back, as it trampled the sandal over as it fled even deeper into the woods.

He glided down, Chilldrake coming out from the other side of the hill, carrying along Snowy’s pack. He inspected the sandal—the strip on the top had broken, rendering it impossible to to snag on Gyftrot's antlers.

“Damn. What’re you gonna use now?”

“I don’t know, um, let me look,” he said, snatching his bag back, rifling through it for anything of use. Could he eat something on the spot, and use the resulting empty wrapper? No, that would be far too light to throw, and would tear easily. An empty bottle could do it, but either he’d have to land a near-perfect throw, or get close enough to manually put it on one of its antlers.

What else did he even have?

Blizzard flitted over to check. Snowy's heart pounded.

“You must be travelling light, if you’ve already run out of things to throw.”

“I—wait a minute! I’ll find something, hold on!”

More rummaging, as if he could somehow will an object into appearing in his pack by sheer desperation alone.

“Could you just… give me something? Do I have to come up with the thing my—”

Blizzard’s wing shot out, seizing Snowy’s own.

“Well, well… what could that be?”

Snowy’s heart sank. In the midst of all that rummaging, he’d caused the memento to be visible. The cropped photograph of him and Mom. Blizzard used his other wing to fish it out of his pack.

“That your momma there?”

“No. Wait. Please. This is important, really important—”

“But you’ve left that life behind, haven’t you? Why else would you have come here?”

“This is the most important thing I have in here.”

Blizzard looked at the photograph from an angle, running a feather over the edge where he’d taken a pair of scissors to it. Spotting the places where some parts of his father still remained in-frame. “Interesting.”

Chilldrake looked apprehensive, wings drawn towards chest. “Hey, bro, you sure about doing this?”

“You trust me, no?”

Chilldrake looked down. “Guess I do.”

Blizzard’s shades were more opaque than Chilldrake’s, but Snowy could feel his gaze on him. “Why not let this be a point of transition? Out with the old life… in with the new.”

“I feel like there might be other—”

“Anything I asked, remember? You said it yourself. If you back out of the deal now, how is anyone going to trust you from here on out?”

“You’re doing this on purpose.” It took everything Snowy had to keep his voice from breaking.

“Purpose? Of course I am. I’m giving you more of a chance than I normally give everyone else. Thank Chilldrake for that.”

Chilldrake looked away. “Uh, yeah. You’re welcome.”

“You know exactly what you’re doing.”

“And you know exactly what you signed up for, coming to me of all people. I’m not willing to take anyone who can’t commit, who can’t—”

“Okay okay I get it! I’ll do it! Just a damn picture, anyway,” Snowy said, suppressing a sob.

Blizzard smiled. “Finally. Chilldrake, head off and get the glue.”

Once that was in wing, they followed Gyftrot’s tracks. It had made its way to a shallow cave, and had apparently fallen asleep from the exhaustion of the chase. The little white dog had taken the opportunity to run off. Snowy squeezed the glue onto the backside of the photograph, and tiptoed up to gently press it against its forehead. At such an angle, with such a light object, there was a chance it wouldn’t even notice until the next time it looked at its reflection.

Over by the entrance, Chilldrake started a halfhearted laugh, then stopped himself.

Blizzard kept chuckling.

Hey Mom.

I don’t know why I’m writing this. It’s late and I look really weird being the only one in the library and my head feels like a half-melted snowcone. Maybe it’s because I’m being a massive idiot like always.

I’m here, I’m out, I’m free. It’s been a good chunk of time and I haven’t heard of anyone trying to look for me, because I guess my dad doesn’t think I’ve gone that far. Is it good or bad that I’ve got a strong feeling he isn’t going to bother widening the search enough? Can it be both?

This place is cool, genuinely cool. The air is so fresh and it smells so nice. I don’t remember you ever telling me if you ever came here or not but I really hope you did. You deserve it.

But it’s not all smooth sliding, of course. I didn’t plan shit stuff out enough and I didn’t have any place left to sleep in. And I guess I’m too scared to be homeless for a couple days or so, because I did something really, really bad to not have that happen. It didn’t seem like there was any other choice but it was sort of my fault for getting myself into that situation to begin with.

I don’t even want to write it out directly because my mind is still stuck on the off-chance that you’re still alive somehow and might see this. Guess I really am a coward. There’s probably some viewpoint that says I technically didn’t hurt anyone, and I was semi-forced and did the best I could but I still feel shitty crappy about it. I know you would too. Sorry.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, would you even have wanted me to run away like this? If you saw me like this, all scared and pathetic. But there isn't any going back now. Not if it's just him I'm going back to.

What did the snowdrakeman say to the rampaging reindeer? Chill out!

fuck me

Snowy

Chapter Text

Gingerly, Snowy pulled the oven door open. He shied away from the heat of it, then leaned in closer once the smell reached him. The scent was rich; maybe the nicest thing in this town. Quincy’s mittens couldn’t fit his wings, which meant he had to make do with two pieces of cloth to pull the tray of cinnamon bunnies out.

It was sloppy work. Most of them were deformed, lopsided in shape. Outside of vague recollections of a one-time class where his wing had been held through the entire process, Snowy had never directly baked anything before. Hadn’t had a reason to.

But it did feel nice. Smelling, eating it felt nice, even if the texture wasn’t nearly up to par. Something else he’d been missing out on. See? It’d been a good decision to run off. Staying here, continuing to learn new things, was certainly better than staying put with his father.

Probably.

“Well, for a beginner, you’re not… that bad,” Quincy said, mouth half-full with one of his less-deformed cinnamon bunnies.

“Ah, thanks, thanks. So I’m done here? With the training?”

“Yeah. One day might seem like a little time, but my shop doesn’t have all too much going on. You’ll get the hang of it, I think. Is Monday a good time to start?”

“Yeah. I guess.” Really, no time was a good time to start, considering the delinquents would assuredly have a habit of skipping class. If they, especially Chilldrake, wanted to include him in their activities and he wasn’t available, that would mean he wouldn’t be pulling his weight, and when he was already taking up space in their treehouse it would most certainly mean Blizzard would have bad things waiting in store for him.

But Snowy also knew that letting them be the sole source of his income and livelihood would be going down another slippery slope entirely. One that promised equally terrible fates in the long run. He had to at least try to reduce his dependency on them.

He and Quincy continued eating his practice buns.

“So, I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say that can get you to spill a little?”

“Nothing. Sorry. It’s complicated.”

Quincy sighed, and smiled. “That’s alright. I know how it can be. But… gut feeling says you might be in need of some advice, and I don’t think I can conscience not giving that to you. It’s the least I could do.”

“Sure. Shoot.”

The rabbit leaned against the kitchen island, one elbow on the countertop. “You’re young, but you seem to have showed up out of nowhere, with no connections to your name. Judging by your accent, New Home, or somewhere close?”

It was a jarring feeling. Snowy had let his guard down with Quincy, and hadn’t expected himself to still be this far out of his depth. “Guh. Um…”

“Don’t worry, where you come from doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got the guts to come all the way here, and judging by how you’ve been asking ‘round for jobs, stake out a life.”

He found himself shrinking back into his seat. How much did she know?

“Snowdin isn’t a big city. The days can get dreadfully dull at times. Everyone knows one another, so when someone like you comes to shake things up, they get talking. People are keeping an eye out for you now.”

Snowy swallowed. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Quincy squatted, putting herself at eye level with him. “The important thing is, you have drive. A will to go out there and put your mind to actually doing stuff. It’s a thing that’s been steadily vanishing these days, especially with city-slicker youth. You should be proud you have that.”

“You can tell this much about me? When I haven’t even been here two weeks?”

“You learn to tell many things about people, when you get as old as me.”

“Really? You don’t look that old.”

“Thank you,” Quincy said, chuckling. “Anyway… that drive—it’s a boon. So long as you continue to grit your teeth, face the struggle day after day, it’ll act as a fuel, to keep you moving forward down whatever road you might take. Only, it doesn’t come with some magical knowledge of which roads are the right ones. For someone as young as you? It’s rather easy to end up spending the best years of your life doing something you’ll ultimately regret. Do not fall down that trap, understand?”

He nodded sheepishly. “I think I get it.”

She raised herself back up, leaning with her back against the counter, facing away from him. “You know about Blizzard and his accomplices.”

Not a question. A statement. “Yeah, we’ve talked, but I know what you’re getting at. They’re a bad influence and whatever; I should be staying far away from them.” It was a technical truth—he was just involving himself with them anyway, because there was little other choice.

“Promise me to never deal with them. Never get on their bad side, don't try and get on their good side, either. It will never end well.”

There wasn’t any wiggling out of this one. “I promise, Quincy.”

She looked at him with eyes he couldn’t decipher. Was she judging whether or not he was lying?

“Thank you,” she said.

“Right. Thanks too. Gotta go.”

Snowy grabbed his bag and slipped out through the back door, out of Snowdin itself. Only letting himself start panting once he was on the other side of the rope bridge.

It didn’t take long for Chilldrake to find him. “Yo! Snowy!” he called, fluttering over. There was a box gripped in his talons, and he transferred it to his wing as he landed. “Took ya long enough. My dinner’s getting cold.”

“I’m not that hungry. Just eat it by yourself, or something.”

“Eh, it’s always better if I’ve got someone to chat with. Come on! I know a good spot.”

Snowy followed, as Chilldrake made his way to where the land suddenly dropped off into a sheer cliff. Not nearly as grand as the view back near New Home, but the crispness of air and the smell of pine and dirt made up for it.

“Woah.”

“Yeah, right? Could look at this for hours,” Chilldrake said. He sat down, panting with the exertion of flying and running with his load, legs dangling precariously over two hundred or so feet of air. Snowy opted to stay a little further away from the edge.

Chilldrake accessed the cloth box, which turned out to be something meant to insulate another, smaller lunchbox within. It was made from plastic, translucent, and moisture had beaded up inside of it.

“Whoops!” Chilldrake said, covering up the writing on the plastic lid before Snowy had a chance to read it. “Don’t want to just give away my real name like that.” He opened the lunchbox, set the lid upside down in the insulating container.

His meal was half meat and half vegetables, complete with a tiny drink and sauce packet. Not the dinner that Snowy had expected a delinquent to be having.

Then the smell hit him, and he acted on autopilot, snatching up one of Chilldrake’s nuggets.

“Hey, what the—oh, right, the I.O.U. Go ahead.”

Snowy took his time chewing. The taste definitely wasn’t the same, but the qualities that were similar…

“You—your mom made this?” he asked.

Chilldrake looked flustered. “Hey, who gave you that idea?!”

Snowy needed to keep his voice from shaking. “Uh, I mean—gut feeling, is all.”

“What, going from experience?” Chilldrake said, grinning stupidly.

“I—I—” 

It was really hard to keep his voice from shaking. “Yea—sure. Experience."

Snowy could make out how Chilldrake’s eyes widened behind his shades, as his brain managed to put two thoughts together. “Oh! Oh shit, sorry, sorry. Yeah, my mom made it.”

Snowy hadn’t expected Chilldrake’s parents to be that involved, either, but if school was a factor in his life then so were parents, probably.

“Soooo embarrassing, right? I lose street cred whenever that gets out. Like right now. My bro's the only reason nobody's babbling to the whole town. You won’t tell, right? Promise?”

“Uh—sure. Promise.”

Snowy wanted to ask how Chilldrake’s home life was, but that was an absurd topic to bring up to someone he’d known for about a week. He couldn’t imagine it to be too good—delinquents like Blizzard tended to come from bad upbringings, right? That was the stereotype.

“You know, if ya look real closely, at that spot off to the right without any trees, there’s a little house there.”

Snowy squinted. Sure enough, there was a cabin situated in a clearing. Light shone from a window, only a pinprick from this distance.

“Yeah, that! Just keep your eyes on it, trust me. It’s gonna take a little bit, though. Got any more jokes?”

“Sure I have. What’s the worst thing that could happen at a snowman-run nuclear reactor?”

“What?”

“A meltdown!”

The time for him to get it was shorter than last time, at least. His laugh was unrestrained, flecks of food flying from his beak. “‘Nother one!”

“I—um, what did the vegetable seller say, when asked about his snowman customers? ‘It’s great for revenue, they buy my carrots, and when they melt, I can just pick the carrots up and put them back on my shelf.’”

This was a record for how long it took for Chilldrake to parse the joke. When he did, Snowy swore he could hear the laughter echoing off distant walls.

Chilldrake put another nugget in his beak, chuckled some more mid-chew—

Then jerked and froze, as something appeared to catch in his throat. He panicked, tossing the lunchbox aside, reaching a wing to his neck.

Snowy couldn’t stop himself from screaming, as he stumbled over to wrap his wings around Chilldrake’s chest. How was he supposed to do this again? The instructor or whatever had told him the spot to squeeze varied by what type of monster the victim was, was he doing it right?

There was no time to deliberate. Snowy squeezed. The chunk of meat fell off the cliff. Chilldrake took in a gasp of air.

There was relief washing over Snowy, at that. Why was he so relieved?

“Ack—kkkgh—kkgh—kaaah! Damn. Damn. Um. Right. Thanks. Coulda got it out myself, but thanks. Guess I owe you one.”

He'd assumed there would be some sense of accomplishment for potentially saving a life, but there was only a sheer, overpowering relief at the fact that the life saved had been Chilldrake’s.

“...You can take your wings off of me now.”

Oh right. Snowy retracted them slowly, feeling the slide of feather against feather. He remained sitting where he’d gotten closer to Chilldrake. The both of them were sitting at the cliff edge, now, feet above nothing. Even with the benefit of wings, the sight of the drop still made his gut churn. Another holdover from his old life, perhaps.

Chilldrake’s dinner had been scattered across the snow. He picked up the nuggets, shook and blew the dirt off of each one, and put them right back in the lunchbox. The greens, he swept them off the cliff edge.

“Really?!”

“What, you wanted them?”

“It’s… pretty wasteful, isn’t it?”

Chilldrake scoffed. “Didn’t think you were that much of a nerd. Sure, I can give them to you next time. And eyes on that cabin!”

“Oh, right. Of course.” Snowy took his gaze off Chilldrake. Back to the cabin.

They kept watching.

“Oh! Oh! There he is!” Chilldrake called, leaning so far into a pointing motion that Snowy prepared himself to catch him if he looked to be falling off. A weird thing to worry about, when the both of them could fly.

Snowy looked, and the cabin door was open. A figure exited, too distant to make out any details. They paced about in front of the cabin, then reentered not a minute later.

“...That was it?”

“Yeah. Guy does that a couple times every day. Pretty cool, right?”

“Um. I… guess?”

Chilldrake wolfed down the rest of his meal with seemingly no regard to how he’d choked on it earlier. “Oookay. We should get going, get you prepped up.”

Right. There was a plan of theirs scheduled for tonight. But…

“What do you mean, ‘prepped up’?”

“Oh yeah, so, basically, nobody else in town actually knows whether or not you’re with us, or if that’s just a rumour, right now. My bro told me that. So I thought, since you’re blue and all… maybe we could paint you green.”

It was Snowy’s turn to take an inordinate amount of time parsing what Chilldrake had just said.

“Wuh—whuh—you mean—”

“So that if they see you, they won’t know if it’s just me or bro or some other cousin that’s decided to join us. I’m such a genius! Right?”

Chilldrake looked at him, wide-eyed behind his shades. Snowy considered.

This was a horrific plan. There were so many avenues for failure, and he didn’t know what sort of consequences it’d cause for him.

But the consequences of trying to reject it, going against one of the only two monsters here that held any sort of goodwill towards him, potentially drawing Blizzard’s ire in the process? That he knew.

“Yeah. Sure. Let’s do it.”

“Booyah!”

The consequences would be even more severe than he’d thought. Not only would this not work, he’d be embarrassing himself the entire time.

“Don’t move, I’m almost done!” Chilldrake said, inches from his face. The smell of the spray paint was overwhelming—he moved to sneeze, and Chilldrake shot his free wing out, clamping his beak shut. “No sneezes! You’re gonna ruin it! Damn, think I got some on your beak. Hold on…”

He rubbed at Snowy’s face. The feeling came with the realisation that this was the first time he’d really received so much as a friendly touch since—

Wow, he was pathetic.

“Uh, I ended up just smearing it up. Think that’s gotta do for now.”

Chilldrake completed the greenification of Snowy’s entire body. As a finishing touch, he slotted one of Blizzard’s old shades onto Snowy’s head.

“...And done! Wanna take a look at yourself?”

Snowy looked around, at Ice Cap, who was struggling to hold in her laughter, and at Blizzard, who wasn’t even trying.

“I think I’ll pass on that.”

“Then what’re we waiting for? Let’s get to it!”

The heart of Snowdin Town, every important building, was concentrated along a single street. Snowy and Chilldrake waited for when there weren’t people at the edge of town to sneak in, ducking into what was less a back-alley and more a simple gap in between those important buildings, and the row of residential houses that bordered them. Only the backside of both rows faced them.

Snowy carried the bag he’d initially brought to Snowdin with him. Chilldrake had something MTT-branded, details worn and dirtied.

Darting across the gaps in the buildings, past the connected shop and inn, a generic house, more restaurants and other businesses, they stopped at the structure whose exterior was made of brick. Grillby’s.

There was a back door, alongside a window barely within reach, just wide enough that they could fit into it. Chilldrake tried both, and found them locked.

“Hmm. Guess he learned from last time. Alright, Snowy, let’s see what you got!”

This was it, the point of no return. Snowy would be committing a genuine, recognised crime that he could be arrested and charged for.

“C’mon, what’re you waiting for?” Chilldrake said, making a feather-gun gesture in the direction of the window.

Snowy released a bullet, aiming to break it. The glass cracked, but didn’t shatter completely. Crumbs of it rained down on the snow.

“What kinda shot was that?!”

Voices, from the main street.

“Oh, crap, someone’s heard us! Nevermind, let me handle it!” Chilldrake said, firing his own flurry of sickles, breaking a hole through the glass. He tossed his bag in before him and flew up, using a foot to unlatch the window, and slipped in. There was a thump as he fell to the floor on the other side.

Snowy heard footsteps drawing near and panicking, beating wing to squeeze himself into the window. Green flecks were left behind on the frame as he scrabbled and fell through, onto cold, shard-littered floor.

The back kitchen of the bar was dark—Grillby himself had closed it down a couple hours ago. The only illumination came from the freshly-broken window and from a slit beneath the back entrance.

That slit became an outpour of light, as Chilldrake managed to get it open.

“Yes! There now get i…” He realised that Snowy had already gotten inside, and that he’d just left an opening for whoever was pursuing them.

They really should have discussed this more.

Chilldrake slammed it back closed, and barely managed to relatch one of the locks before someone on the other side slammed into it, jarring the entire door. He jumped back in shock, and transitioned the motion into running for the main area. Snowy followed after him, trying to feel his way through.

One step found a jolt of pain lancing through him. A shard of glass. He continued on a limp, flapping his wings to compensate.

The main area was more lit-up, from the large window at the front of the building. They began to steal from the back bar, Snowy going for the largest bottles, Chilldrake picking and choosing select ones.

A bang and an increase of light coming from the entrance to the back kitchen signaled the door being broken open. Chilldrake hadn’t relatched it completely.

He signaled for Snowy to freeze.

“Oi!” a voice called. “I know you’re somewhere. Move where I can see you.”

Chilldrake gasped, and whispered, “Oh, we’ve lucked out.”

“What?”

“I know that voice. This guy can only see moving things.”

“You mean, like—”

“Like a dinosaur, yeah. He’s a dog, though. Literally just called Doggo. Just do what I tell you to.”

Chilldrake slung his bag over his back. Snowy followed suit.

“Alright, that came from over there,” said Doggo, and footsteps sounded. Chilldrake vaulted over the bar, and Snowy did his best to copy with one injured foot. They laid down against the other side of the counter, using the chairs and tables to block themselves from the view of the crowd that had gathered at the front street.

Doggo entered from the kitchen. He had a shortsword in either hand, which made Snowy’s eyes widen. They were just two kids—he wouldn’t actually use them, right?

Right?

The dog went behind the counter first. Snowy could hear the blades scraping along wood. Once that proved to be empty, Doggo began to search the main area, waving one sword low to the ground, the other above tables.

“I got on the Canine Unit for a reason, yeah? You kids should learn not to underestimate me.”

Whenever his head looked away from them, they scooted a little further towards the kitchen door. One third there, halfway there…

Doggo paused, as he passed by the front window.

Of all people, Jerry was the one on the other side, shuffling in place so that Doggo could see where he was pointing. Snowy stopped as his head turned.

But it was a bad position to stop in. His injured foot was placed on the floor, and it smarted. An involuntary reflex.

“There! Don’t move an inch!”

They disobeyed that order, rushing back to the kitchen and slamming the door closed behind them. He needed to pull instead of push it open, which delayed him for a precious moment.

Snowy threw himself to the side as Chilldrake did. Doggo came in swinging, swords tinged a light blue. An attack that would only hurt a moving target. Even if he were hit, Doggo probably wouldn’t be willing to hurt a pair of children too much, just enough to stun them for capture. Not that Snowy wanted that either.

The door to the main bar and the back door were situated directly opposite each other, at the bottom- and top-left of the kitchen. They’d needed to dodge to the side from Doggo’s blades, and the space was small enough that he could bar their way to either door by simply standing in the middle, with both blades held to the side of him.

“Move a bit, so I know where you are.”

When they remained still, he had his blades lose the cyan hue, and simply began to walk forwards, cutting off the space available to them. Snowy’s heart pounded.

Off in his peripheral vision, Chilldrake didn’t seem half as panicked. Smiling, even?

“Fly!” he yelled, pushing off into the air. The ceiling was high enough to allow him to pass over Doggo, who needed a moment to react and return the cyan magic to his twin blades. They cut through the darkness, missed.

Snowy’s injured foot gave him a slower start. He banked, to get close to the edge of the room and push off a countertop. It lent him the momentum needed to blow past Doggo, who was already distracted with Chilldrake.

There were people gathered in the back alley, but none of them could fly, or otherwise get ahold of them. The west edge of town ended in a cliff, and Chilldrake simply leapt right off, gliding down with alcohol in tow.

So confident, he was. This was the first time Snowy had ever gone down a drop that far and Chilldrake was doing it like nothing.

Snowy jumped in after.

Chilldrake caught him as he landed.

Hey Mom.

I've got a friend here now. There’s also that rabbit lady but she’s twice as old as me so it feels really creepy to call her a friend? Like you don’t call teachers your friends. No offense to teachers, obviously

Anyway. Chilldrake, which I’m assuming is a name he came up with himself. He’s basically a gangster? Or a delinquent, if that’s what you adults call these guys. And sorta stupid, but that’s I’m pretty sure this place has a hundred other kids that’d make better friends than him, but the way things are going I’m not sure if any of them are gonna want anything to do with me in a month or so. Sorry. So I’m basically stuck with him right now.

But he laughs at my jokes. Like actually, actually laughs, because he thinks they’re funny and not in a “so bad it loops back to being funny” kind of way. I can barely try and he’ll laugh, and I’m pretty sure I can try my hardest with everybody else here and nobody would give a fuck get nothing.

Sorry, pretty sure I’m not thinking straight right now, haven’t been thinking straight for days. Yesterday I did an actual crime. Broke into some dude’s bar and stole actual shit stuff worth like thousands or something. I can get arrested now when they find out, because Chilldrake’s idea of a disguise was a bunch of spray paint that still isn’t washing off fully. I basically can’t go back anymore I can’t

Sorry. You definitely wouldn’t have wanted me to run off if this is what I end up getting myself into. But I ran off anyway. I can’t go back because I don’t want to go back to being hot all the time and being in my old house and being around him again.

I don’t even want to think about him. I can’t.

Sorry. Again. If you’re still alive and reading this, please don’t be eating when you go to the next line.

What did the vegetable seller say, when asked about his snowman customers? “It’s great for revenue—they buy my carrots, and when they melt, I can just pick the carrots up and put them back on my shelf.”

^ Made Chilldrake laugh so hard he was literally going to die. Freaked out a bit then, but I think I’m feeling a little proud of myself?

Love you.

Snowy

Chapter Text

Snowy did his best to hide the injury on his foot as he went back and forth in the shop. The band-aid covered the cut with little room to spare, and it was thin enough that it still hurt whenever he put weight on it. The rest of the “gang”, as Chilldrake called it, hadn’t been able to come up with anything better that wasn’t conspicuous.

Quincy could probably take better care of the wound, but having her look at it would risk her spotting the green spray that was—as Snowy had predicted—proving itself incredibly difficult to wash completely from his feathers. It didn’t take much to connect the dots from there to the broken glass and flecks of stray paint at Grillby’s.

He brought out his cinnamon bunnies, and went to stock them up on the front shelves. Even with his sloppy work, they still emitted a warm scent. It attracted footsteps before he was done.

“Huh. Didn’t know you were still taking assistants, Quince.”

He froze at the sound of that voice. Doggo’s voice. Out of all the hundreds of people in town, him?

“Ah! Forgot to tell you, that’s Doggo of the Canine Unit. He can only see moving objects, so why don’t you shuffle around a tad, give him a good look at you?”

There was no worming his way out of this one without being suspicious. He turned to face Doggo, trying to sway in place without hurting his foot.

Doggo’s eyes widened, and Snowy felt his eyes do something similar. Oh crap, the scent. Chilldrake, you idiot, any dog could smell the damn paint you put on me!

But there were no shouts of accusation. “Mmm! I was wondering where I knew you from. You’re Snowy, aren’t you?”

He knows my name. He knows my name it’s so fucking over.

“From the Determination debacle going on.”

Oh. Snowy had gone online, face and name and all, to shout about it in the early days. He hadn’t thought a town as disconnected as this would have anyone really caring or being able to recognise him from that alone, but it seemed like just another mistake he’d failed to correct in time.

“O-oh! Yeah, I guess. Didn’t think anyone would—”

“Hey, listen, I… actually have someone in the Labs, too.”

“Really?! Uh, you’re…” Snowy sifted his memories of the others involved. There had been protests, interviews with those who were still waiting. Dozens of faces. Which had been Doggo?

“Oh, no, I didn’t do any interviews. They aren’t my type of thing. Dogamy and Dogaressa might be more familiar.”

“I… think I remember seeing them somewhere. With the spider reporter, yeah?”

“Yes, that one.”

“This something I’m supposed to be listening in on?” Quincy asked.

“It’s fine if he’s fine with it,” Doggo said. “Are you, Snowy?”

“I—um—uuh.”

“It’s alright. We can talk another time. Right now I’m just hungry.”

Doggo paid for two bunnies. He whispered to Snowy as he exited.

“Don’t lose hope, alright?”

It took him a while to put his guard down. The lucky break had been colossal, and it left him wondering whether Doggo would eventually double back, admit it had been all a ruse for whatever reason, and fling him into jail.

That didn’t happen, though. How had he not recognised his scent, or even just the remnants of the paint on his feathers? Dogs did that, right?

Had it been the fresh bunnies? Giving off an aroma strong enough to mask his scent? He had no idea, but the prospect almost made him chuckle. He had an earnest, unforced connection with someone who wasn’t a delinquent, now. Another step on his way to becoming a known face here.

Snowy and Quincy settled into a sort of flow, where he handled the more menial tasks, and she gave him opportunities to interact with the rest of the townsfolk in a natural manner. It was light work, and he suspected he’d get better at it once his foot stopped hurting every other step. Things looking up for him—he’d forgotten how nice that felt.

Halfway through the next batch of cinnamon bunnies, the oven died. Snowy panicked, sputtering apologies, but Quincy reassured that it wasn’t his fault, and left him at the counter as she dealt with it. It wouldn’t be that hard, right?

He heard footsteps, but something was wrong. They started too suddenly, loud like whoever it was was already near, despite there being no sound just a moment ago.

Snowy didn’t expect who came in—Sans, of the skeleton brothers. He was wearing bathroom slippers; how had he silenced his approach?

“i’ll have the usual,” he said.

Oh crap.

“Um. Uuh. That is…?”

The skeleton chuckled. “kidding, kidding. looks like you’ve nestled in quite nicely here.” He tilted his skull to the side, so that Snowy knew he was addressing someone else. “hey, quincy, whaddaya got cooking up over there? don’t smell anything, though i’m not too sure whether that’s because there’s nothing in there or because i don’t have a nose.”

No.

“Hiya, Sans! There should be some bunnies getting done right about now, but I can’t get this damn thing to run.”

“that’s a good thing, no? don’t think your old legs can catch up to it anymore. lemme see.”

Sans walked to the side, so that a wall blocked line of sight. There was one footstep that came from in front of Snowy, and another step that came from behind just a moment later. Sans stood between the two of them in the back of the shop.

“here’s your problem. it’s not…”

The jargon was lost on Snowy. He was in disbelief, not from the inexplicable teleportation, but because—

“You’re actually funny.”

“yeah? i think i got a funny bone or two somewhere in here.”

“Told you, Snowy, the best way to pass the time is to watch those two out in the woods.”

“No, like, I thought they were funny in an accidental sort of way. Not like, actively making jokes that are actually funny.”

“maybe paps can be the first one. me? yeah, my brain’s about seventy-percent joke by volume,” he said, tapping a palm against his skull. There was a hollow knocking sound, and something rattled inside. Snowy would have laughed, if not for the sheer mental shock still paralysing him.

Shame, not reluctance, made it difficult for Snowy to force his next sentence out of his mouth. “I, uh, could I like… be your apprentice?”

Quincy made an indecipherable expression, and Sans clearly holding back some form of chuckle. “like, in jokes?”

“Yes. Genuinely. I wanna be a comedian, that’s my dream. Think I could learn a fair bit from you. If you’re fine with it, of course.”

Sans seemed to need a moment to compose himself. “first off, hit me with your strongest one. give me a feel of your current power level.”

Alright, there was no holding back on this one. Neither of them were eating, and it wasn’t like Sans was even capable of choking. “What did the vegetable seller say, when asked about his snowman customers? ‘It’s great for revenue, they buy my carrots, and when they melt, I can just pick the carrots up and put them back on my shelf.’”

Dead silence, for one eternal second.

Quincy chuckled a little, then suppressed it as discreetly as she could. Not discreetly enough.

“hmm. needs a bit of work.”

Translation: You’re not fucking funny.

“well, thing is, there isn’t some secret technique i have that’s gonna make you a pro overnight. it came naturally to me, and you gotta build it up naturally, too. maybe you could hop in my hoodie, listen to everything i say? i’ll pass of the top of your head off as, like, a particularly gaudy wig. just don’t build a nest in there, was a pain to clean up the last time that happened.”

“Uuuuuhh—”

“but seriously,” he said, picking up a cinnamon bunny from the shelf and tossing the Gold for it onto the counter as he left, “you can come whenever i’m free, which is most of the time. i’ll be open.”

Sans pulled down his hoodie and undershirt, exposing the hole formed by the top of his ribcage. He shoved the bunny down into it. “and by that, i mean literally.”

His footsteps stopped the moment the outer walls blocked him from view. Snowy needed a moment—many moments—to calm down.

“Well, that was something. You didn’t tell me you were an aspiring comedian.”

“I mean, it’s not like that was relevant. I didn’t want to bother you about it.”

“Why would that bother me? You’re my assistant. It’d do us good to connect more.”

“Yeah. Alright.”

He felt he could use a break. Unfortunately, the next set of footsteps sent him into a panic.

They sounded like his own.

It was the less bad of the two possible candidates, at least. Chilldrake skipped into the shop, beak opening in surprise as he spotted Snowy.

Quincy was still faced away, fixing the oven with Sans’ advice. Snowy made a tense expression, motioning up and down with his wing in an attempt to communicate no not here please.

But Chilldrake was already talking. “Woah! Didn’t tell me you got a job already.”

Snowy heard Quincy move behind him, and didn’t know if looking back to check was a good idea.

“Uuh. Yeah. Gotta support myself somehow.”

“And with her, too. Man, that’s luuuuucky,” Chilldrake said with a grin, flicking eyebrows up and down. Quincy did, Snowy supposed, have a body that most people would go after.

Snowy’s chest, inexplicably, stirred with a feeling he couldn’t place. It was par for the course for Chilldrake, just a teenager being a teenager, so why was it irking him? He didn’t exactly have brainpower to spare in figuring that out at the moment.

“Mmh, it’s gonna be harder to plan stuff now. It’s not school, you can’t skip—”

“Later! We can talk about this later, alright?!”

Chilldrake’s next sentence died in his throat as Quincy approached. Snowy didn’t imagine she had a pleasant expression on her face. “Oooh. Whoops. Sorry, miss.”

“You wanna buy something or are you just going to keep talking?”

Chilldrake bought his things and hurried off. Quincy turned to glare at Snowy, who found it impossible to maintain eye contact.

“Snowy.”

“Yes. Um.”

“That didn’t sound like ‘never get on their good side’, back there.”

“He—that was beforehand! Before you told me! First few days I came here we chatted up, I didn’t know how bad those guys were!”

Quincy tilted her head to one side. “Really.”

“Really! Swear! I’m just… figuring out how to deal with him right now.”

Her expression softened, as she put hands on hips. “Whooo boy. This is a tad more complicated than I thought. Tell me the details? I’ll help out wherever—”

“No, no, you don’t need to do that.”

“What? Snowy, this is serious. If you get on Chilldrake's bad side, you're getting on Blizzard's bad side. Trust me when I say you'll need help for that.”

“Really. I can do it myself. If anything bad happens, I don’t wanna drag you into it.” Especially if it’s my fault you’re wanting to involve yourself in the first place.

Quincy was more worried than stern, now. “Are you sure about this, Snowy? You don’t want that drive going down the wrong path, remember?”

“Yes, I know. I’m sure. I can handle it. Promise.”

She didn’t seem too convinced. It was impossible to win the argument, which meant it was time for deflection. “Look, can we just get back to work? Gotta fix that oven, yeah? Can I help with that?”

Finally, she gave a sigh of relent. “Sure you can. Alright, we’ll start by opening the thing up like this…”

“...so the next time you come into the shop, or talk to her on the street or whatever, just act like I’ve just cut contact or something, okay?”

“Mhmm. Got it.”

Snowy wasn’t confident Chilldrake actually did, or would remember to do it in the first place, but it was the best he could get.

“And tell this to Blizzard, too. Whenever I’m not around.”

“Uh huh!”

They trudged through the forest together. Snowy's foot hurt less, now that the wound was more thoroughly dressed. He was starting to recognise particular landmarks; a rock outcropping here, a fallen trunk there. The feeling that he could get lost without guidance was fading.

“Secondly, dogs are supposed to have a good nose, right?”

“Duh.”

“So why didn’t Doggo pick up the paint on me, when we were… at Grillby’s last night? He came into the store today, I definitely hadn’t washed everything out, and he still didn’t say anything.”

“Him? They say he got conked on the head a while back. Gave him the dino-vision. But my bro says a whack to the brain does more than that, and he got one of his pups to squeal that he’s also forgot how to smell, too.”

“Noted.” So it had been nothing but luck that had saved him, then. Always luck, not any craftiness or ingenuity on his part.

“Thirdly… what do you know about Sans?” And why didn’t you tell me about him earlier?

“Ooooh, right,” Chilldrake said, wincing as if he’d just remembered something urgent. “Bro doesn’t like him, so he has us stay away from him. Eventually I just… forgot that he’s also a super funny guy.”

“Why does Blizzard not like Sans?”

“Dunno. Just says he’s a nerd or something.”

“...Okay. I’ll stay clear of him.”

“Damn, that does suck. You’d love him. Eh, rules’re rules.”

It was so strange, hearing that come from a delinquent’s beak. That meant one more secret to juggle while doing everything else.

"It's alright. I can deal with living... sans Sans."

A pause, and then laughter. Snowy found himself smiling too.

There was a boombox placed at the base of the trunk, just below the treehouse, that blasted punk rock of choppy quality. Ice Cap’s head was prominently visible through one of the windows. The figure on the ground some distance away nearly Snowy jump in fear—but no, that wasn’t Gyftrot. The girl stood on two feet, and her antlers were undecorated. She turned as they approached, putting a cracked baseball bat over her shoulder.

“Sup. The blue one’s Snowy?”

“Uh, that’s me, yeah.”

“Ooh, that’s Dess,” Chilldrake explained. “She’s one of us, technically. Most of the time she just goes and does her own thing, but she’s super cool, so we just let her.” Turning to face Snowy, hiding his beak with a wing, he whispered, “Though it’s mostly cause her mom’s ex-Royal Guard and would mulch our asses if she finds out we tried anything.”

“Um. Okay.”

Dess used magic, forming a sphere of ice in her free hand. She tossed it up, and hit it into a tree, breaking off chunks of bark. On closer inspection, the tree was heavily scarred from previous impacts, markedly thinner around head-height. Broken-off bark lay in a pile around its base.

“...What’s she doing?”

“Using the Punching Tree,” Dess answered, sending another ball of ice shattering against wood.

“The… Punching Tree.”

“Yeah, my idea,” Chilldrake said. “It’s like a punching bag, except with a tree. When we get angry, or sad, or just feel like it, we can hit the tree!”

He sent out a wave of sickles, shearing off more bark. “Like that! Don’t worry about destroying it, there's loads more of them out here.”

Snowy looked, and sure enough, there were two broken stumps half-buried in the snow.

“C’mon, you try it!”

Dess stepped away as Snowy moved into position. He envisioned the tree as the door to the Lab, and fired the same way he’d done it then. Half of the sickles went wide, kicking up plumes of snow, and the ones that did land didn’t do as much damage.

“Uuuuf. Terrible form,” Ice Cap said, leaning out the window.

He tried more times, tightening the spread, focusing more on speed than power. Iterating on the pattern he sent out.

“You’ve obviously never done this seriously before,” Dess said. Snowy didn’t sense any disparagement in her tone of voice; it was just a statement. “That pattern’s really only good for catching smaller, faster targets. Why not try doing it as a stream of bullets, instead?”

He went for it. The rate of fire wasn’t as fast as he’d liked, but everything was hitting. Before long he’d worn right through the bark, and was striking into sapwood.

“That ain’t too great, either,” Ice Cap said.

“Serviceable,” Dess said. “Not great by any means, but you’ve gotten better than you were ten minutes ago. Now, try shooting a wave, like Chilldrake did.”

She continued to school him. By the time three tracks had finished and the fourth one was already three-quarters through, he was already beat.

But it’d been a productive use of time. He’d learned things he never would have, had he stayed in New Home.

“Hff… so… what else do you guys get up to out here?”

“What do you wanna do?” Dess said, resting the head of her bat on the snow.

“I… that doesn’t tell me anything. And I’m too… hff… chipped out for anything physical.”

“I could get you the uncensored version of The Crawling Dust.”

Snowy went from wings-on-legs panting to completely upright in a blur. “No fucking way. But I looked through the stash, it’s not there!”

“Course I didn't just put it in the stash willy-nilly, any kid could just snatch it up when we aren’t here. Ice Cap, come down! All three of you, go behind that tree and cover your eyes and ears until I say so!”

They did so. It took a couple minutes for Dess to give the all-clear. There it was in her hands, the fabled original cover he’d only ever seen in low-quality photos, as anything better would be flagged and removed. He brought it up to the treehouse and read it.

It was the original version alright. More realistic, more visceral depictions of weapons and wounds.

Of the Fallen Down. It sent a chill down Snowy’s spine, and made him want to pause for a moment or two, but there were three people with him who would see that as him being a pussy. No way that was going to happen—he powered through, pushing himself to nitpick flaws like some Internet critic. By the end he was back to panting.

Still, it was a good comic. Certain scenes had more impact than the censored version. Dess repeated the same process to hide it, in a place she assured them was different every time.

Snowy spent the rest of the day in the treehouse. There was variety of objects strewn about the interior. Snacks, books, gadgets, even some crude furniture made from pieces of wood nailed together. He entertained himself. The hour grew late; Dess and Ice Cap left, leaving only Chilldrake with him.

“So, when are we gonna use the beer we stole?” he asked, motioning to where it’d been set up in the corner. Saying “we” and “stole” in the same sentence felt off, but he supposed he would get used to it in time.

“I’m saving it, actually. Mom and dad are going on a trip next month, and my bro got them to think Dess is a good babysitter. I wanna throw the greatest party ever. Though, if I fail my tests again they’ll prooobably chuck me to a camp the entire time they’re gone.”

A trip? Snowy still didn’t have an idea of what Chilldrake’s parents were like, but trips and camps seemed… normal, for a household that had produced Chilldrake and Blizzard. “I could help you study. I wasn't half bad, back when I was going to school.”

“Fsh, as if, nerd. Bro says the papers have already been made, so we’re gonna grab the answers from right under their noses!” Chilldrake put a wing beneath his beak. “Hey, you wanna help me? You got experience breaking and entering now.”

“Uhrm. Sure.”

“Yay! And then we can sell those answers for more money! And... right, if I come home late a fourth time mom and dad are definitely getting angry. Gotta go!”

Chilldrake, with a brief running start, flung himself out the window of the treehouse. His landing wasn’t as smooth as Blizzard’s was, but he wasn’t hurt. From his vantage point Snowy could see certain buildings on the edge of Snowdin Town, and he kept his eyes on Chilldrake as he flew in that direction.

With that, Snowy was left alone with his thoughts. They tended not to be good company. He made himself as snug as he could in the bedroll that had been set up for him. The treehouse was empty and still—a step up from the apartment with his father in it, but still far from comfortable.

Embarrassing as it was, he wanted someone sleeping with him. The best option was obviously off the table, but Chilldrake wasn't too bad of an alternative. Still, it wasn't like he could complain—at least he had a place to sleep at all.

Hey, Mom.

It's going nice, I guess. I lucked out meeting someone today. Sans the Skeleton might be the funniest person in the town, and he's letting me learn from him! I've got an actual, bone-a fide comedy instructor now! That is, genuinely, so cool. I should be happy about this.

But I've been thinking about it more and more and everything I catch is cancelling it out. There's no way I can get up to or over his level if all I'm doing is following his advice. And if he makes the best jokes in the world every second sentence, all the time, who the hell heck is gonna want to listen to me? It feels like the only way to make it is to leave town entirely, go to places where there isn't too much competition. I'll need to leave them behind. Chilldrake, Quincy, Dess, I'm actually starting to like the people here now. Especially Chilldrake, even if I don't really know why.

My stupid brain is overthinking things again. Getting stuck on one particular moment when I first told Sans I wanted to learn from him.

You know, my favourite sound to hear is when people laugh at my jokes. It's self-centered, I know. But not many people laugh like that. You used to, but of course you're away now. Chilldrake does too. Maybe that's one reason I like him so much.

I hear my least favourite sound a lot more. It's when people are just laughing at me.

Love you, Mom. Some part of me's still hoping that you're still alive, somehow. If you see any big white dogs, tell them their families are still hoping, too. Still waiting.

Snowy

Chapter Text

“What does a snowman use to get around? An i-cicle!”

“mhmm.”

“What dog always bites? Frost!”

“alright, i think i see the problem here.”

Sans leant back in his chair. His post was just a frame of a structure, too open to insulate against the cold any, front table littered with ketchup and mustard stains. There were, he realised, no trails of footsteps leading to or from the post, though there was a collection of them around a weirdly shaped lamp that didn’t look convenient at all to use.

“you’ve just been pulling from preexisting jokes you found elsewhere. searched ‘top 10 funniest snow jokes’, went to the first result, and then memorised everything.”

“Um. Hmmrh.”

“hey, don’t try and hide it. i know those snow jokes. all 1,089 of them.”

“Alright, yeah, you got me there. That snowman thing I told you the first time was something I came up with on my own, though.”

“when you boil it down, humour is just subverting your audience’s expectations. you can’t do that when they’ve heard what you say a dozen times already.”

Sans put a hand down his ribcage, pulling out a hot dog that had been drowned in mustard. “if you wanna get as good as me, you gotta be dynamic.” He reached and grabbed from the condiment bottles that had been piled haphazardly in the back corner of the post.

“adapt to the situation, do things on the fly.” Sans held the bottle of ketchup over the hot dog… then swapped their positions, letting the mustard drip down onto the nozzle, which he put to his teeth, slurping.

Then he stopped. Shook the ketchup bottle, which made a sound like whatever was inside was solid. Unscrewing the cap, he reached inside and yanked out a second hot dog, shrunken and discoloured. “huh. so that’s where i put it.”

Snowy’s beak hung open. Sans tossed the expired hot dog, and Snowy didn’t see or hear it hit the floor of the post.

“of course, don’t take this to mean you just need to be as random as possible. then there’s no expectation to subvert, and you’re just going to look like a bonehead.”

“Right, need a balance and all that. Kinda hard when you’re on ice.”

“which slides smoothly into the next thing. you need to diversify. making nothing but ice jokes means the only people who’ll be interested are from ‘round these parts. even if we end up breaking the barrier in your lifetime, you can’t be a seasonal comedian when you aren’t even seasoned yet.”

“Oh. Yeah. I guess. Where am I supposed to start? Fire jokes?”

“depends. you touring in hotland?”

Snowy shuddered. “No.”

“in any case, you gotta be a lot more general than that. look up other comedians on the internet, watch more flicks, all that jazz. learn from them.”

“Huh. That’s just… studying. Didn’t think I’d ever have to do that again.”

“well, what did you go to me for?”

“I dunno, I thought it’d be like, those karate movies where they, like… you know.”

“i mean, theoretically, i could do something like that. but i’m—” Sans yawned, stretching his arms until they popped “—already pretty busy. don’t wanna work myself to the bone.”

“Oh. Um. Okay?” There was probably some way to convince him to go all out with the training, if that somehow wasn’t a joke, but there was no telling which actions would get there and which would just result in Sans being frustrated enough to stop entirely. Better for Snowy to be grateful for what he was already being given.

Sans did something like a squint. “hmm. you know, you say my jokes are actually funny, but i haven’t ever seen you laugh at them.”

Snowy blinked, then shook his head in exaggerated movements. “Uh—what?! No, of course I laugh, you just haven’t been around to see it! Like when I…

“When I…”

When he…

Um. What the fuck?

Deflect, deflect! It was a skill that was steadily becoming more useful the more time Snowy spent here. “Well, I haven’t seen you laugh, either! Not once!”

Sans froze, not just in expression but in body, maybe for longer than Snowy just had. He resumed movement so suddenly it felt like a video that had buffered. “well, if i laughed at all my jokes, i’d have died from suffocation by now.” He looked down, at his body. “oh wait.”

There came the tromping of boots, approaching at a decent pace.

“oop, here comes my bro.”

Papyrus burst from the forest behind the post, covered in snow and twigs, looking exasperated.

“SANS! WE ARE NOT TO LET OURSELVES BE DISTRACTED ON THE JOB LIKE THIS!”

“hey bro.”

“WHAT IF A HUMAN SLIPS BY WHILE YOU’RE BUSY CHATTING AWAY? WHAT IF—” Papyrus gasped in such an overdramatic fashion that it was impossible to tell whether it was ironic or just completely sincere. “—A HUMAN HAS HAS THREATENED THIS POOR MONSTER INTO DISTRACTING YOU?!”

He rushed to Snowy, knelt, and placed gauntleted hands on his shoulders. “CITIZEN! YOU ARE NOW SAFE BENEATH THE VIGIL OF THE GREAT PAPYRUS! TELL ME, ARE YOU DOING THIS AGAINST YOUR WILL?”

This was close to too much. It took Snowy precious seconds to piece together his thoughts.

“NO! HE HAS BEEN RENDERED SPEECHLESS, BY THE HORRORS HE HAS WITNESSED! A TRAGEDY!”

“W-wait! I’m fine! I’m fine, really, this is just… uh…”

Snowy looked to Sans for what to do next. The skeleton gave an upwards nod.

“A… training session? Like, in comedy and stuf—”

Papyrus gasped and rose, covering his mouth in shock. He turned to Sans, who was now leaning forwards in his seat, supporting his skull with one hand. “YOU MEAN… YOU HAVE TAKEN… A PROTEGE?”

“eh, pretty much.”

Papyrus’ expression lightened. “WELL WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME EARLIER? WE CAN SPLIT THE WORK TOGETHER, THE TWO OF US AND THE CANINE UNIT!”

“Um. Wait—”

“DON’T YOU WORRY, YOUNG ONE, I HAVE MUCH EXPERIENCE IN BEING MENTORED! YOUR TRAINING WILL BE THE GREATEST THE UNDERGROUND HAS EVER SEEN!”

“This is just—”

“I’LL HANDLE THE PUZZLE-MAKING CLASSES, OF COURSE. YOU CAN SPAR WITH DOGAMY AND DOGARESSA, DO MOVEMENT TRAINING WITH DOGGO, AND I SUPPOSE SANS CAN TEACH YOU TO TAKE SOME TIME OFF ONCE IN A WHILE. YES, THIS IS PERFECT!”

The situation was so insane it had Snowy wondering if Papyrus was going to drop the act sometime soon. The brothers would laugh, point to a hidden camera or something, and he could go viral and get a head start that way. Or maybe this genuinely was sincere. In any case, the second-hand embarrassment was quickly growing unbearable.

“I’mnottrainingtobearoyalguard!”

Papyrus froze, slowly turning his head to look down at Snowy. “WHAT. DID YOU SAY?”

“I’m trying to become… a comedian.”

Snowy didn’t know eye sockets could get that wide, or that jaws could drop that far without snapping off entirely.

“SANS. I’M BEGGING YOU. FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE I WANT THIS TO BE A JOKE.”

“nnnnope. totally sincere. was entirely his idea, too.”

“DEAR ANGEL…”

Angel? Snowy had never seen someone swear by that before.

“YOUNG MAN! SANS MAY BE MY BROTHER AND ALL, BUT HE’LL BE A BAD INFLUENCE! WHICH MEANS…” His skull lit up. “I’LL JUST HAVE TO COUNTERACT IT WITH MY OWN GOOD INFLUENCE!”

“Wh-what?”

“I SHALL PREPARE MY PUZZLE LESSONS AT ONCE!” With that, he began marching back the way he came.

“Uh—wait! Wait a moment! You know who Blizzard is?”

“THAT MISGUIDED DELINQUENT? YOU HAVEN’T FALLEN IN WITH HIM, HAVE YOU? I’LL NEED TO WORK TWICE AS HARD.”

“Of course not! Just… never tell him that you’ve seen me ever! Or anyone else, really? It’s complicated… bird stuff.”

“AH, YES, BIRD STUFF. I UNDERSTAND. IN THE MEANTIME… DON’T PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET!”

“Uh. Yeah!”

Papyrus vanished into the woods. The sound of snapping branches was so loud Snowy wondered if a tree had fallen.

“so. that was my bro. pretty cool, right?”

“I guess. You two are just… like this all the time?”

“all the time and all the space.”

“Hmn. That’s… something. You aren’t ever worried?”

“worried how?”

“Sorry if that’s a bit rude. It just seems like with how he is, people could…”

“trick him? hurt him?”

“Yeah. Oh, I guess you’ve thought about that too. Obviously. Sorry.”

“no problemo. i’m not worried about him at all, really.”

“Huh. Why?”

“complicated. skeleton stuff.”

“...Sure.”

There was an awkward silence. Was Sans still going to continue the lesson? Snowy pulled out his phone to check—

“Oh, shit. Gotta fly.”

He bent down to take off, but paused. “Hey, can you teleport other people too?”

“no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Like, when you teleport. I don’t know what else I can call what you do.”

Sans shrugged. “eh, i’m just a fast runner.”

Snowy squinted. “Rriiiight. Nevermind.”

He took flight. It was a skill that he hadn’t had much opportunity to test out back in his old life. Buildings were tall, air zoning laws were weird, and most of all the Barrier-veiled opening produced unpredictable winds anywhere above ground level. There were buildings with specialised wind tunnels one could pay to use, but the one time his family had gone there they’d strapped him up in a harness that had made most movement difficult. Not a pleasant experience.

This frigid wilderness had ample room. There were parts of the Snowdin region where he could fly for hours and still not catch sight of any sign of civilisation. Even in towns, the laws regarding aviation were lax, because there hadn’t been any reason to create any more than what was necessary.

Snowy got himself up a small hill, and used that as a launching point to coast in the direction where the ground descended. Moving horizontally, there was little need to flap; it made sure he didn’t arrive at the destination exhausted.

Snowdin Town’s education was bare bones. The school had originally been a small building in the heart of town, but as the population had grown, it had relocated to a newer, larger structure on the edge of the settlement. It would have been nice to be able to say that he’d deduced that through the location and apparent age of the building alone, but really he’d just looked it up online.

It meant that there wasn’t much surveillance around the school, which in turn meant that it was more than possible for two flying-capable monsters to sneak in on a weekend “evening” and heist exam answers from the teachers’ office.

“Yo. Over here!” Chilldrake whisper-shouted from behind a particularly large tree. “Put your bag in that hole in the trunk.”

The hollow contained Chilldrake’s stuff, piled atop other strange knick-knacks Snowy vaguely recognised from cautionary videos shown in assemblies at his old school. “Ignore all the other stuff, Dess uses this one alot.”

Snowy shoved his bag in. All Chilldrake kept was a fanny pack with his phone and some other small items in it, to snap pictures of the answer key. They wouldn’t even need to risk directly stealing it, or being weighed down too much, if they needed to fly.

“Sure you don’t want the paint again? That worked last time, I still got another can in there.”

“No, thank you. I think I still haven't washed it all out.”

Chilldrake grumbled, but didn’t press it further.

Even if it had upscaled in the past, the school here was much smaller than Snowy’s old one. Just a singular three-storey building, made from the same brick and mortar as Grillby’s, with no balconies or courtyards they could fly in from. The compound was surrounded by tall metal fencing which, according to Chilldrake, had been installed as a response to one too many incidents caused by Blizzard’s posse. Of course, it couldn’t keep out two fliers.

Chilldrake led Snowy around to the rear wall of the school. “So there’s this back door that’s had its lock broken since, like, forever now. We can just…”

He stopped, looking at the door in question. The handle hadn’t a speck of rust or grime, and there was a splotch of plaster where the old one had apparently used to be. “Hmm. That might be a problem.”

The door didn’t give. Neither did any of the other accessible ones, or the windows.

“Shoulda asked bro to teach me how to pick these things. Dammit!”

Snowy thought about going to the roof and trying the door there, but this school didn’t have a walkable roof. He paced.

“Hey, those windows, how do they lock?”

“There’s those handle things you pull over the frame, duh.”

“Okay, good! Because if there’s one thing that’s the same as my old school, it’s that people forget to do that a lot .”

They circled the building, pulling on each ground floor window.

No dice.

“Um.”

“You were saying?”

“There’s still two more floors we can check!”

Chilldrake looked up at them, wincing. “That’s gonna take a lotta time. And even if we do half and half all that flying’s gonna make me way too tired.” He sighed, “Nevermind. Monday I’ll go and—”

This was bad. Snowy was embarrassing himself, and being completely useless on top of it. “No! No, wait, please, I can do something. Come on…”

He rounded the school again, scanning for something, anything.

There. On the third floor, one window was open a crack. He pointed it out. Chilldrake looked, removed his shades and looked again.

“Oh! Didn’t see that, thanks.”

“Maybe you should wear those shades a little less?”

Chilldrake blew a raspberry. “As if.”

They flew. Snowy found purchase with his talons, and flapped at an angle, letting his weight pull the window open. The two landed onto the classroom floor.

Adapt to the situation, right? “Don’t leave your windows open, kids. It’ll let the chill in.”

Chilldrake perked, smiling in a giddy way. Snowy imagined sparkles behind those shades.

The classroom as a whole was old-fashioned; Snowy hadn’t seen a blackboard since the renovation at his old school. The door outside was, fortunately, not locked. Chilldrake lead him through the halls, footsteps echoing. It smelt of wood.

“Ya know, half the stuff we do is at school. Imagine if you could go with us.”

“Guh, no. Not more school. That was… part of the reason I ran off in the first place. Not a big part, but… still. I could do without school for the rest of my life. And I have a job.”

“You really blew it doing that right off the bat. I would’ve waited a year or something. You don’t even need one that much, we can—”

“No, no, I don’t… don’t want you always chucking money at me.” Snowy said, looking away.

They reached the stairwell, and began descending.

“I don’t mind, I got a buncha savings. I’m sure everyone else can help too.”

“Then there’d just be more people I’m always asking money from. Even if it’s just food.” Snowy was also concerned about what Chilldrake’s perception of “a buncha” savings was, but it felt rude to bring it up now. “And sooner or later your bro’s gonna get pissed.”

“My bro?! He’s… ah, nnn…” Chilldrake fumbled with his wings, uncertain. “I could try telling him not to be pissed.” He sighed. “But yeah, he’d probably get pissed. Think he’s already pissed, actually, from you needing to sleep in the treefort all the time.”

The conversation died as they reached the bottom floor. Chilldrake sped up, excited, but stopped just around the corner.

“What’s going on—oh.”

The teachers’ office was down the hall to the left of the stairwell. But the lights in that section of the hall, as well as the office itself, were on.

“Shouldn’t be anyone in here right now,” Chilldrake said.

“Well, obviously, there is.”

They craned their heads to listen, but it was too far away to hear anything.

“We gotta call it off, man,” Snowy said, glancing back into the stairwell.

“Maybe someone left it on? I’ll go check.” Chilldrake pressed himself up against the wall like a stealth game, and began shimmying his way towards the door.

Snowy winced. “Dude, are you sure—”

“If anything goes wrong, you were never here, kay?” Chilldrake flicked his head to the side, to communicate a wink.

“I—oh. Thanks.” Snowy retreated as far into the stairwell as he could while still being able to peek out.

Chilldrake approached. Five steps away from the door, four steps, three…

Then froze, and began moving backwards.

The door swung open. Snowy ducked back into the stairwell, bracing to hear the scolding that Chilldrake was sure to be receiving.

But there were only footsteps, not from Snowdrake feet. He chanced a peek.

Either he wasn’t the only one with ridiculous luck, or it rubbed off onto everyone he met. Chilldrake was to the left of the door, which had opened outwards and to the left, which meant that it had blocked him from view of the round-eared monster that was now heading further down the hallway, towards the bathrooms. She hummed a song.

Chilldrake took in a gasp the moment the teacher shut the bathroom door. “Fuck. She won’t be in there for long. Hurry!”

They made their way into the teachers’ office. It was cramped with furniture, and the wood smell was even stronger here. Snowy had expected a mess of papers like it had been with his old school, but maybe due to it being a smaller one, and on an off day, most of it was surprisingly organised. There was, of course, the desk of the teacher that had been working overtime, which was riddled with documents.

“Okay! We’ve got English.” Snap.

Snowy looked in the other desks, pulling open files and binders. “Think Math is here.” 

“Nice! Hold that out for me?” Snap, and a haphazard attempt at putting things back.

“You found History yet? I hate that stuff.”

“No, not seeing that anywhere. Damn, these drawers are locked…”

“Yes! Science! In your face, Ms. Piss-ley—”

Snap, accompanied with a sound of a toilet flushing.

“Fuck!” Chilldrake yelped, and Snowy shushed him as they used precious seconds making it look like they hadn’t been there. They rushed down the hall.

Just as they made it to the stairwell, Chilldrake’s movement dislodged a feather from his back. Snowy spent a moment picking it up.

A moment that saw the door open, and the teacher gasp in shock. Terror ran through him.

“Excuse me?! Young man, what are you—”

He continued running, not far behind Chilldrake, who exited onto the second floor to make a break for a classroom. Pried open a window and took flight.

But his foot slipped on the thin frame. The jolt made his first few flaps imperfect, putting him lower to the ground, at a less-than-stellar angle.

Closer to the top of the metal fence.

Snowy could only watch as Chilldrake’s waist clipped it. The momentum made him flip over, and he fell nearly head-first onto the snow. He squirmed, beak opening and closing in silent pain.

Snowy’s own scream, by contrast, was very audible.

“Your feathers took most of the impact. Squatting and flying’s gonna hurt for a few days, but you should be good in time for the exams with the right medication. Your parents should be here in a couple minutes,” the nurse with a mouth for a head said, as they finished treating Chilldrake.

“See? It wasn’t that bad. You shouldn’ta called a damn ambulance.”

“Yes, yes it was,” the nurse said, rolling their entire head around in place of eyes.

“Okay, look,” Snowy said, still panting, “I had no fucking clue how bad it was, you flew right into that thing, turned over—” he mimed the motion with his wings “—I think it’s pretty reasonable to want to call for help?”

“We coulda just ran and waited to see if it was that bad or not.”

“I saw you, you could not have ran.”

“You could’ve… carried me?”

Snowy stood up with enough force to knock his chair over. “If you need to be carried you need to go to the fucking hospital!”

“It'd do you good to listen to him,” the nurse said. 

Chilldrake crossed his wings and pouted. “And now this guy knows everything.”

“Um, there should still be like, doctor-patient confidentiality or something? I don’t think they’re allowed to tell anyone if we don’t let them. Right?” Snowy turned to the nurse, begging with his eyes.

They sighed. “Alright, look, everyone knows who you are, who your family is. I don’t really care, there’d be no point anyway.”

“Oooh! Nice.”

Wait, why did they say “family” like that? Chilldrake hadn’t talked about his parents much. Neither had Snowy ever wanted to bring the subject up.

“In the meantime, I’ve got other patients to treat.” The nurse left the two of them alone.

Snowy sighed.

“Look, I was scared, dude. Super fucking scared.”

“Pfft, I’ve had worse.”

“Like?” Snowy said, doubting.

“Well, once me and Dess were playing Chicken—”

“What?”

“C’mon, you don’t even know what Chicken is? What do city kids even do? So it’s when you shoot bigger and bigger bullets at each other til someone chickens out. Simple stuff, most of us’ve done it at least once.”

That was… concerning.

“So Dess shot, and it was this—” Chilldrake hesitated for a moment, then put the gap between his wings to be as wide as his torso “—big. Blew me back into a tree and everything. Hurt like hell.”

Snowy just glared, disappointed. Chilldrake’s grin grew more and more forced, then broke entirely. “Yeah alright, it was, like, half that size. Still hurt a lot.”

About the same size as the bullet Snowy’s father had shot at him, then. He could only wish that had been a game.

“C’mon, you should see what that kid with no arms gets up to every other week.”

“That’s like your parents saying there’s starving kids in Waterfall or something.”

“Well I mean… I guess.”

Snowy set the chair back upright, sat back in it. “I just don’t want you getting hurt.”

“That’s girl talk. We’re delinquents, man, getting hurt’s part of life. You gotta learn that, you’re literally one of us.”

Because I had no other choice.

Or had he? Had there been other, better options he’d given up? If so, how bad was this outcome, compared to all the others?

At least it wasn’t home. “Okay, alright, I’ll learn that. But I’m still gonna call an ambulance everytime stuff like this happens, and you’re not gonna stop me.”

Chilldrake groaned. “Fiiiiine.”

Snowy couldn’t think of much else to say. He looked around, but the hospital room was relatively tiny, which meant that the only thing to look at was Chilldrake, lying on the bed. So he did.

“What’re you looking at?”

Snowy turned away in a panic. “Uh! Um, y-you?”

“Yeah? I’d look at me too.”

Snowy chuckled. He resumed gazing. Chilldrake’s feathers were wet and mussed up, speckled with dirt. He smelled of the forest. It wasn’t just from the earlier escapade but a lifetime of them. Snowy had now taken those on, too, and in time his feathers would be equally ruffled, his scent equally suffused.

He thought about how it had felt to touch Chilldrake, after he’d saved him from choking. It had felt so nice . He wanted to ask for that touch again, but there was exactly zero way to go about it without being weird.

Why was he so hung up on that? It wasn’t like he was—

No no, wait a damn moment, this can’t be right—

The door opened. There were two Snowdrakes, green of feathers, neither of which were Blizzard. The parents .

“Oh, sweetie!” the mother said, going in for a hug that Chilldrake begrudgingly accepted. She patted him on the back, squeezing. “I was so worried about you, I left immediately.”

“Yeah, yeah, thanks ma. Urnf, too tight!”

“How much does it hurt? Do you need anything? Here, I’ve got water for you, drink up nice and slow.”

“C’mon, not in front of him, you’re embaaaaarrassing me!”

“Ah, yes!” the father said, as both parents turned to face Snowy. “You’re the friend who called the ambulance, yes?”

“Y-yup.” What the fuck. What the fuck. These are good parents. What the fuck?!

He patted him on the shoulder. “Looks like Chilly keeps good company.”

Snowy sputtered. Chilly?! There’s no way his real name is fucking Chilly?!

Chilly himself spilled water out of shame-induced shock. He looked away, and Snowy could imagine the heat on Chilly’s face. If only the blush would be visible…

“Something the matter?”

“Um, nothing! Yeah, was just doing the right thing.”

The mother put a wing to her chest. “Angels do attract angels, after all.”

“We’re both incredibly grateful,” the father said. “If you need anything, just call and we’ll see what we can do, alright?”

“Oh, no, no, please, you don’t need to. I didn’t do that much, just called—”

“And that’s more than enough, young man. I do insist.”

An offering, a debt owed to him, in a sense. Because he’d done something right for once. “Okay, sure.”

“Now, Chilly, what were you doing at school on a weekend in the first place? I don’t remember any events.”

“I, um, so Snowy and I were like—”

“I think his account might be a little off,” another voice said.

Snowy’s heart sank. He recognised it. Doggo stood in the doorway.

“Now, what do you mean?” the father said.

“We have an eyewitness report, from a teacher who was working at the time, that your son and his friend were actually trespassing on school compounds at the time the injury was suffered. Apparently in an attempt to acquire answer keys.”

“Excuse me?” the mother said, moving closer to Doggo until she had to crane her head up just to maintain eye contact. “Do not tell me this madness has spread to the Canine Unit of all things. My son is a proper student. He would do no such thing.”

Doggo sighed. “Can’t count how many times this has happened already. Miss, I assure you, your two sons have a…reputation for causing trouble for the town. We have proof and—”

“That ‘proof’ is all lies. Nothing more.”

“Why would anybody want to lie about this?!” Doggo clenched his fists.

“It’s the crabs in the bucket, of course. They’re jealous, jealous of our success, and the only way they try to deal with it is by trying to drag us down. By trying to smear our dear little boys.” Her tone of voice had quickly grown hostile.

Snowy looked to Chilly, incredulous. Chilly gave a sly grin in response.

All this time, Snowy had thought their parents were absent or negligent or whatever else. Anything but this.

“I assure you, that has never been the case.”

“I can’t count how many people have said that before you. I haven’t believed them, so why would I believe you now? When you’re just another crab like the rest?”

“It’s a good thing we’re funding the police station,” the father said, “Or else our two boys would have been locked away by now, because people just can’t accept that they’re just good children.”

Doggo’s head dropped. “No point,” he muttered, nearly inaudible. He took a breath, recomposing himself. “Snowy was also… reportedly seen alongside your son in the school.”

“Are you sure the teacher didn’t see things wrong? They look similar, don’t you think she could have confused them?”

Great. That scrap of goodwill he’d earned was as good as gone. The father was motioning between him and Chilly, inviting Doggo to compare the two when the both of them were stock-still.

“Snowy… is in this room?”

“Yes, are you blind?” the father said.

“I can only see moving objects. I only saw you when you moved closer to me, Miss.”

The mother scoffed. “Sounds like one of those mental illnesses they make up nowadays. But yes, he is right there,” she said, patting him on the back, sudden enough to make him stumble forwards. In that moment, Doggo locked eyes with him, and maintained that contact. Snowy shriveled.

“I would like to converse with him in private.”

Chilly’s mother put more pressure on his back. He walked, and followed Doggo as he stepped out of the hospital. Out of the heart of the town, only stopping right as they reached the end of the long bridge that spanned a valley.

“Tell me if anyone’s approaching, alright?”

“Um. Yeah.”

Doggo took a deep breath. He looked out into the wilderness, though Snowy didn’t know how much of it he could actually see.

“I only realised something was up a couple minutes after I saw you in Quincy’s shop. Your posts and videos showed you lived in New Home, so why in the world did you end up here of all places?”

Snowy looked away in shame.

“I’d like it if you let me know you’re still there, please.”

“U-uh, right! Still here.”

“Great. It didn’t take me long to find out what was really going on with you. Your da’s going crazy looking for you, you know. Online campaign and everything.”

“Oh, so now he cares about me, is it? He can look for the rest of his damn life. Probably using M-Mom to get more attention, too.”

Doggo turned to look at Snowy. Not direct eye contact, just in the general direction where his voice had come from. “Have you seen the ads he’s put out?”

“Do they say anything about how bad of a dad he is?”

“He’s… remorseful, to say the least. Always talks about how he’d give all his money and career up just to have another chance with you.”

“That would not be enough.”

“Then you might be happy to know that most people online hate him.”

That left Snowy chuckling. Laughing. Roaring. “Fuck yeah! Fuck him, baby! I’m never coming back, never seeing him again! Ahahahah…”

The realisation set in. “Hah hah hah… wait, you’re not gonna send me back, are you? Oh fuck, I—”

Doggo sat down in the snow, a good few feet from the cliff edge. “My family was torn apart, too.”

Snowy hesitated, then sat down at a distance from him. “Um. I’m sorry.”

“Whaddaya have to be sorry for? You didn’t do anything.”

“I-I mean...”

“We lost a good deal. A bad flu had gone through the entire family, and the oldest chaps were barely hanging on. When the offer arrived, most of us didn’t even know half of all the words there. But it had ‘SOUL’ and ‘persist’ and ‘reward money’ and that was all it took.

“Some of us didn’t want to go with it. I know I didn’t. There were arguments, all the time, and after all that bogus revival stuff… everything just… came apart.”

Doggo gave a small chuckle. “You know, I was a feisty pup when I was your age. I think, maybe, if all this happened back then, I’d have tried running too.”

Snowy nodded. It was reassuring, to know there was at least one other person in the same boat as in. “So, you’re not gonna arrest me or anything?”

Doggo sighed, long and sad. “I wish I could’ve had a harder time answering that question.”

“...But?”

“Something was always weird about the evidence from the burglary at Grillby’s. There were flecks of paint, green paint left behind there. Nobody really did anything with it, because we all knew it wouldn’t go anywhere, with who their parents were. But there were some feathers left on the scene that looked weird. They smelled like paint, too.”

“Woah, woah, woah, I thought—”

“That I couldn’t smell? Yeah, I know where you got that from. But I sorta simplified it when I told lil’ Doglas. Said that I just couldn’t smell, but really I can still do it, just a little bit, if I hold stuff up to my nose. So I ran water through the feather, and it came out blue.”

“Oh.”

“I had a suspicion already, with everyone gossiping about you when you first got here. Seeing you helping Quincy out was a surprise, and when I realised who you really were I… really didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to have this conversation with you, at the very least. One monster affected by all this Determination bollocks to another. But if you were doing this with Chilly at the school…”

Doggo shot to a stand. Snowy jolted in surprise, and it was enough for Doggo to know where to put a cyan blade through. “Then it isn’t a big leap to say you were at Grillby’s, nabbing beers, too.”

The blade moved as Doggo shifted position behind him, from going through his pounding chest down to his gut. “Just so you know… you missed a spot. Was it Chilly’s idea?”

“Uu—uh, y-yeah.”

Doggo chuckled. “Of course it was. Oh, he used to be such a sweet kid.”

The other blade was set on Snowy’s shoulder, gleaming an unaltered white. Doggo moved the blue blade out of his body. “Stand up slowly.”

He did so, mind racing for an escape route. Once he was fully up, the cyan blade swung back into his chest.

“This is going to break Quincy’s heart…”

No. Terror coursed through Snowy. Doggo, Quincy, Chilly’s father, he was losing every last scrap of goodwill that didn’t come from a gang of fucking delinquents. “Wait. Please. Don’t tell her.”

“Sorry, kiddo. Should’ve thought of that before committing burglary.”

But he couldn’t fall even deeper, either. Not jail. Never.

Snowy thrust his wings backwards, slamming and pressing against Doggo’s body, using that as leverage to push himself away.

It was movement. Searing pains overtook the parts of his chest that the blade of cyan was penetrating, but he had enough momentum to fling himself completely past the tip of the shortsword. He scrambled for the edge and leapt without hesitation.

Flight was painful. Every flap of Snowy’s wings exacerbated the pain in his chest. He scrambled to gain enough speed to start coasting, because anything else meant death.

Success.

Snowy flew off into the endless woodland, vision blurring with tears.

Chapter Text

“Please, man.” Chilly had been shouting from outside the treehouse for a while now. Snowy still didn’t bother with a reply.

“Come on. Maybe I can’t get up there right now, but we can still talk! I’m really sorry, okay?”

There’s no point.

Chilly grew silent, and Snowy thought he’d finally given up, but no; he heard the rope ladder moving like someone was climbing it.

“Uuuurgghhhhaaaow!” Chilly groaned as he heaved himself onto the treehouse floor. He pushed himself to a stand and looked down at where Snowy had been lying sprawled out for the last few hours. “Hey man.”

“You shouldn’t push yourself like that.” The words were hard to push through his beak. They came out hushed.

“I can take it, okay?” Chilly walked over to the chair and moved to sit down, but paused, and instead pushed it over to Snowy, nudging him with the two front legs. “Come on. That’s not good for your back.”

“Your mom told you that, didn’t she.”

“Hwhat—I… yeah, I guess. Pretty sure all moms say that.”

At least Chilly had a mom.

When Snowy continued not to take the seat, Chilly turned the chair around so the backrest faced away from him and sat down himself. First cool kid-style, but he seemed to realise it was inappropriate, and just did it normally instead, head low. The orientation meant he faced away from Snowy.

“Again, I’m really sorry. Shouldn’t’ve taken you.”

Snowy didn’t bother responding.

“Can I… do anything?”

“It’s over.”

“What is?”

“Every—okay, not everything. A lot of fucking things.”

Chilly fidgeted with his wings. Snowy didn’t move.

“Quincy’s gonna hate me. Sans is gonna hate me. They’re all gonna hate me.”

“We won’t hate you!” Chilly said. He tried to twist in place, but winced in pain, and had to awkwardly pivot his entire body around on the chair so he could look at Snowy.

“Doesn’t matter. I can’t get another job. Can’t go into town without getting arrested anymore.”

“I could try telling mom and dad you’re still good. Though I don’t know if they’re gonna believe me.”

A small chuckle found its way free. Do you know how good you have it? “No point. Everybody else is still gonna hate me.”

“Yes point!” Chilly said, returning to the cool kid-sit, wings folded on top of the backrest, head positioned directly above Snowy. “It’s still gonna help! I mean, if he believes me…

“But I can still try other stuff! Maybe get Blizzard to do something.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“Why not? You help me, I help you. Simple assat!”

But he had already been helped. Every night they tolerated him sleeping in this treehouse, every moment they hadn’t tattled on him to Quincy, every bit of conversation they sustained with him, that had been help. Two stints, two missions, one of which ended in failure, hardly made up for it.

Snowy wished he could actually articulate that. Right now, all he could really do was move for the first time in hours, turning away from Chilly.

“Man, are all city kids this dense?”

Chilly got up with a grunt of pain. Wings touched Snowy’s face, and he gasped, as Chilly manually turned his head to face him. They were upside-down in each other’s vision. “Snowy! What the heck do you want! Tell me!”

This close, Snowy could see past the veil of Chilly’s shades. He could look into eyes that had an energy that he didn’t see when looking into the mirror.

The part of his mind that wanted to say nothing was hopelessly overwhelmed by the rest that just needed—

“—Y–yyh—yyyou—”

“C’mon! Spit it out!”

“I w-wanna… do more stuff with y—you.”

Chilly gripped his head even tighter. It roused within him emotions that became more terrifying the more he dwelled on them.

“Then you’re gonna do more stuff with me. A lot more stuff. And after I ace those tests we’re gonna have the greatest party in the whole damn Underground! Got it?!”

“Y-yes! Got it!” Snowy said, grinning.

Hey Mom

It’s been

No. Not right now. Not the right mindset. It could wait.

Snowy crumpled the paper up and shoved it into one of the deeper recesses of his bag.

Seven days before the exams, Dess lent her lockpicking kit.

Snowy flicked his eyes between the transparent practice lock and the tutorial on his phone. He had the gist of what he was supposed to do, it was just that the guy in the video had actual hands and Snowy’s wings were way worse at handling small objects.

On the treehouse floor next to him, Chilldrake had given up on fine manipulation completely, shoving the rake back and forth in the keyhole. It looked like he was going to break the thing entirely before managing an unlock.

Snowy felt embarrassed to be failing this hard, even when nobody was really watching him. Manipulating the tension tool and hook together meant overlapping his wings in weird ways, and apparently that was too much for him. It was like learning to write, way back then, struggling to hold a pencil thinner than his individual feathers, his father looking on. He’d never scolded him, since he’d obviously gone through the same thing himself, but the weight of his gaze alone had bored into young Snowy. 

Blizzard wasn’t going to be half as merciful. He’d gotten the hang of it in a day or so at thirteen years old, at least according to himself.

“Whopee!” Chilly said as his lock clicked open.

“What!? Come on!”

Chilly walked over and put his elbows on the edge of Snowy’s table. “You still using that thing? The other one’s way easier. No clue why people don’t just use that all the time.”

Snowy looked at the rake on the table. Now that he’d sunk some time into using the hook, copping out felt like cheating, in a sense. Like going to easy mode after he hit a hard boss. In front of Chilly? No way.

But at this rate he’d be here until tomorrow. What else could he use to manipulate the tools? His beak? No, too inflexible, and he didn’t trust Dess to keep these things clean.

His talons? His feet?

In front of Chilly?

He knew that certain bird-type monsters also did stuff like that, avian gamers that held controllers in their feet, but man that would be dirty. He’d just bought a wing-adapted controller and it had worked just as well.

He needed to game again sometime.

Snowy pushed his chair away to get more room, held both lock and tension tool in his wing, and operated the hook with his feet.

Chilly fell over laughing. “Nooo! Naaah! No way! Oh god oh hell my guuuuts!”

Still laughing, in pain, he began to crawl for where he’d left his bag in the corner of the treehouse. “I gotta get this, I gotta—”

“—Noooope!” Snowy said, flinging lock and tools away. They clattered against the wall. “Not letting you get that.”

Chilly flipped onto his back. “C’mooon. Think of the views I’ll get.”

“Nooot worth the dignity loss. Absolutely not worth it.”

“But c’moooon!”

“Chilly, please—”

“Nah, don’t call me Chilly,” Chilly said, turning away.

“You—you cannot say that. When you laughed at me being Snowy.”

Chilly turned even further away, wing covering a grinning beak. “Sorry bout that.”

“Like genuinely!” Snowy threw his wings in the air, feigning anger, though he couldn’t stop from smiling himself. “Chilly! Was that like projection or something?! I thought that only happens in movies!”

“I mean, Snowy is worse, though, it’s just the name of your actual species. Like naming a Froggit Froggy.”

It was. But there were other arguments to use. “If—if you were Snowy and I said I was Chilly you would still have laughed.”

Chilly made a sound like “phhff”.

“Come on! Admit it! You absolutely would’ve laughed too!”

“...Yeah, it is pretty embarrassing. That’s why Blizzard makes all the other kids call me Chilldrake.”

“…Actually, wait, does Blizzard have a real name?”

Snowy didn’t see but felt Chilly’s eyes widen behind those shades. “Urm. Hmm. Probably a good thing you can’t go to school here. Or maybe he’d put earplugs on you every roll call.”

Snowy raised an eyebrow. “Caaaaan I—”

“Nah, he told me he’d kill me.”

“...Told.”

“Yeah?” Chilly made a mock-gruff voice, “‘If you even give him a letter off my actual name, I’ll kill you.’”

Snowy stared in silence.

“Course he’s just joking. Actually he’d probably just kill you instead.”

“Uh huh. Nevermind then.”

Snowy continued picking. He got it eventually.

Hi Ma

I have no idea what’s been happ

Yes he did. Yes he had a good idea of what happened; he was there for all of it.

Snowy shoved the paper into the same fold of his bag.

Five days before the exam, Snowy and Chilly skipped bullets. There were larger, more scenic lakes to do this at, but Chilly still couldn’t go too far without the pain getting overwhelming, so their only choice was the one closest to Snowdin Town. If Snowy looked back, he could make out the rough shapes of buildings in the distance. It was the closest he’d ever been to town after he’d been found out by Doggo.

Snowy was figuring out how to shoot bullets that weren’t the sickle shape that came naturally to all Snowdrakes, since it wasn’t really the best shape for this kind of thing.

“Alright, let’s see if I still remember how I worked it out the first time… Try making two of them,” Chilly said.

“Like this?” Snowy said, firing two crescents that skipped once or twice before falling into the water and dissipating.

“No, like, in the same spot, sorta.”

“…Not sure I understand?”

“It’s more a mindset thing. You got the whole blueprint in your mind, right? Just… get a second one, flip it, and put them over each other so there’s no gap between them. Like this!” Chilly produced a chakram of ice magic, that he held up for Snowy to see before tossing it out by hand.

Snowy concentrated. One sickle… two… created in the same spot. The result was a misshapen mess that looked more like a donut that some very heavy monster had sat on.

“Eh, better than my first try. Ya made it fat, which means you’re putting too much energy into it cause you’re going slower.”

“You know about this stuff?” Snowy asked.

Chilly rolled his eyes. “Duuuh. Haven’t you at least tried stuff like this before?”

“Enh.”

“Hooooooww?! You can just do this, you know. Like anytime, anywhere.”

“Not… really? My school really didn’t like us doing… stuff like that. Don’t think my parents ever said anything about it either, so I guess I just… never got around to this?”

“Man, what do city kids even do?”

Snowy felt he needed to put up at least some modicum of defense. “Well I uh—um, we’re smarter. Definitely smarter.”

“That’s not even something you ‘do’, man,”

“It is true, though! Like we’ve got higher pass rates, better resources, more colleges, all that.”

“Pfft, college’s a scam,” Chilly said, tossing another bullet with a grunt. It was a full disk this time, center filled in, and it skipped a good half-dozen times across the water. “Don’t need to burn a dozen grand to learn stuff I’m never gonna need.”

“Then what are you going to do? When you’re an adult, I mean.”

Chilly paused for a moment, putting a wing beneath his beak. “Mmh. Haven’t thought about it yet. Probably a ‘tuber or something.”

Some things were the same across all kids, it seemed. Really, Snowy could count himself in that demographic, since he hadn’t realised how ridiculous the prospect of earning an actual living off of comedy was until very recently.

In fact, he hadn’t made a single joke in a hot minute. Hadn’t been in the mood to. That needed to be rectified.

“This is worth skipping class for,” he said, forming a slightly less abominable bullet. It skipped once, flew into a chaotic spin, and fell in with a large splash. Chilly giggled.

They continued with the skipping. Snowy kept working on the custom bullets, until they could sort of resemble his normal ones. It was apparently much faster progress than when Chilly had done it.

“The way you throw is just ass, though,” Chilly said. “It’s why they aren’t going far at all.”

“Alright, what do I gotta do?”

“Enh, everybody says I’m a horrible teacher. You needa go to Dess for that. And even then my gut’s starting to kill me.”

“Hey, you can go if you want, alright? I can stay here and practice.”

“Suh-weet,” Chilly started away.

“And! Uh! Thanks. Thanks for doing all this, Chilly.”

“Don’t gotta say it twice,” he said, walking backwards for a moment to feather-gun Snowy. “But really, don’t call me that.”

“Come on,” Snowy whispered, grinning softly, to someone too far away to hear. “I think you got it coming, at least a couple times.”

His grin fell away as he looked beyond Chilly, to where Chilly was going. The town that had offered him a chance that he’d squandered. The town whose inhabitants were sure to hate him by now.

He still wanted to walk its streets again, whatever the cost. Because if he didn’t have the town, then all there was left for him, for the indefinite future, was a little treehouse in the woods, run by people who were nothing but bad for him.

The weekend before exam week, Blizzard took Snowy and Chilly for a shakedown. The bear cub had purchased copies of the answer keys, but was stonewalling on the payment. They laid on a hill that overlooked the mountain path she took home every day, and once it was clear she was walking alone they approached on wing. 

Chilly did a fine job at hiding his pain as he landed alongside Blizzard, blocking her path. She gasped at their arrival, and turned to run, only to find Snowy covering the rear.

Blizzard was injecting weight into his voice. It, for a moment, reminded Snowy of his father. “Luteol. Look at me.”

Luteol turned around, drawing mittened paws to her chest.

“I believe you have missed your payment.”

“I—uh, oh. Hah. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”

Blizzard tilted his head to one side. “Excuse me?”

“Okay, look, something came up with my parents. They don’t… really have much right now, so I can’t really ask them for extra—”

“Can’t, or won’t?” Blizzard advanced a step, and Luteol retreated two. Snowy needed to calm the shaking in his wings.

“No, it’s not like that—they say they can deal with it in a bit. We should be fine in like a month, I can pay you in a month!”

“You agreed to pay yesterday. In fact, you set the time yourself. It’s bad form not to follow up on promises.”

“I didn’t know this stuff would happen then!”

“But you agreed to it regardless. That cannot be retracted.”

Luteol’s head swiveled, looking for potential escape routes. Chilly moved in response, walking off to her right, so that she was trapped between the three of them and the sheer face of the hill.

“C-come on, it wasn’t even the actual answer paper, it was a photo of it, you don’t have to be so hung up on it.”

“Then why are you only bringing it up now? It’s glaringly obvious that all you’re trying to do is worm your way out of your payment.”

“I can get the money!” Luteol shouted, panting. “Eventually. In a month.”

“In that case, I’ll have to set an interest rate. One additional Gold for every missed day.”

Her entire body startled at that. Snowy, too, tensed. “No. No way I can get that much.”

“Tch, tch, tch.” Blizzard said. “Too bad.”

Luteol tried to steady herself, clenching her paws. Her words were barely holding themselves together. “A-and what if I just don’t pay?”

Chilly shot sprays of sickles to either side of him. They hit trees and snow, kicking up plumes of white and brown. “Then we’re gonna make ya regret it!” he shouted, nearly inaudible over the sound of snapping branches. Luteol leapt back in terror, almost falling over. It probably kept her from noticing how he was wincing from the pain the exertion was causing him.

Snowy’s head hung.

“There’s got to be something else I can do.”

“Mmm. Well, seeing as you lack the Gold, you’ll have to pay by other means.”

“Ooh! Favours! I always love a favour.”

“I…”

“So? What’ll it be? Pay in money, or in favour?”

“What kind of favours? Like there’s some that I…”

“Choose. Or we choose for you.” The sheer force in Blizzard’s voice—Snowy knew it wasn’t meant for him, but it had his heart pounding regardless.

“Favour! I’ll do a favour.” The last word was clearly spoken on the verge of tears.

“Sweet! I want—”

“Not this time, Chilldrake. I have other plans. Luteol, consider this a smidge of grace I’m allowing you.”

“R-really?”

“Eyes up, Snowy. You will ask her for a favour.”

“Wait, what?” Snowy said, jerking his head back up from where it had drooped in shame.

“The favour must be an action. Something she has to do, and not something she doesn’t.”

Luteol turned around, tears in her eyes. Snowy had had a bear classmate in his old school, and maybe it was because they all looked the same to him, but he saw some of that classmate in her.

“Th-the newcomer,” she said.

Snowy took a step back.

“Consider, Snowy. What favour’s worth fifty Gold?” Blizzard asked with mild amusement in his voice.

“I need to… to think about it. Give me time or something.”

Blizzard chuckled. “Oh, but I have a suspicion, that if I gave you that time you would somehow never get around to it. You will ask for the favour now.”

Luteol perked, seeing opportunity. “No, wait! You, uh, don’t have to do this. Joining these guys, it’s wrong, you know it’s wrong but there’s still—”

“Do you really mean this shit, or are you still trying to wiggle your way out of this? A situation that you trapped yourself in?” Blizzard said.

The implication he was getting at was likely true, Snowy surmised. Luteol definitely didn’t have any strong feelings about Snowy; she was just grasping at straws.

But still. If she made a break for it in his direction now, he didn’t think he had it in him to stop her.

“So? What would you want of her, Snowy?”

He couldn’t ask for anything that humiliated her. Couldn’t ask for anything that cost her money or resources. Most of all, not for anything that would get her further caught up with them in the future.

“I’d like you to decide quickly, Snowy.”

He struggled to come up with something that wouldn’t tick Blizzard off.

Blizzard sighed. “Fine. If—”

“We’re having a party!” Snowy said. Luteol stilled, more confused than anything. Chilly made a small “ooh” sound.

“After the exams, we’ll have a party. Like, at Blizzard’s place. The favour is… that you help us set things up.” Was that enough? Was that worth fifty Gold? What was minimum wage again?

Blizzard’s beak moved, but before he could get a word out Snowy cut him off. “And clean things up after! And, uh, also make sure nothing real bad happens. Nothing we don’t want. Basically, you make the party go smoother.”

Blizzard put wings on hips, thinking. “Alright, I suppose that’s a decent favour. Run along now, Luteol. Do not speak of this to anyone else.” He strolled to the side, letting her sprint past, onwards to her home.

Phew.

“Now then, Snowy,” Blizzard said, and began closing the distance between the two. “That was the first time you’ve directly done business with another person. I’ve got pointers.” The last word was all but spat out.

“Firstly, get used to this. If you’re with us, you do your part. Every night you get to sleep in our treehouse? That’s a favour I’m giving you. A favour you owe us. You knew what you were getting into.”

Blizzard crossed the spot where Luteol had stood. Where she had cowered as they’d threatened her. As Snowy had threatened her.

He took a step back.

“Secondly, do not retreat. It makes you look pathetic. The weakest link. You will damage our reputation as a whole. If you truly want nothing else, be still, and give them nothing. Don’t break eye contact, don’t show your apprehension. Learn to fake it, and in time it will stop mattering.”

Snowy’s talons scraped the snow. Blizzard had approached enough that Snowy was confident he could nail him with the bulk of a shotgun spray. But then what?

“Thirdly, for mostly the same reasons, stop stuttering. I hate it. Be certain of what you want to speak.”

He came to a stop just outside of wing’s reach, eyes just barely visible past his shades, boring into Snowy’s own.

“I don’t know how much you’ve already damaged your reputation here, but you have time, don’t you? No other responsibilities, now that Quincy’s kicked you out. Nothing but time to practice and rebuild yourself.”

Blizzard started forward again and, before Snowy could react, set a harsh wing on his shoulder. “Don’t worry. It’s easier than you think.”

The wing lingered on his shoulder for long moments as Blizzard passed him, and then took off.

“Damn, nice favour, man. Shoulda thought of that,” Chilldrake said. “But yeah, bro can be like that. Alot. Really, I think he goes a bit too deep on that whole ‘badass cool kid’ shtick sometimes. Eh, what can ya do?”

Snowy couldn’t reply.

Hey Ma

I’m sorry. I’m really really fucking sor

If he was really sorry he wouldn’t have done it in the first place.

He’d have to dispose of all the accumulating paper balls sometime if this kept up.

After the second day of exams, Snowy helped Chilly cram study in the treehouse. It wasn’t one of the subjects they’d managed to get the answers for, and according to Chilly, he “really really super duper uber” needed not to fail this thing.

“So the way I used to do it is um.” Snowy picked up a chewed pencil from a dirtied case and began writing out his equation beneath Chilly’s own, which was almost incomprehensible. “You take the second matrix, sort of flip it sideways—” he made the corresponding wing movements “—and then slide it over the top of the first matrix.”

“Uh huh,” Chilly said.

“The first rows that overlap, you multiply all the numbers in the same spot. So three and eight here, four and minus five here. Then add the numbers you get together and put in the result.” Snowy wrote a 4 in the top left position.

“Mhmm.”

“Then you push the top matrix down again, and now every number is sorta intersecting now. Um. For the top one, you gotta put what you get, from all the multiplying and adding together, to the right in the result thing, and uh… the bottom row goes down.” Snowy wrote another two numbers in the final matrix.

“Uh… huh.”

“And then you push it down again, and now there’s only one row, so you just put the result in the last spot.” He completed the equation, and was pretty sure he was correct. Pretty sure.

Chilly looked down at Snowy’s work like it was arcane language. “Yyyeah I don’t get it. At all.”

“Um! Okay, simplify, simplify… alright. Instead of pushing the entire second matrix down, you can do it one row at a time. So we do the first step, that’s the same as last time. Then you move the row down again, multiply everything, and the result you put down a spot. Continue like that until you get to the bottom, then do it with the second row, but put those results to the right. Each row you use, you put that in a different column. Got it?”

“Think so?” Chilly said, nodding slowly. He did an exaggerated yawn. “Hoooof, I’m bored.”

“We’ve gotten through two chapters.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“It’s 4 P.M., Chilly.”

He looked away. “Man, you’re never gonna let me live that down, are you.”

“Nah.”

“Okay, okay, how about… we get you a better name.”

“Huh. Somehow I’ve never thought about that before.” Snowy rose from his awkward slouch over Chilly’s desk, leaning against the wall. He could see Chilly, face bathed with the light from the window in front of his desk, excited like some of his old schoolmates used to get. 

Like any other kid that hadn’t threatened a girl with a show of force just a few days ago.

“I mean, you know all the snow words, right? Just pick a really cool one or something.” Chilly giggled. “Heh. Cool.”

“Alright, let me think. Firn, neve, esker, tarn…”

“Ooh! I like Esker!”

Snowy pinched his beak together. He’d never felt too strongly about his name; it was a tad dumb, he could admit that, but Mom had liked it. None of his old classmates could have made fun of him for that without being hypocrites. They’d just gone after… most other aspects of him.

But Esker was a genuine, objective upgrade, a boost in perceived status he sorely needed. It’d put Snowy in the eightieth percentile of names. In the league of people like Luteol. Which they had threatened into working for them, if only for a day or two.

He really needed to get used to that.

“I can go with Esker. I guess.”

“Neat! Then you’ll have to quit calling me Chilly, okay?”

On the third day of the exams, Blizzard’s face twisted in sudden disdain. “No.”

“What?! Why?!” Chilly said, while Snowy could only fight to hold his head from dropping. A light snow was falling.

Blizzard grumbled, shaking his head. “It’s because… well… you’re—let me put it this way. You haven’t earned it yet.”

“I—what do you mean?” Snowy said. Of course it wouldn’t have worked out, it had to go through Blizzard.

“That, for one thing. Your stuttering, your uncertainty. That is the image you’ve displayed for the people here. ‘Snowy’ would do this, and a hypothetical ‘Esker’ would not. And…”

Blizzard paused mid-sentence, beak frozen for just a moment. “They already know you. You’ve made your first impression, and have failed to change from that first impression in the time you have spent here. Trying to rename yourself something like ‘Esker’ would tell everyone that you want to play at being someone you most certainly are not.”

He walked over to a nearby tree and leant against it, propping one foot on it, almost exactly like the first time they’d met. “Maybe when you’ve earned a reputation. When they’re scared of you no matter what your name is. Then you can be ‘Esker’. But until then, don’t waste my time.”

Blizzard flew off. Snowy let his gaze shift to the ground. “Sorry. Didn’t think there was so much to this stuff.”

“Psssh, nah, ain’t that complicated,” Chilly said.

Snowy perked. “Uh—what?”

Chilly threw a casual wing in front of him. “Yeah, ‘Esker’ sounds way better than ‘Blizzard’, and that’s the only reason he can’t let you take it.”

Snowy tilted his head, eyes wide. “Really.”

“Really, yeah! I’m just remembering, while back, Ice Cap wanted to be called Hoarfrost, and oh man the look on bro’s face. Glared at them so hard they never talked about it again.”

“That’s… something.” It painted a picture of Blizzard that Snowy hadn’t been expecting, and from his own brother of all people. Which… “Why are you telling me this?”

Chilly froze and let out a short “eh” sound. “Oh. Whoops. Didn’t mean to. We’re friends and all, but I didn’t think we were that close. Brain musta slipped”

What?! Close??

 He drew his wings close to his chest. “P-promise you won’t tell. I think bro’s gonna actually kill me on this one—”

“No, no, I won’t. Swear.”

Chilly grinned like nothing was wrong. “Thanks, you’re the man. I can still call you Esker when we’re al—”

“No, nah, I’m still fine with Snowy.”

“Oh. Okay. Wouldn’t ever pass that up but whatever. Still can’t call me Chilly though!”

“Suuuure.”

On the fifth and final day of the exams, Snowy stood on the other side of the rope bridge. He ran in place, made false starts, punched trees. It took around twenty minutes to muster up the courage to begin flying, but at that specific moment somebody was walking from the opposite side. He dropped, and hid behind trees and bushes, until he was sure they had passed.

It took another fifteen minutes for him to recover the lost momentum. By the time he touched down near the heart of Snowdin Town, it was already well past when Chilly’s class would’ve let off.

Eyes turned with his arrival. It might not have been a good choice to arrive in such an attention-grabbing manner, but being who he was, trying to walk in unobtrusively would have just bought a few dozen seconds before people started recognising him. As it was, he’d landed right next to a fast food outlet, which he wasted no time entering.

“One chili dog.”

The person running the counter didn’t care about him any, thankfully, but they needed time to cook the chili dog up. Conversations lowered in volume as Snowy waited. People mentioned his name in the same breath as Chilly’s and Blizzard’s, taking glances when they thought he wouldn’t notice.

As soon as the takeaway bag went on the counter, he slapped the money on the table and snatched it up. It wasn't too big a chunk out of his savings, but it was money that he couldn't get back—now that he no longer had an income, Blizzard and the rest were directly supplying him with food and drink, not cash that could be used for other things. Blizzard's way of keeping him dependant, maybe.

Outside, some of the people that had seen him land had gathered around the restaurant. Waiting for him.

Quincy was among them. He wasn’t fast enough to stop himself from making eye contact. She looked… more disappointed than anything. Snowy couldn’t really picture her feeling anything else in regards to him.

It called Mom to mind.

“Hey,” Quincy said.

Snowy turned away, beak pressed shut, and took off with the takeaway bag in his talons. He couldn’t, really couldn’t have that conversation right now. He focused entirely on flying, returning to the other side of the rope bridge, setting the bag down—

“HALT!” came a distressingly familiar voice. The shock of it made him tip the bag over onto the snow.

“No. Oh no, no no no.”

Bones rose in a ring around him, one after another. When he tried to take flight, they angled themselves inward, forming an enclosed cone which he thumped against and fell.

“Not now,” he grunted through a mouthful of snow.

“IT BREAKS MY BONY HEART, TO SEE YOU FALL INTO DARKNESS LIKE THIS, SNOWY!” Papyrus said, slightly muffled by the barrier he’d trapped Snowy under. The gaps in between each bone were barely wide enough to fit a wing through. Past them, he could see Papyrus emerging from a patch of trees and bushes he’d just hid behind earlier. “TO THINK THAT IT WAS NOT A HUMAN, BUT FELLOW MONSTERS THAT HAVE CORRUPTED YOU! OH, THE HORROR!”

“P-please, not now,” Snowy begged, desperate.

“JUSTICE WAITS FOR NO MONSTER, YOUNG MAN!”

A single bone in the cone lowered halfway into the ground, opening up a small window. Papyrus had gone on one knee to be eye level with Snowy. “SINCE IT HASN’T BEEN TOO LONG SINCE YOU’VE FALLEN INTO THEIR CLUTCHES, I STILL BELIEVE YOU CAN CHANGE! I WILL BECOME THE GOOD INFLUENCE!”

Snowy looked back at the fallen-over bag. The chili dog had to be getting cold from sitting atop the snow. “Genuinely! I have… stuff I gotta do!”

“YOU MAY LEAVE… AFTER YOU FILL OUT THESE QUESTIONS!” Papyrus dropped a pencil and a crumpled sheet of paper into Snowy’s cage. The paper had questions written on it, handwriting even worse than… no, he couldn’t really call it “worse”, Papyrus needed to have put active effort into getting his handwriting to be like… that.

The gap in the cage closed back up. “REFLECTION IS THE FIRST STEP IN SELF-IMPROVEMENT! OR AT LEAST THAT’S WHAT THE BOOKS ALL SAY. SO THINK ABOUT YOUR ANSWERS VERY CAREFULLY!”

Snowy checked the takeaway bag first. The chili dog wasn’t too ruined from him dropping it, but the bottom of the box had already gotten concerningly cold. He needed to get out fast.

WHAT DID YOU DO WRONG?

made the wrong friends, stole stuff

WHY IS IT WRONG?

because its illegal

HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL?

bad

WHAT WILL YOU DO ABOUT IT?

i dunno

WILL YOU BE BETTER IN THE FUTURE?

ill try

“Done!” Snowy said, holding the sheet up. The bone lowered again to show a squinting Papyrus.

“THAT WAS VERY QUICK.”

“I’m a quick writer, okay? Now let me go!”

Papyrus took a good look at the answer sheet. “CERTAINLY NOT! YOU ARE CLEARLY NOT PUTTING YOUR HEART INTO IT!”

Snowy brought shaking wings down to his sides, throwing pencil and paper to the snow.

“HANG ON, STAY HERE, I’LL WRITE UP ANOTHER ONE…”

He picked up the takeaway bag. The narrow opening began to close up, and he lunged for it, getting his free wing through. The bone jabbed into him, but stopped as it felt resistance. It didn’t hurt that much.

“No! Get me the fuck out of here!”

Papyrus turned, panicking. “SNOWY! YOU’LL HURT YOURSELF! AND DON’T SWEAR!”

Snowy continued pushing himself against an opening he clearly wasn’t going to fit through, groaning with the effort.

“STOP THIS AT ONCE!”

“Make me!” Snowy screamed, reared his head back, then brought it forward into the cage of bone. He only pulled back at the very last moment, so that it only looked like he’d slammed his skull against the barrier, and let out a false scream of pain.

“SNOWY! NO!” There was genuine fear in Papyrus’ voice. He brought his hand up, raising cyan bones from the ground to penetrate Snowy.

Snowy moved anyways, just slightly, and let out a scream that far exaggerated the intensity of his pain. The cyan magic hurt less and less, until Papyrus brought the bones back into the earth. Snowy used the opportunity for another false slam of his head against the wall of bone, another false scream.

“If you keep keeping me here I’m gonna crack my fucking brains open! I will! I will!”

Papyrus was blubbering incoherencies now. A third slam—

Bony fingers seized him from behind. The cone of bones retracted into snow.

“SANS! HOW DID YOU GET IN THERE? SNOWY, HE—”

“easy, easy, paps. i think we caught him at a bad time.”

“OH, I’M SO SORRY, I DIDN’T—”

“no worries. wasn’t your fault. snowy, you’re going somewhere, right?”

“Y-yeah.” His throat was sore from all the screaming.

Sans released his grasp. “then fly along, now.”

Snowy flew, but only for a short time. He was far too exhausted—more mentally than physically, but exhausted all the same. It wasn’t too long a walk to the treehouse.

Sans appeared from behind a tree. “heya.”

It was good second before Snowy decided to bother with a reply. “Hey. Sorry bout that. Wasn’t… thinking too straight.”

“nah, i think you were thinking pretty well to come up with a plan like that.”

“Uh. Thanks.” Snowy wasn’t even sure how he’d come up with something like that on the spot. A hundred racing thoughts had connected in a bizarre way.

“just don’t pull anything like that on paps again. most of the time he’ll just panic and do nothing.”

“Sorry.”

Sans didn’t walk with Snowy, but each time a tree blocked view of him, he vanished, and reappeared further down the path. “care to tell me why you’re in such a hurry?”

“I gotta give this thing—” Snowy lifted the takeaway bag “—to Chilly while it’s still good.”

“that all?”

“No, I mean—it’s for a joke. Like genuinely. Like it doesn’t need to be hot for the joke but I don’t wanna give him a cold chili dog or anything.” He winced just hearing those words come out of his beak. “Dammit! I did all of that for a joke! Why the hell do I—”

“hey, i appreciate the commitment. i’m still open for training, by the way, in case you forgot.”

“Huh? I didn’t think you’d still want to do that for me. After the shit I’ve done.”

“you look like you’re in quite the pickle, i don’t wanna add to it. nobody has to know.”

“Thanks. I’ll try making time for it.”

The treehouse was visible in the distance.

“though i still feel the need to tell you: the path you’re going down isn’t exactly the best.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“paps is right. in the grand scheme of things, you’re only dipping your talons into what people consider ‘bad’. you still got ways to get out while you still can.”

Snowy groaned. “I’ll figure something out, alright?”

“that’s a lot easier to say than do.”

He rolled his eyes.

“just keep this in mind: you don’t seem like the type of person who’d go far enough that i’d need to bother stopping you, but i’m not gonna go outta my way to bail you out once consequences come knocking either, kay?”

“Didn’t ask for it.”

Sans disappeared behind a tree, and didn’t come out somewhere else.

Beneath the treehouse, Chilly was lounging with Ice Cap and Ice Sheet, enjoying the release of burdens that came with getting past the final round of exams. Snowy had wanted to catch them on the way out from school, but this would have to suffice.

“Hey!” Snowy called, “look what I got you!” He pulled out the box that held the chili dog.

Chilly leapt to his feet, rushing to him. “Yooo! Thanks man,” he said, reaching for the box.

Not good—he wasn’t getting it, and if he did get it mid-bite Snowy would have to squeeze stuff from his throat again. He pulled the box out of Chilly’s reach. “Apapap! What is it?”

But Chilly just moved faster, snatching the box from Snowy’s wing. “It’s a chili dog, duh.” He flung open the cover and stuffed the first of it into his mouth, chunks of meat falling to his feet.

“N-no! Wait, hold on a moment!”

“Whhht?” he said with a full mouth, which meant even more concern that he’d end up choking a second time. Snowy readied himself. “Ith’s uh thili thug—”

Chilly froze mid-bite, realising. Groaned in what seemed like a shallow, playful sort of frustration. Behind him, Ice Cap and her brother started giggling.

A chili dog, for Chilly. A chilly one, at that. A double meaning Snowy hadn’t intended, but welcomed all the same.

Was it worth it, going through all that, just to see the look on Chilly’s face?

Probably.

The night after results were released, Snowy, Chilly, and Luteol gathered in the library to work on the posters that would be going up everywhere. The marking for the tests had been done fast, though Snowy supposed that was what happened with a school so small.

Luteol was only here because, by Chilly’s argument, making the posters for the party that would soon come was technically preparing for it. She and Snowy sat to either side of Chilly, all bunched at a single public computer.

Chilly’s taste in style and aesthetic was… utterly incomprehensible. The poster was eye-grating, filled with dead memes and extant memes and memes that either Snowy hadn’t known existed or had been completely made up. There were as many fonts as there were lines of text, half of the images used had false-transparent backgrounds or watermarks or both, and most egregiously of all Chilly had mixed up “its” and “it’s.”

Had Snowy seen this just floating around on the Internet, he would have immediately dismissed it as intensely unhinged, but ultimately satirical. Knowing it was Chilly who was making it? There was not a hint of irony in this man.

“Aaaand there!” Chilly said as he dragged in a badly cropped screenshot of a powerscaling edit. “Done! So? What do you two think?”

Snowy grumbled awkwardly, not because he didn’t have anything to offer but because he didn’t even know where to start. He was confident he could construct a better poster in half the time, but… there was no way he would risk wounding Chilly like that. Not when he was practically all Snowy had left.

Luteol remained silent, as she’d mostly been for the entire duration of the process. By the look on her face, she understood exactly nothing on the screen.

“It’s supposed to be ‘you’re invited’, not ‘your invited’.”

“Ooh. Cuuh. I’m an idiot. Lemme fix that. Anything else?”

“It’s… fine. Yeah, it’s good enough.”

Snowy looked at Chilly as he whooped with excitement.

Was Chilly an idiot? Of course he was, it’d been obvious since—

NO! No no no. That was the last thing Snowy wanted. His conscious mind tried and failed to swat that idea away, as natural as it seemed.

More a difference in personality, maybe? The jocks at Snowy’s old school would welcome Chilly with open limbs. He still had his occasional brilliant moments, like with the custom bullets. Yes, that was a more reasonable assumption. Really, if Snowy thought about it, he was more of a buffoon at times, seeing as it was his own actions that got him into a situation where the only real connection left was another id—

No. Not an idiot. Snowy had—had standards. He couldn’t have his closest companion be an idiot, he couldn’t be falling for—

WHAT?!

I-I can’t—

At least he’s not Papyrus.

Yes. At the very least, Chilly was smarter than Papyrus. A thought terminator that kept Snowy’s mind from going insane. If it hadn’t imploded already.

Chilly texted the poster to everyone he wanted to invite, then started looking for supplies. It was going to be Snowy’s first ever taste of an actual party, and by the looks of it, it was going to be glorious. Something that he could finally look forward to.

How selfish of him.

mom

im a terrible person. theres no i think or i might be i just am. a horrible fucking person. an actual criminal.

theres probably excuses. i dont want to use them. i know im a terrible person and i keep doing terrible things anyway because its too scary to try and stop. theres gonna be a party with booze and probably other drugs and shit and im gonna go there because

i dont really know. i have so much fun with chilly and then we go extort a girl and i dont think he even thinks about it and i keep wanting to have fun with him because if i dont then

i think id just

i dunno

youll probably still forgive me since youre my mom and all. i dont want you to. i wouldnt forgive me.

this is stupid. writing letters like this is stupid. you wont see this. i dont think i can even send this anymore because everyone hates me now.

ill just stop.

goodbye forever

snowy

Chapter Text

Snowy, Blizzard, and Luteol watched as Chilly set up his banner at the roof of the portico. It was one of his spare bedsheets he’d taken a marker to, and was supposed to say “BLIZZARD AND CHILLDRAKES ALLNIGHT PARTY FOR EVERYONE WHO WONT SNITCH”, but between how thin the letters were and the way the sheet drooped and folded, it was nearly ineligible. Chilly didn’t seem to mind.

With that done, they did a final once-over of the entire house, to ensure everything was in place.

Chilly’s home was… maybe not a mansion, but one or two steps away from being one. The place was larger than most other homes in Snowdin Town, and had a weird modern look to it that reminded Snowy of the houses in the outskirts of New Home. A style that didn’t necessarily look out of place, but also didn’t fully fit in with the rest of the town.

An exterior of beige walls, with white highlights at pillars and window frames had been decorated with Chilly’s old arts and crafts projects. Pennant streamers, things like wind chimes, other projects that they’d modified to look more “cool.” Paper jellyfish, stars, and flowers, all had received flames or thorns or gleaming red eyes wherever appropriate. They’d even printed out flames to paste at the bottoms of windows.

Well, the parts of the exterior that people would see as they approached—Chilly had run out of stuff by the time they got to the right wall. The backside had been left as-is.

The interior was all spacious rooms and floor tiles smooth enough to give clear reflections. A flatscreen wider than Snowy’s wingspan was mounted above a fireplace that, judging from the cleanliness of the bricks, was more decorative than anything. The furniture was better than what he’d had back in the apartment. Fake potted plants dotted the space. An honest-to-fuck chandelier, twice again as big as him, hung above the living room.

All in all, a complete one-eighty of what Snowy had expected their home to be. It had been hours since he’d first seen it and he still felt like he hadn’t fully wrapped his head around what all this meant.

There were kids with homes and parents like this back in New Home, and they hadn’t turned out to be anything like Chilly and Blizzard. Snowy knew he wouldn’t have—this was a good life. A good home and good parents who didn’t believe their children could do anything wrong.

I’d kill for this.

Was “kill” the right word? He knew he hadn’t half the guts needed to do something like that, but, again, this was a good life. A life with opportunities that were more than running or rotting. Snowy was good at studying, he’d be a model student, he’d go to fucking college, not involve himself in whatever they did—

“Hey, Snowy? Snoooowy. You there?”

“Uh! Yeah. Just spaced out.”

Foodstuffs: check. Complete with bootleg cinnamon bunnies Snowy had made with the stuff in the house.

Games: check. Between them and Dess, they had most of the current generation.

Alcohol: check. Tabitha had lugged the bottles from the treehouse.

Music: check, though taste was another question entirely.

The party was all set to begin.

They ran to open up the gate at the wall which surrounded the entire estate. A half-dozen teenagers were already waiting, though they seemed to be staying clear of, and staring at, a particular spot in front of the gate.

No, not a spot—a monster, skin white enough to blend in with the snow. The scowling form of Jerry.

“You stay behind, Luteol. It won’t end well to let him see you,” Blizzard said. The rest of them approached.

“Am I correct to presume you’re about to throw a party?” he said, gesturing to the various decorations they’d put up.

“Yuh huh,” Chilldrake said, already in a stance that looked like he could attack at any moment.

“And am I also correct to say that your parents don’t know about it?”

“Duuh! Whaddaya expect?!”

Jerry sighed, putting a hand on what seemed to amount to a nose. “What’s happened to respect, these days? You’re ruining your own home! I’d never even think of doing something like that when I was your age.”

“That’s ‘cause you’re just lame, man,” Chilly said.

“You should have just stayed home, Jerry. I’m sure we wouldn’t have bothered you,” Blizzard said, shaking his head.

“‘Wouldn’t have’? Is corrupting these children—” Jerry gestured to the people around him, who backed awkwardly away “—somehow not going to bother me and everyone in the general public?”

“Corrupting?!” Chilly squawked. “What does that even mean? Booooomer talk.”

“You know what it means. They’re going to do drugs, they’ll lose all sense of respect, they’re going to end up just like you!”

Chilly folded his wings, smug. “Not seeing anything wrong with that.”

“Of course you don’t, but I do. Delinquents like you don’t think of anything other than yourselves.”

We do have beer, though. Somehow he’s got a semblance of a point.

But man. He’s Jerry. No way I’m giving him a victory.

Jerry took out a phone from a stained fanny pack. “I’ll have you know, I’m very acquainted with the police force. They will answer my calls, so you better call it off and take everything down before—”

The sound of Blizzard pushing the gate open drowned Jerry out. He turned to address the other teens around Jerry.

“Whoever restrains him gets a small reward.”

They moved.

“Excuse me?! No, no, no! You can’t—you’re doing it! You’re corrupting them! This is proof, proof!”

“Chilldrake, you still have the jump rope?”

Jerry’s screams were muffled by the underwear stuffed into his mouth. He struggled, but the rope was too tight, his arms too weak. He could only kick out at the dirt and roots beneath him.

Dess pitched a tomato to nail him right between the eyes. Juice and pulp splattered him and the tree in the backyard he’d been tied to, adding to the tapestry already present. He couldn’t open his eyes without getting two or three different fluids in them.

Serves you right.

For…

Trying to shut down a party involving underage drinking? Jerry had been super annoying about it, in addition to every other time Snowy had met him, but this was a comical amount of punishment. Straight out of some show or movie, though Snowy wouldn’t put it past the brothers to have taken the idea from one.

The party was in full swing now. The music had cycled to a track chosen by the one of the kids that had held Jerry fast as Blizzard had tied him up. Snowy didn’t feel the “reward” was anywhere worth a potential assault charge, but they had accepted it well enough, and nobody would want to follow up on a crime committed on Jerry, anyway.

Still. A part of Snowy lingered on how those shows and movies rarely wanted him to root for the kids doing the tying-up and humiliation.

But still. It was Jerry. The movies never made you root for a Jerry.

Snowy headed back into the house. It wasn’t as crowded as a typical movie party, but maybe it was because there weren’t enough teenagers in Snowdin Town to fill it up in the first place. The food in the kitchen was two-thirds cleared out and—he noted with no small burst of delight—his bootleg cinnamon bunnies were gone completely. A large jug was set on the kitchen island that hadn’t been there at the beginning, and it contained at least one cup’s worth of every other drink in the house. There came a loud crackling, as someone chucked a pawful of silverware into the microwave to see what would happen.

The living room was the busiest. The music was loud enough that everyone had to raise their voices to be heard. There had been carnival-style games set up, but most of the teenagers weren’t even trying to follow the rules or do them properly. Adult content was playing on the TV, though by this point it was barely eliciting glances.

Snowy jolted as he stepped on a sticky patch. Someone had dropped a half-eaten cup of jelly, and it had been trampled until it was nothing more than a red puddle across the floor. A larger kid stepped onto the cup itself, sending a squirt of jelly upwards to stain the bottom of a couch.

In fact, looking closer, most of the larger pieces of furniture had been stained. Bits of food were stuck in between cushions, on the carpet, beneath sofas. It smelt like… a lot of things. The cold air was probably masking the worst of it.

If it was up to me, I’d never let people trash a house as good as this.

Snowy headed upstairs to get away from it all. The party had started fine enough, but by this point he just wanted to head back into the treehouse.

Which was heavily, heavily disappointing. He’d waited weeks for this, Chilly had hyped it up for weeks, this was several different kinds of illegal, why couldn’t he just enjoy this? He was just feeling sheer suck from a dozen different sources. Everybody else seemed to be having fun, but it was the sort of fun that jock-types and frat boys had. The sort of fun that he wasn’t meant for.

Of course there wasn’t anyone like him here—they’d all stayed home. 

The stairs on the first floor led up to a balcony that overlooked the living room. From left to right:

The door to the master bedroom, which was locked and had a sign taped to it that warned people to keep out.

The door to the bathroom, which had three people gathered around it. A rabbit was pounding on it. Snowy thought he smelt smoke.

The door to the brothers’ own room, ajar, which he entered. It was messy, covered in posters, bunk beds in one corner. Eight or nine people, brothers included, were taking turns playing Blazing Scale on a gaming rig decked out in RGB lights.

“I am Mihanna, spear of Neulonnia.”

“Dammit!” Chilldrake unplugged the wing-adapted controller and plugged a regular one in for Ice Sheet. From how she went over the inventory, tested out the attacks she could do… it looked like she hadn’t even played this game before.

“I am Mihanna, spear of Neulonnia.”

“I’m… more used to a keyboard.”

“A keyboard?! No, no damn way,” Chilly said in disbelief.

“I mean, I could show you. Lemme just…”

“Hey,” Ice Cap said, “It’s my turn next.”

“I died after ten seconds, that did not count as a turn,” Ice Sheet said, frustrated.

“We never defined a turn like that.”

“It should be like that! I can’t learn the moves!”

“You could do this for the rest of the night and not learn the moves—”

Blizzard held out a wing, blocking the monitor. “If you’re going to do nothing but argue, give the controller to the next one in line.” With the angle he had to stand at, he saw Snowy, who had been lingering outside the small crowd.

Blizzard didn’t acknowledge him, but Chilly followed his gaze. “Oh! Snowy! Want a turn?”

Snowy couldn’t consider himself any good at blazerlikes—he’d only been able to finish POTFC with profuse amounts of summons, and was pretty sure his father had refused to buy Dustblown not because it was too violent, but because screams of anger had kept him awake one too many times. And he definitely couldn’t resort to spirits in front of everyone.

Still, he needed to have some semblance of fun.

“Sure. Why not.”

Chilly whooped, not noticing the frustration painting Blizzard’s face.

Snowy took the wing-adapted controller up. The build was strength, using powerstanced greathammers. Chilly’s build. The controls felt more fluid than POTFC; attacking and rolling was faster. It couldn’t be that hard.

“I am Mihanna, spear of Neulonnia.”

Snowy groaned, head hitting the backrest. “How the hell are you supposed to dodge that?”

“When she jumps into the air, unlock and circle around her,” Dess advised. “Roll at the last moment. Then roll into the second flurry. The third, she’ll overshoot you. Wait for that to happen, then roll away.”

“Uh… huh.”

“Or you can just throw a frost pot.”

Snowy checked. “He doesn’t have the recipe.”

“It’s in the Manor.”

He bristled. “I, uh. Where is that?”

Dess leant further forwards, from her position behind Snowy’s gaming chair, twisting her head to look back at his panicking face. “This your first time playing?”

“Yeah,” he said, shameful.

“Eh, you did better than half of them,” She looked back at the screen. “Bring up the map. It’s over… there.”

Phew. She was the only one in the room with him at the moment; the others had all left to do other stuff he wasn’t really interested in. This was hour four of the party, attempt twenty-something, and in all honesty Snowy wanted nothing more than to start a new save and play as much as he could.

But Dess’s eyes widened as she glanced at the clock on the wall. “Oh. It’s time.”

“Right.”

Reluctantly, he abandoned the game and headed back down. The living room was just as crowded as earlier, but the crowd was waiting. The other parts of the house were mostly empty.

Blizzard appeared at the balcony. Again, he was injecting an oomph into his voice, that drew everybody below to listen to him.

“People! I’m sure you’ve all waited long enough. I’d say a little more than half of everyone who came here have left—the half that have curfews and senses of restraint and suck up to mommy and daddy.”

A giggle ran through the gathered teenagers. Snowy’s heart quickened.

“Which means, I trust that everyone’s who’s left has enough understanding not to snitch.”

Blizzard said the last word with casual venom. He walked to the master bedroom, unlocked it, and came back out with a case of alcohol.

The crowd cheered as he set it on the living room table. Even Snowy would have found it a bit silly if it were the “cans and red solo cups” type of beer, but this was proper, high-quality alcohol, straight from the shelves behind Grillby’s bar. Each bottle was unique, and would have been ludicrously expensive had it not been stolen in one of the first crimes that Snowy had participated in. He spotted Chilly among the teenagers, awestruck, like he was seeing a fireworks show.

“And that’s not all. Dess, if you may?”

More cheers, as she opened her bag and brought out leaves and lighters.

Luteol exited the kitchen with dozens of cups, all inserted into one another in tall stacks. People rushed to partake, but Blizzard held both wings out. He’d make a show of taking the first drink. 

Dess supplied an opener, and he popped the most expensive-looking bottle in a practiced manner. Drank a good quarter of it in one go, and slammed it back on the table with a sigh of pleasure.

Luteol took up the responsibility of barista and bouncer. She’d serve according to Blizzard’s instructions, restrain anyone that got too rowdy, and avoid touching a drop of it herself. Not that she wanted to. Cup after cup was snatched up.

Chilly found Snowy in the crowd, grabbing onto his wing. “We gotta, dude.”

Snowy grumbled awkwardly, looking away.

“Come on! Yeah, it was bro’s plan and all, but we did all the work!”

Mom had said something about this, once, when the family had come across a drunkard passed out in the street. But Snowy hadn’t been paying much attention.

And what was underage drinking, when he’d already crossed so many lines?

Out with the old life… in with the new.

“Eh. What the hell.”

Chilly all but dragged him to Luteol, holding up two feathers. Snowy locked eyes with her, and they stared a sort of mutual understanding.

He accepted the cup of dark wine. They clinked their glasses together, and threw them back in unison—

What the shit?!

He raised a wing to cover the bubbles his sputtering had generated. The taste had some strange concentration of fruit in it, but there was nothing that could do to stem the bitterness that burnt its way down his throat. In the process of forcing it down, he became acutely aware of how each swallow needed a brief cooldown before he could gulp again.

Chilly’s chest jerked about like he was barely holding back a coughing fit, cheeks puffing up for brief moments.

Neither of them had depleted a third of their respective shots.

Chilly threw his wings into the air, whooping. Snowy thought for a moment, then joined in.

Red wine: just weird.

Whiskey: liquid fire.

Luteol held a Loox back before they could dive onto the table with all the alcohol. She turned them around, and gave them a little push. They stumbled, then started walking in that direction to nothing in particular. She tried to resume giving out glasses, but jumped in horror at the sight of  something at the balcony.

Snowy tried to follow her gaze, and overshot, world spinning about him for just a moment. When he corrected, he saw a rabbit attempting to climb over the railings, reaching out for the chandelier. She took off running, and when it was clear she wouldn’t get up there in time, instead positioned herself underneath, so she could catch him as he fell.

White wine: actually not that bad, but there wasn’t much of it.

Plain old beer: piss, like genuine, actual piss, I don’t know what piss tastes like but this might be close.

All in all, a colossal mistake.

Some bulky canine sat without looking, on the couch that Snowy had been sprawled out for the last ten/twenty/thirty minutes or so. He grunted, and the canine didn’t react even as he swatted undextrous wings at him.

“Hhome,” he found himself saying. But he couldn’t really walk or fly back to the treehouse, not in this state. It wasn’t even that he was that drunk, owing to how difficult it was to actually drink the stuff. He’d stuck to smaller samples after the first cup, looking for something that didn’t taste like acid.

Maybe half of the bleariness came from staying up late the night before to make preparations. His thoughts were gaseous, going all over the place; he could pull them together and form more coherent thoughts, but even those seemed to remain diffuse around the edges.

No treehouse, and he had no intention of just passing out on the couch like a drunkard, either.

What else?

“Chilllyy.” The word escaped Snowy’s beak, as he pried his feet out from behind the back of the canine. He got to his feet and spent a good ten seconds making sure he wouldn’t fall onto the table with all the bottles.

Looking around had to be done slowly, or he’d lose his balance. Chilly was nowhere to be found in the living room. Snowy took slow steps.

Dess was on her hands and knees, looking at the back of a couch. Blizzard was pulling at her arm, trying to get her up, but he looked well into blackout territory, movements sloppy and without strength.

“Dess. Deesss. Come on.”

Dess only giggled like a maniac. It sounded like there were five other people elsewhere in the living room, all giggling like her, but Snowy didn’t want to spare the balance to look.

“My room’s nice. We can have—have fun.”

“I’m busy.”

“No, you’re not.”  Blizzard yanked, but his grip gave before Dess did, and he’d been leaning far enough back that he fell to the floor. “Hhrrgghh. Urf.”

“I’m looking. At art.”

“That’s a fuckin’ couch.” He crawled on the floor, and grabbed onto Dess’ body to push himself up. Snowy almost missed how Blizzard’s wings moved closer to her chest and groin, though she didn’t seem to mind, or even notice.

“No, look closer. At the stains.”

“It’s some juice or shit! Come on, I got somethin’ to show you upstairs!”

“It’s juice, and art. Look at the stuff on the floor—it’s got, like, prints in it.” She pointed. “Two different feet, and the prints go over each other. Two people stepped on the same spot and the juice, it recorded those steps. The juice let them make art, they didn’t know they were making art, but that’s why it’s art.”

“Who cares,” Blizzard said, even more frustrated.

“I care! Look, there’s like, some of it on the couch, up here. But you can see, you can’t have gotten that if you just dropped it, not like, with the angle and everything. So I asked why it’s up there at all, and I got thinking, and I realised, it’s art! It makes you think, how could it get from the floor to the couch, did someone step really hard and it splashed out or something? Did someone do it on purpose? You can look at how the cup’s pointed this way, but the juice is the other way, and the cup’s all crumpled up and stuff, so someone must’ve kicked it around or something, and maybe that kicking got some of juice up there—am I talking too much?”

Blizzard tried to pull her away again, to roughly the same non-effect. “Yes, and that shit ain’t art! I’ll show you rreal art, just come with mme already!”

“You can’t say that! Art is ev—everything is art. And nothing is art, but everything can still be art. If a spider makes a web and you think it’s, like, nice and everything, then it’s art. It’s art to you. And this is art to me!”

“Would you shut the fuck up! I—uurg—rrf—”

Blizzard fell back to the side, puking. Dess turned to stare at half-digested chunks of chocolate bars, floating and drifting through a mixture of alcohol and energy drinks.

“Woah. Look, you just made art.”

Blizzard half-groaned, half-screamed.

Snowy chuckled, and even with dampened instincts, he found his wing shielding his beak. But Blizzard was in no condition to notice such a thing, or even remember one moment of this.

Real shame Blizzard would kill him, if he ever let this get out.

Snowy continued. From the half that had been there when the drinks had been brought out, a further half had gone. It left the house feeling empty.

But they’d thoroughly trashed the place. The games Chilly had set out were in ruins from hooligans flipping tables and chucking chairs. Cards, dice, cups, wrappers, minis, strewn across the ground floor alongside the prone bodies of the especially wasted. It stank, and it was hard to tell whether it was because someone had pissed in the corner or because the lower-quality beer had been liberally spilt all over the place. Probably both. Snowy flinched as he heard the sound of shattering glass—the cleanup crew, him included, had their work cut out for them.

Such a nice house. Wouldn’t have done this. Would never do this.

Why do they do this?

Mom would never want this. But that doesn’t matter anymore, does it?

Snowy reached the kitchen. The microwave was smoking. Everything on the kitchen island had been swept to the floor to allow a rabbit, nude, fur stained through with five or six condiments, to lie across the surface. Ice Cap was sucking at a patch of syrup at their shoulder.

“Heeeey, Snowy. Want some?”

“Nnnngh.”

“Eh. More for me.”

The backyard only had ten or so people. Most were gathered around the tree. Jerry, who had entirely given up by this point, looked like an abstract painting with everything that had congealed onto his body. Snowy wanted to bring Dess out to look, but he’d have the same success as Blizzard, and Blizzard would probably try killing him for taking her in a different direction.

Why am I sso used to that? Him killing mme?

He definitely wasn’t drunk enough, if he could form a thought like that. There were still the worse-tasting beers on the living room table—if he could just suck it up and drink more, he could probably suppress that part of himself and start having fun again.

But man, everyone had said it was an acquired taste, yes, but he hadn’t expected basically everything on offer to taste so bad.

Chilly threw something at Jerry, missed by a mile, stumbled over to the pile that had accumulated at Jerry’s feet, stumbled back, missed again.

Snowy tried and failed to think of something to say, so he just didn’t stop walking forward, until he bumped into Chilly’s back. The sensation still felt so good, like those plushies he used to have, but bigger and warmer. Smell… there was the alcohol, yes, but the forest scent still remained beneath all that.

Chilly yelped, stepping away. Bereft of the support that he’d just been leaning on, Snowy stumbled, though green wings caught him before he could fall.

“Yoo-ho! Snnow!”

“Mmmrrgh.”

“Ya wanna join? We stuck, like, some tubes up Jerry’s nose so he doesn’t die or wwhatever.”

“Can I go home?”

That… hadn’t been what he’d had in mind, but it worked.

“Huuuh? But we still got time. Like it’s just… just two or something. I think.”

“I’m tired. Can—can’t walk.”

“Just crash on a couch or whatever.”

“Bu—but Chilly, I—”

“Dauuude! I told you don’t call me Chilly, man!”

Snowy whined like he were nine again, stepping forward to try and set his face onto Chilly’s chest so he could smell that scent again. Chilly kept him at a distance. “Dammit, you’re embarrassing me.”

Snowy giggled, then gasped as he realised there were, in fact, still other people around them, staring, some chuckling. “Oh! I’m, um, sorry I—”

“Nevermind, nevermind, man. I can give you my bed. Bott’m bunk.”

“Can, uh, you take me there?”

Chilly groaned, and walked him back into the house, past the kitchen, into the living room. Blizzard lay slumped across the first few steps up towards the second floor, face down. Another puddle of puke had formed beneath him.

“Heh, bro’s never gonna believe i’was him who did that,” Chilly said, chuckling lightly.

“...What’s even the point?” Snowy heard himself say.

“What point?”

“Him. He’s… pretty sure he’s not gonna remember this or anything.”

“Neeh, I ‘unno. Was suuuuper cool when he got the stuff out, though.”

Wai—wait a minute.

Snowy stumbled a bit, but Chilly held him steady. They reached the second floor, Chilly shooed out the kids who’d ended up in the brothers’ room, turned off most of the lights, and eased Snowy into the bottom bunk.

“Uuuff! There!”

“Thanks,” Snowy managed.

“So, how’dya like it? The party?”

“Eenh.”

“Eenh?” Chilly said, confused.

“All the beer tastes like shit.”

Again, not the thing he had in mind, but it was true. Chilly looked taken aback by the statement—a little hurt, even. Snowy turned away in shame.

“Come oon, all of it?”

“I mean, the, the white wine? I think? That was fine.”

“Pfft. Bro says that’s pussy shit.”

Snowy’s eyes widened. His thoughts, diffuse, went in a dozen different directions at once, and one of those directions resulted in a revelation. He’d read up on things like this before, where thinkers would put themselves on the edge of sleep, so that the altered mental state could allow them to make connections they wouldn’t have normally. He’d done something resembling that, on sheer accident.

It was less like turning on a lightbulb and more the toppling of dominoes. Ones that had been set up over all the time he’d been here. The earliest placed when he’d met the brothers for the very first time.

Chilly wasn’t the type of person to ever come into this sort of life on his own. His personality, his upbringing, it would never make sense in a vacuum.

But people tended to idolise their older brothers.

“It’s his fault,” Snowy said, jerking upright.

Chilly froze, confused.

“Oh go—oh ffuck!”

Concentrate concentrate. Think. Can’t llose thiss.

“Blizzard. You’re like this because of him.” It was so, so incredibly obvious in hindsight. Maybe if he hadn’t been an only child, he might have caught the signs earlier.

“Wuh—what t’hell are you even talking ‘bout?”

Snowy made eye contact. Chilly took a step back, beak shaking as if trying to think up a response.

“When we sstole all that beer and stuff, he was the one who planned it, right? Who wanted to do that in the first place?”

“Uh huh?”

“The papers. Answer papers. Who wanted the idea—got the idea first?!”

“Dude, calm down. I wan’ed to do that.”

For a moment, Snowy felt the train of thought lose momentum, threatening to crash and dissipate entirely. But Chilly tilted his head to the side, thinking.

“Hmmh. But I mean, ya cooould say bro too? Since he started doin’ it first, a couple’o years back.”

Hyperventilation.

Stupid! I was so stupid I’m so stupid stupid stupid!

But I knnow now. I know now!

Snowy pushed himself out of the bottom bunk, staggering. He began to fall, and Chilly reached out to catch him—albeit hesitantly.

“Okay, um, lllook I. You need to. Um.”

Focus. Focus. Lock the fuck in, think up the words, lock the fuck in!

He set wings on Chilly’s shoulders. “You need to listen to me. Oh fuck.”

“Um. Uh.”

“Blizzard’s corrupting you. He is.”

Behind his shades, Chilly’s eyes squinted in utter confusion.

“He made—made you this way. You wouldn’t’ve ended up like… this,” Snowy strained, gesturing at nothing and everything in particular. “If he wasn’t, like, if he wasn’t him.”

Chilly’s beak fell a bit wider. Then—“Duh!? Yeah?! Whass your point?”

Snowy gulped. Preparing. “That isn’t good.”

Chilly turned his head to the side a little, still keeping his eyes trained on Snowy. “This the beer? Yeah, ‘s definitely the beers, ya gotta get some sleep.” He pushed him back towards the bed, but Snowy pushed back.

Some fragmented, diffuse part of Snowy’s mind acknowledged that the alcohol was loosening his beak a little, making him say things now that could probably wait for a better opportunity.

But absolutely nothing he was saying was anything he didn’t believe.

“No, ‘snot the beer, I haven’t even had enough of it to actually be drunk yet. I’m still thinking, still thinking rationally.”

“...Nnaah. Doubt—”

“You don’t have en—enough either. I saw how you drank that thing, you’re not drunk.”

Chilly blinked behind his shades. “Wha—whazzat have to do with anything?”

“Because it’s shit! It tastes like piss and shit and we still drink it! Why?!”

“Cause it’s cool!”

Snowy’s throat was starting to hurt. He leaned in closer. “Why’s it cool?!”

“Ca—uh, cause… all the cool kids’re supposed to do it.”

He had to slow himself down before he risked passing out from screaming alone. “You got that from Blizzard, right?”

From how Chilly reacted, Snowy knew he’d struck something.

I can do it. I—I can fix things, make things right.

I can make Mom proud.

“Chilly, listen, I—”

“Already told you, stop calling me Chilly!” He pushed Snowy away. Snowy staggered back, finding support against the bedframe behind him, panting.

“You gotta listen. Blizzard is fucking evil.”

Momentary silence.

“That’s… boomer… cop… nerd talk ’n stuff.”

Snowy nodded, and the world briefly swung about him. “Yeah! Yeah it is.”

“So… so ya think they’re right all of a sudden?”

“No—not, not all of a sudden.” He pushed against the bedframe, making himself stand up straighter. “I’ve. Always thought that.”

Chilly’s wings were now half-bent at his sides, clenching and unclenching. “What—so you… you just…” He pinched his beak shut, and was probably squeezing his eyes closed too. “But you were a runaway! You were cool and everything! You joined us and you literally did all the stuff! With me! Why th’ hell are you gonna say all this now?!”

I joined and regretted it every other damn second. Every damn time Blizzard showed his damn face.

“Because I hhad to. There was—wasn’t much other option, I didn’t have a place to sleep. And I guess I…” The floor swung up into his view. “I was so scared. Of being hhomeless.”

And if I really just slept in an alley or something, Blizzard might’ve found me and…

“Homeless—so you just—you wanted the treehouse? That’s it?! You just wanted the treehouse?!”

Snowy had little idea what to say next. He forced himself to look back at Chilly anyway.

“I ddn’t… didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. At all. Just wanted t’ not die.”

It had been the worst choice. It had been the only choice.

But it had let him get to know Chilly. And running had therefore become something he couldn’t consider.

Now that he understood Blizzard’s role in all this, there was another opportunity open to him. Somewhere down the line, there was a possible version of Chilly that still wore shades, still smelled of the forest, and still laughed at terrible ice jokes, but no longer looked up to his older brother as a role model.

I WILL BECOME THE GOOD INFLUENCE!

Snowy took a step forward. “I know what’s happening, now. You need to listen to mme.”

“Hwhat?! No I don’t.”

“Blizzard is a terrible person.”

“No. Nuh uh.”

“He goes—he got us to go after a girl for fifty bucks like nothing. Like a fucking mob boss or something.”

“Yeah? That—that’s cool, man, ya get it?”

He took another step. Chilly retreated a step. “It’s cool, and it’s horrible. Fucking horrible.”

“I—okay, and?! And?! We’re the delinquents, we’re the troublemakers and everything, of course we do all the ‘baaad’ stuff or whatever!”

“And why do you do it?!”

“Because! It’s! Cool! And fun! And rad as all hell!”

“Why?!”

“It just is, man! Why’re ya being so—”

“Blizzard told you that. Didn’t he?”

Chilly froze up. Snowy took the moment to take a deep breath, gather his racing thoughts. “Listen.”

“No, stop that, stop telling me t’ listen.”

“Blizzard is—Blizzard has groomed you into doing all this.”

Chilly recoiled in equal parts shock and disgust. Alright, that probably hadn't been the correct word to use.

“He… he’s manipulated you. Tricked you and everything, all this time.”

“Stop it, stop it, shut up!”

It wasn’t working; Chilly was getting too defensive. Snowy needed another strategy, he would make it work, he had to make it work. He was going to keep arguing until Chilly realised he was backing himself into a corner, a circular loop. 

He was going to make things right.

“Doggo said, that you used to be a sweet kid, Chilly. Back then—”

A wave of sickles. Half chipped at the wall, half struck true. He collapsed against the bedframe.

“Stop fucking calling me Chilly!”

A moment of relative calm, as Snowy did his level best not to even whimper, moving his gaze back up. He wasn’t close enough to see past the shades. He didn’t want to.

“Can’t believe it. You—you’re just…”

Quiet sobbing.

“F-fuck you, man.”

The door opened, and was slammed shut, hard enough to make the curtains flutter.

In the silence, Snowy came to the realisation that he had burnt his last bridge.

He knew that the best and most logical course of action was to leave as fast as he could, to get a head start against the hunt that would come after him. Maybe steal some of Blizzard’s money to hamper him a tiny bit, use it to last Snowy the way to another town.

Instead, he crawled back into the bottom bunk, with that hint of forest scent.

The pillow was wet by the time he fell asleep.

“What a terrible creature, torturing such a poor, innocent youth... Ah, do not be afraid, my child. I am Toriel, caretaker of the Ruins. I pass through this place every day to see if anyone has fallen down, and you are the first human to come here in a long time. Come! I will guide you through the catacombs. This way...”

(The shadow of the Ruins looms above, filling you with determination.)

Chara          LV 1

Ruins - Entrance

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