Finn is interrupted quite abruptly from their thoughts by a door.
At first glance, they think nothing of it. They just passed through a heck ton of a lot of excruciatingly tall and scratchy reeds and a cave devoted to absolutely nothing but a crystalized slice of cheese and a mouse hole, and a metal door sticking randomly out of the rocky wall of a cavernous underground hallway seems almost commonplace.
Almost. Finn doubles back when they realize what it is, and all their wonderings and decisions about the future of monsterkind fly thoroughly out of their head.
"That's kinda odd, don't you think?" Finn asks, studying it. The door looks kind of like an iron door from Minecraft, minus the windows.
I don't like it at all, the dummy whispers, and Finn is surprised to hear fear in its voice. This... this wasn't here before...
"Maybe they added an extension after you left," Finn suggests.
No, I mean... this whole part of the hallway. It wasn't here. The last cave led directly into the next.
Finn gets a shivery feeling again, but firmly pushes it down. They have to stop letting their fear affect them. They're the hero of the Underground.
"Well, we should check if there's any monsters inside," Finn decides. They firmly grasp the handle of the door, and it turns, so they pull it open.
Dear Asgore, the dummy whimpers, barely more than a terrified murmur in the back of Finn's head.
There is indeed a monster in the room. He's staring directly at them.
Finn swallows their fear and cautiously heads inside, keeping a steady gaze locked on the monster. It seems to be yet another skeleton, but there's something extremely off about this one; the very air around him seems to be warped. His skull is broken into a twisted smile, toothless and empty. There's a gash running down through his right eye socket from the top of his head, and another torn through the bottom of his left eye socket, connecting it to the black crevice of his mouth. He's wearing a collection of tattered black robes, and the bones of his hands are poking out, displaying gaping holes carved into the center of his palms. His eyes have no creepy white pupils, like the skeleton with the blue jacket has, but neither are they alight with the friendliness and joviality found in the eyes of Papyrus. They're just... empty.
The walls are empty, too. Looking around, Finn realizes with a shudder that the entity is literally sitting in the middle of a void. The floor is a piercing gray, an unknown substance that cuts off into the endless black reaching out forever on all sides. There are no cave walls, no blue flowers, no gemstones set into the rock. Turning around, there's only darkness - darkness and the door, still open onto the friendly cavern hallway. The only thing tying this place to the Underground at all is that silver door.
It might have been a mistake to walk inside.
Let's go let's go let's go let's get out of here, the dummy sobs.
Finn turns back to the monster, scared out of their wits but determined to stay strong.
"Are you okay? Do... do you need help?" they ask hesitantly.
DON'T TALK TO IT!! the dummy screams.
The monster just sits there, unmoving.
"I'm Finn," Finn ventures. "What's your name?"
Silence.
"That's okay," they assure it.
They're about to turn around and get the heck out of there when something in the monster's eye sockets flickers.
Finn starts and stares at the skeleton's eyes.
There's nothing there.
But they know what they saw.
Finn slowly moves closer, wondering, blocking out the dummy's frantic yells of panic in their mind. They stretch out their hand.
There it is. Flickering in the warped air. The RESTORE button.
Finn presses it.
Lights turn on in the skeleton's eyes. White lights. White pupils. It stares at Finn for a second.
Then it vanishes.
"Well," Finn manages. "Nice meeting you."
They turn and sprint out the door, out of the void, back into the safety of the Underground and the cavern rock and the sound of dripping water. They collide with the opposite wall of the hallway, then spin around once more, staring.
The door has vanished as well.
WHAT DID YOU DO?!
"I have no idea," Finn admits frankly, "what just happened."
WHY DID YOU HAVE TO TOUCH IT?! WHY DID YOU HAVE TO GO IN AT ALL?!
"I don't know, it just... he looked like he needed help," they explain. They're having a hard time processing everything. They can't quite believe that it just happened. It seems a little unreal.
The dummy seems to have run out of things to say, for it simply makes a frustrated noise of anger in Finn's mind and then subsides, muttering in the background to itself.
"We'll just pretend like none of that happened," Finn decides, moving on.
The next room contains another telescope, an equally starry ceiling, and, not at all unexpectedly at this point in time, a skeleton.
"heya," the skeleton in the blue jacket comments, watching them with his shiny white pupils. They don't seem at all scary now that Finn has the image of cracked and empty eye sockets in their head. He's leaning against the cavern wall, next to carved-in entranceway that leads into what Finn can see is a completely empty cave. His hood is still pulled over his head, shadowing the top half of his face.
"Hi," Finn says awkwardly, pausing a couple of yards away from him. Not only are they completely disregarding all his well-given advice at the moment, but he's close enough to have heard everything that happened with the door. If he doesn't think they're a complete lunatic by now, well... they can't imagine what else he might think of them.
"I'm, er, sorry..."
"hello, er sorry," the skeleton replies, amused. "i'm sans. sans the skeleton."
Sans! An image of a pile of snow next to pair of large red boots flashes through Finn's mind, and their eyes widen underneath their mask. Sans. They'd thought whoever wrote it had just been extremely fond of French, but they must've actually been labeling it - with their own name. Was this really him? Papyrus's lazy brother?
"No, not that, I'm sor- I'm Finn," Finn stammers, flustered.
"fin, huh?" The skeleton regards them, the same cheesy grin on his face as always. "knew there was something fishy about you."
Then, surprisingly, he holds out his hand.
His left hand.
He's left handed, like Finn.
Finn walks forward to take it, and they shake hands, the first real handshake Finn has participated in since before they fell into the Underground.
It doesn't feel like just a simple handshake, though.
It's almost as if Sans has proposed something, and they're agreeing to it, whatever it is. A handshake over unfinished business.
They let go, and Sans nods.
Finn nods back.
"See you around, Sans."
"see you around, kiddo."
YOU ARE READING
UnderHappened
FanfictionThe Undertale Genocide Route is happening, but a new card has joined the deck: Finn, a quiet kid with a love for stuffed animals who falls into the Underground soon after Frisk. At first, it doesn't seem like there's much Finn can do, until they dis...
