The Castle

Killer

The air was heavy with dust, the same dust that coated Sans' shoes when he walked through the unusually powdery snow. He had no destination as he aimlessly wandered through Snowdin. Grillby's caught his lightless sockets, but he did not stop or slow; there was no reason to go into Grillby's anymore. All of the warm appeal that the building once contained had vanished when the flames of its namesake owner had been extinguished. There wasn't even any food left behind the counter, rendering what had once been his favorite bar useless and uninviting. 

It was all the skeleton could do to keep smiling and trudge onwards, maybe when he got to Waterfall he would lay down in the main fall and let the water carry his bones down. No one would stop him, no one was left. The Underground was empty even of the small critters that had once roamed about. Every last living being had fallen by his hand, and he had felt nothing, not remorse, not guilt, not even a psychotic sense of glee. He was just as empty as the Underground, it was clear by the way his soul refused to sink back into his chest. Some buried part of him in the small, red target must have been so revolted by what he had become that it kept the culmination of his being floating in front of his sternum. He didn't blame it, he knew the gravity of what he had done, but he couldn't find it in him to care. It wasn't all awful: Frisk was gone, the power of RESET was out of their control and in his instead, and that little ghost brat had finally left him alone. 

"Uuuugh, you're so boring, Sansy." 

Speak of the devil.

The sharp smile plastered on the skeleton's face twitched at the corners. "Stop calling me that, Chara," came his hollow reply as he absently wiped at the corrupted determination leaking from his sockets and down his bone cheeks in black globules. 

A ghostly apparition moved into his peripherals, the bright red of their irises standing out against the faded yellow and green of their sweater. They looked unamused, crossing their arms to speak with a smug upturn of their mouth, "Well, that's your name, isn't it, Sansy?"

The skeleton considered the question for a moment, keeping his pace steady, "No, no it's not."

Chara's face twisted up in a mockingly incredulous look before they floated in front of him to face the skeleton fully. "Is this about what Asgore said? You've got to be kidding me, he says that every time we kill him and you've never been this hung up about it." 

"I'm not 'hung up' about it, I've just had more time to think, and he's right. I am not Sans anymore, I'm just a killer." The skeleton's tone was flat, devoid of life.

"Boo, freakin' hoo, the king doesn't think you're you--y'know what? I don't care, call yourself what you want, let's just reset again. I've been wanting to know what would happen if we killed Undyne last. ... What are you waiting for? Hurry up and summon the button, Sansy." Chara bobbed in the air carelessly, floating back around to talk to him from behind, their legs lazily drifting upwards. There was a certain hunger in their echoed voice, a hunger the skeleton didn't care to cater to anymore.

"No." He stated simply.

"No?" The amount of building rage and indignance contained in that single word as Chara's voice pitched down might have been frightening if he could still feel fear.

Before their exchange could develop any further, a shadow just beyond the Snowdin-Waterfall boarder caught both of their attention. The dark mass was gone as soon as it was spotted, moving deeper into Waterfall. Both the skeleton man and ghost child went still and quieted, waiting to see if whatever was in the shadows would reappear. 

The hunger filled Chara's ghostly red eyes once more when the skeleton glanced up at them. "Well, this is new," a delighted grin spread across the child's face so wide it almost split it in half. Hunger dripped from their words as they urged the skeleton forwards to investigate. He didn't particularly mind, for once, he was just as curious as his ghostly parasite. Both of them had thought they killed every monster in the Underground, and the skeleton still wasn't quite convinced they hadn't. The faint, electrical buzz of magic that leached into the air from the bodies of every monster he had ever met was unheard--or, unsensed, as it wasn't really a sound as much as a feeling-- no matter how hard he strained to catch even the faintest whisper of it. If there was no magic, there was no monster, and he wasn't sensing anything that would indicate a magic other than his own. Then again, maybe it had been an animal.