songs for the fallen

the prince, and this world's future

?????
_____

 He held them, once, so very long ago, as they were dying. He rested his paw on their fever-flushed face and begged them to hold on. Told them they were the future.

I am the future, they'd thought to themself. This is the future. I'm doing this for you.

Their brother wanted to go back on it. Their mother was a shadow in the doorway. They never could tell if their parents knew the truth. To his credit, their brother never told.

Their father sat at their bedside. His voice was heavy with grief. He spoke their name with the solemnity and reverence of a prayer.

Chara.

It wishes it couldn't remember. It was never meant to have a name.

A familiar darkness stretches on forever, until it doesn't. They remember how the warm water lapped at their ankles, once upon a time. They remember that golden light. Nobody ever knew. By the time they really had a reason to use that power, it was far too late.

It gives itself too much agency, in these thoughts. Considers itself a person instead of a thing. It can't afford to think like that anymore.

Red leaves crinkle under Frisk's feet. They return to the basement. Face Toriel again, steadier this time. The echo (it cannot call itself Chara, it cannot attach that name to itself) watches, detached, wishing it were elsewhere. Wishing it were nowhere at all. That final death did not lead it to warm water, golden lights, a miasmic approximation of the smell of oranges. It led it to a dim awareness of a coffin, of dirt in its rotting throat, and then nothing else. That was supposed to be it. That was supposed to be the end.

But there is no end, now, not if Frisk has that same power. If they can turn back time, Chara--the echo!--knows that it will never rest again. They will kill everything in their sight. They will kill its mother, kill its father, kill everything else in their path. Raze this world to dust and not look back even for a second.

Yet, somehow, at the end of the battle, Toriel is still alive. Frisk isn't even holding a weapon.

It detests that they allow her to hug them. It detests the wistful look on their face as they watch her leave. It detests everything about them as they walk onwards, through the door at the end of the Ruins, into an uncertain future the echo has no power to predict.

They wrap their arms around themself. "It's cold," they complain.

The echo makes no move to respond. It simply won't say a word. It won't give them the satisfaction of knowing that their voice has been heard.

Standing before the final exit, the doorway that leads out into Snowdin Forest, if the echo's memory serves it, is a flower. It remembers, very vaguely, seeing this flower before, right when it had first awakened. Frisk flinches at the sight of it, jumping backwards, reaching for a weapon they can't find. Right--he did attack them, didn't he?

The echo doesn't know why it's so certain the flower is a he.

He laughs. It's a laugh they recognize. They know his expressions, even though they've never seen his face before. He's familiar to them in a way they can't describe.

And, it realizes, the longer it looks at him, the harder it is to keep itself detached. To remember it is nothing. Not a human, not a monster, not anything. Nothing more than dust scattered in the wind.

"I bet you feel really great," he taunts, petally head cocked to the side with a terrible smile tugging unnaturally at his face. "You didn't kill her. You didn't kill anybody." It knows his voice. It knows him. It doesn't understand why.