Undertale

Epilogue: Memory

(Artwork: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Undertale-Asriel-573972508 )

I woke up on a bed of golden flowers.
I was in the Ruins, at the place where I had fallen. For a minute, I felt horrified. What if Asriel, or Flowey—wait, Flowey was Asriel... what if someone had reset the timeline!? What if I had to do all of that again?
But Asriel... Asriel was there. He was in his true form, watering flowers and smiling sadly. "Don't worry about me. Someone has to take care of these flowers," he said.
"Wh... why are you here? Why am I here? Am I dreaming? What..." I broke off. "Asriel, if you're still here, why don't you come back?"
"Frisk, please leave me alone. I can't come back. I just can't, okay?"
"Why not?"
"I don't want to break their hearts all over again. It's better if they never see me."
"Asriel..."
"...why are you still here? Are you trying to keep me company?"
"Y-yes... I like you."
"Frisk... Hey. Let me ask you a question. Frisk... why did you come here?"
"Wh-what?" I didn't know why I was back in the place I had fallen... I didn't remember coming back...
"Everyone knows the legend, right...? 'Travellers who climb Mt. Ebott are said to disappear.'"
"Oh, you mean why I climbed the mountain in the first place?" Again, out of all the monsters in the Underground, Asriel was the first person to ask me that, too.
"Frisk. Why would you ever climb a mountain like that? Was it foolishness? Was it fate? Or was it... because you...?" We stared silently at each other for a moment. I looked down. "Well. Only you know the answer, don't you...?" I swallowed. If he wasn't going to press me, I wasn't going to say anything. "I know why Chara climbed the mountain," said Asriel. "It wasn't for a very happy reason. Frisk. I'll be honest with you. Chara hated humanity. Why she♥ did, she never talked about it. But she felt very strongly about that." There was a moment of silence. Asriel went back to the flowers. "Frisk... you really are different from Chara. In fact, though you have similar, uh, fashion choices... I don't know why I ever acted like you were the same person. Maybe... the truth is..." He looked down at the flowers, as though looking at Chara's grave... wait... was it? "Chara wasn't really the greatest person," said Asriel darkly. "While, Frisk... You're the type of friend I wish I always had."
"Aww, Asriel..."
"So maybe I was kind of projecting a little bit. Let's be honest. I did some weird stuff as a flower."
"Yeah, you did."
"There's one last thing I feel like I should tell you. Frisk, when Chara and I combined our SOULs together... the control over our body was actually split between us."
"What?"
"She was the one who picked up her own empty body. And then, when we got to the village... she was the one that wanted to... to use our full power. I was the one who resisted. And then, because of me, we... well, that's why I ended up a flower." There was another pause. "Frisk... this whole time, I've blamed myself for that decision. That's why I adopted that horrible view of the world. 'Kill or be killed.' But now... after meeting you... Frisk, I don't regret that decision anymore."
"Good. You shouldn't."
"I did the right thing."
"Yes, you did."
"If I killed those humans... we would have had to wage war against all of humanity."
I knew it. When I had watched those tapes in the True Lab, somehow I knew that Chara wasn't committing a noble act of self-sacrifice so the monsters could get human SOULs. If she hated humanity, and she wanted Asriel to kill the humans... she wanted to cause another war between humans and monsters, so that humanity would be wiped out. And she'd almost gotten her dying wish. Because she and Asriel died, Asgore declared war anyway. If Asgore's original plan succeeded and I had died, humanity would have been wiped out. Chara sounded like a horrible person to me, but I sort of felt bad for her. I wondered what she had gone through to make her hate humanity.
"And in the end, everyone went free, right?" said Asriel, as though in response to my thoughts. "I still feel kind of sad knowing how long it took... so maybe it wasn't a perfect decision. But you can't regret hard choices your whole life, right? Well, not that I have much of a life left. But that's beside the point."
In the end, everyone went free. Except you, I thought. At least everyone's happy because of you.
"Frisk, thank you for listening to me. You should really go be with your friends now, okay? Oh, and, please... in the future, if you, uh, see me... don't think of it as me, okay? I just want you to remember me like this. Someone that was your friend for a little while."
"I will, Asriel. Definitely."
"Oh, and Frisk... be careful in the outside world, okay? Despite what everyone thinks, it's not as nice as it is here. There are a lot of Floweys out there. And not everything can be resolved by just being nice."
"I like monsters better than humans."
"Frisk... Don't kill, and don't be killed, alright? That's the best you can strive for. Well, see you." He went back to the flowers.
"Asriel, I don't want to go. When will I see you again?"
"Frisk... Don't you have anything better to do?"

♥

Somehow, I had the sense that even if there was a sentient flower popping up around the Underground that contained some essence of what had been Asriel Dreemurr, the real Asriel was as free as everyone else. Maybe he'd stay by that flower bed forever, but just as the human SOULs had gone... elsewhere, perhaps he would too. It made no logical sense, especially because monsters completely disappeared when they died, but I wanted to believe that the prince of monsters was happy somewhere. That the flower's consciousness was separate from his own, connected by only a thread of memory.Soon, I would wake up. I would start a new life among monsters and be their ambassador in the human world. I would live with Toriel (and Sans), with the whole world to explore, and I'd be happy. I could show the monsters the real stars, and we'd make wishes, and maybe the other humans would grow to like them too. Humans weren't all bad, no more than monsters were. No one should ever be afraid of the monsters under beds, or mountains. I should know.

♥ Disclaimer: As Chara's adoptive sibling, I figured that it would be realistic for Asriel to know Chara's gender, so I decided to choose a pronoun. Most people see Chara as being female, so I chose "she", but we can assume Chara's pronouns are interchangeable. The same goes for Napstablook and Monster Kid.