No One is Happy with This (Undertale)

80 ~ Sharp Answer

You still have nightmares, after it all. Sometimes you still wake up in a cold sweat, fragmented images of Gaster poised over you with a weapon still flitting vaguely in the shadowy corners of your waking mind. But they're... not the horrible kind of nightmare. Granted, they're still bad; all nightmares are bad, but these aren't really bad ones. You don't wake up in a panic, you don't sit up through the night, waiting for the sunrise.

Sure you still have nightmares, but they're normal nightmares.

So you roll back over and go back to sleep.

The first warmish, not-completely-muddy day in March just happens to fall on a weekend, and Toriel and Asgore decide it's a good day to have a picnic in the park. Everyone is invited, Alphys, Undyne, Sans, Papyrus, and Gaster, all showing up at the park with a dish to contribute to the picnic.

While Gaster seems to have forgiven the misunderstanding, he certainly hasn't forgotten it. He seems... wary around you. He keeps giving you sidelong looks, his expression one you can't understand.

You suppose you can't blame him. You did remind him of That-One-Time, and, well... you're willing to bet he likes thinking about it as much as you do.

He also hasn't given you your fauchard back yet, meaning you get to have the experience of explaining to Undyne that no, you cannot practice summoning your weapon, because you don't have it.

You try to be coy about the reason why; you don't want to bring up the whole you're-a-genocidal-maniac thing again, but Sans' slyness with words you do not possess, and your deflection of her questions refusing her answers but not diffusing her curiosity, she decides to go ask Gaster for that which you had so tried to deny her, for the sake of everyone's mood.

It's the first nice day outside, after all, and you'd rather be having fun than constantly apologizing and feeling like the awful person that you try to tell yourself you're not but Flowey constantly reminds you that you are.

Thankfully, while Gaster remains as much an anomaly in behavior as he seems to think you are, he can still be relied on for a clear and blunt answer to a difficult topic.

"Frisk and I had a-... misunderstanding," you overhear him saying to her. "And I realized that perhaps giving a human child a war-worthy weapon, as well as encouraging the aggressive use of it, is not necessarily a particularly wise decision."

Well. Blunt it may be, but you suppose, out of context, that's actually kinda vague. Undyne goes away from the conversation looking a little herself like a metaphorical cat.

But, well, there's not a whole lot you can do about it. And besides, it's a nice day out. You should be enjoying it!

And you do. You spend all day playing with your friends in the sun, running around and laughing, and even Gaster joins in for a little while. That's definitely the most intense game of freeze tag you've ever played.

Evening comes, and after watching the sunset, you all head home.

The next morning, you wake up to find your sheets are all sweaty, and you have a lingering sense of dread. But, you can't directly remember any nightmares, and it wasn't enough to wake you up, so that's good.

It being a Sunday, you decide, after eating and getting dressed, to go visit the lab. Yesterday, Gaster said something about getting ready to build the new CORE- apparently, he's been working on some of the smaller parts of the CORE for the last few months, and was testing them out one more time today to ensure comparability before beginning work on the whole thing.