Rising Storm [ Ink!Sans x Reader ]

12. Talk Some Sense

"Come on, it's time to wake up!"

You grumbled to yourself as light flooded your vision. For a moment you had the overwhelming sense that you were some place that you did not belong but the feeling dispelled as you saw your brother standing by the foot of your bed. "You couldn't give me five more minutes?" you groaned, shoving on your army jacket as you stood up, rubbing the sleep from your eyes. It felt like you hadn't slept in ages.

"They're doing another drill today," your brother explained, grabbing you by the hand and leading you outside. "I let you sleep past morning breakfast so I brought the food up to your room." He gestured to the cold pile of grits on your nightstand. "But General Lee wants to meet in an hour with the rest of the squadron; he thinks that the monster king is going to launch another attack on New York City."

"Again?" You subconsciously traced a circular scar on your arm from where a bullet had struck you in a battle years ago. The war between monsters and humans had been going on longer than anyone could remember. At first it had been all peaches and cream when the underground civilisation had crept their way up from underneath the Earth. There were talks of peace and even integrated schools with monsters and humans sitting side by side as equals. But when the mangled body of their human ambassador Frisk was found mangled and torn in a dumpster, there was outrage from both sides.

The humans had pointed towards the monsters as the killers. Wretched in grief, the monsters had thrown insults towards the humans, blaming them for the murder to incite violence between the two races. And just like that, the lines were drawn and the first bullet was thrown and ever since then, the planet was purged in a desperate power struggle to claim rightful dominion over the Earth. The truth was, though no one wished to admit it, that Frisk's killer had been a human, most likely belonging to some of the anti-monster groups across the world that were looking to provoke violence between monsters and humans.

But no one knew and no one cared. The war had become more personal as the years went by. Whole countries had been eradicated and evacuated from the violence. The body count was enormous and your parents were among the dead, survived only by you and your brother who both lived in a military camp. He had been too young to join the army so you had volunteered yourself. You never wanted to kill, but it was the only way of securing a safe place for you and him to avoid the hell that waited outside. It seemed that even if someone did win this war, they would win control of a planet that was barely worth living on, the air poisoned with smoke, ground drenched in blood and radioactive fallout from bombs dropped.

But somehow, even though you had lived through this your entire life, these memories felt false, lies implanted into your mind. There were times where you found yourself spacing out, mind lost, trying to remember something important that it could not reach.

"Look, I drew you something!" Your brother ran to his cot and pulled out a drawing, holding it up proudly to you as you attempted to eat the grits that chipped your teeth with every bite.

"That looks amazing," you lied, looking at the scribbles on the sheet of paper wondering what it could possibly mean. Maybe it was your brother's attempt at abstract art.

"I'm going to be a painter when I grow up!" Your brother declared, happily taking back his masterpiece and taping it up to the wall beside his bed. You couldn't help but smile at his innocence, a quality that was stripped from most after the first bombs had fallen and engulfed the world in endless flame. Most likely when your brother came of age he would be compelled into military service. 'Luxury' jobs such as painters and writers were things of a dead era where people could be whatever they wanted. Nowadays, it was each according to his need according to his abilities kind of world.