Before the Storm ( Sans x Reader )

7. When the Walls Burn

The days continued without cease.

It was getting harder and harder to differentiate each day from the next, the past from the present and the present from the future. Every day was filled with pain and horrific torture as the scientist conducted wave after wave of experiments, seeming to grow more frantic with whatever end goal he was trying to reach. You knew that the end was near, that the scientist was closer than he had been in a very long time to achieving the sadistic goal he had been laboring to achieve, a goal that was shrouded in secret and mystery that he refused to discuss with neither you nor Sans.

There was no progress in Papyrus' condition. He remained an empty shell that responded not to anything around him, fixated with staring at a concrete wall and would make no make indication that he even sensed your presence whenever you tried to talk to him. Sans' reaction to the whole scenario was what unnerved you the most, the way he had built up walls around his mind and closed himself off to the rest of the world, allowing the emotions that were channelling inside him to remain unchecked, growing stronger and stronger until it would reach such a degree that you were convinced would certainly kill him.

You weren't an expert on how skeletons lived and behaved, but you had been around enough to know that skeletons were not like most monsters when it came to harnessing and controlling their emotions. Emotions were vital when it came to using magic in the Underground, the conductor between the hidden pocket of arcane energy inside your mind to the rest of yourself. Every monster needed it to summon forth their magical abilities and skeletons were no different.

However, for whatever reason, skeletons could not get rid of their thoughts and feelings the way that humans or any other monster could. While some could merely forget about their emotions, the way a bout of sadness or anger could pass like a coming storm, that was not something that skeletons were part of. Unlike everyone else, the emotions stayed there inside their minds, gathered with every other emotion that they had ever felt, mingling and gathering into a pool of energy that would eventually begin to burn them from the inside out.

That was why skeletons had the ability to glow as you called it, a way of channelling all of those suppressed emotions into leaving their corporeal form and dissolving into atoms in the air surrounding them. But something had gone wrong with Sans during one of the scientist's experiments and he had lost the ability to glow, no longer able to release his emotions on his own, once more damned to be a victim of the gathering cloud of energy and emotions that were building up inside him.

You knew that Papyrus had acted as a catalyst for Sans and the two of them had been able to harness their magic into one another so that the two skeletons could remove all of their pent-up emotions and hatred and anger that had built up as a result of the constant torture thrown their way. But with Papyrus gone, Sans found himself exposed and vulnerable with no healthy means of releasing the emotions inside of him. You weren't sure what had happened a few days ago when he had gone through a seizure, the pent up anger and energy inside him reaching to such an extremity that it had nearly killed him. Whatever had occurred that day, you were convinced that it had helped alleviate some of the emotions that were rolling inside the skeleton's mind like a hurricane, helped to remove some of the burden as Papyrus had once did.

But the skeleton had refused contact ever since them, withdrawing himself to a corner of the room to stew in his own anger and self-pity, hating the world and fate for throwing him into such an unfair position, for making him rot inside this dark green tomb whilst the rest of creation walked above his head, unchained and unbounded.

You were pretty sure it was a bad thing that he was putting himself in such a state but you kept your distance from him, partially convinced that he was a ticking time bomb ready to go off should anyone be idiotic enough to provoke him. You were sitting once more in your own corner of the cell, the tips of your fingers tracing the scarred outline of the handprint on your back, feeling the shiny red skin that was a consistent reminder of the dream that had not taken place in the land where most dreams did, full much more of reality and cruelty than a dream usually was.