Do You Get It?

Catching Up

The Destroyer

I leave the King with only a gum wrapper in my pocket. I refrain shredding it to pieces. I have gotten nowhere in my search for answers. And now I'm going to go back to Sans and Ink with nothing. NOTHING.

I march through the Core and try not to let my anger get the best of me. The steady growth of emotion threatens to overtake me. But I can't fail at controlling myself too. I have already chalked up enough failures for one day. I fiddle with the wrapper in my pocket, and I can feel the edges of the drawing. I can't deal with that now. That handmade drawing. That child's portrait of a family. A family that I can't even remember.

With my head in the storm clouds, I quickly get out of the Core and Short Cut to the True Lab. I stand in front of the doors. My hand floats right above the handle. I hesitate.

What am I going to tell them? My enemy and his friend. How are they going to tell me that they knew I was wrong to go all the way to King Asgore. They knew that he wouldn't remember anything. But I had to hope. I had to hope that there could be a possibility that he would remember. That he would be able to help us...

That he would be able to help me.

I shove the door open with pure willpower. I can't hide my failures forever. I make my way silently trough the halls. Before I enter the lab where I knew that they would be staying, I wait. I hear my own breath and the silence of the room. Were they in there? My mixed emotions caused me to open the door quickly and clumsily.

There I see Ink and Sans sitting on the floor staring at a weird glowing substance in vials. Papers and machine parts surround them in a passive tornado of science. They both look at me with the same surprised expression. "What is that?" I ask, almost forgetting about my unproductive adventure.

Ink looks at Sans as Sans looks at Ink. I stand there like a third wheel, having no idea what's going on. "It's Determination." Ink says bluntly. Determination isn't a substance you can bottle, it's a feeling. "Seriously?" I ask, wondering if they are telling the truth. They nod. Ink continues to stare at it while Sans continues to stare at me. "How was the trip to Asgore." Filled with self inflicted anger I just pull out the gum wrapper and hand it to him.

I don't wait for a response when I do, instead I sit down in the desk chair next to them. Sans holds the gum wrapper and unfolds it. At first he thought it was a prank or something, but upon further inspection he saw the symbols. He shuffles around the papers on the floor and all I can do was wonder what he was doing. He finds a poorly torn sheet of graph paper and a wooden pencil. I see his eyes bounce back and forth between the page and the wrapper.

And when I catch on to what he's doing I talk to Ink, "How did you figure out the symbols?" He gives me a clipped response of what happened the last few hours. "I found a journal in the hallway, it had some translations in it." That one sentence explanation already proved how much more successful they were compared to me. "I found the symbols and wrote them on a gum wrapper. Then I talked to Asgore and he knew nothing." I say with a voice within hidden nervousness. But seeing their reaction made me wonder if I had even spoken at all.

Ink nodded and Sans just gave a quiet laugh. I don't know if I should be grateful for their passive reaction or not. But I accept anything that doesn't include fighting, verbally or physically. Sans continues to labor over the gum wrapper. It doesn't take him forever to do the phrase, and it doesn't take me long to get excited to find out what it says.

I don't have to ask him for what the symbols translated to, because the words fall out of his mouth.

"THE FALLEN WILL NOT BE FORGOTTEN."