PATCHWORK SOUL - NEW MEDIUM

FIVE-FINGER IMPRINT CHAPTER 13

That night, after everyone else had fallen asleep, Frisk was still up with a lot on her mind. The only downside to having Gaster around now was not having the living room to mope around in. Instead, she curled up between boxes up in the attic with her journal and quietly scribbled in it by the light of a tear in time. She wrote about the new dreams, and the new powers, Gaster's arrival, and about Flora. With all of it happening at once, she was sure there was some connection. Had to be. It was too strange otherwise. Sometimes, just getting it all on the page helped to sort it out.

At the moment, the issue of Flora troubled her the most. Sans's memories of the CORE rupturing were as fractured as her thoughts. What little there was didn't feel like him— it was more like the memory of something he'd seen on TV. Did it erupt? Explode? It had happened in that chamber, as far down as a monster could go, right? But the spire went up through the mountain, and the magma reached far above that. So did something burst outside that chamber, too? How else would Flora have been effected? How old was Flora, anyway? When had she been yanked away?

Frisk tapped her pen on her notebook. Could there be more monsters who were gone? More who'd come back? She hadn't met every monster that lived underground, though. She didn't know if she could ever answer the question. She wrote down to ask Gaster about it.

Her fingers hesitated on the page, red ink dotting heavily in one spot before she pulled it back. Her hand felt stiff writing the word "dad" on the paper. She read it over and over again until it looked like gibberish. "Ask dad". Underlined it. She smiled to herself. He was just downstairs. Real and solid and settling right in.

She went back to writing, though her eyelids were getting heavy. Before she knew it, she was blinking awake, rubbing her eyes at the sound of a hissing whisper.

"Psssst. Pssssssst. Little sister? It's your coolest and tallest brother Papyrus, are you up heeeeere?"

"Mhm. Yeah," she said quietly. She coughed to clear her throat and then stuck her hand up so he could find her past the boxes and the treadmill.

Bright-eyed, he leaned around a pillar of cardboard, then grabbed half of it to set it aside. He sat down on the smooth wooden floor and scooted over, tilting his head. "Are you doing okay? Why are you up here?"

She held out her journal. He took it hesitantly and looked her up and down. She stuck her thumbs up. He grinned and lifted her in his magic, pushing himself over into her spot. He let her down on his leg and held her with one hand as he held the book with the other.

She fell asleep again until he squeezed her gently into a magic-charged hug. She blinked heavily and patted his arm.

"Are you awake enough to talk?" he asked.

"...Yeah." She rubbed her eyes and smiled up at him. "You read the whole thing?"

"Yes. Yes, definitely. Your spelling is getting better. It's just... Nyehhh..." He jokingly squished her head. "There's so much going on in this little space, isn't there!"

"Hah, yeah, I guess so," she said.

"What did you make of that dream in the weird place, with the weird Papyrus?" he said. "He wasn't cooler than me, right? Impossible! Right?"

"Bro, you're the coolest, you already know that." She smiled up at him sleepily. "You're such a goof. Don't worry."

"What?! No! It's just..." He tapped his fingertips together. "I mean. If I were less cool of a brother. I might, um... I might worry that... Maybe these last few days have been kind of rough. And maybe I wasn't as helpful as I could have been when things were happening and a certain little sister was going on weird time adventures. Nyeh. Heh. Heh..."