The alarm was going off and Sans groaned as he reached for it. He blearily noted that it wasn’t his morning alarm - it was a quieter one reserved for different purposes. Grumbling, he grabbed his phone, yawning as he started reading.
His yawn broke off as the reports loaded and he woke all the way up.
What the hell is going on? he thought, staggered by what he was seeing.
A few minutes passed as he read before his phone buzzed with a text message.
Alphys: OMG SANS WHAT IS HAPPENING
Sans: i dunno
Alphys: did yuo read the reports????
Sans: yep
Alphys: what is going ON?!!!
Sans: looks like at 8:05 this morning, several hundred timelines came into existence inside of 2 maybe 3 primary layers
Alphys: yeah, but what does that mean?
Sans: i dunno anything u dont know. were looking at the same reports
This was not true. Sans hadn’t told Alphys quite a few things that he knew about the origin of the crack in time that they’d been analyzing for years. Mostly because he didn’t want her to come to any problematic conclusions about the timing, when it came to his injury and Papyrus showing up. He also hadn’t told her about all of the private conclusions and suspicions he’d been building up in the last eight months since the reports started showing looping timelines.
But they were looking at the same reports. So, really, she knew everything he did about this particular event.
Alphys: Sans this is Freaking me out
Sans: relax alphys. this has been going on for months
Alphys: but never THIS much! Why is there so much all at once?!
Sans: i know. its the anomalys birthday and they dont want the party to stop
Alphys: SANS
Sans: look
Sans: i dunno why u think i know anything
Sans: i woke up like five minutes ago
Alphys: Okay. But i don't understand everything. WHat does this all Mean? what's with the gap? It looks like Everything Ends? DOES THAT MEAN THE UNIVERSE IS GOING TO BE DESTROYED BECAUSE I'M NOT OK WITH THAT
Sans: hey dont worry about that either. look how tiny the gap is. well keep an eye on it. if the probability goes up then well worry.
Alphys: u know this stuff better than me. Gimme machines over this any day hahaha. So what are the chances? Please please tell me everything.
Sans: alright alright
Sans: pretty damn confident the universe is safe. honest
Sans: itd take forever to explain but im pretty sure this is implying things got close in a different timeline
Alphys: and couldn’t that happen in this one, too???
Sans: sure but thats always true
Sans: theres nothing in the reports from before about that risk being part of the current timeline
Sans: nothing in these reports about it being part of the current timeline either. really alphys. id be way more worried otherwise
Alphys: So we just barely escaped being completely erased from existence and that’s okay?!?!?!?
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Sans: yep
Alphys: SANS THAT IS NOT OKAY
Sans: its not great but nothin we can do abt it. and it doesnt matter cause the danger is past anyway. it kinda looks like its still possible but almost all of the probability is in the last layer. the chances might even be 0 for this one. it could be just bleedover. the sensors arnt perfect.
Alphys: Oh. YOur right!! It really could be zero! OMG Thank You Sans.
Sans: anytime
Sans: ill look into this. u focus on ur stuff. i got this
Alphys: Okay. You’ll tell me right if you find anything????
Sans: of course
He was lying about telling her things, but the rest of it was true, at least. He didn’t want to upset Alphys, though, and it was generally better to keep things close to the chest.
Besides, while she was one hell of an engineer, she really struggled with anything to do with temporal issues. Space, she had down - she could whip up dimensionally anchored storage with spare parts laying around in her lab - but time, eh, not so much.
Admittedly, he hadn’t exactly given her much of a chance. Hard to get used to dealing with time stuff if you don’t have any guidance. And while he’d made extensive use of her engineering skills to build the spacetime scanning equipment in the first place, and she helped monitor the reports, he didn’t give her anything else to work with. He wouldn’t have included her in the reports, either, if he could have managed it, but naturally, he couldn’t leave her out of getting reports from machines she’d built without her getting suspicious.
And even if the odds had looked bad, he’d have found a way to convince her there wasn’t any danger. No point in worrying her about it when she couldn’t do anything. At least it looked true - kind of terrifying to see that the possibility had come up, that it was a theoretical event that could result from this time traveller’s actions, but at least it honestly didn’t look like a real possibility now.
He felt bad for the last Sans, though - the one who had had to deal with that layer. He would not have been happy, seeing those indications for the current timeline. He really wished he could remember things from other timelines. It bothered him so much, knowing that everything he did was just going to be erased and forgotten.
He wrapped up his conversation with Alphys and laid back down in bed, sighing.
He didn’t really need to watch anything himself. He and Alphys had set up a ton of monitoring systems around the whole of the underground. They had a few AI programs to notify them of specific, predicted events, so if something interesting happened, both he and Alphys would immediately know about it.
It was kinda funny how much Undyne got on his case about being a lazy sentry, when in fact he was the best one in the underground, all from his own bed.
Meant there was no reason to get out of bed, too. Beyond doing the bare minimum to avoid getting fired.
One of the key conclusions that he’d not told Alphys about was that he suspected the anomaly was a person. Partly because every time he’d decided to try to explicitly track things down, he either found absolutely nothing, or something suspiciously coincidental had happened that derailed his plans.
Like he’d caught a time traveller and they’d figured out a way to undo it.
Except there was a flaw in that hypothesis.
Eight months prior, he and Alphys had seen a staggering burst of timelines come into existence; from when they’d just been analyzing the spacetime crack that spanned the entire underground, and probably extending in fractures to the entire world. Thing is, there had been extremely few new timelines since then, by comparison.
Sans was not going to mention to Alphys, or anyone, what was at the center of the crack, or when exactly it appeared. Or why he knew it appeared then. Wouldn’t do them any good anyway, right?
Tens of thousands of timelines, in thousands of layers - it had been far beyond their equipment’s capacity to analyze in any detail. At least there was a ton of data for them to use to refine their sensors. It wasn’t until five months ago that they’d finally started getting estimates of numbers - all they’d known at first was that some huge thing had happened that was screwing up all the readings.
Back then, the sensors weren’t always active. They booted up and took recordings once per week, to allow regular monitoring, without clogging things up with massive amounts of mostly useless data. They’d been studying it for six years - ever since the incident, ever since he and Papyrus were stranded here and Gaster had died - and there hadn’t been any changes. No point in steady readings in that case, and by eight months ago, he’d pretty much given up trying to go home anyway.
Their first report of the anomaly came out only days after Alphys’ determination experiment issues, so she was convinced that it had something to do with that. She was sure it was her fault. And it might’ve been related. Sans and her had both suspected the flower that she’d injected with determination had something to do with it, since flowers don't tend to up and wander off, and especially since they knew that determination had some major spacetime affecting power.
Alphys didn’t know that to nearly the degree Sans did, but still.
They’d redirected power and set the sensors into continuous readings with alarms set up for any changes. They’d worked on building new sensor equipment to figure things out, and had done so continuously over these last months.
But Alphys was, er, distracted by her own challenges, leaving Sans to mostly do it all on his own. She’d build the stuff he thought would help, but it was mostly him figuring out the whole time thing. He helped her with her stuff, as needed, like by being the one to remember to get dog food for the amalgamates - she’d been really absent-minded - but the time stuff had been all him.
Anyway, the problem was, all those timelines came into existence at once, and since then, there’d been basically nothing. In this layer, there’d been only seventeen new timelines formed. So, what, a time traveller had made so many thousands of layers that their equipment still couldn’t get an exact count, and then suddenly mostly stopped using their power?
And the weird, coincidental plan-derailments didn’t line up with the new timelines. So, what, the time traveller had figured out all of his plans in a previous timeline layer, and didn’t need to use time travel anymore to stop him?
If the time traveller knew him that well, and was that opposed to Sans finding anything out… Sans had concluded months ago that he’d have to be really careful. At first, his plan was to be quick to kill them - they clearly had no issues with erasing everyone in any given timeline. Killing them, while maybe excessive, would at least fix things. Though lately he'd given up that line of thinking.
Regardless of what the anomaly had been up to, though, obviously today was different. Something happened this morning, and it probably wasn’t the anomaly’s birthday.
The other weird thing was that all of the other layers seemed attached to a single point eight months ago. There weren't just new timelines - that was reasonably normal, all told, if not to this extent - but they were anchored to a point this morning instead. New layers of timelines, and not just timelines. He didn't understand what it meant.
Nothing he could do about it right now, though. He yawned, made sure his alarm settings were set right, and went back to sleep.
—
Frisk had no idea what to say to Flowey when they met in the Ruins again. So they simply stood there, awkwardly fidgeting, as Flowey complained at them, clearly annoyed, for abandoning their plans. Apparently, when Frisk had reset, he must have decided that they’d just been messing around and hadn’t actually wanted to hurt him.
Frisk didn’t want to tell him the truth about Chara’s insane hostility.
He ended his little complaints with a huff and said he’d just wait for them to stop messing around, then he left.
And then… then there was Toriel…
Somehow, and Frisk didn’t even know how it happened, they found themself crying on Toriel’s shoulder while Toriel rubbed their back and hushed them soothingly. They didn’t deserve the kindness, the love, the care, not when they’d murdered her. Not when they’d murdered everyone.
But it hadn’t happened. The whole point was that it was okay, since it would be undone. They’d promised the first Sans that they’d fix everything. That they wouldn’t lose themself. They could get through this.
They’d get through the Ruins, and everyone would be alive. Everyone. Toriel would be sad, but just for a day. She’d be alive and she would see the dawn, stand there in the golden light, and everything would be good.
Frisk wiped their tears and smiled tentatively at Toriel.
“Everything is going to be okay, little one,” Toriel said softly.
Yes, it will, Frisk thought.