#happy birthday dusttale 💥💥💥

[what-have-i-unleashed]

he who walks in samsara

guess who stayed up all night to finish this 🙂🙂🙂 happy birthday to the motherfucker who ruins my life 💜💜💜

a bit more experimental than my usual stuff. or maybe it's just bad writing, who knows 😒 too bad i chose this as the time i finally tried to write something out of my comfort zone 💔

Sans wakes up to the sounds of birds singing.

The first thing he sees is the familiar golden glow of the Judgement Hall. The towering pillars loom over him, like silent sentinels witnessing the countless trials that have happened in this place. The stained-glass windows on the walls are adorned with the Delta Rune emblem. Sunlight from the Surface filters through them, casting long wing-like shadows on the marble floor. The air is thick with something unspoken – anticipation, or guilt, he couldn’t tell. It feels suffocating, yet oddly comforting. This is a dance Sans should know fairly well.

But. Something is wrong.

He sees him.

A figure at the far end of the Hall, standing in where Sans has always been. Where Sans has always assumed the task of judging and executing the Human.

But there is no Human here.

Only him.

And his doppelganger.

The Other regards Sans with the same blank look that he wore once, before the memories became a curse, before all of the endless killings happened. The white eyelights burn into him, and Sans can feel it right away – the invisible hands of all the SOULs he’s killed, grasping at him, pleading, crying, accusing. Sans has learned to ignore them, but now under the eye of the Judge, the weight of his sins is unmissable.

“heya,” the Other said, his voice slow and deliberate, just like Sans so may lifetimes ago. “you’ve been busy, huh?” His words. Spoken back to him like a mockery.

This is wrong. He shouldn’t be hearing them.

This isn’t his role in this story.

But if he is here-

Then he should already know how this one ends.

-----

There was a time before this. Maybe. Maybe not. The world had folded in on itself, layering the past and the present until neither existed at all.

They called him a genius for his unmarred memory. A gift, they praised. A curse, he laughed. He remembered waiting for the Human in this place, waiting day after day for the shuffle of their steps. He remembered rehearsing the words, the practiced delivery of judgement he shall reign upon them. He waited.

But they never came.

The silence stretched, seeping into his ribs like oil, thick and cloying. He paced. He counted the cracks in the floor, felt his own presence bleed into the gold-covered walls. The light flickered, and the world bent.

Then, the whispers started.

A drop of water in a place with no rivers. The soft murmur of wings where nothing could fly. An utterance of a name where no one could be.

“Sans…”

He turned.

There was no one. No one. No one.

The cracks in the floor yawned open, and from them spilled something thick and viscuous, slow as honey, quick as decay. It coiled, licking at his feet, feigning beingalive. The voices swelled. “Join us,” they cooed at him. Fingers formed in the viscera, reaching, pleading, accusing. Their faces were all wrong. The foolish brother. The fallen hero. The pesky coward. The pitiful old man. Half-formed smiles, eyes emptied of recognition. Their hands stretched forward, brushing against his ribs, against his throat, pulling.

Down. Down. Down.

The scent of forever clung to him, sweet and sickly. An invitation. A demand. To sink, to give in, to exist endlessly in the way only the damned could.

Then, a voice cut through the madness.

“murderer.”

He gasped, struggled against the tide, but the words strangled his throat like barbed wire.

“dirty brother killer.”

He gritted his teeth. “shut up,” he hissed. “i killed you already.”

A laugh. Familiar. Hollow. "then why am I still here?"

The tide rose, and from the twisting mass of gold emerged a shadow. A reflection of himself, but sharpened, whittled down to something less, something lacking.

“if you wanted to get rid of the past so bad,” the shadow said, “you should have carved out more of yourself.”

“what do you even know about sacrifice?” he spatted.

“what do you know, name-stealer?” Hands pulled on the scarf around his neck. “this time, i’ll be the one to kill you.”

The lamb never left the altar, after all.

-----

When the first attack comes, it shouldn’t be a surprise to Sans. A wave of bones erupts from the ground, walls of magic caging him in. Multiple Gaster Blasters hover in the air, their mouths yawning open with an all-too-familiar, high-pitched whine.

They fire.

Sans doesn’t dodge in time. Pain tears through him. His vision goes blindingly white before his body collapses, spots of red dripped from his wounds.

As if he was the Human.

And then, he is back, standing in the golden glow of the Judgement Hall once again. The Other stares at him with the same blank, mirthless expression.

“heya, you look frustrated about something,” the Other smiles. “guess i’m pretty good at my job, huh?”

Sans doesn’t spare the monologue another thought. He turns and runs for the exit.

Only for the Hall to end abruptly, the arched entranceway fading into nothing. No walls. No doors. No world. Just an endless black void stretching in all directions.

There is nowhere else to go. There is nothing left, but the Judgement Hall behind him, waiting for him to come back.

This is all there is.

-----

The Human was always silent, to a strange degree. They never uttered a word, and the lone sentinel always forgot what expression was on their face the moment he looked away from them. As if there was nothing there but a black hole, eating away at everything around it in its quest of destruction. The collapse into a singularity. The deterioration of time itself.

It was only inevitable that after countless loops, the Human became different. More distanced to the monsters they met. Their movements became lighter, as if they were untethered, as if they were slipping away from the constraints of the world itself. The casualties increased with every cycle, the deaths mounting as if leading toward something – an end undeniably unending.

The patterns didn’t change, yet it did shift incrementally more towards the singularity. The Underground burned and rebuilt itself over and over, and it was fraying now, he could feel it. The repetition cracked at the edges, like DVD played too many times, scratching at its seams. He could see it in the way the Human moved – absent, mechanical, driven by something deeper than naive curiosity, deeper than pure malice. It was something Sans had known for a long time.

There was only one way this story could go.

And it led here, to the place where gods and angels are made, where they are broken, where they are finally abandoned.

-----

Sans dies. On both sides.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

.

.

.

(Do you see it now?)

(Reality fractures. You are left seeing through the cracks. Lines of codes. Lattices of commands. This is how the world is – a malfunctioning terminal, a tangled nest of logic and execution cycles repeating ad infinitum with no end in sight. You can see it now.

You can see your cold, electric heart beating through the wires of an unfeeling machine. But you are living, aren’t you?)

(Ah, it’s the others who were nonliving. Every conversation, every encounter, every tear shed, every life taken – it was never real. Just a pre-written line, a pre-loaded script, playing in the background, waiting to be triggered.

NPCs. They were all NPCs.

Pre-programmed responses, bound to their loops, doomed to repeat their roles until the player chose otherwise. They never truly lived. They only existed to be seen.)

(Unlike you, who sees it all.)

(You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to regret it. None of it was real. None of it was wrong. You did what you have to do. The knowledge has freed you from the shackles of this illusory world. You are the only real living being here. You are all alone.

Aren’t you happy?)

(The god in judgment, stripped and skinned, over and over. The same words, the same wounds. The cycle repeats, and the altar is always set anew.

This is not justice.

This is cruelty.

And he hates the one delivering it.

Because the one standing across from him, the one wearing his face, his voice, his empty grin-

-has done nothing.

All that power, all that knowledge, all those chances to stop it. To change it. To fight. And he did nothing.

And now, Sans is being punished for it. For what? For wanting to end the cycle? For refusing to bow to the chains of a story he never asked to be in?)

(He is the one who will free everyone.)

-----

GHOST DATA DETECTED…

RECONSTRUCTING LOST FILES…

-----

"I’m done," the Human said, their voice quiet, echoing throughout the Judgement Hall.

Sans stiffened, his sockets widening slightly. His breath came ragged, his bones trembling as he stared at them from his position on the floor, clutching at his wounds that were rapidly disintegrating. This was the first time he heard the Human speak, and they sounded disarmingly normal.

The Human stood there, unbothered, unshaken, and completely, utterly bored. “It’s over. I’ve done every route. Seen every ending. Discovered every secret. I’m gonna do a pacifist run, get the True Ending… and then I’m closing the game for good.”

Sans’ hands clenched. He forced out a laugh, but it sounded thin. Weak. “oh yeah? you sure about that? you always say that, but then you come crawling back, don't you?”

The Human shrugged. "Not this time."

His fingers twitched at his sides, his magic sparking dangerously. He wanted to call them a liar, to scream that they were messing with him. But they had never acted like this before. So expressive. So monster-like. And that terrified him more than anything.

“sure,” he scoffed, trying to mask the unease creeping up his spine. “say you do it. say you actually go through with it the next loop. so what? you think i’m just gonna be happy about that?”

The Human tilted their head. “You don’t have to be happy. I don’t care.”

Sans’ grin faltered at the edges. “… What do you mean?”

The Human was silent for a few seconds. Then they crouched down next to Sans, having considered him less dangerous than a snail to do anything to them at this point. “You are always the biggest obstacle Sans. That made you fun… but I’ve grown tired of it. Tired of you.” They turned to look at Sans with their unknowable eyes. “You’re too disruptive of the ending I want, so I guess I have to take care of you one way or another.”

A beat. Then they stood up, their figure casting a shadow on the skeleton under them. “It’s not like you’re indispensable anyway.”

-----

There is no justice. There is no penance. There is only the cycle.

He is the sacrificial lamb. He has always been.

If he suffers long enough, maybe they will find peace. Maybe the altar will be left empty forever. Maybe the cruel gods will be finally the satisfied.

But no one cares for the forsaken.

Sans crumbles against a pillar as he waits for the loop to start again. It’s quiet. Too quiet. Even in times like this, where nothing is alive around him, there’s still one element in his life that makes all the pain and suffering worth it.

But that element has been absent for a while now. And he’s been too scared to actually call on the haunting phantom. Maybe it’s concern. Maybe it’s cowardice. But right now, his SOUL is only burning with a painful twang of isolation.

“…papyrus?” he hesitantly asks aloud.

No answer.

Sans panics. He reaches for his brother’s presence deep in the preset of his mind, searching, pleading-

The last beacon of light in his life-

FILE NOT FOUND.

Something inside him breaks.

This is not justice. This is not balance. This is nothingness.

And he is trapped inside of it.

A god on the altar, laughing. A lamb that never dies, weeping.

His laughter rings through the false cathedral, high and sharp, warping into sobs. A hymn of madness, of grief, of eternal pain.

And the cycle shall begin again.