#life is hard when you live on the whims of an eldritch monster beyond the bounds of your comprehension

[orbital-inclination]

what is the relationship like between rem + molt and the other au travelers? who is in their group traveling with them? how do those like ink, error, and core feel about them?

Dust, Killer, Horror, Cross and Blue all eventually join Molt and Rem. By that point, they have a base of operations and divide into smaller groups (2-3) while traveling to avoid drawing attention to themselves.

Ugh, those two? Anomalous pests. Error views Rem and Molt in the same way as he views everything else. As glitches to be terminated. Bugs in the code he needs to hammer out before it all goes to hell. He doesn't ACTIVELY seek them out, but when they cross paths he won't hesitate to try to destroy them along WITH the AU he wants to get rid of. The apple troop avoids him at all costs. Ink places equal value on all creation, and for that reason, he is forced into a position where he feels obligated to respect all "characters" he comes across, even "characters" like Error. Can art destroy itself? Should art destroy itself, if that is the intention of the creator? What do you do when one Artist's art can only be appreciated through the destruction of another Artist's work? Ink doesn't think of it in exactly those terms, bc I don't like being that BLUNT with meta stuff, but that is the gist of his internal conflict. Molt and Rem passively interfere and that is a PROBLEM for Ink, who believes the "narrative" should be left to play out organically without outside interference. But I don't think their relationship is always purely antagonistic. Sometimes Ink will chase Rem and Molt off. Sometimes he won't. Sometimes he's lonely enough to sit down and just... talk to Molt. (i would go on about this more but this post is already too long KJSDFLSD)

I'm not familiar with Core!Frisk enough to say this with confidence, but if their goals are the same in this multiverse, they probably don't like Rem too much.

As for other au travelers in general? Depends on the traveler. Rem regularly commits petty crimes. He trespasses, he steals stuff. He’s not above blackmail. His gang is guilty of breaking and entering. I don’t imagine that kind of reputation will fly with a lot of people.

[jolie-in-the-underground]

Fallout (Q and Grim fic)

I actually wrote this last night in response to that completely tragic mini fic my sister posted over on @skeletonsgrim about Grim’s suicide attempt. Then I just REALLY got the urge to watch Ironman, though, so that’s why you’re only just now getting this 8′D i’m terrible i’m sorry

So uuuuuh enjoy the feels and Q’s reaction? *sweats*

Q reached the end of the internet and lingered at its ever expanding horizon of new content, scanning it all with every bit of processing power he could spare that wasn’t already committed to maintaining his world and other vital operations.

It was, to say the least, a startling amount of tech being bent to a single purpose. Q had long since grown out of the lodge basement, and all these years later now owned entire server farms around the world, one of which he maintained in the basement of his home. His basement that was bigger than most people’s entire house.

“Sans, what on earth are you doing down here?” called a familiar voice as the sound of footsteps on the stairs tripped Q’s sensors and pulled him back into the robotic body in which he spent so much time these days. “It feels like we have heated floors upstairs!”

“sorry, peaches, looking for something,” he responded distractedly, his attention still primarily on the ongoing search.

“Looking for what?” Q’s one-time landlady asked with an incredulous laugh. “The lost treasure of the Sierra Madre?” She grimaced and waved her hand in front of her face as she entered. “Lord, it sure feels like the Sierra in here! Do you have the cooling units going? The whole place is going to go up like a match at this rate!”

A soft huff of laughter escaped Q in spite of himself. “if i didn’t have the units going, only flames would live here now. as for what i’m looking for…” he paused and grimaced, once again hit with the inconvenience that came with having a best friend no one else could see. This was far from the first time he’d had to maneuver around the subject of Grim when talking to someone else. “well, it’s something very important, and we’ll leave it at that.”

The answer earned him a lift of a feminine brow as the woman stepped closer, “That’s… vague.”

“peaches, trust me, if i could explain, i would,” he mused tiredly. The search for Grim was starting to drag at him, but he kept at it. Being what he was, Q’s void plagued doppelganger didn’t carry a phone that could make use of satellites or cell towers, leaving it completely reliant on wifi for any sort of communication. It made getting in touch with him a challenge, to say the least. That, and his habit of teleporting overseas on a whim to fight eldritch horrors from beyond the veil of reality were why Q had finally insisted that Grim start wearing a tracker, just in case. The other monster had eventually agreed, though it had taken a great deal of pestering on the AI’s part.

Q was very persistent when it came to getting what he wanted, though. Grim hadn’t really stood a chance.

Now, though, the tracker wasn’t working, and the only time that ever happened was when Grim took one of his brief, painful trips into the void to see his family. There was always the chance the tracker had been broken, of course, but after what had happened with that piece of shit anonymous message someone had left on his friend’s blog… Q would have bet everything he owned on Grim taking it to heart and…

The AI shifted uncomfortably in place as the servers around him kicked into high gear, sending the temperature shooting up another few degrees. Q had found that the only way he could even begin to keep track of Grim’s movements when he wasn’t wearing a tracker was, oddly enough, via posts on conspiracy blogs, ghost hunter forums, UFO sites… it was ridiculous, really. Still, humans’ inability to see Grim while still being able to see the things he moved or the lives he saved often wound up on these sites, attributed to other phenomena entirely. They’d both had a good laugh together about the skeleton’s official cryptid status, and Q had put together an algorithm that would seek out such mentions that might be attributed to his friend. He’d done it as a joke so he could send the results to Grim whenever a new one popped up, but now…

Now it was his only hope to track where his friend might have disappeared to if his tracker wasn’t working.

A large part of him insisted that it was a foolish endeavor, all data pointed towards one result and logic insisted that Grim had made a trip to the void, not had his tracker damaged. The rest of Q, though, held on tight and insisted that maybe he had. It was better than the alternative.

When the tracker had initially gone offline, the AI had quirked a brow, but not descended into outright panic. After all, he wasn’t Grim’s keeper, if he wanted to pop off into the void for a few minutes, it wasn’t any of his business…even if his friend was generally pretty good at keeping him up to date when he was planning anything like that. But then they’d passed the five minute mark and Q had begun to worry. Then six dragged into seven, into eight… now they were ticking steadily past nine and a half and the monster was frantic.

“This is big, isn’t it?”

Q’s eyes darted to the woman beside him and saw her gazing up at him, brow furrowed with concern for whatever was bothering him. The way her lover’s expression contorted in response only deepened her frown and made her reach out to him on reflex.

“Ouch!” she yelped and snatched her fingers back the moment they came into touch with his overheated exterior.

Before he could even apologize, the tracker alert dinged quietly and Q’s eyes went wide.

Grim was back. He’d cut it down to the second, but he was back.

“i gotta go,” Q said and darted towards the back of the long room where there was a ladder bolted to the wall leading up to a hatch in the ceiling. Around him, the servers continued to hum for a minute, then gradually began to back down and enter their cooling cycle.

“What?” came the startled reaction from behind him. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“i think so,” Q called back as he mounted the first rung and started up hand-over-hand. “i’ll be back in a bit, peaches, don’t wait up.”

“Where are you going?” the woman asked with a blink as she trailed after him down the stacks, long since inured to the AI’s eccentric comings and goings.

“uh-” Q paused and actually looked at the tracker map now, then rolled his eyes hugely and let his head sag forward to hit one of the ladder rungs with a dull clank. “alaska, apparently.” The woman behind him made a startled, almost affronted noise until he twisted where he hung on the ladder and bent to land a kiss on her upturned cheek. “i’ll be back in a few hours, promise.”

She rolled her own eyes now, but turned so her lips caught his now that he wasn’t so overheated as to burn her. “Fine,” she said when they broke contact. “Bring me back some smoked salmon or don’t come home at all, though.”

He laughed and started to climb again. “yes ma’am.”

“The candied kind!” she clarified from the bottom of the ladder as he pushed his way up through the hatch.

“who do you think you’re talking to right now?”

“My husband, the guy that’s abandoning me on date night to make a trip to Alaska to find the lost treasure of Sierra Madre!”

Q had disappeared up through the hatch, but at her shout poked his head back over the opening and grimaced apologetically. “i’m sorry peaches, it-”

Her expression softened when she saw the discomfort in his gaze and she waved him off with a smile, “I know,” she said. “Just hurry up and go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

His wife blew him a kiss and the AI pantomimed catching it, then shot her a wink and said, “see you in your dreams, peaches,” then closed the hatch and stepped up onto the patch of cement he’d had laid in their expansive back yard.

Once at its center, he paused and kicked off his shoes, then rolled his pants up to his knees before stripping off his hoodie and the t-shirt he’d been wearing under it. The shirt he tossed aside, and the hoodie he tied off around his waist before activating his flight array. Panels on his body lifted and shifted as the specially designed engines flared to life and launched him effortlessly into the air.

Yeah, alright, so he might have borrowed the idea from Ironman. So what? It was a good design and he felt cool as hell as he soared up and over the city, then breached the cloud layer to find himself over a sea of gently shifting white illuminated by the rising moon. The monster took a moment to orient himself to the tracker location, then shot off towards the northwest at speeds that would make jet blush.

It didn’t take him long to get where he was going, and the fact that the tracker had moved a bit since coming back online gave the AI some relief on his trip north to find his friend. Unfortunately, that still left him with plenty of time to get worked up.

He was coming in far too hot and fast, Q knew, but when he spotted his friend cresting a hilltop at the base of a mountain, all caution went out the window.

The monster dropped out of the sky like a stone, and only a last second burst from his boosters kept him from hitting hard enough to leave a crater. The close call was, however, enough to char the earth for several feet around, and Q left it to smolder as he marched towards Grim with an expression like a thunderstorm.

His best friend had the good grace to look ashamed of himself, and dropped his gaze from Q’s as he approached. It wasn’t enough to allay the AI’s wrath, however, as he shouted, “nine minutes and fifty-five goddamn seconds, grim!” and jabbed at the air between them with a finger.

“yeah,” was the solemn response as the other monster still refused to meet his eyes.

Q stared him down for a long minute, but when Grim offered no defense he made a sound of irritation and stormed off some distance and paced for a moment before marching right back to demand, “you were really ready to pack it in, weren’t you? This little trip was your last hurrah so you could die on your brother’s fucking doorstep wasn’t it?!”

Pinned under the weight of his friend’s gaze, Grim shifted uncomfortably, but finally managed to say, “i… not on their doorstep. not intentionally.”

He’d known as soon as he got back that he was in for a lecture, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. Q’s ability to cut to the quick of a subject when it suited him had always been able to wrong-foot Grim considering his friend’s usual proclivity for half-truths and teasing, and that was still the case now. The bluntness of it shone a light on the harsh reality of the almost permanent solution the skeleton had sought for his temporary problem, and the disappointment in his voice stung like a lash.

Q pointed wordlessly at Grim, struggling to find the words he wanted, but failing, so his hand tightened into a fist and he turned his back on his friend and walked away again to give himself some space. Mechanical body struggling to keep up with the onslaught of emotions the AI was suffering, Q’s hands began to tremble and he shook them out angrily, then put them to use dragging his hoodie off his waist and pulling it on. He zipped it up and adjusted it with short, sharp movements as he collected himself.

“i’m sorry,” Grim finally managed to say quietly as he approached to stand at Q’s side, eyes on the sprawling view of the forest and distant, glittering city that was laid out before them.

The AI looked at him sharply, eyes narrowed. “that so?” he asked bitterly. “what would ‘sorry’ have done for me or your brothers if you hadn’t come back?’”

Grim’s shoulders slumped further, making him look as though he were ready to fold in on himself. “nothing, i know. I’m just… i’m sorry, q. It was a moment of weakness, and i-”

Q’s eyes flashed and he turned to jab his friend in the shoulder as he hissed, “you don’t get to say sorry yet, you jackass!” Grim flinched, but took it and nodded, though his submission only made his friend angrier. “you don’t get to just lay down and give the fuck up, grim! you don’t get to go out like some goddamn tragic poet on your brothers’ front door step and traumatize them for the rest of their lives watching you die and turn into some horrible fucking monster!”

As though the first jab had opened him up for more, the next turned into a hard shove that sent Grim stumbling back several steps, though he quickly caught his footing and stood his ground when Q advanced on him, fury clear in every line of his body and gesture of his hands.

“and you know what?” the AI continued as he reached out a third time and grabbed Grim by the sweater so he could pull him in and give him hard shake. “my best goddamn friend does not get to leave me behind without so much as a word!” Q’s expression, full of righteous anger a moment before, shifted into one of anguish as he shook Grim again and said, “not even… you couldn’t even do me the kindness of a note, grim.”

Grim met Q’s gaze and he opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came as he stared up at the other monster, helpless in the face of his hurt.

An incoherent sound of pain escaped the AI and he shoved Grim away from him bodily before turning his back on him again, hands fisted tight in the pockets of his hoodie. “you don’t…” he began, struggling to speak before finding the words and shouting them, “you don’t get to just leave us behind!”

“q-” Grim tried again and reached out to his friend, hand coming to a rest on his shoulder, only for him to pull sharply away.

“no! you still- you get to listen, goddammit!” the AI said fiercely as he turned to glare at his friend. “your brothers aren’t here to lecture you, so that leaves me, and you’re gonna fucking listen!” Grim’s eye sockets widened fractionally, and Q took advantage of his silence to speak. “you fucked up in the past, grim. you fucked up bad, and that guilt is something you’re gonna carry with you for the rest of your damn days.” The other monster flinched visibly, but Q pressed on relentlessly. “but that guilt does not entitle you to an early check out, you asshole. not only does it literally help nothing and no one, but…” he faltered, expression becoming pained once more, and this time when he reached out to Grim, it was with a hand that was not only slow and unsteady, but in search of reassurance that his friend was, in fact, really there with him. It landed on the other monster’s shoulder, the fabric of his impossibly black sweater painfully familiar beneath his fingers.

“i’m sorry,” Grim said for the third time, and this time, Q seemed willing to hear him out. “you’re right. me screwing up and feeling bad over it doesn’t entitle me to ending things the easy way. people rely on me and i almost let them… let you down. i’m sorry.”

Q tried to smile, but the result was a confused grimace torn between humor and a soul deep need to cry that his mechanical body could not fulfill. Hand still on his friend’s shoulder, the AI gave Grim a gentle shake as, in an unsteady voice, he said, “you know, for a supposed genius, you’re like… the biggest idiot i’ve ever met, bro.”

The words startled a laugh out of Grim, and unlike his friend, he did begin to cry. “yeah,” he agreed with a trembling smile and an unsteady breath as tears began to spill down his cheeks once more, leaving inky trails across his stark white features. “well, takes one to know one.”

“shut up,” Q groused with a weak laugh that trailed off quickly as he met Grim’s gaze and his expression went solemn. “it’s not… i’m a selfish asshole, grim, i don’t give a shit if you stay because you want to take responsibility for how you messed up in your timeline, or if you wanna stick around because i’m your friend and you like all my sick science toys i let you play with,” they both laughed unsteadily at this before he continued, “i don’t care as long as you stick around. i just…” the monster took a completely unnecessary breath and released it in one long, shuddering rush. “-don’t know what i’d do without you, man,” he admitted weakly as he gave his friend another gentle shake.

“turn into a super villain, probably,” Grim said as he lifted a hand to his face and tried to mask the fresh rush of tears there by pretending to wipe away the ones that still lingered from earlier.

“heh, the wife would never let me,” Q mused and dragged Grim in for a hug. “well,” he amended as he settled his arms around the other monster’s shoulders, “maybe on weekends. she’s kinky like that.”

The shorter skeleton grunted as he was dragged in against his friend’s broad, hard chest, but didn’t complain. Synthetic Q’s body might be, but contact was still contact, and the physical sign of affection was a balm to Grim’s tired, aching soul. He let his forehead drop onto his friend’s shoulder and took a breath of his own. “i have no idea how she puts up with you,” he grumbled with a soft snort.

“me neither,” Q admitted with a chuckle. “probably has something to do with-”

“if you make a dick joke right now, i’m out,” Grim cut in sharply and Q barked a laugh. They stood there like that for a minute, Q’s arms around Grim’s shoulders in a tight embrace that his friend leaned heavily into as he returned it in kind. They were both shaken by the near miss they’d had that day, and after all the tears and shouting, it was only then that the immensity of it all really hit them. Q’s grip on his friend tightened at the thought of what he’d almost lost, and Grim had to fight back a sob at the pain he had inadvertently caused to the people closest to him in pursuit of freedom from his own.

Eventually, Q said, “you’re not alone, grim. we’re here for you, not because we have to be, but because we want to be. just… try not to forget that again.” Grim couldn’t respond, but he nodded against Q’s shoulder, and the other monster sighed. “you’re smearing that emo-ass mascara of yours all over my damn sweater again, aren’t you?” he asked, referring to his friend’s ink-black tears. Grim nodded again, but Q just patted him on the back and gave him a pass on it this time.

When the shorter skeleton finally pushed gently away from his friend, he grimaced and said, “you reek of ozone, man, what the hell?”

“was doin’ mach one out over the ocean,” Q remarked after a moment, “probably from that.” He slung his arm around Grims shoulders and they both started walking together down the hill towards town.

“what? thought you were doing mach three for sure judging by that entrance you made, ironman,” grim drawled.

“nah, didn’t want to lose my pants again,” Q said with a shit-eating grin, and Grim laughed long and loud at the mental image.

((Try not to be too hard on on Q for shouting, guys, Grim is like a brother to him and the fact that he almost lost him so unexpectedly scared the shit out of him. Hope you guys enjoyed! Wrote and post this with my sister, @nighttimepixels permission, of course, and Grim belongs to her! Q, obviously, is mine, heh.))