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You laugh, and keep laughing.
It’s SO funny, you can’t stop.
Tears run down your face.
Backing up for a moment: it was an ordinary day in Waterfall. You’d been talking with Shyren, trying (not for the first time) to help her get a handle on her anxiety long enough to perform a song to someone other than herself. Gruelling work, as always, but at least it’s been providing you with a distraction from the monotony of your own life – and who knows, maybe you’ll be able to reap some genuine happiness from her eventual success? That hope has been enough to keep you coming back, patiently listening to her repetitive angsting, meekly offering what advice and support you can.
(Even if there are times you want to coil a vine around her stupid whinging throat and yell at her that you’re sick of hearing the same boring worries for the hundredth time and that some people have REAL problems and maybe if she could GET OVER HERSELF for long enough to acknowledge them it would not only make her a million times less ANNOYING but would also help achieve her own STUPID AMBITIONS, too).
But anyway. Be that as it may.
You’d gotten done talking to Shyren, and were on your way back to Snowdin when you heard the smallest snatch of a voice that made all the non-existent hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. The words were impossible to make out over the rushing water, but the vague shape of the voice was all you needed to identify its owner. You could never forget that voice. Not in a million resets.
You looked around frantically, trying to lock onto the sound even as it faded. You thought it came from the right, and there didn’t seem to be anything in that direction but the cave wall. For a moment you wondered if you’d simply been hearing things… but then your eyes caught sight of a crevice in the wall, so well-concealed by shadows and the stone’s natural colour variations that you never would have noticed it if you hadn’t been looking.
You surveyed the crevice briefly. Looking up, you saw that it started as a hairline fracture about six feet from the floor, and got wider as it went down. You doubted you could have fit through when you still had your body, but in your new form it looked like it should be a piece of cake. You burrowed forward without delay, leaving a trench of churned-up mud in your wake, desperate to find the source of that voice...
...And wound up here, in a small, circular room, face-to-face with a single echo flower.
You stood still for a moment, disbelieving. It seemed impossible, and yet it made perfect sense. Your camcorder was one-of-a-kind; there’s only one other thing in the Underground that could have preserved Chara’s voice all this time. Nonetheless, you were so astounded that it took you several seconds to gather the wherewithal to extend a vine and nudge the flower, prompting it to speak again:
“Hi, Asriel! It’s me, Chara.”
And so you laugh. It’s funny – hilarious, even. This is an absolutely textbook echo flower prank, and you just fell for it one hundred and ten percent. Dunked on from a hundred years in the past; owned from beyond the grave. Golly, Chara would be so proud.
You know when they must have made this. The memory takes a moment to dredge up, but it fits perfectly once you do. It was part of a game Chara made up: you each walked through Waterfall and spoke to seven different echo flowers, then went looking for the other’s messages. Chara had found all of yours by the end of the morning, but after searching right through until dinnertime you’d still only found six. No amount of pressure from you had persuaded Chara to reveal their last message’s location. You’d pleaded, pressured, bargained, tried every strategy you knew for getting your way… and still they never yielded. In the end, long after you’d both forgotten the game, they’d gone to their grave still carrying the secret of the final flower’s location. But here, at last, you’ve found it.
You use a vine to flick the tears away from your eyes, and look back at the crack in the wall that you slipped through. How’d they even get in here? They must have really had to squeeze; and those rocks look pretty jagged. You guess they were just that determined to win – and you know now, better than you did then, just how much pain they were willing to go through to achieve their goals. You could never hope to stand against them in that regard.
But hey! You can content yourself with second place. You turn back to the flower and give it another poke, listening out for Chara’s message. But instead of speaking with your friend’s voice, the flower laughs at you – a long, high-pitched cackle giving way to piteous sobs that belie the complete lack of feeling in the one who produced them.
You recoil in disgust. It sounds deranged – frightening, almost. And as the laughter fades, a yawning pit opens up in your phantom stomach. Chara’s voice is gone. The last message they left, just for you, has been erased and overwritten by your stupid ugly laughter. You feel a sensation like a tangle of thorns in your throat, hot tears squeezing their way out of your eyes. All the symptoms of misery save for the actual emotion. You messed up, and their voice is gone, and it’s too late to bring it back...
Wait! What are you thinking? The message isn’t gone! You can go back and hear it again, no problem. You open your menu and hesitate for just a moment, but… Shyren be damned. Her musical career is a dead end anyway.
RESET.
You appear in the garden in New Home, and waste no time in burrowing into the ground and disappearing; it’s been many resets since you last bothered talking to Asgore here. You hurry through Hotland, paying no heed to the curious glances of passers-by, and are back in Waterfall within an hour. You return to the cave where you first heard Chara’s voice and, after a frightening moment where you’re certain you’ve lost your way, manage to relocate that crack in the wall and reenter the room with the lone echo flower.
You extend a tentative vine and touch the flower’s petals – more carefully, this time, as though you might break the voice inside if you handle it too roughly.
The flower speaks once more.
“Hi, Asriel! It’s me, Chara.”
Your breath catches, and even though you were prepared this time you still have to fight back a laugh. You tap the flower again and again, replaying Chara’s message until every little fraction of it is embedded in your memory. They sound cheerful, with just the barest hint of a laugh in their voice; you can imagine them giggling after making the recording, thinking about how long you’d spend looking for it, anticipating your triumph when you eventually found it. The last message they left for you.
...The last message. Now that you’ve heard it, there’s nothing left. It’s a sad thought, in that detached, abstract way that you experience all your sadness now. It’s almost like Chara just died again. Kinda poetic, really. You nudge the flower to hear it speak one last time, and then turn and burrow out of the chamber. This has proved to be an interesting diversion, but there’s nothing to be gained from lingering further.
* * *
You go back, of course. After a day spent wandering the over-familiar paths of the Underground, idly musing on what to do with this new timeline, and a night spent in shallow, fitful sleep below a flowerbed in New Home, you still can’t think of anywhere to go but the chamber of the lone echo flower. Now that you know it’s here, it seems wrong to just leave it without doing… something.
But what is there to do? There’s nothing more to hear from the flower, and there’s no meaningful way to act on its presence. You suppose you could tell Asgore or Toriel about it, but you know they’ll just get all emotional, and then you’ll be forced to pretend to care about that to avoid weirding them out. And they’ll forget when you next reset anyway. So, like, why bother? It’s all pointless! You should just leave, and forget this place exists!
And yet, here you are.
It feels kind of morbid, coming back here on purpose. Why are you so drawn to a creepy, dark room with a recording of a dead kid’s voice? But… visiting graves is a thing with humans, right? And you know monsters keep the dust of friends who have passed. So maybe this is like that. A morbid thing that you do anyway, because remembering is more important than not being weird.
This isn’t Chara’s grave, of course – that’s back in the Ruins. If you wanted to pay your respects in a normal way, you’d go hang out there. But you’ve tried that before, and it just doesn’t feel right. Maybe it’s the way the whole chamber is bathed in bright sunlight that you know would have stung their eyes horribly. Maybe it’s because of the carpet of golden flowers that everyone thinks they adored, even though you’re pretty sure that was only ever an excuse they provided for you to cross the barrier. Maybe it’s the fact that you always have to keep an eye out for Toriel, meaning you can never devote your full attention to mourning. Whatever the reason, you can’t bear to stay there.
This cave, on the other hand, is perfect. They were a fan of dark, eerie places – they would have totally vibed with being buried in one, to borrow their turn of phrase. And the concealment of the rock wall, paired with the sound of rushing water outside, ensures you can stay here as long as you want without being overheard or interrupted.
So, here you are. You tap the flower once again, and once again it speaks.
“Hi, Asriel! It’s me, Chara.”
You feel like you should speak, too. Pay your respects, or wish them well in the next life, or something. They’re talking to you through the flower, after all; it’s only polite to answer. You can always reset if you want to hear their voice again. But what to say?
You start simple, with a tentative “Hi, Chara.” The flower’s petals curl inwards slightly, catching hold of your words.
You clear your throat. “Hi, Chara. It’s… it’s good to hear your voice again. It’s not exactly happy, but… I dunno. It makes me feel calm, I guess?”
The flower quivers slightly, and you continue, emboldened by the passive audience.
“I guess I should catch you up. After I… after we died, and after my body turned into dust, I ended up in this flower. I don’t remember anything that happened until the new royal scientist – this Alphys lady – injected me with determination. Man, I should probably explain about the determination experiments, haha…
“So basically, us dying really messed Mom and Dad up. Dad vowed to kill any more humans who came down here, and Mom didn’t like that, so she left and went back to the Ruins. She tried to take care of a bunch more humans who fell down there, but eventually they all left, and Dad…” You hesitate for a second, but then continue. “Dad killed them. He has six human souls now. He won’t show them to me, though. If there’s a way to get him to, I haven’t found it.
“So, the human souls… the royal scientist found out there’s this stuff called determination in them – it’s what makes them so powerful. She injected some into me, into this flower, to see what it would do to a non-monster host. Turns out, it brought me back! And it even gave me the power to turn back time, and come back after dying. It’s like a video game, almost.
“But… I haven’t really felt anything since I came back. I lost my soul when I died, so I don’t feel compassion, or joy, or sadness.Everything kinda just feels the same as everything else, if that makes sense.
“Heh… it’s weird. I haven’t actually told anyone about this. Not even Mom and Dad. They don’t even know who I am in this timeline...” You smile wryly. “Then again, you were always the one person I could share everything with, weren’t you, Chara?”
You pause for a moment. The flower, having absorbed your words, is still once again. There’s no sound in the chamber save for the ever-present rush of the water outside.
“It’s weird,” you say. “I feel like I’m talking to you, Chara, even though you’re dead. Even though I know you’re just a recording. It’s easy to pretend. Easier than I thought it would be. Maybe I’m just crazy. Hah…”
You furrow your brow and look up at the dimly glowing crystals set in the ceiling. “But I’m being an idiot,” you growl. “You’re not here. It’s just me pretending. Pretending I didn’t screw everything up. Pretending I didn’t get you killed.”
You turn your head down again, and when you next speak it comes out as a whimper. “I’m… I’m sorry, Chara. I messed up your plan, and you died because of it. You died, but I’m still here. I wish it had been the other way round. I would have died for you, Chara, I promise. I just… I couldn’t kill for you, I guess. I’m…”
The tears are back, hot and stinging in the corners of your eyes. You wipe them away with a dismissive vine.
“I’m sorry, Chara,” you finish. “I really am.”
You take a moment, try to swallow the lump in your throat. Then you look up, tears still blurring your eyes, and tap the echo flower again.
“I’m sorry, Chara,” it says in an unbearably whiny voice. “I really am.”
You snort. Somehow you have a hard time believing it.
* * *
You keep going back. You scold yourself between visits, telling yourself that this useless moping gets you nowhere, that you ought to get over yourself. Every time you overwrite the flower, you insist this is the last time. And yet it never is. Barely a reset passes where you don’t pay it a visit to mumble some vague lamentations about the plan’s failure, Chara’s death, or your own miserable existence. The flower has Chara’s voice and, like Chara, it becomes your confidant – the keeper of the secrets, the listening ear for the fears you dare not share with anyone else. You tell it about the pain of human bullets, the crack of gunfire in your ears, the sensation of your limbs crumbling to dust before your eyes. You tell it about the gnawing black hole of apathy that threatens to swallow you from the inside in every waking moment; about the dwindling half-life decay of your emotions; about your cold disdain for the feelings of others than only seems to grow with each reset. You whisper your secrets to it: your fear of living forever without love; your equal terror at the prospect of ceasing to exist; your desperate desire to get your vines on the human souls at long last.
And when you finally slip over the brink, it becomes the witness to your first murder confession.
“Hi, Asriel! It’s me, Chara.”
“Hi Chara. I...” Your voice quavers. “I killed someone today.”
The flower’s petals curl inward yet again, swallowing up your statement. You clear your throat and continue.
“One of the Froggits in the ruins. I followed it, waited until it was alone, and then just… hit it. It was easy.”
“I didn’t even feel bad,” you say, hysteria creeping into your voice. “I didn’t feel ANYTHING. I know my emotions aren’t working, but I should at least still feel bad about killing people, shouldn’t I?”
A drop of water falls from the cave roof and lands on the flower. “...But I should at least still feel bad about killing people, shouldn’t I?” it asks. You flinch at the sound of your own voice.
“I know it’s not forever,” you add hurriedly. “I’m gonna go back, bring it back to life. No-one will ever know what I did. But still… it should have felt worse!”
Your voice echoes in the cramped space, reflected back at you even before the flower has finished absorbing it. You narrow your eyes at its silent, listening bloom, and raise your voice further.
“Why couldn’t I do it back then?” you demand. “Back when killing would have actually done anyone any GOOD? I could have finished what you started, Chara. I could have saved EVERYONE! But I was stupid and weak, and now it’s too late, and there’s nobody I can kill to make it right, even though killing is easy...”
You’re crying yet again – sharp thorns in your throat, liquid fire in your eyes. But inside you just feel empty, and worn-out, and… exactly like you did before. Killing the Froggit hasn’t changed anything. Nor has confessing your crime. The only thing that’s changed is that you now know how little any of this affects you.
And even though you can rewind time, there’s no undoing that revelation.
* * *
You unravel quickly after that. Having hurriedly undone your first murder, you allow the aftermath of your next one play out in full. You even attend the funeral, watching from the shadows, listening to the family wonder how such a thing could have happened. You follow the royal guard’s investigation until, about a month into the timeline, they’re forced to throw in the towel. And still, through all of that, you feel nothing. Not remorse, not anxiety, not even any relief at escaping undetected.
So you go bigger. You kill people you “care” about. New acquaintances like Shyren and Papyrus at first, and then bigger targets: the royal scientist, the head guard, the robot entertainer. Eventually you kill the king and queen, revealing your identity at the last moment just to see how they react. And though the results of your experiments are interesting, and sometimes even surprising, none of them ever yield an emotional response from the chasm that was once your soul.
It’s during this series of timelines that you learn the truth about Sans. He’s the only one who comes close to comprehending the extent of your power, and the only one who poses a significant threat to you even after several battles. But you don’t altogether hate him for that. You make a game of his hypervigilance, seeing how high a bodycount you can rack up before he hunts you down, trying to break your high score across multiple timelines. He gets to you quickest on the occasions that you kill his brother, which you suppose makes sense… but you still have to laugh at his exaggerated devotion to the skeleton that everyone else acknowledges to be a mere mediocrity.
Throughout all of this, the echo flower is your one constant companion. It hears the details of each new killing spree, of the monster population’s varied reactions, and of your own unaffected emotions. And throughout it all, it listens patiently, never speaking except to repeat your own words back to you, its pallid blue heart like a watchful eye, trained on you in silent judgement.
“I’m so bored, Chara,” you wail at it after yet another showdown with Sans sends you back to your save point. “I’ve tried everything! I’ve hurt everyone, and helped everyone. There’s nothing left to do!”
“Why am I still here?” you demand. “What is there left for me to do? Am I in hell, Chara? Is the whole universe laughing at me?”
You lash out in frustration and your vine connects with the flower. It bends backwards and yells, “Is the whole universe laughing at me?”
“You’re not even real!” you shout at it. “You’re just like everyone else! An empty shell that repeats the exact same lines over and over, and never changes! Useless! Useless!”
You strike the flower again. “Useless!” it cries. “Useless!”
You can’t stand it. You wrap a vine tight around the flower’s base and rip it out of the ground, listening as its voice sinks into fragmented groaning before falling silent altogether. You put the stem between your teeth and bite it in two. Pluck each petal off one by one and scatter them around the room. Claw at the mud with your thorns, scraping the roots from the ground and flinging them about with wild abandon. You hate the flower. You hate it! You hate Chara, you hate the Underground, you hate the world, you hate yourself. You hate the whole miserable repetitive meaningless universe.
Once the flower has been reduced to glowing blue shreds, you burrow into the mud and hurry to Hotland as fast as your ugly little stem will carry you. Standing on an outcrop of orange stone, you look down into the roiling magma for only a moment before flinging yourself over the edge.
You wake up in the garden.
* * *
You don’t visit the echo flower again after that. You don’t do much of anything, in fact. Your timelines start to run longer, and you start to spend bigger and bigger proportions of them sitting alone in remote corners of the kingdom doing nothing. Your efforts to busy yourself with projects both sadistic and benevolent become increasingly cursory – you’re no longer able to delude yourself into thinking there might be any kind of escape from your crushing emptiness. The human souls are your only hope in that regard, and it’s clear to you at this point that they will be forever out of your reach.
In spite of everything, Chara’s grave becomes one of your most frequent haunts – their real grave, in the Ruins. You still don’t exactly like it, but there’s worse places to hang out. You feel ever-so-slightly less lonely surrounded by other golden flowers, and you can at least glean some distraction from looking up at the chink in the rock and imagining the lives of the humans on the surface. And, most importantly, you’re free from the echo flower’s judgement. There’s nothing here to speak your words back to you, remind you of what you’ve become. Here, perhaps, you could finally fade away, and end your existence in peace.
Or so you think until, on a bright August morning, you’re jolted rudely out of sleep when a human crash-lands on the flowerbed about an inch from your face.
The rest, as they say, is history.
* * *
So here you are, at the end of the story. After all the battles and tears and torments and miracles. After hours and hours of Frisk walking all the way back through the Underground, finally making it to the very first room and finding you there. After you finally persuaded them to go and take their first steps outside with their friends (“Don’t you have anything better to do?”). After you watched them take your mother’s hand and walk down the mountain path and out of sight.
After all of that, you quietly return to the chamber in Waterfall, and the one echo flower that still holds Chara’s message.
You tap it, and listen to their voice again. It’s a good thing you stopped overwriting it when you did – the power to go back no longer lies with you. The voice in the flower is much more fragile now, as easily broken as the silence that surrounds it. You have to be careful in its presence, or it’ll be gone forever. If you want to say anything to it, you’ll have to make darn sure it’s worth erasing your best friend’s voice for.
Chara. You still miss them, even after all this time. You’re no longer naive enough to ignore all the ways they hurt you, but nor are you too proud to admit that you love them anyway. It’s not like you were faultless, either – even before you lost your soul, you harboured the seeds of the monster you’d eventually become. In the end you were both just kids, trying to do the best for each other and the world the only way you knew how. Neither of you deserved what happened.
All the same, you don’t regret your choice not to attack the humans who killed you. You regret basically every decision you made that led up to that point, but you’ve done enough killing to know the misery it breeds. You’re glad not to have the blood of a village of humans on your conscience as well as the dust of all the monsters you’ve slaughtered.
But all this contemplation brings you no closer to deciding what to do about the echo flower. Overwriting it for good would remove the temptation to keep coming back – you can imagine yourself wasting away in this cave otherwise, listening to it loop forever, and you don’t want that to be your fate. But some rebellious, sentimental corner of your being still insists that wiping out this record of Chara’s life would be an insult to their memory. And is it really your call to make? Don’t Asgore and Toriel deserve to know that this flower exists, even if the message was meant for you? But you can’t be the one to tell them. For all your character development, you’re still not ready for the conversations that would doubtless provoke.
You turn for the exit of the cave, waiting until you’re safely out of earshot of the flower before letting out a heavy sigh. So much has changed, but you still have no idea what to do with yourself. Will you sink into the same emotional torpor you inhabited before Frisk’s arrival? If so, will the fresh potential of life on the surface do anything to relieve your boredom? It’s too soon to tell.
But maybe you don’t need answers just yet. Maybe you can make today a fresh start, take things as they come, and leave the big decisions for later. Staying underground, or venturing to the surface. Preserving the echo flower, or erasing it. Seeking out your old family, or staying isolated. You may not be able to control time like you used to, but your choices aren’t going to vanish if you don’t make them right away.
So you return to New Home, burrow through the throne room, and stand on the ledge just outside the mountain’s exit. You watch the sun as it sets behind the human village, just as it did on your first visit one hundred years ago. Deep in the caves of Waterfall the echo flower remains, cradling your departed friend’s last message… for now, if not forever.
And here, as evening turns to dusk and then to starry night, you feel something a bit like peace.