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After Asriel's attack, everything goes white... and then it all fades to darkness.
Is this what dying feels like?
You can't move. Every time you try to move your body, nothing happens. You can't even twitch a finger. You're falling - or you think you are, you can't open your eyes to check. You can't even hear anything, either, not even the sound of your own heartbeat reminding you you're alive. It's strange, and terrifying. There's a slow kind of numbness creeping up through your bones; it's not from cold, because you can't feel any kind of temperature. It's something else.
You feel your determination start to flicker and fade.
You reach for your save file. You still have a save outside the barrier room - if you can just go back, do the fight over, maybe you can reach out to Asriel before--
Nothing happens. Panic wells up in your stomach, sick and sharp, and then just as quickly it's smothered by the same numb sensation as you feel in your hands and legs. If you can't reach your save then you can't load it and you can't fix things. You - you've always been able to fix things. Everybody's relying on you. With that in mind you focus and try again. You're trying so hard to be determined, to stay strong, but as your mind reaches out - there's nothing there.
You try to reach your save again. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Nothing happens, every single time, like there's a brick wall between yourself and your save. Every time you try, your determination fades a little more, slipping out of your grasp like trying to catch smoke in your fingers. Every time you try, you feel a little more numb.
Seems saving really is impossible.
Everything's fading away. The whole world is ending, you remember a voice telling you - but you can't remember whose voice it was any more. The whole world is ending, and so are you. It would be so easy, you think, to just drift away and let go. You fought so hard for so long; would anybody blame you for just wanting to rest? You don't... You don't have to stay determined, right? You could just... give in.
Someone calls your name. Just as you feel like you - everything you are, everything you were before the mountain, everything you have yet to be or say or do - are about to fade away completely, someone calls your name and takes your hand.
Your eyes flash open wide and it's like you were drowning and coming up for air. You drag in a ragged gasp, choking on your own breath, and look up.
Chara's holding onto your hand. They're stretched out, reaching out as they fall headfirst, the opposite of your own downwards drift into darkness. You can feel their hand holding tight to your own, the palm and fingers crisscrossed with scars and old, long-healed sores. Their crimson eyes are wide, panicked, and they shout your name like it's the only word they know, and then they pull.
You're not fading away any more. Chara pulls on your hand hard enough that the two of you stop falling, and you lift up, up, into the arms they wrap tightly around your skinny shoulders. Their face is pressed into your shoulder and their hands are bunched into fists in the fabric at the back of your sweater, and the sudden return of sensation is overwhelming because - because Chara had never once been able to touch you before, when they'd been just a projection of what remained of their soul, and you thought they would never want to even if they'd had the ability.
But here they are, holding on to you with trembling hands. Your own arms circle their waist and you hold on tight, in case you fall away again. Their own sweater - thinner than yours, layered over a collared shirt - feels soft and reassuringly, impossibly real under your hands. Your cheeks feel damp - right when you had thought they'd left you to die, right when you'd needed them the most, Chara had come back for you. You wonder if they'd ever left.
Chara's hands tremble when they hold your face and whisper your name. Every time they do, every time their cracked, scarred-up lips shape around the word and every time they brush their thumbs over the tops of your cheekbones, you feel a little stronger. A little more real. In Chara's hands you feel like you exist again, and you whisper their name as well. It takes you a moment because it's been so long since you've spoken to anyone. Whether you say it in relief or wonder or some other emotion entirely, you can't be sure.
They press their forehead to yours for a moment before pulling away, letting go of your face and taking up your hand in theirs, like they'd done before.Their gaze turns somewhere far above and you look up, too. Asriel's up there, glowing like some awful beacon, a snarling and twisted mockery of the little boy he'd been. When you look back down at Chara there are tears in their eyes - black ones, welling up and spilling over and leaving fat oily marks down both cheeks, like the blackened sclerae of their eyes are melting and running down their face. You'd thought it unsettling at first, a long time ago, but now you know better. Your thumb runs across the bumps of their knuckles; their hand shakes.
"But maybe," they say quietly, still looking up at Asriel, staring at the six fragile points of light glimmering in his chest, "with what little power you have..."
"You can SAVE something else."