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[Whoa. They really did forget. Yeah, that's fair. Crazy event, lots of fallout. Sans is pretty sure that Mettaton collapsed in his room at one point.]

[Plus it's been a few days. A lot can happen in a few days.]

yeah i'm fine now.

back to normal.

how about you?

doing okay?

[Chara was there with a knife pressed to his sternum, and then they hesitated and then...it was a few minutes later and Chara was gone. Everything's a bit fuzzy after that.]

[Doing okay?

An innocuous question. Hah. If he could see them now - worn, hand bandaged, sleepless circles hung beneath their eyes, pale and drawn from the dry heaves -

Yeah. They're doing just fine.]

Same as always.

[Not technically a lie.]

[There's a bit of a delay.]

[Something's wrong, isn't it?]

so your brand of okay, then?

[This is becoming a theme. Levels of "okay." The word has stopped having any meaning at this point.]

[He knows what questions he has to ask, how to bring them effortlessly to the edge of saying something they don't want to say with a deftness that's kind of admirable, if it weren't so unnerving. He's good at this.

And they're too tired to fight it.]

Sort of.

You saw what Chara was doing today, right

[Self-explanatory.]

[What Chara was doing today?]

[What they were...?]

[He missed something.]

gathering flowers?

[Narcissuses, he thinks. Some human myth.]

[He missed something.]

[Does he not know? Maybe he doesn't. Maybe they never told him. They're remarkably blasé about people who know that they've attempted this sort of thing. But even still, especially in the wake of what happened between Chara and Sans...

It seems wrong. Disrespectful.]

We had to talk about what happened. It wasn't easy.

[Narcissus.]

[He may or may not have teleported down to the library to look up the myth. Might not hurt to look up the flowers themselves, either. Flowers have symbolism sometimes, right? Plus, well the flower, but if that were the case wouldn't they gather up golden flowers? He told them about that pond specifically because there were no golden or yellow flowers there.]

about asriel, you mean.

are they okay?

are you okay?

[Something happened. He missed something. He's not supposed to miss things.]

About Asriel. About you. About everything.

I don't know. We're getting there, maybe. But they're pretty far from okay.

[They wonder if he noticed the mirror. He must not have. He must've slept for most of the day, and then a bit longer, and the mirrors put themselves together in the span of hours.

He has no idea.]

[It was back to normal by the time he was anything approaching coherent again, with a fresh set of Wingdings. He'd smashed it without even bothering to read it.]

[And, yeah. Not just Asriel. Him as well. "Everything."]

i imagine they would be.

[He can't find the mythology section.]

i remember they stopped. with me, i mean. or they paused. and then you pushed them away. so...thanks for that, too.

[Ah, here it is. Myths. It's...a pretty big section. He's not sure what a "Greek" is or a "Norse" or most of these words.]

did something happen in the woods?

They disappeared for a few days. I was worried. I was happy to see them show up again.

[For a few moments. Then they'd put together all the pieces based on what was visible on the video feed, and what Chara was saying, and what they knew of them. And what happened last time.

Last time. Bookends, almost. And with the Knife too. A fearful symmetry.]

[Either nothing happened, or Frisk's not telling, maybe respecting Chara's privacy. Sans doesn't have it in him to push. But he's still in the library, trying to figure out who Mongols are and if they have myths about guys named for flowers.]

[Maybe the gardening section would be easier.]

yeah.

i'm surprised they went back to that pond.

It's nice there. It has a lot of pretty flowers.

[They puked all over them. Not so nice anymore. Ha-ha.]

Why is that surprising?

because i told them where it was. i figured since i know where to find it, they'd find a better place to go to be alone.

[No one likes to have their best hiding place discovered.]

guess they didn't tell you?

when asriel arrived and they ran off

i told them about the pond cause i figured it's a hidden spot for them to be alone and think but it's also safe.

i even asked them to message me about the purple flowers back there. the hydrangeas i think? give them an excuse to text me without it being, yanno, a thing.

[Without acting like he cared about them, which would have just made them laugh and probably never text him again. And so they could just chat about something innocuous like flowers. A roundabout way of making sure they were safe. Pretty much his entire methodology right there.]

they didn't know what the white flowers were though. i guess they went back and found out.

[Narcissus...]

[He's at the gardening section. Jeez. Surface libraries are big and exhausting and very daunting.]

["Safe."

They almost laugh at that. But that requires energy, and they're...they're quite frankly, exhausted. Drained to the point of collapse.]

Asriel always makes things harder. Whether he's here or he's gone. It always makes things hard. They miss him.

[Don't know how to live without him. Well, they have that in common. Frisk doesn't know how to live without Chara.]

Yeah, they did. Narcissus.

yeah.

so i've noticed.

[He's grabbing gardening books off the shelves, flipping to the index and trying to look up the name. Thanks to Frisk he at least knows how to actually spell it now.]

they said there was a story about the flowers. do you know it?

Yes. I've spent a lot of time in the library. There's lots of stories there, Greek myths and stuff.

[Many of which were morbid enough, interesting enough, dark enough to hold their interest.]

Narcissus was a man who was so beautiful he fell in love with his reflection. He wasted away staring at it, only able to look and always unable to touch it. When at last he died, a beautiful flower grew in his place.

That's the story, anyway. There's lots of them like that. Most of them are sad.

wow. that's pretty morbid.

i guess the moral is don't love yourself too much?

oh i bet that's where the word "narcissist" comes from.

[Funny how that works. He's flipping through more books. Narcissus. Also known as daffodils. Hey, he's actually heard of daffodils. Mostly for the sake of rhyming jokes. What's up, buttercup? What's the story, morning glory? Why don't you chill, daffodil?]

[Cultivars, regions where they grow, whatever a "tepal" is...none of this seems pertinent. He isn't even sure what he's looking for. He doesn't know anything about flowers. But there must be some kind of significance...right? Maybe he's just overthinking things.]

is chara still out there?

It is, yes. There's a story about the word "echo" too.

[The etymology of the word never interested them particularly, though linguistics can be pretty interesting. Chara uses a lot of big words sometimes. And some days Frisk has nothing else to do but read.]

We stayed out there for a while and talked. But we left after a while.

[Broad terms and generalizations. Besides, the place didn't smell too great after they were done with it.]

[Daffodil symbolism. And there's an abridged version of the myth, just a few sentences. Etc etc etc. He really is just reading too much into this, isn't he? Heh. Literally. Digging through the library, looking for answers about some dumb plant that Chara probably...probably just thought looked nice or something. They like flowers.]

[Toxicity. Huh. Lots of plants are poisonous, right?]

you guys back in the mansion?

[Symptoms...jeez, those sound nasty.]

it'd be nice if we could have a break after that last event.

[Death may result if large quantities are consumed.]

[The bulbs and leaves are the most poisonous part of the plant.]

[...]

think we could all use some downtime.

Yes.

[Frisk is, anyway. They're not lingering in that same spot anymore, if that's what he's worried about.]

I think so too. I just don't know how. There's no relief from this.

They're grieving.

wish i had an easy answer for you, kid.

[But let's not jump to conclusions. The pulled all the leaves off the flowers but that's what you do when you...stick flowers in vases, right? People do that. People do that all the time.]

time helps but sometimes it's not enough. grief takes awhile. sometimes there's not enough time.

[Sometimes there's a Reset before you can process everything.]

[He snaps the books closed. Puts them back on the shelf. Teleports back to his room.]

And all the years they spent dead and lingering? Was that enough time?

[How long a time period was that? Frisk...honestly doesn't know, and it's not like Chara's talking. Granted, their perception of time in that stretch might not have been the best.

But that doesn't matter.]

[Said the wrong thing. But really, what else is new? Frisk doesn't need empty platitudes.]

they were conscious that whole time?

[That's horrifying.]

either way. you go back to square one when the world decides to give back someone you lost and then take them away again.

The other human SOULs were when I called out to them.

[They called for help, and somebody came. No one could come if no one could hear, right?]

Yeah. I know. This isn't the first time it's happened. I'm just tired of it happening every time.

oh.

[They were conscious too? They were--]

[The whole time? Some of them had been in those goddamn jars for years. Some of them--]

[Stop.]

i'm sorry, kid.

[What is he supposed to say? It gets easier? You get used to it? That's a horrible thing to say. That's a completely awful thing to get used to. No one should ever get used to losing someone, to losing the same someone over and over. That's--ha. What kind of monster do you have to be to get used to something like that?]