Chapter Text
A child wearing a tattered cowboy outfit. His eyes are cast in a deep shadow.
He draws his weapon. Death in a steel barrel, a quarter-inch wide. How many died for her negligence and naive hope in him? There is dust on the cuffs of his pants, gravestone-white.
She is the only one left to stand in the breach. He must not reach the souls in New Home.
He’s saying something, but it’s lost to her. She raises death in a glass cylinder, tipped with a needle. She is the only one who can do this.
Martlet jackknifes up in bed, an arm lunging for her syringe. Her syringe? She is still on the rooftop. Where is her armor? Why is she so small and frail? Where is the human, where will the next shot hit her, where is the syringe!?
There is no syringe in her grip or on her person. A heaving breath in. The tang of ozone from the Core is not here. The air is cold, not hot. It smells like half-finished carpentry and, underneath that, the subtle scent of the pine forest outside. This is Snowdin. She is home, in Lower Snowdin, in bed.
Her heart is still hammering. A nightmare? Obviously it was a nightmare, just a nightmare, but… the feeling of the syringe in her hand refuses to fade. Why dream of a place like that? Why dream of a human?
It’s not the first dream of a human Martlet has had, but they tend towards the nondescript. Near-formless things, more of a force than a person.
It had felt so real. She can recall the pain of being shot. The dread of her armor shattering. Can she? She’s never been shot at. She's a royal guard, but not such an elite as to have a set of armor.
A shuddering breath. This is silly. This is silly! Getting worked up over a nightmare… she’s a royal guard, for goodness sake. Take a deep breath and stop shivering. When did she start shivering? Around the same time she brought her knees up to rest her forehead against, she thinks.
This is pathetic. It’s time to get up and shake it off.
Martlet drops her feet back to the floor as she lets her head loll back. Wooden rafters and wooden beams. Snowdin. One of the beams is splintery and wider on one end. Her work, not her mentor’s. It had been too embarrassing to ask him to fix it, but she thinks he saw it anyway. A moment to gather herself, and then Martlet pushes herself to her feet. She aches all over from how tense she had been. That must have been a long nightmare.
She could really go for a splash of cold water on her face right about now. Martlet takes only one step before vertigo seizes her, like hitting an air pocket mid-flight. She wobbles, scrabbles for a bedpost, and misses it by a mile. Martlet pitches over completely and lands hard against the side of her bed.
“...What is wrong with m-!”
Memories of a perfect body. Long legs and long talons, razor sharp. A wingspan that could carry her anywhere. The mental image passes, becomes foggy and out of reach in an instant, but the feeling of that body lingers. Martlet feels like her limbs have shriveled to half their size. Martlet feels like half of what she ought to be. Memories of a perfect body? That never happened, though she had daydreamed once or twice about being the heroic royal guard that saves the day with her secret weapon. A hero, Martlet? Hilarious.
Suddenly, she feels deeply tired. Dread fills her at the idea of going to work today. What time is it? Martlet glances at her cuckoo clock. It was handmade: her mentor had handled the mechanisms, she had made the wooden shell. Looking at it hurts. She wants him back, but he’s gone.
“...I’m late.” It’s hard to care. The job’s not hard and making puzzles is fun, but even with steady work, she feels idle. If she quits, her folks will be disappointed and she’ll be disappointed in herself. Deep breaths. Gird yourself. Be a responsible adult.
Boots on. Tanktop on. Her handbook and basic carpentry tools go into her inventory. Martlet has the door to her bedroom half-closed behind her when she thinks of it. The syringe.
There’s no reason to risk having the needle with her. It’s safer and she’s safer with it stashed in her bedside drawer, hidden in a mess of blue feathers. She’s still shaken from that stupid nightmare. As if today of all days she’ll meet a human. Martlet scowls. She had gone for the syringe as soon as she’d jerked awake. Where had that instinct even come from? Stupid.
But it had felt so real. She still feels the phantom sensation of a syringe in her hand, of the serum in her body. That’s… not normal. She’s going to be late.
Feeling half-insane, she slams her front door behind her and takes flight, the syringe in her side pocket with its needle capped.
The first motions are rote. Clover’s body had known them well and now his mind does too. Rise from the bed of flowers, meet Toriel, complete puzzles, and on and on. Fall into Flowey’s trap. Meet his “best friend” once again. The simple, painted-on eyes and smile are no longer disarming. Countless attempts at remaining with Toriel, living simply and happily, rendered null.
Clover recalls no attacks or even cruel remarks from Flowey, not even with so many timelines passed, but he knows the little yellow flower wants something ravenously. He believes he can manipulate Clover to get it for him. Clover does not attack. No use in playing his cards too early, and in a fight he has eternity to lose.
So he goes through the Dark Ruins a second time. He meets monsters and they attack. Clover levels his toy gun and the intent to harm is enormous. How dare they try to kill a child? Did they have a hand in killing the other five? Did they help wear them down so another monster, deeper in this wretched cave, could murder them? It’s too much and too soon after having 19 LV. He almost empties the whole cylinder of the toy six-shooter out of habit, but the monster nearly dies after one pull of the trigger.
It would be so easy, but he made a promise. Clover stays his hand.
“Please let this day be normal. Please let this day be normal.” Martlet has been muttering the phrase like a prayer for a few minutes now. She clocked in and now it’s time to check her puzzles and, if time permits, work on new ones. Yes, that is what she should be doing: having a normal day and being a normal person. But it seems like half of her has decided that she needs to fly off and check the entrance to Home. The entrance that has been closed for as long as anyone can remember. The one that a human maybe, just maybe, could appear from. All the other humans fell in that place, or so it’s said.
“Please let this day be normal. Please just be normal.” She’s halfway there already, Honeydew fading into the distance behind her, and Martlet already feels like this is a total capitulation to abject insanity. And that’s if the human isn’t there. If he is, then it’s the world that’s crazy, not her, and she would prefer to live in a world that makes sense.
She should just turn around. The cavern walls split Home into its own sub-cavern within the Underground, accessible only by a handful of doors, and one such door is almost in sight now. She can still turn around and have a normal day. Gosh, she could just call in sick and it would even be true, and whatever is happening to her is just insane enough that Undyne might believe her, and then she could brew a hot mug of tea, and—
—and there he is.
The hole in Martlet’s head, opened when she screamed awake from that nightmare or perhaps earlier than that, yawns wider and fissures at the edges, bleeding black memory. Falling, armor broken. Death in a steel barrel and death in a syringe, serum burning like frostbite in her body and in her soul. Falling falling falling apart and still fighting, melting, dripping on that rooftop, in Hotland, but still winning, killing, that human. Clover.
Blackness creeps into her vision from the edges, leaving her staring down a dark tunnel. Her wings feel heavy as two sheets of lead. When did the ground get so close?
“I’m sorry, again, for attacking you. I really thought you were… someone else.”
Clover nods and tries not to think too deeply about who this “someone else” is that Dalv would have attacked, lest he get very, very angry. He had promised. He even refrained from hurting him; Dalv seemed to be suffering from paranoid delusions and the insanity defense could apply.
“Um… I think… I think I’m going to finally move out of the Ruins and… get out of my shell. I’m going to say goodbye to everyone and, um, pack my things and… thank you. For helping me, even though I…”
“Don’t mope.”
“...Haha. Yeah, you’re right. Thank you. Again.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Dalv smiles and gives a final tug at the boards blocking the entrance to Lower Snowdin. The board tears free and clatters to the floor. “There you go. Stay safe out there, okay?”
“...I’ll try,” Clover says, stepping out, and the door clicks shut behind him. Clover breathes deeply and checks again: 1 LV. Sometimes he still feels the… distance. Far, far away and so high up. It would be so easy to kill the monsters who hurt him, to carve a dusty path for the next human to walk. Like stomping on ants. He takes his hand away from his toy gun. Promise promise promise. He’s pushing on the gates to Snowdin before he realizes it.
It’s cold, but he likes it more than the sad, dilapidated Ruins. He takes a crunchy step in the snow and sees Martlet careening toward the ground.