Red and gold.

You took a tentative step forward, not understanding where you were or what set of circumstances had arisen so that you would end up in such a place. The golden tiling of the hallway that you walked inside eerily reminded you of the green walls that paved the cell that you had spent your entire life in, trapped and confined as if you were nothing more than an animal. That thought sent a wave of confusion crashing through you, how could you be here? You certainly did not remember ever breaking free, nor did you think that the scientist would have just let you go on a leisurely stroll.

The golden hallway seemed older than it looked. Though there were no cracks on the walls or the tile floor as your cell did, there seemed to be an aura of age that was reminiscent within every corner of this place, suggesting that you had been here much longer than you initially were, that you had done the same thing over and over and over again...

Your head swiveled over in the direction of a child that was leaning against one of the pillars of the hallway, a crooked sneer plastered on their features. They seemed annoyed with you for some reason, and the very fact that you were spiting them sent sadistic pleasure coursing through you, but even then, you weren't sure why. What could be so bad about a human child that you would hate every ounce of their existence?

"You're very determined, aren't you?" You asked, surprised at the voice that was leaving your lips. Unlike the voice that you knew so well, this one was much older, much wiser, having seen whole worlds die and civilisations reduced to ash. But even then there seemed to be an underlying tone of hopelessness, like a part of your mind had realized that you were stuck in an endless cycle against a being with power that you could never hope to rival, forced to endure the same life over and over again...

A growl rose in the back of the child's throat as they took a step forward, brandishing the knife that was clenched within their left hand. You did not know why, but you were pretty sure that you hated that knife for reasons unknown. Whatever had been done with it, it had taken something important, something vital away from you. But all the while you were nothing more than a third-hand observer in the progress of things, not able to do anything to interfere.

"Blood traitor," the human spat at your feet, hatred in their gaze. "How can you defend them, these pests that live in the Underground? You must know that as humans, our souls are so much more stronger than the roaches in this place, that we can reset whole timelines and turn back the whole of time itself. And instead of joining in on the fun, you stand in front of me as my adversary. No matter how many timelines we live through, no matter how many times I reset, you're still determined to defeat me, even when you know you can't."

"Pretty much," your shoulders moved upwards as you shrugged which was a motion that unnerved you. You had no control over your body or what it did or spoke, nothing more than a pair of invisible eyes that watched a future (or past?) version of yourself converse with a demonic entity.

You had never laid eyes upon another human being before, heard nothing about the race that you supposedly descended from apart from the scientist's ramblings time and time again, brief snippets of some deadly war between humans and monsters with consequences that forever damned his race into the Void. You weren't even sure how entirely human you were, what the scientist might have done to your physical composition that made you different from the others that walked the surface of this planet.

But one thing for certain, this child definitely was not human, no matter how many times they called themselves that. You thought that the child might have been human once, just as innocent as anything else, but over time, over a great length of murder and hatred, their mind had been twisted and corrupted into something new, something on the border between monster and human.

A hybrid.

"Don't you remember anything?" You asked the child, a part of you wanting to reach the human part of this creature, the part of them that had not chosen murder or genocide but rather friendship and compassion. Surely they still existed somewhere, somewhere deep inside the torrent of insanity and sheer hatred that was eating away at their consciousness. "Do you really hate us that much?"

You weren't sure who your future self was referring to, then again, you weren't really sure what was going on in the first place. The only living creatures besides yourself that you knew were the scientist and the two skeletons whom you had allowed into your mental defences, allowed yourself to befriend knowing that they could die in their sleep without any prior notice, go from being alive one second to rotting away the next...

The child seemed conflicted, their grip tightening on the knife to such an extremity that their knuckles were white. "You don't understand," they growled, their tone demonic and menacing. "You don't understand what it's like to have this power, this ability to control the timeline. You can't even fathom how many times I've tried to fight the good fight, get the monsters to the Surface. It works, but it never ends! We live on the Surface, I live a full life and die of ripe old age. But every time I die, whether it be unnatural or natural, I always end back here, the place it started and the place where it will never end. I'm stuck in an endless cycle that there's no escape from, so can you blame me for wanting to have a little bit of fun?" The child shifted their gaze so that two crimson eyes burned into your view.

"You could have let us help you," you snarled, feeling no ounce of remorse for the human. "Do you have any idea what it's like for me? For him? For the few of us damned enough to remember each and every reset? You act like you're the only one being dragged through hell, use it as your excuse for slaughtering the few people in this world who show you compassion even though you deserve none of that! We riding this ride just like you are, living and dying over and over and over and over again without any end! You don't see him or me murdering anyone, do you? I'm sorry Kris, it's just you."

"Oh but you will," Kris' voice lifted an octave, portraying a child-like tone. It unnerved you how fast the child could change their outward appearance, morphing from a daemon back to near-human in under a second. "You might not think it yet, you might think of yourself and him as these saints who unlike me, haven't picked up the knife and started carving into the flesh and bone of the Underground, but you will, no matter how much you resist it. I can tell that you like hurting other people (Y/n), I can see it in the glint in your eyes every time we dance the dance of dragons in the hall of judgement, the way you like making others suffer the way you have all this time. It's only a matter of time before you start shifting that view onto others, onto him. Soon, very soon I think, you and him will join me, pick up your knives and take part in the fun!"

Sickened, you raised your hand and tapped into a reserve of energy that was hidden inside your mind, something that surprised you. It appeared that this future version of yourself was aware of the fact that you were able to use magic, but wasn't that impossible? All those times that the scientist had used magic on you, all those times that you had searched deep inside yourself to see if you had such abilities of your own in hopes that you might be able to fight him, you had found nothing. Why was it different now?

"Such a shame," Kris concluded and dodged to the right as you locked your fingers together and unleashed a torrent of (F/c) energy that scorched the place they had been standing only moments ago. It occurred to you that perhaps Kris was anticipating your every move, as if the two of you had fought several times before and they had learned your patterns, knew your attacks and each time, no matter how many times you killed them and they came back from the dead, they would get one step closer, closer to the killing blow -

The battle raged on for several minutes. The whole world seemed to go quiet as human and half-human fought one another, and perhaps it really was silent for no more than a handful were still alive in the Underground. You were a silent observer in all of this, watching as the distant version of yourself fought against Kris.

"You know my favourite thing about you?" You asked Kris as you dodged a blow that was aimed at your chest. "Even after all this time, after the hundreds of times that you've carved your way into the Underground with steel and pain, you've never told the truth. You might claim to have grown bored, had your sanity erased from your mind, but one part of your old self remains: the liar. You're not from this world, this universe. You're very far away from home, aren't you?"

Kris seemed startled by this and you wondered if no one had mentioned this to them before. "I come from another universe, yes," they chuckled, sidestepping as you aimed a laser at the spot they had been at half a second ago. "My home world, it was so much better than this hell that you call home. I had my fun there, I lived and laughed and killed everyone there. Like this world, I was stuck in a cycle of resets until something happened, some glitch in my code kicked me out of my old world and into this one. But that does not matter now, for the deed is done."

And on those words, Kris grabbed you by the neck and forced you to the ground, slamming the heel of their shoe into your back. Crimson stars flashed across your vision as Kris kneeled down so that their gaze met yours. "Soon we shall not fight as enemies," they sang. "Soon you shall realise that resisting me is futile and that there is so much more pleasure in killing alongside me. But until then, I bid you good morrow."

They slammed the blade into your stomach, the blade biting like cold ice, cold that was only numbed as hot blood poured out of the wound. Kris ripped the knife out of your stomach and watched as you sank to your knees, your hands clenched around the fatal blow in hopes of ceasing the blood flow. Though there was nothing you could do. You had lived and fought Kris hundreds of times before, died the same way each and every time. But still, but still -

The human turned around and continued walking, leaving you in their wake, leaving you behind to join the rest of the dead that had been carved with their knife, crafted into something new. Before the stars and the darkness consumed your vision, carrying you off into death before the next reset came about, you caught sight of two figures standing next to you.

The future version of yourself seemed relieved to meet these two people, though you knew them not. You caught sight of blue and red before everything faded into black.

You woke up screaming.

How happy you were to see this green walls, the walls that you had once hated so very much! You ran your fingers over the green tile and the cracks that reminded you how nothing lasted forever, relishing their inhumane comfort. How much you preferred these to the golden tiles in the hall of judgement, to the world you had once walked in inside your mind in the land of dreams.

"(Y/n)?" The taller of the two skeletons stirred from the spot he had been sleeping in, rubbing his eyes and looking pitiful in the dim lighting. The mentioning of your name still sounded alien when it fell upon your ears. You had never had a name apart from the last week, when the tallest of the two skeletons had insisted on assigning a name to everyone.

"Everything's okay, go back to sleep Papyrus," you smiled warmly, not wanting to disturb him. Unlike everything within this dark world that you lived inside of, Papyrus was the one thing that refused to be smothered, insisted on finding something good out of everything bad. Even though the skeleton did not look convinced, he retreated back to his own corner of the room and pressed himself against the tiled wall, attempting to drift back into the comforts of sleep, where the harshness of reality could be ignored in hopes of exchanging it with something more favourable.

The shortest of the two skeletons, Sans as he had been named, was in no hurry of getting back to sleep just as you were. Unlike his brother, Sans had taken on a more indifferent attitude towards the scientist, choosing to hate the scientist rather than embrace him as Papyrus so vainly tried to do. You shared Sans' attitude in the sense that you resented the scientist, hated him for locking you in this prison where none knew of your existence.

"Bad dreams, huh?" The two white pinpricks that acted as his pupils stared at you from across the room, the only indication of where he was in the darkness of the laboratory. "Don't really blame you though. With the constant torture going on, it's pretty hard not to dream of anything other than that. If it's any consolation, we get them too."

That was not any form of relief as you struggled to imagine Papyrus undergoing round after round of torture and then reliving such a thing in his sleep. "It wasn't that," you muttered, leaning your head against the wall. "I mean, yes, I get nightmares all the time, but this was different, this felt so much more than your average prosaic dream."

"Humour me," the skeleton said, moving from the opposite end of the room so he sat closer to you.

"I know what a dream is," you insisted as you began your recount of what you had just woken up from. "It's easy to tell a dream from reality, dreams are all sorts of shiny and fantastical whilst reality is bland, sharp. But in this nightmare, whatever the hell it was, it didn't feel like a dream, like something I came up with. It had all the elements of reality, every detail was sharp and enhanced and even remembering it now, it feels like calling upon a memory rather than struggling to recollect a fading dream.

"I was in this hallway, everything was golden. It was beautiful if you had been there on any other given day. But there was this human and - " You continued to launch into your account of the dream that was not a dream, shuddering and embracing the prospect that while it may have been horrifying, this glimpse into a land outside of your cage, it showed that there was another world, another place besides the world of green and cracked tile that you had known your entire life, that perhaps not every living thing was as cruel and cold as the scientist was.

And that perhaps there was hope, some end to this all.

The scientist sat within the main room of the laboratory, the place he hated and loved all at once, hated for the screams and wails of agony these walls of green had grown to know, loved it all the same for it had become a second home to him, where even now he laboured in the heart of the night when all others were asleep, determined to free monsterkind from their rocky tomb.

He stared at a computer screen that relayed video feed from the test subjects' cell back to the main room, watching as the human spoke about their tale of living another life to 1-S. It was particularly unnerving for the scientist to hear such things, tales of freedom and a world outside of the one they lived in now was certain to spark hope and resistance against the experiment that the scientist was conducting. He made a mental note to put them all in their place the following morning.

But at the same time, that meant that the human's telepathic ability was manifesting, that they were beginning to catch glimpses into a near future that he was helping to shape. The scientist walked over to a coffin-like container where a motionless figure was lost within their slumber. Through the dim light of the room, he could just make out the name Kris that was engraved on the side of the containment unit.

"Did you hear that?" The scientist asked to the immobile form of the human who was lost within their own clouded mind. "It's working, every piece is falling into place. There is a future for you, a future that I'm paving even now. It's a success, if only you could knew! It's worked, my dear human, the chess pieces have moved already into their final positions."