(I've assembled a mini playlist for this book. For maximum feels, feel free to listen to the music while reading!!!)

"Sans."

The word, it acted as a lifeline, was your lifeline. Once, you thought, that this small strand of letters meant something to you. It had been a name once, a title given to an object that you never even thought about killing. Because you couldn't kill someone, but you could kill something.

And a word was what you have to a something.

"Sans," you searched his eyes for any sign of the person he had once been. Emotions, most likely a foreign concept to the skeleton, had been ripped away hundreds of timelines ago. One could only watch their brother butchered for so many times before simply going numb to it all.

Dots flashed in the corner of your vision as the pressure around your neck increased, your lungs screaming for the oxygen that had been deprived from you. You couldn't help but laugh at it all, blood gurgling in your throat and eventually splattering across his skull. If he was taken aback by this at all, Sans offered no indication.

Because wasn't it just funny?! He killed you over and over again, a primitive part of him hoping that there wouldn't be a reset, that your mangled corpse would remain a corpse on the tile floor of the Judgement Hall. But you never died. You always came back.

"I don't understand," you wheezed, not even bothering to conserve the few traces of oxygen still left in your bloodstream. What did it matter, anyway? You'd come back again, getting closer and closer until you finally delivered the killing blow... "What is the purpose in any of this? I'll kill you in the end, I'll kill all of you!" Blood was streaming out of your noise and mouth now.

Sans didn't reply, the cold look still plastered on his face. You couldn't help but wonder if he was actually thinking anything, or if he had simply succumbed to his fate and become part of the machine that functioned under your power over the Reset button.

You continued on with your act, hoping to aggravate him even further. "I-It wasn't my fault!" you pouted. "It was C-Chara! S-She made me do it!"

And you were suddenly much closer to Sans' face. His left eye flared a dark blue, reflecting every ounce of hatred he felt for you and your miserable existence. "Don't blame a dead girl for your mistakes," he hissed. "Chara is dead, she has been for years now."

This earned nothing but a fit of sadistic laughter from you. There was still a part of that comedian in there somewhere. He hadn't withered away like the rest of monsters in the Underground.

Yet.

His anger intensified as he noticed the cocky grin on your face, reveling in his rage. Red dots flashed before you as the grip around your throat increased in such an intensity that you began to feel the tendons in your neck sever. This is new, you thought, no longer retaining the ability to breath.

You spat out a mixture of blood and saliva onto the ground. "I'll come back," you croaked, though it sounded much more like the growl of a wounded animal than actual dialogue. You staggered once and slipped on your own blood, landing face first onto the ground, whimpering slightly as you felt your nose bend at an angle it was not meant to.

"It's over," Sans hissed in your ear. "We're going to be free from you."

Confusion was the last thought that registered in your mind as you felt your grip over reality lessen until your consciousness separated from your body. Hell, you had died thousands upon thousands of times during your adventures, but something about this seemed so much more final.

Terror seized your limbs, a numbness that started in your mind, spreading like a disease through your body until you were rendered motionless, staring at the empty space in front of you. Your hand hovered over a small space to your left, the spot where you had been accustomed to seeing the Continue button, the very source for your twisted immortality.

I'm dead, you realized, unsure of how to react. Death wasn't something you had even considered...

In a very, very long time.

There had been a time once, you supposed, in which you had never considered killing anything, focused only on a future and a family of your own. You had the dreams of any [age]-year-old, the idea of being a sadistic serial killer not even brushed upon.

Your father had come home on night in one of his drunken rages, an aspect of life you were not unfamiliar too. He was sometimes violent during his episodes. yes, but when he took out the hammer, you were truly afraid.

And when he turned on your mother and beat her into a pulp and then to your sister, you had done it. It's funny, really, what adrenaline can do to a person. It's God's steroid, providing strength in people that couldn't open a water bottle to save their lives.

You had thrown yourself onto him, quite literally clawing out his eyes and then turning on him with the hammer, strike first, ask questions later. In one night, in one hour, the family that you had grown up in, though barely meeting the definition of family, had been torn away from you. Everything you had ever known or loved.

So could you really be blamed for climbing up Mt. Ebott that night, ready to cast yourself into the seemingly bottomless pit below? One jump, one leap is all it would take to end the pain.

And you jumped.

Of course you had died, the buttercups waiting for you on the ground did little to stifle your fall. But whatever magic that had laced itself within the Underground intwined with your soul and you lived.

You progressed through the Underground, made friends, lived a life, freed them all. Things were good on the Surface and you eventually died of old age, like any normal human being.

Except you weren't human, were you?

[Y/N] had died a long time ago, the very moment that they fell to be specific. Because when you came back and lived through the same life again, it felt like you were watching old reruns, a few details missed here and there, but still the same.

You slowly accepted the realization that there was no escape from the loop you had quite literally thrown yourself into, damned to live the same life over and over again. Deliberately you would begin to alter details, curiosity urging you onwards. Never could you bring yourself to kill until...

Froggit was always the first to go, wasn't he?

It was dominoes, really. One kill led to another until you suddenly found yourself in the Judgement Hall, being mercilessly torn apart by Sans. And oh, how pissed he had been. Because weren't you two just the perfect family, maybe even a little more? You never really wanted to hurt him, but as your death count piled, the guilt, all that remorse, was replaced with a hatred so strong that when you finally struck him down it was more of a victory than a funeral.

The monsters, they suddenly seemed so much smaller. You could kill them however many times you wanted to, and with a simple thought, you could bring them all back to life again. They were your subjects and you were their god.

So could you really be blamed for striking them down one by one? Reveling as they slowly bled to death in front of you, and then doing it all over again just to watch it one more time? You had lived years, centuries even, in that damned Underground, watching the same story on repeat. You were convinced that just one more reset and it would all be over.

But it never stopped, never ended!

And maybe some could have gone on longer, but everyone breaks eventually.

But now?

Now you were afraid, afraid for the very first time in your life. Toriel, everyone, dead because of you. They weren't coming back, death was a permanent seal stamped onto their gravestones. A final "SCREW YOU" from Sans himself.

But there it was, the Reset button hovering only inches in front of you, the yellow text glaring at you defiantly. Confusion washed over you. If you died you had been given two options, the reset never being the only one until the timeline had been completed.

You didn't have a choice, really. It was to continue on with the game or stay in this damned room forever. And we all know what insanity can do to a person.

With a gasp, you found yourself amidst the patch of buttercup flowers, a withered grey than the vibrant yellow you had familiarized with. In fact, the entire Ruins seemed to have been long since abandoned, as if monsterkind hadn't dwelled here in centuries.

You slowly progressed through the Ruins until a faint cloud of smoke wafted towards you. You coughed and took a step away from the foul odor, wiping at your eyes to clear the tears from your face.

A lone figure sat on a rock, barley illuminated by the dying sunset. The only true light visible where the two white pinpricks that acted as his eyes.

"Well what do we have here?"