Now that you were there, it was quite easy to see how Frisk had fallen down the mountain. As you walked along the surface, searching for the entrance, you nearly fell in yourself. It was hidden by an abundant overgrowth of weeds and vegetation, and the ground was slick with mud after the heavy rainfall of the previous night. (Of course, you didn’t recall said storm at all, but your father insisted it had happened and, well, you hadn’t been in this timeline last night to see it so you had to believe his word.) There was not even any signage to indicate that there was a sudden drop off and that travelers should be careful, lest they fall to their deaths and/or a society entirely inhabited by monsters that have been trapped for centuries and probably are very eager to get their hands on some human souls. It wasn’t uncommon for children to fall down there and be killed. In fact, you knew this mountain was home to many corpses that had sought means of ending their lives. You knew of at least six children alone that had become victim to Mount Ebott.

Suffice it to say, the person that planned this field trip was a complete idiot.

Although, to be fair, you weren’t much wiser. Sure, Frisk had managed to survive the fall down there and you had prior knowledge of what awaited you inside, but it was still more likely that you would break your neck upon impact. Perhaps it wasn’t right to be judging people as idiots when you were about to recklessly do what they had carefully avoided.

“So this is it,” Your father stated, staring down the gap in the ground, “This, this is where we lost Frisk.”

You could already hear the fear crawling through his throat and lacing itself through him. Something was probably wrong with you, because you should have been apprehensive at the least. Instead, you lamely responded with, “Yep, I guess so.”

Your father tentatively inched closer. You knelt on the ground and tried to stare as far down into the darkness as you possibly could, but to no avail. It was complete darkness stretching forever down into a void of nothing. Nothing to catch you. Nothing to help you. Nothing to ease your fall except, perhaps, any sharp edges in the walls that you happened to hit on your way to the unforgiving ground.  Finally the proper amount of fear settled like a rock in your stomach. This was what you were about to hurl yourself into. Not a small hole or a mystical little cave that you could explore, but this tunnel of darkness and pain that could only really end in death.

On top of that, you hadn’t anticipated the monster’s original animosity towards humans. In Frisk’s many accounts of her journey, she sometimes neglected to tell the full truth of her first encounters with the monsters, but you had caught the times when she described the horrible battles and things they threatened her with. Frisk had already been through this before, but you had not. After one human managed to slip through their grasp, the monsters probably would be even more insistent upon capturing the souls of the next two to come through, and you weren’t confident in your abilities to get past any of these threats. At the very most, you would probably be able to struggle your way through Toriel’s gentle resistance. Once you passed her, you would be royally screwed.

“Do you have a plan?” Your father asked impatiently. He needed certainty. You remembered from when you lived at home with him, before the events leading to your inheriting of your current residence, he always wanted to know a step-by-step of what would happen. You couldn’t just tell him you were going to do your homework or that you were going to email a professor, he wanted to know specifics. What were you emailing about? What subject were you going to start with? How long was it going to take? It made perfect sense that he wanted to know the same things now. Unfortunately for him, your “plan” couldn’t even be considered one.

“Um, well,” you paused in order to think of some way to sugar-coat it, but nothing came to mind, and you dropped off into uncomfortable silence, staring sheepishly at the hole in the ground beneath you.

It took him a moment, but your father eventually followed your gaze and put two and two together. Repulsed with your obvious intention, he exclaimed, “No! You’re not just going to jump down into the mountain! Do you have any idea-”

“Well do you have any better suggestions, Dad?” You demanded.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” he stated sharply.

With no small amount of sarcasm, you laughed dryly and requested, “Well then, enlighten me. Please.”

“Listen to me, we’re going home. We forget this, and accept that, that, and we just go home and,” he faltered, obviously struggling. How could someone possibly propose that their daughter was dead and there was nothing they could do about it?

“Dad, if Frisk could survive the fall, we can,” you insisted.

“And how do you know?! Don’t joke around about this,” he begged.

Oh shoot. You forgot. He didn’t know. To your father’s knowledge, it was the first -and last- time that Frisk had fallen down the mountain. You remembered faintly what it had been like when you discovered she fell down. The assumption that she had died was automatic, no matter how long you denied it for. Even though you hoped against all hope that she was alive somewhere, you knew that everyone believed she was dead. There was no funeral because your father couldn’t manage to bury an empty coffin, but everyone knew in their deepest thoughts that Frisk was inarguably dead.

Wait, wow. Looking back at it like that made your hiding of Frisk a lot more cruel. You almost wanted to apologize to your father and your other family now, but they wouldn’t understand that in this timeline anyway. That was the point of all of this, to do right what you had done wrong in the last timeline. It was a second chance for you, and maybe this time you’d finally do it all the right way.

“I’m not joking, Dad,” you responded, inching yourself closer to the edge of the hole. It lay open, gaping, ready to swallow you whole and pull you into whatever waited for you at the bottom. Whether it was going to be instant death or monsters, you weren’t at all prepared. But you needed to do it, you reminded yourself over and over and over. For your father, so that he wouldn’t live the next months as a shell. You needed to do it for Frisk, so she knew that she wasn’t alone in remembering the past and that you were there for her.

And you needed to do it for yourself. You wanted to fix everything this time, and you wanted to make amends for last time. You wanted to accept everyone into the truth that Frisk was back, you wanted to be a better sibling and a better friend, and, if things worked out the same again and you managed to form the same connection to Mettaton that you had in the last timeline, you wanted to be brave. You wanted not to be scared and to not question everything that happened between you and just let yourself love him.

You wanted to tell him that, too.

You had a rare opportunity, and you were not going to throw it away. Instead, you were going to throw yourself down a dark hole in a mountain and hope that you didn’t die.

“If you don’t want to, don’t follow me,” you continued, “But I need to do this.”

Your father looked at you with eyes wide in fear. He didn’t know. He thought he was losing his second child too, perhaps that you were going to kill yourself. He didn’t know that you were doing precisely the opposite, finally reclaiming your life from fear.

As you took the plunge, he shouted out for you to wait, but you couldn’t hear him over the sound of your pounding heart and the wind rushing past your ears, tearing the sound of your scream out of your throat.

It was a long fall. You couldn’t tell if you were getting close to the bottom. For what felt like eternity, you were surrounded in nothing but inky black darkness. Only the overpowering sound of the wind confirmed that you were still alive. You had expected to be dead by now, at the bottom of the mountain bleeding out and using your last thoughts to remind yourself how utterly stupid you were. And yet, here you were, alive and well. At least, you assumed you were well. You couldn’t tell what sort of consequences this fall would have on your health yet.

But just as you were despairing, thinking perhaps the fabled magic was keeping you falling eternally, you saw a bright light under you. The ground. It shimmered with an ethereal quality, and you were approaching it rapidly. This had to be the end. There was no way you were going to survive this. It was just going to end like this now, just a puny little human going splat!  The monsters would come by and do away with your body, possibly stealing your soul in the process. You weren’t ready to die at all. You should have thought this through, you should have waited for Frisk to get out by herself again instead of bothering with this noble hero nonsense.  You looked down at the ground below again. It was covered in a patch of golden flowers and green grass.

At least you would die with a nice view.

______________________________

Alphys scuttered across the polished linoleum floor, her feet struggling to keep up with her small body and keep traction on the ground at the same time. Her skittering left scratches over the surface of the flooring, but she couldn’t be bothered to care at the moment. There were more important manners to attend to.

She had been upstairs when she heard the loud thwump come from below her. At first she had believed it was Mettaton, but he had left to record the newest installment of “Mettaton: The Movie” hours beforehand. Her next thought was one of the amalgamations, but there was no way that she would hear that from her room. The only explanation left was that the human had done something.

Alphys had the entire Underground equipped with hidden cameras to record the progress of any humans that may have fallen down. A few hours ago, a new one, a little girl, fell down the mountain and began a journey. The girl had appeared to be dormant within a house in the ruins that was a normal resting point for most of the newly arrived human children. Alphys had thought the human would take repose there for several days at the least, but it was on the move once more. According to that sound, nothing good had happened.

Alphys was worried about this human already. She had seen it roaming the ruins, killing any monsters it came upon. But not only that. This human deliberately searched out monsters to be its victim. There were a few moments when the human had looked directly into one of the cameras, and its eyes were black and cold, the skin covered in a fine layer of dust, and a cruelly determined look rested on its face. She should’ve known not to leave the video feed unattended. She was so stupid.

Alphys reached the screen and switched to the camera angled towards the house. It was still. No light came from inside.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

She switched again, to the feed showing the exit of the ruins from inside. There was nobody. The area was abandoned with nothing but a few scraps of torn clothing on the ground next to a pile of chalky gray dust. She should have known this would happen.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!

“Dammit!” Alphys yelled out to no one, slamming her small fist on the sleek tabletop. She was an idiot. She knew that human was up to something, and she never should have left the video feed unattended. She could have warned those in Snowdin about what was coming. If only she wasn’t so, so, so…

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

“Alphys, darling?” The robot she had pretended to create rolled into the hall where she was. She never should have lied to the King. She was supposed to know how to handle these things, but she couldn’t all because she was just....

Fake! Fake! Stupid!

“Are you alright, Alphys?” The gloved robot hand reached out to rest on her shoulder. He shouldn’t be worried about her. He didn’t have to. He didn’t even really care. She was too useless for anyone to care about her.

Useless! Fake! Stupid!

“I, I m-m-messed up-p big t-time, M-M-Mett-t,” she choked out through a quickly constricting throat.

“What was it this time, darling?” He asked, not worried enough for the situation. This time, huh? Right, because all that Alphys could do was mess things up. She couldn’t get anything right.

Stupid! Useless! Screw-up! Fake! Liar!

“I-I-I, th-the h-human,” she stuttered, looking at the ground and hugging her arms around herself. Safe, she needed to be safe. She couldn’t mess up again. She needed to keep herself safe. She needed to keep herself safe. She needed-

“The human what? Oh, I do hope it’s something exciting!”

She needed to be safe. She wasn’t safe. She was stupid and she messed up and she wasn’t safe and nobody was safe and nobody would ever be safe and the human would kill them all it’d kill them all it’d kill them all-

“It, it killed her. I-It k-killed her, M-Mett,” she felt tears freely pour from her burning eyes. She wiped her eyes sloppily. The robot’s metal arms wrapped around her, trying to comfort her as best as he could.

“Calm down, darling,” his monotone voice uttered in what was supposed to be a soothing tone. Unfortunately, this form only offered a rather unappealing and robotic voice that didn’t do much to calm the nerves. Alphys obviously was in no position to keep telling him what was happening, so he looked at the screen himself. The feed flashed momentarily before flipping to a different camera. That was odd. It meant that there had to  be something happening over on the other camera.

A human. No, two. Two more humans had come, one far younger and in far better shape than the other. The pair had just walked through the door leading to the Ruins’ entrance, and both seemed more scared than they did determined. The flower popped out of the ground in order to greet them as it did for the human before. The younger human, at first incredulous but then angered, spoke animatedly to the flower. The older appeared too shocked to speak. The humans and flower spoke a little longer until the younger human stood up tall and walked forward, eyes ahead, and trampled the flower into the ground. Well, they certainly were a feisty one! If Mettaton had a mouth in this form, he would have smirked and laughed. Instead, a single, alarming, “Ha!”, came from his speakers, causing Alphys to finally look up.

She had calmed significantly, but the laugh seemed to have set her on edge once more.

“W-what is i-it?” She asked, wide-eyed and fearful.

Mettaton imagined an evilly smug look on the face he had only recently tested, and a smooth, even voice coming from grinning lips as he responded, “It looks like the human brought some company.”
_______________________________
A/N: And so it begins.