That granola bar and soda bottle she picked up at the vending machine did wonders. Y/N sighed, letting the crispness of the air fill her lungs with a cold sensation before being released. Despite the world seeming to rest on her shoulders, she managed to find hope in the little things. That was enough to keep her alive.

It was curious—as she had been getting her food items, she had the sudden sensation that someone had been watching her, but in the moments following it had disappeared. In addition, her sixth sense hadn't gone off, which only furthered her inquisitiveness.

But Y/N's mind wandered off that train of thought and drew back to the topic she couldn't stop herself from thinking about: that hole.

Something about it simply fascinated her. Of course it did—she was a creature of mystery and thrillers, and this hole was the biggest mystery she had ever faced, besides...well...

Y/N quickly directed her thoughts away from that, back to the recent, familiar nuisance. Again, she imagined an underworld beneath all she had known. Sparkling water, shimmering light, scorching heat, calm echoes of life. A wonderland more fantastical and aesthetic than anything Carroll could dream up. It was beautiful, in her mind's eye, though it might not even exist anywhere else but.

And again, the prospect of seeing for herself presented itself in her mind. What's the harm, her mind always asked. Literally everything will be harmed was the usual answer. She preferred her brain matter contained inside her head rather than splattered on the floor of a tunnel to the center of the Earth.

Like yesterday, the idea lingered longer than she liked. Y/N couldn't dismiss it outright, for once. There was still an inconsolable part of her desperate to know, no matter the cost.

What if...maybe...

Her heartbeat took off in her excitement, and her mind went wild with possibilities. She could hardly breathe from the stifling, pure adrenaline pumping through her bloodstream. On a typical day, when her overactive imagination took a hold of her like this, she was able to scold it back into order, in this reminding herself that she did indeed contain a microscopic speck of common sense.

Today was not a typical day, apparently. Tuning out her inner voice begging her to go see was not an option. The clamoring inside her consciousness was rising in volume like a tidal wave, and they slammed into the walls she had so carefully contained them in, cracking them in moments and crashing over her senses. She wasn't prepared for her defenses to be breached so easily, and she was most certainly not prepared to be corrupted in a snap afterwards.

Y/N abruptly stopped. She had been walking back from the store after browsing the products and awkwardly avoiding the other customers (ending up in her purchasing a box of the granola bars from the vending machine, as she had discovered they were actually very good), but now she was rooted in place. Luckily, no one was around, or else they would have questioned why a woman carrying a grocery bag had suddenly frozen in the middle of the sidewalk with an insane look on her face.

Then, like gravity, the hole began to pull her in.

Her mind was in a frenzy. The sane part of her was determined to keep a grasp on reality, but the more dominant part of her brain was speed-walking (somehow more smart than her yesterday self) to the place she couldn't take her mind off. Her body was moving on its own accord, too caught up to slow down now. Her pace didn't change as the landscape turned from suburbia to wilderness, and neither did it slow when she throttled down the steep decline of the basin.

Y/N blinked, and she was seated at the edge of the hole, leaning over it precariously and staring with an intense, obsessive gaze. Control was finally returned to her begging hands, and she jerked back once again, scrambling back and dirtying her nicer blue jeans with streaks of blackish dirt.

Oh, sweet control. May it never leave her grasp again.

She grunted, pushing to her feet and glaring down with hands on hips at the hole.

"No!" she barked. "Bad hole!"

She kicked at the ground, as if to show it who was boss, but in the end it was the one who showed her. You see, Y/N massively misjudged the force needed to dislodge the earth underneath her, overshooting her required momentum. As a result, her foot shot right through the dirt and up into the air, which threw her off balance. She leaned back and waved her arms in the air, trying to stabilize herself, but it was too late. The inertia was already carrying her.

Y/N slipped on the dirt, landing hard on her behind and back, then tumbled off the edge and down into the hole.

(•)

Oh, God, the pain. Why. Why.

In actuality, it was more a faint soreness than pain, but Y/N preferred to pretend it was worse and whine about it so she had an excuse to stay lying down on this very nice bed. Bed—more specifically, a soft, cushy bed—was better than basically any other thing on the planet, except for maybe food.

On a side note, it was rather dark in heaven.

She stared up at the blackness, her hands folded over her stomach. Okay, the pain was basically nothing. She could get up now.

...Any day now.

Where was she, anyway?

It was finally her curiosity that encouraged her to sit up and look wildly about her environment.

Y/N furrowed her eyebrows at the endless darkness that seemed to surround her on all sides. Was this heaven, or was she in hell? Come to think of it, had she been good enough for heaven?

Try as she might, she never seemed to be good enough, did she?

With that cheery thought in mind, she glanced down at the ground, and the sight caused her eyebrows to go back up.

Below her, where she had been laying, was a bed of grass and buttercups. It was as if seeds had managed to float here, gathering up the smallest ray of sun that managed to find its way through the pitch, and grow beautifully. Fortunately, the ones under her had seemingly not been crushed. It was almost as if she had been laid there.

Strange—the buttercups appeared to imply that Y/N had actually survived the fall down the endless hole, against all odds.

Dang it.

Well, on the bright side, she had discovered this very weird new place. That had to count for something.

Looking more closely around confirmed her suspicions that she was underground. She was situated in what looked like a cave, with cavernous ceilings, stone walls, and a smooth rock floor (which only made the buttercups look more odd).

Her eyes adjusted to the faint light, and suddenly Y/N noticed a corridor carved into the wall, shrouded by shadow. Maybe that would be the way out of her predicament.

Getting to her feet was not the issue, but rather the act of standing itself—her knees were gelatin, and she wobbled as though she was walking a tightrope rather than staying still on very much stable ground.

The minute she took allowed her to not only steady herself, but also notice that her box of granola bars had, conveniently, fallen down with her. Her first steps were toward it, picking up the bag and twirling it around, securing it in her palm.

GRANOLA BAR (5) added to INVENTORY

...Was that her imagination, or...?

...um...

...Probably.

Y/N chose to ignore the questions dinging around her brain like screensavers to favor keeping her sanity, although that was only a temporary solution, considering what was coming up next.

The corridor was surprisingly wide, about the width for five people to walk through comfortably. From the outside it had looked narrower. The better for her to wander through, not particularly in any rush. Death would find her in its own time.

But things were about to get much messier. Her journey was only just beginning.

The end of the corridor expanded into a cavern similar to the one she had just been in. Another patch of grass, almost perfectly circular, was in the middle, with an enormous yellow-petaled flower blooming in the exact center...

...and it had a face.

This definitely wasn't heaven. And it definitely wasn't a dream, either—though she happily admitted that she was weird, she would never dream of something so ludicrous. Those facts combined were, in all honesty, terrifying. This was real.

As Y/N stared in horror at the face, it seemed to notice her, staring back with a grin starting to stretch from petal to petal. Its eyes were beady, black, empty, and dead.

"Howdy!"

She cringed. Its voice—how was it speaking to her? The voice ground the word to powder, even around the roundness of the 'ow.' The sharp stab of the final vowel-like articulation could be legally classified as a weapon. The voice was fake and just as cheerful as its eyes.

Oh, its eyes. Those were what nightmares were made of. Black, hellish pits.

"I'm Flowey!" it continued, as if it was speaking casually and not traumatizing her with every syllable it spoke. "Flowey the Flower. You must not be from around here."

"Oh, really? You figure that out by yourself?"

Y/N froze up. Had she dared to speak? Had she dared to sass the demon flower?

It narrowed its gaze at her, flares of rage just skirting the edges of the darkness. Its smile remained, always false, though it was now tainted with annoyance and anger.

After a long pause, it continued, though the voice was more strained than before. "...So. I'll give you the rundown of how to survive this place. You're going to want to get your LV up."

"What is—?"

"Love. To get it up, you have to collect EXP."

Y/N furrowed her brows, tilting her head as she tried to make sense of that in what little remained of her brain. "...so, wait...to get love, I have to—wait, why do I—'get LV up?' 'Collect EXP?' This sounds more like a video game than real life. Did I actually die back there, because this makes literally no—"

"YES IT DOES!"

She flinched. The flower's scream was much worse than its normal speaking voice. It grated against her ears.

It tried to regain control of itself, trying to smile again, but it looked more like a furious grimace. "Anyway. Take a few levels' worth. Please."

Something about his tone was suspicious. (Who was she kidding? His whole everything was sketch.) So when little glowing orbs appeared around him and started floating in her direction, slow as tortoises, Y/N had the common sense to dodge them.

The flower did not look pleased, to say it simply.

"Take. The. E. X. P," it growled through the gritted smile.

More lights. She dodged, wordlessly. Afraid.

The plaster grin fell off, and terror struck her like a freight train. Even if it was only a cover, the cover was so much better than the full heat of its fury.

It laughed.

"Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. HA HA HA HA HA!"

The lights multiplied before her, circling her, closing in rapidly. There was no escape.

The flower began to grin again, but now it was out of pure malice. Were those teeth?

"YOU MUST HAVE HEARD ME WRONG! BECAUSE I ASKED YOU—VERY NICELY, BY THE WAY—TO TAKE THE DAMN EXP!"

"No thank you!" Y/N managed, though the sting of her sarcasm seemed dull as she cowered.

The lights were a foot or so away. She could feel the searing energy radiating off of them, like they were already almost burning her skin off.

"Down here, kid..."

They were only inches from her, now.

The flower screamed in laughter.

"IT'S KILL OR BE KILLED!"

For a moment, Y/N thought they were burrowing into her skin, and she nearly cried out from the sheer pain blowing through her nervous system.

But her end didn't come that day.

A blast of fire burst from behind the demon, and it vanished, hopefully into an early grave. The lights disappeared. Y/N looked up to her savior, and she found herself staring at a towering figure of white and purple.

It seemed like a goat—with horns, flopping ears, and a muzzle—and a female one, at that. Her face was folded in a way that gave the appearance of kindness and motherliness, something that made Y/N calm in an instant, reminded of her own mother's face, not too dissimilar in that way. The goat woman wore a purple dress with a strange design on the front that looked vaguely familiar, and the more she squinted at it, the more it resonated in her mind. How did she know it?

"Hello, my child."

Oh, the voice was sweeter than honeycomb. Her attention was diverted back to the lady again and the concern on her face.

"I see you've fallen into the Underground. Here, let me help you. That creature will hurt you no longer, now that I am here."

The goat woman hurried over, and as she came closer, she looked massive in comparison to the human, over ten feet tall.

"Thank you, ma'am," Y/N spoke hoarsely. The whole experience was quite frightening, and it was only now that she realized she was on the verge of tears.

"Oh, come now, come now, dry your eyes. You're alright. Here, take this."

A sizable, lacy handkerchief was pressed into her hands, and Y/N took a moment to dab at her eyes, shaky breath trying to stabilize. That demon flower. As if she needed another thing to haunt her.

"I'm fine," she murmured, trying to push down her awful feelings. "Thank you again, ma'am."

"Oh, child, please call me Toriel. Or Mom, if you so desire."

So the motherly air wasn't her imagination.

"Yes, Mom," she found herself saying meekly. To be cared for by a mother again...if that wasn't the fever dream.

Toriel smiled, then took Y/N's hand in her paw. "There we are. Come with me, child. I will keep you safe."

The familiar feeling of her hand in a mother's was heavenly.

She was led through an enormous doorway into what looked like an abandoned city. The rocks had brightened into a purple, vines hung from cracks and crawled across ceilings. It was crumbling, and it was beautiful.

"My child," Toriel announced, chest puffed and ruby eyes bright with pride, "welcome to the Ruins."

(•)

The days blurred into a wonderful haze. Y/N was not sure how long she stayed with Toriel, but she didn't care. To be with a mother again was a feeling she didn't want to let go of.

It didn't take long for the pair to become close. They shared a love of puns, purple, buttercups, and once Y/N was given an opportunity to try it, cinnamon-butterscotch pie. The title 'Mom' was instantaneously adopted and accepted between them. After all, they had so much in common, and Toriel was so similar to a mother she had lost...

The blur was filled with more happiness than the last few years than she had felt on the surface. She spent her days eating pie and learning about the Underground and monsters. Y/N had been taught about them by her mother—that they were good, undeserving of being thrown under the earth, and that they were not to be feared, but to be loved—but Toriel, as a monster herself (and the prior Queen of the Monsters, as she found out), was able to tell her so much more. She learned about the society the humans had no idea about, and she found herself missing it. Something told her that her mother would have loved it.

One of the days, Y/N picked her head up from reading a book that Toriel had recommended—something about magic that she had discovered an interest in—and furrowed her brows in thought.

"Hey, Mom?"

Toriel barely looked up from her book of puns, but the warmth and care in her voice was still evident as she turned a page. "Yes, my child?"

"Can I...leave?"

Her eyes seemed to stop on a word and stay there for a minute, before she cleared her throat and moved her eyes along again, though they were disturbed now. "Leave?" 

"Well..." Y/N swallowed, already starting to burn up with guilt. "I just...you've told me about the wonderful world down here, and I, um...kind of...wanted to see it for myself?"

She buried her face in her book again, trying to avoid any and all eye contact with Toriel. She hated, more than most things in the world, to be a disappointment. "I'm very much happy here, don't get me wrong," she mumbled into the pages, "but I just thought that..."

"No, I...I understand." Toriel gently placed down her book into her lap, folding her hands over it as though to keep it safe from all harm. "You're no child that needs protection. You're a brave young woman that doesn't need a silly old lady to worry about you all the time."

"Your worry is not silly, Mom." Y/N leaned her head back into the chair, letting her eyes droop slightly and the book fall. "It's motherly and caring. There's a difference."

"I suppose, then, that...you should be able to go out on your own. You can take care of yourself, I'm sure—I know." Toriel stared down at her hands, fidgeting them. "It's just that...I fear what I do not know goes on beyond the walls. The last child I let leave—I don't know what fate befell them. I hope that they are alright. It's been nine years, so I suppose that they aren't quite a child anymore..."

She lifted a hand to knead her forehead, sighing with eyes closed. "I fret too much. One of these days I'm simply going to faint."

Y/N rubbed at her arms. Toriel had told her also about the seven children she had let leave her walls of safety. To be unable to know whether or not they had even survived the others, let alone Asgore...she could not imagine the mental torment. 

Well, actually, she somewhat could.

"Well, anyway..." Toriel stood up from her chair, crossing the room gracefully to place the pun book back on the shelf where it belonged. She looked over her shoulder to give Y/N a halfhearted smile. "I suppose you'll want to leave now, won't you?"

She looked away before she could answer. "The others did. I tried, begged, pleaded for them to stay, but...I was never enough for them. I'm sorry I can't be enough for you, either."

"Oh, Mom..."

A moment of silence stretched over them, sorrowful and pensive. Then Toriel cleared her throat, coming over to take Y/N's hands. "Well, I can't have you leaving on an empty stomach. How about we make you a care package, hmm? I made this lovely little things just this morning—they were supposed to be a surprise, but I suppose they can be a sort of goodbye present. I call them cinnamon-butterscotch bites. They're like little miniature pies, but wrapped up."

Y/N finally found a smile in her soul. "That sounds wonderful, Mom."

(•)

INVENTORY:

GRANOLA BAR (3)

PIE BITES (7)

PHONE

MAGIC BOOK

GOLDEN PIN

Y/N heaved the bag over her shoulder, adjusting it again. She could hardly help it, it was a nervous habit of hers. Adjusting, unable to stop until it was perfect, which it never could be.

"So," she said awkwardly. "I guess this is...goodbye. For now."

She and Toriel were standing in front of the doors. They were enormous, made of a sturdy wood that managed to stay smooth and perfectly polished after so many decades. Not so much as a single splinter jutted out.

"So it is," Toriel replied faintly. Her hands were folded in front of her to stop them from shaking, but in all honestly, the tremors were still very much obvious.

"You know I'm going to text you as much as I can, right?"

"Of course, my child."

"And I really mean it. I have your number saved and everything. I'm not going to ignore you. I'll keep you company even when I'm not right here next to you."

"I know."

Y/N tightened her grip on her bag strap. Everything was fine. It had to happen eventually, didn't it? The claustrophobia, the yearning for more, the solemn farewell. It was a script the universe had familiarized with its characters, ready for another mother and daughter to take up the act and fill their roles.

Goodbyes were, without question, the hardest thing in the world for anyone to do.

She reached out and hugged Toriel, burying her face into the soft purple cloth. "I'll miss you, Mom."

The goat woman sighed, leaning down and wrapping her arms around her surrogate daughter. "Oh, child. I'll miss you too."

Their hug was long and warm, and when they pulled away, their movements were slow and reluctant. A smile, sad but loving and understanding, passed between them. No desperate begging, no tears. Just a mutual feeling that they would see each other again.

Seeming to be satisfied, Toriel drew back, turning to leave. "I best leave you now. Good luck on your journey."

"Wait."

A half-turn. "Yes?"

"I love you."

Toriel beamed. "Oh, my child. I love you too. I will speak to you soon enough, I'm sure."

Y/N let a hand drop to her side, the other grasping one of the enormous metal door handles. She dared not take her eyes off of her, making sure to etch every last tuft of fur, every wrinkle, every sparkle of her eyes into her memory. "Goodbye."

"Goodbye, dearest."

Toriel finally turned and walked down the hallway. The patter of her feet echoed down the hall, and then she was gone. The reverberation of silence was painfully familiar.

Y/N turned back towards the door, studying the intricacies of its carving. It was plain, but the grain of the wood consumed her attention for an additional minute, stalling her inevitable leaving. This was what she had wanted, right? To explore the Underground. And here she was. Down the rabbit hole. In the place the legends only whispered about. Now she was a part of it, experiencing it for herself.

Maybe they needed what she could give. A little bit of hope never hurt anyone.

Y/N took one final breath, preparing herself for whatever came beyond, then pushed open the great door—which responded with a resounding, ear-splitting creak—to a whole new world.