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riftfic · 8 months

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17. Epilogue

The end is here.

Thank you, everyone, for staying with me till now. I've made two additional illustrations buried in the text below. :)

Happy Anniversary, Undertale. 💙

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An incandescent future unfolded over the course of that year. Though far too familiar events repeated with frustrating familiarity, they arrived in new packages: some in bright and colorful wrapping, some in grossly damaged bags. Even if confusing and often jarring, most monsters expressed gratitude to have familiar yet unfamiliar lives awaiting. The additional security and a world more accepting allowed them to press on with more comfort than expected.

Not all were as fortunate. Several returned to lives in pieces. Lost relationships. Humans that knew them, loved them, and had aged beyond them. Photographs of small children they might never conceive. Tombstones engraved with names of the living . . . sometimes their own.

At first, Asgore and Toriel tried to shield you from the responsibility. This level of accountability, they said, should not rest on a child’s small shoulders. No one needed to know about your hand in the broken clock.

You didn’t see it that way. Not knowing why their lives had been stolen, left wondering if their relationships could be undone again, only festered the wound. So you explained to them what had happened and why, and swore that it would not and could not happen again. Amazing, how forgiving monsters could be—not that they all were.

For three months, HEART continued its search for monsters left behind. The moment Sans had recovered, he had jumped at the chance to join Papyrus and Undyne among their ranks. His unique teleportation magic served them well once he had a feel for those snaking, unfamiliar shafts and pathways. Places once difficult to reach suddenly became accessible. Dozens of monsters and their families owed him thanks, especially those trapped deep in the Ruins.

None of them were Wingdings.

With this and all else he had set in motion to free them, monsterkind quickly came to love and respect Sans in a way he had never truly experienced. Sure, he had been a recognizable face in the local comic scene, the friendly smile at Grillby’s every other night, the playful hotdog peddler in Hotland, sentry and judge for the royal family, but never . . . this. If the swath of gifts and well wishes in his hospital room hadn’t been enough proof, Asgor went far enough as publicly honoring him. He hadn’t knighted him, thankfully—a fact Sans could not celebrate more—but he did proclaim something more touching than that.

He named a star.

As a human, the first mention of this honor had underwhelmed you. Humans named stars all the time for science, for romance, for shits and giggles. What you hadn’t understood was that, to monsters, this meant far more than looking up and picking a distant flicker.

Their people had evolved from stardust. While humans had a touch of this magic in them, monsters churned with this fire as their lifeblood. The celestial bodies, their very beginnings, were esteemed with enough reverence to be gods.

Their banishment to the Underground had been especially cruel for this fact, and after such a long separation from the sky, marking their reunion with a new light was more than fitting. After all, when someone’s name was thought with enough intent in so many hearts, a star wasn’t only named; it was born.

It was bright and it was beautiful. When viewed through his telescope, it nestled in a pocket of blue and gold fringed in red, much like the Ring Nebula, only light years from a star they had once named after you.

“i don’t get it,” he admitted to you after the fact. “all i did was make up for somethin’ i did wrong. my motivations weren’t exactly heroic either.”

“Not all knights wear armor, Sir Sans the Star.”

“heh . . . and just what’re you gettin’ at, fair frisk the fart?”

You laughed. “It doesn’t matter why you did it,” you said. “You still did it. You brought back the dead, Sans. You deserve to be thanked for that, don’t you?”

You knew Asriel hadn’t been the one he wanted to resurrect. Even after the members of HEART had disbanded, he delved into the dark in search of Wingdings until his phalanges bled and his magic ran dry. All of you had begged him to relent, Asgore more than anyone. Not until every inch of the Underground’s remains had been scoured did he finally lose hope.

At least now, his brother’s name did not wither from memory like a dream in the morning light. For the first time, he could mourn him freely. He could share memories with those who knew him, find understanding in kindred spirits, and heal.

As one year on the surface came to a close, he finally found the courage to destroy the machine.

The spring sun crisped dewdrops from dandelions as you and Sans strode across his overgrown lawn. The skeleton brothers’ house, a cozy little two story chalet, stood half embedded in the steep hillside behind you. Its stilted, elevated porch overlooked miles of green forest and a babbling river inlet at the knoll’s foot, just as he had remembered. A long road wound atop the hill’s peak, passing from driveway to driveway to outline a comfortably spaced neighborhood. In the distance, Mount Ebott reached among smaller peaks for white clouds in a gold and pink sky.

Under your arms, you each carried a folded mesh lawn chair. Matte black aviator sunglasses masked Sans’ eyes, though a cyan glow smoked behind the left lens. A pair of bright purple shields blocked your own. Following behind in a cloud of blue magic, the rusty, tattered block of a machine he called a “temporal flux manipulator” hovered helplessly a meter off the ground.

A safe distance from the coyote bushes dotting the property line, Sans shook out his chair and tossed it down beside a patch of naked buckwheat. You followed suit and plopped into your seat.

“countdown?” Sans requested.

Before you could start, he had flung the machine unceremoniously upward, nearly thirty feet into the air. At its very peak, he voided his magic. It plummeted into a satisfying cacophonous crash of metal and glass, as if a double decker had smashed into a brick wall.

“Three,” you said.

Two Gaster Blasters materialized over his shoulders.

“Two.”

Their unhinged jaws pooled white-hot energy in their gullets.

“One.”

Those wild-eyed dragon skulls unleashed two furious jets of dangerous magic. The light reflected in your sunglasses. Screams of raging power overwhelmed the once peaceful ambiance of nature. You both watched impassively, but perhaps just a little smugly, as what had once been a marvel of science was pummeled down into a flaming mess.

The blasters dissipated, appeased. Both natural and magical fire burned high like a bonfire in front of you. You popped open a bag of marshmallows. Sans, meanwhile, emptied an old yellow envelope into the flames, then shrugged and tossed in the sleeve as well. Blueprint after blueprint shriveled away to embers, never to be crafted again.

“erase that, ya fat gameboy,” he muttered.

Just as he reclined in his chair, a sputter of laughter spooked him out of it again.

“That was five years of our lives and 20 million G in government funding you just blew up.”

Sans whipped around, eye sockets wide and empty. You followed his gaze. The uncooked marshmallow you had been too impatient to wait for fell from your lips.

A lanky skeleton stood somewhat removed behind your chairs, clinging to a small paper bag and his own wrist. An orange laminate wristband hung above his bony palm, rugged from wear, and another rested alongside it in white. The sleeves of his loose, plum colored button-up had been pushed up to his elbows; the buttons down his torso had been fastened incorrectly, off by one. Something like apprehension and hesitation lit the small lights of his eyes, so similar to Sans’ and yet worlds apart.

Sans’ hand shook audibly as he peeled the sunglasses from his face.

Wingdings looked exactly the same as he had nearly a century ago—no longer melted, his body whole—even if those awful cracks still split his skull. They had been mended, only scars now behind a thin but large pair of lopsided circular glasses. Though he had seemed joyful a moment ago, his smile slowly slipped away.

At his heels, a small white dog panted happily. Far behind, at a bend in the road, a black Lincoln idled in park. Asgore stood leaning on the car door, watching from afar.

“I guess,” Wingdings eased past the silence, “it worked. Kind of. In a roundabout way. Basically, I was right; you were wrong. Congrats to me.” A small smile split his face again and his shoulders twitched upward. “Hooray,” he lilted weakly.

Sans had been creeping cautiously nearer, trembling, tracing that silhouette with the star of his left eye. Only inches apart, he touched the wristbands. The white one listed his name, his species, a mental hospital, and an admittance date—almost nine months ago. The orange band simply stated, “SUPERVISION REQUIRED.”

Sans’ face was wet before he realized why. Every thought and feeling had been swept away until now.

“did you really come all the way from the void,” he hardly breathed, “just to rub it in my face?”

Wingdings stared down at him a long moment before his eyelights circled up into a cinched brow. He shrugged again. “Yes?”

Sans bubbled with laughter then, and Dings bubbled back. Next thing you knew, they were piled in each other's bones on the ground, happy, relieved, home. The Annoying Dog danced joyful doggy circles around them with a wildly flapping tail.

From his vantage point, Asgore smiled with relief and found the resolve to approach.

“Oh, hey,” Wingdings said brightly when he noticed you nearing. “One sec.”

He opened the paper bag and rustled around inside. The sound of pill bottles jostling like rain sticks only distracted you a moment before he surfaced something both considerate and serendipitous. Chocolate. Your favorite. A big, thick bar of the good stuff, the kind that melted in the mouth and made for soft and perfect s’mores. Your mouth salivated as you took the brick into your hands. The two of you were going to get along fine.

“One square at a time,” Asgore instructed you firmly.

You nodded.

“nine months?” Sans lamented playfully, tugging at the band around his brother’s wrist. “i coulda given birth by now. what happened? where were you? why . . .” Joy siphoned out of him. “why didn’t i know?”

At this, the anxious guilt Wingdings had forgotten sprang to life again.

“I’ll explain.” Asgore’s broad shoulders blocked the sun like a monument. His large though gentle voice stilled them all.

“Your majesty, I can . . .”

“I am no longer ‘your majesty,’” the great boss monster interrupted Wingdings with a smile. “I am your friend.”

Dings relented, then, even if he fidgeted with the tags wrapped around his ulna and radius. Sans took his hand hostage.

Shortly before Sans had joined HEART, a small team had discovered Wingdings deep in the remnants of Waterfall. They had nearly given up their search when an annoying white dog barked after them ceaselessly. It led them to a dark alcove behind watery curtains, where Wingdings lay huddled in a corner, confused and nearly starved.

“I was all bone,” Wingdings interjected shyly, but no one smiled.

When he received the call that yet another skeleton had been unearthed, Asgore had raced to meet them almost as fast as he had run to meet you—but what he found was not the reunion he had hoped for. His smart, clever friend had been whittled down to a frightened creature with an ever fracturing hold on reality. With the breaking of the barrier, more than his grip on the rift had slipped loose. His mind had lost its bearings into a whirlwind of relentless psychosis. Excluding his early years in the void, Wingdings could not remember enduring an episode darker than this.

Though warned of Wingdings’ catatonia and incoherency, the king of the underground immediately requested to visit him. He was glad he did. Something about seeing Asgore snapped Wingdings out of his stupor and into a brief moment of clarity, long enough to ask for help . . . and beg for the news not to escape, not even to Sans.

“I didn’t want to be seen like that, marbles all over the floor,” Dings said. “And if I couldn’t be helped, well . . . I thought it would be better to stay forgotten.”

‘i didn’t forget you.” Sans’ grip on his brother’s hand tightened. “i mourned you. i thought you were dead.”

‘I’m sorry.”

“I should have told you, Sans,” said Asgore. “Right away. I was torn . . . and the longer I put it off, the harder it became.”

Sans took measure of his heartache and decided it wasn’t worthwhile to blame them, not now. He had learned to forgive Asriel; he could absolve his brother and Asgore of this one misstep. He let the warmth of that metal bonfire and the sight of Wingdings’ tired face smooth over his soul.

“you don’t gotta apologize,” he sighed. “it sounds . . . scary.”

Windings nodded meagerly, but did not elaborate.

Asgore had placed him in a special care ward under the brightest human and monster minds he could assemble. Thankfully, humans had already researched three years ahead on this front. With their combined understanding of monster and human anatomy, they found a combination of physical and magical treatment that worked enough to stabilize him. The rest relied on therapy.

“I’ll have sessions twice a week,” said Dings. “Asgore already agreed to take me, so if you have reservations . . .”

“reserva—the hell are you talking about?” Sans said. He had gripped his little brother by the shoulders, then, harsh at first but quickly gentle. Tears beaded in his eyes. “you think a little hot water’s gonna scare me off? you’ll be lucky if you get me off your heels!”

“It’s not over,” Windings said shakily. “I’m not cured. Something like this doesn’t just go away. It . . . sleeps.”

Sans deflated, then softly clutched him to his chest. Dings lowered his eyes, melting touch-starved into arms he had once lost hope in feeling.

“i know,” Sans answered calmly. “and when it wakes up you don’t gotta face it solo. you’re not alone in the dark anymore. you’re home.”

Sans inhaled deeply, mercifully, as if he hadn’t truly breathed since the day he lost him. Saying the words aloud had released something inside him like puncturing a balloon. Everything felt pure and new: the weight of his brother in his arms; the scent of him intermingled with the neighbor’s freshly-cut grass; the warmth of his breath amid the late summer sunlight bleaching his skull; the glow of his eyes against the bonfire flickering strange their shadows. Nothing would let him forget this, not even the stars that began to glimmer out of hiding.

“you’re home,” he said again, and this time his voice rattled with joy.

Wingdings held him very tightly then, desperately, and with it Sans knew he shared the sentiment. He smiled truly, deeply, never more whole, and hid it for himself in folds of wine purple cloth.

“you made it.”

The End

Hear me now, hope you're listening It's been centuries, least what it seems to me I've been on this road, my eyes glistenin' Our past don't matter, I'm much stronger And fly much farther, soar overseas Finally, see, I'll keep on climbing Ridin' the lightning and I am sure

At times, I really didn't show What was wrong with me, wrong with me I told myself I cannot grow Without lovin' me, lovin' me But this is just the hell that lives inside Tell me now, where to? Please be my guide

I've been goin', goin' in circles Reoccurring dreams, talkin' in my sleep Then I'm floatin' up to the surface I can finally breathe, I could do anything And I don't know why it's all right And it's not at the same time Then I look up at a blue sky And I know

At times, I really didn't show What was wrong with me, wrong with me I tell myself I cannot grow Without lovin' me, lovin' me This is just the hell that lives inside Tell me now, where to? Please be my guide

"Lovin' Me" - Kid Cudi feat. Phoebe Bridgers

That's it. That's the end. :')

This has been an amazing journey. Thank you, thank you so much for reading through to the end.

I've been considering starting a new fic, a part two so to speak, that follows Wingdings as he reconnects with family and friends and learns to navigate his new life. Plus healing, as well as his mental health and trauma from the void. Maybe romance??? idk. A wholesome slice-of-life thing, much lighter in tone. I have scenes in my head already.

Thank you again. I have a surprise in store, so please don't unsubscribe just yet. ;)

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#undertale #rift #riftfic #ut #undertale fanfic #undertale fanart #chapter 17 #epilogue #the end #sans #frisk #wingdings gaster #wd gaster #gaster #asgore #thank you #i can't say that enough #8th anniversary #undertale anniversary

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recurring-polynya · 9 months

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Yesterday's post about shinigami blood types (or lack thereof) reminded me about an idea I had awhile ago that shinigami had an equally woo system of assigning personality types based on reiatsu color. This is especially charming to me because of the fact that Ichigo, who hates horoscopes and such, changes reiatsu colors like seventeen times over the course of the series and I feel like the Reiatsu Color Girlies (gender neutral) would have a field day with him.

For funsies, and because it's Friday, I decided to take a stab at making one. I started with the reiatsu color chart from the Bleach wiki. I threw out all the really minor filler arc characters. This is mostly a shinigami thing, so I considered non-shinigami characters as I was thinking about the categories, but they were, like, supporting evidence. I decided that black reiatsu is not a thing people have normally, that's...you know, final form nonsense. Both Yoruichi and Soi Fon's shunko is listed as white, but I feel like shunko is just white, that's not the same as having white reiatsu and is not a personality reflection. On the other hand, when one's bankai is a different color than their normal, that's like revealing a secondary personality type, which is oddly consistent with bankai as a concept. I futzed around for a bit, and finally decided I wanted it to be color-wheel balanced, so, while the Bleach wiki uses the categories of Orange, Golden Orange, Golden Yellow, and Yellow, I just used Orange and Yellow. These are all designed as a spectrum anyway, so if someone's reiatsu is somewhere in the middle, or two-toned or something, they are considered to either have the traits of both, or to be somewhere in the middle.

Finally, keep in mind, this is in-universe hokem, so it's actually very on-brand and hilarious for someone to be grossly miscategorized.

Some notes:

From the very beginning of this project, it was hilarious to me that Matsumoto was getting thrown into the same personality archetype as Hitsugaya and both Kuchiki. In my mind, Rangiku strongly identifies as a white reiatsu person, despite the ample evidence to the contrary. No one is sure if this is a bit or not.

I took all the Arrancar off this chart, but obviously Grimmjow's is blue, and I think it's a hilarious Seireitei microaggression that he would go into the studious class overachiever with Kira and Ishida (I realize that Ishida is also not a shinigami, so to him, it's a microaggression how on-brand this is)

The pink category was such a mixed bag, and it also contained basically every girl Arrancar. I tried to come up with something that literally every one of them would make a horrified face about, a club to which absolutely no one wishes to belong.

The red category feels very solid to me and I love the collection of characters within it, except for Urahara, what is this man doing here? I feel he would be very "hmm, maybe I am a man of action" about it, which is definitely a bit, and Yoruichi has nearly murdered him over it on multiple occasions.

Has there ever been anyone with green reiatsu who wasn't absolutely insufferable over it? Certainly not anyone on this chart. (Kira is both vocally critical of the reiatsu color personality system and incandescently angry that he doesn't have green reiatsu)

#bleach worldbuilding #the spelling on the chart is not my usual b/c i copied it from the wiki and didn't feel like changing everything #i did not go to the trouble of looking up a number of characters who were Notably Missing from this chart #any after-the-fact additions will hopefully just add to the humor value #will i find some way to work this into a fanfic someday? i sure hope so!#this is just a dumb thing i made up if you disagree with it feel free to make your own

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