Chapter Text
The skeleton raised his fist and rained justice down upon the sinner. What he lacked in strength, the murderous flower made up for in agility, weaving through each meteoric bone attack as if it were all a choreographed dance. Yet the skeleton wasn’t easily stopped, summoning a blaster that caught the flower off-guard, breaking their perfect rhythm. Hundreds of abruptly-silenced voices cried out as the coating of dust burned off the flower’s body.
Flowey gave his opponent no quarter; his next timeline loaded with a machine-gun’s spray of bullets that drowned the light beaming through the arched windows. Sans watched them approach as if standing before a firing squad, before destiny itself, the scene only missing a cigarette dangling from his grim smile. Three bullets struck true and pierced through his chest and emerged out his back coated in red. Flowey cast his head back in uproarious laughter, shadows dancing on his face, eyes burning like lit coal. A much smaller laugh silenced his and he looked up incredulously only to be met with a ring of blasters and Sans, holding his jacket open, revealing only his ketchup bottle had been pierced rather than his thin spine and brittle ribs. Flowey’s mouth hung agape as the blasters fired, leaving nothing of him but a stain on the floor and an echo of laughter.
Flowey loaded again and fired enough bullets to completely dwarf his last effort, but he had gotten angry, sloppy; Sans easily found a hole in his pattern and slipped through the cracks, taking a swig out of his pocket ketchup as if to gloat. No love was lost between them; the two couldn’t exist without one another in this moment, a grenade without a pin, a dry field without a match. Only the souls of the damned were left to witness this match that would tear apart time’s fabric itself: unstoppable force vs immovable object, light vs dark, good vs evil--
“UGGGGHHHH!” Flowey groaned. “You stupid freaking CHEATER! You NEVER fight fair and it’s so STUPID!”
For a moment, Sans actually forgot to attack. “Huh,” he said, scratching his skull. “I have a feeling that’s the first thing you’ve said that wasn’t full of hot air.”
“SHUT UP! YOUR FACE IS FULL OF HOT AIR!” Flowey shouted. He took a deep breath, then let go, for a moment remembering his long-gone ‘Cool Evil Final Boss’ persona-- and then he let out a wail that contained all the rage of anyone who’s ever gotten, as gamers say, ‘owned’.
Flowey thrashed about out of pure rage, the dramatic effect somewhat lessened by the soft, sandal-like ‘thwp’ sound his little flower body made as he slammed himself onto the ground, roaring in anger the whole time: “IDIOT! STUPID CHEATING JERK! JUST! LET! ME! WIN!”. He grabbed the yellow save point and chucked it like a video game controller. Sans caught flashes of The Void with every bounce, but otherwise just felt a disruption of some kind-- a disruption that broke the laws of reality caused by a child’s temper tantrum.
“I don’t think whatever you did was supposed to be possible,” he said, but Flowey was long past the realm of rationality. He was rolling back and forth, slamming into the walls, positively wailing, tears of frustration steaming from his eyes. Sans scratched the back of his head, uncomfortable at this shameful display. Only once did Flowey look up, completely quiet and sober, to see if he had managed to kill Sans in the crossfire.
“Are you done?” Sans asked.
Flowey threw his head back down and continued to scream. Bullets manifested and fired in the vague direction of Sans but mostly bounced off the walls like murderous ping-pong balls. As his turn approached, Sans felt like it would only be right to just put this thing out of its misery-- yet he was engrossed, like someone watching a train derailing in real time. It felt almost otherworldly to think that this brat had killed his brother.
Of course, knowing Papyrus, this flower thing probably whined and asked about reeeeaaaallllly wanting to kill him and Papyrus probably said, “Sure, since you want to so bad, why the heck not!”
Or maybe he was just having a fever dream. It was getting harder to tell.
“Look, ‘you win’,” Sans finally said. “How about that? Will you reset and play nice now?”
“I wanna kill you!” Flowey groaned. “I wanna kill you so bad you stupid cheating jerk idiot loser!”
This didn’t seem like the same flower that had a look on his face that definitely meant he’d given a past Sans (or two, or twenty) a long, overdramatic speech containing every single one of his faults. He wanted to ask how in the world he had managed to kill everyone else in the Underground, but he had-- oh God, he’d opened his blog and started crytyping. This was just embarrassing. There wasn’t even anyone to give him a sympathy Like.
“I’m calling you out,” Flowey said, voice hoarse from his tantrum. “First point: being stupid and sucking.”
“Cool. Can you @ me in it?”
“You’re supposed to be ashamed!”
“Awful bold of you to assume I can feel shame.”
The flower seemed to consider this. It was, in fact, quite true that Sans had showed up to this climactic battle with a gigantic ice cream stain on his shirt which, when asked about, he said he was “saving for later.” His other shirts had so many stains on them that Sans called them ‘the samplers’. He once hid a chicken nugget inside his skull as a dare and still couldn’t get it out.
“Point taken. Consider this,” Flowey said, a nanosecond before hurling the phone at him, which Sans dodged. “I hate you!” he shouted. “I’ll make you pay! I’m going to reset and kill Papyrus in front of you!”
“Ok.”
“And I’m going to torture everyone in Snowdin!” he added. “And I’m going to tear down Grillby’s!”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I… I…” Flowey stammered. He tsked. “Cheater!” he called out, one last time, before burrowing a hole and disappearing into it.
Sans stood for several moments, incredulous at what just happened. Of course the next Sans would have no idea, unless Flowey’s crocodile tears carried across timelines. How hilarious and oddly… ‘adorable’ wasn’t the right word, kind of like how you would hesitate to call a pony with nuclear launch codes adorable. But if that cute pony slammed its hoof onto that red button and destroyed the world, the last thing you would say would be, “what did you expect? It’s just a dumb fucking horse.”
Or something like that. Man, he was tired. And hungry. He thought about shaking his head as hard as possible to try and dislodge the nugget, but in the end, decided to make the effort to trudge over to Grillby’s.
“Aw man,” he mused aloud, having pulled out his phone. “He didn’t even @ me.”