Chapter Text
Your name is Clover.
That is the first thing you can think of when you first feel yourself fade into consciousness, as though waking from a particularly restful sleep. You feel a slight bit of discomfort in your neck, and try to move a bit to fix it, but find that you cannot feel your legs.
You can’t feel your legs.
Really, you can’t feel a great many things, but your newfound lack of legs is your most immediate concern. Without being able to move about too much, you open your eyes, and are immediately blinded by the bright lights above you. Squinting, you look to your left and right and spy row after row of enormous plants, towering structures with three leaves on each of their faces. You try to reach towards them, but find you don’t have arms either. This, you decide, concerns you even more.
You try to remember how you managed to get into this situation in the first place. The last thing you recall is a meeting on the rooftop. You recall Martlet - yes, Martlet! Maybe you’re just back at her cabin? Maybe you’re just resting up before heading to the castle? You shake your head. No, Martlet never invited you back to her home. Why did you think that? That’s not what happened at all.
You scrunch up your face as you try to remember. Yes, you did meet on the rooftop, but then you’d headed further past. You’d met up with Starlo, the funny sheriff with a reckless streak matched only by his sense of duty, to try and stop Ceroba from taking your SOUL. Yes, that’s right. She’d knocked out your friends, put on that mask, and fought you with everything she had. You’re nearly certain she killed you more than a few times; you can still nearly feel the burns from her magic on your mostly-numb body.
Eventually, after seeing what she’d done, you’d shattered her mask, and with it, her resolve to keep attacking. You could have killed her, made sure she’d never try to hurt you or your friends again, but you’d stayed your hand. It wouldn’t have been right to kill her after knowing why she did it, after seeing that she had suffered more than enough. It wouldn’t have been just.
When your friends awoke, the four of you had reconciled. You remember looking at your friends, at the city below, and wondering what you could have done to make things right for them. To make them happier, to make monsterkind happier, for you’d seen that the monsters hardly deserved to be trapped far beneath the earth. You remember thinking about Martlet, who had shown you compassion and tireless aid, who deserved to fly above the clouds on the surface above. You remember thinking about Starlo, a determined and just, if stubborn, monster who deserved to ride off into a real sunset. You remember thinking about Axis, bumbling yet oddly passionate for a machine, with a propensity for magic that belied a genuine desire for a life of his own. You remember thinking about Ceroba, who had already sacrificed so much for freedom, who deserved to see her and her husband’s work achieve something, to bring the happiness they had hoped you could bring.
You remember thinking about Flowey. You never could have gotten to the end without him. You believed he deserved to soak in real rays from the sun, to see the surface at least once.
So you’d said your goodbyes, and given up your SOUL. You had waved as your friends walked away, pretending you couldn’t see their tears even then, hoping that the bitterness and longing in your chest would vanish before you left. But even as you lay down to slip away, as you saw a flash of yellow and green with a peculiar expression on its face, as you closed your eyes and waited for your heart to stop beating, you realized you still wanted to keep going. It was selfish, you knew that, selfish and cruel, but you wish you could have stayed just a little while longer. Stayed with Martlet in Snowdin, poring over puzzles. Visited Starlo and his friends in the Wild East, wranglin’ bandits as a full-fledged member of the Feisty Five. Hung around the Steamworks, helping the bots and being there for Axis when everyone else had gone. Stuck with Ceroba, helping her through the latest of her traumas, being a light at the end of the tunnel for her darkest times. You really had something special in the end, didn’t you? Nothing like before you came to the mountain, nothing. Ah, there goes your heart. You’d figured it wouldn’t have taken so long, but it’s here now.
Even at the end, the longing stayed with you. Just a few more minutes would have sufficed, you thought. If only that hug had lasted just a moment longer, maybe then you would have been satisfied. But no, justice is cold, justice has no time for family. But at the very end, you felt it pulsing within you, unbound from your SOUL. A sense of duty to your friends, to the people you chose to help save. A desire to see them safe, to see they saw the light at the very end, the sun still blazing past the barrier. A desire, a
need
, to see justice be done, to feel the warmth of the sun with your friends, to
CONTINUE-
You shake your head, and nearly buckle as the weight of what happened crashes into you. You died. You were dead. You were dead and now you aren’t. Why aren’t you dead? Does the King not have your SOUL? Why can’t you move? Are you a ghost? Are ghosts real? You think you heard someone mention a ghost monster once, but you’re a human! Are human ghosts real?! Why can’t you move -
You desperately flick your gaze around the room you’re in, and find that you can’t see more than a foot in front of you. You squint, and realize that the lights above you aren’t attached to the ceiling; they’re LEDs from a lamp just above your (head? Ghost-head?), and the rest of the lights are off. As your eyes adjust, you realize you are in some kind of laboratory, with clean tile floors and unlit lights. On a nearby table, stacks of paper pile high towards the ceiling in a teetering stack. Adjacent to it, you spy a refrigerator, half-open. You can see a stack of syringes inside, glowing various colours. One is tinged red. It is empty.
You have seen a syringe like it twice, you believe. Once was in a dream, a memory belonging to someone else, tinged deep blue as it surged through an innocent soul. The other recollection feels fainter still, though you dimly still see a whitish-red syringe tumbling over the side of a building, discarded by someone who trusted you above all else.
You recoil from the sight of the syringes. As you do so, you see a mirror on the far end of the room, past the rows of three-leaved plants. You strain your neck to see it, then freeze.
In the mirror, you can see the rows and rows of large three-leaved plants sitting in neat pots on a table. Standing above them all is a single four-leaf plant, on a long stem facing the mirror. At the centre of the plant’s face is a face , staring back at you with wide, frightened eyes. You shift your head to the side. The plant in the mirror shifts too. The plant in the mirror starts shaking, its stem wavering as though being pulled by a strong breeze. Its face contorts into something like a smile, and then it starts laughing, the hollow sound echoing throughout the room. It keeps laughing, and laughing, and you want it to stop so bad but the joke is too good, so it keeps on laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing and-
You hear footsteps coming, and a distant banging sound. You manage to tear your eyes away from the mirror and crouch back down in what you now recognize is a small flower pot, stifling another chuckle as you do so. As you hide between the three-leaf clovers, you catch a glimpse of a scaly yellow monster in a lab coat, looking around to find the source of the sounds. Finding none, she presses her hand to her face and begins muttering to herself.
“O-ok, it’s probably just one of the others l-laughing again. N-nothing new. I j-just have to go b-back there before she starts thinking I’ve run off again, or she m-might blow the d-door down anyways!” she says, gesturing wildly around her as she gets flustered. You recall a moment when a certain fox lady had blown a door clean in rather than deal with passwords again. Despite yourself, you feel your new face contort into a smile.
The scaly scientist hurriedly shuffles over to the stack of papers on the desk, shutting the refrigerator as she passes. She sorts through them faster than you’d have thought possible, before retrieving a single file. You can barely make out the name on it. When you do, you are filled with something indescribable.
“A-aha! Kanako K-ketsukane,” the scientist says, flipping through it with her back to you. As she does so, you think about what you saw on the terrace, beneath the sakura tree. The little girl who wanted to help more than anything else, who had her life and hope stripped from her by misplaced faith and reckless devotion. You suddenly have an understanding of where you are, where Kanako is, and who is banging on the door above.
You honestly don’t know how she hasn’t blasted the doors open yet.
You raise your
neck
stem above the rest of the plants and look at the file over the scientist’s shoulder.
Kanako Ketsukane. Boss Monster. Admitted 12/20/201X. Age: 9. Cause of Falling Down: SOUL-Based Trauma.
You skip past the assorted scientific jargon before your eyes settle on
Results of DT Treatment
. You stare at the words on the page, the hopeful early days and the detached, clinically precise descriptions of what happened to her afterwards. Your normally inexpressive face splits open with a mirthless grin. You can’t help it, it’s just yet another brilliant joke.
Even if she got here with you, it wouldn’t have meant anything. She couldn’t have saved her. Nothing can
.
There never will be justice, not for her.
Your body blocks out the light from the lamps, causing the monster to turn around in confusion. You quickly school your face back into its inexpressive state, as you often had to do back at home. Even so, the scientist monster is startled by the large plant looming over her. You hurriedly move back down, but not before the scientist recollects herself and brushes aside the other plants to look. When she sees you, you are certain she sees yet another experiment, where you see a chance to see what has become of your SOUL, of your friends, to see if it was worth it after all, if justice has a chance of prevailing. And a final thought arises, unbidden: a chance, perhaps, to mete out justice yourself.
The monster pauses for a moment, then awkwardly introduces herself. She is Alphys, the Royal Scientist. Before she can stop herself, she asks for your name. You think for a moment, listening to the steadily intensifying banging above you, recalling a golden flower that you know you must find, and make your decision. You give her your answer.
Your name is Clover.
Clover the Clover.
You are filled with justice.