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"Chara," someone says.
A voice calling out to you from across a vast expanse. A deep, dark ocean, empty of any dreams. For once, you are floating.
"Chara," someone says again.
This time, you wake up.
You heft yourself upright. The room is dark, but you can see Asriel's familiar silhouette sitting on the edge of your bed. His gleaming eyes are fixed on you, and you yawn as you rub your eyes.
"What's wrong?" you ask.
"Chara," he repeats. "Chara. Chara."
Ah.
You reach for his hand. He offers no resistance, but he also offers no response. Usually he's eager for your touch, more than happy to intertwine his fingers with your own, but his hand remains limp.
"I'm here," you say. Then again, maybe you shouldn't be. You're probably not the best person to comfort him. You don't know how to help people. Whenever you've tried in the past, you've always failed. Still, Asriel came to you, and you won't turn him away.
"I kept calling for you," he says. His arm hangs there like a dead thing, even as you press your small, cold palm against his great, soft, warm one. "I called for you so many times."
He's not really present, you realize.
Years have passed. You know that anybody else would think that it's been more than long enough for him to have finally worked around the holes in his consciousness. But you're not anybody else; you yourself are still struggling to figure out who Chara is in the wake of your rebirth. You can't blame Asriel for losing himself sometimes.
You toss aside your blankets and move to join him on the edge of the bed, leaning forward to enfold him in your arms. You gather him up carefully, as though he's something small and delicate, not a nearly-adult boss monster.
He leans into your embrace, but doesn't return it, not until you give the command, "Hug me."
He doesn't move immediately. His arms remain slack at his sides, as though he's forgotten that they're his to move. But eventually they twitch back to life, and slowly, slowly, they encircle you as well.
You feel his hands settle on the small of your back, pressing you against his chest.
His heart beats against you. It's a rapid, fluttering thing. His breathing is desperate and uneven, and you think of the little bottles that his therapist sent him home with one day. The orange ones that made him sick, the small white ones that made him giggly and sleepy when he got angry or afraid. The ones you saw him flushing down the toilet. You hadn't told anybody at the time, but you wonder, now, if those were something that he needed after all.
You don't know. You don't know.
(Toriel and Asgore think you should see somebody too. You always refuse.)
"I missed you," he says, hands gripping the back of your sweater. "I missed you so much."
"I know."
"Where were you? I called for you over and over again. You never came."
"I'm here now."
"But you weren't before," he says, and there's a darker edge to his tone now. His fingers twist into the flannel of your nightshirt, claws digging into your back.
If he digs in any deeper, you'll withdraw. For now you just repeat, "I'm here now. I'm here."
His expression flickers between anger and confusion, but gradually, the anger seeps away. When it does, he lets go of your shirt and instead lifts his hand to cup your cheek.
"This is...real, right?" he asks. His fingers ghost along your skin, barely making contact, as though afraid that you will vanish if he does. "You won't disappear?"
"I won't disappear," you promise.
"You've disappeared before."
"I won't this time."
"I watched you die. I killed you. I killed everyone."
He's trembling.
"I could kill you," he says. "I could snap your legs like twigs so that you can't leave again. I want to sometimes."
But his face is wet when he presses it against your shoulder, and in your arms, he grows impossibly still.
Maybe you should be afraid. But no matter how sharp his words become, how dark his eyes may grow when they're on you, his hands are only ever gentle. He treats you like you're made of porcelain and thinks that you may shatter. He doesn't know that you're already broken, that his every touch is mending you with golden seams.
More than anything, you want to do the same for him.
"I know you won't," you say.
"How do you know?"
Words, memories, ideas, all of them come stuttering to the surface, only to disappear. I trust you. Not good enough. I just know. But how do you know?
"If you ever try, I'll kill you first," you say.
He barks a laugh, short and rough and not really a laugh at all.
His breathing is still ragged. You wonder if maybe you should get his parents. Maybe this is beyond you. But he still clings to you, and you still cling to him, and you don't see how there's any room for anybody else in the space the two of you have created.
"What's wrong with me?" he asks, voice quavering. "I'm supposed to be better now. I have a soul again. Why am I still like this?"
(It doesn't feel as bad as it should, he'd told you once. The anger, I mean.
It never does, you'd replied. That's what makes it so hard.
His fingers curling and uncurling, over and over again, as though testing to make sure they still work.
I remember how it felt, he'd said. Magic tearing through skin and bone. Dust raining over everything. It felt...good. Do you think it still would?
Centuries of screaming, muffled by a smile.
He'd smiled at you, then. You'd smiled back.)
"It's okay to be like this," you say.
"It's not."
"It is."
"I don't deserve you," he says. "I don't deserve any of this. You're going to leave someday. Everything will."
I don't deserve you. Well, that's a load of bullshit. You're garbage, you're trash, you're ugly and you're evil, and Asriel is—was?—everything good and sweet in the world. He deserves better than you. But now is not the time for your dumb hang-ups.
"I can't promise that it won't," you say. "But for now, at least, I'm here. We're all here."
"Asriel isn't here," he says. "What happened to him?"
"Asriel changed," you answer. "That's all."
"But how do I get him back?"
And you don't know what to say.
You may have been already cracked, but now Asriel is cracked as well. If you could, you would undo it, but you can't. All you can do is try to mend him, the way he tries to mend you. Not disguise or overlook the damage, but integrate it into the whole. Broken, but still valuable, still good.
(Finally a match for you, something whispers.)
"You don't have to be Asriel," you say. You try to keep your voice soft. Nonthreatening.
"Then who am I supposed to be?" asks the boy, man, monster in front of you.
Hands are what others use to touch and to control you. Hands are what you use yourself to break and cut and scar. Hands are what he lacked for far too long and and what he now fears so desperately. What if, he asks you time and time again. What if I go crazy, what if I can't hold back someday, what if I choke or break or stab, what if, what if, what if. Hands are dangerous, and so you bring his hand to your mouth and kiss the pulse-point of his wrist.
(Your own what if: what if I sank my teeth into his flesh?
But you don't. You just kiss him, because you are strong enough to be tender when you want to be, even when everything inside you is roaring for you to be otherwise.)
You say, "It doesn't matter. Whoever you are, whoever you become, I'll still love you."
He watches in the dark, perfectly silent, perfectly still, and then suddenly, he lurches forward.
When he kisses you, he does so roughly, insistently, desperate and hungry and afraid, but his face is still wet, and when you break away to brush your lips against his eyelids, he gives a single hiccuping sob.
"I don't know if I want to be Asriel anymore," he says, voice thick. "I don't feel like him these days."
"I can help you choose a new name, if you want," you offer.
You're not the best at giving comfort, but naming is something you can definitely do. After all, you became Chara when you were very small. You'd grown tired of your old name and wanted something new, something unique. Chara, Beta Canum Venaticorum, χαρά, joy. A tiny wish, maybe a prayer. If you were to help him, you'd find something similar, something that speaks of happiness even as it flickers in the dark a million miles away. Infallible, untouchable, its light reaching others even when the star's already dead. Nobody has to know.
"What would you name me?" he asks, and finally, his hands and arms are fully alive again, trailing along your skin and stroking your hair.
"Cor Caroli," you suggest. "Or Charles. We'd match."
He snorts, and then he smiles. At last, a genuine smile.
"I thought I was the one who was bad at names," he says.
"You are, though. I mean, come on. Flowey the Flower?" you remind him.
He groans, and you smirk.
He wraps his arms around you and the two of you fall back onto your bed. As you curl into him, you once again feel his heart beating against you, but the rhythm's steadier now. Whatever panic had overtaken him before is finally dissipating."I think I'm okay with staying Asriel for now," he says.
Now that you're lying down again, exhaustion, heavy and thick, is threatening to drag you back to sleep. But before you can drift away, you ask, "Do you know what brought this on?"
Asriel is silent. Then, softly: "I woke up and panicked when you weren't there. I knew you were just in your room, but...I don't know."
Is that something you can fix? you wonder. Would it help for the two of you to share a room again? But you need your space sometimes. You need quiet sometimes. You...
"You can stay here tonight if you want to," you say.
"Thank you."
He doesn't say another word. Neither do you.
You'll have to tell Toriel and Asgore. Frisk, too. Frisk isn't in charge of Asriel's welfare, obviously, but they deserve to know he's having trouble again. And you should probably tell someone about his medication—you of all people know what it's like to hate taking pills, but...
It's strange, to be taking care of Asriel for a change. Usually, he's the one taking care of you. But neither of you are the people that you used to be, and maybe this is just the price you have to pay for finally beginning to outgrow your former fragility.
It doesn't matter. It's not like you're alone in this, and if you can help mend those cracks even just a little, then it will be worth it. And besides—it actually feels kind of nice, to be the strong one for once.
Eventually, the two of you drift off to sleep in one another's arms. Once again, you're floating, this time with Asriel beside you.