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[Sans doesn't want to talk about the end, even if it already happened. Talking about the machinery he was using is easier.] The timeline stuff--a lot of it's quantum physics, y'know? I helped build the machines--put the magic in it, mostly--but even now I don't remember helping build it. Just know I did. [He couldn't fix everything, just put enough back together to know too much about the mess they were in. Can't go back. Now he doesn't even have the machinery, but maybe that's for the best.]

...This was going on a while, huh. [The words emerge slowly, because yes Sans had hinted as much a couple minutes ago... But as things they don't really talk about or acknowledge go, that gaping confusion about their pasts is the confusion. He hesitates a moment, deciding what to ask.] And you were checking them, all those years?

Yeah. [An impossibly long time, if you stretch out all the timelines. Now that Sans can remember them, he's not sure what sort of implications that might have for his psyche. Well, it's not like the emotions didn't build up even if he couldn't remember them. A lot of the damage was already done. (But if he thinks "it probably can't get worse" he's just dooming himself, so he doesn't.)] Tried fixing the rest for a while--well, you know about that, a little. [About the machine in the basement, and how Sans had tried to fix it before eventually mostly giving up. Sans didn't tell Papyrus that the bits he had managed to get working were giving out timeline data, that's all.] Tracking down the cause I could do. Stopping it...

[Sans could never stop it. Flowey had gotten better and better at hiding, but even in the timelines where the ~~kid~~ anomaly had taken over, Sans had suspicions about that flower that avoided him. The anomaly was about as subtle as a brick to the face to Sans's well-tuned observational skills. But that just meant Sans could watch the train come barreling toward everybody. He couldn't get out of the way. He couldn't stop the train.]

Some people... are really hard to convince, of anything. [Agreement, something edging closer to resignation than he usually lets himself express, especially around Sans. Papyrus shifts, stares at Dinah's soul rather than glance his brother's way. People who want to do something to help, maybe-flowers and maybe-humans with agendas, entities who live deep underground...] I wonder how they did it.

[The curiosity isn't as strong as it would have been, before. Suspicion and fear are stronger, his thoughts continuing to orbit a fearful conclusion one half of him had jumped to, earlier this week, that he can't find it in himself to refute. But maybe it's not connected, maybe there was some mysterious ancient artifact that Flowey unearthed, traveling around in the dirt like that. Maybe something the human could steal. Something that might turn up, and let them try to fix all this mess. That's a better thought, isn't it?]

Determination. [That Sans does know.] A lot of it. More than any monster could hold.

[Sans hesitates. Well. He's already talking. Might as well keep going.]

Undyne--she had it. Not as much as the anomaly, but more than I thought a monster could have. When the anomaly got to her--

[More hesitation. He skips the details.] She died. And came back to fight the human again.

[The way Sans uses the word determination, it doesn't sound like the usual meaning. Maybe there's something familiar to it, from Flowey's stories, or something else...? He doesn't poke at it. It's abruptly easier not to, when Sans keeps going - with a surprise drop of Undyne's name.]

Came... Came back? Again? Undyne did? [Back from dying, he knows Sans said. But back in time, he almost hears, after the last topic.] Th-That sounds like Undyne! Why fight just once, when she could push herself for a whole extra duel.

Yeah. Anomaly got a cheap shot in the first time 'cause she was protecting someone else. You know Undyne'd never let that slide. [Sans manages a little flicker of an expression, bittersweetness that's heavy on the bitter. It was undeniably and extremely Undyne situation. If anyone was going to pull that kind of thing off it was her. But she shouldn't have had to.] She didn't manage the turning back time part, but she made the anomaly do a lot of it.

[It hadn't been fair. Even with Undyne, the anomaly only had to win twice.]

As impressive as I could have expected! [As he did expect, really. Undyne's vehement attitude on humans was clear in their last phone call, and there'd never been any doubt she'd give the human a run for its money. He just hasn't spent much time imagining the fight. Rough enough, remembering those fragmented bits of Sans's, with the brittle mocking accusations and the tricky moves among the golden pillars, ending in death. He hasn't wanted to imagine how Undyne fell.] But, I guess it wasn't impressed. And wouldn't have been, if I'd pulled out all the stops...

[That, he has occasionally imagined. What kinds of cool, complicated moves might have awed and frightened the human into surrendering? It's preferable to imagine weaving attacks together than the accumulating dust and the gaps in neighborhoods forming in its wake. He's occasionally regretted what he went with, the gamble on pushing the human to choose whether to attack someone so blatantly not attacking, or else accept his mercy... But if they were time traveling, then their choice whether to continue really was the deciding factor in it all, and no cool moves would have stopped them.]

[Sans shrugs, which is actually something of an attempt at honesty. It's natural to praise his brother, but the anomaly is something else entirely. Sans is sure that if Papyrus had set his mind to it, he could have held up the anomaly for a long time, but time is exactly the issue with the anomaly.

But there's something else Sans is sure of, too:] Well, nobody could'a offered 'em mercy like you did, either. Actually believing they could change, even with what they did.

[Nobody else is like Papyrus, as far as Sans is concerned. Papyrus really is great.]

Nyeh heh heh, why do you think I did! [His heart isn't entirely in it, but Papyrus boasts and laughs with a ghost of a smile.] I still do believe that, you know. Even if it's... maybe harder, than I thought then.

[The compressed memories sit heavy in his awareness, even as he continues to skirt around activating more of them. The human hadn't just killed, he's sure of it. It had played, performed on TV, befriended them? Tried things out, like a person choosing to try out everything... Or like something deep underground trying to see what made people tick, so as to push them just the right way. And that's familiar too, echoes of familiarity. It feels like he's been trying to please and steer some powerful person for a very long time.]

That's what makes you so cool. [It's something Sans says a lot. He always means it, of course, but this time he breaks his expressionless mask for something actually sincere.] Really.

[He remembers how Papyrus was when he was younger--much more insecure. And he's gotten a lot better with his self-esteem. But, now that Sans has been forced into Papyrus's head and memories multiple times, Papyrus still has more of that insecurity left than Sans realized. Sans is always going to be on Papyrus's side. That's a core part of what makes him Sans. And Papyrus's ability to believe in people, to be merciful, is exactly what makes him so cool.]

[Between his somewhat numbed emotions, and how recent events have drained him, Papyrus doesn't anxiously rush to agree and reassure. Not when he recognizes the sincerity of Sans's words, sinking in even with the numbness, enough to be heartwarming. His smile deepens, and he glances away.]

...I won't argue with that! Not with words so profoundly correct. [Maybe a little over-emphatic, but he has years of compensating to not slip into Sans's habits. His brother can surely see through it enough to hear the gratitude. But his smile goes wry, as he again considers that worrying network post with all the pro-Ozpaka friendship threads.] That said... Maybe our downstairs not-friend is a little much, for me to win over. I'm in no hurry to try.

[Sans hears the genuine gratitude, and combined with the uniquely Papyrus emphasis, it pulls a slightly wider smile out of him just for a moment.] Yeah, that's the problem with incomprehensible entities. They just don't listen to reason.

[Hearing Papyrus say he's not about to go down and try to talk sense into Okpaza is a relief, even if he didn't actually really think Papyrus was going to. It's just nice to have the reassurance.]

[Papyrus snickers at the mildness of Sans's take, and does his best to match.] It's so inconvenient of them. Downright inhospitable.

[An indignation he hopes to hold onto, with all relevant future run-ins. It doesn't seem like the kind of feeling that the entity would go strategically plucking from his skull and circuitry, even if it already showed itself capable of plucking Sans from his memories... Even numbed out, he's still tense and unhappy at the thought. Ugh.]

...The lights, in that room you left. [He says slowly, checking Sans for tension of his own.] They talked like... Just choosing to be ourselves, is a kind of resisting? Did you hear anything like that?

The fourth version of me gave me a pep talk. [Sans sounds a little incredulous, saying it; a little embarrassed. Giving himself a pep talk is not exactly Sans's thing. But that's what happened regardless.] Said things weren't set in stone. Some of us it can't control. A reason besides just wanting to eat us that we're here. That kind of thing.

[So yeah, sort of, if not in those words. Sans still sounds a bit embarrassed repeating this stuff back. It sounds too sappy coming out of his mouth. (As much as anything he says can be said to come out of his mouth and not somewhere just behind it, anyway.)]

[Maybe it said more to Sans than to Papyrus, after all. Not a surprise, he'd arrived later, and heard encouragements from the 'leftovers' of Sans's love. He glances sidelong at his brother again, but doesn't expect to see anything else awry.]

...Good. I'm going to... I'm choosing to believe that! And to keep thinking positively. As well as I can. [The sardonic aside is quieter but there, testing the water of deliberately being both of him - all of him - again.]

[Sans isn't going to commit to thinking positively. That would be so untrue it probably wouldn't even count as lying at that point. But. But.]

Maybe light doesn't just exist to feed the dark.

[That's something else the fourth him said. And it's something to hang onto. Because Sans is going to keep going, regardless. Better to have a direction. If all he has to work with is a cosmic misstep, at least it's something.]

[It's not something the lights had echoed for Papyrus, so his side glance turns baffled. He can't tell if this is a reference to some ominous spiritual thing Sans hasn't shared before, or what.]

No... of course not? Sunlight does feed me, but I'm hardly 'the dark', and it's not all for me anyway.

[Sans laughs. It's a "I have a lot of emotions going on" kind of laugh. Sans has always been the sort of guy who can laugh at most anything, even when he doesn't want to. But right now it's just a release valve, and it's fine.]

Well shit, that's proof right there, yeah? Some of that light's gotta go to you. [There's some actual buoyancy to Sans, suddenly--probably almost out of nowhere from Papyrus's perspective, though Sans is still thinking about what happened in the power plant. Some of the melancholy has lifted.]

[Seems sincere, that sudden lightening (of weight removed, not illumination) on Sans's part. Papyrus doesn't know what to make of it, can't tell if it's something that's been going on a while or something today's chaos has instigated... But, at least he's managed to jostle it helpfully.]

Always happy to be proof of not-terrible things. [He says it with a typical (slightly forced) positivity, then reconsiders, and admits:] Usually. Not quite always. But now's one of those times, don't worry!

The fourth me said some of us reflect back light instead of darkness. I guess mine's more literal. [But that does kind of help clarify what he's talking about a little.] 'S okay if you don't want to act positive all the time, y'know.

[Sans is pretty sure Papyrus does it for his own sake most of the time, but there's a lot of times he does it for Sans, too, and that shouldn't be something Papyrus has to worry about.]

[Ah, no wonder the worry was so easily jostled, if this particular piece of it was from just earlier today. Though, obviously all the conversations today - at the power plant, on the network, here and now - are built on earlier problems. Dinah surely wouldn't have rushed in so emphatically, if it weren't for... earlier worries.

Papyrus muses on these things a little longer than he needs to, the better to not immediately respond to Sans's reassurance with more than a tense side glance. But the relative quiet of internal fans whirring and, the electrical whine of the television and various signals around town coming back on, it all drags on a little too long. He shrugs his shoulders alone, in a slightly hunched way. Even a bit numb, it's a rough thing to talk about with his brother.]

It's... It's not just about what I want, there in the moment. Things go better when I keep it positive! [Whether that's finding some genuine positivity in him to act from, or putting up a positive front so as not to be (even more) offputting.] I don't... I wouldn't... want to make it harder. For anybody. [For Sans, already struggling.]

[Sans pauses, considering. Emotional stuff--still not good at it. And there's been a lot of it today. This week. This month. This year.]

I mean... Sometimes it's about what you want. [Most of the time, if Sans is the one deciding.]

...Sometimes. [It's a slow concession, as Papyrus relaxes the shrug, and repeats:] I'm not always on-duty, proving not-terrible things...

Maybe I'll stock up on tea! And install a sprinkler above one of the windows. So I gaze forlornly out the window into the rain, any time I need.

[He's mostly joking, but with a seed of considering it. Something theatrically sad, mostly a joke, could still be... a way to be sad, visibly, without it doing any real harm.]

If you put it in the kitchen, I think it counts as a safety thing too. [Multitasking. Also, Sans knows Papyrus tends to prefer having things to do and projects to work on anyway. If Papyrus would like to install a sprinkler system, that's fine with him.

They've fallen into joking around again. It's such a well-worn habit it's become a ditch to fall into.]

stuffs some background headcanon in here it's fine

the magic of threads in journals instead of comms

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