Mercy Detached from Justice Grows Unmerciful, Pt.2

"I remember my mother Arial telling me she loved the rain. That I was created in the rain. My origin was uniquely tied to it, and that's one of the reasons, I suppose, I loved it so much. 

When it rains, there's a strange electricity that sizzles in the air. The atmosphere changes, you can feel it coming, and then...then, everything becomes so much quieter, muffled. Most headed inside. Not I. I'd wrap my scarf around my neck, and get my glasses on, and I'd go out, out into the storms with my umbrella. 

I would feel as though all my worries had faded away, muffled by the big quilt of sound that came from the rain pouring around me. The pitter-patter of rain droplets on my umbrella was a soothing white noise to me, and I'd just spent hours just...standing and listening and talking to the rain. Thinking out loud. Dreaming away, me, the rain, and my little personal shelter.

I would prefer, though, when I could, to spend my time under the rain out in the fields in the large town I lived in, or better still, in the woods. When the rain trickles down through a forest, it adds an unusual sort of...rhythm. It was like a shelter IN a shelter for me, and it felt even more comforting than usual.

I'd just take in the greens of the trees, and I'd wait, and wait, and finally, when the rain had ended, the leaves would be freshly glimmering and glittering with the newly fallen rain. It would all be so beautiful, like everything had been covered in a diamond sheen, glistening in the light of the sun. 

I preferred that. It wasn't exactly safe to be out on the sidewalk or in the streets when it rained. My eldest brother, Trajan, would offer to stay out with me sometimes. He was always very worried for my well-being. Felt being out with me would make me feel safer, and better still, make our mother, Arial, and our father, Roman, feel safer. After all, our grandfather Gothic had gone out alone onto a street late one night and never came home, but...no, no, I always insisted I'd be fine, I'd stay out of the streets. Away from humans.

Yous see, the city was divided, self-segregated between monsters and humans, one of the many border towns on the two kingdoms, the one belonging to Monsters, the other belonging to Humans. I would get many, MANY strange, often dirty or frightened looks as humans gazed out their windows or across the street or in my direction at the market. The north side of the town belonged primarily to the monsters, the South side to the humans, with the market in the middle. 

Milling about in the market, you could almost pretend everything was just...fine. But even there, there was an electricity in the air you could faintly feel. A tenseness. A nervousness. People wouldn't really like to linger that long, especially not if you didn't feel there were enough of your kind there. 

Humans didn't much...care for many monsters. Some they found cute, I admit. Adorable, even, for they resembled their own pets, or they were too harmless-looking to feel threatened by them. Nobody, for example, ever really feared a froggit, and some, well...some even found the mer-race intriguing. Sailors, after all, had always told stories of the beauty of mermaids on the sea, out in their natural habitat, and it was not uncommon for men or women of mankind to tilt their head and gaze upon the vibrant blue shaded skin of the merfolk. To see their rich, vibrant, red hair, the way the sun shone off their scales.

There was an erotic beauty, I admit, to the merfolk that did intrigue some humans. Made them admire them, the great advance guard of Monsterkind, who worked so hard to uphold law and order in our towns or our SECTIONS of towns. On the other side, there were rather ugly monsters nobody felt love for, like that of Gerald and his kin."

"Ohhh, you mean JERRY and his family?"

"What?"

Gaster was snapped out of his remembrance of times long past by the Soul of Perseverance nodding sagely, her eyes a-glittering with knowledge behind her glasses. "Yeah, Jerry's family. They're all kind of "UFO" shaped, am I right? Greyish in color, too? Rather beady black eyes?"

"Oh yes. That was them. Their unique sect of monsters didn't have much power of their own." Gaster said, and a bit of a snort erupted from his mouth. "Pfft. Rather pitiful, really. Their only true brand of magic was increasing the magical skills of others, but we didn't really get to experience such a benefit from them, because THEY had decided to throw their lot in with humans. In fact, Gerald, Jerry's father, personally taught one of the 7 Mages that created the barrier."

Gaster folded his arms over his chest as he sat in the library chair, and his eyes deeply narrowed. For a moment, he felt a surge of bitter anger and resentment and frustration rise up in him, and it was as if he was a young lad all over again, hatefully gazing at Gerald all over again, him and his...student. His HUMAN student. 

"You've no idea how infuriating it was to so many of us to see him helping HUMANS with magical power. It was an insult to so many of us. It felt as though he was selling out his kind, plain and simple. I remember one of my brothers, Garamond, a rather thin, lanky fellow, he got into an argument with Gerald's human student. Said it was insulting that he, a "white-haired little freak" was getting taught magic by a "pathetic Judas Iscariot of monsterkind". The student surprised Gerald by using better blue magic than Garamond could ever do, and HE had been one of the family's best fighters! I was astounded Gerald would teach the human how to manipulate blue magic..."

"Well it doesn't sound like you treated his family well." Christa remarked, the Soul of Perseverance leaning back in her chair and shaking her frizzy-haired head. "His family was the first breed up against the wall when monsters decided to enter war with humans. Didn't Undyne's mother order them to be STONED to death? She personally threw the boulder that cracked Gerald's head open like a melon. Perhaps if you'd treated them with more decency, they would have spent time with your side, instead of the humans, who actually appreciated them."

"Th-they only tolerated them because they could enhance other's magic!"

"Yes, but your side wouldn't EVEN tolerate them, so they went with the side that at least was HONEST about what they wanted. Apathy and indifference are a lot more infuriating to people than being used and being aware you're being used. At least the latter's honest. And the former's even harder to take if its from your own "species", who should have been shown more compassion than the race that supposedly despised all monsters."

Gaster frowned darkly. "How do you even KNOW of the fate of that breed of monster?"

"Up in Heaven, the Heavenly Host knows past and present and future, HE included. Those down...below...in the other place, y'know..." Christa cringed. "They only know the future and the past, but not the present. We normal folks in Heaven know the present AND the past, but not the future. It's one of the benefits to being up here, because in the end, when all are to be judged, there will only be the Present, and those in Hell will know...nothing." Christa remarked with a sad sigh. "So I'm aware of Jerry's past. The jury will know of yours, as will the judge. But what matters is your integrity, and your thoughts, and feelings. We know what you DID. We don't know how you felt...what you thought. If we know that, it can inform WHY you did what you did, and make it easier for you to convince the Heavenly Host you belong here."

Gaster frowned a bit, looking slightly to the side before he finally sighed again. "Very well. You want to know then, how I felt about humans? They didn't like me much and I didn't like them."

"Because they scared you?"

"We scared them too. You see..."

A hesitant moment, and then...

"Humans believed skeletons were...created from them. It was a rather strange, persistent rumor. They called us "revenants", thinking we were animated corpses, the dead come back to life through darkly magical means. Unfortunately their reasoning was remarkably and disturbingly sound, for monsters, as you've no doubt realized, do not have skeletons. Our bodies are made up not really of bones or blood, but of magical dust. Hence why we leave no true "remains". So in a twisted way, it would make sense for some humans to believe we skeletons monsters had, at one point, been humans.

My mother, Arial, told me that on day on our way back from the market. It had begun to rain, and as I was walking alongside her, the gleam of her armor a-glittering in the light as she stood tall and proud, eyes beaming, I could see her face fall, see her stiffen as a woman in a shawl walked by, muttering to herself. "Revenant", she said. "Foul things. Unnatural." 

I asked my mother what it all meant, and she deeply sighed, and clutched her head in one of her large-gloved hands. She told me about why humans thought this way, and then ruffled over my head, at the soft fuzziness of my skull as the first droplets of rain began to fall. She said it was so silly, so foolish, and I tried to put it out of my mind as I went to get my umbrella, and to head out into the forest again during the storm.

But out there, in the dark depths of the woods, I saw a human. He was...rather young, I suppose. Barely older than I was. He was soaked to the brim, the rain pouring down around him as he peered about, wearing a large, slightly poofy jacket of deep blue. He was pushing around through the bushes, and I could hear him muttering.

Now, we skeletons, for the most part, stick to our own language. The "Hands" language that many others do not speak, but basic, normal English I knew well enough. And it seemed so strange and odd that he'd be out here, in the woods, in the rain. When I called out, asking him what he was doing, he raised his dark-brown-haired head up, and turned.

I remember, his...his eyes, they were so oddly...strange. They were so deep, and dark hazel green, and he had a somewhat small nose, and his cheeks were so rosy. He just stared at me at first, then he spoke.

"What do you want?" He asked, his tone suspicious.

"You are getting very wet." I said.

He looked away from me, and pouted slightly. "Yeah, well...hmph. I'm looking for someone. It's not any of your business."

"Why would they be out in the rain?"

"Why are YOU out in the rain?"

I stared a little bit at him, slightly confused by this. I wasn't used to talking to humans, I allowed myself to be tripped up, I childishly replied back "I just like the rain."

"Oh?" The human looked me up and down, and I noticed he seemed to be considering something. He looked strangely at me, in a way that was a mixture of...I can't quite place it. Was it disappointment? Regret? Anger? Suspicion? 

"It's calming to me." I said quickly, looking slightly down at my boot-covered feet, as the human went to stand under a nearby enormous oak tree and he folded his arms over his chest, shivering a bit under the cold before he finally spoke up. "So why are you out in the rain?" 

"I keep hoping I will find my brother. He loved these woods." The human muttered, and I remember him just staring off, over my head, as if seeing someone behind me who wasn't really there. "It has been years since I saw him, yet every single week I keep trying to find a time to get away from my father's smithy, back to these woods he loved, especially in the rain. He also loved the rain. The longer he is gone, I know, th-the...the less..." He stuttered, and stammered, and his tone began to break. "The less likely I shall f-find him...living. Yet every time I hear the door knocking...every time I hear a creak out in my house, I keep thinking, and hoping...I'll hear his voice again. And he'll say "Gotcha, Hazel", and tackle me like he loved to do, and...and I'd carry him around the woods again like I loved to do so much." 

I remember he tried to cover his face to hide tears, then. He drew in a shuddering breath, then spoke. "But I have not seen my brother in so long. And I miss him. You couldn't understand. You probably have plenty of brothers and...and sisters and..." He stormed off, and I didn't really seem him too often again. Yet every once in a while, at the market, I thought I saw him peer at me when he was with his own family, staring at mine and my brothers.

I never understood why, to this day. Nor why he did what he did when he found me on the field of battle that fateful day. The end of a week's worth of fighting. We had decided that we'd begin by having the goblins and the imps lay waste to the first wave of humans with archery strikes, and then we skeletons would barrel forth. Unfortunately, this did not work out so well, for though we killed quite a few of them, they had the numbers we did not, and could simply...overwhelm us. Five monsters to take down one human soldier was not uncommon. Oh, how...how stupid I was! 

I didn't want to fight. I was too afraid. I lingered at the edge, thinking, perhaps, that my brothers wouldn't need me. True, we had lost our mother and father so early, even before the fighting truly started but...my brothers had always been STRONGER than my parents in a fight. I thought they'd be fine. We had the entire skeleton guard on the front lines. We didn't have to worry. I didn't have to worry.

What an incredible delusion that was, to believe. Because in the end, there I was...seeing my brother's dust dissipating in the wind, and HE was there. That...that boy, Hazel, now in a furious, baleful rage, a white coat whipping around him...and he...had a glow around his sword. He had magical ability, he was one of the MAGES of the Human kingdom. And he had a blue blaze around his sword the likes of which I'd never seen. He pointed it at me, and I was lifted up, up into the air, and sent whizzing towards him. It felt like I was being squeezed by a gigantic hand, my very soul gripped by an iron vice. He shook me angrily, looking into my face. I can...I can barely remember what he said, it's all so hazy. He was...crying? I...I remember that. 

And I remember I smacked him in the face. I think I might have broken his nose. I remember his blood splurting out onto me, him tossing me onto the ground in front of him. I remember speaking, in the language of hands, daring him to kill me. He had nothing left to take! 

Then he spoke.

"Now I guess we BOTH don't have brothers." 

I remember collapsing. And crying, and crying, and crying. I don't know to this day why he didn't kill me. He just took off the white coat he wore, and sheathed his sword, and tossed it to the side, along with his coat. He must have walked away.

I don't understand why.

I just...I just don't."

Christa, however, did. She quietly folded her hands in her lap, wondering when it would be safe to tell Gaster that he had indeed been "born" in the rain. Born when a little boy had tragically been killed out in the forest, his flesh and muscle gone, only bones remaining...bones...and a soul that had lost so much of what had once been in it, yet faintly retained a trace element of what came before. He had gone from being Aster, named after a flower just like his brother and his sister, to being named after a typeface. Another skeletal 'foundling', picked up by one of the skeleton monsters, by "Grandpa Gothic", of all people. Gothic, who had never forgotten his momentary angry lashing out at the child he'd found out in the woods, and had regretted it for years. And who had then died out there, in the woods, in the very place he'd hastily killed little Aster in an burst of fire magic...died in his old, decrepit age, lost in thought and regret, by a freak lightning strike. Ironically struck down in the same place he'd killed Hazel the Mage's brother. 

It was a tragic truth that monsterkind didn't want to own up to. All skeleton monsters were "unnaturally" born. They had to come from humans, or, in Sans and Paps's case, "clones" of a sort. No monster wanted to admit to this, for the only way a skeleton monster was born was through a human death at magical hands, and it was primarily MONSTERS that had magic, not humans. Every monster, after all, could do magic. 

Christa hesitated, then said "Um...Gaster...have you ever noticed that skeleton monsters are very, very adept at...blue magic? The magic associated with moving items around, gravity? And...well..."

"Yes?"

"Well...ALL human mages could use that type of magic. All of them, every single one. But no other monster besides skeletons can." She said nervously. "So, what I'm trying to say is...did it ever cross your mind to...well...do a kind of test on your own body to find out if...well...if you WERE formerly a human?"

Gaster gaped for what seemed to be a long time, simply staring in sheer shock. "That...that can't be. I would remember if I'd been a human, surely!"

"Not exactly, not if you died. A traumatic event like that would hurt your memories immensely. How much can you remember before you turned...say, 8? 7?" Christa inquired, and her tone seemed to quiver and slightly shake, an uncomfortable shudder rising off her. 

Gaster hesitated again, then slowly narrowed his eyes at her. "Are you saying that...that that human Hazel was right, that-that-"

"You were, technically, born in the rain...as a skeleton monster. But before that, yeah, you...you were a human, just like all the other skeleton monsters used to be. It isn't something they really like to admit to, and many probably didn't even know it themselves, but...yes." Christa mumbled out. "Your original name was Aster Perkins. Hazel probably guessed right when he went to confront you."

"Then why did it look like..." Gaster began to say, his voice becoming pained and...and coarse, and hurt. "Like he HATED me? Wanted me dead?"

"If I really had to guess, it was that he hated you as much as he loved you." Christa murmured. "He hated what you'd become, but he still cared about his little brother. He was torn between his duty between family and country, his love and his hatred. He didn't know what to do. It was probably...I mean..." Now her voice seemed to crack. "Looking at you, it was probably Hell for him. Because you keep seeing the person you love, yet they're not them. You keep wishing it was. Wishing it was them, as if they'd never left at all, but then they open their mouths and you realize no, it isn't them. You don't know them. And this...this stranger wearing your dearest friend's face is standing right in front of you, and you don't know how to feel because being with them is like being back there all over again and yet it HURTS, it HURTS because its not them, and you'll probably never see them again and you get reminded of that EVERY MINUTE YOU'RE WITH THIS STRANGER!" She said, her tone rising, getting higher, more pained, tears brimming in her eyes.

Gaster blinked in stunned shock for a few moments as Christa took off her glasses, wiping them on her purple shirt, panting a bit. "S-Sorry, I...just...it's stupid. It's stupid." she muttered.

But it wasn't, Gaster realized. Now, at last, he thought he understood why THIS girl was representing him in the court. Why she wouldn't be "biased" in favor of him, not really. And to make sure of his theory, he asked one simple question.

"How well did you know me in your timeline?" 

"...enough to get a good birthday present. It was a joke book inside a physics book inside a joke book." She muttered out, slowly putting her glasses back on her face. "You always said Sans got his sense of humor from you."

"I can't be that Gaster." He intoned quietly. 

"I know. I figured that out. My head knows that. My heart feels different. Every time you speak, sometimes, it's like...like the Gaster I knew IS speaking out through you. And that's when it hurts the most, knowing that one of my best friends in the world isn't in front of me, despite all the evidence my senses are telling me." Christa whispered out. "I want to believe. Even if it's a lie, I want to believe."

Gaster didn't have an answer. He just sighed quietly, looked away, and said...

"Maybe...we ought to take a break."

Christa just nodded, slowly rising up and making for the door as Gaster looked down at his hands as he laid them on the table. He tried as best he could to picture flesh over them, to think of skin, and proper cheeks, and hair. And for a moment, he thought he could feel it. 

But then that was gone, and he was simply touching cold bone, sitting alone in a quiet little space of a large, now-empty library, with nothing but the cold weight of truth slowly sinking into him. 

"Do you expect me to pity you?" 

Gaster turned around, seeing Sans behind him, his hands in the pockets of his large blue jacket, "harrumphing". "oh, how awful, your childhood sucked. you had your brothers taken. you know what I think? you knew how much it sucked. you knew how awful it was to lose your family. yet once you decided my brother Papyrus and I were just tools to use, you threatened me and Paps with losing ours every week. you knew better, but you still DID it." 

Gaster groaned slightly, rubbing his temples as he turned around, blinking as he stared briefly down at himself. He wasn't in his usual lab attire anymore. He felt over his frame, realizing he was...shifting. The labcoat occasionally flickered and shifted, turning into a darker coat with an adorably fuzzy, warm silver sweater beneath, and he stared in surprise as Sans chuckled a bit. 

"aw, ain't that cute. The perception Christa has of you is so nice. so...warm and friendly. so familiar. she can't stop seeing him, HER Gaster, every time she looks at you. and its clashing with what you really are. the sick bastard who tortured me and my brother." 

"I had wondered why my appearance seemed to shift upon arrival here." Gaster murmured. "So...my visage is divided thanks to how I am seen up here? Will that change should I be judged worthy to enter Heaven?"

"you didn't say "when"." Sans remarked. "...why didn't you say "when I am judged worthy"?" He inquired, raising an invisible eyebrow up, looking almost amused. 

"I cannot see the future, Sans. I'm not like you." Gaster remarked quietly. "I imagine that must give you a bit of joy inside, knowing whether or not I'll survive all this, holding it over my head."

"oh, that gift isn't with me anymore. Not once we got out of the Underground." Sans remarked, shaking his head. "i'm as in the dark as you are. and if I did know, I'd tell you." He remarked. "...well, if it was bad, I'd tell you. just to watch you struggle...just so you'd know it feels to try and fight the inevitable."

"I spent every day doing that." Gaster said angrily. "You weren't on the Surface, you didn't see the war, Sans. You had NO idea what it was like! No idea the horrors of the War of Humans and Monsters. You didn't have to breathe in your own brother's dust, watching bits of your family spilling through your fingers!" He roared out, rising up, his body quaking and shivering, his eyes filled with a pure, absolute, raw rage. "I had everything taken from me! EVERYTHING! I couldn't see the sun anymore, I couldn't feel grass beneath my feet, I couldn't see the rain, and my family was gone! GONE! You want to complain about almost losing your family? Except for your brother, why don't you tell me?"

He now took a furious step at Sans, who stayed stock still, just staring as Gaster got up in his face, a baleful glint in his eye. "What in the HELL did you have to lose?"

Sans visibly flinched at this, his body slightly quivering as Gaster darkly grit his teeth. "I lost...my home. I lost my world. I lost my mother, and my father, and my brothers. I lost my CULTURE. My PEOPLE. All you really had was your brother. The threat of losing that means NOTHING to someone who actually did lose it all. So don't you dare judge me. Especially when you didn't endure half the pain I did. You never suffered the way I did."

"so that makes what you did okay!?" Sans yelled back. "everything we suffered at your hands meant NOTHING in the end! the "strength" and the "gifts" you tried to give us to have us be barrier breakers, or to fight humans? in the end, it meant nothing, cuz WE sure as hell didn't break the Barrier! and I've seen the other routes, the roads less traveled by. Bad news, Gaster! my brother and I couldn't defeat the human, we just died. a lot! not only do we not escape the Underground, but everyone down there dies, cuz we couldn't even beat a single child! at least YOU could argue the pain YOU went through helped you make us, at least SOMETHING good came from what you endured, but what we suffered through?! it...meant...nothing." Sans said, as tears began to rise in his sockets. "because we didn't free our people, we didn't break the barrier, all we endured at your hands meant nothing! our pain was meaningless. the very reason we were made?...it all means nothing. because a human kid broke the barrier and freed us."

Sans wiped his eyes on his sleeve, looking away, cringing as he folded his arms over his chest. "sometimes I even hate the kid. because looking at him, I get reminded that all I endured meant nothin'. no point in being a weapon to shatter the barrier or hurt humans if we're free, on Earth, and now friends with humans. and sometimes i hate him because of what roads he took, the awful things he did, yet even then, i...love him." Sans murmured. "he's so young, and he suffered too. died so often in the Underground. and even after all that, at the end of the day, despite all he endured, in the end...he made the right choice. he has tried so hard to be good, and loving, and to forgive. but you?"

Sans turned back to Gaster, and laughed, cold, low and foul. "you're not some stupid kid who doesn't know better. you had a choice every day. you chose...poorly. and now you want others to feel bad for you? as if what you suffered somehow makes it okay that WE suffered? no. no freakin' way. you don't get a pass because your life sucked. nobody does. you had a choice. you chose WRONG."

And with that, Sans left the library, leaving Gaster well, and truly, alone. He felt his visage shift, turning, altering, forming now into his white labcoat, and he sat down in his chair again, and covered his face in his hands. It felt as though his very face was burning as he quietly cried for what seemed to be a long, long time, drifting off into an uneasy slumber. Luckily, in about five minutes, a gentle form draped a large, hand-knitted blanket over him, patting his back and walking away, leaving Christa to stare up at them.

"Papyrus, how nice to see you." she said softly, holding out her hand as he took it in his large glove. "I'm amazed you find time to knit."

"I CAN ALWAYS MAKE TIME FOR FAMILY." Papyrus offered with a smile. 

An idea began to come to Christa. Maybe, perhaps...there was a possibility for redemption. "Papyrus, do you think you and I could talk in private? I'd like to call you as a witness tomorrow night at the beginning of the trial..."