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feralphoenix · 7 years

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best of 2016

i actually did write some things other than undertale this year, but this top 10 is undertale all the way down.

01. love does not make me gentle or kind (Undertale - Chara/Asriel, ensemble); February

And so this is how—Sans bossing you every step of the way—you wrap both your hands around Papyrus’ middle and carefully, carefully lift them up into the air. Judging by the squealing and wild waggling of tiny fists and bootied feet that ensues—that and Sans’ laughter—Papyrus is enjoying it too. You can’t help it—you start to grin.

“Nyooooom,” you croon, gently making Papyrus “fly” around you and Sans while the skeleton siblings both laugh. “Nyoooooooooom.”

You swivel your waist, still making zooming noises and grinning like an idiot—and there, in the doorway between the living room and foyer, is Chara: Standing still with one hand on the wall, with an expression you’ve never seen them wear before. There’s something raw and burning in their eyes, intense enough to give you chills even though there’s no anger or hostility there at all. They reach up to clench their left fist around the locket that sits golden and glowing against the black yarn of their sweater, and they never look away from your eyes even once.

As you bring Papyrus back down to sit in your lap, Chara startles a little and turns to their left. Prase is there, one pale hand on their left shoulder, shaking their long orange hair back. They ask something, so quiet that even you can’t hear them, and Chara makes a face and signs something to them. Prase signs something back. Chara wrinkles their nose and starts to smile. Both of them begin to laugh.

All the happy bubbles in your stomach from playing with the baby pop, leaving something sour in their wake.

a four-years-later followup to somebody out there needs you. the previous fic was a portrait of the repercussions of this series’ premise for chara, so this one focuses on what the far-reaching repercussions are for asriel and how he’s grown. the main plot revolves around chara trying to take a few steps towards independence and asriel, who over the past eight years has formed big chunks of his identity around being their caretaker, balking Very inelegantly.

at the time i remember this being very controversial characterization for asriel, lmao... but i like to depict the ugly parts of codependency to really show how unhealthy it is for everyone involved. expanding the worldbuilding for this series, and further developing the soul ocs who appear (prase and rufus), were also really fun.

02. don’t you let the thunder in (Undertale - Frisk & Chara, Toriel, the Player); February

They skip across the cracked-floor puzzle in light steps that don’t match their usual careful gait and they breathlessly hum Toriel’s old lullaby and they miss all the exact same pitches and it’s too much, it’s too much.

What’s wrong? they think at you. Their concern and uncertainty seep syrupy and horrible into all the wounded parts of you and it’s only then that you realize your helpless panic and rage must be bleeding into them the same way.

You want to tell them nothing but it’s too raw and you can’t, so: You scream instead, curl up and rage. You’d cover your ears if you were corporeal, if you had a hope of blocking them out. Stop looking, you howl. Cry. You want to throw things and stomp your feet and punch the wall and grab something sharp and slam it through your brain. Frisk flinches. You want claws so that you can dig them into wherever your minds connect and tear yourself away.

I’m sorry, they say, and they’re miserable and you’re miserable and you hate it, you hate it. I’m not doing it on purpose.

Figure out a way to STOP doing it! you shriek at them. You’re aware that you’re not helping, that in general it’s not going to do any good to throw a tantrum like a ten-year-old, but—but you ARE just a ten-year-old. So are they. You’re just a couple of stupid kids. It’s funny. It’s just—so funny.

a fic that i wrote for a friend on the premise of frisk and chara’s bodysharing/soul link also involving mindsharing, and the difficulty in drawing and maintaining boundaries. the same friend wanted to see a little more work involving the player as a neutral or benevolent entity, since undertale players irl aren’t uniformly evil but it’s really rare to see the player appear in fic except as the Ultimate Badguy(tm) or as a self-insert in sans/reader fics.

anyway, i alternated perspectives to show how the weird mind meld is hard for both kids, and the little hints about how they might work it out to something more beneficial and symbiotic in the future.

03. the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul (Undertale - Chara/Asriel, Chara & Asgore, ensemble); March

“If—it wouldn’t be imposing,” you begin, and falter. Take another deep breath. Let it out. “I want to learn how to fight, too. Will you teach me?”

Asriel’s eyes go wide, his expression blank and shocked—but behind him, Asgore breaks out into a wide, proud smile.

“Of course I will teach you, my child,” he says, every word filled with warmth. “I would be more than happy to help you learn to defend yourself.”

Your hands shake a little as you breathe out, relieved. “I’m sorry,” you tell him. “I know that I’m not—very strong to begin with, and there will be difficulties because of my problems with mobility, but—”

“There are ways to compensate for those things,” Asgore says. “If this is what you want, then we will find the methods that work for you.”

Your vision blurs, for a moment. The smile that steals across your face is shaky, probably ungainly and too-wide—it feels so much more natural than the contained expressions you’ve learned to produce for the sake of interacting with strangers. But the birdsong and sunlight in your chest make you feel warm and weightless, and you don’t care, you don’t care; finally, you have a place to start.

Asriel pushes back from the table in a great scrape of wood on wood, erupting from his chair and rising to his full height.

“No,” he says.

Your heart seems to—stop in your chest, for just a moment.

“I beg your pardon,” you say.

this one is a three-years-later followup to love does not (listed above). i wanted to follow up on the events that the previous fic had set in motion, with chara’s desire for change vs asriel’s fear of it. since asriel was a very unreliable narrator in love does not (and chara was also pretty unreliable in somebody out there needs you), from chara’s adult perspective we get a clearer picture of the ways that asriel’s overprotectiveness and control issues are harmful.

unfucking codependent fuckhell continues to be a cherished hobby. it was also a lot of fun to write the combat training scenes here and start to build groundwork for improving chara’s relationship with toriel too.

04. like ships had come home in me (Undertale - Frisk & Chara & Flowey, ensemble); April

One of the interesting things that’s happened as a result of monsters rejoining the surface world is that there’s been a great surge of interest in “retro” things from the humans who’ve welcomed them. Up until Alphys fixed up all kinds of new gadgets and appliances for everyone, at least, all monsters had to use of technology was whatever humans had thrown away and made it into the Waterfall dump in one piece. Sympathetic humans have helped the monsters get used to new technology, but monsters’ familiarity with old things makes them exotic in the eyes of young people.

This especially goes for entertainment. You’d guessed as much from Alphys’ Mew Mew obsession, but sometimes all the monsters could scrounge of human media was decades old—while everyone was more than happy to try out new things too, they still had a lot of love for everything they’d enjoyed in the underground. This brought old human fans out of the woodwork, and made new ones out of monster sympathizers, and, well.

Somehow or other this led to the revitalization of some things that were still new when Chara had fallen into the underground a hundred years ago. The old multiplayer game about squids fighting over territory with paint, for one.

“You think of this as new,” Chara says with despairing fondness, “but I never got to play this kind of stuff when I was alive. I was never allowed to have my own video games! Ree was, but he had, like, this ancient SNES and that was it.”

“Hey, shut up,” Flowey interjects from your lap. “You had fun with it. I know you did.”

“Once I got over my perfectly reasonable disgust that you thought Super Mario was the cool new game in 2015,” Chara says archly. And to you: “We found an N64 a couple months before we… y’know. He cried.”

this piece mostly started out as a way to explore the flowey-joining-everyone-on-the-surface concept because this angle on his characterization isn’t something i see very often in that context (or, uh, any other). the story winds up following two narratives - the trio’s adventures on the surface in the year after breaking the barrier, and also how flowey and chara sort of “came out” to everyone about their true identities, for lack of a better term.

it’s all mostly positive postcanon stuff with some wistful things and (naturally, because it’s me) trauma recovery-related content too, and i think it came out pretty solid.

05. a wish you tell a star and no one else (Undertale - Chara/Asriel, Asriel & Alphys, ensemble); May

Heat rushes into your face and chest, and you curl up like you’re a kid again—too shy to try to break down the barriers of politeness and status between you and your subjects yourself, and with no one willing to break them down for you except for Chara, who came from a place where your status never meant anything. “I guess,” you say.

They curl up next to you, shaky. You wonder what it is they’re holding in. The desire to order you not to talk to Alphys anymore, maybe, or a plea that you not leave them alone. It’s so weird, being in this position, after all the time you spent terrified that Chara would be the one to leave you for all their new friends.

It’s also weirdly embarrassing, watching Chara at least try to keep jealousy and anxiety buttoned in, when you were such a mess about it for such a long time. To teenage you’s credit, it’s probably easier to do when you have a lot of friends and you’re twenty-five, versus being fourteen and suddenly having to fight with the very human who’d scared your partner half to death for their attention.

But you’re gratified too: That they value your attention and affection so much to fear losing it, and that they respect you enough to urge you to do what might make you happy instead of clinging.

So you wrap your arms around them and hug them tight to your chest, closing your eyes and resting your chin atop their head again. “Thanks for encouraging me,” you tell them. And, after a pause: “I’m not going anywhere.”

Chara doesn’t say I know or try to joke. Instead, they make fists on your sweater and tremble a little, and they say “thank you” in a voice so tiny you almost don’t hear it over your father and Innig’s footsteps off in the middle of the garden.

a four-years-later followup to the subtle difference (listed above). this fic returns to asriel’s perspective, following a number of various plot threads - his upcoming coronation, the need to find a new royal scientist, his first friendship aside from chara and their social circle, and his attempts to propose to chara. it was a very ambitious story and covers a lot of character development on asriel’s part that was a long time in coming for this series.

doing the asriel+alphys friendship was unexpectedly fun and rewarding. they’re not characters i see written as friends very often, and the setup for this series allows them to have a very different dynamic from canon.

06. you in your veil and your pale white dress (Undertale - Chara/Asriel, ensemble); July

It’s good to be curled up half on Asriel’s lap and with your legs bent up over Prase’s, your toes on Undyne’s jeans. You have your pizza boxes propped on your own lap where they belong, topped with tomato sauce and substitute pepperoni and steamed peppers and none of that awful cheese; everyone else’s pizzas are more or less free-for-alls, with only yours and Liron’s clearly labeled in bold marker, since the others’ food generally has things that neither of you can eat.

You’re hungry from more or less skipping lunch earlier, you’re relaxed and sleepy from your afternoon spent messing around with Asriel, and as noisy as everybody is, it’s very calming to be here, amongst a friendly press of bodies—amongst people you like and whom you know are safe. Your and Asriel’s work is important, but it’s draining, so these chances to kick back are very valuable.

“Anyway, what are we going to watch tonight?” you ask. “I know we agreed on Sailor Moon last time, but I don’t think I’m quite steady enough for arguing with Alphys over whether the nineties adaptation or the reboot is better.” You having been introduced to the series by reading the manga at the library and her first finding it through someone’s discarded box set of the first anime, your opinions on the subject are very different. Debating it can be fun, especially since you do agree that you’ve got the right to think how you want even if you’re both pretty sure the other is dead wrong, but it can be stressful if one or both of you have brittle nerves.

Alphys, who understands this even if her anime opinions are occasionally incorrect, grins and shrugs, nodding. “Th-that’s fair, I think,” she says. “D-does anyone else have requests?”

a five-years-later followup to a wish you tell a star (listed above). it mostly deals with the separate plot threads of wedding preparations, the current state of chara’s recovery, and chara making friends with astis over the book kitchen and sharing food. aside from the literary references part of the plot, there’s a lot of discussion of chara’s past trauma and their frustration with growing up nonwhite & marginalized in a very white area with no connection to their cultural heritage.

this fic also happens to be a nice example of a plot that flagrantly disobeys the western conflict-centric model. i got a lot of confused and/or curious comments from people who didn’t know how the story still works and is entertaining despite its lack of overt conflict sources/things going wrong or getting worse. i don’t know whether to be smug about this or despondent that the conflict model is the only one western education will ever touch.

07. under my skin, there will be flowers (Undertale - Chara/Asriel, Yellow Soul Human); September

“Chara, when we talked about this earlier… you said you meant to… to destroy your whole village, when we were kids. I dunno... I don’t think your feelings, the hatred and resentment that made you want to do that, are bad or wrong. But I’m still glad that I was able to stop you, because taking people’s lives away is… it’s a really serious thing. It’s bad, you shouldn’t do it unless you have no other choice.

“I stopped you then. I… Chara, you’ve made it this far without ever gaining any LOVE. Wouldn’t it be great if you could avoid that now, too?”

“It would be,” you agree. “It would be great if there’s a way to end this with no one killing and no one being killed. But just like you acknowledged yourself, there are some situations where you don’t have a choice. You’ve hypothesized that that’s how it may even have been for the human, haven’t you?”

Asriel huffs. “Well, yeah, but.”

“If the situation arises where it’s kill or be killed,” you say, gentle as you can, “I will kill. Because if it’s her life or your life, your life is more important. To me—to the whole underground. I won’t let you die, Ree. If the only way I can keep you alive is to kill someone, I’ll do it. I can live with that. I know it may not sit easy on your conscience. You’re a better person than me, after all. But even if it makes you hate me, I won’t let you die.”

Your voice wavers only a little on that last sentence. Asriel holds you tighter.

“I won’t hate you,” he says, soft and velvet. His nose presses against the crown of your head. “After all the talking I did about how having LOVE doesn’t automatically make somebody evil… golly, I’d be such a hypocrite to. I’d still love you no matter how much LOVE you gained, even if you did really bad things—the kinds of things I couldn’t forgive. I’m always going to love you, Chara. That was the choice we made—all the years we’ve put into this.”

a four-years-later followup to you in your veil (listed above). whereas the previous fic had no conflict, this story is very tightly focused around conflict: how to prevent the new violent human from killing anyone, and also the friction between chara and asriel over methods. plus the fact that something’s definitely fucky here.

this fic was fun to do because the setup is basically playing undertale but from the defensive side - chara and asriel remain in new home where asgore is in canon, and spend most of the story directing their deputies, planning, and arguing about those plans while holly progresses through the underground.

although this fic ought to have been asriel pov based on the alternating pattern i set up, this story is really chara’s, no way around it. so i gave asriel the pov for ycouyo 6.5 instead (lmao) and let chara take center stage where they belonged.

08. the first shoots of green after a wildfire (Undertale - Flowey, Chara); September

The human child emerges into the light. They’re wearing clothes he doesn’t recognize—jeans heavily stained in dirt, orange-and-yellow striped hoodie with a cutesy leaf pattern on the sleeves. They’re shouldering a heavy-looking black backpack. Their hair’s in the same rough bowl cut as it was when he last saw them, and they don’t seem to have grown much. Their eyes are still hooded in the bright light pouring from the hole above him, but he can see slivers of red iris beneath their protectively lowered eyelids.

Flowey thinks about saying something rude and nasty to make them go away, and a little to see what it will make them do, little to no hope though there might be of getting pacifistic Frisk to lash out and end his miserable existence for him. Then he sighs and droops. “Do you seriously not have anything better to do?” he asks. It comes out sounding whiny.

They trudge stoically up and start shrugging out of their backpack, setting it down at the edge of the golden flowers that mark Chara’s grave. It clanks. If there’s a flowerpot and a trowel or something in there, he will scream and hide in the soil for a million years.

“C’mon, Frisk,” he says with a sigh. “I told you already—I don’t want to subject everybody else to some accident of science that’s missing his love and compassion glands. I’m fine with this.” He is a lying sack of shit, but this isn’t at all new. “Go home. Go be with the people who love you.”

“Frisk can’t come to the phone right now,” they say, a little flat and a lot sarcastic, and Flowey feels some phantom jolt in the vicinity of where his heart would be if he were still a monster.

i got the idea for post soulless pacifist chara trying to make things up to flowey using the only method the player has ever taught them (i.e. indiscriminate acts of violence) and it was just so awful and wrenchingly sad that i had to write it.

doing flowey’s pov for the first time was a fun way to flex my characterization skills, and this is one of only a very small handful of undertale fics i’ve done in third person.

09. to rest in crypts and wake in gardens (Undertale - Chara/Asriel, Frisk & Chara & Asriel, ensemble); September - November

“You’ve—fallen down, haven’t you,” they say, and take a step closer. “Are you all right?”

You shrug a little. Where are we? you sign, not thinking. I didn’t think anyone lived on the mountain.

“Oh,” they say again, eyebrows raising. And—so quickly that you can hardly believe it’s happening—they raise their own hands and sign along as they reply, “Technically, no one does. These caves are inside Mt. Ebott, not on them, and they’re certainly populated.”

I can hear, you sign back, stupidly, rudely, because that’s definitely what you need to say to someone who’s courteous enough to reply in the same language instead of being mean to you when they see you trying to communicate. You flush so badly that your ears feel scalded. Sorry, you add feebly.

The person actually smiles a little as they drop their gaze. “That’s all right,” they say, and then look back up at you hastily. “I didn’t want to assume either way, and now I know.” They rub at their upper arm in what you think might be self-consciousness, and then reach the same hand up to squeeze their pendant. “I am Chara,” they say, and then they finger-spell C-H-A-R-A for you, and show you a sign you don’t know: It looks like the sign for knife but in reverse, their right index finger sweeping towards their chest instead of towards you. It has to be their name sign. They make it a second time, and this time you repeat it. They smile again. “That’s very good. What do you like to be called?”

You spell F-R-I-S-K for them, and follow it up with the name sign you chose for yourself—an F with your right hand tapped twice over your chest in the same place as the sign for heart.

Chara mimics you, getting the sign right on their first try. “Frisk?” they ask, and they smile when you nod. “And what pronouns do you prefer?”

The relief that rushes over you when they ask this is as tangible as if someone has wrapped you up in a warm blanket and given you a tall glass of strawberry milk. They, you tell them, smiling.

This time they grin. “Will you look at that, we match,” they say.

a four-years-later followup to there will be flowers (listed above). this story shifts to frisk’s perspective as we follow them from their fall into mt. ebott through their adventures exploring the underground, guided and assisted by both chara and asriel. this allows for both an examination of the smaller changes in the world that have been created by this au’s setup, and for a comparison with the canon neutral/pacifist storyline of undertale.

i’d planned for this scenario literally before i wrote the second fic in this ‘verse, so it was really rewarding to finally get to write it. i originally planned to post it all at once, but it became so long that i had to split it up into chapters by area...

10. remember weather by the voice of the wheel (Undertale - Frisk/Chara/Asriel); December

You’re not old enough to buy things online yet, so you pull your mother aside late at night when Chara is in the shower and Frisk is upstairs. “I can pay you back for these later, I think,” you say quietly just in case, “but Frisk and Chara have been really miserable this year and I want us to have some nice memories of the holidays too, dang it.”

She doesn’t chastise you for saying “dang”; she just lifts your phone to give it a look herself, producing her reading glasses to appraise the pages more closely.

“This is very thoughtful of you, my son,” she says at last. “I would be happy to help procure these gifts. And—because I know that they are quite expensive—I would also be happy to negotiate a few extra chores in place of part of the price, if you would like.”

There were several timelines when you had the entire supply of gold in the underground to yourself. While in many ways you’re relieved to just be the prince instead of an aberration with godly time-warping powers, having to go through Mom or Dad for your allowance is not one of them. You sigh so that she’ll know how very put-upon you are, and that you’re deliberately choosing to be Mature when you say “Okay, Mom.”

return of the son of frisk and chara are jewish because i say so, the end, so there!!! it would be nice to start a tradition of hanukkah stories for every year i’m still writing undertale...

anyway this wound up being... mostly a story about trying to enjoy the holidays and find a way to keep your head up even when times are tough, both in a general sense (microaggressions) and a personal one (the kids’ various traumas).

#fanfic portfolio #undertale spoilers -#you can only use your own

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