thisavrou_log | JULY OTA

Entry tags:

undertale: mettaton

JULY OTA

Who: Ratchet and OPEN
When: Backdated Early and mid-July
Where: Ex-Bar and Medical
What: Ratchet has a sad (in every sense) funeral for Sans, later ends up in medical, probably for something stupid
Warnings: None atm

07.04. JUST EAT THE SAND.
Where the Bar Used to Be

Ratchet was sick of people dying.

He was sick of people dying, or disappearing, or just...well, it didn’t matter why or how. They were gone.

Maybe that was selfish. He’s not the one who had died, after all. He still had his life, and the chance to live and make things better. To do something with that. But it just made him feel guilty. He kept surviving these stupid, pointless disasters. Shitty, preventable, unnecessary events that killed people - innocent people - and either sent them away for good, or cycled them back around to die again. And again.

Ratchet’s kneeling in the place that used to be the bar. He’s pretty sure anyway. The maps on the MID were all out of alignment, the universe shift had distorted the ship, changed it, moved rooms, created others. As far as Ratchet could tell, this was where the bar had been. And it’s where Sans had spent a lot of time.

Kneeling on the ground in this alien room with it’s colored glass, looking nothing like the place it used to be, Ratchet’s not sure this is the right way to do this. He was worried about this, when Sans had taught him. Scared he wouldn’t be able to do it right.

He looks down at the bucket. A plastic sand pail left over from a few pit stops prior. It’s bright orange, and shaped so that if you flipped it upside down you could make a castle from it, complete with turrets. It’s probably not the best thing you could put someone’s earthly remains in, but it’s what he could find in such short notice. Sans probably would have gotten a kick out of it.

He brought some things of Sans’. It was supposed to be things Sans loved but...that was a pretty short list. There was a bottle of ketchup, a book of jokes he’d taken from the library - not really Sans’ but representative of something Sans cared about, right? - a pillow, the only part of Ratchet’s bed he could find after the dimension shift had ripped his room apart. It was probably kind of weird, but Sans probably loved that bed more than Ratchet did. Always telling him how perfectly broken in for naps he’d made it.

Part of Papyrus’ uniform, taken from the last same place Ratchet had learned how to do this in the first place.

There’s a bottle of bourbon next to him. Another scavenged remnant from Ratchet’s room, and an ironic one. The same half-drunk bottle Sans had originally brought him to apologize with, saved up for a rainy day. But that’s for him. Mostly.

“Sorry if I’m doing this wrong, buddy. Told you I was never real good at this kind of thing.”

He pours out a shot’s worth of the bourbon, directly onto some of the dust that’s already on the ground, before taking a drink from the bottle himself. He’s not really paying any attention to whether anyone is coming in or not, seeming absorbed in the process.

[Alternatively, Ratchet will probably wander with his bucket of skeleton dirt elsewhere on the ship, so feel free to run into somewhere else you think might be prime for a weird funeral dusting! Or a terrible place, your call.]

07.10. BUT NO, REALLY. DON'T EAT THE SAND.
Medbay

Ratchet never went to the medbay willingly.

Which is why it’s so surprising when he wakes up there. It’s disorienting; having never spent any actual time there, the bed feels strange and unfamiliar, the smells strange, the harsh lights even stranger.

Ratchet sits up abruptly, startled by his own inability to remember what had happened. The last thing he could remember the ship was still swarming with Caducans, and he was...he was, what? He wasn’t fighting them. He didn’t want to fight them.

“Crap- “ He winces, hand at his side, his ribs aching from some injury he didn’t remember getting. Not completely anyway.

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Frisk has been wandering around in something of a daze. Ever since waking up, they've been hit with blow after metaphorical blow, and it hurts. It hurts to see so much gone wrong and not know what to do about it, to know that some of this was surely their fault, if they'd just known what to do--

They can't go back. They can't fix it.

It's Ratchet's voice that catches their attention, and they pause for a moment before stepping over slowly. Each step comes a little heavier than normal, considering their current state, but somehow they still manage to be rather quiet despite that.

"...Ratchet? What..." This can't be what they think it is...right?

Ratchet looks up at the sound of the voice; if he's surprised by Frisk's unusual appearance, he doesn't show it. They aren't the first person he's seen with the...unusual change. At this point it just seems rude to make a big deal out of it.

"Hey. Hi, Frisk."

There's an unusual heaviness to to his voice, although he flashes a brief, unconvincing smile.

"You here for the funeral?"

No.

No, please, no.

Frisk's face screws up, and for the fourth time today they really, really wish they could cry. As it is their lip wobbles, and their hands curl up in the fabric of their uniform.

"He...he didn't...?"

They saw Papyrus and Toriel, they've sent messages to Asriel and Alphys, and Mettaton...well, they've seen him, too, in a sense. But Sans...

"Yeah."

Ratchet looks down, feeling the weight of his own answer. It hadn't been a good month, especially not for Frisk and their family. He glances back up, the distress is obvious on their face, and he feels like he should say something. Anything. Something comforting or sympathetic.

He gestures Frisk closer, looking down again, not even sure what to say to make himself feel better.

"C'mere."

Frisk's steps start slow, but suddenly they whimper and hurry over to wrap both arms tightly around Ratchet. They press their face to his shoulder, clinging to him desperately.

"H-he said...he promised he'd be h-here when I woke up!" Frisk's shoulders shake, and their voice wobbles with a sob. "H-he promised...!"

Ratchet hesitates in surprise, the suddenness of the hug and the tears and the words taking him aback. But it's strange. How Frisk's grief makes it seem...more okay. Sharing in sorrow wasn't something Ratchet had done a lot of, but it was something he was learning the value of.

He wraps his arms around Frisk, pulling them into a tighter hug.

"Hey. It's okay." What a lie. "You know he would have been here if he could, Frisk." That one's more honest. Sans might have a lot of flaws, but he kept his promises. "You know that."

Frisk hiccups and sobs, though no tears stain Ratchet's shoulder. They cling to him tightly, trembling and trying so hard to not break down completely.

"I can't...it's my fault, I-I should have...I should have fixed it...!"

“You couldn’t have.” His tone is abrupt, bordering on harsh. “You can’t get caught up in what you should have done, Frisk. It’s...not your fault.”

He feels like he’s echoing a dozen other people, the words of all the most important people in his life suddenly having a bizarre level of clarity as he realises how easy it is to ignore that sentiment. He doesn’t know whether he’s trying to assure Frisk or himself.

Edited 2016-08-20 04:05 (UTC)

Mettaton had been upset when he'd recently walked into a wake before. Upset enough to sacrifice himself to the cause of killing as many Caducans as he could.

So naturally, he's not overly enthused to happen upon another one being run by someone who wasn't a monster at all. Who else had died? Should he even be surprised that more death had come out of this fighting?

It doesn't matter. What matters to him right now is who it is. And judging by the items brought to this memorial, he had a pretty good guess who had passed.

Quietly, the small ghost moved forward. Ratchet isn't likely to remember him as a robot, much less as a ghost. That works for him. He doesn't want to be known as a lame, pink ghost.

"Excuse me," he says quietly, in a voice far too meek and feminine to expose his true identity. "Can I ask who you are mourning?"

Ratchet pauses in what he's doing, looking up and around for the source of the voice. He's not mad about being interrupted, but he seems mildly surprised. His eyes fall on the semi-transparent pink form, a look of confusion on his face that quickly passes. He didn't know what he was looking at, much less who.

"It's uh. Sans. Did you...know him?"

Edited 2016-07-27 09:14 (UTC)

"I did," the small ghost responds, floating nearer to the bucket of sand. The bucket of Sans, more like. As he thinks of the pun, he's caught between eye-rolling (which is hard to do without pupils) and a small mix of amusement and sadness.

"I didn't think that he would end up like this. He didn't sound as if he wanted any trouble in the first place."

Mettaton doesn't seem to notice that his eye is tearing up. He can't even place his feelings on his matter; the last time he'd spoken to Sans, they had parted on negative terms. At least...he had been upset because Sans had said something hurtful to him. Truthful, but also hurtful. Now it didn't seem important though.

How many friends did Mettaton have to lose? And more importantly, would they come back like he had? What if hey didn't...?

"Well. Most people don't usually plan on ending up like this." He nudges the plastic button with his knee, as if for emphasis. Or maybe it's supposed to be funny.

It seemed liked all the wrong people kept ending up dead. It was never the people they would be better off without...as bitter and ugly a thought as that is.

"Hey, uh...did you want to scatter some of his dust? Since you knew him and all?" Ratchet looks over at the little ghost, looking uncomfortable, like he suddenly realized some social faux pas he's just made. "Er...I mean...sorry. If you're, you know. Tangible."

Was it rude to assume that about a ghost?

Edited 2016-07-28 06:35 (UTC)

"I can, but...I think it is fine. What you're doing is fine. And don't worry. I'm a ghost, sweetheart, I get that sort of thing often."

Mettaton couldn't bring himself to do it. He didn't feel as if he had the right to it and although he was flattered that Ratchet would include him in the process...he couldn't rightfully go through with this knowing what his last conversation with Sans had been like.

"...Are things always this awful? It isn't exactly growing on me."

“What, things on the ship?”

Were they? Ratchet had a hard time thinking of anything that wasn’t awful on this ship, but that felt dramatic. It wasn’t so bad. They had food, shelter, practically immunity from death. Maybe they would even get to go home someday, but Ratchet didn’t put much stock in that.

“Yeah. Kinda. It’s not so bad it you’ve got people. Friends, family. That sort of thing.”

Mettaton takes a moment to think about that. Does he really have people? Well, he has Alphys and Frisk. Papyrus too. There's others, sure, but those three are the ones that stand out in his mind right now.

And yet he still feels pretty upset about all this. Especially because excluding Alphys, he'd definitely be lying through his ectoplasm about who he was. This wasn't him. He wasn't "himself" as a ghost.

So right now, he didn't have anyone.

"You're right. It's good to have a decent support system, though it would be even nicer if that support system wasn't in constant danger," he finally says.

You see a lot of interesting things wandering the ship.

Charlie's gotten used to non-human sentients by now, but what Ratchet is doing catches her eye. Like any good protagonist whose curiosity causes them trouble, she walks over to ask him, "Hey, what are you doing with that...is that sand?"

It's a curious action, one with no meaning she can understand right now. Of course she's curious. Shame what they say about curiosity, though...

"It's uhm...no. It's not sand," Ratchet replies, glancing up briefly. He's seen the girl around, but doesn't know he well. Not that it matters at the moment.

"It's...Sans. San...s" He emphasizes the 's', laughing, not realizing the pun until right then. It's terrible.

"I see."

...She was expecting some worse reaction at the news that yet another person she knows is missing and will never return. All she can feel is the same icy cold when her aunt gave her a certain piece of news years ago, though. That same cold, that same almost premonition because of course this would happen.

Of course it would.

"What...what are you doing with the - the ashes?" She assumes it's ashes, at any rate.

As if in answer Ratchet picks up a small handful of the dust from the bucket, sifting through his fingers.

"Not ash. Dust. Magic dust." He shrugs. "I guess. I don't really totally get it, myself. But...there's a lot to not get around here. You kind of just have to roll with the punches."

He let's some of the dust fall from his hand onto the objects laid out before him.

"You're supposed to put it on things the person cared about."

It feels awkward telling her that. Like reciting something by rote that you didn't really know.

"So it's a funeral."

How many has she been to? She's used to rolling with the punches by now, but the funerals - not so much. You never get used to it, not really. You just end up cold instead of breaking down, after a while.

"...can I come with? I met the guy before he died, and..." She pauses. Were they friends? She doubts it. She hasn't been good at reaching out to people since -

don't think about it

"Well, I think I owe him this much, anyway."

After all, he'd kept her from dying alone.

“Yeah. A funeral.”

Was it really a funeral if it was being held for someone who wasn’t going to stay dead? He was just going through the motions at this point. People died, came back to life, died again. Sometimes they disappeared. It was hard for any of it to feel real, and getting harder for any of it to mean anything.

“You can take some. It’s not my dust to give so...you know. Help yourself.”

"I'm not exactly an expert, but I get the sense that you should probably keep the speed of your movements to a minimum, given your condition."

Peridot's there. Hanging upside down from the ceiling with her grav boots, distractedly fiddling with the busted up remnants of some of the sensors that she had set up, for just in case the Caducans managed to evade her traps and tried to break in. Her demeanor is even colder than usual, and she keeps her sharp eyes focused on the device she's working on and little else.

Ratchet looks around and then up, eyes falling on Peridot with confusion.

"...Peridot? What are you doing?"

It's a good question. Good enough to make her pause, hands faltering briefly at their work. Ratchet may only be wondering what in the hell she's doing up on the ceiling, but when applied to a broader context it's a question that Peridot has been grappling with a lot for the past few days. A question with no obvious solution, nothing to point her in the right direction. And When she's feeling aimless and anxious, she fidgets, and throws herself at busywork... Case and point, here she is: On the ceiling of the med-bay, fiddling with a device that hardly needs any repairs or attention at all.

"Calibrating this already perfectly calibrated sensor," she responds coolly, a bitter edge creeping in. "Because why should I bother putting the effort into building anything new, when the captains are just going to completely disregard and disrespect the results of my work."

Sighing quietly, she finally peels her eyes away from the sensor and deigns to look at her injured crew mate with a curious frown. "So what happened to you, anyway?"

Ratchet raises an eyebrow but doesn’t disagree. It’s never not rewarding to hear that bitter tone when talking about the captains. A secretly shared thrill at a private joke amongst the more disillusioned of them.

“I, uh...can’t really remember,” He rubs a hand against his temple absently. “I was trying to avoid the Caduceans...not fight them. I think I mighta gotten hit from behind or...something. I woke up here with a headache and this pain in my side and no idea how I got here.

He lets his hand fall to his side, shaking his head. It wasn’t really important. It’s not like dying or getting injured even mattered here.

“Are they still on board? I take it the captains are handling this about as well as they always do?” There’s an obvious sarcastic note to the word ‘captains’. There’s an obvious sarcasm to the whole sentence, really.

Peridot listens to his explanation quietly, expression bland... up until he asks about the Caduceans. Then she laughs, and it's the most bitter and humorless laugh that Ratchet has probably ever heard come out of her weird alien mouth.

"No... No, they're not," she adds, still chuckling even though there's basically nothing humorous about the situation and she knows it. Peridot turns back to the device, aggressively cranking bits of it and messing with the moving parts with a lot more force than necessary, hands shaking as she works. "But that's only because the Captains decided that the best way to deal with them? Was to shove them into the Ingress!"

A piece snaps off. Peridot lets out a few choice swears that she's picked up from the humans and hucks it at the floor, fuming.

"Sorry, they what?"

It wasn't just incompetent, it was cruel. Where did they even end up? On a nice, warm planet, a trillion light years from home? In the vacuum of space? On a frozen moon with no oxygen or light?

"So basically we killed them. Or for all we know, something worse. Because last time I checked we didn't know how to get the Ingress to work, and neither did the captains; nevermind set a nice, pleasant destination."

"More or less! Oh, and you'll love the Captain's reasoning behind it." Peridot actually looks at Ratchet now, an utterly joyless grin on her face. It's kind of creepy, to be honest??

"You know why they did it? Because they believed that the Caduceans would never stop chasing us, even if we tried to contain them, or let them go, or stranded them somewhere. So by that stellar logic, it was decided that they needed to be dealt with, by "non-lethal" means. And wow, who would've guessed, that shoving a bunch of humans into the weird inter-dimensional space portal, would have messed things up even further and nearly destroyed the very ship we've been living on!?"

The tech abruptly glances away again, trying to hide her face... but the way her shoulders shudder is telling of just how close she is to shedding a few tears of frustration over the situation. Everything shitty about the leadership on this vessel has just been building lately, and she's starting to reach her limit for tolerating it...

☄BUT NO, REALLY. DON'T EAT THE SAND.
Niko failed in all his efforts. Maybe he was doomed to fail, but that doesn't mean it lacks sting, knowing that he's bound to be better at killing than making peace. And as usual, he was.

Big surprise, huh?

"Hey man," Niko commented as he checked in the Med Bay for the umpteenth day in a row, seeing who was gone, who got better, just a glance in with hopes matters had improved. Usually they hadn't. "You look like you had a bad time."

Why don't we say the obvious more often, everyone?

Edited 2016-07-28 05:30 (UTC)

"I've had worse," Ratchet replies with a smile and all the confidence of someone who just woke up from several days unconscious and didn't know what the hell was going on. Which in fact he had, and a brief glance at his MID confirms that fact.

He's glad to see Niko though; someone who's likely to give him honest answers. He rubs that side of his temple, the beginning of a headache already starting to bloom...or maybe fading. It was hard to tell.

"What's happening on the ship, Niko...are the Caducans still here?"

"I'm sorry, no. They thought was a better idea to die and attack innocent people for a lost planet. No matter what good plans we had, we failed."

And it was actually infuriating. That they threw everything away. That they gave them no choice but to kill them. Niko had known, with the advantages of this crew, the other side would be slaughtered.

"I hear some were tossed in the Ingress. But that could be as bad as death."

Ratchet’s eyes widen at that; it’s the first he’s heard of what became of the Caduceans and it’s about a million light years from what he’d expected.

“In the Ingress? What, the broken Ingress?” His brow furrows thinking about it. After all the planning, the discussing, the hundreds of ideas - good, bad, coordinated, sloppy - that had been proposed and tossed aside, and reassessed and fit together into new plans...after all that, throwing them in the Ingress was what was settled on? “Whose bright idea was that? Haven’t we done enough to those people?”

Edited 2016-08-20 03:32 (UTC)

"Not all of them, no. Most of them kept coming until they were shot. And that was the only alternative to letting the others go because they were assholes that wouldn't fucking back off."

He still sounded angry about it, couldn't help it.

"They attacked a lot of innocent people for some outdated sense of honor...

"I know that... maybe this is a big question to ask, Ratchet, but why can't I manage to make peace when I really need to. When I don't even want to fight. Do you believe in things like curses?"

Ratchet has a sand pail and Tony has a 400mL beaker. Nobody's got an ideal arrangement here.

Tony's not the sentimental type, either - so he claims - but Sans had tasked him with handing off some of his ashes, and he may as well make good on that request. After all, the guy is dead and Tony's not, which is how things usually seem to go. What's 20 minutes spent filling the lab equipment with skeleton dust and passing it along to a space cat? Weirder shit has still (somehow) happened, and he's got the time. Other people don't, and never will again.

He peers into the former mass hall as he passes, more out of habit than anything else. Finding Ratchet in there is just a convenient bonus, and means less time spent picking through sharp and dangerous debris (the occasional blood splatter, maybe even the occasional body) in his bid to find the guy.

"I'm pretty sure that's not how chasers work."

He leans in the doorway, having watched this little ritual reach its conclusion in uncharacteristic silence. Even the quip falls decidedly flat.

Miles has been looking for the bar since the fight ended and everything's...well, not settled, but the noise has died down a little, anyway. Partly in the hopes that some of the liquor could be salvaged, partly just to distract himself from the strange sheen of glass over his stomach, and the nausea he's still feeling over the absolute clusterfuck that battle had been. Better not think about it.

It's a little hard not to think of it, wandering into the glassed-over mess hall, and Ratchet stands out pretty starkly in the otherwise empty room, kneeling on the floor with what looks like a bottle of bourbon and a kid's set of beach toys. Aha. So there is liquor left to be had.

And Ratchet seems to be wasting it pouring it on the floor. Miles's brow knits as he approaches, wondering just how drunk Ratchet is today.

"What...are you doing?" There's a faint tone of nascent, if skeptical, amusement in Miles's voice, but it dies away once his gaze settles on the scattered dust on the floor, and his stomach suddenly feels cold. Much though Miles is fond of writing him off, Ratchet isn't a regular drunk, and this isn't a drunken mope fest. Miles knows what mourning looks like, even at a glance. He bites his lip, looking like he's expecting to be kicked in the stomach any second now.

"Is that..."

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JULY OTA

eat the snas

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i don't want to eat the sand ok

you have to. it's a requirement.

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no sand pls

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DON'T EAT THE SANNNND.....

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where the bar used to be, rip

there was a bar here