After Frisk’s death, Gaster never loosened his grip on them. The pressure only worsened, crushing what little innocence they had left. What once had been a fragile friendship slowly rotted into a rivalry, fueled by fear, desperation, and the terror of sharing their brother’s fate.

Time had passed, and both of them had grown from children into teenagers. Chara’s seventeenth birthday had come and gone in silence, uncelebrated and unacknowledged neither by Gaster nor by Chara himself, as if it had never existed at all.

When the training ended, guilt weighed heavily on you. You wanted to make amends, even if it was too late. With the savings you had earn over the past few months, you bought a golden, heart-shaped locket, clinging to the hope that it might mend something that was already damaged.

The locket was small, gleaming in the sun light. Inside was a photo of three of you as kids, smiling back when Gaster had’t taken their innocence yet. Chara rarely spoke to you anymore, his silence sharper than any insult, so you approached him quietly, catching him off guard as he lay resting in the grass, playing with his knives as usual just to pass the time.