Undertale Patience Novels & Stories

I know this round is mine, but Cade is a patient predator, and his patience won’t last forever. The meeting begins, a tedious parade of bureaucracy drowning any sense of urgency. Each topic is more pointless than the last, a labyrinth of words and motions designed to waste time. My patience, already fraying from the day’s events, stretches thinner with every passing second. If Cade’s waiting for me to snap, he might not have to wait much longer.

she said. "I know," he said. "It will need attention," she said. "I know," he said. He looked at the cutting. "Forty years of waiting," he said. "I think I can tend a lavender cutting." She looked at him. The specific expression of a person who had learned the difference between patience and waiting. Who had been waiting for forty years. Who was now ready to be patient. Not the same thing. Waiting was passive. Patience was active. The choice to tend something whose outcome you could not guarantee.

The kind that came from the chest rather than the head. This was the second kind. I was patient for ten days. Ten days of watching and noting and giving him the space to bring it to me the way I trusted he would, because he had promised and because I had stopped doubting his promises sometime around the fourth Wednesday afternoon. I had decided patience was the right response — not the passive patience of someone waiting to be managed but the active patience of someone who trusted the person enough to let the timing be theirs within reason. Ten days was the outer edge of reason.

Not looking back to see their expressions, I walk out the room at a brisk pace knowing that soon they will follow. I'm really started to get so sick of this shit. For over a decade I have been at this camp wanting what Xander showed me. He said that I would have to have patience. After all this time I'm just starting to feel like the giant lovey dovey fucker was screwing me one over. Even though he won that fight all those years ago I still don't trust him farther than I can throw him. I may have worked with him all these years but not having gratification after all this time has my patience sprung thin.

The comfortable arrangement of two people who have spent enough evenings together to have a rhythm. Except the rhythm is slightly off tonight. Like a song playing in a key that is one note different from what you know. Close enough that you cannot immediately identify what is wrong. Far enough that you can feel it. He is waiting for me to ask about the photo. I know this because I know him now, the specific quality of his patience when he is waiting for something, the way he gets quieter rather than louder, the way he listens more carefully than usual as if expecting something to surface in the conversation.

I was looking at the valley. He was looking at me. Not with the urgency of a man who had been waiting for an answer to a question and could not hold the waiting anymore. With the specific, patient quality of a man who had waited for years and understood that patience was not the absence of wanting but the decision to honor the other person's pace above your own. He could wait longer. He had told me he could wait longer, in the specific, evidence-based way he told me things that were true, not as reassurance but as fact.

For a long while, he said nothing and then, a quiet chuckle escaped his lips as another log collapsed into glowing embers. "It worked." The words echoed around the empty chamber before silence swallowed them again. Many thoughts swirled in his head as he watched the fire. How many years had it taken to arrive at this moment? How many lives had the journey cost? Enough that he had lost count. But one thing was evident. It had taken a lot of patience for him to get to where he was now. Everyone mistakes patience for inaction. It is not. Patience meant studying your opponents and making a move only when you were sure of victory.

“I save walls for real enemies.” He grins and rises. “You sure you do not want to try a real solution. Like a mate. The Moon Goddess knows what she is doing.” “The Moon Goddess has a sense of humor. She has had nine years to send me someone. I am still waiting. I am not holding my breath.” “You do not get to pick. That is the point.” “I picked patience,” I say. “It works.” He shakes his head. “One day you will hear her voice and the ground will tilt and all this control will feel like paper. You will see.”

A lifetime of patience. A lifetime, whole and intact, in the dark.