I was sick again last night, and, like always, had skelebro thoughts. This is getting pavlovian lol.
CW: illness, magic vomit, and dissociation oh and uhhh weirdess about eating. It's not an ED, but figured I should warn for similar themes possibly.
Otherwise, it's just a stream of consciousness ficlet... don't mind the tense changes.
Papyrus wasn't sleeping so it would be inaccurate to say he'd been woken up by the noises in the bathroom down the hall. As it was, he stopped staring at his ceiling and blinked himself back, taking in his room: the action figures, his desktop, his bookshelf, his closet.
Color was easy. A red book cover, the cape on Action Guy, the red border of flame on his carpet. The red finish on his car bed.
Texture came next. The hard sides of his computer, the hard wood of his door, the hard bones of his attack box.
He always skipped taste and smell—he's a skeleton, and he kept his room much too clean for that.
Hearing. The buzz of electricity humming through the house. The muffled stumbling in the bathroom.
He sighs and swings his legs out of his bed mentally resets his counter back to zero. He leaves his room and skips the bathroom, taking the stairs to the kitchen instead. He grabs a glass of water and a new packet of tasteless little crackers even though Sans is bound to have a half a dozen open packets leaving crumbs all over his room. On the way back he grabs a spare blanket.
"Aw geeze, did I wake you?" Sans asks, in between shallow breaths. He's sitting on the tile, back to the shower. The little under sink cabinet is open like he'd grabbed it for leverage.
"I wasn't sleeping." Sans winces, and Papyrus can tell mostly from experience that it's more about Papyrus not sleeping than his volume.
Papyrus puts the glass and crackers on the sink counter and drapes the blanket over Sans' shoulders. He looks smaller under the blanket.
"You don't gotta stay," his brother says, like he says everytime. If Papyrus had eyes he would roll them out of his head. Sometimes he thinks they're backwards, the both of them. Sans hates when Papyrus gets sick, can barely stick around to get him something to drink. Papyrus supposes that's what he gets for getting sick so much less now.
"You'll feel better, if you drink the water," he says instead of anything else. It's not really a lie, even if Sans will definitely feel worse at first. His brother heaves a great sigh and reaches for the water, then takes small, hesitant sips. Papyrus keeps his hand on Sans' back.
"You can say it," Sans says, after taking the world's smallest amount of liquid. Even that much makes him wince as his body absorbs it.
"I told you so," Papyrus says, cheerfully. It's their running joke. I told you not to go eating at Grillby's. I warned you about the grease, bro! Sans gets to play his part so much less often now, but sometimes Undyne has a new recipe to try that Papyrus knows is going to upset the delicate nature of his skeletal magic matrix and he eats it anyways because Undyne is a very good friend and also, Papyrus is much better with his diet so sometimes it only hurts a little.
He guesses Sans is the same, he just has more friends.
Sans' eye lights have fuzzed out, a gaussian blur hazing their normally pointed stare. He's made of bone, so he can't quite go pale, but the sticky, cold sweat slime of illness beads up enough Papyrus can tell he's not doing as well as he was three seconds ago.
Papyrus helps prop him up, close enough Sans can lean over the toilet even with his wobbly frame. Papyrus doubts Sans drank enough water to help at this part, so he rubs small circles against Sans' spine and when his brother dry heaves with a miserable little sound Papyrus pats his back like he's trying to get the last bit of sauce out of a can.
They're skeletons, so they absorb magic very easily when they eat. But they're also skeletons, so there are some things they can't process like other monsters. Papyrus isn't sure why or what process is different. He just knows that heavy, rich foods make him and his brother ill. And non magic food is worse. Maybe it's too much and too little magic intent, maybe they were just made wrong.
Sans had kept a little notebook, when they were younger, of all the things that made Papyrus ill after eating. It'd grated on Sans, who would go out of his way to find something new and exciting and fun to eat for once, and have Papyrus squalling afterwards in a disconnected and pained haze. Sans didn't like keeping him on a bland low-magic diet. Sometimes they didn't have the opportunity to be picky about their foods anyways.
Sans never had been, and maybe, Papyrus thinks, that's a habit his brother can't break now that they're grown and whatever delicateness Papyrus has had to build diet around has caught up to him. If Sans weren't so used to eating whatever Papyrus couldn't when they were kids would he be better at sticking to the bland or overcooked low magic foods he needed?
Papyrus uses a corner of the blanket to mop up the slime from Sans' brow and leans him back. He grabs the water again when he sees nothing had made it into the toilet and makes Sans drink more than a shaky kitten's sip.
Sans mumbles something a little too quiet for Papyrus to hear—by design, because Sans' eye lights are more focused now, and the slime is drying on it's own. That doesn't really matter, Papyrus has known his brother for long enough he can identify the self-deprecating tone merely from counting how many beats it's been since he opened the bathroom door.
He wishes Sans would take better care of himself. But Papyrus is always going to be there, so it's okay that Sans doesn't, sometimes. Papyrus is always proud of himself, or tries to be, but in these moments it's always easier. He may be loud, and stubborn, and too optimistic for his own good, but that's exactly why he can help Sans. He doesn't ever startle his brother, because he's loud. He never let's Sans get away with crawling into a metaphorical hole because Papyrus will out stubborn him. And he'll keep doing it, repeating this bittersweet, backwards nostalgic cycle because he's optimistic enough to think it helps.
He's hopeful that one day Sans'll get better, either at remembering his own limits and needs or magically recovering from—well. Everything. But it doesn't matter if he ever does, really.
Papyrus can feel it under his hand before Sans even makes a noise, so he has his brother leaned over the toilet again when he heaves suddenly. This time refuse magic hits the bowl with a splash and Sans makes that startled noise which means it decided to expel itself in every inconvenient way.
Papyrus uses his advantageously long arms to grab a hand towel and waits until Sans' shoulders are shaking less, before pulling him back up a bit.
"Gross," Sans says, and Papyrus has to agree, because somehow the greenish mix of Sans' magic has found its way through his nasal holes, and his eyes. Papyrus offers the towel and Sans takes it, wiping roughly at the magic splattered on him.
Papyrus waits to see if another fit will crash into his brother's frame. Sans just breathes. At some point Papyrus realizes Sans' breath has fallen into a deep and regular pattern, and Papyrus lets his relief relax his tense posture.
Sometimes these fits can take hours to resolve, all night even, into the artifical light of morning. Those times are the worst, because Papyrus has to leave for the sentry job and he knows Sans just crawls into the shower and runs the tap until he either gets enough energy to make it back to his bed or Papyrus finds him sleeping, waterlogged, in the tub.
Papyrus cleans Sans' face with a new towel, catching the many spots Sans missed. He wraps Sans up in the blanket and lifts him up in his arms. It recalls a vaguely mirrored memory in him, a time when Sans used to be taller than him and would swaddle him in the closest thing to a baby blanket he could find.
Papyrus deposits Sans in his room, giving into the urge to tidy just enough that the mattress actually looks like a mattress and not a junk yard. He shuts the door behind him, goes back to the bathroom and when he blinks again the bathroom is blindingly clean and the stink of bleach is almost over powering. He starts to count—white tiles, white light, white towels, black shadows in the corners like ink staining paper—realizes he's better off somewhere he hadn't just scoured clean to within an inch of it's life, and steps out of the bathroom, into the hall, and back into his room.
He's definitely not sleeping.
Sans can sleep well enough for the both of them.
Papyrus wakes up his computer and opens the undernet, typing slowly into the search engine. He finds a pencil from somewhere and a piece of paper. He resolves to, at some point, get a notebook.
He finds a little mommy-cooking blog that hasn't been updated in awhile, with simple recipes. He taps the pencil lightly against the paper as he scrolls through and reads and writes.
