Sans was in love with you before he was ever fully attracted to you.
It was a little ass-backwards, wasn’t it? That’s what all the rom-com anime and movies out there would have him believe. There was supposed to be some moment when you first met where he just stared at your face, saw an angelic glow around it as angels sang in the background, and experienced total tunnel vision to everything but you. Seeing you in a swimsuit, or seeing your skirt hike up just a little too high on your thigh, was supposed to make him forget who, what, when, where, and why, and—he didn’t have a nose—but his nose was supposed to bleed, or something.
None of that happened. When he first met you, what he noticed about you was the sound of your laugh. Not the way your hair framed your face and shined differently under different sources of light. Not the softness, color, and curve of your lips. Not the expressiveness and detail of your eyes. And definitely not anything to do with your body. Not yet.
And when you wore that skirt on a day you hadn’t expected to be so windy, he just felt bad for you. You were embarrassed. He didn’t want to sneak glances. The urge just wasn’t there. All he’d wanted to do was avert his gaze and guide you to the nearest clothing store to grab a pair of shorts for you to wear under that ill-advised choice of garment. And that’s exactly what he did.
And when you brought him to that water park, he hadn’t given your socially-acceptable half-nudity a second thought. His mind had been occupied with thoughts of two-person rides, overpriced junk food, and how nice it was to see you splashing around and having so much fun. And to be honest, he was more worried about what was going through your mind as you looked at him, a short, stocky skeleton in swim shorts, though he didn’t realize at the time why he cared so much—why the thought of you not liking what you saw made it feel like his soul crumpled up and died a little.
That wasn’t to say he didn’t think (or, the more accurate term may have been, realize, because it was an objective fact) you were pretty. He was asexual, not blind. He saw your face, your skin, your eyes, your hair, your lips. He saw your body, where it curved and where it straightened, the swell of every muscle and collection of fat, the outline of bones under your flesh here and there. Oh, he knew you were gorgeous.
But to be attracted to someone carries an underlying intent. As he understood it, being attracted to someone meant, that at least under some hypothetical scenario, well… you wouldn’t mind taking your clothes off with that person and doing the no-pants dance with them. Or even if not that, it at least meant a certain fixation with looking at that person. And he saw you and all, but he wouldn’t say he ever, italicized and bolded, looked at you. Not for a pretty damn long time.
Not that it was easy to tell whether or not he was looking at you in the way one does when one has certain intentions. Hell, he always got the feeling that love was supposed to be this big, confusing, indescribable thing—but only one of the cliches about it ever rang true to him, and it was that he knew it when he felt it. As quiet as he was about it, he knew when he fell in love with you. Even something that he could never hope to put into words was more clear-cut to him than the issue of sexual attraction. When did he cross that line into sexual attraction? Was it when he caught himself acting like an absolute fool just to get you to smile, because he was kinda obsessed with it? Was it when he lost track of what you were saying for the first time because he was too busy staring at your lips? Was it when he rested his head on the side of your bed, watching over you like you’d asked him to do as you were out cold sick with one of those human illnesses, and felt an ache in his soul that kept him up all night when he thought about combing his fingers through your hair?
Romantic love had been described and exemplified to him a million ways over the years. Even when he hadn’t yet attained it for himself, he’d seen its ins and outs and heard it expressed in countless different words. Of course he knew it when he felt it. Something so visceral and all-encompassing and universal was easy to identify. But sex and sexual attraction? Not so much. Everyone got so coy about that kind of stuff. There was an eternal undercurrent of shame to it. Some tried to compensate by making it sound too flowery and spiritual and much the same as love itself… which was nice, and he liked it, but he wasn’t naïve to the fact that they were separate things, closely tied as they could be for some people including himself. Some just avoided the issue of it, which didn’t help at all. Some spoke in euphemisms, either demure—to sleep together, to make love, to pleasure—or just downright hilarious—to choke the chicken, to gargle somebody’s marbles, to do the no-pants dance, as aforementioned. He’d thought it was all something he simply wouldn’t and couldn’t ever understand, as someone who didn’t have genitals and wouldn’t really know what to do with them if he did.
And yet, somehow, at some point, without even meaning to, he did understand it, and for the life of him, he couldn’t point to when. Was it when you decided that you were good enough friends that you didn’t mind changing clothes with him in the room, and he couldn’t take his eyes off you? Was it when you wore that suit to your first official date with him, and his patellae felt all wobbly as he, inexplicably, couldn’t get the thought out of his mind of you backing him up against a wall with a dark, simmering desire in your eyes?
Or was it only when he spent another sleepless night, the magic flowing through his bones so hot and excited and aching with a need he couldn’t fulfill, because his last memory of you that day before you went home was your lips pressing frantically and affectionately to his face, your hand creeping up his sternum, and your voice whispering that you loved him? You loved him. You loved him. You wanted him, clear as day. And whether it became true that night or in any one of countless gray-area moments before it… he wanted you, too.
But there was an issue to come back to here, and a major one—he still did not have genitals. The excitement he felt flowed evenly through his body and overwhelmed all of him. There was no identifiable point in which it concentrated, no part of his body that ached to be touched any more than any other part of him. And it wasn’t like he didn’t try. It was embarrassing, just how much he’d tried. To put it lightly, he watched some videos, not because he was titillated by their content—he found them kind of weird and goofy, actually—but to try and figure out what he was supposed to do to himself to reach that sweet relief everyone seemed to be chasing when they felt the things he felt. There was nothing between his legs to wrap his hand around, so anything involving that was a lost cause. The idea of teasing his fingers along the slit narrowly separating the two pubic crests of his hips seemed promising, but ultimately proved fruitless, not to mention personally humiliating. He knew this was completely private, and nobody else would ever know, but he felt a sense of crushing self-consciousness anyways. He wasn’t getting any closer. It was just bone. Just touch. It wasn’t working, and he felt like shit for it, like maybe he was broken. He tried sticking his fingers through the gaps in his ischia. Wedged a pillow under his coccyx and sacrum and wriggled back against it like a bear scratching its back on a tree. Turned over on his stomach, bent the pillow up into the curve of his body, and desperately, almost anguishedly mimicked that forward-and-back motion he knew worked for anyone, anyone else. For all the effort he put in, all the straining and rutting and soft, muffled pleading into his mattress… all it did was make him ache more painfully, turn him into even more of a mess, his entire body and the soul at its center begging incessantly for the impossible. Until at last, he admitted defeat, slipped his shorts back up, consumed with shame and mortification, and laid still on his side as the heat in his bones slowly ebbed away on its own, unspent.
He didn’t sleep a wink that night. Because he knew what had to come next.
It was no secret that you were—among a billion other wonderful things, of course—kind of a sexual person. At least, you were open about your sexuality. You joked about hentai, talked casually about ‘turn-ons’ and such, and a couple of times, downright flippantly referred to the fact that you masturbated sometimes. Even before he started feeling the way he did now, that all had never bothered him. It was a strange sense of humor to him, but one that made him chuckle nonetheless, and if you were comfortable with all that stuff that most people got uncomfortable about, then more power to you. He admired it about you, even.
But it took on a whole new meaning now. You… knew this stuff. All the things that eluded him, his whole life and even now that these feelings had emerged in him. The ins-and-outs (haha, in-and-out, another stellar euphemism for the scrapbook) of all of it. You knew how to pleasure yourself, and how to pleasure others, and even though he was a special case, he felt certain that if there was anybody in the entire world who could figure him out, it’d be you.
Not to mention the fact that he’d sooner personally bring a wrecking ball to his happy place, his favorite place in the world, Grillby’s, than ever speak a word of this to anyone but you. He’d never understood the shame around this stuff, and yet now it was hitting him as hard as it hit anyone else, if not even harder. How could it feel so wrong just to want? He didn’t know, but he couldn’t stop it. That’s just the way it was. He couldn’t look you in the eye for a whole day after he tried to give in to his urges.
A few more days passed. The feelings returned often, unexpectedly, and sometimes unwelcomingly. When you joked that his voice was sexy. When you slipped your hands under his jacket as you kissed him. When one of his jokes made you laugh, in that wonderful way he’d always loved so much. The very first thing he loved about you. Suddenly, it had this effect on him that it never had before. He felt so dirty for it he forgot to laugh along with you.
You didn’t notice. But he knew it was only a matter of time before you did. So, he knew what had to come next.
He had to tell you about it. All of it. As best he could. And he just had to hope that you could help him through it, like you helped him through everything else in his messy life.
