"You're too young to hate the world." Gaster & Sans, please :D
Good choice! Set between chapters 17-18
It’s well into the recesses of the night when Gaster hears the first stirring clatters of movement in his lab. Perhaps, to anyone else, it would be unnoticeable, quieter even than Toby when he gets up for a drink from his bowl, but years of paranoia and fear and surety of inevitable death by betrayal in the night have trained Gaster to have better listening skills than most, both in conversation and in ambient noise.
He rises like a shadow, stopping only once to scratch behind Toby’s ears when the dog lifts his head lazily from the bed— Technically, he really should be sleeping out on his pillow in the main room, but he comes sneaking in here almost every night, and Gaster doesn’t have the heart to throw him out. Not now, not ever. It’s a reassurance, to know he’s by his side as always, when many things can feel like an uncertainty at times.
There is so much in his life he could not, cannot, save— But this, this dog that the child he called something like his own loved with all her heart, this he can keep from the darkness.
Gaster makes his way down the hall quietly, a quick check at the second door on the left reassuring him that the younger boy… his younger boy, is still asleep. The door before that leads to an empty room, but that in of itself is hardly surprising. It’s why he’s awake, after all.
He finds Sans curled up on the wide, lumpy couch in the main room, looking impossibly small for a child of thirteen and then some, with a large blanket wrapped around his shoulders as he hugs his legs and stares down at his toes with a somber grace unbefitting of his young age. Gaster sits down next to him gently, and chooses not to be offended when Sans startles and flinches in response.
He understands how easy it is to get lost in your own head, after all.
“Nightmare?”
Sans jerks his head, not quite a nod, but an acquiescence, if nothing else. “Bad memories.”
“Ah…” Gaster offers, choosing not to press. Sans will tell him if he wants to, and if he doesn’t he will not. That is simply how this works.
“Not mine.” Sans says, shaking his head slightly, wrapping his arms tighter around himself. “I know how to handle— “ He coughs, and Gaster lays a careful hand on his back. “Not mine. Wind’s.”
“Oh.” Gaster blinks, quietly reordering his thoughts. He had known Wind had spoken to Sans in the wake of the annual inspection, but he had not thought…
This is… New. Wind had never shared her memories with anyone. Not himself, not even Rose. He had even thought perhaps she did not carry the ability, that the consequences of generations of intermarriage between monster species in the Underground had diluted her Currentwalker blood enough to lose that certain grain of their magic.
To know that the first person, the only person, she chose to share this with was Sans speaks to a much closer bond of trust between them than he had predicted.
It is surprising, but good, he thinks.
“I see.” He murmurs, and Sans sighs, slumping.
“When she showed me…” He trails off, clearly trying to think out his words. “It was like I was reliving her life, through her eyes— Every memory, every fear, every dream. I guess it’s not surprising there were… some things left behind.”
“No.” Gaster says softly, jotting the information down in a corner of his brain while keeping his focus on Sans. He needs to deal with his child right now, he can ponder on what this means later. “It’s not at all.”
Sans shivers, and slumps into his side, subconsciously seeking comfort. “I spent this whole time thinking the only wrong to find was my own— Obsessed with my own misery, and I never even realized…” He sighs out, eyes closing. “It’s not just humans. It’s monsters. It’s Wind. Asgore takes everything, from everyone.”
“Yes and no.” Gaster offers, and he can’t help but wonder when his intellectual and moral equal became a barely-teenaged child. “It’s never as simple as it looks on paper, Sans. There are bad monsters, and bad humans, and all of us are capable of hurting each other.”
“It’s wrong.” Sans snarls quietly with the same steely conviction Gaster had seen in him that first day, when he’d watched the child be dragged into the castle in cuffs with the human girl’s dead body. “They’re wrong. All of them— Asgore, Melaina, Undyne, the guards. They’re all so fucked up, just like us, and they can’t even see it.”
“You’re too young to hate the world, so—“ Sans stiffens, tasting the half-finished word, and Gaster quickly corrects himself. “Kid. Don’t let it all get to you, the world’s not quite finished with you yet.”
Sans sniffles a laugh, and Gaster realized idly that those were the same words he told Wind, all those years ago.
Too soon, he thinks. It’s far too soon and certainly not the time to broach this tenuous line between allies and family that they share, with little slip-ups on his part such as that.
“I don’t hate the world.” Sans says, tired and beaten-down and exhausted but undeniably honest. “…I just hate the bad things in it.”