For Lack of a Better Title (Ch. 7) Born To Run
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AO3
Here it finally is, the last part I posted before I ghosted.
It was a particularly chilly morning even for Snowdin, but Sans paid it no mind as he sat at his sentry station with his chin resting on his palm.
His mustard supply was running low, so he would need to make a stop at Grillby’s sometime soon.
He could do it on his walk home. He could also just teleport back and do it on the way to work the next day. The sea tea’s effects had worn off about an hour ago and he barely had the energy to keep his head up let alone drag himself across Snowdin.
If there was one thing keeping him awake it was his concern over his brother’s behaviour the previous night. He could tell Papyrus was making a serious effort to change, but he’d nearly lost his mind laughing over what? A broken cup?
He lived for jokes, and even he couldn’t find anything funny about it. Unless there was something flying way over his head, which wouldn’t be that surprising with his height.
He chuckled softly to himself. That was a joke Papyrus would’ve appreciated.
But even that wasn’t enough to distract him from the fatigue pressing down on his posture and pulling his eye sockets shut.
On an ordinary day, he wouldn’t have thought twice about dozing off at work, but this was different. For one, his usual naps were always light enough to allow him a decent reaction time if something were to actually happen. The tired he was feeling now was nothing short of an ache, and he was willing to bet that if he fell asleep now he wouldn’t be waking up any time soon.
Aside from his safety, however, there was the weight on his conscience as well, because as harsh and over-reactive as Papyrus could be, Sans also had his own share of faults. His slacking over the years had gone from involuntary to intentional after their first miserable years in Snowdin, so much so that Sans would go out of his way to piss his superiors off.
But it was different now. Papyrus was trying to improve himself, and Papyrus never half-assed a task. It only seemed fair that Sans make an effort too.
And that meant not falling ...
He jolted back awake and groaned, dragging his hands down his face. Thinking about staying awake wasn’t helping. In fact the act of sitting itself seemed to be working against him.
Sans slid slowly off his stool and moved to the open space behind his station to stretch. He pulled his arms above his head, relishing in the loud popping of his joints. Satisfied, he reached down to his toes. As far as he could anyway. He made it halfway before resigning to just hang limply.
It was a nice position though. If he swayed side to side, it was almost like being rocked. He let himself relax into the motion, drifting left, then right, then back and forth again …
The sensation of falling was all the warning he got before his body tumbled forward. The snow was soft enough to cushion his fall. As uncomfortable as the snow melting into his jacket was, he wanted so badly to curl up and give in to the exhaustion that was now clawing at his soul.
Tired was a feeling he’d gotten used to over the years, but this was something he hadn’t experienced in ages. The tears pricking the corners of his eyes were just barely holding back the frantic part of him that wanted nothing more than to break down and cry until he fell asleep. This must be how babies felt, he thought. Papyrus had certainly thrown his fair share of sleepy tantrums as a child.
He couldn’t let his thoughts drift, though. He had to get up.
He didn’t want to.
But he really needed to get up.
And he really, _really _did not want to.
Shut up, he told himself. In one brief surge of energy he pushed himself onto his knees, then crawled back over to his station and used the wall to hoist himself back up.
His soul was beginning to pulsate with the need to shut down and rest. As good as it’d made him feel, he was starting to regret accepting that tea from Papyrus. He knew it was meant as a kind gesture, but the lack of sleep it caused was making it increasingly difficult for Sans to do his job.
He finally struggled back into his seat, legs dangling a foot above the ground. At the very least, he thought, he could keep his head propped up on his forearms so that if he did lose this battle against sleep, he would fall and wake back up again.
In the meantime, he would close his eyes and just listen for a few minutes.
His breathing slowed to a crawl as his mind emptied itself of thought.
He wasn’t even aware he’d fallen asleep until he was startled awake by a fist slamming onto the table in front of him.
He nearly fell off of his stool from the jolt. It took his bleary mind a moment to focus on the pair of eyes glaring down at him. He couldn’t be sure in his post-sleep haze, but if he wasn’t mistaken, the glare seemed rather forced. He could barely comprehend the noises leaving Papyrus’s mouth, but if he concentrated hard enough, he could see the thinnest threads of concern laced in Papyrus’s expression.
He realized why when he glanced past his brother and saw Undyne glowering over his shoulder, watching Papyrus deliver his lecture with disgusted interest.
All the words about how lazy and insufferable Sans was held less of their usual vigor. Undyne was clearly oblivious, but having raised Papyrus, Sans could tell his soul wasn’t in his insults.
He could still feel tiredness creeping along the edge of his vision, but by then he was alert enough to play along. He pretended to be annoyed as Papyrus went on ranting. He even added a “Piss off, it’s your fault I didn’t get any sleep” for effect.
Too much effect, apparently, because something in Papyrus’s expressions shifted. For a split second, Sans saw genuine hurt flash in his eyes, but the moment passed instantly, overtaken by the pure, unbridled anger he was used to.
Papyrus grabbed Sans roughly by the front of his jacket, pulling him up against the counter. “What did you just say to me?” he growled.
Sans did not intend for Papyrus to take his retort seriously. That should’ve been a sign that he needed to tone the snide comments down, but a stubborn part of him was less than unwilling to grovel in front of Undyne.
In fact, if he was being completely honest, he partially blamed her for Papyrus’s exceedingly violent nature. The day he showed any vulnerability to her would be the day Papyrus ate food from Grillby’s of his own accord.
But he had to react, so he settled for a sneer and two middle fingers.
He regretted that immediately.
The backhand that followed came as more of a surprise than it should have.
Sans found himself on his side in the snow beneath his station, wide-eyed and clutching at his face.
He honestly hadn’t been expecting Papyrus to do that.
He almost laughed at the absurdity of it.
He didn’t see the mortification that passed over Papyrus’s face, missed the hesitation before Papyrus put on a snarl so as not to rouse any suspicion from Undyne. She still stood behind him, arms crossed and looking grim, her very presence looming over him like a shadow.
“Get back to work,” Papyrus snapped. “Don’t let me catch you slacking off again.”
They left Sans sitting on the ground, trying desperately to convince himself that that hit had been a part of the act, just his brother going above and beyond to convince Undyne, but ...
The sharp stinging in Sans’s cheek said otherwise, and the glower on Papyrus’s face had looked genuine.
Sans shoved himself up.
He kicked his sentry post, causing two empty bottles to fall over onto the ground.
He wanted to yell, wanted to scream, wanted to do anything but be there where even the desk he sat at was a reminder of his stupid, asshole, fucker of a boss.
Stars, when had he even started calling him that? Better yet, why had he agreed to call him that? Oh right, because he was weak and lazy and a pushover when it came to his brother, so what the hell did it matter if he was mistreated all the time, right?
He couldn’t keep thinking about this. He hadn’t felt this angry since ... he didn’t even know. He couldn’t think at all. The red in his vision was especially distracting.
A distorted glimpse of his reflection in one of the fallen bottles clued him in as to why. He immediately dampened the flare in his socket.
Maybe he was overreacting.
Or maybe not, because for years upon years he’d put up with his brother smacking him around to impress his fish-faced captain without any complaints. He knew - he’d acknowledged - that progress in their relationship would be slow, painstaking even, but for all the times he’d put up with Papyrus’s tantrums, not once had he ever retaliated.
That fact had never grated on him so much, but now it was the only thought cycling through his mind.
He was angry, and he every right to be.
He looked down at the bottles beneath his feet. Like hell he was about to stay at his post. He didn’t even care what Papyrus would do if he found him gone during his shift. He needed to get out of there.
So he went to the one place he knew Papyrus wouldn’t follow.
Undyne was staring expectantly at him.
They’d walked away from Sans’s post to finish their rounds, and even after ten minutes checking stations and getting reports, Papyrus still felt numb. Every part of him was screaming to return to his brother and apologize.
Of all the flaws he wanted to fix about himself, his flaring temper managed to get overshadowed among other issues. Only now, when Sans’s insubordination was enough to rile him up, did Papyrus remember just how explosive his temper could be.
Usually he prided himself on his duress under pressure, and usually, he could effectively control his emotions on the job. But for reasons beyond him, something about Sans brought out the worst in him.
A part of him still wanted to justify his actions with Sans’s comment. He knew it wasn’t true, knew Sans didn’t really hold his efforts to help last night against him. Neither of them had even thought ahead to the next day.
In fact, if Papyrus had realized sooner that he and Undyne would be making rounds that day, he would’ve had Sans stay home to rest.
Instead, he’d succumbed to the pressure Undyne’s presence put on him. He didn’t want to reprimand his brother for something he knew was out of Sans’s control, but he couldn’t not discipline him in front of his superior.
And even that was something of an excuse. There were plenty of significantly better reactions he could have had, but instead he chose to lash out impulsively.
“Papyrus.” Undyne stopped abruptly, barring an arm across his chest.
The world seemed to still alongside them, silent and empty until Undyne filled it with an unexpectedly gentle voice.
“I’m not even going to begin to try and understand your relationship with your brother, but ... if it’s affecting your work, and you need some time off to resolve ... look, if something’s going on ...”
Papyrus could see what she was getting at, but he wasn’t very eager to ask for time off. That would mean no outlet during the day, giving him plenty of time to dwell on his inability to fix himself.
And besides, there was no way he was giving his captain any ammunition for even a remote potential future accusation against his work ethic.
He politely declined the offer. She nodded, looking like she had more to say, but they both knew it wouldn’t be a very productive conversation if she continued, so she dropped the subject.
The rest of their route was smooth but uneventful. They picked up reports, got first-hand status checks on the goings on of Snowdin. Papyrus tried his best not to check out for most of it, but Undyne seemed to notice his mental absence.
At the end of the day she dismissed him from their usual sparring session, claiming that she had too much paperwork to catch up on.
Papyrus was left to his own thoughts on his trek back home through waterfall. The closer he got to home, the more anxious he grew, and the stronger his guilt became.
His mind decided to take an unusual train. Instead of jumping to accusations, he was playing out ... scenarios. Scenarios that made his soul twist, where he was going to his brother and doing something that would have been unthinkable before: simply apologizing. He wasn’t even sure if he knew how to properly apologize. His emotional vomit to Sans didn’t count - that had been more or less accidental, a split second reaction made out of panic.
Now, he needed to do it voluntarily, and he had no idea how to say two simple words.
His incapability was beginning to annoy him. He didn’t even realize he was muttering aloud to himself until he heard his own voice echoed back at him.
He pivoted to face the sound, conjuring a weapon on instinct.
“It’s not like I’m not trying,” an echo flower whispered up at him.
It sounded ... pathetic. He sounded pathetic. What was he doing, sulking through the caves of Waterfall and complaining to himself? He should be at home, making amends, or at the very least explaining himself.
He let his weapon dissolve.
_It’s not like I’m not trying. _
Listen to him, complaining about his own pitiful self as if it would do any good. It certainly wouldn’t change the fact that he didn’t by any standard deserve the word “great” in his title. “Terrible” on the other hand might as well be a word made just for him.
It’s not like I’m not –
“Shut up.”
Shut up shut up shut up shut –
“STOP.”
A snicker farther down the path wasn’t completely hidden by the chorus of echo flowers that had taken up an overwhelming melody of shouts. Papyrus swept a frustrated wave of bone attacks across the expanse ahead of him.
He only succeeded in wiping out a patch of grass, making the noise echoing off the walls of the cavern unbearably loud.
He stalked forward, searching for the source of the laugh. He scraped a hole through the palm of one of his gloves when he couldn’t find one.
He spent a minute pacing around, burning a path into the cave floor until he echo flowers’ blaring reduced itself to a soft whisper and the cavern was once again near silent. Even then he continued back and forth for a long stretch of time before he headed to the area’s namesake.
The waterfall was loud enough that he couldn’t think, enough to force his mind to relax and focus on one thing at a time. He needed to get home, first and foremost. If Sans was there, he’d apologize. If he wasn’t, he’d wait. Either way he’d fix things now, before it became a problem too big to handle.
It was a plan, and it was simple.
He could do simple.
As he continued back, he tried to occupy his mind with trivial things: training tomorrow, cooking techniques, organizing his closet again.
Just as he passed the delineation point between Waterfall and Snowdin, more laughter caught his attention. He paused and shifted around to find the source, ready for a fight if need be.
He stopped short of an attack when he saw that he was not in fact being mocked. Where he was expecting to find a jeering monster hiding between tree trunks, he saw instead children.
He scoffed to himself, ready to turn away, when a flash of red caught his attention, compelling him to study the kids closer. They were both of the same species, but one was clearly older, wearing a bright red jacket that he was tempted to go over and warn them about. Being young and defenseless, they might as well have been holding up a flashing sign inviting attacks.
But he already knew approaching them wouldn’t do any good. There wasn’t a monster in Snowdin who didn’t know who he was, and if full-grown adults veered from his path, children were sure to bolt on sight.
As if on cue, the older one turned and spotted him. The smile melted off of their face, replaced with dread. Without taking taking their eyes off him – Papyrus silently commended them for it – they ushered the younger monster to their feet and retreat farther into the woods, not turning to run until they’d put a substantial distance between them.
Papyrus made his way to the clearing the children were playing in. He told himself he was only curious, considering not many children were out and about in the middle of the day, and in such a public place no less. He may or may not have been walking slower than normal just to stall the time.
As he approached two indeterminable lumps of snow, he realized that they weren’t so indeterminable after all.
They were snowmen.
The amount of memories that came flooding into his mind was almost laughable. It had been ages since he’d last played in the snow, a time that had faded into the back of his memory, but those had been some of the best times of his childhood.
He had a fleeting desire to kneel down and continue the kids’ work, to feel the familiar cool texture of snow molding in his hands and see the clear progress of a perfectly formed structure coming together. He remembered the familiar scent of the scarf Sans would give him when they went out, hear the intoxicating sound of his genuine laughter ...
The small smile tugging at the corners of his jaw vanished.
They’d lost all of that because of him, hadn’t they. His gross turn in behavior had forced Sans away, and now his distance was only driving them further apart.
He couldn’t let that keep happening.
He knew it.
He _felt _it.
This new resolve filled him with something he couldn’t quite place, but it was like all the confidence he had in battle and cooking combined and multiplied by a million.
He felt determined, and he was going to seize the opportunity to do something, to take that first real step toward reconciliation that he should’ve taken long ago.
The remainder of the walk home was suddenly easier. He paid no mind to anyone around him, making a beeline to their house. His hands was shaking by the time he got to the door, so much that it took him a good minute just to get the key into the lock. When it opened, he stepped inside. A quick glance around for clothing items on the floor confirmed that Sans wasn’t home yet, so he went through his ritual of removing his gloves and boots by the door before heading to his room to take off his armor.
Normal, familiar tasks to ground his racing mind.
He couldn’t ever recall feeling this nervous before. For as long as he could remember, he had always been confident in his ability, or at the very least proud enough to convince himself that he was more than capable.
Now there was so much room for doubt and error. He was seeing for perhaps the first time a possibility of things not going how he wanted them to, and above all else it scared him. For once, he was going to need more than just confidence to get himself successful results.
By the time he get back downstairs, Sans still wasn’t home. Papyrus had no idea if that wasn’t normal or not. In fact he couldn’t seem to focus his attention on any thought that wasn’t his short, sweet plan.
Stand up and apologize as soon as Sans walked in the door.
Papyrus was still seated on the couch, running a phalange up and down the scar over his eye, when Sans finally walked through the door. Stumbled, rather, but Papyrus was too concerned with not losing his nerve to pay it much attention.
Hoisting himself up took more effort than it should have. His bones felt leaden, his mouth cottony. He told himself it was now or never. “Sans, I need to –”
“Fuck off.”
Of all the possible outcomes, he wasn’t expecting this.
“Knew you ... couldn’t change,” Sans slurred. Papyrus finally noticed how his brother’s eye lights seemed to be having trouble focusing on him. Sans almost pitched forward when he tried to take a step forward.
In retrospect, Papyrus couldn’t even say he was surprised that he lost his temper. Something about seeing that his brother felt the need to go and drink himself stupid because of him had his mind reeling back to his old thought processes, where he was finding any and every way to blame Sans for his own misfortune.
“I can always count on you to get wasted instead of doing your job,” he bit out, narrowing his eye sockets in revulsion.
Sans scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Oh yeah? Well I can always count on you to be an asshole.”
“At least I’m an asshole with standards!”
“That’s not what you said last time you fucked me!”
It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back before all hell seemed to break loose in their living room. “You insolent little –”
He lunged at Sans, who dodged easily, teleporting across the room as soon as Papyrus’s clawed hand came shooting out. His aim was slightly amiss, his inebriated mind unable to focus very well, and Sans ended up crashing into the staircase.
Papyrus took the opportunity to get him off guard, but Sans was quicker than he anticipated and he ended up in the same position as his brother a few moments earlier as Sans teleports away. This time he stumbled across the living room and tripped over a stray shoe.
He was fast, but not fast enough. Before he could recover enough to teleport again, Papyrus was pinning him down, one gloved hand cinching the vertebrae in his neck.
“Oh Papyrus, choke me harder,” he mocked.
Papyrus was seriously tempted to.
But almost immediately his palm pressed into something sharp. His first thought was that something on Sans’ neck is broken, which was enough to make withdraw his hand immediately.
He realized soon after that it wasn’t a broken bone.
It was metal.
Pointed but not sharp enough to cut.
“You ... kept this?” He reached down slowly, hesitantly fingering the soft leather of the collar that was hidden partially beneath his brother’s jacket.
How had he never noticed? It was a pretty obvious accessory, unless Sans had been keeping it concealed intentionally, in which case he still figured he should have noticed because he was the one that gave it to Sans in the first place. They also lived together, and ate together, and sometimes even slept together, and still somehow he’d never noticed.
Sans didn’t reply, and Papyrus couldn’t bring himself to look away from the collar and up at Sans’s face.
The anger was subsiding, the guilt settling back in. He really wanted to apologize, he did.
Seeing the collar, something of a gag gift he’d given Sans ages ago, was like concrete evidence that he needed to appreciate his brother significantly more than he did.
He should apologize, he really should.
It’d be so simple to just say those two words.
But the more_ I’m sorry_ bounced around in his head, he came no closer to forcing his jaw to move.
Sans shifted below him, reminding him that he still had him pinned down.
He removed himself carefully, settling back into a kneel a few inches from Sans. He wanted to at least offer a hand to help Sans up, but he was unable to make his body comply.
He wanted to reach out and steady Sans when he began to sway, no doubt the result of his intoxication.
He wanted so badly to explain himself and find a way to make it up.
Instead, he asked what Sans wants for dinner.
“Like it matters,” was the mumbled response he received.
They might never be able to move on, he realized. He was so stuck in his stubbornly static, and the trust in their relationship was beyond repair. There was no way to undo their tumultuous past, and they couldn’t just pretend it never happened.
But Papyrus couldn’t for the life of him confront it, so he kept his mind carefully blank so at the very least he wasn’t thinking about it.
Neither of them moved.
One of them sighed, but he couldn’t tell if it was himself or Sans.
“I’m not that hungry,” came Sans’s final reply.
The phrase rattled around Papyrus’s head like the echo flowers in waterfall, repeating and repeating until the words no longer held any meaning. They managed to linger more than any insult he’d ever received, any injury he’d ever sustained.
He may or may not have said “okay.” He thought he was headed toward the kitchen, but instead of a pot handle he found a doorknob in his hand. Instead of the heat of a stove, he felt the chill from the wind.
Instead of confronting, he was avoiding.
Instead of standing his ground, he was running.