Chapter Text
There’s a skeleton monster asleep in the library.
This is… odd. Not the whole monster thing - there were plenty of them in Ebott since the barrier fell, and lots of them had come to the university. Something about assessing those with degrees to make sure they were up to par with surface-education and allowing those who didn’t have them to seek them out with scholarships and grants and such. You had seen monsters before. The odd thing was that they were asleep in this part of the library, where barely anyone came.
It was a monster, you were pretty sure. That or a particularly elaborate prop someone had set up to prank you. No one had done that sort of thing in the library since The Silly-String Flute Incident a couple of years ago. Even the boldest of jokers (and the most desperate of youtube pranksters) wouldn’t dare go up against Madam Rozemyne after that. So. A monster. A skeleton. And not a very big one. They looked like they were maybe 4 and a half feet tall at most. You knew better than to assume this meant they were a child - you had been told that monster kids wore stripes so that people could tell they were children regardless of shape or size. You couldn’t quite see all of their outfit, but you didn’t think they were hiding any stripes under that blue hoodie.
Whoever they were, they were sleeping face down on the table. Snoring too, though not loudly enough to cause a disturbance. If you were further away you might not have heard it at all.
You were not further away. You were standing next to the table they had claimed, all the way in the back and pleasantly lit by the window it was just under. You couldn’t fault them for their choice, because this was a great spot. It was, in fact, the best spot in the library, and you knew that because it was your spot . And here this monster was. Not even using it to study. Just. Taking a nap. Gods, you wished that were you.
You had been annoyed by this for a few seconds, but now you were mostly just worried. In your experience, most students at Ebott University were perfectly okay people. Nice. Some of them were great. But there were also students who had sticky fingers, and you had lost some of your things to them in the past. Nothing expensive, but that honestly made you more annoyed than if they’d stolen something they could actually sell. They really thought half a stack of sticky notes was worth snatching from a stranger? Weird. And here was this monster, asleep, with all their stuff on the table. Anyone could come up and snatch their shit too.
To add to that, not everyone liked monsters. There were people who weren’t even neutral about them. What if someone hateful came up and did something? This weird skeleton was completely vulnerable. They hadn’t even noticed you standing there and watching them sleep like a complete weirdo! They… hadn’t…
…
With a nod, you sat your stuff down across from the skeleton. If they weren’t going to protect themselves, you could do it for them. It wasn’t like you were going to have to fight off a hoard of ninjas or something - it was a college library. Anyone looking to steal would probably be warded off by anyone mildly alert sitting near a potential victim. The skeleton didn’t stir as you sat down and opened your laptop. Nor did they twitch as you unzipped your backpack and took out your notebook. You settled in to take Psych notes and your companion didn’t notice a thing.
Your professor hated this book, and you were starting to understand why they had assigned chapters out of order. You were taking notes on chapter 4 currently, but if you had tried to do that without having read chapter 12 you would have felt like your brain was melting out of your ears. If the department head was so desperate to make students buy his textbook he could at least have hired an editor to arrange the damn thing to make sense. You paid $75 for this thing - used, by the way - and you felt a little bit like crying when you thought about it too long. $75. That could have been food. That could have been a game. You could be playing Story of Seasons right now, but instead you’re here in a library sitting across from a skeleton and trying to see if there’s any new information in the 7th anecdote about a person who got brain damage and experienced changes in their personality.
…Speaking of skeletons, you looked up. Your new companion (in the way that the Companion Cube was a companion) was still very firmly off in dream land, even though it had been a good half-hour since you’d sat down. Fuck, you wished that were you. Asleep. Not a care in the world. Not having to copy down a diagram of a human brain. Not wondering how this applied to monsters, who all seemed to have similar psychology even though some of them didn’t actually have brains. Did the skeleton across from you have a brain? Probably not. Again, you wished that were you.
You stared at them a bit, jealous of the simplicity of not currently being conscious and thinking. Well, you were helping them, weren’t you? You turned to a blank page of your notebook. Slowly, you tore it out. This was fine, right? You weren’t going to hurt them or anything. And it was time you took a break and used your brain for something else. You still remembered how to do this, right? You made one fold along the paper. And then another. They weren’t perfect or crisp, but you couldn’t say you minded that much. You bent one piece, and then another, and then smoothed the entire thing out, and flipped it over. Soon, you had your prize.
You pushed the two corners of your little project towards each other so that the two halves of it spread apart. The skeleton continued to snore. You pushed your chair back slowly. The wooden legs slid soundlessly over the thick library carpet. You stood carefully, making sure not to bump the table. Hesitantly, you leaned over the table, your arms outstretched, you deposited your expertly crafted paper-hat onto the unsuspecting skull. Success!
You nodded once, satisfied with this monumental achievement. Side quest accomplished, you reluctantly turned back to your notes. You pulled your chair back, picked your pen up, and tried to focus your brain on the rest of the chapter.
Another half-hour later, you had moved on to your trigonometry homework. It wasn’t due for another few days, but if you did it right then you could spare yourself the trouble of thinking about it until next week. Plus you could take your time. Win-win. In theory. In practice, you were contemplating what was really stopping you from buying a cabin in the woods and living off the grid and fist-fighting bears for a living or whatever forest people do instead of getting a degree. (The things stopping you were money and bugs. You could probably fight bears, maybe, if you tried very hard and believed in yourself. You hadn’t tried before so it was anyone’s guess.) You were deep in thought on the subject when you heard footsteps approaching your table.
This was odd to you. You’d heard plenty of people shifting around in the library - it was the middle of the day, after all. But this wasn’t a super active part of the library most days. That was what you liked about it! Even if the sunlight on your laptop made you uncomfortably aware how dirty your screen was. You lifted up, wincing as you straightened your spine. You had really been hunched over, huh? You rolled your shoulders and flexed your fingers, the rings you wore clacking against each other. With sore muscles, you turned around to look just as the owner of the footsteps approached.
Another skeleton monster. This one was tall - ridiculously so. He was slouching - probably worse than you had just been - but you were pretty sure he was at least 7 feet tall. He seemed… tired? His eyelids were drooping. Eye-sockets? Whatever. He wore an orange pullover hoodie which somehow looked big on him even though, as previously stated, he was about seven feet tall. Both hands were in his pockets, but he didn’t seem to be carrying a bag. Honestly the guy looked cozy. Are all skeletons just like that? Constantly ready for a nap? That might be racist to think. You have a sample size of two, and midterms are next week so maybe they’re just hard workers.
You could tell the exact moment that the new guy spotted you, because he paused. He looked almost startled to see you there. Maybe he was supposed to meet up with the one currently face-down in a physics textbook? He seemed hesitant to come closer. Like he was afraid of you or something. His head slouched down a little further, his shoulders drawing up as though he could hide like that. It was kind of cute, but you felt bad for him. You weren’t too good at reading his face, but you knew nervous body language when you saw it. You waved at him and tried to look friendly.
He looked even more startled at that, but he pulled one hand from his pocket and waved back. Success! Man, you’re good at this whole social interaction thing. No one would ever know how little practice you have. He hesitantly approached the table. When he spoke, it was quiet. “uh, hey. you know him?” He gestured at the smaller skeleton. You shook your head.
“No.” You replied with a shrug. “I just didn’t want someone to come and steal his stuff or something.”
You watched as the tall skeleton very clearly looked at the paper hat you’d put on his… friend? Brother? Whatever they were to each other. He poked it like it might explode. “and the hat?”
You shrugged again. “Price of protection?” You answered. You thought it sounded pretty good considering you’d pulled it out of your ass. You hadn’t actually thought through what you would say if asked about it. Truth be told - you hadn’t thought about much except for how bored you were and how badly you wanted to look at anything that wasn’t psych for a couple of minutes. All your brain power had gone into remembering how to make the hat in the first place. You’d had none left to figure out what to say if the person you were sitting next to woke up without sounding like a weirdo or a creep or something. Normal people probably didn’t decorate strangers. Failure. Damn, maybe you are bad at this social interaction shit. Or maybe you’re brilliant, since you did just possibly fix it. Who can say, really?
Thankfully, the skeleton that was actually awake seemed to think it was funny. You hadn’t noticed how carefully neutral his teeth looked until the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile. It was small. He wasn’t beaming or anything. But it was a smile, and you felt like you’d done something wonderfully right. Especially when he readjusted the hat to fit better.
He leaned over and shook the smaller skeleton gently. No response. He shook the guy a bit harder. Still snoring. The taller skeleton glanced at you before shaking him roughly. “sans! get up already!” He quietly complained.
The skeleton you’d been sitting across from jolted a bit, and then raised his skull slowly. You didn’t quite know how to read a face like that either - his eye-sockets were so big, but the lights in them looked unfocused, maybe? It was a guess, but you thought he looked bleary.
“mmhp.” He (Sans?) mumbled. “paps?”
Oddly enough, the taller skeleton flinched, looking a little nervous, before he responded. “nah. it’s stretch, ‘member? you never texted back so i came to get you.”
Sans blinked, once, twice, and then squeezed his eyes shut before opening them again and sitting upright. The hat didn’t move. “oh. right.” He said. His mouth didn’t move when he spoke. It was like his voice just emerged from inside his skull, like a human wearing a mascot head, except it was entirely unmuffled. Or like there was a speaker in him. Or like Mewtwo from the first Pokemon movie or something. He looked down at his notes, and then over at you. “guess i was bone tired.”
You don’t know what you were expecting when this guy woke up, but between his unusually deep voice, the slightly unsettling way he talked, and the skeleton pun (which wasn’t even funny or clever but it was the first thing he said ) you were completely unprepared. A laugh escaped you like it was being punched out of you, and suddenly you couldn’t stop. You had been sitting next to this guy for like an hour. In complete silence no less! One hour of neither of you saying anything. And he introduced himself with a pun! You covered your mouth to muffle the sound - you were still in a library, after all.
Still, Sans grinned. His eye-lights had… condensed? They looked more focused. Brighter, too. “heh. you’ve got a great sense of humor, huh? so who are you?”
Oh. Right. You didn’t actually know this guy. You introduced yourself with only a little bit of a stutter.
Sans repeated your name. “ok. do you usually sit with random people you find sleeping?”
You didn’t usually find people sleeping, but you didn’t think that would be a good answer. You were about to try and give the same explanation you had given to… Stretch? To Stretch. You were going to explain yourself. But Stretch himself interrupted.
“we don’t really have time for an interrogation.” He told Sans. “thank the nice human for watching your stuff and let’s go.” Sans looked up at Stretch for a few seconds, before he stood and gathered his stuff - a notebook with no visible writing in it and a thick textbook he had been using as a pillow. You were right about him being short. You’d guess he was just cresting 4 and a half feet tall. Next to Stretch he looked absolutely microscopic.
“thanks?” he said to you, looking unsure as to why. You gave him a thumbs up and resolutely did not look at the paper hat still sitting firmly on his head. How was it doing that? Was it magic? You hadn’t put any magic in that, you didn’t think. He seemed satisfied with the thumbs-up. He started to walk back toward the entrance before Stretch stopped him again.
“we don’t have time for that either.” Stretch said. Then he just picked Sans up like he weighed nothing (then again, as a skeleton he didn’t have most of the parts that made humans heavy, so maybe he did weigh nothing) and started to walk away. He hesitated, and then turned back to you one last time. “have a nice day, human.” He said. He was gone before you could reply. Literally. Disappeared into thin air.
Huh. Well, if anything that seemed like a good stopping point for the day. You decided to gather your stuff and head back home. You had work later, anyway.