#habby balentimes day

[auntie-diluvian]

What would have happened in chapter 2 if you decided to write it?

Eek I’m so sorry I took so long to answer this!

The longer I think about it, the more I think a second part would have really jumped the shark any way I’d have written it, but I did have some thoughts*, which got… uh, kinda long (hence me taking forever to answer your ask), so I’m gonna put them beneath a cut if I can figure out how.

Some of this was sort of charted out in a long chat between me and Py (specifically I think the bit with Papyrus showing up, which I think was her idea?), but that conversation was so long ago it’s been lost to the sands of time (and tumblr chat having no search function), so most of this is new and specific to the version I posted.

I had a couple of scenes in my head that were a little more defined, the rest was just kind of vague, and it never came to a conclusion, really. So I guess, in theory, all of those “Reader goes to Italy and carboloads themself into personal fulfillment, Sans dies of skelesyphilis, and his gf fucks off somewhere” fantasies can still happen. If, you know, by the end of me rambling about this, any of that still sounds, oh god, you know, fuck, appealing, or whatever. If not, then uhhh whoops sorry I don’t have any ending for you at all, my dude.**

Also this hasn’t been beta’d or anything, I didn’t want to give it the same status as the stuff I actually publish, just like, on principle? so like. keep your expectations in check maybe? especially re: some of the most cliche and melodramatic dialogue I’ve written to date lol

The first scene was to take place on Jan 2nd:

Your friend, the one you’re now glad isn’t speaking to you, is standing at your door, anxiously clutching a small, rectangular cardboard box bearing a sticker you recognize as the logo of your favorite bakery. She speaks to you, and you feel your stomach flip.

“Um, so, these are for you. Uh, happy new year, by the way, and um, the frosting probably got a little smushed- you know how high they like to pile it on. But, you know, they’re fresh, so- should be good. Got your favorites.”

She hands you the box and you peek inside. Cupcakes, of course. Half the frosting’s on the lid, like she said, and you stare at them, dumbfounded. Can’t look at her.

She clears her throat.

“I know what I’m like, sometimes. I can be melodramatic and petty and- and self-destructive. I do dumb shit like drive away my closest friend with the silent treatment because I didn’t get the answer I wanted. I’m so sorry. You were right, and, god, furthermore? The entire thing was just… stupid, you know? Can you forgive me?”

You sway on your feet, dizzy.

“Of course.”

She steps forward and hugs you, and as her arms wrap around you, so does an awful panic.

Your cell phone is burning a hole in the pocket of your bathrobe, from the text you had received ten minutes prior, alerting you to your friend’s impending arrival:

Sans: she’s coming over to your place. please don’t tell her anything. i’ll figure something out. sorry to ask you to do this. i’ll make it up to you

Sans: ok that sounded wrong. not what i meant. everything sounds wrong though

Sans: i’m sorry

“Oh, thank you,” she says, sounding more grateful than she should, her scarf tickling your cheek. “That’s such a relief. Thank you.”

Really just laying that guilt on thick. Uhhh let’s see, after that:

You tell her you’re sick just to get her to go away and she believes you because you look horrible and are wearing a bathrobe in the middle of the afternoon

Cue angst about furthering the extent of your dishonesty

The next day she texts you just to “catch up” but in the middle of it, drops that Sans has been more than usually distant. They talked about so much and she knows it’s going to take time for things to get better, but since that first conversation on New Year’s Day, he’s kind of shut down-

But enough about her problems, what’s been going on with you? Oh, Not Much, you tell her. You’re still getting over your cold but you’ve gone back to work. It’s the truth, more or less. You have the sniffles, at any rate, though that’s more due to your daily extended heartbreak/guilt crying alone sessions than any physical malady.

A week later, your friend is back to sending you memes and talking about her job, your favorite shows you watch. Sans is living with her. Everything is normal, on the surface. Sans chimes in on the group chat every now and again, but that’s it. Not another word from him. The awful feeling in the pit of your stomach has faded to a dull ache that only bothers you at night.

Which is why it’s a total surprise when Papyrus shows up on your doorstep one evening and lets himself in. You didn’t even know he was in town. You’ve met him a few times, loved the guy, but he’s not here for a social call.

Well, okay, he is, but it’s not a pleasant one. He is. So. Disappointed. In you. He’s prepared a speech! To express the enormity of your fuckup.

About the 45-second mark of which, you break down sobbing. He stops immediately and grabs you a glass of water and a cool washcloth for your neck.

He apologizes as you calm down, and you have a long talk with him about the hows and the whys. It’s incredibly cathartic, you’ve never told anyone about any of this situation, and you’re drained by the time you’re done. But as he leaves, he has this look on his face and you hate it- pity tinged with trace amounts of leftover dismay, so it’s a relief to lock yourself in for the evening, even if the alternative (i.e. being alone with your thoughts and your guilt and everything else) isn’t much better.

An hour or two later, you get another text from Sans: “i’m sorry again, i didn’t know he was gonna do that.”

Interrupting myself here to say as an aside, so much for a synopsis of my vague concept; this is now going on 800 words. Look at all this work you definitely made me do that I didn’t put on myself at all. Anyway.

Sans text, continued: “he’s in town cuz of me, though, so i think i gotta listen to him. he’s uh saying we should get together and talk about how i”

“hang on”

Five minutes later: “scratch that i’m not listening to him.”

Ten full minutes later: “we can have lunch tomorrow. to talk. if you want. you don’t have to agree to it. i’ll understand.”

It’s about two in the morning when you finally respond: “Where and when?”

He replies immediately.

It’s a good sandwich. A shame you can’t do much more than just poke at it and nibble at the toppings that have fallen out of it onto the wax paper basket liner. And the bag of chips is completely out of the question. You’ve already put them away for later, for when you might eventually start regretting skipping lunch because of the awful somersaults your innards keep doing. Sans’s sandwich isn’t faring much better- he’s twirling his frilly-ended toothpick between his fingers, occasionally poking it into his dill pickle wedge.

Neither of you has said a word past your perfunctory greeting and the order you’d both placed at the counter eight minutes ago. The rest of the sandwich shop doesn’t seem to care, though. Most of its other patrons are absorbed in getting their order and getting out, or making the most of their too-brief lunch hour. It’s noisy, and it would be the perfect setting for the conversation you’re supposed to be having, you credit Sans with that much. If you could just speak.

You’re staring off over his shoulder, at the display rack of different brands of hot sauce, when he startles you by biting off over half of his pickle, chewing, and swallowing with his eyes closed and a sigh.

“thanks for… you know, not telling her yet.”

“I didn’t do it for you,” you say with enough sourness to give that pickle a run for its money.

“no, yeah, i know- i just. yeah. i’ll tell her, though. soon. uh, -ish.”

“Will you tell me when you do it? I don’t think I can take another unexpected visitor, and  I-” you laugh, ”-I’m going nuts checking my phone, panicking at every single notification.”

“‘course. yeah.”

“Okay. Thanks. For that.”

“sure.”

You tear off a piece of sliced turkey that’s hanging out the edge of your sandwich.

“…can i say somethin’?”

“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“i didn’t- uh, know you had- i just thought you were riding the same wave of… whatever that was, as me.”

He clears his throat.

“i didn’t know you felt that w- i mean, that you had actual feelings for- at least, not until you started sayin’ all those things–”

“–I changed my mind, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

He ducks his head.

“yeah, okay.”

You take another bite of your sandwich, chewing as you scramble for something, anything, else to say.

“So. Uh, how’s, um, y'know, everything else?”

He blinks, shakes his head, and laughs.

“what, you really wanna know? or are you askin’ just to ask?”

Shit. No, you don’t really want to know.

“Yeah. I wanna know.”

He leans back, the plastic of the chair back creaking, and looks out the window behind you.

“shit… it’s all… it’s all fallin’ apart on me.”

“I’m sorry,” you say, already a well-honed reflex.

“not your fault, really. in the end. i’m just already tired. a week ago, this’s all i wanted, for everything to go back to normal. but it turns out normal was just a lot of her pretending she could stand me. and we’re not pretending, anymore. so… but that’s supposed to help us sort everything out, right?”

Goddamn your bleeding heart that got you into this in the first place.

“feels capricious of me, right? but if it’s gonna end, why can’t it just end already? but i’m not allowed to give up yet, because that’s not what we’re doing, we’re working through our issues.”

He pushes his basket over to the seat next to him, and folds his arms on the table, head nestled into them.

“even though giving up is all i wanna do anymore,” he says, voice muffled by his sleeves.

“Every relationship requires work, Sans,” you say. Platitudinal, but true, if not particularly helpful.

“but at what point do you cut your losses? is it before or after the seventieth thing this week she tells you you’ve been doing wrong all along that she never bothered to mention to you before? you know she prefers the loose end of the tp to come out underhanded? i didn’t. she’s wrong, but hey, fuck- anything for my baby. i’m tired. i didn’t know it was gonna be like this.”

Underhanded toilet paper rolls? Do you even know who she is?

“i should just go ahead and tell her about this whole thing, already, see if that- i dunno, breaks us beyond repair. but if i do that now when all our wounds are still fresh, i don’t get to say i tried to fix things, and i guess on some level, i need that.”

He rubs his face.

“fuck, listen to me whine. i’m making it sound worse than it is. ”

“Dude, I don’t know. I’m still horrified by the toilet paper thing.”

He snorts.

“i don’t even use the stuff much, so it wasn’t worth makin’ a whole thing out of it.”

“Okay, but I’m fixated on it. It’s like, all I can think about. What the fuck?”

You’re overcome with the strangest feeling- it shouldn’t be so odd to you now, three weeks into your guilt spiraling, but you want to text her about this so badly, to give her grief about it. And if this were a normal situation, if you hadn’t made everything awful, you wouldn’t hesitate. But you’re having a clandestine lunch with her boyfriend to discuss the awful thing you did, and therefore you can’t give her shit about her weird habit you now know about thanks to him, which is what friends do. Friends don’t let friends put the roll on the wrong way without at least dragging them for it for the rest of their natural lives, so can you still even call yourself her friend?

Probably not, huh? That, and the other thing you did. Friends don’t do that, either.

Your smile fades as you start to understand on a much more personal level what he meant. You doubt you’ll be granted the same mercy as him, of working out your issues, and until then you have to live like this, unable to even joke around without it turning bitter. You’re going to lose her, too- you’re going to lose them both, maybe, probably, and the waiting and pretending is only adding to your misery. It’s a hollow kind of wanting, for something to be over and done with, but it’s rooted in you all the same.

You finally decide you’re not going to finish your sandwich, but you wrap it back up in the wax paper liner anyway, and start putting your coat back on.

“Well. Thanks for meeting with me. I think I’d better head back to work, now.”

“you realize we didn’t talk about what happened at all, right?”

You shrug. “Maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe we don’t need to.”

“you don’t- you don’t have anything you wanna say to me.”

You close your eyes and sigh.

“I’m… sorry?”

“shit, yeah, me too.”

“It was a mistake.”

“unequivocally, yeah.”

“I think that about covers it, don’t you?”

He nods silently.

“Then… I’ll see you around.”

You almost make it to the door, leaving him slumped in his seat with his uneaten sandwich. You look outside at the cold, slushy parking lot, check the time, and nearly get in your car and drive back to work. But instead, your feet carry you back to the table, back to Sans.

“I do actually just have one question.”

He looks up at you, and you can see deep into his eye sockets, and the dark semicircles beneath them, how tired he is.

“sure. anything,” he answers.

“If you had known how I felt, would it all have gone- would we be here now, having this conversation? Or would I have gone home before and none of this would have ever happened?”

Your fool brain wants you to continue: Or would you have stayed?

But you already know the answer to that one, so you stop yourself; these questions are dangerous enough, as is.

He actually looks somewhat taken aback.

“i don’t- i dunno. and i dunno how much good speculating about it’s gonna do. what’s done is done.”

“Please. It’s the one answer I feel like I have any right to.”

He shoves his hands in his jacket pockets and leans back.

“yeah. i think i’d have done the same thing.”

Your chair creaks as you fall back into it, defeated.

“Why?”

“what do you mean, why? did it seem like i gave a shit who else i was hurting at the time?”

He slumps a little further down, and in a softer, more soothing tone, says, “what are you after? do i care now that i hurt your feelings? …yeah. not that it really counts for anything.”

“It counts,” you croak.

“hmm.”

He stands, finally.

“guess you’re right, though. i’d better be getting back to work.”

He shrugs on his wool coat and winds his scarf around his neck.

“you uh… you gonna be ok?”

Are you? Feels like… maybe not?

The sobbing starts, even as you will it not to- christ, no, anything but that.

“oh. uh. shit.”

People are staring, now. You hide your face behind your hands, try to even out your voice to reassure him and your new audience that no, really, you’re fine, but it just comes out all the more overwrought for your efforts. Sans is useless, grimacing, hands outstretched towards you, placating, like with a panicking animal, and it reminds you of the conversation you’d had that night, when you’d offered yourself up as a shoulder to cry on.

“you wanna get out of here?” he asks, and you nod, rolling your eyes at your own uninvited histrionics and swiping at your cheeks.

“k,” he says, and when you open your eyes again, you’re sitting on your couch, in your apartment.

“got tissues?”

You swallow.

“Uh, bedroom, but- please don’t go in there, it’s- it’s bad.”

“k.”

He returns a few seconds later with a handful of toilet paper, and you take it from him.

“hey. it’s gonna be okay. y’know why?”

You blow your nose.

“Why?”

“no matter what else happens, you’ll always know: you put the toilet paper on the holder the right way.”

You chuckle weakly into your wad of tissue.

“You’re right. I’ll always have that.”

He sinks down on the couch next to you. Not too close.

You sigh and slump forward, elbows on your knees, calmer now.

“Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen. The- you know, the turning on the waterworks in a sandwich joint. That was embarrassing. I’m embarrassed.”

“happens. plus, i think you’ve earned the right to cry.”

Your chin wobbles again, threatening.

“Oh? I have? Cool. ‘Cuz I don’t know what I have the right to feel, or do, right now. It all feels wrong.”

“yeah. i know,” he mumbles.

“Sometimes I start feeling sad, for me, because of what I’m about to lose because of this? But then- no, can’t do that, because- hey, maybe I should have thought of that before we-” you catch your breath.

“yeah.”

“I’m mad at myself, and I’m pretty okay with that. But then sometimes I think maybe I’m mad at you for like, seven different reasons, and half of those reasons conflict with each other, but I can’t even… stay mad at you like I think I want to.”

You aren’t looking at him, but you can feel his stare.

“like how?”

You poke and prod at your face, trying to relieve some of the tension headache that’s building around your eye sockets and temples.

“Like, as your friend, I’m annoyed that you put up with ALL of her bullshit. You’re such a doormat when it comes to her. But as her friend, I’m so fucking appalled that you’d sleep with me, her best friend, less than a month after the breakup of a like- how many years? Six?”

“…seven.”

“Seven year relationship. Fuck, sorry, not to belabor the point or anything, but- yeah.” You sniffle. “And then- here’s the kicker. Just as me, alone, not relative to anyone else- I keep wishing you’d just fucking stayed in bed after I poured my heart out to you. Like I have any right to feel that. And of all of it, all the shit, that’s the one that sticks the worst, so the rest don’t get a chance to mean anything.”

The second you turn your head to make eye contact with him, he’s there, leaning in, warm. Big old eye sockets looking at you just like you’d wanted for so long.

“i should’ve. i know.”

Your breath leaves you, almost-but-not-quite on a sob, as he kisses you, and everything is right and better, if only for a split second.

“Wait.”

“yeah- yes. ok.”

“What about-” you can’t bring yourself to speak to him more than a few inches removed from the kiss, as if tethered there by a spell, “-what about everything you just said, what- this isn’t fixing things.”

“no.”

“And I can’t- you can’t do this to me again.”

“i won’t. it won’t be like last time.”

“You can’t promise that,” you say as matter-of-factly as you can manage, given the circumstances.

“keep thinkin’ about how i can’t remember the last time i felt the way i did when you were sayin’ all that stuff about me.”

Your cheeks flush even harder, as if the rest of you hadn’t yet gotten the memo.

“That’s called an orgasm.”

The ridge above his nasal cavity scrunches up pleasantly when he laughs.

“We shouldn’t.  If it was wrong before, it’s so much worse now.”

“i know.”

You cast your eyes aside to your front door, then down to where your hands are almost touching as you lean towards each other on the couch.

“You’re so full of shit, you know that?” you ask. “Fuck you for making me fall for it twice.”

Your eyelids flutter shut as you pull him in by the back of his neck.

THEN YOU FUCK AGAIN!!! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!!! HOW COULD YOU!!!

hehe

He keeps his promise, more or less. It’s not her he has to run off to, at the end. You both have half a day of work ahead of you. You’re both late, and it’s as good an excuse as any for you to pretend he won’t still be going home to her, later.

You still have questions. You can’t focus at work.

He never promised much of anything, you now realize. It felt like he was offering much more, but- so what? Is he actually done with her? After everything? What does this look like tomorrow? A week from now?

What, you seriously think he’s going to leave her for you? Only if she kicks him out, you think, bitterly. Which makes you what, exactly? A consolation prize for his neglected ego?

You call him right as you’re getting off work, but hang up before he can answer. You want the truth??? You can’t handle the truth!!!

Things get better as they get worse. He starts coming over to see you, at least once a day. He stays an hour or two when he can. He talks with you in bed.

Yours, now, you think, sometimes.

You don’t ask him when he’s going to tell her. He’s choosing you, so he has to, right?

He will. Soon.

*Now I’m looking back at the beginning of all this and I’m like-

Some thoughts??? Bitch! You just wrote most of the damn thing! And after you said you weren’t gonna!

…So CLEARLY I had like, a little more I evidently wanted to say about this fucking thing. So there you go???

GOD that was a lot of dashes in there though, huh? I didn’t even try to keep the number down.

Oops hehhe

But, uh, yeah! I don’t know how this ends! Or even, at the risk of sounding a bit pretentious, if it ends! Maybe everyone learns from their mistakes and suffers the consequences! Or maybe nobody does! Or maybe it’s a weird combination of learning and not learning and suffering and not suffering because it’s supposed to be like, way more complicated than that.

**Or maybe reader and Sans’s gf wind up auditioning for the same local network tv wrestling show and they have lots of sexual wrestling tension together and also reader has like a will-they-won’t-they thing with an 80s disaster caricature of Marc Maron and they both bond with a group of wonderful interesting women and get to create something bigger than themselves!

God, I love GLOW. Maybe just go watch GLOW instead of this, it’s like, basically the same thing only with more eighties vibes and less skeletons and more women’s wrestling and less magical penises.

So really, not the same thing at all except for the one plot point of sleepin’ with your best friend’s dude that they kind of share, but very very good, you know?

Anyway! I love getting asks (I apparently love them so much that I can’t help myself and end up writing almost an entire chapter just to answer them), and fleshing out all the vagueness a little more without the self-imposed pressure of having to finish it into something publishable was really fun. So thanks for this ask!

[henryinplacesheshouldntbe]

Happy Valentine’s Day!

habby balentimes day, anon