Chapter Text
The medley of sounds from the busy city were drowned out by you turning up the volume of your car’s radio. You adjusted your rear-view mirror to see your child (S/N) sitting peacefully on the backseat, too distracted by the breakfast he was eating to notice you were staring at him. He seemed excited by the lively expression he carried on his face and the way he scarfed down his food without so much as taking a break to drink from his unopened juice pouch.
It took you fifteen more minutes of driving to arrive at your destination. Your child had already finished his breakfast long ago, and he was currently halfway done with colouring a page of his book.
“Excited for your first day?” you asked, smiling at him after opening his side of the doors.
He nodded in response, a bright grin showing on his round face. “Yeah! I can’t wait to see what it’s like.”
You smiled back at him and waited for him to pick up his backpack. He reached out for your hand after making sure he had everything with him, following you to the entrance of the new school established by a former queen of whose name you were told was ‘Toriel’. Though you were aware you had no reason to be nervous – seeing as you weren’t the one who would be starting over in a new place – you couldn’t brush off the feeling of anticipation when beginning to spot monsters left and right. Having lived most of your life at a quiet, peaceful town with a population of no more than a hundred people, you weren’t used to seeing so many of them in one place.
(S/N), however, didn’t seem to be having trouble with that aspect, already breaking free from your hold to run off with a pair of bunny children and one goat child. The group of four engaged in a quick game of tag while you were left to wait for the gates to open. You looked around you during your wait, being particularly entranced by a tall fish woman holding a child up in her muscular arms. The latter noticed your staring and waved at you, an act which you returned to avoid upsetting them or making them think you ignored them.
The more you looked around, the more monsters your eyes seemed to come across with. They varied from humanoid fires to multi-limbed spider people, your trouble with adjusting to the diversity of monsterfolk only intensifying with that observation.
You snapped out of it when hearing the gates open, the vast sea of people that began to walk into the premises making it hard for you to track down where your son had ran off to. Your eyes jumped from one person to another, finally stopping to see him conversing with a goat monster clipping the hedges set close to the gates. The pair were occupied talking with each other, content looks showing on their faces.
“Come on, (S/N),” you called out, tilting your head downwards in a form of salute at the gentleman left in charge of trimming the plants. “You can’t be late on your first day!”
He said his goodbyes to the goat monster and took your hand again, excitement clear by the way he pulled you whenever you were walking too slow. You still couldn’t shake off your awe at how different things were at the city, and your curiosity only grew when spotting a skeleton sweeping the hallways with a broom. You slowed your walking pace in spite of your son’s speed and pent up energy, catching a glimpse of the name tag on the skeleton’s shirt. It read ‘tutor & janitor’ on it, another observation that only made things more confusing to you and exiting all the same.
It was most likely going to take a while for you to get used to this new lifestyle, though you were just as determined to go explore it.
Your alarm going off made you jolt from your daydreaming, the sound in surprise that came out your mouth making the skeleton – Sans, from what you could read above his job titles – look up at you with an arched eye socket. You looked away from him in a haste and settled on checking your phone instead, holding back your frustration after reading you only had half an hour left before you arrived late to work. The harsh reality of balancing work with having to drop off your kid at school fell on you right at that moment, and you muttered a curse to yourself before hurrying the rest of the way to his classroom.
Breathless and near having your legs collapse, you arrived at the entrance door of your son’s first class. You didn’t leave until you made sure he settled in well with the students and his teacher, waving goodbye before stepping out of the classroom.
You avoided parents and staff on your way back, engaging in a battle against time to prevent a tardy mark on your first day at the new job. From the looks of it, adjusting yourself to this brand new lifestyle was going to be harder than you thought.
You still had the determination to power through it though, and you weren’t planning on letting frustration get the best of you just yet.