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The first time Gaster heard the song, it was because Grillby was humming it quietly. It was the first thing he heard on that cold, drizzly morning, the lilting tune of it drawing him slowly into wakefulness with gentle yet persistent tugs at his awareness. At first, he thought it was the remnants of some dream clinging to the edge of his waking mind, attempting to lull him back into the blissful unawareness of sleep. But the more he focused on it, the more he heard, the more he realized he was awake. He blinked in Grillby’s direction as the bodyguard went about sharpening a knife at the front of the abandoned garage they’d tucked themselves into that night. The background patter of the gentle rainfall and the rhythmic sound of metal scraping against metal wove itself into the haunting little tune, a fitting accompaniment for a person of such stoic character.
“What is that?” Gaster asked, his voice hoarse with sleep and naked and dissonant when compared to the soft tune Grillby had been singing. Grillby stopped his humming abruptly, and the motion of his knife, and the patter of the rain made itself loud in the silence between them.
“I heard it in a music box once,” Grillby elaborated slowly, as if it took him a moment to recall exactly where the song had come from, “A rusted old piece of human trash someone kicked away somewhere. Thought it was pretty.”
He paused and then offered a dry sort of smirk, “It gets stuck in your head easy.”
“Huh. Well I agree, it’s pretty.”
Grillby nodded, and stood up from his work, and just like that their day was started.
After the first time Gaster heard the song, he caught it more and more. There was something about its repetition that seemed to keep Grillby calm in moments of stress. He would catch it on the edge of Grillby’s breath when he was reloading a spent weapon, not an outright hum, but more in the rhythm with which he expelled his smoke-filled breathing. He timed his footsteps to it as he ran, crooned it low when Gaster was panicking and Grillby was too rushed or impatient to come up with real words to calm him down. His fingers tapped it when he was counting.
The first time he heard the lyrics was when they were sneaking their way through an abandoned train station, Grillby taking them down the tracks a ways to pick up a new car he’d arranged for them. The place had seemed lonesome and decrepit, and Gaster stepped close to his bodyguard in the gloom of it. Every joint and seam of the place creaked and groaned as if a stiff wind might blow it over. Water dripped from various leaks in the roof, and twice Gaster thought he saw something go skittering away in the dark. If he had skin, it’d be crawling.
Grillby was humming the song again, here, in this gloom. Low, incredibly low, barely a breath of noise so he could hear if something came up behind them. But he timed the footsteps of his strides to it, and Gaster found his own steps matching. It gave his mind something to focus on, detracted some from his anxiety.
“That’s a waltz you know,” Gaster had said after a while, his nervousness getting the better of him and forcing him to speak, “It’s got the uh… one-two-three-time signature.”
“You can tell that?”
The interruption in the music was abrupt and somewhat unwelcome. Gaster had become so accustomed to it, he’d nearly forgotten it was Grillby’s voice and not just some natural ambiance.
“Y-yeah. It’s, if you count it, you know?” Gaster hummed a few of the now familiar measures, accenting the beats that someone might count if they were playing the instrumentation. Then suddenly Gaster found himself blurting out the question, “Do you know how to waltz Grillby?”
Oh… well… how silly of him. Immediately the skeleton found himself feeling sheepish and embarrassed. But of course, it was none of his business -
“Not really,” Grillby answered smoothly, shrugging, “I took a class for it once when I was a kid but… you know, nothing since.”
“R… really?” and then following the same impulsive little voice that was knocking against the inside of his ribs, Gaster asked, “Would you like to learn how?”
Grillby stopped walking abruptly, the jarring scrape of his boots against the grit of the crumbling floor scraping away any remnant of the song he had been humming. First the tune, then the rhythm, all sent to a jarring stop by Gaster’s intervention. The two blinked at each other, Grillby flickering through a few off-colors Gaster wasn’t used to seeing. There were blues, some flashes of maybe purple. But Grillby’s body language was stoic as ever, and Gaster had the distinct feeling like he was looking at some ancient painting trying to interpret the artist’s meaning - and much like looking at artwork, he found the subject beautiful, but altogether unreadable. Standing here wrapped up in Grillby’s stare, Gaster found himself suddenly incredibly aware of how his lanky body shambled itself together. His bones felt uncomfortable under his clothes, his soul felt tense and unnatural in his ribs, he worried if his posture was wrong, or if his expression looked too desperate or stupid.
Just as he thought to maybe stammer something, an apology, or, or something, Grillby was breaking eye contact and sweeping his sharp gaze around them. He walked a few steps one direction, peering off into the darkened corridors that spidered outwards from the main station room. Then he swept his gaze up to the windows near the ceiling, searching for any sign of movement or disturbance.
And then, unbelievably, with an almost laughable casualness, Grillby turned back to face Gaster and said, “Yeah. Actually, that would be nice.”
It took Gaster a long second to realize Grillby had said yes, another second to realize he’d meant Gaster to teach him right here, right now. And then with an awkward stammer and a shuffle of uncoordinated movement Gaster stepped them over to a clear space in the station and explained somewhat falteringly how Grillby was meant to stand. They were suddenly incredibly close, feeling closer than normal simply because they were face to face. Gaster’s hands had found their natural places on Grillby’s side, and with their fingers interlacing. But though Gaster was sure he’d waltzed dozens of times in his life, never had the touch of it felt so warm and nerve-wracking. His soul was in knots, and he tried his damnedest not to stammer every other word out past his awkward teeth. But if Grillby noticed how flustered he was, he gave him the mercy of ignoring it - or perhaps that delicate shiver in his grip, the spinning blue hues in his flame, were all his own quieter nervousness.
Gaster stepped them in a circle, one-two-three, one-two-three, he counted. And Grillby, the natural that he was, leaned gracefully into the movements as if he’d done them all his life. Maybe it was his carefully maintained athleticism that gave him a clear vision of where and how his body was supposed to move - even if the moves were foreign - or maybe he remembered more of that class from his childhood than he let on. Maybe he knew how to waltz all along and he was just humoring Gaster for… for gods knew what reason?
Maybe he only seemed so confident because he was quiet, and in reality, he didn’t trust himself to speak.
Gaster filled the silence for the both of them coaching, somewhat uselessly, the one or two steps that Grillby took oddly. He hummed a couple measures of Grillby’s song, stepping their feet with them.
“Hmmm–mm-hmm…. One–two-three… can you tell it’s a waltz now?”
Grillby nodded. Flickered like he was about to speak but glanced down at their feet instead. And then, suddenly, that augmented sort of lullaby wafted with the smoke of his breath as Grillby started singing.
“Dancing bears, painted wings,
Things I almost remember,
Then a song, someone sings
Once upon a December -”
His eyes were half lidded with concentration, his gaze ever sweeping between his hands and his feet, Grillby was too distracted to see the absolute wonder that washed itself across Gaster’s face. He was speechless, he was nearly breathless. It seemed to Gaster it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard or felt. Singing so close to him, the words might as well have been whispered from Grillby’s soul straight into his, and in the silence Grillby’s voice rang and echoed, curling around them both like its own haze of magic, their feet a steady metronome against the cracked tiled floor. Grillby was through the song before Gaster was coherent enough to even catch most of the words. He was too focused on Grillby’s face, the movements of his chest, the seeping warmth of his grasp. And dazed and spellbound, he didn’t realize they’d stopped dancing for a few embarrassingly long seconds.
And then he was breaking their grasp too quickly and turning away from Grillby in a furious attempt to hide his blush. But even after they’d stepped away from each other, the warmth of Grillby’s hand on his shoulder, and of their fingers interlaced left a tingling warmth like electric on the surface of his bones.
The next time Gaster heard the song, was at a time when he thought he’d never hear it again.
Alone in a dark cell, aching from broken and bruised bones, his every breath a groan of pain. The only reason he didn’t cry was because hurt his injured ribs too much. He’d been captured, finally, by the monsters pursuing them. Ripped away from Grillby in a staggering ambush, the last he’d seen his bodyguard, his companion, Grillby had been cornered by three monsters, fighting so desperately he was nearly biting and clawing to get past them. He’d been low on ammunition, lost most of his knives, down to just his magic and his wits.
And then Gaster had been knocked unconscious, only to come back to life hours later with a splitting headache and the dark assuredness that Grillby must have died. He never would have let them take him alive, after all.
He’d had no time to mourn before they were shoving blueprints in his face, grilling him for answers on his experimental works. Demanding he build them something, maintain it, give them whatever cruelty they were asking for. He’d refused bravely, only to learn with breathtaking quickness that pain makes a coward of nearly every creature on the face of the earth. He didn’t know how Grillby did it. How he endured wounds and still managed to carry them out of every terrible situation they’d ever been in, how he could be choked and shot and stabbed within an inch of his life only to crawl back to his feet and keep going. Gaster had turned into a cracked, begging, wailing coward the minute he’d gotten a solid enough kick to the ribs. He’d held out, yes, he’d held out. But only because he couldn’t find the breath to stammer coherent words, to offer his submission. If they came back… when they came back… he didn’t know what he’d do.
He mulled over that in aching misery on the floor of his cell, listening to the shuffling as various monsters shifted their guard over him. He’d lost all sense of time, all sense of comfort and warmth. As far as he knew, he’d lost everything. He didn’t know what to do anymore. He could try escaping but he didn’t know where to start, or even if it was worth it, and for the moment at least he ached too much to try.
Gaster didn’t know when he’d fallen asleep, but he knew why he woke up.
He woke up because of the many monsters that had been coming in and out of the room to keep guard over him. Suddenly half of them made a scrambling dash down the hall. Their voices shouted something rushed, that he was too tired to parse. The air was thick with a smothering silence as it seemed the captors that remained in the room with him held their breath. Once or twice there was the shuffle of a footstep, a nervous cough, a mutter from one monster to the next of uncertainty.
And then Gaster heard it, first as a wilting, augmented tune so strung out by the distance he could hardly tell it was music. Then slowly louder, close enough that he could make out the tune even if he couldn’t hear the words yet, and with it a growing, flickering light down the hall. Some of the monsters in the room with him swore, the air prickled with magic. Gaster heard the muted click as someone pull the hammer back on a pistol.
“Someone holds me safe and warm,
Horses prance through a silver storm
Figures dancing gracefully across my memory…”
Grillby was there, standing right there at the entrance to the room, looking nearly as haunting as the song he sang. In fact, if Gaster weren’t so fond of the song as something to dance to, so fond of the elemental himself, he was sure he’d be terrified seeing Grillby standing there like some wrath-filled angel in the doorway. His face was expressionless, the glare on his glasses hiding whatever direction his eyes could be looking. The color of his flame was bright yellow, a sustained and bleaching color, and it made the black of his clothing like pitch, like nightfall in comparison, and the dust that spattered him gore-covered stars.
For a moment it seemed he carried no weapon besides the menace of his presence. And then his hand moved, and then the rest of him like a flood. There was the glint of a thrown knife and one monster was dust. The blinding flash of fire and sparks, the thunder of screams and breaking bodies. And lilting and dancing through it all, waltzing in the madness, that song.
“Far away, long ago
Glowing dim as an ember
Things my heart used to know
Things it yearns to remember-”
Callously, with about as much care as someone brushing trash out of their way, Grillby kicked some dust aside and picked up the keys to Gaster’s cell. His voice had settled into a low hum again, the color of his flame the more natural, and warmer. He pulled open the door and lifted Gaster first to his feet, and then deciding Gaster was too wounded to walk on his own, picked the skeleton up entirely. Gaster wrapped his long arms around Grillby’s neck, the warmth of the flame easing the burden of his aches and pains. With a voice that shook more than he’d wished it to, Gaster whispered, “I knew you’d come for me if you could.”
Grillby shushed him quietly and, as though Gaster’s weight weren’t even there, walked smoothly out of the little cell. The hallways they passed through were dark, deserted. There was everywhere the remnants of Grillby’s violence. Things worth burning still smoldered and smoked, dust choked the hallways or splattered itself in washes against the walls. The crunch of it beneath the rhythm of Grillby’s footsteps set Gaster’s teeth on edge. Here and there were spatters of leaked magic, bullet holes scored walls. Gaster caught a bleary glance of a surviving monster that had hidden himself in a dark corner, nursing a shot to the shoulder. When he saw Grillby, he froze with wide-eyed terror. Gaster saw even the heave of his chest stopped, holding his breath to not garner attention. Grillby noticed him too - of course he did. His grip tightened imperceptibly around Gaster’s frame as he walked.
As he did so, Gaster felt something, the seep of something uncomfortably hot against his tattered coat. And then belatedly he noticed the muted taps as something dissonantly off-beat from the song Grillby hummed dripped onto the floor. Grillby was bleeding. Magic, yellow-white like the hottest parts of his flame dripped in intermittent spatters onto the floor, where it fizzled and sparked for a moment before burning itself out.
“Grillby -?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he hummed, eyes still concealed beneath the glare of his glasses, and though the mask of his face still showed nothing, his voice was gentle and warm, “It’s going to be alright, Doctor.”
His voice lilted back into that drifting hum, and this close Gaster could feel the vibration of it as it wove its way through Grillby’s chest.
“And a song someone sings
Once upon a December…”