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The cold, clean light of the cavern crystals shines unfettered through his window, bathing his room in an impartial, clinical, fluorescent blue as he groggily opens his eyes. He observes the lazy spin of his ceiling fan and curses the burning feeling behind his sockets. He feels as though he hasn’t slept at all, the heavy, leaden feeling in his limbs a reminder of his ever-present exhaustion.
His mind, as always, searches for a possible answer (a flutter of restless curiosity in the back of his mind like the ambient hum of his magic: why? how?).
There were the plausible hypotheses: he had some unremembered nightmare, his was simply stressed (hah, that was more of a given nowadays), he hadn’t eaten anything remotely nutritious in the last week—
—and the not-so-plausible-but-still-entertaining-enough what-ifs: he had done something unforgivable in another life, the entire universe was somehow devised just to make him personally suffer, or– oh! heh, a sinful, vindictive anomaly with time-bending fuck-you powers had a vendetta against handsome and extremely funny skeleton monsters.
He considers, for the hundredth time, the merits of giving up on the day ahead; rolling himself into a well-tucked blanket lump and falling into blessed unconsciousness for the foreseeable future. No having to go through the motions to seem like a functioning, responsible member of society, no crushing feeling that his every action is somehow meaningless, no late nights spent pouring over readouts trying to find a pattern (if he could just understand, surely there was something he missed, something the anomaly was searching for or desperately needed—) and his phalanges were ripping holes in his sheets and his thoughts were so l o u d and he needs a break, just a few hours, please—
…The sound of Papyrus rummaging through the kitchen downstairs stalls his thoughts.
…If...
If he doesn’t get up today…Papyrus would be left alone again suffer the injustice of a peaceful day free of his specially curated annoying sibling™ routine.
…that bag of fancy dog food he’d been meaning to take to the LAB would spend yet another day leaning against his dresser.
… the woman in the Ruins would have to go without that stellar joke he thought of last night—
…
well, then.
he… he couldn’t let that happen.
“hmf–” he heaves himself up on one elbow and starts to shift his feet out of bed and—eugh, his socks look nasty, what the fuck. How long has it been since he’d changed them??
He stares at them for a few seconds, contemplating the effort it would take to remove them and search for a clean pair. self-care and all that jazz. With a huff he flops backwards and—after a minute or so of increasingly manic internal pep-talks—decides that he can allow himself a compromise.
He wiggles around on his mattress, attempting to remove his socks without lifting his head out of the blessed embrace of his pillow. With his socks (eventually) removed, he proceeds to toss them in a direction that feels the least offensive. They sail through the air, landing with a muffled thwap against the wall before slipping down into a sad, jumbled pile against the baseboard. good enough.
He blindly shoves his now-bare feet into his house-slippers (not to be confused with his “outside-slippers”—Papyrus was very particular about the dirt his fuzzy slippers could pick up and subsequently track all over their house) and, after two tries, finally stumbles to his feet, blinking blearily as he shuffles towards his bedroom door.
A crumpled AstroFood wrapper still rests in the middle of the floor, in the same place he’s left it every day for the past week and a half. He observes it for a moment with a sort of detached fascination, marveling at his own sloth before his attention shifts and the mess disappears once again into the static blur of his subconscious.
As his fingers curl around the knob, he sways, lowering his skull to rest against the doorframe as a wave of dizziness washes over him. Stars, he was so tired–
“BROTHER! I … BEGRUDGINGLY … MADE YOUR FAVORITE FOR BREAKFAST! YOU’D BETTER COME DOWN AND APPRECIATE IT BEFORE IT GETS COLD AND I FEED IT TO YOUR PET ROCK OUT OF PURE SPITE!”
…heh.
Maybe not for himself, but…
For his friends, his family…
Sans takes a deep, fortifying breath, plasters a mischievous grin on his face, and steps through the door.