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Gaster never intended on becoming a father. And he had very little idea of what he should be doing! Books did not cover nearly enough to help him through every scenario, and even less with Sans. Case in point:
“…What on earth are you doing, Sans?” Gaster signed from the entryway to the kitchen.
Sans stared at Gaster as if he were the most unintelligent creature to ever live, a toddler perched in a high chair to his left, and papers spread out on the dining room table in front of him.
“taxes. duh.”
Gaster blinked. And then blinked again, as if that would help make sense of the scene in front of him. But of course it did not change a thing, and especially not when Sans was the one he was staring at.
“You… don’t have to do that.”
Sans snorted. “uh, kinda do actually? dunno if anyone's told you, but it’s illegal not to. i made money this year, so i gotta report it.”
This was absolutely not the point Gaster should focus on, but—
“You see nothing wrong with running an illegal casino, but tax evasion is where you draw the line???”
Sans rolled his eyelights at Gaster, and… yes. Okay, Gaster truly didn’t mind Sans’s particular charm, but he very much understood why Sans had been marked down as showing no respect for authority. (Originally the papers Gaster received said “little respect,” but “little” had been crossed out in pen and the word “NO” written in all caps and underlined several times.)
“bud, i dare you to get on the MRS’s bad side. the guard wasn’t gonna catch me, but the MRS?” Sans shivered and made a face. “i’m not an idiot.”
(But then again, Sans clearly respected at least one authority. Gaster was simply not considered “authority.” The Monster Revenue Service, on the other hand…)
Right. Gaster needed a cup of tea to deal with this.
“I see,” he signed. “…Would you like a cup of tea? I’m going to get myself some.”
Gaster eyed the cut up fruit Papyrus was pushing around on his highchair, and then looked at the fact that Sans very distinctly did not have any snacks around him. Silently, he grabbed a few bags of fruit chips and moved them down to the table. Dinner had come and gone, but Sans could stand to eat more often.
“sure,” Sans said. And then, “thanks.”
Progress!!! Gaster was going to cry.
“Of course,” he signed.
When the pot of earl grey brewed, and Gaster had grabbed cups for both him and Sans, as well as a cup of milk for Papyrus, he sat down. He knew better than to offer to do the task for Sans—that would only result in Sans completely shutting down and refusing any help at all.
“May I help?” Gaster asked.
Sans gave Gaster a long, considering look, but he finally relented. “sure. you’ve gotta be good at math with all your science stuff, so you can count these.”
He shoved a shoe box to Gaster full of receipts.
“the business isn’t really real, so i just gotta do my own taxes. personal income.” Sans looked at Gaster out of the corner of his sockets, and Gaster just knew that wasn’t entirely correct.
But Gaster also wasn’t sure about all the legality of this in the first place.
“Do children even need to pay taxes?” he asked. “Or would it just be lumped in with my own?”
He really should get his accountant on the line.
Sans sighed, but when he spoke it was the voice he put on when he was explaining something. “course i gotta pay. i’m calling it tips, so the threshold's real low. gotta file as long as it’s above a grand. don’t matter if i’m a kid or not.”
Really, for all Sans’s sass, he was quite gentle when teaching, so long as you did not get defensive. Gaster would, of course, fact check this information, because Sans, while incredibly well read and intelligent, often had glaring blind spots from the way he was raised (or more accurately not raised). But for now Gaster saw no harm in going along with it. …And truly, this sounded like something Sans was probably right about. He was a slippery little thing, and would not being giving up his money if he saw any loophole out of it.
“I see,” Gaster said. Sans gave him a sidelong look as he tried to parse out the words.
It was heartwarming, how this prickly little thing cared so much—to the point where he was the first to attempt to learn wingdings, in a long, long time. Gaster would never understand how anyone thought this child was malicious, scar on his face notwithstanding. Sans was just a very particular little monster. But underneath that he was kind.
Gaster couldn’t wait to see the day when Sans stopped hiding that part of him under defensiveness.
“What am I counting these for?”
Sans paused, rolled the words over in his head, and slowly repeated the question back. “…what am i counting these for?”
Gaster beamed and nodded, unable to stop his hand from tapping on the table in excitement. He tapped harder when he was rewarded with a shy little smile.
“tryna figure out if it’s better to go with the standard deduction or not. didn’t make very much—probably won’t actually have to pay anything, even if i gotta report—but i wanna make sure i’m covering all my bases. was gonna just go standard ‘til you volunteered t’ help.”
Gaster grinned widely down at Sans. “I have absolutely no idea what you just said! Science is my forte. Taxes, alas, are not!”
Sans snorted, but the grin on his face was amused. “hope you have someone else do ‘em for you at that rate. i don’t volunteer, by the way.”
“Of course! My accountant is very wonderful monster. She says every year that she isn’t sure if she’ll agree to do my taxes next time. She’s been saying that for seventy years.”
Sans nodded. “any sane monster woulda dropped you as a client after the first year. she musta lost her marbles.”
Gaster cackled, and when Sans shoved the receipts back into his chest more insistently, he obliged and got to work.
###
By the time Gaster finished counting the receipts, Papyrus had gotten fussy. Apparently, toddlers could only be amused by taxes for quite so long before they started to need other enrichment.
And—Gaster didn’t really want to leave Sans to do taxes on his own, but… he was, admittedly, quite terrible at this. But! If Gaster phrased this right, hopefully Sans would not take his next words as a show of disbelief in his competence, and instead would take it as the offer of help it was meant as.
Brushing off his coat, and wincing when he tasted the ink on his teeth—he’d chewed a hole through yet another pen while tallying things—Gaster set his paper down.
“This really is quite a lot,” he signed. “Would you like me to have my accountant look this all over instead?”
Sans… shifted. The expression on his face was one Gaster could not quite place, but the fact that he was showing vulnerability of any kind was immense progress.
“…uh. she gonna have a problem with how i got the money?”
Gaster raised his browbones. “Well, considering you are no longer actively running your illicit gambling den, I don’t see why she would. I trust her.”
Sans stared down at his papers for a long moment before he sighed. Success! No one liked doing taxes! Truly, Gaster was a genius, and not for the CORE.
“…yeah. you’re paying her, though, pal.”
“Not an issue at all!”
Gaster beamed, and Papyrus hit his hands on the highchair. “Bowwed! Pay time!”
Sans looked at Papyrus, his hands twitching. Before he could stand up, Gaster slid his pen away, far from a grabby toddler’s reach, and asked Sans, “Do you mind if I play with him for a bit? I think I’m getting better at settling him down!”
Sans paused, rolling his pencil in his hand. And then he nodded. “i’ll put this stuff away for now. i’ll join you in a little.”
Success!
As time went on, Sans had been getting increasingly comfortably letting Gaster take care of Papyrus. It probably helped that Gaster knew he was rather incompetent, and listened to all of Sans’s advice carefully. And most importantly, it helped that Gaster was not trying to take Papyrus away from Sans.
Really, the end goal was for Sans to not be parenting Papyrus, and instead able to simply be his brother—but Gaster was no idiot, despite what Sans may think. And he’d seen quite well how things played out when monsters tried to tell Sans he was no longer allowed to raise the child he’d been responsible for since their birth.
Really, Sans’s behavior was entirely understandable when you thought about the fact that the child he called his own was taken from him several times over.
Gaster smiled down at Papyrus, standing up and making his way to the high chair. “Yes, yes Papyrus. I imagine you are quite bored sitting here while we do taxes. Would you like to play?”
“Pay time! Pay time!”
Papyrus was already reaching for Gaster, a grin spread across his face. It was a good thing he wasn’t overly agitated, because if he was, Sans would not even allow Gaster to attempt to calm him.
One day, though. Hopefully soon.
Gaster pulled Papyrus into his arms, the gesture much more natural than it was the first few times. And it was… nice.
Gaster may not have intended on becoming a father, nor did he think the process would be quite so slow once he decided. But he would admit that he was growing incredibly fond of the idea.
“Yes, Papyrus! Play time. I believe it is about due for us to exercise your hand-eye coordination and color theory with an invigorating block puzzle.”
Sans snorted, but he didn’t say anything. Gaster wasn’t sure how much of the wingdings he caught, but clearly enough to find something humorous about his words. Sans often did that when Gaster talked to Papyrus, but! He hadn't corrected Gaster yet, and the child was protective enough that he would certainly tell Gaster if he was making some overly large blunder.
Gaster set Papyrus on the ground, ignoring the pain in his back as he stayed hunched over to allow Papyrus to hold his hand and pull him towards the living room. Could he create hand bullets? Yes, though they would get covered in slobber. Would he? Not at all. It was charming to hold that tiny, grabby little hand.
Gaster never quite realized how much he wanted this before Sans and Papyrus came into his life. He was much too old to have children their age, and yet… they made him feel young. Like perhaps, it wasn’t too late to have a life he'd never seen as a possibility before.
One day. One day, Sans would trust him enough to allow it. Gaster had to believe that. If a monster didn’t have Hope, what did he have left?
###
Gaster sat on the living room floor across from Papyrus as the toddler chewed on his shapes and shoved them into the holes in his puzzle. His little brow bones were furrowed as he looked at the rectangular hole on the puzzle, and then the circle block he held.
“Ciwcle!”
“Yes, Papyrus! That is a circle. And it goes in…?”
Papyrus's little sockets brightened as he tumbled over towards Gaster. “Ciwcle!”
And then—
Papyrus grabbed Gaster’s hand, and dropped the block right through the center of the hole in his palm.
Gaster barked out a laugh, loud and long and free in a way he’d very rarely done before the children had come into his life, but now happened startlingly frequently.
“Yes, Papyrus! Very creative thinking of you! That is indeed a circle. Good job!”
Papyrus's giggles joined Gaster's own laughter, and instead of making his way back to his puzzle, he climbed into Gaster’s lap in order to steal his hand to examine. There may have been a bit of slobber involved. Papyrus babbled to Gaster, and Gaster did his best to parse out the words and respond. He still didn't truly know how to interact with a toddler, but he’d found that so long as he was enthusiastic about what Papyrus was doing, Papyrus was happy.
At some point, Sans had put away his taxes and come out to the living room, curling up on the couch with one of his textbooks. He watched Gaster and Papyrus with a steady gaze, but it wasn't as critical and angry as it used to be. Instead it was something softer, his eyelights only focused on Papyrus's laughing face.
Papyrus tugged on Gaster's sleeve and pointed at Sans’s book.
“Daw read?”
Daw—what Papyrus called Gaster, a mangled version of Sans’s “doc,”—and then the sign for read. It did odd things to Gaster’s SOUL when Papyrus signed, or understood his Wingdings as easily as his Aster. One of this child’s first languages was what Gaster used.
Gaster couldn't quite put it into words, the things he felt when he saw proof of his influence in Papyrus's life.
“You want me to read to you?”
“No!!!” Papyrus cheered, in a very clear yes.
Gaster could not understand the logic, considering Papyrus knew the word “yes,” but the young one did not like saying anything other than the negative. He got quite cross if you misinterpreted it, as well.
“Very well. I shall read. I have—”
Gaster hummed and paged through his inventory. He only had what he was reading, earlier but it should do, shouldn’t it?
“An introduction to General Relativity: Spacetime and Geometry. A bit advanced for your age, I suppose, but the graphs are colorful.”
Papyrus patted the book insistently, and Gaster chuckled as he settled back. Papyrus still had his hand captured, so Gaster made a few bullets to hold the book up and page through it as he began to read aloud.
Unsurprisingly, Papyrus was more entranced by the graphs than the content.
Surprisingly, Sans was… also intrigued, going by the way he slowly inched off the couch, closer and closer. He’d stopped reading his own book a while back.
“read that part again,” Sans demanded, and Gaster paused.
He hadn’t expected Sans to admit that he was listening.
“Of course,” Gaster said, and he read it again, slower.
Sans’s brows furrowed, and he shook his head. “no, that doesn’t make any sense. how are those related?”
Gaster held the book aloft, using a few spare bullets to sign.
“There are graphs, if you wish to look.”
And being able to see the words in a Times New Roman font on the page instead of trying to decipher Gaster’s cipher would certainly help as well.
With the invitation, Sans huffed and made his way over, sitting as close to the book as he could without actually touching Gaster. Gaster began reading from the top of the page again, and the pinch in Sans’s brow bones smoothed out.
On and on Gaster read, until Papyrus released his hands and fell asleep. It was the longest Gaster had spoken in quite some time.
Sans moved closer, his eyelights trained on the book, and his side pressed against Gaster's.
Gaster did not stop reading. Not until the slight weight against his side increased, and even then he finished the page he was on.
When he looked down, he couldn't describe the emotion that grabbed his SOUL and squeezed. It was rather hard to see the scene in front of him with the blur of tears that filled his sockets.
Sans had fallen asleep, his sockets closed as he leaned fully against Gaster's chest. Like this, he looked so much closer to his age. Not even out of stripes yet, barely into the double digits.
Gaster prayed that one day, Sans would allow Gaster to be a father in more than just legality to him as well as Papyrus.
And right now?
One day felt closer than ever.