Archive of Our Own

— December 18th, 2019

The frigid December air bites his cheeks as Grillby Kohler trudges down the unplowed sidewalk, a little before half-past noon that day, the cold wind blowing through the worn poly-wool blend of his old peacoat.

Sunlight is starting to break through the overcast, but at a glance, he can tell it isn’t going to last. A billow of dark gray storm clouds are rolling in over the waterfront with the promise of an early blizzard, and not for the first time since he stepped out of his apartment that day, Grillby finds himself wishing he’d worn a thicker coat.

He owns a nice one, too. A navy-coloured puffer with a thick golden trim around the neck (and pockets that actually keep his fingers from freezing off). But an unexpected phone call, an ill-thought lie, and less than a minute on autopilot was all it took for him to forget that it was sub-zero degrees outside.

Maybe, he thinks, this is what karma feels like. God, who lies to their grandmother? 

Grillby does, apparently. And it wasn’t even a very good lie, either, it was a stupid one to tell and will be a humiliating one to get caught in when he shows up to Christmas alone, again, and his father is going to make that face at him, the one that makes Grillby wish he could spontaneously burst into flames and burn to ash and carry away on the wind to where he won’t have to deal with how disappointed everyone always seems to be with him.

Who cares if Grillby is still single?

If he’s the wrong side of thirty and still going home to an empty apartment at the end of the night?

Keys clatter against the sidewalk between his feet, disappearing into the snow. Grillby stares after them with muted disdain, his eyebrows furrowed and his hand, still outstretched towards the lock on the bar’s side door, held half-way between the motion of pressing them into the keyway and dropping them. A fat snowflake lands on the inside of his wrist and begins to melt. 

He sighs.

One of those days, then.

Grillby spends the better part of the next hour opening the bar. He does it with the radio turned up just a little louder than usual, just enough to keep his own thoughts from filling any extra space. It’s too late in the season to hope for anything besides Christmas music to play on their local station, but that’s fine. Mariah Carey is—fine.

He’s wiping down the booths with a damp cleaning rag and a multi-purpose disinfectant when he hears the sound of the front doors being unlocked. Grillby checks his watch, rolls his eyes, and continues cleaning.

A flurry of snow and cold air blows in. The door-hinges groan. There’s a rustle of fabric against fabric as the person in the doorway, who Grillby already knows is his prep-cook without having to turn around and check, shuffles out of their coat, then kicks the snow off the toes of their boots and enters the bar with small, squeaky steps.

“You’re late,” Grillby says. The small, squeaky steps stop. “Again.”

He turns around, throwing the cleaning rag to hang over his shoulder like he often does with the dish towel at the bar, and leans back to rest his weight against the booth’s table. His prep-cook is a short, too-skinny and slightly unkempt man in his mid-twenties with an unruly mop of blue hair and eyes that smile more than his mouth does. He’s also Grillby’s cousin, and twenty minutes late.

“Sorry, G,” Wilbur signs, and at least has the decency to look properly shamefaced. “I didn’t mean it this time, honest. It’s the snow, the buses were all running behind. I’ll leave early tomorrow, promise… double promise.”

“... ugh, goddammit.” Grillby pushes his glasses up to rub the inner corners of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “You’re such a pain in the ass sometimes, Will.”

“Sure, but you love me. Still your fave cousin, yeah?”

“Yeah, whatever, just go do your job. Doors open in fifteen minutes,” he says. Although, it’s true. Wilbur is his favourite cousin, in fact, Grillby is pretty sure Wilbur is everyone’s favourite cousin. He’s just… one of those people. Easy to like, hard to reprimand. Has whatever-it-is that Grillby’s family seems to think he’s missing. The small, squeaky steps start up again as Wilbur continues his way to the kitchen. 

Grillby pulls the cleaning rag off his shoulder with a little more force than is strictly necessary and balls it up in his hands. He turns around, stops, then turns around again. “Hey, are you coming to Christmas this year, Willy?”

Wilbur pauses beside the bar counter. “Nah, Mum and I are gonna be spending it with Dad’s side of the family this year,” he signs. “Why, you gonna miss me?”

Grillby wrings the cleaning rag in his hands. He doesn’t mean to feel relieved, but he does. 

“Yeah,” he replies. “Wanna do gifts on Friday?”

“Sounds good!” Wilbur smiles, tilts his head in a way that makes it easy for Grillby to imagine the sound of his laughter, although no sound actually comes from him, and shoulders through the double Employee's Only door into the kitchen. 

Grillby releases the cleaning rag from his death-grip and shuffles around to sit inside the booth he had just been wiping down, his posture deflating like– like– like a balloon, or something. The kind of balloon that’s lived for too long in a hospital room or under a child’s bed after a birthday party. Half-formed and deflated with sun-bleached rubber and wrinkles and fingerprints. The radio is still on, a pop-remix of Carol of the Bells is pulsing through the speakers, but it doesn’t seem quite loud enough anymore.

He isn’t leaving for four days, but somehow, that’s worse. It’s worse that Grillby has to spend a little less than a week dwelling on… this (a stupid mistake, a stupid lie) and then three more days surrounded by his disappointed family while they all pretend not to pity him for having to lie in the first place.

Grillby groans as he rubs his hands over his face, suddenly exhausted. 

It’s going to be a long night.

Business throughout the day is surprisingly steady for a Wednesday. It’s not unusual for Grillby to spend the first couple hours of his shift polishing glasses and trying to look busy, but there’s a causal flow of people going in and out of the bar tonight, ordering drinks with their meals, stopping to make inconsequential conversation over a beer or two at the counter with him, nursing a whiskey to warm their stomachs before heading back into the snow, and it’s nice. Nice, because Grillby likes his work, and nice because he’s thankful for the distraction. 

The flow starts to ebb away a little after eleven o’clock, with only a small handful of Grillby’s regular barflies continuing to hang around into the night.

A group of four older gentlemen, and one of their wives, sit together around one of the corner tables, talking over glasses of scotch and a game of poker, smiling and animated. Opposite them, swallowed in a veil of jaundice beneath the amber sconce lights, a man Grillby thinks is too young to be a drunk is slumped over, alone and asleep, in his booth with a half-empty bottle of beer beside him. There’s a man in leather who looks older than Grillby and the sleeping dunk and the poker players combined sipping rum and coke beside the speaker system, tapping his fingers along to the rhythm of the late-night radio. The seat at the end of the counter is empty.

Grillby checks his watch. It’s eleven-fifteen.

Someone taps him on the shoulders.

“Kitchen’s clean, I’m heading home,” Wilbur signs. His hair is sweaty and disheveled from a long evening over a hot stove and the smell of oil and grease and fire clings to him like a second skin. There’s a tired smile on his slender, freckled face, and his winter coat is already on and zipped up to his throat.

“Get home safe,” Grillby says, nodding. “Goodnight, Will.”

“Night, G.”

Grillby checks his watch again. Eleven-eighteen.

The bitter cold sweeps in around the soft silhouette of a body, slinking in from the dark through a gap in the front doors just barely wide enough to fit between. Snow and ice covers the outside of his sueded leather jacket and hangs heavily in the fringe of his hair, on his eyelashes, melting into sopping wet slush as he stands, brushing himself off, by the doorway.

Sans looks tired and sore tonight. He’s moving a little slower than usual, has smears of purple beneath his eyes that swallow up the life on his face and makes him look uncharacteristically grim, despite the relaxed upturn of his lips. 

The table of poker players call out boisterous greetings when they notice him and wave him over to their table for a bout of conversation. They invite him to join their game, to sit and have a drink with them, and Grillby can’t hear Sans’ reply from across the bar, but he sees his mouth move over a few short words, and then the whole table starts to grouse him playfully as he continues past them.

Sans pulls the zipper on his coat and shucks it off as he approaches the counter.

“Heya, G.” He smiles at him, loose and easy. The sleepless bruises under his eyes look less abrasive this way, less desolate, as the hard lines of his face soften into curves and glow with hues of copper beneath the warm light of the wall sconces.

Grillby is already salting the rim of a tall, clean cocktail glass when Sans slides into his usual seat, tosses his coat around the back, and leans forward to rest his chin on his palm.

“Can I get—”

“—a muddy caesar with a half-shot of vodka, extra tabasco, no horseradish, and a wedge of lime,” says Grillby, glancing up at him over the top of his glasses. Their eyes meet for less than a moment before he looks down again. “Yes, I know.”

Sans barks with warm, breezy laughter. “Took the words right outta my mouth,” he hums. 

His posture slips a little lower as he waits, lower and lower, until he’s resting with his head down and watching Grillby prepare his drink over crossed arms and bunches of dark blue fabric and spring-shaped curls of jet black hair. Grillby tries (and fails) not to feel picked apart by that lazy, unassuming stare as his hands drift through familiar motions beneath the bar counter, pulling the Worcestershire sauce from where it sits between a bottle of mustard and a jar of bright maraschino cherries without looking at it.

“You look tired,” Sans says, the rumbling baritone of his voice muffled, almost indiscernibly, between the thickness of his sleeve and the smooth timbre of his accent. Grillby looks at him again and something twists, like a knife or a knot or maybe a spinning top made of bee stingers, in his chest.

“Pot, meet kettle,” he replies, trying to sound casual. Trying to sound like his brain doesn’t feel like a pinball machine, or like the way Sans’ eyes are suddenly dark and narrow and flickering haphazardly across his face doesn’t make him feel like a rat in a maze. 

The ice clinks quietly in its glass as Grillby sets it down and slides it a little ways towards him. 

Sans sits up, but doesn’t reach for it.

“What’s wrong?” he asks finally. Grillby slumps the weight of all two-hundred-and-six of his bones against the counter.

“How do you do that?”

“It’s my big brother powers, y’ wouldn’t get it.” Sans tilts his head a little. “C’mon, pal. What’s eatin’ ya?”

And Grillby wants to tell him, then. While the bar is just empty enough and the music is just loud enough to hide it. In the middle of the night. Leaning towards each other beneath a wash of dim amber. There’s not a lot Grillby hasn’t told Sans, this way. He’s familiar, a constant. But the words feel stuck in his chest tonight, all tangled up and nonsensical and stupid. 

“It’s nothing,” he says.

“Bullshit it’s nothin’, you look like you’ve seen a fucking ghost.”

Condensation beads on the side of Sans’ drink and rolls, gleaming full of colours, down the foggy glass. It must be nice to be able to split into so many pieces like that, to refract and shatter into a hundred new parts of yourself and never have to worry about the old ones again. 

Grillby reaches silently under the counter for a coaster. The night drags on.

The table of poker players finish their game, pay their tab, and wish Grillby a merry Christmas. The man in leather reaches the bottom of his rum and coke. The sleeping drunk rouses, chugs a glass of water, then stumbles out into the frigid dark.

Sans picks at the celery salt on the rim of his glass, drink still untouched.

“Look, if you really don’t wanna say anything, that’s fine. You don’t have to,” he says, “but… c’mon, G. It’s me. What am I gonna do, laugh atcha?”

Grillby looks up from drying a whiskey tumbler. “You might.”

“Might not, too.”

He glances around at the empty bar, down at the watch on his wrist, back up at Sans, passing the whiskey tumbler back and forth between his hands, covering one side of it in fingerprints. The look on Sans’ face is difficult to read, and Grillby knows that’s on purpose.

It’s a quarter-after midnight, still fifteen minutes from when the bar would usually close for the night, but he sets the whiskey tumbler on the counter and tosses the dish towel over his shoulder and goes across the room to flip the lock on the doors anyway, because if he’s going to talk about this, the last thing he needs are bar-hoppers stumbling in last minute.

“Okay,” Grillby says, rubbing his hands together. It’s odd being on the other side of the counter, beside Sans instead of across from him. “So, I… may have done something, uhh… less-smart.”

“‘Kay?”

“And you can’t laugh.” He can already feel the heat crawling up the back of his neck, beginning to burn the tops of his ears. “I lied to my family and told them I’d be bringing somebody home with me for Christmas when I’m not and now—dammit, Sans, you’re such an ass.”

Sans’ laughter is loud and deep from his chest, it rolls through his shoulders, makes his eyes press into pretty half-moon shapes and his nose scrunch up into a tight furrow. His smile is wide, a little crooked, splitting his face from ear-to-ear.

Grillby slouches against the counter, glaring, flushed with blush all the way from his collar to his temples.

“No, no, no—” Sans flails one hand in the air, gasping for composure. “I’m sorry, I’m—hey, I’m sorry, quit pouting. It’s… hoooly shit, G. What in the everloving Hallmark were you thinking?”

“I don’t know! I- I wasn’t? Gran brought it up and I just couldn’t stop thinking about that- that- that look they always give me, like there’s something wrong with me or something! I was stupid—”

“Supremely stupid.”

“—and now I’m going to show up on Sunday alone and they’re all going to know I lied because… because I’m thirty-six and married to my job.”

His forehead thumps against the countertop. Fists against the sides of his head, Grillby tangles his fingers into his hair, dishevels it from its braid, twisting until his scalp feels numb and his brain feels quiet under his knuckles. A beat of silence passes through the bar. Sans finally takes a sip of his drink.

“You could bring me.”

Grillby lets his grip relax, moves his hands to fold limply over the back of his neck. He turns his face enough to peer sideways at Sans through a messy curtain of hair.

“Yeah,” he scoffs, smiling a little despite himself, “‘cause having you there to cue well-timed laughing tracks at my expense would just make it all better, eh?”

“No—well, yes.” Sans stares into his drink, swirling the last few unmelted ice cubes around inside slowly, clinking them against the edges of the glass. “But no, what I mean is… well, you didn’t tell them who you’d be bringing, right? Your fam would be none the wiser, nobody but me would ever have to know about your little To All The Boys stunt. Everyone’s happy.”

Grillby jerks upright hard enough to make his stool teeter back onto its hind legs.

“They’re expecting me to bring home a boyfriend, Sans.”

“Yeah?” 

Sans can’t be serious. He hasn’t been drinking, not really, the single sip he’d taken a moment ago had shaved barely a half an inch off his Caesar, so Grillby knows he’s not just being drunk and stupid (like he sometimes is), and his face is too sincere to be teasing, but… he can’t be serious, right?

“Jesus, don’t look at me like that, you’ll give a guy a complex. It’d only be for what, a few days? And it’s not like we’re strangers or something, G.”

“What about Papyrus?” Grillby asks. “You always spend the holidays together.”

Sans shifts in his seat. “Actually, Paps is… uh, goin’ home to New York for the holidays to spend ‘em with our old man, wants to introduce him to his girlfriend and ‘rebuild bridges’ or something, I dunno,” he says. “Point is, you’re not pulling me away from him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

It makes Grillby feel a little sick to think about Sans spending the holidays by himself for the first time in twenty-five years.

It makes him feel a different kind of sick to think about what bringing Sans home to his family (as his fake boyfriend) would imply. A myriad of soft touches and even softer looks and mistletoe and sweetheart, darling, my love spills, unbidden, into his thoughts, too fast for him to catch them, and his chest aches. Doing it wouldn’t be a problem. Faking it might just kill him.

“I don’t know, Sans. It seems like a lot to ask.”

“You’re not asking,” Sans says. “I’m offering.”

Grillby drums his fingers along his thighs pensively for a moment. He stands, hands hovering around himself, looking for something to do. “Let me think,” he says. He settles for pulling the dish towel off his shoulder and reaching for the whiskey tumbler again. “Finish your drink, I’m going to start closing up.”

The bar’s end of the night routine soothes him, the way all familiar things and habits seem to. Takes up enough space in his brain to force his thoughts to move a little slower, a little more clearly, hushes the anxious blaring in the back of his mind. Grillby covers Sans’ drink tonight, just to balance the register, sweeps through the seating area flipping chairs up onto tables, checks the bathrooms, stores his perishables, does a walk through the kitchen to make sure Wilbur didn’t forget anything. 

He wipes down tables, mops hardwood. Sans finishes his Caesar half-way through and Grillby swipes the empty glass from him as he passes. 

The last thing he does is shut off the overhead speakers. The resounding silence is deafening.

He returns barside to find Sans out of his seat with his coat on, unzipped, leaning against the counter with his hands in his pockets. He turns when he hears the creak of the Employee’s Only door and meets Grillby’s eyes over his shoulder with a placid smile.

“So?” he says.

Grillby folds his hands together and tucks them under his chin.

“It’ll only be for three days,” he replies. “We leave on Sunday.”

“Gotcha.”

“And you’re allowed to change your mind! At any time, if you decide that you’re uncomfortable or- or that you just don’t want to—”

“Hey, lighten up, wouldja?” Sans says, pushing himself away from the counter. Grillby doesn’t know how to interpret the oddly satisfied look on his face, the way the edges of his smile sharpen into a grin or the slight uptick of his eyebrows. “What’re friends for if not participating in elaborate fake-dating ruses, right?”

Grillby frowns at him. “It’s not a ruse.”

“Uh-huh,” Sans snorts, obviously convinced. He pulls one of his hands from his pocket and spins his keys around his fingers, nodding towards the door. “Wanna ride home?”

 — December 21st, 2019

The Glee cover of Jingle Bell Rock is playing overhead as Grillby meanders through the shopping centre’s main courtyard.

It’s busy today, but not any more so than he’d expect on a snowy Saturday afternoon, and surprisingly less so than he’d expect from the last weekend before Christmas. The food court is full and rich with the smell of greasy fast food, loud with laughter, bright from the sun shining in through the frosted glass skylight. All around him, people are bustling, lively, as they flitter from store-to-store, their arms lined with rows of plastic bags.

Grillby feels strangely detached from it all as Sans hums along to the music beside him. A reusable felt shopping bag swings off his wrist in the narrow space between them. It’s beige, with a tiny graphic of a cat reading a book on one side, and Grillby has a feeling it might belong to Papyrus.

Jingle Bell Rock comes to an end.

“Should I buy something?” Sans asks, looking at him. His curls are pulled back from his forehead today, hidden under a navy-coloured wool toque with a white bobble on the end. It looks like it might be handmade. “Be kinda rude t’ show up empty handed.”

“No,” Grillby says, catching Sans by the sleeve to tug him towards one of the stores. “I’ll sign your name on all my gifts, you’re already doing me a favour by showing up, you don’t need to bring gifts for my family, too.”

“I like your family,” replies Sans.

“You like Will and Fuku.”

“They’re family.”

“Yes, well…” Grillby leafs through a display of silver peacoats, pressed and new and nothing like his own tattered burgundy one (which he is, thankfully, not wearing today) as Sans wanders away from him, a little further into the store. “There’ll be other people there than just my niece, and Will and my aunt are going to Michigan this year.”

“Like who?”

“My grandmother, my father. My brother and his wife. Fuku, too.” He unhooks one of the coats from its display and turns to hold it out. “Do you think she’d like this? She always steals mine when she visits.”

Sans looks up from browsing through a rack of long, narrow red scarves and quirks his brow, his mouth twisting oddly. “Ain’t she… a lil’ young for that?” he asks, looking the peacoat up and down like it’s something worse than just a coat.

A light and warm and familiar feeling burns in the centre of his chest, a very Sans-specific type of fondness, and Grillby can’t help the way it makes him smile and shake his head a little, because Sans is a lot of things but rarely do any of those things come before being an older brother, and for once, Grillby gets it. It’s hard for him to picture Fuku wearing it, too. The slim-fit sleeves, the cinched waist, the professional cut of the lapels. It’s nice, he thinks, and very grown up. Too grown up for the picture in his head of a quiet toddler in a yellow sundress, wading into a shallow river for the very first time with nervous, teary eyes as Grillby holds her hand and promises that she won’t fall.

“She’s seventeen,” Grillby says, folding the coat neatly over his arm. “Eighteen in February.”

Sans stares at him like he’s waiting for the punchline of a joke. Then, after a moment, a smile starts to crawl, slow and relaxed and wide, across his face.  “Shit,” he says. “You’ve practically got one foot in the grave.”

“Uh-huh. Right, right. Remind me, how old is Papyrus again?”

“Old enough to make my back hurt when I think about it too hard,” Sans laughs, careless and brassy. “I tell ya he’s graduating college in October?”

Conversation passes easily between them. It always has.

They don’t spend as much time together outside the bar anymore, not like they used to (in fact, Grillby can’t even remember the last time they did something like this together), but it still feels the same, he thinks. It doesn’t feel like weeks or months have passed. And maybe that’s because Sans is in the bar most nights at eleven-twenty like clockwork, or maybe that’s just them.

Constant, reliable, familiar.

Three hours and seven stores later, the reusable shopping bag is full and bumping against the side of Grillby’s leg as Sans swings it between them, humming along to the tune of Baby, It’s Cold Outside. Grillby glances at him. A lump forms in the back of his throat, and he can’t tell if it’s his heart or all the words he wants to say right now or just vomit. 

His Adam’s apple rolls sluggishly when he swallows.

“Hey, um…”

They stop just inside the shopping centre doors. Through the foggy glass, Grillby can see the remnants of Wednesday’s blizzard beginning to stir in the dark and, immediately, he pulls up the zipper on his puffer coat until it’s tight against his chin. 

“What’s up?” Sans tilts his head. He looks sleepy from a long day, his eyes lidded and bruised and warm gazing up at him, melting him a little.

“Thank you,” Grillby says, and it’s quiet. Almost a whisper. A flicker of confusion passes across Sans’ face, but only briefly, and when it disappears, something more patient has taken its place. “And I don’t just mean for today, I mean for this… this whole thing. I don’t think I’ve actually told you that yet. So, thank you for having my back.”

“Hey, forget about it.” Sans nudges him with his elbow. The reusable shopping bag bumps Grillby’s leg again. “I don’t mind, G. Just do me a favour and don’t get weird on me after, ‘kay?”

“Okay.” Grillby nods, smiles, then reaches forward to take the reusable shopping bag from him with both hands. “I should get these wrapped tonight. I’ll pick you up tomorrow at eleven o’clock.”

Sans takes a step backwards from him towards the door and shoves his hands into the pockets of his heavy, sueded leather coat. The hood from his usual blue hoodie is bunched up around the collar. Sans grins (a wicked, cheshire thing) and says: “Sounds like a date!” before he ducks out into the cold.

Grillby looks down at the reusable shopping bag hanging from his fingers. He turns back to the shopping centre’s main courtyard with one more last-minute gift in mind.

—  December 22nd, 2019

Grillby drums his fingers against the steering wheel, rapid and rhythmless. The weather today is blessedly clear, the sky a long stretch of cloudless blue around the afternoon sun, and the roads plowed, salted, and dry. The snow banks at the edge of the road are tall, sturdy and glittering white.

He drums his fingers against the steering wheel. It’s perfect weather for a long drive, he thinks, the kind of weather he would have been lucky to have last year. Last year, the roads were dark with black ice and thick with slush and Grillby had considered turning around more than once after less than an hour. He’s considering turning around now, too. 

He drums his fingers against the steering wheel. He checks the clock on the dashboard.

He drums his fingers against the steering wheel. But what would he tell them? He’s been driving for over three hours and is well-beyond the halfway point and the weather is perfect and everyone is expecting him and—

A hand settles over his knuckles, barely touching, but steadying enough to still his anxious fidgeting.

“Easy, Beethoven,” Sans says lightly. “That the Fur Elise or Moonlight Sonata you’re composing?”

Grillby takes a deep breath and flexes his palms. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. I thought you were asleep.”

“Well, I was.” 

Sans slouches back into his seat with a drowsy smile and folds his arms across his chest. His hoodie is off, scrunched up into a ball between his shoulder and the window as a makeshift pillow, and he’s wearing khaki pants instead of jeans today that look stretched and overworn and bunch up around the ankles because they’re too long for his legs. Grillby doesn’t take the time to let himself wonder if Sans is trying to look nice for his family.

“Sorry,” he says again.

“Talk t’ me, buddy.”

Grillby clenches his teeth hard enough to hear his molars squeak. He feels like every bone in his body is trembling, quaking beneath layers of muscle and fat and skin, vibrating into his nail-beds and the lines of his ribs and his tongue and his eardrums and his stomach and his kneecaps, like a pressure from the inside is trying to force itself out through his pores. But how does he say that?

“They’re going to know,” he says instead. He veers to the shoulder of the road and throws the car into park hard enough to make his head jerk forward against the inertia. “This is so stupid, they’re… they’re going to be able to tell, how are we supposed to convince them that— that we’re—?”

“Together?” Sans says. Grillby looks at him. He looks passive, mussed from sleep, patient. He’s looking at Grillby with his head tilted back against his hoodie-made-pillow, over the round curves of his cheeks.

“You’re not worried at all, are you?”

“Little worried I won’t make a good impression,” he shrugs. “Worried you’re gonna drive us off a bridge or somethin’ just to avoid going to this thing.”

“Sans.”

“Worried about you,” Sans says, more earnestly, his eyes set like steel, hard and dark, as he shifts to correct his posture and leans forward across the centre console. “How long we been friends, G, like fifteen years?”

Grillby smiles a little. “Sixteen,” he says.

“Sixteen, right. Do me a solid and just trust me a little then, ‘kay? It’s gonna be fine, you’re gonna be fine.” A hand touches his face. Not hard, not a lot. Two fingers, curled just beneath his chin, only barely tilting his head up. Sans smiles in the same loose and easy way he does when he’s approaching Grillby at the bar each night, and something about it settles the writhing pressure under his skin. “We got this, buddy.”

“I do trust you,” Grillby says, and he means it. He’d never quite realized before just how much he means it. “You’re… right, I’ll be fine. You’re right.”

“Usually am,” Sans winks. Then, he falls away from Grillby’s space, back across the centre console and against the window. The upholstery creaks under his weight as he shifts to make himself comfortable again. “Speakin’a fines though,” he says, reaching for the radio, “you should probably get us off the side of the highway.”

Michael Bublé starts singing White Christmas. Grillby smacks Sans’ hands away from the dashboard and shuts it off.

“Not in my car,” he says. “There’s an AUX cord in the glovebox, we are not listening to Christmas music in my car.”

Sans laughs, loud and warm and deep, as they shift gears and pull back out onto the road.

An hour and a half later, Grillby parks in front of a two-story cottage home just outside the edge of North Bay. They’re close enough to feel the chill of the water here, close enough to smell it in the air, but not quite enough to see it. The property is surrounded by tall, old evergreen trees dressed in clean, undisturbed sheets of snow and ice. A collection of empty red and yellow bird feeders decorate the front yard, and a single row of Christmas lights blink along the eavestrough.

His brother’s car is already parked in the driveway.

“Ready?” Sans asks, unbuckling his seatbelt.

Grillby takes a deep, shuddering breath in through his nose, blows it out his mouth, and does it again. The engine is still running, purring quietly under him. He tries to focus on that, instead of the ringing in his ears, or his brain, or wherever that stupid ringing is coming from as he takes his glasses off and cleans them with the microfibre lens cloth he keeps in his back pocket. He glances at Sans—blurry, nothing but Sans-shaped colours and flares of light, shrugging back into his hoodie and coat.

“Guess we’ll find out,” he replies. He sets his glasses back on his face, flips down the sun visor and checks himself in the mirror. 

He looks tired, stressed, (old, his brain supplies). Too much hair has fallen from the braid hanging over his shoulder, it looks frizzy and disheveled and definitely like he nearly had a breakdown on the side of the highway an hour ago. Grillby yanks out the elastic and runs his fingers through it, breaking up the plaits. 

Good enough. “Let’s go.”

He cuts the engine and steps out into the cold, sunny afternoon. In spite of everything, it’s nice to be home, and Grillby, like he does every year, finds himself wondering why he doesn’t visit more. Sans’ steps crunch in the snow as he circles around to the trunk of the car, calling over his shoulder something about keys  that Grillby only half-hears.

He doesn’t notice that he’s been standing there for just a little too long until a hand settles between his shoulder blades and startles him.

“Any reason you’re holding our luggage hostage?” Sans raises an eyebrow at him, grinning. “You getting cold feet again?”

Grillby snorts. “Stop.”

“Freezin’ up on me?”

“It’s not even that cold out.”

“Uh, it’s plenty cold, pal. S’ like negative-eight degrees or something.”

“I was just thinking,” Grillby says, shaking his head a little.

“Sounds dangerous.”

“Very,” he laughs, and all things considered, thinks there might be a note of truth to that. He bumps their shoulders together, before gesturing with an elbow for Sans to follow him as he wanders around to unlock the trunk. There are only two bags between them, plus the reusable shopping bag with the graphic of the cat reading a book on it. The gifts inside are cleanly wrapped in decorative red paper. Grillby has both duffle bags over one shoulder before Sans gets the chance to reach for them. “I’ll take our bags, it was a long drive.”

“I’m not made of glass,” Sans says, reaching for the reusable shopping bag anyway.

“I know, but you’re an ass when you’re sore.” Grillby replies. He shrugs both duffle bags over one shoulder and slams the trunk closed. The car beeps twice, tail lights flashing as he locks it.

Sans catches him by the wrist as he turns to head towards the front door and Grillby almost stumbles. His eyes jerk down to stare at their connected hands. He looks back up. 

Sans has his nose scrunched up, just a little, the way he sometimes does right before he makes a really bad joke. But his eyes are wrong. They’re bright and dilated, moving wildly across Grillby’s face like he’s searching for something he can’t find. Then, after a moment or maybe even less, he steps a little closer and lets his fingers slide down Grillby’s palm to curl into the spaces between his knuckles. 

“Let’s get this show on the road,” he says. His voice is low and terribly quiet. 

Grillby doesn’t knock before he enters, he doesn’t need to. It’s home, and everyone is expecting him. The front door creaks as it opens and, inside, the cottage is warm and full with the smell of gingerbread and sugar and peppermint. He can see Blaise and Kenna from the entryway’s arching threshold, sitting together in the lounge with their backs to him and a fire crackling beneath the mantel.

The radio is on in the kitchen. Santa Baby is playing.

“Hellooo,” Grillby calls out. Blaise whips his head around so quickly it’s a wonder he didn’t snap his own neck, a wicked grin on his face.

“Oh, oh, oh! He’s here, he’s—” Blaise stands. The big, black cat that had been sleeping in his lap yowls as it tumbles to the floor and scampers away. “—oops. Sorry, Char!”

Beside him, Kenna clicks her tongue and shakes her head. She’s frowning at her husband as she turns around in her seat but, once her eyes are on Grillby, her expression softens into something kind and upturned. She looks well, he thinks, with crows feet and laugh-lines that sit shallowly in unblemished skin and only a single stripe of silver hair hanging down the left side of her face. A healthy and beautiful forty-three. “Hiya, G,” she says. He smiles at her.

Blaise bangs his hip on the arm of the loveseat, trips, and crashes into Grillby at the door, throwing his arms tight around his neck. He stumbles back against the impact. Sans lets go of his hand.

“Hey, little brother! C’mere, lemme look at you.” Blaise pulls back an arm’s width, his hands holding Grillby firmly by the shoulders. Seven years did nothing to stop the two of them from being the spitting image of each other, ruddy red hair and freckles and brown eyes and all. “Shit, you’ve gotten old.”

“Blaise!” Kenna snaps, halfheartedly, as she comes to stand with them. His brother looks over at her and laughs, then claps Grillby on the shoulder once, firmly, before stepping out of his space.

“What? He knows I’m kidding,” he says, tucking an arm around his wife’s shoulders. His attention shifts to Sans. “So, do you plan on introducing us anytime today, baby bee?”

Sans snickers.

“Don’t call me that,” Grillby snaps, a cold feeling settling over him all of a sudden. He shifts to set their duffle bags down and take off his coat, then turns to Sans, who already has his off and hanging on the wall. He’s standing with his hands buried in the pockets of his usual blue hoodie and a polite smile on his face, and it’s impossible to tell whether or not he’s uncomfortable, but when he meets Grillby’s eyes, his smile gets a little warmer. “This is—”

“Sans!” 

Blaise and Kenna turn around. Fuku Kohler is standing on the landing behind them, her arms full with at least a dozen balls of yarn. Her hair is half the length, but just as bright green as the last time Grillby saw her. She thunders down the stairs, two-by-two, the yarn bouncing down forgotten around her ankles.

Charcoal sprints in from the lounge and tackles one, rolling away with it into the kitchen.

“Hey, greenbean!” Sans laughs and opens his arms to catch Fuku as she runs right into him. 

“No way, ” she says, balling her hands up in the front of his t-shirt. It’s black, Grillby notices for the first time, with three white stripes running horizontally across the chest. “No way, no way! Please, please tell me you’re who Uncle G brought for Christmas?”

“Don’t see anyone else around,” replies Sans, peering around the entryway

“Oh my God,” Fuku slaps her hands over her cheeks. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew he was in love with you, I totally called it on my fifteenth birthday when that one song came on and he looked at y—”

“—do I get a hug, too, or should I just go unpack while you two catch up?” Grillby says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder as he takes a half-step towards the stairs. Fuku laughs and Sans lets her go, his hands returning to his pockets.

“Hi, Uncle G,” she says, hugging him snugly around the waist. He presses a kiss to the top of her head.

“Hey, sweetpea. What’s with the yarn?”

Charcoal tumbles past the entryway again, leaving a trail of teal-coloured wool behind her.

“Oh!” Fuku startles, like she’d forgotten about it completely, and scrambles to start collecting the odd-dozen yarn balls back into her arms. “I’ve decided to learn how to knit this year.”

“What happened to baking?”

“That was last year,” she says. “I tried it, and I’m bad at it, so this year I'm knitting.”

“You don’t think that’s too much yarn?” 

“I didn’t know how much I’d need so I just took all of it.”

“Seamstress-ful,” Sans says. Kenna giggles quietly behind her hand.

“Sans.” Fuku glares at him over an armful of colourful wool. “Mom, don’t encourage him, that one wasn’t even—oh, Char! Ps-ps-ps-ps, here kitty! Give me that!” 

Fuku turns and sprints into the lounge room, her socks slipping on the hardwood, a maroon-coloured yarn ball falling from her armpit and bouncing along behind her. Grillby and Sans share a look with Blaise and Kenna, and then they divulge into peels of quiet, fond laughter.

“She’s a real gem,” Sans says. Kenna smiles at him, and Grillby can tell by the subtle curve of her mouth and the way her eyes seem to twinkle that she’s already completely taken with him, and he’s not even remotely surprised about it.

“She talks about you sometimes,” replies Kenna, holding a hand out to him. “I’m Kenna.”

“And I’m Blaise,” Blaise says, extending the same courtesy. Sans takes a half-step forward and shakes both their hands earnestly.

“Sans Baines,” he says. “Pleasure.”

A crash echoes from the lounge. Immediately, Fuku starts shouting reassurances—everything’s okay, nothing’s broken, don’t worry!  

Kenna runs to go check on her anyway. 

“Ha, that’d be my cue. You should go say hi to Gran,” Blaise says, inclining his head towards the kitchen, moving to follow after his wife. “She’s baking, probably can’t hear us over good ol’ Dean Martin in there, otherwise she’d already be out here. She’ll be happy to see you, G.”

Grillby nods, and then Blaise is gone, too.

He looks over at Sans, watching him as he starts to toe out of his (not at all appropriate for winter weather) sneakers. A feeling of sudden trepidation settles over him, roiling like a storm cloud. Sans lifts his gaze with one shoe still half-on like he can sense it. “Alright?” he asks.

“Do you like them?” Grillby replies, rubbing his palms together. A funny, crooked smile finds its way onto Sans’ face. He finishes taking his shoes off.

“‘Course I do,” he says.

Grillby can’t pinpoint at what moment between Wednesday night and this afternoon he started worrying about what Sans thinks of his family. Maybe it wasn’t a concern until this exact moment, or maybe it had always been one and he just hadn’t realized it, but either way. Sans’ answer quiets whatever noise had been starting to brew inside him a moment ago.

“My grandmother’s name is Enya,” Grillby says, stooping down to unlace his boots. “Don’t call her Mrs. Eld or she’ll… I don’t know, stick your head in the oven or something, she hates formalities.”

“Noted.”

Grillby brushes off the front of his sweater-vest, straightens the collar of the dress shirt underneath, then turns and holds out his hand. Sans links their fingers together. 

The radio is much louder in the kitchen than it had sounded from the entryway. 

Grillby’s grandmother sings along, in a sweet, warbling voice that hints towards a youth spent as a part of a choir, to the tune of Let It Snow as she whisks batter in the crook of her elbow. The kitchen is large, split between being both a kitchen and a dining room, with yellow cupboards and white speckled countertops, and is almost sickeningly humid despite the open windows. There are two trays of gingerbread cookies cooling beneath one.

“Knock-knock.” Grillby taps his knuckles against the open door alongside the words. His grandmother startles a little, gasping a quiet ‘oh, goodness’ to herself as she spins around. Their eyes meet, and immediately, that startled expression melts away into a small, pleased smile. She sets her bowl and whisk down on the counter.

Grillby steps a little further into the kitchen, pulling Sans along behind him, and his grandmother, moving only a little slower now than she had the last time he’d seen her, meets him halfway to take his face gently into her hands.

“Oh, hello, our little baby bee,” she croons, pinching lightly at his face. “Still grown up then, are you?”

“Afraid so,” Grillby replies, chuckling. “Hi, Gran.”

“Hello, my dear.” Her eyes turn towards Sans. “And this is?”

“This is Sans,” Grillby introduces, tugging him forward a little. Sans almost stumbles. He has that look about him again, like he’d had by the car when he’d first taken Grillby’s hand, like he’s nervous and trying not to be, like there’s a tension inside him strung too tightly to break with a joke or a smile. Grillby squeezes his hand. Sans squeezes back.

“Hi,” he says finally, clearing his throat a little. “It’s nice to finally meet you, uh, Enya.”

Grillby’s grandmother gives him a knowing look before she drops her hands from his face. She looks Sans over with what Grillby knows is only false scrutiny, his grandmother doesn’t have a judgemental bone in her body and, even if she did, the subtle fondness on her face is enough to give away, to anyone who knows how to look for it, just how pleased she is to have him here. 

It makes Grillby’s stomach ache to know he’s lying to her.

“My,” his grandmother says, bringing a hand up to pat Sans’ cheek, “aren’t you a handsome one.”

Sans blushes, a deep ruby-coloured glow. “Oh, uh—” he scratches the nape of his neck with his free hand. Grillby bites his lips into a firm line, breathing in against the urge to laugh (because his grandmother will smack him upside the head if he does.) “—thank you?”

His grandmother pats Sans on the cheek again and hums, a tiny sound that rings like a singing bowl.

“Oh, bashful, too. How sweet,” she croons. Sans glances up at Grillby imploringly. He shrugs back. “You’re good to our Grillby, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, ‘course. I’d do anything for him,” Sans says. Grillby is startled by how sincere it sounds, although he supposes he shouldn’t be, all things considered. 

Grillby’s grandmother smiles. Her teeth are a faded yellow from smoking throughout her twenties and the lines around her mouth sink in deep. 

“Good,” she says. His grandmother, such a tiny woman, has to push herself up onto her toes a little to fit her arms around Sans’ shoulders as she pulls him in for a hug, and despite the nervous and shell-shocked look on his face, Sans immediately leans down to accommodate her. Her hands rub his back, small soothing motions Grillby knows the feeling of well. “It’s very nice to meet you, dear, welcome to the family.”

“Now,” she continues, pulling away from him. “I have goodies to get into the oven, and you boys must be tired from such a long drive. Why don’t you go get settled in, hm? You know where your room is.”

“Hey, why do they call you that?” Sans asks, following him up the stairs. Grillby glances at him, briefly, as he rounds the landing, and feels heat start to creep into his face. He doesn’t have to ask what Sans is referring to.

“From the song,” Grillby admits. He steps around a wayward yarn ball sitting at the top of the stairs.

“What song?”

“You know, the—” he sighs, “‘—bringing home a baby bumblebee.’ That song.”

Sans laughs, but not unkindly. “Why?”

“I, uhh, used to sing it a lot when I was little, too little to really remember. Blaise is the one who started it but I only know that because he told me once. Gran’s called me it for as long as I can remember.”

“Huh.”

“What?” Grillby stops outside his bedroom door, one hand on the doorknob, their duffle bags slung across his shoulder. Sans is smiling at him and looking sleepy, like he could doze off right where he’s standing.

“Nothin’,” he says, shrugging one shoulder. “It’s cute.”

Grillby rolls his eyes and shoves open the bedroom door. “Bite me,” he snorts, grinning. Sans follows him into the room with another warm, brassy laugh.

It’s always the same as the way he left it. And Grillby isn’t sure why this keeps surprising him, but it does. Dark blue walls covered by dozens of pale-green glow stars, curtains printed with tiny red rocket ships, an empty terra-cotta pot on the window sill with his name painted on it in messy white letters. Paper airplanes hang from the ceiling on strings, and trophies and bottle rockets and pins and photographs, of people Grillby hasn’t seen in over two-decades, sit collecting dust on the vanity. 

Always the same.

In fact, the only thing that had ever changed after he left was the bed, swapped out from a twin to a queen.

Oh, shit.

Grillby lets the duffle bags slide off his shoulder. They land beside him with a ‘thump!’ that feels only about half as heavy as his heart does landing in the pit of his stomach. He drops his face into his palms.

“Oh my God,” he groans. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s—”

“Of course they’d expect us to share a bed, why wouldn’t I share a bed with my boyfriend, right? I’m so sorry.”

“Grillby, it’s—”

“Listen, you don’t— I mean, I’ll— we don’t have to— woah! ”

He stumbles against the edge of the bed and lands, stomach-down, on the clean, dark gray comforter. Sans’ hands linger on his hips for less than a moment before he moves away, sits beside him. The mattress dips beneath his weight.

“Buddy, would ya shut up for a second?” Sans says. It sounds like he means for it to come across sharply, but it doesn’t. It’s a quiet timbre, deep in his throat.

Grillby lifts himself by his elbows, feeling flushed and off-balance and suddenly too aware of all six hundred muscles in his body, and looks over his shoulder at him. Sans raises his eyebrows, mouth twisting like he can’t decide if he’s going to laugh or not. A minute passes, one that feels impossibly long and silent and still. It makes Grillby’s skin burn.

“It’s just a bed,” continues Sans, eventually, shifting to cross his legs and tuck them beneath himself. It makes him look oddly boyish, young. More like he’d used to when they first met. “It’s not gonna make something happen just ‘cause there’s two people in it, G. Re—” he pokes Grillby on the forehead, “—lax.”

Sighing, Grillby rolls over onto his back and folds his hands across his stomach. His legs are long enough that his feet can still touch the floor like this. “Sorry,” he says again, (and he’s getting really sick of that word.) “I’m just nervous—anxious? I don’t know. I’m… embarrassed.”

“Yeah, pretty sure your hairline has receded a solid inch since Wednesday,” Sans replies sagely.

Grillby smacks his knee, smiling. The air between them settles back into something more familiar.

Fuku is yelling downstairs, her voice bright and excited, too muffled through the walls for words to make it through, and Kenna is laughing pleasantly, tinkling like a windchime. He hears a timer go off in the kitchen, followed by the sound of cutlery being set out on the dining table. God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen starts playing from the radio in the kitchen.

Sans touches his hand.

Grillby blinks open his eyes. He doesn’t remember closing them.

“You know, I…” Sans starts, then stops. He licks his lips, turns to look out the window. Looks for so long that Grillby starts to think he might have changed his mind about whatever he was going to say, before he turns back suddenly, and says again: “You know I don’t mind being here, right? Can never figure out what sorta bullshit noise you’ve got going on in your head, but you got this awful habit of convincing yourself you’re…” (he sighs) “... look, buddy. It’s not hard to be close to you, ‘kay? You’re my best friend.”

That’s the problem, isn’t it? Grillby thinks, but doesn’t say. He doesn’t know where the thought comes from, only that it makes his chest ache.

He turns his hand over and lets their fingers fall together, tangled, brushes his thumb over Sans’ knuckles and wonders, for the first time, how they’re ever going to come back from this. How things are ever supposed to be the same again.

“Oh,” he says. 

Sans barks a single, warm breath of laughter. “Oh,” he repeats, shaking his head. “Get up and help me unpack, wouldya?”

Blaise knocks politely on the open bedroom door forty-five minutes later, coming in to lean against the threshold. Grillby looks up from his laptop. At the same time, Sans dog-ears a page of his book and gently closes it, setting it down on the comforter between them.

“Dad’s here,” Blaise says, crossing his arms. “He wants you downstairs to say hello.”

Grillby’s insides turn to ice.

“Okay,” he replies, and somehow, he manages to keep his voice surprisingly steady. He puts his laptop into sleep-mode and sets it aside, then draws his knees to his chest. “Tell him I’ll be a minute.”

“Sure,” Blaise says, but he doesn’t move to leave. His fingers drum along his biceps in the same rapid, anxious way Grillby’s do when he’s thinking about something too hard, like on the drive here. “Try not to let him get to you, eh? I told him to lay off a little this year, but uh… well, you know Dad.”

Grillby scoffs a little. “Uh-huh.”

“He means well, G.” Blaise tilts his head at him imploringly, his lips pulled down in a way that makes the age lines beneath his beard appear deep and sunken, and his whole face tired and old. “He just wants the best for you.”

“Right,” Grillby says, and he almost laughs. “Because running a successful business just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

“Don’t get like that, bee, it’s Christmas… and there’s more to life than just work, you know.”

“Blaise,” he snaps. “Would you just go tell him? Please.”

His brother leaves without another word, closing the door behind himself with a quiet click. His footsteps are loud and heavy going down the stairs.

Grillby presses his mouth into his knees, hard enough to feel the grooves of his teeth against his lips, and sighs through his nose.

Sans reaches over and rests a hand on the back of his neck. The weight is comforting, and warm, and familiar, and it keeps him grounded as he works through the coiling serpent pit of thoughts in his head. He’s thankful for it, and he’s thankful for him. Thankful he doesn’t need to tell Sans about his father because he already knows. They’ve talked about him plenty over the last sixteen years, over tall Caesar cocktails and drowsy 80s rock music, beneath the glow of amber sconce lights. 

He doesn’t know how he’d handle having anyone else here with him right now.

Grillby would never describe his relationship with his father as being poor. Rocky, maybe, but always loving. And, in some ways, he thinks that might make it harder, makes it hurt more that he doesn’t know what it is he’s doing so wrong in life.

Sans runs his thumb up and down through the small, downy hairs at the nape of his neck. A shiver crawls along his skin.

Sans hums along to the tune of You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch as they quietly descend the staircase. There’s noise coming from the kitchen—other than the Christmas music. A rattle of pots and pans, the sound of a knife on a cutting board, the hiss of oil in a hot pan. The warm smell of festive baking has been replaced with the heat of herbs and spices.

Sulien is waiting for them beneath the arching threshold that leads between the hallway and the lounge, leaning against it with his arms crossed over his chest. An odd mirror of Blaise’s posture at his bedroom door. He’s an old and burly man, the corners of his eyes wrinkled finely and his hair, despite his age, thick and brown on his head, cut short and swept back.

He regards Grillby with a pleasant and decisively neutral expression, one Grillby has seen an innumerable amount of times over the last thirty-six years and still hasn’t figured out how to read.

His nerves buzz like a live wire beneath his skin, moving through him like electricity, fraying all his edges. He wishes seeing his father still comforted him, wishes it felt like the overwhelming sense of home had when he’d first stepped into the North Bay air again or like the familiar candor of Sans’ smile on the highway, but it doesn’t. It makes him feel itchy and sick.

“Come sit,” Sulien says, in lieu of a greeting, his eyes moving between Grillby and Sans only briefly before he pushes himself away from the wall and ambles into the lounge.

Grillby reaches back to take Sans’ hand as they near the bottom of the stairs and Sans meets him halfway, catching him by the fingers and holding tight.

Fuku is curled up on a pillow by the fireplace with Charcoal stretched out, snoring, on her feet. She has a pair of large wooden knitting needles in her hands and a web of knotted yarn hanging between them. She glances up as they enter and offers a small smile.

“How was your drive?” Grillby asks, settling down onto the loveseat. Sans sits next to him, close enough for their knees to touch and their hands to fall across the subtle space between them like a bridge.

“Fine, fine,” Sulien replies. He grunts as he lowers himself into the adjacent wing chair, sinking into the cushions, his shoulders rounding out like his head is just a bit too heavy for his neck. “Good weather for a long drive, not like last year. You arrive long ago?”

“About an hour ago.”

“Good, good. All settled in?”

“Yes, sir.”

Grillby hates this. He hates the way the two metres between them feels both impossibly wide, a distant chasm, aching and cold and sucking in all the light from the room, and yet somehow impossibly small, like he’s going to suffocate in it. He hates the small talk and the way it feels unwanted, obligatory. Like talking to him is a chore, just a box on his father’s Christmas To-Do list. And he especially hates that they haven’t spoken a word to each other since last year, and how that fact is lingering unacknowledged between them, tangled into a worse mess than the yarn on Fuku’s knitting needles.

They maunder this way through unimportant, impersonal conversation for several odd, too-long minutes before his father finally asks about Sans.

“So,” says Sulien, drawing his fingers together into a loose steeple above his chest. “Who’s this boy, then? Didn’t know you were dating.”

Grillby bites his tongue against the urge to remind his father that there’s an awful lot he doesn’t know about him anymore. 

Sans speaks up before him. “Sans Baines,” he says, leaning across the coffee table to proffer a handshake. His father sits forward to meet him. “It’s a pleasure.”

“Sulien Kohler. That’s quite the accent you’ve got, where’re you from?”

“New York,” he replies. “Grew up there. My brother, too, but he doesn’t sound it much anymore. He was only eight when we moved to Canada, kinda grew out of it.”

“Been here a while then, eh?”

“Sure, long enough. Just about seventeen years now.”

“And my son, how long have you known him?” Sulien asks, looking back and forth between them with narrow eyes and a furrowed brow, his mouth set flat. “He’s never mentioned you before.” 

Grillby shifts a little closer to Sans, close enough for their thighs to run parallel from hip to knee, and grips his hand tighter, bracing himself. His father knows, he must. Grillby can fool Blaise and Kenna, can fool Fuku, can even fool his grandmother. But he can’t fool his father, not once in his life has he ever been able to lie to his father, he should have known better, he—

“That’s not true,” Fuku pipes up. All three men turn to her at once. Grillby had, admittedly, forgotten she was there. She’s not looking at them, her attention still focused on her knitting, but she’s smiling, almost laughing. “Uncle G never stops talking about Sans.”

“I— I do not!” Grillby says. A little too quickly, maybe. He yanks his glasses off and digs the microfibre lens cloth out of his pocket, ignoring the way his face starts to burn. 

“Uh… yuh-huh, you do.” Fuku glances up, and she looks an awful lot like Blaise in that moment, her eyes sharp, bright, mischievous, glinting with a flare of orange firelight. “‘A friend at work’,” she drawls, pitching her voice down. “Puh-lease. I love you, Uncle G, but you’re sooo transparent, the only reason Mom and Dad didn’t figure it out, too, is ‘cause they hadn’t met him before.”

“I could be talking about anyone, that doesn’t prove anything! I have… other friends at work, too.”

(He doesn’t.)

“Could be,” she shrugs. “But we both know you’re not.”

Grillby doesn’t know what to say to that. Fuku is right, afterall, he has talked about Sans to his family before, subtly, without a name or a hint of a description or any inclinations towards the idea that the person he’s talking about might be anything more than a friendly regular, or even just one of his few employees who aren’t Wilbur. And she’d seen right through him anyway.

“You’re just like your damn father,” Grillby says, slouching into the back of the loveseat.

He feels Sans staring at him and looks over to meet his eyes, dark and creased around the edges with mirth, dilated, almost trembling with how rapidly they’re flickering over Grillby’s features. His left eyebrow twitches up just a fraction, quietly curious, teasing, and he smiles with all his teeth like the stupid cheeky bastard that he is.

God, Grillby is never going to hear the end of this one.

“I hadn’t realized you were talking about someone so… important to you,” Sulien says, oddly stilted.

“You weren’t really supposed to,” Grillby replies honestly. He shoots a pointed glare towards Fuku who, coincidentally, happens to be very engaged with her knitting again, and is definitely smirking at the yarn and not at him. “I’m… I don’t know. I’m a private person, Dad, I didn’t think it was anyone else’s business who I was…”

He trails off, gesturing vaguely between Sans and himself.

“Suppose you were a rather quiet boy.”

His father shifts, rolling his shoulders. He isn’t quite looking at Grillby anymore, his gaze is vacant, like he’s looking straight through him as he taps his index finger against the arm of the wing chair, a slight twist in the corner of his mouth. The severe lines of his face cut deep shadows across his faraway expression.

After a moment, his father draws his hands back together over his chest and nods towards the arching threshold behind Grillby’s head.

“Son, why don’t you and Fuku go help Enya in the kitchen,” he says. “Let me and—Sans, was it? Let me and Sans have a bit of a chat together.”

“No way, you couldn’t pay me to go into that human airfryer right now,” Fuku snorts. She clicks her needles together and spears them through her ball of yarn, sliding her current project up the shaft to bunch like a bird’s nest around the top of it. She stands in a single smooth, sweeping motion. Charcoal flops off her feet like a bag of dirt and rolls onto her back, still happily snoring. “I’ll be upstairs.”

Grillby stares down at his lap.

Sans’ fingers are long, nimble things, with short square nails and a hundred tiny scars on them, left behind by the work he does during the day. A constellation of knicks and scratches and burns. His hands look older than the rest of him, they’re weathered along the edges like leather, and his skin stretches, tight and thin, around each joint and knuckle. They’re very unlike the rest of him, he thinks, tracing a pensive line down the curve of his palm with the corner of his thumbnail.

“Hey,” Sans says, nudging him with his elbow. “You still in there?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I’ll be fine. Go on, I’ll meet ya out there in a few, ‘kay?”

Grillby glances up at him over the tops of his glasses. Sans’ smile is softer this time, rounder in his cheeks. His eyes have a flickering ring of golden-orange around the edges, and if Grillby focuses on it, it’s almost too easy to imagine that ring is from the gleam of amber sconce lights.

The heat in the kitchen is sweltering, heady with the smell of glazed ham and oven-baked hash browns and roasted garlic and allspice, humid enough to make Grillby pull the elastic off his wrist and tie his hair up into a knot, far away from his face and neck.

Blaise and Kenna are bustling around each other, revolving like the cogs and gears in a watch, hardly saying a word, and yet somehow communicating effortlessly. They’re both flushed, a fine sheen of sweat lighting up their skin under the dim fluorescent lights, and they either don’t notice when he walks in or are too preoccupied with preparing supper to care. 

His grandmother sits, out of the way, on a dining chair by one of the open windows. She’s holding a bowl of cranberry sauce, stirring it slowly, looking out at the snow with a tired, content expression on her old face.

Grillby comes up to her quietly and sets a hand on her shoulder. She startles, just a little bit, and turns to look up at him. The cold air drifting in the window flutters the wispy silver hair hanging around her slender face.

“Would you like me to take that, Gran?” he asks, half-reaching for the bowl of cranberry sauce. His grandmother looks down at it as though she’d forgotten she had it before she hands it to him with a small, embarrassed smile.

“Yes, that might be best,” she says, waving a hand at herself. “My silly old brain must have wandered away again, goodness me. Only meant to sit down for a quick rest, get away from the heat a little bit, and now I’ve gone and mulched the cranberries.”

“It’s only jam,” Grillby says. “And nobody likes cranberries anyway.”

The bones of her shoulders feel round and pronounced under his palm, the skin thin and almost papery beneath the sheer fabric of her blouse. He can remember a time when her arms had been full and plush, when her face had been round. It scares him sometimes to think about how fragile she’s become, though she’s still able and healthy.

“Excuse you, I like cranberries,” Blaise says, stooping to peer briefly into the oven. “Mind chopping some pecans into that, baby bee?”

“Sure.”

“Say, where’s that boy of yours?” his grandmother asks. “Lost him already, have you, dear?”

“He’s probably out there getting Dad’s shovel talk,” Blaise laughs.

Grillby throws a pecan at him. “Don’t be stupid,” he says. “Dad wouldn’t.”

“I dunno,” says Kenna, passing behind him. She goes to the fridge, pulls out a tub of margarine and an orange, then closes it with her hip and sets the orange down on the counter beside him as she passes by again. “—add a little orange zest to that, too, would you, sweetie?—Sul gave me a pretty brutal shovel talk after Blaise and I got engaged.”

“He did not.”

“Did too.”

“He did not.”

“Made me cry.”

“Kenna!” Grillby sets the kitchen zester down on the counter with a firm click and Kenna bursts into chimes of bright laughter, a hand coming up to cover her mouth. He turns, the bowl of cranberry sauce tucked into the crook of his elbow, and leans his hips back against the counter, scowling at her halfheartedly as he stirs. “You’re not funny,” he says.

She laughs harder.

“Oh, alright now, you two,” his grandmother says, shaking her head. She sets a hand on the window sill, bracing her weight against it, and stands from the dining chair brushing the wrinkles out from the front of her skirt. “Supper isn’t going to finish making itself. Grillby, get that spoon out of there before you turn that poor sauce into soup, heaven’s sake, dear.”

Rhythm returns to the kitchen.

Grillby glances towards the doorway. He wonders if it’s true, if his father is giving Sans some sort of… shovel talk right now. He doesn’t think it is. He can’t even imagine what something like that would look like coming from his father, of all people. But he still wonders, still waits, still chews his lip and glances at the doorway, again and again.

Ten minutes go by. An uneasy feeling unfurls in his chest.

The hot air starts to make him feel sick before too long, and by the time the twenty-minute mark rolls around, his grandmother has already shooed him away to the dining table to cool off, where he sits watching his fingers drum along the edge of the polished oak.

Maybe, he thinks, they just found something really good to talk about.

Sans is good at talking to people, afterall. Grillby sees it in the bar some nights, the nights where Sans turns around in his seat and leans back against the counter and chats with crowds of strangers like they’re all good friends, tells terrible jokes, fills the room up with the sound of drunk laughter.

“You look fried.”

Grillby looks up. Sans folds his arms over the back of the adjacent dining chair and tilts his head a little, smiling at him. His hoodie is off, tied around his waist by the sleeves, and his dark curls are tousled like he’s been running his fingers through them. He looks muted and subdued, tired, his posture draping over like he’s boneless inside.

“Hey,” Grillby says. “I’m—yeah, um. It’s just the heat, I’m not used to working in a hot kitchen anymore, I’m… I’m okay.”

He’ll be okay.

Supper comes and goes. Night swarms in.

“Aren’t you going to get ready for bed?”

He pauses with the comb pulled only halfway through his damp hair, watching Sans in the vanity mirror. Sans is face-down on the comforter, fully dressed, ankles crossed, one arm folded beneath his head. His face is turned like he’s watching Grillby, but he’s not. His eyes are closed.

“I am ready for bed,” replies Sans without moving. “I am very ready for bed.”

“You shouldn’t sleep in your day clothes.”

Grillby means that Sans should get up and get changed into pajamas, but Sans doesn’t do this. Instead, he yanks the arm out from under his head, shifts to lift his hips and starts fumbling with the button of his khakis, kicking his legs to wiggle out of them.

It takes a conscious effort for Grillby not to stare, for him to keep his eyes on the lines the teeth of his comb cut through his hair and not on bare, tawny-brown skin.

“Happy?” Sans asks.

Grillby hums.

It’s only a little later than nine-thirty and the cottage isn’t quite quiet yet, still settling after a long day, the muffled stillness of nightfall only just beginning to slip between the walls. It’s blue outside, moonlight glowing on the snow, lighting up the frosted windows. It keeps the room illuminated faintly as Grillby switches off the light and plunges everything into darkness.

A whistle of wind cuts through the trees. It rustles the branches with an applause of tinkling ice crystals.

“What did you and my dad talk about?”

Sans rolls onto his back as Grillby pulls back the comforter and shimmies underneath, sinking his body into his satin, lavender pillowcase with a deep, bone-weary sigh. Grillby lies on his side next to him with an elbow tucked under his neck. His glasses are off.

“Nothin’, really,” Sans says, turning his head. The cold glow in the room makes his eyes, usually so dark, look unexpectedly silver, electric. “Mostly you. Gave me the usual ‘what are your intentions’ spiel.”

Oh God, it was a shovel talk.

“Asked a lot about the bar, actually. Still thinks you work too much, wanted to know how you’re doing.”

“He could’ve asked me that,” Grillby replies. 

The words are bitter, like soap-scum on his tongue.

“And that’s what I told him,” Sans says.

The atmosphere between them ebbs and crashes, drowsy and vibrant, oddly charged with a sense of conversation, though none is passing between them at the moment. It feels domestic, and against his better judgement, Grillby wonders what it would be like to have this, always, to come home after long evenings and crawl into bed beside Sans and lie in the darkness, close enough to hear each other’s hearts beating.

After a time, Sans rolls over onto his side, too. A smile stretches, sleepily, across his face.

“So,” he says, “what’s this about you talking about me—sorry, a friend from work all the time?”

Grillby groans into his pillow. “I knew you wouldn’t let that go.”

“Not a chance, pal,” Sans laughs, hushed and breathy. “But really, what’s next?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Not a lot. Blaise might try to force us to play monopoly,” Grillby says. “We’ll put up the Christmas tree together on Tuesday, decorate it, maybe have a drink. We always watch that one movie together on Christmas Eve, the one with Will Ferrell in it.”

“Aw, not Elf. There are so many better Christmas movies than that. A Christmas Story, Home Alone, The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

“That’s a Halloween movie.”

“Nuh-uh, it’s absolutely a—” Sans trails into a yawn, “—absolutely a Christmas movie. Has Christmas in the title and everything.”

Warmth blooms in Grillby’s chest. “You’re tired,” he says. It’s impossible to keep the fondness from seeping into his voice, especially in the dark. “You should sleep.”

“‘Kay.”

Sans yawns again and rolls back onto his back, and Grillby stares at the side of his face, watching it break down inch by inch as he falls asleep, as all the walls go down, until there’s nothing left but the smooth ridge of his brow and the soft curve of his cheeks and his slightly parted lips.

— December 23rd, 2019

Grillby doesn’t remember falling asleep. He wakes too-early, when the light coming in the window is still dim and blue, no longer moonlight but still barely a gleam on the horizon. And for a moment, staring foggily at the blurry pattern of glow-stars along his walls, he forgets where he is, then decides he doesn’t care and begins to drift away again.

Something rattles. The realization that this is the sound that woke him floods in. He turns over onto his back.

Sans sits half-slumped against the headboard on the edge of the bed, his duffle bag pulled up beside him, an orange prescription pill-bottle in his hand, rolling back and forth across his thumb, tumbling the capsules around inside like rice in a rainstick.

Grillby’s voice comes thick and raspy with sleep. “Sans?”

Sans startles. The pill-bottle slips from his fingers to his lap. 

“Shit—sorry,” he says quietly. Slow hands drag through his hair, ruffling dark downy curls. “Didn’t mean t’ wake you.”

“Are you okay?” Grillby asks.

“Peachy.”

It’s hard to tell from this distance without his glasses, when all of Sans’ edges bleed together into a single silhouette, when there’s nothing but soft colours and shadows, but he thinks Sans might be trembling.

He reaches for him. The tips of his fingers ghost against the length of Sans’ spine, barely touching. The back of his shirt is damp, clinging to his body. Grillby can feel the heat of his skin through the thin cotton. It’s almost feverishly warm.

“Are… you in pain?”

“I’m always in fucking pain!” Sans whips around to glare at him, but the look is gone from his face almost as quickly as it appears, crumples up into something else, something small and indiscernible, then deteriorates completely. “Sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap, you didn’t… You don’t deserve that.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not,” he says, and the words crack in his throat, “you need me. You need me and I’m… fuck!”

“Sans, it’s okay—”

“—couldn’t even go three damn days without—”

“Sans, listen to me.” Grillby’s voice is too loud for the early hour. Softer, he continues: “Just for a second, please. It is okay. This isn’t your fault.”

And he means it. More important than that, he wants Sans to know he means it, to believe him when he says it, wants to see Sans’ walls fall away again like they do when he sleeps and for him to stop looking so…

Not fragile, not breakable. Even like this, Sans is neither of those things, isn’t glass, won’t shatter.

… so vulnerable. Like there’s some terrible part of himself on display.

He moves his hand, still only a whisper of a touch, up along the slope of Sans’ shoulder blade, traces the subtle incline of his trapezius, brushes the back of his knuckles from the dip of his neck to the curve of his jaw. Sans reaches up and grabs his wrist, and for a moment, Grillby expects him to push him away, but he doesn’t. He pulls him closer and presses his hand a little more firmly to his skin and tilts his face into his palm.

“I’m sorry,” Sans says again.

It’s so quiet. If Grillby couldn’t feel his mouth moving against the inside edge of his wrist, he might not have known Sans had spoken at all.

“I promise, it’s okay. You’re okay.”

A memory flickers in: two fingers, curled just beneath his chin.

(It’s gonna be fine, you’re gonna be fine.)

“I can’t stand when this shit makes me feel like some kinda busted up toy,” he says. “Like I’m… I’m useless and taking up space.”

“You are absolutely not,” Grillby snaps, shaking his head. “Sans, I don’t know—I can’t even begin to know what you’re going through, but what I do know is that you’re not useless. Or a waste of space. Or whatever other… stupid, terrible things you’re thinking right now.”

“Grillby—”

“—no, wait. Just wait, I’m not done.” He licks his lips, takes a breath. “You’re right. I do need you, and- and sometimes, I feel scared because I don’t know what I’d do without you. But you can need me, too. I want you to need me, too.”

Grillby doesn’t have to see him to know for sure this time that Sans is trembling. He can feel it, the quiver of his fingers, tight, biting, into the skin of his wrist, the way his mouth is working, opening and closing, not making a sound, the way his breath rushes in and out of his lungs like he’s desperate for it, drowning.

“Tell me what I can do,” he continues, rubbing his thumb against the stubble on his cheek. “If there’s anything at all I can do to help.”

“Stay,” Sans says, gasping. He turns fully, drawing his legs up onto the bed, knocking his duffle bag and the pill-bottle to the floor. The hand on his wrist slides down the length of his arm. “Just stay here, don’t go anywhere.”

“I won’t,” he promises. “Not ever.”

Sleep comes again like a heavy blink. 

He wakes in a tangle of warm limbs to a room full of pale afternoon sunlight.

— December 24th, 2019 

Christmas Eve comes with traditions for Grillby’s family. Not particularly rigorous or impressive ones, but traditions nonetheless. 

It starts with pulling out his grandmother’s very old, very dusty faux Christmas tree from her storage closet and decorating it together throughout the afternoon over sweets and cucumber sandwiches. The merry tune of a Christmas song Grillby doesn’t remember the name of is playing from the radio, moved into the lounge from the kitchen counter onto the mantel. 

Grillby, Blaise, and Sans are the only ones who actually decorate the tree. Fuku is too preoccupied with knitting, his grandmother sitting on the loveseat beside her teaching her how to cast on. The yarn she’s using today is a different colour than the one she’d been tangling up on Sunday.

“Is this real?” Sans asks, holding up a garland of colourful popcorn. It matches the reds and greens of the stripes on his gaudy holiday-themed sweater.

“I think it’s styrofoam,” replies Kenna. She’s sitting on the pillow by the fireplace, an open hardcover copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses in her lap. A pair of delicate gold-framed reading glasses with lenses shaped like sideways ovals balance neatly on the bridge of her nose.

Sans sits back onto his heels and pulls the garland the rest of the way out of the box of decorations, extending it into a droopy arch between his hands. Then, after a moment, he sets it aside and kneels forward again to keep digging.

“Quit putting the baubles so close together, G. You’re making the tree ugly!”

“There’s no such thing as an ugly Christmas tree, Blaise,” Sulien says. His father is slumped comfortably into the wing chair with Charcoal curled up on his lap, her large black ears twitching at all the different sounds in the room as her tail lashes lazily over the edge of the cushions.

“Tell that to Grillby’s side,” Blaise snorts.

Grillby throws the ornament in his hand at him. It bounces off his shoulder harmlessly and rolls away under the coffee table. All their Christmas decorations are plastic now, and have been for a long time. Grillby can still remember when they used to be made of glass, shiny and blue and cold to the touch, when they felt so delicate in his hands that he was scared he’d crush them just trying to pry them free from their cardboard moulds, but Blaise is a very difficult person not to throw things at and his grandmother got tired of cleaning up broken baubles every year.

A string of tinsel wraps around his shoulders from behind as he reaches to hang up another thumb-sized snowman. Grillby turns around, the frills of gold and silver plastic crinkling against him, and Sans smiles, waving the tail ends of the tinsel in each hand. There’s glitter on his face. The small and gritty kind that looks like sand, dark blue, smudged across the apples of his cheeks and stuck in the coarse stubble on his chin.

“Why did the tree go to the doctor on Christmas?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

“It caught tinselitis.”

“Sans!” Fuku shouts.

The tinsel snaps tight around Grillby’s shoulders. Rolls down the length of his spine, hooks him by the waist. The pull behind it isn’t strong, but it’s unexpected enough to make him stumble forward, his hands flying up to steady himself against Sans’ chest. At first, he can’t tell if the action was intentional or not, if Sans was maybe just too caught up in laughing at his own joke to remember the tinsel was in his hands, but then, all at once, his expression sobers and it’s like the whole room mutes around them. 

Grillby is vaguely aware of Kenna giggling, of Fuku complaining loudly, of Charcoal startling off his father’s lap and darting between their legs, but distantly. Like he’s underwater or behind a sheet of reinforced glass.

Sans is looking up at him with wide eyes, his mouth slightly parted and just barely upturned at the corners. His lips have such a subtle cupid’s bow. A deep, rich ruby colour blooms over his face and, oddly, Grillby can’t help but notice the way it makes the glitter on his skin stand out even more. It looks… ridiculous.

Flippant, callow, soft.

Before he can think to stop himself, Grillby lifts a hand to Sans’ face and ghosts the edge of his thumb beneath his eye, along the line of his cheekbone, against that smudge of blue glitter. It spreads into a long, twinkling streak.

His eyes flicker back down to Sans’ mouth. It would be so easy to lean in and close the space between them right now.

Blaise’s voice rips the room around them back into focus. “Would you two get a room?”

“Oh, leave the poor boys alone,” chides his grandmother, a hint of mirth denoting each word. “They’re having a moment.”

“Can’t their moment wait until the tinsel is actually on the tree?”

A chorus of teasing, good-natured laughter rolls through the room.

Grillby’s hands draw towards his stomach and knots into the fabric of his t-shirt as he turns away, back to the Christmas tree, back to decorating, back to doing things that aren’t almost kissing Sans.

He hangs a dozen more tiny baubles before Blaise cuts him off from adding anymore, and goes about getting the lights plugged in. They’re yellow this year, the tiny pill-shaped kind that twinkle on and off at various speeds, but between the pink and silver ornaments adorning the branches and the waxy, washed-out green of the faux Christmas tree’s plastic pine needles, Grillby thinks they look a little closer to beige. The string of tinsel is braided along the bottom of the tree like the icing piped along the borders of a cake.

“Alright… so, we feeling pizza or Chinese food this year?” Blaise asks.

The energy in the room starts to disperse, settles down like an old dog flopping onto its bed at the end of the day. Conversation turns to food, orders and preferences, drinks. Grillby feels himself slipping into the background. He excuses himself quietly from the room, although he’s not sure where he plans on going or what he plans on doing, just that needs a moment somewhere that isn’t the lounge.

He ends up in the hallway, sitting at the bottom of the stairs with his elbows folded across his knees, tracing patterns with his eyes through the frost swirled over the front door’s tiny window. He doesn’t know how much time passes.

“Hey.” 

Sans leans against the banister with his hands tucked into the back pockets of his jeans.

“Hi.”

“Wanna go for a walk?”

It’s amazing, the things time leaves behind. Most of them don’t really exist, are just figments living within Grillby’s memory, revived by the familiar sights and sounds around them as they walk, slowly, unhurried, down the long stretch of rural road. A hundred tiny injuries, a hundred secrets, a hundred laughs, long behind him and still, somehow, everywhere. 

The snow sinks quietly beneath their steps, damp and soft. It’s surprisingly mild today, considering it’s Christmas Eve, warm enough to make the ice crystals hanging off the trees drip. Their hands are apart, Sans has his tucked into the pockets of his sueded leather coat, but Grillby wishes they weren’t. He wants to reach over and dig it out and trap it between his fingers, press their palms together, line up all the tiny creases and grooves.

Grillby looks down, watching his boots kick through the snow. He chews his lip.

The cottage home doesn’t have neighbours, none within reasonable walking distance, anyway. There’s nothing but trees and snow and shrubbery on either side, the sun in the sky, the breeze cutting over the peaks of the evergreens.

“Did you think my side of the tree was ugly?” Grillby asks eventually. He doesn’t actually care that much, but he thinks the silence might drown him if it goes on any longer.

“Yeah,” Sans replies, glancing sideways at him, smiling. “Was pretty bad, G. Used like thirty of those tiny snowmen.”

“I like the tiny snowmen.”

“Obviously.”

They laugh, relaxing. 

The atmosphere between them readjusts into something languid and cool, more comfortable. Grillby bumps their shoulders to draw back Sans’ attention as it wanders away and gestures with his chin for Sans to follow him as he steps off the side of the road and into the snowbank, only deep enough to soak him to his mid-calf.

“Come on,” he says, backing into the treeline. A web of cold, soft cedar branches parts behind his back, tinkling as the tiny beads of ice stuck to its leaves tousle together. “I know where we are, I wanna show you something.”

Sans hesitates for a moment, looking down at the snow with a bit of a grimace, before he steps directly into Grillby’s track of footprints and follows along them through the bank.

It’s hardly a far walk, if they’re in the right place, and after only a few minutes of weaving between the skirts of spruce trees and a bare maze of woody shrubbery, he’s certain that they are. Piece by piece, his memory of where the overgrown paths used to be find him, and before too long, the world’s crappiest treefort comes into view and Grillby immediately bursts into laughter.

“What am I looking at?” Sans asks, tilting his head.

Grillby calls it a treefort because that’s what he’d called it as a kid, but it’s barely a box. It’s made of nothing but branches and long carpentry nails that stick out from it like the broken quills on a porcupine, and he can’t remember anymore if it’d always been this bad or if time had just taken a toll on the ugly thing.

“I—” Grillby takes a breath, sobering himself. “—I made it with Blaise when I was a kid.”

“Looks like a Saw trap.”

“It’s a fort,” he grins. “I didn’t know if it would still be out here. Honestly, I didn’t even remember it existed until I noticed where we were. I don’t… I don’t think I actually wanted to show you that bad, I think I just wanted to see it again.”

“God knows why,” Sans snorts.

Time feels muted and distant within the cover of the trees. Like the rest of the world is somewhere else, somewhere far away, and they’re here, suspended above it, frozen.

He looks over at Sans and their eyes meet instantly.

Sans is watching him, smiling, relaxed against the trunk of a thin, young oak tree, his arms folded over his chest. It takes a lot for Grillby not to focus on his mouth, more than it ever used to. It’s late enough in the afternoon that the sun has started to slip towards the horizon in the short time since they left the cottage, and they should probably go back to the road before the shadows casting over the snow stretch any taller, but he doesn’t want to move. 

He wants to stay here, where it’s just them and a one-note symphony of dripping ice crystals.

“Should we talk?” Sans asks.

“I really wish I knew how you did that.”

“I told you before, it’s big brother powers,” he replies. “Paps hates talking about his problems, tried to sprint the 100 meter in high school on a sprained ankle once because he didn’t wanna tell anyone he hurt himself practicing. I learned pretty quick how to tell when someone’s thinking about things they’re supposed t’ be saying.”

Grillby thinks he might understand now what it feels like to be a gleam of light, caught in a water droplet on a foggy glass, refracting into too many pieces. It’s nowhere near as nice as he’d imagined. 

And it’s ironic. Hilarious, really, because he set himself up for this. Made one too many thoughtless and selfish decisions at once and changed everything, tangled it up, left his grubby fucking fingerprints all over it.

“I’m sorry,” he says, lowering his voice. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Sans shifts his weight, pushing away from the oak tree. “Whaddya mean?”

“I mean… this. ” He gestures between them. “I messed up, I told you things would stay the same between us, but now… I don’t know if they can.”

“What?” Sans’ smile falls away a little bit at a time. Inch by inch, muscle by muscle. “Slow your roll there, buddy, I don’t… G, I don’t understand.”

Sans takes a half-step towards him, drawing his hands from his pockets to hold them out, palms forward, placating, like Grillby is a wild animal, like he’s going to startle and dart away into the woods. Sans’ eyes are dark, blown wide in the fading light, roving over his face. He takes another step.

“I thought nothing would change,” Grillby says. “But then, when we were decorating the tree, we—”

“Is that what this is about?”

“It’s not just that. It’s everything, this whole thing. I don’t know how to go back from this, Sans, and I… even if it wasn’t real, I don’t know how to pretend none of it happened.”

His hands might be shaking, but it’s hard to tell with how tightly Sans holds onto them, clutches them against his chest and presses his knuckles into the chilly sueded leather of his coat. He doesn’t remember Sans reaching for him or grabbing him, or if he reached out and welcomed the connection, maybe grasped for it desperately, or just let it happen. Sans looks at Grillby with his eyebrows furrowed, working his mouth like he can’t figure out how to make words come out of it.

When he finally does speak, his voice is so deep and quiet that Grillby feels it rumbling inside his chest. “You think this isn’t real?”

“I… I don’t know— yes? Isn’t that why we’re here? An elaborate fake-dating ruse or- or- or whatever you called it?”

“Not that. This.” Sans traces his thumbs along the bumps and grooves of Grillby’s knuckles. “You think this, right now, this isn’t real?”

Grillby turns his attention down to their hands between them. He can’t help but marvel at the way their fingers fit together, like the pieces of a puzzle. As though every inch of skin and muscle and bone was made to be intertwined together this way, with each other and never anybody else. He can hear his heartbeat behind his ears, can feel it bounding in his chest, galloping like a racing horse, and he wonders if Sans can feel it, too. The blood rushing through his palms, the pulse under his nails.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re my best friend,” Sans says. “I don’t… I don’t have to fake love you, G. The whole reason I'm here is ‘cause I love you, 'cause I knew you needed me and... and I don't think there's a damn thing in this world I wouldn't do for you.”

"Oh," he replies, intelligently.

Black shadows cut indiscernible shapes into the snow around them, long and narrow now, bleeding into each other, bracketed by silver panels of dim winter sunlight. Sans’ laugh bounces between them, spills quietly from his chest, full of air like a sigh or a whisper. His hands run a line down Grillby’s arms and over his shoulders, to the dip of his collarbones where he settles them, palms flat and warm on either side of his neck, thumbs parallel up the length of his throat.

“Your head’s full of bees or somethin’, I swear.”

“Something like that,” Grillby agrees, and he reaches forward to grip the front of Sans’ coat, if only to do something with his still shaky, suddenly unoccupied and very uncertain hands.

It’s easy for them to fall together. For the space between them to disappear, swallowed up by soft lips and warm breath and the shy brush of fingers along the edge of his jaw, and it’s even easier to lose himself in it. Press in a little closer, kiss Sans a little harder. Drown in the taste of his mouth and the smell of snow and cedar lingering in his hair.

A phone buzzes. Sans makes an irritated noise and slides his hands up into Grillby’s hair like a silent question, or maybe a challenge.

And later, when they’re walking home in the dark, he’ll pull the phone from his pocket and find a stack of texts from Fuku telling him their food arrived, that they’re starting the movie without him, asking where he is, and teasing him about getting lost in the dark. But for now, his phone keeps buzzing.

—  December 25th, 2019 

On Grillby’s first Christmas home, he’d cried. Both when he’d arrived and while trying to say goodbye. He’d only been eighteen, then, and he remembers pulling over on the highway halfway back to Scarborough to hunch, shaking, over his steering wheel, to ask himself whether a four-and-a-half hour distance between himself and his family was worth a certificate and a bar and whatever other things had motivated him at the time, things he can’t remember anymore. It’d felt like pulling stitches too early, twisting the wrong way and snapping all those lines of little black thread, tugging himself apart. 

It got easier as he got older, as the temperature between himself and his family shifted marginally and invisible expectations grew steeper and steeper, until suddenly, coming home started to feel like a mountain climb and leaving a rapid descent back to level ground.

“Now, don’t go eating these all at once, you’ll give yourself a tummy ache.”

His grandmother hands him a tupperware container stacked full with baked goods, mostly shortbread cookies because she knows they’re his favourite, but through the clear-plastic side, he can see gingerbread in there, too. There’s a yellow post-it note taped to the lid that reads, in small, curly cursive handwriting: ‘for Bee & Sans’.

“And you call me as soon as you’re in the door,” she continues, “that little thaw yesterday made the roads freeze up with black ice.”

“I’ll drive slowly,” Grillby replies, tucking the tupperware container under his arm. “Promise.”

It’s only a little after ten-thirty in the morning, but with a five-hour drive back to Stratford ahead of them, Blaise, Kenna and Fuku have already gone, leaving just his father and grandmother to say goodbye to now. His father leans quietly against the arching threshold, his arms crossed over his chest, looking just the same now as he had three days ago waiting for Grillby at the bottom of the stairs.

“Good, good.”

His grandmother fusses with the braid hanging over his shoulder, smoothes her fingers along the plaits and tugs them into loose, symmetrical heart-shapes. A line forms between her thin, silver eyebrows as she fidgets with the elastic fastened around the end.

“Oh, goodness,” she says, shaking her head a little. “It’s always so hard to see you go, my dear.”

He smiles at her, swallowing around the sudden tightness he feels in his throat. Grillby hasn’t cried saying goodbye to his family in eighteen years, but that might be about to change. “It’s not forever, Gran. I’ll be back again before you know it.”

The front door cracks open behind him, flooding the entryway with a sudden rush of frigid winter air as Sans slips back inside, exhaling a shivering breath.

“Car’s packed,” he says. “Everything’s ready to go when you are, G.”

“Suppose I shouldn’t keep you boys then. Sans, come here, dear, come say goodbye.” Grillby’s grandmother has a fond look on her face as she steps up to fold her arms nicely around Sans’ shoulders, unbothered by the thin layer of fluffy snow clinging to the sueded leather of his coat, even as it falls onto the bare skin of her arms. She reaches a hand up to pat his cheek as she pulls away. “You’ll take good care of our Grillby now, won’t you?”

Sans’ smile is small and bashful. “Of course.”

Another handful of soft words and farewells pass between them for the next couple of minutes as his grandmother continues to linger, fretting over Grillby’s hair and his face and the zipper on his coat, worrying needlessly, biding their time together for just a while longer. Eventually, his father pushes away from the threshold and comes to place a hand gently on her shoulder.

“Enya,” Sulien says, “the boy’s engine is running.”

“Oh, alright,” she huffs, folding her hands beneath her chin. Her eyes move from Grillby to Sans and back once, twice, before she nods to herself and takes a small step backwards into the hallway. “Sul, be a dear and come help me get the lounge tidied once you’ve a minute, would you?” 

Then, it’s just his father. Standing in the entryway with his mouth set into a firm line, looking at Grillby with his usual upturned (but still decisively neutral) expression.

“Drive safe,” he says.

“I will,” Grillby replies, shuffling his weight from one leg to the other, adjusting the tupperware container under his arm. Sans settles a steady hand against his lower back. “I’ll see you next year.”

His father has never been one for long or particularly sentimental goodbyes. Even when Grillby was a child and only used to see him on weekends when he’d come home to the cottage from his work-apartment in the city, saying goodbye was a short and polite affair between them, nothing but a kiss on the forehead and the promise that his father would return again the next weekend, too.

His father holds out his hand, and as Grillby reaches forward to shake it, his father takes a half-step forward and catches him by the forearm instead, the nylon of his puffer coat hissing beneath the callous skin of his fingers.

“I’m proud of you,” Sulien says. “I don’t say it enough, but I am.”

Grillby’s throat cinches around his windpipe, constricting like a snake.

“Um—” It doesn’t fix things. It doesn’t erase a year of silence and anxiety, it doesn’t undo the fight they got into last year, and it’s far from being a proper apology, but it’s something. It’s a knot being untangled from the messy web that hangs across that suffocating chasm between them. “—thanks, Dad. I’ll… I’ll call you.”

His father smiles at him, just a little. Then, he releases his grip and jerks his thumb in the direction of the lounge, clearing his throat as he takes a few steps backwards out of the entryway. “Should go help Enya clean before that poor woman tries to take the Christmas tree down herself. Take care, boys.”

It’s a dim, silver Christmas morning. An overcast of clouds rolled in with the cold front overnight, leaving everything covered in a thick, pearly layer of ice. Flurries glitter in the bitter air, falling slowly, swirling on the light breeze. Grillby’s car is purring in the driveway, pulled into the spot where Blaise’s car had previously been, a plume of opaque white fumes puffing out the exhaust pipe.

Sans nudges him with an elbow.

“So?” he says.

“So, it… went okay, I guess.”

“Could’ve been worse?”

“Wasn’t totally horrible,” Grillby replies, bumping their shoulders together before parting around the hood of the vehicle. Sans stops in front of the passenger door, folds his arms on the edge of the roof and rests his chin on them, grinning.

“Funny, y’know, I think I remember one of us saying everything would be fine,” he hums. “Wonder who that could’ve been.”

“Shut up and get in the car, Sans.”

It almost feels strange to be pulling up outside his bar again, even though the last time Grillby had been here was last Saturday night, just shortly after he and Sans had parted ways at the shopping centre. The windows are dark and frosted over, the facade sign’s neon lights dimmed into dull gray lines against a solid black backdrop. It isn’t until he steers into one of the parking spaces reserved behind the building, scarcely ever used by him because Grillby lives too close not to walk to work, that his nerves start to crackle to life, doubt churning in his stomach.

“What’re we doing here?” Sans asks, peering up from his phone with his thumbs still hovering over the keyboard, halfway through writing a text.

“I thought I’d make you a drink,” Grillby says, and at least his voice doesn’t sound as uncertain as he feels, “to say thank you… and because it’s Christmas.”

Sans gives him a funny, crooked smile, but doesn’t say anything. He turns his attention back down to his phone, types out a few more words before he hits send, then locks and returns it to the front of his jeans. He reaches behind him to pull his coat out of the backseat and starts shrugging into the sleeves. 

“Won’t say no to a free drink.”

Grillby unbuckles his seatbelt and climbs out into the chilly city air.

They enter through the side door and pass quietly through the kitchen. Grillby flicks on the barside lights as he goes, flooding the seating area with the familiar, warm glow of the amber sconce lights. A fine, almost invisible layer of dust has settled over the bar, and the air smells stale from the electric auto-heating system.

Sans slides into his usual seat at the end of the counter and leans forward to rest his chin on his palm. His eyes are heavy, lidded, as they watch Grillby slip out of his puffer coat and set about preparing his drink. It takes a little longer than it usually would have, he has to do a lot of back-and-forths between the bar and the kitchen because everything is still put away, but Sans doesn’t complain or even raise an eyebrow. He watches passively, looking content and unhurried, albeit Sans never looks particularly hurried about anything. 

The familiar rhythm of building a cocktail soothes him, marginally. Helps to settle the anxious, itchy feeling under his skin and in his brain and his bones and crawling up and down his esophagus. Grillby sets the Caesar on the counter, wipes his hands on the back of his corduroys, and circles around to take a seat. It’s still odd, sitting in front of the counter instead of standing behind it, being beside Sans instead of across from him.

“So, why’d you really drag me in here? Not that I’m complaining, but—” Sans takes a sip of his drink, hums happily at the taste, then sets it back on the counter. “—we both know it wasn’t for this.”

“The drink is half of it,” Grillby replies honestly.

“And the other half?”

He drums his fingers against the tops of his thighs for a moment before he answers. “I… got you something for Christmas.”

“You didn’t.”

“It’s just one gift!”

“Dammit, G.” Sans sighs, and it sounds exasperated, but the smile on his face is anything but. Wide, full of teeth, maybe a little embarrassed. “We don’t do gifts, we never do gifts.”

“I know, I know,” Grillby says, raising his hands placatingly as he hops down from his stool. “It was a last minute buy—just wait here, I’ll be quick.”

The bar’s back office is sterile and impersonal. Nothing but an empty room with a writing desk in the centre and a filing cabinet against the furthest wall. Grillby doesn’t like to spend time here, and doesn’t often. Only when he needs to file paperwork or draft schedules or, very occasionally, host an interview.

Sans’ gift is tucked into the first drawer of the desk on top of a stack of looseleaf printer paper. It’s not wrapped. In fact, it’s still in the bag the retail cashier packed it into when he bought it, a generic white plastic one no bigger than a book sleeve with the store’s logo printed onto the side of it. Grillby clutches it to his stomach with both hands as he walks back to the barside seating area, crinkling the soft plastic between his fingers, moving slower on the way out than he had been going on the way in.

He finds Sans out of his seat, leaning against the counter with his hands in his pockets. His Caesar is half-finished next to him. He turns when he hears the creak of the Employee’s Only doors, and meets Grillby’s eyes over his shoulder. Grillby nearly stumbles against the feeling of deja vu it gives him. 

That night feels so faraway now.

“It’s not much,” Grillby says. 

He makes his way back around the counter with slow, hesitant steps, glancing down at the plastic bag in his hands, watching the way it flexes and pulls with microtears beneath his thumbs, wrinkling full of transparent stretch marks. He stops to stand a little less than an arm’s length away.

Sans reaches out for him to rest a hand, cold from holding his drink, heavy and steady, on his wrist. He looks up over the top of his glasses, and he’s a little too far away to make sense of the blurry colours and outlines of Sans’ face, but the weight of his touch is enough for him to imagine what the creases around Sans’ eyes and the slight upturn of his lips must look like right now.

“Get out of your head,” Sans replies. “It’s just me.”

Constant, reliable, familiar.

“Just you,” he agrees softly.

He holds the bag out with both hands, and once Sans takes it, he immediately draws them back towards his body, fluttering them momentarily in the empty space around his stomach, before he decides to clasp them beneath his chin to keep from fidgeting. He wants to close his eyes, but he doesn’t, because he also wants to see the look on Sans’ face, his very first reaction. The one that will come before he has a chance to school it into something else.

The white plastic bag flutters quietly to the hardwood floor. Sans’ lips part slightly, his eyebrows furrow, that deep ruby colour blooms across the high points of his face, bronzed slightly by the glow of the amber sconces. His gaze flashes up, dark and ringed in a gleam of orange-gold, then falls back down as he spills open the long, red scarf across his hands.

“I saw you looking at them on Saturday,” Grillby says, quiet like he’s scared of someone else hearing, “and it made me realize you… um, you never replaced the one you used to wear after you gave it to Papyrus.”

Sans’ eyes snap up to him again.

“I considered getting it in a different colour,” he continues, “but I thought you’d appreciate the red.”

“That was over a decade ago. I gave Paps that scarf when he was—I don’t know, like ten or something.”

“Do you not like it?”

“Not like it?” Sans curls his fingers into the bunches of red fabric, buries them in it, twists the scarf up in his hands and draws it to his chest for a moment, before slowly spooling it out to it’s full length. It hangs in a U-shaped curve between his arms, thin and light. He laughs. “Are you kidding? Of course I like it.”

A tension Grillby hadn’t realized he’d been holding in his shoulders melts away, and all at once, the noise inside him hushes to a murmur. He watches as Sans loops the scarf over his shoulders and tucks the ends together around the collar of his coat, a single ribbon of colour against what is, today, an otherwise dark and depthless silhouette, and it feels like peering through a looking glass into the past. Back to 2003, when his bar had been open for little more than a year and business was usually slow, a chilly October evening. Sans’ hair had been shorter, then, his face still fluffy with the last traces of baby fat, and he’d come in wearing his blue hoodie and a bright red scarf looking like he was caught between falling asleep and getting into a fist fight.

The look on his face, now, is entirely fond.

“Thank you,” Sans says. He hooks his fingers into Grillby’s belt loops and pulls him forward, closing the space between them so their bodies run together in a line from their knees up to their chests, then turns and presses his lower back into the bar counter. Grillby laughs and leans his weight against it, letting his arms drape around Sans’ neck and stretch out, long and open, behind him.

Kissing him is different, here. Up against a bar counter that knows sixteen years worth of their secrets, in a room etched with an echo of their voices talking only just loud enough to be heard over drowsy 80s rock music, beneath the familiar glow of the amber sconce lights. It tastes like vodka and tabasco and clamato, and it burns him right down to the core.

“Merry Christmas,” he replies.

THE END