Lights Like Stars (Sans x Reader)

1 - First Impressions

In which you meet the neighbors and receive a nickname.

You

The café is crowded for a Thursday afternoon, but because it's nearing Christmas, you aren't as surprised as you could be. The lunch rush is drawing to a close, and your worn sneakers squeak slightly as you cross the linoleum floor balancing a tray of sandwiches on your forearm, bound for a table near the door occupied by yet another set of extended family members who've not seen each other since last year and are cheerily catching up on each others' lives. The jukebox is on its third run-through of Elvis's "Blue Christmas;" some joker must have punched it in several times, either through ignorance of jukebox operation or with malicious intent. You reach your destination and start passing out plates. Your customers smile and nod as you hand them their orders. One gives you a quiet, "Thanks." The little boy near the end of the table glances down and says, much more loudly, "Your socks are different colors."

"Yeah, they are," you concur wearily. It's a longer story than you'd like to admit, involving laundry day, a malfunctioning alarm clock, and a drunken roommate who apparently threw up in your clean laundry basket sometime last night. The punchline of the morning's chaos was a short skirt displaying, for the public's current enjoyment, one black sock and one white.

You return to the kitchen, grumbling. Roxy steps jauntily up to you, her short blond ringlets bouncing, scrutinizes your face for a moment, and then turns to the small dry erase board hanging on the front of the walk-in freezer. She pops the cap off the marker and, under the heading, "Socks," makes a tick. That brings your socks comment count up to twelve. You blow out a breath. Roxy giggles.

"People are more observant than I thought," you admit. "I owe you a root beer float."

"Not yet," Roxy chirps. "We're still waiting for lucky number thirteen." She draws a circle at the end of the line of black marks, demonstrating the absence of the crucial comment. Roxy has long claimed thirteen as her lucky number, possibly out of pure contrariness. For a walking ray of sunshine, your small friend can be quite hardheaded.

"It's only lunchtime," you counter. "At the rate we're going, it'll be up to twenty by quitting time." You're exaggerating. You'll be going home before the dinner crowds arrive, so, with lunch out of the way, the bulk of your daily custom has been and gone.

"Mama told me not to count my chickens before they're covered in ice cream and sunk in soda."

"Ew." Roxy can be so odd sometimes. The far-off jingle of the bell hanging over the café's front door announces a luncheon latecomer, or perhaps a couple coming in for coffee. "Go man the spatula, you weirdo," you order fondly, heading for the swinging doors to the dining area. Your friend grins brightly at you and flounces off, golden curls bobbing along behind her.

You exit the kitchen just as a loud, clear voice announces, "HELLO, NEW NEIGHBORS! IT IS I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, AND ALSO SANS! WE HAVE FINISHED MOVING AND ARE READY TO MAKE OUR FIRST IMPRESSIONS!" You stop in your tracks, stunned by the speaker even more than the speech. The rest of the dining room seems to share your sentiments, all conversation falling immediately silent, all customers staring towards the front door, as wide-eyed as awestruck children.

The speaker is a monster.

You've heard of the monsters, of course. It's been big news all over the world, but particularly in this area, in the few small towns near Mt. Ebott, the monsters' point of origin. When they first appeared, a new but clearly well-established race that had been living, all unknown, within the nation's boundaries for millennia, there was an understandable panic among the various branches of government as they attempted to cope with the sudden problems that came with the monsters' exodus from the Underground. The monsters had their own king, their own laws, and their own social order. Were they a visiting nation, or an invading force, or should they be considered citizens themselves because they were apparently born here? Should they be allowed to stay as guests, integrated into the country, or sent back to the Underground to await immigration cards? What if one of them committed a crime? Who had jurisdiction, and how would the offender be tried? It's been months since the monsters arrived on the surface, and it seems another ice age might pass before the government decides what to do about them. Luckily, the monsters themselves are few in number, and so far they haven't committed any crimes and have caused only minimal problems, most of those due to ignorance.