Papyrus hates Grillby's. Grillby doesn't take offense to it, as Papyrus has explained his aversion to the greasy smell many times over. It just affects him differently and makes him ill instead of hungry. Grillby's never asked how Papyrus tolerates the smell of Sans, around whom the greasy smell hangs like an aura. He just assumes that it's a sibling thing, something you get used to over time.
Despite his proclaimed aversion to the restaurant, Papyrus comes to Grillby's when he can't find Sans. It's a reflex now. If Sans can't be found at his post, then he's sitting at the bar, either drinking ketchup straight from the bottle or chatting up the bartender, completely at home in the dim restaurant. He teases the patrons, fixes the jukebox for short periods of time, and always laughs the loudest, up until the moment where he passes out just about anywhere and Grillby has to find the phone.
The patrons have bets on how long it'll take Papyrus to come in and retrieve his wayward brother. Some, like the Dogi, can smell him coming from a mile away and so have amassed small fortunes from the practice. No matter what, whether it be on his own or summoned by Grillby, Papyrus always enters with an air of long-suffering affection. Some days, Sans would be asleep on his stool, head pillowed on his arms and covered with a blanket Grillby keeps on hand for this purpose. Other days, he'd be just awake enough to call a sleepy farewell to the bartender as his brother herded him out.
It's not exasperation that brings Papyrus to Grillby's today. Nor is it a call from the bartender.
This time, when the rangy skeleton slams open the front door, the bar is closed and silent. The bartender sits in one of the booths by the windows, watching a powerful snowstorm whirl about outside. Such storms are often made from an excess of magic in the air and are rare in sleepy little Snowdin. When Papyrus announces his presence, Grillby reluctantly looks away from the swirling frost patterns etched on his windows, reaching for the spectacles in his robe's pocket. His every moment is calm and measured and oblivious to the horrors that the coming night will bring.
Papyrus is painfully aware of what is coming and so does not wait for Grillby to put on his spectacles. Instead he comes sliding in, covered in snow and ice, scrabbling for any handhold he can find. Grillby mourns the loss of his clean floor only a moment. He's had worse than ice tracked in here anyway. No; it's Papyrus that holds his attention now, his intense heat dying down to a curious sizzle as he waits for the skeleton to speak.
"S-SANS," the boy stammers, hanging onto the corner of a booth as if it is a lifeline and he a drowning man.
At the word, spoken so desperately, Grillby stands.
It's dangerous for a fire elemental to be out in a storm of this magnitude. He doesn't care. He rams his spectacles onto his face with such force that one of the lenses cracks. Then he's striding out the door, still wearing his favorite robe and his worn slippers.
His slippers begin to slide as soon as they step off the welcome mat outside. He kicks them off, trusting in the fact that his whole body has bristled against the cold, turning him into an inferno of white and gold and orange. Wherever he steps, the snow evaporates. Papyrus walks by his side, skipping a little in his haste, but Grillby does not run. Everything in him screams for him to do so, for him to run like his own life is in peril. He has to remind himself that he is of no use to Sans if he expends all his energy on the way there. Instead, he twists his fear into himself, then pushes it out before him. A sheet of flame plows through the snow leading to the skeletons' home, where it joins its brothers and sisters.
The brothers' house is enveloped in fire and he just has to see the color of it to understand. Hot enough to melt bone. Magic is streaming off the construct, like rats fleeing a sinking ship, and the storm whirls ever tighter around it, seeking sustenance. A crowd of locals stand at the storm's edges, siphoning off the blistering winds and casting them to the farthest corners of the town.
Misha, one of the town's two bear residents, tears a sizable chunk of storm off the whole and consumes it as if it is nothing but spun sugar, hissing the weakened energy out through his teeth. "Come here, son!" he calls when he sees Papyrus. And then, when he sees Grillby, "Help me make way for the fire elemental!" is roared over the howl of the wind.
Papyrus is at his side in a heartbeat and Grillby catches the scent of bubblegum full in the face as the skeleton rips a Grillby-shaped hole from the storm and crushes it between his gloves. "GO!" he commands and he does so, ducking into the eye of the storm.
All he can hear is fire now, licking the house and eating sheets of it in a feeding frenzy. The house's brick frame is mostly unharmed, however, so Grillby rolls up the sleeves of his robe and walks under the blazing doorframe.
The house is a mess. Everything and anything the brothers took pride in must be a smoking mess by now, if not completely liquefied. He steps around the remains of the living room table, now ashes scattered in a haphazard pattern across the discolored brick. The awful striped carpet is long gone, but he has no time to rejoice in its demise. He rescues Sans's pet rock from the ground, juggling it from hand to hand to cool it before slipping it into his pocket.
"Sans," he calls, navigating the melting furniture with feet now blazing blue-white. His voice is soft from disuse and he has to try again in order to be heard over the fire. "Sans, what's eating you?" The old-fashioned language slips in, a remnant of a childhood long gone. When they were young, Sans used to mimic Grillby's strange slang, squawking 'Oh my stars!' whenever something startling happened and receiving an elbow to the ribcage for it.
There's no response and he continues. "Sans, it's me." The words are unnecessary, as most words are. Sans knows who it is. Sans always knows.
"You're frightening Papyrus. You're frightening the whole town." Stepping over what might have once been a book, Grillby ascends the carcass of the staircase, hand grazing the wall. Heat radiates from it, fire hiding in the walls. The reminder that the house could fall at any moment makes him jump the last few steps onto the landing. The floor looks to be absolutely coated in soot, just like the rest of the house, and he grimaces at the sight. "I'm adding this to your tab!" he declares. He cleans out his fireplaces for this exact reason, so he doesn't get soot on his floors.
He raises his hand to tap at Papyrus's door. Every single one of Papyrus's signs has gone up in smoke and he can still see a ghost of blue magic over the door. It's not enough to even sting now, so he knocks. At the touch of his hand, the door itself poofs into dust. The black soot clings to his bathrobe like snow, despite his gentle attempts to dislodge it. "Added: one burning house. And the cleaning costs of my best robe." He doesn't even try to make his voice sound jovial.
Papyrus's room is untouched by heat. His collection of action figures stands guard on his bedside table, his skeleton banner hangs proudly on the wall. Grillby puts a few figures in his robe's other pocket, to give to Papyrus if the house doesn't make it. Papyrus has been collecting these since he was six and it would be a shame for him to have to start such a fine collection completely from scratch.
The bed is too low to the ground to conceal Sans underneath it, so Grillby opens the closet. Nothing in there but Papyrus's clothes, all neatly hung up. When he turns to survey the room again, it clicks in his mind why it was warded. The bed has been stripped of its sheets and the pillow thrown to the floor. The corner of the carpet nearest the window is rumpled, the computer and desk facedown on the floor as far from the window as Papyrus could drag them. The window is open and, when Grillby looks out it, he can see the remains of a makeshift rope being steadily consumed by fire. It does not take a genius to understand what had happened.
There is only one other place in the house where Sans could be. As he walks along the upstairs hallway, Grillby looks over the shambles of the house. Sighing at the loss, he taps the bottom of Sans's door with his toes. When it does not immediately crumble away like everything else, his temper, usually as placid as a child's, flares. With a violent twist of his body, he slams his knee into the center of the door, creating twin holes in both the polished wood and the knee of his pants. He hits the door again, this time with a fist, and it gives, turning to dust on impact.
"Sans, I hate to do this," he announces to the silent room. His statement reveals his deceit. Had he been apologetic, he would have said nothing at all. Without making a sound, Grillby moves to the center of the room, stepping over the silent treadmill and the remains of what was most likely Sans's trash tornado, now still and scattered across the floor. He assesses the room, then drops to his knees, snakes an arm around the bureau, and catches a fibula. He yanks Sans out, intending to give him the worst of his angry stares. Instead, he is very nearly slammed into the corner of the bureau as Sans lunges back into the shadows. Despite being short, Sans is powerful and it is only Grillby's reflexes that prevent him from breaking his face on the sturdy chest of drawers.
Realizing that perhaps force wasn't the best way to go about this, Grillby inches around to the back of the bureau and squeezes himself into the space Sans has made behind it, ignoring the way that Papyrus's action figures seem intent on puncturing his thigh. The skeleton himself is pressed into the corner of the wall, knees tucked up under his chin. Looking at him, Grillby thinks that he understands the meaning of the term 'larger than life.' When he's talking, Sans can make anyone think that he's big and tough and confident, but when his voice is slow in coming, when he's curled up in the corner with his blue eye bubbling like tears, he's so very small.
"Sans? What are you doing?" In his question is every question he has. Why are you doing this? What did you do to Papyrus? Are you trying to set the whole town on fire? and most importantly, the question he can't ask: Are you okay? Because Sans is not okay. Sans has not been okay for a very long time and Grillby, like everyone else, is only realizing the extent of it now.
"eighty-nine," the skeleton tells him in a dead voice, the black of his empty eye as dark as the pits of Hell. Every syllable of the number is charged with hate, hate that he's only heard late at night when the skeleton has had too many bottles of ketchup and the excess magic is tipping him over an edge that no one can see.
"You're not letting it become ninety," Grillby says, hoping he's saying the right thing when Sans is being so cryptic.
"damn right i'm not," he snarls back, fingers digging at the edges of his eye sockets.
They sit there, almost nose to nose in Sans's little pocket of safety. Sans is mostly unresponsive, his eye remaining hollow as the other runs over with blue. His magic is colder than it's ever been and Grillby can only faintly smell the lavender of it, the Sans part of it. He doesn't remember this Sans from when they were children. He remembers a loud and lovably excitable friend, almost as loud and lovable as Papyrus, not a hollow-voiced stranger who spouted numbers without context and magic without life. And it is magic that is fueling this fire, magic being pulled from Sans without his consent if the lack of Sans's lavender is anything to go by. This is a panic attack of some sort, stress manifesting in one of the most harmful ways.
Grillby can't voice these thoughts, so instead he says "You're frightening Papyr-"
"they killed him eighty-nine times," Sans says quietly. "i'm not doing it again. i'm not letting him die."
"He's safe. He's with Misha right now." Grillby runs over the possible context for Sans's statement. Papyrus dead is not an easy thought. The young skeleton is so exuberant, so full of life that it seems impossible to picture him as a heap of soft grey dust. But Sans is so disturbed that he seems insane with it. Grillby moves closer to him, hooking his fingers around his wrist and prizing it away from his eye socket. "He's safe, Sans."
Sans blinks at him and Grillby feels him shudder even as he hears the bones click against each other. The blue eye flickers, a candle almost guttered out. He releases his friend's wrist and brings his palms together in a silent clap. "Now chill."
He didn't think it would work, but slowly the corners of Sans's eyes narrow. Grillby smiles now, his whole body burning back to a deep orange out of relief. When the skeleton's face is a shade of its smiley self, Grillby pats him on the shoulder and squeezes himself out from behind the bureau.
"You need a minute? You look a little burnt out." These puns are terrible. Grillby isn't the comedian in the friendship. But Sans is laughing, little wheezes of mirth that sound horribly painful and look even worse. After a while, these die out, leaving only the sound of Grillby's flame and the roar of the ones outside the room.
He glances towards the doorframe, wondering how much time they have before the fire decides to invite itself in. When he looks back, he's greeted by his friend's grey-white eye lights, closer now. "grillbz, you need to turn up the heat on those puns. they're pretty raw-ful. leave the burns to the master."
Grillby holds out a hand and Sans, after a moment, takes it. When their hands meet, he feels the rush of magic entering his fingertips, searching desperately for an outlet, and he feels the house cooling in the way that some can feel the change in air pressure. He would complain of a headache, but he's too busy laughing in relief. He sounds like a woodstove and Sans sounds like smoke, faint and ready to disappear.
It's almost funny how little the skeleton weighs. If Grillby had been the comedian, he would have made a joke, something about skin and bones. But he isn't, so he just gets to his feet, drawing Sans up with him. "Keep your hood up," he warns. Skeletons might not have lungs, but smoke inhalation is always a danger to souls. When Sans does as he's told, Grillby leads him out of the room and into the ruined house.
They exit the wreck just as the storm dies down. Papyrus is there, scooping his brother up in a bone-crushing hug. Grillby acknowledges praise from onlookers before he too is added to the brothers' embrace. He stands within it for a few moments, then feels uneasy and intrusive enough to duck back out of the ring of Papyrus's arms.
The house is burnt nearly to a crisp, smoke rolling in waves off the remains of the roof. Grillby looks at the wreck with almost grief. That house had felt like a third parent to him, as odd as it sounds. He'd spent much of his childhood running through it, playing hide-and-go-seek with the two skeleton brothers, a game that turned into Monsters and Humans as Papyrus got older and recognized his dream of being a Royal Guard. Some days, they'd played in the kitchen, Grillby learning new recipes from…someone. Maybe a book. He doesn't quite recall now, but he can remember asking if he could come back every day.
And now, now the old house is a shadow of itself, with the three people who loved it most standing outside in the snow instead of under its roof. As he watches, the upstairs collapses in on itself, the Snowdin Canine Unit throwing up a reflexive protection shield around the onlookers in order to divert possible shrapnel. When none is forthcoming, the shiny white wall dissipates, leaving only the pungent smell of wet dog and the slightly nutty scent of fresh-baked biscuits.
He turns from the house to the skeletons, who have been draped in blankets by Dogaressa and Dogamy. The rest of the dogs, loyal to a fault, come in for hugs and pets, even twitchy old Doggo. Their ancestors used to work with children before the need for a Guard came about and it's nice to see that those instincts haven't quite died out. Papyrus has his face buried in Greater Dog, who has wriggled out of his armor in search of affection, and Lesser Dog is patting Sans's head in an interesting reversal of roles.
Doggo, never one to make too big a fuss, has dug up an umbrella, which he is holding over Grillby's head. He can always see the bartender because fire never quite stops moving. Grillby gives the dog a thankful nod and takes the umbrella from him, resting it against his shoulder. His face stings now that he focuses on it and he realizes that the snowflakes have probably peppered him with the fire elemental equivalent of burns. It's nothing that can't be fixed with a swig of something flammable.
"Grillby? (Grillby?)" the canine couple says, wandering up to him with their tails wagging at half-mast. "We were wondering (not to impose upon you) but perhaps (we should all go back to the bar)?" Their method of speaking is disorienting, but their concern is impossible to mistake and their intentions are good. "The skeletons (poor pups), they may be in a state of shock. (Blankets can only do so much, you understand.)"
He nods briskly, turning on his heel and walking back to where Papyrus is holding both Greater Dog and Sans as he sits cross-legged in the snow. The older skeleton is dozing off, cuddled up against his brother's ribcage, but the younger looks up and his eyes glint? Maybe? But it's more probably just Grillby's reflection along the polished bone around his eye sockets. Sans has said before that Papyrus has very little orange magic in him, definitely not enough for the glow that Sans can produce.
He reaches down and picks up Greater Dog, who squirms slightly in his grasp and makes a huffing sound of annoyance. He puts them back into their armor, then extends a free hand to Papyrus. "Coming?" he asks, making his voice gentle.
Papyrus gives him a trademark sunny smile, but it looks hollow, his gaze drifting back to the wreck of the house. Grillby taps the side of his skull to bring his attention back from the dark places it was most probably going. "I do know how to make pasta," he continues, although food is the least of their worries. Already he is working on solutions for the other issues that the skeleton brothers' current situation provokes.
The younger of the two nods briskly, wrapping his arms around his brother as if Sans is a stuffed toy. He stands up like a baby animal, ignoring the hand even as his knees wobble. Grillby reaches out and steadies him, patting his elbow when he's sure that Papyrus can support himself, but is not quite surprised when the young skeleton leans on him. When he'd met the bone brothers, Papyrus stumbling over himself had been a common occurrence. At age eight, the skeleton had just hit his first growth spurt and when he wasn't checking and rechecking his height, he was tripping. Grillby had gotten used to catching the little skeleton before he smashed against the ground. It is harder now that Papyrus is taller than him, but they manage somehow, walking back to the restaurant with most of Snowdin following.
He settles the two in a booth and darts around, turning up the lights. The dogs sit in booths around the brothers, growling like thunder at anyone who even tries to come near them. Doggo chews worriedly on the stub of his dog treat because Grillby most definitely will not let him light it inside. With good reason too. Grillby, like most fire elementals, smells like an autumn bonfire. Lit dog treats smell like someone's burning rubber chickens and if everyone isn't already sick from smoke inhalation, that will rile a few too many stomachs.
Satisfied that everyone is comfortable, he ducks into the kitchen and up the stairs to his apartment. It looks much like the bar downstairs, sans restaurant features and with a bed and a desk and a few books scattered around. He needs to pick those up. Sometime. For now, he goes to the closet and pulls blankets down from the higher shelves. As he walks back down the claustrophobic staircase, he runs his hands over each blanket, warming them just the slightest. People like being warm and he intends to make everyone relax.
The inhabitants of Snowdin are grateful for the blankets. At the dinosaur child's behest, he uses a safety pin to fasten their blanket around their neck like a cape. The child scrambles back to their parents and sister, who sit in the Canine Unit's normal place. The picture of peace is almost complete, but people still look a little shaken. He drums his fingers on the counter and alights on a solution.
"Doggo?" he calls.
The dog comes padding over, biting down hard on his dog treat as he grunts acknowledgement.
"Sorry, but could you fill some of the kettles with water for me?" He hates to ask, but it looks like the people will need tea and Grillby can't get the water himself, no matter how hard he tries. He always manages to spill some and then he has to wrap his arms in bandages and wear longer sleeves and the whole thing just becomes one big mess.
Doggo's used to being asked though and he just nods before slinking past him towards the kitchen.
Grillby crinkles his eyes gratefully at the dog's retreating back before sliding into the bench across from the brothers. He hands his last bundle of blankets over to Papyrus, but his eyes are on Sans. The older skeleton is awake and toying with a napkin, fingers methodically shredding it into long strips. Even the low lighting, ideal for hiding, fails to conceal the dark circles under his eye sockets.
The bartender taps on the table. He has to do it a couple of times before Sans will look at him. Very softly, as to not draw more attention than they have already, Grillby says "Care to open your bone box and explain?"
Sans surprises him by nodding. "eighty-nine times," he says very softly. "eighty-nine times i've seen this place empty, grillbz. cold and dark and quiet as death. in waterfall, that old music memorial, it's shattered. there are pieces of it everywhere. the kid did that."
"THE KID?" Papyrus prompts, when Sans grows silent. The smaller skeleton props his chin up on his fist and his mouth curves into a Cheshire grin that he doesn't really mean.
"the human kid, paps. you haven't met them yet. i don't know why. maybe the lady's giving 'em a run for their money." His head shifts so he's staring at the tabletop, and his hands reach back to pull his hood over his face, kneading the plush inside with his knuckles.
"Got the water," Doggo announces, appearing silently at the table. He has two kettles and his dog treat gripped so hard between his teeth that there is a vein pulsing in his throat. Grillby takes the teapots with another crinkle of his eyes and Doggo wags his tail back before wandering over to interfere with Lesser Dog's poker game. He always helps them cheat and it never works out.
Grillby balances a teakettle on each palm, heating them slowly as he listens to the story unfold. And, stars, he almost wants to close his mind to it because the story Sans is telling, it's true, all of it.