Some time passed. How long, Sans did not know.
DORK.
Drifting in and out of sleep, he dreamed in broken pieces.
DORKER.
As his brain processed memories and emotions of the day, unique fusions flickered through his mind.
YET DORKER.
Not all thoughts were accompanied by images; in fact, his most vivid perception was of a blackness which seemed to symbolize either an end to everything or a boundless new beginning, from which there came a silent voice. It echoed in his head:
THE DORKNESS KEEPS GROWING. BROTON READINGS POSITIVE.
An image appeared in the blackness: a skeleton head, jaw slackened in an innocent, unassuming smile, blush tinging the cheekbones like strawberries. The eyes popped wide with excitement and seemed to fill Sans's whole vision. They grew like saucers in his mind, vast and shining and full of potential, like blank new slates for colors of emotion to splash across, or perhaps pasta dishes waiting eagerly for lifenoodles and soulsauce to be slapped upon them. What was this feeling?
Sans blinked himself awake. He was in the shower. Drenched in his lab coat, he had allowed himself to drift off in the chemical shower after having been emotionally drained, and he now watched as the steadily-cooling water rinsed through the semitransparent white fabric of his sodden lab coat and swirled down the drain in a symbolic fashion. After a few further moments of contemplation, he turned off the showerhead, pulled back the purple curtain (purple was Gaster's favorite color), and stared down the seemingly endless hallway toward the door leading back to the main section of the basement level.
Heedless of the slapping squish his slippers made on the tiled floor, Sans made his way slowly across the treacherously impractical length from the chemical shower to the doorway. A trail of slippery footprints followed him all the way through the lower level halls to the popato chisp machine. After a few fumbled attempts at pushing the correct buttons, he managed to accidentally select the Rigid instead of Cripsy ones, and let out a sigh of resignation and collected the bag when it dropped down. He tugged the bag open with less energy than usual, half-heartedly popping a couple of unyieldingly stiff chisps into his face. They somehow phased through the seemingly etched-on permanence of his grin, and despite his preference for different texture he appreciated that this flavor was drastically less ghetto than he was accustomed to. The only other thing he wanted right now might be coffee, but the brewer was upstairs and he didn't know if he had the strength to bring himself up there just yet. He stood for a few long, arduous moments in the foyer, just eating his chisps.
Finally, back on the brightly lit main floor, there sounded the ding of the elevator. It was followed by a metallic swishing noise as the door slid open to reveal Sans, squinting slightly against the increased intensity in light and glaringly vivid memories of recent events, and shuffled out like a snail, leaving a residual trail of moisture in his wake, as well as dropping the empty popato chisp bag somewhere on the floor. He passed by where Gaster sat in a chair by the incubation tank and heard the scientist reciting something, in an endearing, storytelling manner. Something that invoked an oddly bittersweet feeling of nostalgia within Sans. He paused to listen.
"...If this experiment were performed with a measuring rod at rest relatively to the Galilean system K, the quotient would be pi," Gaster read in a lilting voice from a heavy, black hardbound book, glancing occasionally at the skulleton in the tank, who listened patiently. "With a measuring rod at rest relatively to K, the quotient would be greater than pi," Gaster continued.
"PIE!" exclaimed the resident of the tank, his wide jaw opening in a dynamic grin. Gaster responded with a loving smile, rising up a little from his seat to gently pat the skull on the crown. After a few seconds, it further proclaimed, "QUICHE!" Despite being thoroughly submersed in the liquid, his voice rang out clear and loud as a bell on a chalkboard.
Gaster laughed gently and closed the heavy book with a soft thud. He patted the skull once again with loving pride. "Delightful." He turned then to see Sans, who was watching with an oddly blank expression. "Ah, Sans," he said, standing fully and lifting a neatly folded pile of clothes, including one of the shorter lab coats, from the tabletop. He offered them to Sans with an encouraging smile.
"Thanks," Sans said tiredly, taking the dry clothes and letting go of whatever question he had been going to ask. He was currently trying his hardest to remember whether or not these feelings of nostalgia were accompanied by memories of being inside a tank. However, exhaustion quickly got the better of him and he shrugged it off, taking the clothes upstairs to change. Gaster watched him intently.
When Sans got back from his garmental hiatus, sans lab coat, Gaster's eyes widened questioningly at his son. "I'm gonna step out for a bit," Sans explained, eyes skimming down over himself at the slacks and hoodie he was now wearing. He had on his default pink slippers. He recalled, as he continued to stare at them, that he had originally bought these to serve as a prop in his clever pun; he had told Gaster that he had already given himself the pink slips. It had been a half-serious attempt.
"Where to?" asked Gaster.
"Snowdin," Sans replied in an almost slurred voice, rubbing the back of his head. "There's some stuff I need to pick up."
"Wonderful!" Without hesitation, Sans was handed a small shopping list made from a torn-off piece of blueprint paper. Slowly, he glanced down at it. It was written in wing dings. "God damn it," he muttered. As he strained his already withering mind trying remember how to read these things, Gaster had returned his attention to the young skull in the tank. He was staring at it fixedly, with the same smile anyone but Sans would have taken for vacant.
"Seriously?" Sans said after a while, when he had identified the actual listings Gaster had given him. He heaved a sigh and shuffled toward the nearest doorway, indending to take the shortest shortcut possible.
"But not too short," suggested Gaster softly, turning his face a fraction of an inch toward Sans. He was chuckling almost imperceptibly. But Sans was too tired to feel creeped out or indignant about it. He stepped through the doorway and vanished.
No longer than ten minutes later, Sans stepped back through the doorway briskly. He was looking a little better, a little more energetic; he clasped a half-empty bottle of ketchup in his hand, his other arm wrapped around bags of varying sizes. One could clearly be seen to contain another several bottles of Meinz ketchup. There was a bag full of skeins of orange yarn which he didn't even need to deliver to Gaster; the scientist had already whisked it out of Sans's arms the moment he'd come back in through the door. Had he been waiting at that precise spot by the doorway the entire time?
"Feeling better, Sans?" Gaster asked almost as an aside, though he fixed his white pupils deliberately on Sans through the several balls of orange yarn he was nearly juggling in his excitement.
"Yep," Sans replied truthfully, taking another swig of ketchup. "Gettin' there." He deposited the other couple of bags onto the table beside the main lab desk and said, a little too off-handedly, to Gaster, "Why don't you leave the babysitting to me for a little while? I know you must be excited to get to work on...whatever," he said cautiously, eyeing Gaster playing with the yarn, which was now thoroughly entangled in his hands and skull, being thoroughly assessed for quality.
Gaster didn't look up at Sans, but he seemed deeply thoughtful for the new few moments as he reached in and out of the yarn with a seemingly chaotic intensity. "It is...the perfect color," he commented, presumably to himself, such was the softness of his voice. Sans took his responselessness as assent when Gaster wandered off toward a different section of the lab, still carressing the soft fabric of the yarn lovingly between his fingers, muttering something about calculations of predictable dimensions of height and width. Sans and his new brother were alone in the room now. He shuffled over and sat in the computer chair beside the tank, gazing at his skull-bro.
"Hey there," he said in a mellow tone, to which his brother responded by widening his pupilless eyes and strong jaw excitedly. "I'm your brother Sans." Taking another quaff of ketchup from the bottle in his left hand, his right hand dug around in his hoodie pocket and pulled out a freshly-checked-out book from the Snowdin librarby. The skull's eager stare followed the motion in silent awe, bona fide innocence exuding from it almost palpably.
Sans opened the book. He began to read: "Once upon a time, there was a very fluffy bunny." He glanced at his skelebrother in between lines, his reading tone not quite as storytime-like as Gaster's had been, but still melodic enough - as melodic as a voice like Sans's could be, anyway. He tried to make it convincing. "Fluffy Bunny loved to hide. He hid in holes both far and wide. Then jumped out with surprise. Peek-a-boo, I see you, Fluffy Bunny."
The skull's eyes were now becoming larger, shiny and dark and sparkling as he listened. A rosy blush even began to appear on his cheekbones. If he'd had any hands, Sans would swear, they would be squeezed up to his face right now in avid anticipation. Sans tried to put a little more effort into making the next page as exciting as possible. "In the mailbox, in the walls, Fluffy Bunny couldn't be seen at all," Sans dropped his voice an octave, leaning in toward the tank conspiratorially. "Until...peek-a-BOO!" He flashed the book's illustration up to the glass. Fluffy Bunny was depicted leaping out of the fourth wall, which Sans sort of enjoyed as well, and his brother gasped impossibly inside the surrounding liquid of his incubation tank. Sans chuckled.
He turned to the next page with growing anticipa-sans.