"Did losing a half-hour of sleep mess you up that much?"

Kip awoke with a snort and a sudden awareness of Dierk standing in the doorway. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up.
"Is it lunchtime?"
"Yes, and Gaster won't wake up, again. Do your magic?"
Kip got up silently and headed up to the study.

This time Gaster had fallen asleep at his desk, head lolled sideways between his arms. His hands rested on a clutter of papers. He was wearing oval glasses. The earpieces were attached to his earless skull with pieces of masking tape.
"Gaster," called Kip, touching his wrist. When that got no reaction he lifted his hand and tugged gently. Gaster shifted and raised his head a few inches.
"Eurrgh."
"It's lunchtime."
"Alreadyy?"
Gaster started to sit up. His pelvis slipped off the front of the chair and he disappeared under the desk with a frantic scrabble which knocked a few papers off the desk to flutter slowly to the floor. He reappeared a moment later, considerably more awake.
"Hi."
"Hello." Kip tapped his own glasses. "You look nice."
"Oh. Thank you." Gaster smiled and fiddled with the end of his sleeve. There was an uncomfortable silence as they stared at each other across the desk. "...Lunch?"
On a whim, Kip smiled and held out his hand. Gaster looked at it for a moment, then ducked under the desk, came up next to him and took it. Kip dropped his hand without letting go and laced their fingers together. Gaster looked like his brain had blanked out, so Kip pulled him towards the door.
"You might need to start taking naps during the day."
"I do, sometimes."
"I meant not on your desk. Lying down, comfortably."
"Oh. No, I'm fine."
"Did you not sleep well last night?"
"Aah... no. Oh yeah, I woke you up."
"Were you smoking in my room?"
"...Was I? I might have been? I was thinking about other things. Sorry."
"Don't apologize, I don't mind. It just startled me a bit."
"Mhm."
"While we're on the subject of sleep, would you like me to keep waking you up, or would you prefer Dierk to do it?"
"Uhh no I'd like you to do it. If you don't mind."
"I'd love to."
Kip brushed his thumb over the skeletal knuckles. Gaster opened his mouth and then shut it without saying anything.

Another five days passed. Kip woke Gaster in the mornings, after placing a new paper flower beside his plate, and walked down to breakfast with him. Once Gaster fell asleep while dressing and Kip buttoned his shirt, carried him downstairs and propped him in his chair.
He'd started wearing his glasses to meals, and for the rest of the day, when Kip saw him, they were generally either pushed down over his nasal bone or hooked over his collar. Kip didn't remark on it, but was quite amused at the degree of self-consciousness it showed. He hadn't thought Gaster cared about his looks. Evidently he did, at least in some ways. And Kip was influencing his opinions: evidently he'd decided it was OK to wear glasses in public.

Gaster would slowly wake up over the course of breakfast, then disappear into his study to do whatever it was that he did. Kip considered another sneak in to see whether his notes had changed substantially. He did wonder what Gaster was accomplishing, and whether he actually went there to nap. Or cry.

After lunch Gaster generally disappeared back into his study, but twice Kip convinced him to stay out long enough for a game of cards. The second time he fell asleep in his chair, where he continued to sleep for an hour, until Kip woke him. In the evenings they played chess (Gaster continued to lose, but was steadily improving) or, if Gaster didn't feel up to it, watched Kip play piano.

Pink rose. Golden lotus. Light green carnation. White lily. Red daylily.
Gaster had begun telling time in flowers. He knew they were from Kip, though he never managed to ask and Kip never commented on it, but every morning there was a new flower there beside his plate. The rose's petals were blanched at the bottom, flushing to their brightest color at the outermost edges. Heat reaction, he'd decided after examining the petals in his study. Heat had a bleaching effect similar to light, both disrupted the chemical bonds in the dyes in the paper. The change in color was beautiful. He spent half an hour turning it over and over in his hands. This one was perfect, Kip couldn't do better, he thought. The rest of the flowers proved him wrong.
The lotus was singed brown at the tips of its petals, and the boxy pistil at the center had a dotted pattern across the top. The carnation's edges were cut—burned, actually, which was even more impressive—in a delicate fringe. Gaster hadn't known it was possible to control fire that precisely. The lily, a stylized twist of a calla lily, was breathaking in its minimalist beauty. The edges were seared a precise black, perfectly smooth, and there was a yellow spadix just visible from where it was glued inside. After the carnation he'd started using glue, though Gaster was at a loss as to where he'd gotten it from. Dierk? Being uncharacteristically helpful for once? The daylily's bloom was tilted, opening at a slant, to look better lying down, and dark stripes of burnt color trailed down its throat. The petals were speckled as if from a shower of precisely controlled sparks that winked out as soon as the paper began to darken.
He cleaned out a drawer of his desk and kept the flowers from previous days there. He always kept one on his desk, where he could look at it while he worked. It was almost alarming, the regularity at which they appeared. When was he making them?

Kip had plenty of time to make flowers. He had nothing else to do while Gaster was working but nap and think, or read. The books in the house—or, at least, the ones that had been left—were all very dull, neutral or human-fixated. He played solitaire once and decided he hated it. He wondered what Dierk got up to.
Perhaps he practiced intimidating knife tricks in front of the mirror, intimidatingly.
It was therapeutic to sculpt the little shapes with his hands and magic. A portion of his 'training' had been set up to alienate him from his own magic, presumably because the humans felt threatened by monster Companions who could use magic easily. Kip retained a clinging sense of wrongness, a bad taste in the back of his throat when he used his magic now. It was surprising to him to find that it all worked as it was supposed to. It didn't feel like it should.
So he slowly, carefully, used his fire to trim the edge of a carnation petal to a fringe, focusing on the ease and familiarity of it, shaking off the feeling.

Yet another flower appeared, rose-shaped again but this time with stripes of variegated color, red and bleached tan. Gaster needed to do something.
"Dierk," he said. Dierk looked at him in surprise. As a rule, Gaster avoided speaking to him. "Do we have any alum?"
"...Alum. Maybe. Why do you want it?"
"Experiment."
Dierk gave him a funny look.
"I'll check and see."
"Please do, and tell me when you've looked."
Whew. He actually said words and didn't mess it up. Nice. He sneaked a glance at Kip to see if he guessed what he was planning. He was hard to read, but he looked pretty blank. Maybe he didn't know? Could Gaster actually surprise him with something? Good.

That evening, two-thirds of the way through a chess game which Gaster had initially done well in but was now steadily losing, he said "Hey... I just.. wanted to say something that... OK. Um. God I should have said this two weeks ago."
This would be important. He'd been doing the nervous tic he did when he was trying to work up to saying something for the entire game, rubbing the sleeve of his sweater between a thumb and forefinger.
Kip gave him a brief, encouraging look before pretending to return most of his attention to the game. Didn't want to give him stage fright.
Gaster kept rubbing his sleeve, a little faster now, preoccupied.
"Um. Listen. You don't owe me anything."
Kip looked up at him.
"I just... wanted to clear that up. You know? Because this... You're not here for a happy reason, OK. You shouldn't be here at all. This doesn't make sense, and I don't know what the organization told you your job was, but I won't hold you to it, because it's not fair."
Kip tilted his head sideways.
Ha. Gaster was having scruples. Cute, especially in a monster who was helping mastermind the destruction of his entire race. (Maybe. He reminded himself to keep open the possibility that Gaster was still on their side... somehow.)
"I'm not making sense," muttered Gaster, rubbing his face in his hands; "OK. The contract basically says I own you. I don't own you. People can't own each other, it's one of the basic facts of reality."
"Then don't say it like that. We belong to each other."
"Alright, that, that sounds better, yeah. But then why are you the one with the tattoo?"
"I'm your Companion."
"And that doesn't bother you, at all?"
Kip shook his head slowly.
"Should it?"
"... no. I mean. I guess this is good, this is a good thing, that you're not upset. Um."
Kip was beginning to look concerned.
"Are you going to send me away?"
"No! Can I even do that? What would happen to you?"
"I don't know."
"Alright, no, I wasn't even thinking about that don't worry—actually I don't know if they'd let me. Anyway I wouldn't do that to you, it'd just throw you back into the system... I can't change anything." He buried his face in his hands. "I'm sorry. I just... thought I could make things better. Haha."
Externally, Kip was concerned. Internally he was laughing maniacally. Guilt. So much guilt. It made him giddy. Guilt was an excellent motivator, and Gaster was at least half infatuated with him already. It wouldn't be hard to make him hate himself. God he'd love to see that.
(...Why was he so incredibly happy about this? When exactly did he become such a cruel person?)
Alright, but it would be nice to feel like he could control Gaster reliably, and this seemed like the best way at the moment.
He decided to twist the knife a little.
"Hey. Hey." He reached across the board and took Gaster's hands in his, gently pulling them away from his face. His eyes were damp. "It's OK, Gaster. Don't think about it too much."
"Yeah." he nodded. Kip pulled his hands closer and kissed his knuckles.
"I love you," he said.
If he'd used a physical knife Gaster's reaction might have been the same. He gave him a long betrayed look before saying "Don't say that."
"...Why?"
"I...You don't have to." Kip continued to look at him blankly. "And I'll want to believe you."
"If it's true..."
"Don't say it."
"Alright." Kip smiled. "I would die for you."
"Um. What?"
"It's in the contract you keep mentioning, actually. But I'd rather not think about that. It's my mission to keep you safe, because I l—because I'm your Companion. And I will." his smile broadened. "I would love to die for you."
Gaster gaped at him for several seconds, his hands limp in Kip's. Then he recovered and squeezed Kip's hands.
"You're...you're not going to. It's OK, I'll take care of you. I promise."
Kip nodded brightly, inwardly wondering if that was too much. Making Gaster feel overprotective could also have complications. Damn, he was hard to predict.
...Actually, he'd been fairly consistent, so far. Kip just had trouble believing in his act. But he needed to get over that if it was throwing him off.
Alright. Anxious, eager to please, sad scientist with no friends. Kip was starting to lean towards the theory that Gaster was a simple coward who'd been scared into cooperating with the humans by direct threats against his physical wellbeing. (Dierk was a prime, though not exactly subtle, example of the Republic's fondness for appeals to the stick as a compelling rhetorical device. Dierk, by the way, had offered no further explanation for his earlier threats, and Kip was inclined to read it as a display of pent-up resentment packaged as an incentive to Kip to hurry up and make himself useful.) In that case Kip's mission would probably be to kill him. If he'd snapped once, even if he hadn't revealed everything at the time, he would later. And anyway, he'd already done enough damage. He should be killed for betraying the trust of his King and his people.
Also Kip just really wanted to kill someone, Kip admitted. That's why he was there. That's why he had put up with three months of abuse and brainwashing. Just to get here, look this filthy traitor in the eyes and then break him.

Alright. At the moment, his mission was to befriend Gaster. Make him feel comfortable. Learn his weaknesses. How he used those weaknesses would be decided later, when he knew more.

"I know," he said, and pressed Gaster's hands to his face before releasing them. His magic pulse had become tangible through the bones of his hands, signaling the skeleton equivalent of a racing heart. Good.

A/N: oh hekk that last chapter was so bad someone un-bookmarked this fic haha..ha. Yeah that was pretty disturbing man but I mean the rest of the fic isn't all flowers and puppies either. ...It was pretty disturbing. ... I'm sorry. I hope I didn't actually severely traumatize anyone. There's a reason for the M rating and it is that I will occasionally do stuff like this.

Anyway. Little inside joke which went right over Gaster's head because he's Gaster.

Green carnations are a symbol of homosexuality. Round of applause for Kip.