The shopping district was a cordoned-off avenue, with decorative bollards at each end to block vehicles from entering. The buildings were older, two or three stories tall and built of sturdy brick and mortar instead of modern glass and steel.
It was a much nicer area than most of the places I frequented, full of expensive boutiques and upscale gastropubs.
I felt distinctly out of place in my ratty hoodie and frayed jeans.
“The receptionist recommended the bookstore,” I mumbled as I shoved my discomfort to the back of my mind. I pulled the stack of paperwork from my bag to check the sticky note. “ The Feather Quill .”
The street was busy but not crowded. Groups of people congregated beneath space heaters, chatting and laughing in the chill. Determined to enjoy the last Sunday of the year before winter truly took hold.
We passed a burger joint and the smell of meat and grease set my mouth watering. A glance at the menu quelled my hunger, leaving me queasy instead.
“I dunno how anyone could stomach those prices. Just looking at them killed my appetite,” I said to Sans as we continued our search.
I was rewarded with a small chuckle, which I celebrated with my usual fist pump and a soft “Fuck yeah!” – drawing another snicker out of him.
“Let’s hope the café is more affordable or … uh … “ I stuttered to a stop, trying to remember what I had been trying to say. When nothing came to mind I shrugged. “Thought I’d think of something before I got to the end of that sentence, but here we are and I’ve got no thoughts. My brain is as empty as my stomach.”
“ Donut worry,” Sans said. “Not everyone can be a wiener .”
I stared at him.
He had punned back.
He never punned back.
I nearly tripped over my own feet in surprise.
“Six points,” I said as I regained my composure, hoping he hadn’t seen my lack of coordination. Hoping my tone actually sounded casual and level. “Out of ten.”
Sans’ eyelights flickered over to me, his skull tilted in what I interpreted as curiosity. I pointed back toward the burger joint. “They didn’t have donuts on the menu. Or hot dogs.”
Sans snorted and gave me a loose shrug.
“Y’gotta grab the opportunities as they pun .”
“Oof. That one was way too forced. Two points. One for pity, one for effort.”
“Tough crowd,” he muttered.
“What can I say?” I said. “I only accept bad jokes of the highest tier. Gotta give me the top-shelf of punnery. Nothing else will do.”
“Yeah? How’d that happen?”
“Life,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “It’s the worst joke I know.”
Silence.
I glanced back at Sans, my gaze falling immediately on his collar and souring my nascent good mood. I turned away, ashamed.
What right did I have to complain? All the bad shit in my life I’d brought upon myself.
“Hey,” Sans said, drawing my attention back to him. He was looking across the street. “Is that it?”
The Feather Quill was larger than I had expected. Stairs at the back led to a second level, and there was an opening into one of the adjacent buildings.
A chime jingled as we entered.
“Welcome! Anything I can help you find?”
The girl at the cash register smiled brightly. She closed the book she had been reading, saving her place with what looked like a strip of receipt paper.
“Uh, the café?” I asked, unable to stop staring at her hair. It looked like cotton candy, pulled up into twin buns on either side of her head.
“Upstairs,” she said, pointing toward the back of the shop. “Stairs are right over there, or if you want there’s an elevator. It’s old and creepy but I promise it’s safe. I just had it looked over. Just don’t do anything stupid and it’ll be fine.”
With that glowing endorsement I was definitely going to take the stairs.
“I recommend the ham and cheese panini, personally, but everything’s good. We’re not licensed for monster food, but Beau – our barista – can infuse whatever you’d like.”
“Infuse?” I asked. Before Sans or the checkout girl could answer my stomach growled, and I shook my head. “Never mind.”
I began walking toward the stairs with a nod toward the girl, “Thanks.”
“No problem. If you need anything just holler. Name’s Sparrow.”
“Welcome to The Roost!”
I shouldn’t have been so surprised by the barista.
Although it was difficult to not be surprised by a seven-foot tall baby-blue bipedal rabbit.
It wasn’t weird to see monsters around Ebott, doing odd jobs or running errands, but it wasn’t common .
Monsters were expensive, and the desire to dominate and control other people rarely intersected with the wealth to do so. There were obviously people who owned slaves – like my mother or Apollo. My mother had likely maxed out at least one credit card in order to buy the rabbit lady. A small price to pay to have someone to control. Apollo believed having a monster would help promote his bar and make it a destination, so he determined that the expense was worth it.
It didn’t hurt that his family was loaded.
Most monsters were owned by large corporations. They did similar work to me – monotonous, soul-crushing, “unskilled” labor on factor lines or in fields. Or they were forced to do the tasks that had been deemed to dangerous for humans.
“Anything I can get for you?” the rabbit asked.
Most monsters weren’t baristas as cozy bookstore cafés.
“We’re just looking,” I said as I neared the counter, lost in my thoughts. The words stilted to my own ear. I felt uneasy, patronizing somewhere that had a monster slave – especially when I didn’t know the owner. At least I knew Apollo. He was a narcissistic asshole, but he treated Grillby well enough.
“Spiffy! Just let me know when you’re ready.”
“Still saying ‘spiffy’, Beau?” Sans asked, his tone friendly and pained.
I glanced between the two monsters, surprised out of my dark thoughts. “You two know each other?”
“Lived in the same town,” Sans explained with a shrug. He began to look at the pastries in the display case. “We were business rivals.”
“Business rivals?” I repeated, curious and intrigued. It was so rare for Sans to talk about his past in the Underground, before the Barrier fell.
“If you could call it a rivalry,” Beau said. “There wasn’t much market for fried snow.”
“There wasn’t much for ice cream, either, bud.”
The banter felt natural, and eased some of my misgivings. I was still uneasy, but at the very least I could give Sans some time with someone he knew.
I held my hand out to the rabbit, “My name’s Terra. It seems unfair I should know yours when you don’t know mine.”
He took my hand and shook it twice, his smile growing a little.
“Beauregard, but please – call me Beau.”
“Nice to meet you!” I said sincerely. I glanced at Sans as I took my hand back. “Find anything good?”
“Tomato soup,” Sans said, his attention still firmly on the options in the case. I couldn’t tell if he was avoiding looking at me, Beau, or if the cold turkey and ham sandwiches were just that interesting.
“Cool,” I said as I pulled my wallet out of my bag. “Can we get a tomato soup and a ham and cheese panini? Sparrow suggested it.”
“Of course!” Beau said brightly as he rang up the order and counted out my change. “I’ll have that out to you in a jiffy!”
“Thanks,” I said as I took my change and the receipt. I dropped the coins into the tip jar before adding a few extra dollars.
It was the least I could do.
The café covered about half of the second floor of the store. Sandwiched between the Young Adult section and the graphic novels and manga, it was made up of some tables and chairs as well as a couple of couches. I commandeered one to work on the medical paperwork for Sans.
The very … uncomfortably thorough medical paperwork.
I had managed to get through the first section when Sans came over with my sandwich and his soup.
I frowned at the panini. It looked delicious and was a good size, but I wasn’t certain it would hold me through my night shift.
Of course, not eating it definitely wouldn’t keep me going through my night shift …
I pushed the paperwork away in favor of eating.
“How’s your food?” I asked around a bite of sandwich, watching Sans stir his soup without eating it.
“S’alright,” he said. “I’m just not soup- er hungry.”
I snorted at the pun, but the improvement to my mood was short-lived. I glanced back toward the counter, where Beau was sitting with a book.
“We can get it to go … I’ll eat it later if you don’t want it.”
Tomato soup was far from my favorite food, but I couldn’t stand the idea of wasting it.
Sans shrugged, and we lapsed back into silence. I decided to leave the topic alone for now. If we needed to get back to the clinic before he’d finished eating I could get a to-go box.
I ate in silence, looking at the paperwork from the corner of my eye.
“You ever had one of these before?”
Sans raised a brow at me – an expression I still couldn’t fully reconcile with his skeletal face.
“Soup?”
“The medical thing,” I clarified with a wave at the paperwork.
Sans looked back at his food, expression nauseated. “One or two,” he mumbled.
He pushed the bowl away with a grimace.
“Right … ” I said.
I suddenly realized why he wasn’t hungry – and felt stupid that I hadn’t figured it out sooner.
It wasn’t like I was a fan of doctor appointments, either. Hell, I avoided them as much as possible – and not only because I didn’t have insurance.
“Hey, if there’s time after … ” I paused, uncertain how my offer would be taken. “Do … Would you wanna get some ice cream?”
“What?” Sans asked, meeting my eyes with wide, dark sockets.
“It’s a human thing,” I explained. “It’s … well usually it’s used as an incentive for kids – ‘Behave at the doctor’s and we can get ice cream after.’ ”
“Y’think you gotta bribe me to behave?” Sans asked. “Like I’m some kinda babybones?”
“No!” I said quickly, waving my hands as though I could clear away the insinuation behind his words. “Not at all! I just … ” I faltered, looking away from him. “I know how bad doctor appointments suck. Getting a treat afterwards makes it suck a little less.”
I turned back to look at my sandwich with a frown.
“Although now that I think about it … Traditionally I think you’re supposed to get ice cream for being good at the dentist. Being good at the doctor gets you a lollipop,” I chuckled as I looked back up to meet his baffled expression. “Y’know, I always felt like a sucker , being good for the doctor for some cheap candy.”
Sans snorted and I could see some of the tension bleed from his shoulders. He pulled the bowl back toward himself and took a bite.
Fuck yeah.
“So … you wanna get ice cream?”
“Sure,” he said, finally meeting my eyes. Something in my chest warmed when I saw the eyelights in his usually dark sockets. They were dim, but there . “Ice cream sounds cool .”
“Awesome,” I said with a smile. “It’s a plan.”
I finished off my sandwich in companionable silence, all too soon finding myself face-to-face with the paperwork again.
I picked it up with a sigh.
I couldn’t answer the next set of information on my own.
“So … ” I asked as lightly as possible. “When’s your birthday?”
“Dunno.”
I blinked at the skeleton, surprised. “You … don’t know?”
“Nope.”
“ … Not even the year?”
“Nope.”
“ … How old are you?”
“It’s impolite to ask people their age.”
“It’s impolite to ask women their age,” I countered. “Men aren’t supposed to give a fuck.”
“Old as dirt,” Sans said with a dismissive wave.
I glared at him, becoming frustrated. “You aren’t helping.”
“You should reevaluate your assumptions on my desire to be helpful,” Sans said with a grin. He leaned back in his chair, balancing on the back two legs in the exact way I had always been yelled at for doing.
I resisted the urge to tell him to be careful, but decided to move on. If Sans wasn’t going to help me out, I just wouldn’t answer.
They should have all the information on file anyway.
“Monsters don’t keep time like humans,” Sans said after a moment. He tipped the chair back down and stirred at his soup. “You humans have the sun and moon, day and night. We didn’t have that Underground. We kept time as best we could based on the ebb and flow of our magic. It worked, but it wasn’t perfect and things diverged.” He sighed, staring at his soup like it held all the answers in the universe. “Then the Barrier broke and things were crazy … nobody cared enough to try to match up the calendars.”
I looked back down at the paperwork.
What he was saying made sense. Human cultures didn’t keep time the same way, so I shouldn’t have expected Monsters to keep the same calendar.
I wondered how someone would even go about synching the monster and Gregorian calendars – especially if the two didn’t agree on something as basic as the length of a day. And how could they – without the cycle of day and night to tell?
“Why the hell does it ask for your birthdate, then?” I asked with a frown.
“Forms are prob’ly copied from some vet or somethin’,” he said with a dark chuckle. He waved a hand as he continued. “Honestly, askin’ for age doesn’t make sense for monsters anyway. We live longer’n humans, and some of the stronger monsters are basically immortal ‘nless they decide to have kids. What’re you gonna do with the year ‘1668’? It’s meaningless.
“And age doesn’t matter to monsters like it does to humans. You all age more or less the same – mentally and physically. Monsters don’t.”
I nodded, vaguely recalling some of the lectures I’d gone to. Lectures I couldn’t quite remember the details of. Something about how “maturity” in monsters didn’t follow the same linear process as it did in humans.
“Wanna choose a birthday?” I asked after a quiet moment.
“Nope.”
I sighed, considering leaving the line blank on principle. It wasn’t like they really needed to know. Sans was right – it was arbitrary and meaningless.
I glanced around the café, my sight settling on Beau and remembering what he’d said about Sans selling fried snow.
I thought about the first week Sans lived with me.
The near-empty box of cookies. The single cherry tomato.
He might have been doing it to be a jerk, but it was so similar to the pranks my little brother sometimes played. Gifts wrapped in duct tape, boxes five times bigger than the item they held.
I looked at Sans, appraising.
He was a prankster.
“How do you feel about April first?”
The skeleton shrugged, but looked up from his soup.
“It’s a human holiday,” I explained as I wrote it down. “ ‘April Fool’s Day’. I don’t know the history or anything, but people celebrate it with practical jokes and pranks.” I looked up at him, meeting his eye sockets as I finished. “It seems like your kinda holiday.”
His eyelights, still dim, sparked a little and I knew I’d made a good choice.
I hummed a victory theme under my breath before moving onto the next line.
“What do you want your ‘purpose’ to be?”
“Movin’ onto philosophy now?”
I rolled my eyes, about to snark back, when I realized he was considering it. I continued through the questionnaire while I let him think.
How long has the monster been in your possession?
How much time does your monster spend in your presence (ie: within the same home or workplace)?”
Of this time, what percentage has been within your direct presence (ie: within the same room)?
What percentage has your monster been within your direct line of sight?
I frowned at the questions, unable to decide if I should be truthful or if I should say Sans spent most of his time in my presence.
“Bodyguard,” Sans said, thoroughly breaking my train of thought. I looked at him, confused, before remembering my earlier question.
Then I realized he was using the job I’d told my coworkers.
“Glad you approve,” I said with a chuckle as I wrote it on the line.
“You think I could pass as Vin Diesel?” Sans asked, flexing his nonexistent muscles.
I paused in my writing to stare at him. “You don’t know any of the classic Disney masterpieces, but you do know a shitty action comedy?”
Sans shrugged as he picked up his now-empty bowl and my empty plate.
I shook my head as he bussed the dishes to the counter, deciding to answer the questions truthfully, just in case I was asked for more information.
The less I had to remember, the better.
Does your monster perform tasks requiring magical output?
Does your monster perform rigorous or physically demanding tasks?
Does your monster perform sexual tasks?
Do you have any plans or desires to have your monster perform any of the above tasks? Please explain.
No. No. NO. NO.
My brain stuck on the “sexual tasks” for a moment, outrage and disgust filling my soul.
On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being “negligible or none” and 10 being “extremely”)
How obedient is your monster with the aid of the collar? NA
How obedient is your monster without the aid of the collar? 10
How aggressive is your monster? 1
How likely is your monster to attack humans? 1
… animals? 1
… other monsters?
I looked up to see Sans chatting with Beau, both of them smiling and laughing. I wrote another one.
Has your monster shown sexual interest in any of the following …
“Nope,” I said as I flipped the sheet over to the next page. “Nope nope nope.”
I continued on, filling what little I could. Unfortunately the forms mostly asked for things I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Things I had no business prying into.
If Sans felt like divulging his secrets he could, but I wasn’t going to dig into his private medical history. Or his sexual history, which the paperwork seemed extremely interested in.
I double checked the pages, making sure everything I had filled out was accurate, then gathered it up and walked over to the counter.
Just in time to catch the tail end of a joke.
“-d the bartender says, ‘Don’t worry about it. The peanuts are complimentary.’ ”
Beau snorted and I felt like an intruder.
“Hey,” I said, getting Sans’ attention. “The rest of this is stuff I can’t answer. It’s private medical stuff. You wanna fill it out for yourself?”
Sans glanced at the papers, then back up at me.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Cool,” I said, taking a step back. “I’ll be looking at the manga once you’re done.”
Tiny Raven 
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