Chapter Text
“YOU REALIZE, OF COURSE, THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS,” Papyrus says.
His needle-sharp phalanges locked tightly around your hands, the stern and imperious look upon his skull as he tells you so…
You’d be hard-pressed not to realize that this was important.
The scarred yet lovely white soul hovering almost hauntingly between you, awaiting your touch, only adds to the gravitas of the moment.
Papyrus releases your hands.
You don’t move.
He stares at you a moment, taking you in.
And then he reaches for you.
The backs of his claws light carefully on your cheek, stroking slow and purposeful.
“…I LOVE YOU, MY JEWEL,” he says, quietly; matter of fact. “THERE ISN’T ANOTHER SOUL ALIVE I’D ALLOW TO DO THIS. YOU KNOW THAT…YES?”
“Yes,” you answer, because you do know it.
As aloof and closed off and even mean as Papyrus once was…once he let you in, you were in, and he never made you doubt that.
You take his soul in your hands.
The sound of wind, gale-force, rushing past your ears.
Pressing down on a healing bruise, testing the fading soreness.
More heat than sweet, peppery cayenne overpowering a faint hint of juicy pomegranate.
Curling your fingers around the stem of a rose, just lightly enough that the thorns don’t prick you.
Papyrus is…a singular sort of skeleton, not the easiest to get close to by any means of the word.
But you’re here, holding all that he is in the palm of your hands, at his own invitation.
You raise his soul and press a kiss to its scuffed and wounded surface, feeding all your intent into the gesture.
I love you, too.