Chapter Text
Your name is (Your Name), and you deliver water, and you have a crush on a monster.
You see him every week on your route to deliver those big jugs of water for dispensers to office buildings. You don’t know what he is exactly. Sort of like a skeleton, maybe? Whatever, it wasn’t important. All you know is that you had a humongous crush on him and you wanted to have his weird monster-human-hybrid babies.
But maybe you’re moving too fast here. Let’s start from the beginning.
“You’re fired.”
Your mouth drops open. “What?”
“I said, you’re fired.” So that’s how you lost your dead-end job that you hated anyway but had also sort of really needed. You huff angrily as you scroll through job listing sites. “No sense for customer service,” your butt. You are the best at customer service. Okay, so, maybe you tend to say what’s on your mind, and maybe sometimes what’s on your mind isn’t always so nice. But you try really hard and that’s what should matter! Unfortunately ‘trying really hard’ doesn’t really get you jobs by itself.
You more or less absentmindedly send in your résumé to a couple of equally dead-end jobs that you will probably hate equally as much before turning in for the night.
Anyway, without going into the full details of the hiring process, you got hired to haul water to deliver to high-end offices so that rich people could stay hydrated or whatever. You don’t really care as long as you make money.
You memorize the boring route by the end of the first week. By the end of the first week, you have also managed to make friends with the receptionist in that tech startup and make enemies with the yoga instructor along the freeway and insult the basic existence of a therapist. As one does.
“Can you tell me again how you managed to make a grown man cry?”
“It was an accident! Sort of. I just saw him, and I said, well…I may or may not have said ‘Nice Halloween costume’, even though it’s November but I mean I can respect that. And then, um, he said, ‘Excuse me?’ And I said ‘The mask is probably the coolest part’, and he said ‘That’s my face’, and a single tear ran down his cheek like in the movies, and I just said ‘crap’ and got the heck out of there. And now I have to see him tomorrow again and it’s going to be so awkward!”
The receptionist, whose name is Andrea, pauses to process all that. Then, she says, “You’re kind of a jerk.”
You hide your face in your hands and moan, “I know! I have no brain-to-mouth filter. Also I may be the Devil.”
“Well…good luck with that.” Andrea says, rather unhelpfully.
“With being the Devil or with the guy whose face I dissed?”
“Both. Now run along back to Hell or wherever it is you are when you’re not here bothering me.”
Okay, so maybe ‘friends’ is a loose term.
The Next Day comes, and with it your impending (doom) meeting with the therapist with the weird face. You go through the other stops on your route, dawdling as much as possible at each, until one of the big office types yells at you and says he’ll report you to your supervisor if you don’t move along.
The therapist’s office is the last stop of the day. You can totally do this.
You totally can’t do this. You start speedwalking away from the door, as fast as you can while carrying three gallons of water.
That’s when you hear a vaguely familiar, cultured voice, saying hesitantly, “Would you like to bring that in? It looks quite heavy.”
You whirl around to find the therapist guy, head tilted, with an eyebrow raised curiously.
Your eyes widen, and you drop the bottle of water to the ground and bend in half in an approximation of a bow. “Oh my gosh I am so sorry.”
“Whatever for?” He sounds genuinely surprised.
“For what…I totally insulted your face last time! On accident, and I feel really bad about it, but I even made you cry, and—“
He interrupts you, holding up a hand placatingly, still looking somewhat confused. “I recall the incident, but you did not make me cry. I have terrible allergies, you see, and sometimes my eyes water. You have nothing to apologize for.”
“But I—you’re not mad at me?“
“You made an ill-educated comment about my face, which was obviously based on ignorance rather than malevolence, and then apologized. Why would I be mad at you?” He beckons you with gloved hands. “Please, do come in. I would love to chat if you’ve the time. I’m afraid you dashed off too quickly for me to introduce myself last week.”
Wonderstruck, you follow him into his office, lugging the water behind you. He calls out, “If you wouldn’t mind changing out the bottle, I could make you some tea, if you’d like?”
“Uh…no, I’m good, but thanks.” Is this guy a saint? You busy yourself changing out the bottle as requested, then sit in one of the chairs in what appears to be a waiting area.
He comes out of a room and extends a hand to shake. “Lovely to meet you. I’m Dr. W. D. Gaster, but you can just call me Dr. G.”
You numbly shake his hand and he smiles kindly at you. “And you are?”
“You have a really cute smile,” you blurt out.
Crap. Crap! You stare at your hands in horror. That is not your name or anything even resembling a name! Maybe if you just pretend you didn’t say anything, he’ll think he imagined it? Yeah, that’s a plan that should work. “Uh, I mean, (Your Name). Is my name. That is the name that is mine. (Your Name), that is.”
You look at him only to find him with his mouth open in an ‘o’, and a rather fetching black blush high on his cheeks. “Ah, well, hm. I…I see…Nice to meet you, (Your Name), and…thank you, I suppose?”
“That’s adorable. You’re adorable.”
CRAP.
His eyebrows come together in a bemused expression, and his blush only intensifies. “Oh my. I…I’m afraid I don’t quite know how to respond to that.”
You bury your head in your hands and groan, “Please just…don’t respond at all. I am so sorry, holy crap. I just don’t have a filter and it’s a problem and kill me, please.”
He laughs, a surprisingly musical sound. “Oh, don’t worry about it. You’re very honest. It’s a lovely quality to have. I was just surprised, is all.”
You may love this man. You preemptively throw your hands over your mouth so that you don’t say anything to that effect.
You get the feeling that you’re going to have a bad time.