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twentydaysofdrabbles · 2 years ago

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The Concierge’s Duty (Part 14)

You don’t want to admit it, but the Emissary’s presence had rattled something in you. It doesn’t affect your ability to run the hotel as efficiently as always, stars no, but it does make you think a little more about the life you now lead.

Living with one foot in a grave was never going to be sustainable - you would have died a servant of the High Table no matter what you did. At least now, you could--

It happens so quickly.

A deep thrum of ice ripples through you. The hairs on the back of your neck stand. All mere seconds before you hear a series of sharp pops, so faint that if you weren’t so familiar with the sound of gunfire, you would have dismissed it as a figment of your imagination. The air is like syrup on your tongue, thick with battle magic.

Logically, you know that the Continental is built well, that these sounds, these feelings, are muted as far as your guests and the rest of your employees are concerned.

But your instincts don’t lie. They never do.

“Take the desk,” you call over curtly to a nearby receptionist who had frozen in the middle of cleaning glasses off a table. The man nods seriously, already striding over to the counter as you whirl away. Others in the lobby look up at you curiously, but none move; your guests tend not to be overly nosy without the promise of a reward.

Bypassing the elevator entirely, you stride to the stairs and hear more thundering footsteps - all familiar, your security guards who had likewise heard the ruckus. Without thinking about it, you track the noise and yelling and smell of blood and gunfire and magic to the second floor indoor pool room.

The wooden sliding doors to the pool room do not open quickly enough. Immediately, glass crunches under one foot, while the other steps into a puddle of red tinted water. The lavishly built indoor pool is a mess - small pools and bigger ones fill the room in an artful layout, with partitions, pillars, planters, and pagodas providing a sense of privacy.

All demolished in one way or another.

Is that a red bone that’s sticking out of the roof of the middle pagoda?

Shit. This is bad. Your dead eyes flare to life, burning and tracking around the room to find the guests. One is a monster - there are no mages left. The others must be human, or monsters who prefer firearms, because the discarded magazines, bullet casings, and bullet holes left in the walls are littered all over the place.

Four in all. Three on one. Hardly fair odds.

From the silence in the room, the fight is either over or there has been a lull. Not good. Not good at all.

Fingers flexing in your gloves, you curl them and ready the mechanism in your wrists, gesturing with your head for your guards to spread out. Not that your guards carry firearms in the Continental, but you know for a fact none of them are unarmed. They obey you, their hands loose by their sides, shoulders tense, heads on a swivel.

Meanwhile, you let your nose lead you. Coppery blood, something sweet - cherry perhaps, and then something sour. On reflex, your lips part to let you taste the air. It’s sharp on your tongue amidst all the other flavours, familiar, like vinegar...like mustard.

Sans.

Teeth snap closed as your tongue retreats back into your mouth, your lips twisting into a ghost of a snarl. Your pace quickens to weave through the destruction, stepping over broken brick and wood and wicker, eventually finding a dead body half-drowned in a wading pool. Male. Leather pants, sensible boots, long jacket. A red bone straight through the chest. Red-tinted water obscures the rest.

The need to call in the Collector is shelved to the back of your head. You must find the other three.

Loud footsteps explode from the other side of the room along with the shouts of your guards as they give chase. Heavy booted feet like the ones belonging to the corpse. A slight limp - they are injured. Fast - not injured enough. The slamming open of the utility door, fading sounds. They are doing a good job of getting away from your guards.

Even if you didn’t link the boots, you knew it wasn’t Sans. The man, despite how round his belly is in his clothes, is light as a skeleton monster would logically be. He is still here somewhere.

It doesn’t take long for you to find him - not because you spot him, but because you pre-emptively back up a few steps to dodge a sharp, red bone that comes flying at your chest with all the force and speed of a bullet. One that stops mere inches away from where your chest had been.

“shit! scared the bejeesus outta me, sweetheart,” comes Sans’ weary voice as the skeleton crawls out from behind a toppled planter.

Immediately, you look over him clinically to assess him. Clad in a red hoodie and black board shorts, Sans was clearly here to relax and was subsequently interrupted. His bones are coated in a thin layer of red sweat, more of it pouring from his skull to wet his already drenched hoodie. To your dismay, you find him nursing a bullet wound on his shoulder, a bloom of darkness on the side of his ribs, his legs marked from running around and dodging. There is something different about his skull - ah, there is a crack above his eye, and his grin... He’s missing a canine tooth.

But he’s not dust, and that is a relief.

“Mister Sans,” you say with a sigh, the furious burning of your eyes ebbing as he slowly gets to his feet. “No, sit. Allow me--”

“¡Joder!” It’s soft, so soft that you barely heard it above the lapping of water in the pools.

Your brain processes the curse just as your head snaps to the source of the voice, your body moving before you could think about it. A woman is slumped against the wall, a smear of blood on the white stone revealing her path to where she now lies. Wild hair, wild eyes, ink sprawled over her dark skin. Dressed for function rather than form.

Fuck, indeed.

“Well, this is awkward,” she mutters in Spanish to you, her bared teeth red from her bleeding nose.

Leaving Sans to ease himself back down on a recliner that hasn’t been toppled over, you stride over to the Cartel Lieutenant, your shoes crunching on glass and wood and casings. You don’t say anything as you stand before her. There isn’t anything to say.

The woman groans and looks up at you, her useless left arm hanging by her side, her right still clutching an empty gun. “Fucker put up a good fight,” she laughs dryly, shaking her head. “He’s quick for a fat guy isn’t he...” As if she had not met or heard of Killa Harkan.

Your eyes cool as you stare down at her. “This...is a mess.”

She grimaces, lets go of her gun. “I dislike making enemies of you. We’ve always been on good terms, haven’t we?” A cavernous sigh, then she holds the hand up in a universal sign for surrender. “Well, will you do it here?” Fearlessly, she looks right into your dead, unfeeling eyes.

“Not my decision. There are rules,” you murmur softly in the same language, calling forth one of your hovering guards with a gesture. “You know them well.”

“Aiy, I do.” She lets her head fall onto her shoulder. “Son of a fuck...” It doesn’t sound like she’s swearing at you, or even Sans, even as your guards roll her onto her belly to bind her hands.

The Manager would have heard by now - she will let you know her decision.

In the meantime, you need to ensure that the Collector and the Doctor are called. Those orders are whispered to one of your remaining guards, who strides out with purpose to leave the rest to clean up and secure the area. You, on the other hand, go straight to Sans who stares up at you tiredly.

“Mister Sans,” you greet him quietly, kneeling down by him.

“sweetheart.” The eternal grin on his face widens a little. “almost went off the deep end there.”

Well, if he’s well enough to make puns, he should be fine. A shake of your head and a wry smile answers him in one fashion, while you respond in another, “Not my idea of a pool time.”

The way Sans brightens and looks at you like you gave him a million dollars makes up for the fact that you cracked a pun at him. Stars, that’s all you have in your repertoire.

“Let me see your wounds, Mister Sans,” you say as you accept a first aid kit from one of your housekeeping staff who just showed up. “I have sent for the Doctor, but he is currently tending to another guest. He might be a while.”

Sans grumbles, trying and failing to shuck his hoodie off. “nothin’ a bit of monster food can’t cure. i’m not in danger of dusting anytime soon, but i might ask boss to...” He trails off, struggling with his wounded shoulder that clearly bothers him more than he is saying.

You offer your help with a silent gesture, one that he takes with a reluctant nod. It’s not your first time rendering first aid to someone, but certainly a first as far as stripping guests are concerned. The hoodie comes off, sticking momentarily to the marrow leaking from his cracked rib, the fluid clearly congealing just a little quicker than blood.

“Do you require the services of a Dentist, Mister Sans?” You gesture to his eternal grin, now sporting a gap where his left canine tooth once was. Your other hand busies itself with wetting a clean bit of gauze to begin wiping off the red-tinted marrow off his bones so you can see what you’re working with.

He summons that red tongue again, licking around and into the gap of his missing tooth. Grimacing, he grumbles, “maybe.”

There is a moment where you notice the differences between Sans and Papyrus’ bodies. The first being that though his hoodie falls over his rounded belly, when his chest is bare, there is a clear void between his pelvis and ribs. Magic could be the only explanation. The shorter skeleton brother is stocky and broad in comparison to the tall, lithe figure of Papyrus, and this is evident even in his bones. His humerus and femurs are all as large as your own arms and thighs, maybe larger.

His ribs - a brief glance reveals he has more than the standard human - are thick, the spaces between them small enough that perhaps only your pinky finger can fit through them. Where there is meant to be cartilege, there is red magic holding him together, connecting his ribs to his sternum, his ribs to his spine. His thick, thick spine that looks like it would be as thick as your neck, maybe thicker.

Unlike with Papyrus, you take this all in in the span of a heartbeat. But just like Papyrus, Sans notices it immediately.

“hey,” he mutters to you in his deep baritone to drag your attention to his eyes. “a night ‘s still on the table, y’know? if ya ever want to.” Stars, did his voice dip? Because that sounded...very suggestive. Even beyond his words.

Good thing the staff have left you alone for the most part. And it seems that the ones nearby have other things on their mind - like fishing out the corpse that had sunk to the bottom of its pool.

You take in a brief breath - cherry smoke and vinegary mustard fill your lungs - and exhale slowly. Oh stars, are you--why are you even remotely considering it? He’s a guest. A guest...

“Professionalism is important to me, Mister Sans,” you murmur back just as quietly, pressing a pad of gauze to his rib, then another to his shoulder. Soft red splotches stain your white gloves from where you had briefly touched him. It’s not really an answer, but as sharp as Sans is, he’d hear what you really mean.

The monster’s breath skips a beat at your answer. He looks at you. Looks at you really closely. And then huffs a soft laugh at what he finds. “alright then I concierge you mean. still not a no, though.”

Concierge you mean...? Oh, he can see what you mean.

Another smile cracks your neutral facade. “Mister Sans,” you rebuke him lightly, pulling him towards you so that you can lean and see if there is an exit wound on his shoulder. There is, and so you abandon the gauze patch on his ribs to fish another one for the other side of his shoulder.

Again, the bright grin on Sans’ face makes you feel...light. The way it softens his menacing visage is...

“Oh goodness,” the Doctor exclaims from behind you.

The small smile on your face drops and your expression smooths out. Sans’, too, falls after seeing the change in your demeanor.

“Doctor,” you say, standing and keeping the pressure on Sans’ wound. Though you’re not sure if it’s even that useful, but Sans hasn’t told you to step away. “I leave Mister Sans in your care; I must see to other matters.”

The man waves kindly with a smile, reassuring you that he will take care of Sans.

As for Sans, he winks at you and makes a motion with one hand - the universal sign for a telephone. “call me,” he mouths.

It takes herculean effort not to roll your eyes, but you manage.

“Mister Sans, Doctor,” you incline your head at both and walk away.

“So, Doc, what’s the damage?” You hear Sans asking the Doctor as you leave. And then, “And...uh...you know a good dentist?”

Though you are occupied with arranging for the final assassin to be found and identified, for the Lieutenant to be judged, for the body to be disposed of, in the back of your mind a thought lingers. There is a distinct difference in Sans’ tone, his way of speaking. As though...he were speaking in proper case? It’s hard to describe.

Another thing to consider.

The inside pocket of your suit vibrates. It’s the Manager. You pick up the call after dismissing the staff, already moving to head to the Office. “Ma’am.”

“My Heart, it’s time we made a dinner reservation of our own.”

Your lip quirks up into a shadow of smile, a spark entering your eyes like a flare in the dark sky. “Understood.”

#undertale fics #mafiafell au #mafiafell sans #sans x reader #mafiafell sans x reader #reader insert #undertale reader insert #minor depictions of violence #the concierge #ficlet #drabble

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