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They hadn’t always been opposites. Hadn’t always been short and tall and lowercase and capital and introvert and extrovert.
They hadn’t always stood apart, even when they were together.
--
It’s hard to say when the brothers began to grow apart. It wasn’t some sudden divide, some abrupt shattering of seemingly every similarity they possessed, but rather a slow change, a creeping realization that they weren’t the same as each other anymore.
Perhaps the earliest divide came when they learned speech, stepping blithely over the rules of language as only the ignorant can.
Papyrus used only capital letters, because his teacher told him they were for Important Words and Papyrus felt that everything was important, that the supposedly less significant words were being done dirty and that if no one else would acknowledge them as they deserved, he’d just have to do it himself. Even so early in his life, he showed his compassion.
Sans, if he’d had the words to put voice to his thoughts at the time, would have said that capital letters simply felt too loud to him. He was a creature of quiet, hiding in the dark spaces his caretakers tried so hard to forbid him from (and isn’t it funny, how even then he’d decided that rules were something for other people) and while he respected his brother’s choice like he’d respect every one of Papyrus’ choices for the rest of their lives, he knew it wasn’t a choice meant for him.
Sans spoke softly, his words round and friendly, while Papyrus had never been anything but a bundle of sharp edges trying his hardest to be heard.
--
Sans wasn’t a people person. He thought the majority of monsters were irritating and a bit slow, but he’d learned young how to smile and laugh in the right places and he was just quiet enough that people mistook him for a good listener. He’d learn later how not to be filled with contempt every time someone was different from him, but in the beginning of his life he was popular and surrounded with people who thought they were his friends, and he let himself inject venom in his teasing remarks.
Papyrus loved people. He was desperate for them to like him, desperate to fit easily like so many others seemed to. He wanted so badly to be like his brother, to be surrounded by people who thought the world of him, but he said the wrong things in the wrong places and he didn’t seem to know where he was supposed to joke, to laugh, and where he was supposed to be serious.
Papyrus was a pariah looking as hard as he could for just a single friend, and Sans had allowed himself to become a bully because he was charming and looked kinder than he was.
--
Papyrus shot up like a weed, easily outstripping his peers. Combined with his loudness, his new size tended to intimidate the people around him. Soon enough, though, they learned he was kind and harmless and only recognized cruel words when they weren’t said with a smile.
Sans stayed short, and his very presence seemed to put those around him at ease. He turned a blind eye to the people who hurt his brother with kind expressions and told himself it was Papyrus’ own fault for trusting so easily, told himself the abuse he ignored would help his brother learn lessons.
Sans was small and friend shaped, with a sharp kind of cruelty hidden behind his smiling mask, and Papyrus was big and looked the grim spectre of death the humans so feared, but wouldn’t have hurt a fly if doing so would cure malaria.
--
The brother’s parents eventually heard about the bullying, and about the way Sans was learning to inflict harm with a word, and they moved to a new neighborhood with a new school.
After that, the brothers learned how to lie, though you wouldn’t guess from either of them how thoroughly they knew the art.
--
The new school was more proactive, and Papyrus no longer had to worry about his lunch going missing or his desk being graffitied. Sans, on the other hand, was quickly learning that his now routine manipulations would no longer be tolerated.
They were both quick learners. They picked up on the new rules fast.
Both brothers made friends, at that school. Papyrus became close with two children who were as brash and reckless as he was, while Sans made the acquaintance of a shy lizard girl named Alphys.
--
In the years that followed, both siblings mellowed out. Sans lost the venomous edge to his words after Alphys threatened their friendship over it in a rare moment of courage. He collected a circle of associates and kept them all at all arms length as he was wont to do, and his grades stayed high.
Papyrus learned how to hold his tongue when a harsh truth would cause someone pain, after he lost a friend to a thoughtless comment. He learned how to fake a smile when the other moved away. His grades were high too, because for all that people thought he was an idiot, the pure logic of the classroom came easy to him in a way people never had.
The next big thing happened when the brothers graduated at 16.
--
Papyrus got a job as an accountant, crunching numbers for a construction company in the capital. He found the work boring and far too easy, but he needed the money and it was one of the few jobs where they still wanted him after the interview, so he didn’t have much of a choice.
Sans worked odd jobs until he was 18, and had bought a cheap apartment in Hotland the year before. The reason he stopped the odd jobs when he was 18 is because he’d received an offer to be assistant to the new royal scientist- his old friend Alphys.
Sans was satisfied with his job. Papyrus would have given just about anything to be doing anything else.
--
When the brothers were twenty, Sans and Alphys did something horrible and desperately attempted to cover up the evidence. They stayed friends, because an event that traumatic could only really serve to unite them, but both thought it best if they went their separate ways, and kept Sans’ involvement in the whole thing as quiet as possible. Thankfully, they’d never publicized his status as assistant to the royal scientist, so it was a simple task for him to pack his bags.
Papyrus, on the other hand, had accumulated quite a bit of nest egg from his job as an accountant. A housing lease had opened up in Snowdin, a small town on the outskirts of the kingdom that had a reputation for its kind and welcoming residents. Papyrus figured the place would be perfect for him, so he started looking for a roommate to cover what little of the lease he couldn’t afford himself.
Sans contacted him, and the brothers moved to Snowdin.
--
Long ago, they’d made a game of lying to each other, of covering up everything about themselves that might have hurt the other, and it was such an ingrained habit by the time they went back to living together that it would have been odd if they’d begun telling each other the truth.
Here are the things they never mentioned, that the other knew anyway.
Papyrus had moved to Snowdin because he hadn’t had a close friend in years, and he hoped that it would be easier in a place renowned for its kindness.
Sans had discovered a horrible secret about the nature of time a few days before the amalgamates had awoken, and he would never tell anyone about it, even Alphys.
Papyrus had made the acquaintance of a golden flower that called itself Flowey, but had all the mannerisms of the dead prince and none of his kindness.
Sans had a machine in a secret basement, one that he hoped would be able to break the cycle once and for all.
Papyrus knew that Flowey had no soul, and that ever one of his kind smiles were faked.
Sans would never finish his machine, because the cost of its activation was too great to pay.
Papyrus knew exactly what happened to humans captured by the royal guard.
Sans kept secrets in a notebook spelled against time itself.
--
A human fell, and they changed the world in ways no one had ever dared dream.
Papyrus had nightmares about xenocide, and Sans had entries in his notes that told him exactly what had happened in the last corridor.
--
The surface was nice, and even if Frisk seemed to smile in all the wrong places and react to things before they happened, well.
Everyone had eccentricities, right?
--
Sans finally got to see tomorrow, and Papyrus allowed his smile to become entirely real when he spotted a hedge trimmed into the shape of his smile.