Ace in a Hole (Undertale x Hazbin Hotel)

Chapter 1

The man that sold the house to Sans was a broad-bodied type with an awkward, pinched smile and the overanxious accidental racism he'd come to dread. Most humans weren't inherently racist against monsters, much to their discovered delight after government negotiations were made once the Underground was escaped. But if there was one thing worse than outright misery, it was little inconveniences.

Sans somehow wished it was just the typical grade of racism he had been taught to expect on the surface, with pitchforks and belittled reasoning. Something he could latch onto, like a soured leech, and justify his own awkwardness with the race. Alas, the boy was just nervous, and Sans was just an ass.

The same stutter like Alph, the awkward hunched shoulders, and the constant "Uh, not because you're a skeleton or anything!" was what defined the fresh adult when Sans saw him. And Sans knows it's not because he was a skeleton or anything. It wasn't a conversation where he felt insulted; it was more so the conversation where he just wanted the guy to consider breathing for a change.

Clearly, this retail man had never interacted with a monster before. Which is understandable. Sans was born underground; just seeing the sky alone was still jarring to him, a month and a half after they'd all escaped to the surface. 'This,' being them together in a room on the surface, was still new. Interactions were going to be stilted and all over the place. Tiptoeing around to figure out cultures and differences. This man was just too heavy on caution—too afraid of becoming a dick— that the prophecy fulfilled itself. The type of person who goes so far the opposite way that they just loop right back around to where they shouldn't be. Honest at heart, anxiously terrible in practice.

So Sans mostly tuned out the squeaks of overcompensation as he glanced up at the old-style building hovering above the two of them. Radio station, to be specific. One of the classics, with vintage poured into every brick of its architecture. Each one was spoken with age, with walls that saw the chattering of the 1900s right when radios were in their prime. Sans wasn't really a radio person—he'd fixed a few of them in his college years but didn't go out of his way to pop in for a listen. Sans would fancy a radio during a nice game of poker, feet kicked up on Grillby's bar with the sweet tantalizing taste of the bartender's family legacy on the rocks.

New Orleans, Louisiana, wasn't the best place to settle down, but prices were cheap and it was a few hours away from Mount Ebott. The building showed that. The amazing thing about older things, as Toriel—the vintage queen—would attest to, was that personality dripped from every relic of the past. On the downside, so did time.

The place was rotten with age, half of the right side completely caked in vines and overgrowth. The windows were embroidered with dust, and Sans swore there was some sort of animal stench he couldn't place. While looking a bit sad and miserable, it was functional and didn't have spores or mold. Old, but styled. Sans was fine with anything that had four walls and a roof, frankly. Anything that kept him away from Papyrus' house.

His brother really had gotten lucky. Whole empty bar for him and his boyfriend, with a second-story apartment and a small patio for a garden if he felt like it. The only downside for their living arrangement had been thin walls, which hadn't been a concern for either of them.

The concern came from Sans, the resident of the guest bedroom, who sat just next to their wall with the bed pressed up against it. And while Sans was most certainly glad that Papyrus and Grillby were compatible in all ways, he himself was not compatible with living near such ruckus.

"... functional water, heat, and electricity!" The man to his left had continued, "I, um, don't know if you really need heat—not that you don't deserve it, of course, or that I'm in the right for making any assumptions! I, uh, sorry, um—"