Sans AU One-Shots

Dream || finals.

Pairing: Dream Sans x Chubby! Female Reader
Prompt: A hard day spirals you into a stressed, anxious mess, and even after work kicks your behind, you have to go home and scramble to pull yourself together enough to get an essay final written up in time to submit it in a couple hours. Thankfully, a certain Guardian takes notice of your negativity and comes to cheer up his favorite human.
Type: stress -> comfort, cozy, Christmas vibes, romantic, you've always been worthy of love even when you don't see it
Length: 5.2k words
Background:
Notes: Requested by a lovely reader. | This is as close to a Christmas/winter/holiday one you're gonna get this year, so eat up, kiddos ☕

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You loaded the last of several cases of soda into the bottom of a cart, scanned it with the company provided phone for order pickers like yourself, then pushed the cart past some other shoppers with a dip of your head and a quick apology. With the holidays right around the corner, the grocery store was packed with people, and pickup orders - grocery orders customers placed online for employees to gather and bag for them - were nearly overwhelming the few employees that decided to show up to work. With the worsening weather came sickness, and while you wouldn't have normally worked with finals right around the corner and plenty of college PowerPoints begging to be studied on your laptop back at your apartment, you were called in nearly every day to keep the store afloat.

The thought of your college finals around the corner made it hard to focus on the task at hand, and you worked up a sweat pushing the cart past the other shoppers, weaving around them as best you could. You weren't trying to make them feel bad for being in your way, but the company phone had been pinging in your hand almost constantly for the last hour as your boss berated you for going too slow with the online pickup orders. A mother sent you a dirty look as she swept her children against her side while you breezed past, and you shot her an apologetic look that she disregarded with an upturn of her nose. The holiday season was a crazy one, but despite it being about merry and cheer, all you felt was hostility from everyone around you.

Being out amongst the customers wasn't where you wanted to be, but with the staffing issues, you had no choice, and the sheer number of people made anxiety press in around you as your breath quickened and you tried your hardest to focus on the phone in your hand. What did the customer want next? A loaf of bread was all they had left, then you could complete the order and bring it back to the others in the back, who packaged it up into bags and brought it out to the customer when they arrived.

You looked up just in the nick of time to screech to a halt, pulling the cart back to avoid hitting a fox monster as she stepped out in front of you. "Whoa, sorry about that!" Your chest was heaving, both from the scare and pushing the heavy cart around the whole store, and you would've given her a sorry look and moved on if she didn't hold a paw over her heart in total offense.

"You nearly flattened me, you cow!"

"It was an accident, ma'am. I'm very sorry about that." You kept your customer service voice pleasant but you were fully conscious of the customers around you listening in, and you felt yourself sweating as you fought to catch your breath.

"This neighborhood really is falling off if they're forced to hire people like you," she muttered under her breath, snout in the air as she adjusted the straps of her purse to rest in the crease of her elbow. She sniffed at the air and recoiled, dark eyes flickering over your sweaty body in disgust, and you stepped away from her, suddenly self-conscious. "I can't find any damn sugar in this whole store and Christmas is coming up. I don't suppose someone like you would know where it is?" Her lips were half pulled back in a sneer before she even finished, the question more of a statement like she knew your answer already, and you nodded timidly.