Sans woke up far too early. That is to say, it was around five in the morning ish by his guess, which was a fairly accurate guess.

Don' hafta get up yet, he silently reminded himself, 'm home now. Don' need t' command th' army righ' now.

So, without further ado, he settled down, snuggling against his brother, and fell back asleep.

~o0o~

The next time he woke up, it was to a hand on his shoulder, gently shaking him out of sleep.

"mmnnnngggguhhh...?" He groaned, light from the crystals in the Underground's ceiling streaming in the window almost like sunlight, making him blink. "wha' time...?"

"Almost nine thirty. Dad said I should wake you up now."

Sans rolled halfway over to look up at his little brother with a sigh. "...thanks, bro." He said gloomily.

Papyrus looked concerned. "Sans, why are you so sad?"

"i..." Sans hesitated a moment, then couldn't hold back the building snickers. "i'm in morning!"

Papyrus gave a roar of frustration, grabbed Sans' hand, and started to drag him out of bed. "GO. NO PUNS ARE ALLOWED IN MY ROOM!!"

Still chuckling, Sans flopped out of Papyrus's bed and onto the floor. After a moment, he pulled himself to his feet and walked out the door.

There was nothing like a good pun to start his first morning back home.

Of course, the eggs Gaster was just finishing scrambling as Sans walked into the kitchen definitely came close, but puns were still on top.

As Sans pulled up a seat at the kitchen table, Gaster slid a plateful of scrambled eggs in front of him.

"Good morning. Sleep well?"

Sans grinned and nodded before stabbing his fork into the yellow mass on his plate. "yeah. thanks."

"So I thought today, if you wanted, I could take a look at your Magic." Gaster sat opposite Sans at the table.

Sans just nodded, as his mouth was more or less stuffed with food.

Papyrus walked into the room, having more or less forgiven/forgotten about Sans' pun. "Oooh! Can I come see?" Papyrus had an endless fascination with Sans' Magic, especially after it was decided that he was going to be building up his Magic the normal way.

Sans finished his mouth full of food. "i mean, i guess so, bro. if you'd like to."

"I would like to!" Papyrus grinned happily at Sans.

"then it's settled." Sans said after shoveling the rest of his food into his mouth. "let's get going, I guess."

~o0o~

The True Lab was only an eight minute, twenty six second walk away. (Sans knew that because once after he claimed it was "like, five minutes away," Papyrus had borrowed his wristwatch to count each individual second it took them to walk there.)

After being pestered into changing into a clean pair of clothes by both his brother and father (they claimed you shouldn't wear the same clothes more than twenty four hours, but he had, multiple times, on the warfront, and didn't understand what the issue was.) Sans and his family left for the True Lab.

Despite it being a quite short walk, said walk was filled with monsters coming to greet Sans, congratulate him, and thank him for saving the life of some relative on the warfront.

Sans was a pretty popular hero. Being the friendly, patient guy he was, he stopped to chat with everyone, throwing in a good number of puns, much to Papyrus's annoyance.

Eventually, they did reach the lab.

The True Lab had ten floors extending underground, and the deeper you got, the more classified, and more dangerous, the experiments and projects got. Only the lobby floor and the one beneath that were open to the public. The tenth floor, the deepest floor was only open to Sans, Papyrus, Gaster, and Gaster's four assistants. Even then, Papyrus was only allowed down there when Sans or Gaster was with him.

The tenth floor was, also, the boys' 'birthplace', where Gaster had created them.

Gaster's private lab was on the tenth floor. That was where most of the experiments involving Sans' Magic took place. It was a very large room, split into two sections. The first was about one third of the room, with tiled floor and walls. It housed Gaster's desk/workbench, a number of filing cabinets, a number of shelves and other cabinets over and under a wide countertop, and a steel operating table with thick, magic-resistant leather restraints in the middle of that third. The other two thirds of the room was for testing attacks and weapons. The walls were plated in apocalypse-bunker grade steel, the far wall being painted with a huge target, the outermost ring almost ten feet in diameter and the innermost under six inches. A variety of machinery hung from the ceiling on tracks so it could be moved across the room, and even more strange machines were crammed into the corners of the room.

The only difference Sans noticed from the last time he had been in the lab was quite a noticeable one. One of the walls of the lab-third of the room, the left wall, had been knocked down to open up into the adjoining room. Sans knew that to either side of this room were Gaster's assistants' personal labs, but it looked like instead it had been turned into some sort of containment or quarantine cell. The walls were made of some white, no-doubt Magic-resistant material, and where the wall originally separating the two rooms had been, there was a sheet of reinforced glass or similar clear material. The door in was like an airlock, two locked doors with a small space between.

After lifting Papyrus to sit on the edge of Gaster's desk, Sans gestured to the renovation. "ummm...?"

Gaster glanced over his shoulder at where Sans was gesturing before heading over to the counter. "I told you that if I was going to find a cure for the Corruption, I'd need a live subject to study, and to do that I'd need a place to keep them."

"... oh." Sans looked a little longer at the containment cell, whatever Magical equivalent he had of a stomach doing flips. The idea that a living monster would be stuck in there for research, even if they were one of the Corrupt...

He shook his head. If that was what was necessary to end the War, then it had his approval.

Gaster snapped him from his thoughts, lightly grabbing his shoulder and leading him over to the border between the lab and the weapons testing area. "Get warmed up," he told Sans, "it'll be easier to get accurate readings if your Magic is already flowing."

As Gaster returned to whatever he had been doing, Sans took a few deep breaths. Being a skeleton, breathing was not necessary to him the way it was to most monsters, but it did help him focus his Magic.

Then, barely thinking about it, he summoned six bones and fired them in quick succession at the target on the far wall. They each hit it dead in the center. Then he summoned two Gaster Blasters, one to either side of him, and with a thought, let the deadly beams loose on the target. Again, they hit the bullseye.

"Oh! Sans!" Sans turned when he heard Papyrus shout. The small skeleton was still sitting on the edge of Gaster's desk, his feet swinging beneath him. "Can you do bones and Blasters at the same time?" Papyrus asked eagerly.

Sans grinned at his brother and turned back to the target. He lifted his left hand, purely for dramatic effect, as only Blue Magic required the concentration that hand-movement provided, and summoned four Blasters and a multitude of bones. He thrust his hand forward, sending the mass of attacks once again towards the center of the target. They exploded against the wall in a shimmering blaze of spent Magic, searing an afterimage into both brothers' eyes. Papyrus let out a cheer.

Sans turned again to Papyrus and was about to say something along the lines of how that was nothing and he could summon much, much larger attacks, when Gaster interjected.

"That'll be good enough, Sans." Gaster had grabbed one of the ceiling mounted machines and was pulling it along the track towards the weapons testing area. He glanced at Sans. "Summon a Blaster for me?"

Sans nodded and obliged, summoning a medium sized Blaster just beyond the edge of the weapons testing area. Gaster pulled the machine over to the Blaster, and from that pulled a variety of Magical sensors and whatnot. These were all attached at various points along the contour of the skull-like weapon.

At a nod from Gaster, Sans fired the Blaster, but didn't let it deform and dissolve into nothingness.

After a moment, Gaster nodded again and began unhooking the various sensors. Once he had pulled them all away, Sans allowed the Magic that formed the Blaster to dissipate.

The pair walked over to his desk, where Papyrus was still sitting, and Gaster nudged his computer out of hibernation. The monitor lit up, a graph already loading the data from the machine. The graph started off flatlined, before it had been connected to the Blaster, before lifting almost ten points. A steep incline that got steeper as it went marked Sans' chargeup of his weapon, and the peak at nearly fifty points marked its discharge. From there the line dropped sharply and immediately to one point, before hitting zero when it had been disconnected.

"Yeah, you're definitely leaking Magic." Gaster pointed to the ten-point baseline. "That should only be three or four, at the very maximum."

Sans let out a plaintive moan. That would mean being knocked out so Gaster could fix the Blasters, then waking up more than twenty four hours later, with a headache and needing food but having no appetite.

Gaster glanced at his elder son. "We don't have to do it now. You're home for two weeks, just so long as we take care of it before you go, it's alright."

"no, no, it's fine." Sans waved a hand dismissively. "might as well get it over with."

Gaster nodded and walked over to the cabinets to get ready something to knock Sans out. Sans, meanwhile, slumped into the deskchair, and peered up at his brother, who was still sitting on the edge of the desk.

"y'know, pap, you're real lucky that you're building up your magic naturally."

"But you're so fast and strong!"

"yeah, but my magic breaks. and then we hafta take a crack at fixin' it."

"Sans!" Despite not having eyes, Papyrus made it quite clear he was rolling them.

"still. all puns aside, it's a real pain in the tailbone."

"Sans, stop!"

"we really work ourselves to the bone to keep it all goin' properly, and sometimes i think i'm a bit of a numbskull for stickin' with it."

"Saaaaannnns! Please!"

"but i'd be a pretty spineless soldier without any magic."

Before Papyrus could protest any more, Gaster set a hand on Sans' shoulder. "Alright, that's enough. Come on, Sans. On the table." With a heavy sigh, Sans stood, pulled off his shirt, and walked over to the operating table. 

After he had pulled himself to sit on the edge of the table, Gaster held out to him a paper cup filled with a foul-smelling liquid in it. Sans reluctantly accepted the cup and knocked back the liquid. He shuddered and struggled to suppress his gag reflex.

"i swear," Sans groaned, handing the empty cup back to his father, "that stuff tastes worse every time i-" he cut himself off as the drug began to take effect. Sucking in a breath, he gripped the edges of the table as the room seemed to tilt precariously, a strong sense of vertigo overcoming all else he might try to focus on. Gaster grabbed his shoulders, and Sans reached out to hold tightly to Gaster's arm.

Sans groaned again. "g- guh- gets-- w- wu- wor-rse- ev-e-ever-y t-tuh-time--"

He honestly couldn't tell if the tilting now was because Gaster was slowly forcing him to lay back on the table, or just because, but either way, it made him feel sick to his stomach.

Well.

He didn't actually have a stomach. But he still felt sick.

And, had Sans been awake to realize it, when unconsciousness finally came, it would have been a relief.

§

A/N
*tries to pun*
*fails*
*runs away*

Anyhow, here's this! I hope you've enjoyed it, and comments/votes are always appreciated!