Chapter Text
It was a mess almost every morning.
You would wake up to the sound of your first alarm, shut it off, then proceed to shut your own eyelids for another five minutes. Which in turn becomes more than five—and knowing yourself—your second alarm goes off.
Now here you are, rushing your routine once again throughout your one bedroom apartment simultaneously brushing your teeth, fixing your head and face, getting dressed, and swiping the first thing in your fridge for a quick breakfast-snack. You realized halfway across the short hallway to the outside world that it ended up being a slice of American cheese. Sure, why not!
Slipping on your footwear, you continue your haste down to the main floor stuffing the single slice inside your mouth and starting your car. If the law didn’t exist and if you didn’t care about breaking them, you’d probably already get loads of speeding tickets on a daily basis.
You could try and fix your barely-on-time attendance, and stop doomscrolling for who knows how long on your phone until you pass out. But, nope. Call it however the public wants as unhealthy, the night just simply speaks better to you compared to the early wakes of daylight.
Regardless, you eventually arrive at your high end server job by pulling into the parking space a short distance away from the building. It’s a rather fancy restaurant, the typical type of dining place where the chandeliers glisten like crystals and the whole place looks like any random CEO could walk in all dramatically only to reserve everything for himself. Thankfully that hasn’t happened yet. You’d be annoyed about it if it did though.
“Ah, there’s the person of the hour! And with three minutes left to spare, that’s a new record!” One of your fellow servers, Casey, chuckles as you rush past their figure. You merely rolled your eyes and sped into the staff lockers.
Once properly changed and apron tied tightly around your waist, you head back out where you start your early shift. Greet your customers, hand out the menus, take orders from tables, hand out the food on ridiculously fancy but plain white plates. Over and over, rinse and repeat. Occasionally during your breaks you take the opportunity to scream in a cup to keep your sanity stable. That or you vent to yourself in your car during lunch breaks. People think you're slowly losing your mind frankly.
By the later half of your day, you were beginning to feel every bone in your body wear in exhaustion. However you still had one more hour left of professional smiling to do and by god you were going to deliver. Literally.
“Hello miss, I’ll be your server for this evening. Here are your—wait Daphne?” You pause, blinking your eyes at the sight of your too casually dressed best friend. White tank top, long skirt, brown boots and brown clearly thrown on hoodie. Also, wait, is that a carrier sitting beside her too?
“Heya [Nickname]!” She waved enthusiastically. Mischief curling at her painted lips.
Suspicion rose in your gut, raising a brow between the carrier and her. “What are you here for this time?”
Yes, this is a pretty normal occurrence from your friend. Daphne had a knack for showing up at your work place at random bearing gossip or things she recently found interesting and something she must tell you about. At least she orders while she's here and doesn’t bother you too much when you're busy working. You can also appreciate speaking more like yourself around her.
“To show you what I got! My boyfriend gave him to me yesterday and I had to show you!”
“You couldn’t just send me a text about this?”
“Psh, nah. Showing him in person has a better effect.”
Seeing the confusion littering your face, she giggled and soon reached for the carrier. Putting it on her lap before angling the door to face where you stood, allowing you to chance a peek bending slightly forward.
Inside of it lay a skeleton bitty, a skele-bitty? You’ve heard a ‘bit’ (heh) from other customers and even seen a couple videos or photos on the monster-like creatures circling parts of the internet but never truly thought too hard on the matter. You just thought they were cute and moved on. Skeleton bitties however must be a newer development since you don’t remember seeing anybody ever mention the species.
“Tada! Meet Classic! He’s a Sansy-type skele-bitty! Isn’t he the cutest?” Daphne beamed, cooing at him from the gaps of the carrier he currently resided and wiggling a finger.
Classic, merely dressed in a dull white t-shirt and shorts—shifted his position laying on his back to resting on his sides and facing in your direction, letting out a big yawn once he did.
“Sup’ kid.”
Woah, the baritone on this bitty was a weird experience to behold. Never in your mind did you expect someone the height of an apple to have that kind of voice, much less a bitty. Yet you’ve experienced it anyway. And for a split second, you could’ve sworn he looked way older. Exhausted and tired from something you can’t exactly place. Still, you gave him a small little wave albeit awkwardly considering you’ve never met a bitty before this.
“He looks rather uh tired, don’t you think? Maybe?” You ask her, standing back upright.
Daphne just waved her hand dismissively, “he’s fine. He’s on the low maintenance side and doesn’t require a lot of anything. Trust me.”
Questionable but you guess you’ll have to put some trust in what she’s doing.
“Anyway! That’s basically all I wanted to show you, can I order my usual chicken Alfredo and some lemonade? Thanks!”
Sighing, you pick back the menu and cross the room over to the kitchen's counter area, calling out the order to one of the nearby chefs before resuming work carrying more dishes out. Eventually you do return to Daphne with her steaming hot plate that smelled of freshly made pasta along with her choice of beverage in ice cubes. She thanks you again once you set it down in front of her.
Another hour passes and finally, finally your shift is over!
Breathing in that sweet crisp breeze happening in the air with a mix of car exhaust leaves you sagging. You don’t have to deal with this amount of torture until Monday because, thankfully, it’s a weekend tomorrow, and you can carelessly do what ever your heart desires. That means sleeping when you want, and eating whatever you want. Weekends are a type of luxury for hard working people like you.
So in a typical after-work routine, you change back into what you wore previously, get in your car, drive home, then proceed to crash onto your couch where you also internally die from the ache in your legs. And despite your better protest to move them after all the walking you already did, you have to keep yourself somewhat functional.
You sluggishly pulled yourself off the couch exactly twenty minutes later just to cook some instant ramen and eggs.
Best meal you’ve ever had.
Although now another issue arises—that being the stuffed full trashcan you went to throw your empty ramen cup into. How long has it been since you last threw out the trash?
Huffing through your nose, you quickly dress your figure in a hoodie thrown off on the couch, left forgotten to ever reach the inside of your closet before making strides back into your kitchen, tying up the trash bag in a secure knot, then heading back outside to the colder outdoors. Personally speaking, winter was approaching a little uncomfortably fast for your liking. Oh well.
Perking up at the dumpster behind your apartment building, you sped up in hopes to just get it done and over with so you can enjoy doomscrolling to your hearts content. Maybe even indulge in doing some gaming or watching the movies you were procrastinating on.
“—m’ hungry Blue…”
“I Know, Red. I’ll Find Us Something For Us Here! Just Wait A Bit More!”
You make an abrupt halt. Hearing the upcoming conversation had you pause and you wonder if you might be walking into two homeless people rummaging for leftover food. This might be awkward if that’s the case.
Yet, the minute you sucked up every courage you could muster and willed yourself to move out from where you partially hid. Nobody was there.
Huh, weird.
Confusion hit you the second time today as you made your way to the dumpster, hauling the trash bag and opening the lid while looking both ways for where you thought you heard those voices and still seeing nothing. Were you actually going insane? Did you finally lose it and started having auditory hallucinations of a make believe conversation instead?
Seeing nobody around, you decided you should definitely hurry up and head back inside.
What you didn’t expect when you returned your gaze within the mess of trash bags held prison in the dumpster were two glowing blue eye lights, and the owner of said eye lights being a skele-bitty past the shaded darkness of his confined space.
Good news! You weren’t going crazy. Bad news, he’s summoned a weak attempt of bones pointing directly at you.
Great.