Monday Morning

The steady clacking of keys was a constant, even late into the night. This code wasn’t going to write itself—and it was due for review on Wednesday.

Today was Sunday.

Or so Alphys insisted on believing despite the date on her computer very clearly reading Monday. It wouldn’t really count as Monday until she went to bed. To reinforce this perception, shortly after 1AM Alphys had full-screened her IDE so she couldn’t see the time.

And the blackout curtains over the windows of the study prevented the sky from intruding on Alphys’ self-imposed delusion. So when she heard her girlfriend’s webbed feet slapping down the hallway, she assumed Undyne had only gotten up to use the bathroom.

“Alphys?” Undyne poked her head into the study. “What are you doing? It’s eight in the morning. You didn’t come to bed at all!”

“What?” Alphys blinked. She rubbed her eyes, lines of code dancing behind her eyelids. “I-I could have s-sworn it was only three...”

Undyne scoffed. “Not again.”

“H-hey, at least I wasn’t watching anime this time,” Alphys protested. “This—t-this is important work!”

“I know, I know. You’re getting money to buy anime with.”

“A-a-and to pay rent!”

This was a lie. Undyne paid the rent and they both knew it. Alphys’ last paycheck had barely cleared before it was gone, spent on more DVDs and figmas.

Undyne stepped over to the computer desk and peered over Alphys’ shoulder. “I don’t understand a word of this.”

Alphys lifted her glasses up. She squinted, then set them back down. An exhausted shudder wracked her body. Now that she’d been jolted away from her groove, she didn’t understand a word of it, either. She was more tired than she’d realized. “Uh, well, y-you see, it’s for optimizing real-time search results in... in...” She rubbed at her eyes. Try as she might, she just couldn’t make herself focus on the code she’d been plowing through before Undyne’s interruption. She groaned.

“Bedtime.” There was no arguing, especially because Undyne was objectively right. The last time Alphys had argued over this very same subject she’d wound up slung over Undyne’s shoulder and tossed into bed—and not in the fun way, but in the painful oops-the-bed-is-broken-we-need-a-new-one way. (In Undyne’s defense, she’d spend the next week apologizing profusely and had even had Toriel come over and do the cooking so the kitchen wouldn’t burn down without the bedridden Alphys’ supervision.)

So Alphys saved her work and got to her feet. “You win, you win.”

Undyne grinned. She patted her girlfriend on the shoulder and walked with her to the bedroom. “I’m waking you up when I get home from work, sleep or no sleep, so don’t try and code on your phone.”

That didn’t matter. Now that she was here, flopping face-first into bed and having Undyne tuck the blankets around her, Alphys didn’t have the energy to even try to stay awake. “Night,” she mumbled.

Undyne took Alphys’s glasses and set them on the nightstand. “Night. Nerd.”