The noise of the fair pounded painfully against his eardrums. Hugo hated crowds, but this quiet, provincial AU required perfect camouflage. To remain invisible, he took a job as an assistant to a local cloth merchant — a boring, inconspicuous job that wouldn't attract the attention of Ink or Error.
His hands, still lacking his usual gloves back then, were constantly itching with glitches. Hugo hid them deep in the pockets of his bulky purple jacket.
?: "Hey, kid! Help me drag these bags over to the counter!" a passing human called out to him with a cheerful smile.
Hugo winced inwardly at that "foolish, creepy smile," but nodded politely. He absolutely detested physical contact. Every time his fingers accidentally brushed against someone else's clothes or skin, a shiver of disgust ran through his body.
Hugo: "I need gloves. Thick ones. To seal myself off from this world," he thought coldly.
In the evening, when the fair tents began to close, Hugo stepped into a shop on the edge of the square. An old monster tailor was dozing behind the counter. Hugo silently chose the simplest, thickest brown gloves. They perfectly concealed his dark hands, which were covered in system errors. He pulled them on, finally feeling the long-awaited barrier between himself and someone else's reality.
"That'll be three coins... what's your name again?" the tailor yawned, rubbing his eyes.
Hugo froze. He didn't have a name. In the system code, he was recorded simply as an Error.
At that exact moment, two people walked past the shop's open door. One of them laughed out loud and shouted to the one catching up: "Hurry up, Hugo, we're late!"
The sound of this name seemed ideal to the faceless virus. It was simple. Ordinary. Absolutely unnoticeable in the endless multiverse.
"Hugo," he replied quietly and politely to the tailor, handing over the coins with his newly gloved hands. "My name is Hugo."
...Two weeks later, that AU ceased to exist. Hugo stood in the middle of the growing void, watching the collapse of the fair tents where he had so recently worked. He had actually grown to like this world a little. It was quiet here, and the new gloves did an excellent job of protecting him from touch.
But pragmatism won. Hugo adjusted his collar, concealing his face, and dissolved into the darkness, leaving nothing but a sterile white vacuum behind.
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