paled and wrapped up emotions
Rating; T WC; 1098 Characters; Error, Blueberror, Pale Notes; error bonds with the multiverse’s troublemaker. and gets a gift from BB
part 3 of Multiverse #379 AO3 mirror | Ko-fi
Error gazed at the expansive space that filled Outertale. Or what passed as Outertale in this multiverse. It was the same set of asteroids he was used to, but the constellations overhead were all wrong, the colors just off in the nebulae.
It didn’t even matter much. Bit by bit, all those colors faded around him; first into a monochrome that then bled into inky darkness.
“What’s it this time?” he wondered idly, turning to look from what used to be a sky at his companion.
Pale was… Nowadays, Error hesitated comparing him to either himself, or Ink. He acted like Ink when he’d run out of paints, not possessing emotions a lot of the time, but instead of carrying paint vials around like the infernal artist, he’d just go to an AU and bleed it dry for them. The result was always a black void, too unstable to keep its shape when left empty afterwards.
Pale turned towards him, a thoughtful expression on his face.
“Melancholy,” he said, eventually.
Error nodded, slowly standing up since the asteroid he’d been using as a stargazing spot was long gone. This had been one of many AU copies made up by Template, its express and sole purpose to be used by Pale.
He marveled at how this multiverse functioned from the moment BB had explained it to him.
The balance held, because Pale only destroyed AUs to feel something again, and a copy of the original worked for him just the same. And Template, unlike fate-damned squid-dick, knew how to keep the creation of new AUs in check. This multiverse worked almost like a well-oiled machine, and Error would’ve been jealous of it, once upon a time.
As it was, the moment he’d been thrusted into Template’s Anti-void, the ever-screaming voice of Fate was gone from his skull, and the only voices left there were the quiet cacophony of pseudo-creators, eternally vying for his attention.
He felt no desire or drive to destroy a single AU in here. He just tagged along with Pale sometimes, to watch him at it. Not aimed at him, or anything else, for that matter, as an attack, the black ink was almost mesmerizing to watch.
Error opened a portal to the Anti-void, where BB was already sitting in a tangled web of blue strings that made up a hammock not unlike the one he’d had in his own Anti-void. He’d made it maybe a week ago, and BB took it for his own within an hour.
He stared at the shifting mess of code that surrounded the glitched edges of the portal, visible only to his eyes. Or maybe the other glitches could see it, too, though they never mentioned it. It took a while to re-acquaint himself with his own powers, to learn how these universes connected and what they were made of. Their code, just like the coordinates, were just off enough for Error’s instinctual ones to fail.
“Oh, hey!” BB called out as they slipped from endless black into the stretching white.
Error nodded his greeting and Pale raised a hand. “Hello, BB.”
BB pulled a notebook out of his glitching inventory, almost dropping it twice in the process. A blue pen — with a pom-pom on top, no less! — was next, and BB held both while regarding Pale with starry eyelights.
“Mweheh, ok. How was that one?” he asked, flipping to an empty page to write down the emotion that copy had elicited. They all made BB do it, because Template was too scatterbrained (another thing he shared with Ink, though with Template, it didn’t bug Error nearly as much) to not lose the notebook somewhere.
“A rare one,” Pale said, watching the hammock slowly swinging to a stop now that BB was no longer in it. His eyelights sparkled with something. “Melancholy.”
BB hummed, flipping through the pages until he stopped on a specific one, rowing over the neat, capitalized lines. “We already have one with melancholy,” he noted, voice stuttering over a glitch, and then scribbled ‘OUTERTALE #4’ next to ‘SWAPFELL #2’. “Though I think… pure…? melancholy… might be better than ‘melancholy and self-loathing’. Heh.”
Pale snorted, shaking his head. “At least marginally.”
“Mweheh! Alright! Just let someone know when it starts wearing off. I’ve got three more copies lined up for testing, but that can wait for another time if you just wanna feel something specific. Template should be in Fell number uhh… two!”
Pale stared off at nothing for a while more, but then he nodded in BB’s direction. “I’ll think it over. Thanks.”
And he was gone, presumably off to ‘Fell number uhh... two, with an exclamation mark,’ which just left Error and BB in the Anti-void.
“Hey, Error, wanna see what I knitted yesterday?” BB asked, not missing a beat.
Error regarded him with a surprised and, admittedly, curious look. They’d found a hobby they shared, though BB wasn’t that skilled in knitting just yet. Just another thing that set him apart from the Blue Error had known. Just another thing that made him like BB more than he ever could’ve Blue.
“Look!” BB exclaimed, exchanging the notebook and pen for a bundled mess of something blue, which promptly glitched as it exited his inventory and spilled on the ground. “Shoot!”
He scrambled to pick it up and held it out for Error to see. It was a long strip of blue, the stitching a little loose here and there, but it looked like what it was — a scarf. Probably. “A scarf?”
BB nodded vigorously. “For you,” he elaborated, explaining exactly nothing.
“For me?” Error echoed, staring at the scarf as it was being held out to him.
“Yep! Cause yours is singed and stuff. I thought you’d like a new one. Mweheh, but it’s okay if you don’t!” BB looked just a little sheepish, not meeting his gaze but instead staring off to the side. Immediately, Error snatched the scarf from him and pulled his own off.
“I would,” he said, too quick. “I do.” It felt comfortable sitting around his neck. He hoped it showed on his expression, because he didn’t know how to convey what he was feeling with words.
BB seemed to, thankfully, get it. His face lit up and he laughed. “Good!”
It was just them in the Anti-void now, as often. Even without his collection of puppets and souls, it didn’t feel lonely anymore. BB retreated back to the hammock, beckoning him along.
Error didn’t want to go back to his own, even if he could.