But of course, skeletons do not have blood.
You did not realise this at first, kneeling before Error's lifeless form, the red dagger still in hand. You had work to do, work that your father had written into your very code and drove you to carry out, to create the perfect universe with the perfect utopia that none could usurp. You were the end game, the final stage in his plan. And yet you waited, waited for the damn comedian to wither away into dust and thus end this hell that existed betweent the two of you, to finally put a stop to this cycle.
Something else was stirring inside of you while gazing at Error's lifeless form, watching the vitality slowly drain away from him. Every part of you wanted to lash out and fight against the coding that held you prisoner, to escape the bonds that held you captive, to snap the strings that were chaining you to the ground.
"What a shame."
The dialogue caught you unawares and your head whipped around, attempting to find the source of the noise. It was not possible for someone to be speaking to you, for you and Error were the only living things that still lived inside the Void, and the comedian was on his death bed, sailing forever into the oblivion that awaited him.
But then the realisation sunk in, the prospect maddening. The comedian was alive, after all you had done! Even with his health at one, even after your dagger had cut through him as scissors often did with paper, the damn comedian was alive.
"This was a limited edition," Error muttered, removing the ketchup bottle from his jacket. Your eyes traced along the gash marks cut into the condiment bottle. So your knife hadn't struck the comedian but the damn ketchuo bottle tucked away underneath his jacket, thus resulting in the red liquid to spill across the Void, an eerie contrast to the serene white of the world around you.
A part of your rejoiced in this, the comedian was alive, still walking and talking! But why would you feel such a thing, why would such emotions run through your mind when you had a greater task at hand, to carry out your father's plans and create the perfect world, the perfect place where no resets would ever occur, no alternate worlds would ever form?
There is error in perfection and perfection in error.
Those were the words that the anomaly had whispered to you, those were the words that stuck and hummed in your very core. There would always be fault within the perfect world. even if everyone lived in peace and the universe was at an equilibrium for no creaitvity would exist, nothing would change, everything would stay the same. And with error, with the so-called anomalies that were the alternate universes, that was perfection. For even if they were a nuiscance, they were the true balance within the multiverse for creativity flourished.
That was the balance.
You sunk to your knees, feeling your entire being split in two. This was where you would die, where your code would collapse in on itself, the corrupted wanting to kill the anomaly, wanting to gash your knife across his spinal cord and watched the life drain away. And yet a part of you remembered, remembered the echo flowers and the weeks spent together, fighting against the odds and conquering false gods so that there might be a better future, living in the now and conquering the problems one at a time, not caring what the future may hold.
The comedian sensed this, the way your entire composition was tearing in half, how your grip on the world was slipping as if with the next breath could your soul slip away into oblivion. But still you persisted, still hanging on by a meager thread even when all odds were stacked against you living. You felt the glitch's arms wrap around your chest and held you close, feeling the hum of his soul and magic vibrate in unison within the magic of your own soul for you two were halves of a whole, halves of a balance that were forever intertwined.
You said something to him. It must have been something nice because Error smiled, something you had never seen the comedian do before. Perhaps it had been a joke, the last line to escape your lungs before they heaved their last breath, or maybe it had been your final message to him, your first and last 'I love you.' But it mattered not what you said for the darkness was growing, your code was splitting in two, you were dying and there was nothing you could do to change it.
It was best you died anyway, for the power of the Overwrite button would cease with you. And Error could turn and recreate the universe for he was no longer just a chess piece conducted to destroy, he contained a part of your soul, a part of the ability to create as you were Ink's successor and thus the shared nature of your souls would allow such an ability to be passed onto him.
There is still hope, and that was the only thing stronger than fear.
What a funny thing. You smiled at the thought and closed your eyes, hearing the comedian call your name but the words fell upon nothing more than deaf ears.
~
And yet.
Something was changing inside of you, something was changing as your code, the original and corrupted from Gaster's Overwrite button, seperated in two. With a trembling sigh, a gasp of breath that left your pale lips, the corrupted code left your being entirely. Piece by piece, parts of a puzzle that slowly snapped into place, your code mended over the gaps, repaired itself.
You were in a comatose state as this occured, unaware to how life around was functioning and knew not how Error was reacting, whether he saw you dead or simply rendered incapable of processing the outside world.
But when you woke, you woke to a song.
You were in the Doodle Sphere and it was no longer a graveyard of the dead, no longer filled with purple flame and torn paper. Each painting had been reconstructed into place, each a window into an alternate reality that thrived. Each reality had a voice, a voice that sang loud and clear through the emptiness of the Void and intermingled with the others, a never-ending chorus. But the song had no name.
"Error?"
It was the first name that came to mind and you saw the anomaly sitting next to you as you slipped back into reality, staring up upon the paintings that hummed in the sky. His head swiveled in your direction at the sound of your voice, taken by surprise. "You're awake!" The surprise in his words suggested he had never thought you would wake up again.
"The multiverse, wasn't it destroyed?" The questions were all threatening to spill from you, to burst through your lips. "How long was I out? What - "
"The multiverse was destroyed," Error chuckled, looking down at his hands. "It took a little bit of effort, an enormous amount for me since I don't like doing much of anything, but it was easy when you knew how to put the pieces back together. I remembered the coding of the majority of the universes and managed to put them back together. I think that there might be some mistakes, small ones anyway. Something calling itself a Paperjam sprouted up shortly after I started trying to fix everything. I did what any rational person would and threw it into an endless universe to spend the rest of its life in."
"You'd make a wonderful parent," you noted sarcastically.
"It wasn't like I was related to him or anything," Error shrugged off the subject.
"But how did you do all of this? I thought that you could only destroy the codings of the unvierses, not create them. Wasn't that the whole thing that set you apart from Ink, that he was able to create universes and you destroyed them?"
"Once," Error mused. "But since you took the place of Ink and our souls were split, some of that transferred over to me and some transferred to you. In a way I am no longer the destroyer and you are no longer the creator, it's a balance."
The two of you sat in silence for a while, drinking in the hum of the universe. "That reminds me," Error sat up and waved his hand, a rift appearing in the air. A sight such as that might once have apalled you, the gaping hole that tore through nothing. Inside it was a window to another world, a universe you had never thought to see again.
"This is Tribetale," Error said, some profound sadness in his words. "It's what Ink called your universe, the one that was destroyed. I remembered some of the coding and was able to piece it back together. You can go home like you always wanted, everything's as it should be. The multiverse will function as it should be, no longer creating anymore universes and none destroyed either. The song will remain the same within the Void for the rest of eternity."
You stared in silence, watching the distant outlines of your siblings playing in a field of flowers, laughter and shrieks of joy carrying into the Void. You could make out the faint outline of Frisk as well, the friend you had for so many years. But yet it no longer felt like home, even if you would return to it. You no longer belonged there, not anymore. The old [Y/N] had perished alongside the original deletion of the world and left behind someone new entirely. Like Ink and Error, you had been a different person when you first entered the Void and shaped into a new person entirely. Sure, you still had the same name and the same voice, but someone new carried your appearance.
"It's wonderful," you said at last and turned to Error. "But I don't belong there, not anymore. I don't think I could go back knowing that there's thousands of other worlds out there. Plus, what would you do without me?" You slugged him playfully and the glitch recoiled from physical contact, hissing and sounding more like a cat than a skeleton.
"I'm here to stay," you finished, looking up at him. The darkened mood seemed to lift from Error and a sudden vitality filled him.
"There were a few universes that I forgot to bring back," Error explained as the two of you walked away from the rift, leaving behind the laughter, the field of flowers. "Lusttale, Undertail, I don't think those will be missed much, plus they were a bother anyway."
You opened your mouth to protest but then decided otherwise. Perhaps it was for the best.
The two of you walked, each an opposite side of the balance that soared through the Void. One the creator, one the destroyer, and yet the two of you were neither for your souls had been bound and created something new entirely. You were content with the way things were, the equilibrium of world and the need to never again create or destroy and Error pleased as well, for the song that hummed through the multiverse was pleasant to those who listened and would ever change, no more annoyances of worlds popping up at random to offer their own lyrics.
You chuckled at a joke the comedian said, your voice lost amongst the song in the Void, the song that now had a name, the song that remained the same. The song that reflected the dawn of a new era of peace and stability, that marked an end to the never-ending cycle between good and evil, forever halted by your actions that seemed to perhaps change the multiverse for the better. And the song would never end, never change.
And for that, it was called Daybreak.
~