((PLEASE NOTE: The AU this chapter focuses on, Six-Feet-Under-Tale, was created in collaboration with Pastrinator64, and he came up with the name.))
Only
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It had come on like a storm. There had been signs for quite some time: flashes of white out of the corner of the eye, mirages, strange gatherings of numbers and letters, distortions in specific places, the power fritzing and finally going out. These were the constant rain showers. There were rumors that the generators in the Core, which provided Six-Feet-Underworld's power, had been blasted to smithereens, the doorways and halls blocked with tangles of blue strings. The facility was completely shut down as workers began to disappear. Any witnesses were labeled as completely incoherent and had been sent to prison, because who would believe that their coworker had not fallen, but had been pulled into a white patch in the wall?
These had been the tremors. They had all been warnings for what was to come. These warnings were going on unheeded by the mass populous, who carried on life as usual. They scavenged towns and cities, following their personal vendeta of "shoot to kill." Those who didn't had their throats slit at a first moment's hesitation, their bodies turning to dust at the next. The streets ran thick with blood and ash like a river.
However, there was a select few who chose to investigate this fragmented reality. In a basement laboratory, four monsters lived. Battery powered computers were used to keep track of and analyze data of their world. It had been set up when the anomalies in the very fabric of their dimension began to pop up several weeks ago. In the lab, the distortions were minimal, limited to the occasional freezing and glitching of a computer and static on the walls of the complex. They were determined to find the source of the anomaly and destroy it. The leaders of the team were Six-Feet-Under-Tale's Sans, a fellow scientist named Dr. Alphys, and the ex-leader of the Royal Guard, Undyne.
On that particular evening, Sans returned from securing the facility via locking the doors and windows and replacing the boards that were usually nailed over them. The glitches tended to shake things loose. He took a sip of his mug of a red, viscous liquid ― ketchup? ― as he approached a locked room. He peered into the window, not bothering to open the door. He knew what,or who, was inside, who was inside. The fourth member of their team. That red scarf was held tightly between his teeth like a gag, tying up his arms against his sides. Around his spine was a thick metal cuff chaining him to the wall. This was the punishment for those who spoke of the impossible.
Sans was all too aware that he was the one who deserved to be in the chamber instead of his brother. His hand tightened on the mug at the thought. It had been his mistake to take Papyrus to the Core to show him what he was working on. It had been him who had not kept track of his brother, whose curiosity was like that of a puppy. It had been Sans who couldn't shut him up when he began screaming about the second Sans, clad in black, that disappeared through a white patch in the wall.
Sans had begged to be chained up instead. He killed for it just to prove that he deserved it. It's what everyone did to get what they wanted. But Undyne had refused, saying that he had a job to do. He had to solve the mystery as to what was happening to their world.
He wouldn't get the chance.
As he watched Papyrus, who was motionless in the room and oblivious to his presence, specific areas on the walls began to warp and change. Static buzzed over the window as if it were a screen. The very fabric of time and space was being disrupted in such a concentrated manner that the very atoms of the dimension were being strained and torn and worked open. The walls began to glitch, then literally pulled apart into a boxy, geometric doorway into whiteness.
Sans's hand went to a belt beneath his lab coat, and he whipped out a two-way radio, jamming the call button so hard he thought his finger would go through it.
"Alph, Undyne, anybody," he demanded, "there's a huge freakin' emergency in block 4. the anomaly―" His words were cut short by a harsh gasp. Inside the cell, blue strings had whipped out through the doorways in space-time and wrapped around various parts of Papyrus's body on all sides: his arms, his torso, his legs, his vertebrae and neck… In a second, Sans saw his brother's eye sockets fly open and the mad terror held deep in the dark recesses of his skull. And the second after that, Papyrus was abruptly torn apart like the pieces of a puzzle. The strings had tugged back so quickly it was like being drawn and quartered, and there was an explosion of white dust that coated the windows and walls like ash.
This had been the tornado, as sudden and jarring as lightning.
The mug and radio seemed to fall in slow motion. The shattering of the cup felt too sharp in Sans's ears, and the ketchup stained the floor, wall, and his slippers like blood. From the static over the radio, his friends could be heard demanding for an answer.
Sans felt frozen in place, his eyes locked on the window. Through the opaque view of the room beyond the window, the glitching white voids in the walls closed like a healing wound, and the static too receded. His fingers twitched, his right eye black as night. And his left had become a big, bright, furious orb of blue, fritzing out like the static that had covered the window moments before.
Footsteps pounded down the adjacent hall. Undyne was running so fast to investigate the commotion that she skidded in order to turn, but she managed to keep her balance. Her eyes flashed bright gold out of anger. She planted herself firmly on the ground yards before Sans, pointing at him spitefully.
"You CANNOT just call and not explain what you found!" she roared, oblivious to Sans's state. "Talk, you boneheaded bast―" A bone as tall as her suddenly whizzed at her out of thin air, and she reflexively flattened herself against the wall in an instant as it flew past her and slammed into the wall behind her, causing a small explosion of plaster and stone. Startled, her jaw tense, Undyne slowly turned to look at the skeleton.
Sans wasn't looking at her, his left hand out towards her from forming the attack. The glow of his eye reflected against the smooth, white surface of his skull and the dusty window in front of him. Suddenly, between one blink and the next, he was there and gone, and Undyne didn't have to look to know he had moved directly in front of her without taking a step. The first thing she noticed was his mad grin, angry and pained and plastered on like a doll's. His hard, bony fist clenched around the edge of her protective armor's neckplate and, despite her being taller, he pulled her down to his level so that they were eye to luminous eye.
"The anomaly killed him," Sans said slowly, his voice a harsh, grating whisper. He made each word count. "Who was supposed to be monitoring it?"
Undyne swallowed hard, her gold, slitted fish eyes glaring at him. She squared her jaw to hide how he unnerved her. A blue spear seemingly made of a magic energy manifested in her hand, and she swung to knock him aside with the blunt pole. He automatically took a sliding step backwards as the tip moved past his stomach, and a little word appeared for a split second in front of him: MISS.
"It was you, you twerp," Undyne growled. "You were supposed to―"
"ST-STOOOOP!" a third voice screeched from the hall Undyne had come down. The little scientist Alphys ran up and slowed to a stop at the intersection, doubling over and putting her hands on her knees to catch her breath. She was about as tall as Sans, and her height combined with her weight made running quite a chore.
"One...one moment…" she wheezed, pushing up her glasses on her lizard-like snout. Sans shot her a glare, his hands jammed into the pockets of his lab coat, clenched tightly to stop the trembling. He turned on his heel and strode purposefully back towards the now empty cell.
"S-Sans, w-w-wait!" Alphys called, reaching out. "I found something that might help―"
"i'm going to wait for it," Sans interrupted matter-of-factly, in a tone that made his statement seem as hard and fixed as concrete. Then, in an even more serious tone, "Don't bother me."
Alphys gave a little whimper of protest, but the cell door had opened and slammed shut, not bothering to listen to what she had to say.
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Sans sat himself down firmly in the center of the cell and pulled the scarf over his lap like a dusty blanket. His eye sockets now looked as black and empty as he felt on the inside. He was sitting in and surrounded by his brother's essence. Papyrus's dust looked like it had been packed inside a bomb that had gone off, and now stuck to the walls, ceiling, and floor, all except for where the discontinuities in their realm had opened in order to pull him apart. Now, the dust stuck to the ketchup that had splattered Sans's slippers like glue. He didn't know how long he sat like that, wallowing in his own self-hatred. It had been his watch. His turn to take over the investigation. His turn to track and record these anomalies. He was supposed to prevent this. He could have saved his brother.
For hours, thoughts like this swirled through Sans's mind, forcing him down deeper and deeper into his own darkness. Eventually he did what he always did when the thoughts became too much to bear despite the fact that he was sitting up; he fell asleep. The deep sleep was broken up by nightmares and visions of what he had just witnessed, each time wiped out by a wave of pixilated whiteness. Over and over again Sans watched and rewatched the way his brother looked at him before exploding in a cloud of dust. Before the dust could settle, his mind was overtaken by the strange white void. Even when the dream faded and then restarted, his brother's muffled, agonizing scream, cut off as abruptly as music being stopped in the middle of the chorus, played throughout like a broken record.
Suddenly, another piercing sound from the outside lurched him unexpectedly from his slumber. Shrill, buzzing sirens were going off all over the compound. Outside the cell, red emergency lights were flashing. In a world as unsafe as Six-Feet-Under-Tale, where danger and emergency were a part of daily life, much was needed to trigger an alarm. These alarms were set to off only if a world-ending disaster were to occur, an event triggered by the abrupt disappearance or alteration of data from the world. Without much thought as to what he was doing, Sans draped Papyrus's dusty scarf around his neck and warped himself out of the room to the multitude of computers. He had to see for himself.
Reports of constant errors and sectors of Six-Feet-Underworld becoming unresponsive were rapidly piling up at the bottom of the code. Sans scrolled to the top, where the programming for the world began at Mount Ebott. To his horror, a large chunk of it was missing. What was there was being changed before completely vanishing. This was what he saw:
[p]404 Error: Ruins/Home:level1 not found[br /]
file erased[br /]
[p]404 Error: Ruins/Home:basement-hall1 not found[br /]
file erased[br /]
[p]404 Error: Ruins/Home:basement-hall2 not found[br /]
file erased[br /]
[p]404 Error: Ruins/Home:ruins-exit not found[br /]
file corrupted[br /]
file erased [/p]
As he watched, file after file changed from "corrupted" to "erased" before the line of text vanished. And within moments, he watched a name disappear:
[p]404 Error: Character/Toriel not found[br /]
file corrupted[br /]
file erased[/p]
The changes were accelerating into Snowdin's forest, nearing the town. Sans could feel something inside him tense, as if someone were squeezing his heart and soul. He couldn't just watch the code disappear. So he teleported to Hotland, where the code told him Undyne and Alphys were.
When he arrived, the streets were in chaos. Monsters, the weapons they carried at the ready and magic attacks prepared, were fleeing in the opposite direction of the strange world-devouring glitches. Undyne, in a full suit of armor, was shouting orders above the commotion, standing on one of the steam pipes on the side of the path that ceased doing its job. Sans stood on the side of the road, his hands jammed in his lab coat pockets. Undyne looked at him, her yellow eyes gleaming through her helmet.
"So you finally decided to quit wallowing in misery?" she stated gratingly. Sans's fists clenched around the fabric of his pockets.
"you oughta watch what you say," Sans muttered, his eyes just visible above the folds of the scarf.
"Or what?" Undyne scoffed. "You're not so special now, are you? We've all lost people, while you've been lucky. Well, to hell with that! It's about damn time your luck ran out."
A tense, strained grin formed on Sans's face. "this coming from the woman who wanted my brother, who wouldn't hurt a fly, who is ― was ― the only one who chose to believe in hope, thrown in a cell."
"Papyrus was a fool," Undyne said cooly, "to believe that there was any hope in saving us."
Sans's smile fell away like a curtain, his left hand emerging from his pocket, the tips of his phalanges glowing blue. How badly he wanted to wipe away that smug grin that was always plastered on her face, to make her feel with every ounce of her being what he felt…
Whatever he was about to do was halted by piercing screams. Sans looked in the direction they had come, towards the entrance of Hotland. He cast one final glare at Undyne, who scowled in return, before teleporting to the entrance.
He was met by an oncoming stampede of monsters running in the opposite direction. He just managed to dart to the side of the road before a wave of them rolled through. All the monsters were residents of Waterfall, with a few families from Snowdin mixed in. They were screaming, shoving each other out of the way, pushing each other back, calling the names of their family members, and constantly and frantically looking over their shoulders. In the distance, a bright white glow could be seen growing and brightening like an approaching train.
Sans reached out and grabbed the muscular arm of a fleeing Aaron, startling the Waterfall monster. He seemed very anxious to get away, sweating profusely.
"what's going on?" Sans asked calmly. "where's it at?"
"I-I can't explain it, dude!" Aaron cried. "It's just this...white void...swallowing up everything! Nobody's come out of it, they're just gone, man! Just gone! It was in Snowdin―then it was here! It'll get us too if you don't run!"
"where's it at?" Sans repeated.
"Th-The bridge, last I saw!" Aaron spoke quickly, slapping Sans's hand off his bicep. "You'll die if you go after it, tho!" With that, he swam off through the air.
Sans didn't waste a second. He teleported to the trash dump, which was just after the maze of a bridge. At the start of the hall was not a wall, but an enormous white space. It had the same geometric, glitchy pattern as the doorways that had opened to allow Papyrus to be torn apart. The straggling monsters, such as the short-legged Woshuas and Temmies, were being tied up and pulled into the void by blue strings that were constantly shooting out to catch their prey. Their screams were deafening. Their world, the walls, water, stone, and trash, were all being sucked into this void like a vacuum, and it all turned to dust the instant it touched it. Sans had to teleport backwards several times to keep from getting caught in the quickly advancing pull of the void. He stood up on the highest trash pile, then fell to one knee, placing the palm of his hand on the surface beneath his feet. Dozens of thick, ten-foot bones shot out of the walls, floor, and ceiling, criss-crossing and overlapping to create a skeletal wall to block the strange oncoming void. When Sans didn't see any of the glitches come through at first, a triumphant grin lit his face. Then, his bone wall began to dissolve like sugar cubes in water. The void simply ate it up like it was candy. Sans took a sharp intake of breath, then disappeared.
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On the steps of New Home, their King's house, Sans pounded on the door. The sound reverberated throughout the cavern. He looked over his shoulder. No one had arrived here yet; they had to make it through the maze that was the Core without the use of the elevators. Sans knew, in the deep depths of his soul, that they were all screwed. There was no way they could outrun the oncoming wave.
After too many seconds, the door opened on its own accord. Sans darted inside, propping it open for any monsters that made it this far. The chain to the garden was broken and hastily tossed aside. There was no radio on. No crackle of the fireplace or hiss of a teapot. The quiet of the house was deafening.
"ASGORE!" Sans shouted, breaking the silence. It was such a rare occasion that he raised his voice, but desperate times call for desperate measures. His call still ringing in his ears, he listened for a response.
But nobody came.
Once more Sans vanished, skipping over the multitude of halls halls and appearing in the garden. He landed in dead flowers and blood. The golden blossoms that once grew here were now crumbling brown husks spotted with crimson. The bloodstains were a polkadotted trail to the throne, where a large figure was slumped. In the dim light, Sans made out the cloak of their unconscious King and the gleam of razor sharp wire. Electric blue strings. They were speared through King Asgore's body; his arms, his legs, his torso were all pierced through just so that the strings didn't touch his major organs. His matted, golden bearded face was illuminated with an unnatural light. Just above his chest, tied up and suspended with those same blue strings, was a fist-sized upside down heart. Asgore's soul.
Sans ran to King Asgore's side, searching for a way to extract him from the strings. The strings, however, stretched from one end of the room to the other like a web, impaling the King right in the middle. Sans grabbed Asgore's shoulder in an attempt to wake him, but his hand brushed one of the wires. Where it touched, it felt like a thousand tiny needles stabbing the marrow of his bones and grating along it with his movement. His hand recoiled as if he'd touched a burning stove, glaring at the wires with an angry confusion. It was blue magic all right; magic that hurt when you moved through it. It was the magic he and Papyrus specialized in.
"You idiot…" said a small voice from behind him. Sans whirled around, looking around, then down. In the mass of crumbling flowers, one bright golden blossom was facing towards him, and in its center was a face. A sad, rueful face. "He'll be gone soon," Flowey said.
"what?" Sans demanded, glaring at the talking flower, the other anomaly.
"Asgore," Flowey nodded towards the unconscious King. "He'll be dead in a minute. We all will be."
"you're joking," Sans said. "nothing is ever unstoppable. it's just a glitch, and glitches can be fixed―"
"You don't get it, do you?" Flowey said, his face contorting in slight confusion and disgust. "C'mon, skeleton, I thought you were smarter than this! You just left them all behind. All those monsters piled up at the first elevator in Hotland that still worked on emergency power. There was a back-up. That void consumed them. Haven't you noticed the silence?"
Sans looked up at the door. Narrow caves like those of the Underground carried sound quite well, but there was nothing to be heard.
"Nobody's coming," Flowey continued, "and nobody will. This is the end of the line."
"what do you want?" Sans sneered spitefully. "if you're just here to ridicule me, then make like a flower and leaf."
"You don't honestly think this is normal, do you?!" Flowey demanded, his mouth growing jagged like fangs. "Of course somebody's causing this! This ain't just part of the code, buster!"
In one fluid motion, Sans knelt down and grabbed the head of the flower, pulling it so he was face-to-face with Flowey. "Who is it?" Sans growled.
Flowey just laughed nervously. "I-It's not who, it's where!" Flowey looked back. The glow of the whiteness was creeping in from the hall and growing closer. It was moving far too fast.
"The barrier," the flower said. "Maybe you can do something―"
Sans's eyes turned black. He grabbed the base of Flowey's stem and uprooted him, an enormous clump of tangling roots coming with.
"H-Hey, what do you think you're―" Flowey screamed in protest, but was cut off as Sans chucked him towards the door. Flowey looked up, propping himself up with one of his leaves, watching Sans with the hopeless expression of a child.
"Don't make me your hero, kid," Sans muttered, turning around and striding out of the room, the scarf flapping like a cape behind him. He heard Flowey cry out as he, too, was consumed by the whiteness, but Sans didn't bother to look back.
Once he left the room, he broke into a sprint. Sans knew the void would be right behind him, and he knew in his heart that he was all that was left. If he could just manage to find some sort of loophole...whoever was doing this had to be around.
He skid to a stop at the entrance to the barrier. It was not the strange, endless hall it looked like it was; something was blocking the view of it. Another of those geometric windows spanned the length of the room a distance away, but it was not empty. A dark figure was standing inside the void, a hood pulled up and their hands in their pockets as if they were merely watching a stage performance. As soon as they saw Sans, a grin of yellow teeth spanned their face.
Sans's eyes narrowed, and he took off at a sprint towards the figure, teleporting ahead a few feet every few steps. He'd hesitated for too long and the void was too fast, he could feel it licking at his heels. Where it touched, the areas of contact tingled as they flaked away into dust. His heels, the edges of his lab coat, the hem of Papyrus's scarf, and growing increasingly closer―
He was running out of time. He was gaining on the window in front of him and the whiteness was closing in. He made a desperate leap, and the void seemed to move with him, lurching forward. The figure stepped aside, and he could hear broken laughter and a distant rock song, skipping like a record. "...Another one bites the dust...another one gone, another one gone, another one bites the dust…"
The world around him turned white as he entered the void in front of him and the glitches behind him ate up his world. Sans landed hard on a floor that he didn't know was there. The bottom half of his body up to his spine tingled like it had fallen asleep, and at the back of his mind, it occurred to him he may not have made it in one piece. But he was alive, albeit only slightly; the edges of his vision were going black, his heart pounding too fast for it to be healthy. He rolled over onto his back, and through the blurry pinpoints that were left of his vision, he saw a distorted face looking down over him. It had the shape and features of his own, but the errors and glitches that distorted it made it difficult to make out. Then, it spoke.
"thIs iS n-n EW," the stranger said in a voice vaguely similar to his own, yet broken up and stuttering like a scratched CD. "No b-bOD y hAs e vEr maDe-ade-aDE it THiS fa-ar. yO-ou muST Be sPe cIAl… Wh-WHat a NIcE thIng-ing tO aD d TO my-y cOll eCTio N."
Sans didn't get to respond. His eyes went dark before closing, unconsciousness taking him away like the current of a river.
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((AHAHAHA WHOA THAT GOT REALLY LONG. I guess the chapter lengths are going to vary a LOOOOT. On Tumblr, this chapter was split into three parts, and it was much more organized but got cut off at odd times. You can check it out there in its original formatting at geeettt-dunked-on. There's a link by the Ask, Submit, and Archive options titled "Only (an Errorsans Fanfic!)" where you can read it chronologically. Things like the code are kept in their original HTML format (cause that's how I wrote it) where I had to make something up here instead to make it seem programmy since FF doesn't let you use arrowheads for some reason. This was such a PAIN to reformat for FF. Like I usually space out the letters when Sans is super serious instead of italics, but it doesn't let me do that. UGH. I'd also like to make every chapter in a different character/AU's POV. I wasn't able to do that on Tumblr, so I'll do it here.
ERROR SANS IS INTRODUCED! :D Remember he belongs to loverofpiggies on Tumblr.
As always, read, review, follow, and favorite. After this chapter I think I'll FINALLY go back to work on Sonic '06 Blooperscause that's been on hiatus for waaaaay too long.))
~STH-N