My Friend Over the Phone

Chapter 38

A/N: hello there, I'm back from hiatus and finally recovered-ish from burnout! Yay!
Anyway, this is just to apologize because I've realized that maybbbeeee I should've put warnings for torture and kidnapping at the beginning of the past few chapters, it completely slipped my mind. I'm going to update those chapters to put in proper warnings right away, so if you see that I've updated a bunch of chapters, it's just that! Thank you for your patience!

!WARNING! This chapter contains:

- Character Death(s)
- Suicide/Self Sacrifice

Ink stood silently in the darkness he was shrouded in. Whenever he tries to move, something wrapped around him stops him from doing so. When he tries to talk, his breath is taken from him. The worst part is that he can't find it in him to panic. He can't find it in him to really care about his situation. It's likely better this way. He was a monster, and not just in a literal sense.

His lack of a soul means a lack of more complicated emotions like regret and sympathy. Sure, he can take pure happiness or sadness from other humans and monsters and feel it by drinking his paints, but he knows those emotions aren't his. He can't take feelings as abstract as remorse. That's why he tried so hard to learn to be a morally correct person, with the help of Dream. But isn't Nightmare an immoral person? Is Dream morally correct for reconnecting with him and letting him get away with the things he does? He doesn't think so. So who is he to go to for guidance on how to be a decent person?

...

For years he tried to make himself an artificial soul. He didn't know where to begin, and nor did any of the scientists from all the different universes he spoke to. No one knew the secret of making a soul, let alone one he could absorb. You can only absorb a soul if you already have one, and only if it's a soul of the opposite race. If you have a monster soul, you can only absorb a human soul, and vice versa. A soulless being cannot absorb a monster nor a human soul.

The natural souls had to find their own someone to live through and connect with. That was entirely up to them, he only made them bodies to choose from. He could never connect with those souls. They didn't want to be someone like him, without a home or family, constantly under stress of creating, creating, creating. Why did he even bother? How could someone as careless as him learn to lead a life that makes him feel so dull every day? He used to like creating, back when the Multiverse was nothing but a vast beige emptiness, just begging for some stories. It made him feel like he was meant to be more than just an outcode, a mistake that was never erased. Did Error ever feel the same way about destruction? Perhaps he did.

It amazed him that he could still think about these things in his soulless, magical paint-less state. Normally when his paints were empty or missing, he would barely even think about anything more than that they were all just code. Numbers. Useless numbers. He sat down. He couldn't identify what the floor felt like. He traced patterns on the blackness, seeing if it make make some kind of indent. Maybe it was too dark for him to see that; he could barely see his arm.

His arm. It had strange lines wrapped around it. Not his tattoos, he knew what those looked like. This almost looked like...

String?

◾️▫️◾️▫️◾️

In a dark room, a phone rang. The cracked screen on the cell phone lit up. There was no picture, and the caller ID simply read 'MJ'. It rang, and rang, and rang. But nobody came. It beeped as the caller recorded a voicemail. It played out loud.

"Hello, E. You're not here right now, and I know it's part of our agreement to not leave voicemails, however I won't be here in a few hours to tell you what I need to say.