★osc oneshots★

animatic battle ★ animatic ★ blue-crossed error

Everybody has a purpose: something they are truly good at, something that gives them the energy to live, something that makes them happy and fulfilled.

Animatic's entire purpose had always been hosting.

Excitement overtook him whenever he announced a challenge, ran an elimination, created equipment, chatted with a contestant. Hosting was coded in his brain as the ultimate goal and the definition of joy. It made him experience the peak of emotions he could ever have as a simple white circle.

Animatic felt abundantly happy with his role. He didn't need anything else - this was enough, this was perfect.

But as time passed, his contestants seemed to grow distance with him. If at first they were willing and interested in the competition, then soon their expressions turned bored and frowning.

Until they finally left,

denying Animatic all purpose he ever had.

Initially, the optimistic circle tried chasing, yelling after them, telling them how ridiculous it was to quit. And where would they even leave to? Their world consisted only of the vast whiteness spreading infinitely in all directions. Or maybe so he had thought. But still, why would they abandon an activity so primal and vital for them? Being objects, made to compete in an object show - what else could they want from life?

None of them had stopped as they treaded out into the horizon.

They didn't say goodbye. They didn't even spare him a comforting look. Their backs, turned away, was the last thing he saw of them.

How long had it been since then?

Static filled Animatic's mind. He couldn't remember.

Neither when they had left or when he had last moved from the ground.

It didn't matter, did it?

Lying on the floor was nice.

He just had to wait until they would come back.

They were his contestants. They had to come back.

His arms, his legs, his whole body hurt from the stillness, yearning, screaming to pop back into occupation. He was meant to move, to jump and shout and demonstrate all the wacky activities that could ever exist. Without that movement, his body was decaying.

They would come back. In a day, in a week. In a month... but they would.

The fake, optimistic words had been bouncing in his mind, slowly losing effect, having no comfort or hope left to provide.

The floor emanated with sickly white, just like the space around him. But that was okay, Animatic liked colour white. Animatic could live like this. Animatic didn't need the black lines of other objects. Animatic didn't need their smiles and gestures sparkling in the dull void.

He felt like his body was slithering out of his control and growing into the ground. The sensation creeped him out. He tried to ignore it, but there wasn't much he could distract himself with.

With no yells, no chittering or complaints, it had been mind-numbingly quiet since they had left. The silence choked him, but one can live without air, can't they?

Choking wasn't so bad, he concluded. Maybe he should try. He lifted his arm, planning to stuff it into his mouth, but he recoiled at the sudden, nagging throbbing in it.

For the first time in who knows how long, Animatic raised his face from the ground to look at his arm. Instead of a smooth black line, he saw an elongated, deformed mishmash of strings, red, black and blue; strings that wriggled and glitched with every move.

He stared at it in apathy.

His fingers twitched, ever so slightly, in a command to create a reflection of his frame. He wanted to see himself whole.

Goodness... he thought, I don't look like this, do I?

Round, absent, wide-stretched eyes. Unmoving, pursed lips, as if sewn together by silence. A cluster of messy strings as his outline, where his clean black lineart had been. And a big, light-blue cross intersecting his face.

A giggle slipped past his mouth, prying his lips open on its way. He couldn't believe it - had he really been reverting to a simple sketch of an object? Had the world deemed him so useless already?

Sudden anger seethed in his mind and flowed through his distorted body; Animatic started slamming his long, jittery arm on the reflection until it washed away into nothingness.

His hand burst with fiery pain, so he allowed it to hang limply by his side. Everything became blurry, he couldn't focus his sight.

They really had left him... They had left him and now, without a purpose, he was decaying. His body chose to rot while consciousness still paddled his mind - or maybe his mind was already dying with it, too.

Animatic descended to the floor and stayed there, quiet and unmoving again.

Days passed as his eyes continued to burn holes in the ground. His body was giving up.

It didn't matter, did it?

He was just a failed concept. An error. A sketch never meant to be a drawing.

Soon, his body would decompose, making him become one with the whiteness, devoid of feelings, devoid of purpose, devoid of joy. Animatic closed his eyes. Maybe that would be better.

But instead of a slow, uneventful death, things started happening - things he couldn't grasp with his confused mind. There were hands touching him, there was motion, there was wind. There were colours, there was a door, and then there was darkness.

The chaos abruptly stopped and Animatic wondered if he just had an acid trip.

He stood up... discovering that pain didn't overwhelm him anymore.

His glitchy, damaged body had sparkled back to life. It would never return to that previous innocent state of a white circle, but it also refused to shrivel up and disintegrate. He became something in the middle - a scribble that stopped itself from being wiped out.

Darkness engulfed every corner of his vision... darkness after years of white. His sight, already dysregulated enough, had trouble adjusting to it.

After a while, he found the door that he remembered; however, using spells or banging his fists on it brought no effect, leaving him only to slide down along it and wait.

Silent, Animatic lay against the wood, gazing off into the darkness.

It might've seemed that such conditions would strip him of any sense of purpose he had left, but strangely, now he could feel it even more clearly. Even if he had become but a mere error in the fabric of the universe, his unfulfilled purpose still kept that error alive, pounding in his chest like a deformed heart in a deformed body.

He was meant to host. He always had been.

And he had to do it, whatever or whoever it takes.

-----
A/N

wattpad mobile is so dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb lalalalalalala

(it broke the chapter again so i had to fix it)

this fic was inspired by "Animatic's Backstory" by AnimationsUltra on YT :3

let me know how i did! i love feedback