Rising Storm [ Ink!Sans x Reader ]

14. The Outliers

"I don't like it."

The details were all too wrong for your liking. The stars seemed to be the wrong shade of white, looking more dull than you would have liked. The gemstones in Waterfall seemed to have more luster than these pinpricks of light possessed.

"I think it looks fine!" Ink protested as he fixated himself with drawing a pattern of ridges along the bark of a tree he had been fussing over for the last hour and a half. He was currently lost in a debate of what shade he should use for the bark, leaning more towards a green or brown colour.

You tucked the paintbrush that you had been using behind your ear and sat down on a hill you had painted earlier, lying down on the grass to stare up at the glass dome that had taken you nearly a week to paint.

At first it hadn't seemed like such a bad idea. The thought had occurred to you and Ink to create an alternate universe where the monsters had been banished to a life in the outer regions of space rather than the cold, dark world of the Underground. For the most part you had been eager to paint the sky with a mixtures of blue and purple but ultimately felt dissatisfied with how it had turned out. The tones were all wrong and you had severely messed up on the shading.

"This universe has certainly been labourious," Ink grunted and managed to divert himself from working on the tree and took a spot next to you on the hill, staring out at the twisting cosmos that you had painted. "It looks amazing," he breathed, transfixed by the stars that winkled and twinkled from behind a passing nebula.

"You could fit in here," you chuckled, noticing the specks of purple and blue that dotted his brown tunic, making it look like the painter had decided to take a chunk out of the sky and wear it as a garment.

"I just got this dry-cleaned!" Ink protested, noticing the paint splotches.

"And it was the first and only time you had ever gotten it washed!" you teased but in all actuality it was probably the truth. You didn't think you could ever recall a time where Ink had actually washed his clothes.

You trailed your finger across a blade of grass, admiring the green patterns that had been intricately woven into it. It was such a seemingly unimportant detail when compared to the great vastness of the universe you and the painter were creating but yet you cherished this blade of grass just as much as you might with all the planets and stars combined. You were transfixed at the thought that a simple combination of paint colours and magic could create living organisms that could continue to sustain themselves for the centuries to come.

"I wish we could stay here," you murmured, leaning your head on Ink's shoulder as you watched a comet blaze in the sky, flickering in defiance against the coldness of outer space before ultimately succumbing to its fate and perishing from all of existence, scattering into thousands of atoms of dust and rock.

The artist said nothing but leaned his skull against your head, humming a little tune to himself. The both of you knew the truth, an instinctual part of you both realised that no matter how many worlds and universes you created, you would never belong, never fit in with one. You were both outcasts, thrown out by your dead worlds seemingly by chance and left to wander and perish in the Void.

The outliers.

A name suddenly came to you, a series of sounds and syllables that seemed to summarise and fit this universe better than anything else. "What do you think of Outertale?" you proposed the idea to Ink, wondering if the painter would agree.

"It sounds perfect," he agreed, having pulled out a small paintbrush and begun to draw a series of patterns and spirals across a blue echo flower, giving it the appearance as if it too contained a thousand tiny galaxies and planets inside its very petals. Hundreds of years from now, the flower would multiply and its descendants would populate the entirety of this universe.