Rising Storm [ Ink!Sans x Reader ]

20. The Circle Closes

"I thought you might like it."

You struggled to adjust your gaze to the light that flooded your vision, your pupils not used to the sudden intensity of the light from the world around you. A sheet of stars painted the top of the sky and stretched on in an infinite sea for what seemed to be millions and millions of years, expanding in an infinite majesty that none could truly comprehend.

The painter sat next to you, watching the stars with some sort of transfixed fascination, probably remembering the time he had spent in this universe painting each and every one of them. "You know," he mused, "the stars that we're looking at right now, they probably don't exist at this moment in time. The light that's shining down now was emitted hundreds of millions of years ago and we're just now seeing it. The star that this light comes from is probably cold and dead, some black hole that's sucking in light rather than radiating it."

"That's a nice thought," you chuckled darkly, not really sure how Ink thought that it would make a great conversation topic.

"What I'm trying to say," the painter rolled his eyes upon sensing the sarcasm in your words, "is that this moment of time, that light has been travelling through a seemingly infinite vacuum of nothingness just to give us light. Millions of years leading up to this moment."

"It certainly feels like its been millions of years," you responded, reflecting on the sheer amount of chaos and suffering that both you and the painter had dragged yourselves through these last few infinities, conquering both gods and demons alike to perhaps achieve a better future for yourselves and those that lived in the multiverse. You frowned as a few unpleasant memories began to resurface, namely the one of the creature of fear claiming your mind and drowning out your consciousness into oblivion.

"Ink," you asked, your tongue feeling like lead as you prepared to ask the question that you felt that the two of you had subconsciously wanted to avoid. "How did you manage to get past the creature of fear? I remember falling into what felt like an infinite pit of nothingness, becoming nothing, as my consciousness simply stopped existing. I thought I died, and yet here I am without a scratch on my body, no evidence that anything had even happened at all. How did you do it?"

The painter leaned against the bark of a tree, watching as a comet flashed through the sky, sailing in majesty for a few seconds before it flew behind the moon and out of sight. "The creature did take over your mind," he said at last. "And I did fight it and erased it from existence and you lived. No harm done. I think a thank you would be appreciated."

It occurred to you that Ink seemed to be deliberately avoiding eye contact. "Look at me and tell me the truth," you replied, folding your arms across your chest, hating the secrecy that existed amongst the two of you, that even after all this time, after the dangers the two of you had crossed and endured, he still had secrets to hide and things to bury in shadow.

After a painfully long time, the painter finally did shift his gaze so that his two eyesockets held your eyesight, both irises in the form of blue diamonds, representing the emotion that was ravaging his mind at the moment. "There was a..." He paused for a moment, not sure how to string together to words. "There was a complication," he said at last. "I had to do it (Y/n), you have to understand that had there been another way, some alternative, I would have done it. But there wasn't. I tried and tried but I couldn't and - "

A single translucent tear materialized in the corner of his eyesocket and fell to the ground, disappearing amongst the tufts of grass that dotted the terrain. You didn't respond as he continued, "The creature was a part of you, latched onto every nerve in your brain. I had to stop it. It was going to burn the whole of creation if I didn't do anything, I'm probably the only one left who had any real chance of stopping it from killing everyone.