Chapter Text
The screen flickered again. Static gnawed at the edges of the portal frame like a hungry thing.
Error narrowed his eyes, fingers twitching as he willed the feed into focus. It wasn’t easy, keeping a rift like this open—especially one connected to that timeline. A mess of rejected data and discarded resets stitched together with bubblegum logic and broken hope. He hadn’t expected it to last this long.
He hadn’t expected her to last this long.
[Y/N] sat on the rooftop, small against the dark canvas of the night. Even from here, Error could see the slump in her shoulders. The way she held herself like a paper crane soaked in rainwater—folded too many times, and ready to fall apart.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
He scoffed quietly, tapping his foot against the nothing beneath him. His fist tightening, as if reacting to the tension curling in his chest.
When he’d dropped her there—reset glitch, no Frisk, no Determination, nothing that could trigger a catastrophic loop—it had seemed like the safest option. A timeline with minimal instability. A version of himself from before it all broke.
Classic Sans. Untouched. Intact. Safe.
What more could she possibly need?
But as he watched her now, half-drunk, half-broken, wrapped in a hoodie that clearly didn’t feel like home, something twisted in his ribcage.
She wasn’t healing.
She was rotting.
And it wasn’t just the timeline.
It was the absence.
His absence.
He clicked his jaw, a familiar static buzzing at the base of his skull. Emotions—real ones—were slippery. Dangerous. He’d buried most of them long ago, beneath strings and scars and hard-coded detachment. But watching her press her palms to her eyes like she was trying to crush the ache out of her soul?
That did something.
That hurt.
“She’s not supposed to miss me,” he muttered, low and bitter. “She was supposed to forget.”
But she hadn’t.
Every night, she whispered his name. His, and the others he used to be. Names she stitched together like a prayer, like she thought saying them enough might summon him back, as if maybe one night, if she said them in the correct sequence, he really would come back
Error swallowed, hard. The portal buzzed louder, like it knew what he was about to admit.
And he hated it.
“I thought she’d give up,” he said. “I thought she’d…fuck…i dont know….. move on…?”
He said, questioning himself as he watched her curl in on herself, lips moving in silence. Maybe talking to the hoodie. Maybe the stars.
Maybe just trying to hear a voice that wasn’t there anymore.
He shifted his stance, the strings pulling taut around his fingers as his glitching eye flickered erratically.
“I thought… if she stayed with me, she’d get corrupted. Twisted. Like me.”
A pause.
“She still might.”
But then he looked at her again—this soft, shattered version of the person who used to hold his glitch-splintered hands without fear—and realized something that made his code crawl.
“She doesn’t need me to break her,” he whispered.
“She’s doing that all by herself.”
The classic Sans wasn’t helping. Error could see it now—he was fine, sure. Stable. Whole. But he wasn’t him. He wasn’t the version that had dragged her out of a timeline on the verge of imploding, who had held her hand across worlds made of dying stars, who had stared down multiversal annihilation and still whispered her name like it meant something.
She didn’t want safe.
She wanted him.
The broken one.
The real one.
Error shut the portal with a wave of his hand, teeth grinding together as static bled from his sockets.
Maybe it was time to stop pretending he was doing this for her. Maybe it was time to admit it:
He hadn’t sent her away to save her.
He’d sent her away because he was scared.
Because deep down, he didn’t think anyone could love the mess he’d become.
And watching her now?
He realized something worse.
She still did.
***
The threads snapped.
Error flinched as the last of them recoiled from the rift like a cut nerve, sizzling out into dead air. His hand hovered over the half-formed portal, still flickering with residual static, struggling to stabilize. But it wouldn’t.
No matter how much code he rewrote.
No matter how hard he tried to anchor himself to her timeline.
It rejected him.
Hard.
Like a body rejecting an incompatible transplant. The timeline hissed at him with code too clean, too sealed, too… untouched. A world without Frisk. Without a Player. Without the permissions Error had spent his life exploiting.
He couldn't get in.
He couldn’t even touch it.
“What the hell is this,” he muttered, pacing in the void. His fingers twitched like they didn’t know what to do with themselves. The blue glow of the dying portal reflected in his glitching eye socket, mocking him.
He’d tried everything.
Injected variables. Warped time strings. Even tried brute-forcing the script itself.
But her timeline had no Frisk. No playerb. No SAVE. No LOAD.
And without a Player tether… he was nothing but a ghost on the outside looking in.
“She’s trapped.”
The word echoed louder than he meant it to, swallowed by the silent space around him. He bit the inside of his mouth until code leaked from the cracks in his teeth.
This was supposed to be safe.
She was supposed to heal.
And now he’d dumped her into a perfect, clean, static-free dead zone—like tossing a message in a bottle into an ocean with no shore. No glitches to slip through. No backdoors. No puppets to pull.
Just her.
Alone.
“I broke her.”
The one thing he was trying to prevent.
The words hung in the air like splinters.
He stared at his hands, the same ones that used to hold hers. The same ones that had tied off the last thread between them and cut her loose. For her own good, he’d said. For her.
But what good was freedom if it came with no way out?
What good was safety if it meant she couldn’t be reached?
He clenched his jaw and opened another panel, swiping through corrupted timelines, fingers digging for scraps of influence. There had to be something—anything—he could do.
A ripple. A message. A sign.
A crack.
But there was nothing.
Just static. Just her face, half-lost in a screen of corrupted pixels. Her eyes dull. Her shoulders curled. Her smile broken.
He slammed the panel shut and screamed into the void.
And the void just giveback deafening silence
He didn’t know what hurt worse—that he’d severely miscalculated, or that he’d underestimated how much she mattered. To him.
She hadn’t stopped loving him.
Even when he wasn’t there to deserve it.
Even now.
And now, he couldn’t even tell her he knew that.