Chapter Text
Error liked to knit when he got pissed.
He wasn't a 'calm' person even in general, but on the days where rage burned bright and quick through bone the glitch threw himself at the nearest comfortable space with a pair of wooden knitting needles and set to work on utilizing his strings. It was the only form of creation he liked- aside from his dolls, of course -and Error found the concept of looping his own string against itself a rather calming work.
Whatever the reason, knitting was a soothingly repetitive action for the inverted skeleton. He stitched over, and over, and over again until his color-dipped hands had crafted something that he desired. It was a cycle that began and ended with the same essential movement, and by the end of completion the worst of the anger had drained from his frame.
The destroyer found himself knitting quite a lot, lately.
There was always a dull ache that liked to masquerade as anger even though Error knew it was something entirely different. The emotion was a constant burning feeling deeply routed in the depths of his soul, an irritating pang that was slowly driving the destroyer fucking mental as it grew worse with each passing day. "I am not jealous." A layered voice muttered stubbornly beneath unneeded breath, "I ain't." The words slipped from a frame hunched over a half-finished scarf, the glitch swallowing as emotion clawed its way up from the bottom of his stomach like bile rising in his throat.
The half-hearted denial was correct, but only partially so; the gnawing sting that clung to Error's ribcage was not jealousy, but rather envy. It was an acidic feeling that hung heavy in every jolting breath he took, and the result was getting to the point where he didn't want to move for fear that he'd exhale and never be able to take the breath back again. "Quit bein' a baby. There isn't anythin' to get so worked up over, anyway."
If only that were true.
Error had never been good with emotions. His code was skewed and fucked to all hell, and the processes most other living beings followed were a bit more difficult for him to perform. Hell, something as simple as touch was an issue so large that the destroyer tried his hardest to avoid it in its entirety. His system was not capable of handling things efficiently, and 'feeling' was no exception to his tainted golden rule. When emotion was small and subtle Error had no problem controlling it- but this? This level of envy? No fucking way was the glitch able to keep it contained.
He hadn't felt anything this strong in a very long time.
"Of course it's causa Nightmare's group. Just my fucking luck." He tugged at the blue stitches harshly with a snarl, the string growing dangerously taut but refusing to snap under the sudden strain. God, the fact made made Error angry. The knowledge that the reason envy plagued his being was because of Killer and the others, was because they were all dating and he wasn't part of it. Part of them. It made his soul ache something awful with every fleeting thought.
The glitch had thought that the feeling was a mere fluke of some sort at first. Just another run-of-the-mill hitch in his code, another echo of something forgotten ghosting along his heart; he'd thought, and he had been mistaken. The emotion had only grown over the past few months, morphing from a subdued flutter to an all-consuming need that made doing his job just a smidge bit harder. Every second spent with the bad sans poly was borderline hell, because they all had each other and Error had no one but himself. They functioned as one unit in every way; as a team, as mission partners-
as lovers.
They were cohesive, and Error envied them. Envied them more than he'd ever cared about anything else. Was bitter, dreadfully so, over the fact that all of them could return home after a mission and curl up with one another over under the din of childish bicker between Killer and Cross. That they had the opportunity to lay piled up against each other in rest, that they got to rest because they knew that the others had their back, that they were safe.
It wasn't like Nightmare and his group actively went out of their way to avoid the destroyer, no, not at all. Cross always invited Error to their little 'gatherings' and Nightmare always offered him a permanent residence on the second floor right next to the king's own room. Killer hassled the glitch for joint training periods and Dust and Horror invited Error to hang around them while the two of them baked in the kitchen. They asked for his presence a lot, actually, but Error never went.
Error wanted to go more than anything else, wanted to be there alongside them, but the darker never let himself. It felt mildly wrong in his eyes. Wrong to be there when he wasn't really there as part of their group. Wrong for them to tolerate Error when he wasn't a part of their inner workings. God, Error wished he was. Wished that he could be around them and share the same bond as everyone else did- he wanted it more than he wanted anything else, but he couldn't. It was impossible.
It hurt Error worse than any other wound he'd ever received.
"Dammit!" The string grew knotted as the glitch's breathing hitched, fingers stumbling along the small wooden sticks with a clumsiness that was unfamiliar. "Dammit." The word was more of a whisper than a curse, and Error momentarily hated himself for letting something so small grow to such a consuming level. He wasn't a person who was supposed to be weak, yet here he was bitching over the disgusting concept of love.
The sound of blue strings finally snapping under the pressure of his hold snapped Error straight from his line of thought, asymmetrical eyelights moving to capture the essence of a few strings as they fell broken to the ground. A bolt of anger flamed through his body at the miserable sight, and the glitch threw his battered knitting needles, half-finished scarf and all, as far as he could manage to watch the brittle wood crack as they distantly hit the ground.
Good. They weren't helping him anyway.
Error slumped back onto the worn fabric of his beanbag with a strangled laugh. He was pathetic for getting so worked up over something that would never happen. He was supposed to be unshakable, unrelenting, unfazed; he was the destroyer for fucks sake, and Error couldn't let himself get so frail as to let pitiful cravings like this take over his mind and taint his overall objective. And, Error sighed miserably, those were my only pair of knitting needles. Even if the glitch thought he should move on, Error wasn't entirely sure how he could achieve that goal. He didn't know how to make the feeling go away, didn't know how to stop it from circling in his head like a pack of vultures there to pick away the rest of his thoughts.
Error could fall in love, but he could not fall back out of it.
"Fuck." A hand was dragged down his face in angered exasperation. Knitting had not only failed to calm him but had only made Error more upset; he was out of things to do and the destroyer didn't particularly feel like moving. He'd normally slip into an AU and dispose of his turmoil that way, but he didn't have the time to, no, not today.
Nightmare and the others had extended an invitation to him- it was why his thoughts had cycled back to his 'little issue' in the first place. The king had offered Error a time and a date for the glitch to arrive at the mansion with little to no explanation whatsoever. It was one of the more odder circumstances; usually Cross or Killer would throw out a reason for requesting his presence on off-mission hours, but the rest of them had fallen silent as well. Error had planned on declining the invitation as he did with all the others, but Dust had muttered 'if there's one time yer actually gonna show up, 's gotta be this one'.
Error ended up begrudgingly accepting the invitation much to his distaste.
He wasn't sure why they'd asked for him now of all times. There was nothing going on in the slightest, just an unimpressive day that held no missions nor other planned activities. "Came outta nowhere." He muttered, "Unless I forgot something." Error wouldn't be surprised if had ended up forgetting an important date. Time passed oddly in his anti-void compared to most other multiversal spaces; the inverted skeleton had spent no short amount of time in the blank space and he still didn't know how, exactly, the concept of time flowed. Some days seemed much longer than they were while others seemed to flow by far too fast for reality to handle- there was really no telling just how much time had passed until he stepped foot into a different AU and back into the normal stream of things. As far as the glitch knew it could be fucking Christmas- he had more important things to worry about than what day of the week it was.
Waving a hand in front of his slumped frame to conjure up a window, Error shifted to prop himself up a little more and face the screen with his skewed attention. He only had an hour and a half to calm himself down and get his shit together before he had to leave, and knitting had obviously failed at acting as that soothing barrier. "Undernovela it is." The show was always the glitch's last-ditch effort when he grew to be truly upset over something. The drama was engaging and took his mind off of everything else for a bit; while there wouldn't be a new episode until later in the week, Error figured that he could re-watch a few older ones in the meanwhile.
Maybe, if he tried hard enough, he could forget about the ache present in his chest.