Chapter Text
One day he didn't exist.
The next, he did.
A being formed from a faint stroke of creativity amongst a world of lacklustre and carelessly scribbled sketches.
And that's as far as it got.
He didn't have a name, a world, any clothes or possessions.
He had a body, and a soul to go with it.
The beating magic stood out like a stroke of colour on a white canvas. Accept, there was no colour. They hadn't gotten that far yet. They made a few unenthusiastic sketches on a piece of paper, rewarding Their favourite character with a personality, and leaving the rest to rot.
...
What a gift, he thought.
The gift to live in a world of the lifeless.
...
He existed. He didn't exactly know what he was, but he existed.
He roamed the blank world, eyes gazing over the endless vast of white for something, not that he knew what. A silver scribble stood out against the blankness, and he watched it. He watched as the scribble began to take shape, seemingly odd and uncategorized lines growing and manipulating themselves into a figure. It was taller than him. It was new.
Before the figure had the chance to move, a sharp line of graphite was carved over his face, covering his eye in a fit of anger. It wasn't the hot rage; the typed that bubbled in your stomach and burnt unsaid words into the lining of your throat. It was the frustrated kind, the one that was thick with the poison of self-loathing, letting disappointment hang heavy in your hands and the tips of your fingers.
The figure looked down, meeting his eyes. Whilst the small one tilted his head, eyes lighting up with the excitement of curiosity, the taller one simply stared. He didn't speak. He didn't smile. He just looked.
That is when the smaller one realized, his brother existed.
His brother existed, but he didn't live.
...
As the other scribbles began to appear, bits of their bodies drawn messily with a mix of smudged graphite and paper crumbled from the harsh pull of an eraser, he realized that they all existed, but none of them lived.
Every day, if time existed at all, he'd try to talk to them. He'd laugh to them as he learnt to joke. Style them as he learnt he could pull at the loose scribbles. Ask about them as he learnt of opinions. Hold them as he learnt he could feel. Plead with them as he learnt desperation. Cry as he learnt hopelessness.
Nothing worked.
Nothing helped.
Nothing gave them life.
And once he learnt that he began looking elsewhere.
He walked away from the sketches, enveloping himself between the sheets of crumpled paper. He walked away from the place he had learned. He walked into the white.
As he walked, he took note of the expanse. It was endless, but looked like it was surrounded by thick walls of torn and scrunched up concepts. No matter how far he walked, he never got closer to the walls. No matter how far he walked, he could not find anything new. So, he sat.
He sat, and he observed, and that was it.
He'd sit, spending what could've been hours (days, weeks?) studying each individual crack and imperfection in the walls. His mind was glued to the sight. A labyrinth of folds and creases he couldn't yet decipher but could draw identically with the loose lines of unneeded graphite that were scattered around the ones who existed. And once he was done, he'd realize there was nothing else.
He realized there was nothing else.
There was no purpose.
Nothing new.
Each agonizingly familiar texture, the lack of smell, and no other taste but his own tongue was excruciating. The hope became hopelessness. The boredom became desperation. The abyss of absolutely nothing became the want to escape.
The need to escape.
He needs to escape.
It wasn't unusual for the Guardian of Negativity to feel a strong and sudden pulse. Negativity is a special type of emotion. Positivity is something that is expected. It's an emotion felt near daily for those in the multiverse, and for the vast majority, it's the resting state. Even contentment is a type of positivity. It's a natural response to creatures simply cycled in their futile routines, which more than often end in the inevitable RESET of a timeline, starting the cycle all over again.
Negativity is different. It lingers, crawling underneath the skin of its victims and disrupting their day. It poisons their stomach, burning them sharply and lying acid in their tongue, and heaviness in their core. Their souls sink in quicksand, light dampening with each senseless second of movement.
Positivity ends in complacency. Negativity ends with death.
What was unusual, was for the pulse of negativity to sing. It echoed through the vast multiverse in a violent and magnetic pulse that almost knocked Nightmare off his feet.
And without another thought, the Guardian of Negativity quickly located the source, the specific ringing imprint coming from... an AU? No, not quite.
...
An Existence AU...? How peculiar. Existence AU's are made generally of empty and unfinished beings, none of which are savable. All of which are Fallen Down.
The pulse pulled tightly at his soul again, the urge almost sickening as his entire body physically ached to move.
And so,
He did.
The sudden burst of Negativity quickly brought the Guardian of Positivity to his knees. His vision blurred as his stomach hung heavy. Bile lingered at the base of his esophagus, burning sickly in his throat. His kneecaps ached as a firm arm neatly wrapped around his torso and helped him up.
"Dream! What's happened?" Swap's voice was laced with concern as Dream gripped his hand carefully, fighting off the gag pulsing at his throat as he came to a stand. His spare hand moved to his pounding skull once he was upright. The Guardian sucked in a shaky breath before he spoke. "I-I'm okay, just... a particularly strong burst of negativity. It's..."
He paused, focusing in on the pulse (despite how much he wanted to vomit). "...It's from an Existence AU?"
The confusion in his voice almost matched the expression on Swap's face identically. "An Existence AU? I thought the monsters in those AU's barely had physical bodies, let alone souls...?" Dreams eyebrows furrowed, his (lips?) mouth pinned in a straight line.
"They don't." The imprint lingered, his hands shaking as the nausea was set aside to make room for an emotion he identified as a mix between morbid curiosity and genuine concern. "Not by definition at least." He let out a breath, rubbing the pads of his phalanges together.
"I'm going to go check it out. I'll be back soon." He turned to face Swap with a faint smile, moving out of his arms, and summoning his magic (probably quicker than thought necessary). A gold portal ripped through the space of Underswap, and without another word, or before Swap could protest about going alone with the possibility of Nightmare being there, he stepped through and closed it behind him.
With the nature of the imprint, Dream expected there to be a monster in despair. As he entered the AU, the air felt thick and heavy with negativity. For a normal monster, it would've felt like an atmosphere. The faintest hint of wrongness that even animals of the instinctive construct would cower. For Dream it was debilitating. Over the years of healing Negative AU's, he'd gotten used to feeling like he was breathing through a straw, but that never made it pleasant.
What the Guardian of Positivity didn't expect, however, was to see the source of the negativity practically burrowing into his brother's arms. The emotions the small one radiated were unbelievably conflicted, and he could tell that his brother sensed it too by the look on his face.
Despair, joy, hopelessness, relief, dependence, disbelief.
But upon them, the most potent was pain.
The type of pain that feels like your insides are ripping out. The type of pain that breaks people down bit by bit. The pain that claws at the walls and begs for mercy. The internal pain.
But also, physical. His body ached, fingers tense and shaking, head pounding, and soul-...
Oh.
Oh dear.
His soul was held away from him, pulled aside by a slithering tentacle, which looked surprisingly careful not to touch it. The white essence was littered with phalange shaped gouges, stretched from the middle out with stringy bits of magic holding it together.
This monster hadn't just existed.
He had lived.
He had lived in what might be the worst type of Hell that Dream had ever had the displeasure of imagining.
...
And his brother was there.
The Guardian of Negativity.
The one who haunted dreams. Who terrorized AUs. Who'd killed thousands.
Comforting him.
...
With a thick swallow, he took a step forward, making his presence known.
"Nightmare." As much as he tried, his voice still shook as he spoke, strained from the sickening affect the negativity still had on him. His brother looked up, seemingly putting aside their grievances temporarily to look at his brother with confusion. Quickly, his tentacle shot towards Dream. His body tensed at the achingly familiar sight, before the limb stopped in front of him and unwound itself, revealing the gouged and cracked soul.
"Take it. I don't know how he's touching me right now, but I know me holding this will not be any better than it being in his chest." In despite of himself, and the pure shock that fell through his body, he didn't hesitate, quickly grabbing the soul, being careful not to touch the tentacle less he get burnt by the corrosive material that its made of.
His hands wrapped carefully around the soul. Half torn and pathetically pulsing in his hands. His green magic was rusty, but he did what he could with the atmosphere; at most, it stabilized, but was in no way fixed.
He kept hold of it as he turned back to his brother, a million questions lying on his tongue.
"I'm not going to kill him, Dream. That wouldn't benefit anyone." His tentacles curled behind him as he spoke, his hands wrapping haphazardly around the sobbing monster enveloped in his torso.
"Besides... he's much too interesting."