Chapter Text
Ink was strange in many ways and he knew that quite well.
He was soulless, had an awful and unreliable memory, and he was often too much for people, as many strangers and friends alike had told him. (“no, Ink,” Dream had said, “people who call you annoying and hurt you are not your friends, don’t let them do that to you.”)
And the coolest strange thing, Ink thought, was that he was immortal.
In the multiverse, everyone was immortal to an extent. For the most part. If anyone was ever dusted, if a human or a Creator reset the world, they would come back as if nothing had happened.
That of course only applied to incodes, but still. Most of the outcodes that he knew were immortal gods like him, or they were bonded with another soul like Nightmare’s gang. He knew that Blue and Dream were bonded as well, and that he would be part of that if he had a soul to bond with in the first place.
Even though it might not be an official bond like what Dream and Blue could do, he knew he was loved by them just the same. He had written it on his scarf in very big letters to make sure that he didn’t forget, and they all shared matching tattoos that Ink had given them when they had decided to bond in the first place.
Ink had used his own magic to make those tattoos instead of standard paint, and even though he couldn’t feel them, they said they could both feel him and he was happy with that.
The other outcodes were those who’s worlds had been destroyed. There was no real way of bringing any of them back if they were ever dusted, but Ink tried not to think about that too hard.
That also didn’t mean that Ink and everyone else couldn’t die, it just meant it was a lot more difficult and it was usually not in a way that would be accessible to the common resident of the multiverse.
Even so, that never stopped people from trying.
It was a Gaster variant that tried to unlock the secrets of his immortality this time, from a long destroyed Neutral Fell universe. This Gaster lived in the Omega timeline but Ink was certain that they were not there anymore.
Core Frisk would have stopped this by now, he was sure.
This wasn’t nearly the first time that he had been captured, but it wasn’t often that they were prepared or actually… competent.
To capture a coder, it wasn’t as easy as just taking them like any random resident of the multiverse, and these people knew what they were doing.
Ink had admittedly been distracted when he had been captured. By what, he couldn’t remember. Knowing him, it had probably been a flower or a rock.
Someone had walked up calmly behind him and he had no soul, he could not feel their intent.
A syringe full of something unknown was stabbed and emptied into his spine, and the effect was immediate.
He tried to swing around and fight back, he summoned a wobbly shield of paint, but he only stumbled and fell while the shield shook and collapsed back into the ground.
He could barely open his eyes let alone move his limbs, and yet he tried all the same. He tried to call out to someone, Dream or Blue, surely they were close by?
No one came.
His vision greyed out and shook while his eyelights rolled in his sockets.
A nullifier was pulled too tight around his neck, and his eyes flickered out.
It started pretty normally in their lab, with tests of his marrow and his bones, and tests on how well his healing worked. As it always happened, his blood and marrow would dissolve in the air before any meaningful research could be done, and they shards of his bones that they chipped and cut off melted down into regular ink.
When they found little point in continuing that research, they started testing his healing more.
They would cut him with different kinds of knives or flood his body with poisons and drugs to see how fast they could be filtered out.
They broke his bones and cut out his eye to see if it could be reconnected.
The first couple times it could be. they reattached it immediately then only a minute or so after the second time.
The third time, it couldn’t be reconnected. He had healed too much for the magic to be fixed by the time they tried.
Maybe if he had the doodlesphere or if he was with broomie he could try to fix it, maybe make another eye, but here... he could only watch in horror and grief as they took more and more from him.
When they left him alone at night, he stared at the paint his magic had turned into with his working eye.
At first, he had tried to talk to them. He told them that it was okay what they were doing since he knew that their goal was just to help more people. He said that they could have just asked him and they tied his mouth shut.
At first, it didn’t hurt all that much, nothing could really compare to the pain he felt when he had ripped his soul to pieces, but it didn’t feel good.
When they went into his ribs to try to find where his soul may have once been, he pleaded with them to stop. They didn’t, and when he cried they just bottled up his tears.
They tried to test his immortality with overdoses and stopping him from breathing and… they worked. Ink knew that when he died, he didn’t really die properly, he mostly just stopped moving and his eyelights turned to a pale pinprick in his sockets while his body healed just enough to survive again.
Dream told him once that when he “died,” his body sometimes shuddered and twitched while any injuries slowly started to fill themselves with paint, but it wasn’t really much of a show. Not something the Gaster or his followers were looking for.
He had screamed and begged for them to stop for the first time when they brought the sharp scalpel to his socket. They didn’t want to waste sedation on him since he didn’t need it, he would survive without, but it had just made him feel everything.
They strapped his head down tighter and told him to, “shut the fuck up, these pathetic attempts to fool us won’t work,” he kept crying. “I know soulless monsters like you don’t even feel pain.”
He just cried harder until they had gone and left for the night again and he was alone.
The lab was dark so at least it wasn’t all the empty white of his original world.
The next time they came to him, he knew that something was different. The Gaster had a look in his eyes that was strange and Ink didn’t like it.
When they worked, they kept inching closer and closer to his spine, trying to find a way to gain access to the fluid there without it immediately healing or evaporating.
They talked openly in front of him, not worried about him hearing or understanding.
His head jerked back on the table when they pulled a blindfold roughly over his eyes. His sockets burned at the stifling grip the fabric had on him, and he struggled to move his head from were it was tied.
They were talking, but he couldn't make it out over the racing of his non existent soul and his fast breathing.
He thought he heard an argument and a door slam, but he couldn’t make sense of anything.
And then he felt it.
There was a thin piece of metal on his neck, right below the first vertebra of his neck.
It shuffled a little, adjusting position, and his head was held down tighter, and—
He heard it before he felt it, a sharp clang and the subsequent echo, and the scrape of metal on bones and the slicing pain radiating from his neck down his entire body.
He screamed.
He screamed for all he was worth in horror and agony as the hammer his the chisel again and the metal intruded further into him.
It was wrong, things are not meant to go through a skeleton’s spine, and Ink could feel every torturous rattle as it got further and further until—
The chisel hit the table on the other side.
It was a quick procedure and the Gaster took the metal out with a sickening schlik, and all Ink felt was static.
His body was—
He—
His mind faded into numbness and there was screaming all around him.
It could have been from him or from the scientists but he wasn’t sure.
It was loud and he couldn’t feel anything except for the constant buzz.
And then it was suddenly quiet.
He was facing the floor, or he thought he was, and he lingered in the quiet, and took shaky breaths.
He felt disconnected from his body and ha, of course he was because they hammered right through his spine with a chisel.
But his body was still around, it was, he was sure.
He could feel it.
His head couldn’t turn by itself but he tried to move, he really did, and he heard shuffling from the other end of the room.
No one was here though, right? Surely if they were, they would have taken him and tied him down again, but they didn’t. And when he heard shuffling, he felt it too.
There was something and he tried to move and felt something push before glass shattered where he heard the noise before.
His body was still there.
He couldn’t see and surely he was running out of paints soon, but he had to get back to his body— or his body to him.
It shuffled and struggled along, he didn’t know how to walk without looking where he was going, and his dexterity was gone. He couldn’t stand up and he could barely make it crawl.
The horrible drip drip drip and shuffling scrape of bone on the floor got closer until it tripped right over his head and landed in a sprawl on his other side.
He could finally see more than the floor underneath him as his head goes tumbling with it, and he is turned to face his body.
The first thought that reaches his frazzled mind is, Blue and Dream are going to be sad.
Still wearing the same clothes that he was captured in, his body is sprawled awkwardly on the floor and Ink can feel where his elbow is crushed awkwardly underneath him. It was strange to see all of his marks and scars from so far away, and he thought that if monsters didn’t turn to dust when they died, this is what they would look like.
There was paint still dripping from his neck and the front of his shirt was covered. He would probably need to find a new shirt since he wasn’t sure if the stains would ever come out of that one.
He belatedly noticed the magic nullifier around his neck was gone, and had probably come off when his head had, ha ha…
He tried to move again and his body slowly rolled to be on all four limbs and crawled its way to him.
It was strange to feel his own hands on his face at a different angle than normal but he slowly, oh so slowly, managed to sit down to pick his head up off of the floor.
The world tilted around him and he nearly vomited before he realised that he probably wouldn’t even be able to.
He managed to turn his head around to be facing the right way on his body and put it back on straight.
He felt nothing.
He wasn’t sure what he expected to feel really; maybe a connection again or for it to fix itself and he would be whole again, but it didn’t.
If he stopped holding onto his head, it would probably fall off again.
His reflection shone back at him from the hundreds of shards of broken glass all over the floor and a mad giggle slipped between his bloodied teeth.
He laughed and laughed and laughed because if he didn’t then he would scream and tear his head off and crush it to pieces until it was no more than dust, but if he did that then he would have to let go.
He didn’t want to let go of his head.
It was probably hours before he moved, though it could have been minutes, but he wasn’t sure. It was a long time where he sat still and only shuffled back to lean on a cabinet.
He was running out of paints and he was already using up more just through his tears.
Eventually, he started to hear crashing come from a distant hallway. There was yelling and he recognised the voices of Blue and Dream but he didn’t react.
Couldn’t.
At this point he could barely move.
The noises started to get closer but Ink heard them dimly. His mind was starting to go blank. Somewhere in his brain, he knew that that was bad and he should try to stay awake but it was getting harder and harder to listen.
A large gust of wind ran past his body as the door to the lab was knocked down and the two people he cared for most in the world ran up to him.
They were scared, concerned, their eyes were worried and he could tell, but he couldn’t get his body to react.
He couldn’t even understand what they were saying.
Maybe his name? Or to…. Do something?
He wasn’t sure.
The glass shards below twinkled lightly as he stared past them. He couldn’t even move his eyelights. His one eyelight now, he supposed. He wasn’t even sure if it was still there. Maybe it had lost its colour or returned to the pale white pinprick, but he hoped not.
Dream and Blue always got sad when he ran out of paints.
And they were sad now, trying to talk to him still. Then Blue tried to hold his hand, tried to tug on his wrist.
Ink tried to resist, he didn’t want his head to fall off again, but Dream reassured him and Blue kept gently pulling on his arm.
His grip loosened, his hands fell away, and for a moment nothing happened.
But then the world tilted again and his head dropped into Blue’s lap.
He finally gave in to the static numbness when he heard his mates scream.