Supernova (Ink!Sans x Reader)

3. When Darkness Falls

"It's not possible!"

"Well obviously it is, so why the hell are you so determined to deny the obvious truth that is quite literally in front of you!"

The painter cast a frustrated glance back at the human that was lost in the world of their own dreams, oblivious to the argument that was going on in front of them. "Because it's not (Y/n)," he snarled, feeling the same hatred and frustration build up inside of him from the moment he had first laid eyes on the literal ghost of his past. "You said it yourself that the multiverse is at a standstill from all the destruction that the war with Nightmare caused. It can't create anything until we've erased all the infected universes."

"I know what I said," Dream snapped, pacing back and forth, the tips of his fingers flexing anxiously as if he expected some hidden enemy to jump out at him at any minute. It was a habit that the painter himself had also picked up on. Ever since the war, an endless bloody conflict where every friend could turn into an enemy at the slightest second, where your own shadow became a threat, where you always had to sleep with one eye open in case the darkness decided to strangle you in your sleep, it wasn't hard to always be on edge.

"And you're right," Dream continued, stopping to cast a glance at the human. "The multiverse shouldn't have been able to recreate (Y/n), but here they are right in front of us. And they're not the only thing that has come back either. You saw the way that the shadows behaved back in the ruins of the Underswap universe. There's no way that they're acting of their own accord, randomly carrying out the instructions of a dead commander. Nightmare is alive, somehow, and he still commands his servants from afar."

"But it can't - "

"And yet it did," Dream interrupted, agitated by the painter's refusal to accept the human's return. "They're not a trick, Ink, not some illusion created by Nightmare's remnants to kill us. If he really wanted us dead, those shadows could have ripped us apart right then and there. But yet he called them off which means - "

"Exactly!" The painter snapped. "If, if I'm even remotely considering the possibility that Nightmare is somehow alive and out there, then why call off his troops when he had us cornered, weakened and frightened? You can't deny that this thing," he gestured to the slumbering human in the corner, refusing to call them by their actual name, to admit that there was even a chance that the one whom he had known so long ago was now alive and well, "you can't deny that it isn't connected to Nightmare and his shadows somehow. This so-called human just happens to pass out and the shadows decide to retreat when they have us in a nice little corner?"

"It is strange," Dream admitted, "and (Y/n)'s return must somehow be linked to Nightmare's return, I'll give you that, but that doesn't mean that (Y/n) isn't (Y/n) - "

"It isn't them!" The painter snarled, his teeth bared back in the beginnings of a feral snarl. The truth was, the artist was so damn sick of getting his hopes up, even remotely considering the possibility that the human might have come back after all this time.

When he had crossed universe to universe upon the end of the war, when he had greeted the weary survivors both human and monster alike, had he not always felt his breath hitch in his throat at the flash of (H/c) hair, stop halfway in his words only to be greeted with disappointment as the owner of the (H/c) hair far-off in the crowd turned to look at him and bore a face that was certainly not (Y/n)'s?

No, he was done falling victim to such illusions, done getting caught up in petty hopes and dreams. Even then, it was obvious that the human bore no memory of him or Dream, so what was the point in even attempting to reconnect? As far as he was concerned, the (Y/n) he had known was long gone, dead alongside the billions of others that had perished in the war.