Of a Better World

To Be Different

To Lust, he was unique.

In his mind, it hardly mattered that the multiverse was infinite and never ending and that there were trillions of endless sanses that were near perfect copies of him. He didn't acknowledge the fact that nothing about him is original; that he isn't special. From the way he looks to how he acts he, Lust didn't care that he was indistinguishable from many sanses he shared a multiverse with. He decidedly stayed oblivious to the fact that he could be completely replaced with another sans step for step- and no one would notice the difference.

Yes the worlds were numerous, yet as far as Lust was concerned, his universe was every bit as important as the ALPHA timeline- the original universe from which every AU split from.  Completely set apart from the sea of universes his own world floated in, where every second new universes were born and old ones collapsed. He stood in defense of a timeline equally indifferent to him and inconsequential in its place in the multiverse.

And though silly, his stories above all were special to him.

Horror could easily tell that by the way his hands clamped around a tiny, pearly seashell as he excitedly told its tale. Found in the dump back in Underlust he'd said that the inside sounded like the ocean, but Horror could hardly attest to such a statement said by someone who'd never even seen the beach. Yet he still found it in the kinder part of himself to hold his tongue as Lust told his story as if there weren't a thousand other Underlust sanses who could recite the same story word for word too.

Because as far as Lust was concerned, he was special in every way. He felt unique joy, unique pain, unique loneliness and it was unimportant to him that there were so many just like him. He was all too aware that there may be a billion Lustverse sanses out there, but he still found a way to be proud that he was 1,000,000,001.

It was a sharp contrast from Horror who had long since accepted the insignificance of his existence. 

When everything had first gone to hell, when the core had stopped working and food had begun to run short, he had blindly believed that he mattered enough for someone to save him. Dream and Ink often helped or rescued monsters whose universes were in ruins. He had so innocently believed that they would help him out- making it so much more startling when he was shoved to the side.

Dream, always busy of course, couldn't find time to even see him let alone offer help, more in favor of attending to those in more dire situations. Relocating victims of Error's destruction or collasped AUs and so forth. The fact that he still had a universe, no matter how poor of a shape it was in, had put him as low priority on the list.

Ink had barely wasted time talking to him, uncaring and flat out refusing to help. The soulless guardian made it more than clear to a young, panicked, Horror that he protected universes from harm- he didn't alter them. Horrortale, as was written in its script, was destined to go through a mass starvation, and so Ink didn't seem all that keen on preventing it. He left universes to carry out their "natural" timelines under his protection no matter how severe the devastation, and so Horror was left unaided.

It hammered the realization into him that he, among a unbelievably huge amount of sans, was completely irrelevant. He had always known that within a day, Error destroyed hundreds of universes. And yet Horror had always counted them up as just a number of unfortunate souls; an unlucky statistic. All until he realized that he was part of a wretched figure. And that there was no use weeping over his luck.

But Lust was far too busy to concern himself with existential crises. On the rare days where Horror felt particularly talkative, the smaller skeleton was patient with him as he verbalized his half baked, yet fairly probable theories about the coding of the multiverse. Always attentive and prone to make Horror feel so much more important than he deserved, he listened, and nodded, and interjected on occasion. 

Lust didn't seem all that alarmed to find out that, at most, he was just a randomly generated string of ones and zeros. He sat just as untroubled as he always seemed even as Horror's own nihilistic mind sunk deeper into pessimism.

Lust simply blinked affectionate eyes and chortled.

"well if i am randomly generated, then how lucky am i to get to be me?"

Horror had almost come to expect the cheeky, half narcissistic response. That, having completely overlooked the fact that his life amounted to nothing more than a bundle of numbers and pre-made choices- Lust still managed to find a positive. Instead of hollowly reflecting on how insignificant he was, he instead marveled at the impossible chances of his existence. That despite how astronomically small the probability was of him being, he'd beat the odds.

Perhaps that's what made him special in all of his unremarkableness.

That and everything else wonderful about him, Horror supposed. All the photo copied traits he shared with an endless number of other faceless Lustverse sanses, but that still were special to him.

Perhaps he was right, and he was a completely unique being. Or maybe not, maybe he was completely indistinguishable from the rest. But looking into his affectionate eyes as he joked and rambled and fidgeted, Horror supposed it didn't matter.

To Horror, Lust was unique.

A/N: After struggling with this chapter for much longer than I needed to, I have come upon the terrible realization that I might actually have to make a decent outline for the rest of the story to make things easier. But because it's gonna take a while for me to stop procrastinating and do so, I'm gonna make a sanscest oneshot/request book for drabbles in the meanwhile so you guys aren't just left hanging :)