Chapter Text
As Classic Sans’s right hand skeleton, Underborn Sans, AKA B or Arrager, was expected to be a collected individual with control over his emotions and the ability to deal with stressing or dangerous situations with calm and logic. As the same skeleton’s AU arranger, he was expected to know every existing AU and keep an open mind to the new ones. As both of these things, he had made up a name for himself among the various Sanses and Papyruses out there, and had obviously seen some strange or even incomprehensible things, keeping his cool and trying his hardest to at least understand these behaviors and looks; each universe was different after all, and he understand that all of them were vital to the Multiverse as a whole, and therefore understood that he was in no place to judge this differences between the various he had met during his life.
But this guy.
This fucking guy.
This fucking guy who had just strolled into B’s world like he knew the whole place like the back of his hand but was utterly confused and curious about it at the same time.
He was tall; taller than Gaster Sans, almost as tall as your average Papyrus. His hoodie was mostly black, with orange stripes on the sleeves and an orange DELTA RUNE stitched on the chest, and was oversized, covering half of his femurs, which were covered by black and white striped socks and orange leg warmers too, which covered from his knees to his feet. Judging by the thickness of his legs and his curvaceous body (dem hips), his bones were covered by an ectobody.
His skull was what caught most attention; his right eye socket had two white rings for eyelights, but the left glowed entirely orange, not a speck of black could be seen. Stitches crossed his face, one life all around his skull a little bit above his nose ridge and sprouted like webs around his orange socket. How or why the hell he had to stitch up his bones was beyond B, or why he had golden canines or why the hell he had that jello tail that had to be at least as long as he was tall when he obviously didn’t have any need for it.
Or why he apparently had not only your usual Sans powers but also your usual Papyrus’s powers, or Undyne’s, or Mettaton’s, or Alphys’s, or Toriel’s and Asgore’s, or even Muffet’s and Grillby’s and of monsters B didn’t even know existed.
Or why he could shapeshift into all of the mentioned monsters plus a form that apparently took a little bit af them all in one or why he seemed to know every little thing about everyone in the Multiverse like he’d known them for years and years when, according to the weirdo himself, he had never stepped foot into any of them.
What this guy even was or where he’d come from was so beyond B he felt he could swim in that ocean for centuries and he’d never find unless he took him there himself.
Which he tried to do, but only ended up getting B more and more lost.
Who are you? No idea.
Why are you here? Studying.
How do you know me? I’m not sure I do.
Where did you come from? Nowhere.
What are you? A hack.
B was completely lost towards this stranger. It made things harder for him, especially when he seemed to know just so damn much about B and yet didn’t know anything about him at the same time, while B had no clue about what this guy even was.
B asked him if he could stay with him and his brother in his world for a while, which he happily agreed to. He greeted Papyrus and Tempus like he’d known them for ages yet had no clue who they were at the same time. B’s world was being turned upside down by this Sans, which he nicknamed Hacked as to avoid confusion, seeing as while other Sanses called him B or Arranger the monsters in Snowdin still called him Sans.
In the period of time Hacked spent with him, B’s desperation line was getting thiner and thiner with each new information about him. This guy made even less sense than Error; Error had at least had a development since he was created, he knew he came from the Anti-Void, he had to discover the AUs on his own to even know what they were about, he had his peculiarities and he was considerably older (at least existence wise) than most Sanses, giving him some basis for his knowledge and time to experience with his magic, learn what he could and couldn’t do and perfect his techniques, and he had a purpose for existing, even if a self given one.
Meanwhile this guy that had just sprouted from not even he knows where knew everything about the Multiverse off the bat, but at the same time had no fucking idea how it even worked, had no apparent purpose other than just being there while at the same time beinga Multiverse researcher even though he had never been to any other AU other than Underborn and yet he knew almost everything was there to know about them.
He knew about (and hardcore shipped) Rust and Razz’s twisted relationship and claimed that their world was his favorite even though he had never seen them face to face or even stepped into Swapfell before.
He knew about Red and Fell’s decaying bond and swore he would one day travel to Underfell to try and help them, keep them safe and make them feel loved and well even though he didn’t even know how the world looked like.
He knew about Blueberry and Stretch and to B’s utmost shock claimed to be terrified of them, saying that he’d rather not ever step into the AU unless he absolutely had to, even though he knew Underswap was probably among the most sugar coated universes the Multiverse had to offer.
The last straw before B became desperate to solve the mystery that was Hacked Sans was when he mentioned Deretale and how he wished he could have had the opportunity to visit it before it was erased, even though that happened years before Hacked was even considered a possibility.
Needless to say B was losing his shit.
For the first time in years he was losing his shit over another Sans.
He was losing his shit over another Sans that didn’t even had a weird world or a fucking backstory to give him a reason to make anybody lose their shit.
Thankfully, Error decided to pay his world a visit before Hacked could make him flip completely over, which made B heave a breath of relief upon thinking the older skeleton could have at least an idea about Hacked. Unfortunately, Error was as lost as B was, especially when Hacked started spewing out little factoids about Error’s life that he couldn’t have possibly known about because he wasn’t fucking there to witness.
He wasn’t even alive when most of them happened.
Error’s visit brought forth more questions than answers, but one of the things B and Error figured about him managed to solve at least a part of his mystery.
It was obvious that Hacked wasn’t born like B or any other Sans from physical AUs had. The logical conclusion then, was that Hacked was closer to the likes of Ink and Error than to the likes of B, Blueberry, Red or even Classic himself. Hacked himself had said loud and clear that he had been born from the Multiverse, like Ink, Error and others like Paperjam and Fresh had.
But what came out of him next is what bugged both Error and B’s minds permanently.
.
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Over the course of what could have very well been millennia, Ink Sans did his job. He created and protected AUs, he fought his good for nothing nemesis Error Sans, he kept in touch with the original Sans, Classic, and with all the others, and he lived life as best as he could.
Then came Blueberry Sans, which was held captive by Error in exchange for not destroying his world, Underswap, which led to guess what, romance, which led to Ink flipping his shit and losing his position of hero towards the Sanses to a position of neutrality for most and hostility to others.
Especially after their little hellspawn of a child had been born.
Still, the artist tried to lead his life. He didn’t exactly need the others to like him, he just needed to protect their worlds, but it didn’t take very long to realize he didn’t even need to do that anymore. The greatest threat to the Multiverse was good ol’ Error Sans, and he hadn’t made a single hostile move towards any AU since Blueberry and him got together.
So that gave him a lot of spare time. Minor threats were taken out rather easily, and they were few and far in between.
Which led to Ink studying a new foe.
They had always existed; that much was common knowledge. It was them that had most likely created Error himself, and even some AUs were only possible due to them.
All in all, corrupted coding wasn’t really that much of a threat. Still, Ink found entertainment in riding the major AUs from these corruptions and took satisfaction in knowing that he was somehow protecting his so loved AUs again, even if there wasn’t anything proving that the corrupted codes would become threats.
He couldn’t destroy the codes however; only Error could do that, and Ink sure as hell was not asking his help.
So, once the coding was removed, he dumped it. He would have loved to dump the corruption straight into the Anti-Void and laugh as Error struggled with them, but he didn’t really want anyone being angrier at him that they already were.
The Void also wasn’t an option. Who knows what it could turn the coding into?
He had hit the motherload when, upon exploring the Multivoid, he found a strand of emptiness in between the Void and the Multi-Void - the clashing forces of these two worlds kept the coding from mingling and kept it hidden as well as keeping the corruption from spreading to the Multivoid.
Or so he thought.
Ink’s eye sockets were void of their light and his mouth was set into a thin line, a fearful frown at what laid before him.
The black strokes and splatters looked like either ink or claw marks. He had experienced minor glitches at least once since arriving, be it alterations in voice or movement and even visible particles on his body. He swore there was someone that sounded like The Undying whispering nonsense and was afraid of the dark spots because shadows of monsters that shouldn’t have ever seen the light of day had jumped him more than once already. The whole place felt wrong and made Ink feel wrong.
Concerning was a meek word to describe this.
The Multivoid was not the Alpha Timeline; the Alpha timeline had been created for the sole purpose of interdimensional meetings. It was only as big as the amount of Sanses and Papyruses in it, and it was easy to control and monitor. The Multivoid was born along with the first ever AU, the first shift in timeline, and with as much purpose as empty space between universes could have, having been found out of dumb luck and being labelled as a meeting place for the multiple AUs much later and out of convenience, only getting bigger and bigger and bigger as more AUs kept coming until it became simply too big to keep track of.
The fact that a portion of it, even if minuscule when compared to the vastity of the Multivoid as a whole, had been or was being corrupted, was everything. The Multivoid was so deeply connected with the Multiverse and it’s universes, that there was no telling what this tiny portion of corruption meant to the entirety of it.
Resuming, once Ink had found this little piece of dimensional Hell when arriving to dump another batch of bad coding, he knew he had fucked up.
So much for keeping the Multiverse safe.
The worst part was by far the biggest strand of black; like a bucket of ink had exploded in that spot.
The blackness itself wasn’t exactly the problem; the problem was the tracks that sprouted from it, like something had emerged from it dragged itself away, shifting and turning and twisting while doing so.
He had found himself getting back here almost everyday for what had probably been a month by now, and still no sign of just what happened or what came out of this Hell hole or where it was now.
Thankfully, the corruption was not spreading it seemed, and as far as he could tell no AU had been affected by it.
He tried to keep calm then, and not let his mistake out. He used his magic to close off the corrupted section from the rest of the Multivoid and increased vigilance on the AUs closer to it. It may have been suspicious to those that could see him spooping around and he was sure Classic had heard about his increased activity by now, but he wasn’t sure he cared.
All he cared at the moment was keeping the corruption in check and finding whatever had crawled out of it.
His only mistake was expecting it to be a horrendous, glitched, malformed creature, instead of a meek, innocent hacked skeleton.