Chapter Text
Carol's worldview allows the Angel its Heaven and is in all other respects strictly materialist. The prophecies are parables, or hypotheticals, the heroes Jungian archetypes; if there is a historical Jockington, he was a learned scholar at best. Fate is not real, or at least cannot be apprehended in its entirety with the faculties of the living. Any evidence to the contrary is by necessity the fault of poor epistemic hygiene—stories assembled out of coincidences and hope, pretty and self-fulfilling, surrender to the unfalsifiable benevolence of the random.
So the fact of the girl her daughter's age, who was there for a moment before the light turned, is not—frankly—at all plausible, once considered in the warm and insistent light of the Holiday master bedroom.
The facts, again: she saw a girl. Who is, of course, Kris, a human boy of seven, the Dreemurrs' adoptive son. She looked at him and saw a Holiday—a Holiday daughter—and the image seized her in some way that she struggles to shake off, or call entirely unfounded, despite the obvious illogic of it. As if an omen had shone through the surface of that frail skin. Explainable as regret about her own daughters' disinterest (charitable), accumulated work stress (likelier) or some ambient stereotype of human boys as waifish androgynes which she's absorbed (a frustrating lapse in her own self-control, but solvable in a way that the other two aren't).
All of this, she acknowledges, and yet the image refuses to go away.
She sets aside her laptop and clears her throat, not turning from her reclining position in bed. Rudy, in his armchair, flicks his ears to indicate he's listening.
"What do you think of Kris?" she asks him.
"What, little Krismas? Our homegrown holy terror?"
Oh, Rudy. "Adding a syllable defeats the point of a nickname. Especially if you're inflicting it on our neighbors' child, and not just our daughters."
"Says the woman with six dancing Santas in July! All I can do is roll with your decorating style, Cee." He grins at her over the spine of his Nabokov. "Not to mention, 'December' was your idea."
"And I stand by it. There are plenty of Aprils and Junes in the world already. Cold months deserve further representation." She waves off what will inevitably be another wave of jokes before they can really get started. "But I'd like to hear your thoughts. Honestly."
"Honestly?" Rudy sets his evening reading aside, on his end-table, where bright energy-saver bulb lamplight washes its cover out into an unparseable glossy sheen. "Not the biggest fan."
Carol blinks. "Really."
"That kid honest-to-God terrorizes Noelle. What with the bed, the plastic fangs, the crap with the pizza mascot… at first it was an accident, y'know, with all that hiding there's gonna be a scare or two. Now I'm not so convinced."
"Noelle hasn't said anything to either of us. And she cried when Kris had to leave her birthday party early, too." Sometimes she'll find Noelle industriously losing Gin Rummy against him, fur matted by tear tracks she's forgotten about.
"Most of the time it all works itself out. Azzy's got a good head on his shoulders. Still, you know how much trouble that girl has telling anyone no." Which is, unfortunately, true. He cricks his neck uneasily, expression sheepish—he's a peacemaker by habit, with a few notable exceptions, most of whom are dead—but unsmiling. "Boys'll be boys, sure, but a boy who makes your daughter cry on every single playdate is gonna burn through his grace real fast. I know we love the Dreemurrs, but I've been considering dropping Gorey a line. Already would've, if Dess and Azzy weren't keeping him in check."
"I get the sense that December's more than keeping Kris in check."
That earns her a wince. It's a conversation they've had to have before, after all, and so far they've failed to work out anything like a proper response; Rudy's too conciliatory, and she's never known how to correct against what is technically a virtue.
December is protective of Noelle. It's the single manifestation of Carol's better nature in her; in all other respects she emulates her father and is undoubtedly better off for it, given her relatively simple teenage problems. Yet she so often escalates when she doesn't have to, to her Li'l Slugger or to intimations of unnamable revenge—her adrenaline overflowing its banks, responding to dangers she can never name after the fact no matter what questions she's asked.
That pizza-box incident that left Noelle insomniac for a week—it sounded harmlessly farcical when Asriel explained it with that awkward smile—drew something ugly out of December. A look, maybe, in her eyes; hours taking longhand notes she scribbled out with black sharpie; a thin laugh. A week after their graveyard visit there was a purplish discoloration on Kris's shoulder, just barely peeking out from beneath her sleeve, which might have been the human version of a bruise.
His sleeve.
"Eh, I figure as long as he's still hanging out over here, she's probably alright." Rudy flaps a hand at her, disarming as ever, a fishhook to drag her out of her own thoughts which Carol gracefully accepts. "You figure Krismas might have a puppy crush? Wouldn't be the first time a guy got all moony over the classic Holiday right hook."
"That wasn't my proudest moment, and you know that."
"Maybe it should be! It's definitely one of mine." She swats at the air in his direction and he mimes being heartstruck by some invisible arrow, then pulls himself out of his armchair for the evening's winding-down.
"It's difficult to know the mind of a child. Perhaps these will be happy memories for them, someday." Whatever her vices, December has a certain degree of charisma to compensate—enough, at least, that it's dragged Asriel into its orbit, a besotted little impromptu defense lawyer, two years her daughter's junior and already flexing his own public-relations muscles on her behalf. If she's hurt anyone, it's in a way that they'll forgive. "I'll keep an eye out."
"Well, if you're not worried, I'll try not to bust out a shovel juuust yet." Rudy slides into bed alongside her with a long sigh; she adjusts to give him room to maneuver, conscious of the angle of her elbow. "Why d'you ask, anyway?"
For a second—just a second—she imagines telling him.
"…Kris came to watch me in the garden, recently. The other day, when we had that thunderstorm, and Asgore had to evacuate the Cattenheimers. Noelle fell asleep, I was maintaining the tachi, and December wasn't watching them, of course. So he wandered out."
"Eesh." Rudy mock-winces. "He try to grab a sword?"
"Not once. It struck me as rare focus, given his usual standards of behavior. It must have been an hour before the light changed, and he barely seemed to blink until I was finished. December is twice that age and can't manage the same." She hums. "I suppose I was impressed."
Carol isn't especially inclined towards flattery—particularly not behind closed doors; there's not much of a point to praise if it doesn't provide further motivation—and Rudy's little hah of laughter sounds surprised. "I know it sounds strange," she says, to forestall the obvious objection that this is a child who mimed a grisly parody of cardiac bypass with a Valentine's pillow just to harass Noelle. "But Kris is patient. And listens closely. It can be difficult to tell, given he's still working out how to express it, but I suspect he's absorbed more than any of us realize. Noelle could use an influence like that. And I'd like to encourage it."
"Matchmaking already?"
There are worse excuses to see if an experiment replicates. "There are worse things. We like the Dreemurrs, after all."
Rudy's doubt manifests the way it usually does in him—a wry little quirk to his eyes, like he's rifling through a mental catalog of jokes to soften it. Carol extracts herself from under the covers, adjusts the cuff of her snowflake-pattern pajama set, and turns towards him, laid out on his side. "It's our responsibility as adults to recognize potential in our children when it appears," she says. "I'm 'Aunt Carol,' aren't I? I don't think I'm overstepping if I try to be part of our neighbors' lives."
She's calmer in the cool sterility of the kitchen, in the early morning when no one's awake besides her and, perhaps, December. Low temperatures have that effect on her. Asgore has joked clumsily about luring her into a walk-in freezer to ask for a day off, repeating secondhand humor from one of her office aides. Presumably he didn't realize that the aide who came up with that joke was unsubtly implying that he'd murder Carol and preserve the corpse a la venison, itself standard masculine office posturing not intended for the ears of its virago subject—or maybe he did? It's difficult to tell how much of what Asgore does has any intent behind it; she can imagine him decapitating her with that same vague look on his face.
By and large, Carol does respect the Dreemurrs—as people; as parents. More importantly, so does everyone else, her husband among them. She's under no illusions about her reputation compared to Toriel, a living saint to a generation educated under her aegis, and to their parents she's the Festival Queen in archetype, her six-year streak broken only when Shyra was posthumously elected (which was Toriel's idea in the first place).
And as for Asgore—well, she's under no illusions about herself as competition, either, all else being equal. Certain inevitabilities dictated by culture and Hometown's ostensibly progressive church were, at the time of her courtship, her only guarantor against that faintly apologetic smile and eerily silent lion's tread and endless, childish faith. College-aged Carol Touji recognized early on that her romantic success was built on the shoulders of Titans, whose holy menace—wavering punitive fantasies, spawned from the uncertain road not foretold in scripture—quashed whatever flowers had been planted between Rudy and his roommate. In either one of them, a revelation might be almost plausible. In her, it's absurd.
She doesn't think of what she said as a lie. Kris is patient. Carol did recognize potential in him, and Noelle does keep asking when Kris can come over and play again, despite the intermittent night terrors. Honesty is best with a complete grasp of the facts. Until Carol's worked it out, anything she says will be muddled, the crossbreed of reality and an undigested moment of delusion. She knows what it's like when she tries to explain her abstract feelings instead of sticking to the strictly concrete—"I let Kris play with knives, and it was for my personal entertainment" would be less contentious than the sticky, inexpressible sentiment that drove her to dismantle the Persian frame for a girl who wasn't there.
Of course, Rudy would take her side if she were to admit her lapse in judgment—he's conflict-avoidant, a peacemaker, and Carol's side is the path of least resistance by default, even if the Dreemurrs are on the other end. She shouldn't catastrophize. At worst, he would smile at her in politic incomprehension, like he does when Noelle describes her night terrors—lost toys accusing her of neglect and convulsing brachiating roots in her wallpaper snowflakes. With his sweet and endless tolerance for the absurd, waiting for the moment he can remind her that it's all just a dream.