Chapter Text
The human thing did not answer.
It looked away.
Noelle's smile didn't fade. If anything, it widened, stretching too far.
It wasn't a fake smile.
That didn’t make it better.
"Kris," she said again, softer this time, reaching a hand toward the human thing. "We made it. We reached the other side, Kris! We—"
"Noelle."
Kris's voice cut through hers. They hadn't moved from where the wires had dropped them.
But their eyes had gone somewhere very far away, nearly no longer part of this world. It was A sadder and more horrible place.
They weren’t in their home anymore or anywhere anymore.
In nowhere they were.
Noelle's head turned. Her smile faltered.
"...Kris?"
"..."
Noelle's eyes moved between the humans: Kris, standing in a too-clean room, the proof of what had happened moments ago having disappeared, and the human thing, standing in a destroyed room, splinters in the ground and a metal rod in the corner, still staring at its own bloodied palm.
"Then who—" Her hand, still extended, curled slowly back toward her chest. "I thought. Kris. Why do you sound different?"
Noelle got up, eyes darting around, lingering on Kris.
She took a step forward.
Kris took a step backwards.
“Kris, speak again.”
“...”
“Kris, why are you not happy? We crossed the lake. We are not in h-hometown anymore. We are free.” Her voice trembled, like a glass about to shatter.
She took another step forward.
Kris didn’t know what to do; their body had frozen in place.
"That… wasn't me." Kris's jaw was tight enough that the words came out clipped. “It wasn't me.”
“Fahahaha. Kris, you are speaking too low.” Noelle gave a sardonic smile. “Kris, you don't have to convince yourself. I know that—” She was cut off.
“Take it off.” Static filled the room for just a moment.
Noelle whipped her head to the origin of the sound.
The human thing was looking at her, with its eyes covered by the unnatural shadows populating the room.
No, it wasn’t looking at her; it was looking at the other, real human.
“...Why do you sound like Kris?” Noelle said, without a hint of emotion.
“The ring take it off.” The words became blurry at the edges of the echoes.
“YES, YES, you sound exactly like that voice.” She narrowed her eyes, turning her back on it to look at Kris again. “Kris… It… It wasn’t you?” Her voice had suddenly become filled with betrayal. “You… but you wanted to be here, right? Here with me, Kris, right? You wanted to escape, you—”
“Noelle Holliday, take that thing off, now.” The static had disappeared.
Kris flinched.
It wasn't the words. They lied; it was only partially the words, but the worst part was how it said them with the exact clipped cadence, the exact cold precision, the exact way each syllable landed like a hammer. They knew that voice.
It was Carol’s voice coming out of someone who wasn’t Carol.
Noelle went rigid.
“Why do you sound like her?” Her face twisted in a combination of disgust, horror, and fear, each one fighting to take absolute control.
“Noelle. Take. The ring. Off—”
“SHUT UP. STOP USING HER VOICE.” Anger ended up winning the struggle.
The human thing's shoulders had curled in tight, both hands folding against each other, nails trying to scratch its skin off. The blood fell to the ground and traveled under its sleeve.
For a moment, the cold, clipped precision held in the air by distant vibrating echoes. ”Take it off, now.” ”Take it off, now.” ”Take it off, now.” Steadily repeating.
Then it cracked.
"Take it off—" and the static bled back, thick and stuttering, the mother's voice collapsing in on itself. "Kris, the ring, please, take the ring off her. It hurts— I can’t keep—"
"Was it you?" Everything felt as if it had narrowed down, Noelle and the human the only ones in the room. "This whole time. Was it you who—"
Kris didn't wait to hear the rest of the sentence.
They crossed the space between them in two steps, and grabbed Noelle's hand before she could pull it back. The ThornRing embedded in her finger like a worm.
Kris yanked it off.
She tried to fight them off, but she wasn’t ready for their final betrayal, and with the ThornRing off her finger, its tendrills had to go back somewhere.
Noelle screamed.
It wasn't pain, Kris hoped it wasn’t because then that meant that they had just—
Her whole body seized, knees buckling, both hands flying to her skull as vibrant red thorns came out of her fur.
Some of the vines tried wrapping around whatever they could find, her arms and antlers the main victims.
But the force was too much, and they ended up broken, absorbed by the ring.
She hit the ground hard, in a fetal position, breathing in short, broken gasps.
The ring sat in Kris's palm, small and green. Very unremarkable and forgettable.
Kris stared down at it, then at Noelle, then at the human thing, still standing in the wreckage with its hands pressed over its own mouth in horror.
Except the horror couldn’t hold on its face, and it slipped off.
It was replaced by tiredness and pity.
Kris wanted to throw the thing away, but it was still standing there in front of them. They couldn’t trust it.
Kris pocketed the thorn.
Their mind immediately screamt at them, making them remember this exact situation just days ago, them not throwing it away, keeping it instead, and how it had spiraled into this.
They ended up hurting it away to the opposite corner of the human thing.
Neither of them said anything.
Noelle's breathing slowly, slowly began to even out.
She didn’t open her eyes, but she wasn’t asleep.
Kris looked at the human thing.
It tried to meet their eyes, but it was unable to hold the look for long.
“...We—” Its breath hitched, but it continued. “—Should talk.”
“...”
"We should talk?" it said again, its little confidence starting to erode away.
Kris didn't move. They wouldn't leave Noelle’s side even if it killed them.
"...Fine," Kris gave up, there wasn't a point to this silence. If they weren't going to attack it, at least they would hear it out. "Talk."
The human thing swallowed. Its hands were still bleeding a little, and it didn't seem to notice or care.
‘Where did it cut itself?’ Kris questioned. Both of the hands were as bloodied as the other, and it had finally stopped bleeding as profusely as before.
"I'm sorry." The words came out fast, causing an audio feedback that cut itself off. "For the lake. For all of the ice and snowgrave, and Berdly, and I don't remember doing half of it, which makes it all worse, but you should know everything, no lies, or stone unturned. Everything that I can tell you and think right now. I know it doesn't fix a single thing—"
"It doesn't," it wasn't said to be cruel. It simply was the truth.
The human thing flinched anyway.
"You knew," Kris said, "that we didn't want to. Noelle told you. Over and over, she told you, and you kept going anyway."
"I know."
"Then why?"
“...Why am I apologiz—”
“Why did you do it?” Kris had something at the tip of their tongue. It felt important, about it and everything else, but…
“I… thought you were not real… A game.” It looked away.
Noelle suddenly said, “A… game?”
Kris turned back to Noelle. “...Noelle. Are you alright?”
Noelle looked at them, but her gaze was unfocused, as if she had just woken up from a deep sleep.
Kris remembered seeing her like this before, when they were younger and they decided not to hide under her bed and instead just…
It didn’t matter right now.
She wasn’t looking at anything, but she still spoke back. “...No.”
Kris didn’t know what to do with that. They wanted to comfort her in any way; that is what a good friend should do, no?
But they felt too scared. The memories of her leading them down into the murky water, and even more, and then more and more and more and—
The human thing cleared its throat. “Yes, a game. I controlled Kris around and made them do everything and anyanything horrible in the last days.”
Noelle started trembling, hard.
A laugh escaped her, very unlike her normal one. “But… but that means—” She took a deep breath, then another one which became a gasp.
Noelle froze in place, her breathing slowing down and steadying.
“We are a game?” Her voice was too normal.
Kris looked away. They didn’t want to think about it. They had guessed it was something like that since the mantle, but everything that had happened in the last few moments was the final nail in the coffin.
They knew that the entity would believe itself to be a god in their world when they summoned it. That it would use them as an instrument to explore anything and everything, to find any possible path.
That was why they summoned it after all. Carol, believed it could be guided to be a helpful force for her plan.
They underestimated it, completely.
But that didn’t answer everything; the nagging part of their brain spoke, burning their tongue with the fact they had been ignoring.
It licked its lips nervously. “N-not exactly… “ It sighed, filling the room with the sounds of muffled electricity, sagging its tense shoulders. ” Yes, you were videogame characters.”
Noelle started to get up. “That is why. Why nobody noticed the changes, why e-everyone pretended Kris hadn’t changed… Why everything felt as if it was the same each day no matter what.” She took a step forward.
The human thing took a step backwards.
But this time, Noelle stopped and looked at Kris and the human thing.
“That ring. What was that? Why did it make me do—” She cut herself off.
“Why did it make me so powerful?”
It frowned. “I do not know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
It raised its bleeding hand defensively. “Exactly that: The thing came out of nowhere without explanation and— Well, it had a trance ability, which doesn't explain its power anyway.”
“Then what was the point of backtracking to freeze everyone? To f-freeze Beerdly?” Noelle spoke incredulously.
“I-I…” It started scratching its palm.
Kris was unsure if it was the wounded one or not.
Then Noelle’s eyes widened, coming to a realization. “You were curious. You wanted to know what happened if you did that, because we were characters in a video game.”
“And I can't even completely blame you for that. I— everyone has done the same, not caring for the characters because they weren’t real, right?”
She started gesturing wildly. "And if I did, I should blame myself too! Dragon blazers! Cat Petterz! Oh god, Cat Petterz..."
"You can't blame yourself for that," it said, and immediately looked as if it wished it had chosen different words. It tried again anyway. "I mean— you could. I am not forcing—" I cut itself off.
"It wouldn't be different from anyone who's played anything ever. Ignoring people because you knew they weren't— because you thought they weren't real." Its voice cracked slightly on the last word, static swallowing half of it. "That doesn't make it right. Just... common, unexpected."
Kris said nothing to that.
Something about that made their neck itch. If they weren't real. If they had simply been pixels on a screen, then what was it? How had it gone from the "real" to the "fake" or vice versa?
They filed the thought away. Now wasn't the moment.
Noelle sat down, nearly throwing herself to the ground, onto the pristine floor, knees drawn up, arms wrapped loosely around them. She wasn't looking at either of them anymore. She was looking at the window.
Kris could tell she wasn't okay.
"My mom," she said, to no one in particular. "Was she— is she like that because that's who she is? Or because someone needed her to be stubborn and cold— because a story needed a strict mom?" A small, humorless huff of air. "And Susie."
Kris's chest tightened at that.
"Did I actually—" Noelle's voice wavered, then steadied. "Or was I just written to have a crush on her? A-a... Was that just a sideplot? Optional content that wouldn't affect the main story?"
Neither of them answered. It didn't feel like she wanted an answer yet.
"And Dess." This one came out smaller. "She never came home. I used to think about it every day and— I still do." Noelle looked down at her own hands, turning them over like she was checking they were still hers. "Was that just so I'd feel like I had depth? For a backstory people would skim over?"
She laughed. It wasn't a real laugh.
"And if that's true—" She looked up, finally, first at Kris, then at the human thing, and her face sobered. "Then you're the one playing. And Kris is the one I'm supposed to— to orbit. The protagonist." Her breath caught. "Which means I'm not— I'm just... background. Lines I say that people can skip because they were written for me t-to give lore or filler."
She pressed both hands flat against the sides of her head, like Kris had seen her do before, right after the ring came off.
"Am I still doing that?" she whispered. "Right now. Is this me talking, or is this just the next line?"
"No." The word came out of the human thing fast, too fast, almost tripping over itself to get there before Noelle could finish the spiral. "No, listen— just, please, listen for a second."
Kris watched it steady itself, watched it struggle on where to start and then, strangely, it didn't start with its own account first.
It looked to Kris like it was silently asking permission, or maybe just too tired to carry the telling alone.
So Kris helped it instead with what they could remember.
They told her about waking up on a confusing and shifting floor with her unconscious and the human thing. About a thing that didn't belong to the place and it felt— No, it was too large for the room to house.
Here the other human added its own tell on how the narration kept correcting it, kept feeding thoughts into its mind, kept punishing curiosity and railing its action to a specific direction.
Of the owner of the voice who had built the whole scene like a stage set for the human thing to perform grief and horror and slow-dawning realization exactly on cue. How it had refused to follow the choreography and how that refusal had cracked open the story.
Noelle listened to all of it without a sound. Her eyes tracked between them, but her face gave away nothing like disbelief, comfort, or pity — just a stoic look.
"The owner of the voice left," it said. "Got angry that Kris wouldn't hurt me, and I wouldn't fight back, that the two actors were not "acting". So the voice gave up, calling it a punishment, leaving us here, in a story never finished." It swallowed.
"But that's the thing. It isn't finished. There's no more narration deciding what happens to either of you. No more lines you're supposed to say. A broken story doesn't have a script left to follow, Noelle. Being unfinished and still existing means that you are free, with nothing behind telling you what to say at which moment."
Noelle didn't answer.
She shifted around, arms still wrapped around her knees, something working behind her eyes that neither of them could read. Calmer than she'd been a minute ago, at least outwardly —the trembling had stopped— but whatever she thought of the argument, she kept it to herself.
Then, finally, she spoke, "If you're the player," she said, slow and deliberate, "the real one. A person, from somewhere outside all this. Then how are you here? Standing in front of us." Her eyes narrowed slightly. "And if you can be here —a real person— then what does that make us? We're supposed to be the characters and not actually real. How did we get here? How did the voice get you here?"
The human thing opened its mouth.
Nothing came out.
It looked, for a moment, like someone who had been struck, to the point of nearly losing its footing. It closed its mouth again, gaze dropping to the floor, and didn't try a second time.
Kris watched it fail to answer, and the thing that had been burning at the back of their tongue since the apology finally made sense.
"Do you remember anything," Kris said, "from before any of this?"
The human thing blinked at them, thrown by the sudden turn.
"I— yes, obviously, I remember the game—"
"I mean a life before the game. Anything that doesn't have to do with the stupid game."
"Ah... Well, I was a caretaker of a... r-religious building, and that is why I have... the essential skills." It started scratching its wound, flakes of blood falling out of its hand.
Kris waited.
"I had friends... which I can not remember, but they were... they were..."
It tried again, reaching for something specific, maybe the face, name of a place, a special day.
What came back instead was fog and not blankness.
This was worse: fragments that almost seemed coherent at a glance and then slipped apart after a few seconds. It grabbed what looked like a memory only to find it was a handle with half the door missing and no room behind.
Just floating ideas on what it was and what it could be.
Unfinished drafts on how it should act.
"I don't know." Its breathing had gone uneven. "There's nothing behind. I thought there was. I thought if I just tried hard enough I—" It pressed both hands to its own chest, trying to see if it still had organs. "There isn't a before. There's just whatever the voice needed me to be, whenever and however."
Kris watched it come apart in real time, and something shifted in their chest that they hadn't expected to. It wasn’t forgiveness, not yet, but something like that.
"Then it's not on you," Kris said, quiet, still a bit unsure. "Not all the way. The voice built you expecting to have a puppet controlling… another one, but the voice failed."
The human thing looked up at that, something flickering behind its shadow hiding its eyes, like malfunctioning lights.
Noelle was still watching both of them, quiet and pensive. Kris saw something in the way she set her jaw, how her eyes struggled to lock on any part of the human thing.
"Why do I keep calling it “it”?" she said eventually, half to herself. "Even now. Even after everything, I can’t change it."
Kris opened their mouth, and found they didn't have an answer either. They'd been doing the same thing this whole time, hadn't they? It. Never once, not even by accident, anything else.
The human thing answered before either of them, in a depressive and tired tone of voice.
"I think it's because of the owner of the voice. The way the voice talked about me. Never a name. Never anything else than “it”. Just… a blank slate, the pest." Its hands curled slightly at its sides.
“Even now. The… The—” It tried to fight its own vocal cords.
It wasn’t enough.
“The owner of the voice. Goddamit… The voice, you can’t call the voice anything other than the voice.” Each time it said “The voice”, its finger twitched.
“Doesn’t that mean we are still trapped in a script?” Kris still felt as if multiple eyes were still watching them.
“...No, maybe? …No, a story— a narrator wouldn’t want to repeat the name of someone too many times.” It pointed at itself. “I was always referred to as “it”, and the script broke before it could be solved. Maybe if the voice had kept calling me “you”, I would be even less than a person.”
Noelle’s eyes widened. “And because a narrator isn't supposed to enter the story, the voice didn't have or want to be referred to as anything else; we can only say the voice. And Kris and I being “pre-made” meant that the script had to bend around us.”
Kris heard the accidental message. They were more real than the human thing. They had a more solid and real background than it.
It felt nice to have something of an edge over their puppeteer.
Kris immediately hated that thought, trying to bury it under anything they could find.
Which made them stumble over the voice’s final words.
…What was outside of the room?
“...I am sorry, Noelle, for the… uh… voice copying.”
Noelle finally stood up, took a deep breath, and let it go.
“It wasn’t fun.”
It nodded.
“Maybe that ring was messing with my mind even more than it is, but I still want to hit you.”
It nodded again.
“But I won’t.”
It tilted its head, confused.
“You were a victim too, even if I didn’t see the voice— that right there, plus Kris's recount, is enough for me.” She took another deep breath.
“And… Well. You should know I felt trapped in a loop back there, so… I… I want to see the bright side. That we are in a new place nobody knows about, a new and unpredictable place.”
Kris looked at her. Their chest twisted along with their heart.
"You don't want to go back."
It wasn't a question, but it came out like one. Kris wanted to be wrong, that they had misinterpreted her clear message.
"No," Noelle said. Simple and stady. It unsettled Kris more than trembling would have. "I don't."
"Your mom is back there. Susie. Your whole—" Kris stopped, because saying your whole life felt wrong; who should care about backstory now?. They tried again. "Everything is back there."
"Is it, though?" Noelle didn't say it cruelly, but it hurt to hear it hurt so much. "Or is 'back there' just the loop. The one where nothing changes no matter what happens, where I say the same things at the same table every single day and everyone just pretends it's fine—" Her hands curled slightly. "Where they didn’t realize you were being possessed because they are just characters on a screen, behind another layer of story where they were and still are only backstory?”
Kris didn't have an answer for that, but… They wanted to go back…
"I don't want to lose all of it."
"Then how would we even go back?" Noelle's voice was blunt, and underneath that, lost to Kris's internal desperation, Noelle’s own desperation. "W-was there a door back to Hometown standing somewhere in this— whatever this is? Because I don’t see it"
Kris opened their mouth, and nothing came out, because she was right, and they hated that she was right, and there wasn't a rebuttal anywhere. Just the truth flaring at them with a mocking grin; its eyes shining pink and yellow.
They stood there, stumped, and the silence stretched long enough that it started to feel strangulating.
It was the human thing that broke it.
"...The voice said something. Before it left." Its voice had gone careful and testing, like it wasn't sure it had the right to bring this up at all. "About the room…" It scrunched its face, trying to remember.
Kris's head snapped up. "It said we could leave to an unfinished world," Kris said slowly; Their jaw tightened. "Like being anywhere outside its story was a threat."
"Maybe it thought it was," the human thing said. "Maybe it didn’t have the outside prepared or even an idea of what it should be."
Noelle was watching the two of them now, something new behind her expression. A fountain of hope and expectation, tinged with a dose of fear.
"Then that's the door," she said, nodding toward the far wall, where a door like the one the voice had thrown at them still sat, hinges not matching the frame it was jammed into. "That one. It has to be."
Nobody moved for a moment.
Kris looked at the human thing. The human thing looked back, and didn't look away this time, though it clearly cost something to hold the eye contact.
"I still don't trust you," Kris said flatly.
"I know, and I didn’t expect you would."
"But I'm not leaving you here either. Not after—" Kris didn't finish the sentence.
The human thing's face twitched, the shadow covering its face receding for a moment, revealing a nose before it was swallowed in a blanket of darkness once again.
"Okay," it said.
Noelle was the one who approached first, crossing the wreckage and pristine-ness of the room with a steady march,
She reached the door and set her hand against it, hesitating only a second before she pushed.
It didn't creak. It swung open smoothly with a ceremonious
Swish.