Chapter Text
The skin on Susie’s arms prickles through the sleeves of Toriel’s old coat. That’s the first thing she notices when she wakes up.
She had the dream again. That’s the second.
Her back is soggy and cold. That’s the third.
She opens her eyes.
The sky is blue. That’s the fourth.
Shit.
Susie sits up groggily and fumbles around the grass for her backpack. It’s shoved with the rest of her stuff, in a dip between the roots of a huge oak tree.
The walk to school is long. Too long. But if she doesn’t go she won’t see Noelle or Toriel. Or Berdly. He’s her friend too, even if he’s annoying. He gives her the math homework, and granola bars at lunch sometimes.
Yeah. If she stays here her brain will just make it worse.
She stumbles through the forest, down the cliffside, onto the sidewalk and into the school, barely conscious. When she throws the classroom door open, everyone but Noelle and Berdly winces.
“Susie, you came!!”
“Looks like it, huh.”
Noelle giggles and pats up in her direction as she boots her computer up, brushing her shoulder.
“It’s better with you here, i’m glad .”
Susie pulls a chair over and drops down at Noelle’s desk. She smiles, pushing something into her hands. A wrapped muffin.
“I baked a bunch with Dess and Azzy yesterday.” She whispers “Don’t have enough to give to Berdly, shh…”
“Kh. Thanks.”
Berdly peers over at them from his desk. “Our presentation is going to be the best.”
“The best is relative to what we’re being compared to.” Noelle says, poking through her pencil case “Everyone’s’ll be good in some way or another. Catti always does pretty graphic design stuff!”
Miss Alphys walks over “Susie, great to see you! Don’t worry about attendance, it’s been difficult for all of u-“
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“...Alright. Well, everyone! Time for presentations, Noelle, Berdly, you go first!”
The presentations drag and, of course, Noelle and Berdly’s is the best. Susie leaves the moment the lunch bell rings.
Wind smacks her as she swings out the school’s big double front doors and onto the sidewalk. The air is cold, even with the midday sun.
It’s only a ten minute walk. Susie could do it backwards with her eyes shut. That happens when you do it every day for a month.
She pushes the gate open and throws her backpack onto the grass.
“Everyone presented today. Miss Alphys excused us from the project, i forgot to tell ya. Noelle and Berdly’s was nerdy as shit. Like, they wrote extra.”
The ground is even colder than the air and still dewy and it soaks into her jeans uncomfortably, but she doesn’t want to stand up, or sit anywhere else. Her chest hurts the least bad here. And, hell, anything other than spending her lunch break in that school cafeteria. Maybe sometime she’ll sit with Noelle and everyone but. not yet.
“‘Cause you care about that stupid stuff. Schoolwork, or whatever.” She flops onto her back and stares up at the clouds “Wish it was still hurricane season. Sunny weather is boring as hell.”
Wispy, bone-white clouds glare at her from the sky. A couple of dead leaves flutter from one of the taller trees. Nothing is green anymore, not even yellow, or caramel brown or that dark sunset type red.
It’s all dead.
Winter sucks.
“Actually, I wish it would snow. Why do we only get cold mud. That’s bullshit.”
Something crunches. Leaves.
“Uh…Someone there?”
She calls, screwing her eyes shut and praying it isn’t Toriel. One more lunch crying over pie’ll kill her. Not that she isn’t glad for the food, or the company, it’s just… a lot, sometimes. All of the times. Everyone is a lot. Everything is a lot. If Kr-
“Oh… this is where you go.”
That’s not Toriel.
Susie whips toward the gate of the graveyard, where Noelle stands awkwardly, running her fingers up and down the length of her messenger bag’s strap “Oh- gosh, hi Susie! Sorry if I scared you! Uh-Who are you talking to?”
“..Nobody.” Susie pulls her knees to her chest, embarrassed.
“…That was dumb to ask, wasn’t it?” Noelle sits down. Her knees knock against Susie’s “I talked to Dess a lot when she was missing. I sat in her bedroom and talked like she was there with me. I just…i’ve had a harder time letting myself now, with..with them. Since they’re…”
She takes a breath. It sounds shallow.
Her eyes flit over next to Susie, tracing the inscription on Kris’s gravestone.
Kris Dreemurr
200x-202x
Our brave knight, we miss you
Our brave knight. We miss you. With that little piano engraving on the center.
She never heard them play.
She found Asriel watching a video when Toriel invited her, of them playing in the hospital a year and something ago. They rewatched it together until their eyes were bleary. Kris’s fingers danced across the keys, they smiled easily, quietly, in a way she barely got to see.
It was an instrumental cover of an older song, Asriel said, nothing like the weird internet music they usually played, but it was one of their favorites.
“They never took lessons or anything.” Noelle says, somehow catching Susie’s train of thought “They just watched youtube tutorials and snuck into the hospital to watch officer Undyne play as a kid.”
Susie nods.
She doesn’t really know what to say.
Noelle and Kris were best friends. She knows so much more about them than Susie ever will.
But somehow Susie is the one that crashed and burned the most obviously. Noelle missed a week. Susie skipped and sat in the graveyard for three. Noelle still talks to everyone. Susie slams the classroom door and shouts at anyone who gets in her way and still ditches sometimes, sits in the bathroom stall farthest from the door and stares at the frowny face doodle sharpied onto the door by Kris’s bright orange marker.
How did she keep it together?
How didn’t she tear her life to pieces?
Susie doesn’t know what she’s going to do anymore.
She didn’t know before the broom closet and she doesn’t know now. But for a week she did.
“The bell is about to ring. We should get back.” Noelle says and looks away.
“Okay.”
Susie grabs her backpack and slings it over her shoulder. She always says goodbye. She’s gonna have to leave without saying goodbye. Her chest crawls with a cold sludgy feeling.
“Oh, right!” Noelle clasps her hands and wheels around right as they’re about to walk out “Bye Kris, I love you!”
Oh.
“Bye, dumbass. Don’t get cold out here.”
Noelle tilts her head and smiles funnily at Susie “That’s sweet.”
“Shut up…”
The wind picks up as they walk back to school, whipping Noelle’s hair around her freckles. Neither of them say anything. They just walk. It’s nice, walking with someone again. Kris was so warm when they walked together. Even standing a foot from them you could feel it, spreading its way through the biting air. A human thing. Or maybe just a Kris thing.
They held her hand the first time during the festival, when they’d been standing with the group. And then they tilted their head and looked at her, the lights from the festival reflected in their eyes, and they smiled. Their hand was so warm.
Their hand was warm the last time too. It’d been so loud, the Roaring desperate in their ears, and they’d reached out and grabbed her and smiled through the wet in their eyes
“I love you, Susie, I love you, Ralsei. Tell everyone I love them too.”
And then they’d taken their sword and Susie and Ralsei had been screaming and everything was so loud and then they-
“Oh..Susie.”
They’re stopped on the sidewalk to the school. The flowers Toriel planted along the edge look nice. Marigolds. Noelle reaches tentatively up to push Susie’s hair away from her face.
“Huh?”
“You’re..you’re crying.”
“Oh.”
Sure enough, when she rubs her eyes her fingers come off wet.
Shit.
She scrubs them off with her sleeve. Noelle pulls her hand back, but doesn’t step away.
“Uh-dammit, sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m…fine.”
Noelle glances at the school and bites her lip.
“You know what…let’s go get something at QC’s. I’ll pay. It’s freezing, I need hot chocolate.”
Susie blinks “But-”
“Let’s go before I change my mind!!”