Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

(Crunch, crunch, crunch)

“Are you eating something, Kris? As the volunteer assistant librarian I’ll have to warn you not to spill crumbs on the books!”

Kris raised a bag from under the table, still munching, not even looking up from the encyclopedia that lay flat on the table. The bag was transparent plastic with a green label. On the label were several colorful birds.

Berdly did a double take. “Is that bird seed?”

Kris nodded and swallowed. They stuck out the bag. “Want some?” Their voice was hoarse as always.

He hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. “Well, if you insist.” He grabbed a wingful out of the bag and started pecking at it, expecting Kris to stare, maybe fire off a mocking comment—but they already had their head buried in their book again. They sat hunched on their forearms, staring at a stylized drawing of some sort of factory, full of tubes and gears and wires. “You didn’t buy this for me, did you?”

They shook their head quickly. “Used to eat it off the bird feeders. Mom made me stop.”

Mixed with the oats and maize was the occasional peanut and sunflower seed and even a dried mealworm. Before he knew it he had run out, preening between the feathers for a last morsel but not finding any.

“This is… pretty tasty. Where did you get it?”

“From the store,” they mumbled. “’s got a very deep fruit basket.”

It did have a very deep fruit basket. Last time he went there he had seen someone secure a rope to delve down.

The bag was open on the table. Berdly felt awkward about grabbing another portion but Kris didn’t look up.

(Crunch, crunch, crunch)

“Do you have an idea for our group project yet?”

They shook their head. They were still staring at the factory. Apparently they weren’t even considering it as a subject?

“Well, if you don’t have anything, I have an idea.” He scraped his throat. “I think we should do a presentation about humans.”

“No.” Kris frowned severely, and their fingers dug into the table.

What was the matter with them? “You’re an expert, aren’t you?”

They shook their head again, forcefully.

“Look, Kris.” I need someone to lean on. Like Noelle. I can’t do this on my own. “You can’t let me do all the work. If you want to cooperate you need to bring something to the table. Capisce?”

Kris’s mouth tightened and they shut their eyes. Was he going too far?

But—“Okay,” said Kris. “Fine. We’ll do humans. Whatever.”

Berdly felt lighter. “Great! Good.”

He didn’t enjoy annoying Kris like this. Not any more, not since that strangely vivid dream.

But they looked so resolute right now that it seemed even a truck would bounce right off their lithe frame. Their smooth skin, the hair covering their eyes, the slight veins running through their hands into their sleeves, it added up to a pretty picture, somehow so compelling that Berdly felt he could stare at it for hours. It only lasted for a few seconds before Kris relaxed and shifted position and the picture was broken—yet some fragments remained.

That was normal, right? Humans were beautiful creatures. He had never met any besides Kris, but he was sure others were just as striking.

“Berdly?” asked Kris, pulling him out of his daze.

“Right! Yes. I was thinking we could start with Gerson’s book, that’s sure to have good material. Have you read it?”

“Nah. Have you?”

“Well—” sputtered Berdly. “I’ve been meaning to—”

Kris chuckled and made tut-tut noises.

Berdly turned and walked to the bookcase, trying to hide his blush. He grabbed two copies of The History of Humans and Monsters. It was always well-stocked.

They made a satisfying thump on the table. “Here. Let’s read chapter one for tomorrow.”

“You know, I think my mom has…” started Kris.

“What now?”

“Eh, never mind. I’ll try to read it. Thank you.”

Berdly’s eyes followed Kris out the door. It took him a minute to remember what he was doing and start reading.

Chapter Text

The book surprised Berdly. He had met Gerson only a few times, and remembered him as a knobbly man who laughed shrilly at his own jokes about his age. His series of fantasy novels notoriously had whole made-up history books as appendices. If he made even his storybooks like that then his real history books must be extremely dull, or so Berdly thought.

Instead, the history book read like a storybook. It told the story of a humble blacksmith turtle, expelled from her village by an evil human monarch, taking up arms in revolt.

And then it suddenly stopped telling that story and started telling a different story. Not a heroic story about a plucky underdog, but a tragic story about a village falling on hard times when the monster part of its population collectively decided to leave.

It took Berdly a few pages to realize the stories were linked. They were about a single village and a single series of events. But they framed things differently and disagreed with each other. The first story’s iron edict handed down from the top was a long stream of pestering policies in the second. The turtle and the monarch, sworn enemies in the first story, ended up marrying in the second story to unite their nations.

Some people, the book said, claim that history is not a story. I disagree. History is not just a story, it’s many stories. None of them are entirely true, some are outrageous lies. But if you want to understand people you have to know the stories they told about themselves.

Some people claim that story logic makes you focus on the wrong things. That for the full picture of the First Human-Monster Conflict you need to talk about absolute and comparative advantage, about delays in long-range communication. They’re probably right. But this is my book. If you don’t like it, go read another one!

The things Berdly read set up camp in his head and wouldn’t leave. During breakfast he paid scarce attention to his worms, instead thinking about the doomed rebellion that fought battle after battle and survived against all odds. On his walk to school the world took on a melancholic tinge as he considered the havoc wreaked by the peaceful exodus, the damage that could be done without violence. By lunchtime two versions of the blacksmith were bouncing off each other, colliding again and again in different orientations. Did she kill the monarch? Marry them? Did they marry for politics, for love, for both?

He drifted through the day, carried by the maelstrom in his head, until he was back at the library with Kris and all of it spilled out.

He solemnly laid the book on the table and sat down across from Kris. “So,” he said, maybe a little too eagerly. “Did you read it?”

Kris wagged their head sideways. “Not much.”

Berdly frowned. “Why not? Was it above your level?”

They shook their head. “Not that. I just…” They slung one arm around their body, hugging themself. “I just didn’t like it.”

“Well, I thought it was great. What part of it didn’t you like?”

“The start.”

“What, right away when it described the village?”

They nodded.

Berdly sighed. “Kris, we have to prepare a presentation here! How will we do that if you don’t do the reading?”

They looked down. “Maybe…” Their tongue darted out of their mouth to wet their lips. “Maybe you can tell me what happened?”

“That’s completely—” He stopped to think about it. Was he really going to pass up a chance to talk at length about the story that had infested his mind all day? “That’s… a great idea!” He shifted in his seat, setting himself a little more upright. “So there was this blacksmith, a very long time ago…”

Kris listened, attentively. They stared at him, head poised on an arm on an elbow on the table, hanging at his lips. When he told about the monster platoon dressing up as trees they even laughed, and he couldn’t stop his beak from curling into a grin. He wasn’t used to people laughing at things he said. Not unless they were making fun of him, anyway.

Sometimes they got a pained look on their face, and he stopped talking, and they asked him to skip something. They didn’t want to know much about the humans in the village. That was going to a problem for their presentation. But if he was being honest with himself he really just liked to talk.

“…a-and, to seal the arrangement, the human monarch took the blacksmith as their bride.”

He stopped talking, hoping that Kris would ask him to skip it, but they were smiling. “How did that go?” they asked. “Did they live happily ever after?”

“Well. There were a hundred years of peace.” He paused. “I was curious about her because Gerson was also a blacksmith before he wrote books. And a turtle. So I looked it up, and those two might actually have been Gerson’s distant ancestors. That’s—that’s interesting, don’t you think?”

Kris nodded thoughtfully.

Chapter Text

“So how are you guys doing with your project?” asked Berdly.

Noelle kicked a rock. It traced a long arc through the air, no doubt helped by her hooves and cross country training. “It’s going great! We’re doing it about—you won’t make fun of me, will you?”

“What?”

“We’re doing it about giant robots,” she said, and her face broke into a smile. “I had to prod Susie a little to get her to come up with it. I don’t think she realized that you can just pick any topic you want.”

“Like from movies?”

“Movies and other fiction, yeah. But also real-life exoskeletons. Susie’s studying a lot of physics to figure out what’s feasible. It’s honestly kind of inspiring.”

Susie? Studying? Maybe he had been too harsh on her all this time.

“And what’s your topic?” she asked.

“Oh! It’s, um, humans.”

Noelle raised an eyebrow. “Humans, really? I didn’t think Kris would like that.”

“They did agree to it,” he said, probably a little too defensively.

“Of course, I’m sure it’s fine, it’s really hard to make them do something they don’t want to. They just don’t like humans. Or, well—it’s complicated. You know we were close growing up, and—how do I explain this.”

He waited for her to continue.

“There’s human movies, and then there’s human movies, right? There are movies made for humans, where all the actors are human, and Kris… really doesn’t like those. Sometimes one would appear on TV, or their dad would put one on by accident, and they’d just run out of the room without saying anything.” Noelle shook her head. “But there’s also human movies, where it’s all monsters and just a single human who’s maybe like, a vampire, or a wizard, or something. And Kris loved those. One time they spent months wearing only gray clothes and pretending to be a Frankenstein.”

Berdly took a deep breath. “Actually, you’ll find that Frankenstein was the doctor, not the—”

“Not in that movie.”

“Oh.”

“Kris! I thought that perhaps we could interrupt the reading with something lighter. How do you feel about this?”

Berdly handed them a DVD. He had spent some time picking it out in the library. Kris wasted no time and immediately flipped it over to read the names of the cast. (All traditional monster names, with one exception. He checked.)

“The Mummy,” he announced, not that it didn’t say that on the box. “It’s a classic. You can tell because they remade it five times.” He chuckled.

Kris nodded. “Okay.” They looked like they wanted to say more, opening their mouth and closing it without any words coming out. Finally: “We could. Watch it at my place?”

“Why certainly, Kris! I would love to!” Why was his heart pounding? “Right now? Or later?”

“Uh. We can go now and eat dinner first. Mom has a thing tonight so she said she’s cooking early.”

“Now, Kris, I must warn you about the, ahem, colonialist aspects of the film,” said Berdly. “While Egypt was no longer under monster occupation when it was shot, the human population is portrayed rather—”

“I don’t really care,” said Kris.

They walked the rest of the way in silence. Kris seemed to like silence.

“It’s so nice to see you making more friends,” said Toriel. “That makes two friends in as many weeks, doesn’t it? You’re really churning through them!”

“He’s…” Kris started, but they didn’t finish the sentence.

Toriel was strangely intimidating. He knew her from school as stern and imposing, and there was some of that, but it was mixed with something else, a playfulness that he didn’t have the measure of. He wasn’t sure if he was allowed to relax and act familiar or if she would put on that frown she used for misbehaving children.

“In any case, I’m off to the parent-teacher evening. You kids have fun with… The Mummy, was it not? Don’t you have enough mummies, Kris?” She winked. And then she left.

Berdly spent a full five minutes figuring out the DVD player. At first he assumed it would be like the one at home, and soon he was in too deep and asking for help would be embarrassing. In the meantime Kris watched him struggle with a faintly amused look on their face.

“The television is unplugged,” they finally pointed out.

Berdly could feel himself turning red as he crawled behind it and plugged in the cable. “Couldn’t you have told me that before?” he snarled.

“…yeah, sorry. I just. Like watching you work.”

He straightened his clothing and sat down next to Kris on the couch. The movie started to play.

He stole occasional glances at Kris. They seemed to like it. When the titular Mummy started to move they smiled, and when the poor archaeologist went mad and couldn’t stop laughing Kris laughed out loud with him.

Kris’s laugh came in bursts, hoarse roars alternated by wheezes. He wouldn’t mind hearing more of it.

The movie continued. There was a brief scene with a human digging team. Kris endured it. They frowned, but they didn’t cover their eyes or anything.

Then they got to the scene with the dance, and a dark ritual took over Helen What’s-Her-Name’s will and made her exit the party in a trance, and Kris flipped the fuck out. They screamed, a primal wordless cry.

Berdly fumbled for the remote and tried to hit pause but hit eject and the screen went blank and the room went dark while the DVD slowly whirred out of the player.

Kris was panting, clawing at the couch, muttering under their breath. Berdly reached out but didn’t really know what to do and just grabbed their arm and said “Kris! Kris, calm down. There was only one human in that scene, right? I talked with Noelle, she said you liked movies like this, what’s the matter?”

He felt really stupid as he said all that. What did he expect, that Kris would start calmly analyzing their own panic? But stupid as it was, it seemed to have some effect. Kris turned around, looked at them, their eyes slightly out of focus. So he kept talking, just saying whatever came into his head.

“I just thought it would be fun, it wasn’t really justified for research, but just reading all the time gets boring, and I don’t know, maybe we could say something in the presentation about humans as outsiders, but we don’t have to watch it, don’t worry, I’ll take it back to the library.”

Kris wriggled their arm free of his wing to grab it with their hand. Their fingers interlocked with his, grabbing tightly but not quite painfully, and he could feel them rubbing his feathers, exploring the texture. They closed their eyes and slumped backwards, still firmly holding his wing.

“Take as long as you like,” he said. It was the only thing he could think of.

“Thank you,” they mumbled.

It was dark, and only getting darker as the evening lapsed into the night.

If he shifted just right he could lay down while still holding Kris.

Somewhere in the house a clock ticked.

Chapter Text

Berdly woke up under a blanket. Light was filtering in through the curtains. And his head was resting on Kris’s legs.

He slowly sat up, not wanting to disturb them.

The DVD lay in its extended drawer. The clock ticked and tocked. And Kris was slowly breathing in and out.

Their head was jammed against the side of the couch and their jaw hung slack, exposing pearly white teeth. Each breath made a few strands of hair flutter. Their eyes were shut tight.

He heard soft creaking from the other side of the house. He turned around, and Asriel walked into the room.

Asriel was as tall as his parents now, though still on the lanky side. He wore wide jeans and a shirt printed with what was probably the logo of a band.

He glanced at Kris, then back. “Berdly, right?” he asked softly.

Berdly nodded. “Hi.”

Kris groaned and squirmed against the cushions. Their eyes blinked open. When they caught sight of Asriel they sat up and smiled.

“Hey there, buddy,” said Asriel, and he leaned over to ruffle their hair. “Did you sleep well?”

Kris nodded eagerly.

“How was the movie?”

Kris’s smile froze into a forced grin.

Asriel sucked in air. “That bad, huh?”

“See, I did talk with Noelle about it,” Berdly explained. “But there was evidently something we missed.”

“It happens. Don’t worry about it.”

“I want to try again,” Kris mumbled. They were looking down at the floor.

“Come on now, Kris,” said Berdly. “We can watch literally any other movie! There’s no need to bother with this one.”

“But I want to. Does it… have a happy ending?”

Berdly had of course read a plot summary before taking the film to Kris, as well as some fun trivia to dazzle them with, but he hadn’t told them that. Had they guessed? “It does, yes,” he said. “Very—very textbook happy ending.”

“Then I wanna watch.”

Asriel made oatmeal. Kris washed up, and returned in clothes that were identical to their old clothes, minus stains. Classic Kris. When everyone was ready they sat back down on the couch to eat and watch.

Berdly had groaned inwardly (and maybe even outwardly) when Asriel said he was making oatmeal. It was such a bland dish. But this was actually pretty tasty. What was his secret? Was it the salt? Was he just really good at making it?

He ate it in short quick bites. Right beside him Kris was shoveling it in enormous chunks that quivered on the spoon.

Asriel was also having trouble with the DVD player, which made Berdly feel a little better about his own struggles. By the time he had figured it out Kris was nearly finished.

“Okay, let’s fast-forward,” said Asriel. “Kris, can you give me a recap of the bit you already watched?”

“There are these archaeologists in Egypt and they dig up a really shriveled human body, some kind of high priest. There’s also a box, but it says on the lid that it’s terribly cursed, and one of them is scared of it. But then when nobody’s around the youngest opens it and reads the scroll inside, and the corpse comes alive and steals the scroll.”

Kris was normally quiet, but sometimes you could get them going and they would turn talkative. Berdly had never seen them talk this relaxed and naturally before.

They continued: “A decade later a human native points out a royal tomb, and they dig it up, and exhibit it. The human does a ritual with the scroll and the new corpse. And then a woman at a party—she—she—”

“She’s possessed,” Berdly chimed in. “Controlled somehow.”

“Darn,” said Asriel. “Okay, I get it. It’s, uhh, a bit of a long story.”

He paused the movie, rewound a bit, paused it again. The woman—Helen, a handsome canine monster—was frozen on the screen in the moment where she turned from her dance partner with a blank expression on her face.

“You sure about this, Kris?” asked Asriel.

Kris nodded.

“Then here we go.”

He hit play and the people on the screen started moving. The camera followed Helen as she retrieved her coat from the cloakroom.

Berdly reached out to Kris, on instinct, and they squeezed his wing.

Helen’s journey continued, interspersed with shots of the ritual. She collapsed at the doors of the museum.

When she woke up, not remembering what had happened, Kris relaxed their grip.

This repeated throughout the film. When Helen was herself Kris smiled and laughed (even at parts that Berdly didn’t think were intended to be funny). When she was possessed they tensed up but continued to watch, their eyes glued to the screen.

But near the end of the movie something changed. Rather than entering a state of trance or madness Helen spoke as the High Priest’s lover, her human ancestor, Ank-Sun-Amon. And Kris’s reaction was different. They stared at the screen with a kind of longing. This continued even as the events turned sour and she became distressed. And at the end, a tear rolled down their cheek.

Asriel left to comfort an old friend (who was “going through a messy pepperoni breakup”). That left the two of them alone.

“So what was that all about?” asked Berdly.

“Huh?”

“I noticed you became quite emotional toward the end there, Kris.”

“Well, you see, Berdly,” said Kris in a nasal voice that sounded nothing like Berdly’s. “When people see something sad happen, such as Ank-Sun-Amon returning to the afterlife, their eyes release a special mucus, known as tears—”

“We weren’t crying. And besides, that’s not what happened.”

“It isn’t?”

“She was a reincarnation all along, as made abundantly clear by her saying that she’s ‘someone else too.’ She’s on her umpteenth New Game Plus, if you will. There was a deleted scene that showed her previous lives: first in 18th century France, then in medieval times, then—hey, are you listening?”

Kris was staring off into space. “That’s interesting. A human soul reincarnating in a monster body.”

“Well, firstly, the soul is a physical organ, I don’t think it migrated from body to body. And secondly…” He forgot what he was going to say. “Secondly, I… guess that is interesting? Say, does this have anything to do with when you used to wear horns to school?”

Kris jolted, but quickly retorted: “No more than with your desire for nipples.”

White-hot panic rushed to his head. “How do you know about that?”

“L-lucky guess?”

“I never told anyone about that. Never. How can you possibly—”

“I found this, this drawing you made. You drew yourself pretty muscular.”

“Oh.” He did have a vague memory of designing his ideal form. “Did you like it?” he blurted out.

They shook their head. “Not really my type. I’d rather you stay as you are.”

Chapter Text

“…but when the entire joke is that you’re filling in the blanks of an existing template, that’s when a meme becomes degenerate. A joke must be more than a simple callback. If it were up to me—”

“Aren’t we here to do research?” Kris asked.

“I’m just—just applying a critical reading to one of our sources—” Berdly sputtered.

Kris wheeled over their chair. Together they looked at the image on his monitor: someone in a corner at a party thinking They don’t know I’m human.

“I think it’s funny,” said Kris.

“Well, maybe a little bit,” he conceded. “But it’s the principle of the thing. The original versions of this image had phrases like ‘my feet hurt,’ and—”

“Why would their feet hurt?”

“What? I don’t know.” The conversation was somehow getting away from him. “Okay, so, the rest of the page. It says that monsters living in human society often have an advantage, because humans are all built pretty much the same, but monsters aren’t. So a monster can be the strongest person in the whole village, or the best swimmer. But there are also disadvantages, because everything’s made with humans in mind, so perhaps they have to import food or can’t fit through doorways.”

Kris nodded. “Makes sense. Like how most blacksmiths are turtles. Something about toxic fumes, right?”

“Yes.” He scrolled aimlessly. “There’s an equation here, for the ratio of monsters to humans, but it’s—I don’t—I didn’t have a chance to look at it yet.” Logarithms. Why did it have to be logarithms?

Kris stared intently. “When the number of humans goes up,” they said slowly, “the number of monsters goes up a bit faster. So the more people there are, the greater the fraction of monsters.”

“Right. Precisely.” He inhaled. “And then there’s humans in monster society, and that’s different, because they have less reason to live there. You don’t see it much any more, because nowadays everyone knows what humans look like, but in medieval stories it was a cliché for a human outlaw to hide undercover in a monster village, pretending to be a monster themself. Humans living among monsters would be assumed to be troublemakers.” This made Kris grin for some reason. “Okay. Your turn.”

Kris rolled back to their own screen. They scraped their throat. “Human-monster relationships,” they announced in a singsong voice, and alarm bells went off in Berdly’s head.

They were reading the words right off the screen. Berdly had studied his piece, internalized it, reformed it into his own words, but Kris was doing none of that. They were regurgitating their piece verbatim, without summarizing it or showing proper respect to the differences between the written and the spoken word.

And why, out of the six links Berdly had sent them, had they chosen this one in particular? They could have picked the one about language families, or clothing, or the 18X0s embargoes, but they just had to choose the one about—

“Although the saying goes that ‘humans don’t have sex’…”

Something went wrong with Berdly’s breathing. He burst into a coughing fit. Kris waited for it to stop, then went on as if nothing had happened.

“…this is an oversimplification. It is more proper to say that humans have one sex, while most monster species have two. This single human sex is compatible with itself as well as both common monster sexes, but the resulting species depends on echosomal—look, there’s a table here.” There indeed was. It was a complicated affair that went by species and sex and distinguished viable from fertile offspring and had copious footnotes. “Buncha perverts if you ask me.”

“Perverts?” asked Berdly weakly. “Kris, isn’t your dad dating a ghost?”

Kris blinked. “Oh, yeah. That’s right.”

“Anyway, why are you going over this? We covered it in biology already.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“What? You were there, you—” But no, they hadn’t been there for that class. Behind him had been an empty seat. At several points he had wanted to crack jokes, but it just hadn’t been the same without Kris as a target. “You were sick, right?”

They shook their head. “Mom didn’t want me to go.”

“Your mom didn’t want you to go to school? The one who’s always going on about the value of education?”

They shrugged. “Guess she didn’t like that lesson.”

“Wait—so you didn’t know? The page you read aloud, you’re hearing about all that for the first time just now?”

They shifted in their chair. “I knew some of it.”

“Well, what didn’t you know?”

They talked slowly, looking off to a point beside Berdly. “I didn’t know humans and monsters could have babies.”

Angel on a stick. “We were talking about mixed ancestry just the other day! You know, from Gerson’s book, and in the movie. How did you think that worked?”

Kris was still looking away, lips pressed thin. “Adoption,” they said.

Oh. Something inside Berdly sunk all the way down to his legs.

Kris stood up, picked up their bag.

“I didn’t mean…” he started, but he didn’t know how to continue. Didn’t mean what? Didn’t mean that they were—

Kris walked out the door.

Chapter Text

He had blown it. He really had. No coming back from this one. Was Kris ever going to look him in the eyes again?

His shift wasn’t over yet, so he moved to his working seat and sat there for another twenty-five minutes. A few people passed through, maybe. He didn’t pay them any mind.

Then he walked. He walked mechanically, legs and arms falling into a perfect rhythm, carrying him forward without a particular aim. He walked, and walked. And then he looked around and found he was standing in front of the flower shop.

The building was a little worn, more than he remembered. The awning was starting to bleach, chips were missing from the orange paint on the wall, and the “flower king” sign had dried out. But the bushes in the planters looked healthy as ever.

An idea dawned.

Yes! This was it! The right gift would surely redeem him in Kris’s eyes. He would meet them before class, present his bouquet of roses or tulips or sunflowers or whatever. Kris’s bitterness would melt away like snow before a GPU. They’d lean forward to accept the flowers, and they’d—hug him? Yes, they would pull him into a warm hug. He strode forward, filled with purpose.

The door swung open without a noise—oiled hinges, no bell.

Asgore stood against the counter, faced away from the door. His meaty arms framed his loose floral shirt. And to his right, head turned toward him, stood a crash test dummy in a polka-dotted dress.

She was something of a recluse, but she came into the library sometimes, looking for books on knives, or ballistics, or anime (which she pronounced an-eye-mee, despite Berdly’s corrections and explanations that for printed works the proper term was manga). She was not unfriendly, per se, but she was very forceful.

And she always scowled. She didn’t have a face, so it wasn’t quite clear how she did it, but it was unmistakable. Now was no exception. “We NEED to know your financial situation!” she said, rather loudly. “Income. Expenses! Taxes!”

Asgore sighed. “I know.” From this angle Berdly could see a wistful smile.

“Give me those and I’ll turn this place around, Gorey! I’ll see what sells, see what’s too expensive, see what—”

“Ahem.”

The both of them turned around. Asgore’s face turned from slight worry to happy surprise, and he walked up from behind the counter. The dummy meanwhile took a step back as if to observe from a distance.

“Howdy!” said Asgore. “You are one of Kris’s classmates, are you not?”

“I am indeed!” said Berdly. “And I have come here to purchase flowers.”

“Flowers, you say?” He chuckled mildly. “You’ve come to the right place.”

“Well, obviously.” Did he think he had just wandered in here by coincidence?

“Did you have some particular flowers in mind? Would you like to look around?”

Berdly hesitated. “Flowers—flowers mean things, don’t they?”

Asgore smiled. “I certainly like to think they’re meaningful. But if you mean specific meanings for specific kinds of flowers—that’s a complicated issue.”

“Complicated how?”

“There are people who’ll tell you that a lily means purity, or that roses stand for love, but that’s all a bit arbitrary in my opinion. It relies on the recipient knowing the code, and, well, we can’t count on everyone being so involved with flowers.”

“So it’s bunk.”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that. But it depends on an understanding you share with the recipient. If you know what it means, and they know what it means, then you needn’t be able to explain it to anyone else.”

Berdly frowned. That was awfully vague. Was he supposed to agree on a code in advance?

“Don’t overthink it,” said Asgore, catching his look. “It can be quite simple. Tulips as a reminder of a time the both of you saw tulips. Sunflowers for someone who likes yellow. Or just a flower you think they would find pretty. Why don’t you have a look? You can ask me if you have any questions.”

Asgore’s eyes tracked him for a while as he walked around, but then he went back to talking with the dummy in a hushed voice.

Berdly walked from bin to bin, pausing and nodding thoughtfully. What was a normal amount of time to look at each? Was the nodding overdoing it? Should he keep his wings at his side, or maybe touch the flowers, or lean forward and smell them, or something? Did he look weird?

A sophisticated flower, that was what he needed. A sophisticated flower from a sophisticated guy. To—to tell Kris that—well, he’d work on that.

Here was a potted orchid. Yep, that was the name, it said so on the label. Orchids looked freaky.

But for all its intricateness the flower was sturdy. It was made to last. A commitment, not something you put in a vase and watch wilt away.

“Found something you like?”

Berdly jumped, then rebuilt his composure before turning around. “Yes. This orchid, please.”

Asgore nodded. “A wonderful choice! Would you like some tips on taking care of it?”

He almost said no. Of course he knew how to take care of orchids, who did this guy think he was talking to? (Berdly didn’t know. Didn’t have a clue.)

But Asgore offered to explain it, so he was practically doing him a favor by letting him explain it, that didn’t reflect on Berdly at all. Right?

Right.

“Nnnnnnyes, please.”

Asgore beamed. “You’ll want to water it often, but not too much. It’s good for it to dry out a little. Watch out with the petals…”

Chapter Text

The orchid that sat on Berdly’s desk had only been bought yesterday afternoon which meant it didn’t need to be watered yet and wouldn’t need to be watered before gifting it to Kris when school began (48 minutes from now). He would have to communicate the watering instructions to Kris and possibly repeat this information about timing so that Kris would know when to water it, unless they could intuit it by feeling the soil.

Deep breath.

His breakfast was all eaten up and his bag was all packed and his dad had left for work and there was nothing keeping him really. He had looked up all his orchid facts. He should just leave. He would be early and Kris would be late as always but that was okay.

He picked up the flower in its pot with both wings. It wobbled as he walked.

Kris was actually a little early today but Berdly had been very early so he’d had to wait for a long time in the classroom, thankfully unlocked, twiddling on his chair before even Ms. Alphys arrived and startling her when she did. She asked how the project was going and he said it was going fine and she asked what the plant was for and he said it was a present and she said it might be nice to have more greenery in the classroom and then she stopped asking questions.

Kris came in after Snowy and Noelle, eyes crisscrossing through the classroom and finding him. Kris halted next to his desk and looked past him, over his shoulder.

“Sorry about yesterday,” they mumbled.

What? How—dare they! This was supposed to be his—He stood up, chair legs scraping over the floor, lifted the orchid, extended it against Kris’s torso. “You have to take this flower.”

Kris wrapped their fingers around the pot. (Around his wings.) They finally looked him in the eyes. “Why?”

“Because, because I’m sorry.”

“Right.” They tugged, and Berdly extricated himself. “You buy this from my dad?”

“Y-yes.”

They nodded. “It’s nice.”

“I’ll, tell you how to take care of it—” but Kris already walked to their own desk. With the orchid.

The classroom was almost at full occupancy. Susie arrived a few minutes later, fashionably late. She was, and remained, his crush, no matter her flings or trysts. Susanna, light of his life, choir of his groin. Who else? She gave Kris a fist bump in passing, and he felt a pang of jealousy. Of Kris, of course. That was who he was jealous of. Lucky stiff, getting to be friends with Susie.

The pot stayed on Kris’s desk for the rest of the day. The instant that class ended Berdly swiveled around (first his head, then the rest of his body). He stared at Kris. Kris stared at him. He stared at Kris.

“Did you know,” (he said,) “that orchids need fungi to grow?”

“Yeah,” (said Kris,) “dad told me once. He has to use special chemicals for the seeds.”

Damn! Why o why did he think getting a flower was a good idea? It was all going wrong.

“He grew a few at home, before the, um, you know what, when he didn’t even have the shop yet.” Susie walked past and ruffled their hair. (Why did people keep doing that?) They didn’t move an inch.

“S-so you’ve probably had lots of orchids?”

“Nah.”

“No?”

“I just, never did…” They struggled with the words. “I never really owned any. Flowers.”

Right right right. This could be salvaged. “I suppose we’re all, ah, missing certain experiences in our lives. Like in the library yesterday—”

Kris recoiled, shut their eyes and physically moved backwards. Abort! Abort! But then—a nod. Phew.

“Speaking of! We should go back. To that location. To resume our activities.”

“Sure.” Kris got up. “I’ll just drop this off at home first.”

They walked away with the pot, leaving Berdly where he sat, all alone in the empty classroom. At the door they stopped, turned, nodded to him.

“Thanks for the flower.”

Kris sighed and plopped down on a chair that spun once, twice, thrice. They sighed again.

“I had to convince mom that it really was my flower,” they told the wall of the computer lab. “That dad wasn’t having a, a, a ‘relapse’.”

Something had happened to that family recently, some sort of dramatic resolution that the whole town seemed to know about. But Berdly had been zoning out at that time and was fuzzy on the details. Was this part of it? He attempted a sympathetic squawk.

Regardless. That was not what the two of them were here for. They had to talk business. “You know, Kris, I’ve been thinking.”

Kris tip-tapped another half turn.

“About the project. It’s not going very well, is it? Every time you have to read about humans, you, you…” He gestured wildly. “You know what I mean.”

An old lady wandered into the lab. He knew her. Mrs… Something? She definitely had a last name. With a K? “Oh, hello, Bradley,” she said. “Can you help me, find a book?”

He put on his best smile. He wasn’t actually technically on shift at all but this was what he signed up for, this was what the librarian life demanded, assistentiality at every avenue. When somebody needed a book about a topic he helped them find it. (Unless it was really hard. (Though if the library didn’t have it he could put in an order.)) “And what manner of tome would you be pursuing?”

“It’s called ‘a history of monsters and humans’ or something like that. I hope you have it…”

Ah, yes. The History of Humans and Monsters. That national bestseller written by local celebrity Gerson Boom. That book they had a whole shelf of, that book only surpassed by the same author’s fantasy cycle. I hope you have it? Please. “We most certainly do! I will show you the way.”

She smiled, she actually looked very happy about this eventuality. “Oh, thank you young man. How you remember where all the books are, I can’t imagine…”

Berdly nodded at Kris and accompanied the lady to her shelf, pointing out the exact elevation. He did not explain his method for finding the books (quite elementary under the Okada Octal Hierarchy), Mr. Douglas had told him to stop doing that unless visitors asked very directly.

She took her book, he entered it into the system, he returned to Kris. “As I was saying—”

But Kris talked first, forcing out the words as quickly as they would go. “I want to stop being scared.”

Chapter Text

“You… do?” asked Berdly.

Kris nodded. The nod seemed to cause them considerable pain, but they nodded.

Of course! Kris could just stop being afraid of humans! Berdly was going to propose picking a different topic for the group project, but this was clearly the more practical option, and it was Kris who proposed it. Still—“Are you sure about this, Kris? I wouldn’t want you to be uncomfortable—”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay. Okay, okay, okay. How—how will you—”

Kris was staring at the ceiling. It was possible they hadn’t thought this through yet.

Then the responsibility fell on him to come up with a good solution. Right right right.

Kris needed to see humans. Needed to acclimatize to them.

There were no human zoos, no institutions you could visit to see humans behind a steel fence, to gawk at that wondrous co-species and reassure little Krissy that don’t worry, they’re behind the bars, they can’t hurt us (while the humans do the same thing in reverse). Those didn’t exist.

But there was another option that was almost as good: they needed to watch another movie together. It was irrefutable, he had scientific proof.

“Let’s watch a movie.”

Kris stared, seemed puzzled. “Okay.”

“You know, one with humans in it. So you can overcome your fear.”

Some trepidation now.

“Consider the matter logically, Kris. We need you to get used to humans, and that means exposing you to humans safely, in a way where you know nothing will happen to you. A television allows us, essentially, to get humans in a box! You can look at all the humans you like and train your brain not to fear them. It’s the perfect plan.”

Kris was smiling now, which was not the intended effect—he had been hoping for a thoughtful nod or something of the kind. But he liked it. Kris’s smile was stunning, the arc of that mouth, the wrinkle in one corner. And knowing that he had caused it, well, that was just the cherry on top.

Mrs. K______ had long since left the premises. They could rifle through the DVDs undisturbed. Berdly had his eyes on a rather nice one, a flick about Kropotkin’s prison break. A tender, humane story, tension and excitement offset by the spirit of fellowship.

Kris had other ideas. They arrived with a copy of Starship Troopers. The Verhoeven movie about space bugs, about alternately killing them and being killed by them. Full of gore and fascism.

“This one, Kris? Really this one? This movie will help you become comfortable with humans?”

They insisted. If they were to watch a human movie, it would be this one. They even negotiated him into watching it at his place. (He had to admit that this might not be the kind of film Ms. Toriel would like to see them watch.)

Kris walked at a leisurely pace, dawdling to appreciate nature (a random bush) and contemporary industrial design (a fire hydrant). It took at least ten minutes longer to get home than it would have taken Berdly on his own.

The house was still and empty. (Until they entered. Then it wasn’t, as much.) No ticking clock to welcome them—no groaning pipes, not this time of year—only silence, and old gizmos and memorabilia in old cabinets. Kris stared at a Ratman figurine, a pocket watch, an old transistor. Berdly knew that they hadn’t seen those objects every single day of their life, that they might therefore find them interesting, but he couldn’t muster any attention of his own. He strode ahead, out of the hallway. “We’re finally back, Kris! My humble abode. Not to be confused with the document viewer.”

(Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick)

Kris was messing with the, the, the thing with the balls, the metal balls that swung on wires. The one that demonstrated some important physics principle. The five gleaming balls hung in a row, lightly touching each other. If you pulled one to the side, and let it go (as Kris must have done), it’d hit its neighbor and come to a standstill—and the farmost ball on the other side would be jolted, and the cycle would continue, back and forth, while the balls in the middle hung still. (Not perfectly still, but still enough to get the idea.)

Kris had come over before, they weren’t seeing it for the first time, but today of all days they had decided to take an interest. Well, Berdly could play that game. He turned back. Stood next to Kris. Watched the balls swing. It must have been years since he’d last touched the thing, but his experience hadn’t left him, wouldn’t betray him.

“Watch this.” He stabilized the balls, then pulled two of them to a side. Those excited the two balls on the other side, and now four balls moved in total, with only the middle ball left out. “Neat, huh?”

Kris nodded.

Berdly took the contraption to the coffee table—this lured Kris along—and sat down on the loyal stuffy couch. There he continued the pattern.

Lift three balls, and the middle ball is in constant motion.

Four balls, and now only the balls at the ends get any rest.

Five balls—they all just swing in eerie silence.

Berdly leaned back, wings behind his head. That was it. Those were the tricks it could perform. Kris nevertheless continued to play with it. Gazing unblinking through strands of hair, they made the balls collide again and again and again, tick-ticking Berdly’s eyelids shut.

The rhythm changed.

He opened his eyes. Kris was lifting balls from both ends and making them collide simultaneously with the middle, causing them to bounce in place. What the heck? This was new, this wasn’t something he had seen before.

Kris did glance sideways but Berdly thought he hid his surprise pretty well.

The balls swung to a standstill. Berdly coughed. “So, how about that movie?”

Kris wrothe, contorted their legs for a moment, but relented. “Sure.” There was no more delaying it.

Berdly took the DVD to the player.

Chapter Text

The movie started strong with booming triumphant music and ranks upon files of soldiers (in a cosmopolitan blend of species and genders, but all strong and beautiful and uninjured). Thankfully Berdly had watched last year in an astonishing act of foresight not one but TWO online videos about the movie, and so he wasn’t fooled, he knew what was up: it was satire! This projection of power was actually fascist (and therefore bad)!

Would Kris pick up on this? They seemed preoccupied with the humans on the screen. Those were just standing there, not doing much of anything, so it was manageable enough, but Kris sure wasn’t thrilled.

In a followup scene a human was snapped up by a giant space bug and swung around. Kris exploded, shrieked with laughter, pounded the couch with a fist, and got even louder when the bug snapped the human in half. Berdly paused the movie, tried to figure out what to do. This wasn’t the intended tone of the scene he didn’t think. But he wanted to support Kris. Maybe a mild chuckle as a compromise?

By the time Kris calmed down and wiped the tears from their cheeks he still hadn’t figured out an approach so he just pressed play.

A classroom. Lots going on. Digital flirtation. But also a speech about—responsibility, and stuff, delivered to the human class by a very forceful teacher. The kind of person Alphys tried and failed to be when she got fed up with the other students. The teacher was human too, and Kris didn’t like that one bit, but they grimaced through it. Lots of humans in this film.

Besides being human the teacher was missing an arm. This was meaningless.

It was so meaningless that Berdly had no idea why it affected him. It snagged him, nagged at him, dragged up misty mirages. But he couldn’t put his talon on it. So he let it go.

There was some sort of impenetrable love quadrangle, all the main characters following each other into the army. This was why Berdly hated human stories. It was all so much simpler if you went boy-girl, if you couldn’t pair any one character with any other. At least if a girl monster followed a boy monster into the army she’d have to dress up for it, grow out her mane and wear a kilt or something, it’d be a whole thing. Humans, though? Yeah, just pair them up any which way, put them in any situation you like. Pah.

(…He did kind of root for Dizzy, though. Just a little. They deserved their love.)

The army had more monsters in it, as promised in the opening. That took away some of the heat. There was a drill instructor, very loud, very crude, but he was a monster, some sort of howler monkey, so that was alright.

Berdly heard a grating noise from beside him and realized that Kris had been digging their nails into the couch the whole time. He reached out and patted them on the shoulder. They startled, then smiled briefly.

“Are you, are you okay, Kris? Are you holding up?”

“Sure.” They moved a little closer to him, and he felt a warmth in his chest.

So—the drill instructor instructed and drilled. Injured some people. Kris liked it when he threw a knife through someone’s hand. It was pretty cool. Wouldn’t be able to pass for fascist propagandist dickwaving if it wasn’t cool, right?

Then came the shower scene and some, uhhh, other things were waved around. Yep. Those sure were showering humans and monsters. Kris stared straight ahead without really seeing while Berdly looked around the room, anywhere that was not the screen. This would’ve been better if he were watching alone, but hey, at least Kris had been the one to pick the movie.

The movie meandered on, very horrible, very exciting. Somebody died, and it was the lead’s fault. Then millions died, everybody in Buenos Aires. (Arguably the co-lead’s fault?)

Right, so how about that satire? He wanted to dazzle Kris with some Cool Facts. The Buenos Aires thing did seem a little satirical. But—

He discreetly fished for the DVD box. He looked. He frowned. “Kris,” he said. “It may surprise you that this movie came out before 2001, particularly if you noticed the parallels with…”

They didn’t react. Too busy looking at the screen. Maybe he could try again after it was finished.

On the screen bugs ate people, people blew up bugs, bugs and people tore each other to pieces. The bugs were winning. Humans and monsters ran away together, tried and failed to save each other. Was this heartening? Did it benefit Kris’s psychosocial development?

“Is it working, Kris? Would you say you are becoming more predisposed—”

Kris shushed him.

It looked as though the lead had died. Could it be? It could not. They were still alive (…still alive…still alive), floating in a tank and being stitched up. Kris snarled.

“You don’t like them much, huh?” asked Berdly.

“I just hoped they were dead.”

“That—sounds like you dislike them?”

Friends gathered around the tank, heedless of the people in hazmat suits.

“I guess,” admitted Kris. “They’re so smug. And reckless. Making bad decisions, getting people hurt.”

“They’re just doing what they think is right.”

The line of Kris’s mouth wriggled like a snake. “Not much use if what they think is wrong.”

“Means they can be reasoned with.”

The bugs were losing this time. One bug, half shot to bits, raised a segmented leg, exposed a small beady eye, and that captured all of Kris’s attention, their conversation partner forgotten. Was it begging for mercy? Was it even smart enough for that? In spite of its jaws and claws and bulk it managed to look harmless. Vulnerable.

The bug was killed. Kris threw a sofa cushion to the floor.

Berdly coughed. “I’m getting peckish. Let’s take a break?”

Kris sighed. “Yeah. Let’s.”

Chapter Text

Berdly got up and rubbed his wingtips together. “Dad’s working late”—again—“but there’s leftovers in the fridge. Baked potatoes, broccoli—”

Kris also got up. Something clicked, maybe their arm—it was so weird that humans had bones inside them. “I can cook,” they said.

“You can? I wouldn’t have taken you for the type! I mean, no offense, but, but, but, but, but, in fact, forget I said anything.”

Kris released their glower and strode toward the kitchen. They pulled open cupboards, slid out drawers, left the fridge and the freezer wide open, hopping from place to place until everything that could be unveiled was revealed. They stepped back and gazed pensively at the vista, turned their head a few degrees (bouncing their hairdo around).

Then they started piling up ingredients. Garlic, an onion, a can of tomatoes, old cabbage, a small box of coconut-something, anchovies, olive oil, vinegar, noodles—Berdly lost track. “What are you even making?”

Kris shrugged, didn’t even turn. “Food.”

They seemed satisfied with the ingredients, had closed the fridge and some of the more obstructive cabinets, giving Berdly space to approach. Now they were checking the cutlery drawer. For (no points for guessing this) knives.

Kris and knives. An iconic duo. More than once their mom had actually had to come into class to confiscate one. Really, it was a miracle they hadn’t permanently maimed themself yet, with how much they swung—

Berdly jumped back. Kris was swishing around one of the knives from the drawer. They ignored Berdly, nodded at the knife, and placed it on the countertop.

Then they got a cutting board and turned the onion into small uneven cubes, clearly relishing each chop. “This is a pretty good knife.”

“I’m glad you like it?”

He watched Kris work. They took out a pan, turned up a burner as high as it would go, spilled some oil inside, followed by the onion. Then they got to work on the cabbage.

“Can I, can I assist you in your culinary endeavors, Kris?”

“Stir the onions.” Only short phrases now. The cutting of the cabbage captured their cogitation.

“What do I—”

“Wooden spoon.”

One of life’s minigames. Poke the onion to deplenish its burn-o-meter. Make sure it doesn’t get too high! If it does it’ll turn black and taste bad and Kris will realize that you’ve never cooked a thing in your life.

He was acing it! He poked near-constantly, not letting a sliver of onion go sedentary for more than a moment, and none of it was burning up.

“Incoming.” There came the cabbage. It was getting crowded.

How long was he supposed to keep doing this, anyway?

Kris peeled little pieces of garlic, a mere three of them, and put them in the metal thingy with the grating. So that was what that was for. Alley-oop, into the pan.

Next, tomatoes, a whole can, flooding over the rest, dampening the sizzling for now. Then chunks of frozen spinach. Kris stood next to him in front of the pan and gently grabbed hold of the spoon and pulled it out of his grasp. It was their turn to stir, and stir they did, vigorously.

“Boil water,” they tonelessly commanded. “Noodles.”

“In a pan?”

They nodded.

He took one of the taller pans, filled it about halfway to the brim, put it on a burner. That was it, right?

“Lid,” said Kris.

Right right right.

Now he just had to watch the pot until it boiled. Which it wouldn’t. There was a saying about that.

Kris was still stirring very very hard. “Shouldn’t you turn down the burner?” asked Berdly.

Kris shook their head.

“You know, so the food doesn’t burn?”

“I like the fire,” Kris declared. Fair enough.

They stirred with one hand and added ingredients with the other. Spices, generously sprinkled from each container without the formality of checking the labels. A nice big splash of vinegar. Two tiny—

“Pot.”

It boiled, full of sputtering of foam. This had started while he hadn’t been watching. The sages were right!

He used scissors to cut open the noodles and threw them into the water, which stopped boiling.

Lid.

The tomato vegetable gunk was giving off steam, lots of it. Berdly opened the window. The cool breeze started clearing the air.

“Are you okay with watching the rest of the movie?” he asked.

Kris scoffed. “Of course.”

“You seemed pretty upset back there!”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were throwing things, Kris.”

For the span of a breath they stopped stirring. Then they continued. “I guess I was.”

“If, if that bug’s death got to you, Kris, then you should know that this film has a thick layer of, ahem, satire. It did not endorse the bug’s killing, in fact the act was portrayed in a rather unflattering light—”

“It died, though.”

“Well, yes. It did die.”

The muck in the pan was getting thick as much of the water had evaporated. The spoon strained against the countercurrent.

Kris turned off the burner.

“Let’s keep watching,” they said. They took two bowls (from the nice stack that wasn’t used every day but that was okay) and filled them with globs of food. “Here.”

Berdly took a spoon from the drawer and handed one to Kris as well.

They sat down on the couch, the movie still on pause on a closeup of a soldier’s face, mid-sneer.

Berdly felt apprehensive about the concoction in his lap. The smell was somewhat promising, but wasn’t cooking supposed to involve a little more… reading recipes, weighing ingredients on scales, that sort of thing? Throwing everything into a big pan and stirring—well, he himself might be capable of that, but he didn’t know how to cook.

He took a bite. The taste was… well, it was describable, very much so, it just wasn’t what he had been expecting, to the extent he had been expecting anything. It was a rich taste—tomato, crunchy bits of vegetable, noodles, a complex web of spices, the tanginess of a vinegar surplus. (The spinach, however, was nowhere to be found.) It wasn’t perfect, but it was tasty.

“This is good!” he said, between beakfuls. “I’m not just saying that, Kris, I’m genuinely impressed by the quality of this meal!”

Kris shot him a lopsided grin.

Chapter Text

Kris’s chewing became very intense when the movie resumed. The bugs didn’t get any reprieve: they got blown up some more, their corpses were piled up, and then when a really big beetle surfaced the hero exploded that one too with a special bomb.

When the action subsided Kris pulled a small bottle from their pocket and squirted a little bit of red goop into their bowl.

Berdly didn’t miss it. He was very observant. “What’s that?”

“Sambal. Want some?”

Berdly held out his bowl and Kris added some, even more than they had given themself. How generous! Kris grinned very very broadly, teeth showing.

He followed Kris’s example in stirring it through the food. Then he tasted it. Not much of a difference. A very subtle flavoring agent, to be sure.

Kris was frowning at him. “What?” he asked.

“Spicy,” they said. “It’s supposed to be really spicy.”

He chuckled good-naturedly. “Oh, my dear Kris. Don’t you know? Birds can’t taste spiciness! We don’t have receptors for capsaccino.” That wasn’t the right word. “Cappucin.”

Kris shrank a little, sagged their shoulders, and went back to eating their own meal. They were relishing that, at least.

“But rest assured, Kris! In the counterfactual world where I could taste samba, I’d take it like a champ. No food would make me tear up. I’m sure it’d improve the taste.”

Kris soon cleared their bowl and turned their full attention back toward the movie. They were engaged, not as frustrated as before. Maybe they’d only been grumpy because they were hungry.

Rico—that was the lead’s name, he remembered now—hooked up with Dizzy! It took some coaxing, but then they practically had intercourse on screen! Hell to the yes!!! His ship was setting sail! Something was right in the world!

(Dizzy’s “I love you” went unanswered. One note of wrongness.)

The movie shortly changed course to the detritus of a bloodbath, a whole military base wiped out by bugs. Very nasty. Kris looked—thoughtful? Skeptical? What was going through their head? Were they reconsidering their stance on the bug issue? Warming up to the idea that maybe the bugs were bastards, at least a little bit?

They spoke almost casually: “I don’t think the bugs did that.”

What? “Kris. There’s a hole in that guy’s skull. Who do you think put that there?”

“Is there though?”

“I’d think so, yeah! The lieutenant put two whole fingers—”

“What if they made that up?”

Berdly blinked. “It’s a movie, Kris. It’s all made up.”

“I mean—” Kris waved a hand through the air. “You said it was a, a parody. I think in the world of the movie this is like a news item they made up about how bad the bugs are.”

“Like propaganda?” It wasn’t true, obviously, but it made some sense…

They nodded enthusiastically. “The meteor that hit the city didn’t make sense either. It came from so far away, it’d take too long.”

Berdly started thinking up a refutation but then he heard a key crawling into the cylinder of the front door’s lock. A grinding turn. Click.

Dad was home.

Berdly quickly paused the movie while the familiar auditory sequence continued. The front door creaked, dad shuffled inside, it closed. The keys jingled as he shoved them into the lock from the inside for safekeeping. He plodded through the hallway, emerged into the room. “Ah!” he said. “Kids! Kris! Long time no see!”

It had in fact been a while since he had last seen Kris but “long time no see” was his standard joke, he said this every day, if Kris hadn’t been there he would’ve said it to Berdly alone and if Kris started coming over regularly again (not a bad idea) dad would keep saying “long time no see” every time he saw Kris because that was his standard joke.

It was not a very good joke but Kris humored him and nodded which was par for the course as their greetings went, neither warm nor cold.

Dad ogled the TV. “Say, is that Starship Troopers?”

“It is,” said Berdly. Kris was looking at dad with a faint air of boredom.

“Very… interesting movie, that.” His coat was still hanging from a wing and shoulder. “There is a scene… you’ve probably already passed it…”

Kris broke the silence. “Yeah?”

“The human pilot takes off in a spaceship. They have to disconnect something or other, and they do it at the very last moment. Then they just barely clear the bay without hitting anything. The movie treats it as, as essentially fine. Risky but correct.”

He stared at the screen, reconstructing the scene mentally.

“In my line of work I get to think about that situation a lot. It’s the ultimate in personal responsibility. If it goes wrong it’s all your fault. But if it goes right everyone pretends that there’s nothing to improve. The flight instructor, she should have failed them for taking those risks. But this society, it doesn’t want that. It doesn’t want safety. It wants the best soldiers, the best pilots. Even if a moment of distraction would cause people to die.”

Classic dad speech. Dad loved diatribes, as well as screeds—even odes, when the mood struck him.

This diatribe (definitely a diatribe) had inexplicably strung Kris along. They sat twisted toward the doorway, hanging on his lips. Beak. Whatever. “They want heroes.”

Dad slipped out of his daze, focused on Kris. “That’s right. That’s exactly right.”

“So,” said Kris. “What’d happen if the pilot messed up?”

“Well,” said dad, “it’s been years since I’ve watched it, so—oh, you’ve got it.” Kris was already rewinding.

The three of them watched the movie in reverse. People un-died, bugs were re-assembled, Rico got de-flogged. There! That was the scene flashing by. Kris gracefully resumed ordinarily paced forward play.

“Right,” said dad. “For those tubes I think you’d be looking at massive industrial damage if they aren’t disconnected in time. No casualties, but the connectors would be torn apart, and the tubes would be damaged. In a properly designed system you wouldn’t even be able to move the ship before disconnecting them.”

Somebody on screen delivered token words of caution. It didn’t help.

Dad whistled. “Look at the margin, there’s no room to spare between the ship and the station. Oh! See that balcony? There’s people on there. Really rubs in how big it all is. Anyway, if they hit the space station there, those people would probably die. Be sucked into the vacuum, or drop onto the moon, or the like.”

Kris nodded greedily. “What happens when a person is in a vacuum?”

Chapter Text

Kris scribbled all morning. It did not escape Berdly’s hearing, seated as he was right in front of them. He stole surreptitious glances but couldn’t make anything out.

Berdly wasn’t naïve enough to think that Kris was taking notes. Kris was not big on note-taking, or schoolwork in general. Throughout a typical year they took three notes, perhaps four at the utmost. So what was it?

Lunch broke and everyone went out. Even Kris. They didn’t sleep through this one. Berdly lagged behind, got the classroom all to himself.

On Kris’s desk, positioned uncharacteristically neatly in the corner, lay a notebook. This was the object into which Kris had been writing. It was shut tight, so Berdly could not see what was written in it, unless he opened it.

He was really curious what Kris had been writing. He was curious whether they had been writing about him. About Berdly.

There for sure existed a reason for Kris to be writing about Berdly in their notebook during class. No, he couldn’t think of one right now, but there had to be, it just made sense, it felt like the kind of thing that could happen. If it did happen then Berdly wanted to know that it did, and if it didn’t happen then he supposed he wanted to know that it didn’t.

Would Kris want him to read their notebook? He had to admit that they probably wouldn’t. And he considered himself considerate, ethically upstanding, someone who did no wrong if he could help it.

However, Kris was outside, and so was everyone else. There was nobody here to see him read the notebook. Least of all Kris. And he had to think about himself sometimes, it wasn’t healthy to always put others’ needs before his own.

He paced a semi-circle around Kris’s desk, leaned back against that belonging to Susie (who was his crush), really focused his vision on the notebook from the correct angle. Perhaps, if he looked hard enough, he could read right through the cover without actually opening it, thereby achieving his twin principles of—

In the corner of his vision the door swung open and he sprung to attention, straightened himself upright, probably making himself looking more suspicious than if he had been doing nothing at all so that was not very strategic of him but he wasn’t actually planning anything untoward so it was fine.

It was only Alphys, shuffling backward into the classroom with a cup of coffee and a comic book clasped in her tiny hands in the most awkward possible configuration. She laboriously closed the door without dropping anything (though there were a few close calls). Whistling off-tune, she got halfway to her desk before noticing she had company.

“Oh! Berdly! Shouldn’t you be outside with the others?”

“Just—just thinking.”

“Right. Sure. We all like to think sometimes. Most of us, at any rate.”

She deposited the items, freed her hands.

“S-so. Yesterday, I asked about your project, but you, were, distracted, by your flower.”

“Yeah… That.”

“It went over well, I think! The flower. Tori, Tori mentioned it just now. Um, not sure if I'm supposed to tell you that? But Kris gave it a nice spot in their room.”

They did? They did! Forget the notebook (for now), this was great news! Kris actually liked his gift, and by extension, quite possibly liked him!

“…You’re very happy about that, aren’t you?”

Berdly tried to smooth out his face.

“A-anyway, about your project?”

“What about it?” he replied automatically.

“How’s it coming along? Did you, did you figure out your subject?”

“Humans.”

“W-well, you told me that, but I, um, thought I understood you’d pick something more, more specific?”

“We are still in an exploratory phase.”

“What are you, ah, exploring?”

“Just yesterday, we—” sat jammed together, three on a couch made for two-and-a-half. Kris in the middle, skipping forward through the movie. Dad urging them from the far other end to pause so he could point out the skewed laser beams, computer-generated, sloppier than any of the other effects.

They caught up where they had left off, and almost immediately, Dizzy got killed, torn apart by an insect. What the hell? So soon? Dizzy, of all people, the one he had been rooting for all this time, the one character of all that he least wanted to see die? If it had been whatseirname, Rico, that would have felt better somehow, but this, this had HIM about ready to throw things, and it took all of his prodigious self-control to avoid that (possibly helped by being jammed too tightly to easily grab a cushion).

What WAS it with this film? Must all the interesting people die until the world is squeezed and flattened into pulp? Do they only exist to be thrown into the meat grinder, to die heroically and achieve nothing? Is that the meaning of life, to die? Yeah, sure, it was satire or whatever, but JEEZ.

Dad and Kris were looking at him. Why were they looking? Why was Kris—taking his wing and—squeezing—oh, that felt good, actually. He squeezed back.

The movie unspooled. Most of the older people had died by now, so everything shifted a generation, putting the protagonists in command of troops that were Berdly’s age. How about that. People kept dying. One got their skull sucked empty by a monstrous blob of a brain bug, a big threatening pudding.

The brain bug got captured. Very triumphant. Three friends reunited, covered in guts and moral hazard, with most everyone else dead. The movie ended.

Berdly saw Kris out. The sun had set. He looked up at the stars.

“—we watched a movie.”

“You w-watched a movie,” repeated Alphys. “That’s—I really am glad you’re getting along with Kris, Berdly. You always—always team up with Noelle, so I worried—”

“Psssh, miss Alphys! There’s no need to worry about me! You should extend your concern to Noelle, I’m always helping her with this and that.”

Alphys blinked slowly. “Well. Be that as it may. I have some—advice? I-if you’ll take it?”

Berdly mustered all his willpower and forced himself to nod.

“Pick a topic. Any topic that, that you two are comfortable with. Get yourself over that hurdle. Do it about, about human cuisine, or the human immune system. Or go in a different direction, even. Like, kite surfing, or sewing, o-or cartoon animation? Just, just pick something. Anything.”

At that moment Snowy burst headfirst through the door. “Look, I’m like a battering HEN, I—oh, you guys are already in here!” He was followed by Noelle, Jockington, everyone else—then Kris. Kris, who turned to him immediately upon entering, walked right up to him, stood in tense silence, looked him in the eyes, then asked—

“Can you move?”

Right right right. This was where Kris sat. Imagine that. “For you, Kris? Of course.” He bowed, shuffled backwards, bumped into Catti (eliciting a sigh), moved over to his own seat. There he leaned back and turned his neck 180 degrees to talk to Kris all conspiratorially. “I just had a talk with miss Alphys.”

“Yeah?”

“She said we have to pick a topic. For real now. Despite my best efforts she is convinced that ‘humans’ is too broad for us to pull off.”

“Bugs,” said Kris.

Berdly raised his eyebrow quizzically. “Bugs?”

“Yeah. Like insects. Let’s do it about those.”

“Is that what you want, Kris? Do you like insects?”

They nodded decisively. “I do now.”

FROM KRIS’S NOTEBOOK

Sirk went to the park. The park was dark but Sirk saw something move, in the bushes. And they he she heard something too. It sounded like this: meep, meep! The news said that a bug meteorite had fallen last night so she was careful. But she was also curious and she walked closer. Her fur bristled.

The ground was sticky against her paws shoes but she couldn’t see it in the dark. It smelled weird like metal. When she got to the bush there were legs sticking out of it. It was a body!

Sirk pulled the bush to the side. The body was a human who had been hit in the head by a meteorite, the meteorite was next to the head on the ground. The middle of the body was hurt damaged, there were pieces missing. Sirk was standing in blood!

Something skittered deeper into the bushes, retreating from her. She should have been scared, but for some reason, she wasn’t. On instinct, she called out, “come here, I won’t hurt you”. And the skittering stopped, and a head poked out from between the leaves. It was small, and armored, and it had feelers, and tiny beady eyes. It was a bug!

Sirk crouched down and ignored the blood getting on her pants and stuck out her hand. And the bug crawled forward. It got close to her hand and for a moment she worried that it was going to bite her, but then it leaned into her, nestled into the hollow of her palm, and she petted it and scratched it behind the neck. “There there.”

The bug was innocent, it hadn’t killed the human, and it was a baby, it was much smaller than the ones they showed in school. If they found the bug they would kill it because there was war. She had to hide it somewhere and feed it. Bugs don’t have mothers but

Chapter Text

Insects (Latin: Insectaea) comprise a large group of interverberate animals (though the beasts themselves tend to be quite small). Over one million species have been identified, and as many as ten times that number are believed to exist in an undescribed state of being. They can be found on all eight continents, including Antarctica, which houses the distressing Belgica species of flightless midge.

They also (as pointed out by Kris) existed in Hometown.

You were supposed to find them under rocks, yeah? You lift a rock and there they are in their wriggling multitudes. It’s a classic action you can perform. Only when Berdly and Kris went out into the woods around town there weren’t really any big rocks, not the turnoverable kind, nothing above pebble caliber.

It was a gentle afternoon, the wind rushing through the trees, the sun bouncing off the surface of the lake in the distance. Kris was momentarily transfixed but they soon broke loose and blundered past Berdly, between the trees, eyes sweeping across the forest floor. They pointed. “There.”

A tarp? Black and filthy, it blended in with the leafy mulch. It lay aimlessly, forgotten. Without hesitation Kris knelt down into the dirt and flipped over a corner.

Nothing. Or… was that…? Yes! Teeny tiny creepy crawly insects! They existed! Kris pulled out a magnifying glass, set down a tiny jar with perforated lid—they had come prepared. What were these beasts? Ants? Or perhaps—

“Ants,” diagnosed Kris.

“Of course they’re ants, anyone can see that.”

Kris leaned closer. “They’re busy.”

Busy indeed, but busy with what? They crawled to and fro without pattern, often in opposite directions.

“Don’t eat them,” said Kris.

“Excuse me? Why would I eat them?”

“Birds eat ants.”

“Yeah, wild birds, perhaps. But, Kris, were you to find a, a,” what do humans eat? “a slice of pizza, right here on the ground, would you eat it?”

They considered it. “I might.”

“Well, I wouldn’t.”

“Your loss.”

They said all this without looking up, still closely scrutinizing the ants.

“This one has five legs. That’s one less than normal.”

“It sure is!” He bent forward and patted Kris on the back.

“Let’s take it with us.” They took a piece of paper from their marvelously spacious pockets and flipped the ant into the jar, then held the jar so that the sunlight shone through it.

Berdly had to squint, but sure enough: five legs. The ant circled over the bottom of the jar, sometimes braving the walls but never getting far before sliding down. What was it thinking? Did it understand at all where it was? Did it think it was flying through the air? Was it looking for an exit?

Kris lowered the jar. “I’ll add a leaf so it doesn’t get homesick.”

They passed the flower shop. Kris paid it no mind, which was strange, because it was their dad’s! If they didn’t remember then he’d have to remember for them. It would probably impress them to know that he remembered. It would impress them even more if he greeted their dad like a known acquaintance!

He scraped his throat. Kris stopped walking. “This is where your dad lives.”

“I am aware.”

“Might it be fun to pay him a visit, Kris?”

Kris said nothing, moved nothing. There was quite possibly some serious inner turmoil going on, but if so then none of it showed on the surface.

The silence stretched on.

“Sure,” they said, and they really did manage to sound casual.

The door had a bell now! It was gentle, but it still spooked Berdly a little bit when he walked in. It was evidently enough to alert Asgore, who wandered in from the back. “Howdy!” he said. “Berdly, right? Did your gift hit the mark?”

Berdly continued inside making way for Kris and when Asgore saw them his smile turned into an, an extra-smile, is there a word for when you smile even more than normal?

The corners of Kris’s mouth quavered upward as well. There was something there.

Berdly gestured. “Why don’t you ask the recipiee?” That wasn’t the right word.

Asgore’s eyebrows ascended. “Oh! I did not realize. Well.” He scraped his throat. “Kris. How do you like the orchid?”

They shrugged. “It’s nice.”

It was nice! A nice orchid. Right from the horse’s mouth. Myth confirmed.

Asgore nodded. “That’s good. Now, is there anything in particular I can mean for you two? Of course you are always welcome to, ah, ‘hang out’.”

Right! This was his chance. His chance to demonstrate his chumminess, his acquaintialitude, his neighborliness. What did neighbors do?

“We’re here to borrow a cup of sugar!”

Asgore’s face was a big question mark.

“For our ant,” he clarified. “See?”

Kris fumbled up the jar.

He nodded. “I do believe I have a treat for your animal friend. Follow me.”

They traversed the stairs (did they go up or down? Berdly wasn’t sure), exchanging the brightly lit shop for the murky beyond.

This room sprawled out like a recovering flu patient—grimy wallpaper, a tile floor that though mopped retained its discolorations, an unlit bulb in the ceiling compensated by a stray desk lamp on top of a fridge.

In one corner stood a stack of empty bell jars. In another stood the crash test dummy, stock still, her invisible scowl uncharacteristically friendly today.

“Don’t mind the mess!” said Asgore. “We’re working on it.”

The dummy’s limbs flowed into motion. “Hello!” she said, a little loud. “It is so nice! To see you both again!”

“Likewise!” said Berdly.

“Hello…” wavered Kris, and it seemed like there would be a followup appellation but after a bit they closed their mouth.

In the middle of the room stood a quaint semicircular table; on the table stood a platter; on the platter stood a teapot (still steaming), two cups, and, yes!, a sugar pot. Asgore measured out half a scoop. “That should be enough for the road, don’t you think?” he said and dropped the sugar on top of the ant. “While you are here, would you like a cup of tea?”

“I would!” said Berdly. After a moment, Kris nodded.

“Wonderful! Wonderful. I have… one more clean cup in the cupboard. That should be enough.” He turned to Kris. “Your stepmother cannot actually ingest liquids.”

“It’s true!” said said stepmother, who didn’t look like a stepmother. “And the CRETINS at the automotive testing facility have forbidden me from trying. Or they’ll stop paying for repairs.”

Asgore deployed two folding chairs and poured out two cups. They all sat down. The porcelain was hot against Berdly’s wing—he didn’t dare try and hold it up by its ear.

“I must ask,” said Asgore, and he gestured vaguely. “How long have you two been…?”

Chapter Text

Asgore wrung his big meaty hands. “Boy, do I have egg on my face,” he said.

“It’s fine,” said Berdly. It was fine. As long as—

“I of all people should know not to make these assumptions about a simple flower.”

Kris watched studiously as the ant extricated itself from the sugar while Berdly suffered.

“I suppose I may have been projecting my own recent fortunes.”

stop talking—stop talking—stop talking—stop talking—“stop talking”—did he say that out loud? That wasn’t supposed to be out loud.

Asgore chuckled, once, a single burst of air. A chucklet. “Of course.”

Kris wandered toward the sink, jar in hand, screwed open the tap, lazily tuned it to a trickle. They let the water run through their fingers, then shook off a few drops into the jar. They slouched back. “It needs to drink too.”

“I did wonder,” said Asgore, “why you were carrying that bug around.”

“It’s for our school project!” said Berdly. “We are to hold a presentation about insects.”

“I was lucky to save this one ant,” said Kris. “Berdly ate most of the others.”

“I did NOT!” He almost grabbed Kris by the collar. “You can’t—don’t listen to them.”

“I know some about extermination,” said Asgore, unperturbed. “But I don’t assume that’s what you’re after, with how you’re pampering that thing.”

“I won’t rule it out,” started Berdly, but Kris shook their head.

Berdly dipped a little tea with his beak and whipped it back. It was nice, though hotter than optimal.

“How’s business?” he asked.

“I lost customers during my slump. Which is what I have been calling it. But I’m winning them back! Someone’s spreading the word for me.” He smiled as the dummy caressed his shoulder, almost reeled him in. Mine, mine!

“I saw the graffiti. Very colorful.”

By the time they made moves to leave Berdly was pretty satisfied with himself, having succeeded in his goals and having reasserted his platonic pallosity with Kris in the face of a certain misconception. He bid Kris’s parents adieu. Was about to step out the door. Then Kris pecked him on the cheek.

Right there, on his face, next to his beak, a smooch. A kissaroo.

Panic circulated from his chest to his legs and they kept ambulating, out the door (jingle-jangle), away from the danger, away from the possibility of recovery because he was outside now and could hardly go back to explain and now Kris followed him (jangle-jingle) roaring with laughter.

Berdly steadied himself against the wall away from the glass while panic made place for nausea. “Why did you,” he stammered. “Why did you do that.”

Kris’s face deformed. “’Cause it was funny.”

“But they’ll think. They’ll think we.”

Kris shook their head. “Dad knows me.”

“Well. Nevertheless. I…”

But it was true, Kris was known for their pranks, had sometimes scared Noelle half to death to hear her talk about it. And Berdly had explained it, he had told it, just now during tea. So there was no harm done. There wasn’t reason to be upset at Kris and he had a duty to leave this emotional state. Right? Right.

“…I’m going to head home.”

The moment got stuck. It clung to him. He couldn’t detach it, he couldn’t move past it. Even as he lay in bed he was still running out of the shop. The heart-pounding shame came with a dangerous excitement. Did he want to let go?

He felt much normaler the next day. He got out of bed in an ordinary manner. Maintained correct posture while making breakfast. Enjoyed a gentle meditative walk to school. Arrived precisely on time to find on his desk a blank piece of paper cut in the shape of a heart.

If he had come in first he could have removed the thing but he hadn’t and by now people had noticed. They all faced him expectantly. Except for Kris, perched supremely innocent in the middle of the room staring at the ceiling.

He had to react. He had already been looking at it for a good one-two seconds and it demanded a more sophisticated response.

He knew it came from Kris because come on but should he reveal he knew this? What would the others think if they saw him jump to that conclusion? Would they think those things that he (Berdly) desired for them to think or would they think less desirable thoughts?

If he claimed he had deduced this truth using his massive intellect and people wanted to hear the deduction and the deduction included Kris’s having kissed him, then what would happen? Nothing good.

He had to play the detective. He had to pretend not to know, he had to do a cursory investigation into this secret admirer, and then he could drop the issue with no harm done.

First things first. He flipped the paper over.

And on the rear of the sheet these words appeared:

Regards,
Kris

Kris guffawed. Berdly turned around.

“Kris! You are the one who did this!”

A sober nod. “That’s why I signed it.”

“You are up to your no-good pranks again! Making everyone believe that you—that I—that we…”

They raised their hands. “You got me.”

Right right right, he had caught his perp, and now—what? How did this help him at all? Better keep talking. “Their simple minds will not be fooled! They know that I—that you…”

Again with the nodding. “You showed ’em.”

“Right! So long as we’ve got that in order.”

Everybody was staring at him even more so than before but at least they knew, they knew that there was NOTHING between him and Kris, he had made that clear enough.

Alphys spoke up. “I’d, um, like to start class now?”

Chapter Text

Noelle took Berdly aside at lunch. “What was that about?”

“What was what about?” snipped Berdly back.

“Your showdown with Kris.”

“Oh, that. They were pulling a prank on me.”

“Yes, you were very emphatic about that, but what was, you know, the deal?” Her hoof tapped against the fence.

“The deal was,” and he stood up straighter than before, “that there’s no deal. That we are uninvolved, except to the extent that we are involved, as project partners, no other kind of partner.”

Noelle’s eyes were locked onto his face as though he were a particularly compelling television program. “I see,” she said.

“Was this not clear?”

“No. No, nothing about what happened was clear.”

She still looked at him. Took him apart with her INFP stare.

“Do you want me to tell them off?” She spoke slowly, softly. “Kris stopped messing with me. I can convince them to lay off you.”

Did he want them to stop? Logically speaking, he did.

Illogically speaking…

“Oh Noelle Noelle Noelle. I can fight my own battles.” Yes, very good. That was the kind of thing he would say, if he were himself, which he was.

Noelle looked over his shoulder and froze (deer, headlights). Berdly turned and—yes, indeed! There they were.

“Kris! My dearestmost! I was just telling Noelle about the ant we caught.”

Kris sighed. “I don’t care if you forgot your lunch. I’m not letting you have it.”

There was something Berdly had forgotten. A sacred promise that had slipped through the cracks. When he accompanied Kris home (to visit the ant) and saw the convenience store in the periphery of his vision—he recalled it.

“Kris! Do you remember our other project?” He waggled an eyebrow.

Kris studied him. “No,” they finally said.

“The project to have you stop being scared!”

“Oh. That. I figured that…”

Berdly pointed out the store in the side road, or rather, the box truck in front of the store (and on top of the road), or even ratherer, the human unloading supplies from the truck (on top of the road (in front of the store)).

The human was tall, for a human, assuming Kris was a normal height for a human, which they might not be. As a further distinction, this human wore a sleeveless puffy jacket, had their hair cut short, and was taking one of those vertical carts down the lift gate elevator thing.

Sans was there also. He waved.

Kris wasn’t eager so Berdly encouraged—“A human! In our town! It’s perfect! Come on.” He pulled Kris along.

When they reached the truck and the platform reached the ground the human turned a bored head. “Hullo.”

“What’s the haul?” asked Berdly even as Kris reclaimed their sleeve and skittered behind him.

The human drew a slow breath. “It’s groceries, man, I don’t know. Vegetables? Cereal?” They had a city accent. “I’m not about that, I bring them only from A to B.”

They carted the boxes around the corner to the side door.

Kris exhaled. And frowned. “Would’ve liked a warning.”

“I didn’t know they were going to be there! We had to hurry! And, anyway, it went fine, didn’t it?”

“Let me decide whether it went fine.”

He almost rolled his eyes. Almost. If this was all for Kris, which it was, then maybe their opinion mattered—no, not just mattered, it always mattered, Kris’s opinion was vitally important to the order of the world—but maybe their opinion was in fact correct, even though it didn’t match his opinion.

“I will…” he started. “I will… take it more slowly… next time.”

A hint of a smile. “Thanks.”

Was Sans watching this tender moment? He didn’t want Sans to see the tender moment. No, Sans was gone. Berdly hadn’t seen him leave.

He coughed. “The human will probably be back soon. Do you want to go, or…?”

Kris wiggled in place. “I should stay.”

The human returned, sans boxes, avec Sans. The lift gate started its ascent. Berdly took note of bare arms, the ring in the ear. A fascinating species.

“Am I so interesting?”

Crap. “You’re from the city, right?”

“That I am. I work mostly inside the city, but for some orders I have to go outside it.”

He nudged Kris. Your turn! Say something! “Is it crowded?” they mumbled.

They chuckled, already back at ease. “Compared to here, very much. But it can always be worse.” The lift was by now on its way down.

“My brother goes to university there.”

They sized Kris up. “Oh yes? Does he look a little like you?”

Kris shook their head. “You wouldn’t recognize him.”

“Aha.” To Sans: “These are the last.”

“Thanks a million,” said Sans. “Let’s take them inside. Now you kids stay out of trouble, alright?”

Ants were tidy and numerical. Three segments. Six legs, plus two antennae that could pass for legs. Two broad eyes. No squishy parts, all discrete and exoskeletal.

But those were Ants, the species, the general phenomenon. Berdly’s object of study was Ant. The ant Kris had caught. The one without a left middle leg. Five legs.

Even this number of legs was hard to get down on paper. The real ant was fully realized in three-dimensional space, round body and angled legs, but the ant that came out of Berdly’s pencil was flat and foiled any attempt at inflation. He had to keep trying.

“This one looks like you.”

He looked up. Remembered where he was. He was in Kris’s room, in the corner, next to Kris, at the cramped computer desk. There was just barely room for him and Kris and the ant. He had been drawing but then Kris had said something. “What?”

“This bug. It looks like you.”

On the monitor: an image search. Query: blue insects. There were a lot. Kind of pretty? “Which one?”

“Uhhh.” Kris scrolled a little, traipsed across the thumbnails. “This one.”

It was blue; it had wings; it daubed. The common blue mud dauber. “That one? Really?”

“Sure.”

Kris clicked through, ran some more searches. Though it was a wasp it couldn’t sting. It ate spiders. It built nests out of mud. (This was what “daubing” meant.)

“See? Just like you!”

“Kris, despite your continued insistence, I do not eat spiders or any other kind of small arthropod.”

“But you do build your nests out of mud!”

“I do not.”

“We’ll see about that.” They winked.

Chapter Text

All things must come to an end. They had learned all that they could from the ant. It was time for it to go home.

Home (according to Kris) being the specific spot in the woods where they had first found the ant. Under that tarp.

The woods were big! So many trees! And for what purpose? They all looked the same! They had been searching for at least three minutes and they still hadn’t found the place.

“Kris,” he said, halting his disentanglement from an errant branch. “Why don’t we just put the ant down somewhere around here? This is a nice place. I’m sure it’ll thrive.”

Kris walked relentlessly.

He tore himself loose and started a pathetic little jog. “Kris! There’s no need to make it complicated!” Finally they turned around.

“It deserves to go back to its colony,” they said. “We’re like… aliens. If a flying saucer abducted you. And then it put you back later. You’d at least want to be dropped off at the right town, yeah? But. Anyway. We found it.” They pointed to the ground. It was the tarp.

Probably, anyway. It was unclear what the tarp was for and in such hazy circumstances who could say that there was only one?

Kris crouched down once more, flipped a corner to reveal the ants at the colony’s outskirts. Had they missed their compatriot? Berdly knew they hadn’t, that they had the brains for actually quite a surprising range of behaviors but not for that. Kris opened the jar. Shook it a little. And there along with its greenery tumbled the ant and soon disappeared into the writhing mass—not invisible, but impossible to pick out. Bye ant.

He sat down next to Kris, taking care not to crush any bugs. The ants criss-crossed, every single one of them anxious to be somewhere else but none agreeing where that was. For a moment he had wanted to say something, to go so far as to give a eulogy, but that was all wrong. Nothing needed to be said. This was a non-event, the end of a detour for an organism that went on nothing but detours.

Time passed.

Kris and Berdly replaced the corner, returned everything to the way it had been, save for footprints that would soon fill out, and walked to town. They didn’t look back.

Eusociality. That would be the topic of their presentation. A nice impressive word. It even came with a meaning, which he and Kris would have to impress on the dimmer among their classmates.

Eusocial animals lived in colonies and were as close to perfectly social as you could get in this world. Only the queen reproduced, which sort of removed any reason to be selfish, evolutionarily speaking, according to the web pages. He’d probably fumble his way through that part.

Most eusocial species were insects. That’s how they got the topic. But there were mole-rats too, and maybe certain monsters? The web pages were divided on this issue. There were certain very intense pages about Migosps, about their membership in something called the overmind. And then there were slimily amusing debunkings of those pages, and debunkings of the debunkings, and this went on for a few iterations. Berdly couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and Kris just shrugged when he explained the issue.

They were video-calling today so Kris was shrouded in a snowy haze. Kris swore up and down that their webcam really was that bad, that they weren’t using a filter because who would even make a filter like that, but—anyway. He’d send Kris lots of links, and sometimes Kris would even send links back. They were trying, they really were, which was more than he had dared hope for. He had been prepared to do all the research himself, perhaps even willing, but it hadn’t come to that. Granted, the quality of their research wasn’t up to snuff, but it was like they were trying to make him happy, and that did make him happy. It did him good.

“We can,” Kris garbled, and even at this fidelity Berdly could taste the hesitation, like they couldn’t believe they were proposing this. “We can ask one. There are Migosps in this town.”

Yeah. Yeah! “There are! What say we keep an eye out and try to get an interview?” This was the final touch their presentation needed. They’d have a fact dump, the ant drawing, and the interview. It would be—well, maybe it wouldn’t quite be the presentation to end all presentations, not the most informative fifteen minutes in all of creation, but it could be enough for a good grade. Even without Noelle.

“Sure,” said Kris, and smiled asymmetrically. “I’ll keep an eye out.” There came an indistinct voice from the background (probably Ms. Toriel) and Kris turned their head and then the call ended.

In the half-second before the video cut to black it preserved a frame of Kris’s swiveled half-smile. The image endured a good while longer in Berdly’s head.

Chapter Text

The very next day a Migosp showed up at the library. What were the odds? Pretty high, probably. Migosps came by all the time.

It hugged the wall as it entered, as though it were trying to sneak in behind the desk, but this was not enough to evade Berdly’s eagle-sharp eyes. It met his gaze with a malevolent frown, but he hardly ever saw a Migosp without that look on its face, so it surely didn’t mean anything. Certainly shouldn’t stop him from leaving his post and following it into the Arts & Culture section.

Berdly didn’t hide. His position coincidentally prevented the Migosp from seeing him but there was nothing improper about that.

The frown relaxed into an easygoing sneer while the Migosp scanned the books, occasionally peering up at the higher shelves. Berdly, with his extensive experience of visitor browsing patterns, recognized that this was not the sight-seeing saunter of someone with no particular destination, nor the hunt for one specific book by one specific author. The Migosp was looking for a topic. That topic turned out to be dance.

It diligently pulled the stepladder into position. Berdly noted with satisfaction the smoothness of the wheels and locking mechanism, kept in order as they should be. Plenty of monsters needed this assistance.

Hop, hop, up went the Migosp. A claw touched one book’s spine, two spines, found its mark, pulled it from the shelf. The book was too large to hold comfortably, but propping it open on one step and kneeling down on the step below seemed to do the trick.

Berdly briefly checked the reception desk—nobody, excellent. This was the perfect moment to pass by the Migosp and notice it, all casually-like. He scraped his throat. “Hello there!”

The Migosp almost fell backwards off the ladder, and Berdly instinctively caught it, wing against carapace. Carefully it pulled itself back. Berdly let go, and its face passed through a quick maelstrom before reverting to the customary glare. “Watch it, singleminder,” it muttered, chewing out every word at a constant rate and tone.

Singleminder. Wonderful word. Probably an insult, mayhaps even a slur? Some of the web pages used it. At the end of the aisle a bunny monster had stopped to stare. The Migosp’s eyes flicked between Berdly and her.

“My deepest apologies,” said Berdly, and he bowed, which hopefully mollified it a little. “It will not happen again. But I had a reason for disturbing you, which was, would you be willing to represent the overmind in giving an interview?”

“Interview,” said the Migosp. The bunny was still looking, now joined by a Froggit, and the Migosp looked to them almost as much as to Berdly. “The swarm—the mighty swarm accepts. But not right here. Somewhere else.”

Berdly had secured a time and an address which was anyway much better than conducting the interview in the library because it meant that a) he could finish his shift and b) he could inform Kris so that they could go together.

It was a small house in the small district of town, there where the ceilings went as low as ordinances allowed. Even Kris who (as previously established) was possibly of subnormal height for a human (not that Berdly minded, in fact he quite liked it)—even Kris had to duck.

There was music playing, a swaying repetitive beat that tried to lull him into dance—but he refused, he stood steadfast, prim and proper and professional except for his being hunched over. (Kris’s chin did bob up and down.)

The Migosp walked differently, talked differently. It had opened the door wobbling in complete surrender to the music and greeted them with a “Hiya!” that was entirely out of character. The Migosp at the library wouldn’t have hiya’d him. Was this the wrong address? “We’re here for…”

“The interview!” It snapped its fingers, like tiny twigs breaking. “Come on! You can sit here.”

They sat down on the floor, didn’t dare risk the furniture of this entirely ordinary miniaturized living room—scaled down perfectly, except for the doors and ceiling, which seemed simultaneously too short and too tall.

As the Migosp turned a knob the music dimmed to a soft throb and the room became a little less cramped.

Berdly managed to retrieve his questionnaire without knocking anything over. Kris casually took out pen and paper. (Their job was recording. Despite everything, their enviable meaty fingers wrote the fastest.)

“Now then!” said Berdly. “We’d like to ask you some questions about the overmind!”

For the first time its smile loosened. “Oh, yeah, the overmind…”

A major rule of interviewing: let the subject talk. Don’t interrupt them. Berdly said nothing, simply stared, willed the Migosp to keep talking.

It scratched behind an antenna. “I’m not really into the overmind thing. I know I’m supposed to but I never got the hang of it.”

Hey, hey, hey now. The interviewee wasn’t supposed to say things like THAT. “But in the library?”

It hopped from leg to leg, still in beat with the tune, almost a jig. “We were in public, there were people watching, I had to say something!”

Yeah, he might as well throw his list in the trash now. This project was a miserable failure and everyone was going to see him for what he was. Who was he to think that he could get anywhere without Noelle? This sort of thing never happened when she took the lead. Pack it up, time to go home. The Migosp had at least the good graces to look apologetic about it.

Berdly had nothing to add. Things were getting uncomfy.

“What about your family,” said Kris in a soft monotone. “Do they, uh, have the hang of it.”

“My nestmate doesn’t actually. We never talk about it, but. No swarm orders that I know. It would have come up, right?”

Kris scribbled and nodded. “So, like, do you know anybody who’s really part of it?”

Kris’s voice, there was just something about it, and the current subdued tone brought out the best of it. Its hoarseness hit exactly the right note. They ought to become a voice actor. Maybe he should tell them that. Would that be weird?

“So what if it’s, sort of, an act?” they said. “Does that fit the facts?”

He stopped listening to the Migosp, only heard Kris, forgot the interview, but it was worth it, and anyway, Kris was still taking notes.

Their speech dissolved into words, no longer cohered as sentences. Loose words like “even”, “order”, “society” that didn’t hold great appeal in his day-to-day life now caressed his ears and retained their thrill when he mentally played them back.

He vaguely understood that this was not normal, that something was going on.

And as he listened to Kris’s mumbling song he came to a realization.

Chapter Text

The interview ended. Berdly didn’t notice at first but suddenly Kris was getting up and exchanging pleasantries and being shown to the door and then they both stood outside, blinking in the sunshine, casting sharp shadows against the wall.

Kris rolled their shoulders, outstretched open palms behind their back. “That went well. What did you think?”

“Very, yes, very informative,” he stammered.

A toothy smile. “Oh yeah?”

“You wrote everything down, right?”

“I noted down the gist of things. You were paying attention, weren’t you?”

Berdly mumbled about the heat and stiffly turned and walked home.

Susie did not want to speak with him at all, tried her damnedest to wriggle out of it, till Berdly gave in and spoiled the lede—“You are not my crush.”

She froze. “Damn right I’m not.”

“Because, you see, a crush implies a level of obsession I cannot muster,” he said, the leaves rustling behind him.

“Uh-huh.”

“I was so infatuated with the idea of a beautiful gamer girl that any instantiation of that idea snatched, as it were, her pale fire—”

“Yeah okay. So who are you gonna hit on now?”

“Excuse me?”

“You got over me because you found someone else. Who is she? Anyone I know?” She grinned. “You gotta tell me, I’ve earned it.”

“I don’t need to learn from experience like some kind of empiricist. I rationally considered the feelings that would be induced by true love and concluded there was a mismatch.”

“Dude. C’mon.”

He spoke truthfully: “There is no girl.”

She cocked her head. “Yeah? You’re coming out of the closet?”

“There’s nobody, okay? Nothing romantic.”

Susie rolled her eyes.

Not nobody. That had been a white lie. He would not try to explain to her the overpowering (yet entirely platonic!!) effect Kris had on him. Not when he didn’t understand it himself.

The strange thing was Kris had only started intoxicating Berdly recently. Their voice (their voice!) hadn’t changed—his ears had. He could remember phrases they had spoken months ago but only heard the beauty in hindsight.

That left two possibilities. Option uno: he used to be distracted. Numero zwei: he had gained an obsession.

All the world screamed at him that Kris’s sublimeness was an objective fact. But could he trust his senses? Nobody else had ever remarked on this phenomenon. It was him against everyone else, including his past selves. Were all of them wrong?

Yes. Yes, they were wrong. Kris was objectively amazing.

The date of the presentation snuck up on Berdly. He knew the number of remaining days, was at all times aware of it, carried it in his heart, and still it arrived sooner than it should have.

It was fine. He and Kris were fully prepared, in that they had a presentation-sized number of words, and a number of digital slides to go along with those words. It wasn’t like the work he used to put out with Noelle: a presentation with her was a beautiful unitary exposition with a start and a middle and an end, and even when he researched his part on his own she’d knead it into the rest and hide all the seams. This presentation wasn’t that. It started, it rambled, it ended abruptly.

But they had one! They had a presentation. All that was left was to present.

The day crawled forward, despite the finished preparations, despite the fact that his fate was already sealed. People found their seats. The class went through an info sheet for the upcoming field trip to Hoofdstad. Then suddenly he stood in front of the room, waiting for Alphys to roll in the television cart, unsure where to put his wings. He glanced to the side. Kris slouched. Their specialty.

Alphys manipulated a cable into the computer with some false starts. Walked over to the mouse and keyboard, opened the display settings—another eternity. Finally the cathode ray tube flashed into action, just in time to show (nestled between the desktop shortcuts) a muscular tightly-clothed vigilante before he faded into an image of a tree.

She opened the ODP file from the flash drive, revealing the glorious first slide.

Berdly took a deep breath.

Afterward he could not remember anything he had said. He did remember a line he hadn’t said—“our oldest common ancestor didn’t live on land”—it had been in the script but after he accidentally barreled past it he didn’t dare track back. The rest was automatic.

He also remembered the faces that he saw one at a time depending on where he pointed his beak. Noelle’s polite attention; Alphys (temporarily seated at Berdly’s own desk) with that wavery mouth she got when she didn’t get to interrupt; Temmie inscrutable as ever.

He switched with Kris at the predetermined times. With nothing to do except advance the slides he got to really appreciate Kris’s delivery. Not the content. He knew that well enough that it no longer registered. It was the way they talked and enunciated that he thought was very well done, a real richness to the flatness. And yet all the class wore the same temperate faces they did for him. He wanted to shout at them—why aren’t you appreciating this? Nine people in all the world who get to witness this, and eight of them look like they have something better to do?!

He did not shout. He pressed the space bar to advance to the next slide.

The presentation got a B. In public. Alphys delivered the hammer blow right in front of everyone, even went through the rubric to really rub it in.

Nobody said anything but he could feel the weight of all the class’s inward smirks, their silent jeering and jowling at his averageness laid bare.

Kris took it like a champ. Would that he had their serenity, their ability to take things in stride!

Then again, for them this was actually a pretty good grade? A supra-average one? Was that why they smiled? They glowed, and Berdly couldn’t even say whether it was an illusion, and it carried over on him, in the way that the moon reflects the sun.

Late in the afternoon in the hallway Kris prodded him, said something about how he’d been right, that if he wanted an A he shouldn’t have partnered up with them, but it didn’t puncture his secondhand good mood.

Chapter Text

Berdly cooked dinner. He only had half an idea what he was doing, and that was with the help of the online.

No videos for him. Only text. Austere. Intellectual. Easily displayed on his phone, flat on the counter with text slightly too small to read without bending forward. No matter. The rice was easy enough, the pot only boiled over a couple of times. The beans were… just beans? They came out of the can and they were done? Could that really be it? The onion was tricky, very tricky, but he got it into little pieces and into the pan and looking plausible. And so on.

The food ended up edible, adequate, a little tasty even. A passing grade for sure. And he did it all on his own.

“How did the presentation go?” asked dad, and Berdly said that he and Kris had gotten a B. A short shimmer of surprise on his face, and then—nothing. No shadow of disappointment (and he tended to be blunt). “I see,” he said. “But how did it go?”

In his bed staring at the ceiling he unraveled the question and found to his surprise that it had gone fine. It was okay. Alphys had even praised the interview, though his shame drowned out her precise wording. (Maybe Kris remembered.) No grievous mistakes were made.

And yet, a B.

Dawn brought clarity. No new facts, but the contradiction was so diminished that he could no longer empathize with yesterday’s Berdly who had found it more than a dull ache. He was a B student. He did his best and his best had been worth a B. This was how the world was. It would not collapse.

Alphys walked up to Kris’s desk—right behind Berdly, so it was only natural he overheard her, even if she wasn’t addressing him as such. “I talked to your mother,” she told Kris in a near-whisper. “You can skip the school trip.”

Was it okay? It was not okay! Well, it was okay that they could, if they really wanted to, but—“You don’t want that, right?”

Kris said nothing; Alphys turned, annoyed. “I don’t think this has to do with you, Berdly.”

“No, look, I know their deal with humans, okay? I know there are humans in Hoofdstad. And I know Kris is trying to work through this. They want to come with. Right, Kris?”

He turned to Kris. Alphys turned to Kris. Kris still said nothing.

“I will be there,” promised Berdly.

Finally, carefully, Kris gave a small nod.

“You made the right choice, Kris.” It was the right choice. It was the right choice. Berdly would make sure that it was the right choice.

Kris weaved irresolutely over the pavement but their eyes glid over Berdly and they straightened up.

“It’s going to be great,” said Berdly. “It has to be great. We’ll make it great. Okay?”

They unrolled their shoulders, nodded lazily. “Sure.”

“Which means…” Which means… “That we have work to do!”

“More movies?”

“Oh no no no my dear apprentice. I have greater plans. This weekend, Bridgeson, you and me.”

Kris halted and Berdly waited dutifully as they thawed and finally slowly nodded again. They breathed in and out. “Okay.”

Bridgeson was a town upstream flanking the river that fed into the lake. On a good clear day, standing on the shore outside Hometown, you could make out a few of the houses rising out above the trees.

Humans lived there.

Kris had never been—probably. Berdly hadn’t asked. He himself had also never been. Not that he was going to reveal that now, at this late stage. But he had looked up a little online and so he would intuit his way around, play the tour guide, find something for the two of them to do.

That was in the near future. As of now he was riding to Asgore’s. There it was! Kris was just now getting their bicycle ready under supervision of daddy and dummy. Berdly stopped pedaling and let the momentum carry him to the spot and braked and planted down one leg, posing sportily. “Ready to depart, Kris?”

“Just about.”

“No helmet?”

Kris shrugged. “Ehhhhh.”

How intrepid! Berdly did wear one, naturally. But so long as that beautiful head didn’t end up damaged he didn’t mind seeing Kris’s hair.

On cue, Asgore ruffled it. “Have fun, you two!”

Kris’s bike sputtered and whined but try as it might it did not fall apart. It even quite effortlessly pushed ahead of Berdly and he had to invest significant effort in keeping up. His ordinary scaly spindly legs were no match for Kris’s meaty trunks. Berdly labored, panted, stopped talking, until finally—“Can you slow down a little?”—and Kris did so and wordlessly grinned.

At this kinder tempo Berdly could afford to look at the river to his right, slipping in and out of view behind the foliage while Kris wavered in front of everything. In a dim childish summer he and the Dreemurrs (and Holidays and Felizes and whoever else) had played in that stream, in a flattened widened segment where the current relented. The water had been clear and cold, coldest when Catty splashed him and kept splashing even as he complained to the adults. Kris had been off in a corner, dipping only their lower legs.

“Do you remember when we used to swim here?” he asked.

Kris gazed for a few seconds. “No,” they said.

Cycling was hard work, made that much harder by the stupid trees obscuring their progress. For all he knew Bridgeson was light-years away.

“Did you know,” said Kris, still pedaling. “About the Madagascar Hissing Cockroach.”

Did he? “I did not. Tell me more!”

“They…” Kris started, and stopped when they were unable to come up with an easily verbalized fact besides “they hiss” and “they are cockroaches”. They resorted to “I’ve seen videos. There are people who have them as pets. Let them crawl over their hands.”

“Do you want to keep insects as pets?”

“I’d need, like, a terrarium,” they said doubtfully.

“Maybe you can get a terrarium? Have you asked your mom?”

“Maybe,” they conceded. “We’re there.”

Where? There! They had arrived. Vegetation gave way to glorious civilization. A few low houses loomed beyond the trees, separated by a simple street.

They chained their bikes together and lightly leaned them against a tree. In the distance a human walked over the pavement. Kris’s hand instinctively grabbed Berdly’s wing.

The two of them stepped forward, out of the forest.

Chapter Text

Berdly led Kris forward even as they took a sudden interest in the architecture, the sky, the bricks that paved the road, anything but the street ahead, the unbroken corridor of housing. They did not strongly resist but had to be persuaded of every step.

Halfway down the street, on the other side of the road, there walked a human. They gradually came into focus, though angled from behind there was not much to see. They wore a short coat. An old-fashioned hat covered trimmed gray hair, from under which a large mottled ear flapped out.

The human shuffled. Their left leg would reach forward gently but naturally, and then the right leg caught up stiffly without bending. Even at their own hesitant pace Berdly and Kris easily outsped them. While passing Berdly heard Kris hold their breath. The human paused, turned, nodded, tipped their hat, their wrinkled face not unfriendly. “Nice day today!” called out Berdly. The human said nothing but did smile and raise a hand.

Then it was over. The human was behind them. Kris tried for a moment to pull Berdly along, get him to walk faster, but he resisted and they relented and gradually calmed, their demeanor normal after turning the corner. There they stopped to rest. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” asked Berdly in a low voice.

Kris forced a shrug. “I managed.”

“Great! Because we will be doing more of that!”

There were indeed more and more people the deeper into Bridgeson they wandered and hardly any of them were monsters. First, an overalled worker carrying equipment from a car to an open doorway—too busy for interaction, and though Berdly forbade Kris from crossing the street they passed without incident. Later there were shoppers, children playing football, a sunbather on a chair with half-shut eyelids, local teens with a plastic bag. Someone jostled into Kris, a tall broad jacket-wearer, and Kris recoiled—but nothing happened. The moment passed.

When the populace densified enough that they hardly went a moment without seeing multiple other humans, that was when they reached the bridge. It was flat, wide, conventional, its special role betrayed only by an informational sign and a short pillar-totem near one corner.

Since Berdly had done his homework surely the sign had nothing to teach him. He homed in on the pillar. Its stone was worn and discolored, far older than the rebuilt and re-rebuilt bridge. It was carved like a frog, squeezed into a round vertical shape. (Not a Froggit. A frog.)

He looked up. “So this is Bridgeson’s eponymous bridge!” Or was Bridgeson itself the eponym? How did that work?

Kris lagged behind at the sign. “It’s not named after the bridge,” they said.

“What? Stop pulling my leg, Kris.”

They looked up. “It says so right here.”

“That’s ridiculous! Let me see that.”

“It’s named after the family named after the bridge,” they said, wearing the shit-eatingest grin that ever was.

Bridgeson’s grocery store—realistically there were multiple but this was the one they found—was a little larger than Sans’s, a little more professional, equipped with more than a skeleton crew. A uniformed goon patrolled the corridors, restocking the pasta and sugar and hummus and licorice and orange juice.

Kris had wandered inside without saying anything and Berdly had followed. Kris took a bag of flour and put it back. Inspected all the fresh fruit. Then they entered the snacks aisle and very quickly found the garlic-flavored chisps. “Let’s buy these,” they mumbled.

Yeah sure that looked tasty. They pooled some coins together and Berdly transacted.

The chisps were pretty tasty and very dry, almost dry enough to go back and buy drinks but Berdly had the bidon on his bike to look forward to. Kris munched down chisp after chisp with an ecstatic face, clearly relishing every crunch. That sight was worth many chisps.

Kris tilted the bag to inhale the final morsels, creating a perfectly beautiful instant, head angled back, throat bared, eyes attentive, strands of hair scattered and caressed by the sunlight. It deserved a photograph, an oil painting, a marble sculpture.

From then on the empty bag swung from their hand. They no longer even paid very much attention to the humans around them. (Only occasional glances.)

“Look at you!” said Berdly. “You’re doing fantastic! I’m proud of you.”

Kris conspicuously rolled their eyes but also grinned.

“Therefore I say we take it to the next level! You can endure the presence of humans, so let’s interact with some!”

The grin went away but Kris didn’t protest, resigned to their fate.

Now all Berdly had to do was find some interactable humans. Humans you could walk right up to and press A. But so many of them looked busy! They were undertaking journeys and engaging in activities and that was no good. Targets should be receptive to conversation. Uncivility could stunt Kris’s progression.

So sunken in his pondering was he that he almost didn’t notice the middle-aged human who greeted them. It was a small greeting to be fair. A raised hand and a hullo. But it was a hook! He stopped, poked Kris, twirled around to answer. “Howdy! Nice weather, huh?”

“Very nice weather exactly!” said the human, who sat on a metal chair out on the pavement next to a small table. “There was rain in the early morning but it’s all gone now and so hot you wouldn’t know it.” They puffed out air.

“And not a cloud in the air!” said Berdly.

They nodded enthusiastically. “That’s right, that’s right, that’s right.”

“I’m showing my friend around town.”

“Your friend the human? You are from here?”

“Ah, well, not from here. As such. It’s the first time here for both of us. Right, Kris?”

Kris shrugged from a safe distance.

“It’s a shame,” said the human. “A nice town and room for monsters. Why not move here, hmm?”

“Let’s not get carried away—”

They barked a laugh. “I’m teasing. But. You can move here. My… what do they call it… my sister-in-law lives on Hill Street. A monster. Moved here.”

“Your sibling married a monster?” asked Kris. They still stood half behind Berdly, but they were talking! Conversing, even!

An inward nod. “Before then, my sibling, Sam, they would take the train every weekend to visit. Worth it, they said. They even wanted to move there though it went the other way in the end. If Muhammad can’t come to the mountain, eh?”

“They must love each other a lot!” said Berdly.

“Sure do! Sam said it wasn’t that. Said that oh, they just liked monsters, and coincidentally, weren’t tree monsters particularly neat? Talked my head off about Daphne but of course they didn’t love her, that was ridiculous.” Bellowing laughter.

“Like—like what did they say?”

“Wasn’t just what they said but what they asked. Would get a picture taken and show it to me, ask me how she looked. Found it very important that I thought she was as pretty as they did. Repeated things she had said. Wasn’t she clever?”

Ah. Well, well, well. He looked toward Kris, who studiously inspected their own feet.

“Was a real relief when the penny dropped, let me tell you! Lovely lady though. Don’t get me wrong.”

Welly well well. Well well welly.

“They’re now married for. Thirty years?”

Damn.

Chapter Text

Damn. Damn. Damn. He did love Kris.

This was going to be so much work.

Observing Kris’s beauty, no strings attached? Easy-peasy. Hanging out? Pretty low-intensity.

But love? True romantic love? That had implications. It collapsed the whole wide possibility space into an escalating ladder. There would have to be a heartfelt confession, followed by moonlit walks, romantic cinema, and so on. They would have to plan a wedding: rent a venue, prepare the reception, send out invitations. And then it was time to have kids, raise them, put them through school, support them in their tumultuous adolescences. And finally they would have to grow old together. They would get to grow old together. That did sound good.

One step at a time.

Words were still being spoken, the old human prattling on haphazardly and Kris hacking out the occasional few syllables to keep the engine running. That was good. He distinctly remembered that it was good for Kris to be talking right now.

So. The first step. Confession. Hopefully followed by reciprocation, can’t forget about that. Imagine if Kris didn’t love him! Actually he wasn’t going to imagine that. Let’s bury that contingency. He would have to make his love known to Kris but the waters were severely muddied by those dastardly pranks, the kiss and the signed anonymous love note. What if his actions were misinterpreted as moves in that game? That would be dreadful.

Perhaps he could just, wait it out? Observe Kris for signs of unambiguous love? Maybe even get them to confess?

It was the prudent option, the safe option, the smart option.

Oh! Kris was holding his wing! Was that…?

And now they were pulling on it. Current prognosis: it was not.

Berdly returned to the waking world. So frantic was Kris that by now they had let go and were unsteadily wandering away behind his back. What was going on? His head spun from Kris to the befuddled human in the metal chair to a passerby, a tall human with a shopping bag who had stopped to watch. “This is…” he said. “It’s… Ahem.”

He ran after Kris, quickly caught up, but they weren’t behaving rationally, even less so than usual. Did see him but didn’t pay attention to him. Their eyes slid off him, darted around, searching and not finding.

“Kris?” he said, and their lips moved but no sound came out. He grabbed their hand again and that did something, they still didn’t look at him but they held him so very tight that it hurt a little (but so what?).

Now they spoke—if you could call it speaking. Soft disjointed words. “Away…”, “no…”, “maybe…”. They still walked, but now Berdly kept up.

Where the hell in town were they? He didn’t have the dexterity to manipulate his phone under these circumstances. He’d have to wing it. The sun was over there… It was about 3PM… They entered town from the west… Ah, it was no use. Think smaller.

They went into an alley. No people here. That was probably the point. It was not the most exciting alley he had ever been in. That was good. The last thing they needed was excitement. Some trash cans, some doors between the beige bricks, and Kris kept looking at the doors, quickening their pace. Not at peace.

He should take the lead. Scout ahead a little. He took Kris’s other hand, had brief eye contact, and wriggled and turned so as to walk in front.

All things come to an end—alleyways no exception. There was a new street, room enough to breathe, still empty but by no means guaranteed to remain that way. But! Was that! Yes, at the end, those were definitely trees. The edge of town! This promised peace and quiet. (It did not promise their bikes. Those were at another entrance, another point along the border, to be located later.)

They hurried along. Kris saw the greenery and now fixated on that except when they looked over their shoulder which they did often. The houses scrolled backward, the road changed its texture. Leaves rustled and a bird distantly sang.

There was a bench with a plaque: In loving memory of Mallory. Good enough. “Why don’t we sit down?”

Kris did sit down. They were done fleeing. They sat, and they watched a bush across the road, and they released Berdly’s wing. They did not look Berdly in the eyes. They did sometimes look him in the legs. Wasn’t that a nice sight, his tawny scrawny bird legs next to their betrousered ones? Not a lot of legs like his in this town. Maybe that was the point.

Tears started to flow. Not the ugly sobs that he had expected—he noticed them when they pattered down onto Kris’s clothes. He patted Kris’s back. Almost said “there, there,” but decided against it.

The tears stopped. Kris breathed in, out. In, out. Rubbed their eyes, raised their chin.

They stood up.

In a shaky-yet-breezy voice they said: “Let’s get going, shall we?”

This didn’t make sense, right? There were things that needed to be said. Maybe while they walked he could work out how to say them.

Kris looked leftward at the distant buildings. And they looked rightward at the depths of the forest. They stepped resolutely toward the buildings.

It wasn’t long before they met people. Kris greeted each of the first three humans with a stiff tense raised hand, getting perfunctory responses.

“Are you okay, Kris?”

They turned, smiled, nodded briefly. “I’m fine.”

Chapter Text

“I think we need to take a right here.”

Kris paused their springy step and looked around. “Sure. Thanks, Berdly.”

Kris still wasn’t normal. They were acting like a normal person, or trying to act like a normal person, but that was not the behavior of a normal Kris. Kris’s weren’t supposed to be normal. Hopefully they would soon go back to strange.

Every now and then they still greeted people with that awkward quivering hand.

“So what, uh.” Berdly coughed. “What happened back there, just now.”

Kris said nothing and didn’t turn to show their face. They raised another arm at another human.

“Kris!”

Now they turned around and their smile was horrible. Out in the forest—that had been a good smile. A hint of sadness and recuperation, beyond all the stages of grief. But this smile constituted a relapse. It might have been passable on another face but this just wasn’t how Kris smiled. It was the wrong smile.

The smile stopped. This was better. It really was.

“You were there,” they said.

“I may have been distracted at that particular instant.”

“We talked.” Kris shrugged. “And we talked about something I don’t want to talk about.”

“Did they—”

“Something I don’t want to talk about,” they repeated.

“But did they do something.”

“We just. Talked.”

“Okay. Okay okay.”

What would he have done if the human had done something malicious and intentional? Would he have marched back to where the human sat and delivered a piece of his mind and a taste of his fist while Kris watched and swooned?

He would not. He didn’t even have fists, these wings weren’t made for fighting. So it was a good thing nothing like that had happened.

On the trek back through town Kris gradually unwound, fell back into their disorganized slouch, lost the forced smile for good. They paused at a window with a cat, a reddish cat with a concerned stare and a mouth that hung slightly open. Kris swept a finger through the air, and the cat followed it. Then Kris started walking again.

By the time they were back at the bikes Kris was normal, which was to say, weird.

Berdly gulped greedily from his bidon. He had wanted to save a bit of water to offer to Kris, but before he knew it he had emptied it all out.

The day wasn’t a total write-off but it was a clear mistake. How was Berdly to explain this to Kris’s parents? And would Kris still attend the school trip? This was supposed to build up to that, to be a little foretaste, but it was sure to have spoiled the whole dinner.

Kris looked up at the tree tops. “Don’t tell dad about this,” they said. “Or mom.”

Huh! He hadn’t really looked at it from Kris’s side. But he supposed they were… embarrassed? “You want me to keep it a secret?”

Kris nodded all casually-like. “Yup.”

“Okay. Yeah. That’s fine by me. It’ll be our little conspiracy.” He clicked his helmet shut around his beak.

They were now conspirators. Wasn’t that cozy? Wasn’t that… intimate?

They set off.

Berdly unfolded the day like a sheet of paper. They were well past the crease, now doubling back. What had they been talking about when they arrived?

Right. Hissing cockroaches. How about those, huh. He’d have to look those up on his personal computer.

Would a hissing cockroach make for a good romantic gift? Should he be giving Kris romantic gifts? He very dearly wanted to. But maybe a cockroach wasn’t very romantic. Maybe he should start with, like, chocolates.

“You like chocolate, right?”

Kris vaguely looked in his direction, then back at the road. Eventually: “Yeah.”

That was good intel. He filed it away for later.

They arrived in Hometown, or Hometown arrived around them, all those good known houses, and Asgore was standing outside, as was his right on nice days like these, and faced directly toward them.

They scraped to a standstill.

“Did you two have fun?”

Berdly had mentally rehearsed a declaration but Kris was quicker. “We had a great time,” they said, and it felt like they meant it, it had that warm trill, which meant that either they were a very good liar or they… despite everything…

And now Asgore smiled. It was a good smile. Oddly familiar. “That’s a load off my mind. I shouldn’t have worried.” To Kris: “You were in good hands.”

Yes! He had passed the test! He had the approval of his… his… future… father-in-law? Was that right? That did not sound right, that did not sound like the kind of familial interrelation that ought to exist for him. But anyway. If he was to have a father-in-law then he should certainly want the father-in-law to like him. And this one did. Good news! Even if he had in fact screwed it all up.

“Now, Berdly… Would you like to stay for dinner? We’re having baked potatoes.”

Boy! Would he! “Sure,” he said, and shrugged.

The shop’s backroom looked better than before. The ceiling light worked, the mattress had grown a bed frame, there was even a dining table now. In a corner a small oven softly breathed. The inside looked cloudy, which it maybe shouldn’t.

When Asgore hurried over and pulled it open the cloud expanded around him. He emerged with a tray of lightly scorched rescue taters.

There was no tablecloth, no matching cutlery, no other food to go with the potatoes save for a bottle of tomato ketchup and a chipped ceramic salt shaker. But Asgore looked so pleased with it all, with this arrangement, this configuration of people and objects.

The dummy, whatsername, came upstairs and collapsed into the chair across from Berdly without saying anything.

There they sat. Three plates. Four people, all different species. They almost looked like a household.

Berdly chewed on a piece of potato. It was dry.

Chapter Text

Kris devoured the overbaked potato like—like potato that wasn’t overbaked.

Asgore sighed and looked toward the end of the table. Which was odd because nobody sat there.

Hmmm. Berdly mentally iterated over various Dreemurr family members and classified them by their (actual and plausible) presence at the table.

“Did Asriel leave?” he asked.

Kris nodded, mouth still full of potato but now with corners slightly drooped. Bingo. What was the best play now? No, forget about that. What could he say that was true?

“That’s too bad. I didn’t get to talk to him.”

Kris swallowed the whole mouthful in one gulp, very impressive. “We can talk online.”

There was no way to know what Kris meant because of the lack of clusivity. There were (at least!) three possibilities:

• [Asriel and I] can talk online—perhaps you [Berdly] can do the same;
• [You and I] can talk online to Asriel;
• [You and I] can talk online to each other.

That third interpretation was enticing. They had video called a few times for academic matters but it wouldn't hurt to do it some more. He could see it play out, him seated upright in his chair, slicking back his feathers before picking up the virtual horn… But this could not be what Kris meant, could it?

No, he had to shelve that (otherwise stellar) conceptualization because this proposal was necessarily one that involved Asriel. It would be Asriel for whom he would sit upright and slick back—well, would he? Would he doll himself up for the benefit of Asriel? He would not. That was just silly. Not for Asriel, no sirree, not even with the family resemblance.

He should take another bite. He had been staring out into space for a while. Also his thoughts were wandering in strange directions which meant he was hungry.

“How does it taste?” asked a voice that Berdly soon determined to be the dummy’s. Without anything better to do she was staring at everyone else, as intensely as could be managed without eyes.

“It’s good,” he said.

“I’ll bet,” she said, and she sounded resentful, envious even. Geez. He knew she couldn’t eat, or, or could only eat ghost food, or something, but…

“Honestly, you’re not missing that much,” he said. Wait. Was that a smart thing to say?

He turned to Asgore, who attempted a brave pseudo-smile. “Don’t torment our guest, honey.”

Berdly had the distinct impression that, had she had eyes, she would be rolling them right now. Though in a sort of ironic way that acknowledged her own misconduct. This was salvageable.

“But, Berdly,” said Asgore, and he leaned forward onto his elbows. “How was it today? I know I’m not getting anything out of Kris.”

How indeed! What could he say here? What was there to say that was interesting or clever but not secret? What did Asgore want to hear that Kris did not mind him to say?

“We just walked around, mostly.”

Asgore nodded emphatically, as though Berdly’s lame deflection were deep and meaningful. “That’s good. Walks are very good. I used to take a walk every day, to keep the world fresh and the people close, back before, well. And nowadays I’m back to that schedule.”

“Right.”

“But I have not much been to Bridgeson. Did you make the loop over the bridges?” He gestured out a shape that only he could see.

“We, we, did we? I don’t think so. We just…” He looked to Kris for help.

They shook their head. “We didn’t cross the bridge.”

“That half of town is worth seeing,” said Asgore. “It’s not as old as the west, but it has that 19XX charm. If you ever visit again…”

Berdly did not think they would, but—Kris didn’t frown at the suggestion. Maybe he should just ask? Not now though.

“How about YOU take ME somewhere, huh?” said the dummy, and she punched Asgore’s arm. “If East-Brimton is so nice then how come we haven’t gone there yet?!”

“We can go there tomorrow. We’ll close up shop and take the truck. When your legs run out of battery I’ll carry you. Would you like that?”

A shrill cackle. “You know what? Yeah! Yeah I would! I would LOVE to go on such an outing with you! That sounds lovely. Lovely! LOVELY!”

“Wonderful!” Asgore scooped the last piece of potato off his plate and popped it into his mouth.

How about that.

I’m glad your bike crashed.

“Their—my giftee’s bike didn’t crash, though. It very notably didn’t.”

“Tell ya what,” said Sans. “Throw in another five bucks, give me a picture of the bike in a sealed envelope…”

Berdly rolled his eyes.

“Sorry, kid. I’m all out of ‘get well’ cards. It’s this or nothing.”

It wasn’t really about the card. It was about the box of chocolates that was attached to the card. So what the hell. He paid for the bike card and maintained a flat face when Sans told him to “say hi to Kris”. He took the box home, to his room, and placed it on his bed.

The card wouldn’t come off. It was overengineered into a part of the lid, continuous cardboard, only separable with a pair of scissors, which would leave an ugly frayed edge. Not the greatest presentation.

And speaking of presentation—these chocolates were heart-shaped. Now what message would that send? Did he want to hurry along so fast?

It would be fine. Kris loved chocolate and loved eating. They probably wouldn’t even notice, so quickly would the chocolates vanish down their throat. Right?

It was not yet time to sleep but he moved the box to the table and laid himself horizontally onto the bed and stared at the ceiling.

He would give the chocolates to Kris on the day of the school trip. That seemed correct. The morale boost would be helpful. Or something.

Probably Kris would like the chocolates. Probably they would attend the school trip, and probably things would go alright. Probably the whole thing would enhance their relationship, get them that one step more intimate.

Those were a bunch of probablies. How probable were they when multiplied? And if they came to pass, what were the odds that Kris actually loved him? Why should Kris love him?

Then again.

Maybe everything would turn out alright.

Chapter Text

Kris’s webcam was switched off and their microphone was switched off and they refused to use the chat function but what they did do was spam those animated emoticons. Lo-res roasted turkeys danced under Berdly’s webcam footage. What did it mean? Was the intent to mock him? He did not feel mocked. Because:

“That is entirely the wrong species, Kris. It is as if I compared you to a cow on the basis that you are both mammals!”

Five seconds of radio silence—and then Kris emitted a whole conga line of turkeys interspersed with emus and dodos and pigeons.

Maybe Berdly did feel a little bit mocked.

A digital gong sounded and the tiles on the screen shifted. Asriel had joined the call. He arrived with a sheepish smile, calling in from a dim room where the monitor lit his face. Behind him were messy shelves and the very top of a doorframe. “Oh! Kris, you’ve invited a guest?”

Berdly graciously waved one wing. “Don’t mind me!”

“It’s nice to see you, Berdly. Kris says you’ve been hanging out lately?” (On cue, Kris turned on their webcam.)

“Yeah,” babbled Berdly, “we’ve been seeing each other a lot! You know, as pals.”

Kris looked normal. Suspiciously normal—where had the snow gone? They said no word, just nodded solemnly.

“That’s awesome!” said Asriel. “It’s been rough for Kris.” (Kris spluttered, spat out air.) “C’mon, I’m sure he noticed. But yeah, making friends with Susie, and now you, Berdly—it’s a load off my mind.” (Another splutter.) “No, Kris, that doesn’t change.”

“Ha, well, we are becoming rather good friends! I may even surpass Susie!”

Kris frowned, sucked in a cheek, wibbled a horizontal hand in the universal gesture for “doubtful”. Crap! How tight were they with Susie? What was her secret? Should he be jealous?

“So you’re both going on that school trip, right?”

Kris talked for the first time. “Berdly convinced me, actually.”

“Huh! Alright! You take good care of Kris, alright? And vice versa.”

“Report,” said Kris.

Berdly didn’t know what that meant but then Asriel started talking. “Fine, fine. So I asked for advice about that linear algebra thing…”

And Asriel delivered an account of his previous week, and Kris was captivated, and Berdly had trouble following. But the parts he did understand made the college life seem less distant, more tactile, almost real. And he enjoyed sharing this.

The pieces were piling up: chocolates, a shared secret, the upcoming outing, and not least Berdly’s realization of his attraction, of the task in front of him. It would all fall in place shortly, it had to, it could not do otherwise. And he had to prepare. He needed it to go right.

Susie was the local Kris expert. He attempted to take her aside during lunch: “Susie? Can we speak in private for a moment?”

Her face showed genuine pain. “Berdly, I swear, if you changed your mind again—”

“It’s nothing like that! I need advice.”

She followed him away from the pack, each of her heavy steps a shuddering impact compared to his dainty legs. What a woman! Such a shame that he wasn’t into her.

When she stopped walking he had no option other than to stop with her. This slightly secluded section of pavement would have to do.

“Shoot,” she said.

He had to approach this with care. What the hell was he going to say. What if she blabbed? Was it wise to spill his secrets to a confidante of Kris’s? “Please promise that what I am about to say stays between us,” he said.

“I’m not gonna do the spy roleplay thing.”

“Then…” He couldn’t afford it. “Then this conversation is over.”

She groaned. “You made me curious. Fine. I won’t tell anyone.”

“I need you to help me…” He picked his words carefully. “Woo Kris.”

She froze. A smile grew on her maw, and her eyes twinkled. Finally she burst into laughter. (Berdly wished she would be quieter.) “You—you actually—last week you told me—and when Kris—I thought—” The laughter overtook her speech.

Berdly inwardly sighed and suffered through it. This was to be expected of Susie. She had her qualities alright, but she was a deeply unserious person.

He did not need her seriosity. He needed her help. He was willing to pay this toll.

And pay it he did.

Susie ran out of breath, and wheezed, and recovered. “Sorry, dude. I just. I can’t believe I didn’t notice. I can see it now, but.”

“Yeah, well, glad you got that out of your system. Can you help me?”

“What do you even want from me?”

“You know Kris.”

She grinned. “We’ve met.”

“I want things to go right between me and them. Can you help me.”

“I, uh, don’t have the experience you’re looking for. I didn’t have to woo Noelle. She did the hard work.”

Berdly massaged his temples to stimulate his brain. “Then how about we flip it around. How did Noelle catch your attention? If you pretend you are Kris, or pretend that Kris is you, and I’m Noelle, then what should Noelle, meaning I, do to ensure that you, meaning Kris—”

Susie fidgeted with her jacket. “If you like each other then that’s it, right? Do you have to make this complicated?”

“Noelle made it complicated! And look where that got her!” (He was finally beginning to understand just how complicated she had made it. He now had i) the knowledge that she had liked Susie and ii) the experience of red-hot infatuation running through his veins. When they were studying, and she used to bring up what Susie wore that day, that hadn’t been her making small talk about fashion. It was more like a brain infection kind of thing.)

“But if she kept it simple then I still would have liked her,” Susie asserted. “She’s, she’s really great! I would have seen that. Right?”

There was a knot in his brain, a twist, tangling and thrashing. He didn’t want to dig it up. But he forced it out. “She’s Noelle. Everybody likes her. And I’m… I’m…” Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. “People don’t always… see how great I am.”

She rolled her eyes. “Join the club.”

He wanted to explain that it wasn’t like that, he wasn’t like her, but the words stuck in his throat, couldn’t be coerced into a shape that made sense. He stayed silent. And worried.

Susie spoke up. “You could always give Kris chocolates.”

Chapter Text

It was unusually early. The lost hours, quiet and undiscovered and gently lit. One day you get up at dawn and you remember it, this stretch of time that happens daily but isn’t supposed to be experienced.

Today was the day of the field trip. The whole class was going to the city. Including Berdly. That was why he was up and blearily marveling at the sun through the window.

He floated through his preparations. Frictionless. Everything was so very easy when he didn’t hurry, when his limbs moved as slowly as they did right here right now. He didn’t need to hurry. He had given himself an ample margin. There was his backpack. There was his lunchbox entering the backpack. The box of chocolates. His wallet. Had he packed everything? He had packed the box of chocolates. That was good. That was required.

The streets were empty. The town wasn’t done setting up yet, all the playing pieces still off the board. He saw nobody until he reached the school, where he from a distance observed Catti slipping in through the door.

People gathered in the classroom but there was nothing to do there. No bags were unpacked, and Susie kept her coat on. She leaned nonchalantly against her desk, while Snowy sat seditiously on top of his, and Catti ignored hers, instead walking up to Ms. Alphys to ask a question. Only Temmie sat correctly posed on her chair, front paws on the table, face aimed toward the blackboard.

Noelle hurried through the door and gave Susie a peck on the cheek. Jockington slithered in. Kris was not there.

Alphys kept checking her phone. “Our driver should be arriving about now.”

Right then there was a knock on the door.

“Come in?”

“You’re supposed to ask who’s there,” said a voice.

“I know it’s you, Sans.”

“Sans who?”

Alphys opened the door. Sure enough. Sans.

“Heya kids. I’ll be your chauffeur today.”

Why was the grocery store guy driving them to the city? Forget it. That didn’t matter. Where was Kris?

No actionable announcement was made but Snowy hopped off his table and then other people got up and a gentle current started toward the exit and no! They couldn’t leave without Kris! But he played it cool. “Ms. Alphys,” he said. “I don’t think we’re complete yet?”

“We’ll wait outside,” she said with a sideways glance.

The group sauntered through the hallway, Berdly at the rear, dragging the nails of his toes over the tiles, rrrk, rrrk, rrrk.

In the parking space outside the school stood a grey windowed van. Berdly hadn’t heard it arrive.

The headlights flashed. “Doors are open,” said Sans. People approached the vehicle. No!

Catti was already in the back and Jockington wrapped around a headrest and then Berdly finally spotted Kris, walking sedately in the distance. They waved.

Dread gave way to frustration. They could be late, that was expected of Kris, but they were so unapologetic about it. Did they know about the torture they put him through? Did they think about that at all? He sort of vibrated in place while they approached.

By the time Kris arrived everybody was seated except for Berdly and except for Alphys standing next to an open door. “Sorry guys,” said Kris. “My. My bike crashed.”

“At least you’re here now,” said Alphys. “Get in quickly so we can leave.”

After shuffling and negotiation it transpired that Berdly sat in the middle: the intellectual’s spot, the well-protected center. If sometime during the ride the van fell into a ravine then the people around him would serve as a crumple zone. More specifically he sat between Kris on his left and Susie on his right. (He did not want them to be crumpled. Especially not Kris. If he had to choose then the van better land starboard down.) On Berdly’s lap sat Berdly’s bag.

And as they rode Kris stared through their window with rapt attention for the fields and overpasses and other cars. And Susie stared out of her window for a bit but then she started pestering Berdly. She leaned over and stage-whispered: “You got the goods?”

He patted the box of chocolates through the fabric of his bag. She nodded knowingly and went back to looking out the window. There was a windmill. And then the road sank into a tunnel that did not leave much to look at.

When they left the tunnel things looked different. Those trees weren’t there before, right? He would’ve seen them. Even the sky was less full.

Well, whatever.

Susie poked him and gestured with her eyes. He shot her a cutting look. This did not help. She leaned down and whispered into his ear: “Come on…”

This… did not seem like the ideal secluded romantic moment to gift Kris the chocolates. He had not yet planned the hour but surely something better would come along.

On the other hand. Susie was a Kris-understander. And he had asked her for help on that basis. Should he not trust her judgment?

Well then. How to approach this? He should not confess his love, but he should suggest it. He was currying favor, increasing his Kris-score. And he was not simply delivering gastronomical value: he was demonstrating that he observed and cared for the facets of Kris’s being.

“Kris!” he said, somewhat too loudly. “I got you something.”

He wrenched the box from the backpack and surrendered it to Kris who received it with both hands.

They folded open the card and read: “‘I’m glad your bike crashed.’ Aw, thank you Berdly!”

“That’s, um. The store didn’t have.”

“And so timely too.”

“Sans!” he shouted to the row in front. “Back me up here!”

Sans engaged the intercom: “Special express delivery. Only at Sans’s grocery store. Tell your friends.”

Berdly controlled himself. The way out was through. “Just open it.” Kris was already messing with the tape. For one hopeful instant it looked as though they were going to use their teeth but the tape came off along with some of the cardboard print.

Kris took a chocolate (dark, heart-shaped) and held it up to the light—no, popped it straight into their mouth and quietly moaned.

Susie leaned over and almost flattened Berdly’s right leg. “Gimme.”

Now hold on just a minute.

He had been played for a fool. Bamboozled, coaxed into a snafu, principal-agent-problematized. This was not the ideal receptive moment for Kris. This was the ideal moment for Susie. The moment when she could grab a bite.

Kris was bumping the box into Berdly’s chest.

He took a chocolate.

Oh, these were tasty.

Chapter Text

Berdly had eaten three chocolates so far and Kris at least ten. “I believe we should save some for later.” (That was Berdly who said that, not Kris. Obviously.)

Kris looked longingly.

“He’s got a point,” said Susie, who had eaten five. “Remember last time?”

Kris shut the lid and—handed the box back to Berdly. For safe-keeping, he supposed. Very wise.

“Almost there,” said Sans.

Almost where? Beyond the windshield lay some manner of urban agglomerate, some buildings of which looked landmarky. But their destination wasn’t that close. Berdly had seen maps. They had been riding for a short time. Time equaled space. “That can’t be Hoofdstad.”

“I took a shortcut.”

“No way. We’ve been driving for, for how long?”

Kris looked at their empty wrist. “Looks like… fourteen months?”

Nobody else had anything to say. Berdly was losing his mind.

The chocolates remained in his lap. He tried with one wing to push them into his backpack without looking but ended up needing the other wing and both eyes to widen the opening and when he looked up they were well inside the city, stuttering through a busy street of shops and hotels.

Some of the words on the buildings were English, others were gobbledygook. But that was to be expected. Technically speaking they were in a different country now.

The van was swallowed by the Earth—that is, they drove into a parking garage. Sans braked, the van idled, Sans leaned out the window to push some button, the boom barrier rose. They found a nesting spot. They stopped for good.

And then everyone was standing outside the van between the color-coded concrete columns. The whole tribe gathered around Alphys, who was at a loss for words. “Right!” she eventually said. “Let’s leave. The garage.”

The street was busy and the sidewalk somewhat narrower than optimal, part of it stolen by a bicycle lane. Alphys walked at the front. Kris and Susie walked side by side near the back and Berdly did not fit and so he ended up behind them at the very back, next to Sans, who for sure wasn’t walking as fast as anyone else but kept up somehow.

This wasn’t Hometown, not at all. The cars kept coming, and coming, and coming, as did the bikes. There were a LOT of shops. But it also wasn’t really the historic metropolis they had come to see. It was a little lame.

The group re-undulated to make space for an oncoming passerby. A human, close enough to touch! A human with a beanie and a backpack and a pair of headphones, looking straight ahead and past the group. What did Kris do? Kris retreated behind Susie. The human passed. Nothing happened.

“You been to this city before?” asked Sans.

As an infant he had had a surgery here. Allegedly. Did that mean yes or no? If he said yes then Sans would pry, he just knew it. “Not really.”

“Hey, me neither.” He winked. Always with the winking! “It’s nice to go some place new, huh? Can’t always do the same things with the same people in the same locations.”

“Sure.” (Kris pointed at an island in the middle of the broad street, and Susie laughed. There stood a statue of a human, old-fashioned clothing, coat and hat in hand, looking kind of lost.)

“Anyway, here’s my stop. ’scuse me.”

Right as Alphys corralled the column to a halt Sans insinuated himself to the front. The class stood on what could barely be called a square, certainly not a plaza, perhaps a bulge of sidewalk, in front of a building, a fairly tall building, at least it would have been in Hometown but in Hoofdstad it was above-median at best. The building had turrets, as though it wanted to be a castle when it grew up. They stood there, and most of all, Berdly stood next to Kris again.

Kris did not look at Berdly but instead at Sans. Who said: “Alright people, let’s settle down.” (Everybody was already quiet.) “Who can tell me where we are.”

Berdly squinted. Some of the letters on the building said “Asscher” which was probably a name. Others spelled “slijperij”. That HAD to be a misspelling of “slippery”, no way was that an actual word with an actual pronunciation. This did not appear to be an ice skating rink though. He scrunched his brain but could not find anything smart to say.

Noelle knew Dutch or possibly she had received the answer through supernatural means: “A diamond cutter?”

Sans: “Right on. In the year 1900 this used to be one of the premier cutters in the world. But then something happened that made it kinda notorious.”

Now Berdly passed his erudition check [Arduous: Success]. “I in fact know this story! It’s the one with—the diamond—the really big diamond—”

“Hey, I’m still the tour guide,” said Sans. “I can handle it.” No wink this time, but he sort of smirked sideways. What a jackass!

Someone put a hand on his shoulder. It was Kris. What was the hand doing there? Pulling him back, maybe. Anchoring him. The hand did not last, but Kris shot him a quick faint smile.

Every sentence out of Sans’s bony mouth was a stab in Berdly’s gut. He should be taking the stage, relaying to everyone this moderately interesting tale. But he couldn’t have made it cohere were he even allowed to, he could only listen helplessly as that bastard got all the pieces that Berdly also knew to slip into place.

The story went like this:

In 1905, in South Africa, in the walls of a hole in the ground, somebody found a diamond of over half a kilogram. It was, by an incredible margin, the largest gem-grade diamond ever found.

The diamond was gifted to Edward VII, King of Britain (King of South Africa, Emperor of India, King of Formosa—) who still needed to have it cut, to turn it from a cool rock into jewelry.

Some of the greatest diamond cutters in the world worked in Hoofdstad. What’s more, the British empire was going through yet another feud with the Low Countries, and Hoofdstad had recently declared independence (a “unilateral corporate split”, following Dejima and New Amsterdam). The decision was easily made.

(Okay, fine, Berdly couldn’t have reproduced this part, all those European squabbles and exploitative colonies were hard to keep apart, but this wasn’t the interesting part ANYWAY, that was still coming up.)

(Kris’s eyes were glazed over.)

So they took the diamond overseas to the Asscher company—and the story goes that the navy sent a heavily guarded ship to carry an empty box, while Bram Asscher quietly collected the diamond and carried it in their coat pocket on a passenger boat.

They delivered it to their brother Joseph, who had to cleave it into smaller pieces, a nerve-wracking operation. He cut a small window to see inside the stone—he carried it around for days in the pocket of his apron to plan how he would cut it—and then on one of his midday walks he disappeared.

His body turned up in a canal. The diamond was never recovered. The end.

That’s what Sans said, those two words, “the end”. As if people had stopped looking! As if nobody had tried to understand what happened! It didn’t end there, it still hadn’t ended, nothing in the history of the world has ever ended.

Okay, and then Sans worked backwards and sideways, said something about minority craftspeople, and it was fine, interesting even, but Berdly’s private Knowledge remained bottled up like soda water and all these unrelated facts were shaking it vigorously.

When it was over and done with and time to move on and everyone had just started walking—he uncorked. “They’re still looking for it,” he told everybody/nobody.

Only Kris acknowledged him. And drifted next to him in line. “Looking for what?” they asked.

“The diamond! People are still fishing for it, and there are others who think it was already found, or that Joseph faked his own death.”

They rounded a corner and now there was a canal up ahead. Possibly the canal? “I should’ve brought a net,” said Kris.

“There have already been divers down there,” said Berdly. (Though somebody appeared to be doing something with a fishing rod at this very moment.)

“They didn’t have my raw talent.” Kris gazed up and over the houses into the sky.

Chapter Text

Kris liked what Berdly said about the diamond. They were engaged. They were talking about finding the diamond and becoming famous. Berdly was getting a good grade in Kris.

This was part of the master plan:

1. Impress Kris
2. Confess love
3. ???

But when would it be time to graduate to step 2? He had to—prove himself sufficiently good? That answer did not seem quite right. Love wasn’t just people pairing up with the greatest person they could find. He loved Kris, and Kris was great, but it wasn’t just that they were great, it was that—that they—he couldn’t nail it down, but there was something else to it, another necessary condition.

He had to impress Kris, he had to charm Kris, he had to meet Kris’s ineffable prerequisites. And he had to watch, hawklike, to see if he was winning.

Angelo volente there would be a sign. There would be a sudden moment of clarity. Kris would act or speak or gesture or incline their head and Berdly would know, not guess, know that Kris felt about him the way Berdly felt about them. And all would be well.

The group toured on. They visited a church, a squat little building in the middle of a city block, much prettier on the inside than on the outside. Kris fondled a pew. Alphys talked about something called the Malachic revival. And when they were done, when they walked to the exit, rain started to patter against the roof. They huddled together on the threshold outside the wooden doors where the drops barely hit them, and Alphys’s phone loaded a jerky low-resolution cloud map, and it was decided that they should put on their rain coats and power through.

Kris hadn’t brought a rain coat. In fact they hadn’t brought a bag at all. Berdly had—well, he actually hadn’t thought to pack his rain coat that morning, but he always kept an emergency poncho at the bottom of his backpack, so if you broke it down he had actually thought way farther ahead than anyone else. He tore open the packaging and unfolded it and whoa, this thing was big, gossamer-thin fabric with the surface area of a small yacht. “One size fits all” was no joke, it would have fit an ent.

Berdly rolled up the bottom and pulled the cord to fit the collar and got an idea. He scraped his throat at Kris (who blankly watched as the others applied their protection). “I have room to spare…”

Kris stared. And walked over, and threw up the poncho’s hem, (Berdly almost yelped but this was not a dress and he was not getting Marilyn Monroe’d,) and dove under it. Berdly donated a sleeve and widened the collar and so they set off.

They were forced to stick together now. Berdly liked it, Kris accepted it—then abused it by stopping in place and jerking their side of the poncho and making Berdly almost stumble. He had to be firm. “Don’t do that, Kris. Or I will have to revoke your poncho privileges.” (Kris gasped with indignation.)

Berdly avoided the newly formed puddles while Kris stepped with extra force. Berdly correctly waited when a red light split the group while Kris… you get the picture. These antics were making it somewhat hard to appreciate Kris, let alone to impress them. It was not all bad, the two of them managed to carry on a conversation about a movie that Kris had watched, but the way that their fates were intertwining right now was decidedly suboptimal. If Kris decided to get wet or to get hit by a tram, did that mean Berdly had to go along? If he resisted, would that disenthrall Kris?

And then the rain stopped, and the sun broke through the clouds to make Berdly feel warm all over, and Kris immediately threw off their half of the poncho and kept splashing through puddles from a comfortable distance, not too far, not too close.

In the vestibule of the big museum Alphys pulled the printed tickets from her bag, then stuck her snout back in, and looked up again, and asked Sans: “Do you have the worksheets?”

Sans shook his head.

Alphys’s bag dropped to the floor. “Well, that’s just typical.”

Sans put a hand on her shoulder. “Al…”

“I-if I go back now, then by the time I return it’ll be… but then we won’t… maybe I can dictate what I remember, or, or find a print shop—”

“Alphys. How about all of us enter the museum and then you and me go look for the café and talk it over.”

And thus it went. The students were left to fend for themselves and they set off in pairs down arbitrary corridors (or in Temmie’s case a ventilation shaft). Susie winked at Berdly before she split? And then he was alone with Kris and the paintings. There was some murmuring from two rooms over but today was not a busy day.

Berdly assumed the correct gait for the occasion, wings behind his back, thoughtful appreciative nods as he walked sort of diagonally past the Art, almost forgetting to read the little plaques.

Kris bounced around like a billiard ball.

They bumped into each other at one particular painting. It was a painting of a human, which, you know, still not Kris’s strong suit, but so relaxed, so loose that it failed to repel them, perhaps intrigued them, they even cocked their head slightly clockwise (as seen from the front, that is as seen by the painting, viewed from behind it would be counterclockwise). The human in the painting bared one shoulder. They had a lot of shoulder, if you caught Berdly’s drift (these were broad shoulders). Lots of skin. Tantalizing smooth texture. This was a shoulder you could drown in. A strap fell down from their unusually broad hat and traced the shoulder’s contour and Berdly burned up inside, wanted to reach out and swipe the strap away and touch that shoulder for himself, press on the skin for that supple firmness.

This was awful. First of all that was not actually a shoulder, it was paint. Second of all this made him a pervert, a pervert of the lame Victorian flavor. Shoulders of all things. (Kris, standing next to him, had shoulders. These were currently covered up, which was probably for the best.)

Speaking of Kris—Kris was no longer looking at the painting. Kris was looking at him. And when they saw him looking back they swung their finger perilously close to the canvas and pointed at the human’s chest. “Nipple.” Yep—that was a nipple bulging through the fabric of the top.

“Don’t be childish, Kris.”

Chapter Text

Berdly and Kris traveled back through time. Crossing into the medieval period they met a portrait of two people, monsters both, richly dressed mushrooms in black caps. (Newlyweds, Jan van Bock, oil on wood, 1434.) Their stilted poses and expressions, their clothing, the rendering of their skin, these suggested medieval art. But the domestic details of the room, the accurate geometry, the view in the tiny mirror on the back wall, those looked modern.

(Berdly did not take conscious note of all the above. This is me telling you, leaning over and whispering it in your ear.)

In the tiny mirror at the back of the painting (—Berdly did take note of this—) two additional people were barely visible, witnesses. Those witnesses didn’t really stand in front of the scene. It was Berdly who stood in front of the painting. The witnesses were locked inside the mirror.

Around the mirror there were little miniatures of a crucifixion.

Elsewhere in the room Kris was having fun. “Four,” they said, pointing a finger at one of the many other Jesuses. (Jesi? Jesodes?) Another—“Three.”

“The number three is generally known to come before the number four, Kris.”

“I’m counting nails. That Jesus has one for each hand and one for each foot. Four total. This one has a single nail that goes through both feet. Three.”

“Okay?”

Kris nodded. Looked past Berdly. “One.”

Berdly turned. A wooden Jesus, both arms broken off, just a single nail that pierced both feet like a shish kebap. The numerological implications were unclear. “That’s very,” said Berdly, “impressive, to stay upright like that.”

Kris smirked, and walked into the next room, and Berdly was compelled to follow.

“Guess they didn’t finish this one,” said Kris, foolish Kris. Across the painting, through the painted ruined houses, there lay a gap that revealed the bare yellowed canvas.

“Don’t you know about Marrakesh, Kris?”

Their mouth made an “O”. “Right. That’s the place where, uhh, the corpse—”

“Where the alleged corpse of God fell, yes. It’s traditional to avoid depicting it, since according to eyewitnesses it was indescribable, and it would be blasphemous regardless.” This was going great! He was telling Kris about so many things today!

“I know about that,” said Kris.

Was this the right intensity? Dial up the niceness. “It’s okay, Kris. We’re here to learn.”

“No, really, I know about that,” they said. “I saw one of those.”

“One of those paintings?”

“One of those corpses.” They assessed the painting with one hand on a hip and one hand on a chin. “It wasn’t that big though. Could’ve crushed two or three houses at most.”

“Really. And what did this corpse look like.”

Kris shrugged. “Can’t tell you. It was indescribable.”

Kris was often doing this shit. Making up some outrageous lie, some absurdist fiction that didn’t have any handholds for refutation. Kris would be driven into a corner and would confabulate some arrant folderol and all Berdly could do was squawk and sputter that it didn’t even cohere, and Kris would remain smugly silent, and they would both know that Berdly had not made an argument, that Berdly had not won.

Well, not today. It might take a Herculean effort to uproot this but it would be worth it to prove that he was willing to go that far. By decisively winning today’s battle he could stop Kris from resorting to this tactic in the battles of tomorrow.

“Okay, Kris. Okay. Tell me then the place you saw this towering corpse. Or are you going to say it was not just indescribable but implacable.”

Kris turned around and became incredibly interested in a tiny little portrait of a human before a landscape. The human was holding a key. That’s obviously Saint Pedra, is something Berdly could say. But did not say. He was busy saying other things. He would not be distracted.

“I am talking to you, Kris,” said Berdly.

Kris didn’t turn around. Their face was hidden from Berdly, and they cast a shadow on the wall that drowned the portrait. Had the lighting always been like that? Why were the lamps installed that way?

Kris talked. Spoke. All the sounds were normal but they seemed to pass through Berdly, into his sternum and out of his back, and he didn’t understand a thing.

The halls of the museum were very very large, and very very dark. Berdly did not understand how they had come to be here in this wing, how they had traveled the thousands of miles from the museum entrance. And Berdly knew that behind him, one room back, in the painting, behind the newlyweds, in the mirror, there was a person. And that that person was looking at him. And that it was best for him not to turn around.

Then Berdly blinked and the scene snapped into focus. The museum was medium-sized. The portrait was well-lit by the spotlights above it. Kris’s mouth-sounds retroactively resolved into words. Kris had said: “Lately I like to use mustard in my tomato sauce.”

Berdly failed to suppress a full-body shiver. “That’s nice, Kris. But what exactly does it have to do with, with,” with what we were just talking about, which was,

“I have to squeeze in half a tube to make the taste come through. But it’s pretty good.”

They had been talking about something else. This tomato sauce subterfuge was meant to distract from it. What was it?

“I guess the spiciness wouldn’t do anything for you. Because of the thing you said. About the capsaicin.”

Berdly mustered his full concentration. “Mustard has a different compound actually. It’s—I can taste that one. But let’s get back on track. You—”

Now Kris turned around. And said: “How about you come over and I’ll cook it for you and we’ll have dinner, just the two of us?” And winked.

Okay, FINE, Berdly gave in and decided to be distracted, this might actually be a big deal. Was this the point of reciprocity, the sudden moment of clarity, the Sign? What did they mean by this?

This wasn’t just intended to be a culinary experience, no? There was an implied romantic layer to it.

But…

It smelled like one of Kris’s fiendish pranks. Like the love letter, like the kiss. And Kris had taken advantage of Berdly’s present hesitation by… grinning mockingly. Which didn’t clarify anything.

He really truly didn’t know what was going on. This was no way to live. One more such overture and he would be pushed over the edge, he would risk it, he would declare his undying love.

Now Kris was putting their hand on Berdly’s shoulder. And they said: “Feel free to think it over.” And they walked away.

Kris had gotten the better of him once again.

Chapter Text

This part of the museum is different. Uhhh. Fewer people, more shapes. And not all of these are paintings. The thing I’m looking at now, the thing on the wall, probably not a painting, made of cardboard I think, with edges cut into it. Sort of interesting for a few seconds. Makes your eyes zig-zag.

Berdly is looking at a thing that really is a painting, but the painting doesn’t have any stuff on it, no objects, just shapes. Lines, triangles, circles, grids. I don’t get it. Berdly is into it, freakishly into it, or he’s pretending very convincingly. He’s been standing in front of it for a few minutes now stroking his beak with his wing. I don’t get it. I liked the Picasso kind of stuff a few rooms ago, normal people who looked weird. And I like paintings with normal people who look normal but are shot at with arrows or something, those are cool too. These paintings though are just shapes.

I stand next to Berdly and lean forward like him and stroke my chin like him. I say: “That thing over there looks like a duck.” (An obvious lead-in. It’s blue with a yellow beak so by implication I have said that he looks like a duck. You can have hours of fun this way.)

Berdly pushes a wing against my head. It tickles. “Oh, shut up. It’s not a zoo, Kris.”

“So, what, what am I looking at. What thing is depicted.”

“It’s pretty! Can’t you see that it’s pretty?”

I stare very hard at the painting. At the shapes. “No.”

“Something doesn’t have to be a thing to be pretty, Kris. Like a beautiful sunset. If you didn’t know what the sun was, and you didn’t know what the sky was, wouldn’t you still enjoy looking at it?”

“You think we can test that with the scientific method, Berdly? You wanna watch a sunset with me?”

Berdly stammers. “Well, I, I, I wouldn’t say no to such a proposition, on the condition that it’s undertaken for—”

“We just gotta find a way to give me so much brain damage that I forget about the sun and the sky.”

He squawks in disgust. “Kris, please. If you will not take this seriously then why are we even here?” He walks to another painting with his back squarely toward me.

My lips twitch. My face is hot. I can’t have Berdly see it right now.

Over in the next room there are yet more shapes on the wall, still no things, nothing that someone on my humble level could understand.

And then one room further there are books. Books and printed pages and handwritten pages. Berdly will be insufferable when he’s here. I can see it already. Finally, the intellectuals’ chamber, the library for the mind. He will read this shit out loud and make me listen. (Which is fine I guess.)

Berdly is not here. Berdly is two rooms back. So I can prepare. I can lay a trap.

I force myself to look down into the nearest glass case. There are books in it. The books are propped open only halfway, with the pages at a right angle. They look very old.

The book nearest to me has letters. I don’t see things, or shapes.

The paper is very old and the letters are very weird. I can’t tell whether I see a “n” or a “w”. And the letters form weird words. Words in a language I can’t read.

But the words have to mean things. They’re not just shapes.

The sign says it’s a story about a fox. Foxes are cool. Asriel made a friend at college who’s a fox. College is in the city we’re in.

Next to the book is another book. At the top left of the left page is one of those very big letters, a big “D” (I think), and inside the “D” there are things. I smudge my nose against the glass to look at the little garden inside the letter. Grass. Flowers. A tree. People. I know these guys. I know their story. I can’t read the words but I know what they’re doing there.

I walk through the room. I look at the letters. I look at the things in the letters, the things behind the letters, and my heart slows down.

I find a book that’s not a book but a photograph of a page of a book. The sign says that it’s a very old bit of Dutch text. Not the oldest bit, but many people like to think it’s the oldest. Because it’s so nice.

It is nice. It’s perfect. I memorize it. Memorize the translation. It’s not very long.

Then I wait for Berdly to catch up. There’s no bench. No problem. I sit on the floor, around the corner so Berdly doesn’t see me. The floor is hard and uncomfortable but that’s fine. I’ve done harder and more uncomfortable things. I’m a Hero of the Dark World.

I rest and I withdraw into myself and I wait. All sounds are distant.

Berdly walks in with clicking claws. Just as I open my eyes he notices me and he startles. He collects himself. “Lazing around, are we?”

“I don’t need to look any more,” I say. “I already know everything.”

He stares at me. I can’t tell what he thinks but he doesn’t seem upset when he says: “Some of us are here to learn. Now let’s see what this room is about. Let the bookmeister handle it.”

I rest my head and close my eyes and track Berdly’s location in the room by his footsteps, like I’m a bat.

He reaches the nice text.

“Hebban…” I hear him mutter. “Hebban olla…”

Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic enda thu wat unbidan we nu. Those are the words. I don’t say them. I don’t know how they sound.

I know what they mean, and I say out loud: “All the birds have started nests, except for me and you. What are we waiting for?”

It’s a perfect way to poke at Berdly. Almost as good as that kiss. I raise my head to catch his reaction.

“That is what it says, Kris,” he softly says. “But I detect a certain something in your tone. Like you’re not just quoting, but, invoking.”

Here it comes. He’ll be so flustered and defensive. Maybe he’ll even run away again.

He continues: “Is this… a proposition that you are making, to me? Are you asking if I would consider building a nest with you? Because, Kris… although as a modern evolved monster I do not build nests out of little twigs…”

The unfinished sentence hangs in the air. He reaches out his wing, and I unthinkingly take it, and with some strain he pulls me to my feet.

Berdly inhales. Exhales. Inhales. “I have been giving this matter a certain amount of thought these past days. And I would be willing to take you up on your offer.” He looks into my eyes. “Kris, I want to be with you. Kris, I love you.”

My mind blanks. Blood rushes through me. A buzzing fills my ears. The thing that’s buzzing is me.

Berdly doesn’t make jokes. No, that’s wrong. Berdly makes jokes, but not these jokes. He says this so he means this. Berdly, haughty Berdly, wants to be with Kris. Berdly wants to be with Kris.

Berdly cannot be with Kris. Kris cannot be with Berdly. This is not shaped like a thing that can happen. Berdly x Kris is meant to be a joke. It’s meant to be a good joke, the best joke that I’ve ever come up with. It can’t be more than that. It’s an impossibility.

It cannot happen.

I do not let it happen.

I walk away.

Chapter Text

When Berdly regained full awareness of his surroundings he stood slumped against a wall in front of a stack of books. A measuring rod informed him that he was five centimeters taller than the full print edition of The Desk by Maarten Koning. At least he had that one thing to be proud of.

Berdly had blown it. He had blown it severely. He was not cut out for romance or even for being a person. How had he misjudged the situation so catastrophically?

That look that Kris had given him. A total absence of love. Some sort of fear, or disgust, or pity, or anger, or confusion, or—truly he did not know what it was. He kept returning to that face, looping around it, thinking the same thoughts and learning nothing new.

His legs walked. They carried him through room after room, a little too fast. Maybe if he walked enough he’d start thinking about something else.

There were people here. Many people. The museum had been practically empty when he was with Kris but now Kris had been replaced by dozens and dozens of people, each with their own species, their own face, their own posture. Each equally worthless, fungible personslop. Berdly didn’t have time for this. He didn’t have room for this.

He stopped before a huge metal statue. Dancing, in a wheel, too many arms. Shiva? The plaque confirmed.

It was like the statue danced in his belly, in the soft part below his ribcage. Something there was moving very unpleasantly. Even though logically speaking the problems were located in his head.

The Hindus thought that everything happened in a cycle. The world was currently in the miserable part of the cycle. Berdly especially so.

“Hi Berdly!” said Noelle from behind. He jumped.

She was, of course, with Susie. They were, of course, holding hands. In public. Heedless of handholdless onlookers, no sympathy for the romantically challenged—

“Where’s Kris?” asked Susie. She craned her neck and looked around as though Kris perhaps crouched behind a plinth. Fat chance, buster. Kris was never coming back.

He was going to have to answer her question. He was going to have to be Berdly again. What would Berdly do? “They went off on their own to look at some stuff,” said his inner Berdly.

“Okay,” said Noelle. She seemed puzzled. “Do you want to come with us? We’re going to look at the Japanese prints downstairs.”

“No, I’m good. I’m great.”

“Okay,” she repeated. “See you around.”

With that taken care of he could go back to his miseries.

Could he play the Event off as a joke? A-ha, payback time, and you fell for it, too?

It could work. And if it worked it would consign him to a lifetime of being just friends. Just hanging out together, pretending that nothing was the matter. Ctrl+Z.

And if he didn’t do that—if he kept his soul bared—

Would Kris with all the cards on the table decide to friendzone him? Or would they come around and fulfill his heart’s desire? Or reject his friendship, burn it all down?

He didn’t want to lose Kris.

He pondered in front of the statue for an indeterminate amount of time.

His legs were starting to hurt when Noelle reappeared in his peripheral vision. “I told you—”

“Berdly, we’re heading back. It’s 12:50.”

Ah. Right. Berdlies should be punctual. Time to go.

He didn’t do anything and he didn’t say anything and still Noelle gave him occasional concerned looks. And he realized:

Everyone was going back. Everyone was going to be there. Kris was going to be there.

He would have to interact with Kris, or react to Kris, or carefully avoid looking at Kris. Very soon.

Noelle led a detour through the big room with all the most famous paintings. Berdly was made to take a photograph (no flash) of Noelle and Susie posed like a painting, in front of a painting, then endured as Noelle cooed over the result while Susie toughly grinned.

Berdly took note of the body language, the twee little actions. Susie hesitating before kissing Noelle on the top of her head between her antlers.

Oh! Right! Susie! Fucking Susie!

She was his accomplice, a member of the two-person conspiracy, the Kris-understander he recruited for his heist of Kris’s heart. She would know what to do. She had to know what to do.

But there wasn’t any time, no time to secretly confer and plan ahead. They were walking down the big staircase, they were getting their bags from the lockers, they were about to meet Kris, and he would have to wing it, he would have to intuit the optimal set of inputs by pure instinct so as to not ruin his chances once he knew what he was doing—and already he expected to blow it, he expected to look back on this day years from now and know that this was the moment it came to ruin, the point of no return.

They turned the corner to meet the rest of the group.

Everyone was there except Kris.

Alphys’s eyes met Berdly’s and she made some sort of signal to the group. Behind her Sans grinned.

And Kris wasn’t there.

Alphys started to walk, Snowy said something inane, Susie nudged Berdly and asked him about chocolate.

Kris wasn’t there.

Chapter Text

Susie asked where Kris was. (Berdly should have asked this, but, well.)

“They’re, with, Asriel, for some reason,” said Alphys with hysterical calmth. “Asriel called, but he didn’t say why and how this came to be. Maybe Berdly knows—no? Okay. Nothing our schedule can’t handle. They’ll wait for us at the thing. At the boat.”

A miracle. A stay from execution. Though it meant that whatever way it was that Kris felt about Berdly, they felt it strongly. Kris hadn’t just run away. Kris had run away far.

Something about Alphys’s composure made everyone fall in line. They left the museum for the noisy city.

Berdly sidled up to Susie. “I need your help.”

“Is it about Kris?”

“Yes. I… just now, in the museum, I confessed to them.”

“Oh shit! How did it go?” She frowned. “Uh, I guess that since Kris isn’t here—dude, what happened?”

“I don’t know!” he hissed. Couldn’t let anyone overhear. Opsec was critical. Susie was thankfully sworn to secrecy. “I, I don’t know what I did, but I definitely did something wrong. And then they ran off.”

She bit her lip. “They do that sometimes.”

“How do I fix it? Can I fix it?”

“Shit, dude.”

“Does it, does it mean Kris doesn’t like me? Should I give up?”

The two of them had drifted behind. “Kris talks about you,” said Susie. “I can tell they like you. As a person.”

Berdly already knew that, didn’t he? But the world brightened.

“Though I guess if they ran off like you said then they don’t love you, right? Like, that would make sense, but—but love doesn’t make sense, and Kris doesn’t make sense, so—ugh.”

“So I have a chance.”

Susie looked at him and let out a deep animal grunt. “Ugggggghhhhhhh.”

She put one leg in Berdly’s path then crouched down and bared her teeth. “I don’t want Kris to get hurt. I don’t know how to help you, but solve it, okay? Don’t make it worse.”

He nodded, unmoved by Susie’s threat display. No gamer girl shall harme Macbeth. His fate was held by Kris and Kris alone.

In silence they caught up with the group.

There, on that bench, looking away over the water. Was that—?

Asriel and Kris. Asriel sat normally while Kris sat on top of the backrest, taller than Asriel. Positioned perfectly to reach out and ruffle Asriel’s hair. But they didn’t do that.

They hadn’t noticed the group’s approach yet. This was a Kris without Berdly. Viewed from behind they looked at peace. Maybe he’d think differently if he could see their face. Or maybe it would only confuse him.

Alphys waved and called and Berdly felt a flash of anger at her for trying to break up the picture.

Asriel stood up. Kris jumped down to the ground and wasted no time scanning the group—their eyes met Berdly, and they flinched.

Berdly told himself that this was as expected, assured his beating heart that there was no new information, no update to his priors, no reason to react.

He couldn’t bear to look. He looked at the boat instead. Long. Flat. Glass roof. Tiny little window tables, two seats each. A nice cramped space to continue panicking.

Behind him Alphys talked to Asriel, then to the boat’s captain or proprietor or whoever, then started to direct everybody aboard.

Berdly was closest to the boat, and so he boarded first, and so he sat down without any sort of strategic planning, and so—when Kris finally entered, and found all other seats taken—they sat down across from Berdly.

Berdly choked. Not in a cereal-spitting way: his throat constricted, his brain didn’t get enough oxygen.

And Kris did nothing. They didn’t even breathe.

The boat rumbled and wobbled as it left the pier.

Berdly was going to die. He was going to physically perish within 30 seconds unless something happened, anything happened. His mind flailed around for anything that could turn the tide.

In his backpack he found it. No time to think. He extracted and across the table pushed the box of chocolates.

Kris stayed frozen for one, two, three seconds. Then they flipped the heart-shaped box upside down so that all the chocolates clattered onto the table. Then they dropped the box to the floor. Then they ate a chocolate.

All was not lost.

Chapter Text

Berdly also took a chocolate. And then failed to think of anything to say.

The world was enmeshed in fog, had slowed down to a crawl. On the shore outside the boat was dimly visible a giant denture. An incomprehensible droning voice filled the cabin. A tour guide, or Alphys distorted by tinny speakers, or the booming echo of a dead god.

Only Kris was crystal clear. They ate from the chocolates while looking at the chocolates.

Berdly squinted at the false teeth and tried to hear the narration. The teeth had a political function. The teeth could sing.

Down the river was a statue. It didn’t have arms. “Look at that statue,” said Berdly, and Kris looked at the statue. “It doesn’t have arms,” said Berdly. (Probably the arms were just hidden under the statue’s coat.)

“Birds,” said Kris. (Tiny birds in profile against the coat.)

He was doing it. He was interacting with Kris and Kris was interacting back.

One wrong move could kill them both. Take it slow.

“At the museum—” started Berdly, and Kris tensed up. “At the museum, what was your favorite painting?”

Kris chewed. Kris swallowed. “The nipple painting was alright.”

Nipple painting. “The nipple wasn’t, uh, wasn’t really the focal point, I think, of the painting.”

“But you know which one I meant.”

“Yes. Well. I’ve come to know you a little bit.”

They passed by the house of a famous painter, according to the narrator. It looked like any old house.

Berdly started: “And after the paintings—” (Kris scraped their throat, loudly and without much skill.) “Before the paintings…” (Kris did nothing.) “How did you like the… church?”

Kris shrugged.

“I thought it was very peculiar! The way it was hidden between the other buildings, not tall and proud like our own Hometown church. It didn’t even have windows. It must have been dark before electrical lighting.”

“It can get plenty dark in Hometown’s church.” They said it like it was a private little reference.

Berdly frowned, leaned forward, lowered his voice. “Are you admitting to delinquency, Kris? Nightly breaking and entering is not something we should discuss in public—”

For the first time Kris’s mouth approached a smile. “Nothing illegal. Can’t tell you about it though.”

They wanted to change the subject? Fine by Berdly. “That bit of text—Dutch text—with the bird’s nest—”

Kris jerked like they’d touched a hot stove. “Can’t tell you about the church. Can tell you about…”

They dug deep into their pocket while Berdly waited obligingly.

Finally they presented a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. It was blue and grimy, perhaps part of a lake or the sky or creased curtains.

“Is that from church?”

“No, he’s—it’s from school actually.”

“Oh, Kris. You do realize that removing even one singular piece renders the puzzle incompletable?”

“It’ll go back to its friends. But I like having it on me.”

Kris flipped the piece from thumb to pinky.

“So. What I can tell you. Is that if you look closely at this puzzle piece, it’s a guy, see? Those corners are his arms, here’s his head. He even has a bit of stubble.”

Berdly squinted. “Well, maybe.”

With Kris’s assistance the puzzle piece waddled across the table.

This was weird, but weird was normal for Kris, but what made it weird again was that they told him about it.

They used to do these things when they were young, when they wore horns and Noelle wore wings and Berdly had his own unmentionable habits. But past a certain age you were supposed to bury it all, to put the horns away and stop talking to pinecones.

And Kris—had remained Kris, as they always would, it was inconceivable that they would be anyone else—but Kris had covered up some of the rough edges.

Until now?

Kris let go of the piece and it fell flat on its face.

“And close looking”, they said, “is something you can do with anything, any time.”

Very true.

The waves of water washing against the ship’s hull were just like desert dunes which were like bulges of the earth’s mantle jutting against the crust over geological timescales.

This city, this Hoofdstad, was Hometown but bigger, or Tokyo but smaller, or Venice but sideways. It was isomorphic to the whole universe, or to the fine detail on a grain of sand contained in that very same Hoofdstad…

He didn’t know what it meant that Kris was telling him this. He didn’t want to look at Kris. He kept looking out the window but now turned his gaze up.

Above their own boat towered a sailing ship.

It was wooden, brown, with yellow and green trimmings. Tall masts jutted into the sky without their sails. It floated peacefully with nobody aboard. A ghost ship from the 18th century.

They passed it slowly, until Berdly had to press his face to the window to see it, and then they turned a corner and it was gone.