Chapter Text
The peak of spring flaps its wings into her sinuses. Carol cocoons a sneeze into the crook of her arm, ears twitching with the force of it. The slow press of townspeople pulls a grumble from her throat as she weaves through the sidewalks.
Traditionally, she dislikes Valentine’s Day. She dislikes the passive-aggressive tilt of heads: “Single again? Well, that’s Holiday for you. No man’s going to get her wrapped around his finger.” She dislikes the cloying scent of candies and assorted chocolates suffocating the mouths of pretty women and men alike. She dislikes the flutter of anticipation for a stuffed bear in her locker—always to be stamped down.
But she’s an adult now. She doesn’t care about that. What she does care about is the ability to move freely without being knocked into by babbling civilians in whorls of pink, red, the crest of a love heart smearing her vision. She mutters “Excuse me, excuse me,” through gritted teeth, the adonis blue stretch of the sky above her shoving it’s way through her blonde-frilled bangs like it wants to personally excavate her forehead and eye-sockets.
She picks at her eyelashes while she rationalizes how to prod through the crowd to the florist’s. First she tries worming her way to the elbow of the mob, but quickly finds that some people would rather acquire several bruises to the body and ego than move out of the way. Then she tries the other side—she doesn’t feel like kicking kids, so she backs away into the chest of someone. (She doesn’t bother apologizing.)
She places her last bets on brute force. This works better, although earns her several barks of indignation as she cultivates a river of displeased people into the mass, the jibes trailing her all the way to the summit. She pulls at her fringe with a grimace and looks over the block, the disk of cement around the flower shop, the tufts of grass and dandelions crammed into the cracks.
Most of the chatter doesn’t even reach her ears, just coalesces into one sticky swarm of sound.
She walks along the sides, next to the sky-tinted windows, tulip infested window boxes, the amiable white bricks that enclose the florets knotted within. It’s almost sickening, how many people will receive the very same thing Carol will give Toriel. But Toriel will appreciate something simple—not so tacky as a bouquet.
She doesn’t spare a glance to the displays and takes her reward—a single rose—from the register.
She cracks open the door, drafting in a slip of wind. The bell chimes a harsh, final cluster of clinks, and that’s where she sees her. In a sun-slicked jean jacket, a necklace with a small sunflower pendant looped around the fabric of her stringy purple turtleneck. Her face framed on a laugh, eyes cinched around the scintilla of dying stars; hands clamped tight around the waist of a bouquet.
Toriel’s smile brims past the flowers claiming the lower half of her face—a stain of pink-red camellias, carnations, glorified weeds, wound into one muddy silhouette of stomach-churning sweetness. A tangle of thick, stifling floral smells invades her airway.
Toriel leans over to print a loud, wet kiss into Asgore’s cheek. He laughs, flustering, his whole body chuckling with him. Toriel’s gentle smile blooms like the first blossom of spring, her laugh like a waterfall, big enough to drown in. Asgore’s own could paint galaxies, she thinks, if he had the urge.
Nausea wriggles at the pit of Carol’s throat, impatient, building. Her chest throbs. She steps through and rounds the corner without another glance, letting her feet shove her forward to wherever’s farthest from—from—
The shape of the thought curls at her head, but she can’t decipher it. The memory bubbles, roils, carbonates into a filmy haze like she hadn’t caught the moment seconds ago. Hadn’t ground it through her teeth like raw meat.
She pushes through possibilities at a rapidfire pace, ice congealed in her veins, pulse sealed behind a clenched jaw. It’s friendly, it’s temporary (it always is), Toriel bought the flowers for—someone—
It’s for a grave, she knows.
She grips the neck of the rose hard enough it snaps, the head crumpling to the floor. She mills it under her heel until it’s a fragmented, mangled, bleeding pool of petals, disfigured under the ice of her gaze.
Here, the thought thrives: What does he have that she doesn’t?
She knows the answer all too well.
-
It’s the last year of college and Carol throws open the door to Rudy’s dorm, cold spilling over the walls, the chill of spring a blessing to no one. Winter gets done quick and snappy—or it should, anyway. The way spring frosts it’s leftovers into the air says otherwise.
Rudy folds closed the magazine he’s reading. A woman in a red dress bares her leg upon the cover. He slouches back on the couch like posture and politeness is merely a suggestion (it might be, but Carol isn’t ready to believe that.)
He tilts his head, smiling. “‘Whatcha doin’ here, Holiday? Wanted to see me?”
Coffee singes the palm of her hand through the cup. She thuds it down by the counter and shakes off the heat. She washes her hands in his sink, biting down on her tongue until metal pearls in her mouth. “Maybe I did.”
Rudy blinks as she marches toward the couch and seats herself next to him. Their thighs don’t brush, because Carol refuses to sit in a way that doesn’t stack her limbs against each other and make her one rigid mass.
It comes close to it, though.
Theres a barely-there flicker in Rudy’s eyes, something like sympathy, before he slings his arm over the back of the couch so that his knuckle tickles her nape. She doesn’t move away from the touch.
”So, ‘ya heard the news.”
”What news?”
Rudy draws in a slow, slow breath and forces it back out. “‘Tori and the big guy,” he clicks his tongue, “y’know. Knocked boots.”
Carol glares at the curl by his temple. “I’m not sure that’s the correct phrasing.”
Rudy sees the opportunity to make seventy crude jokes at once, and he—“Whatever. They’re an item. It’s a thing.” Doesn’t take it.
”Hm.”
”Isn’t it great?”
”Mhm.”
He laughs, a warm, happy, hollow sound. “You’re chattin’ up a storm tonight, huh, Holiday?”
”Drop the niceties, Rudolph,” she says, and scoots an inch closer to him.
”I ‘dunno, I’m not sure you want me to.”
She drops her head onto his shoulder. Cool breath floats between them. “How was the party last week? With Asgore?”
”Same-old, same-old.”
”You drunkenly tried to kiss him and he left?”
Rudy gulps, shudders out a laugh, “You know me too damn well.”
Rain raps against the window, muffled behind the red-green blinds Carol helped set up in January. Carol chews on her hair where it fuzzes by her cheek. Sat by the arm of the couch, the space heater drones, filling the silence.
”It’s nice that they’re happy, y’know?”
”I know.”
Rudy shifts in place, earning him a glower. “God, they’re gonna have so many babies. Pots of ‘em.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Don’t put that image in my mind. You’d be a terrible influence on them. They’d be running around… breaking vases, stealing cookies. Whatever kids do these days.”
”Y’know how much you sound like an old lady sometimes?”
She stares up at him, stone-cold, “I will leave this dorm, Rednose.”
As always, he effortlessly shakes it off. ”How much d’ya wanna bet they don’t make it past the honeymoon stage?”
She smirks. “All my savings.”
”You’re a menace, sweet cheeks.”
Her mouth collapses back into a frown. “Call me that again and I’ll defenestrate you.”
”’Dunno what that means, but you’ve got me shakin’ in my boots.”
”You don’t have any boots.”
”Heh, yeah, good point.”
Up until now, if you asked Carol to describe her life, she’d know the answer, and she’d tell it to you. Sure-fire, collected, composed, dutiful, resilient, all the synonyms she could wear out. She knew what she wanted, how she wanted it, and she was on her merry way to get it.
Now, she’s not so sure. You ask her how she’s feeling, she won’t tell you. But she’ll run the answers through her mind: flayed, defanged, vulnerable. Unsure. Nothing fits, not her skin nor her bones nor her teeth or the aching hinge of her jaw.
She sags into the warm of Rudy’s arm, abandoning the stiff set of her shoulders for a barer kind of need. To feed, to breathe, to cling to another and share the heat that simmers beneath their skin.
But his arm’s a little too rangy, his shoulder a little too rawboned, a little too angular.
And she’s a little too selfish.
Rudy clears his throat. “There’s no reason we can’t be happy too.”
She nods, the fabric of his sweater catching on her chin. “Correct.”
She lifts her head off his shoulder, looks him in the eye, pretends he’s enough. “Have I, uh, got somethin’ on my face?” He waggles his brows.
Her heart sinks into her stomach. She fists her hand through the out-of-season snowman on his chest, drags him down for a clatter of teeth. A kiss. An amalgamated mess of joints and longing, hoping to find a trace of someone else in the rubble. Hoping to pull away and see a different face, a different place, a different time.