Archive of Our Own

It started when Ralsei looked her in the eye and told her, with all the sincerity of a promise, that he wasn’t real.

The feeling of slipping up. The feeling of reaching for the next rung up on a ladder only to have all the ones that you’d already climbed slip out from underneath you. The feeling of ending right back up where you started, because all along, your path had been cyclical, and there had never been a beginning to something at all.

The only way forward would be to retread the steps she’d already walked in, to go down the same path over and over and hope for the impossibility of change.

Except Susie… She did hope. Maybe the path was the same shape, but it felt different this time, and someone, and Ralsei, telling her otherwise didn’t have to change that. She didn’t look into Ralsei’s quiet eyes and see stagnation; she saw an eternity. A trail that looped and looped could never get worse, and it could never have an ending to something either.

And yet something started in that moment all the same. She just didn’t have time to dwell on it, as the moment was stolen away all too soon. An early curtain fall to usher her and the others onto stage, an ending she most certainly hadn’t called for.

She remembered a time, in the quieter moments where Tenna wasn’t all up in their faces about his show, when Toriel took her to the diner and smiled.

There had certainly been no stability, no single track to keep running, when Hometown had joined the long list of places she’d ended up at, even as she felt like just as much as an outcast as ever. Same box, just a new coat of paint. And even if she’d never liked this box to begin with, that didn’t mean she was happy with it continuing to change colour. Maybe if it didn’t, she’d finally be able to settle in amongst it, right?

Yeah, no way. Susie had never liked the change, but how was it supposed to matter when all the things that meant something, all the things that hurt, just stayed the same? She couldn’t stack a single box, and there hadn’t even been a concept of a ladder to climb out on.

But Toriel had found her, and Toriel had taken her to the diner where she’d promised that a box was still a first step, and that if she kept jumping from its surface, she’d get somewhere eventually. She’d sat across from Susie at the table, just smiling as if she was getting something real, something profound even, out of an encounter that she surely couldn’t even fathom meaning as much as it had to Susie.

It had been warm like fresh diner food, and sweet like pie, intent and welcoming in the slight curl at the edges that she found baked into her memory. Susie had been sat there, wolfing down that hot chocolate like there was no tomorrow, or like it’d just be gone if she let the moment linger, but Toriel’s gentle smile had never faltered, never slipped into disdain or disinterest, with all the sincerity of a promise.

She’d paid attention when she hadn’t needed to; hell, she been the only one to pay attention when she didn’t need to! Everyone else had only cared if she was in trouble, late or lost or too dumb to do puzzles for homework, but Toriel had passed over everything Susie needed to hear with just a small speech, a hot chocolate, and that smile, attention given seemingly just because it could be, and because it was actually needed.

It was funny, because it really was only in the quieter moments that she realised Ralsei looked at her the same way.

Even as he told her terrible things that didn’t, that couldn’t, quite make sense, he wore that same gentle disposition, the same easy fixation, the same cinnamon-scented smile that was meant to warm her up. It curled softly at the edges like the delicate crust of a pie, but like any good pastry, held its shape anyway. And still Susie could never tell if it was entirely real. It felt it, like a mug of hot chocolate after being left out in the snow, except Susie didn’t know if she even actually knew that sensation, not really.

She believed he was real, but that smile, the one that Toriel had offered as the ladder’s first rung… She didn’t know what Ralsei had to always smile about. Because he didn’t laugh it away, force new breath into his lungs; he just offered a glimpse of a continuous world that seemed a little too good to be true.

So did he mean it? Had Toriel meant it? When Kris also… Did they…?

Whatever, she was overthinking things. Ralsei smiled because he was like her, and finding out that people actually wanted to be around you was awesome. Toriel smiled because she was just actually nice, and because anyone would be lucky to have her as a mom. It would be dumb to question any of that.

Ralsei caught her staring at him. “Oh, Susie, did you need something?”

“What? No,” she huffed. “Shut up.”

The smile didn’t lessen, even as he laughed.

“Well, alright then.”

It took her even longer to notice that at his most desperate, at his smallest and lowest and most fragile, reverting to a state that Susie didn’t know quite how to recognise, Tenna smiled just the same way as Ralsei and Toriel. His came across as more fractured – all too obviously something to put up when there were no other expressions left to wear.

She didn’t want to think about that.

“Would you want to play that game over there, Susie? Or…” Ralsei looked desperately around the room. “Or we could fiddle with the vending machine again? Or anything, really!”

Where the hell was Kris? They’d gone into the S-rank room ages ago, and the last time she and Ralsei had waited for them outside a weird door for an extended period of time, that creepy puppet guy had nearly…

They couldn’t wait forever. Susie couldn’t wait forever. They needed to go and put their foot down with Tenna, and make it super clear that round three would absolutely be the last of his games, and they needed to do it soon – else she didn’t know if she’d be able to force herself to ignore how she knew his expressions beat-for-beat, when he’d begin to panic and begin to beg.

“Kris is taking ages,” she said, frowning.

Ralsei bowed his head slightly, and she couldn’t see through his glasses anymore. “…Yes, they are. Do you think they’re alright in there? Perhaps we could… slip a note under the door or something, to see if they’re alright.”

“Screw that! Maybe we should just go in after them.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he sighed.

He looked like he missed his hood and hat right about now.

“Why not?” Susie huffed. “Maybe Tenna’s hiding something super shady back there, and Kris’s run into it.”

“Tenna… won’t be a threat, Susie,” Ralsei said.

“Hey, I think the guy’s fun, but he’s obviously got stuff going on. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s locked something weird back there ‘cause he thought we wouldn’t get in. People do that.”

She’d do that, if she ever managed to have Kris or Ralsei in her space. Hide all the weird stuff, all the bad stuff, because she needed them to stay. That much of Tenna… she did get.

“Tenna wouldn’t hurt Kris,” Ralsei shook his head, sweet and buttery smooth smile trying to reassure her. “I think he actually cares quite a lot about what they think.”

Kris was quiet, but they weren’t that difficult to understand, Susie thought. They got her, and she got them. She named herself ‘ass’ to screw with Tenna, and they did the same. They smiled, with faint apple-cinnamon tenderness, and Susie couldn’t help smiling back at them.

“I never said intentionally,” she muttered. “Whatever.”

“I’m sure they’ll be out any minute now,” Ralsei insisted.

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go fiddle with one of the vending machines. Maybe one of them actually has something good in it.”

He, Tenna, had Toriel stored out the back, in one of those dumb gacha machine balls, as the angel atop his tree. She was still smiling now. But she didn’t warm them all up against the snow, because it wasn’t directed at any of them. She was perfectly still, expression perfectly still, almost as if she was…

This was going to stop now.

Tenna had been giving them all a good time with his gameshow, but if this was what was going on behind the scenes? If this was the shady thing hidden behind the curtain? Hell no, Susie couldn’t abide by that. She’d forgotten that Toriel would even be here, because… But this was Kris’s house, so no duh. It was just…

She’d saved Susie, with just a smile and a hot chocolate, so Susie was determined to save her now, too.

Yeah, she did get not wanting to be left out, and she knew how easily that led to people getting hurt, but this was Toriel. There were just some lines that you didn’t cross, and with people like her, people that offered the kind of smile you could never forget, you were scribbling right over those lines in red marker to mess with them.

Behind her, Ralsei looked pensive.

Kris had apparently been playing some kind of weird video game the whole time behind that dumb door. Without her. She’d definitely be lying if she said she wasn’t at least a little jealous. They’d been in there playing Tenna’s old busted game whilst she’d been stuck outside, making awkward conversation with Ralsei? Why did they get to have all the fun!?

But it was deeper than that. By a certain point, when everything had gone dark and cold and they were all supposed to be saving Toriel together, but Kris had wandered off into that back room again, and Susie felt she had been waiting for well long enough, she ignored Ralsei’s deflections, and stormed in after them.

That guy from the bar was petrified outside a strange side door, covered in curtains that looked like they weren’t ever supposed to rise. He stared at her unblinkingly, and Susie hurried past.

Everything had culminated in some sort of jealousy, but didn’t it all sort of feel wrong? No one was smiling at her now, because even Ralsei had seemed to be getting antsy – he had been since they’d found Toriel, really.

At first what she came across really was a ‘and yet’, because there was Kris, holding some dumb controller in front of a swanky massive screen. That was easy to be pissed off at, even if it was Kris there, because she and Ralsei had been waiting for ages, dammit! She could have been in here with them playing some game this whole time?

But the screen was empty of anything that made sense, and Kris’s breathing was somewhat laboured. She couldn’t understand it. If something was wrong with the game, why hadn’t they just stopped playing?

They said they didn’t even enjoy it. They said they weren’t having fun – insisted they hadn’t been off gallivanting in some different fantasy world without her – but they’d played anyway, hadn’t they? For the entire time she and Ralsei had been waiting. They weren’t smiling, and as per usual, she couldn’t really see their eyes, but Susie understood all the same that Kris was also whispering with all the sincerity of a promise.

And then they grabbed her collar, and surged backwards, shaking like they’d seen something that she hadn’t – something that didn’t make sense. As if Susie had started to flail and fall right off the ladder again, had been right about to trip down through a pit that would undo all of the last two days, and it hadn’t even taken thought to decide to not let her fall.

It was new, because they absolutely had not been in sync for that, but all the same… Kris stared at her, still tugging on her collar, even as their heels dug into the floor, and they did not smile – no cinnamon warmth from their mom’s cooking, no delicate curl like a pastry she knew they knew how to make, no candied frosting over it to tell her it was all alright – but they sent the piercing scent of apple right up to her, hair shuddering lightly with their breath. It was sharp. It was kind of unexpectedly harsh, but Susie shook it off, appreciative as she could get for such a weird action.

What did they want here? They hadn’t stopped playing the game at their own request, and yet now… Now they took initiative? What was it that they were searching for, with injected eyes ready leap right from their sockets and devour her?

Susie swallowed thickly. Okay, maybe she got it a little bit. Kris was weird, right? So was she, so she got that, but Kris was weird, and sometimes they just did stuff. Like playing a game for hours whilst she and Ralsei waited that they didn’t want to, or try to ask Susie to do something for them without speaking a single word. But they were her weirdo, so she got it.

Sweet apple wafted up to her as they settled, and their position became less Kris pulling and her following through where they were tied with a knot of their hand and her collar right over her heart, and more Kris struggling to keep themself afloat as they breathed, using her as anchor like she was filling in that missing rung on the ladder for them. The prolonged proximity was a little weird, but all the same, it was Kris, and…

And they smelled nice! Like something eternally sweet and refreshing, never stagnating or rotting, even as they shuddered right next to her. It did something funny to her, like a different kind of warmth to the one she always knew from a smile, and hey – she’d already tried drinking that damn shampoo for a little extra taste of it, right?

“Alright, I… I get it. Well, if… If you really want to.”

Susie forced them closer yet, sticking her head right up against Kris’s chin. Their breath hitched softly, before all too abruptly, they seemed to calm down. She couldn’t hear them anymore. Not really see them, through the awkward head position, but she’d know it was Kris everywhere, because it smelt like them still. Sorta like home – real home.

“Go ahead. I tasted your shampoo in your bathroom, here, you can taste mine.”

She didn’t even know what hers was supposed to be. Maybe it was just generic, or maybe it was because she used it all the time, but she could never identify it in the same way she could Kris’s. Or Noelle’s, for that matter. But fair was fair, and she and Kris were the same kind of weirdo.

This was just some kind of ritual that she’d get eventually, right? She saved their dumbass from dumb comments from their classmates out by the shelter, and got into their shampoo stash at home as reward, and now they’d just saved her from whatever demon had been lurking in the dark, and they could get a good chomp at her hair and shampoo in exchange.

Kris leant back slightly, still holding onto her, and she could feel the weird look, before they even said anything. And when it came, it was quiet, and still a little shaky, but scathing all the same.

“…What?” Bewilderment, that was what that was. What, like they hadn’t totally realised that it was her who’d gotten into their shampoo despite her denials!? “Why would I… do that?”

Were they screwing with her?

“What!? How am I the weird one here!?” she growled.

That warmth from earlier, the cosy apple-scented heat like trying to gnaw on a lit scented candle, spread to her cheeks, and she bawled her fists, dragging herself away from Kris. They laughed silently, chest shaking now in what had to be some weird Kris display of happiness.

But seriously, they had the nerve to laugh after all of that? After whatever the hell that had been before she’d tried to interpret it!? Like they’d never fantasised about trying to eat scented shampoo before!?

“Jeez,” she muttered, quickly moving away. “Anyway.”

She turned to face away from them, and they didn’t say anything more – maybe just settling down after having gotten back their footing on whatever the hell they were both climbing to keep Susie needing to pay attention to gentle smiles and cinnamon-apple scents wherever she went, maybe still just searching for something in the dark that she couldn’t see. But the funny thing was, even if she didn’t turn now, she got the impression that this stupid ritual, or whatever the hell it had been, had got them smiling – all crooked and cute like the rough curve of an apple slice that didn’t need to be sincere to make her feel safe.

Susie rummaged around her pockets, and dug out a soda that she and Ralsei had managed to scrounge from a vending machine after whacking it around a bit. The fruits of their labour whilst waiting, if you would. Kris seemed like they needed it more than her or Ralsei right about now.

“Here. Stole you a drink,” she offered, tossing it back at them. “Now stop making us wait already.”

She left rather quickly after that. No need to linger.

Just… The funny thing was, she noticed whilst barging her way through those stage curtains, that her hair had still ended up maybe a little damp. Weird, huh? Hah, yeah, that was both of them. She gave a crooked smile of her own, thinking of whatever excuse she could give to Ralsei about this, sincerity not needed to make it stick when he had more than enough for the both of them.

At least they could all be in good spirits, going to tell Tenna to screw off so that they could save Toriel.

…At least she had good practise now, ignoring curtain calls for beginnings and endings to a story she wanted to be infinite, and refuting that one smile always calling out sincerity’s name.

It took surprisingly little to deny Ralsei, when it came down to it – when he offered that same start of a smile to Tenna with a spiel about accepting his own lack of sentience. Maybe she was ready this time. Because she knew he thought that way, but she knew it wasn’t true. She believed with all her heart that it wasn’t true, and if Darkners’ worth really was based on how Lightners felt, then wasn’t that enough?

Once upon a time, she’d felt like Tenna. Unwanted. Toriel had given her a smile, and exactly what she’d needed to hear.

This time, Ralsei had the smile, and she had the speech. She would walk right back through the path she’d been down before, knowing that if it had gotten better for someone like her, then it would get better for someone like Tenna. Someone. Not something.

For just a moment, before he started making a showy big deal of it, she recognised once again, the hopeful little smile on his screen, and this time, she was happy to.

No one was getting thrown away.

Tenna was in pieces. Face down in the snow, strewn into three parts, and Susie couldn’t tell if he was even on anymore. He’d been taken out so quickly… Like he didn’t even matter… But he did matter. She knew that.

Susie looked up defiantly, and caught sight of the figure ahead. Floating ominously. Not even facing her. Not even taking accountability for what they’d just done. Tt. People like that pissed her off.

“Who the hell are you!?” she demanded, steadfastly eyeing them down. Toriel and Tenna were safe behind her, she thought. Tenna was in pieces, but if she just dealt with whoever this was, then after she would be able to help him. Right? “If… If you don’t tell us who you are, then…”

The figure was shrouded in darkness still. Or… Something darker than that, maybe. It had no distinct facial features, and yet Susie knew it was smiling at them, when it turned, and caught her eye. She felt cold. The way ahead felt cold, and the ground beneath her suddenly slippery. They weren’t answering her, silent as snowfall – just staring behind her at something, eyeless as Kris, with their grin – if that was what it was – a thousand times sharper.

It reached out, and for a moment, Susie thought it was beckoning her. Palm outstretched towards her, gaze still beyond her, antlers gleaming chalk white at the edges like blades. Like it was just some teacher calling her again to tell her she hadn’t done enough again. Yeah, well, guess what, dumbass? She’d done more than enough this time, and she was heading towards doing everything. Kris and Ralsei and Tenna and Toriel were on the line.

Then its palm began to grow an almost unseeing purple, and she knew what she needed to do.

Susie drew her axe, and set a warning shot clanging right off of their blade. “Like hell we’re letting you take her…!”

They couldn’t have her. They’d taken Tenna – or at least, they’d clearly tried to – and if Toriel was next on the agenda…

Susie’s heart pounded, something untameable welling up quickly in her chest. Something somewhere between rage and defiance, between desperation and belief. The path ahead was dark and slippery, but she would skate across it, and she would grab the next rung of the ladder even if she couldn’t see it, just because of everyone who was behind her now. Something was plastered across her chest that she wanted to wear proudly, and if there was someone really bad in front of her to fight…

“Kris! Ralsei! c’mon!”

She stormed ahead, and caught the being split its chest open to roar. There was something powerful pulsating in there for it too, so Susie decided she knew exactly where to target.

It was only there, in front of the fountain whilst it summoned a new blade to try to cut them all down with, smiling all the while, that she recognised such a powerful foe. It was only there that she came to realise who exactly the only being she and Kris and Ralsei could be up against here, was. Shrouded in darkness and armour, the only being around with enough determination to look her in the eye and only give off a cold taunt, this had to be them.

The Roaring Knight, huh? This was them?

But they’d defeated powerful foes before, her, Kris, and Ralsei. In the Card Castle dungeon, in Queen’s basement… They’d overcome every challenge that had been thrown their way thus far, and like hell was she going to let that change now. They were heroes, weren’t they? And their eternity in legend was beyond the Knight.

The first attack hurt like hell, a cross over her heart like some kind of siphon for whatever it was that she was feeling and being powered by now, but it wasn’t working. Susie would persist.

Kris and Ralsei were right behind her. The smile that warmed her until she had the strength to refute anything that she needed to fight against, even the future itself, and the sharp smell of sweet apple that reached her even in the deep and cold, and that she’d never need to see to feel empowered by all the same.

The north wind blew, and if there was one thing Susie would call for an end to, it was the feeling of not being enough.

She thought the Knight was still smiling, when she chipped its blade. But it was faltering. It was strained. It was far from unshakable, and she could do nothing but delight in that.

They were blocking the path ahead? Oh, yeah? Well, their sword that had struck down Tenna was also in pieces now, because of her and her friends. It wanted to block her way, did it? Well–

It struck swiftly and silently, and the last thing Susie saw was what a glare would look like if it shown only through a grin.

Cold. Brittle. Like chewing on glass.

Nothing had ended.

Officer Undyne was behind the shelter door, dragged there personally by the Knight once Susie had let her guard down, and there was nothing she could do to get the door open. The lock was code-based, and Susie knew all too well what it was like to get locked out – if she just started putting in random numbers now… Tt, it’d make things even worse if some alarm started going off, even if she wasn’t exactly sure what kind of police would be left to get her in trouble for it.

Why had Officer Undyne even been there? At Kris’s house? Had she been trailing the Knight beforehand…? Why… Why had it even made one in Kris’s house to begin with?

Real people were going to get hurt by this, and if she and Kris so much as asked for help with that… They couldn’t. Dark fountains were dangerous, and there was obviously one inside of that bunker too. And what about the Knight!? Even if she asked Darkners for help in figuring out how to get in, or even just storming the place, she’d seen what the Knight had done to Tenna in just two strikes!

If she told anyone about this, Lightner or Darkner, more real people were going to get hurt.

God fucking dammit. What was she supposed to do!? Kris had caught up to her, but they were also just kind of standing there, staring right through the shelter door. They didn’t say anything, didn’t try anything with the code or lock, and Susie would wager that they also recognised the danger of this situation to everyone else just as well as her.

Forget the stupid ladder, or the stupid path, or her stupid dream where everything went right! Because everything had already gone wrong in just one fight – one that they’d won, at that. They’d won, weakened the Knight until she’d chipped their blade, but then she’d gone down to just a single swing, and she’d seen exactly what it was like first-hand for a smile to not last.

Speaking of… Oh, shit, Toriel was still in the Dark World in Kris’s house…! She was with Ralsei still, surely, and he wouldn’t let anything happen to her, but only she and Kris could actually rescue her.

She wanted to take Kris by the hand again, and run back to Toriel, but they had to be shaken up too, right? She hadn’t seen what the Knight had done to them after she’d been taken out, but it couldn’t have been good. They were probably also exhausted, probably also terrified because this was all in their house, and it had been their mom about to be kidnapped by the Knight, and that expression they had on…

It was neutral as ever, but Susie saw it shaking at the edges. She saw their hands twitching, shivering in the night’s air perhaps, and she saw their lip trembling, so close to moving into something new entirely. She took a few steps away from the bunker, and managed to catch their eye. And now she knew what a silent breath would look like if it was shown only through the eyes.

Unresponsive. Shadowed. Like sleep paralysis.

“Susie, Kris!” Ralsei called, meeting at them, as ever, at the edge of the darkness. Susie hadn’t even noticed Kris appear behind her. “Are you two alright? Did you catch them? The Knight?”

It was just for a fleeting moment, but she caught something in his eye. Him glimpsing away, as he spoke.

“We’re… fine,” she said, taking a step forward. “How’s Toriel?”

“Still asleep,” Ralsei relayed, pointing backwards.

Toriel’s face had contorted, as if she was having a nightmare. Maybe something had ended today; just not that feeling of falling. It felt as if she’d fallen a tremendous distance to be back at this fountain at all, frankly, but…

“Did you think we could catch the Knight?” she asked.

Ralsei adjusted his glasses. “Well…”

“You didn’t, right?” bitterly, she guessed. “Whatever, man. It’s just… I… I thought we could…”

He smiled at her, sweet toasted marshmallows and flakey pie crust all covered in cinnamon, “Susie… The Knight is a very powerful foe, you know. Not to mention the fact that we were ambushed! Perhaps we ought to seal the fountain now, and then you and Kris can search the light world for clues. There must be some, there.” He hesitated. “I won’t be able to accompany you for that, of course, but…”

At her side, Kris looked away. Ralsei didn’t seem too troubled by this, but come on, it was already obvious that his expression was cracking at the edges – like some knife was striking the edge of it, with more and more crust shaving off of it with each meeting with the sharp of the blade. It had been noticeably worn down, by this point. Susie clung to it desperately anyway, even if she knew she couldn’t necessarily believe that words that accompanied such a look.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said gruffly. “You wouldn’t know where to look, anyway. We can do it, I just… Before we go, I wanna…”

She brushed on past him, eyes grazing over the snow. It was somewhere around here, she thought. Just behind Toriel… The spot where Tenna had…

Ralsei seemed startled by her behaviour, and she could feel his eyes darting between her Kris. Had he forgotten what had happened here already? What the Knight had actually done? Or did he just not care, because Tenna was a Darkner? She balled her fists at her side. By that metric, would he even care if he’d been the one torn apart and left to die in the snow?

…She didn’t want to think about that, because she was pretty sure she knew the answer, and even more sure at the kind of face Ralsei would make to tell her as much. She felt a little sick.

“Erm, Susie, I don’t know if…” he began to say.

And then she found Tenna. Or, she found his left arm, anyway, but the rest of him had to be nearby. She kicked around some snow, and there, low and behold, were the other pieces of him. It took a little bit due to his height, but Susie managed to roll his main body over, frowning at how empty his face was.

She kicked him, in the side of the head. That was what you were supposed to do with old technology, right? When it didn’t work, just wack it a little bit, and it would jostle the circuits enough to bring the old junk back to life. Tenna didn’t wake from this, though. His screen remained blank.

“C’mon…” she muttered. “I’m going to find you a home, remember? But you have to get up to… You just gotta turn back on to…”

Not sure what else to do, she shoved his arms back into place, lining up all the wires so that their edges were touching along the two slices through his shoulders. Nothing really happened, but… At least he… At least he didn’t look as broken now?

Susie sort of wished he’d just give her a quick smile – the one he must have learnt from Kris’s mom – just to give her some sign to keep going. It could be as fake as he needed, as empty as he needed, like filling up on all the delicacies the Dark World had to offer only to find out that what they consumed here had no bearing on the Light World, but she just needed something.

“It won’t work,” Ralsei said, ruefully. He approached, and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry… I know you and Tenna were really connecting at the end there, but there isn’t anything we can do for him now.”

“How’d you know?” sharply, she questioned.

“I– I mean, he’s…”. Ralsei gestured at Tenna helplessly. “He was torn apart by the Roaring Knight. I wouldn’t even know where to start to…”

“Then I’ll ask,” Susie decided. “The other Darkners here… They mostly all worked for him, right? So… So they probably know a thing or two about how he works. I can ask them what to do! That’s not nothing.”

Kris wandered over too, silent in approach, but opened their mouth softly once they were at Susie’s side. The air smelt like apple sauce on a cold day. Like the first few moments of spring.

“I’ll wait… by the Fountain…” they murmured. “…The others are still in the studio.”

“Well, I suppose you both still need to make preparations to move these Darkners to Castletown, anyway…” Ralsei said, rubbing his hands together.

“Them to Castletown, and Tenna to someone who wants him,” Susie nodded. “I promised.”

She knew she was rough around the edges, and she knew that despite what she’d said and felt, she’d fallen quite a way down now. The stairs had given way into a slope that she couldn’t even hope to climb, but she was still here, and she wasn’t lost yet. Tenna was rough around the edges, and he’d fallen as far down as he possibly could, motionless and cold and lost as he was in the snow, but she had told him what she had earlier with all the warmth of a smile.

Well, there was only one way up for him.

Hell, it was the same for her, right? Yeah, everything kind of sucked now, and they’d lost it all to that damn Knight, but before all of that, she’d survived long enough to chip its blade! That was kinda badass! If she could do all that then why not more? She still had Kris and Ralsei, and nothing… nothing was lost yet, right?

She headed back towards the light of the Green Room.

She taped up his antenna, the one that was still wonky, even after her and the studio Darkners’ best efforts in the Dark World, once Kris finally sealed the fountain and they were back home. It was sort of obvious that Tenna still looked a little worse for wear, but… Hey, he was a hearty old machine! Someone out in Hometown would want him; she really believed that.

Kris was out cold on one of the armchairs still, and Toriel was baking in the kitchen. Despite everything… Despite the front door which must have been open for some time in the night, and despite the chill Susie had felt since first seeing darkness seep out of the shelter as the door shut in on the Knight and Undyne… It felt warm again the living room. Cosy..

The sound of the tap running caught Susie’s attention distantly, and then Toriel padded in. She looked over at Tenna, Susie, and then the roll of tape, expression softening into the familiar gentle taste of sweet cinnamon.

“Thank you for patching that old thing up, Susie, dear. You did not need to,” she whispered, attentive as ever to Kris sleeping in the corner, and careful as needed not to wake them. “I do not know quite what happened to it… I suppose perhaps something knocked it over in the night.”

Susie smiled bitterly. “Yeah, he… Uh, it looked like it took quite a beating…”

“Oh, well,” Toriel sighed. “I had been meaning to get rid of it for a little while now. It does not get used anymore.”

Just because Toriel didn’t, someone would still want Tenna, Susie reminded herself. Toriel just probably had too much on her plate for TV.

“I, uhm, I broke it,” she blurted, not quite knowing why. “In the night. Yeah, I, uh… I got up to get some water, and I couldn’t see it in the dark, so I tripped and…”

She glanced over at Kris, and noted that, good, they were still asleep. They hadn’t heard her just… saying that. Because she wasn’t really sure why she said it, or why she’d even thought of it. She’d really wanted to keep the story of staying up all night watching horror movies…

To keep Toriel from questioning matters relating to the Dark World? It wasn’t her fault that Tenna had been attacked by the Knight, but it had been so sudden because she’d made him so happy right before that. Maybe if she’d just not…

No, he’d needed to hear what she’d said, she thought. She’d needed to hear it from Toriel, and he’d needed to hear it from her. She definitely didn’t quite have the expression down for it, not in the way that Ralsei or maybe even Kris, if they tried enough, did, but he’d needed to hear something like that, and she’d known exactly how to say it. Something like that was what it really meant to walk the same path all over again.

Toriel studied her for a moment. “…Well, then, do not worry about it, Susie. You have fixed it, and Kris and I were not going to use it again anyway.” She winked. “It can be our little secret.”

“Thanks…. Toriel,” she replied, staring off out the front window.

They went to church, her and Kris, because Toriel asked. She invited, with warm eyes and a warm smile, and so Susie went with her and Kris. It was whatever; the juice was the best part. She’d never exactly cared about going to church before, because there’d never been someone wanting her there before, so…

Whatever. Even Kris sticking stupid stickers on her face halfway through and Toriel catching her eye excitedly weren’t going to change that. She went because she was asked, got juice, and Kris found clues. She didn’t want to linger on any of that. Church was lame anyway, right? And they had detective work to be doing at Noelle’s house.

She wasn’t home yet though. Susie and Kris waited outside the front gate awkwardly for a little while, but uh… It made her feel weird. She didn’t like it.

As it was, she was prepared to wait anyway, because what the hell, she’d waited for Kris playing that game, right? What difference would it actually make to wait for Noelle now too, even if this was equally as uncomfortable. She didn’t feel like she belonged outside the ornate gate at the entrance to Noelle’s house, and she kept half-expecting someone to come around the corner and scold her for loitering, but… At least she was with Kris this time. Waiting for them in the Dark World had also felt wrong, but maybe that was just because they hadn’t been there.

They didn’t seem content to wait either. After a few minutes, Kris very quickly gave up, and began to walk off somewhere. Sometimes, they moved quite slowly, like they were fumbling with the controls to their own body, but this was different. Their movements here were sharp, swift, and quite obviously deliberate.

“Hey, where are you going?” she asked, tone turning into a growl due to incredulity.

“Diner. Got money for breakfast earlier.” They waved some cash in her face as proof or something, but didn’t stop. “You… You’re hungry, aren’t you?”

“Didn’t exactly get a chance to finish my pancakes earlier,” Susie muttered, shoving her hands in her pocket. “Yeah, alright. If Noelle’s gonna take a while, let’s split.”

Kris nodded, something faint and warm ghosting over their face for a moment at her response. Susie felt a little taken aback by the softness of it. She ran to catch up with them.

It was hard not to remember a time when Toriel had taken her here to this diner and smiled when Kris was seated right across from her in the exact spot their mom had been in before, making that exact same face.

She’d seen it from so many people now. From Toriel herself from so many angles, from Ralsei and whatever connection he had to the Dreemurrs that she couldn’t quite parse, from Tenna whenever he dropped the act for long enough for you to be able to tell who had owned him for so long, from fucking Kris’s brother in that photo on the fridge where he looked kinda like Ralsei but just not quite the same the longer you stared. She’d seen it enough times to know that, yeah, sure, Kris’s facial muscles were presumably capable of making such a face, in the same way that, hell, even hers probably were too.

But seeing them sit across from her in the same diner their mom had taken her to, smiling intently with all the sincerity of a declaration that she was their current purpose or saviour or– or something sappy like that… That was different.

They never vocalised anything like that, but their expression was unique here. At least to them. Susie has seen them smirk, crooked and jagged edges hacked into shape by a knife, harsh and dissonant like clashing piano keys, and she’d seen them in relief with a fresh apple sigh and a small delicate curve of their lips to waft that over to her, but this was something else.

Something new. Something sweet. Something warm.

Kris’s expression caramelised across from her, and for all that she was wolfing down the food in front of her to combat the hunger she only seemed to have really noticed upon sitting down here, she couldn’t help staring right back at that. They looked happy. Like… A Christmas had come early, and you had everything you could want in your living room right in front of you because of it, kind of happy.

It warmed Susie in turn, even more than the diner food. They stared and watched and smiled, ice cream melted attentively into a downright gooey expression that was doing something to her to see, because it was the same way seemingly the entire rest of their family smiled, but it meant something different coming from Kris. It was home because it was coming from them, and because there was nowhere else she’d rather stay than where it felt like the juice was freshly pressed and squeezed just for her and them, but it was also something else. Something more.

Like what they’d really done here was say her down to offer her apple pie. Warm apple pie. Homemade apple pie. Just for her. She accepted graciously as she could.

Susie gave back what she could in the form of chatter, free smiles of her own, and stupid jokes about choices that she knew only Kris was just weird enough to be in the right wavelength to get. She hoped it was enough in return for them. That returning her true unabashed self in exchange for a hand right up the ladder she was determined to keep trying to climb was something they wanted and appreciated.

When all was said and done, last bite of free sundae joked about and deftly consumed, Kris turned to the window, glimpse of red eyes daring her to follow. She watched intently as they started some kind of childish attempt at vandalism, doodling on the window with their breath as the canvas and their finger as their pen.

Or, no… It wasn’t really petty vandalism. Kris hadn’t taken to writing something rude or crass that she might have expected them to – because hell yeah that’s what she’d have done. Beneath their finger was just… Well, that was clearly a person, and for as small and messy and quick as it was, Susie understood.

That was her? On the window? Kris had… drawn her?

She drew them back without a second thought. They turned out kind of blobby, with stupid scratchy hair from where she’d used a claw to draw it, and with weird blocky proportions for the rest of it from her thumb. It looked fine. Obviously them, when placed next to her – obviously them, when she scratched in the smile they’d been making at her this whole time – but she completed it with some stupid text about herself anyway. They… didn’t need perfect sincerity to see what she was getting at.

Kris studied her for a moment, before responding in turn with their own drawing, abruptly adding stupid text for doodle-Susie to say. Just some dumb cursive crap. All, oh, ‘I wuv Kris!’. Haha, real funny…

Protesting came easily. For one, when would she ever say something so sappy!? It was dumb and soft, and just too gooey in a way she could never even hope to emulate, so she protested that vocally as something she would never say. And she wouldn’t, sure, but… Maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was all about that sincerity in that smile she’d come to recognise.

What Ralsei had said to her when he’d found them in the Dark World at Kris’s house… All of that had been stupid bullshit. But he’d said it so confidently anyway because he genuinely believed it, yeah, but also because Ralsei could never be anything less than perfectly sincere when he directed what he said to her or Kris. That was just his nature. And maybe it was what made Susie’s own path confusing and messy with a start that she refused to acknowledge, but she just didn’t think she was capable of something like that herself.

She couldn’t look Kris back in the eye to convey exactly how much they meant to her, but not because that feeling was anything small – clearly not, from the magnitude of sweet-tasting warm gratitude she had hovering about at the edges of her mouth up to cheeks when with them in moments like these. She just knew where misplaced sincerity went.

…Susie wanted to try her best to not be somewhere emotions went to be misplaced. She just wasn’t good at not snapping or frowning or growling at people when they started to prickle up against her. A pie was a damn delicious desert when it was right in front of her, but that didn’t mean she wanted it smooshed against her face for a laugh.

Grinning at Kris, telling them in the best way that she could that this was all just for the fun of it, she wiped them both away together off the window. It was the rain, she claimed, out loud anyway. So unpredictable, right? What could you do…

She didn’t think Kris minded, because they were still smiling, like something had stopped watching, and they were just no longer under any pretences to hold their face so stonily neutral as usual. It looked soft and moldable, and that sort of made Susie wonder about trying to rearrange it herself, when Kris would inevitably go back to looking all morose after this.

In the moment she looked away, craning her neck around to try and see if she could spot Noelle somewhere out there finally, Kris moved again, sharp as a tack, hasty like burning caramel, and their finger was already halfway complete in writing something new by the time she noticed. She just heard the sounds, rough squeaking as they moved their whole arm at strange speeds, as if there was some kind of timer on their actions.

‘You too, Susie.’

A response. To the text they’d added to doodle Susie, presumably.

She swallowed thickly, moving back like she was swimming through molasses, like they’d stolen all of that speed from her, because now she was trying to wade through sugary-sweet caramelised apple sauce in the centre of that pie, and hell if she knew if the crust was going to break if she dared to grab at it.

All the same, she did wonder what exactly Kris meant by that. How sincere they were really being. Because they were like her, weird like her, and they liked to prank and joke and laugh and communicate that way, words so often never needed.

“I can never tell when you’re messing around.”

They’d smiled all the way through this like they’d wanted her to find sincerity in that, but all the same, if doubting that meant being able to refute Ralsei’s kind of destructive beliefs about his own autonomy… If Kris did stuff like this to obfuscate their true intentions…

Heh, if Kris was anything like her in that way, that was for the best anyway.

She fulfilled her promise to Tenna. Found him a forever home with someone who actually wanted to watch TV on an old machine.

It… made her feel a little strange. Wistful, kinda. She knew he would be happiest this way, but removing him from Castle Town meant that she wouldn’t get to speak to him again and stuff.

Susie decided it would probably just make him feel better to know that he would be missed.

Standing outside the door a few minutes later and eavesdropping on Tenna’s new owner, the sounds coming from inside were happy. The new owner was happy with Tenna and whatever weird crap he was currently playing. Hah… She imagined him happy, imagined him beaming, because of that, and it was a hopeful sort of feeling. He’d actually found somewhere.

Something about that made her feel proud.

Noelle was… strange. Or something. Maybe she just made Susie feel strange.

Like, Kris was capital W Weird, right? They were a weirdo because they didn’t bother behaving in like, a socially acceptable manner. She was the same way, so she really got that, and it was easy to be around. But with Noelle…

She wasn’t weird by some conventional standard, because hell, other than the fact that she’d consistently been actually nice to Susie, she was the kind of normal girl everyone had in their class, right? Sweet, a little shy, smart… The literal girl next door in Kris’s case. By all means, she should have felt like some totally normal person to be around, because by all accounts, that was what she was. Right…?

There was the business with her sister, but… That wasn’t on her. And then her house was, uh, a lot, but Noelle treated it as sort of normal anyway, so it also shouldn’t have felt it…

But Susie was sure there had to have been a reason that Noelle’s smile – easy, friendly smile that she’d told herself had for sure just been forced – had stuck with her since her first day at school here. And she was sure that there was a reason she felt so awkward, leaning on the armrest of Noelle’s couch, unable to not notice fluffy gingerbread warmth getting closer and closer as Noelle leaned in slightly.

Her shampoo! Uh. Her shampoo was what was making the gingerbread smell.

…Susie already knew that. She’d been around Noelle long enough in class to pick up on that. Heh, maybe if she wasn’t on distracting Noelle duty for Kris, she’d find an excuse to get a taste of it. From… From the bathroom. Where it was presumably kept.

It was always like this with Noelle. Her eyes always seemed so wide and excited near Susie, so different to when she caught a glimpse from across the classroom at school, because here they looked frosted and peppered with some kind of sugar that seemed to glint like Susie was a bright light source. And it got awkward, because Susie didn’t really know how she was supposed to act around someone like Noelle, and something always seemed to be keeping Noelle so high strung – cookie batter determined to keep itself at the perfect consistency, like nothing else would ever be good enough.

If Susie wasn’t also kind of awkward around her back, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to understand. Because, yeah, Noelle was supposed to be just the nice girl across the classroom, her best friend’s neighbour, the kind of person whose face of perfection came way too easily, and Susie was supposed to have known dozens of Noelle's across her many schools, but she hadn’t, because Noelle was way more than that.

She smelled like ginger and pine and spiced orange like the rest of her house, and she carried herself like the kind of girl who would get perfect grades to please her perfect mom to keep living her perfect little life in this castle of a house in a way that was just totally normal for people like her, but…

Noelle wore dark makeup for a friend’s album cover and liked it so much she kept a copy of it under her bed. She always had on peppermint lip balm that clashed with the smell of her shampoo that Susie kind of wanted to taste just as much. She hung out with someone like Susie, and she always spent every moment of their time together acting like Susie had hung the stars in the sky, that she’d perfected some kind of recipe by sprinkling a murky handful of chalkdust-covered sugar stars from the depths of her pocket messily over cookies that Noelle could have spent days painstakingly hand crafting.

And the thing was, it was only ever awkward for so long. She’d act tense as a ginger snap at the start of any interaction with Susie, but then it was like she had some kind of chocolate on the inside to melt, because eventually, she’d just settle, and hanging around her would be easy as pie. They were getting there now, Susie thought. Or maybe hoped.

Because for all Noelle was nervously fidgeting with her hands in her skirt, leaning in with jagged movements like she expected Susie to just keep sinking into the couch away, her shoulders were settling, and she wasn’t laughing quite so randomly, frequently, or as high-pitched anymore. It reminded Susie of watching Kris settle, that one weird time in the Dark World where they’d yanked her away. Eventually, she’d ease into things like Kris, Susie thought, and that was when it would become really obvious to Susie that she did like being around her.

She obviously had big problems expressing it – Susie had seen that kind of thing first hand way too many times when Noelle interacted with both Berdly and Queen – but she could be kind of familiarly bold and weird, when she wanted to be. It came across like Susie was just somehow able to bring all of that out of her, if she just did the correct prerequisites, like telling Berdly to fuck off on the phone, or whatever.

The two of them had talked enough to know that behind the facade of cute candy cane pencils and perfect test scores, Noelle liked dark stuff – blood and horror and the kinds of things meant to freak you out. She’d told Susie on the ferris wheel in the Dark World that she liked horror, liked Susie, because it was all controlled scariness. The kind of controlled dark where the demon in it would never be able to get to you.

Susie could probably use some of that, right about now… With Officer Undyne locked in the shelter and that Knight just… loose on Hometown, the pressure was on, right? Everything that had come before was all the training and proof she was going to get to show her that she was supposed to be a hero, or whatever, and now she was just expected to act like it. And sure, maybe the dark was isolated as if it could be just some kind of dream, but then she was the one who had to go into it and try and find and fight that very demon.

She didn’t scare easily like Noelle, and she did like doing it, but something had… changed, since the Knight had appeared by the fountain last night. Or maybe since Ralsei had tried to tell her what he really believed Darkners were.

But then she looked at Noelle, took in the sugar-coated stare of admiration, and it was like she had someone desperate to maintain eternity for her. Like she had someone else to really maintain her eternity for, in that ladder or path or whatever she was going to call it. Susie had stood up for Noelle before, and that felt… It felt good. Like she’d so easily be able to become the hero she needed to be, because around Noelle she’d been one all along – gingerbread cookie-cutter of a knight, a real one, to Noelle’s glacial star of mint icing, trying best as she could to get out of the role of just being someone’s princess or damsel.

It was cool because she could handle it. Because making Berdly aware where he wasn’t wanted, or telling Queen to shove off, or even just… being the stool Noelle needed to take those kinda steps herself, was easy. It played to the strengths she already knew she had.

Susie thought she liked Noelle best strange. She couldn’t decipher the admiration Noelle had for her, nor the interest she always took in her, but it felt nice. Warm, even against the general chill of Noelle’s house, throughout her whole body.

They had just been chatting, normal things and all that… Video games, Kris, Berdly, as many excuses as Susie could muster up to absolutely not talk about the project that she and Kris would most certainly not be bothering to start today… The tension really had eased up, too.

Then Noelle’s ears pricked, and she turned around with some kind of almost sixth sense, like she could smell something in the air that Susie just couldn’t, towards the kitchen door. After a moment, Susie picked it up too, what it was that she was noticing. Was that… piano? Noelle had said no one in her house played…

“Kris…” Noelle murmured, her eyes widening into something gently surprised, and notably nostalgic. “They’re playing again…?”

“Huh? Wait…” Susie scratched at her head. She was pretty sure she knew that Kris did play, but the other day in the hospital… That really had seemed like a joke. “That’s Kris?”

Noelle shushed her gently, holding a finger right up against her lips. Susie stared at it.

“They used to do this all the time,” she said, smiling wistfully, harvest festival orange peel. “Just… go into the other room, and play when there weren’t people around to hear. I always liked hearing them, though. Felt like it was my own private concert, a-and– They’re so good, you know?”

Susie strained her ears to listen, even through the shut door. They were… Everything was sort of quiet and muffled, but it was pretty. She could sort of imagine their hands on the keys, handling them both loosely and delicately like a knife, and she tried to think how the music, muted as it was, would taste. Something light and easy, impossible to say no to. Fresh and ripe, like consuming it would do you some kind of inherent good. But also messy, maybe crooked and sharp at odd points because of where she could hear Kris straining to reach the right note in time.

Noelle seemed entranced, hand hovering over the back of the couch like she wanted to get up and move, glide over in time with the music to listen, but she just stayed quiet, rooted exactly where she was. Maybe she was afraid it would all stop, if she interrupted. It was some kind of a new side to Noelle that Susie wasn’t overly familiar with – the Noelle with a child’s angel wings in her closet and an inexplicable sort of nostalgic fondness for Kris even when she was otherwise fixated on Susie.

But in a way, Susie felt wrong, listening in. Maybe it was because Noelle had said Kris’s playing had always felt like it was meant for her, or maybe it was just because Kris had only started when there was a whole wall between them that hadn’t been there by that kiddy piano at the hospital, but it felt like she was getting a glimpse into something that she just wasn’t supposed to.

Kris didn’t owe her sincerity, and they didn’t owe her their soul in their music. She wanted to hear anyway, but she wanted it when they chose, when it didn’t have to mean anything. That was Kris, to her, crisp candy apple Kris whose core you were never meant to just see.

“Yeah,” Susie replied. “They are.”

“I wonder why they stopped?” Noelle asked, something ghosting over her face like a cold rush of something dredged up fresh from the fridge. “They… They’ve been acting sort of strangely, recently. The way they speak, the way they act, j-just… But the way they play is the same.”

“Just seem like Kris to me,” she shrugged, brushing off what she knew Noelle meant – the instance in that room with the game that they didn’t stop playing that she couldn’t explain, and all of that sort.

Kris was weird through and through, and the kind of person she didn’t want to have to offer everything to her. She didn’t think Kris had anything to hide. She really didn’t. But that didn’t need to be the same thing as them having to painstakingly peel back their layers, letting her take bites until she was spitting out apple seeds over the floor and wondering why she’d needed to go so deep, to reveal what she’d already known all along. That they were Kris. That they were her friend.

She hadn’t liked it when Ralsei had dug too deep into what he thought about himself, had she? She hadn’t liked his sincerity as he wore Toriel’s smile to tell her illogical truths, and she hadn’t liked it when he’d accidentally let her see that his room was just as empty as the part of him that was supposed to house his own belief in his autonomy and self-respect and desire for who he wanted to be.

“I guess…” Noelle trailed off. “Maybe I just… don’t know them like I did when we were kids anymore.”

Hey, she loved the dark, right? She loved the unknowable demon in the dark that would never hurt her.

That was Kris, Susie thought. It could be her, but because Kris was weird, just like her, it could just as easily be them. They weren’t the sort of person to have anything terrible to hide behind their quiet demeanour; Susie was sure. And they certainly weren’t the type to hurt Noelle.

She was still holding the guitar when Noelle’s mom came in. The temperature dropped, the air went quiet, and watching Noelle’s expression was like seeing a penny drop. A pretty little toffee penny drop from a gooey, warm state into a bucket of ice water.

Or, technically… Noelle had reacted at just the mention of her mom’s presence. Susie… wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to read into that.

It was just, being so protective of the guitar was suspicious, right? It had been stored in that old room, the one Noelle wasn’t supposed to let people into, and Susie knew it had the code in it. She’d seen part of a code in it, and what else would it be for other than the shelter? So she was pretty sure Noelle’s mom was hiding something.

Maybe it was just because of that – just because she knew she had a duty, and technically, for as fun as it had been, she’d come here for the code, not Noelle – that she started to get angry.

It was probably more. Noelle just… She looked so downtrodden, sounded so panicked, splintering and flaking at all of her edges, a warm meal not meant to be frozen, even in this house. Every excuse she had to try to splutter out to her mother just sparked something more in Susie, because being a hero wasn’t just about dealing with the Dark Worlds and saving civilians like Officer Undyne, right? It was about helping people who needed her, and seeing how Noelle hadn’t even been able to tell Berdly no earlier…

She couldn’t deny, part of it was for her as well. She knew how this part went, and she refused to be talked to that way.

Honestly, she took a lot of pleasure, true pleasure, in defying Mayor Holiday to her face.

“Well… guess who’s taking your daughter…” Susie looked up, and she smirked, bold and sharp with all the best parts of Toriel and Ralsei’s insistence, Tenna’s passion, Kris’s weird little crooked edges, and of course, Noelle’s warm admiration and interest, “to the Festival tomorrow, jerk!?”

She didn’t catch the mayor’s expression before she turned tail and ran, but she did see Noelle gasp, and she did see Noelle blush the same brilliant, vibrant colours as a Christmas log fire.

If she was going to actually go the Festival, and honestly, she wasn’t sure she’d end up going as anything more than Kris’s tag along – because who would want to go with someone like her, she’d thought – she wanted to go with someone it would mean something to. Susie ran out onto the front lawn of Noelle’s house to wait for Kris smiling wickedly as the prospect of finding out what that damn peppermint lip balm tasted like.

Outside Noelle’s house, and the self-contained little winter ecosystem of a bubble within, it started to rain. Kris retreated inwards in themself slightly, letting their hair shield their shoulders, but she just looked upwards.

The fight was starting to drain from her, just a little, now. Maybe it was sinking in that she was still supposed to have a job to do here. Kris didn’t have the code either, so… If it wasn’t raining, she could have suggested searching for one of the other symbols – church or police station, right? But everything was shut, and no one gave a singular fuck about the kind of mission that she and Kris had but couldn’t just tell people about.

Who would want to hear that the entire world could end?

She wanted to just go home with Kris, but with the door to their house locked as well, and with them being just as keyless as Noelle on the average school day…

They ended up back the church. Susie didn’t exactly like it, but there also wasn’t anywhere much better to go, save from just squatting under the cover outside the mayor’s office – fat chance after that display from her – or just seeing if the rain somehow revealed new clues about the shelter. But she wasn’t the type to just wait around. She wanted to do something.

Or… At least have someone tell her something nice again now? Toriel was leading choir practice in the church. If Kris went and got her, then it could be like the other day… Maybe they wouldn’t be saving the world, but if they couldn’t make progress towards getting into the fountain inside the shelter, then, hey, making a nice warm pie could be a close second anyway.

It seemed more like the angel, or whatever was out there, was laughing at her and Kris when she actually got the church doors open, though. It started to return her fire a little bit, actually, to see darkness seeping out into the real world whilst there was a presumably an entire choir stuck in there, surely confused and in danger, and… Did that Knight really think it could just do whatever it wanted? Susie knew better. They’d beaten it before, technically, and she’d seen after that exactly how easy its expression would be to break.

It did occur to her that she and Kris could stake out the outside of the church, wait for the Knight to leave, because they would have to, right? Every living thing had to eat and drink and sleep, and nothing in a Dark World could actually sustain a Lightner. She was pretty sure she could beat them in the Light World too, because why else had they ran? It was all logical.

Except, of course, for the part where her and Kris were weird, and they didn’t do logical.

If Toriel and other innocent people were in there, then it was her and Kris’s duties as heroes to help them out, not just wait for the goddamn Knight. Susie didn’t like that she’d hesitated before entering this time, didn’t like what that said about where she stood on the ladder today, but she went in anyway, and that was probably what counted.

Rain and ungrateful town be damned, Susie was determined to make a difference.

Kris fell through the shattered glass of a piece of prophecy with her, and she forgot to account for the fact that whilst her arms where tough enough to brace the impact and still keep moving, Kris had just tried to chase down and face the Knight alone, and Kris was… Human. Sometimes a little more fragile.

She knelt by them, and noticed the bleeding, little shards embedded across their cheek and between armour plates. A small bit of blood dropped down their face like a tear. Susie panicked, because even in this musty old church Dark World, she had been able to smell Kris whilst they were close – sweet apple and cinnamon and everything that felt right – but…

Human blood smelt metallic. Like it would break her teeth to try, and that… This was Kris. That wasn’t right.

She did know her healing wasn’t that good. She knew she was a beginner, but if Kris needed her, then she initially chose to view it just the same way as standing up to Noelle’s mom for her. Sure, Susie didn’t like it when adults screamed and yelled at her, and sure, she wasn’t too good at dealing with that when it was just her, but for Noelle, what else was she supposed to do? Her healing was just okay, and she knew that, but for Kris, she needed it to suffice.

Then Ralsei came in, and she expected him to behave as normal – guide her way through this, because he cared, right? He had strange opinions about himself and other Darkners, but he would do anything for Lightners, so if Susie wanted to help Kris…

But he just stared right through her, chilled as the church’s stone walls in the rain, and asked her to move. He didn’t seem to care about what she had to say. He just… For Kris…

At least the healing was done properly, right? She had to reason as much to herself, because otherwise, it would just feel…

The fall down here had maybe been just as metaphorical as literal, she thought. Because with even Ralsei so tightly wound, and with her being as ineffective as ever… This wasn’t like the crash on the rollercoaster in Cyber City; she’d really fallen now. It sort of hit her when she caught the edge of Ralsei’s eye through the mist of his glasses, and even there, even though it was still present, his smile now just seemed changed.

She… understood what he’d been saying, before Tenna had interrupted. She understood the feeling of being obsolete, and needing to have purpose to be meaningful, because… Well, when had Susie ever really had purpose? She was pretty sure other people could do everything that she could better. She wasn’t gifted academically or socially, when they were always acting and sparing in the Dark World, her skill set wasn’t even that useful. She’d never been enough to stop the Knight, and she needed to just face it; she was ass at healing.

Even in the Light World, with Kris and Noelle… She’d stood up for Noelle, but could Kris have…? They’d been friends with Noelle for much longer than her.

This wasn’t her purpose, she was pretty sure Ralsei was saying, and in this situation, didn’t that make her obsolete? He wasn’t obsolete just for being a Darkner, because that was obviously still bullcrap, but she’d fallen far enough still to get that what he’d meant, really meant, was that people like her and him didn’t have places unless they could offer something to belong in them.

It was just that he was a hell of a lot better at the kinds of things that made him belong than her.

Kris wasn’t bleeding anymore. That was good. She’d got the message loud and clear that next time, it wasn’t worth her trying to stop something like that herself.

The old man started shattering prophecies like it was nothing as soon as he got ahead of them, and he didn’t exactly get injured for it because… Hah, that happened when you weren’t shattering them with your body, right? He just didn’t seem bothered by any of it – the prospect of all of their stories ending, and the damage that trying to refute that could do.

He knew something she didn’t, Susie supposed. But that kind of pissed her off. It wasn’t like with Kris or something where she knew they had more that they weren’t saying, but she also knew that kind of stuff was surely also just the sort of things that never needed to be said. But something sure as hell did need to be said here. Something was up with this Dark World – it felt wrong and uninviting, and it sort of made her note that yeah, sure the darkness had technically always been growing with every new fountain, but today… It was everywhere. All encompassing as the ocean, or the kind of smile that wanted you kept in and docile.

She just wasn’t sure what her kind of hero was supposed to do here. Kris led, and Kris sealed the fountains. Ralsei interpreted the prophecies, and Ralsei supported Kris. Susie couldn’t do any of that, not exactly, so…

It just seemed like the old man understood something about that, even if he wouldn’t speak a straight sentence about it. It was beginning to make her to miss the old days of the enjoyable Dark Worlds, and that just wasn’t right. She wanted to always be able to find something fulfilling right where she was, when she was at Kris and Ralsei’s side.

He was fun though, she could admit. Undeniably frustrating, when he walked slow, talked in riddles, and just generally got in the way of the group’s already falling apart rhythm, but… He made her laugh sometimes. That wasn’t hard to do, because what was a better way of dealing with your problems than laughing at them? But it was… kinda nice, all the same.

There had been a time – or, scratch that – there had been many times where she’d been confronted directly by a teacher about her scholastic performance. Wasn’t exactly surprising given that she didn’t really try most of the time. Class was a bore, and she sucked at it anyway. Honestly, the only reason she went was to not get expelled and sent to just… just move out again.

She didn’t care when people told her she was doing badly. Didn’t like it, sure, because who did? But like, if she hadn’t tried in the first place, how was that supposed to be a big deal? So what if she failed some fuckass essay if she hadn’t even bothered reading the book it was supposed to be about? It was a kind of… easy shield. And it was perpetuity. Not the kind she, uh, enjoyed necessarily, but it was easy to live in. Like never falling down the ladder, or never having to find the end of the path, because she’d never started moving from her one spot in the first place.

But saying that… She did remember a time it actually stung. There had been a book – honestly, she couldn’t remember it now, because she’d thrown the damn thing away and forgotten about it after everything – and she’d… enjoyed it. Dunno. She’d been pretty young, pretty small… pretty shy… and the book hadn't been too tough or anything. She didn’t know if there really had been that much hidden meaning behind it, but she’d thought it was awesome.

And that was unusual for the kind of crap she usually read in class! Like, wasn’t it practically a requirement that it be boring or something? But this had excitement, it had proper suspense, and it had the kind of people in it that Susie could actually understand. Weirdos probably, right? Anyway.

She’d read the stupid thing cover to cover, twice over, and when they were supposed to write something about it in class, hehe, she’d been ready to actually care. It all got sort of fuzzy now, when she tried to recall any of what she’d really been so desperate to grasp at and put on her page, but…

Eh, that didn’t really matter. She’d bombed the whole thing for ‘missing the point’ or some shit. For not getting enough of some checklist of techniques in, and for, in the teacher’s words, not hers, making the whole thing ‘practically unreadable’ along the way. Sheesh, yeah, it wasn’t like her spelling or handwriting had exactly been good back then, but…

It had hurt, getting that particular bad grade. The one she didn’t think she’d deserved. That book had meant something to her, and she was sure she had gotten something good out of it, but it just… It wasn’t right.

…She didn’t like to think much about that. Not that it was hard not to; she’d never been especially incentivised to give a crap about what she was reading or writing for class since. Clearly none of it was for her.

These days… Alphys was too scared of her to really call her out for much, she thought. She could turn in the most garbage essay possible, just straight up scribbles and doodles even, and she wouldn’t actually get in trouble or be dropped from the class because of it, because Alphys wouldn’t dare oppose her, and because hey, if she turned something in, that was apparently good enough to get some kind of passing grade. Somehow.

It was…

Honestly, the closest she’d got to thinking about it for a while had been with Noelle pressing about her and Kris’s project… But then the old man started probing at her about why she wasn’t trying to heal anymore, and like… Maybe that did get her digging around similar feelings. Just a little bit. Maybe it was similar, just, the whole concept.

But it was life or death here, right? Kris had collapsed trying to walk earlier, so she’d just embarrassed herself right in front of them and hadn’t even been able to do something to ease the pain of her best friend. That sucked. Really sucked. And Ralsei was just obviously better at it than her, so the message to just stay in her own lane… whatever that was exactly, somewhere like here… was clear.

The old man called her a coward for that.

He called her a coward for not wanting to make a fool of herself again, and that was what really brought back the memories of that stupid book project essay thing. She had been excited for that. Was that… Had that been the same feeling as she got about healing? Healing was cool because, hey, that was straight up magic she could do, and doing something which so obviously helped people really did make her feel like a hero. That project… Maybe it had also just made her feel like she could do something uniquely special and cool, taking the kind of reading she had out of what the entire class had had presented to them.

Susie was good at proving people wrong. That was always satisfying, whether it was a teacher, Noelle’s mom, or even just some strange old man. That was probably most of what got her riled up enough to figure she couldn’t mess up healing just some damn pricked finger, or whatever.

That was certainly what had her surprised when it was her healing blast that actually helped Jackenstein.

The old man was gone in a blink of an eye at that, prancing away long before the others had a chance to notice him, or she had a chance to explain. She hadn’t actually seen him leave, but she knew she wouldn’t have got to where she had without him, so he definitely had been there. Trying, once again, to… teach her something. Just to teach her at her level…

She stared at her palms, noting how at least fun it was to light them up in green sparkles. Just some practice, huh…? She began to wonder if avoiding a start really was the best way to perpetuate the eternity that she feared the ending of.

Kris and Ralsei were talking to Jackenstein. Susie shuffled back over the old man, leaning uneasily against his desk.

“You, uh… Thanks for back there.” she said.

He peered at her with beady eyes and an unreadable smile. “For what back where, miss?”

“Uh…” she wrung out her fists. “Y’know. With the healing? I, uh, I think that’s the first time I’ve actually been glad to have been goaded into doing something. Think it was the kinda push I needed.”

“Ya think?” He laughed boisterously. “Miss, I can’t help notin’ that I still don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I didn’t help you with some kinda healing mumbo-jumbo. If I did, I’d have asked ya to do something about my age! Gahahah!”

“That’s… not really how healing works, I’m pretty sure,” Susie returned, chuckling a little, mostly to herself.

“No? Shame. I’m not gettin’ any younger here!”

He made it sound like he was practically marching towards some end… But Susie knew what he was capable of, when he wasn’t just trying to be tricksy… If he wasn’t afraid of it, then she wouldn’t be either. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t be reaching it any time soon, anyway.

“I mean, hey, I’m just an amateur!” she smirked.

“And do you like it?” he asked. His grin was mindless – the proper look of a crazy old man. She thought she could see him watching from behind it, though. When… When had she got perceptive, huh?

“Yeah,” she said, staring once more at her hands, and imagining what she might some day be able to do with them if she actually… “I think I do. It’s… cool, right? A proper talent for a hero.”

If she could still do something cool like that, even if worse than Ralsei, that had to count for something, right? She’d always known he was wrong to call himself obsolete, so why should she accept it for herself?

Susie was… a work in progress. Yeah. That was what it really meant to enjoy an eternity.

When they got all of the pieces of that song to play, after the old man had screwed around with her just a little more, Kris played. The piano. Properly, again, this time.

At the hospital, it all really could have been a joke, and with how distant it had been at Noelle’s house – how clearly it hadn’t really been for her – she’d sort of been ready to brush off the idea of actually hearing them ever. She figured maybe they were just shy about it. Like, she hadn’t wanted to show off her healing, so maybe they had a similar kind of thing, and were just uncomfortable with the idea of having an audience. Their mom said they were good, and Noelle said that the good playing in her house was them, but Susie didn’t necessarily have to believe it.

But, really, they were good. She wondered why they didn’t play every day. She would, if she could. If she was actually a good fit for the piano, and she really put the work in, and…

They enjoyed it. She thought that part was really obvious, because when they got deep into the song, they started to sway, leaning into every note like their life depended on it, passion leaking out of each movement like juice spilling from a fresh apple as it hit the ground. Did it hurt them to play? They seemed to so obviously love it, but all the same, they shuddered along each note, and then when they stopped… When they turned, abrupt as the end of free fall, something in the corner of the eyes looked hollow.

She told them to play again some day. She wanted to hear, she knew Noelle wanted to hear, and she figured that if some part of Kris loved it, then they should continue. Susie would hate to think that she hadn’t said enough after this performance to have them find the courage to start.

Susie understood, when the old man, in all the get-up of a great warrior, the Hammer of Justice, asked her about what ending she wants. She’d lost to him. Several times, in fact. But then, she’d started to get that hang of things, and he’d started to talk about these books – chapters of a series kinda like the parts they’d seen of the prophecy itself, she supposed. That was when it started to make sense.

It sounded all well and good, but picking just one ending? Having to have the heroes’ quest even stop in the first place? She didn’t think that was the best way for it to go. If the heroes loved what they were doing, why stop? If the heroes could keep going despite all the dark and hardship… Hey, they were heroes for a reason, right?

“So… how do you think it all ends? No, how do you want it to end?” the old man asked, still bouncing around on the spot, grinning with a twinkle in his eyes like he knew something she didn’t.

She didn’t stop to think about it exactly, but she did take her time with the question, even if the answer was sort of obvious.

“An ending, huh…” she laughed. “If I could choose, I guess… I wouldn’t have an ending! It’s just better if stuff just… goes on forever, right?”

If the heroes never stopped adventuring, never said goodbye, never fell off the ladder due to doubt or regret or the feeling of being purposeless. That would be the perfect outcome, wouldn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t even an actual outcome at all, and that was what made it special. It sort of just… was.

The final thing the old man told her in battle was about hope. Heh… She didn’t know about her being the one to burn with it, but she figured something was lining the path along where she must have come so far, and with Kris and Ralsei by her side, she really did believe someone amongst them had to have it. About the future. It was nice to dream of an ideal one, wasn’t it?

She’d begun something, and… she didn’t think it was that weird to not want it to end, even if it did kinda suck along the way.

It was like the old man said after she beat him, right? Stories were meant to be retold. The path was meant to be maybe a little cyclical, because she was meant to encounter some of the same beats along the way. Love them again, enjoy them again, feel them again. The hardship was new, but heh…

“What Dragon Blazers character am I?”

“Gahahaha, right!” The old man hobbled over and out of the room. “You are… the Dragon.”

Susie smiled. Exactly. Hell yeah she was.

“It’s just… sometimes, knowing things… It hurts.”

Lightning had struck behind them, just before this. Some kind of storm was weathering, and Susie couldn’t tell if this was just what the rain outside the Dark World had turned to, or if this was a manifestation of her, and her feelings, in her Dark World. It had been just a single flash, a burst of light in an otherwise dreary sort of dark gloom that hung over them, clinging to the walls in the air, even in front the church’s ornate glass windows.

Kris was behind them, quiet in the shadows. She wasn’t sure if they were reacting to any of this.

Ralsei was… The moment the lightning had struck, she’d seen his expression clearly, and from the bright white of his fur, it was burned into her eyes so that she saw it after every blink. If she tried hard enough, she could easily line it up with his current one, where he had collapsed back on the damp floor in front of her.

He’d flinched, at first, but now his head was in his hands, and he was sobbing. Susie didn’t… She hadn’t… She didn’t like it when people cried. She didn’t like actually having dealt the hit that caused it even more. He was trembling, anticipating another lightning strike that Susie wasn’t sure was going to hit, and his words were muffled. Slightly hard to make out.

At first, even against her fiercest, he had tried to smile still. It hadn’t felt sincere. And now? Now…

Susie understood. Sometimes… Sometimes there were reasons people didn’t tell you things. She hated, hated it when it was relevant to her, and people around her were just content to basically just fucking gossip, but sometimes… it was different.

It didn’t feel good, knowing that the people who gave her value and taught her what it was actually like to have friends were supposed to just be objects. That for as real as she knew they were, the rules of the world dictated that they’d never be able to follow her beyond the fountain. Not to the festival, not to Kris’s house after a long day, not to school to do her homework for her, or even just continue to teach her, like they…

…

It hurt, knowing that for all the old man hadn’t exactly been a Darkner, there still wasn’t a way for him to exist in the Light World. It hurt knowing that the first person to teach her in a way she understood was dead. And apparently her memories of him the first Dark World just weren’t enough to bring him back.

It felt bad, to hear for that as strongly as she felt about all that she did, that just wasn’t enough. That hope, that belief, that sense of justice she’d come to recognise because of the old man, those were apparently just not the kinds of feelings that could bring him back, because she had never… She’d never known him in life. Never read Gerson Boom’s ‘Hammer of Justice’, because she’d not bothered trying with books since that stupid essay assignment gone wrong at school.

And hell, it hurt knowing that Ralsei had known all of that all along, and hadn’t been able to share it. It was a betrayal to both of them, somehow.

She was hurt, he was hurt, and now he was cowering away from her. But she was… She was supposed to be a hero. Knowing that sort of made the knife twist in further.

Susie knew she wasn’t smart or knowledgeable in the same way that Ralsei was, so she knew that she wasn’t going to be able understand his hurt exactly… But she got pieces of it anyway. She knew the prophecy could hurt already, because, yeah, she desperately wanted to know if it would predict her going somewhere, being someone, truly great, but it was also a story, and most stories… They were supposed to end. This one certainly did. That knowledge hurt enough as was.

She didn’t want some horrible future that hurt Ralsei to think about, that tied his mouth shut with invisible seams that had his lips strung up into a smile to mask away the bad thoughts. The knowledge that hurt. That made her really not know what to make of the stricken expression he had on now. Was this really the push he needed to drop the smile? Was that a push he needed at all?

“And if anyone’s going to hurt…” The windows lit up behind them again, as something caught in Susie’s throat. “Let it… just be me, okay?”

But she was the one who… The one with the tough arms to take the fall through broken glass shards that had apparently been digging into Ralsei all along. She was the one strong enough to tough it all out, because she’d been doing so in the Light World for years. And she was the one who really owed them, Kris and Ralsei…

Susie longed for the smell of sweet cinnamon, the easy smell of warm, flakey pie that would tell her everything was okay. She had what it took to face everything ahead, bear the brunt of it where she needed to, if she could just be told that.

He started sobbing again, when he noticed her discomfort. It smelt like the ocean.

…She couldn’t make a dent in that, even if she tried. Who would be able to drink the ocean?

Carefully, she knelt beside him on the floor. He offered her a watered-down, tearful smile, and told her he’d do what ever she needed him to. Offered her… a chance to go back. To before it started, when everything had been just a fun adventure – an escape to another world where not only did she belong, but she was a hero. He held up the supposed chance to immerse herself once again in diner food and warm hot chocolate and cinnamon pie and apple shampoo and everything that tasted like home.

They were in the ladder rungs together, she thought. Each only hanging on now because the other wanted to offer to give them a boost, knowing the whole thing could go tumbling back down behind them. But… Susie didn’t want to just go back to the start. She didn’t want to climb so high she reached right where she’d began any more than she wanted to fall there. Eternity wasn’t about cycling over and over to the beginning; it was about choosing to deny the ending.

She pulled him up to the same rung as her, then slid them both back down to the same rung that he’d been on. Told him… what he wanted from her, and then what she needed to add to. That they had started this, this feeling, this adventure, this story, together, and they were going to stay doing it together. If he needed to be the one to keep looking ahead… Susie didn’t want to anyway. She didn’t want to hear about an ending.

With her hand in his heads she noticed him crying again. It took her a little off-guard, because he did have that proper cosy, homely smile back on now, crinkling just like Kris’s often did, and yet tears were still leaking out of him. They stained her hands and tasted like rain.

Then he laughed with her, dried his eyes, and told her he was glad they were friends.

…She was too. More than she knew how to express. She’d start whatever she needed to, if it was for Kris and Ralsei.

Susie took it first, when Kris’s defence wore thin against the Knight’s latest onslaught. She could tell they wouldn’t be able to take anymore, but… She could. She always could.

Kris continued to light the way, even as Ralsei made good on his word, and stepped in so that she didn’t have to.

The Knight’s expression, especially their laugh, was as cold as ever.

She couldn’t tell if it was glaring or grinning when it looked at her and the others, and by this point, she didn’t care, either. They laughed at the idea that she and Kris could beat them in the Light World, and made the air stink of decaying leaves. Of mud, and damp bark – the scent of winter arriving – rounded out with a sharp hint of a chemical she couldn’t recognise, and faintly, peppermint.

Why should she even care about what they thought? She’d already managed the impossible against them, all of them together had, and the black shard in Kris’s pocket was proof of that. Susie wondered how satisfying it would be to watch them wrench off its armour, if that was what was coating its body like oil, clinging all around it like shadow, with that very shard from its own weapon.

None of them got to witness that, of course. The Knight, as ever, as ordained by the prophecy even, moved first, and a single shard missing from their blade didn’t seem to hinder their ability to wield it.

The ground opened up before them to the chimes of Ralsei’s screams, and Susie had seen dark fountains be sealed before – more than that, seen them opened when she’d done it herself – but to create one already within a Dark World… To have the determination to summon yet more darkness in a world already crated from what was beyond that…

At first, it really did seem as though there was no way for the church to grow darker. At first, a brilliant blue plume of light erupted upwards, gushing out effortlessly around the Knight like a lantern’s flame, and searing all of their eyes like a supernova. At first, Susie really couldn’t tell what she was looking at, because she’d seen dark fountains before, and this wasn’t it.

But then it solidified. Hardened into some crumbly mixture like a pastry’s crust, but it oozed a putrid smell of dust and decay and viscous bleach that burned to have on her skin in the air. She’d… Usually she’d eat just about anything, just about everything that she could actually get her hands on, but this just seemed like it would make her gag. Susie clutched at her throat, wondering if the remnants of the scene before her were any more safe to inhale than they were to observe.

Susie wasn’t afraid of the dark. Because, hey, for all her life, she’d been treated like she was the horrible thing lurking inside of it, and now, she was friends with what was actually there. But this was something else. Not dark in the sense of a lack of light, but dark in the sense of distortions – of a lack of reality, and the kind of fear that was diametrically opposed to the kind of fear and hurt Ralsei had been facing.

Everyone feared what they couldn’t know. The dark, the ocean, the path after something new had begun.

Well, Susie thought, this seemed like it was the unknown itself.

They climbed together, Kris’s hand in her own to lift up each other to the top, and Ralsei’s encouraging presence following them both the entire way. And then, when they had no choice, they fought together. First the spawn, seeds of what was to come, and then…

A titan was not an adversary they were supposed to win against. Obviously. Susie didn’t need a prophecy to know that, because it found them at the top of the tower with effortless grace, and the form it revealed was equally and immeasurably beautiful and horrifying. She didn’t know how to describe it, because really, how could you describe that which you didn’t know?

It was like the Knight, the night before though. They clearly weren’t supposed to have been able to win that encounter either, but Susie would stand by the fact that they had.

She once again had Kris and Ralsei by her side now, and with the light that she knew could come out of Kris, the kind that had illuminated their way here, and the kind that she’d seen firsthand seal fountains, still with her, she wasn’t about to give up. The old man had told her never to.

Susie clutched the Justice Axe’s handle, and decided that today, the bell was tolling for the continuation of the present into the future, insatiable representation of darkness be damned.

When they needed him most, the old man reappeared, his memory once again alive in this second Dark World within the church, and reminded Kris and Ralsei of exactly what he’d already taught her. Don’t give up. They couldn’t now, not when they’d seen the damn thing with its defences down, and not when they knew that they could get through to do actual damage to it.

Once those shields were once again down, Susie decided she knew what to do. Ralsei had gotten them this far in the encounter, and now it was her turn to use what she knew. Kris could seal dark fountains, huh?

She barely even had to ask if they’d be okay with trusting her. This was Kris. She’d never trusted anyone more herself, and they… They understood. They were also a weirdo. Susie picked them up, and leapt forward, throwing them both into the darkness that burned ahead.

For a moment, there was nothing to see. She knew she’d survived, because she could smell apples, sweet apples, crispy apples, Kris’s kind of apples, and that meant both her and Kris were still out there. She just… She couldn’t move towards them. She didn’t know how. The inner workings of the titan were like a tar pit, oozing and writhing and slithering all around her. There was no option for free movement. Just…

Just falling.

She pushed closer towards where she thought Kris had to be anyway, choking on empty air as she went. They were just there; she knew it.

Something lit up space between them, when they spiralled close enough, something shining like a small sugar-crystal star. It was heart-shaped, and in a way… it felt distantly familiar.

Everything withered away around them in its presence, and Susie woke up at the base of where the tower had once been, coughing. Kris was beside her, but the strange glowing object absent. It seemed like it had come from them, but…

She startled in realisation. That had been their soul? That had been… them? Susie didn’t press. It seemed to personal, and… She still didn’t need that kind of sincerity from Kris, not from soul-deep.

Susie ran ahead, hoping to catch the old man before he disappeared again – hoping to thank him properly, this time.

Even as they surrounded her, she hadn’t been trying to read the prophecies that were still lining the walls, tapestries woven from thorns and weeds. She didn’t want to look, didn’t want to read, didn’t want to interpret, but before she knew it, she turned to look for the old man, but he wasn’t there to shatter and dispel the final terrible future this time, and–

And it was–

It didn’t end when she cradled Ralsei’s face in her hands, staining them both with the remnants of what she supposed had been a poor imitation of the old man’s genuine belief in an undecided future.

Susie had blood on her hands. It didn’t smell like Kris’s. It was sort of like her own shampoo, because she couldn’t actually smell it at all – just see it, staining Ralsei’s cheeks like tears, clear as day. He quivered under the touch, both seeming to lean into it, and freeze away from the barest idea of it. Once again, Kris stood just a little back, watching, she supposed, with eyes neither of them could see.

This wasn’t an ending, because Susie didn’t– wouldn’t believe in endings. Not stupid ones like the prophecy had, and certainly not one that would be accepting this entire situation with Ralsei smiling sweet cinnamon through the tears in her grip as just some decadent fall.

The path would keep going. If it looped and looped and looped, then that was still eternity, right? That was still the dream where everything continued exactly as it was, because the Lord of the Hammer had never been finished by the old man, and Susie refused to let the prophecy be finished by her or Ralsei. Or Kris.

She hoped Ralsei didn’t see stagnation in her eyes, as all she could think to do was laugh.

Susie couldn’t just smile, like him or Kris, or any one up there with any semblance of a connection to that family. She had all the necessary facial muscles to, but she just… couldn’t. She wasn’t sweet or warm or flakey at the edges. Her exterior was built to be tough from everything she’d been through to get here – to start, and to not let it end. So she couldn’t smile, but that would… That would give in to accepting that reassurance, like the kind that she’d once craved so badly to have had her crying on a graveyard bench alone, was needed.

Why wouldn’t she laugh? Why wouldn’t she laugh, when that future– When the idea of a future that held an ending – one she liked or not – was ridiculous, and when she didn’t have any semblance of a nice smile to offer instead.

Her knuckles stung, still embedded with small shards of glass. She hoped… She hoped the pain from that was the kind that she could spare Ralsei from, by laughing off and shouldering and ignoring whatever the fuck that idea of an ending was supposed to be. Or at least… She’d spared Kris, right? From… the knowledge that hurt… They had enough of that already, she thought, if Tenna, and the way he spoke about their family, was anything to go by.

Susie laughed at that too. After everything… After fighting a titan and winning, the battle scars she was walking out with were self-inflicted? Were just from punching some glass?

She caught Ralsei’s eye, running off further ahead. He looked at her back, and seemed to tell her, with all the sincerity of a promise, that there was something she’d missed.

Just one more thing to laugh at and refute, right?

She could smell petrichor, back in the Light World. The sky was dark, with the sun long having set, but the rain had stopped. The remaining evidence of it were just the puddles across the ground, the vague mist covering the town, and of course, the smell.

It was a nice scent – everyone said that. But it made Susie shiver. It felt more like an omen than a reward. In her experience, it often accompanied the kind of rain that never exactly just stopped.

Kris took them to the lake anyway. Maybe they weren’t scared by the prospect of getting little damp, or maybe they just really didn’t want to go home. Susie could understand that… But they hadn’t found Toriel anywhere in the Dark World, so she must have never been in the church at all. So she was back at home, right? She was probably worried sick…

Susie made no move to leave the place by the lake.

She could hear something out there, she thought. Hometown was quiet because of the time of night, and even Kris’s weird lake friend was totally absent, so it wasn’t… It wasn’t from someone. But there was something out there, and if she twisted her head the right way, it sounded almost like a song. Like leftover raindrops plinking down melodically onto a piano, and…

Periodically, Kris kept turning to look at her. She was trying as best she could to not think about that too deeply as she was to not think about… That prophecy wasn’t going to happen. It was ridiculous. She bit back another laugh at the thought, not wanting to be reminded of the feeling of something like that bubbling up and out of her throat as a last resort yet at all.

Quietly, she asked Kris if she had something on her face, instead. They looked gloomy as ever, and didn’t respond in any way that made much particular sense.

But they started to whine when she stood to leave – started to quietly howl, even. They looked at her with human eyes behind thick curtains of human hair, all on a distinctly human face, but… Susie had known other humans before, at a time before Hometown… They hadn’t been quite like Kris, even in the kinds of actions they could take, and the kinds of faces they could make. Maybe it showed that they had been raised by monsters. Or maybe… Susie liked the idea that it was because they were like her more. Because they were just weird.

They didn’t seem to want to leave. Didn’t want to just go home… Susie sort of wished she could take them somewhere nicer, and she sort of wished there was a way for them to just continue already from where they’d been at, but… Letting tomorrow come wasn’t an ending, and she had plans, right? With Noelle. Noelle clearly needed her, but Kris? They had their mom at home… Toriel would know how to smile and make it all better for them too, Susie thought.

Kris liked cinnamon. Kris liked warm pie… According to Tenna’s quiz, it was their favourite food. They had a mother that cared and would be worried now, and– Susie supposed… It was her responsibility to bring Kris home now. Even if neither of them liked it.

She wanted to pull them in, smell apple instead of petrichor, taste that stupid shampoo again, fresh straight from their hair this time, and remember what home felt like after a long day of being tugged further and further away from what she had been associating with that. She wanted them to play piano for her again, serenade her like they’d used to for Noelle, and drown out whatever sound was playing from across the water, and implicitly tell her it was okay for her to prefer being around them and their family and their smile to whatever would be left for her where she actually lived. She just wanted to stay with them, for just a bit longer, and for however long she was allowed to.

The two of them spent the rest of the walk to Kris’s house in silence.

Toriel’s smile wasn’t warm cinnamon and pie.

It was too wide, too bright, oozing a harsh, bitter fruit smell that Susie could pick up on even from the doorway. Her eyes were splayed into an uncanny sort of overt happiness that was so contradictory to what Susie could recognise as the woman who had taken her from old man’s bench in the graveyard to the diner to make sure she knew everything was going to be okay.

Nothing seemed okay now. They’d gone through all of that, everything in the church with tears and darkness and a pervasive taste of the end of the world, but Toriel was just at home, not worried, or frantic, or ready to tell them it had been all worth it. Obnoxious music blared from a record player on that chair… The chair that was supposed to be named after Toriel, and she was just stood there, beaming unnervingly whilst she swayed in the spot next to that stupid skeleton guy from the convenience store.

Kris bowed their head in shame, clearly unwilling to spend any longer looking at what had apparently been waiting for them in the living room all evening. Susie had seen it all before. The noise, the smiles, the drink on the breath that was so, so easy to pick out when you knew what it was, the total invasion of your space and privacy and life. Had Kris…? Had they seen… Was this normal for them too?

Neither of the adults even noticed them at first. That was achingly familiar, and… God, Susie couldn’t do this. She couldn’t just sneak in past two people drunk off of their asses at three in the morning, just to, what? Sleep on the floor by Kris’s bed, kept up all night by dumb laughter and jokes and music? She could get enough of that at home, thanks.

She just… Toriel had always been so kind. So truly motherly, in a way that had made her so envious of Kris for so long, and in a way that had gotten her hoping for the better now. She’d thought that if she couldn’t go home, then Toriel was so nice, and her and Kris were getting so close… It was supposed to be easy. Just staying over here, whilst she and Kris saved the world together.

Susie felt sick.

This was… really the woman who had first turned her life around? She couldn’t even get Susie’s name right, like this. In the diner, she’d told Susie she mattered, and that she’d make friends, but now here Susie was with a friend, with her own child as friend, for fuck’s sake, but it seemed like she couldn’t give less of a shit! Kris had been gone all afternoon! That… That really hadn’t freaked her out? She cancelled choir practice because of the rain she’d locked Kris out in, and she’d just… left.

It didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem like Toriel. Susie supposed that was just one more illusion about the future shattered, this evening.

She clenched the hand she’d hurt earlier. It had long since been healed, because, well, why wouldn’t she have tried out her new, improved healing, right? So it wasn’t bleeding anymore, but why did that matter, when she could still imagine the prophecy’s shards embedding in between each knuckle so clearly? And… why was Toriel reminding her of that?

Toriel was supposed to be safe, to be the outer walls of home! Her smile was the outer crust of the pie protecting Kris’s sweet apple filling, and she’d been the only one before the old man to even tell Susie that she had a path ahead of her actually worth starting – the first one to implant the idea that her current loop of present was a somewhat self-imposed stagnation.

The final knife was telling her to sleep in Kris’s brother’s bed. Susie had… Susie had never met the guy, but that wasn’t the problem. She didn’t need to have met him to notice how wildly uncomfortable that would make Kris, and if Kris didn’t want her there… Then no one in this situation did.

She didn’t want to leave Kris here, obviously not… But she had nowhere better to take them. At least they’d still have a nice roof over their head here, and a bed that was theirs to sleep in, and… Things would be better in the morning, right? That had always been what Susie had liked to tell herself. And Toriel… She’d been so perfect before. At least some of that had to be real.

Susie wanted to go home, but she didn’t have a good home to go back to, tonight. She’d just…

People needed her tomorrow. She’d figure something out.

Kris bowed their head as she left, and she found herself wishing, yearning to have had a final glimpse at something so distinctly, hopefully Kris that it’d have been some consolation. Just a true glimpse of their eyes, waft of the scent of their shampoo, cute little crooked apple smile, anything. Did no one have that left to offer her?

Just down the path from Kris’s house, it started to rain again. Let it, she thought, bitterly.

She’d hung around the house itself for as long as she could, just to check if the lights in the front window would go out, to see if the music would stop, and to try and maybe wait it out for Kris, in case now was when they’d really need her most. None of these things happened. She thought she might have seen Kris up in their window – or perhaps just the silhouette of them, anyway – for a moment, but nothing came of that.

It all brought her back to her empty thoughts. The rain, she didn’t mind. So what if it soaked her through? Really, so what? She just… After that Dark World, after coating herself in whatever darkness had come from that titan, wouldn’t it be for the best if that was all washed off? Wouldn’t it be for the best if the blood was washed off properly from her hand? Even if it was only her own…

The prophecy… It sort of felt like that was what still on her hand, even if only in small remnant form. She wasn’t sure if she could get rid of it, even in a rain like this, because… Well, all the incredible feats she’d done so far, she done them with her friends with her. Tonight, she was alone,and facing the end alone… Wasn’t that the scariest thought of all?

Scarier than titans or misplaced sincerity or demons in the dark, because… Wasn’t it… happening right now…?

“…We… aren’t going to let that happen…” she told herself, but… “…right?”

No one was around to tell her no. That was the scariest part. She could laugh off many things, because when she had people to back her up, people that she needed to reassure and bolster, it was so easy; it was just reflexive. But now… If she laughed now, no one was around to hear. It was just her, the rain, and the distant sounds and lights still coming from Kris’s house.

She let the rain slick her hair down over her eyes, and slowly, eventually, began to trudge away. She wasn’t sure where exactly she was going. She couldn’t– Well, she could, but she really didn’t want to go back her house. She didn’t want an empty room to lie awake in all night. She didn’t want to have an entrance to have to sneak through and explain herself in. And, fuck, she didn’t want an empty windowsill to lean on, staring out at the rain and wondering how she’d managed to berate Ralsei for having a barren room when hers was hardly any better.

Was he doing much better than her in general – Ralsei? He’d been in such a state when she left, tears in his eyes, and blood on his cheeks… Nothing had ended with that, and she expected to see him right away again tomorrow, wherever some new dark fountain popped up.

And she was expecting one to pop up. That Knight… It was just as senseless as it was shameless. She wished she had actually information on them. Wished she could… actually do something about anything right now.

Susie stopped at the gate to Noelle’s house.

Obviously she hadn’t gotten very far, and really, she wasn’t… exactly sure why she’d stopped already. She knew what was beyond that stupid gate now, and frankly, after everything… Trying to get in there once again, to search, to help Noelle, to just see Noelle, anything… It was just going to make things worse.

She wiped the rain off of the middle bar of the gate anyway, and imagined it actually being open for her. Imagined a world were Noelle’s mom wasn’t actually a humongous bitch, and she and Kris could both cosy up by the fireplace with Noelle. They’d have hot chocolate and gingerbread and toffee-apple popcorn, and they could actually stay up watching movies all night. Getting up for the festival tomorrow wouldn’t matter, because they were all going together, and…

“I’m being stupid,” she muttered. The fight to have Noelle with her tomorrow probably wasn’t even over yet. There was Berdly still to worry about, sort of, but then… How was she supposed to authentically stand up to Noelle’s mom again after she’d run away from Toriel? “I wanna make you happy. You and Kris. Play that guitar again for you, search around for that stupid mouse, or whatever it was…”

No one was around to answer. She knew that. She was just… She was just feeling so…

“Is there going to be a ferris wheel?” she asked, to no one in particular. “Are we going to… y’know… ride one properly, this time?”

Was she even going to get to do anything at the festival, or was it all going to get interrupted, anyway? A couple of days ago, she wouldn’t have minded that at all. The festival was supposed to be just some stupid thing she didn’t care about, because even just a couple of days ago, she’d thought there was no way anyone would like her nearly enough to want to go with her… But then Kris and Noelle…

Kris had said they’d want to with her most of all. Unprompted. And Noelle had been about to ask earlier, on the couch. Susie hadn’t acknowledged it then, but… she knew.

She just wasn’t so sure actually caring about it now was such a good thing. It was raining, after all; nothing was going to be perfect.

After the last few days, Susie did want to go now. She wanted a world where the problems of tomorrow weren’t whether Officer Undyne was going to be okay in the shelter, whether Toriel would even notice that she too was surely still in danger, whether the fountain that would next spring up would lead to… the prophecy’s…

She wanted a world where tomorrow would hold the festival, all shiny and new to her, where she could show up in Noelle’s peppermint lip balm and screw around with whatever snack table there would have to be there with Kris. She wanted a world where there would be the Dark World and Ralsei still waiting for her to help out, but it would not all be a tomorrow which would require her to restart, to reset, to end her current progress prematurely just to be able to go back to the good times.

It felt like too much to ask for, because even when she wasn’t enjoying it, she couldn’t just stop playing, but…

In the space between Kris and Noelle’s houses, in the rain, Susie forced herself to smile. Forced her muscles to move in a way she knew they could, but also how they were never supposed to. She pictured, smelt, tasted, toasty warm gingerbread and spiced orange, noting how strange the smile felt. And she imagined holding an apple in her hand, bite-sized chunk missing with seeds stuck between her teeth, and held back a laugh at how that vision made the expression go crooked at the edges.

None of it was quite right, because it was coming from her, but.. Wasn’t it still slightly warm against the rain anyway? Wasn’t it still vaguely familiar? Wasn’t it exactly what she wanted someone to offer her?

She couldn’t see her own reflection; she wasn’t by the lake with Kris anymore.