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It was midafternoon, hazy sunbeams pouring half-heartedly through the school windows, when Kris raised their hand. Susie, having been informed of a “surprise” coming later on in the day, had only dozed a little so as to probably maybe be alert enough to see it coming. It’s meant to go like this: At some point Kris asks Alphys to go to the nurse, and Susie volunteers to walk them there. From thereon, Kris would take her to whatever ominous, but probably really cool, surprise they had up their sleeve. Susie hoped it was a prank. Then she could justify punching them, or biting them a little, or whatever other retribution would come to her in the wake of the moment of impact.
Instead, Alphys just had to interrupt the two of them walking out, her face scrunched in trepidatious indignation.
“Umm, Kris? Could I ask… what exactly is the issue? Like- um, what I mean by that is just, you know you’ve gone to the nurse every week this month, but- well, we don’t. Have a nurse? Or a nurse’s office?”
They took a moment to think, and then muttered, “I’ve gotta go to the hospital.” That’s it. Impassive, they turned and left. Susie covered her snout to stifle her incredibly obvious snickering until the moment she stepped out of the classroom, the laughter exploding from her in a raucous shudder before the door had even closed behind her. They were free.
Susie widened her pace some to close the ground Kris had already gained on her, wrapping her arm around their shoulders when she reached them. She leaned just enough to unbalance them both, course-correcting just before they fell into each other completely. Susie tended to forget sometimes how little weight their scrawny ass could take. She still was undecided on whether they somehow gained endurance in the dark world, or they were simply holding out on her in the light one. Knowing that weirdo, it could be either.
Kris led them, of course, over to the spot at the lake. Susie snorted, “Why do you always come here of all places?” It seemed silly to her to like a lake so much. What do they even do here, other than just look at the murky water? What’s the point?
But instead of a typical Kris shrug or short cryptic answer, they spin around to face her, smirking subtly. And that’s how Susie knows that this is gonna be good, because if they don’t smile like that unless they’ve hit the jackpot. Or, rarely, at her – in those moments where she laughs so hard she can’t breathe, or does something outrageously dumb or out-of-pocket, or steals the entire pie for them to share during a sleep-over.
Anyway, they don’t look that way often.
She brightened up instinctually in turn. “What? What is it, dude?” She said as they rummaged through the pockets of their cargo pants. They pulled out a mint tin and popped it open, twisting it around to display its contents. Inside were foul-smelling little green leaves. Susie looked at the leaves. She looked at Kris, who was still smiling.
“Your surprise is. Leaves?”
Kris lost their smile. They tilted their head just a slightest bit (like a dog, a little). “You don’t know weed?” They asked, nonsensically.
Susie scrunches her snout up. “Weeds? Like in the ground? Huh?” Now that she was thinking about it, she smelled that smell on them all the time, mixing with their apple shampoo and teen sweat into a strange, noxious, incredibly Kris scent. It was one of her favorites.
They stared at her through their sheet of hair for a moment. Then they turned and sat on the shore, pulling a plain metal pipe and some circular contraption with a wheel to turn, both jammed in a ziplock bag, out of another pocket. “Spice grinder,” they said as they picked up the contraption and opened it, carefully placing leaves inside with their teeny piano hands. Susie plopped down next to them.
It felt very quiet around them all of a sudden, Susie thought, and the sound of the grinder was very loud. She felt a little thrill run down her back, although she couldn’t quite pin down what caused it. The world all just felt very intense for a second, all focused around Kris as they opened the other end of the grinder to pour into the pipe.
They finished packing the leaves down with the end of a pencil and pulled out a cheap little lighter, except the metal band that makes it hard to properly light was removed. They brought a flame over to the pipe, tilting it so as to not burn their fingers, and breathed in slowly. They breathed out just as slowly, turning their head to look at her. This sent smoke blowing into Susie’s face; she retaliated first by trying to wave the smoke back toward Kris, then when that didn’t work, by smacking them in the back hard. They laughed, handed the pipe over to her. She took it with clumsy, too-big fingers – claws, really – and oriented it toward her mouth. “So- so like,” she started as Kris shuffled over to her on their knees. “Like this, and then just, breathe in? How much? When do I know to stop?”
They shook their head a second before they answered, like they almost forgot the question required an actual vocal response. “Into your belly. Stop when it burns.”
“Okay so not any different than cigs. Okay.” Susie was still nervous. Kris still hadn’t actually fucking explained what this shit was yet, and she hated when people didn’t tell her shit expecting her not to find out. She always found out.
But, this was Kris. They wouldn’t try to hurt her, just maybe scare or tease her a little (and then she’d come back twice as hard). And besides! She smells it on them a ton, so they have to be smoking it regularly too. So it’s fine. She trusted them.
That didn’t stop the paranoid little part of her from slamming against the walls of her head, making itself infuriatingly, unignorably known. She wasn’t even quite sure why it was being so loud. It wasn’t as though Susie particularly cared if she got hurt, she got hurt for fun all the time. Moreover, in watching the process of Kris taking a hit, she’d eventually surmised that the weird leaves in the mint tin were drugs – which she’d vaguely heard about and knew were Cool and Adult and made you hallucinate, which sounded awesome. But as doing drugs sounded, once again, awesome, Susie’s heart shouldn’t be pounding like this right now. Not this… jittery. Like she kind of wanted to run.
Nerves and excitement and a new kind of intimacy boiled up in her as Kris said, “Suck when I light it,” and flicked the lighter on once more. They tugged her hand down to lower the angle of the pipe and lit it, so under the pressure of looking cool, Susie began sucking as long and as hard as she could. They were so close like this: knees knocked together, Kris’ breath against Susie’s fingers as their eyes flicked to her own – for a split second it felt like time had frozen entirely – and back to the bowl once more.
They took the lighter away once they realized she wasn’t stopping, but the damage was done. When Susie finally stopped, she released all of the rancid, burning smoke in a massive coughing fit, one that she couldn’t seem to stop no matter how much Kris laughed at her. She was going to meet the guy who invented coughing one day and crush him. Over and over in a splatter of gore and guts and brains on the walls and-
Kris took the pipe from her and breathed in smoothly, like they barely felt the smoke at all, and sighed it all out again. They fell into a pattern: Kris would take four or five or six hits, and Susie took one, having to let her lungs recover every time. She really didn’t know how they did it. They looked so serene though, after a few rounds of this. Their face was technically just as expressionless as it always was, but this was the softer, calmer, less troubled version she’d occasionally discover after extra long bathroom breaks or walks in the forest. It was nice, seeing them look like that. Even if the way the white part of their eyes went pink and lidded was kind of creepy.
Susie, for her part, couldn’t stop looking at everything around her. There was so much to see and point out and talk about in this golden, hazy dreamworld. This time bubble world. She had an endless stream of thoughts, about how Dragon Blazers 2 doesn’t really make sense without the first game but she’s too stubborn to play it now, how she could absolutely murder a couple dozen ham sandwiches right now, how Ralsei would be so funny smoking like this, don’tchya think Kris? And they just nodded along, looking out at the lake. This was better than hallucinating. This was certainly better than cigs. This was cotton-stuffed yet somehow impenetrable. Susie never wanted to go home.
After a certain point, Kris started putting away their equipment back into the ziplocks, shoving them into their myriad pockets that Susie would never look at the same way again. All this time, they were hiding drugs in there! They’re so fucking cool.
It was probably about time for school to get out by now – Susie couldn’t be sure, it felt like time stretched out like taffy, like every minute should have been ten – and as such, time for Kris to wander home before Toriel worried too badly, Susie in tow. She stayed over as often as she could get away with, which was quite often given the state she’d most likely find her mother in at her apartment.
At the apartment. Somewhere along the way, Susie realized, “home” became Kris’ house. When did that happen?
She tried to chase the thought, but it’s already fluttering away from her, transient and immaterial. The next thing she knew, Kris had their scuffed little hand out in front of her, so as to attempt to pull her up.
“Let’s go,” was all they said.
She took it.