Chapter Text
The Dreemurrs aren’t Tenna’s first family.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. New homeowners that they were, scraping by on a hope and a dream and two meagre government salaries (let alone mat leave; Toriel would complain about this inequality often, not for herself she would say, but for the world at large), there was no way that they were about to spend needlessly on a bit of entertainment. The only frivolity they allowed themselves was a tchotchke here, some yarn bought on wholesale to keep idle paws busy there, beers for Asgore and Rudy’s regular weekends spent reminiscing tucked away in the fridge.
No, that wasn’t Tenna’s first home. His first home had been a mausoleum of technology, his nervous owner with her piping voice a collector of sorts. She had a different screen for her daily viewing pleasure, already more advanced than him, using him only if she wanted to have several screens going at a time. Or if, on some lucky occasion, she wanted to use the specific charms of a family-sized CRT for one of her myriad obsessions instead of the smaller CRT she had propped up on a shelf. He was kept meticulously maintained, constantly dusted, wires beautifully organized, a claw readily emptying his crevices of grime, but he may as well have been dead.
For all intents and purposes, he had been dead. He hadn’t lived through it, not really; once life sprang into him, it’s as though he had simply been born with the memories of a past life having taken root somewhere in that noggin of his. No, his life hadn’t truly begun until long after his previous owner had graciously gifted him to the Dreemurrs (call it a, heh, late baby shower present, all right? Sorry I couldn’t make it, I didn’t… uh… want to.), after he was gently set upon his place of honour right in the heart of their home, the last thing they saw when they left and the first thing they saw upon their return. Though he was without heart, without emotion, still no more than a dormant creature waiting for its purpose, he looks back upon those days with fondness, Toriel allowing the constant prattle of the television on to keep her company as she rocked little Asriel in her arms, Asgore listening to the morning news as he shoveled his customary homemade breakfast into his waiting maw, the Holidays coming by for playdates and board game nights and evenings spent vacillating between discussing how very lucky they were to have such a beatific life and how damn exhausting being a new parent was. It was a warm, busy life, something he remembers as though covered in a thick layer of snow, soft and suffocating all at once.
Things only change once Toriel comes rushing through the front door with a bundle held tightly in her arms, stricken and harried, and calls out for Asgore. Asriel gets sent off to the Holidays for a sleepover (which drives him to tears – the poor darling can’t be more than two-and-a-half) and Tenna, inanimate as he is, listens to his kind owners murmur about bills, and Asriel’s well-being, and the logistics of interspecies adoption. Rumbled in there is Asgore, well-meaning but accidentally callous, saying, “Darling, it’s been difficult, hasn’t it? Seeing Carol pregnant? Maybe this is a sign.”
The bundle disappears for a number of days, paperwork to be filed and cribs to be sorted, but soon Tenna learns that this child is a permanent fixture in their home, that their name is Kris, and not much else. Kris is not like Asriel, who cooed and wailed and giggled with the best of them. Kris does not laugh. Kris does not cry. It is rare for Kris to utter even a single sound beyond horrible, shivery little sounds of discomfort whenever they need changing or a bottle.
Contrary to what Tenna first believes, led on by the vagaries of raising newborns depicted on his flickering screen, the absence of tears is as much a source of worry to Asgore and Toriel as an excess. Toriel paces the living room endlessly, jiggling the baby in her arms, begging them to show some sign that they’re hungry, bored, scared, happy, anything. “I just wish someone could tell us if we are doing this right,” Toriel confesses to Asgore one day, noble countenance clouded with tears. “Who could we possibly ask?”
And so it goes, until one day Tenna is busy playing something for Asriel, some cartoon featuring puppy dogs with high-pitched voices and low-stakes adventures, all bright colours and rapid-fire cuts that make Asriel grin and coo with glee, and Toriel stands in front of the TV with Kris in her arms, clicking her tongue. “Is this not a little too – oh!”
Little Kris twists their body, one pudgy hand reaching out, palm buzzing against the convex plane of glass that makes up Tenna’s face and the unthinkable happens: Kris laughs.
Toriel gasps. “Asgore! Asgore, come quick, Kris is laughing!”
Asgore scrambles in from the other room with such a ruckus that it sounds like a stampede, and Asriel pushes himself to his feet to wobble towards his younger sibling, three matching, furry faces crowding Kris’, alight with glee.
“You like that, huh, buddy?” Asgore booms.
“You like it, do you not? All the shapes and colours and fun sounds and – oh, we can at least get some educational tapes from the library. Say hi, Kris. Hi, Mister Tee-Vee. Hi, Mister Television. Hi, Mister Tenna.”
Asriel laughs too, placing his hand beside Kris’, claws clicking against the glass and silky soft white fur rising with the static. Kris is still smiling, their eyes practically covered by their big, round cheeks. Asriel’s got a little bit of a slur to his speech, consonants soft and thudding in his mouth, which means it sounds absolutely darling when he says, “Mister Tenna!”
To be named is to be known. To be named is, Tenna will later repeat over and over again in some desperate attempt to convince himself, to be loved. All at once, he becomes more than a TV, he becomes alive, not some pitiful slumbering creature lost upon the side of vast purple cliffs, but –
But one of them. Tall and lanky, with gentle claws that will only sting and slash if he means them to like Toriel’s, a smile to match Asriel’s as he gnaws on his father’s arm with needle-sharp fangs, his antennae as strong and proud as Asgore’s horns. He does little more in his first weeks of true sentience than watch the Dreemurrs right back as he’s lavished with the sort of attention and excitement of the likes he’s never seen before. They feel so close that he even reaches out to touch them on occasion, but of course he’ll never be able to, not the way that they can.
He loves them immediately, terribly. He loves big, boisterous Asgore, so filled with love for his wife and his kits that sometimes it seems to simply burst out of him, he loves Toriel, gentle and stern and loving in equal measures, he loves bright, cheerful Asriel and his tumbling about the living room and the way he yammers away whenever little Dess comes over.
But Kris – sweet little Kris, so oddly without fur, no horns sticking out as tiny nubs upon the crown of his head, claws so strange and flat, Kris, as unlike the rest of the Dreemurrs as Tenna himself is – is his favourite. He knows you shouldn’t play favourites, but why not? Why shouldn’t Kris be his favourite? Kris, who has that wonderful smile and magical laugh reserved just for him? It is with unfathomable tenderness that Tenna then swears to make sure that everything is just perfect for them; he would build palaces and cathedrals, topple empires and kingdoms, craft a world entirely for their liking where never again would they have to remember whatever awful place they came from.
And so that’s exactly what he does.
Or, not exactly. A cathedral is admittedly a very different creature to the soundstage (though this is a claim that Tenna will, in his most successful years, spiritedly attempt to contest), but the essence of his journey is the same. He refuses for this land dedicated to his family to continue to be what it was, such barren nothingness, all dust and debris and strange creatures that do not understand what and who they were made for until Tenna makes them understand. He doesn’t get how anyone who lives in such a wonderful place like this, where you’re warm and comfortable and people actually pay attention to you and the living room is filled with such life and joy could possibly fail to grasp that instinctively, but – but no matter. He’ll make them understand what he feels, the sort of devotion that pushes at the walls and bursts through the windows and crashes into the sky.
It’s a ramshackle operation at first, nothing more than a Shuttah and a Zapper and a rickety wooden stage Tenna only just manages to snap into existence. A light whines as it swings over top of the stage, his newly burgeoning powers only able to conjure up the most rudimentary of equipment. This is where he spends these first, humble days, all of his meager energy going towards crafting puppets and twinkling lights, everything quiet and soft and friendly. He can barely hear the Shuttah in the background, murmuring to their sole colleague, “All of this for a puppet show?”
Tenna pays them no mind. He treats his puppet shows as seriously as he’d treat any of his more serious dramas or, indeed, those cartoons his previous owner had been so fixated upon, glowing with pride as he feels solemn, silent little Kris’ eyes on him.
Perched on the very edge of the stage, he croons as he has every day since he managed to cobble it together: “Maaaa-ma. Maaaa-ma. Can you say Ma-Ma’s name?”
On the other side of the screen comes a tiny, chirping voice. “Mmmmmhha. Mmmma-ma.”
When Kris reaches out towards the screen, Tenna does the same, yearning to burst through the boundary between their worlds and to wrap Kris up in his arms, to feel their tiny fingers wrapped around his own, to shout and cheer. He leaps to his feet instead, something tickling his screen where his sinuses ought to be, shivering with the unfamiliar sensation until a flower bursts through his nose, confetti raining down upon the stage, a bright, beaming light blasting behind him. “KRIS! Oh, KRIS! Your first word! I can barely believe it! I’m so PROUD of you!”
He dances around the stage in an odd soft-shoed shuffle, bursting with so much excitement that he picks up the Shuttah and the Zapper in turn, spinning them around with delight (delight that they, at least, appear to share with a chuckled “way to go, boss!”) as he shouts, “Can you believe it?! This is what it’s about, people! This is what it’s all about! Was all that work worth it, or what?”
It’s not as though he would have told Tori that she missed her beloved child’s first words anyway, Tenna decides in retrospect, when he’s a little sad he could not simply tell her what she was missing out on. He watches quietly, carefully, as it happens for the third time and Toriel nearly jumps out of her own fur in shock and delight, kissing Kris on their cheeks and calling for Asgore and Asriel to celebrate with her, dancing delightedly around the living room – around Tenna, sitting in the heart of the room, glowing with pride.
It’s okay, Kris, Tenna thinks fondly. It can stay our own little secret.
One of many, as it will later turn out — but for now, alone upon his tiny stage, gaze forever trained at something just beyond him, Tenna is content.