Chapter Text
Kris texts you two minutes before the knock.
can we drop something off
it’s not a bomb
You’re halfway through reheating soup and considering whether crackers are a good idea when fists hammer at your door like a marching band. You open it to find Susie grinning beside Kris, both of them holding up an object swaddled in a ratty old blanket.
Your old family friend drops by now and then, usually with Susie. Lately their “visits” have come with scraped knuckles, random knocks in the middle of the night, and suspicious “souvenirs” (you swore that those cards hanging out of Kris’s pocket looked oddly familiar, just like the ones you and Asriel used to play with between classes). You’ve stopped asking questions, you just keep the spare key under the mat.
“You’re home!” Susie announces, as if this were ever in doubt on a Tuesday night, as if you weren’t already wearing pajama pants with little printed clouds and socks that used to match.
“Hi,” you say. “What’s that?”
“TV” Kris says, flat. Kris always sounds like they’re narrating a nature documentary about extremely uninteresting fish.
Susie throws the blanket theatrically off the top corner. Underneath: a heavy, boxy television that looks old enough to remember dial-up. The kind with fake wood paneling and knobs that never do what you want until you threaten them.
“It was abandoned,” Susie says. “We saved it.”
“From what? PBS pledge week?”
Kris glances at Susie. Susie glances at you. There’s a flicker of something like guilt, or a joke you aren’t in on. “It… talked,” Kris says finally. You stare back at them. Soup fogs the kitchen window over your shoulder.
“It made noises,” Susie amends quickly. “Like commercials. Not words. We, uh. Thought you like weird junk.”
They’re not wrong. Your apartment is full of flea market finds. A chipped ceramic cat who judges guests from the bookshelf, a jar of bottle caps, and every type of festive salt & pepper shaker that you can imagine . A vintage TV is not wildly off-brand.
“Okay,” you say, because you were never good at resisting stray creatures with big eyes and electrical hazards. “Bring it in.” They muscle it over the threshold in a chorus of grunts and complaints. The cord dangles like a tail, frayed at the end. Dust puffs when the feet scrape the wood floor and you cough and pretend it’s not extremely endearing that Kris wipes the top with their sleeve like they’re apologizing to it. You clear a spot where a plant never made it and set the TV down with a loud grunt.
Susie leans on your kitchen counter and steals a cracker from your soup. “We’ll come back in a week. If you hate it, we’ll toss it.”
“Or pawn it,” Kris says. “Retro sells.”
“Sure,” you reply. “I’ll flip it for… two whole dollars.”
You see them out, exchange promises about movie night that you might actually keep this time, and then it’s just you and the television, hulking in your living room. The apartment settles. The soup is fine. The kind of fine you eat without tasting. You hover over the TV like maybe it will explode if intimidated. It doesn’t. It just sits there, square and patient, like a stranger pretending not to stare.
“Hi,” you say to it, because you’re alone enough to talk to objects and still call yourself normal. Your voice does that awkward thing where it tries to be funny and lands somewhere between kindergarten teacher and game show contestant. “Welcome home, I guess.” Nothing happens. Of course nothing happens. You roll your eyes at yourself, rinse the bowl, and busy your hands rearranging a stack of magazines that did nothing wrong. You tell yourself you are absolutely not avoiding the compulsion to plug the thing in. Then you give in. The plug is old and a little loose. As you shimmy it into the outlet, a sudden burst of static jumps through your fingers. The TV wheezes, then hums, then there’s a thin white line across the black, a horizon, brightening. Sound creeps in, low and rainy, then swells into music that isn’t quite a melody, like someone wrote a theme song on a napkin and nostalgia did the orchestration. The screen blooms color that isn’t any modern color, saturated and a little too proud of itself. A set materializes: a stage with a glossy desk and a backdrop painted to look like the idea of a city at night, every window a square of gold.
Then there’s him.
“—and we’re back!” says the figure on the screen, a beat before you can be startled. He’s a 3D-rendered showman with an old TV for a head. No face but a wide, grinning mouth and long pointed nose, dressed in a flashy red suit with twin coattails, a long yellow tie, black pants, big white gloves, and bright yellow dress shoes, impossibly tall. You are, against your better judgment, charmed.
“I’m your host, Tenna,” he continues, leaning forward like he’s telling a secret to a friend at a party. “And tonight—ah, tonight—tonight we have a show so special, so spectacular, so sincerely sensational—”
“—that you’ve said all the S words,” you mutter, before you can stop yourself. His smile falters, tiny, like he heard you. It’s probably just an actor’s trick. Pause for effect, let the audience fill in the silence. The silence obliges. A sound like canned laughter trickles in, light and metallic, from nowhere you can find. “—that you won’t want to change the channel,” Tenna finishes, softer, like he’s folding the line around a fret and trying to hide it. “Stick with me, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. You raise your eyebrows at the TV. He can’t see you. Obviously he can’t see you. He glances to his left, expectant. There’s no one there. He covers the tiny sliver of panic with a smirk. “Mike, if you’d cue the…Ah. Mike is… out. Sick. The poor guy thinks NyQuil is a food group. And who am I to judge?” He clicks his tongue, resets, and in the reset you glimpse the cost: a split-second dimming, a scuff in the shine. “No matter, no matter! When have we ever needed help, folks?”
You sink onto your couch, cross-legged, like you’re twelve again. The coffee table, the lamp with the crooked shade, the hum of your fridge, they all arrange themselves around the glow as if they’ve trained for this moment. Your apartment smells faintly like dust warmed into something like toast. You don’t realize you’re smiling until your face hurts a little. Tenna pivots into a monologue. He talks about the news, about the way everything feels like it’s buffering, about how you can measure a year in abandoned shopping carts and still not find the one with a working wheel. He’s good. The jokes sit right on the line between goofy and true, and when they tip, they tip into an area that scares you because it feels like being known. You tell yourself it’s just a really, really good rerun.
At some point you become aware that you’re talking back. Not out loud, not exactly. More like you’re offering the ghost of your reaction and the TV is catching it. He throws a line about late-night infomercials, you think, God, I’ve bought so many useless organizers, and he follows up with, “—and the worst part is they work for three days and then you wake up and your closet has invented entropy.”
“Okay,” you say to the empty room, trying for stern and landing in delighted. “Enough. You’re not psychic.”
Tenna’s gaze flicks, just for a heartbeat, straight at you. It’s only a camera trick. It has to be. He grins like he’s grateful for your doubt. “Skepticism looks great on you,” he says, easy as breathing. “Killer cheekbones.” You slap a hand over your face, mortified at a screen, which is a new low for you. “Now,” he says, hands on the desk. “Ordinarily this is the part where my assistant” He gestures again to the left. The empty space. The beat hangs. “where someone would hand me a card. But between you and me? I like it better when we wing it.” He starts telling stories. Childhood ones, embellished and good-humored. An anecdote about burning popcorn so badly the fire alarm coughed for a week. A running bit about a neighbor who believes the moon landing was a marketing campaign for cheese. You watch. You forget to check your phone. You forget the soup bowl in the sink. You remember what it feels like to be got.
“Where’s your audience tonight, Tenna?” you ask, not to challenge him, more like you’re asking the ceiling, because someone should. “Where is everybody?”. His mouth softens. He leans into the mic like leaning could keep you from slipping away. “Right here,” he says. “Where else?” You look at the clock and discover an hour has become five hours. The apartment has this late-night quality you only notice when you’re in it, a hush that’s not silence so much as a blanket over noise. The TV casts a square of brightness that doesn’t quite reach the corners. A moth inspects the window and decides against it. “Okay,” you say, a little croaky. “I should sleep.” You were already starting to imagine the TV speaking to you, and you worried what other mind games you’d play on yourself if you stayed up much longer. Tenna smiles like he was waiting for that line so he could call for the music and go to commercial. He lifts his hands and the band gives him a soft cymbal and a piano that sounds like it lives in a diner.
“Of course. I’m not a monster. I just… if you want? Maybe leave me on. The channel, I mean. It helps with the ratings.” He laughs, quick and self-deprecating. “Bad joke. Don’t change the channel.” It should be corny. Maybe it is. But it fits into some small, aching corner you didn’t admit was empty until now. You reach for the remote. Your thumb hesitates over the power button. The screen is warm when you move your hand closer, like it’s alive in the way a sunbeam is alive.
“Alright,” you say, to make it official so you won’t be embarrassed later. “I’ll keep you on.” “Attababe,” he says, so casually you decide he must call everyone that. “We’ll be right back after this message from our sponsors.”
There are no sponsors. He fills the gap with something resembling a wink and a cut to the skyline that never changes. You clean up. The bowl, the spoon. The good habit of rinsing. The worse habit of not drying things properly. You hang the dishcloth over the sink and turn off the kitchen light. Your plant in the corner is surviving on prayer and a weekly ice cube. You write a note in your head: water plant. buy bread. do not fall in love with fictional television men.
You don’t sit back on the couch. You fold yourself sideways instead, cheek to cushion, feet tucked under the fluffiest throw you own. The glow from the screen paints color across your knuckles. They look like stage lights in miniature. You tell yourself to stop being dramatic. You promise yourself you’ll turn it off when you start to drift. Tenna returns from “commercial” holding nothing and pretending it’s a card. “And we’re back,” he says, voice a little lower, as if the imaginary band packed up and went home and it’s just you and him now. “Quick lightning round before we wrap. Favorite breakfast cereal.”
You make a face. “That’s private.”
“Granola,” he says, like he knows he’s cheating by answering for himself. “The kind that swears it’s healthy but tastes like dessert. The world is cruel enough.”
“You’re corny,” you tell him. “And yet,” he says. “You’re still here.”
That shouldn’t glow the way it does. But it does. You surrender to being a little ridiculous. It’s been a long time since anything in your apartment spoke back without requiring batteries and a receipt. He keeps you lightly engaged until your brain starts to blur. A joke about alarm clocks as tiny grief counselors. A suggestion that you set yours for five minutes earlier and negotiate with your future self. You laugh quietly, laughing out loud to an empty room. Your eyelids start getting heavier on every blink. The couch breathes under you in the way furniture does when you’re about to fall asleep. On screen, the city lights twinkle. The band plays something soft enough to be a lullaby in disguise. You let yourself have the thought you usually keep under the bed with the dust: I wish someone would talk to me like I’m their only audience.
“Hey,” Tenna says, so quiet it makes your ear bones feel devout. “Before you go.” You hum, barely sound. “Thank you for watching,” he says. It’s not a line. It’s too wobbly and unsure to be a line. “If it’s not… too much trouble. Keep the channel on.” “Okay,” you say, somewhere between awake and not.
"Okay." He exhales like his whole set was holding its breath. Then he does the sign off: not the big one, not the flourish, but the small exchange he must keep for when nights are heavy.
“Goodnight,” he says. “Wherever you are.”
You want to be contrary and say you’re right here. You don’t.
You drift, more a boat than a person.The last thing you see before the dark takes your edges is his outline at the desk, head bowed, not smiling, the shape of someone who knows how to be dazzling and, at the same time, knows how to sit with quiet. You dream of streetlights and studio lights. Your heart does that dorky thing where it rewinds the best line and plays it again, just to see if it still fits. It does.
Between one breath and the next, you think you hear him again, not through speakers but through the air that surrounds you. The words are so blurred they almost aren’t anything at all. “Don’t change the channel,” Tenna whispers, and you, reckless with sleep, nod like he can see you. The TV hums steady in the dark. The apartment hums back. The world, for once, agrees to hold still around you. You don’t notice the way the colors at the edge of the screen bleed into the shadows like water into ink. You don’t notice the faint outline of a set building itself behind you, or the way your couch cushion turns into an armrest you’ve never felt before and your blanket into a velvet curtain and your apartment smell into the clean, sharp scent of fresh paint and stage dust. You don’t notice any of it. Not yet. You sleep. The TV keeps the channel on.