Work Text:
🍎💀🍎
The air around Hometown smelled of death and rotting apples.
Autumn, having choked the world for all it could harvest, lost more of its grip with every sunset, its bright orange leaves shriveling to ash against a gray-matted sky. The grass turned crisp and brittle, delicate curls of frost lining where dew used to be. Winter loomed everywhere, inevitable, from the sharp-tinged stillness of the air to the ancient itch to hibernate in the back of Catti’s animal mind.
It had been four days since Kris Dreemurr went missing.
Four days of sober, grim silence after the chaos of the festival, like a corpse following a gunshot.
Four days of sitting through Ms. Alphys’s stumbling, excruciating lesson plans, as if there weren’t two empty desks haunting the middle of the room. As if Noelle and Berdly weren’t shocked into the sort of dazed silence that couldn’t follow a lecture even when Alphys called on them as top students, over and over, with increasing desperation.
Susie, the beast, stopped going to class at all--not that she attended much to begin with. But Catti still saw her prowling around the edges of Hometown each day like a caged animal, lurking around the school closet and the convenience store and the Dreemurr house in tightening, frustrated spirals.
At first, Catti assumed the wild girl must’ve given in to her dark instincts and mauled Kris--but in that case, what was she still looking for, each time she paced around Ms. Toriel’s front yard? Did she expect to take their place, too, if she only marked up their old territory with enough clawing footsteps?
Ms. Toriel, somehow, didn’t seem to mind the intruder.
Then again, the only times Catti saw Ms. Toriel at all were well after sunset, when Catti spotted winks of a flashlight beam through the woods on her walks home from work. Or when her sensitive cat ears caught an increasingly hoarse voice, echoing, calling out her child’s name against the dying trees.
Noelle, in her purehearted goodness, left Susie lunch boxes by the closet each day. Yet Susie only seemed to prod at them well after Noelle had left, as if even talking to Noelle would shatter some last, secret reverie Susie held. As if Susie wasn’t worthy of looking Noelle in the eye, anymore.
Catti offered, once, to assist Noelle. They weren’t as close, these days--Noelle’s mother pushed too much on Noelle to leave any time to explore the dark arts together--but some last flicker of affection nudged Catti to at least try. (To at least say she had tried.)
Noelle only smiled, her eyes soft and dead above her buck teeth, and didn’t answer. The flicker died out.
It made Catti furious.
What in the nine hells was the purpose of studying the dark arts, if even her best magicks couldn’t help anything when it mattered? She must’ve drawn a hundred tarot pulls, lit a hundred wicks, prayed to a hundred gods from every plane... all to no result. As if she’d never tried at all.
As if Catti was just as powerless as she’d been back when December vanished, taking the light from Noelle’s eyes with her.
Damnit, damnit, damnit.
Catti kicked a pebble across the sidewalk, watching it skitter into the grass like a field mouse. Her tail swished at her back, her ears pressed flat to either side of her head as she stalked home from yet another long school day and even longer work shift. The stink of dried syrup and ketchup packets clung to her fur in matted patches, her paws ached from standing... even the thought of going home to a cozy divination session brought no relief.
Why bother, if the only messages the cards would give anymore were useless riddles about Kris being lost in the darkness? Lost, sad, dark, friend, defeat, betrayal, collapse... they spoke as if Kris were a bad dream or a set of keys dropped behind the couch, instead of a precious former ally in the craft.
Nothing that could help her narrow down a place to search. None of it new to her, either.
Kris had always been... reckless, at best. Prone to the darkness. When they studied the arcane together, it was Catti who focused on healing and protection, while Kris’s bright red eyes locked on summonings and curses with a manic intensity, as if they could find the cure to their very humanity somewhere in the old gods.
A smart soul. A troubled soul. Easy to corrupt. Important to guide safely back home. That had been Catti’s sacred duty, when they’d practiced rituals together.
If she’d paid more attention then, maybe she could’ve caught them before the darkness card shifted from the future space to the past space in her spread. Before she blinked and somehow falling became fallen.
Ha... Like all that effort even mattered, now.
Yet she had to keep trying. What else could she do?
Noelle didn’t deserve to lose another piece of herself. Ms. Toriel didn’t deserve to watch her family shatter still further. Even Catti herself, begrudgingly, missed the dry wit and focus of her old ritual partner.
She had to--
Catti froze, her tail caught mid-swish. Her ears perked, amber eyes going wide and dilated.
There was something else in the grass.
A thousand ancient cat instincts triggered in her mind, overwhelming her cold detachment in a way that would’ve been humiliating if she wasn’t alone. As it was, her shoulders tensed and her spine arched as she squinted at the grass, instantly alert.
Some sort of red glow, pulsing weakly, shone from the dirt. It moved, trudging towards the sidewalk from the forest at the south end of town. The grass rustled around it in a steady drift, crystals of frost melting away around that steady red warmth.
The logical, patient part of Catti’s brain recommended caution. Few things in nature moved with such alien brightness--it reminded her of the lure on some deep-sea fish, or perhaps the shed embers of a capricious elemental monster.
Yet, by the time this part of her brain had outlined such reasonable, dangerous comparisons, the light had already moved close enough to trigger Catti’s base instinct to pounce on it.
It struggled in her grasp, a soft yet smooth creature about the size of an apple. Warm light spilled against her paw beans as she grappled it, flickering with angry, firefly-like intensity. Catti squeezed anyway, her tail puffed with excitement as she held the creature up, opening her paws to see...
A... heart?
Not the anatomical hearts that so often illustrated her dark tomes, either. This was more of a heart-shaped toy, round and pointed like a simple Valentine’s Day card. Yet the fluttering pulse and twitching movements beneath its red skin were anything but toy-like, shifting and breathing with unmistakable life.
A spirit? Some sort of familiar or summon? It wriggled in her palms, upside-down, as if getting its bearings.
Then, slowly, the pointed tip of its body began to burrow, pressing against the thin pink flesh of her palm and through it--
Catti hissed, jolting away and letting the heart-creature tumble back to the grass. It lay still, bright red pulsing against dying winter green, as Catti stumbled and tried to catch her breath. Her tail tip flicked at her back, the skin flecked raw with goosebumps beneath puffed fur.
That... wasn’t any monster type she’d ever seen. To be certain, there were as many monster types as there were grains of sand on the beach, but she’d never seen any so...
(Small? Faceless? Determined to burrow under her skin like a parasite?)
The heart-creature recovered... then, to Catti’s hissing dismay, it began floating, rising up from the grass in dizzy, swaying motions, like a drunken bee trying to fly back to its hive. It swayed towards her, and she reeled back--but this time, at least, it didn’t seem as willing to burrow into her. It hovered a few feet away from her head, its light pulsing in and out as it bobbed through the still winter air.
As if it... wanted to communicate...?
Reluctantly, Catti’s fear ebbed away, replacing itself with the sort of curiosity that got monsters like her killed. The sort of curiosity she’d never been able to resist, embedded in her ancestral blood like a family curse. The sort of curiosity that drove her to dark magicks to begin with.
This being seemed like no other monster she’d seen. It floated like an upside-down SOUL, tip drooping towards the ground and nubs curved skyward, and oozed the vibrant red color of fresh blood.
Not a monster.
Something more... magickal.
“What... are you...?” Catti breathed. She reached a tentative, tentative paw forward, prodding the heart-creature with one claw. To her relief, it didn’t try to burrow into her skin again. If anything, it seemed to nuzzle against her finger, pulsing with what she might’ve mistaken for affection in a more monster-like creature. “Were you... summoned here?”
The heart-creature bobbed up and down. A yes. Catti’s eyes widened, her ears perking up.
A real summoned being. A demon? An angel? ...Neither? ...Both?
Did she do this, in all her desperate rituals? Or was this something Kris had been working on, back when they poured over the occult? Or someone else?
“Did...” Catti swallowed, her voice rasping in her throat. “Did I... summon you?”
The being swung back and forth. A ‘no’, then. That meant...
“Did... Kris summon you?”
Nod nod nod.
Catti’s tail swished. Something stirred in her innards, a weightless ache she hadn't felt in some time.
It felt like fear. It felt like confusion.
It felt almost, almost like hope.
“You know... where they are.”
Nod nod nod nod nod.
“Tell me, then. Tell me... what I need to do. Where I need... to go. Tell me--”
A door slammed shut behind her, and she jolted. A yawning cone of diseased yellow light stretches across the asphalt. The stink of pizza grease and garbage. Muttered curses and the firefly wink of a lit cigarette, just outside of the ICE-Es.
...Right. This sidewalk was far too open for communion. Catti wrapped her hands around the creature, bracing herself to feel it burrowing against her skin again. When it didn’t, she sighed in relief, her shoulders sagging.
“...Not here. Home. We'll set up the ritual. Summon them back.”
Then, flushed with resolve, she turned and hurried home.
🍎💀🍎
Sneaking the creature through the death-labyrinth her parents and sister had made the house into was no easy task. Catti’s nose bristled as the smell of burnt cat food assailed her from the kitchen, a pot bubbling over on the stove next to a rack of dirty cat bowls and rumpled bags of salmon treats, all in garish shades of pink and blue and green.
Mom tried to interrupt her mission, cutting across Catti’s path with her usual glaring smile and screeching voice, all, “HELLOOOO SWEETIE, HOW WAS YOUR DAAAAY? I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, YOU WORKED SO HARD, LET’S GO CATTI!! DINNER’S ALMOST DONE, JUST GOTTA DISABLE THE FIRE ALARM AGAIN!!”
Luckily, Catti was trained in years of evasion maneuvers. It took only a single dodge roll and a few grunted non-answers to get through the accursed kitchen.
The living room was trickier. Catty had put the TV set, her phone, her laptop, and a couple light-up cat toys all on maximum volume, none of which competed with the shouting argument she was having over said phone with Bratty. Her screeching hisses cut through each of her attempts at greeting her sister like a horrible attempt at harmony.
“Heyyyy girl, like, good to see you back--I WASN’T TALKING TO YOU, SHUT UP, BITCH--What’s that, like, in your hand? OOH, did you get takeout for me? You’re so sweet--NOT YOU, OH MY GOD, SHUT UP BRATTY, I DON’T EVEN LIKE YOU--Sissy, where are you goin’? Don’t be mean--DON’T TELL ME HOW TO TALK TO MY SISTER, YOU SUCK SO MUCH--”
At least Bratty distracted her enough for Catti to creep around the back of the couch while she was shouting, even if the sound left Catti’s ears ringing.
Dad, as well, wasn’t too difficult to get past. He stayed curled in his clawed-up recliner, head buried in a mound of shed stuffing while he snored loud enough to rattle the ceiling fixtures.
...For not the first time, Catti envied Kris’s divorced parents, and Noelle’s distant, work-obsessed mother. The silence in their homes must have felt radiant.
...At least, before Kris went missing. The silence for Ms. Toriel couldn’t have too much of a comfort.
Right. Focus on what she was doing this for. Her paws tightened a half-inch around the creature, a dull beating warmth creeping into her bones as she scurried to the dark, cool retreat of her room. She dropped a hand just long enough to slam the door shut behind her, muffling the screeching, shouting, snoring chaos of her family behind painted black walls and layers of hung curtains that smelled less of burnt cat food and more of incense and potpourri.
Finally, peace.
Catti exhaled, long and slow, until her lungs shook and her tail trembled. Then she let the creature go, gently shooing it out of her hands like a freed butterfly. Also like a freed butterfly, it stumbled and fluttered through the air, swinging back and forth before catching itself and hovering at eye-level with an eerie, perfect stillness.
In the cool darkness of her room, the heart-creature shone brighter than ever, casting everything in a ruby tinge. Catti watched it for a moment, her pupils wide in something like wonder, before clearing her throat.
“Right. Show me... what you want me to do.”
🍎💀🍎
It took over an hour to parse the heart-creature’s pulsing and wandering around the room into something resembling a summoning ritual.
At least Catti already knew several types, which made pulling out ingredients and offering them for the creature’s assessment easier. Still, it didn’t seem to know which color of candles to pick. Or which book to read from. Or even which herbs to burn to clear the air and set up a ritual space.
If Catti didn’t know better, she’d guess this wasn’t a creature from a demonic plane at all. It seemed almost more interested in examining every item in her space, tapping against each book one at a time, before shaking itself and focusing on the present.
It seemed... childlike, in a sense. With each new item observed, it bobbed up and down in growing interest, weaving back and forth across the cramped space of her room with a brighter and brighter glow.
Catti couldn’t help it--as she laid out the candles and skimmed the incantations, watching this red light flick back and forth in fascination, she thought of Kris.
A younger Kris, anyway. Back when they’d been studying demons together, before...
...Before everything.
Back when they still wore that cheap festival headband with the red horns, which pushed their hair out of their eyes and let Catti see all of their impish, focused expressions. Back when they still smiled, all jagged front teeth and chapped lips and mumbling, awkward laughter.
Back then, Catti had assumed the studies were part of some eventual prank on Noelle. She’d agreed in part out of curiosity--that old, damned cat instinct to see how things played out--and in part out of a selfish, childish desire to play the hero who protected Noelle from Kris’s machinations.
Was it cruel, to help orchestrate Noelle’s victimhood at the same time she planned her rescue? In retrospect, yes. At the time, it had only been another elaborate performance to put on: Kris, the terrible human threat. Catti, the protector and spellcaster.
She still couldn’t say for certain that they weren’t planned as a prank--only that Kris treated it like all their other pranks, and committed with everything they had. The transition from “studying as just a prank” to “studying with genuine fascination”, if it happened at all, happened so gradually it never came up.
They never did get around to pranking Noelle.
Too much else to do. Incense to burn. Fairy knots to tie. Altars to make. Even blood and dust to offer, which Catti did with shaking reluctance and Kris did with a manic enthusiasm that, even then, worried her.
Even then, Kris seemed far too eager to bleed themself out if it might get a reaction from others.
Fine, then. Catti was no stranger to feeling unappreciated, either. The darkness, as always, understood them, and waited for them with open arms, smelling of old books and sandalwood.
Catti lit the last candle, gesturing for the heart-creature to stop examining her bed and come over. It floated towards the flame in a slow drift, pausing just shy of singeing itself against the wick. Catti raised an eyebrow at it, peering up from the tome in her paw.
“Is this... everything?” she asked, a low murmur. “The last step... to concentrate... and pierce the dark earth... To reach darker than dark.”
Lost in the darkness, her tarot spread suggested. A sense of betrayal. Of collapse. Consumption in grief.
The heart bobbed, not quite a nod. Closer to a shrug. Catti’s eyebrow twitched.
“You are... frustrating. Meddlesome. Pesky.” A pause. “Truly, you must be... Kris’s familiar.”
The heart glowed a smidge brighter, like it was blushing. It floated closer to Catti, pressed against her side, while she drew out the ritual dagger she kept in her dresser, behind the unpaired socks.
It was still, even now, smudged with old flecks of her dust and Kris’s blood. The handle--gold trim chipped away to dark plastic underneath--was still greasy where they’d gripped it with shaking digits, years ago. They’d passed it back and forth, striking it like a wet match, each of them trying to work up enough courage and daring between themselves to gather the single drop of blood and dust the offering required.
The heart-creature glowed beside her, its edges rippling like dark water. Like pools and pools of blood, drawn up from aching veins in one last, desperate shot at a reaction.
(How had she failed her student in dark arts so badly? The darkness was supposed to comfort, not suffocate. Like a warm blanket at night, like the cool dirt of the grave. A rest, from the screaming chaos of the world.)
Catti shook her head, focusing her grip.
Concentrate on what you want... and strike the earth.
I want Kris back. I want them safe. If they’re drowning somewhere, let me reach a hand out. Let it not be too late.
Please.
The blade struck. Like a match, it lit. A roaring brightness cracked through the room, searing across her eyes--then, as soon as it came, it spluttered out, replaced with a billowing smoke.
No, not smoke. A billowing water, rising and spilling across Catti’s purple moon bedspread, across her seasonal calendar, across the piles of incense and books. Catti reared back on instinct, her tail puffed and fangs drawn in a hiss, as the dark water pooled around her legs, sloshed up her chest.
No, no, no--!
Too late to go back, though. (Too late, too late, too late.) The heart-creature nudged her side, and Catti wrapped her hands desperately around it, clinging to its warmth as the cold rose around her and stole the breath from her lungs.
Something about her changed. Her clothes? She couldn’t pay attention. She was falling, or floating, or drifting somewhere. The fairy lights around her bed and the candles around the ritual site winked overhead in blacklight purples and blues and pinks, an inverted field of stars, and like a comet, she plunged, burning, through space.
Through the stars, like deep sea creatures, primordial shapes drifted by. Winding snakes with tendrils for limbs. Gnashing teeth lined with eyes. Curled bodies like unborn children.
Yet the heart-creature, ignoring her hitching breath and wide eyes, tugged on her arms and pulled her still further, deeper. It fluttered through the deeps like its own sea creature, its edges curling and uncurling like butterfly wings, its glow rising in intensity until it shone as the only illumination against the endless abyss.
This place felt... wrong, somehow. Malformed. As if it wanted to shape itself, grasping parasitically onto her bed and her bookshelves and her lights for structure, but they were moving too fast and sinking too deep to let it settle into anything. A space between spaces, even within whatever dark parallel they’d fallen into.
What IS this...?
Kris, what did you get yourself INTO...?
The shapes in the dark became less distinct, even as the heart-creature’s glow only grew stronger. More tendrils. Clumps of purplish-blue cliffsides and jagged rocks. Arched, massive bones against shelves of icy dust and sand.
And in the dust...?
Hands. Dozens--no, hundreds of hands and faces, clawing up towards the far distant surface in broken desperation. Monster skulls stretched their skin back against their teeth in decayed anguish, claws and paws and talons crumbling against the murk. Horns. Antlers. Scales. More and more and more and more and more and more and--
And in the middle, barely twitching: a single human hand, the metal gauntlet around it glistening against the heart-creature’s glow. It curled, not up towards the surface, but around a blackened length of deer hoof, squeezing tufts of frozen fur.
Catti couldn’t breathe down here, but she gasped, anyway, choking against the brackish taste that spilled into her throat.
The water tasted like rotting apples. Dusty, dry somehow, cloyingly sweet.
Catti didn’t understand, but she refused to hesitate. The heart twitched forward and so did she, reaching out towards that single glittering remnant, so that the heart reconnected and her fingers brushed against it in the exact same moment.
The world pulsed around her.
In it, she saw... everything.
She saw the bunker, ajar, vomiting wet darkness against the moonlit sky.
She saw December Holiday chasing the pointed tail into the dark, the cold, the flood.
She saw a prophecy like an endless cycle, broken objects in an abandoned room turned into broken lives in the shadows, then washed away in the flood, restarted. This time we’ll do it right. This time, this time, this time.
A promise made. A plan to change things for good. Stop the cycle. Remake the world.
All it required, was everything. A small request to make, for a human with nothing left to lose.
She saw Susie and Noelle and Berdly and dozens of other faces she didn’t recognize, all shining in the blacklight, guided by a dancing, white-furred monster dressed in brilliant green. She forgot and then remembered how to laugh again, reach out again, hope again. A beautiful and almost perfect world.
Almost.
She saw Kris hanging back, pausing before the stained glass and the lights. Only the soul-creature in their chest still shone, bright red pulling against cold black. A butterfly pinned to a ribcage, straining to be free.
You promised, though.
YOU promised. I didn’t.
She saw it strain so hard their ribs snapped, scattering ashes as it flew away from Kris’s breathless chest. She heard Susie’s shouting, barking voice calling for the soul-creature, even as Kris staggered and fell back into the shadows. The heart-thing froze a moment, watching Kris fall with something like regret... but Susie kept calling, and the heart pushed forward, dizzy with its new freedom.
Long arms wrapped in sharp black armor caught Kris, instead. A hissing, praying voice hummed lullabies in their ear, smothered the dazzling inverted rainbows overhead. It pressed its hands lovingly against their mouth until they stopped struggling, combed their hair away as their eyes rolled back and went bloodshot.
Through their blinded eyes, Catti saw how beautiful even the abyss could be.
Kris did, too. The fight drained from their limbs, replaced with a dead acceptance. When the Knight hugged them close, they smiled and hugged back.
Dess...? Dess! It’s you! You’re not alone down here anymore! I’m here! I followed you!
Bones and rock and peeling, coiling tendrils reshaped around them into a holiday home. Winking bioluminescence hung like Christmas lights. In their glow, Catti saw Dess’s milky eyes widen at the realization of what she’d done.
Dess, I’m sorry for fighting so long. I’m sorry I got so used to the soul that I almost forgot you. Please forgive me. Let’s play music together again!
Broken, squealing cables pulled together into chords. Chords pulled together into harmonies so beautiful even the corpses down here would get up and dance. They were beautiful and they were elegant and Dess, oh Dess, Dess had killed them. Broken them like she broke every other instrument in her room, burnt through and used up like a half-finished hobby.
I don’t care about bringing you back, anymore, Dess. I just want to be with you again. If that means drowning, we’ll drown together. That’s okay. That’s perfect.
As long as I get to be just like you, I’m okay, Dess, Dess, De--
The dust shifted as something grasped Catti’s wrist, hard. She jolted back into focus, the beautiful homes and lights and music of the abyss drifting away from her vision like a dreamy optical illusion.
Kris!?
No. Not Kris.
The deer hoof--hooves, she supposed, long furry fingers tipped with keratin hard points--latched around her white fur, tips digging in as hard as they could grasp. Darkness swirled around the joints like armor, but this deep in the abyss, the armor and the water around Catti took the same shape, bleeding in and out of each other with each drifting current.
What stayed, however, was the deer fur. The hand, the arm, the shoulder, the neck...
The face.
December Holiday stared up at Catti for the first time in years, her eyes blinded white and drowned... yet somehow, still, determined.
Please. I don’t know how to swim. I didn’t realize I wouldn’t drown alone. I didn’t realize we were attached.
Please, don’t let them drown with me. I’ll swim if I have to.
Please don’t let them be like me.
Them, singular: the gauntleted hand, still grasped tight in Dess’s other hand.
Them, plural: Kris, Noelle, Carol, Catti herself.
The soul-creature pulsed between them, as if shaking its head.
Dumbass kid. Of course I'd come back for you both. No one ever drowns alone.
Catti squeezed Dess’s hand, and together, she and the soul-creature pulled back, swimming towards the surface. The ground resisted, cold gray sand and piles of broken carcasses tangling around Dess’s antlers, her armor, the tattered edges of Kris’s cape.
It hurt to leave. It hurt so much. The abyss tugged at Catti’s fur and tail and clothes like cold weights, strained her burning lungs.
How had she forgotten how much living hurt? This wasn’t worth it. Sinking hurt, too, but it was sure as hell easier than going back to her damned ugly house, with her dead-end after-school waitress job, wasn’t it? With her gushing parents and her ranting sister who even now she could hear calling out, reaching out--
Her sister.
A hand grasped the back of Catti’s shirt, familiar claws scraping the back of her neck, batting against the fabric.
The water smelled, insufferably, like burnt cat food.
Another hand grasped Catty’s, the paw beans wrinkled but strong. Mom.
Another, single hand grasped Mom’s. Dad.
A whole, ridiculous chain of drowned cats, spilling down the abyss towards where the heart-thing fluttered ahead, past Dess, to bury itself in Kris’s chest.
They spasmed, once. Then they lurched forward, wrenching their other arm loose from the sand to grasp onto Catti’s paw. They blinked up at her, straining to focus, a dozen emotions flickering across their drowned blue face.
They mouthed, Catti?
She gritted her teeth back. I promised, too.
And she pulled. Catty and Mom and Dad pulled, the soul-thing pulled, and even Dess pulled, atrophied muscles straining against the weight of dead stillness for so long.
The abyss couldn’t help but let them go.
🍎💀🍎
Once again, as Catti breached the surface of the abyss, her room shone with brilliant white light.
Then it faded into the comforting sandalwood semi-darkness she remembered, and she spilled into it, choking and coughing for air. Her arms burned, every muscle wrenched out of alignment from the pressure and the hauling weight.
Several voices coughed and cried out around her. Her room, her quiet sanctuary, was a madhouse of noise and motion, purple and white fur blurring around her as the chaos erupted.
“Oh my god, sissy, what the heck was that!? You were gone forever and, like, you didn’t even have dinner, so I got worried, but o.m.g.! I told you to tell me first if you’re summoning weird stuff, gawd!!”
“That was wonderful teamwork, let’s GOOO Team Cattenheimer! Whoo!! Is everyone okay? I have bandaids and ibuprophen in my purse, sweeties, let me know!”
“Boy, howdy! I haven’t seen a drop like that since your mother took us bungie jumping, hoo-hoo! Gave my arm a real workout, there, Catti-kitty!”
Then, a voice Catti hadn’t heard in days, shaky and weak: “...C-Catti?”
Catti looked up. Dess sat hunched on herself against the floorboards, her thin arms shaking as she coughed up tendrils of darkness that squirmed and died against the candlelight, as she shook them free from the matted nest of her overgrown hair. Next to her huddled Kris, their skin waxy and pale yellow behind their damp bangs, their hands shaking against the sleeves of Asriel’s hand-me-down sweater.
Kris stared up at Catti, their shadowed eyes wide in bald confusion.
“H-how... did...?” They broke off for another coughing fit, hacking up thick globules of dark infection. Dess reached over to slap their back, even though her own flannel-covered arms trembled with each rasping breath.
There were suddenly far too many people in her room, far too many pairs of eyes locked on her. Catti grimaced, glaring at her lap instead of any of them. “Not me. Your summon. Familiar. Came to... get you.”
“My... what?” Kris panted. But something must’ve connected, because they pressed a hand to their chest, their fingers glowing warm red at the contact. “But... it left...? YOU... left...?”
Catti shrugged back, hunting around for her phone. She tapped away at nothing in particular on its screen, to avoid the others’ stares. “Dunno. Must’ve still... wanted to save you. Or... saw Noelle and Susie missed you. Whatever. Don’t mention it.”
Mom, annoying parent that she was, butted in. “My goodness, Krissy, Dessy? Is that you? You both look frightful! This won’t do. Let’s get you some warm blankets and some fresh cat food, okay-doke?”
Dess shivered, hard. Her voice rasped like broken glass and concrete as she struggled to speak. “Mrgh... yes. Food. Warmth. P-please. Thanks, Mrs... ‘heimer.”
Catty, for once, hadn’t butted in for a whole minute. Catti stared over at her sister, who stared at Dess with wide yellow eyes, her tail puffed and swishing as she took it in.
Ah, that was right. Catty had been part of the group Dess and Asriel wasted time with, along with that other orange not-a-cat, whatever his name was. Burgerpants, or something.
Sure enough, Catty opened her mouth wide, and shouted.
“Is that my EX-GIRLFRIEND!?”
🍎💀🍎