Work Text:
Sometimes, Noelle has this dream.
It feels nothing like a dream. It always starts with her waking up in her bedroom. A hand in her hair. A dip in her mattress. A shadow that leans over her.
Her first thought, always, is that it’s her mom. That she’s doing what she used to do every night after Dess went away, when she thought Noelle was asleep and wouldn’t know. Sitting there beside her on the bed and stroking Noelle’s hair like she was a baby again, silently watching, to make sure no one took her away, not even herself. She stopped doing that at some point. Noelle doesn’t remember when.
It isn’t her mom. It leans closer. Noelle’s heart starts to race, and her teeth chatter. She tries to pull the covers up over her face to protect herself. It reaches forward and stops her.
“Hey,” says her sister, “Hey, ‘Ellie.”
It’s Dess’s voice as she remembers it, low and sort of rough—Mom blamed her smoking, said it’d ruin her singing the longer she did it, and whenever Dess brought it up, she’d laugh and take another drag. Noelle never could stand the smell, but she couldn’t stand to be apart from Dess more.
It’s Dess’s voice, and it curls around her nickname the same way it always has, a singsong sway between the syllables. Noelle doesn’t know why it sounds so wrong.
“Dess?” Noelle whispers.
She should know it’s a dream from the fact that Dess smiles so easily in it. From the way she can see her sister’s teeth in the dark.
But she never knows.
Noelle pushes herself up and into her sister. Hugging comes after; first she just wants to shove her face, her hands, her body into Dess like she can make her more real by tackling her. “Watch the antlers!” Dess says. “You’ve gotten big!” Noelle can smell her like resurfacing memories—sweet smoke and her hairspray and a whiff of sweat because Dess could never sit still, always on her feet, always up to bat.
It settles over her senses like stale air. Noelle drinks it too greedily to notice.
“You’re back,” Noelle says. “You’re back.” The words fill up her mouth until she could choke on them. Her eyes sting. She holds onto her sister tighter and tighter, until her fingers burn from how they’re curled in Dess’s jacket. She never wants to leave the spot she’s thrown herself into, face pressed into Dess’s collarbone.
Dess’s fur feels cold where her shirt’s loose collar has slipped, where her chest is bared until it brushes Noelle’s snout.
“Of course I came back,” Dess says, like she isn’t lying. She cups Noelle’s face in her hands and reluctantly, Noelle draws back to look up into her eyes. Dess’s eyes have always been so brown they could be black, and Noelle would drown in them if she could. She leans in, as if to fall, as if to let her sister’s gaze swallow her whole.
Or maybe Noelle is the one who wants to take all of her, wide-eyed until Dess is safe as a glimmer in her pupil. Anything to keep her from vanishing again.
“How could I leave my little sis behind?” Dess says, stroking Noelle’s face in her hands. Caring so much that it almost feels like the question is one Dess really would have asked herself.
Noelle puts her hands over Dess’s. She presses her touch harder into her cheeks; they squish and her mouth parts to show her teeth. She wants Dess to hold her like she tried to, until it hurts.
“I’m gonna take you with me this time,” Dess promises, and her low voice gets lower, and Noelle’s belly feels tingly and strange. “You want that, right? You want to come with me, ‘Ellie?” Again, Noelle strains to hear why a simple word sets her fur on end when it sounds exactly like what Dess would say. Her bedroom is too dark to see anything but Dess, and Dess is a shadow, a grin with a Dess-silhouette around it, eyes that eat her up. The door out might as well not exist. The rest of the world might not exist. If Dess isn’t in it, there’s not much point.
“Where?” Noelle says. She can almost remember this can’t be happening when she asks it—when her mind stirs enough to ask her sister the most important question no one could ever ask her, the one that would fix everything—but she needs Dess’s answer to be real. Enough so that she tumbles back down into the dream to hear every word, and she forgets, forgets, and Dess is in her bed, not missing.
Dess just laughs. “Somewhere scary.” Noelle shivers. Dess’s fingers trace her features, like she can’t see Noelle either and can’t remember—what shape her ears are, how she whimpers when her antlers are bumped, where her mouth is.
Noelle sucks in a breath. Dess smiles, and Noelle wonders why she doesn’t look much like Dess at all whenever she does that.
“Mom needs to know you’re back,” Noelle says because it feels like the right thing she should say and do.
She doesn’t want to.
“Mom doesn’t have to know everything about you,” Dess says, like she knows. “Does she?”
She teases her fingers along the underside of Noelle’s chin. She marks an easy path to follow. In the dark. Dess’s smile eclipses her vision, but Noelle barely knows where her own mouth is. Her hands are lost somewhere in Dess’s jacket, sinking into her sister and pulling Noelle closer. For all of Dess’s promises, that part doesn’t seem scary. If Noelle closed her eyes, it feels like she wouldn’t be able to tell where she ends and Dess becomes.
She never does shut her eyes. That would mean not looking at her sister.
Dess always waits for her to admit it.
“Take me with you,” Noelle says, and for a moment, can’t care about the people who’ll get left behind.
She wants to feel like Dess did.
Dess's shadow leans in over her. Noelle feels her mouth against her own. Everything that was wrong is right here in the other world of Noelle’s dark bedroom. There are no rules. There have never been rules when Dess is involved. Noelle relaxes into the kiss that Dess steals her away with.
“You’ll like it there with me, ‘Ellie,” Dess says, and it rings in Noelle’s ears a third time—wrong though it sounds right. Dess leaves kisses on her mouth, kisses on her nose, a soft exhale over one ear until it twitches. “You’ll like it so much you’ll never want to leave.” Noelle puts a hand on her lower belly, where every feeling is welling in her, strange and scary and squirming. These things that make her dizzy; these things that feel so good that she doesn’t know what to do with them. Dess would know what to do.
“Let’s go,” Noelle says hurriedly. Her legs feel too weak to escape. “Let’s go right now before anyone wakes up.”
Dess puts her mouth to Noelle’s ear. It twitches back again.
“You already are,” she whispers as soft as the wind.
Noelle sits up in her bed and wants to scream. Her heart is beating so fast that it hurts. Her whole body shakes out of her control. She hears a tap-tap-scrape from behind her, at the window. She scrambles up to reach onto her shelf and finds the tiny flashlight she keeps there for emergencies. She shines it into every corner of the room until nothing could hide there and then back, bouncing off the windowpane, to illuminate an outstretched tree branch that taunts her. Noelle swallows.
Her mouth is still cold, and no one is here. Noelle worries her blanket in her hands. She can’t help feeling like someone knows. About Dess. About- Noelle touches her cheeks where Dess was holding them. She wishes they ached like bruises did.
She crawls from her bed and sneaks out. No one else in the house is awake to hear the door creak slightly. Maybe no one else is in the house at all; did Mom ever come home tonight? Noelle doesn’t think about that, about anything else but finding her way to her sister. She slips into Dess’s bedroom like an fugitive.
Her sheets have long since stopped smelling like Dess. The room barely even has a hint of smoke left to its wallpaper. Mom keeps everything right where it was, all the mess that Dess left behind.
Dess never made her bed, which is why no one notices the mornings after, if Mom can even bring herself to come in here anymore.
Noelle gets into her sister’s bed. She pulls the covers up over her head until she’s safe in complete darkness. She stretches out her legs and lays her cheek where Dess used to. Her eyes shut. She puts her hands on her cheeks again. She shivers again, even though she’s used to this cold.
She touches her mouth again and again with soft fingers until everything feels numb.
She won’t tell Mom she’s dreaming about Dess again. It’ll only upset her.
(Noelle should get to keep Dess for herself.)